by Whitney Otto
Yet underneath it all, Anna could not quite shake off the chill, the tiniest hint of frost from Mrs. Rubens. Mr. Rubens was always polite to her, always asking her for things a housekeeper should provide, nothing more. He was often out of town on business and, in that respect, seemed more like an employer, making him more comfortable to be around.
IN THE EVENINGS, when Anna had finished with her tasks, she frequently took nighttime walks, as she had on the ranch. Her center of gravity had shifted, making her stride less supple, a little more awkward, yet still carrying that same odd allure lusted after by the boy from Chicago. She would wander with her hand to her stomach, growing larger daily, her eyes scanning the sky. That was how she walked: hand to belly, eyes to heaven. As if she could somehow link the two. In the Philippines there is a Tagalog word lehi, as in “making lehi.” Translated, it means that when a woman is pregnant, whatever obsesses her will manifest itself in the unborn child; so if one dreams of chicken beaks, one’s child will be born with a chicken beak.
Anna was unaware of this as she moved in the shine of the moon, her palms resting on her stomach and her gaze cast upward. Perhaps making lehi is an instinctual reflex among women heavy with child. Or maybe she was simply crisscrossing it, unconsciously, with the tradition of wishing upon a star. Pauline had told her, The sky belongs to nobody. The sky is free. Her unborn child, in this world, belonged to nobody.
You belong only to yourself.
WHEN SHE CAME BACK one night, Glady Joe Rubens asked, “Where do you go at night, Anna?”
“Just walking,” Anna said. “Nowhere special.” Inside Anna had not forgotten the price paid earlier in her life for walking alone beneath the stars.
“I thought maybe I could go with you sometime.”
No, no, she could not share her walks with anyone, certainly not another child of the family for which she worked. “Maybe,” she said, vowing to herself that her nocturnal wanderings were now over for the duration of her stay in this house.
“I’d like that,” said Glady Joe. “I truly would.”
Anna suspected that, like Mrs. Rubens, Glady Joe wanted to show the world how charitable she could be to the “less fortunate.” She did not stop to differentiate between what was genuine and what was false. What the difference between mother and daughter could be.
ANNA QUIT HER STROLLS, confined herself to her room after the dinner dishes were washed and put away. At first, she wrote letters to Pauline; sometimes she thought about getting in touch with the father of her baby, maybe just show up at his college back east. Really shock his parents.
The Rubenses provided her with an old radio that Anna felt might have belonged to the Rubenses’ daughters, or the Flower Girls, as they were known around town. She was certain that it was donated at Mrs. Rubens’s insistence. Oh, Anna could just hear her: “Now, Glady Joe, Hy, we have to be big enough to share with those who cannot get for themselves. You two can listen to the one downstairs.” But there was so little on the radio that captivated Anna. There were the girlish, fey white singers who tried their hands at jazz or light blues, late at night, but often it did not sound right.
ANNA BEGAN QUILTING. Pauline, who almost exclusively sewed and quilted for the mrs. by then, frequently sent her scraps, which Anna shoved into an old flour sack. Mostly the dark colors associated with the Amish quilts and some patterned pieces thrown in, maybe a true red or yellow. So heartbroken was the mrs. at the loss of The Life Before that she gave Pauline carte blanche to purchase yards of matching fabric (a luxury for the serious quilter) to fashion superior quilts. Anna’s quilts cleverly joined scraps from Pauline’s remnants. She made do with what came her way.
She began a crib quilt for her baby, using a traditional Amish pattern called Broken Star. Anna lay the back cloth and batting; she worked the tiny diamonds to create one huge star against a background of indigo.
One night, Glady Joe knocks softly on her door. Anna is momentarily startled; she often felt that once dinner was through and she retired to her room, she lived alone in this house. So separate from the Rubenses. “Anna?”
She sets her work aside, opens the door, and steps back to let in Glady Joe. Glady Joe holds a book in her hand.
“Is this what you do?” Glady Joe fingers the hundreds of tiny diamond shapes. “I haven’t seen you walking. That is, you must be quite fast because I don’t see you leave.” Glady Joe sits primly on the edge of the bed while Anna thinks, Man, another white child of the house sittin’ on my bed.
