“I live in D.C. now,” Ruby said. “I work in a hospital. But I’d been telling my mother to get rid of the couch for years, it was so old. Two months ago I bought these for her.”
“D.C.?” he said. He unzipped the plastic.
“I like it there. There’s less of that, you know?” She gestured toward the Broadway chaos below.
“Sure.” He ran his hand over the green velvet upholstery: pristine. “It’s from Mr. Harold’s?” She hadn’t bought the sofa from him, and Blumstein’s didn’t carry the line, so it had to be Mr. Harold’s.
“Yes.”
“Took good care of them,” Carney said.
Work finished, Raymond took another look at Ruby. Dressed in a gray dress, round and plump. Tired in the eyes. She wore her hair in a curly Italian cut now, and then it flickered—Ruby Brown as a stick-limbed teenager, with two long Indian ponytails, a light blue blouse with a white Peter Pan collar. She hung out with a clique of studious girls back then. Strict parents, that type.
“Right, Carver High School,” he said. He wondered if they’d laid Hazel Brown to rest already, what it was like to attend the funeral of your mother or father, what expression you screwed into your face at such times. The memories that popped up, this small thing or that big thing, what you did with your hands. Both of his parents were gone and he hadn’t had that experience, so he wondered. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said again.
“She had a problem with her heart, the doctor told her last year.”
He was a senior when she was a sophomore. Eleven years ago, 1948, when he was busy trying to get a handle on things. Spackling himself into something presentable. No one else was moved to help, so he had to do it himself. Learn to cook a meal, pay the bills when late notices arrived, have a spiel when the landlord came around.
There was a gang of younger kids on his case all the time, Ruby’s classmates. The rough boys his age left him alone, they knew him from before and let him be because they had played together, but Oliver Handy and his group, they were of that feral breed, street. Oliver Handy, two front teeth knocked out since whenever, never let him pass without starting something.
Oliver and his group made fun of the spots on his clothes, which didn’t fit properly and so they made fun of that in addition, they said he smelled like a garbage truck. Who had he been back then? Scrawny and shy, everything out of his mouth half a stammer. He shot up six inches junior year, as if his body knew it better catch up to handle his adult responsibilities. Carney in the old apartment on 127th, no mother, father aprowl or sleeping it off. He left for school in the morning, closed the door on those empty rooms and steeled himself for whatever lay beyond. But the thing was, when Oliver made fun of him—outside the candy store, in the back stairwell at school—he’d already taught himself how to properly wash out a stain, hem his pants, take a good long shower before school. He made fun of him for who he’d been before he got his shit together.
What put a stop to it was smacking Oliver’s face with an iron pipe. Curved in a U like it came from under a sink. The pipe had appeared in Carney’s hands it seemed, cast out of the empty lot at the corner of Amsterdam and 135th where they surrounded him. His father’s voice: That’s how you handle a nigger who fucks with you. He felt bad seeing Oliver at school, swole up and slinking. Later he learned that his daddy had ripped off Oliver’s daddy on some scam, stolen tires, and maybe that explained the whole thing.
It was the last time he raised his hand. The way he saw it, living taught you that you didn’t have to live the way you’d been taught to live. You came from one place but more important was where you decided to go.
Ruby had decided on a new city and Carney chose life in the furniture business. A family. If it looked opposite of what he knew when he was little, it appealed.
He and Ruby talked crap about the old school, the teachers they hated. There was overlap. She had a nice, round face, and when she laughed he got the sense D.C. had been a good choice. No shortage of reasons to get out of Harlem if you could swing it.
“Your father used to work at the garage around the corner,” she said.
Miracle Garage was the place his father worked at sometimes, when his main business ran dry. Hourly work, steady. The owner, Pat Baker, had been a running buddy of his father’s before he went straight. Straight as in less bent; it cannot be said that every vehicle on the premises had its papers right. The garage had churn, as Carney called it, like Aronowitz’s. Like his place. Stuff comes in, it goes out, like the tides.