Apron Strings (27 page)

Our kitchen was like a funeral parlor that afternoon. Ethel spilled over one of the ladderback kitchen chairs. Its rush seat groaned with every sigh and sob. Bertha tried in vain to comfort her desolate daughter. Even she looked forlorn. Bertha said to Ethel as she rubbed her on her shoulders, “Honey, ain’t nothin’ ya coulda done different. Ya had ta stand by Miz Ginny. ‘Side Mista Joe had dat assault charge ‘ginst’em. No judge gonna be taken’ no child way from they mama, no how. Ya donne did the righ’thing. Ya know as good as me chil’ren belongs with they mamas.”

Ethel rocked her head and sighed. Once we realized that there would be no solace to be had in the kitchen, we retreated to our rooms. Miserable, we put ourselves to bed. I felt like I had driven a spike through my father’s heart. I wondered if I would ever be able to look him in the eye again.

I don’t know if the divorce was finalized, but all the court stuff was over on the sixteenth day of April, 1959 when my baby brother was
born. My mother named him Dennis, after her brother, who I don’t think I had ever seen, though Stuart said I had once, when I was two. My mother always said he had a delicate disposition and didn’t go out much.

Baby Denny wasn’t anything but a pain—too young to play with, asleep all the time, and when he wasn’t sleeping, he cried. Not that his being asleep was an improvement; you had to creep around like you didn’t want to get caught or there was somebody dead in the house. Any time he woke up and cried somebody got blamed for being too loud, usually me. I must not have been the only one who didn’t like having him around: Ethel and my mother were as grumpy as two old dogs with a bad case of fleas. To make matters worse, my mother started crying again almost as much as she did after the puppy died. She and her friend Mrs. Chambers talked about how funny it was that my brother looked just like my father. “That ought to show him,” my mother said, laughing one of those laughs that people laughed about things that weren’t funny. He didn’t look like my father to me, but I thought it would be better to keep that to myself. My mother seemed to hold a lot of stock in their looking alike since she said it every chance she got.

One Saturday afternoon, a week or two after my mother and Denny came home from the hospital, Ethel took a day off. The house was quiet. I had been stewing about a bake sale since my teacher had announced it on Friday—the very last one of the school year. I peered into one cabinet after another, looking for what? I wasn’t sure.

It all started the week before when Rhonda, the fat pig, opened her big dumb mouth. Ethel had packed some of her marmalade tarts in my lunch. As I was munching away at lunch, Rhonda, who sat next to me, said, “Those look good, can I have one? What are they?”

“Marmalade tarts,” I said, showering her with crumbs as I pushed the waxed paper-wrapped confections her way. “You’ve had them before. I bring them to bake sales all the time. They are one of the first things to sell out. Everybody loves them—one of her specialties.”

“Mm they are good. Your mom must be a really good cook,” she said, stuffing the last of the tart in her mouth.

“Oh, no, my mother didn’t make them, Ethel did. She’s our maid.”

“She ain’t a nigger is she?” she sprayed tart all over me.

“She’s colored,” I said.

“You eat food touched by a nigger? Gross,” she gagged as she wiped the remains out of her mouth, clawing at her tongue with her napkin to wipe out every last crumb. “Better not bring any food she makes to a bake sale again or you’ll be taking it home cuz nobody’ll buy it.”

Though I wanted to smash Rhonda in the face, I remembered what happened when Gordy was sent home for fighting. “Just be quiet, you piece of white trash,” I hissed. It was the worst I knew, and I had to be careful using it because I had to stay in from recess once before when I called another girl in my class “white trash” in earshot of my teacher.

So there I was in the kitchen, looking for something to make for the bake sale. No cake mix, no mix of any kind; nothing anyone could just bake.
Why does Ethel have to make everything from scratch?
I grumbled to myself as I looked through yet another cabinet to no avail. Gordy came into the room and flopped into one of the kitchen chairs.

“Whattya doin’?”

“I gotta make something for the bake sale on Monday.”

“Why didn’t you get Ethel to make something?” he asked as he spun a pencil around on the table in front on him. “You sure don’t know how to cook.”

“I forgot.”

“She’s coming tomorrow. She likes baking. She’ll do it.”

“No I have to, teacher says,” I lied.

“Since when? Bake sales are for making money. Who’s going to buy anything you make? On the other hand, my fudge—that would bring in some cash.”

“I don’t know. Go away! Quit bothering me.”

“What are you up to?” He eyed me suspiciously.

