We Are All Welcome Here (18 page)

“Is he blind in that eye?” I asked.

“No.”

I stood up and my chair fell backward. “Then why do they need the money?!”

“Diana. The eye was the least of his problems. His kidney—”

“Why can’t somebody else help?
I
won that money! Why do you get to decide to give away everything?”

“Because it’s the right thing to do, Diana. And I’m not giving it all away; I’m going to keep some.”

“How much?” I asked.

Quietly, she said, “Five hundred dollars.”

“That’s nothing!”

“Diana. If they had told us on that day that we’d won five hundred dollars, how would you have felt?”

I didn’t answer.

“You’d have been so happy. Right?”

I shrugged.

“Right?” she insisted.

“I guess,” I said. “But—”

“So be happy,” my mother said.

I stared at the floor, listened to the rhythmic noises of my mother’s respirator. Then she called my name and I looked up. “I have made a mistake,” she said, and I closed my eyes, grateful. She would keep the money after all. But what she said is, “I have tried to protect you from the hardness of the world outside. I did that because I thought that with me, you have enough to bear. But you need to know something. Yesterday, those missing civil rights workers were found murdered. Those young boys.”

How to respond? I felt bad, but those boys had been asking for trouble, hadn’t they? Hadn’t they been warned? “But…what does that have to do with us?” I asked.

My mother stayed silent for a long time. Then she said, “You know, it’s ironic. I am in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the neck down. But I am freer than Peacie and LaRue.”

“What do you mean?” But I knew the answer to my own question. Peacie’s bent back before the sheriff. LaRue’s order to report to the sheriff, as though he were a dog being jerked by the leash. The segregation I witnessed everywhere and that was as natural to me as the water I drank and the air I breathed. Adults I was meant to admire and emulate treated Negroes as inferiors, and I had believed it was right. But it wasn’t. I’d begun learning that when LaRue talked about the Freedom Schools and I saw the brightness in his eyes, the lift.

“I can’t march,” my mother said. “I can’t go out and help Negroes register to vote. But I can give money to LaRue, who’s doing it for me.”

“But LaRue isn’t doing it for you,” I said. “He’s doing it for himself, and his people.”

“He’s doing it for all of us,” my mother said. “I hope you’ll come to see that. I hope you’ll come to be proud that we helped.”

“But we need help, too! We need it for a different reason, but we need it as much as they do.”

“I don’t think so,” my mother said. “Oh, Diana. Money’s just money. Once you have shelter from the elements and clothes to wear and food to eat, it’s all just one-upsmanship, that’s all—status and game-playing. Whose house is bigger? Whose clothes are nicer? Whose car is shiniest? What difference does it make, really?”

I said nothing. Maybe she was right. I thought about those three young men, about what had been in their wallets. I wondered if they knew they were going to die, and if, in their last moments, they stood up tall inside themselves and felt not alone. I hoped so. I hoped so. But I acknowledged, too, the drag in my heart, my utter weariness at the way we would have to continue to live. There was only so much a canopy could do.

Later I would call Suralee. She would be outraged. In trying to explain my mother’s way of thinking to her, perhaps I would come to understand it better myself.

That night, rummaging around in my closet for shoes that might be good enough to start school with, I found the sheet music for a song my mother had written long ago. It was called “Sugar Bee Tree,” and it had a catchy melody and good lyrics—to my mind, anyway. My mother used to sing it to me when I was little. I sat on the floor, staring at the notes my mother had so carefully penned in, thinking of all the things she might have done if she’d not been stricken with polio. She was so smart; she’d been able to sing and dance, and she’d been a really good artist, too. Even now she sometimes held a paintbrush between her teeth to do little still lifes, and once she’d painted a beribboned bouquet on a glass for me. It sat on my dresser top now, half filled with pennies.

I dusted off the sheet music and sang a line near the end of the song softly to myself.
And if you come to see, that you could be with me….
It was a good song, and now it lay forgotten on the floor of a closet.

I went over to my desk and pulled out a fresh piece of paper.
Dear Elvis,
I wrote. This was his last chance.

L
ate one afternoon, Suralee and I were under the porch drinking Cokes into which we’d thrown handfuls of peanuts and raisins. I was going to make chili and corn bread for dinner, and Suralee was going to stay and help me cook. Dell was over visiting my mother again. She’d been outside sunbathing when he came, and he’d helped bring her in. It was so easy with him—he simply disconnected her from her vent hose and carried her, and I trundled along behind with the equipment. Times like this I wished for a full-time male caretaker, someone capable of both effortlessly lifting my mother and fixing things. Someone whose presence made for a nonspecific but very comforting sense of safety.

I made iced tea for my mother and Dell; he would help her drink it, and Suralee and I had been given an hour free. We’d told my mother we were going to Suralee’s house, but then decided it might be more interesting to eavesdrop. I’d told Suralee about times I’d listened in on Dell and my mother before, about the frankness of their talks. Now we sat quietly, heads cocked in the direction of their conversation.

It wasn’t easy to hear—the sound of the fan in the open window interfered. But we did hear Dell say, “Diana and Suralee are gone, right?”

Suralee put her hand on my arm and squeezed. “What?” I whispered. “What is it?”

“Shhhhh!
Lis
ten!”

“…over at Suralee’s,” my mother was saying. “You can call and tell them to come back if you need to go.”

