Black Silk (15 page)

In the car he sat alone and waited. Seven years would end tonight. In the morning he and Rhonda would go and find her grandmother.
Seven years had gone by without so much as a mention of her full name: Asenath Gertrude Fowler—how ungrateful! To Rhonda he
had only called her the old woman, the bag of bones, the battle-ax. The crazy bitch. Now his heart shattered at its cruelty.

The lights were on everywhere in the house. Slowly, Billy Merry left the car and walked up the path to the front door.

Minutes before that, Rhonda had fallen into the chair in front of the vanity mirror. —Gone, she said to herself, —gone.

There was no answer to her tears, no legend or inscription on the rock-hardness of her memory, no unearthed instruction to
forgive and forget—and the fact of that absence only made her cry harder.

Sitting on the corner of his bed, ready to spring into action, Mr. Blank was overcome by the faintest aromas of memory and
fell backward on the mattress —Lord, give me strength, he mumbled, only the words came out like cattle’s lowing. He put his
head in his hands. —My children! he cried.

Why was he alone? Why couldn’t he remember them? Everything had backfired, all the lessons and whippings and misguided attempts
at feeling; sitting in a corner, in a closet, no light, too much light. Year by year they had all left the house, especially
the girls, telling him he was incapable of love, warning him to stay far away. The boys learned to disavow his existence.

He wept. Rhonda Robinson would understand things differently. She would applaud his intentions—only just then he was not completely
sure Rhonda wasn’t one of his own. Hadn’t he raised a girl like her, with legs shaped like vines? Hadn’t he seen lips like
Rhonda’s in his house for years? Where?

Hadn’t someone screamed at him because he loved too much? Or not enough? Where were they all?

Flat on the bed, he was convinced of the possibilities of life and of death, of sin and forgiveness, the power of lust that
had layered, one night superimposing the next, for years and years and years, world without end. Desire had never abandoned
him, had never left him or his dreams for dead.

And so, later that night, Mr. Blank found himself at Sixty-six North Moss Drive, in front of Rhonda Robinson’s house. At the
far end of the cul-de-sac he saw a car slowly edging its way on the road and knew instinctively that the car was moving toward
the pink house. He stepped into a hedge of holly and waited.

Somewhere an owl whispered in the branches. A tiny voice scolded, making him tear his hand along the edge of a leaf. The car
pulled into the driveway: a man at its helm. The tiny voice scolded again, and he recognized this as the voice of his wife,
long gone. She was advising him to remember himself.

—No one can work miracles, she admonished, then faded into the holly in his hand.

After some time Billy Merry forced open the front door and found Rhonda curled in a ball by the stove. He unpeeled her gently
and placed her in a kitchen chair. He asked her what was wrong.

—My grandma, she murmured.—I just got the call. She died tonight at the Plantation.

He winced, but not too visibly. Gone. He lifted the fainted Rhonda upstairs to the bedroom, passing the familiar slipcovered
couch and splintered stair railing. Only after he lay her on the bed did she awaken and recall what this evening was supposed
to hold.

—I can’t do none of that! she shouted, bolting upright. (She remembered the curl of his hair, the way he resembled a Greek
statue: Homer, Oedipus, Cupid!)—
No! none of that now, please!

Billy gently motioned her to lie down; all that was far from his mind.

After fixing a wet rag on her forehead, he went into the other room and sat at the vanity. Minutes later he got up, fixed
himself a drink, and took off his coat. Seven years had ended sooner than he’d imagined.

In the confines of the holly hedge, warm air lifting the night into Bethlehem, Mr. Blank undid his coat, slipped off the tie
he had sloppily fastened to his neck, unbuttoned his best work shirt, and exposed his nubbed chest to the air.—If she wants
me, she’ll have me, he announced to the owl-less tree.

He looked up at what he thought was her window—beyond it, he envisioned a soft canopied bed and a pair of porcelain ballerina
slippers atop an oak bureau. Time would pass; an apple cobbler would burn in the oven. Time would pass. He saw a woman squatting
over him as if he were a bath of warm mud, moaning in pleasure, rolling her eyes to the back of her head.

He continued undressing, despite the chill and rustle of the hedge. He did not want her to come out and laugh at him. And
yet, he could not help sending her this vision.

—What took you so long? his wife whispered from his hand.—This woman’s been here forever, seems.

He shivered. He was almost naked.

—You don’t need to ask about me, she continued.—Time heals all wounds. Even I forgive you for looking the other way.

—What do that mean? he asked.

—I was your wife, she answered.—I was the chance you had, but you looked the other way, time after time.

—Now is not the place for all that, he snarled.

—It always has a place, she sighed.—I was there forever, too.

So there was no real reason to keep on coming here anymore, now, was there?

Billy looked at Rhonda in the bed and searched her face, her ears, her nape. He did not like the fall of her tears; they sounded
like something he hated to hear in people, in women: loss.

What would loving be like after tonight? Asenath was gone. What was the purpose?

Billy poured himself another tumbler of Bristol Cream and walked back to the bed where Rhonda lay whimpering under a flutter
of vanilla sheets. On her dress, the zipper had split itself from the fabric, exposing thousands of tiny threads that wiggled
in the open like worms, revealing her large smooth back and the soft length of vertebrae; her shoulders.

He pictured the earth of the garden underneath his feet, the pebbles and soil and secret waterways, and, somewhere in the
distance, a pot simmering on the stove. A pitcher of undrunk lemonade. Cloves and onions. His name had never really been Shame-Billy.
It had always been Bill. William. My Lover.

He stretched himself out next to Rhonda. Downstairs the doorbell rang, but neither of them seemed to hear it. He reached over
to her head and began smoothing the undone hair. Then he laid his hand on her neck.—There, there, baby, he said.—I love you.

She turned to face him. Behind her, the night sky full of the perfume of a dying winter.

—Tell me was it enough! she cried, squared to his face, the first time.—Tell me: Will it ever be enough?

The room settled with quiet. He stared back into Rhonda’s eyes, searching for the remainder of the evening, for the remainder
of his life with this woman, the inevitability of box living combined with the inevitability of love, the mud tracks out of
the garden and onto the asphalt, but just then the doorbell rang again and woke him and Rhonda from their dreams.

—
Why am I changing?
Asenath asked herself in bed earlier that evening. The clock had just rung seven.

Christmas Eve—the time of Love and Bounty and Family, only here she was—alone. For days she’d had the taste for garden dirt
and for sun-streaked skin against her mouth, but her mind had abandoned her, making it impossible to properly sort out people
and places. She threw off her blankets; outside there was nothing but an unusually balmy wind. The other women in the Plantation
had stopped in her room to say good night, then turned their faces and wept. Someone gloomily asked if she wanted her Bible.

All her life she had dreamed of coming up north and leaving behind the beautiful and oppressive sunsets of North Carolina.
All her life.

Now, prone in bed, all she could do was yearn for those skies; for heat and large gardens and busy kitchens and rundown houses
and long gospel gowns that swept the floor. Back in Auntsville she had done many things—she had known a boy in the rows of
her vegetables and herbs. Where was he now? Why had she turned him away? He fit neatly into a box of her design, but where?
Here in Long Island her insides had withered to nothing.