We Are Taking Only What We Need

by Stephanie Powell Watts

  “I don’t know. Let me think,” Aunt Ginny said, her head on the steering wheel.

  “Just go.”

  Aunt Ginny started the car, though we still didn’t move.

  “Go on then. I don’t want you,” Gerald yelled, his voice cracking like a growing boy’s. Aunt Ginny pretended not to have heard.

  I rolled down my window, leaned as far out the car as I could. “You go straight to hell,” I screamed.

  “Don’t, don’t,” Aunt Ginny pulled on my arm, coaxed me back down into the car. To this day, I’m not sure if she was protecting him or me. Gerald said nothing. In fact, the three of us sat, the way people do, when they wait for the life-changing moment to come.

  “I used to really love him,” Aunt Ginny said.

  Gerald finally turned around and went back inside his house. At any minute I was sure he would return with a flower, a baseball bat, with a love poem or grenade, but he didn’t come back at all.

  “Aunt Ginny, go.” I said.

  “He’s coming back,” Aunt Ginny said, though she backed the car from the drive, turned her head to the dusty road. It would be years, but just as Aunt Ginny predicted, I would feel this kind of love for myself, desperate, stupid, the way Aunt Ginny did or the ways I hoped my parents did (though, in fact, I knew better), and though this day was my first trek on love’s complex terrain, I knew only a fool would doubt that Aunt Ginny loved Gerald still.

  MY FAMILY ARRIVED at my grandmother’s early the next Sunday. Though the front door opened many times, Aunt Ginny did not come. I didn’t get to listen to the sounds of the house, with her, or see her pretzel her long legs under her body as she read her trashy book about white people in rich implausible adventures. Just before dark, I walked to her house to the green paint glowing the color of forgetting in the fading light. I could hear her waiting inside, her tense holding out behind the door. “Aunt Ginny, let me in,” I yelled. I was fourteen and in my worst, most painful year. I wanted to tell someone about it, confess it all, but there was no one, and worse than that, there was nothing to tell. But still I made a vow that when my own daughter is fourteen, I will fill the gap for her. I will not let her flounder disconnected and alone. And I believe I would have followed through on that promise. I know it to be true. But although I felt her in quick flashes of being in my belly over the years, she was just as quickly gone. It would be years before I would finally accept that she would never arrive.

  IN THE CAR, the very next Sunday, my father made his usual speech full of the dread of his in-laws, people who forever thought him too common. “Seven o’clock. No later, I mean it, Bebe.” But my mother had decided that her life amounted to these Sundays. She would stay as long as she pleased.

  I was sure Aunt Ginny would not be at my grandmother’s, but there she was, in the kitchen at the table, cutting herself a huge slab of dense chocolate cake. “There’s my girl,” she said. “Come help me eat this.”

  SO MUCH HAPPENED in the coming weeks. The grapes we picked turned to wine by themselves, the bucket forgotten and abandoned outside to become crunchy with insects and drowned bees. A boy I considered falling in love with rammed his hand between my legs on the bus, fluttered his dirty fingers in my lap while his friends hooted like sports fans. For a quick sweet moment, I thought that meant I was desired. And late one Saturday night, the phone rang long and lonesome, not the discordant ring of the wrong number, or the quick bright ring of my mother’s sisters, but the drawn-out moan of bad news. Aunt Ginny was in the hospital unconscious from a bottle of pills. If her mother hadn’t come back early for the forgotten thing on the kitchen table, Aunt Ginny would be dead.

  “I’m going to the hospital.” My mother wrapped the stretched yellow cord of the telephone around her hand. “Come on, go with me?”

  I did want to go, but I was more afraid than I’d ever been. For weeks my mother and I had spoken in the language of long pauses and slammed doors. We tried as much as we knew how, but the eye of whatever was passing over us had moved on, and we were in the storm of it. How can I tell you how hard it is to want not to love your mother? How much and in how many ways I would struggle not to let her know that anything she says means a damn to me. “Why is Aunt Ginny’s sister buried in their yard?” I said, my voice trembling.

  “You listen to me,” my mother said, her face rabid with anger and pain, “your Aunt Ginny is sick. You’re old enough to understand.” My mother sighed, holding the top of her head like it might fly off.