“I don’t want to go,” Dell said. “That’s not what I was thinking. That’s the last thing I was thinking. I was wondering if…How long are they going to be gone?”

“Long enough,” my mother said. A long pause and then, “You can take me out of this. I’m okay for at least an hour.” I heard the abrupt silence that always followed her respirator being turned off, the sound of Dell’s steps, and then no noise at all but for the fan.

Suralee looked over at me, triumphant. I shrugged, a sudden coldness inside. “Let’s go in the backyard,” she whispered, and I shook my head no. “Come on!” she said, and I ignored her.

She crawled out from under the porch, and I unwillingly followed her around to the side of the house, to a spot in the bushes beneath my mother’s bedroom window.

Once I’d seen a neighbor girl riding her bike down the street past my house. I waved at her and thought,
As soon as she waves back, she’s going to fall down.
And she did. I started to go over and help her, but she hopped back onto her bike, embarrassed, and rode off quickly, apparently no worse for wear.

These things happened to me sometimes; I could predict random events with eerie accuracy. I believed I had a bit of my mother’s psychic ability. But now I wished I didn’t, for I knew what we’d see when we looked in the window. And I was right. There in my mother’s bed were she and Dell, doing something like what I’d seen Peacie do with LaRue. Not quite the same scene, of course. Dell had taken my mother’s shell off, and she was frog-breathing, her eyes squeezed tight with the effort. Her top was pushed up, her pants pulled down. I saw the whiteness of Dell’s ass as he moved slowly in and out of her. I saw his hand over her breast, fondling it, pinching the nipple. His pants were pulled down, but his shirt was still on, his boots, too. At the side of my brain, I worried about his boots getting the sheets dirty; I’d changed them just that morning.

“Oh, my
God,
” Suralee whispered, her hand clamped over her mouth.

“Let’s go,” I said, and pulled on her arm. But she would not look away. Finally, I watched, too. Sick. I watched, too.

What a mix of emotions I felt! The burn of shame, of course. But then I began to feel an odd sort of pride, too. Dell and my mother. Dell and
my
mother.

When they were finished, Dell fumbled to get the shell back in place. It was all I could do not to go and help him. But he got it right, finally, and when my mother could speak again, she said, “Can you put me into my wheelchair? We’d better go back to the living room. Oh, and straighten the bedcovers!”

Suralee slid to the ground and I sat beside her. We heard the sound of Dell’s and my mother’s voices moving away from us, and then they were out of earshot, waiting for us to come back. Suralee would not look at me, and I could think of nothing to say. Finally I mumbled, “Sorry,” and immediately regretted it.

“That’s okay,” Suralee said. “I’m sorry for
you.
” She shuddered.

What about her mother?
I thought.

“That was so
creepy,
” Suralee said.

“What about your mother?” There. I’d said it.

Suralee laughed. “What do you mean?”

“What about
your
mother? She does it with men all the time!”
She’s trashy, too,
I wanted to say, but didn’t.

Suralee spoke with disdainful pity. “My mother is
normal.
”

“Go home,” I said, standing up and dusting off my hands.

She stared at me.

“Go home,” I said again.

“You’re just embarrassed,” Suralee said.

I started walking away, and she said after me, “You’re just embarrassed! Don’t take it out on me! Your mother’s crazy, and you know it. For one thing, nobody would give away prize money like that! If she even really
won
it.”

I turned around and said in a low voice not quite my own, “Shut your filthy mouth and get out of my yard. You aren’t my friend anymore.” I watched her walk quickly away, wishing we’d gone to her house, wishing so hard we’d not stayed here. It seemed there was a leak in my life. Everything was draining out.

I snuck around front, waited fifteen minutes, then pushed the front door open. “Hey, Diana!” Dell said.

“Hey, Dell.” I waved at them, then started for the kitchen. “I’ll make dinner now.”

“Where’s Suralee?” my mother asked, and I said she’d had to stay home.

“That’s too bad,” my mother said, and I said yeah, it was.

I opened the icebox and took out a package of hamburger. I could smell them, Dell and my mother. I could smell them in the air. I grabbed an onion and started chopping it exactly the way she’d taught me.

A
few mornings later, I’d almost finished with my mother’s bath when the doorbell rang. We looked at each other. “Cover me with the sheet, and go see who it is,” she said. I could tell by her excitement that she thought it was Dell, as did I. I was sure of it. I’d heard my mother on the phone with Brenda, talking about Dell, saying, “Well, we didn’t set any definite date. But I’m sure he’ll be back soon.” She listened, then started giggling.
“No!”
she said. “I did not! Yet.” She laughed again.

But it was not Dell, it was Susan Hogart, our social worker. “Oh!” I said. “Are you…?”

“I didn’t call,” she said. “But I need to talk to your mother, Diana.” She wouldn’t quite look at me.

“She’s…I’m almost done washing her.”

“May I come in?”

I stepped aside so that she could come in the door.

“Where’s Peacie?” She asked the question like she already knew the answer.

“Um…she went to get some groceries.”

“
Where
is Peacie?” Susan asked again, and again I said she’d gone out to get groceries.

“Diana,” Susan began.

“I’m in
here
!” my mother called.

“You might want to take a walk,” Susan told me quietly, but I stood still.

She touched my arm gently. “Come back in about half an hour. I want to talk to you then. But right now I need some privacy with your mother.”