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

by Susan Straight

  “Them house look huge,” Marietta said. “Big as a barn.”

  “Well, I was thinking I would come and look with you. We got this new baby coming, we might want more room, cause I don’t want Freeman to have to share for long.”

  “You ain’t want for live in Rio Seco,” Marietta said, teasing her. “Rock say it ‘backwood’ for L.A. people.”

  “I’m just talking about floor plans,” Carolanne said absently. “Nate was too conservative when he told me only look for two bedrooms.”

  But Nate called a few minutes later from training camp. He said something that made Carolanne hand the phone to Marietta and run into the bathroom.

  “Mama, Sports Illustrated call over here. They want for do some kind a pictures, you and me and Calvin. I guess Carolanne, too. Some story bout twin.”

  The photographer wanted to meet them in L.A. the next day, and Carolanne was lost for hours, locked in the bathroom, coming out only to call Tiana and Sandi Letey and Tina Brigham. Marietta followed her to the mirror before lunch, watching Carolanne concentrate and stroke the mallard-green shine close to her lashes, then spread gold under her brows. She brushed the curling lashes until they were clotted thick and black, then combed out the clots.

  Marietta made her sit at the table to eat lunch. “You better worry bout what the doctor say on Friday,” she told Carolanne. “You look fine.”

  “My hair’s disaster. What are you gonna do with yours?” Carolanne tilted her head. “You know, I ain’t never seen your hair.”

  “Ain’t much for see.” Marietta got up to wash the dishes. She watched TV alone on the black leather couch for an hour, thinking that the only black women she saw in magazines or on TV who looked normal were mothers.

  “It’s a portrait,” the photographer said. “Formal, really, because we’re not concentrating on the sport as much as the family, the faces. I’d like you guys to take off your shirts, and the ladies can wear these tube tops.” He fingered his beard and looked at Carolanne. “Actually, I’d like to try a couple of shots with just Mrs. Cook and the guys. I mean, your mother, Nate.”

  Skin no one had ever seen. Her mother, Aint Sister, pouring water on her in the zinc washtub, and never anyone again. Sinbad in the dark. The circle of tight material fit around her chest, and her collarbone was hot in the light where they stood in front of a black sheet of material. She remembered the mirrors in the huge bathrooms in Charleston—the mirrors in Carolanne’s bathroom, bedroom. Nate and Calvin teased her about her shoulders and she said, “Hush and look for the camera.”

  The photographer smiled and said, “No, that’s very natural. Go ahead.”

  Just like cry. You don do it in front of nobody you know, then you gon cry in public on the freeway. Ain’t feel no eye on you skin since Sinbad and let the whole country see you old self.

  Carolanne sat at the makeup table, angry. Her lips were pressed in a small oval, Marietta saw. The photographer told them he wanted to play with the light now, and they could see the makeup artist.

  A thin Asian man with hair that stood up in a frozen wave rested his bent little finger on her cheek and brushed something on her eyes. The furry brush felt like a mouth, tiny lips on her eyes and then her own lips. “You have gorgeous skin,” he said. “You’ll never have a wrinkle, I’ll bet. I’m not going to do much here. What about your hair?”

  He began to untie the scarf and she froze. Her cheeks were darker than ever against his pale elbows while he pulled off the headwrap and she watched in the mirror. “Oh, you’ve got it cropped close. That’ll look great with Nate and Calvin. I thought you had it straightened. Let me just pick it out even and you’re done.” He patted and combed. “It smells good—what have you been using on it?”

  “Almond oil,” she said. She had borrowed Tiny Momma’s small bottle years ago and loved the smell.

  “Nice.” He hung his face over her head in the mirror. “Okay?”

  She stared. “One thing—my eyebrow. Eyebrows.”

  He raised his own. “Thicker, a little bit? Darker?” The kissing brush tickled her there, like breath, and he smiled when she did.

  In the other room, the photographer stood uncomfortably near his camera. “Naw, man,” Nate was saying, arms folded. “I gotta have my wife in here, too. She ready to go. She done did her own makeup.”

