Silver Sparrow (31 page)

I wanted to say “You are nice-looking now,” but looking in the three-way mirror it was clear that neither of us was much to look at. We were both too fat, our faces round. Mine was threatened by a double chin and my mother’s had already reached that point. She didn’t have to worry about acne scars like I did, but unlike me, she hadn’t had the benefits of orthodontia. As I leaned my head on her soft shoulder, the dol -baby fibers of her wig tickled my nose.

The salesgirl popped from the mysterious back room, fresh and bright. “It is your lucky day, after al . We had a special order that was returned.

There’s nothing sadder than ringing up a return on a bridal. But this is a happy ending. Do you want to see it? It’s up-sized.”

We agreed but without much enthusiasm. My mother and I were not lucky people.

“I think you’l like it,” she said, unzipping the vinyl garment carrier.

It was perfect enough to make you believe that God real y keeps his eyes on sparrows and overweight colored women alike. The dress wasn’t pure white, but it wasn’t that self-conscious beige that brides wear when they want to make it clear that they are not passing themselves off as virgins. This dress, more
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
than
Gone with the Wind,
was a lush cream color, the same shade as the pale flesh of almonds.

“Try it on?”

The pale almond gown may have been up-sized, but it was stil a bit snug for Mama. Later, back at the Pink Fox, she made the episode into a funny story, joking, “It took Chaurisse, a ninety-pound white girl, and a crowbar, but they got me into it.” Mama had been up against the dressing room wal , hands splayed against the wal like she was getting patted down by the cops. I pushed the sides of the dress together, using my index fingers to poke down the rebel ious flesh, while the salesgirl coached, “Empty out your lungs. Shal ow breaths! Shal ow breaths!”

The plan was that Mama would lose a pound and a half each week until the soiree. In addition, she would wear a serious long-line girdle and a pair of control-top Hanes. And last but not least, neither Daddy nor Uncle Raleigh could see the dress until the special day.

“Mama,” I said, “it’s not a wedding dress.”

“Stop being so negative,” she said.

WHEN TEENAGERS THROW parties, much of the thril comes from deciding who to invite and who to ignore, but for my mother the delight was in including everyone she knew. The party was the only conversation in the Pink Fox ever since the double-enveloped eagles had landed. At dinner, my father patted himself on the back. “Looka there, Buttercup. I forgot that the ladies going to the party were going to have to pay your mama to get them ready to go! This thing is going to pay for itself!” It was a happy time in our household, even though Raleigh was a little down in the mouth when he thought nobody was watching him. He and Daddy had recently stopped working Wednesday nights, so we gathered together and watched
Hill Street Blues.
We passed the bowl of popcorn, popped without butter to respect Mama’s diet, but Raleigh never ate any of it.

Mama said she thought his mopiness was because al the party talk reminded him that he didn’t have a wife or kids of his own. He didn’t even have a date to bring, saying he would just escort me. I told her that I thought that he was stil shook up about the scene at the gas station. Dana’s mama had cursed him to his face. Mama said, “Missing Dana is what’s got
you
turned around. Raleigh’s got problems of his own.”

Three weeks in, my mama had dropped five and a quarter pounds. To celebrate, she had me heft a sack of onions. “Imagine this much lard, removed from my behind.” It had been tough going. For two days, she consumed nothing but lemonade sweetened with maple syrup, made even more disgusting by a dose of cayenne pepper. One week, she ate turkey slices rol ed in lettuce as lunch, but by bedtime she’d convinced herself that a little frozen pizza wouldn’t hurt anything. She didn’t ask the ladies at the Pink Fox to tote around a bag of onions, but she worked one finger, then two, into her waistband to show her progress.

“Show us the dress,” said Mrs. Grant, mother of Ruth Nicole Elizabeth. She was getting her roots done.

“I’m not even halfway to my goal,” Mama said.

“Just try it on,” said Mrs. Grant. “We know you are a work in progress. We can use our imagination. Am I right, ladies?” She clapped her hands, nodding at the women sitting in chair no. 1 and chair no. 2, asking for their support. They waited a moment and then started clapping, too. Mama looked at me. “What do you think, Chaurisse?”

“Go for it,” I said.

While Mama was gone, the Pink Fox was quiet. The TV, mounted on the wal like in a hospital, was broken, so there was nothing to distract us from each other. In chair no. 1, one person was ready for a relaxer. The lady in chair no. 2 waited for her curls to be combed out. Mrs. Grant, under the dryer, cal ed out to me. “Are you looking forward to graduation?” Ruth Nicole Elizabeth had been given an honors scholarship to Emory University.

