I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots

by Susan Straight

  You got rent, too. You got one month for find a job. Then you rent due. Yeah, you was gon have rent you stay in Pine Garden. But you have food in Pine Garden. Have for buy everything here—no chicken, no field. She went back into the kitchen slowly after she had turned off all the water, and she turned the knobs on the small electric stove. Two burners coiled like snail shells; they turned fiery orange under her rice pot and the canned tomatoes she poured into the smaller pan. Playing with the knobs, she turned the rings to ashy red and let the food simmer. The boys’ chests rustled evenly against the oilcloth.

  She went outside to look at the street in the daylight, leaning over the railing. Below her was the sidewalk. Cain dump no water out there, when I clean. Have for sweep it down the piazza. She turned to go back inside. An older woman’s shaky, birdlike voice said, “Yo two boy sleepin now?”

  The woman was very small and thin, her face light brown with freckles near her eyes, and she sat on the top step of the stairs leading down to the street. Her gray-black braid was wrapped around her head in a crown, and she had loosened her coat in the morning sun.

  Marietta nodded. How she see them two? She must look out she window all day.

  “Them some big, fine boys,” the woman said. “How old—five, six?”

  “They near three soon.”

  “Hmm. They big. They favor you somethin hard. They good boys?”

  Marietta nodded again and moved toward her door. She didn’t want to hear questions about where she was from and why did she only have those few things in the street; she didn’t want to wait until the woman got around to Where your husband? “I have fe go clean,” she said.

  The woman smiled. “That’s nice—you fixing to clean. Was a young couple use to live there, no chilren, and they never kept no house. Runnin in and out, pile they thing on the piazza.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I have fe go now.”

  “You from one a them islands? You talk like them island peoples.”

  “No, ma’am. Pine Garden,” Marietta said, standing against the door now.

  “I never hear of no Pine Garden. Near Savannah?”

  “Up the way,” Marietta said. “Off the highway to McClellanville. My boy stir now, ma’am.”

  The woman nodded and turned back to the street.

  Marietta set the rice aside. She took the middle pot and filled it with hot water from the sink, marveling at the gray rush and steam. In the small, empty bedroom, she began to pour the water carefully, keeping it in puddles on the floor and scrubbing until the rags and bubbles turned dark gray. Then she dumped the dirty water into the bathtub and did it again. Watching the water swirl around the drain, she thought, I ain’t have for sweep it outside. Nothing like before now. I ain’t have to go outside for nothing but find work. That old woman be like them at home, be watch and question every minute. She pushed with her knuckles, digging the rag into the floor. Never my dirt. Never my floor. Yeah, this my floor—long as I pay.

  She knelt at the bathtub when they slid off the couch, and she jumped up, thinking they would cry at the unfamiliar surroundings, but before she could say anything, they were out the front door, Nate chattering away to Calvin. She heard them on the piazza and went outside, pulling her headscarf lower on her forehead, flattening her face. She heard a man’s voice. My scarf down this far, no one see my hair. Could be gray, all they know. She thought of Mr. Thomas suddenly, his occasional stares at her face and hands.

  A small man, his eyes only to her shoulder, was smiling at the boys. His red-brown face had curved sickle lines around the mouth, and his hair started far back on his head. “Juntlemon,” he said, nodding at the boys. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance.” They froze like horses skidding backward, and they knew she was behind them, because they reached around for her legs.

  “Or let me begin with your majestic mother,” he said, smiling again. She let her head tilt forward and looked at him with her eyelids mostly down—this little man, talking like a hundred people lined the piazza, his long words skipping stones over the air. Sucking in her cheeks, she stared hard at him; she was in Charleston again. “Well, when you all are acclimated, I’d be happy to welcome you to the street,” he said. “My wife and I live three doors down. My name is Larkin. But people call me Poppa.” He turned and went back to the open door near the stairs.

  “Get back in there,” Marietta hissed at the boys. “Don’t out the door less you ax. Never.” She shoveled their behinds into the dark room.

