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

by Susan Straight

  “I ain’t no stranger,” he said, looking at Marietta. “Right?”

  She leaned against the railing, shrugged, and watched him settle down on one of the folding chairs. “But does your ticket have the right name on it?” Jesse said.

  “Nigger, I brought your Pabst—don’t fall out,” Milton said, pulling bottles out and setting them on the wood. “But they ain’t gon stay cold for long.”

  “They won’t stay long with Jesse here,” Baby Poppa said, and everyone laughed.

  “Marietta, you want a beer?” Milton said, his eyes still on her. She shook her head as one of the kids ran up to the yard.

  “Big Ma, Nate say he can keep a knife. He find a knife in the field,” the boy sang. “Calvin say he can’t.”

  “Calvin right,” she said, looking down at the dirty upturned face and bared teeth. “Tell he bring me that knife.”

  “He said Nate had the knife,” Jesse said.

  “But Calvin only one can get something away from Nate,” Marietta said. “He know how to move him, where he ticklish.” She got up and started down the stairs.

  “Big Ma?” Milton said to Jesse. “They call her Big Ma?” She walked quickly to the field, where Nate and Calvin were still shouting at each other, and she didn’t hear what Baby Poppa and Jesse said, but everyone laughed again. She waited for her face to burn with anger—but instead she felt only the sun on her shoulders. They say what they want—maybe they laugh at Jesse, maybe somebody drop the baseball. I don’t care no more. She stepped into the dirt and said, “You better use you head, Nathaniel, before I slap it.”

  The dirt-crusted butter knife in her pocket, she turned to see the men all turned back toward the TV, Tiny Momma’s face peering out of her doorway, and her boys’ shirts like stamps against the dark piazza, the big face of the apartment house.

  All afternoon, Milton smiled at her, asked her questions, and Baby Poppa, Jesse, Victor, and the others argued about baseball. When he asked, “When’s your birthday?” she said, “Eleven August,” without thinking because she was watching a pitch. “That was last week!” he said. “Why you didn’t tell nobody?”

  Baby Poppa looked at her. “She doesn’t like birthdays, maybe.”

  Marietta kept her eyes on the TV. “I got the boys’ birthdays for worry about—I too old for birthday.”

  “I doubt that—how old are you?” Milton teased, moving his knee to hitch his chair closer. “Too old for presents?”

  She looked at Baby Poppa’s light brown eyes, Milton’s slightly red, Jesse’s small slits in his smiled-high cheeks. “Old enough,” she said.

  “You too old to eat without your boys?” Milton said then. “Too old to eat out with me?”

  She didn’t realize what he was asking at first, until Jesse and the others looked away carefully, thumbnail smiles on their lips, and she remembered that stiff, formal way the men in the fish market had held themselves whenever one asked a girl out. He wanted to take her to a restaurant. Milton smiled, his mustache thick as a paintbrush over his lips, his teeth square and small for his wide face and body. “I old enough for that,” she said, and the men all relaxed and let their shoulders go, their hands moving for more beer.

  She lay on the couch listening to the radio next door. Friday—she and Milton would go out on Friday, and Tiny Momma would watch the boys, of course. The songs tinkled and beat, and the announcer’s voice was deeper, fuzzy in the plaster. She never heard anything but the music—no rattling dishes, no voices not filtered through the radio’s tiny mesh, not even footsteps. No one ever changed the station. But she had stayed awake many nights to watch the man go—only a bent back and dark hat over the door lock when she put her head out her own door. He pulled the knob shut silently and turned toward the stairs, so she never saw anything but his back floating down the dark street.

  For a long time, when she first came back to Charleston, she had imagined that the silent old man was her Uncle Hurriah, that his music was now the radio she heard all night, until he left at midnight, even after he was gone. She had finally asked Tiny Momma who he was, and Tiny Momma said, “He a hermit—he ain’t never spoke to no one, not even the landlady, since he been came here years ago. He leave her rent money in a envelope under her door.”

  “He leave the radio on even after he go to work,” Marietta had said. “Who there for listen?”

  Tiny Momma shook her head. “Nobody else there. He must leave it on for the roaches.”

