knew she was doing the same thing, writing notes back and forth, talking to him when she had to, dancing with him when she got tired of sitting in her chair too long. But she was living in her thoughts, living in a silent conversation with her own desires, just as he was. He was even more centered on himself than she was. He was only thinking about himself now and about what would come next for him: in less than a week, he would be in New Orleans, at yet another college orientation. This one would be at Xavier University. He had family all over the South but mostly in New Orleans. He had ancestors buried there who had lived and died well before Emancipation. But he had yet to visit the town. He thought about the campus and all the black people that would be there. He thought about the cedar-skinned Creole girls and wondered if it would be easier or harder to talk to bayou sisters with heavy accents and different slang than with this person from his own hometown. He imagined that he would catch on to the New Orleans chat instantly, that some deep hidden part of him, combined of his Southern heritage and whatever else was working inside his soul, would vibe with the ways of the people down there. They would be familiar to him in a way that he wouldn’t be able to understand or explain. He would just know them. That simple. It would be home out there, he thought, a return to an old home.
He wrote her one more note.
What if God told me to lie to you? What if He wanted me to meet you?
He didn’t know where that line came from, if he had heard it somewhere before, in a church, on television, or the radio, or from the mouth of some kid trying to talk one of his sisters into a date. He didn’t even know if Erycha went to church or even believed in God. He knew he didn’t. But he passed her the note anyway.
you dont talk to god
Dance, Erycha had learned somewhere, was a story. That was why, though she had trouble admitting it aloud, she now intended to dance as little as possible and to think and to write about dance until she had filled volumes with a philosophy linking movement to culture and solitude. There were reasons for this decision that in sum was a story all by itself. It was a story she was living, though, and couldn’t even talk about, let alone put down on paper. If it was a conversation, it would be one that nobody she was likely to spend time with could follow. If it was a movement, it would be something post-modern, probably some sort of desperate painful lunging on her back on the floor. She didn’t see that going over well at the banquet. Instead, she tried something subtle.
She waited until the DJ exhausted a few dance and trance and hip-hop tracks. She thought how half the time the girls doing modern dance looked like old folks trying to do the gator on their backs. She thought about clubs in Los Angeles she had only heard tale of where the dancers could leave people motionless and in awe, their ideas on a dance floor were so good. When the first staccato beats of “If I Was Your Girlfriend” began and Prince began to speak and then sing, she got up from her chair and looked at Touissant. He stared back at her unmoved but interested enough not to take his eyes from her. It wasn’t long before a slim girl in jeans and heels began dancing in her space. The girl danced close and wanted Erycha to come even closer. But Erycha was a solo act, despite the presence of a partner who flowed and shook and melted into her every time Prince came out of his pleading falsetto and dropped his voice into normal register.
Erycha was used to men dancing close and the girl was really no different. She was a shadow of movement, a likeness and a following all at once. She was willing to bend not only to the beat but to her partner, whereas Erycha, who led, told a story unshaped by the song and independent of her partner. Her body described the knife resting with its blade up right where she’d left it on the table in her small apartment. Her movement was not flow, but a strolling aggression that bent the girl in the jeans and heels this way then that and anticipated Prince’s vocal changes so that she was ahead of time. She vogued her way into Prince’s highest registers and sauntered her way out on the downbeat. She cut one dancer so quick and cold he didn’t even know he’d been upstaged, his lame Chicago-step parodied and discarded, his partner distracted by a deep laceration that he had neither felt nor seen. Then the boy’s partner stopped dancing with him and simply watched Erycha.
Erycha kept on dancing, first with the girl who had approached her, later with the girl who had left her partner. Erycha glanced at Touissant now and again. He was watching her.
In fact, he was captured by her glances. Her looks, even when they were brief, were demanding and fierce, but incredibly sad, too, like nothing he had seen before. In the parking lot after the proceedings had come to their close, she looked at him with eyes that said she wished not to be lied to, but knew that even her dreams were lies, that everything she had ever wanted was one way or another unreal. They both said goodbye and then she turned and walked away, strolling through the poorly lit lot. And he couldn’t stop staring after her.
The same instant his granny died in her Fresno hospital room, Touissant woke feverish and confused three hours to the South in his bedroom in his home in his suburb an hour east of Los Angeles.
He could hear his sisters downstairs. He listened until the sounds turned into words and made sense: they were leaving with Ms. Johnston and Ms. Johnston’s daughter to go to day camp. The bedroom wall stopped swimming and solidified. He rose and suddenly the fever pain wrenched him deep down, and Touissant, who believed that he would live forever, felt starkly, completely alive.
His fever rose like the fires in the San Bernardino Mountains, a homicidal element flashing up against the living world. He felt two quick acid ropes scour his lungs. When he finally half-crawled his way down the stairs and his mother told him about the death in the family, he vomited on the living-room floor.
She looked at him with a blankness that Touissant had never seen in her eyes. “I got no minutes for this,” she breathed. She put her hands on her hips and did something that made her throat sound like it was purging itself. Touissant knew that his getting sick was the last thing the family needed right now. He knew his mother was already counting out the cost of the trip to Fresno, gas money, the funeral fees, the inevitable breakfasts, lunches and dinners that she and her husband’s degrees would somehow be expected to pay for. He understood why she was frustrated and didn’t want to trouble her more. He wished he could chase the fever spiriting through him right out of his body. He watched her clean the mess, and saw how she glanced back at him furtively to judge whether he would vomit again.
“You need water,” she said.
Touissant nodded.
“Water. Hot water. Vitamin C. An antibiotic.”
In the kitchen, she rang out two vomit-soaked towels. Touissant turned and watched his dinner rice and clumps of congealed cinnamon and little undigested relics of vegetable and turkey fly wildly from the towels like water shaken from a dog. “Is that what’s inside of me?” he asked, unbidden.
She stopped. The question caught her in full motion; a stopping question. Questions without answers were an inheritance down from his dad, but they annoyed his mother; the realities of a childhood spent picking fruit and cotton in the Central Valley were as simple and inarguable as the sun and had left her no minutes to ask why life was this way or that. “You sick, or just strange?” she asked. “You sit there.” She pointed to a spot at the near edge of the living room couch. “Peace and be still there. Don’t wiggle around. Don’t move. Be still.”
Touissant did as he was told. Not a sweet woman really, she was a healer, a leader, a mother. But look for your coddling and little self-esteem stuff elsewhere, his dad liked to say, look for it where you gonna find it. His dad’s mother, the woman who had gone to her Lord before the sunrise, knew kindness and knew how to rear children with kindness. Touissant’s mother
