by Jim Grimsley
“It’s a good thing I didn’t see you wearing it first, is all I got to say.” Papa laughed and turned to Mama, but she wouldn’t meet his eye.
“Aunt Delia is pretty but she ain’t nowhere near as pretty as Mama,” Amy declared hotly. “She’s fatter, that’s all.”
At that everyone laughed and the awkwardness passed. But Mama had not failed to notice the exchange of looks between Papa and Delia. Papa watched the dress a little too long. Delia, for her part, watched Papa even longer, through eyes slightly narrowed.
IF DELIA was angry she didn’t show much of it for the next two days. In the morning she and Papa sat at the kitchen table joking with each other while Mama fixed breakfast for them both. Mama kept their cups full of coffee. She said Delia and Papa chattered away like they were the best friends in the world. Delia could make anybody laugh when she wanted to. She talked as if she were in a fever, telling story after story about the Totes, till Papa’s face turned positively ugly with laughter. Mama sat next to him, her hand on his large knee, sipping coffee quietly.
After Papa left, Mama washed the dishes while Delia dried them and put them away. Delia smoked cigarettes, tapping ashes into the double grocery bags that collected trash beside the refrigerator. Mama felt better with Papa at work, partly because she didn’t have to worry about his mood, and partly because Delia behaved more like the sister Mama remembered when she and Mama were alone. Delia helped get you and Amy ready for school. Mama watched the careful way Delia arranged Amy’s dress and the precise combing she gave your hair, understanding from both that Delia cared for you children. Afterwards Delia would offer to serve Mama breakfast, which Mama refused because Mama never ate breakfast, or she would offer to get Mama a cup of coffee, which Mama would let her do. During the course of the day she made Mama sit down and rest while she did a little of the housework.
Once she asked, “Mae Ellen, can you ever trust a man to treat you right?”
This came during a serious conversation in the afternoon, when the two of them stood at the clothesline hanging up a load of towels Mama had washed. Mama took the clothespins out of her mouth. “Nobody ever does treat you right all the time,” she answered.
“But with men, it seems like the more they’re supposed to be good to you, the worse they treat you. Like the way Carl acts.”
“I think all men do things like that.”
“Even Bobjay? Has he ever two-timed you?”
“Not that I know of.” Mama pushed back hair, studying the sky, clean as her kitchen table and blue as a baby’s eyes. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if I found out he had.”
Delia sneered. “But him and his family are so good. He’d never admit that his people would do anything trashy like run around on their wives or their husbands.”
“Bobjay don’t like my family. He never has and he never will.”
“He don’t have to talk about us like we’re some kind of poison.”
“I don’t know why he does. But when I ask him not to say the things he says, it doesn’t do any good. I’ve got so I don’t ever mention Mama or Corrine or any of the rest. It sets him off and I can’t stop him, and I can’t stand what he says.”
Delia absently pinned towels to the line. “Have you ever cheated on Bobjay?”
“No,” Mama said, “I would never do anything like that.”
“Never?”
“How could I look my younguns in the face and try to raise them to do right?”
“Sometimes Bobjay acts like he thinks you have.”
When Mama asked what made her think that, she became silent, watching the line of trees across the fields, a low wind lifting her hair. After a while she said it was a feeling she got from watching him sometimes.
The conversation left Mama wondering about Delia more than ever. It crossed her mind that Papa might have told Delia the story of the photographer when they were alone. In the afternoon Delia sat in the living room gazing out the window or at the television, speaking now and then, seriously, about their mother’s health, or Raeford’s drinking that was getting worse every day, or about their niece Katy who was going to have a baby soon, but most often about Delia’s boyfriend Carl Edward and the girl in the shed. Nothing had ever hurt her worse than that, she said. That black bitch squealing like a stuck pig, wrapping her midnight legs halfway up Carl Edward’s back, him with his overalls wrapped around his knees. Delia had run to her Mama and cried. Her family was all she had in the world. She wanted to slap Papa when he said those ugly things about the Totes; it had been all she could do to keep from jumping at him from across the room. Mama said it made her angry too, but she knew better than to say too much. She knew her family had done the best they could with what they had, but Papa couldn’t understand that. He had grown up a different way. If she disagreed with him it only started another argument, and God knows there had been arguments enough.
