Gorilla, My Love

by Toni Cade Bambara

  Rosie Giraffe mumbles, “White folks crazy.”

  “I’d like to go there again when I get my birthday money,” says Mercedes, and we shove her out the pack so she has to lean on the mailbox by herself.

  “I’d like a shower. Tiring day,” say Flyboy.

  Then Sugar surprises me by sayin, “You know, Miss Moore, I don’t think all of us here put together eat in a year what that sailboat costs.” And Miss Moore lights up like somebody goosed her. “And?” she say, urging Sugar on. Only I’m standin on her foot so she don’t continue.

  “Imagine for a minute what kind of society it is in which some people can spend on a toy what it would cost to feed a family of six or seven. What do you think?”

  “I think,” say Sugar pushing me off her feet like she never done before, cause I whip her ass in a minute, “that this is not much of a democracy if you ask me. Equal chance to pursue happiness means an equal crack at the dough, don’t it?” Miss Moore is besides herself and I am disgusted with Sugar’s treachery. So I stand on her foot one more time to see if she’ll shove me. She shuts up, and Miss Moore looks at me, sorrowfully I’m thinkin. And somethin weird is goin on, I can feel it in my chest.

  “Anybody else learn anything today?” lookin dead at me. I walk away and Sugar has to run to catch up and don’t even seem to notice when I shrug her arm off my shoulder.

  “Well, we got four dollars anyway,” she says.

  “Uh hunh.”

  “We could go to Hascombs and get half a chocolate layer and then go to the Sunset and still have plenty money for potato chips and ice-cream sodas.”

  “Uh hunh.”

  “Race you to Hascombs,” she say.

  We start down the block and she gets ahead which is O.K. by me cause I’m goin to the West End and then over to the Drive to think this day through. She can run if she want to and even run faster. But ain’t nobody gonna beat me at nuthin.

  The Survivor

  JEWEL AWOKE half expecting to find herself in the recovery room, overwhelmed with sorrow and weeping over an irretrievable loss, till she remembered it was only her tonsils after all, and the sobbing was more a result of the Sodium Pentothal than her state of mind. But that was years ago. Today she was waking up on a speeding bus, and a bus ride is a dangerous thing. The mind off guard, an easy mark for all the one-part dreams three-fourths forgot that sprocket themselves and urge the cameras to run amok. Brother Billy on a dare leaping blindfold from a cliff in Morningside Park. The aged super, her friend over the checkerboard, being removed from the cellar on a dingy stretcher, starved to death, left to wait on the curb while the attendants grabbed a smoke and she shrieked, impotent. Carl Berry, who early, tenderly, gave her to herself, walking off the roof—the final high. Greatgranddaddy Spencer with emptied eyes strapped down under the rubber sheets as they turned him on like Frankenstein and she had signed and he had begged but she had signed …

  Her feet in the stirrups, drifting away from herself, but another her in attendance as the coal miner with the cyclops eye dumped hunks of her, the best of her, ruby quartz and reeking, down the drain, as if digging out a diseased portion of a dangerous vein, and for so long she felt herself coming back to herself to meet the pain too soon—snipping my wings, no, freeing me from disease—so long as if very huge portions were malign—seems so much of me is malign—then drifting somewhere else where it was flannel-warm and quiet. But that was years ago.

  the vans coming in the night to haul away everything in liquor boxes marked “this side up” when everything else was upside down now that the man with the rolled-up sleeves was the man conducting the orchestra of cameras was the man bent over the editing bin was the man leaning over her breasts and rolling away to become just a very dead mister

  Wives, she’d learned growing up in the dark, were the ladies found tied to scuttled boats at the bottom of the lake, their hair embraced by the seaweed. Husbands were men with their heads bashed in, doused with alcohol, stuck under the driver’s wheel, and shoved over the cliff. Wives were tautly strung creatures you plotted against with optical illusions, tape recorders, coincidences, and evil servants until they went mad and you inherited the estate. Husbands were dull sofas you schemed against with your convertible boyfriends who knew how to talk him into increasing his insurance at the critical moment. Wives were victims pushed beyond endurance, then snatched suddenly back from the edge by that final straw we carry from birth just in time to butcher beer bellies in the bedroom. Husbands were worms that turned on the femmes fatales who were too cocky to plot his death and got strangled with piano wire

  Jewel had once, after one of their fiercer arguments, taken a safety pin and stuck him stark dead. And when he came from the bathroom, half-shaven and suspicious at the sudden lull in the war, saw his impaled photograph and broke the cap off her two front teeth.

