19.
The New Year and the Silver Moon
Two days before my debut at the Silver Moon, Louella saved me. She was cooking black-eyed peas with hog jowls and making cornbread. Along with turnip greens, this would be served on New Year’s Day. Since she was going to have the day off, she was cooking all this special stuff to store in the refrigerator, and anybody who didn’t eat it would have bad luck through the whole new year. This wasn’t just a belief of Louella’s. Everybody I knew believed it.
She broke an egg into the cornbread batter, and while I stood beside her greasing the muffin tins, she said: “If you ask me, luck’s in the Lord and the Devil’s in the people. But eating this don’t hurt.” She broke another egg into the mixing bowl. “But I sure going to need luck at the Baptists’ tomorrow. I got to get up early to make sure I get me something.”
For a minute I didn’t know what she was talking about. She offered me a taste of the pot-liquor on a wooden spoon and said: “Every year them Baptists just about fix me and my mama up for a whole year.”
Then I remembered about the New Year’s rummage sale at the Second Baptist Church. It was an annual event that I used to watch from one of the windows in my old house. Tables of goods were set up all over the church yard and sidewalks. The sale, though, could be ticklish, because often people unloaded what they’d been given for Christmas and didn’t want, and even if you held onto the gifts for several years before you donated them, sometimes the giver’s memory oudasted the receiver’s.
“What time does it start?” I asked.
“You going to go?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I just wondered.”
“Eight. But you got to get there way ‘fore that if you want anything good.”
I was there at seven. My grandparents thought I was outside cleaning Toulouse’s cage. No one could be sure how long it might take to clean a forty-five-year-old parrot’s cage, so I set Toulouse in the garage and went to the Second Baptist Rummage Sale.
Louella didn’t see me right away. But when she did, I would need a plan. I bought a stuffed bear for a quarter and asked for a shopping bag to carry him in. When Louella examined it, she assured me the Baptists were getting the best part of that deal. Half the bear’s ear was missing, and it was a putrid lavender. He had probably been a prize for knocking down wooden milk bottles at a carnival. In Louella’s opinion I shouldn’t have paid more than a dime for him. She snorted and criticized the Baptists’ greed.
After Louella left I picked through the clothes tables. Nothing seemed right. I examined every piece of clothing donated to the Baptists, and was almost ready to accept the fact that nothing would help me, when I caught sight of an army fatigue jacket. Soldiers got to go anywhere. I’d seen them on street corners late at night. They traveled all over the world. Even as young as some of them were, they got to see everything. I bought the whole uniform.
After I hid it under my bear, I walked up the alley. Overnight, in the mound of dirt that Ezekiel had set beside the outhouse, some kids had made a cross out of some sticks and set it in the ground to look like a grave.
Toulouse squawked at the sight of my bear. I hid my uniform in the hen house and took Toulouse and the bear inside in time for breakfast. Then when Louella said something about seeing me at the rummage sale, I held up the bear for my grandparents to admire.
The wrinkles in my grandmother’s face moved and her eyes watered. No doubt the sight of me holding that purple Baptist bear got to her. “Oh, well … if it makes you feel better,” she said. So the bear ended up on the Man-from-Shiloh’s bed, propped against the pillows.
The next day, the last of the year, was dry, cold, the afternoon sunny and quiet. After supper I watched a TV special about the changing of a decade and waited for my grandparents to leave. They were going to Colleen and Foster Collins’s to play bridge. Sam had told them he was taking me to a party, and they were pleased to have me out of the way and occupied.
With Sam I didn’t worry about what he’d say when he saw me in uniform. I didn’t even think it would look strange doing the midnight kiss with me dressed in fatigues. I thought it would look reckless and exciting. I’d read that sex thrived on the unexpected. Everything I did seemed fine to Sam. But with my grandparents I took special precautions, and waited until after they left for Miss Pankhurst’s house. Then I went into the bathroom to change.
“Up yours,” Toulouse said, greeting me as usual as soon as I opened the door. I hung my fatigue jacket on the shower rod. While everyone else my age might have been fooling around with friends, my peer group was Sam, B.J., Louella, Gill, my grandparents, and a middle-aged parrot. The only pressure I got to drink anything was aimed at the Inside Medicine. And the only person to make fun of how I looked was Toulouse.