  “I don’t like liars,” I said.

  My mother’s face dropped, with shock, but also with despair.

  “It’s not even her sister, is it?” I taunted, knowing the truth but not yet realizing how dangerous and insignificant the truth is in a life.

  “We don’t have time for this. Let’s go,” she said, talking slowly like she was talking to an incompetent. My mother was trying hard not to hate me. I knew it, and I blamed her, though I hated me, too. The only difference between us was she could forgive me. We had been close friends for years, better than friends, but in that moment and many like it, neither of us understood that we would be friends again.

  “I’ll go when I get ready,” I said, careful to stay just out of range of her arm.

  “You make me sick,” she said as she snatched her pocketbook from the table, jingled her keys for comfort. “Suit yourself. But you always do, don’t you?”

  THE NEXT SUNDAY at my grandmother’s, two days after the funeral, the mood was quiet. At least for a while. Aunt Ginny’s story was played over and over: her hair, you should have seen it. That Gerald, he’s to blame. A shame, a shame. Did you see him at the funeral crying, looking as pitiful and ignored as an ugly child? He should cry, we all agreed. But Aunt Ginny’s mother didn’t blame Gerald. All day long and for the rest of her life she’d find a way to insert in conversation that Aunt Ginny died of pneumonia. She told that lie so many times, her face as clear and untroubled as a turnip, she finally convinced herself. And in no time at all, two hours, three, we ate, became many, generations in the small rooms of my grandmother’s house, and we closed over the hole Ginny’s passing made—a stone dropped into a lake.

  IT HAS BEEN years, nearly twenty, since Aunt Ginny lived in that old house on Mills Road, a gravel road now with fine gray dust from pulverized rock in layers over the red clay of my childhood. Now my cousin Mavis and her kids live there, but they will go soon. Nobody stays in that house long. Nothing works right in the old place, and newer is better, we all know that. I was thirty-three, old as Jesus, and had just buried my mother, the last time I went inside.

  My mother, Bebe Marilyn Harshaw Thomas, had always said that she wouldn’t live to be old, and she was right. It is a cliché to say she was right about a lot of things. It is also true. The old green house was seemingly stuck in the same stage of decay it had been in twenty years ago when Aunt Ginny invited me in. Aunt Ginny’s room was the room Mavis’ daughter shared with her toddler brother, the little boy too young to have any opinion, so Aunt Ginny’s old room was still a girl’s room.

  Though Mavis’ child plastered the wall with Disney and television cartoon characters, all I could still see were Aunt Ginny’s music boxes in a row on her dresser, dozens of fraying romances, her record player with the handled carrying box, the neat stack of her 45s we danced to one afternoon, until we got tired of her heavy jumping, skipping the needle, her twin bed covered in a white cotton bedspread like a corpse, and in the closet, heaps of clothes Aunt Ginny could scoop up in a hurry, if somebody ever waited for her in the driveway again.

  And her father. Still there. But not after that day. I would stay until he came in the room, as long as it took, until I felt him vibrate on the air. He would not be staring over a child this time. That day he would face me, a woman who never desired to love him. A woman, sure she’d lost for the second and final time, the person in the world who loved her most. You don’t get too many people who love you like that. For them, I would force him out of that hous
e for good. I would scream at him, fight him if it came to that. For Aunt Ginny, still and forever forty-two. For my mother, whom I would never see again in this life but would feel when I woke every morning, her palm warm on my forehead. “You have to get up,” she’d whisper, and I’d jerk awake, eager to follow her voice.

  “Get out, get out, out, out,” I screamed. I’d make him hear it until my throat was raw and sore. And he would. May God strike me dead if I lie, but before I left that house for good, I heard his retreating steps, the mincing steps of a coward. I heard the creak of the front door, the draft, colder than it should have been. I feel it still. Seconds before the front door slammed, shaking the frame, final as an axe blade, closed and closed.

