by David Haynes
“What is this shit?” I say. “You wouldn’t know hot if your leg got fried off.”
“I swear to God,” Todd goes on in his reverie. “She reads another one of those purty love poems, my little peters gonna come ripping right out of my jeans as big as life.”
At which point I turn around and start whaling on him with my world history book, which happens to be the biggest thing I can get my hands on at the time. Quick, as if it were a reflex, he balls up to protect himself from the blows. I let him off with a light work over.
“Have mercy on the poor boy, Marsh. You can see he’s in a bad way.” Artie pulls me away before I work up a second wind.
“Get off me,” I holler at sissy-boy.
“Please, Marsh,” Todd begs. “Take me with you tomorrow. I’ll be a little mouse in the corner. You won’t even know I’m there.” He says this after he’s uncurled himself and had a chance to recover from the whooping I gave him.
I tell him, “You’re fucked in the head, boy, is what your problem is. Especially if you think I’m going to spend my free hour with Ohairy. There’s something wrong with that woman. She’s trouble. You’ll see.”
“You’re just afraid you’ll learn something. You already know everything there is to know, right?” This is what Todd does—baits a person to get them to do what he wants. Todd and my mother. And maybe everyone else in the world.
“Tell him about himself,” Artie says, getting his in. I swear: just like that Betty.
I say to Artie, “You keep your bald self out of this. And as for you,” I point at Todd, “you’ll be lucky if I don’t turn around and give you some more of my fist.”
Like Gandhi, Todd opens his arms, welcoming me to hurt him some more. Either he likes it or he’s stupid.
*
And, so, of course, the next day, as we walk to Ohairy’s room, I almost have to fire him up again over the smug look on his face.
“Don’t say shit to me,” I say.
We go into her office. Ohairy is the department head, so she gets her own office, but it’s just a tiny little closet, really, as narrow as an alley with one tiny window way up high on the end of it. The whole thing looks smaller than it might because she has cluttered every space with books and papers. Plastering the walls are posters of various people such as Einstein and Alice Walker, and quotes from Emerson and from someone called Li Po.
“Welcome, boys,” she says, and she offers us some chairs. So I take the one closest to her, putting Todd a little behind me. A good thing too, because when I look back there he’s leaned back on the legs of the chair with his hands folded on his chest. He looks like the weasel that got into the hen house. I hope that his zipper hangs tough.
“What can I do for you fellows?” Ohairy says.
What is this shit: as I recall it, this meeting was her idea.
“I believe you have some things to discuss with Marshall,” chimes in Todd, a person, mind you, who never says anything to anyone, except Artie and me, but around Ohairy is a regular chatterbox, even incorporating a full range of animal noises. I shoot him a look which I hope will turn him to stone, or at least those parts of him which aren’t already rock hard.
“Forgive me, of course,” she says. “I’m preoccupied … I’m glad you’re here, Todd. You’re so quiet, I don’t know much about you. You really remind me of someone I know.” She stops a minute, rubbing her chin, giving him the once over.
“Just take a look at this. See what I put up with,” she says and passes me a letter of some kind. I hold the note at an angle which forces Romeo behind me to put his chair on the floor in order to see.
“Oh, you wanted to see this?” I query. Todd grabs my arm.
“Isn’t that pathetic?” she asks.
All I see is this memo from her to the principal: something about starting a current events discussion club. At the bottom someone has written “We’ll see.” I’m completely lost, but Todd is shaking his head like an old dog in sympathy with—well, whatever it is we’re supposed to be in sympathy with. I’m looking around for a bucket of cold water to douse him with.
I’d join something like that,” Todd says encouragingly. Then he asks me, “Why are you looking at me that way? I really would.”
“Sure,” I say. “Sure you would.”
“Thank you, Todd. That’s why I showed it to you. We need people like you boys around here. I think we could start some interesting things around here.” Ohairy’s color is almost as red as Todd by now. “Nevertheless, all the support I get around this … institution is, ‘we’ll see.’”
Somewhere between Yeats and now I’ve gotten lost.
I’m sorry about your little club,” I say, and from behind me I hear a gasp and my name said as if I’d just picked my nose in public or something. A sharp index fingernail stabs pointedly at my chest.
“Which reminds me of your poets,” She backs up by the door. She’s got one hand on her tailored, gray-suited hip and the sharp finger still pointed in my direction.
“I thought about what you asked me for. I decided to loan you this.” She hands me a book. It is called Voices of the World. “It’s a big world out there. Not just about blacks and whites, or Marshall Finney. Or me, or Todd either.”
Todd has leaned forward now, resting his elbows on his knees nodding in solemn agreement. I decide right then that he will be paying for this attitude at a later date.
She carries on. “The whole world could blow up at any time. Instant death for everyone. Aren’t you boys absolutely scared to death? I know I am. And these preppies out here! … So ignorant! So self-involved!”
I try to figure out what the hell she’s talking about so I can plan which look to get on my face: shock? indignation? retardation? I look at Todd. Thin-skinned, sweet Todd: he’s blinking back tears.
