A hundred yards of grass separated the house from the rise of packed red clay above the highway. When we were children, my cousins and I threw rocks as big as eggs as hard as we could at the passing cars below, never once hearing the satisfying ping of the contact of the stone on glass or metal, a sound we reached as far as we could to catch, a sound that would break our hearts if it happened, though we believed it inevitable.
Aunt Ginny’s house is only a quarter mile from my grandmother’s, but lower on the hill, leaning against the downward slope of the road. You don’t notice the house’s lean at first, but once you see it, it’s hard not to think of Aunt Ginny’s house as an alive thing stubborn and willful, human enough to take on earth’s most immutable laws.
In her backyard, Aunt Ginny’s father had planted thick vines of muscadine grapes on wobbly looking wooden structures. You heard the vine and the contented buzzing of drunken bees before you ever rounded to the back of the house and actually saw it.
“Sounds like a giant hive,” Aunt Ginny said, “but they won’t hurt you as long as you take it easy.” Aunt Ginny moved to the vine, picked a fat grape, smoothed the white film like gunpowder with her thumb from the grape’s skin, and took a delicate bite with her front teeth. “So good,” she said. “The little ones are pretty tart, but not bad. Come on. I’m not picking for you.”
I watched Aunt Ginny as long as I could, but as she expected, I inched to the vine to pick for myself.
“I’m making wine this year. I always wanted to do that,” she said.
“Yeah?” I said, concentrating on the thick clusters, careful not to pinch the body of a yellow bee between my fingers. “How many grapes do we need?”
“I don’t know. Enough. Let’s get this pail about full and we’ll quit.”
“What else do you need to make wine?”
“Grapes make wine.”
“If you’re Jesus,” I said.
“I’m getting a bucket, smart ass. Keep picking.” By the time Aunt Ginny returned, my hands and mouth were full, and Aunt Ginny wasn’t picking, just staring at me, the dusty bucket over her chest like a breastplate. “Do some things you want to do in your life. Hear?”
“Shut up, Aunt Ginny. God,” I said, hating the lessons I was sure came to Aunt Ginny from hard experience.
“I’m serious. Don’t wait around. Like sex. Do it as much as you can. I’m telling you the truth. One day, you’ll look over your lifetime of being a good girl and doing all the things you were supposed to and you’ll be as mad and crazy as I am.”
“Okay, Aunt Ginny, I’ll have sex with everybody I know, even dogs. Will that make you happy?”
“You’ve got a filthy mouth on you,” Aunt Ginny said as she shook the grapes to settle them. I was embarrassed at my joke. But it wasn’t that bad, maybe stupid, but any other time Aunt Ginny would get it.
“Did you see my daddy?” she said, pointing to the house. “In mama’s room.” Aunt Ginny’s glimpse of her daddy had changed her mood. I don’t know if it’s possible to hate someone you’ve never met, but I hated her daddy. But I wouldn’t look. If I saw him in the window then every other face with his same turn of jaw, every hungry-looking man cupping his rusty knuckles to keep the match flame alive, sparing it from the air, scratching his leg with the back of his dirty shoe, in Denver, Kansas City, Ohio, Winston-Salem, or even in my dinky small town would forever move me to hate.
Some of the dead you feel like warmth, their presence a consolation, or so I’ve heard. My only experience with the dead was with my father’s mother, her presence the intensity of a clenched fist. She’d never forgiven me for coming into the world two weeks before she died. But I knew from the cold rage coming off of Aunt Ginny that her daddy’s presence was no comfort to anybody. “Yeah,” I muttered, my mouth full of grapes, making my lips pucker with juice. I knew enough about Aunt Ginny’s father to fear even the flutter of a panel of curtain he moved. I turned my back so Aunt Ginny’s father couldn’t see my face either. “Tell him to leave,” I said.
Aunt Ginny dropped her handful of grapes in the pail one at a time; the soft thuds seemed a comfort. She chuckled, “Are you used to things being easy?”
A FEW WEEKS LATER, Aunt Ginny waited for me outside my grandmother’s house, leaning on her Buick, reading. “Hey Bebe. Roger,” she nodded to my parents. “You want to go to the store?” I was already halfway in the car before my mother could answer. “Bebe, you don’t care, do you?” Aunt Ginny asked, her hand on the door handle.
