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

by Susan Straight

  He came and shook her hand. He was a little older than she, Marietta thought, with smooth dark skin reddish-brown underneath and wide lips, the kind that had a definite outline to edge them. “Roscoe is our resident street poet and big mouth,” Red Man said. “That’s all you need to know.”

  “If his mouth big, yours must be…” Lanier started, and Red Man shouted, “Naw, we ain’t talkin bout me, we gotta talk about the game!”

  In their crowing over Nate’s sack, she heard Jesse and Baby Poppa, everyone who gathered around a TV to watch football with beer in hand and particular men to cheer. “Shoot,” Roscoe told her. “Football is a religion with these fools—don’t you know Red Man’s family considers Super Bowl Sunday a holiday, right up there with Christmas? They have fifty-sixty people crowding in here every January. I can hear em all the way down the street at my house, so I usually just give up and come over, too.”

  “You come over for the chitlins, nigger, cause you too lazy to fix em your own self,” Red Man said, and they all laughed again. “Yeah, but this preseason getting longer and longer every year,” he went on. “More money for the networks. No, I gotta wait till September 5. Regular season, Monday Night Football. Then we gon see the real thing. Pardon me,” he turned to Marietta, “no offense, I don’t mean Nate can’t do it then, I just mean…”

  “He just mean he impatient,” Mary said.

  “So where you all sit in Angel Stadium tomorrow?” he asked Marietta.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “High up so I can see something, I hope. I don’t like being too close to the sideline and all I see Calvin and Nate back.”

  “Oh, Lord,” Red Man shouted. “She knows her football! She ain’t sittin down there by the bench worryin bout her boys, she wants to see the plays. We gon get along fine, uh,” and in the awkward pause, she knew no one was sure what to call her. She was younger than them; not Mrs. Cook. But she was Nate and Calvin’s mother. She wasn’t Big Ma here.

  “Marietta,” she said. “I hope you all call me Marietta.”

  After she left them, promising to bring the boys back, she looked for the street. Passing the blind-windowed rock house, she turned down the next street, Pablo, but she didn’t see the palms. She tried to recall where they had driven, and headed down the avenue. Looking down the side streets, she finally saw them, near where they had turned off to get back on the freeway.

  Short palm trees, almost squat as pineapples, but the pendants of misty flowers were still dangling there, and she and Freeman got out of the car to touch them. Could they be tiny dates? She had read about date palms in California. Down the narrow street, the pale yellow sprays of flowers swayed a little in the breeze, and she let Freeman run up and down the sidewalk underneath them until she worried that Carolanne might think they had run away.

  It was dark when she neared the security-guard booth, and Freeman was asleep in his car seat, his head flopped at an impossible angle. Marietta carried him up the stairs to Carolanne’s door and saw that the lights were off. She was worried; Carolanne had asked her to take him, but she should be awake now. Marietta fumbled with the key to her own door while Freeman’s head slid down her shoulder, and she stood in the dark hall, trying to see. She smelled something unfamiliar, and when she passed into the living room, the lights clicked on and Carolanne stood there with a cake. “Happy birthday, Mama. Here, give me the baby. And listen.” She turned on the answering machine and took Freeman into Marietta’s bedroom.

  Nate’s deep voice said, “Happy birthday, Mama. You think we forget, huh? Coach said ain’t no way nobody leave night before the game. But we leave you present with Carolanne. I hope I give you a better attitude for you birthday, Mama.” She smiled when Carolanne came back into the room. Nate sounded like a little boy promising he wouldn’t lick the frosting if you left him alone with the cake.

  “You thirty-nine, Mama. Yeah, try to deny it, but you a old woman. Don’t pop me, ouch!” Calvin laughed into the telephone. “We gotta stay here, but we wish you happy birthday. Save some cake for we, huh?” Nate must have grabbed the phone—“Calvin droolin all over me, Mama. Don’t eat all the cake or I’ma drown!”

  The tape clicked off. Marietta sat on the couch, laughing. “I can’t believe this. California. Lord God,” she said, as Carolanne handed her a large package.

