The Story of Oatmeal
One
from 
JoeUser Forums
JoeUser Forums
Or whatever Ghosts Do
Isaac Weaver
He tells her, “I love you Jinny.”
Her father has just left to go to the restroom, and so this is first time he has been free to speak. Isaac felt his bladder pinch suddenly at the mention of restroom, but he couldn’t pee beside his girlfriend’s father. And a professor at that. No, he just couldn’t.
Up until then the young man had been busy sucking down his last cigarette and drinking a Coke, putting it down, turning his fork into the chicken he’d ordered at the older man’s urging. Isaac laughed at the right times, and nodded when it was appropriate. She was caught in her love for him. Sometimes Jinny loved him almost to death. Sometimes the love was too much, too embarassing. So she hid it away.
The older man, Professor O’Muil, like most professors, was caught in his own words and full of his personal brilliance. Now the sky darkened, and the high schoolers left, and Isaac Weaver, the young man, scowled murmuring, “They would leave just as we’re getting ready to go.”
The meal was over. They tipped well.
On their way out, Isaac pulled on his lambskin coat with the wool collar and then pulled out the chair from under his girlfriend, and put her coat over her. She was big and pretty. Isaac had never understood what was so great about skinny girls. Black people were right on this score, and he’d tell Efrem this when he saw him. And Efrem would throw his head back and laugh at him.
Suddenly she grabs his hand; she hooks it under his and through his coat. It’s so warm, so intimate. This handholding is more personal than sex. A little shocked he turns his blue eyes on her as if she’d just exposed herself. She is smiling. Her face is round, her hair is crinkly an reddish. Her eyes peat green. She is just so beautiful. Her perfume juat smells so good.
“I love you Jinny Oatmeal,” he tells her.
And suddenly he looks so alive and so happy and serious, all at the same time that she knows why they have been together so long.
They are both only twenty-two.
They return to the house on Bernard Street, the one that Jinny has spent her whole life in. It is brick with green shutters, and her room is next door to her sister’s. It is right over the add- on and all the years when Isaac has snuck in and out, or when she wanted to leave unseen she would crawled out of the window and along the spine of the roof before shimying down the wall past her father’s library. But they return only briefly. Jinny has said they are going to the Walker’s: Cecile and Efrem’s. Cecile is Efrem’s sister. Efrem is Isaac’s best friend. They spend a lot of time together, so when Jinny says she’s going to the Walkers it makes since that she won’t return until tomorrow.
Isaac does not own a car. What he wants badly, to go with the orangy suede coat and its wool collar and his black spectacles, is a yellow Volkswagen Beetle. And not the new kind, which is ugly, but a good old fashioned death trap. It’s alright, today they can walk. Bernard Street is on a hill in the northeast of town, in that cozy section of old houses near Saint Clare’s College. It rises on a shoulder that at this time of the year is garlanded in oak trees turned orange and red, the last of their green limned by fire. The maples are their perpetual purple. Beneath them are the backyards of the house on McGuinn Street and then south, before McGuinn, Aramy Street with Weaver’s bookstore. It’s a good autumn walk. One they do the whole time laughing and holding hands.
“You know,” Isaac says,” we really hold hands.”
“You’re nuts,” Jinny laughs at him. “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t mean like fake people in love. Or I guess the people are real. But the love isn’t. You know. The ones who are like: Let’s show everyone we’re in love. Let’s hold hands.”
“And have you ever noticed,” Jinny adds. “How couples never laugh? Like even at Saint Clare you see people walking together, holding hands, looking all serious. But they never laugh or smile. I bet they have sex like this--”
In the middle of Mc.Guinn Street, grim faced, Jinny pumped the air without cracking a smile.
“Please stop,” Isaac begged.
She frowned, and continued play humping the air.
“Is it good for you?” she asked in a stern voice, and returned in a lighter, but still stern tone, “Absolutely not. Uh. Uh. Uh.”
“Oh, God, Jinny,” he was turning red with embarrassment though he couldn’t stop grinning.
