The Sweet By and By

by Todd Johnson

  The door flew open, slamming against the particleboard armoire that served to hold whatever clothes a student deemed better than the wadded-up-in-a-drawer variety. Janice threw her backpack angrily on the bed, the force of which jolted the steel frame. “I told him he could fuck himself.” She sneered as though I could enter without preface into her stream of consciousness, which in a way, I could.

  I threw the covers off and put on a light bathrobe even though the May sunlight was already heating up the room. I cracked the window for some air and stood opposite her.

  “Janice, you need to wake up.”

  “I know what you think, April, but it’s not that. It’s only sometimes it’s like something snaps and he drinks too much and I don’t know who the fuck he is when that happens, but it’s not like it’s all the time. He loves me.”

  “This is not about how he feels about you, Janice, this is about him having a problem.”

  “How do you know?” she retorted.

  “What I know isn’t the point. I want you to hear what I’m saying to you. Please.” I picked up my cosmetic bag; I didn’t know what else to say. The signs were embedded inside me like sensors before I was ever conscious of them, from when I was a child. There are the blurry memories of a towering man’s voice and body—still, in my mind, I never see his face. There is no face, it’s all sound, rage. It is my father, screaming at Mama, and when he had a “fit,” as she called it, I was so afraid that I would hide in my room until it stopped, which usually wasn’t until I heard a car start. That blessed sound meant it was over and I could come out and jump into bed, pretending to be asleep so Mama wouldn’t feel bad that I had heard all of it. She knew I wasn’t asleep, and I knew that she knew, but the ritual saved us having to live through it again by talking about it and instead let us take in the quiet of temporary forgetfulness. A psychologist would say we should have addressed it and may well have been right, but at the time, we did what felt natural, protecting ourselves by licking our wounds privately rather than reopening them in the presence of one another. I believe that fortitude helped form me, perfectly or not.

  I was five or six when my grandmother barreled into the yard in her old Oldsmobile station wagon—we didn’t have a driveway. It was a hot summer morning because I was playing outside barefoot, and there was still dew on the ground, which made everything in the grass stick to my feet. Grandma kissed me on top of the head and marched straight into the house. Minutes later, she and Mama made several trips back to the car, loading it with mounds of suitcases, cardboard boxes, and bulging paper grocery bags.

  “What are y’all doing?” I asked. My stomach had a knot in it.

  Grandma said, “Y’all are coming for a long visit at my house, honey,” and she stopped at Krispy Kreme and got us donuts on the way. They were good and warm, and Mama let me have two, knowing that I might feel sick afterwards from the heart-stopping combination of sugar and fried dough that for a child in North Carolina was like having heaven in your mouth. It wasn’t long after that drive that Mama started wearing a nurse’s uniform to work every day. We never went home again, and I never asked why. The intuition of a child holds more knowledge of what is real than adults ever imagine is the case.

  Until I was twelve, I only heard about my father in bits and pieces, like a crossword puzzle that was never finished, a mix of cryptic clues paired with what were at best guessed-at answers. I saw him even less. He showed up at Grandma’s from time to time, usually when she wasn’t there if he could help it, but he ignored me and went straight for Mama. The sole consistency of those visits, deeply ingrained, was that they always ended with the same blur of rage in the kitchen that sent me running for the cool pine floor under my bed to hold my breath for the sound of his car leaving. The long-standing blur came to an end at the beginning of sixth grade. I came home from school and Mama was already home from work, which was strange in itself. She and Grandma were sitting in the living room together, and I could tell they were talking about something serious by the way they looked at me when I burst in the front door with my stack of books. I always carried a big stack of books. When people asked me why I had so many more than the other children my age I said, “I’ve got homework in all of em, what do you want me to do?” They always laughed and someone would say to Mama, “You got a smart one, Lorraine. Willful too. She’s gon do just fine.”

