Elegy for the Sweet Tempered

I hadn’t yet met Sascha. I was in Rabat with another girl and we were lost in the markets. A man helped and we followed him to a house full of art and dried fish. It surfaced just this morning, sitting in the rental in front of the bakery, waiting for the college kid to pull the sandwich board to the curb and open the doors, that the man wrapped the fish in frayed white cloth before he pointed us toward our rented flat. And that on the walk, like tourists, we bought too many dates. And that I was on the terrace waiting for a playoff score to update on my phone while the girl was in the kitchen organizing the plate for us to share. The man had a gun and he knew where she lived, the woman who had sublet my apartment had written. He took her to the alley. This was nearly all she wrote. And that she was sorry to have told me this and a friend had gathered her. And that my apartment would be empty until I returned.

I’m back at the hotel with all of this and Sascha is still asleep, her shirt stained at the breast and not even an ounce of pumped milk in a bottle on the bedside table. I date the milk and take it to the fridge with the rest. It’s the stick of the door that wakes her. She’s on an elbow massaging her scalp and ready to nurse, but Darius isn’t here. I smile and hand her one of the cookies.

“Go fuck yourself and your cookies,” spilling out a laugh. 

We are just beginning to laugh.

“I want coffee,” she says from the closet as she holds her green and white polka dot dress against her hips.

“Let’s just get the cookies over with.”

It was her idea to go back to the NICU. I convinced her to let Darius sleep at my mom’s. We traveled all this way and it’d be cruel not to carve out some time, no matter how “heavy a presence,” Sascha’s mantra, my mom is. When Darius was born Sascha announced that family wouldn’t be able to visit until we left the hospital. He was jaundiced and we were told it would be a day or two. We stayed nine and my mom came anyway, and Sascha knew we couldn’t complain—the baby in the neighboring bed was taken for brain surgery on our second day and hadn’t returned by the time we left. When we were on the plane back to LA yesterday, she thought the cookies would be nice. I doubted that they’d remember us.

As we cross the street Sascha takes the bakery box from me. Eight months ago, after the nine days, leaving the hospital wasn’t the exit I’d imagined. I crossed the parking lot in the dark, stood in the elevator that had reeked of piss since we arrived, and in thirty minutes the three of us were home. Today there is sun and we walk through the front door and the gift shop is open.

When the buzzer sounds and the NICU doors click, three mothers are being led to the room where torsos the dull color of airplane window shades wait for them. “Take a seat and get familiar,” Sascha whispers, attempting a version of the CPR trainer we know will enter shortly. Each time we’d seen this parade we rattled on about the absurdity of it all. And it was and is. Six or seven others who haven’t slept more than two hours at a stretch in at least a week will be in this room. While our crew was refreshingly democratized by this circumstance and this exhaustion—lululemon meeting three-inch, sparkling acrylic nails meeting whatever we were to them—if they wanted any of us to learn how to save a choking baby, that wasn’t the time to for the demonstration.

A nurse comes at us with open arms before we can even announce ourselves and I’m surprised to recognize her. With my clumsy hug and the smell of Ivory on her bicep comes the memory of how brown Darius was under the bili lights. She’s the only nurse on the floor that was with us, but she feels the need to introduce the others on this shift. Somehow, months and countless babies later, she has kind things to say about us. Sascha shows pictures of Darius from Christmas. Another nurse, wearing all manner of unicorn from head to toe, asks for one. “If it’s okay,” our nurse interrupts. “We can put it on the screen in the waiting room. It gives the parents hope.”

I excuse myself knowing Sascha will start taking pictures with the staff. On the toilet without the need to shit I find an email from three months after the woman who sublet my apartment was raped. I had followed up and she had moved back to New York. In the exchange, unprompted, I had apparently apologized for the neighborhood. I remember wanting to say more, how I felt guilty, but having some sense not to. Her return email was sweet and silent.

I’m searching the internet for variations of her name when a man comes into the stall next to mine. I flush, wash my hands and hustle out just as he begins to grunt what I’m convinced are the drums from that Queen song.

Sascha is waiting by the elevators.

“You,” she says.

I ask if she’s hungry.

“What do you think?”

***

We park down the block from our first apartment and head to the diner with the manhole blueberry pancakes across from the park only to find it’s been turned into a tattoo parlor. The Sloth & The Bee. Five years since we moved even further east in the city, before leaving altogether for my job, and with the distance these names are that much more obnoxious — living the past months in a small southern college town with no billboards and pretty much just an IHOP and a Waffle House for breakfast doesn’t help. 

“Your people,” I say. “Next they’re gonna open Billie’s Groat and only serve oat milk lattes.”

