She hadn’t seen Junior coming. He didn’t just arrive. Nor was he alone. His image rode a roar of static, a hot numbness. This body blink felt like an empty flame. Ndiya felt it burn but refused to acknowledge the heat. With a precision so complete it masqueraded as innate, though it had been systematically learned, honed, and deployed, Ndiya coexisted with a rare thing about which both—maybe all—of her selves agreed without agreeing. This deal of nonengagement was as perfect as water poured from two pitchers into one pail. Except there was no pail. So the deal was pure pour, forever. As in, if you throw a sea turtle into an infinite well, you might as well call the turtle a seagull. This was her method of control, of avoidance. A method she’d used to make this city forget far more than her name. Twilight in Shame’s neighborhood meant Ndiya Grayson wasn’t alone. This fact was precisely why she’d come back and exactly what she’d lived her life avoiding.
And the city had forgotten nothing.
Then there appeared a bright, capsized yellow boat. It had a blue rudder and a red propeller. The border of Ndiya’s vision widened to include a pair of tiny yellow boots and two impossibly large eyes. These eyes didn’t appear to recognize anything in their sight as much as they appeared to house the whole scene inside themselves. It was as if the tiny owner of the huge eyes had bypassed vision altogether and beheld the world as if it was all a matter of inner vision. She felt like he could bypass her skin and soaked-through clothes and x-ray each crook and notch in her spine. “Big, aquarium-eyed little boy,” she thought.
Then, she thought, “Again. Again.”
An old woman was crocheting an expression across her tight-lined face by lamplight. She warned, “Look out for the water, honey. Dirty.” Then her voice changed color, “That’s enough playing tsunami by the bus stop, get yourself on up out away from there, now, Melvin.” Ndiya: “Too late I’m afraid, ma’am.” The crocheted knots beneath the old woman’s eyes looked like someone was pulling them open and closed from behind. Slack for her, tight for him. “Come here, boy.” Then, “Oh, honey, that’s a shame.” Next, “Here, Melvin, now!” And again, “But it’ll dry child, it’ll dry.” And, “Over here, before now! Before you get yourself into …”
But Ndiya’s mind had tipped like if you try to carry a wide, inch-deep tray of water with one hand or balance it on top of your head.
Here she was somewhere between ankle- and knee-deep in what was looking like a third fiasco. And she hadn’t even started her review of fiascos one and two. After meeting Shame at the party, each time they got together began with some farcical incident precisely calibrated to prevent her from feigning any dignity or self-assuredness. Ndiya had plenty of both. She knew it and for as long as she’d been grown she’d been bothered that she couldn’t account for where or how she’d come by any of it and what, if any, good it did her.
So, with Shame, she thought she would experiment, maybe improvise. What was to lose? She met him, after all, at a basement party she knew better than to go to anyway. Somebody’s friend of a friend named Renée had thrown herself a Fourth of July birthday party that was supposed to be a reenactment of one she’d had in 1985 or something. Ndiya’s plan with Shame was to act like she had the false, everyday kind of confidence and protect her secret. She’d act normal. Brilliant. But it didn’t work. After the first few seconds of their first date, she needed the secret kind, at least.
There was the first meeting at Earlie’s Café. Ndiya made it clear beforehand, this was not a date. She’d rushed—if it was possible to rush by bus?—to her brother’s place after work to grab her oversized and always overstuffed canvas handbag. She’d left it over there on a rare visit the previous night. Wanda, Malik’s girlfriend, answered the door. She blocked Ndiya’s path and handed her the bag. Aiming beyond Wanda’s attitude, Ndiya called, “Can’t stay, gotta meeting!” to the blue room the TV lived in, and bolted back to the bus stop thinking, “It’s time to empty this bag.” Traffic was bad, she had to transfer twice; she was at least an hour late. She kept reaching for her phone and then remembering that Shame didn’t have one. When she arrived he was waiting for her outside the café. He sat facing the street and leaned back on his hands on the top of a stone picnic table with his feet planted wide apart on the bench. “There he is, with his feather-light brown self,” she thought, “and there he’ll stay.” From across the street she let him know that she’d seen him with half a smile aimed at the ground in front of his feet. Then she focused on the door to his left while holding him in her sight. She thought, “OK. Keep him there.”
Ndiya tabulated her quick survey from her peripheral vision: “V-neck T-shirt (bad sign) and faded jeans (neutral and leaning on what’s next like a spare in bowling) that rode up to reveal his unpolished (thank heavens) brown boots (the kind with the metal ring at the ankle, that could be OK) and what looked like a brown leather jacket on the table beside him.” From across the street she noted that his clothes all seemed too loose to fit but weren’t baggy. She thought, “It’s been a while since I’ve crossed a street for this kind of thing.” The dusk of the street and the blue light atop Earlie’s awning traveled the lines of Shame’s face. The shadows made it seem like his face had been sewn together from a haphazard assortment of three or four faces. She searched for the sloped lines she subliminally depended on when meeting people and found precious little to work with. She didn’t remember this from the porch at the party. “Not good,” she thought. “He damned near looked white.” But this wasn’t quite a thought. It was more like an itch near the corner of her mouth.
All that changed when he got up to shake her hand and said her name: “Enter Ms. Ndiya Grayson.” First of all, he got it right. Áh-ndiya, accent on the first syllable and the a pronounced soft like the opposite of “off,” not sharp like the a in “candy.” No one got all that right, ever. He read the surprise in her face and said he knew the song. “That’s good,” she thought, because she didn’t. “What song?” He laughed and she remembered his easy smile. “A little too easy,” she thought. She noticed first, then, what she’d learn in stages later. Shame only looked like himself when he moved or when he spoke. And his voice sounded exactly like he looked; it was uncanny. When he sat still, pieces of his face and body pulled against each other. Then, she’d learn later, there was his life: his before-work vacant-self; the with-kids dude; the chef-Shame; and the piano man. In his life Shame was a kaleidoscope. He changed into a third, fourth, fifth person altogether. “One, two, three,” he’d say sometimes, “which Shame you want me to be, which kind you want from me?” He said it was a quote, or almost. She asked from where and he didn’t say. Her first, zero-sum impulse was to wonder where were the people whose faces he’d stolen, pulled apart and put back together. But she cut herself short before that. She was still on that whole “give it a chance to happen” thing.
Still in the street, she replayed his voice from the night they’d met: “Gosh, I guess every day is Wednesday, right?” And she: “What?” And he: “If I’m not mistaken, you just said hello to me and looked at me with both eyes at once. That’s rare around here, that’s all.” And she: “If you say so, but—Wednesday?” And he: “The Mickey Mouse Club, you know, Wednesday: Anything Can Happen Day?” She: “Oh, OK. That’s cute.” And now, outside Earlie’s Café, she thought, “There he is,” and, seeing her reflection walking in the window behind him, “There you are. There you both can stay. Here can sit this one out.”
When they shook hands she felt the thick skin of his palm again. He said, “Thanks for coming, I like your ride.” His open tone left no room and less need for her rehearsed, frustrated, CTA mass-transit-hell excuse for being late. Shame led her by the hand through Earlie’s as if the place was a tight, dark cave. In fact, the space was the opposite of cave-like, tall windows and high