carnival sledgehammer. Take that, monkey ass! I wanted to show him how much better at life I was. As evidenced in the line, “I could not possibly care any less,” because so many “smart” people say “could care less,” which implies that there is a rock bottom of caring that you have yet to strike, thus and therefore you do, in fact, care—most likely the exact opposite of what you were trying to say in the first place. Proper syntax was empowering when dealing with the man who once argued loudly that the correct phrase was not “get the gist” but “get the just.” And that diarrhea was when you drank too much water and constipation was from not drinking enough. The e-mails kept coming:
FROM: Abortion Monkey
TO: Helena Andrews
SUBJECT: Re: Mighty Joe Young
Just hoping you‘re not still walking around with spit in your face, LMAO. By the way, congratulations on you and your new fag, I mean boyfriend.
We went for one more round. Me, spending an entire day crafting, spell-checking, editing, grammar-checking, revising, workshopping, and then copying and pasting the only two hundred words in the world capable of cutting him down a notch. Him, shutting me down with just two—Abortion Monkey. No matter how much high ground went into my e-sermon, once Darin hit his reply button—“Don’t worry about responses, since I’ll just delete anything else you send before reading it. Have a nice life, Mighty Joe Young!”—I’d get yanked from my pulpit, forced to lay my cursor hand on those two abject and filthy words. I was scared of them, felt sorry for them, and refused to delete them. I started solely referring to Darin as “the devil,” hoping that he was, in fact, a liar.
Involving Frances in all this was out of the question—obviously. I’d handle Darin on my own, like always. Like the whole abortion situation. I refused to tell her then, because I knew she’d want to pray to father/mother God through the phone or make me wave a bushel of burning sage over my broken body. I couldn’t take being taken care of. When I first started having sex, we had an ad lib conversation about penises and vaginas. Where have you been, little brown-eyed girl? Downstairs. With who, that new boy? Yep. What kind of birth control are you two using? Ma! The sponge, the condoms, dental dams? The pill! Good. She said if I got pregnant she wouldn’t be angry—“Just send the baby down for me to raise until you finish school.” Obviously, I’d decided not to take her at her word. In the process of becoming childless, I’d grown into a motherless child—untethered—not knowing my mother felt the same about herself once.
Two days after graduation, we were on the floor of my first real apartment, leaning on old couch cushions Frances found somewhere on or around 125th Street in Harlem. She does these things, setting out on her own in the morning (“I’m just gonna go around the corner and see what’s going on”) and coming back hours later with somebody’s trash and no man’s treasure. I heard her in the stairwell before opening the door to see what she’d brought back now.
“Jesus friggin’ Christ, woman! That’s out on the corner for a reason, you know,” I nagged, one hand on my hips and the other already reaching for my “new” toaster, futon frame, computer keyboard, or TV stand–slash–dinner tray–slash–“extra seating!” This time she was dragging three large sofa cushions in free clinic gray.
“Whaaa? You guys need this stuff,” she answered, pulling her prizes into the hallway. I remembered how much I used to love her finding me funny-shaped sticks and seashells on the beach as a child, making me believe the ocean built all these things only for me. She lifted from the earth like a klepto—a bone-white stone, a retired snakeskin—and placed everything in my tiny accomplice’s hands. For me? Yes, sweet the beat, for you.
The gray cushions would become our very own doctor’s couch. With my new roommates gone and the thrill of graduation long gone, she started a serious talk about my so-called life, seeing as how the day before I burst into tears during the gospel song “I Feel Like Going On.” The woman sitting next to us on the church pew handed Frances tissues that she passed on to me without a word. I hate church, and she knows it. She’d guilted me into going to the storefront chapel on the corner only because that