  She purposely avoided asking anyone else about the man, calling him Uncle in her head. She knew he wasn’t, but sometimes she thought about all the old men in Charleston, floating on the streets, drunk or nodding or walking to work, smiling at the boys. She turned over on the couch, away from the window that let in the street light, and thought of her old room, her uncle’s room. Sinbad. When she looked in the travel section of Ebony at Baby Poppa’s, or asked him for old travel magazines from his hotel, she put Sinbad’s face in the photos, but she knew he would find a street like those she never saw in the pictures—one with a fish market or hamburger joint or café, with dark faces bobbing and weaving in the streets, long feet flat on porches and in doorways. He might have ridden the cable cars in San Francisco, licked fog from his lips; he might have gambled in Las Vegas, where neon lights wrapped around the streets like snakes and fireflies; he might walk underneath tall shadows of skyscrapers in Chicago or New York, but she knew he slept in places on streets she couldn’t find in the magazines.

  He been you excuse. He been some lips you think on so you ain’t have for bother with nobody. You never see him again—nobody ax you bout he no more, cause he dead. You always say he dead. Let he dead then.

  He one more spirit, she thought when she sat in Milton’s car. He one more haint—Aint Sister, Mama, all watch me go out for eat. Milton turned on the car radio and bent his elbow out the open window. “What you want to eat?” he said. “You name it.”

  But in the restaurant, which she had picked because it wasn’t far away and she remembered coming to ask the manager for a job, she sat across from him in the booth, uncomfortable. Milton’s face was always across from hers, when they stood, now when they sat, his eyes always directly on her face. She wasn’t used to such close looking, to someone watching her lips when she chewed, her mouth when she spoke, her eyes wherever they moved. The boys, Baby Poppa, and Tiny Momma were all far below her; the people in the big houses always avoided her face, turned their ears to her as soon as they could. Milton—what he want? He laugh? He stare cause I so dark, so, so… he go to work tell Jesse what I fe do?

  He talked about what he and Jesse did at the college. “Man, you should see them wild cats hiding in the bushes—them animals get big off what they scrounge from the students. And they be wailing at night, when they gettin ready to fight. Jesse says that’s how little Jesse be wailin when he mad—like some wild tomcat.”

  She smiled. “I hear he holler sometime at night. Colleen have she hand full.” Why you talk like that? Talk like Baby Poppa—you hear how. Why you talk like Pine Garden? You always make hard fe people.

  Milton said, “Your two boys never hollered like that? Big old lungs they got, they must sound like bulls when they get goin.”

  She said, “I don’t remember.” But she saw them plowing along in the mud behind her in the field, growling when she left the room, roaring when they first woke from sleep. “Maybe lion,” she whispered.

  “What?” he said.

  She shook her head and took a small bite of her meat. In his car again, driving along the waterfront streets, where the moon made the river and harbor pearly-silver, she was quiet, smelling the dashboard. Car insides, truck cabs would always make her think of men—the metal even breathed their smoke and liquor and cologne and hands. He seemed not to care that she didn’t talk; he drove around for a while longer, listening to the radio, and when they came back down her street, he said, “You want to do it again?”

  Jesse and Colleen encouraged it, and Marietta
could tell they liked the idea of her with Milton, of the two of them settling down. Jesse would knock on her door and say, “Milt fixing to come by—you want to play some cards? You like to play tonk?” Colleen would smile at the two of them, ask Marietta, when they had gone out for more beer, if Milt had bought her anything or kissed her.

  Tiny Momma loved it even more. “What you think he like to eat?” she said. “I have it ready when you get home from work, cause you at Mrs. King’s tonight and she keep you late. I get off early and buy some ham hock if he want peas.”

  One or two nights a week he sat on the couch, a plate of cake or cobbler on his lap, their plates cleared off the small table. Marietta said to Tiny Momma, “You ain’t have for leave yet. I need you help me iron them two clothes for school. Baby Poppa say school start Monday.”

