Almost Crimson (6 page)

CeCe injected herself in their conversation, asking Tonia what her room was like. One of the nicer girls, Tonia didn't dismiss CeCe's fringe status and gave a bubbly description of her matching bedspread and curtains, new Cabbage Patch dolls, and wall posters of Diana Ross, Marilyn McCoo, and Thelma from
Good Times
.

CeCe waited for Tonia to exhaust the inventory of her room, so she could submit Dwayne's request. While Tonia rambled, CeCe wondered why Dwayne had picked this girl. She wasn't
that
cute. She definitely wasn't very bright. Confounded once again by the nature of boys, CeCe half-listened and half-waited while they walked the trodden path.

As they reached the edge of the woods, CeCe glimpsed the shimmer of an enormous spider's web stretched between two trees. CeCe sidestepped the tree and, before she could open her mouth, Tonia said, “Bread and butter! It's bad luck to split—”

Then Tonia screamed.

 

Before they left for dinner, Hoot gathered the girls to slice through the heavy tension of their small group with a discussion on “trust.” The open forum devolved into a sharp indictment of CeCe's deliberate trick to scare Tonia.

“You know she's scared of spiders,” one girl barked.

“You were just on that pathway, so you knew the spider web was there,” insisted another.

“What if she had been bitten?” Hoot even asked.

“That's why don't nobody even like your weird butt,” concluded another.

CeCe claimed her innocence once more and absorbed the rest of their accusations. She didn't bother mentioning Dwayne's request. She didn't see how it could help her plight. She spotted him outside the cantina when their group finally arrived for dinner and he waved a dismissive hand at her. CeCe was irritated with the girls for swelling the incident and angry with herself for being hurt by Dwayne's disappointment.

CeCe ate her dinner alone, as expected. She scraped her tray and went outside to sit in the grass. Staying with the group before and after meals was Hoot's only restriction to CeCe's camp haunting.

Sitting by herself, pulling blades of grass between her fingers, CeCe watched Tonia emerge from the cantina with Tall Tonya and a collection of other girls. They approached CeCe in a buzzing swarm.

“I heard you let my girl almost crash into a tree,” said Tall Tonya.

“Tried to scare her,” someone else said.

“Almost got her bit by a spider,” called another voice.

“I already said it was an accident,” CeCe said, willed her legs to lift her from the ground.

“I think you lyin',” Tall Tonya said. She was gangly, with long arms and sharp shoulders.

“I don't care what you think,” CeCe said, her good sense betraying her. She looked at the underside of the girl's chin, the color buttermilk, as she approached CeCe with a threatening stance.

“Don't jump bad,” Tall Tonya said, eclipsing the space between them.

“Don't get in my face,” CeCe said, mimicking the girl's neck roll.

“Don't make me whoop your butt,
Crim-Son
!”

CeCe cringed at the way her name curdled inside Tall Tonya's mouth. CeCe's irritation ignited into fury, swelling every cavern and vessel inside her small body.

CeCe jammed the heel of her hands into Tall Tonya's shoulders, knocking the girl backwards. Tall Tonya recovered her balance and charged at CeCe with balled fists and flying curses. CeCe responded with flailing arms and a stutter of feet and knees. She was distantly aware of the shrieks and cheers, growing louder and thicker as more campers came out of the cantina to watch them fight. CeCe flung herself at the girl's neck, mouth, thighs, and felt Tonya's returning rain of pounds and smacks.

CeCe felt weightlessness between her feet and the ground as muscular arms clamped around her waist. Blaze, one of the counselors for the teen boys' groups, lifted CeCe and carried her rebellious limbs away from the fracas. He carried her to the far end of the field and dropped her to the ground.

Blaze hovered before her like a barricade, but CeCe had no intention of rushing back into the fray. As her breathing steadied, the brew of campers and counselors slowly dissipated. CeCe took in the aftermath like a spectator, as if she hadn't been the one to bloody Tonya's lip. As if she weren't the one all the counselors were shaking their heads and tsk-tsking about.

“I don't even know what to say, CeCe,” the camp director said, ending her reprimand. By CeCe's count, she had been pinned with the word “disappointed” nine times that day.

The adults decided to move CeCe into the six-year-old units for her remaining two weeks. She could be a helper to the counselors there, if she chose, but was not to interact with her age group any longer. As Hoot helped carry out CeCe's duffel bags while the other girls painted pinecone owls, CeCe looked forward to the preschool chatter and, hopefully, being ignored for the rest of her time at Camp Onondaga.

