Between Madison and Palmetto (6 page)

Maizon smiled. “Beat her at checkers four times last night. She's waiting for a rematch.” Now, like always, Grandma was being patient, giving Maizon and Cooper space, she had said, to get to know each other. “You have to give him a chance,” Grandma had said to Maizon over checkers. “Everybody deserves a chance.”

Maizon moved closer to Margaret and put her arm around Margaret's shoulders. “What do you think?”

“About what?” Margaret asked.

Maizon shrugged. “You know. About everything?”

A garbage truck barreled noisily past. Li‘l Jay waved and two garbagemen waved back.

“Garbagemen coming three times a week now,” Ms. Dell said thoughtfully.

Margaret eyed the truck as it turned the corner, heading toward Palmetto Street. The landlord had posted a sign saying he would be increasing everyone's rent by twenty dollars a month. Mama had been relieved that that was all it would be increased, but Ms. Dell and Hattie would have to scrape for it, with Hattie in school and Ms. Dell living off Social Security. Margaret wished again she had twenty dollars to give them every month.

“We'll get by,” Ms. Dell said, and Margaret jumped.

Ms. Dell grinned. “Sorry. Your thoughts were coming on pretty strong there for a moment.”

Margaret reached up and grabbed the hand Maizon had draped across her shoulders. “I think you should give Cooper a chance. He seems nice. Did you ask him why he left you?”

Maizon picked up a pebble and pitched it into the street. “He said he had been scared. Said he didn't know the first thing about raising a little girl.”

“Wouldn't you have been scared, Maiz?”

“Yeah. I guess. Babies freak me a little anyway ... all tiny and helpless.”

“Then you should believe him.”

“I'd believe anything that man said to me with his fine self.” Hattie laughed.

Maizon rose. “I just had the most horrid thought. What if Hattie and Cooper got married and Hattie became my mom?”

Margaret and Ms. Dell laughed.

“I'd tear into you like Forty Going North,” Hattie said. “You could use a good spanking.”

Maizon slapped her cheek lightly. “I'd rather eat raw meat than be related to you.”

“I'd rather eat a live cow,” Hattie said.

They went back and forth for a while before Margaret realized something. Over the months, Hattie and Maizon's cold war had dissolved into a friendly dislike of each other. They sat close to each other now and even, on occasion, touched. Margaret shook her head. Ms. Dell had been right. They were a lot alike and would probably be pretty miserable if each didn't have the other in her life.

10

C
ooper?“ Maizon said, sitting across from him at the kitchen table. It had been a week since she had talked to Margaret about her father. She had been thinking. Maybe Margaret was right. Maybe all Cooper deserved, all anybody deserved, was a chance.

Cooper was working a phone jack, his hands busy twisting the colored wires. When Maizon called his name, he stopped and looked up at her, all eyes and ears as though he had been put on this earth to listen to her. Maizon felt her stomach flutter. My father, she thought.
That man's my father.

“Are you going to come to my play?”

Cooper nodded. “If you want me to.” He stared at her so long, Maizon felt uncomfortable. “I just want to look at you sometimes, Maizon. Sometimes, I can't believe you're real, my daughter, my Maizon.”

Maizon swallowed. “I'm nobody‘s,” she said.

“Of course you aren't. Nobody's but your own.” Cooper clasped his hands on the table.

“What have you been doing, Cooper? All those years you were gone away when you didn't even write or call to see if I was still alive?”

Cooper was thoughtful. “I was looking for something. I was walking this world trying to figure out who I was in it. I was trying to forget you existed.”

Maizon felt herself growing angry. She pressed her hands together under the table and looked Cooper in the eye. “How could you want to forget me?”

She saw the muscles jump in Cooper's neck. Ms. Dell had said that's where men show their pain. She had said, never trust a man in a turtleneck. But Cooper was wearing an oxford shirt, open at the neck. A white oxford shirt, khaki pants, and penny loafers with no socks.

