The pier-and-beam house sat high off the ground and I could see halfway back, but no farther. I crouched and took one step under the house, paused, then took another and another. Just as I reached the darkest part, a ball of daddy longlegs spiders fell on me and ran down my hair and over my face. I screamed and turned to run but smacked my forehead hard against one of the beams and fell onto the moist, mushy ground. Several spiders slipped under the collar and down the bodice of my dress. I yanked at the fabric with one hand and crawled back toward the daylight as fast as I could, yelling as I went. As I emerged from under the house, two plump hands grabbed me under my armpits and shook me in the air.
“What’re you doing under there?”
“The spiders. My tricycle.” I cried and flailed and whipped my head from side to side, trying to get the spiders off me.
Sister Waters put me under her arm and carried me into the living room. “I don’t want to hear no more about no stinking tricycle. And I’ll teach you to lie.”
She threw me on the unmade couch and grabbed her switch from the corner. I danced a mad jig as the switch cut through the skin on my arms and legs. After a few minutes, she threw the switch aside and dragged me into the bathroom. The door slammed. She turned on the water at the sink, pushed my face under the faucet, and jammed a bar of soap into my mouth.
“This is what happens to kids who lie. Are you going to tell the truth from now on? Are you?”
I tried to answer, but my mouth and nose and eyes were full of water and soap and I was gagging. I tried to nod but it was hard because she was holding my face under the water faucet. Finally I went limp, stopped crying, and tried not to gag. It’ll be over soon. It’ll be over soon. My brother called my name from the other side of the door.
Sister Waters pulled my face from the sink and pulled the soap from my mouth. “Don’t lie to me about nuthin’ ever again. You hear me? Well, do you?”
I stared straight at her belly and nodded.
“Now tell me there wasn’t no tricycle.”
I started to cry again. “There wasn’t no tricycle.”
“Tell me you lied.”
“But.”
“You want some more?”
I shook my head no. “I lied. I’m sorry.”
“Tell me you lied about your uncles.”
“I lied about my uncles.”
“Were they here?”
“No.”
“What?”
“No, ma’am.”
“No, ma’am what?”
“No, ma’am, my uncles never came.”
“You made up that story about your uncles and that tricycle to get attention, admit it.”
I admitted it, thinking all the while, But it’s true, it’s true, it’s true.
“Good. Now go on ahead and git your bath before Pam and Randall get back from school. We’re going over to Sister Currie’s for the prayer meetin’. You understand?”
I nodded, but it was years before I understood. The red tricycle had been a dream. I had mistaken a dream for the real thing.
We stayed with Sister Waters for three months, six months, a year, less than a year. I couldn’t really tell you. And then one day it was over. My mother drove up in her old black Ford, the same one we had driven away in when we first started traveling with the tent. We flung ourselves on her and jumped up and down and pulled her in every direction as she packed Gary’s teddy bear and my one-armed doll and Etch A Sketch and all our clothes into a box. We were going to live with our mother in Houston. Pam and Randall would stay behind. They were in school when we left, so we didn’t get to say good-bye. Mama said it was probably easier on everyone that way. She offered no explanation for our time with Sister Waters, and no explanation for why it had ended. I figured that was how life was. Things happened, and then they were over. No hard feelings.
When Gary and I saw Sister Waters at revivals in later years, we ran to her and she gathered us with those big soft arms and brought us to her breasts.
“My kids, my kids,” she said.
We kissed her sweaty neck and told her we loved her, and it was true, in a way. I had not forgotten how she had treated us, but I had set aside those memories in favor of the kind, sweet woman who seemed so happy to see us. Then Pam reminded me one day of all that had happened during our time with The Waters, and I never loved the woman again.
Chapter Fourteen
MAMA EXITED THE FREEWAY AND GUIDED THE FORD INTO A LABYRINTH of suburban streets. Gary and I bounced up and down on the front car seat. “We’re here. We’re in Houston.”