CeCe also welcomed the fluidity of her anger. She sat on painted rocks behind the archery field where the six-year-olds tumbled and raced in the hot sun. CeCe allowed the rush of bitterness to course around inside her. CeCe didn't hold her breath to stop it. She didn't resist its steady leaning against her thoughts. She didn't reject the way her rage sated her. By the time she boarded the yellow bus departing Camp Onondaga, CeCe had fury tucked beneath her tongue.

TEN

AFFAIRS

 

 

BRIAN CLARK LED THE WOMEN back to the kitchen, where he had short stacks of papers neatly lined along the counter.

“The deed has already been transferred to your name,” Doris said, motioning CeCe to the counter. “A trust has been set up for you through Brian's law firm—you know how those work—to cover routine repairs and maintenance for a while. My estate will pay the property taxes for two years.”

“Three,” Brian corrected.

“Three, really?” Doris said to Brian. She turned back to face CeCe. “I must really like you.”

The women looked at each other silently. As was their way, CeCe and Doris held a two-hour conversation of soul-honest epiphanies and heartfelt thank-yous inside that flash of quiet. When the silence burst, CeCe lunged at Doris, wrapping arms around her friend's wide shoulders and sobbing into Doris' hair.

Doris rubbed CeCe's heaving back. “OK, honey,” Doris said once CeCe had collected herself. “The bad news is Mr. Smarty Pants has lots of papers for you to sign.”

CeCe separated herself, her laugh garbled with tears.

“I can't even begin to find enough words to thank you, Doris,” CeCe managed to say, wiping her face with her fingers.

“Live your own life, and live it well, kiddo,” Doris said. “That's how you thank me.”

Doris touched CeCe's chin and left her to sign and clip forms with Brian. When CeCe emerged from the kitchen, she had a thick, white envelope filled with signed papers and a label on the front with her name already typed on it. CeCe gawked at the envelope between her fingers.

“The deal doesn't work without keys,” Doris said. She stood in the center of the empty dining room dangling a ring with three shiny keys.

“When—” CeCe began.

“Right now,” Doris said.

CeCe walked over with an outstretched palm and let Doris drop the keys into her hand. She clenched and unclenched her fists, savoring the bite of metal against her palm.

“Well, my work here is done,” Doris said in a loud stage voice, fanning the air with a faux regal wave. “Brian, call my driver.”

Brian said, “I
am
your driver.”

“Oh, that's right.” Doris tossed a wink at CeCe.

“You two made me love my job all over again. CeCe, congratulations again. My business card is inside your packet and I left another one on the counter. Doris, I'll be in the car. Please take your time.”

“You really outdid yourself this time,” CeCe said to Doris once Brian was outside.

“That's the idea, kiddo. Outdo yourself every chance you get.”

“What happened to the tenants you had, though?”

“Serendipity, honey,” Doris replied, her voice distant. “The husband secured a better-paying job and the wife found out they had twins on the way. When they called to let me know they were going to be house hunting soon, I knew it was time.”

“Time?” CeCe said, grinning as she folded her arms over her chest. Doris was always into something. “Time for what?”

“Time to pull the trigger on these projects before I go,” Doris said.

“Where are you going now?” CeCe asked, still opening and closing her hand around the keys. Knowing Doris, there would be a passport and a long journey involved.

Doris did not return CeCe's giddy grin. She blinked before locking eyes with CeCe, transcribing another silent volume.

“Everywhere,” Doris said. More softly, she added, “I'm dying, honey. Ovarian cancer. Too far gone to try and fix at it anymore. I'm taking the boys and their families away for a few weeks. Then I'm traveling to all the places I've never been—which is a lot of places, I tell ya.”

Breath trapped in CeCe's lungs. The euphoria she felt ten seconds ago seemed perverse and dirty now.

“I know, it's nuts, right?” Doris said, acknowledging the question marks in CeCe's eyes. Doris folded her arms across herself and CeCe noticed she was without her signature silver chain. “Just when I was finally getting my shit together . . . ”

CeCe couldn't force her face to smile.

“Hey, I've known for a long time,” Doris said, stepping back into CeCe's personal space. “Not about the cancer, but that I wanted you to have this house. Before the cancer, my plan was to give you a helluva deal on rent. Once I started thinking about
getting my affairs in order
and leaving legacies and all, the idea took on a life of its own. Don't you go feeling like you got a consolation prize, girlie. You've been on my heart since the day I met you. If it makes you feel any better, you're one of nearly a dozen.”