  “They’re predicting six inches of snow by nightfall and gale winds besides,” said the man next to her. He tapped the window and flakes of snow shifted patterns then slid off the glass like rain. Jewel glanced unconcerned at the landscape rushing by. The trees looked as if something unnatural had been done to them.

  “Mmm,” she replied, and smoothed the book out again on what little lap left in the ninth month. But before she could recall what she was reading, her eyes slipped off the edge of the glossy page to drown in the shadows of her hip, then buoy up again and swivel onto the back of the worn seat in front of her, fastening onto a clump of frayed threads beckoning, accusing, with each bump of the bus. She shifted her weight, not so much to balance the baby, as to juggle the mind’s dangers, to ease the shouting in the head less it become a banging on the wall—let me go mad, Grandmother. Let me bleed and be forever lost and no one. The bus rushing through the whitened country to the old woman who could dispel the incubus devouring her with a simple laying on of the hands.

  “Hope we make it to town before it starts gusting,” said the man, offering a stick of gum. Jewel slid her eyes deep back in their sockets and played dead.

  he had stumbled in with his throat slit, grabbed his neck with all ten fingers as if to plug up the dike. The blood so bright, that’s what paralyzed her as he gurgled to take command, one hand on top of the other and shoulders hunched as if to keep his head from falling off. And she fainting there, registering only briefly the seismographic shocks in her blood, then failing to register anything at all. She had come to to find them attending him on the kitchen table, the fluorescent light from the sink yanked out and strung up over the window shutters, the wires trailing over his body, the light casting a green blue on the rusty suture banding his neck. And he had lived. Never to organize again or turn his cameras on anything but actors, on mostly her. And nothing was ever said about he could’ve died. She fainting killing him. Nothing said but not forgotten, in his bloodstream keeping him from coming to her with her, keeping him from her. And coiled in her memory, springing at the last, seizing her at the casket and spinning her right around to hurl her into the collapsible chairs and up under the flowers, smothering.

  “Be there in ten minutes, the driver said,” the man announced, smiling at the bulge in her lap. “I know you’ll be glad to get comfortable. When my wife was pregnant, and she’s tall with long legs like you …”

  Ten minutes. No bearings. Her past scattered about her and the mind all cluttered, no room to think in. Ten minutes. Grandmother Candy will want to talk. Jewel cleared her throat, fearing she had lost all words. Frantic, she assembled a simple sentence of greeting and announcement of exhaustion. That would be enough to get her from the bus to the station wagon to the house to a bed in the dark. Besides, Miss Candy, as she called the woman in later years, would not push talk. She mostly made statements about herself, then stopped, giving you plenty of room and time to breathe.

  They were standing in the field. A medium shot with hot light. Jewel, tall with squarish shoulders and athletic calves, was pulling the brim of her denim cap down and using both hands to shade her eyes. M
iss Candy, dainty but sinewy and solid, never hid from weather of any kind. She stood with her arms slightly bent, her hands sliding off her hips. The ground was plowed up to receive the rain deeply should it ever come, Miss Candy explained, turning toward the sheds to show her granddaughter all that she had done with the family farm, giving the younger woman time to steer them to the conversation she had traveled from New York to have.

  “It’s been waiting for a long time, it would seem,” said Jewel, running a hand across the bark of the tree Miss Candy had planted on the day of Jewel’s christening. “Rain’ll come in time. It’s a good tree,” she’d said as if it were a causal thing.

  Miss Candy stooped to the earth and traced the travels of the tree roots barely bulging beneath the bristly grass. “A good woman does not rot,” she said on her haunches like some ancient sage. “But slow-ass men can certainly let her get overripe,” Jewel added.

