“Oh, did I drop that?” he asked, his eyes wide as he smiled what he thought was a sweet look and what I thought was a putdown.
“Yes, you did.” I said with a nod, and then I waited, the girl glancing down the hall where that window was open at the end; every pane in that old window was sparkling, and beyond it there was a blue southern sky and a chilly October wind, two things that are shared by all. The girl smiled at me when the boy knelt down and collected his droppings; she wanted to let me know that he was a nice boy, that he did respect her and me both just as if we were his own. I gave my head a quick shake and turned away to hide my laugh. I can use that psychology stuff too.
“This is what they all learn,” I told Bennie one day and showed him one of their textbooks. “All these students get just enough of this stuff to put bad ideas into action.”
“And maybe some good ideas,” Bennie added. Lord, he is a good pure man. He believes in peace and he believes in nonviolence; he believes he will see it on this earth and he has still not given up on trying to get me to agree with him. “People mean well, Mary,” he said. “Look at how far we’ve come.”
“And still a long way to go.”
“But the way come has got to mean something.” Bennie was sitting there eating the leftovers his old lady had packed up in Saran Wrap. Paulette works in women’s homes, ironing and cleaning and watching Oprah Winfrey when she can. Paulette is just as good and peaceful as Bennie, and I marvel and have for years at this miracle of two such good people finding each other when the odds is so stacked against it. That was the day I told him that if I’d’ve found a black man like him rather than all those I’d had, I wouldn’t all the time be needing to ride my broom and talk so strong and ugly. “But how many men are in your league, Bennie?”
“Don’t go putting down my gender,” he said. “You’ll make me mad, girl.” I had to laugh, just the thought of Bennie all fuming was something to imagine. I got to laughing and then had to tell him what I’d seen on one of those talk shows, this fella who is trying to prove out all the differences between the white man and the black man. This fella was saying how whites are smarter and how blacks have more sex. He was saying how all those talks about black men’s equipment is right. I said, WHAT? and I near about jumped into my TV set, near about mounted my broom and flew in. I said, How do you know? You going around door to door and pulling everybody’s pants down? You going to crack skulls and measure the minds there? I know I don’t speak lots of languages. I speak English and sometimes that isn’t great but I speak the language of truth. I learned that language at the school of hard knocks. I went to school on my broom.
“Rode with your eyes closed,” Bennie added and laughed. “If they come to my house I’ll say that I ain’t about to pull my pants down until I’ve gotten Mary’s opinion and permission.”
Every now and then I need to test him. Every now and then we read just enough in one of those cast-off books to get something going. Old foolish things like if a tree falls in the forest or if you close the door is the chair still there. Bennie said, “If it ain’t, somebody did some fast moving,” and we laughed until we near about split, students eyeing us like we’d gone off the end. “Clean has to be complete, I think,” I told him one day. “If you’ve got a speck of dirt then you’ve got dirt and it’s not clean anymore.”
“So you just keep right on working,” he said. “And bit by bit it gets cleaned up.”
“I don’t know if it’s possible,” I told him. “Dirty can stay dirty without anybody’s help but clean can’t stay clean.”
“I can’t follow you today, Mary,” he said. “I give.” He waved his handkerchief like a surrender flag, then mopped his forehead and crammed it back in his pocket. “But I do believe in hard work,” he added quietly. “I believe it pays off in the end.”
“I know you do,” I said. “But you also believe in three on a match and that you ought not wash on New Year’s Day. You won’t go near a ladder that’s propped up against a wall.” He laughed, but then he got that quiet solemn look on his face, the look that says, I believe, I believe.
Bennie looks that same way when he hands me a slip of paper with his name on it that tells him to come and get hisself retired. Just like that, all his years are gone. Just like that, he opens up some fancy letter that says, “Get Out.”
“Retirement, girl,” he says. “It’s just retirement. It’s what we all wait for, what we work for.”
“There’s a catch,” I say. “It’s no different than some child with a dollar bill taped to a string to jerk out of some poor old fool’s hand.”
“It’s all in print, woman,” he says. “They’re going to pay me to set at home. I earned it and I’m going to get it. You will too in another few years. It’s good, Mary. It’s good.”
