Edward Jones - Lost in the City

The sun was even higher when he turned right at O Street. In one of the houses on that street her mother lived until Lydia’s last year of law school. She had once brought down from New Haven a professor of linguistics who thought the sun rose and set on her. He had had a kind heart, the professor had, but his love for her had shown through all too clearly, and that was his downfall. For thirty days during the month of her birthday he had sent her the reddest roses she had seen up to then: one on the first day, two on the second day, three on the third, and so on. “How much do professors of linguistics make?” she asked a friend on the twentieth day, looking down at his name on the card that came with the roses. “Does he come from a sickly family?” her mother had asked while the man was in the bathroom.

She wanted more coke and she began to cry. “And first prize, for her particularly beautiful enunciation, goes to….” John Brown lies molderin where my mother lies molderin…. The cab driver thought that her crying meant that maybe it had finally hit her that her mother had died and that soon his passenger would be coming to herself.

At New Jersey Avenue, the cab driver turned left, then right at Rhode Island down past Frazier’s Funeral Home. At a large apartment building on Rhode Island where the Safeway now stood, they had lived on the same floor as a woman who was terrified that her husband would leave her. “So all the time bein scared of him leavin,” her mother told Lydia years later when she thought her daughter was old enough to understand, “she just became his slave. He was a night foreman at a bakery way out in Northeast. I guess some thought he was a handsome man, but I never cared for him. Had what they call that good hair. Night and day she worried that he’d leave her. She begged me and all the other women not to take him from her. She wouldn’t believe that I whatn’t studyin bout him. She worried herself sick and they came and took her away to St. Lizabeths one day. In those days, they gave you twenty-five dollars if you turned in a crazy person. Twenty-five dollars and a pat on the back. Somebody turned her in, but it whatn’t me.”

When his mother moved into that 10th Street house Santiago Moses bought for her, one of the few things she brought from the place she left behind was the coffee table made of see-through glass and false wood. And once in the house he bought, in the renovated house, one of her pleasures in the first weeks was watching the neighbors watch as the trucks came to deliver furniture, some of it still in sealed boxes and crates, brand new furniture and appliances that no other woman in the world had lived with. In the midst of all the new that her son bought for her — the living room couch itself cost as much as all the furniture in the place she left behind — she put the coffee table that had been owned by God knows how many people before she herself bought it in that second-hand store on H Street in Northeast and had her man rope it to the roof of his eleven-year-old Chevy.

Her whole life, in dozens of pictures, could be seen through the glass top of that old coffee table, and that was what she told her son.

“Oh, don’t give me that stuff, Mama,” Santiago told her two months or so after she had moved in, “go back to Levitt’s. Go back to Woodie’s. You can find somethin somewhere that’ll be better than this piece of shit.” He was sitting on the leather couch beside Rickey Madison and her son leaned forward and knocked twice on the top of the table. It was along about midnight.

“Stop,” Joyce Moses said, “you’ll break the glass.” But her words lacked the scolding force of the old days, and she giggled and put both hands to her mouth and shook herself: She was still exhilarated by the new world her son had bought for her, and, in any case, one more crack in the top wouldn’t have been the end. Her two younger children were upstairs, asleep in oaken beds, safer than they had ever been in their lives. Santiago Moses watched his mother, then he gave the table another playful tap. He was twenty years old.

“Nope nope nope,” Joyce said. “Don’t want another table.” She had been drinking, but “only a teensy-weensy bit a wine,” as she told Rickey after he arrived with Santiago. The carpet was down, having been installed throughout the house before she and Rickey and her two younger children moved in, but much of the new furniture had yet to be arranged in the rooms just as she wanted. There was no hurry. She sat on the floor, leaning back on her arms, her toes disappearing into the carpet. “With all this other stuff, don’t you think if I’da wanted another coffee table, I woulda gone out and ordered it?”

“It’s a gotdamn shame to buy the best and then have this shit sittin in the middle of all the good stuff,” Santiago said. He laughed. “We can give this old one to the poor,” and he laughed again. His feet were propped on the edge of the coffee table, and as he laughed he stretched his legs out over the table and shook them up and down.

“He’s right, honey,” Rickey said. He had been her common-law husband for six years. “Better find somethin new. We can look next week.”

Santiago stopped laughing and turned to Rickey. “My mother’s old anough to know what she want. She ain’t nobody’s child, Rickey. She don’t need nobody tellin her what to do.”

“I didn’t mean anything by it, Sandy. Why you gettin all upset again? Sides, I think I should be able to tell my own woman somethin.”

“Rickey, you can’t tell nobody shit! Just do what I tell you and keep your mouth shut.”

“All right now, you two,” Joyce said. “I don’t want yall startin nothin.” She stood up quickly, for this was how the last fight started. “All right. All right. This conversation’s closed far as I’m concerned, cause I’m keepin this table and thas all there is to it. Why yall wanna go and spoil a good time?”

“We gotta be goin anyway,” Santiago said.

She walked them to the door, and Santiago kissed her cheek, the same kind of peck he had been giving her since he was months old. He turned up his jacket collar and went out the wooden and iron-bar doors and down the steps to his Range Rover. Rickey kissed her mouth. “See you later, baby,” he said. He whispered that she should get a new table and she gave him a playful push.

“C’mon,” Santiago said, “You know what she taste like by now. I ain’t got all night.”

The layered curtains were now up, and she parted them and watched her son and husband ride away down 10th Street. She continued to stand by at the window. She loved this time most, the hours when her house and all that was in it seemed to conspire with the quiet and envelop her. She had, while still in the old place, passed this house a million times, when it had contained a horrible family of loud people. Back then, she would have bet the souls of her children if someone had told her that one day the house would be made over and then hold her and her family.

She turned out the lamp beside her, and by and by she saw a form across the street peel away from a huge shadow, take the shape of a man, and walk toward the house. Before the man was midway across the street, she could see, in the walk without purpose, in the thinness, that it was Humphrey, her godson. For a minute or so, he stood in the middle of the empty street and looked up and down, his hand shading his eyes as if it were the middle of a very sunny day.

“Mama Joyce, it’s so good to see you,” Humphrey said, holding on to the banister with both hands as he made his way up the stairs. She opened the wooden door wider. “Sandy here?” He smiled through the iron-bar door, then he began to laugh, and she saw that he was out of his head again.