“Good,” she replied in the first stern voice. “Now I should only warn you: I’m about to come--” And she took on a dreadful scowl of disapproval..
“What was that?” Isaac said.
“That was a boring boyfriend having an orgasm,” Jinny said.
Isaac shook his head, they linked arms and began walking down Kirk, the south going avenue that took them from Mc.Guinn to Aramy.
“I love fall,” Jinny told Isaac. “You should write a song about it.”
All the houses were little bricks and salt boxes, shuttered behind their red-orange trees and green, green grasses.
“What do I look like?” Isaac said.
“Well, Isaac. You’re not quite six feet. Thin, you’ve got blue eyes--”
“I mean when we’re... You know?”
“No, I don’t know,” Jinny said vapidly. “You’ll have to explain it.”
Isaac’s cheeks puffed out, and his face reddened. Then he decided. “If I have to explain it, I won’t say it.”
Jinny had never known Isaac to pronounce the word sex in her presense. Not in the decade they’d been together. Deed was mightier than word with him in this department. She took pity on her remarkably shy boyfriend.
“You look like this,” she said.
But not too much pity, as she splayed herself out on the ground like a demoniac and gasped like a dying fish.
“I do not,” Isaac said. “And get up. People’ll think you’ve got the Devil in you.”
Jinny hopped up and giggled as they turned onto Aramy.
“I do not look like that,” Isaac insisted.
“Next time, I’ll lend you a compact at the moment of crisis, and you can check it out for yourself.
Isaac grimaced as they passed the brick library where he’d spent a lot of time hiding out. Almost useless time because next door to the library was a, occult shop that sold incense, Tarot cards. And next door to that was an old white apartment building with a barber shop on the first floor. But next to this, after a fair amount disowned and unkept space was a blue wooden building that looked like it must have been a general store at one point in time, but now possessed a bookstore on the first floor. This was Weaver’s Books, and the second floor, and the large attic that had been converted into a third floor was where Isaac lived with his father.
For a long time Isaac had worked the counter when his father did not. After Isaac’s mother had died, both father and son were too exhausted to live much. Slowly Isaac and Aaron had climbed back up into life and stopped hiding behind the counter of the bookstore.
“You got lonely working that counter by yourself?” Aaron said to his son one night over a dinner which Isaac had cooked.
“Yeah. Sometimes,” Isaac said, shrugging. “But mostly I want to be alone.”
“Yeah,” Aaron nodded. He was a little man with a trim goatee and dark hair who was still fairly young. “I wanted to be alone too,” he confessed. “But if we hire someone they’ll probably want more company that books. When we’re not around. We should hire two people.”
But even with two people being hired, on football Saturdays only one person came and only one person was needed. This was actually a relief, Nicky said, and that was good because today, at the end of the bookstore, it was Nicky who worked the counter.
“Hey guys!”
“Het Nick,” Isaac said. “You need any help?”
Nicky gestured around the empty bookstore: “Does it look like I need any help?”
Isaac shook his head and grinned: “No, sir. Well, he said, “If you need anything, you know where we’ll be.”
“Oh, I know where you’ll be alright,” said Nick..
“I meant I’ll be upstairs,” Isaac said, trying to be stern. Jinny just laughed. She liked Nick Ballantine. He went to Saint Clare with them.
The sky outside of Isaac’s window was going from dark grey to bluish black as he held Jinny and they lay together under the covers.
“What to do tonight?” he said.
“We could actually do like we told Dad, and go to the Walkers,” Jinny suggested after a while. She lay on her back and Isaac sat up over her, tracing circles and little zigzags on her shoulder.
“Well, I knew we’d hang out with Cecile and Ef, but I just don’t know where we’ll go. You know, it’s not like there’s nothing to do in Annieland.”
“Yeah, we can drive out to the county limits and watch the grass grow.”
“No, but really,” Isaac said, crashing on his back heavily, and looking at the ceiling, “People always say it’s nothing to do, but it’s lots to do. And it’s not places that are boring. It’s people.”
“Well then it doesn’t matter where we go. Because we’re not boring. Call up Ef and Cecile and tell em we’re coming over. Or better yet. Tell them to come over since they’ve got the car.”
