Fiction

She was 60 and unemployed. Her rent had been raised from 650 to 950. She suspected it had something to do with the rent in Manhattan: Suddenly white people abounded in her neighborhood. Why didn't they just go away? She sucked her teeth: It was bad enough she had to see them at work and all up in the television. Why couldn't she have Brooklyn? They were like cockroaches, she thought.
She moved here in 1970. She tricked her mother and eloped. Her mother had finally secured her a green card and a job in Cumberland, Maryland. "You play your cards right and you can get a good job in a bank." All the other West Indian girls were doing it and she knew she was lucky to be able to leave Trinidad for America. But then her husband mailed her the bus ticket from D.C. to Penn Station.
After all these years here, she would always remember the color of the leaves on the trees when she first came here. She had never seen anything like it. She and her husband would take walks in Prospect Park and she would wonder at the deep yellows, browns and reds. He had a beautiful apartment that he decorated magnificently: wall-to-wall carpet, a 35 gallon round fish tank (which he designed himself); fake leopard print couches that he also had made. There were silver graters that hung from the ceiling with colorful bulbs and a record collection that spanned all four walls. Her favorite album was Rain Forest by Walter Wanderley, "Brazil's No.1 Organist."
There was a telephone in every room and he even had a television in the bedroom. On the weekends he'd have his friends over--all the big artists and musicians from Port-of-Spain liming, drinking stout and old talking.
He'd take his seat behind his Hammond, Philip would pick up his flute, Boisie on guitar and Lennox on drums and they would jam. She was so proud of him--he was so talented and he was hers.
She had known him since she was 16. She had attended a radio show in Trinidad and he was in the band. He sent her a letter written in crapaud foot handwriting. Her first impulse was to dismiss him but she became repulsed at how easily and without effort she could become like her mother, and so, not wanting that she gave him a chance.
That he was from behind-the-bridge also complicated things. It wasn't that her family was rich or anything, but her father did work for the government. She may not have been that educated, but her family had owned a concrete house in Diamond Vale. These are the things, after all, that people seemed to value.
He taught himself to play the guitar when he was sixteen. He soon switched to the organ. He was convinced it was the instrument of the future. In later years, it was with much pride that he watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind. "Look", he'd tell his by then large family, "see--they using keyboards to talk to the aliens." He knew that no one in his family understood his love for, his passion for, keyboards. For him, the keyboard was the way in which he disconnected from the dreariness of everyday existence. An existence that took place between Love Boat and Fantasy Island on the weekends and stretched on to other, hopefully new episodes the following weekend. In between he managed with weed, Guinness and late night episodes of The Honeymooners. Life seemed to peak when heavyweights were Black. But they were in love back then. Laying in bed, watching I Love Lucy in the morning. But then the children came. "You have to send for the children," her mother had demanded. It wasn't that she didn't want her children, one girl and one boy, to live with them in Brooklyn. She just wanted them to have a little more time...
Life changed after that. The oldest one, the daughter, seemed so full of judgement and disappointment. The daughter seemed unwilling to bridge the differences while the mother foolishly thought that biology should have solidified the ties.
Her daughter resented being taken from "home", from Trinidad. The youngest, the boy, looked on with eager, hungry eyes. When they arrived at JFK she hugged them. Her husband did not.
Things changed. No more parties. Her husband complained that he could not practice--the children were too distracting. Despite the fact that they were 12 and 11, she gave them a potty to use in the room. The first six months they stayed at home, as they arrived too late for registration.
He lost his job. The reefer smoking grew. He got angry and threw fits. But that was a long time ago. No sense in thinking so much about the past now. The past is the past. "Rose, you like a duck. Everything does just roll off your back," her father would tell her. He was now dead.
She suddenly got the urge for something sweet. She was diabetic and on medication. She thought that meant that she could still eat sweets. She shuffled into the kitchen and passed her present boyfriend asleep on the couch. She stood there and watched him.
He was younger than she--by almost a decade. It was a vanity she quietly enjoyed. They had met on the train. Long after the move from her husband. Long after the alcoholic boyfriend that had quickly followed that. She was on the train and he passed her his number. "Give me a call", he commanded.
