Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,51
out of embarrassment and partly because she knew it would make him sad to see her there, waiting. Once she’d curled up in the window and slept there, intent upon looking pitiful when he arrived, a day later than he had said. When the yellow cab pulled up the next morning, she watched her father exiting the car, saw the genuine smile on his face as he approached the house, and abandoned the operation. She told Cheese this story while she pulled her hair back into some semblance of order and dabbed herself with the perfume vial in her purse, noting that it clashed with the lingering lily scent of soap.
“You sound like me the week after you left me the first time,” said Cheese. “I thought every woman walking beneath the window was you.”
“Well,” said Eva. “Here I am.”
“You are,” said Cheese. “And I’m sure your father will be there on time today. You said he really wanted to see you, right?”
The worried tone of his question made her want to kiss him, and then to laugh at him, but mostly it made her want to call Maya, the woman for whom she’d left him. It had been two weeks since she’d gotten the last of her belongings from the apartment she and Maya had shared, and they hadn’t spoken since. Cheese’s tolerance exhausted Eva sometimes. She knew Maya would tell her when she was full of shit. Avoiding confrontation because you’d rather take shit than deal with it doesn’t make you a martyr, Maya had said to her once, and probably would have said to her again if Eva had tried that windowsill story on her. But Eva didn’t bother trying to explain her childhood to Maya; it hadn’t been happy exactly, but it hadn’t been sad in any way Maya would have understood. On Maya’s scale of childhood tragedy, Eva didn’t register.
Usually, Eva thought of herself as a good person. She stayed up at night worrying about the human condition in vague and specific incarnations. She made herself available to the people whom she loved, and some whom she didn’t. She gave money to every other homeless person and stopped to let stray kids remind her how much Jesus and the Hare Krishnas loved her, more for the benefit of their souls than hers. Still, she wondered sometimes if it wasn’t all pretense—if, when she shut her eyes and wished restitution upon the whole wounded parade of humanity, she wasn’t really wishing away the world that created war and illness so that she might have a world in which there was room to feel sorry for herself. Every day she felt herself losing things it was unacceptable to mourn.
William was uptown, arguing with Phil about a blender. William had known Phil since moving back to the city in the eighties. Back then, his had been the only building Phil owned, and Phil had lived downstairs and done most of the maintenance himself, but the rapidly rising rents over the past decade, the slick face-lift of 125th Street, and the influx of people no longer scared to live north of it, had made it possible for Phil to expand his operations. He now owned a few older buildings on Convent Avenue, and one on St. Nick; he had moved himself to a brownstone and grown a belly, now that he no longer climbed the stairs to respond to tenants’ complaints. William liked Phil, always had. After all those times going to see an available apartment, only to be told the second the owner saw his face that it was suddenly rented, it had been a relief to have a black landlord. Over the years, he and Phil had developed a friendly rapport, met for a drink from time to time even after Phil moved. But now, as Phil stubbornly refused to let him back into the old building to get the blender he’d left unopened in a box in a closet, William was reminded of what Phil had said about the black contractor who’d ripped him off once: Used to be you could at least count on your own people.
“I understand,” Phil was saying, which of course he did not. “I’d let you in if I could, but it’s not up to me. Right now, the city says, Jump, I say, How high? And the city says, Nobody goes into that building, and nobody takes anything out, and I don’t take that padlock off the door. Structurally unsound.