Silver Sparrow (20 page)

“I don’t know,” my mama said. “I like the last part of what he said, about people not judging each other.”

When she said this, Daddy scooted closer to her on the couch, touching her cheek with his glass of gin-and-tonic. “You got something you don’t want to be judged for, girl?”

Mama laughed and pushed the glass away. “James, you are so crazy.”

“I’m just getting started,” he said.

MAYBE IT WAS because I spent half my life in my mother’s beauty shop, but it seemed that I knew quite a bit about marriage, even when I was just a little girl. It was probably a bad sign when I touched my kindergarten teacher on the knee when she looked unhappy and said, “Marriage is complicated.”

This was my mother’s favorite refrain. She said it at least daily to some woman dripping wet in the shampoo bowl. A shift in pitch flipped the meaning entirely, but the words were always the same. In the car that day on the way to the beautysupply store, talking about George and Gracie, she didn’t say “Marriage is complicated” in a between-the-lines way, like she did when she tried to talk over my head. This time she said it like she needed a word from another language, but she just had to settle for “complicated.”

I nodded, enjoying the sound of her voice. It was like I was her best friend. And maybe I was. For sure, she was mine. Even before puberty changed the stakes, I never had much truck with girls. Spending so much time with grown women had ruined my timing and dated my speech, making me poor company for my peers. As much as I tried, I never could get any traction. Not that I was an outcast. I got invited to slumber parties and I went, as eager as anyone, but I was no one’s best friend, and the best friend is the only friend that matters.

“So where was I?” Mama said.

“You were talking about God.”

“No I wasn’t,” she said. “I was talking about how irritated I am to be spending my Saturday driving way out here to return this dryer. When I bought it, I asked her, ‘Is it quiet?’ She said it was quiet as rain, and then I turn it on and it sounds worse than a lawn mower.” She lowered her voice and winked. “One of the customers said it sounds like a cheap vibrator.”

I nodded, although I didn’t know what she meant.

She adjusted the
I Dream of Jeannie
ponytail clipped so high up on her head that it grazed the roof of the car. My mother col ected hairpieces, wigs, and fal s like other women col ected Lladró, Swarovski, or souvenir thimbles. She displayed the ful wigs on Styrofoam heads jutting from the wal s of her bedroom like the trophy heads of deer. The half caps and smal er pieces lived in her dresser drawer. Because she didn’t approve of girls dressing up like grown women, she never let me wear them, only al owing me to stroke the stiff curls before laying them back down in their nests of scented tissue paper.

From time to time I asked anyway, if I could just try on one of the ponytails — I was most interested in Tempest Tousled, a long spiral curl. Other girls I knew made do with towels around their heads as stand-ins for long flowing hair. A boy I knew from church arranged a sour mop on his head just to see what he would look like if he were a white girl. I didn’t want any of these homemade costumes when I knew my mother had a dresser drawer stocked with the real McCoy, but she refused to let me hold the hair next to my face, even if I promised not to try and actual y attach it. “You need to get a handle of what you real y look like before you start playing pretend.”

If nine years wasn’t long enough for me to figure out what I looked like, I didn’t know how long it was going to take. I had been in kindergarten when I figured out that I wasn’t pretty. That is the worst thing about being a little kid; nobody is shy about letting you know these things. The fireman who teaches you to stop, drop, and rol if you happen to catch on fire — he picks the cutest girl to sit on his knee and wear his cap. At Christmastime, the ten prettiest girls get to be in the angel choir. Plain girls twirl in the candy-cane dance. Ugly girls pass programs. I never handed out playbil s, but I never for a minute thought I would be in the angel choir.

My parents are not good-looking people, either. My dad is medium everything — medium height, medium age for a father, medium brown, medium afro. His glasses are thick as the bul etproof window at the liquor store. Thank God that didn’t get passed down to me. It’s bad enough living with his hair, fine as spun cotton; even a soft natural-bristle brush pul s it right off my head. My mother, when she isn’t wearing her fal s, could be anyone’s mother — as medium as my father, but a bit on the plump side. If you saw them walking down the street, if you noticed them at al , you would think the two of them might produce invisible children.