When Papa came home Delia was a different person. Suddenly she hadn’t a care in the world, she joked and laughed and told so many funny stories nobody could help but enjoy her. Mama liked it because you children were happy and tried to clown yourselves; it made you all look more like other people’s children, she thought. But she didn’t trust Delia’s good humor. She didn’t like the looks Papa gave Delia during the jokes and the stories. She especially didn’t like Delia’s making such a point of telling Papa what a good-looking man he was.
That night at bedtime Papa said he was glad Delia had come to visit. He hadn’t enjoyed himself so much in a long time. Mama answered that she could tell that without his saying so. Papa, who had been unbuttoning his shirt, stopped and watched her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Mama said softly, “I guess I don’t really know. I guess I’m jealous. You make so much fuss about Delia. You said she looked prettier than me in my own wedding dress.”
Papa declared, “I never said that!”
“I heard you with my own ears. You said if you had seen her wearing it first you’d probably have married her.”
He gazed at Mama shaking his head as if she were crazy. “You and your whole family got the filthiest minds in the world.”
“My family doesn’t have a thing in the world to do with it,” she said, and got into bed.
Papa turned out the light but didn’t come to bed right away. In the darkness he stood by the window and smoked a cigarette. He ground out the butt in the windowsill and lay beside her. She waited, but he didn’t touch her or speak to her. She began to feel silly and was on the point of saying she was sorry, when he cleared his throat and said coldly, “Anyway, it ain’t that she looks better in that dress. It’s just that I like you so much in your red one.”
He fell asleep not long after. Things like that never bothered him. But Mama lay awake a long time, gazing upward into the darkness.
NEXT DAY Mama found it hard to talk to Delia at all. She caught herself watching Delia at odd moments, wondering what she was thinking, wondering why she watched Papa with that too-cool gaze. This was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Breakfast went much the same as before, Papa eating his scrambled eggs without a word of thanks, telling Delia a dirty joke he had heard at work the day before, grinning like a fool when Delia exclaimed that he was such a card! Papa asked Delia how long she meant to stay and Delia answered that she hadn’t decided but she wouldn’t miss Mama’s good Thanksgiving dinner for anything, she said. Mama hid her frown behind her coffee cup, feeling ashamed of herself. But still she wished Delia were leaving today.
Amy and you were happy that morning, since this was the last day of school before Thanksgiving holiday. While eating your bowls of warm oatmeal you chattered about school, about your teachers, about the chance of snow, till Mama told you both you were probably the most ridiculous younguns she had ever heard of. She stood at the door and watched you till the orange bus picked you up. The sad look on her face stayed with you all day long.
She did her housework, Delia helping, talking quietly about this and that. Wi
thout being asked, Delia made lunch: cheese sandwiches fried in butter, and hot potato soup. The food reminded Mama of meals her mother made when she was a little girl. They talked quietly with the television buzzing in the next room. The afternoon passed slowly. Delia asked if Mama was cooking a turkey for Thanksgiving. Mama said it would have to be chicken, because turkey was too high. “We got so many bills,” Mama said. “Besides, one kind of bird is as good as another.”
Amy and you came home to find them in the living room, Delia with her hair in rollers, a cigarette dangling from her fingers, sending up a trail of smoke. Mama peeled potatoes, holding the pot between her knees. She watched a game show where people like her made thousands of dollars in nothing flat. Amy and Delia talked about hair rollers. Amy wanted Delia to roll her hair. “Except I won’t let you do it if you roll it as tight as you did the last time. It gave me a headache for a week.”
