Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [66]
I see Max watching Huddie as he gets out of the car. He still moves easily, but he needs more room. Much more room, he’s a big man after fifteen years, almost as wide as his father and taller than I remember. Huddie puts his legs out of the car carefully, scanning the street. I have half fallen for a dozen black men over the years for no other reason than that they exit their cars the way he does, the slow, self-possessed unfolding of a big man to his full size, making clear that he will not be threatened, that there is nothing to fear. And if there is, if you insist, he will reluctantly give you the trouble you’re looking for, kick your sorry ass, and go on about his business. It says Don’t. Fuck. With. Me. and it is the required daily grace under pressure of a black man in a white place, and although it must exhaust him, it moves me, and although I would think that understanding its ugly root would make excitement impossible, it excites me.
He must look enormous to Max. I don’t think he’s ever seen anyone so big in every direction, coming wide and high and black-oak solid into his speculative, pale green gaze.
I think Max knows exactly which house Huddie is looking for, knows why he’s come, knows that this is the man who has come for his mother. I want to think this. I’m beat. I have been explaining single motherhood and conception and marriage and homosexuality and commitment to Max since before he could listen, and I am tired of saying things clearly and reasonably in hopes of warding off trauma. Mad giggling is Max’s response to my sensible, sensitive explanations, and right beneath that, furious disbelief. When he is most angry and disbelieving, he sticks out his tongue and pulls down his lower lids, making faces so ugly and not-funny that it’s clear his only wish is to make me stop telling these ridiculous and frightening lies. He finds most adult men terrifying beasts, especially the fathers of the little girls he plays with, and he does not believe, for one minute, that there are women who like to live with them or that pairs of men make happy, healthy lives (I say the three words together always, banishing all disease, grief, and loneliness) in the worlds of Provincetown and San Francisco, and certainly not that I actually parted my legs and let a man put his penis into my vagina. He prefers to believe that I lay very close to, was perhaps sandwiched between, his idols, Mr. Rogers and Peter Pan; their united sperm would in fact explain why I have a child like Max.
“Hi,” Huddie says. I spy behind the curtains. Mothers have divine dispensation for listening in, sheet-reading, dream interpretation, and interrogation. I don’t say we should, just that we do. I do. How else can we know what to do, whom to save, where to go when they don’t come home? The amorality of my childhood, my shoplifting and wholesale lying, is nothing to what I do, and am prepared to do, every single day for this boy.
Make my son cry? I’ll hunt you down on the playground and pull your miserable heart right out of your weaselly little chest, and after dropping off the sympathy casserole for your mother, I’ll stop by the classroom to remind Mrs. Miller that there is now a space in the Bluejay reading group and Max really is ready to move up. I have made a whole life for us, and although I sometimes feel like those intelligent felons, escaping through the prison laundry truck to practice small-town medicine, well and attentively, for twenty years before the Feds show up, it is a life that makes sense to me. I can do this job better than any other. I am happy every morning and I am sad only late at night.
Max stands on his hands, and his arms begin shaking.
“How long can you do that?” Huddie asks. When we knew each other and Larry was four