Synthetic City - Who's Afraid of William Carlos Williams?

s y n t h e t i c c i t y s e l e c t e d w o r k s o f j u n e a v i g n o n e

Fast Forward

One quick note before we begin . . . BE SURE TO CLICK ON THE LITTLE BEES!

Call me shallow.

Fantasia was named, as her 16-year-old mother Latenya puts it, After the mouse in the movie I seen called that. She is small. For close to a month now during these weekly visits, I have considered slipping her into my briefcase and taking her home. I'm thinking that this would cut down, at 42, the concerns of a haywire pregnancy by quite a bit, and besides most women seem to get fat or just plain flabby and somewhat, dare I say it, boring after they've had kids, something I must have considered in the backdrop of my mind during these many years of disgustingly responsible birth control practices. One of the true pleasures I have in life, if the truth be known, is my ability to wear my black

Victoria's Secret bikini and feel good about it . . .

So much for fluffy fantasies, Silk City style.

What I'm really thinking is how I should be able to steal this baby, dubbed Fantasia, born to this overpopulated world, premature and in withdrawal before being awarded like Cracker Jack prize to her birth parent. How, if I were at all deep, I'd rescue her without concern over the jail sentence, make a profound, articulate statement to the press when caught before the gates of steel slammed in against me:

"Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States"

"Baby Kidnapping by One 'Angela'"

"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN"

That would make me deep.

That would make me real. That would make me an unemployed social activist behind bars without the dire need for a black bikini or 401K.

The three of us sink down deep into a worn brown corduroy couch with collapsed springs listening to Emily, our bilingual social worker, talk about the importance of doing the baby's laundry, saying no to drugs, picking up a broom now and then to keep the transitional apartment clean, and going to Planned Parenthood next week and avoiding boyfriends after one thing until then. Emily is wearing a flowered sun dress with pale yellow stockings that she bought at Willowbrook Mall at Macy's Labor Day Extravaganza Sale over the weekend. She looks peppy and crisp.

I was up late talking to Salvatore

about that jerk neighbor of mine and just picked my jeans off the bedroom floor from the night before. I am tired and rumpled. This room smells like ketchup and fries. I feel like I am not really here, that sleepy, fuzzy, in between channels feeling, when I notice from my slumped position through the space between Emily's lemony knees that the television behind her isn't working. The screen has been kicked in.

I suppose this is okay, that it must not be our property, because our hostess Emily hasn't mentioned it in her litany of MSW updates yet. Maybe she hasn't noticed because I probably wouldn't have either, if I hadn't followed Latenya's gaze, if I hadn't taken my own off the tiny wide-eyed ball of brownness between us on the couch long enough to follow her mother's eyes along their path to the battered Zenith.

"They has such fun, I see that show Cops and say I can do that, why should big white boys be the only ones havin that kinds of fun, if was a boy I could be all that too," she says to me, staring with me at the mangled box as if it is working.

Then she starts to sing, Bad boys, bad boys what you gonna do when they come for you, and for the third time this morning tells me how she wishes Fantasia was a boy, like her five-year-old Drachir

, which is, she explains proudly, Richard spelled backwards.

The skinny brown-eyed boy is clutching a plastic Hunch Back of Notre Dame toy from Burger King along side the twin four-year old boys of Kaideidra, Latenya's upstairs neighbor and another transitional housing client of ours. They are all playing together in front of the broken television on the vinyl floor littered with tiny pieces of Styrofoam burger container. Emily says in her peppy voice that she is going to check on Kadeidra's apartment upstairs, another transitional housing client of ours, and that we should talk about an Educational Plan.

I am, after all, the Educational Counselor for the Paterson Unified Housing Group, one of the many booming non- profit businesses in the city the likes of which have solidly replaced the silk that once lined the purses of the rich getting richer.

I look directly into Latenya's black eyes with their bizarre golden centers. Latenya shifts her gaze to the floor, perhaps at the pieces of Styrofoam, perhaps just away from my canned attempt at authority. She has rich espresso- colored skin, large breasts pushing up through her orange spandex tank top, and she is wearing black leggings with lace ties up the sides. Quite nice ones, actually. She is barefoot and happy, she tells me just to be out of her fuckin' mother's apartment on Straight Street, who still does crack and stole her welfare checks every month.

She says Fantasia is her third child. I'm not sure where the other one is. I don't ask.

I am mostly thinking how damn sexy she is for a kid, how I didn't look anywhere near like this at her age, how the 39-year-old who got her pregnant the last time and ran away to Florida, violating his parole for drug dealing, probably fucked her right in front of her mother's whacked out pupils. And I want to ask her if she'd like to catch up with him and at least make him pay for raising Fantasia. But in my heart, I am still pondering about the more realistic plan of kidnapping. In the end, I'm afraid, such thoughts of you too shall flow past me, Fantasia.

The truth is, I've ranted on so about the value of education, gone home with crowded thoughts of small, sticky faces in my mind, popping my pill from the pink packet before dinner which I eat with my man, a dedicated painter of pictures, who I love to fuck more than most things on this planet. I have wondered, so hard, what kind of parents we would make over the years, if we could think we could afford a child and do it justice, before I settle down for the evening to try and rub thoughts together long enough for them to reach paper. In a way that won't revolt me. It seems, Fantasia, I have chosen an alternative lifestyle

. . .

