Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair by Susan Sheehan

money but he didn’t want to accuse me so he ain’t said nothing.”
    Crystal says, “I really loved Daquan, but while I was living with him I got away with having sex with another guy, Derrick, at Derrick’s place. Then there was this Puerto Rican. I couldn’t resist his soft lips. I had him call me at the Jeffersons’—I told him I was living with my grandmother and had an overprotective uncle but I’d be moving out soon. I went to the movies to see
Splash
with him. Daquan caught me when he brought me home, and hit me, so I never had sex with the Puerto Rican. I was two months pregnant by then.”
    When Crystal realized that she was pregnant, she made plans to go to a hospital clinic to verify her condition and quietly obtain an abortion. She set off for the clinic after telling Daquan she was meeting a friend before going to school. Hefollowed her to the hospital and, unbeknownst to her, into the clinic. As the nurse’s aide gave her the test results, Daquan cried out “Yes, yes, yes!” and hugged her. Crystal, who was thinking, No, no, no, felt frustrated. She cried. “My scheme had been blown.” Mrs. Jefferson agreed with her son. “You don’t be needing no abortion,” she said. “Them things are dangerous.”
    While Crystal was living at Queensboro and was visiting her baby at Bronx-Lebanon at two o’clock one Sunday morning (the hospital permitted visits around the clock), Daquan came by and caught her talking to John, the guy she had been dating (but not sleeping with) when Daquan met her and won her away from him. Daquan wanted to fight Crystal that Sunday morning. “We did a lot of punching and grabbing over the years,” she says. “When I was fifteen, I hit him over the head with a glass ashtray shaped like a gingerbread man. When I was on the phone with my male friends, he’d try to listen; I’d smash him over the head with the phone.”
    Around the time of little Daquan’s birth, Crystal had told her mother how much she was in love with Daquan, her infidelities notwithstanding. She stretched out the monosyllable so that anyone hearing her would have written down “looo-ooove.” “I give it a year after that baby is born,” Florence had said. “Then tell me how much you looo-ooove him.”
    At sixteen, Crystal took care to leave her engagement ring in her pocket or in her dresser drawer except when she was with Daquan. “I realized I was making a fool of myself,” she says. “Daquan’s expectations were husband and wife and me tocall him every time I got home from school. At that age, I was blossing and blooming. There was a lot of fun to be had going to roller rinks and discos with people I was meeting nearer my age, but Daquan was getting upset and asking all these questions. I was sixteen, he was twenty-five. I sat him down and told him he’d been where I was going. ‘I never had a childhood, but I’m going to have a teen-agehood,’ I said. ‘Maybe we’ll get back together when I’m older.’ I dated younger guys. Their demands was less great. And they were better-looking. Daquan walks funny and his eyes is always bloodshot. I’m five feet and a half a inch, and he’s shorter than that. For me, you got to be at least five-eight and built big, with lots and lots of muscles. I look at Daquan now and I ask myself, ‘How the hell did I do it?’ ”
    During Crystal’s sixteenth summer, she met Richard, a student at Howard University who was home on vacation. He was tall and muscular, but, she says, “the sex wasn’t there.” Then, in August of 1987, she started seeing Diamond. He took her horseback riding on their first date. On later dates, they went to Coney Island and to the beach at Far Rockaway, and rode around on his red Suzuki motorcycle. They first made love in October, at the Capri, a hotel with