Miss Jane Fonda O’Hare works up to her big finish. “Can’t we at least talk about this stuff at this school? Just—maybe—it’s not too late and—maybe—we can make a real difference. And,” she snatches the memo back, “I’m going right now to talk to someone about starting our discussion group.”
“I’d like to come, too,” says Todd.
Just like that the two of them are out the door.
“Join us, Marshall,” Ohairy says over her shoulder.
I decline.
I’m left sitting there as the two of them blaze off in their passionate fury. So I figure I’ll talk to the plants. “Hey, plants,” I say, I’m interested in important things as much as the next person. As much as a person with my life is able to be.”
Then I figure I better clear out of Ohairy’s office before I get accused of stealing something.
*
On the bus back home Todd’s sullen window-staring takes on a new intense coloring; something more than self-pity perhaps.
He comes to long enough to speak to me. “I think we’ll get our club,” he says.
“Gods be praised.” I answer.
“This is important, Marsh,” he whispers.
I nod begrudgingly, giving him his due. Sweet Todd: Peace on Earth, bless his heart, that’ll be the only piece he gets.
*
Item by item, I pack away Rose’s life. Sneakily at first, starting with things like the pea-sized ceramic unicorns she collected as if they were gold dust. The little hand-painted poodles, too. Actually, what I do first is to pull the cheap mystery novels off the shelf and tear out the last chapter. I get into a rhythm, ripping to the beat of the videos. Then I figure, “what the hell,” she’d already read them anyway, so I save the energy and just pitch them. Not even someone like her rereads mysteries. Some things were so disgusting: I threw away all of these eighty-nine-cent nail polishes in ridiculous colors like raspberry frost and lilac mist. Imagine having a mother who wears the same nail polish as the sophomore class president.
So, I’m cleaning and the phone rings and it’s her.
“Marshall,” she says, “it’s me.”
I don’t say a word
.
“I didn’t expect this to be so hard,” she says.
“Sam’s not home from work.”
“I know. I know that,” she says. “Lord, don’t tell me when my own husband works.”
There is a long pause, a lot of static on the line.
“Um, Marshall. I’ve got some things figured out. I want to tell them to you.”
“Your things?”
“I want you to listen to me.”
“You want me to send your things to you?”
There’s only some sort of breathing on the line.
I’ll send them to your family,” I say, and then there’s only some more of that breathing filling the silence. So I hang up.
Right then and there I decide to let her crap rot right on the hangers. Let the moths eat each and every stitch.
I stash only the eyesores: ugly beige and brown rocks that serve no purpose, plastic beads, stamps torn from the corners of envelopes—the doo-hickeys that gather dust on every possible place they can perch in this, our … my house. I pack her memory from view so that Big Sam and I can rest easy.
After which comes the call from Aunt Lucille.
“Marshall, no silly stuff,” she says, “I’m coming to get some things for your mother.”
“You’ll have to talk to Sam.”
“I’m talking to you,” she says.
I learned young you don’t mess around with Ms. Lucille Robinson. A little seven-year-old boy I once knew told her more or less to mind her own business. She fired his little behind up real good—so good I think it’s still stinging to this day.
What else you don’t do is put Sam Finney in the same room with Lucille, at least not without police escort, you don’t. The former Lucille Diggs and her sisters, my aunts and now dead grandma, are big lightskinned women—black women with blond and red hair—who fought their way to big money jobs in stuff like social work, and they’ll be happy to tell you that they didn’t take no crap from nobody getting there.
“Yes, ma’am,” I says to Aunt Lucille on the phone. I tell her to come and do it now, quick, before Sam gets home from work.
*
Lucille packs everything away, even things I’ve neglected. I help her to load it into her Lincoln. What she doesn’t take we fill with mothballs and cram into the crawlspace above the kitchen. Artie and Todd are there, standing by, playing chess, watching “Star Trek.” Lucille gives them the evil eye because she’s got “some things she wants to discuss.” Nothing you’d discuss in front of “company.”
“Wouldn’t be no sitting around were this my house,” she says.
“It’s not,” I mumble.
She grabs the fleshy part of my ear and twists. I’ll deal with you later. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”
I can only relax after she’s gone and the deed’s done. The boys and I have a good laugh. Out of sight, out of mind.
*
That night I can feel Sam’s eyes on my back.
“Marshall, come here.”
I follow him to the bedroom. The drawers to the dressers stand open. So do the sliding closet doors.
“Where are they?” he says. He says it in a strange, quiet voice.
My eyes follow the sculptured patterns on the bedroom rug. Around and around it goes.
“Look at me. What did you do? Tell me.” He shoves me back out the door just hard enough that I bounce into the wall. He starts yelling. “I asked you a question. You know so damned much.”
He snatches a handful of his own clothes from the closet. He hurls them at me. In a shower the rags fall around me.
“Well?” he demands.
I retreat toward the living room.
“You’re the big man. What have you done?” he yells.
I see him behind me in the curlicue mirror, opening the linen closet, emptying towels and soap and toilet paper, kicking it, throwing it. The steam iron sails over my shoulder cracking my reflection. Suddenly there are hundreds of Marshalls.
