The Comedown Read online

  Although Natasha didn’t typically enjoy people who distracted her from thinking about the great thing she would contribute to the world, she enjoyed every second spent with Momma. Granted, she had to spend those seconds in moderation—immersing herself entirely in Momma’s world would make her slow, compassionate without meaningful cause. But there was no reason not to take time away from Melville to wander the kitchen with Momma as she set timers and whipped cake batter. There was no reason not to accompany Momma on the occasional outing: to the grocery store, to the fabric store, to visit her friends in the neighborhood of Hough. Going to Hough was Natasha’s favorite for two reasons: the first was that Deborah refused to go, and the second was that whenever Natasha opened her mouth the people there thought she was a miracle. They told her to take good care of herself, she was destined to make everyone proud, and asked Momma what she’d done to get a miracle child. What was it, because so-and-so is pregnant right now and wants a baby like yours. Daddy called people like that “common”—he said science had killed religion and he had no idea why someone would believe in ghosts and magic luck charms and voodoo spells “invented out of fear and boredom on some plantation”—but Momma didn’t agree. She never went to church, but she read the Bible and had nailed a little wooden cross above her half of the bed. She was of the mind that God worked in mysterious ways, and that the world was full of good-luck tricks to curry His favor. So she took queries about Natasha’s growth in earnest, trying to remember if she’d slept on her side or her back during the pregnancy, if and when she’d baked with cinnamon or cardamom, what the weather had been like on the day Natasha was born. Natasha had not yet decided if she wanted children, but she knew they’d only come after she wrote a book about Typee if they came at all, after she herself had set sail for the Marquesas Islands, living among savages as Melville had. Then maybe she would return to Cleveland and have children with someone deserving of her time and intellect, an accomplished man who himself had traveled and studied and shared her curiosity about greatness and how it was achieved.

  The Joneses, whom they often visited in Hough, were the clan Momma had followed out of Arkansas. At their head stood Patreese, thin in all her bright Sunday dresses, widowed, ten years Momma’s senior. She wasn’t necessarily envious of the fact that Momma didn’t live in Hough so much as she was curious about it. What was it like being married to a born-and-raised northerner? Patreese said she’d met people like him who didn’t even consider themselves black folks, were always trying to say how nobody besides them had any self-respect. “Does he have enough self-respect for you?” Patreese asked, ribbing Momma, smiling, patient anger in her voice. Momma smiled back and never answered. Patreese had a daughter, Demetra, who had a two-year-old boy. While Momma spoke with the mothers, Natasha would babysit, trying to get the boy to waddle to her, rushing to him before he could fall. She liked the way he smelled, and she liked the way he cooed when Demetra picked him up: when the two looked at each other, there was an exchange of light between them that made Natasha curious and then embarrassed. Joyce, their next-door neighbor, had three baby girls and would sometimes bring them over and pay Natasha twenty-five cents an hour to watch them, too. She sat in the living room surrounded by big-eyed children, a clueless heap of them drooling and crying and pulling at her socks, Momma and her friends in the next room talking about the things they missed from Arkansas, smoothing the hems of their dresses and saying, “It’s just more of the same here and they promise you it’s different.” Natasha felt important, indebted to these women and their children, like she was the once-in-a-generation phenomenon who would prove to them all that it didn’t have to be more of the same.

  She graduated high school early and started at Axel Renfroe a few months before her seventeenth birthday. Her class schedule was Chaucer and Newtonian physics in the morning, then lunch and American history in the afternoon. Daddy had told her that this fall would begin the most important years of her life, and that she would need to treat every lecture and assignment as vital to her survival in the world. She did, or she tried to—she found that Daddy’s words in her head had the damning effect of making her mind wander and then worry about wandering. She understood that she’d have to do twice the work in order to be half as good as the rest of her physics class, which was a bunch of engineering majors gunning to be anointed teacher’s pet. And the homework was dull: when she tried to do it, she thought about everything else. The sex in The Miller’s Tale, a line of Melville’s poetry: “Beadle of England / In formal array— / Best fellow alive / On a throne flung away!” She stared out the window and mumbled: “Here’s to thee, Hal.” More pressing: the tense pain in her chest that she worried might be an incipient heart attack. Poor fat old Falstaff. Her figure in the mirror in her room. Was she too thin? Deborah would know how to fix that, but after so many years of keeping her distance, there was no use in asking her—even if a metaphysical cannon shot them both into some parallel universe where Deborah actually wanted to help Natasha, she was more likely to be out with her boyfriend anyway, a white high school dropout named Dennis who drove a motorcycle and smelled like wax. Daddy didn’t know about him, and Momma didn’t like him.

