T. Johnson - Hold It 'Til It Hurts

Every Friday night for a month, following the airing of Roots, they ate at Happy Garden, wolfing down fried rice and egg rolls under the protection of red lacquer dragons. The owners’ son, Sam, was in the same grade as Achilles and worked in the restaurant on weekends, busing tables and refilling glasses, when he wasn’t watching ice skating on the TV behind the bar. Friday nights, Achilles’s father escorted Sam, Troy, and Achilles to the skating rink. Troy found his wings. He flew across the ice but couldn’t stop, always bearing down on his brother or father like an unavoidable accident. Achilles spent most of his time on his back. And Sam, for all his enthusiasm about watching, didn’t actually like to skate, and moped around the ring like he was incarcerated, tiptoeing on his blades with an exaggerated T-rex gait. This playdate lasted three weekends before Sam, sensing that his imprisonment was terminal, decided to get to know his two cellmates by sharing his Chinese name and inquiring about their real names, their African names.

Their father sighed when Troy repeated the question. They had just dropped Sam at Happy Garden and now sat in the cab of their father’s truck, Troy in the middle, his head barely at Achilles’s shoulder. When Achilles met his father’s gaze, he knew he’d intercepted a look meant for adults, the kind his parents gave each other when it snowed on a school day.

“Boys, your names are your names, your real names. And this isn’t going to make sense now, but don’t let other people’s problems become your problems. You are better. Be the ones to beat.”

Achilles knew his father hadn’t meant that they were better than other people, only that they had to live by a higher standard: walk away from fights if you can, flatten the bastard if you can’t, and remember that sticks-and-stones stuff. He understood that everyone was equal. But his father didn’t understand that Achilles didn’t start the fights, though he was always blamed for them, though even that made sense when he overheard a counselor explain, “Some kids are just more violent.”

The more Ines spoke, the more he sympathized with his parents. He’d never considered how hard they worked to protect him from the world. Ines thought it hard for kids. It wasn’t. How difficult, though, it must have been for his father, who knew he wasn’t a purple people eater. Was it like a commander sending troops to an uncertain fate?

The Conroys hadn’t made the world. Ines couldn’t understand that, couldn’t understand that his parents weren’t to blame for how he felt when she uttered those two words, Poor Troy. She couldn’t understand that Achilles was that puppy, nay, beast. Miles from home, he was just another black man, as he learned with Charlie 1. He loathed his birth parents intensely, more than he’d ever imagined it possible to detest people he’d never met and wasn’t paid to kill. This animosity was invoked whenever she uttered those two words, as she did that morning of the funeral.

Achilles was in the bathroom wrestling his tie when Ines came in, stood behind him reflected in the mirror, and said, “Your friends had it so hard, especially poor Troy.” She said it as she always did, like she’d realized only at that moment how bad Troy had it.

She wore panties and a bra, the high nylon waist and sheer legs giving her the look of a mannequin. When she fixed her bra, readjusting the straps with a snap, rolling her shoulders like a wrestler and drawing one fingertip and then the other under the underwire, the familiar, warm glow oozed through his stomach, and the hairs on the back of his neck danced as he imagined biting one gaping hole in the crotch of her pantyhose and her wearing them all day. His mouth watered until she added, “White parents who adopted black kids back then didn’t have support groups.”

Enraged, he couldn’t complete the full Windsor he’d practiced all week, the knot Wages had tied in the wee hours, and that Achilles was therefore determined to wear that day. Ines tied it for him — a perfect plump triangle — and snapped at him when he took it off in the car because it felt too tight. She snapped again when she had to retie it in the cemetery lot. A few cars away, a little boy underwent the same ordeal, his mother straightening his tie and collar and lapels, every so often yanking his ears. Their eyes met. The boy looked scornfully at Achilles, as if to say, Haven’t you figured it out yet? They ended up being only feet from each other in the procession to the grave. When the kid gave him another contemptuous look, Achilles stopped short of scratching his chin with his middle finger.

As the preacher spoke about the word of God becoming flesh, ashes becoming ashes, and Wages returning home, Achilles wondered who was left to bury. In every direction, swarms of black umbrellas huddled like compound eyes. Unlike at their father’s funeral, where Troy and Achilles had silently flanked their mother, knowing it was their job to be strong, Achilles found it hard to hold back the tears. It was the first time he had cried since Lamont Jackson died. This felt like a service for all of them: Jackson, Wages, Troy. Though Ines often claimed he’d been emotional at the movie screening— That’s how I knew you were special —he didn’t recall feeling anything. Today, he couldn’t look anyone in the eye. It had been like that for the past few weeks. Whenever he met a stranger’s gaze, he wondered whom they’d lost, and if they’d find them. It was like traveling through a war zone, the faces of the survivors hungry, desperately searching, scanning passersby. People stopped him in the street, yelling or tapping his shoulder to get his attention, their smiles fading when he turned and they saw that Achilles wasn’t their son, or father, or friend, or brother, or neighbor, or even the postman (he had been thrilled to bump into his postman at Lee Circle, even though he was a short, stocky, ill-tempered Episode 1 vet to whom he had never before spoken).

As the preacher droned on, Ines leaned on Achilles to adjust her shoes. She regularly shifted her weight from foot to foot. Her mother’s feet were a half size smaller, as was her dress size. Ines wore a simple black sleeveless dress with a black shawl draped over her shoulders, camouflaging the zipper that wouldn’t close. The dress fit like candy coating, threatening to crack every time she bent from the waist. Under other circumstances, he would have thought she wore it only to remind him of what he was missing, but he knew they were her mother’s clothes. She adjusted her other shoe, leaning on him again, and he put his arm around her, pulling her close to warm the chill in his bones. They were trapped in the shade under an overhang, next to crypts stacked like the drawers of an oversized apothecary. Like most New Orleans cemeteries, all the tombs at Mt. Olivet were aboveground, walled in to prevent floods from washing the coffins away, and arranged like a grid with the graves geometrically aligned along parallel roads wide enough for cars to pass, and with a few alleys limited to foot traffic. It was arranged like a city, except everyone was dead, as were most of the people he knew.

The service was small. Achilles, Ines, Mrs. Wages, and Bethany’s family were the sole attendees. Wexler hadn’t come, as expected. They’d long ago agreed there was no need to attend each other’s funerals.

He’d wanted Wexler to come, and maybe even Naomi. They could both meet Ines. They would see that he was different now, and Naomi would feel, well, he didn’t know what she would feel, but she would see that he wasn’t all bad. That would have meant telling Ines everything, but what did he have to lose? Never mind that Ines admitted coming back to the condo only because she felt sorry for him, couldn’t bear another night at her mother’s house, and was horny that night, that one night, that one night only . He brought that on himself, he knew, trying to laugh off his teary breakdown, blaming it first on the full moon, then on alcohol, then on hormones, meaning he needed sex. Never mind that they lived like roommates of necessity, like relocated refugees, she in the bed and he on the couch, knocking before entering the bathroom, eating only the food they individually bought, carefully refolding the newspaper like considerate travelers. He could live with that as long as he could live with her.