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The train ride and walk home left her brain more scattered and scrambled than before. Too much time to think. The pendulum swung in extremes from ending the pregnancy all the way back to going through with it and raising the child with Channing, or alone. Surely she wouldn’t be the first woman to have a child on her own. This was possible, within reach.
Before entering the apartment Malika encountered the scent of boiling cabbage and bacon. She filed her black Birkenstocks in the long line of shoes by the door. Since developing an ankle injury from wearing wedges the year before, she had resigned herself to the ergonomic shoes with the contoured footbeds. She was convinced her feet were spreading and starting to take the shape of a duck’s bill.
She walked down the long hallway, and saw Elena on the red IKEA couch they’d cobbled together two years before. It had taken almost an hour to get it up to their floor and double that time to piece it together; stretching the taut fabric over the frame was the most challenging part. One of Malika’s acrylic nails had popped off during the process, landing on a spiral bound weekly planner she had yet to write in. Now she just wanted to take her outside-clothes and this terrible day off. Elena held up one finger and finished her phone conversation, “Okay. Okay, yes. Okay! I heard you. I’ll get it to you by tomorrow morning!”
The roommate hung up the phone connected to the only residential landline Malika had seen outside of her parents’ New Jersey home. She wasn’t even clear what number was assigned to the phone in her apartment.
Elena was seated in the lotus position, scratching her knees through tattered leggings. All twenty of her nails were chipped, the black polish barely holding on. Chipped fingernails were understandable, Malika thought, but toes? That was just unacceptable. She looked at her own nails, which looked pretty good for going on two weeks. She was wearing a light, beigey color called “Tickle My France-y” and there was only a tiny chip on her right pinky. Technically it was not her nail, but an acrylic nail in a shape named “coffin.” Malika hated the name of the shape, but it was the most flattering for her fingers. Strong and thick. Her mother had told her on more than one occasion that she had man hands.
“Stupid client,” Elena scoffed in her fading Catalan accent. Tugging at the vertiginous curls springing from her head, she continued, “Ugh! So delusional. They want you to do twice as much work at half the budget.”
She had stumbled into the lucrative business of writing high school and college-level term papers for English and history majors and was on the cusp of turning away jobs. Malika considered asking her if she needed extra help, but decided to keep their exchanges to a minimum.
Elena sighed loudly and moaned, “Estoy a dos velas.”
The first time she had used the expression, Malika had no idea what she meant because she had taken French in high school. She came to understand that Elena was saying “I’m at two candles,” a Spanish expression indicating she was broke. Malika couldn’t understand how this was the case because Elena had been in the rare rent-controlled apartment for so long that she was profiting off of her roommate’s market rate share of the rent.
“Did you need something?” Malika asked.
“Oh, yeah,” she said, untucking her legs, then shoving them back underneath her torso. “So I have some great news!”
Malika had never seen Elena in such a great mood in their two years living together. She was beaming and clapping in anticipation of sharing the news.
“So, you know that Stanley and I have been together for a while.” Her lisp popped up with certain words. “So we’ve decided to take the next, natural step and move in together.”
Elena tilted her head fully, the way dogs and children did when they were trying to be coy. “And, since the lease is in my name—”
“When?” Malika asked, dropping herself into a too-low chair.
“When what?”
“When do you need me out?”
This day just keeps getting better, Malika thought. The pendulum was swinging again. Go through with it. She wanted to tell the little person growing inside of her that, at the moment, it was the two of them against the world. At that moment, she made a promise to her future self that she would always look out for this little, growing baby person.
“I mean, it would be amazing if you could move out as soon as,” Elena continued. “But, of course, I want to give you the courtesy of thirty days.”
“Thirty days to find a new place. Mmhmm. Thanks for thinking of me,” Malika said, pushing herself up again from the vintage accent chair with the itchy fabric.
“No problem!”
Fri, May 18 6:25 PM
Malika: hey…...can you 2 talk??? like NOW
Fri, May 18 6:26 PM
Keith: yep. 1 min. walking out now.
