Leaving Cecil Street

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  Neet stopped in midsentence. Something about Shay’s face, what her eyes were doing, stopped her and her words hung unfinished on the porch. Shay had dark, dark eyes and they were squinting at Neet like she’d never seen them before, her round, generous face had lost its cuteness, and even her dimples that came up close to her mouth had vanished in the severe scowl that had taken over Shay’s face. Shay was waving her hands in front of her, swiping at the air frantically, as if she could shoo away what she was trying not to see. She was gasping out in whispers, “Oh my God, Neet, Neet, oh God, how could you, Neet?”

  Neet suddenly realized what Shay was saying. She stood there facing Shay, trying not to hear what Shay was saying. She reached around and pulled the rubber band from her ponytail. It was suddenly too tight as she realized what Shay was saying. Her hair fell around her face and neck in wispy tousles. Shay was going to wash it later and saturate it with Dippity-Do to thicken it up so that she could then pick it out into a ’fro. She lifted her hair with her fingers, wanted to pull at it in desperation now that she knew what Shay was saying. Neet understood it all now. Understood why she’d been so high and so low lately, giddy, then depressed; why she’d been cramping on and off the past weeks but no period, always been irregular, she’d kept telling herself, not unusual for her to skip a month or two. Understood now why she’d raised her hand to protect herself when Alberta had started to hit her last night. Wasn’t protecting herself, was protecting what was growing inside of her. She understood now as Shay tried to utter the words, but Neet wouldn’t hear Shay utter the words because as long as Neet didn’t hear it from Shay, she could pretend that it wasn’t true the way she’d been pretending for weeks now. Shay’s face was right at Neet’s as Neet tried to cover her ears. Shay wouldn’t let her cover her ears. She grabbed Neet’s hands and held on to them. Mouthed the words as her breath hit Neet’s face, emphasizing the words, “You’re pregnant, God, Neet, pregnant.”

  Neet looked beyond Shay’s darkened eyes down onto the street. The orange-and-red-and-silver-colored merry-go-round horses seemed to be spinning though she knew the carousel was still right now. The sky was a perfect blue this morning. It shouldn’t be, she thought. The sky should be a gray, thunderous sky this moment. A baby. The shame of it. The guilt and pride and dread and hope of it. She was allowing the truth of it to settle. Her eyes clouded as she listened to Shay already half into a plan. “We’ll go to Miss BB,” Shay whispered. “At least we know her. She seems careful and she doesn’t talk, all these years she’s been doing it you ever hear mention of a name? And living next door to Johnetta, if she had mentioned a name, all of Cecil Street would know. We can talk to Sondra first,” Shay said, referring to BB’s daughter. “Though I can’t stand her with her big-butt self, she’ll keep it on the q.t., maybe she can talk her mother’s price down for us ’cause Miss BB’s probably as expensive as shit. Damn. You know Little Freddie’s gonna have to help pay too, you do realize that? So he’s gonna have to get his ass up from those corner steps and get a real job at least until we get through this. If you didn’t have to go to church so damned much, you could pull down some overtime, between the two of us maybe we could come up with enough. What you think, Neet, huh? What you think about that?”

  Neet was hearing and not hearing as she tried to see the other side of Cecil Street through the obstruction of the rides. Miss Johnetta’s house was directly across the street, Miss BB’s next door to Johnetta’s. Miss BB kept a porch filled with flowering begonias this time of year in brightly painted clay pots. Neet couldn’t see the flowers now. Shay was right up on her now, face right at her face asking Neet how much money did she have saved. Neet started crying again and Shay hugged Neet and told her that they would work it out, that everything would be okay and they would work it out. Neet cried harder because she wasn’t sure if she even wanted to go the Miss BB route. What if she wanted to have it? A baby. The thought would nestle against her lately as she floated off to sleep on her mother’s bed where she’d take her afternoon nap. A soft thought that would rise up with the airy line-dried scent of her mother’s pillowcase. She hadn’t realized until now how often she’d inhaled the thought, made it a part of her. So she cried because she knew that to have a baby right now went against everything that was logical. She’d have to run away for sure given her mother’s rigidity over a sin as large as fornicating. Either that or get married to Little Freddie. So she was crying already because she knew she didn’t have it in her to do either. Knew Shay would keep the logic of getting rid of the baby right in her face so that she wouldn’t waver. And really it was the only logical alternative. Really, what else could she do?