My mother hesitated, tried to catch my eye as both a warning and a talisman against harm. I wouldn’t meet her stare. “Come right back,” Mama said.
Aunt Ginny reached across the bench seat and tossed a sweater, some shoes, and a couple books to the back. “Get in. We’ve got to hurry,” Aunt Ginny said too loudly, mostly for my mother’s benefit. Once on the dusty road, Aunt Ginny rolled her eyes to me. “My mother said bring back an onion,” she said and we both laughed at our mothers and their worthless concern like the two of us were girls together.
“Where are we going?”
“Do you care?” Aunt Ginny rolled down her window, letting the air flip her curls in every direction.
“Not really.” I picked up one of Aunt Ginny’s books from the floorboard. Everywhere Aunt Ginny went, every room of her house, my grandmother’s, and now obviously her car, she left these romances scattered like she molted them. I read aloud: Her hair flowed and swirled gloriously like honey against the smooth silk of the lavender sheet. Am I beautiful? she whispered. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes, he said caressing the down of her perfect cheek. “Man, how do you read this?”
“Just wait, little girl. You’re going to feel just like that some day. Mark my words. Then don’t come to me with none of this, ‘But, Aunt Ginny, I love him. But Aunt Ginny, he’s my everything.’”
“Oh, God, if I ever say, ‘He’s my everything,’ I want you to kill me.”
“Not if, when. When, little girl.”
“Yeah, okay, we’ll see,” I said pleased to be talking about my future romantic life, even my refusal of it making that shadow world possible and even legitimate. “What do you need from the store, anyway?”
“Nothing. Just felt like taking a drive.”
WE TURNED ONTO a dirt road, barely big enough for one good-sized car, to a brick ranch house, tiny by today’s standards. Not like the new houses that have sprouted up everywhere with extra rooms nobody enters that, more often than not, go unused, leaving behind little more than the deflated sense of the wrong promises fulfilled. But this was a starting-out place that people were happy to start with years ago (this year the hardwood floors, next year the addition), full of possibility. The house didn’t look lived in. Not that it wasn’t neat or was unkempt, but it was a house without intention; even the grass was filled in with lush green clumps here or there, but bald as sand in the next patch. Aunt Ginny killed the engine and we waited.
“Whose house is this? Gerald’s?”
Aunt Ginny nodded her head.
“Are we getting out?”
“I don’t think so,” Aunt Ginny said.
“He’ll see us. You know that, don’t you?”
Ginny rolled her window all the way up. “Lock your door,” she said. “He’ll come out in a minute.”
“What are we doing here?”
“You want to meet your Uncle Gerald, don’t you?”
“I’ve seen him plenty of times,” I whined.
Gerald poked his head out the door. I thought he might be annoyed or even that his face would flash with anger, but he didn’t look surprised. “Ya’ll coming in?” he yelled. In those days, I scrutinized every aspect of a person’s appearance and I knew all there was to know about Gerald’s clothed body, but he looked kinder outside of my grandmother’s house. His feet were bare and flat like snowshoes, and he wore a T-shirt oversized to accommodate his belly that made him look square and wide as a freezer. “Come on, if you’re coming,” he said.
“We’re here now,” I sighed.
“Who is this?” Gerald said as if he suspected a trick.
“She’s my niece, Gerald. Act like you’ve got some sense.”
“I didn’t say nothing.” Gerald turned to go back inside. “How you doing?” he said over his shoulder. Aunt Ginny smiled at me like I had passed some test. “Ya’ll want cake? My sister brought over some coconut cake.”
Gerald’s house was dark, with mahogany paneling and floors, curtains pulled together like a modest lady’s towel on her bosom, each room pinched with every door possible closed to the visitor’s eye. Gerald led us to his sparse living room with only a dirty plaid chair, a low-riding sofa to match Heimlich-maneuvered against the room’s longest wall, and a console television stacked with years of Ebony magazines.
“I set up my poker games in here,” Gerald grinned. “We’re not fancy.”
