Love Story

Nina and Aaron, Part I Only thirty-three minutes separated their emergence into the world, one thousand nine hundred and eighty seconds of elder wisdom that Nina would lord over Aaron for the next three decades. Already mocha brown with a thick thatch of jet-black hair, a brand new Aaron greeted his audience with an endearing whimper, eliciting a joyful noise from his exhausted mother, his exuberant father, and even the slightly indifferent resident who stepped in when it became apparent that Mom's obstetrician wasn't showing up for the big event. Eighteen miles away from Aaron's well-received entrance in Brooklyn, Nina was already swaddled tightly in the nursery in Queens, discovering the addictive taste of her own wrinkly knuckles. Nina's audience'even Mom'had been all too happy with her banishment to the nursery because the delivery room was still pulsing from the startling decibels reached by her maiden voice. The girl was loud, insistent, and, to all who observed, apparently angry about this new development. Nina, for years to come, would never live down the fuss she raised. Her mother would remind anyone who listened, whenever she had reason to note her daughter's aggressive volume, that ?the girl been screaming ever since she got here.' Aaron was brought home to a small Brooklyn apartment whose rhythms hardly were altered by his arrival'though the space instantly was squeezed to a maximum, which wasn't a pleasant change in late July's summer swelter. His mother Josefina Simmons was still the same patient soul who could go months without ever raising her voice'even when challenged by the everyday outlandishness of her firstborn son, Carney, who seemed intent upon waking every morning to find a new way to ruffle all feathers in sight. Josefina's patience combined with her husband Ray's gentle humor to create a household that could easily rival the idyllic domestication of Josefina's favorite show, The Brady Bunch. Josefina was twenty-eight, born in postwar Harlem, so it didn't escape her notice that the world of Carol and Mike Brady was glaringly bereft of colored people. But she tried not to let tiring demands of racial consciousness intrude on her television viewing. After all, she thought, if you got worked up over things like that, you'd never have any peace. Peace was the goal in the Simmons residence, even in the early 1970s, when there wasn't much of it around them. Their goal was to achieve that airless, settled calm that one would normally associate with senior citizens'certainly not a home with two young kids. Pictureless walls, plastic sofa covers, dark-beige carpet worn thin not by footfalls but by excessive vacuuming. It was a place that could be lifted whole and deposited in the Smithsonian or the Museum of Natural History, in a wing entitled ?Americana Living Quarters: 1970s.' Aaron's father was a Manhattan doorman. His whole day was defined by adhering to decorum, overreacting'or not reacting, period'to nothing. Years later, after he left his parents? house, Aaron escorted a grieving friend to a funeral home and was startled by how comfortable he felt in the company of the dead'or at least in their sitting room. Nina was carted home by a family that couldn't have been more different from the Simmonses. The home in Jamaica, Queens, was a cluttered mess, throbbing with so much intense energy and filled with so much stuff that the place always seemed about to explode in a shower of black militant outrage. The family's central theme, in fact, told much of the story: Nina's father Willy was a Black Panther who had spent the last two years in hiding. The NYPD believed, with good reason, that Willy Carruthers'also known as ?Baby Ruth? by party loyalists'had played a key role in the botched robbery of a Department of Transportation parking meter collector. The idea, hatched a week after an unpopular fare and toll hike, was to take back the public's money and stage a veryChiles, Nick is the author of 'Love Story', published 2004 under ISBN 9780525948247 and ISBN 0525948244.