Keeping Secrets (8 page)

The next ten, eleven, twelve years ground by. Rosalie clerked in a grocery store six days a week, ten hours a day. She grabbed a bite when she could, often too tired when she got home to her rented room to make herself anything. After all those years over her mother’s stove and in the normal-school kitchen, she’d lost her taste for cooking anyway. Food wasn’t important; she’d rather sleep.

Her pleasures, an occasional movie, a visit to relatives, were measured out as carefully as spoonfuls of expensive store-bought sugar, pinched as tightly as the pennies she stored up, roll after roll. Rosalie was ever watchful for waste and ruin. There was always the danger that even the sugar could be spilled, the pennies slip into a crack or be snatched away.

She loved to count the rolls of pennies, watch them grow. When there were enough, she’d lease and maybe someday buy a little corner grocery store across the Coupitaw River in West Cypress. A wholesaler, Zeb Miller, had told her about it, and when the day came he stocked it for her on extended credit.

“You work too hard, Rosalie, not to have something of your own. My wife said, a woman like you, all alone in the world, we ought to help you all we can.”

What he didn’t say was that before too long he would present the bill—but she should have known.

He came making a sales call far too late one night just as she was closing, pressed himself against her as he pinned her behind the counter.

“Just a little sugar,” he begged. Rosalie could feel the anger that was just on the other side of his plea. He wasn’t going to like it when she said no.

“I did you a favor. Now can’t you do me one?”

She loathed herself even as she gave away what she’d been keeping so long, her chastity now coin in a disgusting business transacted in her bedroom in the tiny four-room apartment behind the Norris Grocery and Dry Goods Store. Of course it didn’t stop there. Zeb came to collect what he thought was his due once a week, just as regularly as if it were on his territory schedule. That’s what she was, she thought, part of Zeb Miller’s territory—until she became pregnant. Then he forfeited his leasehold, sent a junior man to take her orders for canned goods and housewares, orders she wrote in a trembling hand. For she was dizzy and sick to her stomach all the time, as much from shame as from the baby.

Finally she sneaked over to Aunt Georgia’s house in the Quarters one night. The old colored woman was supposed to be able to cure what ailed you, no matter what, they said. Smelling of snuff, the tiny grizzled woman with a rag tied around her head had taken one look in Rosalie’s eyes and muttered, “Unh uh. Cain’t. Too far gone.”

So Rosalie had gritted her teeth and lain through night after night of sweaty waking nightmares. In the midst of one halfway through her fourth month, she began to hemorrhage. At dawn, alone, she delivered herself of a tiny dead thing in her blood-soaked bed. She allowed herself a few tears and then closed her mind to the whole affair. It was over, buried. She couldn’t afford the luxury of thinking about it, not with all the headaches and long hours attendant to running a business by herself, though the nightmares of the baby lingered.

And so it went, work and more work, and a few years later, just after that terrible Sunday and Mr. Roosevelt’s somber words on the radio telling the country about a place called Pearl Harbor, she had stood behind the counter enough hours, weighed enough potatoes, measured enough fabric, pumped enough kerosene, ground enough meat that the deed to the Norris Grocery and Dry Goods was her very own.

It was after that that the night terrors lifted and the dreams began, the dreams of her rolling a baby carriage down the sidewalk, of people stopping her and saying, “How beautiful, what a beautiful child.” There was no man in the dreams, or, if there was, he was a shadowy figure standing on the edges. He never had a face, not once.

But did she deserve a baby? Did she deserve that kind of happiness?

One Sunday she looked up from the sinkful of soapy dinner dishes she was helping Janey wash and asked, “What’s the most important thing in your life?”

Though this was not their usual kind of conversation, Janey didn’t hesitate a lick. “My kids,” she said. “They’re the only thing that makes it all worthwhile.” There was a pause and they listened to Janey’s husband, Cooter, snoring on the living-room sofa like a pig.

“Would you do it again?”

“With Cooter?” Janey laughed. “Next time I think I’d try to do better than that. But I wouldn’t give anything for my kids.”

“I’ve been dreaming about a baby girl.”

