Promises Promises

Promise is always talking about the time I left her in the woods. The way she describes it, you’d think I left her for dead. You’d think it was some kind of child abuse scenario, the way she plays it up. Really, though, she was older than I was, and tougher, too. Ten minutes alone in the woods isn’t exactly something to waste your life whining about, and it wasn’t even really winter yet, anyway. And if she ever bothered to think about the context of the thing, she’d see how at the time I had no reason to love or protect her.

But she would rather simplify things. Boil them down to the least common denominator, like this isn’t about anything other than the simple fact that I left her in the woods. Bad memories—those ones that make you squirm inside your skin, that make you wanna crawl out of your own brain—are never that simple. But it doesn’t matter. When it comes to my word against Promise’s, they always believe her. I mean, you have to look at what was going on at the time, for starters. Attention to detail wasn’t important then; Promise was important then. She was the family Dad chose; I was the family he brought along and begrudged. And everyone wonders why I was so quick to get out.

What a crock this is. I look around, and I don’t know what I’m doing here. I mean, my dad died. That’s what I’m doing here, obviously. When your father dies, you come home. It’s just what you do. I had always kind of thought that I would blow this whole thing off when the time came, honestly; but the time did come, and I gotta say, a feeling of obligation is one tight noose around the neck. When I found out about Dad—when Promise called me to tell me what happened—I bought that plane ticket so fast I didn’t even have time to think about it. JFK to BUF in a heartbeat. Before I could even remind myself that I wasn’t planning on giving a shit.

Since then it’s been exactly what you would expect. I sat with everybody at the kitchen table in my childhood home, and we sorted through boxes of old pictures trying to find the good moments to put on display at the wake. I listened to all the funny, satisfying stories everybody wanted to tell, never once opening my mouth to remind the slobbering lot that the man was a drunk and an asshole. I bowed my head for the prayers. I ate a bite from every casserole every little old lady brought me.

Now I’m standing next to his casket, wedged between my half-sister and her mother, receiving hugs and shaking hands. I can’t stop fidgeting; my suit is a half size too small and made of fibers that don’t breathe. I do not fit next to these people, even though I’m supposed to and even though they are my family. I have to accept the sympathy of strangers, and that feels dishonest because I am not sad.

“Thank you for coming,” Promise says to a mourner, rubbing her pregnant stomach. Tears are running down her face, and her pores open up to accept the water of grief. She is swollen all over.

I am hungry. I check my watch, and she sees me doing this. She looks hurt.

“What?” But I know exactly what. It’s been five hours of wakes today. Five hours of standing. Five hours of talking about nothing interesting with nobody I give a shit about. Misery is getting easier to feign, but not for the right reasons.

Promise rolls her eyes. She says, “I need to sit down, I think. I need some fresh air.”

I offer to walk her outside, because it smells like chemicals and old skin in here, and I’m starting to feel sick.

Promise and I sit on the curb outside the funeral home and feel the chill of winter settle in our fingers. I shove my bare hands into my pockets and gaze up. The sky is dull and grey. A few fat flakes of snow appear and float into my eyelashes. Neither of us is talking. I don’t have anything to say, and she probably has a lot to say, but she doesn’t want to get into it. Our common bond—the DNA that binds us—is in a box inside. With him dead, we are just mismatched. The passing of time has made our differences so obvious that we can’t help but be estranged.

Promise is rubbing her stomach again. She is always doing that.

“This is no world to bring a baby into,” she says. She is not talking to me, I don’t think. She is staring straight ahead, at the vacant storefronts and boarded up apartment buildings that line the street. The whole neighborhood, it seems, is vacated pending demolition. Some of these homes you could actually buy for $1—How about that! Wait til they hear this one in the City!—but no one wants to live on this street; the funeral home is the only sign of life for a block in either direction. A few miles away, empty grain silos and a defunct steel plant loom behind the brand new windmills that turn so slowly I wonder if they are generating any energy at all.

I say, “This city is depressing.” I think I am agreeing with her.

“No it’s not. You haven’t even left the old neighborhood since you’ve been back. You have no idea what it’s like.”

I try not to laugh. “Okay. I believe you.”