I am trying to produce a novel taking forever to complete. I call the thing Another Place

although I don't really know where this other place is, why I need to go there, or hold it in my hands so badly, just as I do know the choice not to have a kid, while aided by his reassuring insecurities on the topic, has ultimately been mine. I've feared conception like a wave that will bring me to my knees and steal the time I've already somehow stolen from reality like borrowed pearls.

"Well, now, let's use this time wisely here today, " I find myself saying to Latenya in a calm, controlled voice that somehow makes me nauseas. "Being a cop isn't such a bad idea, but there are lots of things to consider, lots of goals you need to set before you get there, work on your math and writ..." (She tested in on a 3rd grade level)

Just then Kadeidra storms in through the front door lugging two clear plastic bags filled with what looks like two big bottles of C-Town orange soda inside and says that she'd like to get her GED and become an assistant daycare teacher, like we had talked about last time, not a nurse's aide in the two week training program like welfare told her she had to do. She says that she is really the mother of Fantasia since she takes care of her all the time, that she wouldn't even get fed nothing if it weren't for her.

The twin boys grab at Kadeidra's legs as she reaches down and snatches Fantasia her from the accessible position to my briefcase before plopping down on the couch in a heavy thump beside me. Emily walks back in the room. She stands behind me by the couch with her hand on her hip and nods her head in serious disapproval to Kadeidra's charge. Latenya shrugs back at her cold stare.

"You knows it too, boys are just better," she finally huffs back, pushing her braids aside to scratch beneath the left strap of her top. Her long acrylic nails are neon orange with black stripes. Or maybe black with orange stripes. Then I notice the big hickey on her neck. I am not sure Emily notices the bruise, which is facing me head on like a close-up.

"Now see what your fat ass starts, I can't help it if I like boys more," Latenya screams over Fantasia toward Kadeidra. "I know what I'm sayin'. A girls gonna grow up like me and have to stay here and the boys gonna get to go to places where they want to be at. My mamma always tells me she always wished she was a boy so she could pick up and goes where she wants, she says she wouldn't then ever still be living at this shit hole city, my mamma says she would be. . . "

"Now, now, let's not put down this city, this is a city of great diversity and beautiful architecture and a rich history here . . .," interrupts Emily with a sense of outrage in her tone, as if someone just called her a stupid bitch or something, which, actually, I was on the verge of doing all day. She started as soon as I got in the car with her to do our rounds this morning, about the house she just bought on the historic East Side and how she was just appointed to the city's Historic Commission and what they are planning to do at the next craft fundraiser at Lambert's Castle and the sale at Macy's this weekend, they have the best sales on Memorial Day, and I think you must know someone on the Commission, he is a neighbor of yours, very concerned about community and historic issues, Billy something . . .

"Hey, your mamma be a crack addict that steals your babies' checks," Kadeidra shouts. "If boys be so damn good why your man be in Florida and not here with his baby? Why aint you on the pill now?"

"Yeah, she take such good care of herself, washing that pink pill shit down her throat with all that orange soda and Twinkies that makes her ass so fat," Latenya mutters to me from the side of her mouth. I start to laugh, despite my effort to remain seriously concerned.

Emily sends of look of happy approval in Kadiedra's direction. She walks over to the back of the couch, behind me, bends over at me the edge of it. "We are sometimes conduits, Angela, helping to move things along, slowly

but surely," Emily whispers in my ear.

I am a serious conduit again. And Latenya is frowning now, folding her arms and depressing the small of her back hard into the lop-sided cushion behind her. The three boys on the floor in front of her are ripping the Styrofoam into smaller and smaller pieces and throwing them at each other's heads, giggling uncontrollably. A piece sticks to Drahcir's fuzzy hair, which he has trouble removing. Frustrated, he throws his Hunchback straight at the face of one of the twins. He misses. It hits Latenya on her chin.

The barefoot girl stands to scream. Drachir looks up, scared, cries. The twins continue to throw Styrofoam pieces at him. The landscape around me starts to move faster. I feel myself moving with it. I want to go home. I rub Fantasia's head as it rests on Kadeidra's chubby arm beside me and close my eyes. Because if you rub the little brown curly balls on her head, how she smiles.

Rubbing, I travel through this dirty window and these dirty streets, through my own window, to my somewhat safer neighborhood, to my rooms filled with books, window sills lined with plaster saints, Michael stomping on the head of the devil, battered old boys collected from thrift shops and the Salvation Army downtown, each with some deep story of his own. I can travel safely beyond a world I can no longer seem to articulate, beyond the destruction of my rose-colored glasses, toward the peace of a sanctuary I can lock myself into against this river raging at the door.

Because if I rub long enough I will transport myself home, like Dorothy clicking ruby red heels together, knowing if I start to wonder, about anything at all, like if the third child is, or was, a girl, and where she might be, this trick won't work. I will feel the brooms around me multiplying, and I know in reality I could not stop them, know they would not help me with their pails to bring out the water rushing in, the wizard, in the end, being just a mouse.

Rubbing, there must be a way to soar and land elsewhere. Soon I will be in my bikini sailing alone along a pristine reef toward back to some familiar distant shore. If the truth be known, this comforts me. Call me shallow. If I were deep, after all, this day would have gone quite differently.