“One of a dozen . . . what?” CeCe said, stepping back to let her tears slide down her face and hope for the picture window glass to keep her standing upright.

“Amazing young people I've met who needed a break and some luck,” Doris said. She started to count off on her fingers. “There's you. There's the art teacher my boys had in middle school; he wants to study art therapy. My hair stylist struggles to care for her autistic daughter; the girl at my favorite bakery wants a tea shop; a young widower at the end of the block needs a live-in nanny and housekeeper to help with his six kids.

“And Brian,” Doris continued, thumbing toward the open door. “He used to live around the corner. He would take my boys with him to play soccer, basketball, and all. His parents were alcoholics and my boys thought he was a godsend. I'm able to repay him for that. He's opening his own firm now.”

CeCe threw her hands in the air, propelled by a sudden burst of anger. “Doris!” CeCe exclaimed. “You can't just—”

“Zip it, honey,” Doris said, turning for the door. “This one is out of my hands. And yours. I've worked hard to be a gift to someone else for a change. And you've worked hard to deserve it. I know it's a lot to take in, but take it in, already.”

She turned to push open the screen door, a smile dancing on her lips. CeCe put her hands on her hips and felt the keys nip at her flesh again. CeCe looked down at the keys. When she looked up, Doris had escaped out into the early summer air.

CeCe stared at the open door, listening to Brian's car reverse out of the driveway. CeCe looked around at the empty walls and hallways.

For the first time since receiving the house news, CeCe thought about her mother and swallowed.

ELEVEN

BLUE

 

 

WHEN CARLA ARRIVED ON MACMURRAY'S campus in 1967, she hardly noticed its manicured greenery, its white-steepled buildings, or the two thousand pairs of feet plodding the walkways all about her. Carla only wanted to climb her feet aboard a Greyhound bus heading back for home every Friday afternoon.

Uncle John protested after the second month, hearing her only speak of lectures, papers, and exams. Carla had nothing to offer when Uncle John asked about campus events, new friends—just her roommate, another Negro girl, from Rockford.

“I think she's planning to be a teacher,” Carla had said, peeling sweet potatoes while Uncle John leaned into their kitchen over the open half of the Dutch door.

“You gals get along?” he asked.

“We get along all right.”

“So how come you don't know 'bout her studies?”

“I don't know a lot of things about Sandra,” Carla said, annoyance fringing the edge of her voice. “She doesn't spend much time in the room—”

“—and you spendin' too much time in it,” Uncle John said.

Carla paused her peeling, but didn't look up. She knew her Uncle John would be cleaning his nails with a pocketknife, his bushy eyebrows raised and expecting a good answer. Carla had been governed by that eyebrow for most of her life. As a young girl, she learned how to respond to his persistent questions by paying attention to the loving way Aunt Margaret had handled him.

Uncle John and Aunt Margaret had taken Carla in as a young child. She came to them as a quiet little girl, with knocked knees, long lashes and a blue ribbon in her hair. She'd belonged to Margaret's twin sister, who gave birth to Carla the same year John and Margaret were married. Unable to conceive, watching Carla grow in those early years of their marriage had been a bittersweet test of John and Margaret's faith. After her sister's suicide, raising Carla proved to be a test of their humility. They welcomed her as a gift directly from God.

When anyone spoke of Margaret's sister, they described her as having “an affliction of the mind.” She had acquired odd and increasingly outlandish behaviors around the time John and Margaret were courting. Neighbors whispered across laundry lines about her sister's bizarre outbursts, public spectacles, and wandering. It had become common for a shopkeeper, deacon, or neighbor to deliver her, disoriented, to their parents' doorstep. By the time Margaret married and moved to the nearby county with John, one of her sister's disappearances had produced a daughter. Shortly after their fifth wedding anniversary, her sister was found hanging from a pecan tree.

Carla grew and settled in her aunt and uncle's quiet routines. She was an obedient child and shy. Carla went to school and came home to study. She rode her bicycle to the library on Saturdays and helped Aunt Margaret with cooking, housekeeping, and doting on their beloved John.

Once Carla developed into a young woman, petite and doll-like, she could have easily had suitors. She had her mother and aunt's petite frame and caramel-colored skin. Her mouth was small but heavy like theirs, too. “Kissable,” little Clarence had written in a note to her once in elementary school, with a backward “s.”