In the kitchen he smashes plates. He sweeps cans and canisters to the floor with a single swipe across a shelf or a counter. All the time screaming, “What have you done? What have you done?”
Sitting on the couch, I cower beneath my arms, my head down on my knees. I can hear myself. I’m chanting.
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry.”
Big Sam stands over me. His whole body shakes. His face and arms are shiny wet. Both hands vibrate. He clenches them in fists by the side of his head. Tightly clenched. They resemble large brown hams.
“What did you do?” he says. A whisper.
A voice from the door says, “The boy didn’t do nothing. I did.”
Then Aunt Lucille says, “Touch him. Go on. There’ll be a new face in hell tomorrow morning. My guarantee. Something told me … God it was told me … Lucille Robinson, turn this car around, your family is in need. Praise his holy name. And have mercy on your soul Sam Finney if you move another muscle.”
The fists drop. A big swollen hand reaches in my direction.
“Don’t. Don’t you dare,” Lucille says.
“I might have figured on you,” he says. His voice is full of remorse and defeat and fatigue. He stumbles through the piles of linen and towels down the hallway. He closes the door to his room behind him.
Lucille stands above me at my back, gently rubbing my shoulder, watching him go. She bends low and says in a voice like honey, “I guess I saved your butt. This time.”
5
THE NEXT MORNING Sam says to Lucille, “I see you’re still here.”
Obviously. She has made herself a lovely nest right on the green-plaid sofa using some of the linens Sam so graciously distributed for her.
“Thought I’d visit with my nephew a few days, if you don’t mind.” She is real cool and casual about this.
“If I did?” mumbles Sam.
I get a good look at Lucille. She is frightful. Her yellowish skin has blotches of pink here and there where the buttons on the couch stabbed her in the night. Her thick reddish-colored Afro stands at attention around her head in matted clumps. She has draped herself in a floral printed sheet of unfortunate greens and pinks, made it into a toga-like thing. Like a clown she looks, or like Miss Liberty herself, due to the spatula that’s upright in one hand like a torch.
“Who are you looking at with a face like that?” she says to me. “Best get these eggs while the getting’s good.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say. Big Sam shakes his head in disgust. He gets in his pickup truck and disappears for the day.
*
Saturday.
Sam’s been making himself scarce during Lucille’s stay. Lucille has scrubbed, baked, and washed her way from one end of the crackerbox to the other.
Lucille is a widow woman, or that’s what Sam calls her. In fact she has put three husbands in the ground in her fifty years and, also according to Big Sam, is not without a gentleman friend for too long, even these days. She must be between engagements at present. Lucille has a big rambling house in the Central West End, which Rose always describes as a showplace and, also according to Rose, the delivery trucks from Famous-Barr never stop coming after a sale, so well-set financially is she from the various deceased cohabitors of the so-called showplace. Ask Lucille what she does for a living, though, and mysteriously the husbands disappear. She tells you she is something called a churchwoman—out here doing the Lord’s work. This evidently has something to do with delivering meals and ministering to the sick and shut-in, and is somehow associated with the congregation of the Union-Central West Missionary Full Gospel Tabernacle with which Lucille has been affiliated for going on a dozen years—ever since her rebirth from heathendom during a notoriously rowdy family picnic in Forest Park.
The Lord’s work apparently also leaves you time to move in with relatives as needed.
“Now we’ve got this house straightened up and respectable, we’ll have time to v
isit,” she says. I quick get on the phone and get Artie and Todd over here for the day.
*
“Aren’t you a couple of nice young men,” Lucille says to them. “Tell me: do your mamas really allow sitting up in other folks’ houses all day?”
To which Artie says “Oh, no, ma’am, Miss Lucille. We sure are pleased to have been invited to spend some time with you today.”
I wink to let him know this is just the kind of crap I want dished out.
Lucille says “My, my, isn’t this a polite gentleman. You can certainly tell who’s had a proper upbringing around here.” I can tell she is also admiring Barbie’s doll clothes. Old Artie grins from ear to ear.
I indicate with my mouth to ignore Lucille, which for some reason is so funny to the boys that they snicker right in her face. Lucille is nothing if not gracious. She sets about in the kitchen to make us some lunch.
On Rose’s dinette table she lays a yellow polka-dotted tablecloth, which she must keep in her purse, because I’ve never in my life seen it around this house. Then she sets four places to which she calls us in from the TV where we are playing Mario Brothers. I want to finish the game, but I am assured by Artie that would not be polite. He makes his point by turning off the set.
When we get settled, she places at each seat a tumbler of iced tea with a lemon wedge straddling the rim. Then she puts down a plate on which an elaborate lunchmeat sandwich has been arranged between some slices of tomato and a mound of freshly made potato salad. Even a sprig of parsley (or some other kind of green stuff) sprouts out of the salad like a miniature tree in a yellow desert.
I’m really impressed with all of this food, all of the trouble she’s gone to. So much so, I go to take a big swig off the iced tea, which is about the most refreshing looking thing I’ve seen in ages. Just then, there is a sharp stinging slap on my hand.