You, Danny, went into the kitchen to pour yourself a glass of cold tea, and there you found Allen and Duck eating peanut butter crackers Mama had made. You drank the tea and ate the crackers with them, till Mama came in to soak the potatoes, tussling your hair and asking, “Are you glad there’s no school tomorrow? Did the teacher give you a lot of homework?”
You made a face. “She gave us this spelling stuff. We have to write this story about anything we want to, but we have to use all the spelling words for next week.”
“Is that hard? Seems like to me that might be fun.”
“Even if it’s hard I still have to do it.”
She smiled at you and said, “I’ll help you think up a story. I used to be good at making up little stories when I was in school.”
“We also had all this adding. But I did most of it on the school bus. And we have to read in the geography book, about this island.”
“I’ll fix you spaghetti this weekend,” Mama said, “if you study hard. You have to be smart if you want to go to college.”
“Danny’s too smart for his britches,” Amy hollered from the living room. “The teachers don’t like it if you be too smart.”
“You hush.”
“You make me.”
“You make me make you.”
“If I’d of made you, you wouldn’t be as ugly as you are.”
“Both of you hush,” Mama said. “You shouldn’t talk mean to each other.”
She sent you out to play with Allen and Duck in the yard, on the opposite side of the house from the room where Grove was sleeping. If he heard you playing he would want to go outside, and Mama said he must be still until there was no more blood in his elbow. Delia came into the kitchen and stood Amy in a chair in front of the sink to wash her hair. The sound of their laughing made Mama leave the room.
Papa came home early from work and Mama made him a cup of coffee. He sat in the kitchen to drink it, watching Delia slide bobby pins through Amy’s soft, wet curls. Mama had asked him to stop at the grocery store and bring home a few things, so after a while she said to him, “You didn’t get the groceries I asked you buy. We’re out of salt. My dinner won’t be fit to eat.”
“I didn’t forget,” Papa said. “But I didn’t come by a store on the way home, I come down river road.”
“Well, I got to have that stuff.”
“Don’t worry me about it, let me rest a minute. I’ll ride out directly and get whatever you need.”
“You’re going to the store?” Delia gazed at Papa holding a comb suspended in the air. “Let me go with you. I need me some shampoo and things.”
“We got some shampoo,” Mama said. “Don’t waste your money.”
“You don’t have the kind I like. I need me some with condition.”
Papa thumped a cigarette out of the pack and lit it. “Won’t hurt to have some company.”
Delia explained to Mama, “Some of the things I need you can’t ask a man to buy for you.” She and Papa watched each other, smiling. Mama turned to the sink. Through the window she watched the slowly contracting halo of color around the setting sun. She heard Delia say, “I ain’t been away from this house in three days.”
“I haven’t been away from this house in two weeks,” Mama said, almost quiet enough that no one heard. “Can’t go nowhere. Can’t get a damn battery for the car. Can’t do nothing, not me.”
No one answered. She ran water over the potatoes and lit the stove beneath the pot. Wiping her hands on her apron, she disappeared into the back of the house, where Grove lay sleeping on his narrow bed. She lay beside him there, face down on the quilt.
Simply breathing, she listened to the house’s sudden stillness. Grove’s pale face, turned toward the ceiling, made her feel sad all the way down to her bones. “His own youngun,” she murmured. “His own. He don’t half know you.” The thought made her hurt in the belly and she didn’t even know why. She doubled herself over and then, lying like that on the bed and feeling all alone, she heard the kitchen door open and footsteps, laughter, the starting of the truck. Distant. The room where she lay was lit dimly by the last of the daylight. She stood at the window to watch the truck pull away, though the windshield, washed blank and dark, prevented her from seeing their faces.