My mother was a self-described high-strung woman. Put her in a car with two attention-starved kids for five-hundred-plus miles and those strings were ratcheted about as tight as they could go. Each time she stopped the car in the middle of the street and consulted the directions she had scribbled on the corner of a page she had torn from a phone book, she breathed a little harder. She backed up and turned onto another street that led nowhere.
“Oh, sh-i-t.”
Gary and I stopped bouncing and looked intently up and out the front window. He pointed at an airplane low in the sky without saying anything. I nodded. Mama said she had been here once before, last month, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember how she got to the house; besides, all these streets looked the same. A few more stops and starts and she pulled into a driveway, turned off the engine, and let go a long sigh.
“Finally.”
Our house—we claimed it as ours at once—was a slightly run-down replica of all the other houses in that unfinished but slightly run-down neighborhood of chain-link fences and dead-end streets. It was a rental with dark brown trim and, as my mother pointed out, “a real picture window” that looked out on the field across the street. I flung open the car door and Gary and I ran to the front door.
Mama stood on the stoop and fumbled through her keys, trying one, then another. “This one? No. Maybe this one. That looked like the one, no, must be the other one. I know it’s one of these.”
Gary and I twitched and shuffled until the key clicked and we stumbled through the front door. It was clean and modern with dark paneled walls, avocado-colored drapes, and a breakfast counter. We rushed to the gold sofa and honey-colored end tables, then down the hall to the two bedrooms, one with a double bed, the other with two singles. I stood in the hallway, stretched my legs and arms as far apart as they would go, and touched my fingers to the doorways of both bedrooms, ours and Mama’s.
Gary ran back to the living room and looked out the big window. “It’s got everything, even airplanes.”
I threw myself on the couch. “Where did all this stuff come from? Is it ours?” I wanted it to be ours.
Mama stood in the middle of the living room and looked around. “Belongs to the landlord.” Her voice trailed off the way it did when she had something else to say.
“Where’s the table?” I pointed to the space under the hanging wagon-wheel light.
“We’ll have to get one later. Right now, we have these.” Mama walked over to the pantry in the corner of the kitchen and pulled out metal trays with stands. “TV trays.”
“TV?” Gary looked around.
“She said TV trays.”
There was a peace about our early days in Houston that I found unnerving. I missed the chaos and the closeness of Pam and Randall. They had been a part of our lives for almost as long as I could remember, and there was too much room, literally and figuratively, without them. Mama assured me they were no longer living with Sister Waters; they were with their mother, she said. I hoped so, for their sakes. I never told her about life with Sister Waters, and she never asked. The quiet immobility of our new life made me jumpy. I missed the sound of car wheels moving on blacktop. When the sun went down in Houston, I begged my mother to take us for a drive on the freeway.
“Let’s leave the windows down like we used to. It’s warm enough.”
My request brought long strange looks from Mama, as if she were tryin
g to figure out what kind of kid would ask such a thing. But I think my mother understood my loneliness for our old life, because on some nights, she put us in the car and we drove all over Houston without saying much of anything.
From my bed at night I watched my mother’s fish-belly-white legs lying inert on top of her blue-and-white bedspread, illuminated by the dim light cast from her bedside lamp. Her feet pointed straight up at the ceiling. I couldn’t see the top half of her body, but I knew she was propped up on pillows, reading her Bible. When Gary or I woke in the night, she was by our beds before we could call out. She sat beside my brother on the tub while he soaked his flat feet in warm water and Epsom salt. She massaged away the growing pains in my legs. Every morning I padded into the living room, flopped on the couch, and watched dust mites slide down the shafts of light that streamed through the picture window. Mama made bacon and cinnamon toast while Gary charged in and out with a bath towel for a cape calling, “There’s no need to fear. Underdog is here.”
Gary had become enamored of Underdog while pretending to not watch the neighbor’s TV. I threw him on the floor and tickled him until he begged for mercy.
Mama sounded a warning from the kitchen. “Kids, stop that. Go wash your hands. Breakfast is ready.”
We ran to the bathroom, stuck our hands under the faucet, and flung water drops in the air as we passed the empty spot where the dinner table was supposed to go.