Janey gave her a look out of the corner of her eye, for she knew more than Rosalie suspected. Then she put her arm around her sister and gave her a hug. “Dreams can come true, Ro.”

* * *

Rosalie didn’t believe that for a minute. But Janey had put her up to answering that ad in the newspaper, and now a baby was on its way. Any minute now, Emma, with her china-blue eyes and rosebud mouth, would be hers.

Rosalie heard a heavy motor labor and shift gears. The headlights of a bus whipped the platform. She could recite the landmarks of its passage: New York, Washington, Richmond, Atlanta, across the widths of Alabama and Mississippi on Highway 80 and ninety miles into Louisiana, three days and nights of hard traveling, and here it was.

The bus door banged open, and off marched a fat old lady in a straw hat carrying a basket in her arms. Rosalie couldn’t control her twisting hands. Then a tall gray-haired man, stooped, with a cane. Was that him? Was Jake that old? Rosalie lurched forward one step. But he had no baby.

A colored woman was next, trailing three cranky children crying over their interrupted sleep.

That meant he wasn’t on the bus.

Rosalie’s shoulders drooped, her pounding heart slowed almost to a halt. Negroes sat at the back of the bus, always got off last. This nigger woman was the signal. Rosalie shouldn’t have gotten her hopes up. How could she have expected so much, especially from a stranger?

Rosalie turned and began to walk away, back to the turtlelike gray Chevy she’d parked under a streetlight.

“Rosalie…Miss N-N-Norris?”

She stopped and turned back, and there he was. He had to be Jake Fine, this slender big-nosed man in the dark-brown hat and tan suit. He had to be because in his arms, dressed in a long powder-blue coat edged at the neck and wrists with creamy lace, was her baby, her Emma.

4

1949

It was already hot when Emma got up. The heat usually starts in West Cypress by mid-June, already blistering when you open your eyes unless you do it before dawn. Before air-conditioning, ladies rose with the earliest sounds of bluebirds in the hydrangea bushes, to have a first cup of coffee with their maids in the kitchen and then get them started on the serious business of washing, scrubbing, polishing and cooking before the sun rose high in the sky. Then the pace would begin to slow, and, like mechanical toys winding down, maids, mistresses, masters, children, dogs, cats and even the lowliest rattlesnake would creep through the middle part of the day, moving as if underwater, the elongated sounds of their conversation becoming even more monosyllabic and languorous. Naps were a necessity rather than a luxury for children to avoid afternoon fits of frazzle. Long cool baths, morning and evening, followed by blizzards of talcum powder helped stave off heat rash, heat stroke, and malodorous realities that Southern ladies didn’t like to think about.

But the Louisiana summer sun is no respecter of class, burning down through airborne oceans of humidity to steam and stupefy the brain of the cotton chopper in the field and the clerk behind the counter in the airless store, as well as the lady reclining on her chaise behind drawn curtains, sipping iced tea from a sweating glass. The heat is something you simply have to live with, Rosalie would say. There’s no use in trying to fight it, wasting electricity. It happens every year, just like death, disease and taxes. Wait till evening, and it will cool off.

The man on the radio was saying it was going to be near 100 degrees. Rosalie hurried Emma to put on her blue-and-white seersucker sunsuit and sit down to breakfast.

“It’s too hot to stand here in this kitchen. I’ve got to get in the store and help your father. A delivery’s coming this morning.”

Already the backs of Emma’s legs were sweaty, sticking to the green chair. She liked the little flowers’ patterns on the chair’s back and turned to trace them with her finger.

“Here, now, don’t dawdle. Eat your breakfast.”

Her mother plopped her plate in front of her, a fried egg, biscuits, and bacon. Before Emma could stop her, she poured a big puddle of Log Cabin syrup over it all.

“Momma!” Emma shoved her chair back. She
hated
sweet on the same plate, even in the same room, with her egg.

“I swear,” her mother said, wiping her brown hair off her damp face with the back of her hand. “I don’t know why a five-and-a-half-year-old child is so finicky. You should be grateful that you have food.”

“But every morning I say—”

“No sass from you, young lady. Or you won’t go swimming later.”

