The Women of Brewster Place

by Gloria Naylor

  “Why can’t you take us with you?” She followed each of his movements with her eyes and saw herself being buried in the case under the growing pile of clothes.

  “‘Cause I gotta check out what’s happening before I drag you and the kid up there.”

  “I don’t mind. We’ll make do. I’ve learned to live on very little.”

  “No, it just won’t work right now. I gotta see my way clear first.”

  “Eugene, please.” She listened with growing horror to herself quietly begging.

  “No, and that’s it!” He flung his shoes into the suitcase.

  “Well, how far is it? Where did you say you were going?” She moved toward the suitcase.

  “I told ya—the docks in Newport.”

  “That’s not in Maine. You said you were going to Maine.”

  “Well, I made a mistake.”

  “How could you know about a place so far up? Who got you the job?”

  “A friend.”

  “Who?”

  “None of your damned business!” His eyes were flashing with the anger of a caged animal. He slammed down the top of the suitcase and yanked it off the bed.

  “You’re lying, aren’t you? You don’t have a job, do you? Do you?”

  “Look, Ciel, believe whatever the fuck you want to. I gotta go.” He tried to push past her.

  She grabbed the handle of the case. “No, you can’t go.”

  “Why?”

  Her eyes widened slowly. She realized that to answer that would require that she uncurl that week of her life, pushed safely up into her head, when she had done all those terrible things for that other woman who had wanted an abortion. She and she alone would have to take responsibility for them now. He must understand what those actions had meant to her, but somehow, he had meant even more. She sought desperately for the right words, but it all came out as—

  “Because I love you.”

  “Well, that ain’t good enough.”

  Ciel had let the suitcase go before he jerked it away. She looked at Eugene, and the poison of reality began to spread through her body like gangrene. It drew his scent out of her nostrils and scraped the veil from her eyes, and he stood before her just as he really was—a tall, skinny black man with arrogance and selfishness twisting his mouth into a strange shape. And, she thought, I don’t feel anything now. But soon, very soon, I will start to hate you. I promise—I will hate you. And I’ll never forgive myself for not having done it sooner—soon enough to have saved my baby. Oh, dear God, my baby.

  Eugene thought the tears that began to crowd into her eyes were for him. But she was allowing herself this one last luxury of brief mourning for the loss of something denied to her. It troubled her that she wasn’t sure exactly what that something was, or which one of them was to blame for taking it away. Ciel began to feel the overpowering need to be near someone who loved her. I’ll get Serena and we’ll go visit Mattie now, she thought in a daze.

  Then they heard the scream from the kitchen.

  The church was small and dark. The air hung about them like a stale blanket. Ciel looked straight ahead, oblivious to the seats filling up behind her. She didn’t feel the damp pressure of Mattie’s heavy arm or the doubt that invaded the air over Eugene’s absence. The plaintive Merciful Jesuses, lightly sprinkled with sobs, were lost on her ears. Her dry eyes were locked on the tiny pearl-gray casket, flanked with oversized arrangements of red-carnationed bleeding hearts and white-lilied eternal circles. The sagging chords that came loping out of the huge organ and mixed with the droning voice of the black-robed old man behind the coffin were also unable to penetrate her.

  Ciel’s whole universe existed in the seven feet of space between herself and her child’s narrow coffin. There was not even room for this comforting God whose melodious virtues floated around her sphere, attempting to get in. Obviously, He had deserted or damned her, it didn’t matter which. All Ciel knew was that her prayers had gone unheeded—that afternoon she had lifted her daughter’s body off the kitchen floor, those blank days in the hospital, and now. So she was left to do what God had chosen not to.

  People had mistaken it for shock when she refused to cry. They thought it some special sort of grief when she stopped eating and even drinking water unless forced to; her hair went uncombed and her body unbathed. But Ciel was not grieving for Serena. She was simply tired of hurting. And she was forced to slowly give up the life that God had refused to take from her.