  “Well, we’re really looking at twins and their parents, really just one parent, the one that encouraged sports. We’ve got hockey players and their mom, two tennis players and their dad.”

  “Look at my wife. She the one use to get photograph,” Nate said.

  “I did modeling work for the USC catalog and other places,” Carolanne said. Her hair rose in a perfect shell-like dip over her forehead.

  “Well, we’ll do some of both,” the photographer said, smiling. “Let’s get you all in there first, then just the guys, then the guys and Mrs. Cook.”

  “We both Mrs. Cook,” Marietta said, standing on the chair behind the boys as he gently pushed her shoulders down.

  He didn’t say “Smile” or “Cheese” but just “Lift your chin, Carolanne,” and “Not that far, Calvin.” The silver lights were hot on Marietta’s shoulders, and she looked down to see Nate’s and Calvin’s huge rounded shoulders just below her, the black skin marked and raised in a few places. Nate had a crescent scar from a broken bottle on the outside of his biceps, and she tried to look down further to see Calvin’s forearms, to see if the thin hairline scars still remained on his wrists and inside his elbows.

  “Uh, Mrs. Cook, you have to look up,” the photographer said, and the light blinded her.

  “These are the best ones to see—Hampton Hills, Fox Run, and this one called Palm Lakes,” Carolanne said. She held the newspaper ads and the photos of the model homes with her on the front seat of the Lincoln, and she read directions to Marietta after they had passed the off ramp to the Westside. I let she look, Marietta thought. She still vex from the photographer, look for them picture every day in the mail and talk bout “Fool better choose the right ones.” I go long here first.

  But the hills south of Rio Seco, the flat, recently bulldozed land looked very familiar, and the block wall surrounding Fox Run was just as high and blank. The model homes were inside, and then empty, barely finished houses stood on bare lots where weeds had sprung up. “Ain’t been no fox round here for long time,” Marietta said to Carolanne. “No—no need for even show me this.”

  Carolanne rattled the newspaper. “I really like this floor plan.”

  Marietta said, “Go on back. You look another day. I choose a house. I show you where it is.”

  “Wait—you didn’t see Palm Lakes,” Carolanne said. “I thought this one would be perfect, cause of the water. It’s right over the hill.”

  When they came over the top of the slope and Marietta saw a huge tract of houses surrounding a blue, circular lake, with a golf course off to one side, she laughed. She stopped the car on the side of the road and said, “That ain’t no lake. That landscape.” She saw the toothbrush trees scattered around in a pattern, the cement paths leading to the water, and no one anywhere on the grass. “Oh, Carolanne.”

  She drove to the Westside, not to the house, but around the lake, and Carolanne said, “Yeah, right. A city park. You want to bring Freeman here so he can watch people sell dope and make out all over the grass.”

  “Ain’t nobody sell nothing to me, and ain’t nobody bother Rock uncle. We fish, and Freeman play. You gon have for think, Carolanne.” Marietta circled the lake and watched the old men play dominoes, the Vietnamese men wading in the shallows looking for the tiny clamshells they put in burlap bags. Then she drove to the neighborhood, and stopped in front of the house.

  “No—I ain’t even looking,” Carolanne said. “A repo. You got all this money and you want to live in the ghetto in some repo. I don’t believe you.”

  Marietta laughed again. “This ain’t no ghetto—these people got yard, buy they house, got car and truck. This ain’t
Soul Garden. This ain’t Pine Garden. And you gon have for believe me.”

  “Freeman’s tired—he wants to get out and walk. Let’s get on the road. I saw a mall off the freeway, and I have to get something,” was all Carolanne said, and Marietta nodded. She know. She gon give he to me for a time. She know. But I take she shopping.

  In the department store, Carolanne hurried into the baby section and bought bottles that turned different colors when they were heated—“I saw these in a magazine, you can tell if the milk’s too hot without even testing it”—and a bassinet that rocked by itself when you pushed a button. “Freeman never had a bassinet,” she told Marietta when it was in the trunk.

  The doctor shook his head and apologized. The lab had given him the results of the first blood test twice, he said, and that was why he’d thought maybe the baby was dead. Now the HCG levels were progressing, and even though the machine still wavered eerily and spit at them from the speaker, Marietta heard the tapping heartbeat.