Isaac didn’t respond.. This does not mean he didn’t hear. It meant that he was gathering up his strength for getting out of bed.
“One of these days I’m gonna put this phone next to the bed,” Isaac announced with a groan.
“You make a habit out of saying that,” Jinny told him.
“This time I mean it.”
Isaac reached for his glasses, and climbed out of bed. Jinny still likes his body, because it’s his and because it’s so different from hers. He’s not tall so its not weedy. She likes the geography of warm white skin like a surreal winter unbroken by anything but the jet hair from his groin, spurting to his navel. she likes how they’ve been together so long he’s not conscious of being naked when he goes to the phone at the other side of the room and reaches for his cigarettes. She signals to him while he’s on the phone, and he tosses hers to her with a lighter as well.
“Yeah, Yeah. Yeah, well get your black ass over here. Yeah, I knew you’d like that one. See you.”
“Efrem says he’s digging up Cecile at this very moment, and they’ll be over in about an hour to relieve our boredom.”
Jinny got out of bed, her heavy breast pendulums, ginger hair in her face.
“What are you doing?”
In irritation she said, “After seven years I’m finally going to move this damn phone.”
Isaac hears his friend coming into the bookstore while he and Jinny are still upstairs.
“I was just closing up,” Nicky is saying.
“Well now you can just leave. Let me close up. Isaac’s working you like a slave.”
“Hardly,” Nicky laughs. “You really wanna close for me?”
“Yeah. Go away. Play in traffic.”
When Isaac comes downstairs the bell is already ringing as Nicky heads out of the bookstore.
“What an awful day to be in a bookstore by yourself,” Efrem glances once at the darkness of Aramy Street. “We’re gonna have a storm.”
“I told him I’d work with him,” Isaac offered a little defensively, checking the till as Efrem began inventory. “But he said he wanted to be by himself. You know how that is.”
“The last place I would want to be by myself is at this bookstore. I don’t know how you did it,” Efrem said. “Be alone for so long. We’ll meet Cecile later on. She’s at home.”
He went to Fiction to put up all the misplaced books, Isaac began turning off lights.
“Should we sweep?”
“No,” Isaac said. He pushed up his glasses. Efrem looks just like him except for the minor thing about him being Black, which has always seemed like a minor thing. That, and not having the trademark goatee. They are of a height with the same black rimmed glasses, same humor, same tragedy, same friends. Even the same hair cut. shaved low, sideburns. When Isaac pushes his glasses up his nose so does Efrem Walker.
When Jinny comes downstairs she is smiling. Wordlessly when they close up shop. Before Efrem can ask for something, Isaac has done it. Before Isaac can suggest it, it is finished. This is the way it has always been between them. She had known each longer than they’ve known each other, and it is very hard to get over how alike they are because initially she thought they were nothing alike. Or else she would have introduced them. They met by accident. Efrem Walker was one of those rare people who not only was amply aware of his defects and attributes, and played to both magnificently. He couldn’t so much as dribble a basketball, he had no height, horrible vision and knew that people hated smart asses so he became, quickly, a person of grace. Ef did everything with grace. That’s all that could be said. Boys liked him because he was not like other boys. Confident, but not cocky; brilliant, but not above himself; talented, but unaffected by it. He was eloquent, but only spoke when spoken too. Friendly, but not offensive. He wasn’t a pretty boy. He wasn’t macho. He decided it would be best to be striking.
Isaac had never been striking. Jinny loved Isaac Weaver, who had become a bit of a heart throb in recent years, but through high school and in the beginning of college, he hadn’t been striking at all, and he’d been inward, taciturn and friendless.
She was so glad when Efrem finally saw him. Up until then Jinny had wondered if Isaac would ever have a friend.
If he’d bothered to, Isaac Weaver could have counted on one hand the people he reserved warmth for. The last finger went to a very large group, the patronage. His freshman year at Saint Clare’s was a disaster far as Jinny was concerned. He knew it. She didn’t understand him. She thought that he wanted to be fun and have lots of friends. She was having a sort of transformation that Isaac, frankly, was not entirely he liked and she wanted him to have one too.