  The day that she first saw Reggie, she was trying to solve her physics problem set but couldn’t focus. She was thinking instead of Melville tied up by Polynesians: hapless Melville licking his wounds as a witch doctor attempted to kill him with a curse. Maybe it was her faulty reading of the literature, maybe Daddy would correct her if she bothered to run the idea by him, but Melville had always seemed less invested in splitting the world into opposites than in reporting on human helplessness. Were the Polynesians so evil and Melville so good, or were they doing to him what a whole army of European explorers would’ve done to them in a heartbeat? And Ahab—why read about him if he was just a heartless madman, if he had (presumably) nothing in common with the reader? Natasha would hunt the white whale if given a chance, absolutely she would, she wouldn’t care at all how she looked to her crew as long as the thing she wanted most in the world was within her reach. She tightened the ribbon on her dress that gathered right beneath her bust. She sat down, then stood up, then paced the room. The second question involved turning gravitational potential energy into velocity. She looked out at the sky, which was boring, then down at the ground. There was someone at the end of her driveway. A mailman, a new one. Younger than the old one but probably older than she was. He reached out of his truck, a handful of envelopes and magazines: his shoulders were wide. She stood in the window looking down at him, running her hand over the necklace of Bakelite pearls at her collarbone. He parked his truck and got out. He walked around the nose of the parked truck slowly, opened the mailbox, and slid the mail in. He waved at her and she waved back. It was a little weird, what he was doing: usually the mailman just parked the truck and delivered the mail through the window. It was strange to see something different, especially in their neighborhood, where everything had been the same for as long as she could remember. The rare deviation from routine coming the few times their garage door got graffitied with slurs, which Daddy had to scrub off before anyone could see—but even that kind of thing happened with enough regularity that she wasn’t surprised by it anymore. The mailman was something else. Like a car driving backward or a bald eagle eating a hot dog. She laughed, and he got back in his truck and drove away.

  He was back the next day. She watched for him. He parked, got out, and put the mail in the mailbox just like he had the day before. He was a little tall for his uniform; there was a gap between his socks and the hem of his pants where his ankles showed. He looked up at her and she made herself as visible as she could in the window, pressing her nose against the glass. Something from a dim fold in her brain said she was being reckless, she should be focused on catching up in class. She was seventeen—her life was full of promise, her potential was limitless—and she was pressing her nose to her window so a mailman could see her. She walked away to finish her problem set.<
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  After that something shifted inside her. She couldn’t admit to it because she didn’t know what it was, but it was pressing at her insides like she’d swallowed something sharp. When she went to Hough, she kept an eye out for the mailman. When she visited Demetra and Joyce, she imagined them in their aprons at Chuckee’s Drug Store. Had she been there before? She hadn’t—Momma was always promising to take her there for a sandwich and then having second thoughts. Had she ever looked at a waiter or a gas station attendant or a street cleaner the way the mailman had looked at her? She hadn’t. She’d once said “excuse me” to the janitor at her high school and he’d moved his bucket and mop out of her way, saying nothing in response. What did they have to say to each other? What did she have to say to the mailman? She felt warm and a little uneasy whenever she saw him. She felt distracted. She had the suspicion that she’d been thinking about things wrong.

  In the morning she went out to collect the mail from the mailman. He seemed surprised to see her, smoothing the front of his shirt like he’d come underdressed to a ball. His eyes were green. He asked if he could call her and she took the mail from him and ran into the house, head light-feeling, a smile tickling the corners of her mouth. She threw the mail on the table and found a scrap of paper. Then she remembered that Daddy usually shut himself in his study around seven o’clock, which meant he wouldn’t want to bother with the phone. She wrote Don’t call until 7:00 p.m.! beneath her name. She brought the piece of paper out to him and he took it from her, made it an excuse to catch her fingers briefly in his.

  When she went back inside, Daddy and Momma were sitting at the kitchen table, an envelope torn open between them. Daddy was waving its contents around and speaking strongly—yelling, Natasha realized. Momma had her hands in her lap and was looking at the pile of unopened mail. When he saw Natasha, Daddy smiled in a way she didn’t recognize. He said, “Well, well, look who’s here.” Momma looked at Natasha pleadingly, but Natasha wasn’t used to taking directives from Momma, so she said, “I just ran outside again because I thought I’d missed some mail.” Before the sentence was out of her mouth, Daddy showed her the piece of paper, which was her midterm grade report. “You’re making a C in physics,” he said. Natasha tried to say that she’d fix it before the end of the semester, but he slammed his fist on the table. He asked Momma what she thought was so useful about distracting Natasha from her studies by taking her to babysit in the ghetto. He asked them both how either of them expected anything good to come out of the family if they were letting Natasha’s talent go to waste. He asked what was the value in laziness and time wasting. Momma said she didn’t think of it as time wasting, and he stood back and grunted and smacked her in the face.

  Moving fast-but-slow like in a nightmare, Natasha took the stairs to her room two at a time, listening to Momma try to get a word in edgewise. The sharp thing she’d swallowed shifted in her stomach. She felt like puking it up, but that was impossible. She lay on her bed and thought how Momma would obey Daddy. She listened to him pacing and roaring downstairs and thought how Deborah would obey him, too. But she wasn’t like them.