“I haven’t felt like walking.”
“Oh.”
Glady Joe shyly holds up her book. “I was wondering if you’ve ever read this?” Anna reads the title Wuthering Heights and shakes her head no.
“Would you like to borrow it? I mean, it reminds me of you—all that walking around—um, these people are always walking around, too. Across the moors. They spend a lot of time wandering.” Glady Joe says, “I can’t believe you are making this yourself. So many little pieces—how do you keep them all straight? And so striking. The colors, I mean.”
“The women in my family quilt,” says Anna, then, “Look, I’m pretty busy with this quilt. I want to finish it for my child”—she smiles briefly—“so I’m in a hurry.”
Glady Joe rises. “I could leave the book. You could look at it when you have time.”
“Don’t bother,” says Anna, then sees the hurt in Glady Joe’s face. She feels guilty, then annoyed. Doesn’t she have somewhere to go? Of course, she’s not with Hy tonight because Hy is out with a group of friends. Anna heard her mention a special boy—Lee, Anna thinks—but her parents won’t allow her to single-date; she’s only fifteen. But Hy refuses to stay home; she is far more stylish and sociable than her sister. Glady Joe, too, seems “different” from most people in Grasse, but it is Hy who is more noticeable, with her tortoiseshell combs, sparkling dress clips worn with one of her mother’s old sweaters, her embroidered school socks. New hairstyles copied from magazines published in New York and all her talk about Paris and Berlin and artists and such.
The Flower Girls often seem like outsiders when compared to the residents of Grasse; Glady Joe more than Hy, but neither as much as me, thinks Anna. Then Glady Joe is gone from her room and Anna is back at her Broken Star.
LATER, as Anna heads down the hall to the bathroom, she hears Mrs. Rubens saying, “Sweetie, leave Anna alone. You two are very different people and you are old enough to understand what I mean by that.”
Glady Joe protests. “Mother.”
But Mrs. Rubens will allow no disharmony in her house. “It isn’t fair to Anna or to you to start this thing up. These are not my rules; this is the way things are.”
Anna pauses in the hallway. Not fair to Anna? Who is she to say what is fair and what is not? Goddamn these white folks anyhow. They think they know goddamn everything about everyone. Who said Anna was willing to be Glady Joe’s friend, in any case? Though, she has to admit, company her own age would, at times, be a welcome thing.
Anna closes the bathroom door, strips off her dress, shoes, and socks. She stares at herself in the mirror, which only reveals her body from the waist up (the waist that is rapidly disappearing), is dismayed by the heavy fullness of her breasts, which have finally lost that irritating tenderness (when the lightest brush of fabric across her nipples made her crazy). Her abdomen pooches, her hips have widened, and suddenly she is glad she has no man to see her naked. She is sad, too. There is no one to hold her, and she wonders if that is what drew her to the boy on the ranch in the first place—the longing to be held. She curses him for making her recall how much she likes being touched (no one had laid a hand on her since she left Pauline’s). Anna believes that people can live without any number of pleasurable sensations, providing they never come into contact with them again. Because once they are reintroduced into a person’s life, the need for that thing becomes consuming and uncontrollable.
She steps into the bath. As she lies on her back, her stomach and brea
sts peak out of the steaming water, like a small group of South Sea atolls. What had she expected from the boy? Love? Money? Social status? Affection? Revenge? A slap at the parents? At herself? She lifts the washcloth from the water and wrings it dry, the drops of water falling on her many-island body like a tropical rain. She imagines her baby floating in her womb as she floats in the tub and notes that it is asleep.
WUTHERING HEIGHTS sits unopened on Anna’s dresser, as Anna herself sits in the light of the bed-table lamp, eyes close to the work, stitching patches of Broken Star. She is convinced that she hears someone on the other side of her door, silence, then faint, disappearing footsteps.
Good, she thinks.
Until the next night, when Glady Joe comes again to the door, asks to be let in. Anna leans back in her chair, legs pushed slightly apart by her girth, her lap containing the unfinished quilt. “Anna,” says Glady Joe, “I thought I’d come by and see if you’d like some ice cream. Mom made it. Tin Roof Sundae.”