He’d resented her for this. He resented her for starting to turn pretty and starting to turn heads because this meant he might have to start playing catch up. When Isaac Weaver looked in the mirror he saw exactly what was there. A brooding boy with longish, lank hair, brass rimmed spectacles, and a baby face. A nerdy face. He dressed out of the Salvation Army and he wore a chain that came in and out of a pocket and had no apparent purpose but was popular among the burnouts and disaffects of St. Anne County.
Jinny didn’t understand that he did not want friends. She did not understand that guys were different from girls. They didn’t need to run around in groups sharing their feelings and, anyway, if they did, Isaac had never met these such boys.
“I just want you to have a good time,” Jinny told him. “The way I’m having.”
That Saturday had been the one where she’d asked him to go out with her and Cecile and a few friends.
“I’ve gotta work,” he lied, and then went to tell his father that he would stay in the store.
Jinny O’Muil did not know everything, oh she thought she did because of what the nuns had taught her in Catholic school, and how her dad was a professor and everything. But she didn’t know everything. Like what she really didn’t know, and what he was finding out was that you couldn’t open up to everyone. You might want to. But it’s a two way street. If someone else doesn’t want to be loved, doesn’t want to be opened up to, it won’t work and up until this time, Jinny was the only person he’d ever been able to open up to. There was so much in him, a big old grave full of crap, and you couldn’t throw that down on just anybody.
Isaac was sure that there wasn’t anybody to throw his crap on. And why should there be? It—his life-- was, after all, crap. Spending most of his time alone allowed Isaac to understand more about the self than most people his age. Isaac understood, for example, that he was intensely lonely. He knew that Saturday in the bookstore. And he knew that if he was with Jinny and all her fun friends he would feel even lonelier. Sometimes he wanted to crack up and cry, but only Jinny would get that. Not another guy, not another friend. And he had too much in him. He never told everything to Jinny in the way she told Cecile everything. It would have been too much. So he sat in the bookstore.
Having found Jinny at such an early age, the funny thing was he’d assumed for years that he had someone to love. As if there were only one person in all the world meant to be loved by him. But really that was what this loneliness was. He wanted to love someone.
He wanted to be real with someone. He was real with his customers, and they kept coming back because they felt loved. They felt like he was putting all of himself into this really paltry work, and the truth was that Isaac Weaver did. Because when a customer came to Weaver’s and found him in the back of the store, this man or woman might be the only chance he had to love someone beside Jinny in the immediate future.
Today the recipient of all this attention looked worthy of it. Sometimes Isaac stayed away from certain people. Everyone didn’t want to be helped, wasn’t capable of it. Some people, it was just like meeting a snake. The whole short process of talking to them was like being bitten by an asp.
“Can I help you?” Isaac asked the other young man.
He looked up at Isaac and said, “I really don’t think I’m buying anything. You don’t know how strapped I am,” he laughed. “I think I’m just looking.”
And then, to Isaac surprise, the Black guy starting talking to him, “Do you ever just look? I mean, since you work here and all.”
“Actually I look anytime I want to,” Isaac said. “My last name’s Weaver.”
“Oh, this is your’s?””
“It’s my dad’s,” Isaac shrugged. “Ours.”
“You’re Isaac Weaver,” the boy said now.
Isaac seemed a little surprised.
“Well, yeah.”
“You go to Saint Clare’s. You never say anything. You look like you hate people.”
“I do?”
“Well,” Efrem said, “You probably do. No use pretending.”
Isaac gathered up his courage to ask, “Do other people think I hate people?”
Efrem shrugged. “I don’t know. Other people never bring it up. I just think about it because you’re in my art history class, and when Father Keenan turns out the lights and starts running slide, I get time to think about things like that. You know?”
“Yeah,” Isaac said and shrugged again. He was out of practice in the social skills department. “Uh, you read any good books, lately?”