  March 26, 1983

  Cleveland

  On her birthday, she woke up in her bed in the Central apartment and looked out the yellow-edged window and realized she had turned thirty-five overnight. Momma always said she was a difficult baby—after twenty-six hours of labor she’d come out in the middle of the night, wide-eyed and colicky for the first two months—but she’d been worth it. The boys had been born in the afternoon after a few hours of labor: Tasha always attributed her good luck to Reggie’s genes. A man who loved her that much couldn’t possibly give her children capable of hurting her. Daddy on the other hand hadn’t understood Momma well enough to love her. It had taken Tasha years to see it, but she saw it clear as day now. Momma was some homespun oddity to him, the human rod he’d used to ground the lightning of his (less than superior) intellect, the prop he trotted out to avoid accusations of self-hatred. She could hear him running the argument in her brain. Yes, he may have been a capitalist who believed in dressing well and “seeing across differences,” but he had taught at Axel Renfroe and married a country woman. What kind of Uncle Tom would do that? Tasha turned on her stomach, exhaling her stale breath into the duvet. A fork-tongued Uncle Tom. An Uncle Tom who would speed up whenever he drove through East Cleveland, who would probably have sped up driving by the building she and her boys lived in now.

  The place had been Cookie’s before he left Cleveland to live with his wife’s family in Georgia. It was supposed to have been a temporary haven for Tasha, someplace she could go to gather her thoughts and keep the boys safe after Reggie had disappeared. Back then, Cookie thought the people who’d come after Reggie would be coming after her, too, but then they all got blown up or their throats slit or whatever happens to drug dealers when they become useless to one another. It had been all over the papers at the time but she couldn’t bring herself to read any of them. When she couldn’t find Reggie—when nobody could find him—living in Central had turned into something more permanent. She found out through friends of Cookie’s that the last person to see Reggie alive had been a white junkie named Leland. They knew this because he was on the street talking about it to everybody. Tasha hadn’t kept up with the news after that: two types of blood in the back room, a bunch of car bombs that had gone off in East Cleveland, someone who named names and then disappeared or was disappeared. What it amounted to was Reggie had vanished and the cops wouldn’t look for him—he was presumed dead, or more likely they’d killed him themselves. What it amounted to was she had to pay the city of Cleveland thousands in restitution or be found guilty of conspiracy. And then that white junkie showed up on her doorstep one day begging to come in for a coffee and crying about how sorry he was for her loss. She should never have let him in.

  The last time Daddy spoke to her, she’d been packing up the dishes in the University Circle apartment. He had called to say that the family wished her the best but could not support her foolish decisions any longer. “We warned you about that boy,” he said, “but your refusal to listen has resulted in your own ruination.” Then he hung up. Momma called periodically when she knew Daddy wasn’t listening. One time she called and her voice sounded so broken apart that all Natasha could think of was the time Daddy had slapped her in the face.

  “It was when you left the PhD program for the boys,” Momma said. “I think that’s when you started losing Reggie.”

  “I didn’t lose him,” Natasha said, exasperated.

  Momma’s disapproval hummed at the edges of her overcorrected grammar. “The least he coulda done was keep you all safe.”

  “He did keep us safe!” Tasha protested. “And he kept us well fed. He did the best he could with what life gave him.”

  “Daddy wanted more for you, is all,” Momma sighed. “All the time he’s been saying that to me.”

  What did he want, really? Tasha spending a lifetime at Cleveland State among fellow PhD candidates who didn’t look like her, forced day after day to defend her “alien” point of view? A life spent in front of a lecture hall full of plump white faces, watching them count the minutes until the end of her lecture? She wanted Melville only, Melville without all the trappings of having to be Tasha-Marshall-interested-in-Melville. Deborah, on the other hand, had married her dropout and moved to New Jersey with him, where he had a few cousins he had said were going to help him become a policeman. He ended up a janitor at Princeton University instead. His biggest claim to fame was cleaning the office of some math professor who solved some impossible equation and won a prize for it. When Deborah did call, she’d say “Dennis put down new carpeting in Professor Milo Andritt’s office!” like Tasha was supposed to care. So she pretended to, and when Deborah’s voice took on a sad lilt and she asked, “You still staying at that place in Central?” Tasha said yes, pretending that it was intentional. Now, every month when they spoke, Deborah offered to send a chunk of her secret
ary’s salary, and every month Tasha accepted. She knew her sister must secretly delight in this: the former fuckup helping the wunderkind out of poverty. When Tasha and Reggie had been taking Momma and Daddy to the opera, Deborah barely picked up the phone. But the minute Tasha’s husband disappeared, the phone was ringing off the hook. Everyone but Momma had betrayed her. Only Momma deserved to know the truth, so one day, exhausted from years of lying, she told her.

  “Momma,” she had said, feeling shame and pity and anger at once. “I didn’t lose him. He was already gone.”

  “What are you talking about?”