“Sometimes,” Cooper said softly, “you have to try to forget people you love just so you can keep living. Some days I would think of you and all of a sudden, the day would stop and I couldn't do anything but sit and remember the baby you were and remember your mama. I'd get all caught up in the sadness.” He shook his head. “I'd just sit there crying for hours and hours and hours.” Cooper swallowed and stared down at the table. “I couldn't hold on to jobs. Would get a teaching job one week and the next I'd have a thought of you and your mama and I wouldn't show up for work for days at a time. Couldn't tell them I was sick. And how do you explain to somebody who you're trying to appear stable in front of that you've been grieving for over twelve years?”

When Cooper looked up, his eyes were wet and dark. Maizon turned away from him, feeling her own eyes fill up.

“Why didn't you come home, then?”

“I wanted to. I just wasn't ready.”

“I don't know if I'm ready for you to come home now, Cooper.”

“I know,” Cooper said, his voice breaking. “I know.”

11

T
he bridge,“ Li‘l Jay said. He had pulled a chair over to the living-room window and now stood on top of it, his face pressed against the pane.

Margaret sat on the window ledge beside him. In the distance the Williamsburg Bridge loomed brightly out of the darkness.

“You think I'm fat, Li‘l Jay?” Margaret asked.

Li‘l Jay smiled at her, his dimples like half moons on either side of his face. “No!”

“Would you lie to me, little brother?” Margaret said, poking him in the ribs.

Li‘l Jay squealed. “No! No! No!”

Margaret sighed. Mama had taken her to Dr. Nieves a week ago. He swore she was the right weight for her age. He had said she was healthy and alert and had better keep eating if she wanted to stay that way. Mama had told him about the grapefruit diet.

“No grapefruits,” Dr. Nieves said, his eyes serious behind the wire-rimmed glasses he wore. He had been her doctor since she was small. “Those fad diets aren't healthy.”

Margaret had nodded, remembering how sick she'd felt after eating only grapefruits for a couple of days.

On the way home they stopped at the sporting goods store. Margaret got a pair of Saucony running shoes and a blue-and-red running suit.

Mama walked with her arm around Margaret's shoulders. “I don't want to lose you, Margaret,” she had said, her voice low and hollow as though she were holding back tears.

“You won't lose me, Mama,” Margaret said.

“I will if you don't eat.”

“I'll eat,” Margaret promised. A picture of Li‘l Jay and her mom alone came into her mind. She swallowed. “I'll eat,” she said again, this time really meaning it.

“Here comes a train,” Li‘l Jay said now. Margaret peered at the bridge.

“I don't see anything,” she said, but just as she finished speaking, she heard the train's low whistle. A moment later the train, a dark shadow against the bridge's lights, made its way slowly across. Margaret smiled.

“What do you know, Li‘l Jay?” she asked.

Li‘l Jay looked at her, his dark eyes bright. “Nothing!”

“Yes, you do. You know what's going to happen, don't you?” Margaret teased. “You probably know what the next million years are going to be like.”

Li‘l Jay pressed a finger to the window. Margaret stared at it. She remembered the first day Mama and Dad had come home from the hospital with him, a tiny bundle of brown swaddled in white blankets. Jason Tory, Jr. Named for her father. Li'l Jay. She wondered if he'd ever stop being Li‘l Jay.

“Maizon has a daddy,” Li‘l Jay said.

Margaret was silent for a moment. Li‘l Jay had said this as though he were asking how come they didn't. “We have a daddy, too, Li'l Jay,” she said softly.

Li‘l Jay looked up at her. “Where?”

“Up there,” Margaret said, pointing past the window at the dark sky. “Heaven.”

“Him not coming home?”

Margaret shook her head. “No,” she said. “He has a new home. But he watches us.”

Li‘l Jay stared at her, wide eyed. “Every day?”

“Every day,” Margaret said.

Li‘l Jay touched her nose with his finger. “You better be good!”

Margaret laughed. “You better be good.”

