Silver Sparrow (19 page)

As he refil ed her cup, she decided that she would have liked Raleigh, had her cousin not already claimed him for herself. She liked the way he always asked everybody how they were doing.

“How are you feeling?” he said to Laverne for no reason at al .

By this time, Daddy was sitting close to her and fondling her hair. She enjoyed the feel of his breath on her neck and even the sweet liquory smel .

He placed a tingly kiss on the very spot under her hair that he’d been warming with his breath. “Is that fine?” he asked her.

She nodded, feeling wonderful and wanting more punch. She held out her cup, but Daddy took it away from her and put it on a cherry wood end table. “Don’t drink too much,” he said.

“You don’t want to get sick.”

“Okay,” she said, obedient as a child.

“Do you want to see my room?” Daddy asked her.

“Okay,” she said again as he took her hand and pul ed her to her feet.

Her cousin Diane, leaning against Uncle Raleigh’s shoulder, said, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

The idea of this made Mama’s head whirl. Diane was three years older and the possibilities seemed endless. She laughed again.

“James,” Diane said, “take it easy with her. She’s just fourteen and she’s not used to drinking.”

“Fifteen,” Mama said, remembering the lie she’d told earlier in the afternoon. “Fifteen, remember?”

Uncle Raleigh said, “James knows how to act. Don’t worry.”

Diane put her hands on Uncle Raleigh’s head. “You know you got some good hair,” she said.

Mama pul ed on Daddy’s arm and he led her to the bedroom. “Let’s give the lovebirds some privacy.”

It was a setup, a plan between the boys. They hadn’t meant to change her life forever, to make a baby and provoke a premature marriage. It was just about the boys hoping to “get a little trim.” These were Daddy’s words to her, later that night after they’d eaten the dinner she’d ruined, chicken burnt at the skin, bloody at the bone. Daddy told her this that night, as they lay in the single beds, each on the other side of the gap. Mama slept in the clothes she’d gotten married in, her school blouse and skirt. She removed her shoes, but not her socks, and climbed into the bed. Daddy, she assumed was in his shorts and shirtless, but she didn’t know for sure because she had turned her face away when he emerged from the bathroom.

She didn’t face him until he was under the covers, less than a foot away from her. His body smel ed of strong soap and his breath carried the odor of baking soda.

“When is Miss Bunny coming back home?” Mama wanted to know. She was unsure what to think about this woman, Miss Bunny, whose instructions had led to the fiasco that was dinner and had caused her to spend what was left of the evening washing James’s school shirts with lye soap and cranking the water out before hanging them on the line in her backyard while stray cats brushed against her legs. Her hands were stil tender and she rubbed them together, concentrating on the throbbing.

“It’s natural if you don’t want to sleep in the bed with me right away,” Daddy said. God bless Miss Bunny for words to her son, letting him know not to expect too much from his young wife. Her own mother had urged her not to be shy. “You don’t want him to change his mind. Then where wil you be?” Mattie Lee had said. “I’m not raising a baby for you, Laverne. I’m too old to start over.”

“James,” Mama said, “did you know that this is what was going to happen?”

He didn’t say anything. He only breathed deeply with his eyes closed. Mama studied his face, which was softer-looking without his glasses. She observed the dip in his upper lip and the heat rash that stretched across his forehead. “Did you know?”

“Let me cut off the light,” he said.

Daddy threw the covers off himself and knelt in the center of his bed, reaching upward for the frayed string connected to the yolk of light suspended from the ceiling. He was shirtless and under his arms grew patches of nappy hair; his chest was smooth as a crystal bal . He jerked the cord, kil ed the light. She could make out the shape of him as he settled himself back into bed.

“It wasn’t supposed to be you. Your cousin Diane, she met R-r-raleigh at the picture show a day, maybe two days, before . . . you know, what al happened. She said she liked him and he asked her to come over to the house. She said that she didn’t want to come by herself and Uncle Raleigh said that was just fine because he wanted her to bring a friend for me to meet. And Diane said she had a cousin here who was sixteen, same age as her. She didn’t say your name. If she had said your name I w-would have said no way because you were too young to be sp-sp-spending time with us in that way.”

Mama said, “But when I showed up, you knew it was me.”