Promise turns her head to look at me. Her body does not move, though; it does not want to be close to me.

“That’s not what I’m talking about, Josh,” she says. “I’m not talking about no stupid economic downturn or whatever. This family never had no money and we did fine with what we had.”

“Well then what are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about bringing a baby boy into a world where he don’t have no father or no grandfather or no uncle to look up to.”

I don’t have anything to say to that. I’m not trying to not placate her with lies about how much I’ll be around. People are streaming out of the funeral home now. Neither of us turns to thank them for coming. I don’t because I do not know them. Promise doesn’t because she is crying again.

I don’t know why I say it. It falls out of my mouth and I can’t catch it in time to put it back in: “You should have your baby in the water.”

“What?” She is defensive.

“It’s better for the baby. In the water. It’s a smooth transition from the fluid nature of the womb.”

“Is that what all the celebrities in New York are doing?”

“No. Yes.”

Promise smiles a little. That’s nice. But it goes away quickly and leaves no trace.

“Listen,” she says, and I cower a bit, because suddenly I’m remembering the bite of her tongue when she’s angry. “I know you my brother, and I know that means you wanna give me all the benefit of your college degree, but I do not need to hear anything from anybody, especially men, especially strangers, about how my body is gonna push out a damn baby.”

That part where she called me a stranger. That wounded me somehow, even though I know it is true.

“Remember the time you left me in the woods?”

There it is. I’ve been waiting this whole time. “I didn’t leave you in the woods.”

“Yes you did.”

“Your memory is screwed up. All the fuckin’ weed you smoked in high school is really altering your perception of reality. I didn’t leave you in the goddamn woods.”

She shakes her head. “I felt left. I decide if I was left. You left me.”

I want to smoke a cigarette, but I shouldn’t do that, not with Promise pregnant, so I sit here remembering the day she’s talking about. I remember it my way, not hers.

We were at the nature preserve, following a family of geese along a path, which is a funny thing if you think about it, us being city kids and all. Buffalo is weird like that. Like how there’s that really unpredictable part of the year, where you feel stuck between fall and winter. It could snow at any given moment, and usually it doesn’t, but sometimes it does, and so you never left the house without a winter coat.

That’s what time of year it was.

And we were following the geese, telling them it was time to leave and go to Florida. Like they didn’t know winter was coming. When we came out the other end of the path, we were near the train tracks under the interstate. We talked about how cool it was to be down there; we had seen this stretch of land from the highway but figured it was fenced off somehow. We walked along the tracks toward home, arguing about whether or not trains still ran on those tracks and whether or not we could be run over by one.

Promise was 14; I was 12. I had just moved with my father into her house with her mother, Shawna, on the border of the East Side and South Buffalo. It was a large one-family home with a nice yard, but the neighborhood was sketchy and so we didn’t spend much time playing outside there. Shawna had inherited the house from her parents after they died in a car accident. She and my dad talked all the time about moving into a better neighborhood—a few miles south, maybe, or west—but neither of them ever got it together to save money or make real plans.

I wasn’t even supposed to come live with them; I was supposed to stay with Mom. When she found out about his other family, she held me in front of her like armor. He would lose everything, she said. His wife, his home, his son, all at once, just like that. But she got sick of seeing me within a week. She said I looked too much like Dad. She said she couldn’t bear it any longer. She said if she ever overdosed, it would be because of me. So Dad had to bring me with him.

“I fucked up,” I remember him saying. “Now I gotta pay the price. You’re coming to live with me.”

I remember thinking that was an odd thing to say—that raising me was the price he had to pay.

As we got closer to home, still following the train tracks, Promise got scared. She thought she saw a group of guys up ahead, walking in our direction. I told her she was imagining things. She said I had to stay close to her, in case they attacked us. I said I didn’t want to.

“Be a man!” she ordered. How quickly girls turn into their mothers! It really gets you sometimes—right in the stomach, sometimes. Could have easily been Shawna standing next to me, saying that kind of a low-blow line. “Be a man.” Shawna, who had made it her personal mission since the day I moved in to turn me into a respectable young man for the gratitude of her neighbors. She hated black men. Hated all the ways they failed to live up to their responsibilities. Always bragged about me, saying I was going to be better than that. Except for the fact that I wasn’t her boy to make into a man. Except for the fact that I was white. Like she didn’t notice.

