In the store Rosalie looked up from her conversation with Jake and saw Emma. Her face was red. Was she hot or angry? “Did you finish your breakfast?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. Now put on your sun hat and you can go out and play before it gets too hot.”
“And then swimming?”
“We’ll see. If the Cloutiers go and Anne promises to watch you. Are you going over to their house now?”
“Yes, ma’am. Mike and I are going to play in the canal.” And then she bit her tongue.
“Remember what I told you about that.”
“Oh, Ro,” her father grumbled from behind the meat counter. “They’re just kids.”
“Jake, I told you what I saw.”
“And I’m telling you you’re imagining things. Kids will play.”
Emma flushed with the memory of what her momma had seen a couple of days before. She had been playing with the water hose out in the backyard they shared with the Cloutiers. She and Mike were in their underpants, Anne and Wayne in their bathing suits. They’d been spraying one another, screaming, jumping at the delicious shock when the cold water hit their hot skins. All of a sudden Mike stopped, pulled down his pants, and peed against the trunk of the catalpa tree.
Anne, his older sister, said, “Mike, don’t!”
“Oh, leave him alone,” Wayne laughed, showing his broad white teeth in what Emma thought was a movie-star face. She always felt excited around Wayne, the same way she did when she was close to her cousin J.D. who lived out in the country.
Emma turned from Wayne’s laughter and stared at Mike with her mouth loosely parted. She’d sneaked looks when he was wet in his underwear, but she had never seen a boy naked except for little babies getting their diapers changed. Mike’s pee made an arc like the water spurting out of the fish’s mouth that the mermaid held in the baby pool.
Then Rosalie had turned the corner around the side of the yard, coming to get Emma for something.
“What on earth are you doing!” she’d yelled at Mike, then grabbed Emma by the hand and jerked her into the house. “What were you doing?” she demanded again inside the dark cool apartment as she shook her.
“Nothing.”
Then Emma had stared at the brown and yellow squares of the linoleum on her bedroom floor. This had something to do with down there. She didn’t know what exactly, but Momma always made her feel ashamed about down there. When she mentioned it, it made her feel queasy in her stomach, almost exactly like when Momma gave her an enema. Momma had said, “Mike is a nasty little boy,” and she wouldn’t let her play alone with him anymore.
Now Emma, who really wanted to go down to the canal to play with Mike, said, “Linda and Mo Moore are coming over, too, Momma. They said so.”
Her mother looked at her sharply. “You just make sure that they do.” She straightened the straps of the sunsuit covering Emma’s tiny nipples. Her fingers were always rough, her touch a quick poke, leaving tingling red marks for a few minutes on Emma’s pale chest. “You be good,” she cautioned, and Emma skipped out the front door.
Rosalie watched her daughter’s blonde pigtails disappear from view. She sighed and turned back to the invoices. School had been over for a week and a half, and she had looked forward to a summer of relative ease after her first year of teaching. She liked the work, but it was exhausting leaving before dawn to drive the twenty-five miles into the country to the three-room schoolhouse. Much of the trip was on gravel roads with wooden bridges that threatened to wash out in the winter rains. When she got there, she had to bring in wood and build a fire in the stove before her third and fourth graders arrived. She helped Jake in the store when she got home until it was almost suppertime. Then she would run back into the kitchen and throw something together. Saturdays were spent behind the store’s counter, too. Only on Sundays could she relax, after Sunday School and the church service, with a nap in the afternoon.
She’d hoped to unwind this summer. But look at these invoices. They were a mess.
She stood with her hands on her hips, the yellow slips of paper in her right hand. The papers were covered with sums of money, most of which they hadn’t paid.
“Jake.” Her lips were tight, as was her voice. “Why haven’t these been taken care of?”
“What?”
She knew that look he was giving her, as if she were speaking a foreign language. He was stalling for time.
“These bills. Some of them are past due. Which means we can’t complain when we don’t get deliveries on time. You’d think you could do something right.”