  Carolanne was triumphant at home. “I grew up on Kool-Aid and smoke,” she said. “I know what I’m doing.”

  “I hope so,” Marietta said. “Cause you promise you tell Nate next week.”

  Carolanne had gotten the envelope of photographs yesterday, the proof sheets from the Sports Illustrated session. There was no letter saying which ones would be used. In some of the pictures no one smiled, and Marietta looked hard at their faces, she and the boys’ dark cheeks angled to the sides in the harsh light, all shadows and reflection of their straight-set mouths. Carolanne was a silvery flower floating on Nate’s wide chest, her brows and eyes and mouth round and surprised. Carolanne bent close, studying the photos for hours.

  The Houston game was the last one of the exhibition season, and again Marietta saw only the highlights on the late night news. The boys called, said they would be coming home for a week, until final roster cuts.

  But she didn’t stay in the condominiums to wait with them; she took Freeman with her to the little lake in Rio Seco. They didn’t fish; they walked around the still water and plucked long reeds from the swampy area where water trickled from a pipe into the lake and the mud was wet-black. “Duck-duck,” Freeman called to the geese, and he ran to pick up the dried strands of grass she pointed to.

  She sat on a scarred picnic bench, playing with the grass. You want run again. Almost forty year old and you still want run, out here now. Every time, you leave. She saw the geese crash into the water, and Freeman ran after a ball kicked by a small boy who shouted in another language. She was pulling the strands of grass, bending them into a circle, and then she realized that, without thinking, she was trying to fashion them into a round, weave them together to make a tiny coil—the beginning. Her fingers were clumsy, used to mops and brooms and sponges, and it was hard to hold the awkward packet of grass, but she bent the blades as carefully as she could and Freeman pushed his nose close to see what she was doing.

  The Westside

  October

  WHEN WASPS BEGAN TO hover and own the eaves at Red Man’s house, his daughter was sent to Marietta’s, and she came in an hour or so with her long, fat branch-stick and a torch of rolled newspapers. All the boys playing on Picasso Street would say, “There go Nate and Calvin Cook mama! They play on the Rams! But I bet she still holler at em—she look mean.”

  Red Man saw her tall shadow on the porch and said, “Hey, Marietta, they over in the side yard again. Can’t nobody get near the Cadillac to fix it. I heard you like to fish with that stuff. How them catfish down to the lake?”

  “Waiting for me, I hope,” she said.

  The boys kept a distance from her in the side yard, close to the wasps. “Why she ain’t scared?” they whispered to each other, looking around the corner of the house, stucco brushing their cheeks. “Cause she so big and black. Look. I bet if them wasp bite her, she ain’t feel it.”

  She heard their thin whispers, smiled to herself when she lit the newspaper for a moment, then blew out the quick flames. The smoke rose into the eaves and the wasps hung, stunned, for a second before they sped away; they flew fast, not lazy and taunting like they did when the boys came near.

  Marietta knocked the papery nest down with her stick. She put it in a sack, tapped the ash from her torch, and walked back to the front yard. Freeman waited with Roscoe and Red Man. He had gone inside for a cookie from Mary, because he was afraid of the wasps.

  Roscoe said, “We finished for the day. I’ma go get my granddaughter from Mrs. Rollins, see how these two play with each other. She’s turning four next month.”

  It was Friday, and the crowd of small boys had just gotten out of school. They ran up and down the street, watching for cars, barely stepping out of the way. Red Man’s huge truck was parked in the yard; it was piled to the top of the gates with branches and clippings and trash. Red Man and Roscoe did gardening, tree trimming, hauling, and cleanup.

  “Still hot for October, huh?” Red Man said. “I think that’s why them wasps keep hanging around.” He paused and then said, “It’s a bye week, and they ain’t got a game till next Sunday, huh?”