  The tiny kitchen was what fascinated her most. The small refrigerator—over and over she opened it to breathe the cold metal rack and rims cloudy with condensation. The stove and sink—she scrubbed off the syrup of aged grease until the enamel was thick white.

  But the recklessness of what she had done fell slowly in the apartment with the second night’s darkness. The boys ate their rice and tomatoes and then swam around the bedroom and the front room like mullet trapped in pools left by low tide; they darted into the dark caves of kitchen and bathroom as if they were little holes in the creekbank. Marietta turned off the lights, thinking about the electric bill. “We go out, Mama? Less go. We go now. Time for go, Mama?” they said into her knees where she sat on the couch.

  She let herself wonder if Sinbad was still driving Charleston streets in his finned car. No. She knew he had found someplace else to disappoint him while he laughed and whispered and his eyebrows danced. She pulled softly at her gold hoops while the boys left her legs and ran. Taking off her headwrap, she made herself touch the back of her neck, the curve of her head above it, and then she tied the scarf tighter over her hair. The hoops felt heavy in her ears. Eighteen. Now I twenty. Wear black like them lady beena lose husband, keep my hair cover. People think I old.

  Miss Pat used to say women from the islands went to the market to sell fruits and vegetables and baskets. But what would the boys do on the sidewalk—the street wouldn’t be like the fields, where they could run. She went to find them in the bathroom, shooed them out while she fished clothespins from the toilet.

  She had forgotten how the wind sounded different in the city. The heat clinked in the wall heater and the air brushed the window. Now that it was past dark, she let the boys stand on the couch underneath the front window and peer out the screen for a second. She listened to the air moving past the buildings with nothing to stop it—no branches or moss or bark to catch a sound. The cold wind rushed into the piazza, though, and moved the smells of cooking and cologne, and she could hear pots clanking, faraway voices, and right next door, through the walls, she heard radio music.

  All night, after she had laid the boys on the pallet beside the couch, she lay there under the window and heard the sharp singing and guitars and underneath it all the quick little beats. It was a small radio, she could tell by the tiny music. And the voices were so different from Laha or Rosie singing in the fields or the truck, or the people singing at church. These voices sounded closest to the children, Laha’s kids and the rest holding hands, chasing each other and chanting.

  All the other sounds stopped eventually while she smelled the rusty screen air above her through the window crack—the cars, which seldom came down the dead-end street, the steps of boots and heels on the wooden piazza, the click of door locks and TVs—but the radio trickled drums and horns and voices through her wall until early morning. No chair legs scraped next door, no one coughed, but before the sun rose, the door next to hers trembled shut and soft feet padded down the stairs.

  By the time she raised her head to the window, she saw nothing moving, just the dark shapes of the apartments that led in a shadowy tunnel like oaks down the lane. With her cheek on her arm, she watched until a few yellow squares blinked down the street and the outlines of houses showed. Then she poured grits like sand into the boiling water and stacked the baskets inside each other. Only two—the large round-bellied one Aint Sister had helped her make when the boys were almost six months old. It was the same shape as the one the tiny yellow-haired woma
n had fingered that day in the stand, the day Marietta’s mother lay breathing silently in bed. Aint Sister’s fingers had been all over this one, tightening the pine-needle contrast, smoothing the sweetgrass. Inside the large one was the tall jar-shaped basket, which she had filled with the forks and spoons and socks and shirts she grabbed while packing to leave.

  How much did they ask for baskets here in Charleston? Only two left. She closed her eyes and saw the baskets lining the stand, swaying in the wind, breathing sweetgrass dry over her all day. She smelled the belly of the round one, and then she went to wake the boys.

  It was just light when she pulled them down the street, their eyes sleep-slanted and mouths warm from grits. She pinched the oilcloth tightly under her arm and hurried. The sky was gray-cold, and people walked with their heads down until they disappeared into stores and buildings; all she could see was the men’s hat circles. No women walked yet. Marietta found the old market building, and she slowed, set her face. The other women were settled behind vegetables and baskets, only a few women, and she didn’t see Miss Pat. Who could she ask? The women were impassive, or weaving and murmuring, pulling sweetgrass from paper bags at their feet or rounding their hands over turnips and cabbage. They didn’t look at Marietta.