Fri, May 18 6:29 PM
Kya: You guys go ahead. Still at work.
“Hey,” she said when Keith dialed.
“How you feeling?”
“Okay,” Malika said without conviction. “I’m about to be single, pregnant, jobless, and homeless.”
“Wait, what! What happened?”
She could hear cars honking and the clanking and clunking of large commercial trucks in the background.
“Where are you?”
“Outside my place,” he answered.
“Why?”
“Why do you care?”
“Oh, I see,” Malika laughed. The running joke amongst their circle was that Keith was whipped by his twenty-two-year-old girlfriend Naomi. “Not allowed to talk to your friends in front of wifey, right?”
“Hey, keep her name outta your mouth!” he joked, mimicking a Real Housewife of Somewhere. “Wait, wait, back to you. Stop deflecting. You deflect too damn much.”
“Where should I start?” She exhaled.
“Well, I already know about Little Growing Baby Person,” he started. “Can we just give it a real name?”
“Not until I know the gender,” she said.
“So you’re definitely keeping it?”
“Uh, yeah, we’ve been over this.” Malika had contemplated an abortion briefly: inside the fitting room at Zara, on the train ride home. Nothing made sense in her life right now. She had a list longer than a CVS receipt of why she shouldn’t have the baby. She had no clue how she would financially support the child or where she would raise it.
Malika had the recurring thought of being discharged from the hospital, she in a wheelchair with wobbly wheels, a new baby in her arm in a going-home outfit that she’d obsessed over too much for an outfit for someone who weighed less than a small domestic cat. If she had a boy, he would wear a quilted vest, turtleneck, knit cap, jeans, and Tims. She hadn’t fully fleshed out an idea for if she came home with a girl. She had spent so much time consumed with what the child would wear that she had suppressed the other parts of the thought. There would be no one with her besides the baby, no husband with flowers to help the new mother slowly into a later model car. Malika and her well-dressed baby would be on the sidewalk in front of the hospital just sitting there. People would walk by, some would smile. Some would stop and say congratulations. Seasons would change with a time lapse effect as mother and child remained stationary. The baby would get bigger until he was a man in his quilted vest and Timberlands sitting on his mother’s lap. He would look like a mid-90s rapper and she would be a wrinkly woman with wispy grey hair gently blowing into her face.
“I’m definitely keeping this kid,” she confirmed. Malika had stressed definitely with such earnestness, she was shocked at herself. “Whatever happens, I’m not getting rid of it.”
“Okay, okay.” He laughed. “Calm down. Start from the beginning. So your boyfriend dumps your triflin’ ass and then what happened?”
“Okay, now it’s time for you to calm down, Mr. 1992. Triflin’? How was I even triflin’?”
“Wow, where should I begin?” Keith asked. “How was Malika triflin’? Let me count the ways.”
She moaned into her phone, which was on speaker, filling up her small room with Keith’s voice.
“Let’s start with your cold heart. You didn’t show him a lot of affection, even after he told you, ‘Stop being so cold.’ Never held the poor man’s hand in public. Moved away if he put his arm around you. Let’s see, what else?” Malika could hear him tapping his chin, going down a mental checklist. “Ah, yeah, yeah. That time he realized you hadn’t closed your profile on that dating app. Triflin’. Messy. What else?”
Keith went on to remind her that she rarely got Channing anything for his birthday or Christmas, claiming it was due to religious beliefs. “Um, growing up down the street from a Kingdom Hall does not make you a Jehovah’s Witness. You were just cheap.”
“And speaking of Channing’s name, you made fun of it all the damn time. Like, what name would have wanted him to have?” Keith continued.
“I did not!”
“Um, ‘What kind of name is Channing, anyway?’” he mocked her voice. “What kind of name is Channing? What kind of name is Malika?”
“It’s Arabic for ‘queen,’ peasant.” They both laughed, something that was becoming a rarity for her. “Okay, I didn’t call you to be verbally abused,” she said.