“Strange. Strange,” he kept saying as I dressed carefully. “Everything in here is very strange.” He clucked his tongue at the end of it.
“Go suck a worm,” I said.
The waist of my army pants had to be drawn up with a belt. Behind me, Toulouse was watching, his beady eyes and insulting beak reflected in the mirror beside me. The trouble was that the bird had no feelings. Whatever insults I gave him he only gave me back, using them even better.
Fortunately the soldier whose clothes I’d bought had been scrawny and short. Probably it was Mrs. Hobbs’s son, who’d fought in Korea. He sold insurance now in Searcy and had a wife. I rolled up the tops of the pants. I only had loafers to wear, and I put a white shirt on under the green jacket. My hair I stuffed under the triangle-shaped hat, and I used some of my grandfather’s Brylcreem to mold sideburns. In the mirror, I thought I looked about nineteen. My uniform wasn’t exactly right, but obviously I was a soldier on leave. I was slight and short, but so had been Mrs. Hobbs’s son. And my calves looked as if they’d marched plenty.
“Pew,” Toulouse said. “Who’s been sleeping in your mouth?”
But in spite of his comment, which had really been mine, I thought I was ready. I liked the way I looked. Dressed like this, I could walk down Beale Street or into Times Square by myself. I could see and taste everything about the world and no one would bother me or make me stop.
Turning around, I got ready to go out the bathroom door into the hall. And as soon as I did, Toulouse said, as he usually did: “See ya later, queer.”
I knew that his words were only a habit. But they hit me with sickening clarity. I sucked in my breath. Did I really look like that?
While my stomach rolled up into a knot, my arms started to itch. I could put on one of those Tara dresses. I could even wear the flower girl dress left over from Miss Pankhurst’s wedding. But that idea made me a little sick, too. If I did, I’d get stuck in a corner and everyone would treat me like a little girl. Sam would probably never kiss me. But at least I’d look normal.
Gill rang the doorbell. Leaning against the glass, he saw me in the hall. For a moment we stared at each other.
Opening the unlocked door, he came in, wearing a fancy cowboy-type suit and his boots squeaking on my grandmother’s tacky rug. He looked sour; at least he wasn’t smiling. Halfway down the hall he squinted at me. Then he stopped, staring.
“Good God.” His voice was a whisper. He came close. “You get the idea we was going in costume?”
The look on his face told me that Toulouse had been right. I shook my head no, while my mouth opened with yes. “I thought B.J. told me that.”
“Well, it’s not true.” Gill blew out air, whistling over his teeth. “Not like that, anyway.” He cocked his head and looked at my sideburns. My whole head felt greasy.
Sam had come to the porch. “What’s the trouble?”
Gill took me by the arm and led me outside. Sam smelled like whiskey. His face looked swollen. I’d never seen him like that—not that bad. He seemed rushed.
Gill pointed to me on the front stoop. “She thought we were supposed to go in costume.”
Sam smiled at me. His mouth wouldn’t stay in shape, and he bit his lip and rub
bed his hands. “So what? She can if she wants to.” He walked back to the Land Rover.
“But this?” Gill was leading me down the steps.
“I don’t see anything wrong with it.” Sam opened the door to the Land Rover. “Come on. Get in.”
I turned around. “I think I’ll go change,” I said.
Sam reached toward me. “No, honey. We don’t have time. They’re holding a table for us. And besides, you look fine. I like the idea of a costume.”
Sam sat down in the Land Rover. He leaned back, looking tired. He took a handkerchief and wiped his face. Gill was still leaning on the hood of the Land Rover, studying Sam. “Oh for Christ sake, Gill, just get in and let’s go.”