“Are we ever going to get a table?”
“One thing at a time.” My mother set our plates down on the breakfast counter with a sigh.
I bit into my toast and studied her. “You tired?”
“Not exactly.”
Her thin slippers slapped back and forth between the stove and the counter. More toast, more bacon, scrambled eggs, too, please. More, more, more. The beige plastic radio she kept on the counter broadcast one preacher after the next. Garner Ted Armstrong, Carl McIntire, A. A. Allen. The harvest was ripe and the workers were few and they made sure we didn’t forget it.
“Can we turn off the radio? Please?”
We could not. The radio was my mother’s lifeline. Brother Terrell was on twice a day now, and though the programs were exactly the same, Mama listened both times.
After breakfast, Gary and I met the neighbor kids in the field across the street to watch airplanes land and take off at nearby Hobby Airport. We lay in the tall weeds while the jets screamed over us like fierce metallic insects. My stomach dropped to my toes, and I breathed in the acrid odor of jet fuel. I could not believe how lucky we were to live so close to the airport.
As it turned out, it was design, not luck, that determined our location. Mama stopped us one morning on our way out the door to tell us she had a surprise for us; two surprises, really. Brother Terrell was coming to visit and we would go to the airport later that afternoon to pick him up.
We jumped up and down. “The airport! The airport!” It would be the first time my brother and I had been inside an airport.
I stopped and thought for a minute. “But where will they all sleep?”
“Who?” Mama brushed the hair from my eyes.
“Everybody. Pam. Randall. Brother Terrell. Betty Ann. The baby.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
My mother hummed and smiled all day. She swept, mopped, went to the grocery store, dusted, baked biscuits, and swept some more. She made us take baths and put on clean clothes while she curled her hair and sprayed perfume and picked out a dress that “put color in her cheeks.”
At the airport that afternoon, Mama stood Gary in one of the airport’s long windows to watch the planes, keeping one hand on his back to make sure he didn’t fall. I rocked up on my toes to see over the ledge.
“There’s one. Look!”
“Hey, there’s another one.”
Each time a plane landed, Mama murmured, “That’s not it. That’s not it.” In between landings she glanced at the crowds rolling down the concourse until she glimpsed a familiar face.
“Wait. There he is. There’s David.”
She pulled Gary from the window and started to tell me to watch him. She was gone before she finished her sentence, moving like a homing device through the throng. I kept my eye on her back for as long as I could, then lost her in the ocean of elbows, chests, shoulders, and hundreds of unfamiliar faces. We stood apart from the crowd until it swelled and widened and engulfed us too. Gary tried to twist his hand free and I tightened my grip.
“Ouch. That hurts.”
I backed us against the wall and we stayed put. Eventually the crowd thinned and there was enough space between the bodies that I could look for my mom.
“Do you see her?”
“Not yet.”
And then I did. My mother and Brother Terrell stood at the top of the concourse, so close they almost touched. She looked up at him and they began to walk toward us. The closer they came, the more awkward I felt. To see them together like that, without Pam or Betty Ann or Randall or even the baby around, was odd, a bit like coming upon the tent in someone’s living room. Out of context, out of place, wrong. Gary must have felt it, too, because by the time they reached us, neither of us could think of a thing to say. Mama asked us if we were going to say hello. We didn’t answer.
“I brought y’all something.” Brother Terrell reached into a bag and pulled out a pilot’s cap with wings pinned to the front for Gary and a purse for me. I looked inside the purse and asked about Pam and Randall.
He stuck both hands in his pockets and shifted from side to side. “They couldn’t come this time. Maybe next time.”
“Okay. Just wondering.” I slipped the purse over my shoulder and Gary slapped on his cap and we ran ahead of the grown-ups.
That night when my mother tucked us in, I asked the question that had nagged at me all through dinner: Where would Brother Terrell sleep?
“Right there on the couch. Why?”
I couldn’t think of a single reason why I had asked the question or why I did not quite believe her answer.
