Third Girl from the Left (14 page)

“No, ma'am”

“And the man?”

“He's gone.”

More silence.

“Well. I can't have my baby outdoors. You best to come on home. We'll think of something to say to people.” She paused. “Or we won't say nothing at all.”

Angela started crying again, soundlessly this time. “Thank you, Mama.”

“That's all right. You just get yourself on home.”

Angela borrowed the money from Sheila for a bus ticket. Sheila saved more than Angela, even though she seemed to smoke just as much dope and dress as well. She got money from men often. They had stopped making love, but they still slept together and Sheila braided Angela's hair for her every night and helped her blow it out in the morning, her hands moving slow and gentle across her head. Sheila didn't claim to understand what Angela was doing, but she braided her hair. She could do that.

The night before Angela left, Sheila took the night off from the club. All Angela's goodbyes had been said. The Bunny dip was part of her past now, though she still laughed at the stories Sheila told her after work in the morning. So this night, she sat, a glass of wine next to her, a cigarette burning in the ashtray, between Sheila's legs on the floor, just as she used to sit between her mother's legs to get her hair combed. Sheila's hands worked quick and deft to cornrow tight, flat braids. “Oww. Damn, Sheila. Don't pull on it like that.”

Sheila rapped Angela's head smartly with the comb and laughed. “Girl, how many times have I combed your nappy head since you came out here?”

Angela took a long draw on her cigarette. “I don't even know. A thousand? Two thousand?”

“Something like that. And every time I yank one of your naps, you say that mess. Think you ain't never had your hair combed before.” Her voice softened, her hands moved quickly through Angela's hair. They were quiet for a time as Sheila finished her work. “I'ma miss your nappy head and your evil mouth,” Sheila finally said. She lowered her hands to Angela's shoulders. “And these shoulders.” Her hands moved still lower, to Angela's tight globe of a belly. “This too. I'ma miss you, girl. I miss you already.” Angela put down her cigarette and wiped her wet face. She moved the ashtray aside and turned to face Sheila. Kissed her the way they hadn't kissed in months. “I miss you too. You're my heart. You know that, right? You saved me. When you walked in that office that day. You saved me.”

“I know.” She slid her hand across Angela's cheek. “You haven't been so bad yourself.” She grinned. “Even with this nappy hair.” They sat awkwardly for a long time, holding each other. Then they went to bed. They did not make love. But they lay spoon fashion all night, their breath making all sounds and no sounds, the small, soft sounds of union.

 

The bus ride back to Tulsa was many hours long and many hours uncomfortable. Angela cried a lot of the way. People on the bus studiously ignored her. When they pulled up to the bus stop in Tulsa, Angela looked around. It had not changed a bit in the five years since she had left. The largely unpaved parking lot still swallowed departing cars in a cloud of red dust. The lone clerk's radio still played tinny soul music—Earth, Wind and Fire now instead of the Supremes. Angela looked like a bird of paradise come to roost in a sparrow's nest. Even at six months along, her Afro was meticulously maintained (she'd made a quick stop in the station bathroom to get it together after she got off the bus). She wore a loose-fitting bright red Indian-style dress that hung to her ankles, red lipstick to match, and enormous silver hoops. Silver platform shoes added to her height. Most pregnant women in Tulsa wore tentlike gingham tops with bows and blue or black maternity skirts of modest length at the knee or below. Usually, they wore hats on their neatly straightened hair if the day was sunny. One woman in town—the librarian, Joan Harris—wore a modest Afro of the sort Cicely Tyson wore in the early seventies. But, people always said to each other, “She ain't from around here.” (She had grown up in Boston and married a Tulsa man.) Angela stood in the bus station, looking for her mother, drawing all the light in the room to her. Small children waiting with their mothers stared openly.