Daddy said, “I didn’t mean for nothing to happen. We were al having a good time and you didn’t seem scared or anything and everybody was just having a good time. You re-m-m-member, you were having a good time, weren’t you?”

Mama remembered that day and she did have a good time. She couldn’t forget the tinkle of the crystal cups against the crystal punch bowl and the sweet hot taste of the liquor. It had been fun. She could admit that much to herself, but not to Daddy. She knew that something wrong had been done unto her, that she was more sinned against than sinning and she wouldn’t say that she had enjoyed herself, because that was al part of the trick, wasn’t it? “I was too scared,” she said.

“You didn’t seem scared. You were asking me for more punch, remember? And I didn’t let you have it because I didn’t want you to get sick. I was trying to look out for you.”

Mama whispered her next statement. She said it quietly, as it was a word more shameful than the one everyone kept saying,
pregnant.
This was a worse word than that, but she had to say it because it was a word that had been squirming in her throat since she found out that she couldn’t go back to school. “James, was I raped?”

It took him some time to find the words. She could hear him making the tortured noises, not exactly grunts, as he tried to make his mouth, lungs, and voice box coordinate so he could speak. Mama who had been struck dumb herself several times in the past few days, pitied Daddy at that moment.

She asked him the question again, grateful in a strange way to be able to speak any words at al . “James, did you rape me?”

From his bed, there was a spasm of movement.

“No, m-ma’am,” he said. “That is something I did not do. My mama asked me the same thing, she made me put my hand on top of her good Bible and tel her the truth. No. I have never forced myself on any girl. Can’t nobody say that about me. And why you asking? You was there. You know that you laid yourself down on this very bed. Nobody pushed you.”

And Mama did recal herself reclining, and no one had pushed her.

Daddy spoke slowly, letting each word out one at a time. “And I kept asking you if I was hurting you. I said, ‘You okay?’ and you didn’t say nothing different. And you didn’t cry. When it was al over you just put al your things back on and said good-bye to me. You said it real polite. You said,

‘Good-bye, James.’ And then you and your cousin left. I was on the front porch waving and you didn’t even look back.”

“But I didn’t know,” Mama said.

“You didn’t know what? You didn’t know you could get pregnant?”

In the dark of the bedroom in her pul ed-apart marriage bed, Mama turned her face into the pil ow. She had known she could get pregnant. Her mother had told her that when she first got her cycle, but she hadn’t known exactly how it happened and that it could involve something as lovely as a cut-crystal punch set. She hadn’t known it could happen so quickly, with so little pain and no blood at al . She hadn’t known that there would be no proof for nearly two months, no sign whatsoever that anything was amiss. She hadn’t known that the events of an afternoon could get her kicked out of school and thrown out of her mother’s house. She missed her Murphy bed in the living room and the boiled bathwater. When she had withdrawn from school, they had taken her school books away from her. They were raggedy volumes, castoffs from the white-children’s school, with their handwriting on the pages, giving away the answers before a person could figure them out for herself. Mama had gone through al her books with a rubber eraser, rubbing out al the marks that she could, and she covered each of them with book covers she fashioned herself from butcher paper and tape. If she couldn’t have her books back, she wished now that she had been al owed to take those covers off. They were hers. She had made them herself.

After a while, Daddy said, “My mama also says that a lot of good marriages get off to peculiar starts. People get together just like us, because of circumstances, and they are stil together, so this doesn’t mean nothing bad. And the only thing that matters, real y, isn’t how come two people happen to get married, but that the folks are married before the baby gets here. Nobody wants to say that their child is a bastard. That’s the thing that’s important.” Then he lowered his voice. “Look at Raleigh. He’s a bastard.”

“My daddy never married my mama,” Mama said. “I never seen the man.”

“But that’s okay. Al you can think about is the future. That’s what my mama says.”

Mama lay in the dark. She had been wearing her girdle too long and her feet were starting to tingle. She longed for her mother. She had never slept anywhere but her own home. She pressed her hands to her abdomen. She knew that sometimes women died while having babies, and she thought that if she were lucky, this is what would happen to her.

After several minutes had passed, Daddy spoke again. “My mama also says that I shouldn’t worry too much about you crying yourself to sleep.

She says it is only natural, but that nobody should worry too much, because you’l cry yourself out in a couple days.”