Until then her life had been somewhat boring. She had finally left her alcoholic boyfriend and moved in with her sister and mother. She felt miserable in a house full, of what she thought to be, old hens. Her sister had recently migrated from Trinidad to Brooklyn. While in Trinidad, before her move she would brag, "See me, I not living in Brooklyn nah, I going to live in Manhattan." Poor thing, Rose thought, she had no idea. It was only after she moved to Brooklyn that she realized the hard reality of immigrant life in New York City and accepted that she could never leave Brooklyn.
Her mother was in her 70s but found work taking care of elderly people in the Bronx. Her mother's one goal was to fill barrels and ship them back to Trinidad. Barrels full of socks, toothpaste, microwave--things that she could never afford back home became obsessions to be possessed.
Rose expressed her frustration to her daughter, the youngest. "Get a hobby," she would chastise, "Take an exercise class." Yeah right, she sucked her teeth, as if it was that easy.
She made her way to the kitchen and cut herself a piece of store-bought pound cake. She poured herself a coffee mug full of orange juice. She relished that there were no pesty daughters to reprimand her, "You are diabetic, you have to watch your diet." She bit into the cake and licked her thick fingers. What is life if you can't eat cake?
One of her daughters once told her, "You know, the aborigines say that if you are diabetic it is because you lack true sweetness in your life." Rose downed the rest of the cake with a mouthful of juice. She placed the plate and cup immediately in the sink and proceeded to wash them.
She and Roger moved in a month after their first date. He was energetic and funny and told stories she foolishly thought she would never tire of. Like the one about when he first moved to New York and when he saw snow for the first time,"I thought someone was throwing grits out the window!" Or about the time he went to apply for a job and an East Indian, darker than Roger asked, "Excuse me sir, can you help me. What should I tick off here?" In reference to the race box. Roger took one long look at him from head to toe, "I don't know brother, but by the looks of it, you look pretty black to me."
The man panicked as if given a curse, "But I'm not Block!" he sputtered.

Roger wasn't like the others. He didn't expect her to cook all the meals or wash the wares or iron all his clothes. Her allowed her to reunite with old friends that her marriage and children seemed to distance her from. And since he worked and paid his part of the bills, she actually found herself, for the first time in her life, able to shop for herself. She could buy shoes and black shiny blouses from Flatbush Avenue. And there was something familiar about him: his southerness was something she could connect to.
He enjoyed his alcohol and reefer, but Rose, at that point in her life, thought that was the norm. "Ain't nobody perfect," was her favorite line. Sure she knew there were sober men, but by now she held a conviction that her calling was to be with an alcoholic man. "Who you think Jesus was with?" She'd chastise herself whenever she started getting little ideas, little ideas that encouraged her to leave,"Jesus wasn't with the perfect people," she'd remind herself, "he was with people like Roger."
Sure she and Roger fought. Over silly things like his staying up all night and watching tv when she had to get up and go to work early in the morning. But he never hit her and she never had to run away.
She sat at the dining room table and stared at him. His hand propped his dark forehead up and he slept with his mouth open. The television was on. It was always on. He had told her about his drug recovery on their first date. He took her to Coney Island and while eating pink and blue cotton candy, drugs seemed like a faraway thing, a subject she swatted back with her consciousness, away from ruining her then perfect present.
She picked up the phone, dialed. Busy. She sucked her teeth. She tried another number.
"Glenda, you home? What you doing? You want to go to South Street Seaport? In two hours? Ok, see you." She puts down the phone.
Goes into the shower. Smothers herself in Avon. Paints her toenails. Applies her foundation. Takes her pink plastic rollers out. Irons a lion-print skirt. Squeezes her girdle on. Dresses. Adds more gold rings to her fingers. Applies orange lipstick. Plucks at her eyebrows. Checks her wallet. Only twenty dollars for the rest of the month. It is the middle of the month. She shrugs. So what? She thinks, I've worked too hard.I'm 60. I'm unemployed, I deserve to have some fun.
She gets ready to leave, but as she is about to close the door, she takes one more look at Roger. She tiptoes over to him and kisses him on the forehead. We all need love, she thinks, we all need love.