  If You Hit Randolph County, You’ve Gone Too Far

  The first time my brother got out of county jail, we rejoiced. The sight of him, stupid grin, without orange coveralls, made us all feel better, like we had been given a reprieve—a pardon? And now we could all make good. Nobody said this. In my family we never say anything that means anything, just nothing, nothing, nothing all the time—the very reason we are such bastards and idiots in the world. But you could tell by the way we hugged him, took him to the new Sizzler on franchise row in Randolph County. How we let him order what he wanted, the big steak, if he could eat it, with the dessert bar, including ice cream, anything. Even his girl, Renee, most of the reason he had to sit up in jail anyway, was there, letting Greg feed her tossed salad, not a finger food to my mind, with his dirty hands and nails. We pretended that we didn’t notice that they were practically doing it all over the plastic upholstery booth. We were just glad. He was one of us again. And as sorry as that has turned out to be, that is all we have.

  I wasn’t for sure we’d even be able to get him out of jail in the first place. Somebody had to put up bail, mortgage a house, or come into money none of us had ever seen, much less held long in our hands, except maybe at tax time or gambling. Maybe. Even the Christmas bonus Daddy got from the furniture factory was just a few hundred dollars at the most. None of us, probably not all of us put together, could work up that kind of money on the spot. Bond was 100,000 and ten percent is still 10,000. I don’t know what 10,000 means. But I come in peace. Daddy was the one who signed over his house, put his own X on the line on the long shot that my brother was good for it.

  Greg tried to ignore me. I was right across from his ignorant girlfriend—no way he couldn’t see me in the curved booth, but he was steadily trying. Shifting his head from Daddy beside me, to Mark the oldest on my other side, to our airhead little sister Shelia next to his girlfriend. How stupid he looked tipping his chin up and over my face to look at everybody else. I shouldn’t blame him. Wasn’t I the one who said let him stay in there? Wasn’t I sure he should learn a lesson? Selling crack rock. And for what? To get skinny-assed Renee another pair of gold-hoop earrings? Greg’s lost his mind. Eddie Bailey, the policeman who arrested Greg, said he might get a year. A year! That scared us. Me, Daddy, Mark all sat in Eddie Bailey’s office at the police station, dumb as a load of knees, awestruck and stupid like Eddie Bailey had just started speaking in tongues.

  Most likely Greg won’t get the whole time. A first offense like this. The best part is they didn’t find any drugs on him. Greg had sense enough to throw the crack rocks behind him as he ran and let them scatter in the gravel on the shoulder of Honeysuckle Road. What they didn’t find on his body, they couldn’t prove was his.

  “Daddy, I’m going to get a job at the plant Monday. They hiring, right?”

  Daddy wouldn’t look at Greg but stared into the overdone macaroni and cheese, stirred the mound of purple beets into the pasta.

  “I don’t know, Greg. Things are getting tight. I might have my own hours cut here in a minute.” Daddy shoveled a hunk of the beets and macaroni pink and slippery from beet juice into his mouth. Disgusting. If you asked him, he’d tell you the food gets mixed up in your stomach anyway. Nobody could stand to see him eat. I do have to give him some credit for trying to soften the blow. The truth was that Daddy didn’t want Greg coming to the plant, making like everything’s a big game, the way he does, messing up the wood they use for the expensive furniture, flirting with the old white women who worked in the reception area. Greg was too silly to realize that the women saw him as a lowlife and a thug and half-smiled to his face but kicked their purses farther under the desk when they saw him coming. Greg couldn’t see beyond his own fool self. He’d never be able to suck it all up like Daddy did and stand at his station and do the job without feeling like a punk or a Tom. I give him a week at the plant, tops.

  “You ought to think about acting like somebody,” I said, stuffing an oversized cherry tomato in my mouth, the sour juice gushing on my lips.

  Greg did look at me then and pointed his bony finger in my face. “It ain’t even worth it,” he laughed to Renee, like I’d made a joke, but there was nothing about laughing in his eyes. Renee, as usual, had nothing to say, but shifted her shoulder away from me like she smelled something sour in my direction.

  “What is worth it?” I said and folded my arms across my chest. I thought the move made me look like I’d made a decision I was bound to stick to. At the time, I thought I had him. I thought it was a good line, very lawyer-like, like the last words on Perry Mason that’s so good it gets repeated. “What is worth it, Greg? What is worth it?” Now I’m not so sure. I should have said something sweeter. Always start with love. That’s what our grandmother says. Start with love, and when it fails, like it will, knock the hell out of the truth.

