Avail. From the Latin valēre, meaning: to have force or efficacy for the accomplishment of a purpose; to be effectual, serviceable, or of use, as in: on the day I first noticed Celeste, I stood in the lunch line goofing off with Maurice when she took her place at the end of it. If I were older, I might have said she was “beautiful,” but at nine, “pretty” was the highest superlative I knew.
I became friendly with Celeste after I learned she lived with her grandmother across the street and few buildings down from my family’s apartment on Minnesota Avenue. I would visit her, though she was only allowed to talk to me through a screen door. Her grandmother had strict rules about her talking to boys, even at nine years old, and especially about what Celeste was allowed to discuss. Most importantly, she was never to mention why she moved so suddenly from her home in Virginia to her grandmother’s in Knoxville, and without her mama and daddy.
Perhaps because of these visits, a rumor started that Celeste and I were boyfriend/girlfriend—even at that age we couldn’t fathom boys and girls being just friends. But I saw these rumors as an opportunity. Celeste would be my problem solver if I could convince the blackboys on the playground that if we weren’t boyfriend/girlfriend—which she insisted we weren’t—I at least had a crush on her.
Even after elementary school, when she and I lost touch, just as I had with Maurice, Celeste became essential to terrible lies I told in order to hide my sexuality while I was in the closet, and even—and probably worse—when I was out, but still shamed by the stigma of being gay. Among the worst lies was that I told folks that when we were teenagers, I’d impregnated Celeste not once, but twice. Each time she had “miscarried.”
We reconnected briefly in our late twenties while riding the late-night Magnolia Avenue bus route: me on my way home from bartending and she from her job as a certified nurse’s assistant. As the bus rattled down Gay Street to Summit Hill and Broadway, turning toward her neighborhood of potholes and teenagers who, during the day, played chicken in the middle of the road, she complained to me about the minimum wage paychecks that were too small to buy a new alternator for her car or keep up with the rent on a duplex. She was a single mother and showed me pictures of her children on her phone, whom, she said, were at her next-door neighbors’, and oh how they got on her ever-loving nerves. But her eyes grew dark, as though a gloaming occupied her vision, when she looked upon and touched her children’s faces displayed on the screen, as if her only regret was that she too often didn’t have the chance to feed and bathe them, that someone else would have already whisked them off to bed before she’d gotten home from having worked all day. I did my best to forget that many people believed—nearly all of whom she didn’t know—that she had no children, that none were even possible, not even a miracle from god would grace her with any. I had made this an impossibility. So, as we caught up, I could only hide my shame behind a grimace, feeling penitent, meaning: I imagined the love she had for her children might one day translate into an absolution for me.
*
Essential, I said, pausing briefly to mouth the letters one more time before I spelled e-s-s-e-n-t-u-l-e. Essentule. I turned to Celeste, who’d lifted her eyes from the floor, a shy smile forming on her face the way it did when she spoke softly through the screen door of her grandmother’s apartment. I returned it, the same bucktoothed grin as when I first noticed her take her place at the end of a very long lunch line when we were in the third grade, and so it only made sense that she was the one I then rooted for when I heard Mrs. Wolfe say, Sorry, but that is incorrect.