“It’s not so easy,” I say and level my eyes. “They want you out, probably got some old white fella all lined up and ready to slip into your place. I wouldn’t spend that money too soon, no sir, it’ll get snatched sure as you think it’s there.”
“Mary, Mary.” He puts his hands on my shoulders and squeezes. In all these years of working together this is the closest we’ve ever stood. I can smell the detergent of his shirt and I get a sudden picture of Paulette in some cozy kitchen with her iron pressing out his sleeves and collar. I envy her that place and all that I’ve missed by not finding somebody like Bennie for my own. If I was the woman I used to be, I’d grab the man and kiss him full on the mouth right now. I’d be telling myself, Oh yes, I can have this one if I want him, I can lay the fool flat, but now I just want to stand here and look at him. “It ain’t black or white or rich or poor or—” He pauses and then laughs and shakes me. “Or fat or skinny. It’s just got to do with age, baby. That’s all.”
“You’re sure?” I whisper and look away across what is known as the quad, where the leaves are flying in a tornado swirl of orange. I don’t want him to see my weakness; I know I’m there at the crack—the chink in my armor suit, they say. When Bennie goes his own way, I’ll be left with nothing at all. Except for a weekend phone call from one of my children or some crazy come knocking on my door to sell me brooms or Peace, Bennie is who I talk to. Bennie is who I look forward to seeing. Sometimes, if I weren’t so well seasoned with the bad weather, I’d think I might love him.
“Believe me, Mary.” His hand lifts my chin and we look at each other. “You believe, don’t you?” I nod, trying to think of something smart-ass to say when he gives me that dose of God loves you, Mary. I’ll say, well, then why don’t he send me some candy and roses. “I’m going to miss you, Mary,” Bennie says. “As tough a bird as you are. As ornery and mule-headed.” He waits for me to laugh. “I sure will miss you.” He opens his mouth to give me a little more of this sob song, this long goodbye, but I tell him to go the hell on and get his old mess of a watch. I tell him I hope it’ll keep time better than he tells a joke. I start to ask him why he waited until the last minute to tell me but I guess I know the answer. I wouldn’t have taken it well. I imagine that he’s been thinking about it for months now, him and Paulette planning out their twilight time in the evenings after he’s listened to me fuss on the rapes and the murders and the almighty white man.
Sometimes, like now as I watch him move through the leaves, the wind blowing cool and not a cloud in the sky, I even think I might believe something, just as I did as a child with a white rosebud on my chest, my mother’s sister from out of town singing “Love Lifted Me” in a clear deep voice. I felt a peaceful stirring then, much like I did with Bennie touching me. But I find it hard to believe that there’s room for peace in a world where people have to live in fear for their lives. Peace is in another world, the product of a nicer place. I’ll defend my right to walk on this earth. I’ll do my best to make sure I walk just as smooth as I can. If you slap me, then you just better brace yourself to get it right back. No sir, if you pick a fight with me, I’ll do what I have to do to put it to an end. I don’t start any fighting
but I sure will finish one off, and when I go to bed at night I owe nobody nothing and Jesus himself would be ashamed to turn on me with a look of disgust. If you throw a tomato at my back, I’ll turn around and cram it down your damn throat. If you throw a piece of trash to the ground then I’ll do my damnedest to make you feel like a worthless pig. And all the while I’ll hold my head way up high because maybe, just maybe, I am on my way to something. Maybe I might have to wait for another world to see it, and maybe I might have to read all sorts of trashy words written along the way, but just maybe there is something peaceful waiting on me, something more than a word. I watch Bennie make his way up the long stone steps at the end of the quad, the sunlight circling his path, and I imagine that Paulette cannot wait to hear him at their front door. She can’t wait to tell him that she is so proud, that she truly does believe. Because of him, she believes.
Sleeping Beauty, Revised
It’s late fall and my refrigerator is covered in autumn leaves ironed between pieces of wax paper. Every day Jeffrey brings something home from preschool, a treasure to be hung on the wall or around my neck, like the food-colored pasta necklace he presented me with today. On a Post-it alongside a bright yellow maple leaf is the name of the man I’m meeting for dinner—Phil, who is in computer sales, a friend of a friend, the first date I’ve had since I married Nick, which means the first date I’ve had in nine years.