“I guess so,” I said, busying myself organizing the hard-sided rol ers.

“Plans?”

“Probably Georgia State.”

Mrs. Grant’s voice was loud because she was under the hair dryer. “I know Laverne is real y proud of you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I probably need to go help her.”

I opened the back door and started up the concrete steps. No doubt my mother was upstairs. It seemed that $750 was a lot to pay for a dress that was stil so much trouble. Like Grandma Bunny used to say, “Pretty ain’t easy.” Wel , unattractive and unmotivated wasn’t easy, either. I knew Mrs. Grant had asked about my plans to be kind. Going to Georgia State was what I would probably end up doing, but it wasn’t a
plan.
I hadn’t been accepted to any of the Sisters. Even the stepsister turned me down.

I thought about my flute and picolo, snug in their velvet-lined case. I’d lost interest even before I discovered that I wasn’t any good at it. Blowing a flute could never get you anywhere. There is not one flautist in the whole world that anyone has ever heard of. Every boy that plays the trumpet dreams of being Miles Davis, but the flute is something you take up because you couldn’t think of anything better to do.

I crossed through the den, passed the kitchen, and entered my parents’ bedroom, fol owing the crisp swish of crinoline. I found my mother, struggling beneath her wig-heads, contorting herself to reach the zipper in the middle of her back. “Help me,” she said. Her face had grown damp with the strain of it. I tugged the tiny zipper up its track, sealing her soft brown body into a casing of silk and whalebone. A flush of tenderness overcame me and I pressed my lips to the spot just above the hook and eye. “I love you, Mama,” I said as she stepped toward the mirror and reached down her front and lifted each of her breasts and settled them into the sweetheart neckline.

The women in the shop were a wel -behaved audience. Mrs. Grant, who seemed to enjoy clapping her hands, led them in applause as my mother entered through the back door. They marveled over the detailing at the sleeves, the embroidered bodice, the tiny seed pearls, obviously attached by hand. My mother waved off the praise, apologizing for her bulging waist. She explained that she was going to wear Grandma Bunny’s 1950s girdle. “That wil be my something old,” she said. Catching her own eye in the mirror, she added, “I guess my own self is my something old. I’m forty-three this year.” Everyone protested that she was not old at al , and no one pointed out to her that this was just a party, not a wedding.

I’d been carrying her train like a lady-in-waiting, but I dropped to my knees to demonstrate how it could be gathered into a bustle, earning me one of Mrs. Grant’s rounds of applause. While I was on the floor, matching satin loops to tiny pearl buttons, there was a jangle of bass bel s as someone entered the Pink Fox. My mother’s voice was thin as plastic wrap. “Hel o there, Dana.”

I pushed the dress aside like a heavy curtain to see my lost friend standing beside her mother. They were both dressed like schoolteachers —

pencil skirts, button-down tops. If I didn’t know them, I would think they were missionaries for some sort of strict religion. “Dana!”

“Dana!” her mother mocked.

“Finish what you’re doing,” my mother said when I started to rise from my crouched position at her feet. Although my mother was wrapped in layers of expensive cloth, I could feel her body tense, sheltering me. My hands were unsteady, but I stayed on my knees and matched each button with its loop until the bustle was tucked below her waist. Mama stood stil until I finished and Dana and her mother waited, too. Looking back, I can see this little pause as a courtesy.

Mama took two steps in the direction of Dana and her mother, extending her hand. “I am Mrs. Witherspoon. You must be Dana’s mother.”

“I am,” Dana’s mother said. “I am Mrs. Gwendolyn Yarboro.”

I could see that Dana was a younger, more frightened version of her mother. The corners of her mouth twitched every few seconds as she tried hard not to look at me. With the toe of her pump, she scratched her leg, running her hose.

“I need to speak with you,” Gwendolyn said to my mother.

“I’l be with you in a moment,” Mama said. “Just let me go and change out of this dress.” She put her hands on her stomach where the dress was tightest. Then her hand drifted up to hide the plumped cleavage.

“Is your husband here?”

“He’s working,” my mother said. “Is there something I can help you with?”

“Mama,” Dana said, “let’s just come back later.”

Gwendolyn looked at her daughter. “We have to see this through.”

The customers were uneasy in their seats. Mrs. Grant offered to leave even though she was stil wet under the dryer. My mother waved her hand.