  Marietta took the wrapping paper off carefully. She held three soft, already-buttoned shirts in African print. Yellow and red and black and green—not jungle trees and parrots like shirts she saw men wearing at football games, but subtle, small geometric designs. Inside the collar of each shirt was a headwrap in matching print. Carolanne held up one of the shirts to her chest.

  “This lady in the project made them for me. Soul Gardens fashion. I told her about your headwraps and she said these were a good size. Here, try.”

  Marietta went into the bedroom, quiet in the dark of Freeman’s breathing, and came out wearing the shirt with the most red; she tied the scarf tight at the back of her head. Carolanne touched her earrings. “You look like a queen,” she said. “Except you’re wearing pants.” She handed Marietta a smaller package. “This one’s from Nate and Calvin.”

  The tiny box held a gold chain with a football pendant outlined in diamonds. She fastened it around her neck, and Carolanne said, “Well, it looks kind of funny with the African print, but what the hell. I suggested earrings, but Nate said you never take those hoops off.”

  “Diamond. Them two crazy.” She let it fall heavy on her collarbone.

  “I know. I didn’t see it till now—they went by themselves. Well, here’s Freeman’s present. Actually, this one was hardest to get, cause we had to stand in line at the DMV forever. But he carried it all the way out to the car.” She handed Marietta a California driver’s handbook and an application for a license. “Calvin said you didn’t know how to drive yet, and I told him he didn’t know shit.”

  The sun beat down on them when they found their seats, near the other wives and friends of the players. Carolanne waved and went over to talk to two women with black sunglasses and long, blond hair. She wore a pink sundress and pink sandals, and her sunglasses were black, too. Marietta tried to keep Freeman from sliding out of his seat, watching the players warm up on the field.

  “There Daddy,” she told him. “Look.” Nate stretched and talked to Rock and Bulk. Freeman waved.

  Marietta felt a trickle of sweat down her back, and a tickle of fright—this was where she had always wanted to be, and now she watched the boys in their spiraled helmets, their clamshell knees hidden and thousands of other people watching them, too. She said, “Baby Poppa, keep a eye on em,” into Freeman’s hair.

  She had packed food, telling Carolanne, “I don’t think you gon want no hot dog, even if somebody else have for cook it and it ain’t split. I don’t think that what the baby crave, huh?” She put fruit juice, cookies, fried chicken and cheese and crackers into a bag and said, “Don’t worry—I carry it so you ain’t look country. You just have for eat it.”

  The crowd settled, all the shirts falling into their seats before the kickoff, and Marietta swept her eyes over the bobbing heads and slashes of black that were hundreds of sunglasses swaying and then still when the ball flew into the air. Then she watched Nate lean on his knuckles to wait.

  The Rams blitzed several times, but the Chargers were ready for Nate, and the right tackle had help blocking him. He struggled to swing around the outside, but the quarterback got off pass after pass. The Chargers scored on the third series, and Nate stalked the sidelines, throwing his paper cup down angrily. Calvin came over and touched his helmet to Nate’s when they talked.

  The little wide receiver, Leroy Sims, was one of Marietta’s favorites. She loved to see him in motion, making that sharp-cornered turn and suddenly sprinting downfield, slanting across, feet flying so high they might have hit him in the butt each step. When he caught a thirty-one-yard pass that soared into the bowl of his palms, she didn’t stand up and scream with the o
thers; she sat still, wondering at the beauty of the game far from the hugging crashes of her boys. Then it was Nate’s turn to twist and try again.

  He made two of the tackles she loved best, the clean leap at the waist of the fullback—Nate flat in the air and the reassuring sound of the fullback falling but big enough so he could handle it. She was afraid of the grabs to flying feet, of the tackles and blocks that looked like glancing blows but sent someone off balance into the benches. And Calvin came in during the last few plays of the second quarter, with Letey, the quarterback, handing off to Brigham way back at the forty-yard line. Calvin thrust his chest into the linebacker’s and slid with him, dancing until Brigham was down. When he ran off the field at halftime, she saw his jersey tight around his huge arms, the excess gathered into a little ball in his armpits and secured with tape. He had told her that was to prevent hands from grabbing at his jersey. They were too far away to see her.

  Carolanne stood up to take Freeman over and play with Brigham’s son. She told Marietta, “I’ll try to pay attention, but excuse me if I’m not obsessed, okay?”

