“Yes, Rachel,” Drew says, “that makes a lot of sense to me.”
In bed later, I stare at the ceiling for a long time. I am thinking: What if Mor knew about the blues? What if she had thought that sometimes there’s a way to take the sadness and turn it into a beautiful song?
GRANDMA TAKES AN extra day away because the trains aren’t running on time.
That’s okay by me. It gives me an extra day to plan a welcome-home dinner and a celebration of three straight-A report cards in a row. Drew doesn’t mind staying the extra night watching me either. This way the window will be fixed by the time Grandma gets back, and she won’t have to worry about a thing.
“Welcome home, Grandma.” I yell when she opens the door and steps inside with Miss Verle right behind her. The table is set with the good plates and two candles burning. Drew stands next to me with his arm on me like he’s showing off a prize. “See, she’s all in one piece. You didn’t have to worry about a thing.”
“And Grandma, look. I got straight-As again. See.” I hand her my report card, but she doesn’t take it.
“Well, you’re not gonna get a A for that,” Grandma says, pointing to the casserole I’ve made for dinner. It’s more than a little brown on top. It’s actually black in some spots, and it’s runny — kind of like there’s a puddle of water on top of the cheese crust. I think I put in too much milk.
Grandma laughs. “Oh Lordy be.” She laughs some more. “Looks like I haven’t taught you a thing.”
“But y’all do look all cozy up in here playing house,” Miss Verle says and laughs.
I never pay attention to Miss Verle, and Drew definitely doesn’t. There’s no use in talking to a drunk who’s been drinking, which he figures she usually has because she smells like the contributions whether she comes in the morning or around suppertime. She smells like the contributions now.
“Come on. Grandma will show you how you treat a man. Not like that.” Without ever looking at my report card, Grandma takes my hand and leads me to the kitchen.
Miss Verle follows two steps behind. “Drew,” Grandma says real loud, “Miss Doris is fixin to put some hurtin to some chicken. I hope you’ll stay.”
“Miss Doris, you know I will.”
JOHN BAILEY ASKED me why I lied to him about being in Jack & Jill. He said no one at Jack & Jill knew who I was. I never said I was in Jack & Jill; I just let him think I was. He says I probably lied about other things too. Like there’s probably no reason for me to be saying no all the time when we’re kissing. He says because my underwear is small and my shirts are so tight, I must have said yes before. He says he doesn’t want to go with me anymore. Not unless he hears me say yes.
Drew’s not used to me crying. No one is used to me crying. So when I show up at his job doing just that, he hugs me real tight and closes his office door.
“You want to talk about it?”
“John Bailey is stupid.”
“I’m sure he is if he’s responsible for making you feel this way.”
“He’s a fucker.”
“No need to use that language.” I love to be held so close.
“I’m not a kid. I’m sixteen. He’s a stupid fucker.” I talk directly into Drew’s chest, and can feel my voice reverberate right back into me.
“Rachel, you’re a young lady. You don’t need to talk that way. Tell me what’s going on. What’d he do?” Drew’s still holding me tight with strong hands, steady. I think: Maybe Miss Verle saw the other day what I’m feeling now?
“No, it’s me. I’m bad. You don’t know. Really, I’m bad. You don’t know how bad I can be …” Drew’s arm around me is hot. It makes me hot.
You’d think that Sunday worship would make me good. At least that’s what Grandma thought. Not every Sunday, but a lot of Sundays, there I’d be up in the AME Zion Church still singing like a white girl with not enough breath behind my notes. Maybe that’s what mattered. That I didn’t get the sounds right. I wasn’t saying the right prayer. All I know is that being in Drew’s arms — he’s smart, and kind and understands the more sophisticated things like I do — it made me want to be close to him. Very close. I wanted him to stay. I wanted to find a way to keep him around. But I didn’t pick the right way.
I remember him saying this before he leaned away from my kiss: “You’re like a daughter to me. Go on home now.”