“No, stay. There’s nothing happening here.” She picked up a blow-dryer and turned it on even though she was stil in the party dress. “Miss Yarboro is going to come back later.”

“You can’t turn me away,” Gwendolyn said, reaching to take the roaring dryer away from my mother. “Turn that thing off and listen to me.”

“Hey,” I said. “Don’t touch my mother.” My voice, feeble in my own ears, gave away how afraid I was. In Gwendolyn’s hands, the blow-dryer may as wel have been a pistol.

“I’m a missus, too,” she said. “You are not the only one. I may not live in as fine a house, but I am a missus, too.”

My mother looked around like she was looking for a place to sit, but every chair was occupied and every eye in the room was on Gwendolyn, who held a sheet of paper folded in two. She thrust it toward my mother like a subpoena. I looked to Dana, who studied her shoes. Whatever that paper was, it was something bad. Mama refused to take it.

“Get out of my shop,” my mother said. “Get out of my shop. This is my place. Get out.”

Mrs. Grant, under the dryer, began to applaud, looking to the other women to join her in this odd banging together of hands, but they didn’t. Like me, they couldn’t stop looking at the folded page.

“Get out,” my mother said. “I don’t care what you got in your hand. You don’t have any paper that has anything to do with me.”

“Take it,” Gwendolyn said. “Take it before I have to read it aloud.”

My mother’s breasts heaved over the sweetheart neckline. She didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands. At her sides, they pumped like a pair of hearts. Gwendolyn opened the paper. She looked at it slowly before glancing up and taking a breath, surveying the room before touching her hair. Gwendolyn licked her lips and although she meant her face to be rigid and stern, I know I saw a flicker of delight tickle her cheeks as she prepared to read. Whatever she had in store, she had been waiting for a long time. I took three steps forward, tripping over Mrs. Grant’s ankles a bit, but I managed to pul the page from Gwendolyn’s hand.

“Good girl,” Mrs. Grant said, like I was a pet.

I unfolded the page. It was a Xerox copy; I could stil smel the chemicals. I was looking at a wedding license issued to James Lee Witherspoon and Gwendolyn Beatrice Yarboro in the state of Alabama the year after I was born.

“This is bul shit,” I said, not to Gwendolyn but to Dana. Gwendolyn kept her arms crossed over her chest and Dana held her hands at her sides like a church usher. Gwendolyn said to my mother, “I am so sorry to have to tel you like this.”

The truth is a strange thing. Like pornography, you know it when you see it. Dana, silvery Dana, was my flesh-and-blood sister. James, my ordinary daddy with his Coke bottle glasses was nothing but a dog. And what did that make me? A fool. I’d invited Dana into my house. Every time I wanted to hang out, she made me beg. And I did. Every single time. “You’re not sorry,” I was speaking to Dana, but I couldn’t look away from the paper in my hands.

“I didn’t send her over here. That’s between the two of you,” Gwendolyn said. “What’s on that document is between your mother and me.”

“Give it here, Chaurisse,” my mother said. I handed her the page and she looked it over. She crumpled the Alabama license and tossed it on the floor. “You think I’m scared of a piece of paper?”

Gwendolyn looked a little confused, like we had fal en off the script. Supporting her large patent-leather handbag with her left hand, she began to rifle through it with her right. With a distressed glance at Dana, she dropped to one knee and rummaged through the bag. “I have something else,”

she said to my mother.

“You don’t have anything I need to see,” my mother said. “So take your little raggedy pocketbook and your raggedy little daughter and get out here.”

At this, Mrs. Grant pul ed up the top of the dryer and started a standing ovation. The clipped noises of her hand bounced off the tension in the room.

“What is wrong with you?” Dana said to Mrs. Grant. “This is not a TV show. This is our life.”

“I have it right here,” Gwendolyn said. “What is done in the dark wil come to the light. That’s what the Bible says.”

“Don’t you even try to confuse me with scripture.” My mother nudged the patent-leather purse with her bare foot darting out from under the white gown. Gwendolyn scooted her bag back in front of her, pouring the contents of her handbag on the tiled floor of the Pink Fox. There were the usual purse contents — lipstick, chewing gum, emery boards, and a hank of keys. In addition, there was a compass, the kind you use to draw circles. She then shook the purse. “It’s in here.” Dana got down beside her and helped repack. Gwendolyn had lost that triumphant look and seemed a little lost, the way Grandma Bunny had when she was on a medication that made her forget who we were.