  Chapter 4

  LOUISE PAUSED AS she rushed through the living room. Thought she heard the floor sigh under her feet, as if something was moving around below her, under the house, in the cellar. She got a chill then, was about to yell up to Joe to remind him yet again about the light switch in the cellar. Hated that the lowest level of the house was shrouded in constant darkness, a breeding ground for the mice that she was deathly afraid of, or worse. But then she heard Shay and Neet out on the porch, figured that was the cause of the sounds. She said a quick “Morning, darlings” as she hurried past them, then noticed that Neet was crying. She stopped, said, “Neet, baby, you okay?” Shay scrunched her eyes at Louise though, as if to say she had it under control. Go on.

  Louise blew them a kiss and kept moving, relieved. She felt guilty for being relieved, but she wasn’t the best when it came to giving consolation. Thought that it had something to do with losing her mother young. She was only ten years old when her mother died. The morning it happened Louise was fixing her mother the tea with lemon that she’d have every morning because it seemed to relieve some of the severe symptoms of her female problems. But that morning Louise was late getting to her mother. The matches wouldn’t catch as she tried to light the stove and then the water took forever to boil, the tea leaves longer than usual to steep in the water, and she kept adding more boiling water to rush the tea to the whiskey-brown shade. She was agitated as she hurried into her mother’s room, knowing though that her agitation would dissolve in the sound of her mother’s voice singing her name. Her mother had a beautiful singing voice and would always trill out Louise’s name when she told her good morning. The air had been so soft as Louise stepped from the chilly hallway into her mother’s room, soft and warm, as if it was crowded with people though it was just Louise and her mother in the house that morning. Later Louise had described the feel of the room to her sister, Maggie, twelve years Louise’s senior, who’d finished raising Louise after their mother’s death. Maggie told Louise that the angels who had come to guide their mother to heaven were still in the room, that the angels had waited for Louise to get there so that they could comfort her. “Mama made them wait, Louise. Mama said, ‘My Loo’s all alone in this house and she needs soft, warm air to comfort her right now.’” Louise would challenge Maggie; she’d say, Then why didn’t the angels close their mother’s eyes? She’d been so terrified by her mother’s dazed, unseeing stare that she’d spilled the hot tea right onto her mother’s chest. Worried for months after that morning that her mother could feel the tea scalding her as it ran down her chest. She allowed the worry over burning her mother’s dead chest to fill her up. Better to worry that she’d caused her mother pain on her dying bed than to be mired in the inexpressible feelings of abandonment, to have to grapple with what she believed deep down: that her mother just gave up on her and died, that she wasn’t lovable enough for her mother to stay alive for. Almost thirty years later and she’d still stiffen amidst other people’s emotional upheavals. Felt threatened that in the course of consoling others she might unhinge shades of what she’d never allowed herself to feel. Grief that her mother had died.

  She stepped from under the awnings of the porch into the shock of the July sun. The area around her house was once the most splendid stretch of Cecil Street. The fragrant shade the tree provided, the
songbirds it housed, tended to put people in a good mood. But now the stump where the tree used to be was a reminder of loss, a call to sadness. Louise looked at the tree’s remains as she hurried past and felt sad about Neet. Guessed whatever Neet was crying about right now had everything to do with the noise Shay had heard coming from over there last night. To Louise’s way of thinking Neet had a crazy, religious fanatic of a mother and nothing short of Neet’s turning eighteen would change that. She hoped that’s all it was, Alberta’s hardhanded discipline. Hoped Neet hadn’t gotten herself in trouble. She was thinking now about how Shay had reacted when she’d hinted at the possibility that Neet might have strayed. Shay had almost broken her good iced tea pitcher, she’d gotten so angry. A good sign, Louise thought. A frozen silence would have confirmed it for Louise, but Shay’s outburst meant Shay was in the dark. And as close as those two were, if something was up with the one, the other knew. Louise remembered how touching it was when Shay was a baby and woke crying in the middle of the night; within minutes she’d hear Neet through the walls over there crying too. The same thing happened in reverse if Shay woke first, according to Alberta back when Louise and Alberta were on speaking terms.