“It’s nice,” I said, embarrassed that Gerald had to explain.
“You’ve got good timing, Ginny. I’m in the middle of the game.”
Aunt Ginny shifted on her feet like she was embarrassed.
Gerald quickly added, “The Redskins will choke up anyway. They always do. Especially if I have some money on it.” Aunt Ginny giggled and accepted his apology, as pleased as if Gerald had said something charming.
“You can turn the dial, but I don’t get but two channels down here,” Gerald said to me.
“Where are you going?”
“We’re going to talk a minute,” Aunt Ginny said. “Will you be all right?”
“Talk?”
“Just right there,” Aunt Ginny said as she motioned to the bedroom, an uncharacteristic softness in her voice. “Just a minute.”
I rolled my eyes at Aunt Ginny. What did she want me to do?
THE OTHER CHANNEL on Gerald’s television came in only weakly, a dim pulse. Gerald had been generous about getting two channels, but the other station was just another football game anyway. I turned up the volume to cover the mumble from the next room. If I’d been thinking I could have gotten one of Aunt Ginny’s romances, but I didn’t think of it. I was alone and uncomfortable and feeling like my mother who hated being alone. My mother imagined that the rest of the world was invited to a great party with laughing people, too swaddled and secure to experience the abjection of the lonely. Her invitation never arrived. Though for years, I watched her stare out the window, a withering in her eyes, a sad turn on her already frowned lips. I was determined to duck and dodge loneliness, and when that didn’t work, I begged it away. Still, loneliness managed to find me. Though I wasn’t used to feeling it around Aunt Ginny.
The living room was about as inviting as a hypodermic needle, but the outside didn’t look much better. Above the largest couch was a picture window like a large television screen, but the show was pines straight as soldiers in a dark copse across the road. If I explored those woods, like the muscled and strong nature girls I envied, would I find a graying bone sticking from the underbrush of pine needles or a swarm of insects crawling over each other like the bubbles in boiling water? I believed I would.
I WILL FEEL THIS WAY AGAIN. In less than two years, I will be sixteen with my best friend in her grandmother’s house, when her boyfriend will emerge from the kitchen with an ancient rubber from his wallet filled to bursting with water, his face all teeth and light as he offers it to us, the reservoir tip of the condom pointing hard and up like a nipple. My best friend will betray me by thinking this hilarious.
In that very moment, Aunt Ginny will come to me with the completeness of plunging into a tunnel, and I will remember that day two years before when Aunt Ginny and Gerald are together, and I am only a room away. I will see them as clear as an honest memory: Aunt Ginny and Gerald intertwined. She grips his back, her fingers dimpling his fatty flesh, his face lovely now in its proximity to hers. I know it does not come to mind, the bulge of his body or even her own ungainly proportions, but she will concentrate on his fingers and knees, smooth baby skin of his ear, the scrub of his kinky hair on her legs. Lazarus died twice. The second time for good. Not every miracle lasts. And I will breathe a few choking sighs (sighs my friend will mistake for muffled laughter) glad at last that Aunt Ginny brought me with her to Gerald’s to share with her as much as I could the biggest and most complicated miracle of her life.
A LARGE GREEN CAR rolled into the driveway behind the Buick, looking like a parade float, with the back end of it extended into the road. I was angry with Aunt Ginny, but I didn’t want her humiliated and ran to get to the front porch before whoever was in that car tried to come into the house.
“Hey,” the woman yelled.
“Hey.”
“Where’s Gerald? Is he here?”
I looked to the door not sure what to say. “Yeah. I think so.”
“I’m his sister. They call me Sister. I know he’s here. Tell him to come out.”
“He’s busy.”
“Busy? You a Harshaw? You look just like them with them chinky eyes. Is Ginny Harshaw in there?” Sister got out of her car and moved quickly to the house. “She’s in there sure enough. Stupid, stupid ass. Not Ginny, baby. My brother. How long they been at it?”
“I didn’t time them.”