  Milton sat politely while Tiny Momma sprinkled and rolled the stiff clothes and Marietta pressed with the heavy iron. He and Tiny Momma talked about the college; she always asked him about the beautiful buildings and the students. Marietta listened to them and to the boys’ whispers in the other room, to the radio’s tiny taps against the wall, to the kids still playing in the street and the people talking on the piazza.

  She didn’t work that day—she told Mrs. Hendricks she couldn’t come to do all the heavy laundry and windows until Wednesday. She and Baby Poppa moved with the mass of children and knots of mothers down the several blocks to the school, with the women hollering about no playing in the field with school clothes and school shoes, and where your money, boy? You ain’t gon eat nothing for lunch or dinner.

  Women sat at a long desk to fill out papers, and Baby Poppa stayed by Marietta’s elbow when one older woman with high-teased hair asked the boys’ names, age, address, birth date, place of birth. “You are their mother?” she said, looking up imperiously, and Marietta nodded while the woman’s pen scratched over the papers.

  They brought home papers with their names written in large, round letters, and the alphabet, numbers, in different colors. Baby Poppa left those books Marietta remembered—the house and the yellow-haired children, the thick pages and pointy roofs and brown dogs. She tried to read to them every night, their thighs pressed to hers, and she cupped their hands around pencils to practice letters.

  But the week after, she noticed Calvin getting hurt almost every day, coming in from the field where the summer light still hung on. He stood close, nudging her like a calf when she stood at the sink or stove, and she didn’t listen at first when he moaned about his cuts, trying to think of how she could wash the clothes that had piled up so quickly, and dry them at night.

  Calvin wound in around her thighs until she sat on the couch and put her arms around him to examine the tiny scratch on his wrist, thin as a thread. “How this happen?” she would ask, and he said, “A-o-know.” He pushed his head into her stomach and she touched the hard knots of hair by his neck, the ones she would soften and pull out with her fingers and the shampoo. Every day, it seemed, Calvin had one of those identical straight slashes on his thumb or arm, and he wanted to sit in her lap in the evening. Milt would stop by, and he and Tiny Momma had to sit at the table because Calvin didn’t want to leave her legs. Nate would say, “You a baby, Calvin. Rock-a-bye baby.” Marietta told him, “Hush and take you bath.”

  “He ain’t gotta take bath?”

  “He come.” She asked Calvin, “Who scratch you up? You play with a cat?”

  “A-o-know. They hurt, Mama. They was bleeding.” She washed out the cuts and rubbed his back in the tub, frowning.

  The teacher in their class sent a note home, asking Marietta to come in, and she expected it to be about Calvin. Was he fighting, getting cut by fingernails or even a knife? She left Mrs. Despres’s house early with Tiny Momma, and she asked Tiny Momma to wait with the boys by the school fence.

  The teacher was young, about thirty, Marietta guessed, and she sat behind her desk in a cement-block room filled with small wooden desks and posters and cutouts of letters. She was light-skinned, plump-faced, and her arms shook like Rosie’s used to. She said, “Mrs. Cook, the boys are obviously twins, and obviously big.” Marietta nodded. “Well, they’re so much larger than the other children I think they’re actually intimidated by the kids. I mean, Nate does fairly well, but when they’re all in here and we begin a lesson, Calvin just refuses to talk, and Nate gets very defensive about his brother. Calvin seems to be disturbed about something.”

  “I think he fight with somebody,” Marietta said. She breathed, calm, and smelled glue and wood. She imagined Calvin at the back, looking at the many heads stretched out below him, and thought maybe he was angry about the other kids. But she looked at the desks and saw names on them: Aaron, Aubert, Burns, Carvin, Cook, Cook. The front row.

  “Have you seen them fighting?” the teacher said. “I haven’t yet. Do you think Calvin has a problem with his schoolwork? Is it too easy or too hard for him? One of the other teachers tried to tell me that the boys had to be eight or nine, and they must have flunked out at another school, especially because you couldn’t provide a birth certificate. I think they act as though they’re six. I told her they were really six, because I had seen you bring them.” She smiled, and Marietta tightened her chest. But she went on, “I have a daughter, and she’s as round as me, unfortunately. I watched it happen.”