  I care. I do. I went to see him at the jailhouse, which is more than Renee did. And none of that was a bit easy. If you are picturing Paul Newman or Denzel or some other fine man inside a 5 X 7 behind a technicality or mistake, throw that piece of Hollywood nothing out your head. There’s nobody there but sad types, con artists, dope dealers, beaters, stealers, and good boys, poor, young looking, young being, just on the verge of unreachable. Greg was none of these. Well, technically he was a dope dealer because he sold some dope, but that mess wasn’t his life. Someday I’m going to sit Greg down and tell him that nothing I’ve said comes from a bad place. I’m going to say, I’m just concerned, like the clean-looking white people do on television.

  Greg slid the almost empty salad bowl to the end of the table with the other dirty dishes. “I haven’t had good salad like that in a long time,” he said.

  Greg could enjoy some wilted lettuce and too much Russian dressing like he had something. He could be okay no matter what. He took that after Daddy, that calmness. One time Mama screamed at Daddy from the stands at a softball game. “Hit a home run or don’t come home,” she said. Everybody laughed like crazy, all of Daddy’s friends, their wives and children, all in on the joke. None of that made Daddy mad or made him curl up on himself in shame. He just shrugged his shoulders and was as surprised and happy as anybody when he hit his only over-the-fence ball of the whole season.

  “Round two,” Greg said, grabbing Renee’s hand in his. He kissed her forehead lightly like she was a precious thing, a dyed Easter chick in his cupped hand.

  “How romantic,” I said, but nobody laughed.

  “Let the boy live,” Mark said, cleaning the space between his two front teeth with his straw. Like a straw was supposed to be used for mouth hygiene, like his thirty-year-old mouth was a prayer book. He never even lived with us when we were little, just showed up one day and his mama said he wasn’t her problem anymore. Now, Mark’s taken over the whole family.

  “He’s all right,” Mark said.

  “Look here, I’m just calling it like I see it. The boy didn’t just come home from Iraq.” I tossed my paper napkin into my still full salad bowl. “I’m just trying to be realistic.”

  Shelia as usual was quiet, signaling with her eyes that she agreed with everything Mark said. You’d think being a girl and just two years younger that she’d be on my side. But I can’t remember a day, a time, a single minute in life when She
lia Eileen ever looked over the fence to my side. Shelia was easy with people like Greg. That made me crazier than anything. I got the fight honest from my mother. I couldn’t think about Mama without the sight of her yelling, her usually pretty face ugly and twisted like a Halloween mask. Daddy used to tell this story about Mama coming into the plant in the back way carrying her sewing machine. Mama was a little thing, with thin arms like sticks, and I can just see her huffing and puffing from lugging around that heavy machine. Soon as she got in front of Daddy’s station, she flung that thing as hard and as far as she could onto the concrete floor. The metal guts went skidding all over the place, and the hard plastic face of it got split in two pieces. “You won’t be moving my shit again, will you?” she’d said. People at the plant called Daddy Singer for years over that. Every once and a while somebody still will. But I didn’t feel sorry for Daddy. Every time I heard the story, I felt with Mama, got mad as hell right with her. Mad as she must have been all those years ago, like no time and a million decisions hadn’t filled the space of those twenty-five years since that day.

  “Well, if nobody cares, I’m going to get something to eat,” I rolled my eyes at Shelia. I could go off, but I was going to be the bigger person today and just walk away.

  Daddy got up from the booth to let me out. “Go on then, Dee,” Daddy waved his hand like an impatient crossing guard as I struggled out of the skinny booth. It ain’t easy to look like a hero bouncing your weight across a squeaking plastic seat.

  The food bar was depressing, like every one you’ve ever seen. A big blob of mashed potatoes straight from the box, green beans in rusty water, spongy meatloaf covered in ketchup, carrots, chicken wings, and a mound of fried chicken in a large metal bin, the few pieces of breast meat hidden in a whole chicken farm of legs and thighs.