THE NEXT DAY Tamika turns up and starts talking behind my back. Since sixth grade we’ve gone to the same school, and she has never liked me and I’ve never liked her. Her not liking me is on general principle. Me not liking her is because she still might beat me up. For the most part, I see her only in the hallways, sometimes near the bus stop after school. I’m in the honors classes and she’s not.
She talks real loud as I stand in line for my free lunch. “She a ho. Think she all cute. She fast like those white girls. She slept with half the basketball team. She touch my man I’ll slap her.” She goes on and on. And people start laughing. And the part of me that wants to stop being sad, and to stop being hurt and not cry, turns around so quick — like I didn’t even know myself — and says, “FUCK OFF,” and punches Tamika so hard that she stumbles back. So hard that her nose bleeds.
“HEY, ALI,” ANTHONY Miller calls out, on his way to his grandmother’s. Since the fight with Tamika, Ali is me.
“How’d you get so brown?” he says.
I don’t wear the sunscreen that Grandma tells me to. “Stay outta that sun. It’ll make you dark and dusty,” she says. I tell her that she is perpetuating racist ideas from slavery. There’s nothing wrong with being dark-skinned. Like Drew says, I tell her: Black folks have to stick together. She doesn’t like me to sass her. It’s what her mother taught her and she’s passing it on. But she hushes up then. The words “dark” and “dusty” only come out after she’s had some of Miss Verle’s contributions. She’s not proud when she says those things.
“I like to tan,” I say, my brown self reading a book on Grandma’s porch rocking chair a couple of days into the summer break.
“It looks good on you,” Anthony Miller says.
ANTHONY MILLER VISITS his grandmother every day that week and the next. Every day I see him, and we talk a little bit longer. I finish three books in ten days waiting on that porch. He never comes at the same time.
Somewhere around day eleven, Anthony Miller goes to visit his grandmother, and on his way back, I invite him inside.
The African brown fabric couch is covered with a milky plastic now. The pictures of faraway people Grandma’s taken down long ago.
“Can we sit in your room? It’s so hot. I think I’d stick to the couch.” Anthony Miller smiles at me. He knows I’m the kind of girl who doesn’t mind that kind of smile.
We go to my room. We kiss sitting up then lying down. I let Anthony Miller take off my shirt so that he can see what he’s touching.
I want to be something. Some one thing. Maybe it is the it I was when Anthony Miller used to kiss me in the vestibule at Holy Redeemer.
Anthony Miller and I have never gone this far. That’s such a strange thing to say. I never feel as if we’re actually going anywhere.
“You’re so beautiful. So beautiful.” He says it over and over like it’s a spell being cast over him. He closes his eyes. His hands are hungry to touch me. Whatever it is I am at this moment, it is something I want to be. But then the way Anthony Miller kisses me is fast. The way he touches me is hard. I feel like I’m going inside farther and farther the more he touches me.
When he touches me down there I count. He sticks his finger into me, and it feels like a pen jamming into a top. One. Two. Three. Four. Beautiful doesn’t let it hurt.
Five. Six. “Please let me see what it feels like,” he says. I feel his weight on me and his hands spreading my legs farther apart. Anthony Miller is taking the thing I thought I was giving. He is not big enough to make it impossible to fight back, but I don’t. It’s like my body thinks: surrender, beautiful. Seven. Eight. Ni
ne.
“You are so beautiful,” he says, and Grandma opens my bedroom door. She’s not supposed to be at home. Maybe she heard his shoe fall to the floor, or the small noise I let out when he thrust harder to get deeper into me, dry.
She sees him and doesn’t say “Stop” or “What are you doing?” She sees me and says, “You little hussy.”
She doesn’t yell or throw Anthony Miller out of the house half dressed. She doesn’t do anything.
“I should have known,” she says and then walks out of my room, closing the door behind her.
Anthony Miller pulls himself away. He pulls on his pants and shoes in a single move. I am lying on the bed still. My shirt is bunched around my right arm. My skirt is crowded around my middle. He doesn’t need to hurry. Grandma isn’t going to do anything. I’m getting what I deserve.