I tiptoed into the living room the next morning before anyone was awake, determined to find out what was going on. There was Brother Terrell, curled up on the couch with the pillow over his head and the blanket pulled and twisted around him. He was there every night when I went to bed and every morning when I woke up. That arrangement began to shift as his visits became more regular. I often stumbled to the kitchen for a glass of water late at night to find only a blanket and a pillow on the couch. When I asked my mother where Brother Terrell went at night, she said he was probably walking around outside praying, like he did at the tent. I almost believed her until she introduced him to our neighbor Nila as her brother, her real brother. It wasn’t a lie, she explained, because she had a brother named Dave, after all. And by the way, it would be better if we called Brother Terrell Uncle David in front of the neighbors.
“Why?”
“It just would. Don’t back-talk.”
It worked out okay, until Gary and I slipped and called him Brother Terrell in front of Nila from time to time. She cocked her head and looked at us funny. We kept playing and pretended not to notice. We also pretended not to notice when Brother Terrell/Uncle David eventually went missing from the couch altogether and reappeared from our mother’s bedroom in the mornings.
Whenever Brother Terrell left, Mama moved through the house like a ghost. Her sighs were long and labored, and her face was vacant. She didn’t talk unless we asked her a question, and sometimes even then she forgot to answer. It took a few days for her to find her way back to us. First Nila would come through the hedge that separated our houses to tell Mama she had a call from her brother. (We didn’t have a phone.) It was always Brother Terrell, of course. These calls had a positive effect on my mother. Afterward, she stumbled into our room and told us we were going to Big Boy’s for burgers and shakes. Everything was on its way back to our version of normal.
I don’t know how long the three of us
lived in Houston. My mother’s memory is vague and my brother prefers to forget rather than to remember, so I am on my own when reconstructing this period of our past. My best estimate is three months. Despite my initial resistance to happiness, the end of it took me by surprise.
A plague of dead crickets littered the porches and sidewalks of our neighborhood and the sun flattened everything with its white light. Gary and I had just taken our place at the picture window to watch the smallest and most unremarkable of planes make their way across a washed-out sky. We were just tuning up for the I’m-bored chorus when two black women glided up the cracked sidewalk to our house. They shimmered in the heat and humidity of the Houston summer, a mirage of leopard-skin pillbox hats and matching fur stoles. They pulled something big behind them, a console TV that sat high on a primitive wooden sled. There was something of the ancient caravan in their slow, rhythmic progress. They didn’t stress or strain or stop to wipe a brow. Gary and I watched, arms and legs swimming against the glass. The women parked the TV at the bottom of our porch and climbed the steps.
“Mama, Mama, come quick.”
Our mother opened the door before they could knock and there stood Rita, a long, inky black line, and Queenie, round as a butterscotch with skin the color to match.
“Mrs. Johnson? We talked to you on the phone t’other day, about your ad? These must be the children.”
Cars slowed to a crawl as they passed our house that day and the long, white-stemmed necks in them turned like lazy Susans. It was 1963 and people of color did not live in, work in, or visit our bluecollar, all-white neighborhood. We should have seen those cars as a sign, a warning of what was to come, but Gary and I were too young to parse their meaning and our mother too naïve or too desperate to figure out what must have been common knowledge for most people.
We were not blind to Queenie’s and Rita’s skin color, but it surprised my brother and me far less than their leopard spots and television. I had sat with black women under the tent, hugged their necks, and draped white cotton cloths over their stout legs when they fell out in the spirit after a long shout. But those were holiness women, and they dressed like the white holiness women we knew. Plain, shapeless dresses. Dull, flat shoes chosen because they were on sale and good for navigating the uneven ground under the tent. Queenie and Rita were a different species. From their furs to their candy-colored lips (how did they get so red?) and the scent of Topaz and stale smoke that followed them into our house, they reeked glamour, youth, and sensuality. But even they could not compete with the lure of their television. Gary and I fidgeted our way through introductions, anxious to slip past the women and ponder the big box of sin left at the bottom of our steps.
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