Crave

by Laurie Jean Cannady

  I knew Pee Wee could harm because I had seen that in his eyes, but could he have almost tried to murder someone? Could his threats have escaped the confines of Momma’s bedroom? I began to cry again, but I didn’t know why. I could feel Momma’s heart breaking in the other room. I could hear the anguish weighing on every part of her as she called out for Pee Wee and began praying on his behalf. I wanted him to come back so Momma could stop crying, but I wanted him to stay away so I could stop crying when Momma wasn’t there.

  We all cried that night, about the past, about the future, about what was lost, and what was gained. One fact was not lost on me in that moment. If the police caught Pee Wee, I would be free. There would be no more counting birds while counting thrusts. There would be no more runs for Kool-Aid, while being shuffled into Momma’s bedroom. There’d only be the memories of those things, memories I could rewrite because they’d be imprisoned along with Pee Wee.

  The police eventually caught Pee Wee and he was tried for the crime of rape. Momma never discussed the trial with us, but words were not necessary. I could see in her body and her actions when things were going well. On those days, Momma came home walking tall and we’d all spend the night playing with our new brother, Tom-Tom, and laughing about how much he looked like his daddy. When things weren’t going well, Momma returned late and only had enough energy to make a dinner of flour bread with cut up hotdogs that rolled around on our plates. We didn’t talk much about Pee Wee on those days. We didn’t talk much at all.

  Those were days when I was most conflicted because I allowed myself to believe Pee Wee wouldn’t be coming back. I allowed myself to celebrate, even though I hadn’t trusted myself for a long time. Still, I hoped and dreamed about days where Pee Wee’s return wasn’t an ever-looming possibility.

  After the trial ended, Momma secluded herself in her bedroom. Frightening groans rose and fell, pulled from the deepest parts of her as she cried for her man. Towana sat in our bedroom with us while we waited for answers. “They found Pee Wee guilty,” she said as she shook her head from side to side. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but by Momma’s cries, I knew he’d never come back. I knew then I was safe. For the first and only time in my life, I found pleasure in my mother’s tears.

  No-No Zone

  During the middle of my first-grade year we moved to Academy Park. That meant a new home and a new school. It was a newness I relished, hoping I’d be able to leave behind old memories. When I was in Mrs. Roundtree’s second-grade class, we had a special speaker come in one day. She was the tallest woman I’d ever seen. Thick, greasy hair sat like worms on her shoulders, and she had a face the color of milk. I sat in the front row of class and listened as she showed us, on the silhouette of a body, our “no-no” zones.

  “No one should touch you here, here, or here,” she said as she slapped the ruler against the three red circles on the poster board. “If anyone does, you need to tell a grownup as soon as possible.”

  As she elaborated on how bad it was for someone to touch the red zones, I began to feel like the ceiling, the walls, and the floor were folding around me. All eyes seemed to be zeroing in on the back of my head, reading the words “I’m guilty too” flashing inside me. I tried not to look into her face as she explained we should not keep this secret and it was wrong. I didn’t need her to tell me that. I knew my secret was the wrongest thing about me. Even as the woman said it was never the child’s fault, there was a knot settling in my throat I couldn’t ignore. My mouth was dry and my nose began to itch, but I was intent on staying still. I had, for so long, been alone in my secret. That there were others, like me, like Pee Wee, petrified my breathing.

  After the lady left, I decided I’d tell Momma everything that happened between Pee Wee and me. I already believed I was wrong for letting it happen and wrong for keeping it secret, but I didn’t have to be wrong forever. I could find right through telling Momma. There were no butterflies in my stomach, only the roughness of a dry cocoon, twisting into itself inside of me.