Maybe at the time—there on the train tracks—I was really angry at Shawna for teaching Promise to say something like that—“Be a man!”—but I took it out on Promise anyway. That’s what kids do.

“Fend for yourself,” I yelled. “I don’t owe you shit.”

And I started to run away. Promise chased after me. She was crying.

“Joshua! Josh, wait up!”

I gave in and waited for her by a tree. She was frantic by the time she reached me, her skin glimmering with sweat and her thick eyebrows gathered anxiously over her eyes. Breathless, she was screaming at me.

“Don’t you do that!” She slapped me across the face, the way Shawna slapped Dad sometimes if he came home late and drunk. I put my hand to my cheek reflexively. The spot where she had hit me was warm. It stung, but only a bit. The nerve endings in my face, licked by the wind, buzzed.

Now comes the part of the story Promise always leaves out. I kissed her. Quickly. On the mouth. On her lips, so wide like little pillows, so different from mine, and so cold on that day. Without thinking, I did it. Then I ran away, as fast as I could, just as quickly and with as little thought.

So really, I didn’t leave her. That sounds like a decision. Like I wanted to scare her because I’m mean or something. No, that wasn’t it—I just had to run away. To this day I wince in shame every time she tells the story. To this day I can’t understand why she has to tell it so much, why she’s so hung up on it, why she won’t let me live it down. I wonder if it’s payback, or if she even remembers the part she left out. It gets to be I start wondering if it ever happened at all. All those guilty, sweating fantasies of my teenage years, one more fucked up than the next. It could have gotten mixed in somehow.

Maybe she likes to tell the story because it’s all she has to tell about me. It’s not like we were one of those sitcom families.

Promise is still rubbing her stomach. She is still staring straight ahead. Tears are still running down her face. I feel that this has been going on for days. That this is what home is like, now. Coldness, and crying, and always having to escape from one uncomfortable situation to the next, just for the change of scenery. It is clear to me now that any memories Promise and me have together are forever warped by someone leaving someone else behind. Me leaving her behind.

“I didn’t mean to leave you. I just had to go.”

Promise doesn’t want to, but she reaches over and touches my hand with hers. I look down at our skins—mine thin and yellow; hers brown and strong—and wonder what part of my father is in those veins. For me, it’s his laziness—a special kind of laziness, where you establish a long and tedious pattern of doing as little as possible, and then people are impressed when you do anything at all. (My girlfriend told me that in a fight once. Spat it at me like gunfire. Like it was something I didn’t already know. My father taught me that, I said. I laughed when I told her. It made me happy, somehow, to show her she wasn’t revealing anything new. I guess it doesn’t matter.)

But Promise. I do not see Dad in my sister at all, and it’s not just the color of her skin. It’s her beauty—the real kind; the within kind. The way she holds her stomach, nurturing her child with her hands even while he’s still in the womb. And she’s so sensitive. So optimistic. Even when she’s moody—bratty, I would call her—and she snaps at every little thing you do—“Don’t sass me, girl,” Shawna was always saying—she is still so soft under the surface. I don’t have that. I’m just one jagged edge after another. Stiff, and tiresome, and numb, just like him, and I laugh to myself as I think that, because it’s not lost on me that I’m describing a dead person.

For the first time in days, I feel sad. I squeeze Promise’s hand.

“I hope I have a c-section,” she says.

“Why?”

The door to the funeral home opens. I hear chairs being folded up and leaned against the walls inside. The funeral director and Shawna walk out. They are standing behind us, talking about the burial plans.

I wonder what it would be like if I had to stay—if I couldn’t run back to New York the second the dirt is on the old man’s grave. I would like to hug Promise and comfort her, but she wasn’t mincing words when she called me a stranger. I would like to be as close to her as her baby is, but that would be wrong.

Promise tells me about her birth plan and all the drugs she wants to take.

She wants to be knocked out, she says. She doesn’t want to feel it when they pull him out of her.