  She knew he didn’t like to ask about Calvin and Nate directly, since she lived down the street now. The men were sometimes afraid to mention the Rams or the boys until she did, and it had taken her some figuring to guess that they didn’t want her to think they expected tickets or favors or explanations. She hadn’t raised Nate and Calvin in the neighborhood, and so these men didn’t own them. She listened for their hesitation and tried to answer right.

  “They ready for a break,” she said, “but this the second week of October, ain’t it? They play in Chicago on Sunday, and next week they bye time.”

  “You knew that,” Mary said to Red Man. She turned to Marietta. “How he eatin today?”

  Freeman had left half the cookie on Marietta’s leg. “He picky,” she said. “And he mama don’t like when he sleep in the bed with me. Granma never do right, huh?”

  Roscoe walked down the sidewalk with Hollie, his granddaughter, and Mary said, “But not with him, cause he the only one got that girl. Her daddy runnin the streets. Roscoe do a good job with her.”

  Hollie adjusted the barrettes on her braids and took Freeman’s hand to show him the wheel wells of the huge tires. Then she and Freeman circled each other in the side yard for a while, Freeman following her every move.

  “I got plum wine,” Red Man said to everyone. “Go on and try some.”

  “How plum wine gon be orange?” said Roscoe, and Marietta looked at the mayonnaise jar in her hand doubtfully.

  “Cause he was so impatient he use them green ones in the summer, them things wasn’t ripe for nothin,” Mary said.

  “The body and soul of impatience,” Roscoe said, smiling at Marietta. “You should be able to tell by now that the man doesn’t wait for anything.”

  “I don’t need none,” Marietta said, handing the jar back to Mary.

  “Them wasps don’t want to give up,” Roscoe said, looking at Marietta’s bag.

  “I only live here a month, and that the second time they been in he side yard,” Marietta said.

  “And I bet he told you nobody could get close to the Cadillac.” Roscoe laughed.

  “As if anybody even thinkin bout fixin that thing,” Mary said.

  “Plenty people think about it,” Roscoe said. “That’s all they do.” He made a face at the wine. “This stuff tastes like ten-year-old Kool-Aid.”

  Red Man stretched, and his pale chest rose above the V in his T-shirt, much lighter than the dark-burned skin on his arms and neck. “Y’all leavin more for me then,” he said. “That Chicago game on TV—you want to watch it over here?” he asked Marietta.

  “I see what Carolanne fixing to do. She said she want try some weekend beauty routine she see in a magazine.”

  Everyone was quiet, waiting for the small pickup truck that blared music to pass the house. She had seen many of them, all driven by young men, the trucks low and flat as house slippers, the
beds filled with speakers. Roscoe’s son had one.

  “What they good for?” she had asked him.

  “Making noise,” he had said. She watched the shiny black thing stop at the corner. Cain’t haul no people nor fish in there. Bitty thing.

  “When that baby due?” Mary asked.

  “January. Super Bowl Baby,” Marietta told her.

  “We both too young to be grandpeople,” Roscoe said. Marietta was embarrassed. He had told her her face was classic, whatever that meant.

  “Young as you act,” Mary said.

  Marietta stood up.

  “I need for get home and give this boy he dinner,” she said. “Freeman!”

  Roscoe said, “We going to the dump on Monday. I’ll come by and move the rest of that junk.”

  She nodded and took Freeman’s hand to pull him away from Hollie. “I preciate that.”

  He brought wood, though, when he came. “We cut down a pepper tree,” he said. “You might need some wood later, and we got plenty. Wind knocked down a lot of eucalyptus and pepper trees this year, and we had more than we could use.”

  “I have to get me a ax,” she said, looking at the thick stumps and trunks.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Roscoe said. “But let me move this junk first.”

  Stacks of plywood that Calvin had torn from the windows were in the corner of the dirt yard, and scattered in a few piles were the vials, clothes, and trash that had been swept from the inside of the house. Marietta had pushed them all to the far edge, near the garage, so she wouldn’t see them all the time.

  “My son was hanging out here,” Roscoe said, throwing the plywood onto the truckbed. “He got busted with the rest of em when the cops came. Rock house. But the other guys told the cops Louis wasn’t selling it.” He wiped his forehead. “I don’t know what he was doing.”