“Fine. Sorry. I like verbally abusing you. Go on.”
“Maybe I should talk to Iyanla,” she thought out loud. “Who needs their life fixed more than me?”
“Okay, beloved, I’ll have to do for now. Continue.”
“So my boss calls me in,” she said. “You know she’s still red like a lobster from being in the Hamptons all last week.”
“Mmhmm.”
“She proceeds to fire me,” Malika continued. “And I’m thinking we’re having our regular weekly touch base. Nope. She’s firing me, at the end of the day, after I hand in my project!”
“Damn, that’s harsh,” Keith said in a low voice. “She and that whole place are trash. Anyway, what’s your package looking like?”
“Two months.”
“Not bad for a job you hated with a boss that got on your last nerve,” he said. “Did you get me any dad khakis on your way out?”
“Heh, yeah. No.”
Malika had been the marketing department’s assistant during her year-long tenure at Schooner Menswear. She was liked by most of the designers and merchandisers, but frequently butted heads with the sales assistant, a younger Black woman with a flat face named Zoe.
“I think she looked down at me,” Malika said. “I’m, like, eight years older than her and we’re doing the same job. Plus, she’s trying to become an account executive or something.”
“You know this young generation,” Keith sighed. “They don’t know the struggle.”
“No, you know this young generation,” she said, reminding him that Naomi and Zoe were the same age.
“Okay, next,” Keith yelled. “How are you homeless?”
“Elena’s boyfriend is moving in.”
“Don’t you have rights or something?”
“Not really,” Malika says. “I’m not on the lease.”
“Okay, so your life is basically shit right now.”
“Mmhmm. Basically.”
“Don’t worry,” he said with assurance. “We’ll strategize and figure something out.”
Keith was the global director of project management at a company specializing in shared workspaces in underserved communities. Malika was grateful that he had agreed to take on the project of her festering, open sore of a messy life. He was always fixing some other person’s mess. Their friend group dubbed him Captain Save A Ho because the fixed problems usually came attached to a woman he was with or wanted to be with. He and Malika had shared a drunken New Year’s Eve PG-13 hookup back in college. They woke up the next morning, confirmed that they were still okay, and had a greasy brunch that sopped up all the alcohol from the night, and the year, before.
“I promise,” he said. “One day you’ll look back at all of this and laugh.”
“Not likely, but okay.”
Malika resented Saturday mornings the way others grew anxious around Mondays. Elena got up before 6:00 and pounded her metallic silver wooden clogs into the wooden floors, resulting in the shaking of some of the leaves of Malika’s plants. The roommate had bought the clogs online from a teenage seller in Liechtenstein. The postage cost more than the shoes, but Elena said she and the merchant had become friends through corresponding post-transaction. She said she’d be visiting the boy during the next trip to Europe to see family. Malika thought this was inappropriate and told her roommate as such when she wailed about ticket prices.
“Typical,” Elena puffed. “You Americans are so uptight. Not everyone has ill-intent, you know. By the way, any apartment leads?”
“I’m working on it,” Malika confirmed, pouring tepid water into a mug. “I have thirty days, right?”
While Elena’s coffee brewed and the sun positioned itself to rise, she started doing barre exercises. She cursed at the YouTube video in Spanish. After Malika returned to her bed, her roommate clanked pots and pans while making a big brunch that she consumed audibly. Anyone within earshot could hear the slurping and chewing. Malika could hear through her closed room door. She regretted not taking up Elena’s initial offer to have the room farthest away from the kitchen and living room for two hundred more a month. The rooms bled into each other, and if Elena’s boyfriend was over and they weren’t having sex in her bedroom towards the front, they were in one of the rooms right outside Malika’s door.
She could smell the frying tofu and something that smelled, undeniably, like bacon, even though Elena claimed to be vegan. Their kitchen was the same size of their coat closet. It was impossible for the two women to stand in there comfortably or uncomfortably. It could only accommodate one human adult. Each time Elena opened or closed the fridge door, Malika could feel it through her walls. She lay down and massaged the lower half of her face. The inside of her cheek was raw from biting on it throughout the night. This and grinding her teeth were a result of nervousness, her Jamaican grandmother advised her. Granny had said she would pray hard for Malika. She urged her to get right with God.