“Don’t you get attitude in your voice. I’m just asking a question. You know as well as I do what’s going on.” Sister leaned her skinny frame against the closed door of Gerald’s house. Her face was Gerald’s, the same big eyes and round jolly cheeks. “If he’s like any man I know, we shouldn’t be waiting out here but a minute,” Sister giggled, but I was years from understanding that joke. Besides, I was annoyed that she had indirectly insulted Aunt Ginny.
“Gerald’s nobody’s prize,” I said.
Sister laughed, “Who said anything about all that? I’m just saying the both of them need to start acting like grown people. Gerald ain’t got sense. I know it. I’m by myself, and you don’t see me acting a fool all the time, sneaking around like a child. If you want a woman, get one. Damn. I’d rather he find the Lord. You won’t catch me listening to those Jewish fables, but they do some people a whole lot of good.”
Sister stuck her head in the house but appeared to change her mind and didn’t go inside. “Look at you standing out here looking right lonesome.”
“Nowhere else to be,” I said, sounding more pitiful than I meant.
“You hungry?”
“I’m all right.”
“You’d say that, wouldn’t you? My house is on the next road. I’ve got food cooked if you’re hungry.”
“I’m all right.”
“Your Aunt Ginny is not studying you right now. Come on, I’ll take you to the store then. There’s the Run In a minute from here. You can get a bar of candy or soda.”
“Can you take me to my grandmother’s?”
Sister paused and looked at her watch but shook her head, like the ticking hands on the face had made her decision for her.
“This ain’t a Yellow Cab,” Sister laughed. “By the time we get back, your Aunt Ginny will be ready for you.”
Sister and I pulled up to a small box of a store. “Here’s a dollar,” she said.
But I had a couple of dollars in a sweated wad in my pocket. “No, thanks,” I said. Sister returned her dollar to her purse, shrugged her shoulders, a whatever-you-want expression on her face.
Run In was only big enough for a couple of rows of candy, chips, soup, and cola, the few toiletries and motor oil covered in a film of dust.
An older man, maybe as old as twenty, sat on a wooden stool behind the counter talking to a boy I had seen at school lurking in the smoking section beside the basketball court. The clerk nodded hello to me, barely letting his gaze land on my face. I was a child to him, invisible and unimportant.
“I’ve never seen you in he
re,” the boy from school said. I didn’t realize that he’d ever seen me anywhere since he’d never before raised his hand in greeting or looked directly at my face. I grabbed the nearest candy bar, Chunky, a thick kind with nuts and raisins I hated, and an orange soda and brought them to the counter.
“We’ll let you stay with us,” the boy said, winking at the clerk. “You want to give us a try?” he whispered as he leaned toward me. “We’ll be sweet to you.” The clerk laughed but kept his seat, his rough fingers tickling my palm with the change from the dollar. I wanted to stay and let something more significant happen to me, an event I would savor in the retelling. But even then, I knew that staying could never be the right choice. I wanted to say something sassy and sure, but instead I threw the soda close to the boy’s feet, hoping to hear the soda explode out like a hydrant all over the boy’s shoes. Though the can hissed, it did not pop open but rolled like a loyal dog to the boy’s feet. “What the hell is wrong with you?” I heard at my back as I wiped my eyes and retreated to the door. “Is she crazy?”
AUNT GINNY AND GERALD were already outside when we got back. I expected to see visible relief on Aunt Ginny’s face as I appeared, or at least an acknowledgment, but neither she nor Gerald did more than glance up at us for the briefest moment before returning to their conversation.
Sister honked her horn as she pulled out of the driveway. “Stupid ass,” she yelled to Gerald, hoping he would have the decency to show at least a little shame.
“Ginny, I’m tired of this shit,” Gerald said, picking his hair straight up with the pick he kept in the back of his fro. “Goddammit,” he said, but he sounded like he might cry.
“Aunt Ginny, let’s go,” I said.
“I’m coming.”
“Let’s go now.”
“I’ll see you,” Aunt Ginny said as she turned her back to Gerald and walked the few steps to the car.
“What are you waiting on?” I said. Gerald watched us, his ugly toes exposed and pleading. I kicked the dashboard of the Buick, leaving the footprint of my shoe on the burgundy vinyl. “Did you even know I was gone?”
We Are Taking Only What We Need Page 2