  Miss Candy tilted her head up to laugh at that a long while. Then they went into the house, holding each other round. The Franklin stove had been moved to the living room, so they sat before it and sprawled the album out before them. Miss Candy’s first husband was the doctor. And while she waited for him to get through school, she earned her midwife certificate, taught elocution, discovered she was sterile, and took over the family farm for the first time. Climbing into bed with that one, she’d say, was like climbing into bed with a dining-room set. They’d married in the great stone church standing still at the crossroads. He had died shortly after, and all the family thought Miss Candy, or M’Dear as she was then, would stay boarded up in the house forever. But then she went back to giving elocution lessons and midwiving around the countryside. Twenty years later Willie Dupree pranced into town. Fly, they called him. Fast Foot, Cool Breeze, Willie Wail. She called him Honey. He called her Miss Candy. They were married in a fever, is how she said it, pointing to the two wedding pictures side by side. The first, stiff and posed and sober. The other, a close-up of two smiling faces, so close you could see the love flowers on her neck as though a vampire had leapt from the shutter. Miss Candy had laughed at that notion, going on to say that Honey was just the sort of crazy man you’d gladly dance over the cliff with. Only he’d danced away and with someone else and no cliff in sight. And she’d turned the farm over to the Caroline cousins, converted the station wagon into a caravan, and took to the road for several years mending pots and sharpening blades and winding up in New England.

  “And Paul?” she asked finally, for that of course was why she had played out the scene of sharing her memories. “That man very much takes his own sweet time.”

  “He’s very dedicated,” Jewel had mustered in his defense. “There’s so much work to be done … before we can make … our arrangements.”

  “And while you’re ripening,” Miss Candy had smiled, “how’s the work?”

  “New play in the fall. The movie rights have been sold and I might get to play …” She had not wanted to get into that. She had wanted to speak of other things, things one spoke of in the the kitchen while getting your hair braided, while someone made biscuits and commented from time to time, while the radio was on “Wings Over Jordan” and the conversation was put on hold when one of your favorites came on. But family ties no longer knitted close and there was no one to say let’s get our wagons in a circle when someone was in crisis. So she’d come to M’Dear, Miss Candy, the last of that generation who believed in sustaining, and come to speak about this man and his distances. She wanted to tell her about the years of penance as he forgave piece by piece

  lying there sweaty, her legs still in a tremble, the nipples still erect, she felt him moving away, traveling great distances. When just moments before they’d jumped the waves, and no undertow, no drowning, no dangers on release. For the first time in a long time he was not dying or forgiving or withholding, but loving her and giving himself over to pleasure. Just a split second ago she had felt him against her again and touched him then felt him retreating, the arm muscle flexed under her back, alert for ambush, then flabby, then gone. He rolled over and switched on the radio and disappeared into the music. She snuggled against his back and tried to tangle her legs in his. And he became a Chinese box

  The man helped her off the bus and deposited her suitcase by the mailbox of the town square. Jewel looked around. It was a huge open space, silenced and static and ready for snow. The trees, rid of their rags now, were naked, awaiting assault. It would be gusting soon. Miss Candy’s station wagon was nowhere in sight. And the stores were closed for the evening. In panic, she felt a leaking somewhere. There seemed to be no space on the inside to pause and let the mind locate the spring. She stared hard at the pavement. My water broke, she told herself, my bladder. And then she fixed the area as her face. She sniffed. She couldn’t be sure whether it was the nose or the eyes. She put her mind instead to assembling words again for Miss Candy. She would want to know first and foremost about the accident. Jewel couldn’t concentrate. She was still leaking somewhere, like a too-quick douche that leaves you gurgling in your pants all day. But that couldn’t be it. She looked around. In the open air, she mused, there is room for the awful if there is room of any kind at all. She turned her good side to the solitary figure who had turned the far corner, flinging salt from a pail like a farmer. She watched him out of the side of her eye, wondering if he could feel the heat, wondering if she beamed hard enough, whether she could turn him around and he’d come running to gather her up in his pail.