  Instead of telling me to get started on my homework before dinner, Mama got up from the sofa and took the books from my arms. She tried to make a joke about how heavy they were and said if all that was in these books was going to have to fit into her little girl’s head, they might have to clean out some of what was already in there. I didn’t say anything because there’s nothing worse for a child than when a grown-up is trying to pretend like everything’s fine when it’s clear that it’s not. Mama piled the books on Grandma’s low coffee table, my favorite place to sit on the floor and do my homework.

  “April, I’ve got to tell you something and I don’t know what you’re gon feel, but I want to say that whatever you feel, that’s all right.”

  “Yes ma’am?” I said.

  She looked briefly at my grandmother, then back to me. “Your daddy’s dead. He drove his car into a tree in the middle of the night.”

  I remember standing there and wondering if I was supposed to cry, but I waited for my eyes to start and they didn’t. Then it bothered me that nothing happened. I was supposed to react. I replayed Mama’s words in my mind and at the end of them, there was still a blank, like on a math test. I didn’t know the right answer. Nothing came. Without moving, I said, “Can I have a snack?” Grandma jumped up on cue and went to the kitchen where she cut a piece of pound cake and poured a glass of milk. I took it back to her tiny second bedroom, the room that had become my room while she and Mama shared her bedroom, which still had two twin beds in it from when Granddaddy was alive. My room was also Grandma’s sewing room, and she still had an old pedal sewing machine in addition to the newer Singer, which was the source of many of my clothes, and all of my dresses. I sat on the floor and ate sweet pound cake and waited for something to come into my head about my daddy and the only thing I could get to was the blur with no face and the shouting terrifying voice, and so I would take another bite of cake and let it fall apart in my mouth with a sip of cold milk, going back and forth with cake and milk, until it was gone and I stretched out on the bed in my clothes and fell asleep. I did not do my homework, I did not eat dinner, I slept all the way through the night. The next morning Mama told me we would drive to the funeral, she would take me. I asked her if we had to, and she said yes we did, that I might not feel like it right then, but there wouldn’t be a chance to change my mind later. That day I would learn that you don’t always leave people because you hate them, but instead because you cannot bear the burden of them. The agony of my daddy’s living was my mother’s slow dying, and she was not ready to die. She found it in herself to say no, not knowing exactly what the “no” even meant, but she knew that she couldn’t do any more for the man she had loved and married. She couldn’t watch her life and my childhood drain away slowly, dirty dishwater after the meal is long over.

  Mama cried at the funeral, I did too, but I think it was more seeing her cry that got me upset. Grandma did not go. She had not hated my daddy, but she had not loved him either. She had therefore closed the chapter a long time ago and wasn’t interested in reopening it. Soon after, we went back to what had become our life together, rather seamlessly. My daddy hadn’t been part of it for years, he was less a part now. He was no longer someone whom, had I the desire, I could have sought out and found not more than fifty miles away. He was no more, and we went on.

  I had the highest average in my grade, the first time a black girl or boy had ever had that distinction. Mama continued at the nursing home. It had become for her a fertile ground in which she planted an entirely new life, yielding more than she could have ever known ahead of time. Every night, or the ones when she got
to eat supper at home, she told stories from her day at work, a little thing that one of her patients had done or said, a private moment shared with her because she had become an intimate by effect, a role that, it must be said, she treated like a royal appointment. Her stories were not a breach of that privacy, rather they were an invitation for us to enter into a way of looking at life, standing in the present with a view into the distance. Her work with old people changed her, and by effect, me, and I found myself looking at my own grandmother differently, the woman who had rescued us in a beat-up station wagon from a monster that I now am able to see as more sad than horrible.