Rosalie bit her lip then. She hadn’t meant to go so far, so fast. But it was too late now. The words were out. Well, so what? She meant them. Almost everything Jake did (and she didn’t think that was ever enough) had to be done over again. Well, she had to admit he was a good butcher, but he knew nothing about keeping books.
Behind the long refrigerated meat display case now, he slammed down the cleaver he held in his left hand. It made a dull thud on the end grains of the wooden butcher block.
“What the hell?” he sputtered.
“Don’t you curse at me. Just tell me why you haven’t taken care of these.”
“Because I didn’t want to, that’s why!” Jake bit back. Then he tore off his bloodstained apron and stomped to the rear of the store, slamming the screened apartment door behind him.
Before the sound had even stopped, there was an echoing slap as a little colored boy walked in the front, letting the door close behind him.
Rosalie looked at him and wondered if he had heard Jake yelling. Jake embarrassing her in front of a nigger. It wouldn’t be the first time. She wiped away quick tears with the back of her hand.
“What do you want?” she barked at the child.
The boy lowered his eyes, bit his lip nervously. “I…meat.” He fidgeted as if he had to go to the bathroom.
“Jake!” Rosalie called to the back.
There was no answer. Of course not. Once he had had a fit like that and had raised his voice, there would be silence for a long time, for several days. She’d have to do it herself.
“You stand right there, boy,” she said, pointing with her finger like she did talking to the children in her classroom. You had to watch niggers every minute or they’d steal.
Minutes later, she had the meat cut and wrapped and the charge written up in the book with “johnson, h.,” for his mother’s name, Hattie Johnson, inscribed in pencil across the back.
She riffled through the two wooden cheese boxes full of charge books and wondered how much they were owed. If it weren’t for the nigger trade they wouldn’t have a cent. Even with most of those on credit paying up the first of the month, they didn’t have much. But it was the niggers who kept what little bread they had on their table.
Rosalie hadn’t wanted to locate so near the Quarters when she started her business, but that’s where it was, the only store she could afford, and Zeb Miller had assured her the nigger trade wasn’t bad.
“Just keep a loaded pistol under the counter,” he’d said, “if it’ll make you feel better. Probably never have to use it.”
If she’d had any sense, she’d have used it on him, but nonetheless he had been right about the colored trade. Of course, they were slow payers, and you had to watch the little ones like a hawk so they didn’t slip things out of the candy counter, but all in all she couldn’t complain about the colored trade in her store.
Perched right there on the edge of the Quarters, separated from it only by a drainage ditch everybody called “the canal,” her property had been so cheap that within a few years of paying off the store she’d bought the lot next to it, too, the last lot right on the white/black line. She’d built the little house the Cloutiers rented from her. It had been a wise decision. The rent house brought in forty dollars a month and every penny counted, though she had to do all of the repairs herself. Jake hadn’t proved to be very handy.
Now Rosa
lie found herself staring into the eyes of the little Negro child. She’d forgotten that he was there.
“What are you waiting for, boy?”
“My momma’s meat, Miz Fine,” he mumbled, lowering his gaze to the floor.
Rosalie pushed the package toward him. That’s what happened when Jake got her so riled up. She got all distracted. Her nerves couldn’t take it. She even found herself being short with Emma, whom she loved more than life.
She’d said that to Emma once. “I love you more than my own life, honey.”
Emma had looked up from Rosalie’s lap, where she was sitting with the book she wanted Rosalie to read to her.
“And how much is that, Momma?”
“Why, everyone loves his own life most of all, child.”
But as she said the words, Rosalie had known they weren’t true. She didn’t love her life at all. She never had, and she never would. Since Emma had come into it, things had been better. She’d been right about supposing that, in the first conversation she’d had with her sister Janey about finding a child. But she hadn’t counted on the problems, the main one being Jake.