Everything inside her felt torn. She tried to explain to herself. Why shouldn’t Delia go to a store with Papa? What could it hurt? Suddenly it seemed to her that things had got to that point again with Papa, that she was walking the wire again. She remembered what he had said about the red dress. She wondered if he simply didn’t want to get a battery for the car, so she couldn’t drive anywhere even if she wanted to. He would rather bring the groceries home himself than have to wonder where she might drive when he was away. A woman should stay home and clean her house and look after her children he said, and she added yes, you’re only safe when you keep them locked away.
Now Delia. Could she be right in thinking such a thing about her own sister? Or was Mama what Papa said, a woman from a trash family with a filthy imagination? She lay on the bed and pictured Papa’s truck on the highway, Delia’s laughter rising over the sound of the engine.
Amy came in the room, sat on the edge of the bed and whispered, “Mama. Are you awake?”
“Yes, honey.”
“Mama, Delia rolled my hair too tight again. Will you fix it?”
It cleared her head. She took a deep breath, feeling the warm child’s body close to her and hearing the other child breathe softly into his pillow. She took strength from the sounds and the warmth and sat up, saying, “Let’s go in the other room. We don’t want to wake up Grove.”
BY THE time the truck had pulled into the yard again, she had convinced herself she was only being foolish, that she ought to trust her sister better than that, even if she didn’t trust her husband. She tried not to think how long they had been gone; she simply held the door open for Delia and took the grocery bag from Papa, who kissed her elaborately on the cheek. “Sit down,” she said, “I’ve got coffee water on the stove. You too, Delia.”
Papa sat. But Delia walked straight through the house to the bathroom. From rooms away Mama could hear the water running. Mama spooned coffee into Papa’s cup and stirred, liking the soft chime of the spoon on the glass. But when she opened the bag, she found no salt. “You didn’t get everything,” she said. “There’s not any salt. And no fatback either.”
From the bathroom came the sound of the toilet flushing.
“There was another bag. Delia was carrying one. She must have left it in the truck.”
Mama touched his face tenderly. “You’re tired, aren’t you? Sit still and drink your coffee. I’ll go get it.”
“No, let me—”
“I don’t mind. I need me a little fresh air anyway.”
Her sweater hung from the doorknob. She pulled it on and opened the door before Papa could move. Why did he give her such an odd look? Didn’t he see she was trying to say she was sorry? On the porch she stopped to touch the soil of her potted plants. They would want water tomorrow. Swinging wide the screen, she breathed the c
lean November air. The cold made her smile. The truck door latch chilled her hand, and the door was hard to open but there the bag sat, on Papa’s tool box, on the floor.
The seat had been cleared. Why had they cleared the seat?
Mama lifted the bag slowly, then set it down again. An odd, prescient feeling overcame her. Leaning down, with a look on her face as if she were hearing a voice, she searched under the edge of the seat.
Her heart went cold when she touched the thing. She had never really expected… . The feeling, when it came, was much different than she had supposed. She held the flaccid thing in her hand, still warm. She lifted it to the light. A simple sack of viscous seed. He must have wanted her to find it.
How simple it seemed. It probably had not even taken a long time.
She must not forget the groceries. Lifting them to her arm, unhurried, she walked back to the house, to the husband and the sister who was already packing her clothes; she was whispering, “Delia, Delia,” and carrying the leaking thing flat on her palm in the clear air, when Papa first saw her from the kitchen window.
Delia took the bus back to Pink Hill that night. The only turkey she had for Thanksgiving came out of a vending machine in the Rocky Mount bus station.
Mother Perpetual
The smell of roasting chicken drifts through the house. Papa has sat still for a long time, but bends now to put on his shoes. He has long since learned to lace and tie them one-handed, asking no one’s help. Stuffing the pack of cigarettes in his pocket, he circles the chair to the door. The thought that he might be leaving makes your breath come easier.
But when he opens the door Mama rushes into the room wiping her hands on a towel. “Going for a walk?” she asks.
“If I feel like it I will,” Papa says, watching the road.
“Don’t you want your coat? Or do you have something else in mind to keep you warm?”