Something popped in Gill. He opened the Land Rover’s door and leaned in, his voice hoarse, rising, trying to whisper, but instead rasping: “I see what you’re up to! I’ve lived with you long enough to see how you do it! You don’t think I know. But I found the empty bottle in the garbage this morning. You sat up all night—called it an allergy attack, couldn’t breathe. Well, it was an attack all right. And you think you can blame it on that girl. You think you’re miserable because she’s getting married. But you’ll use anything as an excuse: me, B.J., this girl here! It doesn’t matter. At any time, anybody can give you a reason. It only means you’re ready. You’ve gotta go. You’re on your way out right now. You’ll drink yourself into a stupor and be sick for weeks. That’s why you hired me. You think I’ll do anything to see you’re taken care of. Well, I won’t, not this time. I can see what you’re doing!”
Gill was talking so fast that my mind couldn’t catch hold of his words. But Sam pushed him. “Get in the Rover, Gill. Get in and drive or I’ll get somebody else.”
Gill looked at Sam and then turned quickly and started walking down the sidewalk toward the Mill Pond street.
“Oh, Christ!” Sam said, and opened the jeep door. But instead of going after Gill, he came to me. “Come on, sweetheart, let’s go.”
He put one hand at my back to push me along and then opened the Land Rover’s door. I sat down, scared, but obedient as usual; and I saw Gill standing in front of my parents’ house, watching us.
Sam thumped the Rover’s hood as he walked around and got into the driver’s seat. “Now,” he said as he turned the key in the ignition and let the motor grind a minute. He slowly drove off with the Land Rover seeming to just float away from the sidewalk beside my grandparents’ lawn and into the middle of the street.
At first I didn’t know what the sound was; I thought the Land Rover had been hit by a fallen tree, but then I realized that Gill had jumped onto the back of it and was standing on the bumper, mashed up against the rear window.
Sam drove on for a second, then stopped. He smiled. Gill slid off and came to the front of the Land Rover. Silently Sam got out and Gill sat down in the driver’s seat and then Sam came around and opened the door beside me. “Let’s get in back,” he said.
We drove down the street and turned the corner and headed for the highway. Gill was still angry, driving fast, turning corners so quickly that Sam and I fell against each other and had to grab the seams on the upholstery.
“You’re going to like this,” Sam said, meaning the night; and while he said it, he buttoned his coat and wiped his hands on his knees. He smelled strongly of whiskey and shaving lotion. “B.J. keeps getting better. I think Ella Jenkins has taught her a lot.”
In the dark, with only the car lights behind us, I could sense Sam staring at me. He reached up and patted the hat over my hair. “You always look so much like your mama.”
I sat quiet, still, and then he touched my hand. “Pretty soon you’ll leave.” He wiped the window glass where his breath had left a circle. “I talked to your mother today. I called her. She says things’ll be settled by spring.”
My arm itched and I felt a line of small bumps growing. Whenever B.J. got farther away from Sam, I’d figured out, that’s when he called my mother. I’d put memories together and figured out that he’d met us at the bus station in Memphis after B.J. had started going with Ron. And he’d first told my mother he loved her that summer day when I hid in the pantry, way before he’d found B.J. in New Mexico. So, in a sense, his love for my mother was like a spare tire riding in his mind that he probably knew he would never pull out and use. My mother’s unhappiness was like a yardstick for all of us. I think we sensed that if she ever became happy, she’d pull all of us along with her. But I didn’t say anything and instead stared at the back of Gill’s neck, which, in the dark, looked like a thin stalk a long way from us.
Reaching in his coat pocket, Sam gave me a box. Inside was a necklace, a gold chain with a ballet slipper. And on the toe of the shoe was a red stone. Sam laughed. “The jewelry store didn’t have tap shoes.” He laughed again. “What your grandmother doesn’t know’s not going to kill her. But we don’t want to take a chance.” He helped me fasten the clasp.
“Thank you,” I whispered while the Land Rover turned onto the highway.
Gill was still driving like the getaway man from a holdup. We sped past the truckstop and plowed-under fields. In the dark quiet, I sensed Gill’s anger at both of us, and it put Sam and me together even tighter into a stubborn team. Quietly I reached up to take off my hat and pull the pins out of my hair. Stuffing the hat in my pocket, I let my hair hang loose, wild. I knew it was ugly. But at least now I wouldn’t look as if I was trying to be anything I wasn’t. I’d just appear strange and tacky, tough and mean. But I couldn’t go on not looking like what I’d intended. And if there was a chance that the way I looked would embarrass Sam or Gill, I didn’t want to do it.