She impersonates a laugh, affirming some sort of solidarity and rhythm. But if I’m honest, the neighborhood was this way when we were here. And that’s part of why we came. She lets me pull her close by the crepe belt of her dress and I suggest we walk to the deli we’d passed on the drive over. It’s still in the thirties back home and who knows when the weather will turn.

“Should only be ten minutes,” I say.

My guess is that it’s nostalgia that draws Sascha to the quart of potato salad. To be fair, at this hour in the morning there’s only refrigerated food, but the only other time we’d been in this place was when we lied through our teeth to her parents and faked our first Thanksgiving meal together. Despite them being German immigrants living in Connecticut, and not usually doing the turkey thing, I’ve always felt they’d sniffed it out. But I wasn’t the rock climber or the EDM DJ and so they played it cool. Her dad, only slightly inebriated, pretty much fessed to that in his wedding toast. To the one who rock climbed at least. Something about his gratitude for Mt. Olympus being in her rear view put Sascha’s eyes in her lobster bisque.

There’s decent drip up front. The small seating area has chairs over the tables and the woman at checkout says we’re welcome to take one. We ask for a plastic spoon and sit on the bus bench outside trading potatoes and coffee. Sascha asks how I think my mom is managing. 

“I can just picture her,” she says as she puts a spoonful in my mouth before I can find the right answer. “I’m sure Darius is all about it.”

“Thank you for this.”

“Yeah,” more to the air than to me.

***

My head is on the armrest and my ankles on her thighs, the wrought iron massaging the knot on the back of my head that’s been there since I threw it against the rim of the tub after one of our first fights. Sascha moves the cuffs of my jeans and gently twists the hair on my shins.

“You could seriously donate this shit to chemo patients,” she says.

I think of making a joke, something with fuck off, but close my eyes and wait for the spots.

***

I wake to the beeps of the unfolding handicap ramp, and to the apparition of a cinnamon-skinned woman in a purple and gold sequence bomber jacket and a padded chair glittering with a crumpled paper bag and an oxygen tank on her lap. The potato salad is nowhere to be seen.

The driver is shouting for this woman to stop. The hose of her tank is tangled in the door hinge and I stumble up to help push the door back from the outside, my eyes at the level of the veins and flesh escaping her compression socks. When she is free, before she motors away, she squeezes my hand with a delicateness that takes me to the grandmother of an old friend. 

I peek my head into the bus. Besides a couple taking up the whole last row and a man with enormous studio headphones, it’s empty.

“Come on,” turning to Sascha on the bench. Though she lived here nine years, this would be her first bus ride in LA. Definitely the first since we’ve been together. “I’m serious,” as I dig behind the insurance cards to where I keep the cash for the tolls when we drive north on I-95 to visit her family.

The driver flicks her wrist and I stand back so she can draw in the ramp. She’s skinny and dark-haired, more an aged and disgruntled Hollywood-film waitress than a bus driver. Sandra Bullock trying a deep character dive. Sascha would call her rode hard. I hand her five dollars but she demands exact change with the smoker’s voice I’d expected. I ask if she can put what’s left toward the next passenger and she looks into her fisheye mirror. “Go on now,” refusing the money with a wink. “But,” pointing to Sascha’s coffee, “she’ll have to throw that out.”

I rode this same line three times a week in grad school. Like just about everything in the city, on the surface this bus is cleaner than most from back then but the mosaic seats with their sporadic cigarette burns and petrified gum are the same. We pass the man with the headphones and stand at the back door. I slump to watch the street signs with my arm tight around Sascha’s shoulder. “I miss this dress,” I tell her. I want to add that I like that it rides higher with the weight, how it looks on her legs, but she wouldn’t believe me.

My mind sticks on the fourteen-hour layover in Charles de Gaulle as I made my way back to Los Angeles, to the empty apartment save for the water-worn bamboo dish rack with one unfamiliar mug.

I pull the cord too late. The next stop is three blocks past our car but Sascha seems fine with it. We jump into the grass as the bus slows and the heel strap on her sandal breaks. She grabs me by the elbow while she pulls off both and we walk like this, her hand in the bend of my arm, alternating balding grass and concrete until we are driving back to the hotel.

Ricardo Wilson is the author of An Apparent Horizon and Other Stories (PANK Books, 2021) and The Nigrescent Beyond: Mexico, the United States, and the Psychic Vanishing of Blackness (Northwestern UP, 2020). His writing can also be found in, among other spaces, 3:AM Magazine, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, BOMB, Callaloo, The Common, CR: The New Centennial Review, Crazyhorse, The Offiing, and Stirring. Ricardo is an assistant professor of English at Williams College and the director of Outpost, a residency for creative writers of color from the United States and Latin America. ricardoawilson.com