Mama was getting sleepy, but she had another question. “How’s the baby going to get out of me?”

Daddy was stammering so hard, she thought that he was going to strangle. “T-t-talk to my mama. She’l explain everything to you.”

“And she did,” my mother told me, that day in the funeral home as we prepared Miss Bunny for her grave.

Mama kept saying, “Miss Bunny was good to me al my life, and we are going to do right by her. We are going to fix her up perfect.” There wasn’t much for me to do. I handed Mama what she needed and tried not to look at Grandma Bunny’s frozen face. When I did peek, I had to admit that Mama did a fine job. Once Grandma Bunny was dressed, rouged, and finger-waved, there was no trace of the great sadness that weighed her down at the end. Mama held on strong until it was time to pin on the aquamarine brooch that Grandma Bunny had loved so much she wanted to be buried in it.

My father entered the room while Mama was fumbling with the brooch. She stuck herself with the pin and left a faint streak of red on Miss Bunny’s col ar. “D-d-don’t worry about it,” he said, slipping the brooch into his pocket. I turned away, staring into the hot plate, where the straightening comb steamed. Behind me, I heard the hiss of film advancing as Uncle Raleigh snapped our picture. As I was blinking from the flash he took three or four more.

“Don’t worry, Raleigh,” Mama told him. “We got Miss Bunny looking real nice. It was the least I could do.”

Uncle Raleigh said, “I miss her already.”

“Me, too,” Mama said. “When my son was born, with the cord around his neck, just as dead as anybody, as stil as Miss Bunny here on this table, she took care of me. She washed me, put me in bed, changed my linens.”

By the time she delivered, Mama had gotten used to being married, used to living with Daddy and Raleigh. It was too late to go back to school; she wouldn’t be al owed. After they buried that baby boy in the churchyard, she had said to Grandma Bunny, “You going to send me back?”

“Not unless you want to go,” said Grandma Bunny.

“SHE DID RIGHT by me, righter than rain, and righter than my own mama,” my mother said.

“I miss her,” Uncle Raleigh said again. He turned away from where she lay on that metal table. My mama took the straightening comb from the hot plate and set it on a wet towel. While it sizzled, she turned toward Uncle Raleigh and laid her hands on his back and pressed her wet face to his clean shirt.

My father and I stood there, left out of their embrace. Miss Bunny was our blood relative; we weren’t her took-ins, but we loved her, too. “C-c-come here,” he said to me, spreading his arms. I sank into his hug, which smel ed strong with tobacco, and maybe a trace of gin. He clapped me on the back like I was a baby with colic. I believe he kissed my hair. Against my cheek, I felt Grandma Bunny’s brooch stashed in his lapel pocket. I pushed against it harder, hoping to emboss my face with the jeweled star pattern.

13

ONE HUNDRED PERCENT DRIVEN SNOW

“YOU NEVER KNOW,” my mother said to me. “You never know what means what.”

“True,” I said. I was just nine years old, give or take, but I had learned not to interrupt my mother when she was on a rol , especial y not when she was talking to me in the deep voice she used with the women in the beauty shop. She didn’t talk this way to al of them, of course; different people got different treatment, just as some people had to pay for every clip of the shears and other people got their bangs straightened for free. On that day, in the car, she talked the way she did with the longtime customers, the ones who got their lips waxed on the house, the ones who cal ed me

“Miss Lady” and cal ed my mother “Girl.”

“George Burns cheated on Gracie,” Mama said. “Can you believe that?”

I didn’t believe or not believe it, as I wasn’t absolutely sure who George Burns was. “The man who plays God in that movie?”

“Yes,” she said. “Him. He hasn’t always been old, you know. He was young and handsome and he was married to Gracie.”

“Oh,” I said. “I remember.” This was the key. If I talked too much, asking her to clarify, she would remember I was a kid and then she wouldn’t talk to me like this.

This was a long time ago, way back when Jimmy Carter made a fool of himself by tel ing
Playboy
magazine that he had committed adultery in his heart just by looking at pretty women and thinking the wrong kind of thoughts. My mama thought it was touching how devoted the president was to his wife, but my father got al discombobulated watching Johnny Carson crack jokes about it on TV. Daddy said, “He came home every night to Rosalynn, right? I tel you me, white folks look for things to worry about.”