Efrem raised a sharp eyebrow at the turn of the conversation, and then said, “I’m trying to read Faulkner. So that’s not really a good book I’ve read. That’s a good author I’d like to read.”
“You’re an English major, right?”
Efrem nodded, surprised Isaac knew.
“I’m religion-philosophy,” Isaac said, “You should read Basho.”
“Who?”
“This Japanese guy. He wrote journals and poems and all this stuff. Come on over here,” Isaac gestured for Efrem to follow him.
“Now I think this is a dumb place to put all the religion and philosophy, right with Tarot cards and the occult,” Isaac said. “I tried to get my dad to move it to the literature section cause I said good books are like religious experiences, and the Bible and Koran and all that. They’re good books, right? So, Dad just says, ‘If you wanna move it you can move it yourself.’” Isaac was acutely aware of how rapidly he was speaking, of the diarrhea of the mouth suddenly afflicting him. Efrem kept nodding, and Isaac wondered if the other guy just felt sorry for him. But Isaac kept on talking, “Every time I make a suggestion my dad, who’s usually a real nice guy--I mean he’s tops--says something snippy. It’s like, say whatever you want to, but not about my bookstore. You know Dads.”
“Not really,” Efrem said.
“Are your parents divorced?” Isaac got quiet.
“Oh, no,” Efrem went on, “my mother’s widowed. That son of a bitch had the audacity to blow his brains out on my eleventh birthday.”
To Efrem, Isaac looked as if he’d just been slapped, like he was the one with the suicide daddy.
“Are you joking?” Isaac said.
“I’m afraid not,” Efrem told him. “We had to get new carpet and everything. What?” Efrem said. When Isaac still didn’t talk, Efrem said, “I know it sounds cold of me and everything. I’m sorry. I’ll drop it.”
“No,” Isaac said. At first Efrem could hardly hear his voice because Isaac could hardly talk. “No...” he said again. “You see... I never knew someone that it happened to… Too.”
Efrem cocked his head at Isaac.
“My mom. She killed herself when I was nine. And I don’t ever talk about it to anyone.”
Both boys looked at each other, and out of all the emotions each saw in the other’s face, the one neither brought up for years afterward was the completely inappropriate joy of meeting someone like himself.
“I never hang out around this part of town,” Efrem told Isaac on the other side of the booth they sat in at Mc.Donald’s. The cars whizzed by this part of Aramy which ceased to be residential.
“I never hang out...” Isaac was trying to remember Efrem’s neighborhood, but Efrem grinned at him knowingly and said, “You could end it right there and be perfectly honest.”
“I guess,” Isaac said. “It’s just hard to know people, you know. I can’t get into this whole college party thing. I’m.... I’m deep,” he laughed at himself. I’m one of those people that wants real friendships, and people I can really talk to. So, paradoxically, I’m a loner. I was surprised you even knew me.”
“The reason being?” Efrem said, sucking down his shake.
“You’re popular?”
“Really?” Efrem looked dubious.
“You know. In class you look sure of yourself, and you say all this witty stuff.”
“I thought you didn’t pay attention to what went on.”
“I pay enough attention. And you’re even good about your dad. I mean. I’ve never, never been able to talk about what Mom did. But you just come right out and say it.”
“Well, at least you feel bad about it,” Efrem said. “You actually feel hurt by it.”
“Don’t you?”
Efrem shook his head. “Honestly? No. I felt a little upset. Angry even. And then over it. I didn’t miss him. I never... That’s what I feel bad about, the inability to feel really bad.”
“You don’t know what I’d give,” Isaac reported twisting around a cold French fry, “to not feel it for once. You don’t know how nice it would be, for just a day maybe, to be free and happy. Doesn’t Mc.Donald’s make the shittiest fries?”
Efrem said, solemnly, “I prefer Burger Kings. Would you like me to free your mind?”
Isaac looked a little taken aback then said, “I wish someone would. Sure. Free my mind.
Sitting back, satisfied, Efrem said, “I just did.”
“Hey, wait a minute, that’s a koan!”
“No, shit!” Efrem said.
“That’s from the Wumengangen. You’ve read it?”