Sam watched me. Briefly he stroked my hair. His touch was soft, then he looked away.
He loved me—maybe more than anyone, more maybe than I could even care about myself—and at that moment I could feel something about both of us that made me know Sam better than I’d known anyone. It was a feeling that I’d been having ever since I was very small. It came in the dark, sometimes even the dark behind my eyelids in the middle of the day, or even sometimes when I had been laid on a bed during an afternoon to nap. I saw myself: a small bubble that with a slight gasp, popped and leaked into the air, invisible. Loose in the world like that, I was so small I didn’t count. And giving myself up that way made me think I knew a terrifying and very real thing. For I could feel my smallness, and yet in the middle there was a very hard tiny center that was me, no matter what. To bring myself back I had to concentrate on something close up: a loose thread in a bedspread, or someone’s face talking to me, or the sounds of bugs, outside, rubbing their wings together, signaling, until pretty soon I could put myself back together, layer on layer, so I was this freckled-faced kid lying on a bed somewhere, or this sort of stupid girl who’d tried to dress like a soldier but had only ended up looking queer, riding down the highway in a silver Land Rover beside a man she loved. And what I knew about Sam that one certain second was that somewhere in the middle of him, almost as certainly as if I could put my hand on it, the center of his life was shifting, moving, going someplace where maybe none of us could bring it back. Maybe his doing so was because of me.
I turned and looked at his face in the dark. The dim lights from the dashboard and from the moon outside let me see his profile like a silhouette pasted against the window. I knew every turn of his face better than I knew my own. More than anything, what I wanted was to move things around in all our lives. I knew what Sam had taught me about love: that it was to go into someone’s world and become part of their scheme of things. In his mind I was not a picture of something he wanted me to be. I simply was and would always be worthy of his love. But now he was moving out of my world where I couldn’t go—shutting me out—and it seemed that somehow it was my fault. I didn’t know how or why. Just as always, I’d ruined it.
Suddenly I grabbed his hand and began saying crazy, wild things, whispering faster than a jazz horn could blow, telling him all sorts of things that probab
ly Gill was too far away to hear, because of the distance between the seats. But even if he could hear, I didn’t care. Anyone, I’m sure, could have heard the frantic sound of me trying to reach into Sam and arrange things, change his mind, his direction, the course he was on. Over and over I told him that I wasn’t going to leave. I was going to stay with him forever. I would be good and I would always love him. I was going to marry him. “We’ll be together forever,” I said, my voice low but so full it was shaking. I hugged his arm and put my hand in his. “You and me.” But Sam, though he kissed the top of my head and patted my hand, wouldn’t look back at me. He only stared far into the dark fields on the side of the road with his eyes blurred and closing, and his head falling back against the seat, too heavy to move.
We pulled into the gravel parking lot. The tires crunched and the lights on the roof of the nightclub outlined a crescent moon. The building was of painted blocks of concrete and the windows were high slits where no one could see in or out. Cars were parked in the gravel lot in front. When the door opened to let people in, the sound of music came out.
“Dark as a hellhole in Africa,” Gill said as he opened the Land Rover’s door and prompdy stepped in a hole. Rubbing his ankle, he opened the door for me.
A man as big as Frankenstein’s monster stood at the entrance, but sure enough, with a few words from Sam I got to go in. Nobody knew what I was supposed to be, anyway. With my hair down it was evident that I was a girl, but in an army getup and my hair greasy I looked either low-class or harebrained. Even the woman at the coat-check stared at me, then looked away embarrassed when I caught her studying my face.
The piano was turned with its raw wood back facing the empty circle of floor, and with tables surrounding it. A delicious low moaning came out of it and blended with the dark voice of the woman playing it. Ella Jenkins sat behind the high top of the piano, her face as much in harmony with the color of the wood as her voice was with the notes coming from under her hands. Her eyes were closed as she rolled back, her waist curving backward while her throat let slide out the final notes of a blues song. Behind her a man playing a saxophone aimed the bell of his horn toward the ceiling and whined over the dying note of Ella’s voice. Brushes on a drum swirled and stopped.
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