“Nothing. How come you know how to make fudge?”

“George and I make it all the time. Want me to make some? Look and see if we have baking chocolate. It’s in a flat box. Up there.” He pointed to the cabinet over my head and added, “The bitter stuff.”

I climbed up on the counter and searched around in the cabinet until I found the chocolate. I knocked the yellow confectioners’ sugar box
over as I pulled out the chocolate from behind it. Sugar spilled on the counter and floor.

“Good, we need some of that stuff too,” he said while searching in a cabinet for a bowl. “Don’t spill any more though. We might need all of it.”

Gordy delivered his orders like a drill sergeant. “Get this…I need one of those…” The chocolate burned until we were down to the last two squares and he remembered that you melted it in a bowl over boiling water. While he stirred, I gathered more supplies and buttered pans. I buttered my way down from a roasting pan, finally settling on a little bitty thing not more than six inches square. The kitchen sink and surrounding counters were littered with numerous buttered pans too large for the job, bowls with chocolate smears on them, several wooden spoons, butter wrappers, and one badly melted plastic spoon. Gordy said he didn’t think the plastic melted enough to affect the fudge. Sugar coated the floor like frost. Vanilla pooled on the counter. The chocolate goop he created had the consistency of wet clay. Scraping it into the pan proved to be more of a challenge than melting the chocolate. In the end, I had to hold the hot pot while he poked, prodded, and coaxed the brown mess into the awaiting buttered pan. The potholders covered in chocolate stuck to my hands.

“That is some fine looking fudge,” Gordy beamed. He licked his fingers while nodding his approval. “Tastes good too,” he added.

We didn’t have more than a half inch of chocolate in the small pan. “Do you think this’ll be enough to bring to the bake sale?” I asked.

“Bake sale? Who said bake sale? This is my fudge.”

“Gordy, you know…Come on, we made this together for the bake sale—you know, come on…”

“I made the fudge. You made the mess.” He looked around the kitchen. “A big one, too.”

“I’ve got to take this fudge to the bake sale or she’ll tell and then…I don’t even know what. Come on Gordy,” I whined.

“What are you talking about? Who’ll tell? What?”

“Rhonda’ll tell. You know the fat one with the stringy black hair? She’ll tell that Ethel made stuff for the bake sale.”

“So?”

“Well, the way she made it out to be, it was against the law or something; maybe like going to school with colored people. I don’t know. I don’t want to get Ethel in trouble.”

“Are you nuts? How is Ethel going to get in trouble for something she makes for a dumb old bake sale? Sometimes you are so stupid. It’s a bake sale! How is that going to get anybody in trouble?”

“But she said nobody would buy them. Nobody would buy them because Ethel—well she didn’t say ‘Ethel.’ She kept saying a nigger made them. ‘Nobody wants to eat food a nigger touched,’ is what she said. She said I’d have to bring them home and then you know Ethel would want to know why, and then she’d get her feelings hurt.”

Gordy spread out his hands and shrugged, “So if nobody buys them, bring them home and we’ll eat them, no problem. Ethel doesn’t need to know anything. Come on, we better get this place cleaned up. You wash and I’ll dry.”

The next morning Ethel was mopping the floor when I came down for breakfast. She looked pretty rough. Though her uniform was clean, her hair was sloppy: her four normally tight buns were big and loose, each held together with a hairpin that looked as if it might fall to the floor at any moment. Her tin cup was sitting by the sink. “Someone musta spilled some sugar las night,” she slurred softly. “Sugar tracked all over the place. You don’ know nothing about that do ya?”

“Uhh, mm uh Gordy…”

“And there was some nasty lookin’ stuff in the icebox; I throwed it out. Almos’ had to throw out the pan; it was stuck in it like concrete. There’s a pound o’ butter missin, too, and they is some bowls put away looked like theys not been touched by a lick of soap or water. You know where that plastic spoon is? The one I use for mixin’?”

“Umm, no.”

“Hum,” she said. “Didn’t think so.”

I gulped down my breakfast. Even without something for the bake sale, I was glad to be off to school.

Chapter 15

I
t hardly ever failed that if Ham Bone came on Friday, Ethel didn’t come to work on Monday. Gordy and I were watching TV Saturday morning after one of Ham Bone’s visits. “I had one of those dreams again,” I said as we laid sprawled on the floor in front of the television. I had been having a recurring dream that Ethel was drunk under my bed. If I tried to get out of bed, she would grab at me from under it. Like in the cartoons where there are always pink elephants around drunks, Ethel would be staggering around in my dream in a haze of pink.”

