Ali And His Entourage

A teenage boy entered with a gift—a pair of stuffed grape leaves. She laughed from her belly and thanked him. A teenage girl said goodbye and kissed her on the cheek. "You be a nice girl," she said softly to the girl.

Even when I was 15, back in Bessemer, Alabama, I still kept my dolls on my bed. My first husband pushed them off and said I wouldn't need 'em now I had a real one in my belly. Guess I got that motherin' instinct—can't get rid of it. Been takin' care of people all my life. Took care of my mother 'fore she died. Raised up my two little girls. Cooked for Malcolm X, for Elijah Muhammad and then for Ali. Funny thing, people trust you when you feed 'em, and folks always seem to trust me. Sitting on buses, I end up telling strangers next to me what foods they need to eat. I read nutrition books all the time when I'm layin' alone in bed.

At four o'clock she took off her white work shoes with a sigh, slipped on her sneakers and overcoat and walked out into the chill. She wedged inside the 101 uptown bus, left the million-dollar condos of the Upper East Side behind and went home to Harlem. She stopped at the post office, then sat over coffee at the Twin Donut Shop, the way she does every evening, and read her mail. Soon she would return to her apartment—her daughters live in Chicago and Miami and she is divorced—and draw a bath. "Hey, how you doin', Lana?" someone called to her. "Doin' great," she said. "Doin' great."

'Course, maybe if you looked closer, you'd see the hurt in my eyes. Know what it feels like to think of somebody all the time, and suddenly they ain't there? Like losin' a child. Maybe he's sick because he ain't eatin' right. Maybe he ain't gettin' the right enzymes. I see other people 'round him now. Why we ain't there? We the ones made sure he was champ. Don't wanna say my life's empty...no, but...I have dreams about him. One where he's sick and doesn't want nothin' to do with me. Then he's all better and he's so happy to see me. Sometimes I think about that poem I wrote when he was young. Wrote that somebody like that could never live to be old.

I love him, but sometimes I get mad at him, too. People say that after workin' with him all those years, I shouldn't need for nothin'...and I'm flat broke. If they'd only have set up a retirement fund for us, we'd have no problems now. He used to say he was gonna buy me a house when he retired. If I'd asked him, he'd a done it. But I never asked for nothin'. And maybe that's best. Maybe if I had money I'd lose my love for people.

Some days, though, I just have to hear his voice. I call him, ask him what he's eatin'. People ask me all the time how he's doin'. Know how that feels, when people ask you how's your child, and you don't know what to say?

THE MASSEUR

The gate to the fence that surrounded the little yellow house in northern Miami was locked. "Sarria!" I called from the sidewalk. "Sarria!" From inside the house a dog barked, then a second dog barked, a third, a fourth. And then the whole house exploded and shook with barking, a dozen, no, two dozen different timbres and pitches, the baritone bark of big dogs, the staccato yelp of small ones, the frenzied howl of the thin and high-strung. My knuckles whitened on the chain-link fence; how many could there be? "Sarria!" I cried again—he had to be in there, people said he was a shut-in—but my shout was hopelessly lost in the din.

I swallowed hard. Such a sweet old man, everyone had told me. I began to scale the fence.

This the dogs seemed to sense and take as an insult; the whole house seemed to snap and snarl and salivate. My eyes darted, my stomach clenched. I shifted onto the balls of my feet, approached the door, reached toward it from a few feet away and knocked—my god, I could not even hear my own rapping. Bang! The door shuddered, but not from my knocking. Bang-bang! The metal meshing put up inside to protect the windows shook as the beasts hurled themselves at me.