by Gayl Jones
“We did it again last night,” May Alice said.
We were on the stairs going up to class. She had a torn place in the hem of her skirt.
“May Alice, you better quit.”
She said nothing.
“He ought to quit if you won’t,” I said.
“You know a boy won’t quit.”
“Why not?”
She laughed. “Anyway,” she said, “they be after it till you tell them to stop. But then after you start giving them some, you wouldn’t feel right to tell them to stop. I mean, you wouldn’t feel you had any right to tell them to stop.”
“I would.”
“Who you gave some to?”
I said nothing. She turned to go in her class. I kept on walking.
There was a boy at school who used to rub up against girls. Once when it was crowded and we were all going to the cafeteria he rubbed up against me. I wouldn’t hardly eat for a whole week, thinking he’d given me a baby, even though I knew from May Alice that you couldn’t get them unless you had it in you. I wouldn’t eat because I thought starving myself would get rid of it. Mama had kept saying, don’t you want such and such a thing, you better eat, Ursa, and I would keep saying I wasn’t hungry. And then she had said, “You die if you don’t eat.” I don’t know how long I could have kept it up, but then May Alice’s own scare drove me back to eating again. Yes, she had had a scare before she got really pregnant. She thought she was pregnant and kept asking me whether she should take a coat hanger like she heard some people did. I’d told her it would probably ruin her more doing that than if she went on and had the baby. She wasn’t even acting like she used to, like she would act when she was so sure of herself. She said she knew all about having babies but not how to get rid of them. I asked her didn’t she know how to keep from having them. She said, Yeah, but Harold was getting so now he was getting careless, and I asked her wasn’t she getting careless too. She said it was just that now she didn’t like to ask him to use something, and didn’t want to tell him to pull out.
But then her period had finally come that time. It was the next time that it didn’t. At first she kept telling me it was only because she’d been eating too much. “I’ve just been eating too much, I’ve just been eating too much, that’s all,” she kept telling me. But that day when she couldn’t tell me that anymore, I skipped class with her and we spent the whole afternoon sitting down in the wheat field, and she kept hugging me and crying, and hugging me, and saying why couldn’t I have been Harold and then nothing would have happened. I didn’t know what she was talking about then. She just kept hugging me.
She said her mama found out because she got suspicious when she’d stopped finding blood in her underwear when she did the wash. She’d tried to tell her that she’d washed it out herself, but her mama said she never did before, and took her down to Midway and had Dr. Roach examine her. May Alice said she wouldn’t even look at the doctor, she just kept rolling her eyes at him. She said it wasn’t like when you were making love or playing doctor, when a man opened your legs and looked at you down there. She said it was the most embarrassing thing a woman could go through. She said all she did was roll her eyes at him. Then she said the next week when her mama went to find out the results, she came back home and slapped her, and said the only reason she didn’t keep slapping her was because she didn’t want to be responsible for anything happening to the baby, and keep her from paying the consequences she deserved to pay.
May Alice kept asking me to go tell Harold she was sorry, but I wouldn’t. I said she shouldn’t be sorry, he should be. But she just kept telling me to go tell Harold she was sorry, like it was her fault.
“He won’t come to see me,” she would say. “Ursie, go tell him I’m sorry. He’s mad at me. I know he is.”
“He ain’t got no right to be mad at you,” I said. “You should be mad at him.”
“Go tell him I’m sorry, please.”
“I can’t tell him that.”
“Ursie, please.”
I finally got up enough nerve to go tell Harold she said she was sorry.
“It ain’t me, it’s my mama,” he said, and got away from me real quick.
The next time she asked me to tell him she was sorry, I wouldn’t.
I was back in her room with her when Harold’s mama came to talk to her mama. They had started to say something, but then May Alice’s mama said why didn’t they go out in the yard and talk, because she knew we could hear. May Alice and me went in the front room and watched them from the window, but couldn’t hear anything.
“His mama just got out of the hospital having a baby herself,” she said.
“How you know?”
She said nothing, then she said, “When we did it the last time, he was home by hisself. She was in the hospital then. His daddy hadn’t come home from work yet.”
I said nothing. I just kept looking out at the two mamas talking, and wondered what it would be like if one of them was mine, and the idea frightened me.
“What are they going to do?” I asked.
“His mama sho is ugly,” she said, instead of answering. “She’s the only one in the family that’s ugly. I don’t see what Harold’s daddy see in her anyway, except but she’s probably real good in the bed.”
I said nothing. I just kept staring out at the two women.
When I got back home, Mama had found out about May Alice’s pregnancy. I hadn’t told her, but I guessed by now the word had started slipping out.
“I told you not to have nothing to do with that girl. I told your grandmama I used to see her back in that grass back there. Young as she is too. Girl like that, it ain’t nothing but shaking hands. Let her see how hard he’s gon be shaking her hand now. Nothing but shaking hands. I reckon you listen to me now, Ursa.”
I said nothing.