Mildred looked more or less as she had when Angela left. Her hair still shone like wet silk, pressed hard and pulled back into a neat bun. It was shot through with gray now and her skin was slightly more lined but still clear and mellow brown, severely lovely. She wore a navy blue shantung dress with a wide white collar of the kind she had worn for the last twenty-five years, and she smelled, faintly, of lavender water. She walked toward her daughter, slowly at first, then with quicker steps. “Angie,” she finally said. The glorious apparition turned toward her. “Don't you look something, girl. Looks like you learned to put mascara on out in Hollywood, even if you didn't learn how to keep your legs together. You look good, Angie. Real good. Different. But good.”

“Oh, Mama.” Angie folded into her mother's arms, crying again. “I can't believe I'm home.”

“That's all right, baby. That's the place you go when you've got nowhere else to go. You know that.”

They walked home. Angela's mother didn't know how to drive. Angela would have killed for a cigarette but didn't know how to tell her mother that she smoked now. Folks Angela didn't recognize nodded and smiled at her mother and stared at her openly. “This my daughter, Angela,” Mildred offered with a polite smile and a wave of her hand to anyone who asked. Angela smiled the way she'd been taught to as a girl, surprised to find her Tulsa manners coming back unbidden. But she could feel in the sway of her hips, her expanding belly, the itch of her fingers for a cigarette, the itch of her ears for some noise, how she had changed.

At home, there was no banner on the door, but there was a quiet acknowledgment that this was not an ordinary return. All the fancy china was laid out, the table laden with her mother's best cooking. Her father stood, massive, still wearing his pharmacist's coat, home from work to welcome the prodigal. “How you doing, gal?” was all he said. He held her tight but then appeared unable to look at her. He didn't say anything about her pregnancy. Her brother, Otis, was there in his overalls, his three girls running around the front yard, kicking up dust. Her sister, Jolene, pregnant with her fourth, sitting on the weathered front steps in a faded flowered cotton dress, a man's work boots on her feet. She'd married a farming man from a little ways out of town—a good man, but a little low-class, Mildred thought. How her children did scatter. Angela looked like nothing she'd ever seen. Beautiful but so bright and hard, like a pile of red rhinestones and rubies thrown in a bowl, dazzling, some valuable, some not. And she was so jittery, washed out, nervous. She drummed her fingers against the side of her thighs through the whole meal or against her big new belly. Mildred didn't want to know what she'd been doing since the last time they'd spoken, all that time ago. She'd never been able to forget the look on Angie's face in that movie: happy. Blank and happy to be standing up on that bar with no clothes on, dancing. Now she looked at her daughter's head, bent over her plate, laughing at something silly Otis was saying, or turning to smile at her father, never looking at Mildred. Who was this exotic creature they now welcomed into their home? At least Angela looked up from her chicken leg to glance at her mother. Mildred smiled at her, and Angela smiled back gorgeously, unexpectedly. For a minute, she looked almost like a movie star.

 

During the welcome-home lunch the only comments made about Angela's clothes and her burgeoning pregnancy were “You look good,” “How you feeling?” and “Hopin' for a girl or a boy?” Jolene expressed her opinion that boys were too much trouble, always breaking stuff. But after the last corncob was picked clean, the last long hug exchanged, Angela and her mother were alone in the kitchen, and Mildred gestured toward a chair for her daughter. “Go on, girl. You can sit down and help me dry from there. I know you must be tired.”

“Thanks, Mama. I am pretty tired.” Her hands ached for a cigarette, but she busied them with the dishtowel she was handed. She was going to have to go get some smokes soon, though. She couldn't take much more.

“So, Angie. How's it feel to be home?”

How's it feel to be home? Home with the dust already filtering into her oh, so careful hair, with the silence easing into her ears, and walking slowly, slowly, behind the people on a deteriorated Greenwood Avenue. Home where the way she dressed now made people think she must be crazy, where no one looked anything like her and she was trying to figure out how to tell her mother that she smoked. Home where she couldn't even in her wildest dreams imagine telling anyone about half of what she'd done, to get parts, to have fun, for reasons she couldn't even explain. They wouldn't understand. They couldn't. Sitting around the table with her family for the first time in five years, she knew it. It came on her like a stone, filled her mouth and her eyes. They didn't know her. They couldn't know her. But where else could she go? “Feels all right I guess. I . . . I wasn't sure how you'd feel about having me home like this Mama.”