“I’ve read it, and I can pronounce it.”
“You’re fate.”
“I’m Efrem!”
“We gotta be friends,” Isaac decided. “This is too much. We’re supposed to be friends. Wait a minute.”
Isaac hopped up. Most of his food was untouched because he hardly ever ate. He was scrawny, and a littler taller than Efrem. He bit opened a ketchup packet, and squirted the contents on his right wrist.
“What on earth are you doing?” Efrem demanded.
“We’re gonna be ketchup brothers.” he made a fist and gave Efrem his wrist.
“Are you serious?” Efrem Walker said.
“Dead.”
“You’re absolutely mad. You’re the biggest nut I’ve ever met.” Efrem told him. “And you’re white to boot.”
“I’m actually Jewish,” Isaac reported.
“Get the fuck out.”
“Non practicing.” Isaac added.
“Jewish, non practicing? You’re almost Black. How can I resist?” Efrem rolled up the sleeve of his hoodie, and plunged his wrist into the pool of ketchup on Isaac’s wrist.
Being Jewish and non practicing means, among many things, never having to submit to what jinny calls the Sappy Sad Ass Sunday Sermon. Once I went to church with her. Actually, I’ve been to Saint Antonin’s more than once, but the first time I went I almost didn’t want to go again because i thought the priest was the biggest moron in the world, and he preached this sermon about, What if every Christian was just like you. The whole thing was about how you could measure how good you were by if you’d want every Christian in the world to be just like you. And, of course, you were supposed to stare at your feet and feel ashamed because you didn’t really want anyone to be just like you.
I told Jinny that firstly, the whole tiem the priest was talking I wanted to go up there and say, “Hey, dude, I’m a Jew! I don’t believe in Jesus. How you like that?” Only I don’t think most of the people in church believed in Jesus, and I’m pretty sure Jinny doesn’t believe in him anymore than I do. Which is alright. Jesus is a pretty tall order, you know?
But then I’m not much of a Jew. I had a bar mitzvah because my aunt made me, Otherwise I haven’t been to Temple Beth El since I was thirteen. “Today you are a man. Now go take out the trash and go to bed. You got school tomorrow.”
Anyway, what I was getting at was the whole thing about people being just like you. Frankly, I wouldn’t want every anything to be just like me. And I think I like myself. I can admit that I didn’t always like me. But I’ve gotten used to the motherfucker in the last few years.
When I met Efrem I thought, here is someone just like me despite the obvious fact that he was Black. But hell, I’m Jewish so I’m not totally white. I mean, I’m not Christian, I got the little ethnicity thing going on. You couldn’t really tell I was Jewish, not like with my Dad, but still.
I’m digressing again.
It only took me a week to realize that I am nothing like Efrem. We are different as night from day. No racial puns intended.
Actually it’s probably better to say we’re as different as we are alike. I always understand him better than anyone else when I think I don’t. And when I think I finally understand him I’m missing the boat completely.
Efrem Walker is the only guy I’ve ever felt was smarter then me. I mean, Jinny and Cecile say guys are dumb and it’s basically true. I don’t know why it is. I’ve got a few theories, but men are idiots. Except for Ef.
Efrem is also the loudest most talkative person I’ve ever met. He’s all over the place. He does everything he shouldn’t. He makes it easy for me to be me because he’s easy being himself. No matter how weird something I do is, he’s capable of doing something weirder, and when he doesn’t want to be weird, he takes it in stride when I decide it’s my turn. Like once, I bought a hat that was made like the top of an umbrella, and decided to walk around the whole weekend with it. Here I am, this white boy walking around with an umbrella on his head and Efrem is with me the entire weekend, around his family and cousins, and doesn’t so much as bat an eyelash.
I know he gets embarrassed because we’ve been friends for a long time now. But he doesn’t get embarrassed by me, and I appreciate that.