Carla's nose and eyes, however, suggested her mother's mysterious tryst so many years ago might have been an exotic affair. Her nose was arrow straight, with a light spray of freckles, and her large eyes were sleepy and plush, with dark lashes that curled against themselves.

“I think you got an extra helping of eyelashes up there in Heaven,” Aunt Rosie said to Carla one afternoon, her eyes pleading for an extra gingersnap. Aunt Rosie was John's oldest sister, the first of their clan to migrate north from Arkansas. Six of their eleven siblings had settled in Decatur, Illinois, by the time Carla had come around, and Aunt Rosie—also childless—had been a surrogate parent to them all.

Carla had taken her cookies to the porch swing, munching thoughtfully about the Heaven babies who didn't get enough eyelashes because of her.

As a preteen, Carla's “thoughtful munching” advanced to “skillful worrying.” She worried about the supply of firewood during the winter. Laundry being snatched up by a heavy wind in the spring. Baking bread falling in the oven. Soloists forgetting their lyrics in church. The “what ifs,” as Uncle John and Aunt Rosie called them, also kept Carla from straying into friendships with girls her age, or enjoying the
45
rpm records at Miss Sherry's Soda Bop.

The Soda Bop was a converted shed for young people in the area to gather. Miss Sherry had led the charge of keeping her kids from crossing paths with the law or drunken Klansmen on Saturday nights, and most parents in their rural community were glad to help her along by supplying the hangout each week with food, pies, and chaperones.

“A lot of these honkeys is wishin' they lived in Birmingham,” Miss Sherry would say, constantly reminding the youth about the notoriously violent sundown towns surrounding Decatur: Lovington, Monticello, Blue Mound, Mount Zion. “Black folks still gettin' lynched twenty miles in every direction from here. Hate and evil don't know nothin' 'bout North and South.”

“I hear Miss Sherry's got a good thing goin' for you young folks,” Uncle John had prompted one night at dinner. Carla was nearing the end of high school, becoming a woman. Still, she flushed at the blatant discussion of her social life, or lack thereof.

Aunt Margaret smiled and added, “We can take you whenever you'd like.”

Carla had thought about Miss Sherry's, overhearing Monday morning reports at school all these years about the food, the music, the clothes and the slow dancing. Every now and again, her chest had pinched with intrigue. Aunt Margaret urged Carla to go just once, just so she wouldn't have any regrets. Carla had agreed.

Then Aunt Margaret died. Their house, already draped in a lingering weariness, was thick once again with heavy sorrow. Carla was only fifteen and there was so much Aunt Margaret hadn't taught her yet. Like how to whip the meringue. How to backstitch heavy corduroy and keep the seams straight. How to revive the tomatoes. How to turn around a bridge game with a false card or a flannery. How to type. How to pin-curl her hair.

Carla and Uncle John trudged through her final year of high school in dark quiet. While her classmates and cousins headed off to college, factory floors, and wedding chapels, Carla's plans were to live at home, get a job at the library, and take care of her Uncle John. A few months after their extended family had thrown a celebration picnic for her in Aunt Rosie's back yard, Uncle John told Carla about college.

She resisted, but Uncle John explained the arrangements had already been made. Margaret and Marjorie had been raised in a world foreign from John and his siblings. In their world, Margaret's parents had established something called a trust to pass on to their girls the earnings of their hard work and that of the Reconstruction relatives before them. In turn, Margaret, John learned, had continued the tradition, traveling by buggy across the river to consolidate her trust with her twin sister's to make a family trust and college fund for Carla
.

When John drove his dirt-smattered pickup across county lines to meet with the attorney, John asked the polished Negro lawyer if disbursements would last long enough for Carla to finish school. The attorney had chuckled kindly, assuring John that Carla's inheritance would support her well into adulthood.

Carla had steamed for several weeks at the idea of a conspiracy and being shipped away against her will. Uncle John had been patient with her anger, withholding a grin when Carla's excitement betrayed her when her registration materials arrived in the mail.

 

Only halfway through her first semester, Carla turned away from the sweet potatoes and steaming pots to face her uncle.

“I'm there to learn about literature, not about Sandra!” she spat.