Gordy didn’t say anything, though he did shutter.

“She smelled. She smelled really bad,” I went on, desperate to tell someone the dream in hopes of making it go away. “I was afraid to move. If I did Ethel I knew Ethel would jump out from under the bed and grab me.”

Gordy laughed. “She’d get stuck,” he said. “Next time you have the dream just think she can’t jump out from under the bed she’d get stuck.”

“It’s a dream, knucklehead. I can’t think when it’s a dream.”

“I don’t know then,” he shrugged as he got up to change the channel.

I heard my mother complaining to a friend on the telephone after one of Mr. Ham Bone’s visits. “Ethel’s been drinking again. I don’t suppose she’ll be here next week. It makes me so mad. I’d get somebody else if I could.” In spite of my nightmares, the idea of losing Ethel made my knees weak. I couldn’t imagine life without her. I ran upstairs, furious and sick, not caring if my mother knew I’d been eavesdropping.

Helen had the bad luck of being in our room where I had gone to cry. She was scribbling over a picture she had drawn. It felt better to be mad than helpless, so without a word, I pushed her off the bed. She screamed, “Mommy, Mommy.”

I grabbed her curls and yanked. “Shut up, you little baby.” The betrayal in her eyes stung as bad as if she had hit me. I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t even know why I was doing what I was doing. I flailed at Helen as if the rage had a mind of its own and the two of us were its helpless victims. Sometimes my hands connected with bone. The sharp shooting pain of contact only fueled my rage. Hot tears burned my cheeks. There was no thought, only an all-consuming urge to give vent to my anger.

“Get off me. Make her stop. Make her stop,” she screamed.

My mother descended on me like a chicken on a tick. She grabbed me by the arm and pulled me away from my little sister, smacking at my backside as she dug her fingers into my armpit. “Stop it right now. What has gotten into you?”

I was crying. Helen was crying. With far less inducement, Helen was capable of a pretty good show of tears. Her indignation took her to new heights.

“What is going on? What happened?” my mother demanded of me.

“She pushed me down and I hit her back.”

“She pushed me, she pushed me. I didn’t do anything!” Helen railed against my duplicity. “I hate you,” she gulped for breath between sobs.

“That is enough. You,” mother pointed at me, “in bed. I don’t want to see you until tomorrow morning, and then only after you apologize to your sister.”

“I didn’t do anything. She did it.” I pointed to Helen, feeling a little guilty, but that was better than what I had been feeling.

“Enough.” She left, carrying Helen with her. I hated Helen. I hated my mother. I hated Ethel.

“I hope you all die,” I said under my breath as I slammed the door. I flung myself onto my bed and wailed into my pillow. The drawing still on her bed was of a stick lady with an apron and bottle.

I didn’t know whether or not my mother thought Ham Bone had anything to do with Ethel’s drinking, but I sure did. I wanted to tell her
what I thought. I wanted her to fix it to make Ethel better. I wanted to tell her that Ham Bone was bringing Ethel liquor and for her to make him stop. But I didn’t want to get Ethel in any more trouble, even though I hated it more than anything when Ethel drank.

Leola and Johnson’s daughter, Mazine, stayed with us while my mother was in the hospital for the two weeks after she had the baby. Then she was my baby brother’s nursemaid for about two months. I think Ethel appreciated Mazine’s help. Ethel couldn’t spend the night and didn’t have the time since she had to help Early with the farm and still had all the other work to do at our house. When Mazine wasn’t seeing to my brother’s needs, she would join in on the chats that were becoming a pretty common occurrence in our kitchen.

Mazine took after her father, Johnson. She was real light-skinned and skinny. Where Mazine was lines and angles, her mother was curves and circles. When Leola sat in one of our ladder back kitchen chairs, that chair looked about full. Mazine, Leola, and Ethel would cackle like a bunch of chickens, laughing and talking if my mother wasn’t around.

Mazine lived on the third floor in the maid’s room. We regularly crept up to Mazine’s room before and even after my mother and the baby came home because she would tell us stories. She told us one night in the middle of a lightning storm, “If’n yo house gits struck by lightn’ you cain’t put it out wit’ nothin’ but cow’s milk.” That kept Helen up half the night. Meanwhile I dreamt of cows being airlifted to house fires as I tried to figure out how you’d milk a cow hanging from a helicopter.