Tar Baby

Son picked her up and took her to the window. After a violent struggle he actually held her out of it by her wrists shouting, “The truth is that whatever you learned in those colleges that didn’t include me ain’t shit. What did they teach you about me? What tests did they give? Did they tell you what I was like, did they tell you what was on my mind? Did they describe me to you? Did they tell you what was in my heart? If they didn’t teach you that, then they didn’t teach you nothing, because until you know about me, you don’t know nothing about yourself. And you don’t know anything, anything at all about your children and anything at all about your mama and your papa. You find out about me, you educated nitwit!”

It was only ten feet off the ground and she wet her pants, but still she hollered loud enough for him to hear as well as the few people gathered on the sidewalk to watch, “You want to be a yardman all your life?”

“His name is Gideon! Gideon! Not Yardman, and Mary Therese Foucault, you hear me! Why don’t you ask me to help you buy a house and put your aunt and uncle in it and take that woman off her feet. Her feet are killing her, killing her, and let them live like people for a change, like the people you never studied, like the people you can’t photograph. They are the ones who put you through school, woman, they are the ones. Not him. They worked for him all their lives. And you left them down there with him not knowing if they had a job or not. You should cook for them. What the hell kind of education is it that didn’t teach you about Gideon and Old Man and me. Nothing about me!”

When he pulled her back in, her arms were so sore she could not move them. But she was curled up teary-eyed in his lap an hour later when the doorbell rang. Son was massaging her shoulders, and begging forgiveness. They both went to the door and looked so lovey-dovey the police thought they had the wrong apartment, it must have been somebody else throwing a woman out of the window.

Other times they fought about work; surely that was the problem.

He mentioned once wanting to go back to the boats.

“You can’t; you’re blacklisted. You jumped ship, remember?”

“That don’t mean nothing.”

“You’ll be away all the time. Why do you want to leave me?”

“I don’t. But we don’t have to live here. We can live anywhere.”

“You mean Eloe.”

“I mean anywhere. I can get good work in other places.”

“Where?”

“Houston, Montgomery, Atlanta, San Diego.”

“I can’t live there.”

“Why do you want to change me?”

“Why do you want to change me?”

“I want to live, not change. I can’t live just for this goddamn city.”

“Is it because you’re afraid? Because you can’t make it in New York?”

“Make it in New York. Make it in New York. I’m tired of hearing that shit. What the fuck is it? If I make it in New York, then that’s all I do: ‘Make it in New York.’ That’s not life; that’s making it. I don’t want to make it; I want to be it. New York ain’t hard, baby. Not really hard. It’s just sad, and what you need to make it here is the easy stuff I got rid of a long time ago. I’ve lived all over the world, Jadine. I can live anywhere.”

“You’ve never lived anywhere.”

“And you? Where have you lived? Anybody ask you where you from, you give them five towns. You’re not from anywhere. I’m from Eloe.”

“I hate Eloe and Eloe hates me. Never was any feeling more mutual.”

She kept him on the defensive; demanded clarity, precision, very specific solutions to open-ended problems, and any furry notion he had in mind of what to do or where to do it matted before her rakelike intellect. He wanted to do things in time—she wanted them done on time. So he let her make private appointments, did take the SAT and scored in the 400s; the LET and was below the 13th percentile; the IRE and ranked above the 80th percentile; the CEE and scored in the 600s. “That proves,” he told her, “that I can sit still for three hours at a clip, but I always knew that.”

“One of two things,” she said finally. “Either you go to school while I work or we ask Valerian to invest in a business.”

“Will you marry me?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“I’ll go to school.”

“Ooo-wee!” She grabbed him around the neck and pulled him to the floor.

“But not here.”

“Why?”

“We’re living in other people’s space. This is not our crib. Let’s go someplace else.”

“How many times do I have to tell you—I can’t work someplace else. You can, but I can’t.”

“What the hell do you do that’s so jive you can’t take it out of the city and do it there?”