  Marietta let herself smile. She listened as Mrs. Williams said that Calvin had to talk in class or she’d have to consult with the principal about separating the boys. Marietta walked back through the dark hallway to the playground fence, but she didn’t say anything until they got home and the front door was closed.

  “Why you won’t talk to the teacher?” she asked Calvin. He shrugged.

  Nate said, “Cause he a baby, Mama.”

  “Nobody ax you,” she said.

  “Well, he don’t know his ownself.” Nate curled his lip in scorn, and Calvin said nothing, just stared impassively at the refrigerator.

  “Close you mouth for a change and maybe he answer,” she told Nate. But she watched them push and wrestle every night; in the morning before school, if she was still home, she saw Nate talking, gesturing, and Calvin studying the others. In the evenings, dressing the cuts that still appeared almost every day, she held Calvin alone, telling him stories about the fish that swam up the river and under the bridge, how they chased each other under the boats.

  Tiny Momma said, “He playin with a cat, cause that the only thing make scratches like that.” Marietta pushed the reddish meat from the ham hock into the greens and said nothing.

  She stayed home for three days, telling the women who had hired her she was sick, telling Milt she had the flu, and after school she watched out the window. Calvin wasn’t in the field on the second day; she saw Nate, trying to hit a rock with a stick, and she saw another boy and girl. She opened the door quietly and went down the stairs.

  He was behind the house, where a tangle of rusted mattress coils and a pile of boxes hid him from the street. She padded as quietly as she had near the basket stands, peering over the orange-crusted metal, and saw him sitting on a peach crate, holding a razor blade between his fingers. He was examining his forearms. She drew away from the junk and placed her feet carefully in the dust, going back to the apartment to wait.

  On the stairs outside, she held him while the dirt yards up and down the street grew cool and moist with the night. Tiny Momma called them inside to watch TV, and while Nate lay on the floor in front of the screen, she kept Calvin half in her lap, half listening to Tiny Momma say how Mrs. Despres had coughed all day, but she was thinking of the slice in her palm and the blood she had swallowed for the pounding, twisting babies. She traced her fingertips near his ear, remembering the sweetness of her mother’s neck when she was hurt, remembering how she’d turned tall and no one would touch her gently.

  She went to Baby Poppa in the morning. “I see one or two cut every other day,” she said, after she’d told him about the razor blade.

  Ba
by Poppa put his finger and thumb into those half-circles around his mouth and ran them down again and again. “Boys come to the street to fight them,” he said finally. “I’ve seen them come all the way to the vacant lot to look for Nate and Calvin. They stand out at school, I imagine; they’re different, they’re big, and they always have each other. They’re targets.”

  “I don’t see em with bruise or cut like that,” she said.

  “No, you don’t. Nate talks a lot, trying to scare the boys, but it seems like they want to fight Calvin. Everyone wants to hit the quiet boy, make him talk or cry. And they both get teased a lot about the way they talk. I don’t know. I think they’ll have to fight for years. I was too small to have to prove myself.”

  “Why boys always want fight? Girl tease and yell, but boy…”

  “Too much energy,” Baby Poppa said. “See, they watch everybody fight and they want to do it. But that’s not the only reason Calvin’s doing that to himself.”

  “I know,” she said. As the blade sliced his skin, did he think that no one could hurt him if he hurt himself? She knew he still wanted her eyes and hands, but she was careful not to touch him so much that Nate and the others would tease. She watched closely for when he wanted fingers and attention, and she pressed grains of sugar and fine spiderwebs into the cuts.

  When Milton came by in the evening, the boys were asleep. He said, “Come outside for a minute. I know, they sleepin, but just for a minute.”

  He leaned against the railing with her; the fog was rising over the field. “You want to go to a movie again tomorrow?” he said.

  “I have for work a party, all afternoon and night. Halloween party,” she said.

  “When I’ma see you? Seem like you always busy now,” he said, moving behind her and putting his hands on her shoulders. “I thought you have more time since the boys in school now.”

  “Fall usually busy, and then the holidays,” Marietta said. “Boys busy every season.” He turned her around and pulled her to the corner.