“SO, LIKE I was saying. George Burns cheated on Gracie.” My mother chuckled and used the hand that wasn’t on the steering wheel to adjust her
I Dream of Jeannie.
“Back before you were born, he had a wife named Gracie and he loved her to pieces. I mean, he was crazy about her. It’s the kind of love that most people never experience. L-o-v-e.”

I nodded. “Love.”

“But he strayed. He cheated on her with some tramp. One time and one time only. I think he had been drinking.”

I nodded.

“So here’s the good part of the story. He had betrayed his One True Love. What if she left him? He
loved
her! So he bought her a tennis bracelet.”

“A tennis bracelet?”

“Diamonds, Chaurisse. Major jewelry. And he never stepped out on her again. Cheating on her made him get his priorities straight. He almost lost her and it tore him up. So every time he saw that bracelet on her wrist, he remembered how much he cherished her. Don’t you love that?”

I said, “I don’t know.”

“And there’s more. This is the important part. Listen to me, Chaurisse. This wil serve you wel the rest of your life.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Years and years later, Gracie was sipping gin martinis with some country club ladies, when George heard Gracie say, ‘I was always hoping that George would have another affair. I want a bracelet for my other arm!” At this, my mother laughed her thick laugh. She knocked her hand against the steering wheel a couple of times. “You get it?”

I shook my head. “Your blinker is on.”

“But do you get it?”

“Sort of,” I said.

“The point is that Gracie knew the whole time. She just didn’t act al ignorant about it. Two things to learn from that story: (a) you know in your gut who loves you.”

“So how come he did it?”

My mother smiled at me. “Sometimes I forget how young you are. I love you so much, do you know that?”

I turned my face toward the car window. I liked it when she turned her light on me like that, but it embarrassed me, too. “Yes’m.”

“But here’s the thing to remember, and then we’l drop it.”

“Okay.”

“Men do things al the time that they don’t mean,” she explained. “The only thing that matters is that he loves you. George loved Gracie. He loved her so much, that when he dies, he is going to make sure that he is buried underneath her, so she wil always have top bil ing.”

“But why did he mess around with some other lady?”

“Chaurisse, you are not getting it. This is the point: If you are a wife, behave like a wife. There is nothing to be gained from acting a fool, cal ing up the other woman at her house, cutting her tires, or whatever. My own mother was like that, always fighting in the streets over some nigger.”

“But how come he did it? Why did that God guy cheat on Gracie?”

My mother switched on the turn signal and sighed. “Al I am saying is that if you are a wife, act like a wife and not a two-dol ar whore.”

THIS, OF COURSE, was before I got a reputation for being a fast-tail girl, without even being one. When I was fourteen, I bruised my reputation and lost my virginity. In that order, mind you. Life is crazy like that. The start of it was basical y a misunderstanding, a misunderstanding that happened at church — and there is no worse place for a misunderstanding that makes you seem like a tramp. I was standing in the choir closet with Jamal Dixon, the preacher’s son. We were talking. He was talking, real y, I was just listening. At that point, I was one hundred percent driven snow. Jamal was sharing some heavy stuff, about his mother. Apparently, she drank al the time. Every day. She hid bottles in the laundry room behind the hot-water heater. She drank out of a wineglass; she drank out of her toothbrush cup. She crashed the reverend’s Coupe de Vil e at three in the afternoon in the parking lot of Kroger. It was getting to be a problem. “Can you tel ?” he asked me.

I shrugged. “I wouldn’t put anything past anybody.”

I didn’t mean it, about putting what past who, but it was something I often heard my mother say. It was the perfect response to a woman getting her hair done complaining about their husband. This way, you could agree without talking bad about him. So when the couple reconciled, the wife would stil be comfortable getting her hair done in your chair. If you want to be a hairdresser, you have to understand the way people are wired.