“He’s getting a divorce, too,” my friend Sarah, who teaches with me in the junior high school, had said. Sarah is known for her matchmaking attempts, quick to seize any common variables that two people might have. “Three out of ten setups have resulted in marriage,” she said.
What? You have two legs, a nose, and a mother? So does he!
Now I’ve done everything except remove the hot rollers from my hair when our babysitter, a bubbling pepster of a girl, calls to tell me that she can’t come after all, that she dislocated her elbow while doing a back handspring in gymnastics class.
“I have an ice pack,” I say and then recognize the desperation in my voice. I force a laugh. The girl is repeating what I just said to her mother. “Of course I’m kidding,” I say loudly when I hear her mother voicing shock. “You tell your mother I was just kidding.”
Our other sitter (also a high school senior) is at a Cola Hour being given in her honor. I know because I declined the invitation with the excuse of a previous engagement (I was still having trouble saying, “I have a date”). The party was being given by a circle of well-meaning matrons who never crossed the threshold leading from the nineteen-fifties to the sixties. A similar group of ladies had given me a Cola Hour back when I was just out of college and thrilled to be getting married. At the time, the most important thing had been to get at least eight place settings of every pattern chosen down at the local department store.
“I want my fine china more than anything,” the girl had recently told me, her forehead glazed in acne. “Our pattern is Eternal by Lenox.” She said the words in a dreamy way, a hypnotic way that suggested she wouldn’t wake up until that first time she found her Eternal on the top shelf coated in dust. The happy ending comes if she can look at the dishes and laugh, and wonder why young couples don’t ask for something like a washer and dryer, a car battery that never dies. If the dishes strike some distant unfulfilled yearning, then the future may not be so bright. I told her I also had picked a pattern by Lenox: Solitaire. She had squealed and clapped her hands. She knew my pattern. It had been one of her early considerations.
I call Sarah, who is responsible for this date in the first place, but there’s just the cute little message on her machine, Sarah and hubby singing “Hey Ho Nobody Home.” I hang up and dial the blind date’s number, my mind void of pictures as the ring sounds in some unknown house/apartment/condo while some unknown man is stepping from the shower or pulling up his socks (cotton? nylon? black? white?) or driving to pick up his blind date. His machine answers but says nothing at all, just beeps.
“You be the giant,” Jeffrey says, a rolled-up newspaper in his hand. “I’m gonna knock you out and steal the golden chicken.”
“Fe, fi, fo, fum,” I say for the hundredth time today and go stand on the hope chest (the giant’s castle) at the foot of my bed. It’s only been two years since I pulled that last brand-new set of wedding sheets from the chest. Now I use it as a storage place for cast-offs: baby blankets and squeaker toys, the hunting knife and heavy flannel shirt Nick forgot to pack. I’m thinking I’d like to climb in the chest and ignore the fact that any minute a complete stranger will be at my door.
Now Jeffrey is pretending to climb, head tilted back as he stares up at me. He’s swinging a small tree limb he somehow smuggled into the house. “On guard!” He points to a stain on the carpet and says it’s a crocodile. We’ve changed scripts just that fast. I’m Captain Hook and he’s Peter Pan. I always get the sinister roles: witches and ogres and evil stepmothers. I give Snow White the poisoned apple and I make Sleeping Beauty touch the spindle and I talk Pinocchio out of going to school. I indulge my child’s fantasy life despite the recent comments I’ve received about how this might not be healthy. My aunt Lenora has suggested that this is how he’s (she leans close to whisper) dealing with divorce, these violent games.
Lenora is someone who got more education (one course here, another course there) than she could find room for in her head and has spent her whole adult life deleting whatever doesn’t match her own opinion. “Give me a weekend and I could straighten him out,” Lenora once told my mother, to which my mother simply replied, Oh dear. Lenora’s own son has chosen a sort of evangelical route (having driven away a perfectly normal wife) and now spends his weekends in front of the Family Dollar store, handing out the religious poetry that he spent the rest of the week composing. I have always wanted to tell Lenora to go to hell. I can tell that, more than anything, my dear peace-loving mother wants to say, “Lenora, go to hell.” But out of kinship or some distant childhood love, she just says things like, “Oh really, Lenora, he’s just a little boy.”