Efrem also makes me afraid. I don’t mean like he terrorizes me because he’s scary. I mean I get afraid because around Efrem I do the right thing. Around him I know what makes sense and what doesn’t. What I do and what I don’t have any business doing. Like now I’m getting my Masters at City College, and thinking about transferring across town to Mc.Cleiss next year for a Phid (Ph.D) program. I’m not really enjoying what I’m doing, and Ef never says don’t do it. He just shrugs in this certain way when I tell him that. It’s the most merciless shrug I’ve ever seen, and he doesn’t have to say a word to say, Well if you don’t like it, get out you idiot. And maybe I’m just putting words in his mouth, or words in his shrug. But I don’t think so. I’ve known him too long.
Ef is a senior this year at Saint Clare, and that’s because he took a year off... to do what he wanted, he said. Because he damn well felt like it, he said. That shit kind of sticks in my head. Makes me a little mad when I think maybe he might be condemning me for not doing what I think I should be doing. Then I realize that this is when I really am putting words in his mouth, in his shrug.
Lastly before I bring this love feast and homage to an end... an homage that I would die before letting him see because he would laugh me to scorn: it’s really because of Ef that I have friends. I mean yes, I inherited his friends, but I mean my best friends. Jinny and I are different because it’s not just Jinny and I. And I’ve known Cecile for a long time, but never the way I know her now. Now that she’s my girlfriend’s best friend and my best friend’s sister. They are the three people in the world that I would break down in front of. Ef is the only guy I would break down in front of, and I’m embarrassed to report that i have. But I’m glad he wasn’t too phased, or at least didn’t show that he was phased. Sometimes you need to know you can collapse and it won’t be held against you.
He comes into the store, sends Nick out. Nick is a good guy. From Michigan. Ef starts cleaning up without a word, reproaching me for leaving Nick alone. This is the way it has always been. We will go out in a few minutes. Here comes Jinny. It doesn’t really matter where we go, we’re bound to have a good time.
“My heart is fine! Fine!” Efrem roared to the stereo in his bedroom.
“Lonely teardrops! ... Come hooooome. Home. Just say you will! Say you will!”
Gilead Story spun into the bedroom, clapping his hands to the back beat, and singing the falsetto. “Say you will! Say you will!”
And Efrem collapsed on the bed laughing while Jinny and Isaac looked at them.
“You two need a shrink,” Isaac said.
“If you had rhythm,” Gilead told Isaac, “You’d be singing along too.”
Efrem, about to rise, shrieked, and collapsed back onto the bed then asked Gilead, between chuckles, “When did you get here?”
“Just a few minutes ago. I was on my way to visit Nicky at his little boarding house, and go drop a line to Cameron, cause she’s in town--”
“Is she?” said Efrem.
“She is. Cecile said if I’d be stopping by here, let you know she was on her way.”
“What’s she doing?” Jinny said, taking out a cigarette, and sitting on the bed.
Gilead who was taller and darker than Efrem, smoothed out his black coat and said, “It’s a matter of who she’s doing.”
“Is she still messing with that Rory Huff?” Isaac said.
“Among others, I think,” Gilead said. “Look, when I see Cameron I’m half tempted to go back to Michigan with her.”
“Are we getting to be too much for you?” Efrem said.
“You’ve been too much for a long time,” Gilead told him. “But that’s not the point. It’s my junior year in college, and I still can’t keep a roommate. Every time I try somebody, it always gets messed up and I always end up living in some huge ass room I can’t afford. Shouldn’t afford.”
“Look,” Efrem told his friend, “I said a long time ago there are people persons and then there is you, and you definitely don’t need a roommate. Didn’t I tell you that?”
“Well what happened with this one?” Isaac said, “who you managed to get rid of by..” he looked up at Efrem’s calendar, “October.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Gilead muttered as a preface, and then said, “Every time I tried to make something look right, you know, set the room up so that it was balanced and had positive currents--”
“The chi,” Efrem supplied.