  Sometimes I sat at the table with Grandma and did nothing except look at her hands, thinking about everything they had touched in all her years of living. Cotton, tobacco leaves, babies, laundry and strong lye soap, then money in the cash register of the one-room store that Granddaddy ran in the country, less a store than a gathering place for black farm workers with no other place to come together except church one day a week. Until Granddaddy died, she had doled out Coca-Colas and hoop cheese and crackers to more people than she could count. She had handled fabric and thread and made quilts, blouses, dresses, pants, and one time in particular she tried to make a bathing suit for me but it was disastrous, by her own admission, and she never tried such a thing again. She defended her failure by telling me that people were not meant to linger in water anyway, it was for taking a bath and getting out of before you got sick. I also found myself listening to her voice, the changes in pitch when she recounted something that made her mad, or a piece of gossip from church, or a memory of something that happened to her and Granddaddy so long ago that the details would change every time she told the story. Sometimes she caught me staring at her and said, “What you lookin at, child, you make me nervous as a cat,” but I think, without even recognizing it, she liked the attention. And I learned that attention is a prize in love, the first thing you give and the first thing to go when the new wears off.

  The dorm’s capacious bathroom had filled with steam by the time I had let the hot water spray pound my neck and shoulders for as long as I wanted. The hall was quieter. When I returned to the room, Janice was gone. On my pillow, she had written a note on a single sheet torn from a spiral composition book. Her handwriting was surprisingly beautiful for someone who didn’t care much about anything to do with pen and paper.

  Dear April, I DO hear you, and I will think about what you said, I promise. Thank you for listening (again). And Happy Graduation…to us both!!!

  Love, J.

  P.S. I borrowed your dark green earrings, OK?

  Resilient as always, she was on to the next thing. I hoped I would see her later but knew it was unlikely with Brandon in the picture. Riffling through the few clothes I had not already packed, I searched for the coolest thing I could find to wear under the suffocating synthetic material of my graduation gown. I settled on a rust colored linen blouse and matching skirt. I had decided not to walk around campus in my cap and gown, but I wanted to put it on once in front of the mirror. The mortarboard fit, and surprisingly, I was ordained as one of the extremely few people in the world who don’t look idiotic wearing one. Maybe it had to do with the size of my head, I don’t know. I stood looking in the mirror, feeling ready. I looked ready for the next thing, med school and whatever else. My stomach growled. I needed to eat something before the ceremony, or I’d have to wait until after to go to lunch with Mama and Althea. I told her that I didn’t want her to spend a lot of money, that I’d be just as happy with something simple. I meant it, but I knew even then that alongside Mama’s pride, my instinctive reserve would be negligible, especially with Althea involved. She didn’t have children of her own, and I was hers by effect, especially on occasions when having a daughter was a desirable accessory for her extremely busy life.

  “Where do y’all have in mind, Mama?” I had asked. “You’ll have to make a reservation to go anywhere today because State is graduating too.”

  “You just don’t worry about it,” she answered. “It’s gon be our surprise.”

  I put on some earrings. I probably would have worn the ones Janice took, but it didn’t matter. Instead I chose some antique-finished silver ones, and a silver chain with a cross that had belonged to Grandma, the one thing she wore every day of her life. I rubbed my fingers over the cross, it had tarnished some from years against my grandmother’s skin, sweating at work or at home, which was also mostly work. I didn’t feel particularly religious, but I had wanted that cross when she died. I wanted to wear the strength of her years and the changes she saw living them. I wanted her life to rub off on my skin and become part of my body, not relegated to memory alone. I dropped the talisman inside my blouse and unzipped the gown, disrobing and throwing it over my arm. I decided to meet Mama and Althea downstairs because if they came up to the room, Althea would have had more than a few comments about the way we had decorated it, and of all times, I didn’t need to hear that on the day I was moving out. I was leaving it forever anyway. Already I found myself caring about other things. Even if I couldn’t name them, they were the real pieces of the future, poised to spring into my path, like a roomful of invited guests on the other side of a door, waiting to yell, “Surprise!” and rush in to celebrate an occasion with me, only me, at the center of it. I pushed open the heavy front door of the building and strolled into the brightness, out onto the perfectly watered and trimmed green lawn, the sort that should be a prerequisite for all college campuses. The smell of cut grass and flowering trees overwhelmed me as I shielded my eyes against the sun to see Mama and Althea walking toward me, cameras dangling.