  Where I spread my thing? How much they ax for tall basket here? She kept the boys moving, their hands away from the colors, and walked around once more, still searching for Miss Pat’s face. A few older black women holding the hands of white children, Nate and Calvin’s size, came in now and touched the vegetables. Marietta watched them and thought, I sit and put my two basket out, I got no sweetgrass, nothing few do with my hand. I sit here with nothing don’t look right. Like I steal these two basket.

  She let Nate and Calvin pull her out the door. They had seen a store with Christmas tinsel in the window, toys and packages and even a tree. They ran ahead of her and tried to push open the glass-topped door before she remembered.

  “Get back here! You cain go in there,” she hissed at them, snatching their arms away from the brass knob. “Come here!” She dragged them down the sidewalk, and Nate’s face cracked, outraged, into a howl.

  Charleston—she had already forgotten that they couldn’t go into the stores below certain streets, that the boys would have to learn not to run ahead of her and touch until they were in the right neighborhood. There was nowhere in Pine Gardens they couldn’t go—Pearl’s store was the only one they had ever seen. Pine Garden sound good, huh? Yeah, and they cain go in the House soon as they bigger. Can go in the granary anytime now. “Walk right!” she told them, angry, when they slumped and dragged on her hands, trying to pull her back. “Now!”

  She waited until she saw black faces and smelled the right smells. Then she let them go into a corner store. Crackers and milk. She let them choose sardines. “Mama, look he get cookie!” Nate shouted, watching an older boy. “Less get cookie!” She thought of the few times she had let them take a big cookie from the Murray’s tin at Pearl’s, the sweet crumbs that stayed on their tongues only a moment and in their minds forever.

  “Less get cookie, Mama?” Calvin whispered to her, his face thrown all the way back to look up into her eyes. She counted out the coins at the counter, numb, the cashier’s face blurred in her unfocused eyes.

  “Big truck!” Nate said outside, clutching the cookie with both hands. “Look big truck!” Calvin stared at everything, one pointed tooth coming down hard on the corner of his lip again and again. She walked back toward the apartment, and the cookies became only pale speckles around the boys’ lips, hanging magically onto their cheeks until she brushed at them. Calvin squatted in the gutter when they got to their street, his head down to look for anything valuable pasted to the curbside. Marietta looked across at the muddy field and the smoke rising from the factories far across the lots. Them women in the market maybe don’t sold nothing today, but they got chickens, they got the creek at home. They got greens. She touched her cold key in her pocket and told the boys, “Come on, we go upstairs. Eat some fish.” The sardine can slid across the basketweave.

  She missed the rocking chair. Her legs cramped up when she lay on the couch, like her muscles were spongy as the squashed-flat cushions already. She let the boys run wild, and they were crazy as chained dogs, stuffing clothes into the empty refrigerator, filling the bathtub with a pounding rush of water. The radio was soft and insistent toward night, like baby birds in a nest under the eaves. Behind the shade, the window was open a crack, and the screen let in night air and voices. After she put the boys to sleep, she listened to the older woman’s trembling words and the deep answers of men. The small red man must be she husband. Marietta listened for the “don, don, don,” in the older woman’s throat, but though she kept still, intent, watching the boys tumble out onto the piazza in the morning as helplessly as if she were a child, she heard no scolding tongue against teeth.

  Nate and Calvin came back to the door holding striped candy canes. “Mama! Candy! Christmas!” they shouted.

  “Who give you candy?” she said, looking out the door. They whirled and pointed to the small woman coming down the piazza, smiling.

  “Them boys ain’t got nothin for Christmas?” she said, her voice high and rising. “Let em come on over my place and I make em some Christmas cake.”

