Mama (16 page)

"What you want?" she said into the phone. "You better make it quick and it better be important, that's all I gotta say."

"Daddy's dead."

"Don't joke around, Money."

"Prince is dead, too."

"I ain't laughing, Money."

"And I ain't joking, either. Daddy just died in Mercy Hospital and we found Prince across the street in the woods, and..."

Freda hung up the phone and slid off the kitchen stool. Everything got quiet and still. But her heart was pounding so loud she could hear it. Her ears started ringing. Dead? She looked out through the sliding glass doors that led out to a cement patio and past the back yard to an open, empty field. Her elbow accidently pushed a place mat from the counter and it fell to the floor with a loud clap. Freda bent down slowly to pick it up, but she couldn't move her fingers. She walked back downstairs.

Rene looked up, snapped her fingers and popping her gum. "Is something wrong, Freda?"

"My daddy just died," Freda said, hearing it as if for the first time. Rene turned down the TV, but in the background Freda could hear The Temptations singing.

"My daddy just died!" she said, louder. Every muscle in her body seemed to melt. She'd never even thought about what death would feel like. Had never lost anybody before. So what if he hadn't been around all that much. He was still her daddy. And she'd just gotten used to seeing him again. He looked like he was getting better. Why didn't be just do what the doctors told him? All he had to do was quit drinking. Give up sweets. Why'd he have to be so stupid? So stubborn. Dead? This isn't fair, Freda thought. He was only forty years old.

On the drive home, Mrs. Armstrong tried to console her, but Freda was too overwhelmed by this new feeling called grief. She was trying to remember everything she could about her father, but the only thing that came to her mind was the time he was teaching her about the birds and the bees. "Keep your dress down and your legs closed," Crook had said, "and you'll make it through high school."

Mildred was saddened by the news but not surprised. She had known it would happen ever since that storm. A coolness had swept through her mind when she had thought about Crook, and that was why she had made the kids go see him every week. She knew this was going to be his last shot at life, and Mildred's instincts were rarely wrong. It just pissed her off that Crook had turned out to be such a damn fool and had finally lived up to the Peacock legend. If only I could turn the clock back, make this shit right, she thought. But I can't. Can't do nothing but remember the way I loved him. And I loved him. Yes I did.

When she was sixteen, Mildred had gone to the dock to take a boat ride up Black River. Crook had followed her when she got off the bus by herself. He stood on the corner for fifteen minutes, biting his fingernails and watching her say hello to the other kids waiting by the railing, and then he made his move.

"Hi there, gal. Going someplace special, or you waiting here to meet somebody?"

"Nope, I'm just going on the boat ride. Ain't meeting nobody except if one of my cousins shows up. You going?"

"Was thinking about it seriously, but don't exactly have nobody to go with. Could use some company. Be happy to buy your ticket if you don't have one already. You won't have to worry about pop and potato chips. I can get all that for you, plus anything else you want, so long as it don't run over three dollars." Crook winked at Mildred and gave her his best grin, showing as many of his white teeth as possible.

Mildred thought Crook was especially handsome. She'd seen him play baseball and knew he was a Peacock, but he wasn't acting like a heathen. What the heck, she thought, folks was gon' talk anyway, might as well give 'em something to talk about.

Within a few short months, their smiles had grown deeper than what was visible on their faces and they couldn't hide how they felt. Started holding hands like they were glued together, sat on the front steps of deserted schools at night, on rotted tree stumps in back yards of condemned houses, on the bleachers of dark baseball fields, hugging, smooching, feeling each other's texture, body heat, heart beat, and professing their love the only way they knew how. And when Mildred realized she was carrying Crook's baby, there was no question about what to do, and they got married, as they would have anyway.

Now, as Mildred watched a raccoon scurry under the shed in the back yard, she realized that she hadn't stopped caring for Crook just because she'd divorced him. She slid her feet into a pair of furry slippers. "Shit," she said, and flopped back down on the mattress.