“That does sound good,” answers Anna.
In the kitchen, Mr. Rubens is telling some story about a man in his office, someone who works for him, as Mrs. Rubens listens raptly, clucking her tongue in disapproval or surprise at all the appropriate moments. Says things like, “Some people just never appreciate anything” or “They think the world owes them a living.” Maybe she’ll glance in Anna’s direction and smile at her. Anna pretends to be absorbed in her ice cream and wishes that she could politely take it back to her room.
“So I said to him,” says Mr. Rubens, jabbing the air with his spoon, “There’s a depression out there. I don’t need to tell you.”
“Dear,” agrees Mrs. Rubens, “you can only do what is right. You can’t do anything about anyone else; no matter how much you may want to. Nothing goes unseen. We all have to live with ourselves. Finally, I mean. In the end.” She places a tiny bit of ice cream on the tip of her spoon, takes it between her lips.
“Of course, you are right” (Mrs. Rubens nods), he says. “It’s just that it sometimes makes you want to stop helping people—leave them to sink or swim, then let them see how good they had it.”
“Of course,” says Mrs. Rubens.
In comes Hy with two boys and a girl. (“Hello, Lee,” says Mrs. Rubens, smiling. Lee says, “Evening, ma’am. Sir.” Anna can see delight in Mrs. Rubens’s shining eyes as she notes Lee’s wonderful manners and fine demeanor. “The mark of being well bred,” she says later.) The other boy is called James Dodd and the girl, Corrina something—Anna doesn’t catch it.
“Lee brought me home,” says Hy, curls loose after an evening out. Her dress is still nicely pressed—a burnt orange of that new, experimental fabric that is supposed to be so durable—and an elegant alligator belt, really too sophisticated for the young girl who wears it. Hy flings herself into a chair and exclaims, “Ooh, ice cream,” offers some to her friends, who decline (“I promised to have Corrina home by ten-thirty”). Hy merely waves from the table, spooning ice cream into her mouth—a breach of etiquette that does not go unreprimanded by Mrs. Rubens (“Hy, we may live in Grasse but we still have manners”). But Hy just listens, eagerly awaiting the second helping of the ice cream that her mother is scooping into her bowl, never taking her eyes from the spoon to the bowl, with all the intensity of a cat being fed. With one elbow on the table, she slides off her earrings, one, then the other, tosses them toward her mother, thanking her for allowing her to borrow them.
“Well, they looked so pretty on you,” says Mrs. Rubens.
Glady Joe asks, “Who do you like better—Lee or James?” and Hy answers, “Anyone who doesn’t plan to be a farmer.”
Anna is struck by nothing so much as the sense that she truly does not belong here, in this kitchen with Mr. Rubens chatting about the office and Mrs. Rubens’s unconditional sympathy; the loaning of the earrings and the sisterly question about which boy makes the better date/prospect; and how she, Anna, completes the picture of American family perfection by being the charity, the evidence of the goodness of spirit that lives in this house, in this rural town, in the mid-1930s. She feels as if she is in a darkened theater watching something called The American Family, expecting a deep, resonant, informed voice-over to describe its habits, joys, ambitions, frustrations, and sorrows. Its desirability.
I am no part of this, thinks Anna. Not only this house, but this world. This society. This does not surprise her—what surprises her is the way in which she is both drawn to and repelled by what she sees. She is too late for dating; she would be happy to have a man of her own who kisses her when he comes in at night, calls her honey as he runs his strong, capable hands across her stomach, says good-evening to their baby inside her. They’ll talk about their respective days; as tired as he is from working he’ll gaze at her and say my pretty girl. Of course, there is a fantasy in itself—that he would be employed—a dream for half of America. She is lucky to be working, eating this ice cream, which makes it suddenly distasteful to her.
As she takes her bowl to the sink (“More dishes,” she sighs), Glady Joe asks her if she’d like some more; after all, she is eating for two. Anna shakes her head; she wants to return to her room, lose herself in the Broken Star, and forget about being seventeen, unwed, unloved, pregnant, and outside the mainstream.