  After the funeral the well-meaning came to console and offer their dog-eared faith in the form of coconut cakes, potato pies, fried chicken, and tears. Ciel sat in the bed with her back resting against the headboard; her long thin fingers, still as midnight frost on a frozen pond, lay on the covers. She acknowledged their kindnesses with nods of her head and slight lip movements, but no sound. It was as if her voice was too tired to make the journey from the diaphragm through the larynx to the mouth.

  Her visitors’ impotent words flew against the steel edge of her pain, bled slowly, and returned to die in the senders’ throats. No one came too near. They stood around the door and the dressing table, or sat on the edges of the two worn chairs that needed upholstering, but they unconsciously pushed themselves back against the wall as if her hurt was contagious.

  A neighbor woman entered in studied certainty and stood in the middle of the room. “Child, I know how you feel, but don’t do this to yourself. I lost one, too. The Lord will…” And she choked, because the words were jammed down into her throat by the naked force of Ciel’s eyes. Ciel had opened them fully now to look at the woman, but raw fires had eaten them worse than lifeless—worse than death. The woman saw in that mute appeal for silence the ragings of a personal hell flowing through Ciel’s eyes. And just as she went to reach for the girl’s hand, she stopped as if a muscle spasm had overtaken her body and, cowardly, shrank back. Reminiscences of old, dried-over pains were no consolation in the face of this. They had the effect of cold beads of water on a hot iron—they danced and fizzled up while the room stank from their steam.

  Mattie stood in the doorway, and an involuntary shudder went through her when she saw Ciel’s eyes. Dear God, she thought, she’s dying, and right in front of our faces.

  “Merciful Father, no!” she bellowed. There was no prayer, no bended knee or sackcloth supplication in those words, but a blasphemous fireball that shot forth and went smashing against the gates of heaven, raging and kicking, demanding to be heard.

  “No! No! No!” Like a black Brahman cow, desperate to protect her young, she surged into the room, pushing the neighbor woman and the others out of her way. She approached the bed with her lips clamped shut in such force that the muscles in her jaw and the back of her neck began to ache.

  She sat on the edge of the bed and enfolded the tissue-thin body in her huge ebony arms. And she rocked. Ciel’s body was so hot it burned Mattie when she first touched her, but she held on and rocked. Back and forth, back and forth—she had Ciel so tightly she could feel her young breasts flatten against the buttons of her dress. The black mammoth gripped so firmly that the slightest increase of pressure would have cracked the girl’s spine. But she rocked.

  And somewhere from the bowels of her being came a moan from Ciel, so high at first it couldn’t be heard by anyone there, but the yard dogs began an unholy howling. And Mattie rocked. And then, agonizingly slow, it broke its way through the parched lips in a spaghetti-thin column of air that could be faintly heard in the frozen room.

  Ciel moaned. Mattie rocked. Propelled by the sound, Mattie rocked her out of that bed, out of that room, into a blue vastness just underneath the sun and above time. She rocked her over Aegean seas so clean they shone like crystal, so clear the fresh blood of sacrificed babies torn from their mother’s arms and given to Neptune could be seen like pink froth on the water. She rocked her on and on, past Dachau, where soul-gutted Jewish mothers swept their children’s entrails off laboratory floors. They flew past the spilled brains of Senegalese infa
nts whose mothers had dashed them on the wooden sides of slave ships. And she rocked on.

  She rocked her into her childhood and let her see murdered dreams. And she rocked her back, back into the womb, to the nadir of her hurt, and they found it—a slight silver splinter, embedded just below the surface of the skin. And Mattie rocked and pulled—and the splinter gave way, but its roots were deep, gigantic, ragged, and they tore up flesh with bits of fat and muscle tissue clinging to them. They left a huge hole, which was already starting to pus over, but Mattie was satisfied. It would heal.

  The bile that had formed a tight knot in Ciel’s stomach began to rise and gagged her just as it passed her throat. Mattie put her hand over the girl’s mouth and rushed her out the now-empty room to the toilet. Ciel retched yellowish-green phlegm, and she brought up white lumps of slime that hit the seat of the toilet and rolled off, splattering onto the tiles. After a while she heaved only air, but the body did not seem to want to stop. It was exorcising the evilness of pain.