“Anyway, thanks,” he says. Maybe he says something else.
Anthony Miller leaves without kissing me. He waves good-bye.
I hide the sheets from Grandma. I wash my hands and brush my teeth. I don’t wash down there. I know I am bleeding.
THE NEXT DAY I go to the doctor by myself. I make a promise to myself: Never bring another boy to the house and meet my curfew each night. I am still a model student. I have straight As. I can still be something to be proud of: class vice-president, National Honor Society head, coeditor of the school’s creative writing journal. I am a good student if not a good girl. Those are the things I will make count. The other things won’t count. I can make things not count by writing them down any way I want.
In my diary, this is what I write:
“Having sex with Anthony Miller was quite an experience. Anthony Miller got kind of carried away and so did I. The doctor says I have a pretty bad tear down there. I should be more careful. And make sure I’m ready next time. I am still bleeding a little. I think he did something to me. I want him to do it again.”
It’s not a true story, but I tell it to myself. What difference does it make anyway? I tell myself that story because it could be true. It could have happened that way. Things happen in different ways.
Like that man, on the roof, maybe he tells himself stories the same way. Maybe his story goes like this: I saw the girl open the door (he waved at me); it was a whole family of folks (true too); I explained I was about to make a new roost — more birds — and the boy said he wanted to help (Robbie stuttered when he said p-p-p-please). They did their thing then. I did mine.
I don’t know if the true story about Anthony Miller or about the day on the roof or about any story you could think of matters. If there’s no one else to tell another side — the only story that can be told is the story that becomes true.
PART II
Rachel
Heavy summer rain has drowned the few patches of grass that dared to grow in Grandma’s backyard. All the vegetables and flowers Grandma used to grow have died. “There’s nothing left to save,” Grandma says over and over when she goes to see what’s become of her garden after a few contributions. She’s wrong. Wildflowers have taken root near the bird feeder I put out a few weeks ago. I guess they’re not really wildflowers. They’re wild sprouts, but they’re green, and they’re the only things growing in what used to be Grandma’s garden.
Grandma doesn’t like the bird feeder or the birds that it attracts. The other day she “nearly had a heart attack” with a knocking at her window in the morning. She thought a man was trying to break in. It was a black crow. Grandma wants me to take the bird feeder down to “keep flying vermin like that away.” I won’t. I like to hear the birds in the morning. I like to see that patch of green grow. “There’s nothing left,” Grandma says again when I tell her she’s wrong about things not growing in the backyard. She doesn’t listen. All her syllables are slurred.
Sometimes I hide her contributions. I empty out the bottles while she sleeps if anything is left in them. It’s what Mor used to do with Pop’s beer and cognac bottles. I know Miss Verle will stop by and bring Grandma another bottle of sherry within a day or so. It’s still worth it.
There are some days Grandma doesn’t get out of bed now that she’s retired. Those days she drinks the contributions all day. She pours a bit of sherry to have after her coffee in the morning, and then with her tea in the afternoon. With her supper she drinks it straight while watching the evening news.
Seeing Grandma this way, it makes me know for certain that everything about a person will show up in another person in the family. I know the scientific way to talk about this: heredity and inheritances and the things that get passed on. But I think there should be a better explanation because Grandma never needed the contributions before Aunt Loretta died. But Pop needed them for a long time before. Heredity isn’t supposed to work backward. I think about these things: the way that science or math tells us certain things. Math can explain the reason there’s a one out of four chance that I’d have blue eyes. But it doesn’t explain why me. And science or math can’t explain what makes one person lucky, or what makes a person lucky enough to survive.
THREE WEEKS INTO summer and it feels like it will never end. The only good thing is that I don’t have to see Anthony Miller or Tamika Washington or any of the other people from school. I spend my days at the library or on the porch rocking in Grandma’s chair, reading. Grandma and me — we have different routines. We eat our meals separately. She talks on the phone. She visits with Miss Verle. She watches her stories on TV. There is a space between us bigger than the missing Aunt Loretta. We live in the same house but we both feel lonely. We and lonely don’t belong in the same sentence.
