Silver Sparrow (30 page)

My dad honked the horn, twice.

Raleigh muttered under his breath, “Don’t do her like this, Jim-Bo.” Then he said, “Come on, Dana.”

“I’m Chaurisse,” I said. “Dana is my friend locked up in the bathroom, who you and Daddy are trying to leave out here. Please, Uncle Raleigh.

Just tel me what’s going on.”

Uncle Raleigh stood himself up and pul ed me into a standing position. Raleigh said, “Chaurisse, we have al given up so much for you. I would think you would have a little bit more faith in us. Can’t you just walk out on it a little bit?”

He sounded so patient, Uncle Raleigh did. His voice was calm, as though he were asking me to hand him a flat-head screwdriver, but his face was creased and tight, as though he were negotiating for a hostage. My dad honked the horn again and Raleigh beat on the trunk with his fist. He turned his face to me, offering his hand, and it seemed only fair that I would get in the car. It was true. Uncle Raleigh had never asked me for anything.

I looked up into his gentle, patient face. “Okay.”

Uncle Raleigh said, “We love you, Chaurisse. You are the reason for everything.”

Raleigh smel ed like sweat and something I would later think of as fear. “Please don’t fight your daddy and me, okay?”

Daddy lay on the horn. “Raleigh,” he cal ed, “we got to get going.”

“Take it easy, Jim-Bo,” he said.

Opening the door, he helped me in like he would a high-paying customer. He shut the door, and tested it to make sure.

“Daddy,” I said.

“I don’t want to talk out here,” he said. “I’l talk to you when we get home. Let me concentrate on the road.”

BEFORE HE COULD pul away, a compact car, Ford Escort, manual transmission, made a sharp turn into the parking lot. The driver turned directly into our path. A woman jumped out; she was dark, smooth black like Cicely Tyson with long hair, held back with a rhinestone headband.

“God damn it,” my father said.

“Easy,” Raleigh said.

The woman strode to my father’s window. “Where is she?”

“She’s locked in the bathroom,” said Raleigh.

“What did you do to her?”

“Nothing,” Raleigh said. “She was locked in the bathroom when we got here.”

“I wasn’t talking to you; I was speaking to Mr. Witherspoon. Tel me you were not going to just leave her out here.” The lady bent so she could look into the smal slit where my father had opened the window. “You were! You were going to just leave my child stranded out here in the middle of nowhere.” She moved her hand like she was going to slap my father, but the window wasn’t open far enough.

“Calm down,” my father said. “She told us that she had cal ed her mother, and we assumed you were on the way.”

“Did you even check to make sure she was okay?” She peered in the window. “You in on this, too, Raleigh? I would have figured that you were better than this.”

She looked, final y, into the backseat at me. This was the woman I had seen Raleigh with at the park that time. She looked different now, her face was wild and creased. But she smiled at me, and it was a cold smile, more chain-gang than the man on the chain gang’s. “My name is Gwendolyn,”

she said. “I’m Dana’s mother. Wil you please tel me what the hel happened? Wil you please tel me what you have done to my child?”

“I didn’t do anything,” I said.

“Why are you wearing her top?”

“She gave this to me.”

“Gwen, stop talking to her. Leave my daughter out of this.”

“Oh, that’s funny,” Gwendolyn said. “That’s real y funny.”

My father blew the horn. “Go take care of your child, Gwen. Tel Wil ie Mae to move her car so I can get by.”

She hit the glass beside my father’s face with the heel of her hand, leaving an oily spot. Raleigh opened his car door and my father and Gwen spoke at once: “Sit down, Raleigh.”

When Gwendolyn moved down the length of the Lincoln, my father pressed the lever to make sure the doors and the windows were locked. She tapped on my window with a dainty click of fingernails. In the front seat, my father turned on the stereo, flooding the car with Beethoven, turned up so high that the symphony was like the screech of dying rabbits. Gwendolyn’s lipsticked mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear her over the music. She kicked the door before heading to the bathroom.