  “Jewel.” As though she had just decided on the suitable name for the baby that first time as the elders recounted it. Miss Candy was leaning over and rolling the window down. Jewel struggled in and kissed the old woman and they sat back to look at each other. Jewel was fatter than usual and kind of wide-open around the eyes that seemed dangerously bright. Miss Candy seemed to have gotten smaller, or maybe just swallowed up in the plaid alpaca that had been Dupree’s at some point in his fishing time, for the holes and snares and tears were fishhooks and keys and tools at five o’clock in the morning and too sleepy to care. Jewel remembered suddenly that she had liked Honey Dupree very much. He and Paul had gone fishing once and gotten drunk and come back soaking-wet and loud.

  “You brought an autumn snow with you, I see, Jewel,” she smiled, taking off slowly and making a point of showing she was being careful with her passenger.

  No one, it seemed, was preparing for a gale or snowstorm. Even the big fishing boats were still hauling, the old Portagees swaying over the side to yank at a net or a casket of wine. Miss Candy’s yawl, bobbing and straining against its threadbare moorings, was not even pulled up to shore, much less put up for the season. Bad William, Miss Candy’s partner in the grinder shop, was out past the wharf, balancing on a clutter of rocks and singing as always. Too far to call, too cold to roll the window down, too tired to care, Jewel simply smiled at the memory of him standing in the doorway of Miss Candy’s house, big and clumsy with his hands, introducing himself as just her partner less the woman he regarded as young and ladylike think ill of his presence.

  Miss Candy pulled into the yard and Jewel felt the car sink into the gravel. She watched Bad William’s attempts with his gear. He heaved the traps off the rocks again and again, retrieving the trap, wet and rusty, the white chunk of bait flying between the wires with every heave like a mad bird banging to be free to fly up over them and carry off the roof of the station wagon. Miss Candy beeped and Bad William let the trap slide off the side of the rocks and sink below. He waved back, but his hand seemed too close, like through a fish-eye lens of a new order, as if it would smash through the windshield.

  “I need to fill in this driveway some more,” said Miss Candy.

  “Yes, for some time now the ground keeps caving in …”

  The old woman turned in her seat, then decided the station wagon was close enough to the house where it was.

  When she awoke she was under an afghan, one corner familiar, for it had been her baby carriage cover. Someth
ing noisy was cooking in the fireplace, a duck maybe, something greasy at any rate. Miss Candy was stretched out on the couch opposite, sipping sherry, a bowl of cranberries in her lap, a magazine curled on her chest.

  “You were certainly done in,” she said. “How are you feeling?” She directed Jewel’s eyes to the aluminum cart in the kitchen doorway, mysterious under the white sheeting, but not mysterious at all. The woman was ready.

  Jewel nodded and felt her eyes fall off the woman. She couldn’t quite keep her in focus. She kept changing age or something, and color too, like a revolving filter was attached to the camera eye. On the hard-swept floors were the rag rugs she had helped Miss Candy sew the winter Paul had gone off to edit their first film together. It was the time Miss Candy had suggested that someone in the household could use a psychiatrist, a witchdoctor is how she’d joked it. Jewel had made an effort after that to relate more clearly just what madness existed in her home, asking for advice. And Miss Candy had shrugged and said there was nothing for Jewel to win. And Jewel busied herself with threading needles and sticking them into the cushion so Miss Candy would not have to slow up her work. And she’d resolved to move out of the house, for the tension was rotting her life, and there was simply no good reason for them to continue plundering each other. But she’d gone home and she’d stayed. It seemed a waste to have spent that winter with Miss Candy, studying the script only to junk it all. And it was a good film.

  “I still remember the reviews,” Miss Candy said, meeting her eyes coming up off the rugs. “Every reviewer wrote of you as though you were their own personal discovery. Like you hadn’t been out there scuffling all these years. Hmph, as if cream no longer rises to the top. ‘Her performance possessed moments of diabolic power,’ was how one paper put it. And just think, Jewel, somewhere right now some writer is dreaming you up the new part. And somewhere else they’re just now casting the Oscar that—”