  “Cake! Mama!” Nate said. But Marietta looked at the fan of lines wide around the woman’s eyes, her teeth small and even, her two skirts. The “don” lingered there in the wrinkles and folds. Who was this woman? She no kin to me. She want something.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” she said, planting her fingers into the soft meat of the boys’ shoulders and pulling them inside. “We have thing fe do today.” She closed the door, seeing a wedge of skirt fade away.

  Dressing in her black pants and white shirt, she cleaned the boys’ faces of the candy-cane juice and waited until the piazza was quiet. They clattered down the stairs and down the street.

  Heading toward Frank’s, she stopped at each of the small cafés and lunch counters, holding the boys’ hands and asking, “Excuse me, I look for work. I use to work at Frank’s, fish market down the way. You need help?” She tried to look soft in the eyes of the women behind the counters. The young women, with red lips and fingers—were they some of the same ones who had come to Frank’s and painted themselves, watched Sinbad? They shook their heads, staring at the boys, at Marietta’s size and smile. She found herself looking at the tops of their shiny curls when they bent their heads to the counters.

  “Christmastime, now,” one man said. “We full up.” “You need some experience in a restaurant, not a market,” another man said. “This a lot different.”

  She held the boys’ hands, walking them from store to store, from window to window with painted letters and dangling tinsel and Christmas music inside. After a few hours, they began to snatch at things in the stores, to cry for candy and cookies and rolls, and people smiled at their sullen lips and eyes. “Look them two,” they said. “Twins—look how they get mad the same. Poke out they lips like they done practiced together.”

  She bought one candy cane for each and led them back to the apartment. Her eyes felt as if hot, dry cloth lined the sockets. The rice in the bag was a small pillow. The grits bag was still full, and she put a stick of butter into the refrigerator, where it sat like a fat grub on the rack. She moved it to the side and closed the door.

  Children shouted and warbled in the afternoon, and even though Calvin and Nate trod on her legs to stand on the couch and look out the window, she didn’t let them out. They ran to the windows overlooking the field, hollered and pointed at the kids playing, and she shook her head. Until dark, they spun in anger, whirling at the door, and she sat, staring, listening and thinking of the smoke rising from the factories. They were past walking distance if she took the boys.

  A smell floated inside, something sweet and black that she had never smelled before—smoking burnt sugar and butter? She counted her money, lay as if her legs had turned
to fallen oak branches, and dozed. Sardines. Milk. Cookies—she could almost hear the crunch of cookies against the boys’ teeth, loud as their shoes on the gritty sidewalks. I keep em inside, they cain see none a that in the store, cain ax for cookie.

  What you think? You cain find no job here less you ax. This ain’t winter in Pine Garden—this Charleston. Have for be work someplace. Ax them on the piazza. Aint Sister say you grown when you feed baby. Cain keep em inside with no rice and grits.

  The next day, she took the sullen boys, who snatched their hands from hers and tried to run down the piazza, to the woman’s door. She heard TVs and laughter and scolding from the other apartments, saw kids running on the sidewalks. After she had knocked, the woman’s head peered around the door frame. “Scuse me,” Marietta said.

  “Darlin, I gon have to get back to you,” the old woman said, looking back into her apartment. “I stop by your place in a while.”

  She closed the door abruptly. Marietta walked slowly back to her door, her mouth filling with water. That smoky sugar smell had coated the screen, made her hungry for sweets, too. She remembered when the boys were first born, how she had craved a chocolate bar, a cookie, something sugary, and she had no money; she’d had to stay in the house and mix sugar and flour into a sweetish powder to rub with her tongue into the roof of her mouth.

  She paused before the silent, always-closed door next to hers. No radio burbled, no one laughed or spoke. Inside, she told the boys, “Wait. That lady come for tell Mama something. Go on play in the tub.”

  A lemon smell tickled her nose now, and she sat on the couch, her head buzzing. She would ask the woman about the factories, about anyone who knew where there was a job. But she couldn’t concentrate on anything, with the lemon smell growing stronger even when she went to the kitchen and turned on the faucet to remember how exciting the water looked rushing in a straight stream. She stood there with her hand in the hot water until she realized that the smell was everywhere and someone was knocking.