After 7:00, she texted the Jackson twins and asked if they had brunch plans. Keith responded right away and said he had to take Naomi to Westchester that morning. Her parents were having them over for a family get-together that afternoon. Kya said she could meet up, but it wouldn’t be until much later. She was hungover from a work happy hour from the night before.
Elena added to the noise she was already making by putting her phone on speaker and blasting her 90s playlist — the same 90s playlist she played the entire weekend. When “U Can’t Touch This” came on, Malika could see Elena’s feet underneath the door stumbling to reenact MC Hammer’s choreography. She heard her yelp, take a moment to collect herself, then continue dancing.
Malika found herself singing along to “The Boy is Mine,” pretending to be both Brandy and Monica. When the song came out, it had been the summer before she started fourth grade. It was also the summer before her sister, Malinda, entered high school. It was the last time they were friends. The four-year age gap didn’t become a problem until her sister became a freshman and she was still in elementary school. They stopped watching reruns of The Fresh Prince and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. Malika had to watch what her parents were watching, the twenty-four-hour news cycle, home shopping, SportsCenter. On Saturdays, she was forced to hang out with them alone. Weekends were for furniture stores, ShopRite, and coupon-sponsored lunches at Olive Garden.
“Why isn’t Malinda coming?” she would ask.
“She needs to stay and study for her exams,” her mother would respond.
She was always studying for exams. If high school was just one long, never-ending exam, Malika wanted no part of it. Her parents reminded her that all of that studying paid off when Malinda got a partial scholarship to attend Princeton.
“It’s where Michelle Obama went to school, you know,” her father always added whenever it came up years later. Sometimes he’d change the order around. “You know that’s where Michelle Obama went to school, right?” Her parents were thrilled that Malinda was staying in New Jersey, despite only coming home on the same holidays as the out-of-state students. The drive from West Orange to the university was exactly fifty-nine minutes in good traffic. Malinda saw her family on the days of Thanksgiving and Christmas. Not the eve or the day after, only the day of. She worked at summer internships near school or in Manhattan, opting to live on campus or with family in Brooklyn. This reluctance to return to their small, shared bedroom hurt Malika. From then on, she felt more like an only child than the younger sister.
As she lay on her side and stroked the leaf of a nearby spider plant, Malika thought she felt a kick, but reminded herself that it was too early. She consulted the baby tracker app she’d downloaded the night before. The baby was the size of pomegranate seed. She wasn’t a fan of the fruit in general, prompting her to get a second opinion. A pea. Little Growing Baby Person was the size of a pea. She thought she felt a flutter and Googled the earliest an expectant mother could experience any kind of real movement. A mother of multiples on the thread of a UK-based infertility site said she could feel her triplets as early as week seven. Malika rubbed her stomach and smiled.
“You look...good,” Kya said, unconvincingly, as the hostess seated them outside. “You doing okay? You all right?”
“Um, not really. I guess. I don’t know. I don’t know what I know right now.”
Malika had slept in her makeup from the day before and forgotten to brush her teeth. She thought she’d fully washed her face when reapplying her makeup that morning, but when she went into the restaurant’s restroom for the third time, she saw that the mascara residue had settled underneath her eyes. She looked like a fatigued raccoon.
She flipped her long box braids over her shoulder and tried to walk sexy through the length of the main dining area. She stood up straighter and glided in a straight line. She remembered an article from Cosmo when she was in college. It claimed this particular walk drove men wild and she had wanted to drive Heywood Nolan wild. The bespectacled, bookish senior was the unexpected resident hunk of the Communications program. Everyone had a crush on him and Malika’s was the biggest. He spoke low and deliberately, always staring directly into the eyes of the co-ed he was talking to. The furthest she ever got with him was when he asked to copy her notes from a class he’d missed due to mono.