On the day of the funeral, Mildred sent Money to the store to get her some stockings, but he brought back a pair that were far too light, so Mildred boiled them in black coffee until they matched the color of her legs. She let them dry and was putting them on in the bathroom when Freda walked past and Mildred noticed that she still hadn't gotten dressed.

"What's taking you so long to get your clothes on?"

"I told you I wasn't going, Mama. Don't you remember?"

"If you ain't dressed in five minutes I'ma slap the taste out of your mouth," she said, and slammed the bathroom door in Freda's face. Mildred stood in front of the mirror, rubbing a sponge powder puff over her wet cheeks. "She ain't going," she grumbled to herself. "Humph." She put some drops in her eyes and blotted her peach lips, then she tucked the bottom one in as far as she could.

Even though it was almost ninety degrees, Freda wore an orange wool dress and matching jacket to the funeral. She wouldn't change into something cooler, even after Mildred had warned her. "Burn up, then. I don't care." Freda walked all the way to the church by herself instead of riding in the black car with everybody else. She did not know which route she had taken, but by the time she got there, she had removed her jacket and sweat was running down her temples. She was so hot she felt faint.

She sat in the second row next to Mildred. Ernestine was sitting near the end of the same row. She looked sober and miserable. Lost. Crook was her everything. And the church was packed. There were people there who didn't even know Crook. Sometimes folks went to funerals because it was an event, an excuse to get out of the house and mourn for somebody else for a change.

Mildred didn't even hear the organ, playing "Nearer My God to Thee," or the eulogy. She was too busy thinking about the knot she'd made on Crook's forehead when she had hit him with that cast-iron skillet almost eight years ago. Should'a kept your hands offa me, she thought, wiping the tears from her face. The choir was humming something. Mildred fanned herself because all those flowers were making her nauseated. Mrs. Buckles sang her solo and then it came time to walk up and view Crook's body. Freda couldn't look at him. Neither could Mildred. They squeezed each other's hands so tight that the blood froze.

Just about everybody in town, including Mildred, got laid off at Ford's. Faye Love and Curly Mae tried to convince Mildred to go ahead and move into the projects. It would mean a brand new kitchen and a free washer and dryer. No more mice and roaches. Free heat and electricity. An upstairs and downstairs, tiled floors, a small front yard, and a playground, which Mildred didn't really need anymore. Besides, she didn't like the idea of living so damn close to folks that they could probably hear her whispering or farting in the middle of the night. "Didn't take 'em but a minute to put one up and if a hard wind blow, you mark my words, see if those makeshift rooms don't collapse. This ain't Arizona, this is Michigan."

So even though half of her friends and relatives had moved into pink, blue, and yellow houses, Mildred stayed in her dingy white house on Thirtieth Street, promising herself that with time and luck and a little money, she could still fix this place up, despite the fact that the two-by-fours on the would-be front porch had started to develop dry rot.

During her senior year, Freda had saved close to three hundred dollars, working part time as a keypunch operator at the phone company. Phyllis had told her she was more than welcome to come stay with her and she had made Los Angeles sound so exciting that Freda couldn't wait to go. She had made her reservations to fly out there on August 14.

Mildred tried to act enthusiastic about it, but she wasn't. She still didn't want to believe that Freda was really serious about leaving. But right before graduation, Freda told Mildred she had turned down the scholarship so someone else could use it. Mildred sat through the entire ceremony fuming. She had already told her friends that her daughter was winning a scholarship. Now she felt like a damn fool. Freda had some nerve, she thought. And for the rest of the summer the other kids became go-betweens. Whenever Mildred had something to say to Freda, she told them first and made them repeat it to her. Freda thought this was childish, but went along with it. Hell, this was her life, and she had a right to turn down a scholarship to a rinky-dink college and go on about her business.

And Mildred still hadn't said a word to her by the time they were walking to the gate at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Naturally, Freda was hurt, but two could play this stupid game, she thought. She handed Mildred a piece of paper with her new address and phone number on it, and bent down to kiss her. But Mildred turned her head so all she got was a stiff peck on the cheek. She said goodbye so low that Freda didn't even hear her. She picked up the pink luggage Mildred had bought her as a graduation present and just looked at her. This felt worse than when her daddy had died.

