Heavy by Kiese Laymon

Author:Kiese Laymon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

DISASTER

When you came home for your Christmas break, you looked at me, shook your head, and asked, “What are you doing to yourself?”

You made me get on the scale in front of you.

256.

264.

269.

272.

275.

287.

296.

I asked you to leave, then took all my clothes off and tiptoed on the scale again.

293.

In one semester, three and a half months, I gained over fifty pounds. The only good thing about the weight was you seemed disgusted when I acted like I didn’t care.

The next day when I came home from selling Cutco knives, you were in your room. “Why do you say that?” I heard you ask someone on the phone that night. “I will tell him when I have to. I don’t have to now. I’ll come see you when I can.”

I didn’t know whom you were talking to, but I could tell by the whispery, welcoming tone it wasn’t Malachi Hunter. Even though Malachi Hunter had a new baby with another woman, he wouldn’t leave you alone. It’s not so much he wanted you back; it’s that he didn’t want you to want anyone else. Whenever he invited himself over, you asked me not to leave the house. As soon as his car pulled into the driveway, I went under your pillow, got your gun, and put it in my pocket.

Malachi Hunter came into my room without knocking that night you were whispering on the phone. I had the gun underneath the covers, between my thighs. He didn’t say hey or how you doing or what’s up. “The white man, he’ll get you one way or another,” he said. “You can’t be a black scholar and be free unless you independently wealthy. You can’t be independently wealthy and be the white man’s labor. Let’s say your mama needs to go to the conference for revolutionaries in Nairobi, as smart as she is, does she have the money to go?”

“There’s a conference for revolutionaries in Nairobi?”

“Laymon,” he said, “catch up. You supposed to be a writer. Use your imagination. Goddamn.”

You appeared in my doorway and told him he needed to leave. Y’all didn’t fight. Y’all didn’t argue. Malachi Hunter laughed in your face and kept talking like you weren’t there. “She still ain’t free, Laymon,” he said. “She the smartest woman in the world, but she not free. It’s too many cheese-eating niggas in this house who think free and black are oxymorons. I’m allergic to houses like this. I’m gone, Laymon.”

I followed Malachi Hunter out the front door. I stayed in the driveway until I couldn’t see the lights of his Jaguar anymore.

Later on that night, you knocked on my bedroom door. I was working on a satirical essay about Millsaps College filled with something I called “Laymon’s terms.”

“Can I come in, Kie?”

I put my notebook down and didn’t say a word. You sat on the edge of the bed just looking at the carpet. You wanted me to ask you a question but I didn’t have anything to ask other than “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know, Kie,” you said.

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