  Marietta sat alone and watched the people mill around her, laughing, drinking beer. Two men fought, and people stared, rushed over to see. She was watching the litter around the benches, thinking of Baby Poppa, and someone said beside her, “Excuse me, ma’am.”

  A middle-aged white man bent down to speak to her. “Is this your first football game?” he said, his words very slow and careful.

  “No,” she said before she could think, she was so surprised.

  “Oh, well, I was just watching you, and wondering what you think of American football. You’re from Africa, right?” She tried to look into the eyes without looking; he swayed, held a beer cup, and the cheeks were red.

  “No, I’m not from Africa,” she said, and then she thought, don’t tell he bout the boys, he be ax a hundred question. Africa?

  “Oh, I saw your outfit and I guess I thought you were like a visitor from another country or something. Well, sorry—hey, you got great seats.” He turned and stumbled back up the steps to the higher rows.

  She felt the football pendant stick to her skin; it had worked its way inside her shirt. She fingered it, feeling eyes on the back of her headwrap, and she lifted her chin. Africa woman. Huh. I only a haint. Haint move a rock. The gold on the football was warm. August 11—she had really forgotten that yesterday was her birthday. The only thing she had remembered was the date of Carolanne’s doctor appointment. The bag of food sat below the seat, spotted with grease from the chicken.

  When Carolanne came back, Marietta looked at the small belly underneath the pink knit dress. Rosie—her baby, the one after Lil Johnny, had died in the sixth month; it stopped moving, and Aint Sister knew, told Rosie, but she had to carry it, riding inside her heavy and still, for two more months until Aint Sister went in the middle of the night to help with the labor that pushed out the motionless form.

  Marietta handed the sack to Carolanne and said, “Sit down and eat something, now. Stop flitting around.”

  Carolanne said, “Who was that white dude? Was he rapping to you or what?” She took a piece of chicken, and Freeman took a cookie.

  “He want to know was I from Africa,” Marietta said.

  “What? Why?”

  “How I look.”

  “I know that—I mean what was he gonna do if you were? Start talking Swahili?”

  Marietta shook her head. “Hush up and eat,” she said, smiling.

  The second half was long, and she began to miss Baby Poppa more, realizing that this was the first game where she’d sat in bleachers, in a stadium, for four years. All this time she’d waited to watch Nate and Calvin play pro ball, but she missed Baby Poppa and the cool night air. She looked around carefully a few times and people looked back at her; they were mostly white people like the ones back in Charleston, because these were such expensive seats, she knew.

  Nate broke free and chased the quarterback with curved arms, but Marietta knew he would do that again and again, the way he had for years now, and the quarterback would get the pass off or not, but he would fall. No one scrambled fast enough to escape Nate. The ball shot out in a straight line to the fullback, for only three yards. Nate covered the quarterback on the ground, and Marietta thought, He gon do he job. Calvin, too. Roster cuts—that what they all wait for, Carolanne, too. People say first-round draft pick gon make the cut no matter what. If Calvin ain’t do nothing wrong, ain’t fall or read block wrong, he make it. Mama job never done. I beena tell Carolanne, Freeman don eat more than that? Don he sleep now? Don you put some garlic salt on that chicken first? Don forget Nate like pepper on he egg.

  Rock spun the wide receivers around, Nate’s shoulder drove the fullback to the waiting chest of Jeffrey, and Letey handed the ball to Brigham twice, until he scored. Beer ran beneath her feet, Freeman fell asleep on her shoulder, and Carolanne laughed with the other wives, their lips fuchsia and apple and lush.

  How could she miss watching them on TV? The precise square of the game was all she had to concentrate on then—the grass, bounded by lines of coaches, players, and the edges of the screen. The crowd’s roars and constant shouts turned into wind blowing through high pines. She didn’t have to endure stares and stepping over bare tanned legs to get to her seat. No beer running under her shoes, no one wondering who she was. TV. Listening to men laugh and holler at the players, watching the plays form and scatter, someone handing her a plate of rice or a slice of cake.

  They didn’t have to call. She watched Star Search with Carolanne, wondering how to tell her about the plan. Carolanne said, “Look at her, I could do so much better than that. She can’t even talk.”