“You hear me, don’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I didn’t see May Alice again until she had had the baby. She was in the hospital, in a room with all these other women whose stomachs were swollen out. I almost hadn’t gone in when I saw the rest of them, but May Alice had seen me, and I wouldn’t have felt right if I’d turned around and left.
“I didn’t think you liked me no more.”
“I like you, May Alice.”
“Harold don’t.”
I just stood there. She told me I could sit on the bed, but I wouldn’t. I kept looking at her because I didn’t want to have to look at the other women.
“You looking at me so funny,” she said, and tried to laugh.
“Naw I’m not.”
She said nothing, and then she started telling me how pretty the baby was.
“Did you go see him?”
“Naw, they wasn’t showing the babies when I got here.”
“Aw. Maybe you get to see him tomorrow.”
I said, “Yes,” but I knew I didn’t want to come back.
May Alice started smiling.
“What you smiling at?”
“It’s a hurt that feels good too. I mean afterwards. You remember what I told you and you wouldn’t believe me.”
I nodded.
She started telling me how the baby felt coming out from between her legs.
“Don’t tell me about that.” I stepped away from the bed.
“When it happens to you, you’ll be wanting to talk about it too.”
“Naw, I won’t, cause it ain’t gonna happen to me.”
“Don’t be such a baby,” she said. “When you started bleeding you still acted like a baby. I bet when you have your first man in you, you’ll still act like you do now. Like a baby.”
I turned away and ran out. I didn’t want to see May Alice anymore.
I remember when I got home I ran up to Mr. Deak’s store.
“Mr. Deak, whatever happened to Mr. Melrose?”
“Honey, that ain’t nothing for you to hear.”
It wasn’t until I was about fifteen that I learned from reading
back papers in the school library that him and some man got in a fight at the Spider Web—not the Spider where I was to work later, but the old Spider Web that was long since torn down—and that he had either shot or knifed the man, the paper wasn’t too sure which. But now Mr. Melrose was in jail, and the police had claimed they still didn’t know whether the man he had shot or knifed had had anything to do with his daughter. They still didn’t know why she’d killed herself. John Willie, of the police department, had said, “There’s some things them people just won’t let be our business no matter how hard we try. We still asking around though.” I felt like going down to the county jail to ask Mr. Melrose, but I knew Mama wouldn’t let me, and even if I had gotten in there, I figured Mr. Melrose would either think I was crazy, or resent me for meddling. I don’t think anything ever worked me up so much as that woman, and I hadn’t really known her, or paid that much attention to her, just seen her, because she was twenty-some years old, and a woman, and I was only a kid, but somehow I’d kept tying her and May Alice together. I don’t know why I did. And it was always May Alice laying up there in that alley.
I never went to see May Alice no more, and then finally she and her mama moved to Georgetown, Kentucky. I’d seen her a few weeks after she got back with the baby, though. She’d stayed in for the first few weeks. I don’t know if it was because her mama believed in those forty days or felt ashamed. But as soon as May Alice did come out, I saw her. It was hard not to see anybody in Bracktown. I was going across the railroad track to go to Mr. Deak’s store, and she was coming back from there.
“Why you hate me?” she asked.
She still had on one of her maternity dresses even though her stomach wasn’t big anymore.
“I don’t hate you.”
“Yes, you do. You ain’t been to see me.”
“I didn’t know you’d be having company.”
“You know you could come. You my best friend, ain’t you?”
I said nothing.
“Did what I said in the hospital make you mad?”
I shook my head.
“Yes it did. That’s why, ain’t it?”
“Naw.”
“Why then?”
I said nothing.
“All right. Hell,” she said. “I ain’t gonna stand here. Least you could do for somebody is tell ’em why you don’t like ’em. Shit. You ain’t nothing but a baby. I was just talking, thought maybe I could help you. Even if a man stuck a dick as big as a tree up in you, you wouldn’t get help. All you like to do is watch.”
“I don’t.”
“You was, wasn’t you?”
She started laughing. I wanted to say something real nasty to her, but instead I ran across the railroad track without looking. For a long time after that, I would just sit up trying to think of things that would have sent her running. Once Mama came by while I was whispering something and slapped me. “Who taught you that? I ain’t taught you that.” I just kept looking at her. But after that day, though, me and May Alice didn’t speak to each other, and then finally her and her mama moved. I don’t know if her father ever knew about her baby because she said he lived up in New Jersey, where he could get a job, and would send them home money. I just wondered why they moved to Georgetown and didn’t go up to New Jersey somewhere.
When I first had people liking my singing, it was down at that place that was more somebody’s house than a restaurant. When Mama found out she came and got me.
“I ain’t gon have you singing no devil music. Me over there sitting up in church trying to praise God, and you over at Preston’s singing to the devil.”
“What about Grandmama’s old blues records? You didn’t say nothing to her.”
She didn’t answer, then she said, “That ain’t the devil coming out of your own mouth.”