GLADY JOE CONTINUES to come to Anna’s closed door, usually bearing tea or something to show her or give her, while Anna accepts whatever is offered without much commitment. Each time, Glady Joe marvels over the progress of the quilt—its near completion; its complicated beauty. She asks more technical questions and Anna finds herself warming to the telling of how to make a quilt.
She relents, asks about the book that Glady Joe gave her. As Glady Joe begins to tell her the story of Wuthering Heights, she finds herself reading passages aloud; then, beginning at the beginning. In the room there is only the sound of Glady Joe’s voice reading—as Anna quilts—as Cathy and Heathcliff traverse the wild, desolate English landscape.
Anna likes this tale very much. She likes the remoteness of the setting, the drama of the friendship between the two and the way in which it continues and twists into the next generation. She loves the sense of Heathcliff and Cathy as outlaws; yet Cathy can function within society, while Heathcliff is destroyed and embittered by it. Anna likes his midnight soul; his dark heart.
She may stop quilting, ask Glady Joe to reread a passage, then repeat a section of it to herself; or she may ask questions or comment on what is being read. Sometimes Glady Joe sets the book in her lap, asks Anna what she thinks this or that means, the way in which it belongs in the story.
After Wuthering Heights comes Jane Eyre, the “natural extension,” says Glady Joe, cracking open the novel. Anna is taken with the character of Jane: plain, honorable, smart, naïve Jane. She loves her backbone and is drawn to her in an altogether different way than she was to Heathcliff; she loves his badness as much as she loves Jane’s goodness. Glady Joe and Anna disagree about the ending, as well as the reasons behind Jane’s affection for Mr. Rochester.
“It is because he is so great,” sighs Glady Joe.
“It is because she is a domestic and lonely,” corrects Anna.
Next comes Pride and Prejudice, which Anna does not care for (“Just like white folks,” she thinks) and Daisy Miller, until Anna places her work in her lap one night and says, “Can’t we get away from those English?” Everything has gone downhill since the Brontës. Glady Joe seems hurt that Anna is not warming to the same books that she does and says, “Henry James is American, not English.”
“Same thing,” says Anna.
Glady Joe tries Madame Bovary (“No,” says Anna); then Anna Karenina (“No,” says Anna). Then Pauline sends Anna a handwritten copy of a story called “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston.
Neale like me, thinks Anna.
Pauline’s accompanying note reads: I read this in someone else’s magazine but I wanted you to have it so I copied it for you. The shape and style of Pauline’s handwritin
g causes Anna’s throat to close and eyes to smart with tears.
And it is this story Anna reads to Glady Joe one night as she sits working on her first sample patch. Who says at the end, “I wonder who killed Spunk.”
Anna says, “Now that’s a story.” She recognizes something that has been lacking in the continuing stream of stories and novels that Glady Joe has been reading to her. Pauline, now retired, regularly mails stories and poems to Anna, since she is in San Francisco with access to publications featuring black writers. Anna feels like a bridge between the literature of Glady Joe and Pauline: one sending her tales of her mother’s culture, the other reading stories of her father’s culture.
When Anna has a story to read, Glady Joe works her quilting sampler and listens. When Glady Joe reads, Anna works her own quilts. It is not long before Glady Joe tentatively tries her hand at Anna’s quilts, placing the backing to the top piece, rescuing Anna from the tedium of the work.
MRS. RUBENS SAYS something to Anna regarding adoption. “But I’m not sending him out. I’m bringing him up myself,” Anna says.
Mrs. Rubens acts as if she has received a shock with a hot wire. She blurts out, “Oh, but you can’t!”
“Yes,” Anna tells her, “I can and I will.”
“But, Anna,” says Mrs. Rubens, awkwardly fumbling for Anna’s hand, “don’t you want what is best for him? Don’t you want him to have a good life?”
Anna wants to say, What are you going on about? My child will still be called Negro and unless everything in this country changes before next week, my baby will have a rare chance at a “good life”; he will only have a “Negro life,” which is made so hard even in the best of circumstances. Besides which, I am what is best for him.