12

Y
ou have to have a little more feeling when you're walking and talking, Caroline,“ Margaret said, sitting across from her. This was the last rehearsal before the play, and Maizon had skipped out early to go see a movie with Cooper. ”I mean, think about it. Here you are, walking home from somewhere the same way you always have, and all of a sudden your route isn't familiar.“

“I get it,” Caroline said, tossing her hair out of her eyes and beginning again. “The Macons live there,” she said, and pointed over her left shoulder. “So I must live here.” Caroline took two more steps and looked up. “But I don't.” She looked over at Margaret.

Margaret was holding the script and nodding. “That's a lot better. Now the line.”

Caroline's voice dropped to a whisper. “Where there once was, there isn't now.”

“What there once was, there isn't now,” she said again.

Margaret smiled. “That was cool. The best I've seen it.”

Caroline blushed. “Something happened. I remembered myself in this neighborhood when I first moved here. And it—it took over, how alone I felt.”

“Did you have a lot of friends where you were before?” Margaret asked.

“Yeah. I guess. I had my best friend. We were like you and Maizon. Then I had other friends. I was so scared to move here. Especially when we looked at this apartment and then I checked out the neighborhood—”

“—and saw there weren't any other white girls,” Margaret finished.

Caroline nodded. “That was pretty scary.”

“Why'd your family move here?”

“It was cheap and my parents want me to grow up around all different kinds of people. Stuff like that. I was thinking about that when I said that line. And that's why it came out sounding different. And you're a good director.”

Margaret leaned back on Caroline's couch, her back against the mirror covering the wall behind her. Caroline sat down beside her with a bowl of grapes. “Want some?”

Margaret shook her head. “I had a big dinner before I came over.”

Caroline smiled and tilted her head. Over the past months Margaret had begun to like her more and more. She had an easy spirit that seemed to allow her to roll with things. That spirit, Margaret figured, must have been what had gotten her through the first year in the neighborhood.

“I'm glad of two things,” Caroline said. “I'm glad you said hello to me on the school bus that first day. I thought I'd be alone for the rest of my life. And I'm glad Maizon asked me to do the monologue.” She shoved a handful of grapes into her mouth and chewed for a moment. “It sort of makes sense to me. I mean, she's talking about more than just getting lost. Here is this girl who walks home the same way, day after day after day.”

Margaret nodded.

“Then one day, there is not that way to walk home. It reminds me of moving here. All the things that were familiar in my old neighborhood, that I took for granted, just stopped ... being.”

Margaret smiled. Caroline had gotten it. Her interpretation of the monologue was probably different from Maizon‘s, even from her own, but it sort of got to the same point somehow. The monologue was about “change” and how it affects this one girl. But Margaret realized change affected everybody.

“I like it here now,” Caroline said. “I like you and Maizon and Pace.”

Margaret was thoughtful. “Sometimes it's hard. There's all this stuff. Maizon doesn't trust white people so much. I think she really likes you sometimes....”

Caroline nodded. “I know not all the time. She's a little moody.”

“Yeah. But that's not about you. At that boarding school she kind of had a hard time. And you know Bo?”

“I've heard of him. I think I've seen him.”

“You'll meet him at the play. He goes to Baldwin Prep and he's real unkeen about white people. Sometimes I feel all divided.”

“People should just like you for who you are,” Caroline said. “They shouldn't judge you by the other people they met who don't even have anything to do with you.”

“But sometimes they judge you anyway. It sucks.”

“Yeah,” Caroline said. “It really does.” She crossed her legs in front of her and looked around the living room. “People don't trust each other immediately. My mom says it takes time. Guess I'll have to stick around a bit. Wait it out.”

“At least stick around until tomorrow night ... when you debut.”

Caroline giggled. “Who‘d've thought it? Me, Caroline Berg. A star.”

13

A
light rain had begun falling by the time Cooper and Maizon emerged from the movie theater. Maizon pulled the hood of her raincoat over head.

“What'd you think?” Cooper asked, putting his arm around Maizon's shoulders. His arm felt warm but unfamiliar. She wasn't sure if she liked it there.