“Well. I ain't gonna lie. You made your bed, you got to lie in it. I ain't raisin' this baby.” Her hands remained busy in the sink. “But sometime everybody need a hand up. Everybody does something they ain't so sure about sometimes. And you my daughter after all. What am I gonna do, leave you and my flesh and blood in the street without a dime to your name?” She walked over to Angela and handed her a glass, her hands slick with soap. “I don't pretend to think you been right. Don't go thinkin' that. Me and your daddy don't think you been right. But like I said. We can't put you outdoors. Wouldn't be no better than dogs if we did that. Would we now?” She looked Angela straight in the eye.

“I guess not, Mama.” She dried the glass slowly. “Mama?”

“Yes, Angie.”

“I'm just dying for a cigarette. When I'm done with this, I'ma go on down to the drugstore and get some.”

Mildred's back stiffened. Her hands stilled in the water. But just for a moment. “Don't you smoke in this house,” she said finally, scrubbing around and around a cast-iron frying pan. “You do that out back. Where folks can't see. And don't you get them at your father's store. What would folks think? You go on down to the newsstand.”

“Yes, ma'am.” Angela closed her eyes. The baby shoved an elbow into her kidney.

That night, Angela lay in her narrow old bed. It had the same mattress from five years ago. She could almost smell her old self on it. She couldn't find a comfortable place to put her stomach, her legs, her brain. She'd braided up her hair herself, laboriously, as her mother darned socks by the gooseneck lamp that she had always darned socks by. But it was 1975—who still darned socks? Where was she? She missed Sheila's hands in her hair. She had to keep lowering her arms to rest as she got to the back; it took forever to finish. She'd had one cigarette out back, just under the kitchen window, feeling simultaneously fourteen and ninety-five years old. Hiding like a kid even though she knew so much more than anyone else in this damn town.

She rolled over to her side, shoved her pillow under her stomach, belched uncomfortably. The baby rotated again. Angela's eyes filled with tears. She ran her hand over her stomach, now so huge and alien. What would she do when the baby was born? Right now she felt as though she was going to be a beach ball forever, no matter how she tried to gussy it up with interesting Indian-style dresses. She fell asleep crying. If her mother heard her, she didn't come in.

L
ATER, WHEN HE THOUGHT ABOUT WHAT HE
regretted most, it was that he hadn't told her the rest. He never told her about the way he gazed at her when her back was to him, maybe doing the dishes or lighting a cigarette. He never told her that it took every ounce of his will not to go to her when she knelt on his floor in tears. That it took every ounce of his will not to walk to her and lift her up by her elbows and cover her face with kisses and say that he'd love her and the baby forever. If she'd just be with him. But he saw what Angela couldn't see. He saw that they would fail each other in the end. It broke his heart in two. He couldn't explain how he knew it. But he knew it the way he knew his name. And so he left her to sob on his floor, alone.

So now there would be a child in this world who bore his blood but not his name. How he had hoped never to do that. He thought about it for a long time. For an ocean of not calling and a mountain of not getting in his car and driving to her house to see her and a continent of being away from the sweet back of her neck, but seeing it before him every time he closed his eyes. Then one balmy Sunday when the weather was kind of like that day they'd spent eating ice cream at the Santa Monica Pier, he went to her apartment.

He sat out front in his car for a long time, smoking and looking at the small window that she and Sheila shared. He thought about the way Sheila's tongue had felt in his mouth that one time at that party when they were all so drunk and happy. He couldn't explain it to Angie or anyone, but he thought now that he'd been trying to understand, by kissing this girl that his girl loved so much. He thought that if he tasted her, he might understand what made her so special. He thought maybe he could take it in. But later, at that same party, when he'd seen them sitting with their thighs almost touching, laughing into each other's faces about nothing before they went to the men who mattered, their bodies like sacred offerings, he knew that he had failed. That whatever it was stayed between them. They couldn't even tell him about it. He took one last drag on his cigarette, flung it out the window. “Fuck it,” he said. Then he got out of the car. The air smelled of smog and lilacs.