  “Hey!” Mama yelled. “We’re late cause Althea was bound to try on a hat. I told her nobody was gon wear a hat to graduation, it wasn’t like Easter Sunday.”

  Althea had obviously succeeded because she was holding a dark blue wide-brimmed beauty with a black satin ribbon on her head as she broke into a run. “Look at you, girl. Look at you!” she was half laughing, half crying. “It’s your day, April!” The standard line she delivered was no less sincere for having been spoken to every honoree at every imaginable occasion, but seeing the two of them run across the Shaw University campus, it felt true, specifically for me. I held onto my mortarboard, for a minute I couldn’t catch my breath, and then I broke into a run too, squealing my way into their outstretched arms.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  RHONDA

  The Grove Swim and Racquet Club has a long, curvy driveway that runs down a hill through tall pine trees on both sides and then opens up into a wide space that looks like somebody decided by-God to build a swimming pool for their neighborhood and also by-God to dig up anything and everything in the way to make room for it. Besides a huge L-shaped swimming pool and a baby pool with a fountain in it, they also put in twelve tennis courts and a two-story brick building that looks to me like it oughta be a bank but has drink machines and wood benches outside. All my imagined pictures of how nice it must be were a whole lot prettier than how it really was once I was standing there looking at it for the first time. The Grove sure ain’t a grove anymore.

  I never told anybody I went to see Wade. I thought it was pretty brave of me just showing up, but then I also thought what the hell, if it’s too weird, fuck it, I’ll just leave. I’m all the time having to talk myself into stuff. If I only did what came natural, I woulda quit a long time ago.

  The asphalt parking lot was full of cars that day, mostly brand-new ones, like shiny cellophane candy wrappers scattered in the sun. They said on TV it was gonna be ninety-three degrees by the middle of the afternoon but it already felt like twice that much to me, standing in cutoff shorts on blacktop that turned into a frying pan in summer. I guess everybody that didn’t have to work for a living thought the pool was the only place to be on a Monday in August. I can’t say I blame em.

  A long red convertible wheeled into the lot close to where I was, so fast it sent pebbles and dirt flying. Some of em hit me in the l
egs, baby yellow jacket stings, like the driver was trying her best to tear up the pavement that her own club dues had paid for. That seemed like a dumb thing to me, but I really do wonder if maybe when you’re rich you feel like you’re bound to tear up something every once in a while just to remind yourself that you’ve got plenty of money to either fix it or buy something else. Believe me, there’s lots of times I don’t give a damn and don’t mind if you know it, but I try to take care of what little bit of something I’ve got. Maybe one day I’ll have some more and if I do, I hope I’ll stay the same.

  A fat lady was working hard to lift herself out of the red car, wearing a long kaftan sort of wraparound dress, big as a bedspread, with lime green and pink ferns and monkeys hanging by their tails printed top to bottom. She breathed hard and fanned herself once she was on her feet and steady. I kept my distance. I noticed she was wearing shoes with shells on top of them and kitten heels and I wondered if she might not be better off in a flip-flop. She lowered her wide round sunglasses and looked at me over her nose, but I reckon she decided she didn’t know me and didn’t need to, so she reached into the backseat, pulled out a tote bag full of magazines, and tucked a plastic bag of carrot sticks into it. Shit, I thought. I was positive I was the only one who either didn’t belong or wasn’t invited by a “belonger.” The woman slammed her car door like she meant business, and I started to move my tail out of there, but she walked to the gate and inside, not paying me any more mind. So I stayed where I was, standing by the chain-link fence that went all the way around the pool, staring through little diamonds of wire. If I stared hard enough at the crisscrosses, everything else started to blur, but if I looked in the holes, the spaces between the wires, to what was on the other side, the fence went away. All those metal Xs started to look like nothing but a soft gray spiderweb floating at the edge of my eyeballs. I was playing, going back and forth, back and forth from plain to blurred ’til I thought I might give myself a headache messing with my eyes that way. I reckon I had been doing it for about twenty minutes when Wade blew the whistle hanging around his neck and yelled, “Adult swim!”