  Louise was at Fifty-eighth Street now, where Clara’s beauty shop was. She’d been a regular here as long as the shop was on this corner though Joe told her she was crazy to still come here after Clara partially blinded herself in one eye giving herself a lye-based perm. Joe used to tease Louise when she’d return from getting her hair done, tell her one side was cut higher, or curled tighter. “This side looks pretty,” he’d say, smoothing her hair, “but I guess she did the other side with her bad eye.” Louise felt a laugh coming on as she walked down the three short steps and into the shop. Felt a tingle move through her as she thought about her and Joe together last night, and then again this morning. How urgent he’d seemed, such an intensity to his wanting. She tried to wipe the smile from her face as she pushed open the door on the scent of hair singeing in a hot comb mixed with the heavy sweetness of Dixie Peach. Too late.

  “Awl, look who got a grin plastered on her face this morning,” said Nathina, as soon as Louise was in the door good. “Haven’t seen you grin like that since Shay got her Afro pressed for the junior prom. Joe get a raise?”

  “Probably more like Joe got a rise.” This from Joyce, who lived near the corner of Cecil, bending her ear out of the way right now as Clara leaned in with the hot comb. “That’s no money grin, that’s a man grin, a my-man-was-good-to-me-last-night grin.”

  “Y’all need to hush,” Louise said, laughing as she stuck her head around the curtain where the washbowls were. “Johnetta not here yet, Clara?”

  “She’ll be here directly,” Clara said, turning all the way around so she could view Louise with her good eye. “Something, something having to do with that niece staying with her for the summer. So that doesn’t leave y’all much time to get it out of your systems.”

  Louise plopped in the chair next to Nathina, and she and Joyce and Nathina looked at one another and snickered. They always tried to arrange their appointments with Clara on the same day and time because the three had always been close. All were just a few years shy of forty, and regular members at the same Baptist church. They’d always worked outside of their homes even before it was fashionable. Joyce taught third grade, Nathina supervised clerk-typists at the city’s department of probation. They were attractive, though in different ways, with looks that went from the soft and pretty of Nathina’s, to Joyce’s pug-nosed kind of cute, to Louise’s exotic, almost severe kind of beauty. They all loved Clara too, revered her as a matriarch since she was on the other side of sixty.

  “Don’t act like you’re not brimming to talk about the chile,” Clara said, referring to Johnetta’s niece Valadean. She put one hot comb in the stove, taking another out, scattering the smoke as she waved the comb to let it cool. “You know I can sense the conversations swirling around in my shop before they’ve been spoken.”

  “We know, Clara,” Joyce said, hunching her shoulders as Clara pulled the hot comb through the hair close to Joyce’s neck. “You can tell by our hair, right?”

  “I can tell your emotional state by your hair, yes I can,” Clara said as Louise settled deeper in the chair and took in the waves of smoke. The burning hair and heavy sweetness of the pressing oil reminded her of childhood, of Louise’s mother hot-combing her hair every Saturday morning without fail. Even after she’d gotten increasingly sick from her severe female problems that she treated herself because she didn’t believe in doctors—the female problems Louise learned years later to be ovarian cancer—she still hot-combed Louise’s hair on Saturdays. She’d hum and massage Louise’s scalp and cause a layer of contentment to fall over the kitchen table that Louise found no place else. When she was done, Louise’s hair would be so black and shiny and her mother’s eyes would well up, especially after her health declined, as she’d tell Louise that she was just a beautiful doll, she was. Louise shook off thoughts of her mother now. She was not able to recall those scenes and take comfort in having truly basked in a mother’s adoration. She’d feel the loss instead, the abandonment. The sense of loss would expand and stretch even to today. She’d feel vulnerable then. As if she was in the process of losing something but not sure what so that she didn’t even know what to cling to, what to try to protect so that it wouldn’t leave her. She looked around the shop at the young pretty faces on the full-color posters advertising Ultra Sheen and hair-softening comb-out creams. Their faces so beautiful with their oversize eyes and flawless skin and perfect teeth. Thought now her feelings of loss had to do with going to the dentist next week. Was about to tell them that she was finally getting work done on her mouth, but Nathina and Joyce were already buzzing about Valadean.