MY FATHER BLEW the horn at the Escort, but the lady in the driver’s seat didn’t budge. I couldn’t real y see her face, but she wore a blue bandanna tied around her head. Daddy blew and she blew back. For a little car, it had a lot of horn on it.

At the bathroom door, Gwen spoke, but we were too far away to hear what she said. The door opened a crack, and then wider. Gwen disappeared into the smal room. I could imagine how close they must be, jammed into such a cramped space. What were they saying to each other?

By now, my father was out of the car, arguing with the woman driving the Escort. Raleigh was stiff in his seat. He reached over and turned off the Beethoven.

“Uncle Raleigh,” I said, “that lady is your girlfriend, isn’t she?”

“She is dear to me, Dana. I’l say that much.”

“Stop cal ing me Dana,” I said. “I’m Chaurisse.”

“Sorry, Chaurisse,” he said. “I have a lot to keep an eye on here.”

His voice sounded thick and I wondered if he was going to cry. “This is terrible.”

The bathroom door final y opened. Dana leaned her weight on her mother like she was an earthquake victim being tugged from the wreckage.

She turned and looked at my father and said the strangest thing. She looked at his short pants and said, “I’ve never seen your legs before.”

23

TARA

ONE WEEK AFTER Dana and her mother disappeared into the Forsyth County night, my parents sent out two hundred double-enveloped invitations to the anniversary party. The guest list was essential y their combined client rosters, which had a lot of overlap. My mother gave me three cards to send to whomever I wanted, but I only wanted Dana, and she was gone. I never had her phone number, so I couldn’t cal her. I only knew that she lived somewhere in the vast Continental Colony apartment complex. Once she had mentioned her mother being “upstairs,” so at least I knew that she lived in one of the town houses, but there were so many, and they al looked alike. I knew that my mother liked Dana, cared about her even, so I asked her to drive me to Continental Colony to look for the mailbox labeled Yarboro, but she shut me down. “James and Raleigh told me that Dana was clearly strung out on something, and the mother, too. I knew something was wrong with that girl. I just hate that I didn’t see how bad it al was.”

“But Dana and her mother knew Daddy and Raleigh already. Don’t you think that’s weird?”

She sighed and spoke in the Mother Voice. “Just let it go, baby. I think Raleigh was involved with the mom, a long time ago. Maybe Dana was hoping that she could get him to be her father. So many kids, black kids especial y, are hungry in their hearts for a daddy. You don’t know how blessed you are.”

“But it was weirder than that,” I told her.

“Chaurisse, just try and put it out of your mind. I know you miss your friend, but that girl has serious emotional problems. You don’t want to get mixed up with that.”

“Emotional problems” was my mother’s catch-al term for anybody who wasn’t quite right in the head. The neighbor kid who climbed a hickory nut tree in his birthday suit — emotional problems. When Monroe Bil s shot his ex-wife when she was walking out of Mary Mack’s, my mother said,

“Why couldn’t anyone see that he had serious emotional problems?”

“Why won’t you listen to me? Dana doesn’t have emotional problems. She just has regular problems.”

“I am listening to you,” Mama said. “
You
are the one who is not listening to
me.
”

This was not a day to fight. We were in the Honda on the way to Virginia Highlands, a historic neighborhood in northeast Atlanta. Nowadays, you can take the freeway almost the whole way from southwest, but when we went shopping for my mother’s party dress, we took the surface streets the ful fifteen miles. We drove east on MLK, passed by Alex’s Barbecue, which used to have the best ribs on the planet. A mile or so later, we passed Friendship, where we sometimes went to church. After that, we cut through downtown on a series of one-ways. The gleaming gold roof of the capitol reflected in my mother’s sunglasses. On Ponce de Leon, we traveled east, past Daddy’s IHOP and Fel ini’s, where you could get pizza one slice at a time. Final y we made the left onto North Highlands and the trees seemed to bloom al at once and the streets were clean and bright.