“You are too deep my brother. The chi is exactly what I’m talking about. He would come along and mess it all up, or say, ‘Look, doesn’t that look nice this way’. And then one day I told him what he could with his additions and his dirty underwear. Do all white folks do that?” he looked to Jinny and Isaac, “Are all of you junky? Anyway, he says, ‘Just cause you’re Black doesn’t mean you can get all bout it, bout it with me.’ Can you believe he actually said ‘bout it bout it?’ Well, he did. And I said, and just because you’re gay doesn’t make you an interior decorator. Strike Three, Strike Three. There goes another roommate. Fuck it, from now on I’ll live on my own. I’m gone,” and so saying, Gilead Story turned around and left the room
“So what are we going to do tonight?” Jinny said, at last.
“I don’t know,” Efrem said, “but what I do know is I don’t want to spend the night with the two of yawl mewling in my ear, What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do? Isaac’s already been doing that shit and it’s tired.” Efrem’s back was to them, he was straightening his closet. He said, “And don’t think I don’t know you just flipped me a bird, Isaac Weaver. I’m not stupid.”
“If I didn’t know you knew I did it,” Isaac said, cashing a new pack of cigarettes, “I wouldn’t have done it.”
“I know.”
“I knew you would. Do I look fierce like this?”
Efrem turned around, Isaac had a Marlboro gripped between his lips and his eyes looked like stones.
“Aw, dude, you always look fierce.”
“I hate you,” Isaac laughed,” and struck a match.
“I don’t think we should go anywhere,” Efrem said. “Everybody’s here. We’re too old and cranky to do anything anyway.”
“We could go out to the club,” Jinny said.
“Which one?” Isaac stopped smoking.
“There a thousand out on the strip.
“Since when have you ever wanted to go to a club?” Efrem asked Jinny.
“I might want to go to one tonight,”
“Cause Mr. Popularity would just love that,” Efrem gestured at Isaac.
“Hey, dude, girls love me. I’m a hit at the club.
“That’s cause they don’t know you,” Efrem said.
“And they don’t know you’re mine,” Jinny added. “We’d have to scrap if anyone came rubbing up on you.”
Isaac said, “Scrap? Baby you been around Cecile too long.”
“Both of you been here too long,” Efrem said. “Me an Cecile sound like the Huxtables, and yawl sound like a bunch of niggahs.”
“I will have you know,” Isaac reported, “I am a NEGRO. And do not appreciate your derogatory terminology.”
There is a knock on the door.
“Thanks for knocking,” Efrem said as Chuck came in. “Where’s Cecile?”
“Doing someone else, so she won’t be doing you. At least. Not tonight,” Efrem said.
“You ain’t got a be like that,” said Chuck swinging in the room. “People,” he said, smiling broadly as he greeted Isaac and Jinny.
“I heard that, Efrem Walker!” they heard a voice as feet came up the steps.
“I’m glad, Cecile Turner,” he opened it wide so that his voice went down the hallway. “Saves me the trouble of having to insult you twice.”
The door flew open.
“I’m here, Yawl. You can breathe again.”
“I know I’m relieved,” Isaac muttered and Cecile turned to Jinny and said, “Your man really has been around my brother too long.” she turned to Efrem. “It’s like getting all your bitterness in vanilla. Hey, Chuck, what’s up?”
“I was about to ask yawl.”
“I say we get some beers,” Cecile said and turn on the music and just chill.”
“But we can’t let the music get too loud,” Efrem said. “Mama said her head hurt a little.”
“Shit,” Cecile murmured. “Let me go see her.”
“We could have a little party,” Chuck murmured when Cecile left.
“I’m so glad that Gene isn’t my best friend anymore,” Efrem said. “He was dragging me down. And now he’s in North Carolina getting his Masters anyway.”
“Everybody needs a white best friend,” Jinny said. “Except white people.”
“Yes, yes,” Isaac said, coughing, and pushing up his glasses, “I highly recommend it for everyone.”
“Yawl are nuts,” Efrem muttered. He stood up. “I hope one of yawl sons of bitches has money. Beer isn’t free in St. Anne County.”
“Tonight it will be,” Jinny said, “I’ll just flash my tits at the guy in the liquor store.”
“Maybe it’ll be a woman,” said Chuck.
Jinny shrugged and said, “Maybe she’ll be a dyke.”