Still, in spite of my mother’s loyalty, Lenora has planted the seed, and doubts are beginning to flourish. Just the other day my mother turned, her eyes narrowed in Lenora fashion, and said, “Doesn’t it bother you that you always get the negative parts? You know, do you ever wonder if Jeffrey blames you, if he sees you as the antagonist?” That was Lenora’s word for sure. Lenora had once made it perfectly clear that though Nick had left me, she thought I was the one to blame. A man who is not well cared for will up and leave.
I am being devoured by the crocodile when the doorbell rings. Jeffrey gets there first, his Ninja Turtle headgear in place. Phil is tall and fresh-looking, crisp as a stalk of celery. He extends his hand in a firm and cool shake and steps inside, navy wool socks and loafers, khakis and an oxford cloth shirt, narrow knit tie, circular brown frame glasses; he’s the kind of man I always wanted to date in college, the kind of man Nick would size up quickly as a snob, a prep, a wimp. His eyes fix on me only a second and then he is looking around the room at the trophies and pictures and videotapes strewn about on the floor. I turn and catch a glimpse of myself in the hall mirror and quickly reach to pull the hot rollers from my hair.
“Sorry,” I say and he looks at the rollers, nods and smiles; he thinks I’m apologizing for my hair. “But I don’t have a sitter. She had an accident at school. There was just no way to get anyone else.”
“Oh.” He looks at Jeffrey, then looks back at me and shrugs. “So, we’ll all go.” He is wearing some kind of cologne which I don’t recognize; Nick always said cologne was for somebody with something to hide. I’m not sure what else he is hiding but any disappointment is covered well.
“Yeah! Let’s go. Let’s go.” Jeffrey runs and pulls his jacket from the low hook by the stairs.
“Are you sure?” I ask and he nods again. He is freshly shaven and not a scratch on his face. He looks like someone (a good guy or prince) out of one of Jeffrey’s books; I keep expectin
g him to turn to the side and become the flat straight edge of a picture page or maybe just blow away and join the ankle-deep leaves as we walk through the yard. “Fe, fi, fo, fum,” Jeffrey is saying as he crawls into the back seat. Phil holds open my door and I get in. When I look at my house, porch light and living room light on, I have an odd sense of guilt, like I’m breaking a rule or a law. It feels like I’m the one running away from home, only it’s not so easy with a thirty-four-pound walking, talking superhero.
I imagine Phil had planned to take me somewhere else, maybe the tiny dark Greek restaurant on the other side of town, a place for couples and whispers. I imagine that with Jeffrey in the back, bumping against the seat in beat with his rendition of “Fe, fi, fo, fum,” that Phil has thought better of disrupting that quiet dark meeting place for lovers and has made a quick turn into Captain Buck’s Family Seahouse. And so here we are, nets on the ceiling and all furniture vinylized. I stir my iced tea round and round, the red plastic tumbler wet against my hand.
“Rather violent, isn’t it?” Phil asks, and I jerk to attention, certain that he has seen my thoughts, my recounting of the final legal session that granted me divorce and child custody. For a single dollar (truly a rare bargain) I could have bought back my maiden name but declined since Jeffrey was stuck with the married one. Phil is talking about Hansel and Gretel and the way Jeffrey has delivered it, the mean ugly witch pushed into the oven and gassed, charred to a crisp. I don’t tell how many times in the past week I’ve sat in the pantry, cackling and then screaming at the victorious Hansel.
“It’s the same old story,” I say and nod when Jeffrey asks to go and look at the aquarium on the far wall, a huge tank with glowing tropical fish. I watch him dash through the restaurant, barely missing a waitress with a tray piled high with fried food, oysters, shrimp, or clams, they all look the same with the thick golden batter, calabash style it is called. “I mean, when I was a kid, the witch landed in the oven.”
Crash Diet: Stories Page 15