Virginia Highlands is one of Atlanta’s oldest neighborhoods. The homes aren’t columned like over in Druid Hil s, but they’re gorgeous Victorians and the side streets are cobblestoned. We drove al the way out here because my mother had her heart set on buying a dress from Antoinette’s, which apparently is an Atlanta institution, although I had never heard of it.

Strangely enough, it turned out that my mother and father had similar taste in dresses after al . Who knew that my mother, who was extravagant only from her hairline upward, secretly dreamed of Tara? “Your father and I went to see that movie three times. It was beautiful.”

I’d never actual y seen
Gone with the Wind,
because a ninth-grade trip to the Turner Center was canceled because of a complaint from some of the black parents. Stil , I found my mother’s Scarlett-dreams to be plenty weird.

After we paral el-parked on St. Charles, Mama craned to read a street sign and then pointed that we should go right. “Vivien Leigh was so gorgeous. And that accent. It was Southern but not country. Elegant. I’l remember those dresses — even the one she made out of a curtain — I’l remember that for the rest of my life. That little waist!”

I turned my face away, embarrassed, but also not wanting to fal down her rabbit hole. “There’s the shop,” I said, pointing out the painted sign hanging from a purple awning.

It figured that if you wanted a white-girl dress, you had to go to a white-girl store. Antoinette’s, the sign announced, had been doing business with Virginia Highlands’ brides for more than a century. As we walked in the door, we were greeted with the delicate odor of jasmine potpourri and

“Good morning, ladies. May I help you?” spoken like sweet tea. The owner of this accent was a white girl, about my age. She was so thin that the armholes of her sleeveless dress gaped, revealing a turquoise slip. The boy’s class ring around her neck was so huge it could have been a bracelet.

“Yes.” My mother shifted into professional mode, which basical y meant she took special care to pronounce the letter
t.
“I am looking to purchase

— today — a bridal-inspired special-occasion gown. I am hoping to make the purchase today.”

“I see,” the salesgirl said, doing a little double take because my mother’s chestnut pageboy matched her own, in both color and style. “Is this for yourself or for your daughter?”

“For myself,” my mother said.

“Wel ,” the salesgirl said uneasily, and we could feel her sizing us up, “you just look around and let me know if there is something I can help you with.”

The shop was smal , but my mother and I were the only customers on this Sunday afternoon. If this store was such an institution, why wasn’t anyone here? The salesgirl, as if reading my mind, offered, “Most people make an appointment, but you’re in luck.”

We were not in luck. My mother pul ed a couple of dresses from the racks, frowned, and patted her wig. A cream-colored corset dress caught my eye and I turned over the tag. It was a good thing Daddy said the sky was the limit.

“Excuse me,” I said to the salesgirl who was red-faced as she watched me. “What size do you go up to?”

She bit her lip and winced. “Ten?”

My mother returned three dresses to their racks. “Okay, Chaurisse. Let’s go.”

I turned to the salesgirl. Surely, somewhere out there, there were white girls with meat on their bones, and surely these chunky white girls went to prom, were introduced at cotil ions, and got married at Cal anwolde. “Where do they have the kind of dresses we are looking for in our sizes?”

The salesgirl flushed again. “There’s the catalog store cal ed the Forgotten Woman —”

My mother said, “I am not buying my dress at a store cal ed the Forgotten Woman.”

The salesgirl said, “It’s not a good name, but they have real y nice things.”

My mother shook her head.

“Let me cal my mama,” the salesgirl said. We must have looked confused, because she added, “It’s a family business,” before disappearing to the back.

Mama and I sat on an upholstered bench, not sure exactly what we were waiting for. Across from us stood a three-way mirror, and I saw what we must look like to the salesgirl. We didn’t belong here — my mother in her embel ished tracksuit and me in Dana’s rainbow tube top. Mama reached over and plucked a lace garter from a table of fril y underthings. “Do you think I could get this thing to stretch enough to get around my toe?” She laughed, but her face was half anger and half sadness. “Before I got married, I had a teeny waist. I wasn’t a pretty girl, but I was nice-looking.”