  I rushed through my spelling test and daydreamed through my Social Studies lesson, wishing I were home telling Momma my secret. After school, I flung my book bag over my back and hurried home. I rushed into the door, inadvertently slamming it into the wall as I dropped my things to the floor. Momma was sitting in front of the stove straightening her hair. Clouds of smoked escaped into the air each time she pressed the metal into her wavy mane. I had always been mesmerized by the way she held the parted hair between her pointer and middle fingers, pressed the hot comb as close as she could to her scalp, and ironed out her hair’s original texture. With each section she finished, there wasn’t a trace of the curls and tangles that had populated the space just minutes before. I wondered if she could iron my secret out of me.

  The sun shined in from the screen door as Momma sat at the kitchen table with the mirror propped on her legs. A comb hung in her hair as she guided the hot comb from her scalp to her ends.

  “Momma, is Pee Wee still in jail?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, being careful not to burn her scalp as she straightened another portion of her hair. The smell of burnt hair mixed with Blue Magic grease made me a little dizzy.

  “How long will he be there?”

  “A long time, baby.”

  “But how long?” I asked again.

  “About fifteen more years.” I did the math in my head. That would be long enough for him to forget about me. I took in a deep breath and pushed the words out:

  “Momma, Pee Wee used to do the nasty to me.”

  Momma paused, then slammed the straightening comb onto the flames. The stovetop shook violently as Momma hissed, “That motherfucker.”

  I quickly retreated into the bathroom, closing the door softly behind me. I sat on the tub with a grimace, even I couldn’t understand. Listening for screaming or crying, I stayed huddled in the bathroom, wishing I had never told. After I heard a small tap on the door, Momma poked her head in and asked if she could enter. She normally went into any room without requesting entry. She wouldn’t even let us close doors because she said they all belonged to her, but there was something different this time, this space that now stood between us.

  Momma sat on the tub beside me. She took my hand into hers and stared straight into my eyes. I tried to look away, but the curve of her downturned lips held me captive.

  “Laurie, you know the difference between a lie and the truth, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “So, you need to tell me the truth right now.” There was a quiet panic to her voice that made my heart beat fast.

  “I will,” I whispered.

  “Now, tell me what he did to you.”

  “The nasty. He did the nasty to me.”

  “What does that mean?” Momma asked. “What exactly did he do?”

  “He made me lay on the bed and he stuck his thing in me.” She closed her eyes and sighed.

  “Where was I?” she asked.

  “At work, mostly, and sometimes at the store.”

  Momma released my hands and lowered hers to her lap. She began to strangle the bottom of her shirt as she held it clenched in her hand.

  She spoke slowly, as if she were afraid to hear the answer to the next question, “Laurie, are you sure he was inside of you?”

  I didn’t know what she meant. He had definitely been inside of me, inside of my mind, inside of my body. Since that first day in that room, “doing the nasty” had always meant inside of me and I’d just assumed it meant the same thing for Momma.

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m sure,” I said.

  “But how do you know?” Momma asked as she leaned toward me. I turned over in my mind how it was that I knew, working to find which answer would be the right one. I knew because he had lain in open parts of me and, as a consequence, there were bits of me that never fit together again. I knew because of the rawness that stung in between my legs as I tried to keep up with Dathan and Champ while we chased each other
after . . . I knew because I had looked down as he went deeper, as his hips bumped my hips. That, to me, was enough, but I could not say all of those things to her.

  “Momma,” I said, “I knew because it hurt.” She raised her hand and wiped it across her face. She inhaled deeply and looked up at the small window over the tub. I wanted to go wherever she was going, where her mind was taking her to safety. I wanted to fly away too, away from reality, away from my secret, but I couldn’t go because my eyes were focused on the tears that crowded Momma’s eyes.

  “I’m sorry that happened to you, Laurie,” she paused. “I saw blood in your underwear once, but he said you fell on a fence. How did I not know? I’m so sorry I didn’t know.”

  I interrupted, something I’d normally never do when Momma was speaking, but we were sharing and I could feel there’d be no offense, no feelings of disrespect between the two of us there.