  Mattie cupped her hands under the faucet and motioned for Ciel to drink and clean her mouth. When the water left Ciel’s mouth, it tasted as if she had been rinsing with a mild acid. Mattie drew a tub of hot water and undressed Ciel. She let the nightgown fall off the narrow shoulders, over the pitifully thin breasts and jutting hipbones. She slowly helped her into the water, and it was like a dried brown autumn leaf hitting the surface of a puddle.

  And slowly she bathed her. She took the soap, and, using only her hands, she washed Ciel’s hair and the back of her neck. She raised her arms and cleaned the armpits, soaping well the downy brown hair there. She let the soap slip between the girl’s breasts, and she washed each one separately, cupping it in her hands. She took each leg and even cleaned under the toenails. Making Ciel rise and kneel in the tub, she cleaned the crack in her behind, soaped her pubic hair, and gently washed the creases in her vagina—slowly, reverently, as if handling a newborn.

  She took her from the tub and toweled her in the same manner she had been bathed—as if too much friction would break the skin tissue. All of this had been done without either woman saying a word. Ciel stood there, naked, and felt the cool air play against the clean surface of her skin. She had the sensation of fresh mint coursing through her pores. She closed her eyes and the fire was gone. Her tears no longer fried within her, killing her internal organs with their steam. So Ciel began to cry—there, naked, in the center of the bathroom floor.

  Mattie emptied the tub and rinsed it. She led the still-naked Ciel to a chair in the bedroom. The tears were flowing so freely now Ciel couldn’t see, and she allowed herself to be led as if blind. She sat on the chair and cried—head erect. Since she made no effort to wipe them away, the tears dripped down her chin and landed on her chest and rolled down to her stomach and onto her dark pubic hair. Ignoring Ciel, Mattie took away the crumpled linen and made the bed, stretching the sheets tight and fresh. She beat the pillows into a virgin plumpness and dressed them in white cases.

  And Ciel sat. And cried. The unmolested tears had rolled down her parted thighs and were beginning to wet the chair. But they were cold and good. She put out her tongue and began to drink in their saltiness, feeding on them. The first tears were gone. Her thin shoulders began to quiver, and spasms circled her body as new tears came—this time, hot and stinging. And she sobbed, the first sound she’d made since the moaning.

  Mattie took the edges of the dirty sheet she’d pulled off the bed and wiped the mucus that had been running out of Ciel’s nose. She then led her freshly wet, glistening body, baptized now, to the bed. She covered her with one sheet and laid a towel across the pillow—it would help for a while.

  And Ciel lay down and cried. But Mattie knew the tears would end. And she would sleep. And morning would come.

  CORA LEE

  True, I talk of dreams,

  Which are the children of an idle brain

  Begot of nothing but vain fantasy

  Her new baby doll. They placed the soft plastic and pink flannel in the little girl’s lap, and she turned her moon-shaped eyes toward them in awed gratitude. It was so perfect and so small. She trailed her fingertips along the smooth brown forehead and down into the bottom curve of the upturned nose. She gently lifted the dimpled arms and legs and then reverently placed them back. Slowly kissing the set painted mouth, she inhaled its new aroma while stroking the silken curled head and full cheeks. She circled her arms around the motionless body and squeezed, while with tightly closed eyes she waited breathlessly for the first trembling vibrations of its low, gravelly “Mama” to radiate through her breast. Her parents surrounded this annual ritual with full heavy laughter, patted the girl on the head, and returned to the other business of Christmas.

  Cora Lee was an easy child to please. She asked for only this one thing each year, and although they supplied her over the years with the blocks, bicycles, books, and games they felt necessary for a growing child, she spent all of her time with her dolls—and they had to be baby dolls. She told them this with a silent rebellion the year they had decided she was now old enough for a teenaged Barbie doll; they had even sacrificed for an expensive set of foreign figurines with porcelain faces and real silk and lace mantillas, saris, and kimonos. The following week they found the dolls under her bed with the heads smashed in and the arms twisted out of their sockets.