I felt sorry for Jamal. With his blinking eyes and twitching lips, he looked like he was about to cry right there, and I knew enough of men to know that he didn’t want me to see it happen. I turned my face to the robes, keeping my hands busy making sure al the hangers were turned the right way. Jamal kept on about his mother and how she gets carried away with the peppermint schnapps and how his father won’t do anything about it but pray. The family would be together in the living room on their knees, holding hands and breathing in the boozy-minty smel that beamed out from her lips and even from her skin. He swore that even the butter she scraped on his toast in the mornings tasted of peppermint. I didn’t tel him about my own mother, who could be, on occasion, a little bit boozy-peachy. She never crashed any cars or did anything to hurt anyone, but she swil ed Fuzzy Navels on Monday afternoons, dabbing her eyes at her soap operas.

Jamal told me that he wasn’t sure he believed that God is looking in on each and every one of us. He said he had some questions about the whole dynamic with the sparrow. He agreed that God made the world; the universe had to come from somewhere, but after that, who knows who’s in charge? I was thinking that the human mind and the power of suggestion are real y something, because I could sort of smel something like Doublemint on the rocks. He kept going and I pressed my lips together, imagining what peppermint schnapps must taste like.

The robes parted on the rod, Red Sea—style, and who was there but Mrs. Reverend Schnapps herself, tal and steep as though she had been designed by an architect. I had to hand it to her; Jamal’s mother’s asymmetric junior-miss flip had been cut by someone who real y knew what she was doing.

“Jamal,” she said. “That’s enough, son.”

“We weren’t doing anything,” he said. “Just talking.”

“Is that what you cal it?” said Mrs. Reverend.

As I waited on the curb for my mother to pick me up, Mrs. Reverend told everybody how worried she was about me. The women on the usher board and some of the deaconesses were told to pray for me. Even while Mrs. Reverend’s words were tel ing them to pray, her tone was tel ing them to remember Salome. Even before my mother confirmed this to me in a whispered-but-urgent conversation in her bedroom, under the watchful eyes of the wig-heads, I knew the women at church were aiming their sharpened prayers at me.

I was a quiet girl back then. Not that I was shy, I just didn’t have anything to say.

“I haven’t told your father,” my mother said.

“Told him what?”

“About Jamal Dixon.”

“There’s nothing to tel .”

“I know, baby,” she said.

I was stil defending myself a week later, as we drove to Decatur for my appointment with her ob-gyn. The last time he saw me, I was being born. I told him the same thing: “I’m not doing anything.”

“It’s just to regulate your cycle,” he said.

Heading home on 1-20, we hit a traffic jam, and I tried again. “I’m not doing anything.”

“Do you know how lucky you are that these pil s exist? Do you know how lucky you are that I am taking you to the doctor?”

“But I’m not doing anything,” I said again.

“Take them for me, baby,” Mama said. “Just to be on the safe side.”

JAMAL DIXON WAS the first one. We arranged to meet at Marcus McCready’s house one afternoon after school. While I stared at a Jayne Kennedy swimsuit poster on the ceiling, he apologized for his mother’s behavior. He didn’t mean to get me involved. He knew I was a nice girl and he felt bad that everybody was talking about me like that.

“I don’t care if people talk about me.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “She was never like this before.”

“I understand,” I said.

He looked at me and turned his head. “What grade are you in?”

“Ninth,” I said.

“I’m a junior,” he said.

I didn’t tel him to stop or to come hither. I was curious, real y, to see what would happen. Jamal looked like a younger, thinner version of his father, whom I’d often admired standing in the pulpit with his arms outstretched in his beautiful robes. He preached in a thunder-deep voice, but he sang sometimes in a sweet Al Green tenor.

“You’re a nice girl,” Jamal said in the tone you might use to soothe a dog that may or may not bite.

“Pretty?” I said.

He nodded. “You have nice lips.”

I was a little afraid, but I knew I was now on the safe side.

“Don’t touch my hair,” I said. “Don’t mess it up.”

He said he was sorry. He said it twice.

Then I was different, although I looked exactly the same.

THE PILL WAS A SECRET between my mother and me. My father was not to know about the peach dial pack, the white pil s tasteless but potent and those seven green sugar pil s that al owed the blood to come. This was women’s business. Besides, my father loved me best when I was his baby girl, his Buttercup. Fathers are that way. Al they want is that you be clean, entertaining, and adoring. When he came home from work, I fetched Daddy a gin-and-tonic, kissed the top of his head, and petted his tired shoulders.