As she moved through the room, she tried to make eye contact with the bartender. He had the bronzy complexion of someone who loved the sun and a large Afro that doubled as a halo. His features were perfectly symmetrical, as if God had used rasps and rifflers to sculpt the perfect nose and jawline and created this exquisite man. He smiled, she smiled back. He continued to smile, then she bumped into the white lady cutting her toddler’s Belgian waffle into bite-sized pieces. The little boy was wearing what looked like a homemade Batman costume.
“Oops!” Malika said. “My bad. Sorry.”
The mother just looked up at her, with a downturned mouth and furrowed brows. Malika didn’t bother to turn around to check if the bartender saw the exchange. She was just relieved to be back outside in the mild May weather.
“So, have you told Channing yet?” Kya asked, pushing the arugula leaves around her plate.
“No.”
“No? What are you waiting on? For the kid to graduate high school?”
“I’m just waiting for the right time,” Malika said, taking a sip of caffeine-free tea.
“Um, Mal, there is no right time for an unplanned pregnancy,” Kya said.
“Shhh!” she said, looking around.
“What are you shushing me for? He’s not here.”
“You never know who knows who.”
Malika’s eyes darted around, scanning the faces of the other outdoor diners at the Dekalb Avenue restaurant.
“Come on,” Kya continued. “You need to tell him.”
“Hey, I’m still getting over being fired and my roommate basically kicking me out.”
Kya breathed in, then exhaled.
“Mal,” she began slowly, her tone taking on a condescending air. “Remember, you hated your job. And you don’t like your roommate either, right?”
Malika rolled her eyes, thought about it, and nodded.
“Consider all of these things happening at once as God’s way of sparing you and blessing you.”
“Huh?”
“You’ve got about eight months to try and get it together for yourself and for your baby.”
“Eight months to get my life perfect.”
“Pause,” Kya said, forming her hand in a time-out symbol. “Nobody’s saying anything about perfection. That’s always been your problem, if it’s not perfect, then it’s not worth trying or doing or working towards. You gotta kill that, seriously.”
Malika rolled her eyes again, feeling another lecture coming on. She combed a section of braids with her fingers and looked at a car failing at parallel parking on the corner. Folding her arms across her chest, she leaned back in the uncomfortable bistro chair.
“Eight months to get my life, right?” she asked, holding her fingers up to do air quotes for the word ‘right.’
“Right for you and your baby,” Kya reiterated. “Whatever is your right, your new normal.”
“Eight months is nothing,” Malika groaned. “That’s no time.”
“A lot can happen in eight months.”
Two White men in overalls and nothing underneath were attempting to yodel behind a table full of apple cider donuts and apple cider vinegar. The one with a large, blonde Afro was plucking a ukulele, while his partner blew into an empty glass jug.
“Dipped in sugar sweet, it’s the perfect, healthy treat,” they wailed in harmony.
Malika and Kya laughed and shook their heads in unison as they walked past the other stalls. Having a decadent, boozy brunch punctuated by an apple cider donut from one of the overalled, singing farmsters was a ritual they’d maintained for most of their twenties.
“Wanna head up to the top?” Kya asked, as they always ended their brunch dates with a walk up the hill to the obelisk in Fort Greene Park.
“Can’t do that any time soon,” Malika said, patting her belly.
Kya jerked her head back and poked her friend’s belly. “This isn’t Mount Kilimanjaro, boo boo. You’ll be fine.”
“Nah, I’m good,” Malika said. “I don’t have the energy to go up that hill. But I will have a donut.”
As they reversed their steps, the young man holding the jug bopped his head to the beat of their jingle, loosening the little man bun that sat atop his head. As Malika and Kya stood in front of the table, he howled, “My love couldn’t be wider for a glass of apple cider!”
The two women smirked at each other, Kya grabbing a small bottle of apple cider made in upstate New York, and a donut.
“I got it,” she told Malika.
“Thanks.”