John pursed his lips, restricting his words. He didn't want to upset her, but this was not a time for coddling. Margaret had always scolded him behind their bedroom doors that their job was to prepare Carla for the world as much as it was their privilege to shield her from it. He'd hated that truth then and it made his temples pulse now. Still, he knew it was best. He knew this beautiful girl—young woman—was headed for a lonely and gray-sky life if he didn't push her forward now.

Carla turned her back to him, lifting and fidgeting with pot lids, opening and closing the oven door. She was upset, he knew. It often amazed him that although Margaret hadn't birthed Carla, they'd come to be so much alike. John dropped his head to whisper a quick prayer and collect himself.

“Literature. I know, Bluebell,” he said, floating his favorite pet name for her. He'd called her that ever since she arrived on their porch with that blue ribbon in her hair. “But your Aunt Margaret done told me how being a
college
woman means you gets to learn 'bout more than literature and the Greyhound.”

Carla laid down the potato and the paring knife and Uncle John saw her shoulders slack, and then begin with the slightest bounce. He was through the door and next to her in a breath. Carla turned and cried into her uncle's chest. He'd often told her and Aunt Margaret he never knew what to do with a crying woman, except stand still and be quiet. She loved him for that. Loved him for his simplicity. Loved him for being a constant in her life when she'd come to expect chaos around every corner.

“You know better about tracking mud into my kitchen,” she said once the gales had abated. She wiped her face. They both smiled at her small tribute to Aunt Margaret. John, raising his hands in mock surrender, retreated back outside. Once he fastened the bottom half of the Dutch door, he looked at Carla for a long moment.

“Your Aunt Margaret would have some real good words for you now. Make you feel better,” he said. “You know I ain't never been the one good with words. I'm jus gon' tell ya that you gon' be all right. You smart, Bluebell. You gon' be a professor one day, just like you wantin' to, but you gots a lot of days 'tween now and then and you gots to live 'em all.”

Carla's eyes began to brim again. She leaned against the counter with her arms folded across her apron. She let one fat tear fall, and she nodded.

“I promise, Uncle John,” she said, smiling. “I promise.”

 

Carla knew wandering into buildings alone wasn't what Uncle John had in mind when she'd promised to invest more of herself in becoming a
college woman
. MacMurray was a quaint campus settled against a vivid, pastoral landscape. The college had a 120-year history, and Carla had been walking past its noble ghosts in a daze.

Carla's awkward fidgeting was magnified here. In Decatur she tugged at her hands whenever someone turned attention to her in class or at church. Here, with so many girls eager to talk and link elbows, Carla found herself picking at the cuticles of her fingers. She was not ready for socializing, but she intended to keep her word to Uncle John.

Carla read the bulletin boards in front of the library to learn about the events happening on campus. She scribbled dates and notes on an index card and made plans to attend two lectures, one play, and a Christmas chorale concert. Blanketed in the darkness of the music hall, Carla let herself melt away. Tears wet her cheeks as the soaring altos carried Carla back to Decatur, when she and Aunt Margaret would clean house with Marian Anderson playing on the record player.

After her holiday break and another pep talk from Uncle John, Carla returned to campus ready to brave the next phase of her transformation: people. Her MacMurray classmates herded her in the cafeteria, lecture halls, dorm lobby, and on the mall. She didn't know how to insert herself among them. She tasked herself to linger in the dining hall twice a week after dinner, rather than rushing back to the quiet of her room. She relocated herself out of the library corners to tables where passing chatter would force her to look up from her book every now and again. As she made eye contact and received acknowledging nods from familiar faces, Carla felt herself growing stronger and more confident.

The unease she felt here was different from what she felt in high school. Partly because the student body raced ahead with their studies and lives with or without her, unlike the pressure of conformity back home. Partly, Carla hoped, because they were mature young women now, no longer juvenile high school girls.

Largely, Carla knew, her boldness came from being at a women's college. There were no boys distracting her gaze in class, breathing on her bare shoulder in the lunch lines, brushing against her small body in the halls, giving her goose bumps, consuming her with a look from across the courtyard.

Just before spring midterms, Carla stood before the bulletin board and tried to convince herself to add activities with humans to the index cards this time. She swallowed hard at the thought, scanning notices for reading groups, sewing circles, volunteering, and a group wanting to head into town to see a movie. Carla was writing down the phone number for a small group seeking a bridge player when she heard her name.

Carla turned to see her roommate, Sandra, moving through the rotunda with a small group of girls. She said something to the group and they all turned to smile at Carla before walking through the library doors.

“You didn't have to leave your friends,” Carla said.