“COME HERE, GRANDMA wants to show you something,” Grandma says.
When Grandma talks to me, it is about God and the savior and how her days are short on God’s earth. God is ever-present in our lives. He will lead the way. That kind of thing. She says I should get to the Lord. He’s speaking to me now.
Grandma is maudlin. She talks about her death. How she wants to go down easy, like “a Texas afternoon iced tea.” But there is nothing wrong with Grandma. She’s not sick. She doesn’t cough a lot or wheeze. She’s almost seventy and takes the kind of pills old people on the evening news commercials talk about. But otherwise she seems fine except when the contributions catch up with her.
Today Grandma takes from her drawer a blue fabric Seagram’s bag and dumps a collection of coins on her bedspread.
I draw my legs up and sit cross-legged on the bed before her. “Your penny collection?”
“Not just pennies,” she says frowning. “Dimes. Nickels. John F. Kennedys.”
Grandma picks up the newspaper next to her and opens it to a large advertisement that reads, “WE BUY COINS.”
“You’re going to the coin show?”
“But I can’t see what’s the years on them. Grandma’s gonna make her some money before she dies. Better than my number coming in.”
Grandma’s number has never come in.
“Grandma you’re not going to die.”
“Not before I make a little money with this collection, for sure. But it’s gonna happen.”
“But the coins have to be very old to be worth something.”
“Scoot up closer. Help Grandma see.”
I haven’t been this close to Grandma in a long time, and it makes me remember when I could lay in her lap and smell her lavender lotion.
“Here. Look at these,” she says and pushes a pile of coins toward me on the bed.
“1977. 1964. 1980. They’re not worth anything. You may as well spend them.”
“Oh, no. I’m a collector. I should be having every year starting with 1935 and — see, I’ve got me a lot.”
“Here’s a good one. A nickel. From 1937. That’s the year Pop was born.”
“Let me see. How much could I get for that?”
I look at the newspaper ad. “For nickels from 1935 to 1943, it says five hundred dollars.”
“Five hundred? Grandma’s gonna be a rich old lady.”
Grandma hasn’t found the happy part of her voice in a long time — at least not around me. Then she’s quiet for a long time. I sort the pennies from the nickels from the dimes and the John F. Kennedys. It’s quiet in the house — a nice quiet — the kind you don’t mind staying in.
“I talked to Drew about the troubles I’ve been having here with you,” Grandma says after a while. “Troubles” means boys. “He thinks you just need to get involved in something that takes up your day better,” she says. “He’s got you a summer job at the center. Give you something to do.” Grandma doesn’t believe that I’m at the library when I say I am. There’s no reason she should. “Lord, bless Drew,” she says and I agree. “It’s some other good mens out there — somewhere—I have to think.”
Amen. That part’s me. “When do I start?” I ask. “Soon as you call him and tell him — tomorrow, the next day.”
I jump from the bed to call Drew from the kitchen. I haven’t seen him since that day. I have a second chance.
“Hey, we not through,” Grandma yells. “Sit on back down.”
I sit again but I am only partway there, double-checking each coin after Grandma inspects it with the black-handled, square magnifying glass. I am thinking of how I will impress Drew with what I wear, and how well I will do the work he assigns me. I think of how I will get him to like me — the way that I like him.
Grandma’s collection is worth $2,507.03. “Make that two thousand. This one’s for you. Same year as your daddy was born.” We both get quiet as she hands me the nickel. It feels like we both have the same picture of him in mind. In mine, he is the way he was: handsome, smiling, posing in his blue uniform, five-stripes for the wing patches on his sleeve. In my mind, he is always in uniform. Handsome. Worthy of a salute.
“Is it bad to say — I think I won’t always be able to remember him,” I say.
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky Page 12