  “Martina Smith, celebrity spokes model,” Marietta heard the man say, and she frowned.

  “What she suppose to doing? Walk and smile at the same time?” she asked Carolanne.

  “Look, she’s so stiff.” Carolanne sucked her teeth just like Rosie.

  “Celebrity spoke model. Them word don’t have nothing to do with each other,” Marietta said.

  “She’s supposed to represent products, be an announcer, do commercials or game shows or whatever,” Carolanne said. “If she has a brain, she could do a lot of stuff. But you can tell she doesn’t. All she has is legs half as tall as me. Shit.” She took a drink of juice. “See, I had decided to major in public relations at school. I could have… well, I sure as hell ain’t tall enough to be a model.” The shimmering dress turned and walked back down the runway to applause.

  She so big—is that a woman? Blueblack. She looked at Carolanne’s tiny feet, her collarbone showing in the neck of the scooped-out T-shirt she wore. All she life, people tell she how little and cute and light. I wild in the tree, big for a man. “What that baby want?” Marietta asked. “What he tell you?”

  “Why you keep saying ‘he’?” Carolanne asked.

  “Just a habit.”

  Carolanne sighed. “He’s thirsty. He wants juice all the time.”

  “That ain’t enough.”

  “I know.”

  Marietta said carefully, “What you aintie think?”

  “How you know she already knew?”

  “Cause she you aintie.”

  “She said at least I don’t bring my kid for her to babysit and she gave all the baby clothes to Niecie, so don’t ask for none. I don’t know what she think.” Carolanne rubbed her eyes. “She said, ‘Carolanne don’t never come by here—baby be grown next time we see her.’ She was mad cause I spent more time talking to the lady made your shirts than I did listening to her.”

  Marietta didn’t say anything, and Carolanne snapped, “I know it ain’t that far, okay?”

  “I ain’t tell you nothing, Carolanne. Listen. I leave my home, my aintie, and didn’t go but half as far. Didn’t go back for so long. I didn’t have no car, no way to go, but I ain’t made no way cause I didn’t want to, either.”

  Carolanne said, “I don’t have nothing to say to people, all
I see in their eyes is dollar signs. I can’t hang.”

  “No matter who you think you are now, you ain’t that person when you home. You still a child, do the same thing wrong, huh?” Carolanne nodded. “Hear the same thing people remember bout you then. Now you got a boy—maybe two. I got two. We gon do the same thing to them—always remember what they ain’t want for hear.”

  “No,” Carolanne said.

  “We have for do that.” Marietta smiled. “Ain’t no other way.” She took off her shoes and said, “I’m fixing to go.”

  “You tired already?”

  “No. I mean I fixing to leave here. I’ma ax Calvin how the money is and I want look for a house. I think I go to Rio Seco.”

  “What?”

  “You and Nate a family now. You come and visit. But I thought I keep Freeman for you, for a few month, since you getting close to you time with the baby. You need for spend this time with Nate—nobody else. And Calvin need for find he a girl—he ain’t gon do that with me over there. He need find somebody else cook for he now.” She put her hand on Carolanne’s arm. “You listen to that baby better if I don’t be in you ear all the time.”

  “You just started talking to me about a week ago—now you think I don’t want to hear?” Carolanne said. “I never said that.”

  “No, you never say it. But look these condo—I ain’t never comfortable here. I gon look for a house. And we keep that secret along with you baby secret till roster cut, long as you still determine for do that.” Carolanne nodded.

  “Aren’t you worried about Calvin making the cut?” Carolanne asked. “Nate says Calvin’s all nervous.”

  “Nate nervous, too, huh? But I think they both be okay. They go train Calvin. Nate the one need for keep he head small. You gotta keep he off that stuff.”

  Carolanne ran the pad of her thumb over her nails. “If he can.”

  “You keep a eye,” Marietta said.

  She had planned to go back to Rio Seco the next day, and Carolanne had collected for her some section of the newspaper that featured new homes. “I can’t believe you like Rio Seco, all out in the country, nothing to do,” Carolanne said. “But look, they have five model homes open in this tract, Hampton Hills, and three models in Regency Estates. These are great floor plans.”