What she should have done, if she’d thought more about it, was find a child who had no mother or father—an orphan was what she should have sought. Then there wouldn’t have been all these complications—like sex. Though she’d made it clear to Jake pretty early that that wasn’t part of the deal. She never had been interested and didn’t plan on starting at this late date. No, sir, thank you very much. Then there were Jake’s grumpiness and his moods, his temper and his foreign ways. New York Jew—he might as well be from Mars for all he knew about how to get along in the world.
And, too, she had to admit, the older Emma got, the child herself was a bit more than she had bargained for. For Rosalie had never really thought about a child having a mind of her own, of her growing up, of her being anything but a beautiful blonde baby. Already, at five and a half, Emma asked hard questions. Why did her daddy talk differently? Well, if it was because he came from New York, why didn’t Momma come from there, too? When did Daddy move to West Cypress? And why?
Rosalie was hard pressed for the answers, for she had convinced Jake that Emma would be better off if she didn’t know the truth, if she thought she was Rosalie’s own. It wouldn’t be that difficult, she’d reasoned; with the exception of Janey, and the rest of her family whom she rarely saw, hardly anyone knew. She had very few friends in West Cypress, had never had the time for socializing.
Jake had fought her about it. “She ought to know about her real mother.”
“Real mother,” Rosalie had argued. “Then what does that make me, who’s changed her diapers, raised her, given her a home?”
Jake had continued to grumble, but then things had slid along, and Emma had grown, and once the threads began to be spun, even if by omission, the lie became a fabric with a texture of its own.
But Emma’s questions never stopped. It was astonishing, the things that grew in that child’s mind and plopped out of her mouth. Why, just the other day, she’d come home from Sunday School—which Rosalie had thought would save her and make her like all the other children, even if (though she didn’t know it) she had been born a Jew—talking about the song “Jesus Loves the Little Children.”
“If Jesus loves them all, ‘Brown and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight,’” she sang, “if He loves them all, why do we call the brown and black ones niggers? Why do they have to live in those ugly houses on the other side of the canal? Why can’t I play with them?”
Rosalie didn’t need those kinds of questions. They made her uncomfortable and gave her a headache. Southern children never asked them. She never had. Sometimes she wondered whether Emma’s being born a Yankee had ruined her for life.
But she did love her. Oh, Lord, yes, how she loved the child. Though it was hard for her to reach out to her now that Emma was getting bigger. For Rosalie didn’t really know about touching people, even Emma, once they got to the stage where they could hug and touch back. They scared her sometimes, Emma’s grasping little hands. The child liked to touch, to pet things, to ask questions; she was constantly reaching out, as if she wanted to take the whole world into her hands and her eyes and her mouth. Rosalie had never seen a child so hungry, hungry for everything, in her whole life.
* * *
Still shaking with anger at Rosalie’s words, Jake sat at the kitchen table stirring canned milk into his coffee. He tasted it and made a face. The cloying taste was disgusting, but canned milk was a rule of the house. Rosalie thought cream a needless expense. He sighed and stirred some more.
In the past four, almost five years, there were many things Jake had come to dislike about his life in West Cypress, and when Rosalie nagged at him, like she had just done, all of his displeasure tumbled like a house of cards built on a poker table downtown at the Ritz.
For one thing, he hated the food Rosalie piled on his plate every day: squash, peas, beans, okra. And greens, all kinds of greens, turnip, mustard, collard, things he’d never heard of, cooked into a slimy mess with pork fat. His mother, Riva, would never have allowed such things in her back door.
The weather was sticky and hot like a damp blanket from May until October. Though summers in New York had been no picnic, there was the respite of the beach. You needed a boat to enjoy the Coupitaw. The Fines didn’t have a boat.
God, it was so hot today. The little fan turning slowly in the store never hit him often enough for the sweat to dry. This afternoon he had to mow the yard, and his perspiration would pour until his clothes were soaked and he was faint.
Another thing, he would tell Ruth if she were here, he didn’t understand about Southerners. They were supposed to be so polite, but they laughed at his accent, teased him about being a Yankee, while at the same time they pretended not to notice his stutter. But he knew they did—behind those nicey-nice smiles. They just waited to laugh about that until they got out the door.
