Hard But Sweet

Hard But Sweet “Its too hard,” the small boy said to his grandmother. “I know,” she answered. “But once you get past the hard, it’s sweet. Go on now. Try.” The boy bit into the apple again and again until he reached the sweet center of it. The old woman lived in a three room walkup off 10th Avenue. Her daughter had fallen in love with a sailor on one of the merchant marine freighters that came through the west side. The daughter was just 17 and at 17, she confused lonely with love.The sailor was the kind of man that looks for a door to get out in every room he ever walked in. He was in another port looking for another little bit of lonely by the time she felt the first kick. The lonely in the girl masqueraded as love thenA changed into worry when her letters were all returned. Her mother held her hand and told her, “Young is mostly dumb. No crime in that. There’s no help for it except living a little bit of wrong into you, so’s you know dumb next time.” The girl cried each night but then decided, as some girls do, that she was going to make it right, as right as wrong can be, by loving the boy when he came. By raising him to be a man. And by trying to teach him the hardest of lessons, that sometimes getting what you want is the surest way of losing what you need. She took a job handing out flyers to the tourists on Broadway. And when that wasn’t enough she took the third shift collecting tolls on the Triboro Bridge until she started to show and was let go. She and her mother counted pennies and made the rent and scraped wherever they could. They sacrificed, like people do all over. Sometimes sacrifice forgets its own name. That’s when it becomes love. After the boy came along, they borrowed a cradle and a high chair. They held him when he cried and listened when he laughed. And they came to believe that every thing that started as wrong could be made right and every hard thing in their lives might somehow ripen into something sweet. The old woman bought day old bread at the bakery and her daughter smiled hard at the butcher on Fridays asking the price once again when the ground beef was a day from going bad. They bought hard bruised fruit from the corner produce. And in the evening they would sit on the stoop and dream of another kind of street. The kind where worry obeyed red lights and hope always had a solid green. The boy grew, happy to be alive and loved. He would hold his mama’s hand and sit every evening with his grandmother on the stoop. He always had enough even when they did not. And each night after they ate his grandmother would give him an unripe apple. The ones she bought at the corner for half price. And they would listen to the sounds of the city at dusk. The horns of the freighters, the hum of traffic on the avenue. Each sound, echoing the worry and the doubt of life on 10th Ave. But far beneath all the common kind of trouble, beneath the scraping for rent and the heartache from reaching for something like happiness that always seemed just beyond their reach, was a locked away beauty that relied on that struggle. And sometimes the hinges of heartache bent back...some nights looking at the peaceful sleep of a child or feeling the miracle of a cool breeze in August off the river or watching a boy and girl on a first date certain that this first kiss carried a small bit of forever, a locked up richness came tumbling out on the sidewalks and poured through the streets like the traffic on 51st. Some nights radios played from open kitchen windows and sometimes the cry of a far off violin seemed to pierce the dark with a sound consoling and touched by a kind of mercy. Each dawn the ships that lined the harbor made their way to the docks. Dabo waiting alone in the dark would watch the mothers and girlfriends arm in arm. They gathered on West St., their eyes full of worry and hope, trying to reclaim love from the grip of war. As he watched he could feel the music begin to stir in the shadow of himself. He would step closer and begin to play the sound that whispered to him every night. The sound of something pushing down, a weight that touched everything and demanded strength to lift. But then, rising from the center, something piercing it, pulling at the weight. Refusing to be dragged down a thousand masks of trouble. Something pulling up. In his strings the women would hear the undeniable cry of time lost, but also the sound of yearning that somehow made it easier to bear. So they would drop a nickel or a dime into an old tin can at Dabo’s feet. And day after day the soldiers would descend from the ramps, sweep their lovers into their arms like arms were all that mattered. Like they believed that whispering I love you was the only way to cleanse themselves from all they had seen and done and become. The soldiers held their sweethearts in a way that made old women cry for the memory of a man’s arms. They held each other tenderly like they had been dreaming of it for years, and when the music ended they held on, unwilling to let the sweetness step into silence. Then they would kiss the way a man and a woman sometimes do, like they understood each was part of a severed life, each half limping along like a one-legged man suddenly remembering how to run. When the last of the couples had cried their tears of joy they walked into off the dusk. Then the soldiers would leave behind the cold of their memories, leave the feel of snow and the taste of their own blood in the hallways of hotels. In the shadows of unlit rooms. In the refuge of their lovers’ arms. WLM