Emma’s bottom lip was still out, but she was thinking. Mrs. Cloutier next door had offered to drive Emma with her children to the pool across the river in Cypress late that afternoon. There she could play in the water—a welcome respite from lying out in the backyard under the fig tree panting for breath. She didn’t want to miss her chance; Momma hardly ever let her go, because she said that was where kids caught polio.

Emma loved splashing in the baby pool, the one with a statue of a mermaid in the middle. It lay outside the bathhouse that led to the big pool, the one that Anne and Wayne, the older Cloutier kids, had to go through where they washed their feet in chlorine. Emma didn’t know whether the chlorine was supposed to kill the polio or not. But she was glad little kids didn’t have to do it. She and Mike Cloutier just pulled off their shorts and sandals and jumped right in in their underpants. Maybe kids too little to go into the big pool didn’t get polio, so they didn’t need the foot-washing. Just like Baptists in town didn’t wash feet like the foot-washing Baptists out in the country did. That was the kind of church where her Uncle England preached—foot-washing Baptists. In Sunday School at West Cypress Baptist she’d heard something about Jesus washing the feet of the disciples. Probably they lived out in the country like Uncle England. Probably they got their feet dirtier there. Was that what caused polio? She’d have to ask Momma.

They’d been to Uncle England’s church once last year, and she didn’t remember any washing at all. She did remember that Uncle England let her stand up in front of the whole church and sing “Abide with Me” accompanied by Aunt Ida Lou on the piano. Everybody had hugged her neck and told her that she sang so sweet, sweeter than pecan divinity, one lady said. Even her daddy, who she knew really hated going to church, looked like he was crying and gave her a hug. And she remembered they had a big dinner on the grounds afterward, with mountains of the best fried chicken she’d ever tasted, golden brown and crusty, and fluffy biscuits that didn’t come out of a cardboard-and-silver tube and potato salad with both sweet and dill pickles, and chocolate cake and lemon meringue pie. Her momma had fussed at her for making such a pig of herself and asked why she didn’t eat that way at home, and Emma didn’t want to tell her that this was a whole lot better than her cooking because she didn’t want to hurt her feelings. But sometimes, when Momma just seemed to go out of her way to mess up her food, like this syrup on her egg, she thought she just might.

“Well, young lady, are you going to sit there and let it all get cold?”

Momma was in a bad mood again today. She looked tired already and like her stomach hurt. Emma knew better than to say her food couldn’t get cold on a day this hot. She picked up a biscuit and a piece of bacon.

“That egg too. I want to see it down before you go anywhere.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Emma nodded and pushed the egg to the edge of her plate, as far away as she could get it from the puddle of syrup.

Then she heard her daddy calling through the screen door in the little hallway that separated their house from the grocery store.

Rosalie put down the dish she was washing and wiped her hands on her apron. She frowned.

“I’ve got to go see what your daddy wants. That egg had better be gone when I get back. Do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Emma watched her mother’s back and waited until she could hear the slap of the screen door and then her voice asking Daddy what was it now. Quickly she chopped her egg into tiny pieces and scraped it in with the other trash in the garbage can under the sink. Her heart was pounding as she slipped back into her chair and reached for another biscuit. Momma would be really mad if she caught her. Momma never wasted anything, which probably meant that throwing away food was a sin they just hadn’t got around to telling Emma about at the West Cypress Baptist.

She waited a long time, but Momma didn’t come back. So she carefully lifted her plate, knife and fork up to the sink and gently let them go. Then she ran into her room and buckled on her red sandals. It was too hot to go barefooted today. The sidewalk would blister her feet.

In the store her mother’s voice was loud. “I told you to tell the meat man that we didn’t want that many this time.” Emma paused in the doorway.

She loved the store. At night it was scary, but in the daytime it was her own special world.

She adored the neat rows of canned goods. Since Momma had taught her to read last year, she was allowed to stock the lower shelves, but she didn’t really have to read to do that. The yellow label had a picture of spinach. Red was for tomatoes. The baby food was harder because all the jars looked alike. But even before she knew what the words meant, she could put all the same letters together. The Cs for chicken. The
Ps
for prunes. She still loved prune baby food. Her parents laughed about that. She didn’t know why.