He especially hated Sundays, putting on a tie and going with Rosalie to the West Cypress Baptist Church. All that malarkey about Jesus—what did he care? Didn’t Rosalie understand that he was a Jew?
“It’s a small town, Jake. People will talk about you if you don’t go to church, and they won’t come in the store. Besides, think about Emma.”
Riva would have had plenty to say about that too.
“If the Baptists are so good,” he asked Rosalie, “how come Deacon Ledbetter is always trying to cheat you on the bills from his feed store?”
“Hush, Jake.” It wasn’t nice to talk about things like that. Hooey. Hooey, that’s what Christianity was. Rosalie said he had to go for Emma, so he went. But he hated it.
He hated it almost as much as working in the store every day, being left alone to talk to salesmen about things he didn’t understand, to try to figure up bills and answer the phone and take deliveries and cut meat and deal with customers to whom he was supposed to be nice. He couldn’t even make out what some of them were saying, they talked with so much mush in their mouths. And they couldn’t understand him! Hooey!
“Be polite, Jake,” Rosalie was always telling him, sometimes saying it in front of them, making him feel ashamed. He didn’t understand their ways. They were all so slow, and talked so much, on and on about nothing. All that talking, that wasn’t business. If they had to go to New York and order a sandwich in a deli, where you stood in line, said what you wanted, “Turkey on rye, Russian dressing, coffee regular,” then paid for it and got out in a hurry, they would have all starved to death. How could he be polite to people who made him so impatient?
He was fidgety, too, with the rent houses, Ro’d just bought another one, she was always fixing up. He didn’t know how to hammer nails, lay linoleum, hang wallpaper. Rosalie did. She liked it, let her do it. He didn’t want any part of it. When he finished in the store, he wanted to relax, read a detective novel, look at the pictures of faraway places in The National Geographic. Rosalie told hi
m he was lazy. He didn’t know, maybe he was. But he knew for sure that he was all thumbs with a hammer, and hammering was the last thing on his mind.
He missed his family too, the big parties at Ruth’s or Rhoda’s, not that they’d always gotten along, but eventually everyone would kiss and make up. He missed the tables of good food and the rye whiskey and, later, poker with the boys. He missed Ruth’s easy laugh, her teasing him, always making him smile. “Jakey, Jakey,” she’d say, rubbing the top of his head, bald since he was twenty-two. Sometimes they’d all get dressed up sharp and go into the city, do the clubs, listen to the music and dance. Or there was Coney Island in the summer with the rides, the parachute jump, the boardwalk, the beach with all the family and their friends. There was no one who knew him like that here, who could tease him and make him laugh. There was no drinking, at least not family drinking, just a few to have a good time. No clubs, no dancing, no beach. They knew only a few people who came into the store. And then there was her family. Her sister Janey wasn’t too bad, but like all of them she was a Baptist, living in mortal fear of having a good time. They’d rather argue and fight, like they did almost every time that he and Rosalie went to where her mother, Virgie, now lived, on a farm fifty miles away in Pearl Bank next door to her daughter Nancy. After a Sunday dinner of fried chicken they’d gather in the tiny living room and bring up grudges and pick at old scabs until they ran again, the blood mixed with the sisters’ tears. Jake couldn’t ever remember a Sunday afternoon that they’d left there without Rosalie snuffling into a handkerchief half the way back to West Cypress.
Jake stayed pretty close to home, except for the occasional evening he walked into town to play dominoes at the Ritz Bar. He would call Rosalie when he was through, and she and Emma would drive down in the gray Chevrolet and get him.
That was another thing, he’d never learned to drive. He hadn’t had to in the East, and now it was too late. He’d tried, but Rosalie’s poking at him to do this and do that while he was trying to watch the traffic made him too nervous. He’d given up. Not that there was much of anywhere to go. Nor much fun to be had. Not even that kind of fun.
Keeping Secrets Page 7