AGE FOURTEEN
She notices them because the child, a girl with big eyes and small lips, smiles all the time, while the mother—petite, dark skinned, with the same wee lips—frowns. In the summer, Campbell sees them standing near the corner to the west of the house, or across the street by the wall where someone has written, Jesus Saves. Other times, just before the sun dips, they move close to the bodega.
She notices them because the child, no more than two years old, is so well behaved, content as long as one hand is clutching her doll and the other is wrapped tightly in her mother’s hand.
When the rain falls, they huddle in the vestibule of the building that is diagonal to Campbell’s brownstone, the child waving hello and goodbye to the residents who move in and out of the doorways. Smiling, always smiling.
The mother makes way, but her frown is constant, and her eyes never leave Campbell’s stoop for more than a few seconds at a time.
When autumn arrives, she notices them because they are more conspicuous in their white winter coats with faux fur collars the color of red wine.
Millie notices them too. Not at first, not in the summer or in the early days of September, but they catch her eye during mid-October, when the leaves are burnt orange and brilliant yellow.
They are on the corner, beneath the tree, leaves falling around them like rain, and Millie’s pace slows so that she can get a good look at the little girl with the crimson collar.
“So cute,” Millie says, and then looks up at the woman.
When their eyes meet, Millie’s shoulders stiffen, and her mouth drops and then snaps tightly shut before she moves on, her pace fast, her body trembling.
The woman’s eyes are sparkling, and for the first time her frown has turned upright into a smile.
Once in the house, Millie smokes, cusses, and polishes the mantels in between making trips to the windows, snatching the curtains aside, and swinging her eyes up and down the block looking for the woman, the child, and her husband.
Sometimes she looks so hard that she bumps her head against the glass and, disgusted, she sucks her teeth, mutters a curse word, and then snatches the front door open and steps out onto the stoop.
But her eyes just fall on neighbors and strangers making their way home from work.
When Fred finally comes through the door, that woman’s autumn leaves are swirling at his feet, and his face looks like a cozy blanket; his eyes are soft and full like pillows. Millie knows that look; she has been acquainted with it more than fourteen years. That is his after-lovemaking look.
The look on his face, the swirling leaves at his feet, and the memory of the frowning woman send her into a rage, and she’s in his face before he can complain about the house stinking of Pledge and Merit cigarettes, because all Millie has been doing since she walked through the door is smoking and polishing the mantels and mumbling over and over, “That bastard, that no-good bastard.”
Her hands are balled into tight knots that turn her skin red at the knuckles, and her shoulders are hunched up close to her neck. Campbell’s stomach growls, but she won’t even fix her mouth to ask about dinner, and she goes into the kitchen to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
“Millie,” he starts, but she hauls off and slaps him across his face before he can finish. “Woman, are you crazy!” he screams as he stumbles backward from the blow.
“Yeah, niggah, crazy for marrying your sorry ass!” Millie screams back.
Campbell jumps up, and the plate and sandwich go crashing to the floor.
Fred is just standing there in shock, a hand cradling his cheek while Millie starts talking so fast that the only words they grab onto are “Whore” and “No respect.”
Fred tosses back “You crazy” and “Bellevue.”
Millie is through with throwing words, so she kicks off her slippers and throws those; she does the same with the brown-and-tan Mary Janes that sit in the corner, snatches up the lamp from the end table, and finally yanks off her wedding ring. Fred ducks and dodges each object, and they all end up on the floor behind him.
“You crazy, woman,” is all he says before walking up the stairs and into their bedroom.
Millie doesn’t follow; she just grabs up her dust cloth and Pledge and begins polishing the mantels again.
When the letters start coming, plain white envelopes with Fred typed neatly across the front, Millie doesn’t know what to make of them.
She won’t open them. Opening them would mean facing the truth completely, and she’s not ready to do that, so she places them on the kitchen table, or on the refrigerator door, behind the magnet that says, Cancún.
“You told me it was over,” she whispers to him when Campbell has gone upstairs or into the living room to watch television.
“It is,” Fred says in a bored voice.
“Then what the hell is this, huh?” She points at the envelope.
“How would I know? I haven’t opened it.”
“Then open it,” she hisses.
“When I am ready,” Fred says before snatching up the envelope, stuffing it into his pocket, and walking out the back door.
She watches him from the window, out in the cold, cigarette hanging from his lips, hands shaking as he works at opening the envelope.
The wind snatches at the letter, but Fred holds on tight until he’s read every word, and then he refolds it, reaches in his pocket for his lighter, and lets the blue-and-yellow flame have its way with it.
Millie’s tears come then, and so does the throbbing at her temples. She’s out of pills, and there’s only one beer left in the fridge, so she snatches it from its shelf and eases herself down at the kitchen table, propping her feet up in the chair, lighting a cigarette, and popping the tab from the can.
Her mind will wander to her mantels, but mostly to the wrong turn she took fourteen years ago that landed her here.
* * *
There is no love inside apartment 4G, 256 Stanley Avenue. Only silence and brooding since they’d left Detroit on the heels of their mother’s death in 1953.
There is no love in that place, and Luscious doesn’t invite any in, especially the love that walks on two legs and arrives with flowers, calling her beautiful and trying to convince her that she’s in need of a good man, leaning in close and whispering that they would be sweet together. Sweet.
Luscious just scoffs and laughs at them, not one of those wide-mouthed, tilt-your-head-back-on-your-neck types of laugh that would reveal the cotton-candy pink of her tongue and the rotting centers of her molars. If she’d laughed like that for them, they would see and know without her ever having to tell them that all the sweetness she’d had in her life came from the powdered coating of doughnuts and the sugary syrup of cola.
No love, just Luscious working double shifts at the factory,