  “I saved you, Momma,” I said. “That’s why I didn’t tell—because he was going to kill you and Mary.” Momma looked at me and nodded as if she understood. She stared into my eyes, her mind asking questions of me she’d asked of herself years earlier, reliving nights in her daddy’s house, men with trembling hands, barely able to hold liquor, pulling her body, palming it, rubbing it, all while her daddy did business in the next room.

  He would have killed each and every one of them, if he had known what they were doing to her, just as Momma would have killed Pee Wee if she had known. Still, this happened again and again, to mother, to daughter. The questions live beyond the abuse, and the answers are elusive, racing from one generation to the next.

  Momma rose from the side of the tub and pulled me by the hand. She held me close and wrapped her arms around me. I heard her insides moving as I rested my head on her stomach. I held her tightly, wishing I could squeeze out the pain, her pain, my pain. We stood and cried, not as mother and daughter, but as two girls trying to understand why being a child, with dolls, days filled with play, and childhood fantasy, could not be enough, not for either of us.

  SIDE DISHES AND ENTREES

  Side Dishes and Entrees

  Our home on Dorset Avenue, one of many in the cluster of houses that made up Academy Park, was a muted palette for Momma and us kids to paint our futures. Each home in the public housing complex was bone white with black posts running from concrete porches to small roofs. An aerial view of the development would have looked like a mouth, littered with jagged, crooked teeth.

  Our first day there, Momma herded us onto the porch, pushed the key into the doorknob, and leaned. The door opened with a pop to a room as white as the outside of the house. The floor was a dark brown wood, with veins and arteries that stretched from one side of the room to the next. There was a large heater that looked like a metal dresser, in a recessed corner with posts, similar to the ones on the porch. I looked around and tried to imagine our voices bouncing off the walls and our socked feet sliding across the floor.

  Momma led the five of us in a line from the tallest to the shortest. We all moved from room to room as Momma gave us a tour of our new home. “This will be your bedroom,” she said to all of us as she opened the door to a room that would hold the twin beds we were getting from the Salvation Army.

  On move-in day, we only took Tom-Tom’s crib and Momma’s bed from the house on Victory Boulevard. Deliverymen brought a living room set, which had an aroma I’d never smelled before—new. Almost everything we’d ever owned had belonged to somebody else first, clothes, furniture, even food. But this house appeared unscathed, newly conceived, starting with the breeze that floated through the room when Momma opened the front and the kitchen doors, to the dribbles of paint on the floor Momma made us scrape with butter knives.

  That night, when Momma put us into our new-to-us twin beds with our new-to-us sheets, I gazed at the full moon’s glow creeping between the curtains. A glimmer of hope crept through the slits of me, promising tomorrow and tomorrow’s tomorrow held something brighter than yesterday.

  Casualty of War

  We settled into Academy Park nicely. Since we’d moved, we didn’t have an opportunity to make friends, so we spent most of our time in the backyard together. Momma met our next-door neighbor, Mr. Holmes, and he offered her a job at the AAMCO station that he owned across the street from our house. That arrangement allowed Momma to go to work and she didn’t have to get us a babysitter. During her ten-minute breaks, she’d run to the house and check on us.

  Champ, a sheepish boy, with burnt umber skin and curls that looked like a nest of fat, black worms, declared himself the family enforcer. He knew how Momma liked things and always made sure the house was in order when she came home from work. None of us had daddies, so he was everybody’s daddy and not opposed to kicking my butt if I got out of line. He doled out chores and it was our responsibility to do as he said. In my case, that rarely happened. I was a little too sassy and a little too independent for Champ to be the boss of me, so I often rebelled until he threatened to tell Momma I wasn’t minding. Then, I’d sulk off to our bedroom and act like I was cleaning the closet until Dathan or Mary discovered me napping there.

