All Our Names Read Online Free PDF Page B

good, I’d come visit you on the weekends.”
    When it came to more domestic fantasies, however, we fell apart. The distance between what we had and what we wanted was too obvious if we dreamed close to home.
    I remember taking him to the post office once so he could mail a letter to his mother. While we stood in line to buy stamps, I asked him what her name was. He looked up as if he no longer knew the answer to that question, or had lost the right to answer it.
    “Her name doesn’t matter,” he said. “Everyone only calls her Imaye. It means ‘Mother.’ ”
    When we reached the teller, Isaac handed me the envelope. He was shy speaking in front of strangers, so I was the one who asked how many stamps were needed to mail the letter. While we waited, I tried to pronounce her name the same way he had. I said out loud: “Im-e-ya… Im-a-yu.”
    “Not even close,” he said.
    He pronounced it once more so I could hear how far off I was, and finally, after failing two more times, I laughed and said, “Forget it. When we meet, I’ll just call her Mother.”
    He became silent. What I had said bothered him. I didn’t know him well enough yet to understand why, but I felt the distance expanding between us. We paid for the stamps and left the post office, and it wasn’t until we were alone in the car that he told me what he was thinking.
    “It doesn’t do us any good to talk about things that will never happen,” he said.
    I promised myself I would never ask him about his family again, and by and large I stayed true to that. I thought as well, however, that if we couldn’t have a future, I could at least try to make the most of our present. We were running out of errands and chores to complete, and it was time, I told him, we moved on to something else.
    “We’re going to have to find other things to do,” I said, “except go to the grocery store.”
    “What would you like?”
    I thought of all the possible options open to us. I thought of what normal couples did. They went to the movies, dinner. They invited friends over on the weekend. They had beach vacations. I knew we couldn’t get away with any of that, so I told Isaac, “I don’t know. But I’ll come up with something.”
    I decided over breakfast with my mother that certain risks had to be taken if Isaac and I were going to have any sort of life together. I didn’t make this decision lightly. She asked me that morning, while setting the table, “Do you have a new friend, Helen?” She was dependent on gentle phrasing; that was the register we carried on all our conversations in: “Would you like to help me with the shopping this weekend, Helen? Do you think it’s time we changed the curtains in the living room, Helen?”
    I always responded in kind.
    “No one that I know of,” I said. “But I promise to keep looking.”
    The last time she had asked that question was shortly after I began working with David. I spoke of him often around the house, and if there was anyone I spent the weekends and evenings with, it was him. She asked me repeatedly if David was a special friend—a hope abruptly relinquished once she met him. Telling her about Isaac wouldn’t have brought her any comfort.
    David was the only one who had suspected, and even he was quietly alarmed by the suggestion.
    When we were alone, in his office, he had said, “I hope you know what you’re doing with your Dickens.” It wasn’t a reproach; I had the feeling he found saying those words embarrassing. I nodded and tried to make it all seem lighthearted.
    “Of course I know,” I said. “I’m a professional at this.”
    We weren’t divided like the South and had nothing to do with any of the large cities in the North. We were exactly what geography had made us: middle of the road, never bitterly segregated, but with lines dividing black from white all over town, whether in neighborhoods, churches, schools, or parks. We lived semi-peacefully apart, like a married couple in