Amber

I never felt good about smoking joints in front of Amber. Not because I thought the smoking was all that bad of an influence, but we used to keep her up pretty late, her mother and I. We'd smoke and talk about the past mostly, and the poetry we'd seen lately. The radio was always on and Amber was rarely allowed out of bed, it was so late. I knew that Amber liked me. I must have been one of the few men that ever came around anymore.

"I'm not tired, Mom," she'd squeal. I remembered that feeling, feeling like a huge thing trapped inside a little body, that wanting to be up and living, not drowning out in the bunk with the night.

"Quiet, Amber. Sure you don't want a beer or something, Adam?"

"Maybe I could show her a card trick, Margaret."

"She's got school. You know. You're sweet. I've got to put my foot down somewhere."

I never felt good about smoking herb in front of Amber because she hardly saw me any other way. I hate it when a person only sees me one way. Margaret and I smoked a bowl or two when the joint went out. I always think of Bill Cosby when I see a friend coughing and handing me a bowl, remember his saying what a strange thing it is to see a friend hacking and to eagerly await the same fate.

Margaret listened to the college jazz station. She liked to talk about Lonnie a lot, the father of the little girl I knew only from across the room, from underneath. I never quite figured out how a woman could speak so pleasantly about a man who had walked out. I understand the walking out part. Not on a mother and child, but I know the need to leave. Lonnie played alto and he and Margaret went to Paris together once. Whenever she told me about the trip, which she did often, I felt like I could tell Margaret something she didn't know herself about her story, about arriving in a place like Paris with someone, about finding fast, in a place like Paris, how big the world is, how many faces might be in it, and how small the stage you'd lived on before.

I liked talking with Margaret, but I always wanted to ask Amber how she felt about her own life. I liked Amber. I remembered what it was like to be like Amber. She wasn't around yet for the Paris trip. She lay up in her bunk all those nights I came by trying to picture what her mother looked like before she got pregnant., what her grandmother must look like, frail and pale like her mom. I wanted to talk with Amber and, somehow, in the speaking, make it right that a mother and a girl should be disowned twice, by their own man, but worse, by their own family because of the color of the man's skin love had chosen. Somehow. How could you make that right?

Amber lay wondering why her mother's family was never spoken of, except only when I came around, and then only in low and angry tones. She wanted to ask, in the daytime, when I was away, where Lonnie had gone and what had made him go. I sat laughing with Margaret about what someone had said when they got up to the mic the day before at her reading, or about her joke that no one had liked Lonnie in Paris because Parisians would only know good jazz if it spoke fluent French. I sat glancing up at the bunk now and again, wondering how a girl could go through her life calling her father by his first name, calling him that in his perennial absence no less. I sat realizing I was wrong when I thought I knew what it was like to be Amber, caught up in the bunk, no poppa, wanting to really be alive.

"Can I get up for a little while, Mom?"

"You're supposed to be sleeping, young lady."

"But I'm not tired."

"Don't make me take out my belt."

I never saw Margaret take out her belt, but I guess the threat was her way of taking a stand. I never saw Amber go to sleep either. I never liked smoking in front of Amber, but in the late-night conversations that went on in that sagging flat, I tried to say things that would offer a little picture of how big the world is for the ears I knew were listening a few feet from me, up near the ceiling, in the shadows.

I left them alone, girl and mother, in their tight quarters no later than two. I always promised to come back soon. I walked the few crooked blocks home, thought of Bill Cosby and the songs you're supposed to sing to yourself alone on the street on your way home at night, to keep yourself safe and on your way home. I thought if I ever had the chance I'd tell all the mothers I knew:

Don't make the kid sleep. Let her live. Let her breathe. Let her find out how big the world is, how many faces might be in it. Tell her what you've wanted to say for so long. Don't make her sleep. Tell her about your own mother and about being a mother, about becoming a woman and all the ways you can learn to take a stand. Don't make her sleep. Let her down from there. Let her sit in the light for a while. Let her breathe while she can, while she's up, while she's young--and maybe she'll learn how to stay that way.