  We had to wash baseboards, clean windows, and scrub the tub. Each floor had to be swept every day and dust bunnies, wherever they may have hidden, meant to Momma the floor hadn’t been swept. Since Champ and I were the oldest, we also had to clean the kitchen, which meant washing and drying dishes, cleaning the table, counters, stove, and sweeping and mopping the floor. Champ and I often fought over which chores we had to do. Sometimes, the arguments went on so long we’d scramble to clean before Momma came home. Washing dishes was always favorable to cleaning the floor because it didn’t require the constant bending that sweeping and mopping required. The job of the dishes also meant cleaning the counters and the stove, while the floor included washing the table and wiping the refrigerator and lower cabinets. Another incentive for washing dishes was not-so-clean or not-so-dry dishes were easier to hide than a sticky floor or a glob of jelly hidden under the table that Momma would surely detect.

  On one particular night, Momma’s shift ended at eleven. She came home on her dinner break and cooked the chicken, navy beans, and biscuits she’d prepped before she went to work. The beans had been simmering all day and all she had to do to finish dinner was pop the biscuits into the oven and fry the chicken. Once she finished cooking, Momma rushed back to work while we ate.

  After dinner, I was comfortable in the living room, with my back resting on one arm of the chair and my legs draped over the other. Tom-Tom was beside me, and his eyes were growing heavier with each second that passed. Mary and Dathan had already made their way to the bedroom, free of any other responsibilities that night. Champ walked into the living room and stood his lanky self in front of the television. He was so tall for an eight-year-old that I could still see the television through his long legs.

  “Laurie, we gotta clean up the kitchen,” he said. “You can do the dishes this time.”

  Now, I was no dummy, and I knew if Champ was electing to do the table and the floors, that was a much sweeter deal than the dishes. I wrestled myself from under Tom-Tom’s heaviness and went to survey the damage. The aluminum pot Momma had stewed the beans in was filled with beige flakes of crushed beans, some of which had stuck to the bottom of the pan. The fried chicken grease sat on the rear eye of the stove, with a half and half rationing of oil and left-behind grime that had to be strained before I even washed the pot. There was a mountain of dishes that sat in the sink, waiting to be washed, dried, and put away. On top of all that, the counter was filled with half-dried pasty flour that had been used to knead the biscuits and later coat the chicken.

  I looked at Champ through squinting eyes, placed my left hand on my hip, stuck my chest out as far as it could go and said, “You must be crazy.” I could feel my neck moving in a circular motion and my toe tapping in unison with each word that came out of my mouth. Champ and I made a dash for the broom. We reached it at the same time and wrest
led over the long stick for about two minutes. Taller, older, and stronger, Champ muscled the broom out of my hands, so I rushed toward the mop, thinking if I had half the tools for the job then I’d have equal standing with him, but he reached his string bean arm over my head, grabbed the mop, and held it high in front of him.

  On a normal night, I would have conceded and vowed to be quicker, faster, and smarter next time, but a concession speech was not what I had in mind. I don’t know if it was the beans churning in my belly or my resentment toward Champ in that moment, but I was having no part in yielding.

  “If I can’t do the floor, I’m not doing nothing,” I said.

  Champ sharply stared. With the mop in one hand and the broom in the other, he looked like a broom-wielding god, pondering which form of torture to unleash on me in that moment. I thought I had trumped him because he couldn’t do the floor or the table, until I finished the dishes and the counters, but he just walked toward me with the broom and mop sliding across the floor. I readied myself for him to hand both cleaning utensils, however abruptly, to me, but he walked past me and went into the bedroom. I hadn’t anticipated that, but I was not giving in. So, I woke Tom-Tom from his slumber, shuffled him into the bed next to Mary and climbed in next to them. It wasn’t long before our snores began to dance the dance that often populates the bedrooms of sleepy, satisfied children.

  Later that night, I felt someone pulling me out of bed by both of my hands. My butt landed on the floor and my feet followed. I was being dragged out of the room before I could process what was happening. After my vision and my wits began to communicate, I saw Champ leaning against the loveseat rubbing both of his eyes. I looked over to our bedroom door and saw Momma quietly closing it, with the belt, or “leather fly” as we’d unaffectionately named it, wrapped around her hand. She turned around to Champ and me and without words, began whipping our butts.