The farmsters handed Kya a thin magazine made of heavy paper stock.
“Thanks,” she said, tucking it into her tote bag.
“That’ll be fifteen dollars,” the one with the loose bun said.
“For a small cider and donut?” Kya asked, almost shrieking.
“And the magazine,” his partner said.
She pulled it out and looked at the cover. A rusted toy tractor against a white, seamless backdrop and the words The New Amsterdam Farmer, Vol 1, Issue 1 at the top. “I never asked for this,” she said, throwing it onto the table. “I thought it was complimentary.”
“Sorry for the misunderstanding,” the Afro’d man said.
“Now the corner is bent from being in your bag,” his partner chimed in, straightening out the cover. “I should charge you for this.”
“Are you being serious right now?” Kya asked, her eyes wide, her brows dipping into a V-shape.
“Please,” Malika said, kissing her teeth and grabbing her friend’s arm. “Let’s go.”
“What the fuck was that?”
When Kya cursed, Malika knew she was feeling whatever just happened on another level.
“I don’t even want this shit now,” she continued. “I want my money back.”
She turned around and Malika quickly took a bite of her donut.
“Wait!” she yelled, running up to her friend. “I’m already eating this.”
She couldn’t hear what Kya was saying, but saw a lot of hand movements between her and the redhead with the jug. A short line of people grew behind her, some of them tapping a foot or a hand. After what seemed like too long of an exchange, the blonde farmster gave Kya a refund. She said one last thing to his partner then stuffed her money in her bag and headed back to Malika.
“Fucking farmsters!” she huffed, cutting her eyes at her friend. “At least the one with the Afro had some sense. He gave me money for your donut, too.”
Malika shrugged her shoulders, shook her head, and said, “White people.”
Kya twisted her mouth and gave her friend the side eye.
“Oops, sorry,” she said. “No offense.”
“Offense? Because of Troy? Please.”
Kya’s boyfriend was White and Malika didn’t want to group him in the same category as the farmsters.
“Aren’t their nipples cold?” Malika asked earnestly. “I mean, today is pretty nice if you’re wearing a sweater.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The farmsters. Their nipples. Their overalls.”
“I'm sure they have ways of keeping them warm,” Kya said, taking a sip of water from a stainless steel canteen. It had her company’s logo. “Like getting customers riled up with their magazine foolishness. What the hell was that? How you gonna just shove a ten dollar magazine in someone’s hand when they didn’t even ask for it? Don’t you wanna know what I said to them?”
Malika nodded. “Sure.”
“Whatever. Never mind. It’s not important.”
They walked along the path parallel to the brownstones on Washington Park, between DeKalb and Myrtle. When she was younger, Malika pictured herself having a career that afforded her a home like the ones facing the park. Ones she’d seen on Living Single or reruns of The Cosby Show. At thirty she still didn’t know what that career was. She wasn’t sure if she’d ever figure it out.
“I have a question,” Malika said. “A serious one.”
“Okay,” Kya said, her voice almost exasperated from the recent confrontation. “Shoot.”
“Does… Does…” she started. “Nah, nah, nah. It’s too stupid to ask.
“I’m sure it’s not,” Kya said, only slightly convincingly. “Just ask.”
“Okay,” Malika said. “Does Troy have pink nipples? Like the farmsters?”
Kya asked her friend why she was obsessed with men’s nipples all of a sudden and whether or not she was being serious. When she nodded and confirmed that, yes, her boyfriend of three years, did, in fact, have pink nipples, Malika pondered the revelation for a minute.
“What color were you expecting them to be?”
“I don’t know,” Malika said. “Maybe taupe?”
She finished the remainder of the donut and walked towards the obelisk, content enough to see it from a distance without climbing the stairs. Kya took a couple of steps up then turned around to look at her friend. Pointing to Malika’s stomach, she asked, “What color is the baby daddy’s nipples?”
Looking up at the cloudless sky, she closed her eyes for a few seconds, trying to recall the color of Channing’s nipples.
“Medium taupe.”