  Joyce had just asked how old Valadean was. Nathina said she’d put her at about twenty-five, but since she was so country it was hard to say exactly. “They can act younger than they are.”

  “Right dumb-acting, huh?” Joyce said.

  “Dumb like a fox.” This from Nathina.

  “Why you say that, Nathina?” Louise asked, trying to climb out of her own head and focus in on the conversation. She took the towel from Nathina’s hands to dab at the side of Nathina’s face, at the auburn-colored dye trying to edge out from under the plastic cap.

  “Well, I heard that she’s up here trying to leave a man,” Nathina said. “Though it seems more to me like she’s trying to catch one.”

  “Say what?” all three said at the same time.

  “All I know,” Nathina said, taking her voice down, “is that I caught her flopping her titties all in Tim’s face. I didn’t say anything. But when I saw her go to walk in your kitchen, Louise, I looked at Tim, and after fifteen years of marriage he knows all of my looks. He knew my eyes were telling him that if his black ass got up to follow her in there he was gonna be pulling my foot from his behind for at least the next seven days.”

  “Cow,” Clara said as she moved the clip separating the pressed from the undone portions of Joyce’s hair.

  “I don’t know what part of the South she’s from,” Nathina went on, “but my people are from Georgia and when the women are built up like that chile’s built up, they wear girdles and underwire bras when they go inside of someone’s house.”

  “Well, you know now, I understand what you’re saying,” Louise said, “but women are burning bras these days, you know, as an expression of liberation.”

  “Yeah, white women,” Nathina said. “Women libbers with rich husbands. I tell you what all that little hussy wants to liberate. I know the type. I supervise young girls eight hours a day and I can pick out the thick-natured ones who like the thrill of being with someone else’s man. It’s a whole psychology. And honestly, Johnetta’s not above encouraging it. I had to step to Johnetta about the last relative she had living with her, gonna have the gall to ring my bell for my husband to give her a ride to the African store on Sixtieth Street to pick up
some statue or some shit.”

  “Well, that one was really here to see BB,” Clara said, concentrating on the strands of Joyce’s hair being transformed under the power of her hot comb.

  They all got quiet then. Though they acknowledged that aborted secrets lived in the shadows of BB’s back bedroom, they never spoke about who procured BB’s services. BB never named names. The woman having herself fixed would have to tell it herself for anyone to know, as the last niece staying with Johnetta had done. Started crying under the hair dryer at three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, peak time when the shop was packed and every chair occupied. Detailed for everyone in the shop her ordeal at BB’s hands. Clara had had to take that one in the back and ask her if she wanted to see BB in jail, did she want to go to jail herself, then she better keep that particular experience to herself. “Well, I guess some things about a person we just didn’t need to know,” Clara said as they all now cringed at the memory of that scene.

  Nathina started talking again about Johnetta, and Louise was about to tell them how she’d had to punch Joe in his back when she’d caught him angled in a dark corner with the loose-dressing niece, but then Clara stopped her in midsentence, told her to hush because Johnetta was already halfway in the door, mouth moving fifty miles an hour before she was in the shop.

  By the time Johnetta stood in the shop untying the scarf on her head, she was well into her description of the puffy-haired monstrous-looking woman who’d come onto Cecil Street last night. Johnetta was a big woman and her heftiness shook to the rhythm of her words as she tugged at her scarf to loosen where it was knotted under her chin. She’d heard about the woman, she said, from Maryland, whose son was a Corner Boy. Said the Corner Boys had just finished singing “Looking for an Echo,” which was the cue for the live band to start, so everybody had turned their attention to the section of the block where the band was. “Maryland said her son said this wild-looking woman walked over to them and said she was looking for her daughter’s house, then she asked them what was all the foolishness going on, some kind of night carnival? Then they started sassing her, you know, being the hardheaded boys that they are. Then they said she turned her back to them and lifted her clothes, a red, black, and green tie-dyed something, and exposed herself, wasn’t wearing no panties.”