I told her she didn’t have to embarrass me, pulling me out of Preston’s like that, with all them people watching. She coulda just told me. She said she ain’t never known no Corregidora to behave with just telling. That was when I told her I wasn’t no Corregidora. She just kept looking at me, and then she told me she better not catch me down there at Preston’s no more or else I have the devil coming out of my behind as well as my mouth.
We just kept having riffs like that until I just got on the bus and came to the city. I read in the paper where they needed somebody at Happy’s. When I got there I just kept standing outside the place, afraid to go in. There was this man that come by, and just stood there and watched me. I was almost as afraid of him as I was to go in.
He said, “Whose woman is you?”
I wouldn’t look at him.
“ ‘Whose woman is you’ I asked.”
I still wouldn’t answer.
“You got your bitch on today, ain’t you?”
I stood there.
“I said, ‘Ain’t you got your bitch on today?’ ”
I think I got up enough nerve to go inside just because I wanted to get rid of him. Tadpole liked me right off, and I got the job.
“I bet you some man’s good woman, ain’t you?”
Tadpole had put the man out.
When I first saw Mutt I was singing a song about a train tunnel. About this train going in the tunnel, but it didn’t seem like they was no end to the tunnel, and nobody knew when the train would get out, and then all of a sudden the tunnel tightened around the train like a fist. Then I sang about this bird woman, whose eyes were deep wells. How she would take a man on a long journey, but never return him.
Mutt kept looking at me. Somehow I thought he would come up and say something to me like the other men did who’d looked at me like that. I hadn’t wanted them or anything, but they’d come. His look was like theirs and somehow different too. He kept coming into the place, and somehow, even though he’d never come up to me, and I’d never said anything to him, he got to be the man I was singing to. I would look at him when I began a song, and somehow I would be looking at him when I ended it. He kept coming into the place, and then one night he got up and asked me to join him at his table.
“Where did you get those songs?”
I’d sung the ones about the tunnel and the bird woman again.
“I made them up.”
“They real nice. I like the way you sing.”
He asked me what I wanted to drink. I said beer.
He looked surprised. “Nothing harder? You give the impression of liking bourbon.”
“No, that’s all I drink.”
He grinned. “You not such a hard woman. You try to sing hard, but you not hard. I bet you try to talk hard, too, don’t you?”
I didn’t answer.
“You don’t have to say nothing,” he said.
The waitress brought me my beer, and him his whiskey. We said nothing for a while and he kept looking at me. I didn’t look at him, and then I looked at him. “What?” I asked.
“I feel I know you from way back,” he said, and then he started telling me about some trouble he got in when he was back home. He didn’t tell me where home was, and I didn’t ask.
“I was wrong, though, but I got off.”
“How could you get off if you was wrong?” I asked.
“Cause he wouldn’t a did nothing to me, judge wouldn’t.”
“Why?”
“On account of him and my daddy. Yeah, cause he knew if it wasn’t for my daddy he wouldn’t even be the judge down there. You know, my daddy worked for him. It’s a little town. You know how in these little towns they even make a farmer a judge. They made Judge Tackett a judge and he didn’t have nothing but a ninth-grade education. ‘You have to be a lawyer to be a judge,’ that’s what my daddy told him. Judge Brackman’s a lawyer, you know. Well, he was running for election, and my daddy said, ‘You a lawyer. Why don’t you tell them you got to be a lawyer to be a judge.’ So that’s what Judge Brackman did, said you got to be a lawyer to be a judge. He used it in his campaign speech, and he got elected too. Tha’s why now anything I do there, I can get off
of it.”
“Anything?”
“Wasn’t nothing but a traffic charge,” he said with a smile. “I ain’t a bad man. I can be hard sometime, but I ain’t bad.” He looked at me carefully for a moment. “Naw, you ain’t no hard woman.”
“I know my way around,” I said. I don’t even know why I said it, it was just like it came out. I wasn’t even sure it was true. It was just that I was singing in a place where a woman would know her way around.
“Do you?” he asked.
I drank my beer.
“My name’s Mutt.”
“Oh.”
“I thought you might like to know who you talking to.”
“Yes. I’m …”
“I know who you are.”
I smiled, still holding my glass.
“You scared of me, ain’t you?”
“Why do you say that?”
“The way you look at me.”
“Naw, I’m not scared.”
I drank some more beer and put the glass down. I was thinking of how the first night I saw him in there his hair hadn’t been combed, and every night after that, he’d combed his hair. I smiled.
“What you smiling at?”
“Nothing,” I said, still smiling.
He smiled. “You’ll get over that,” he said.
“What?”
“Being afraid of me.”
He looked around him.
“This ain’t really a good place for a woman.”
I said I liked it.
He didn’t say anything else about it, then. It wasn’t until later that he started saying other things. He was a big man, not heavy, but tall big.
“I like you,” he said. “I got some Delia Reese records. She’s my woman. I like you though. I mean, I don’t just like your singing, I like you too.”
I said nothing.
After a while, he said very quietly, “You got somebody?”