Buster had been standing there, waiting for Mildred to put her arms around her daughter, but when he saw Mildred step back instead of closer, he went ahead and hugged and kissed Freda himself. "You be careful and don't try to grow up too fast," he said. Freda promised him she would and she wouldn't.

"Bye, Mama," she said, and turned and disappeared down the red-carpeted corridor that led to the plane.

"Come on, let's go, Milly," Buster said. "We parked illegally, you know."

But Mildred couldn't move. Even when he nudged her and pulled her by the arm, she didn't budge. She just stood there, staring at that red carpet for so long that it became a pink blur. And if you had asked Mildred her name, she couldn't have told you. The only thing she did know was that her first baby was gone.

It was hard to get used to Freda not being there, and for the first few weeks, Mildred kept calling the other girls Freda. She had also phoned Freda to apologize.

"I acted worse than y'all kids do," she said, almost biting her tongue. Mildred hated to admit she was wrong, but even harder was being honest about her feelings.

"Mama, I know you were just disappointed, and I'm glad you called. So now can we be friends again?"

"Yeah, we can be friends," she said. Now Mildred was disappointed by the tone of Freda's voice. She didn't hardly sound like she was ready to come home yet. Freda had already found a job, working as some secretary at a big insurance company and making ninety dollars a week!

As a matter of fact, Freda was enjoying herself immensely. She had never had this much fun in her life. She was going to nightclubs, pool parties, and barbecues where the meat was cooked on hibachis instead of oil drums. She went to rock and roll concerts, and for the first time in her life went on real dates. She took herself out to dinner in restaurants where she had to leave tips. And she practically lived at the beach; had four different bathing suits. She took her pick of movies, at least one a week, and saw her first foreign film and was very pleased because she kept up with the subtitles.

In every letter Freda wrote home, she told Mildred about something new she had discovered. "I learned how to pluck my eyebrows and put on makeup. I enrolled in this modeling school because all the girls at work said I look like I could be a model." She'd spent $750 before she realized she was too short to be a high-fashion model and besides that, she wasn't very photogenic and the camera added ten pounds they insisted she shed from her already thin frame. The most important discovery Freda had made was having her first orgasm, which she didn't bother mentioning in her letters.

At first her cousin Phyllis impressed her. She had a wall full of books, mostly about socialism, communism, and black power. She'd been a claims adjuster for seven years at the same insurance company where Freda worked, and was hoping to make supervisor. Phyllis was also ten years older than Freda and wore an Afro that crowned her head like an eight-inch halo. She wore thick glasses and could've been pretty if she had ever smiled. The first thing Phyllis did was make Freda stop using those awful words, "colored" and "nigger," when she referred to black people, which was kind of hard to do since Freda had been saying them all these years. Then she made Freda throw her straightening comb away. "If you want to stay in my house, you ain't gon' be looking like no white woman." Phyllis had thought the whole idea of going to modeling school was ridiculous, not to mention exploitive, and once Freda realized she wasn't going to make any money at it, she quit.

Phyllis also made her feel stupid. "Girl, you can't sit here and tell me you didn't know who Malcolm X was?" she said in amazement one night at dinner. And when Freda said no, Phyllis laughed so hard, she spit out part of her hamburger. It got to the point where Phyllis wouldn't even let Freda watch "Mc-Hale's Navy" or "Outer Limits" or "Bewitched," made her sit through documentaries about wild life and everything about Africa, and Phyllis just
had
to commentate the news, which Freda found boring as hell. She had no idea what was going on in the world, and at that time didn't want to know. After three months of living in that two-room apartment, bumping into Phyllis every time she went to the bathroom, and pretending that she liked her, Freda finally decided she'd had it when Phyllis called her a whore because she was spending so many nights out.

She found a studio apartment right down the street and was proud to write Mildred a letter using her very own return address. The first thing Freda did was buy herself a twelve-inch black and white TV and watch everything she wanted to, when she wanted to. The second thing she bought was a brand new straightening comb.