  That was when her father began to worry. Nonsense, her mother had replied. Wasn’t he always saying that she was different from their other children? Well, all children were careless with their toys, and this only proved that she was just like the rest. But the woman stared around the room, thoughtfully fingering the broken pieces of china, while her daughter’s assortment of diapered and bottled dolls stared back from their neat row with fixed smiles.

  They reluctantly bowed in the face of her quiet reproach and soothed their bruised authority by giving her cheaper and cheaper baby dolls. But their laughter grew hollow and disquieting over Cora’s Christmas ritual with the plastic and flannel because her body was now growing rounded and curved. Her father quickly averted his face and busied himself with the other children during the moments that her mother would first hand her the doll from under the tree. Yet a lump still formed in his throat from the lingering glimpse of her melted gratitude for the gift of dead plastic.

  He put his foot down on her thirteenth Christmas. There would be no more dolls—of any kind. Let her go play like other children her age. But she does play like other children, her mother pleaded. She had secretly watched her daughter over the years for some missing space, some faintly visible sign in her schoolwork or activities that would explain the strange Christmas ritual, but there was none. She wasn’t as bright as her brother, but her marks were a great deal better than her sister’s, and she was certainly their most obedient child. Was he going to deny her child this one thing that made her happy? He silently turned from the anger that his seeming unreasonableness fixed on his wife’s face, because there were no words for the shudder that went through his mind at the memory of the dead brown plastic resting on his daughter’s protruding breasts.

  In his guilt and bewilderment he spent more money on her that Christmas than on all the other children, but they still felt the quiet reproach in her spirit as she listlessly fingered the new sweaters, camera, and portable radio.

  “That’s okay, baby,” her mother whispered in her ear, “you have lots of dolls in your room.”

  “But they don’t smell and feel the same as the new ones.” And the woman was startled by the depths of misery and loss reflected on the girl’s dark brown face. She quickly pushed the image away from herself and still refused to believe that there was any need to worry. And it would be many months later before she recalled that image to her consciousness. It would return to her after her youngest daughter would approach her with the news one afternoon that Cora Lee had been doing nasty with the Murphy boy behind the basement steps. And she would call her older daughter to her and hear her recount with
a painful innocence that it wasn’t nasty, he had just promised to show her the thing that felt good in the dark—and it had felt good, Mother.

  And she would then sadly and patiently give an explanation, long overdue, that Cora Lee mustn’t let the Murphy boy or any other boy show her the thing that felt good in the dark, because her body could now make babies and she wasn’t old enough to be a mother. Did she understand? And as she would watch the disjointed mysteries of life connect up in her daughter’s mind and hear her breathe out with enlightened wonder—“A real baby, Mother?”—the image of that Christmas would come smashing into her brain like a meat cleaver. It was then that she began to worry.

  “Cora, Cora Lee!” The voice echoed shrilly up the air shaft. “I told ya to stop them goddamned children from jumping over my goddamned head all the goddamned day! Now I’m gonna call the police—do you hear me? The goddamned police!” And the window banged shut.

  Cora Lee sighed slowly, turned her head from her soap opera, and looked around the disheveled living room at the howling and flying bodies that were throwing dingy school books at each other, jumping off of crippled furniture, and swinging on her sagging velveteen draperies.

  “Y’all stop that now,” she called out languidly. “You’re giving Miss Sophie a nervous headache, and she said she’s gonna call the cops.” No one paid her any attention, and she turned back toward the television with a sigh, absentmindedly stroking the baby on her lap. What did these people on Brewster Place want from her anyway? Always complaining. If she let the kids go outside, they made too much noise in the halls. If they played in the streets, she didn’t watch them closely enough. How could she do all that—be a hundred places at one time? It was enough just trying to keep this apartment together. Did she know little Brucie was going to climb the wall at the end of the block and fall and break his arm? The way they had carried on, you’d think she had pushed him off herself.