Leaving Cecil Street

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  “I still don’t understand why you went over there in the first place,” Louise said to Joe through barely parted lips. The soft scrambled eggs were sticking to her gums and she tried to fleck at her gums without opening her mouth.

  “I went to try and find out about Brownie’s whereabouts,” Joe answered, trying to swallow his agitation with the eggs that he scooped up on a crust of toast.

  Louise asked him what made him think about Brownie after all of these years.

  “The couch, Louise. Didn’t I tell you I even told Shay the story about Neet hiding in the couch?”

  “Yeah, but to go from thinking about a couch to suddenly wanting to find Brownie?”

  Joe tilted his coffee cup, drained it, taking his time so that he looked at the flower pattern at the bottom of the cup as opposed to looking at Louise, especially at her gums, which were purple and pink and prominent. “I said I thought maybe Brownie could help Neet get through this thing,” he said, talking into the cup.

  “And you don’t know anybody else who might have known where Brownie was, all the people you know in this city—”

  “Louise, come on, where we going with this?” He hit his cup against the saucer. “You don’t have better breakfast conversation than this?”

  Louise persisted though. “All I’m saying,” she continued, the tiniest quiver to her voice, “is that the woman’s made her point over the years that she wants nothing to do with any of us. I tried to talk to her the other day when I was in the yard looking for Cat and she turned her back on me like she was giving me her ass to kiss.” She closed her mouth again, realized by Joe’s expression that she was showing her gums. She watched as Joe cut a corner of butter for his toast; he left jelly and bread crumbs all around the stick of butter. She stopped herself from remarking about how he always did that, couldn’t he just use the clean butter knife that was sitting on the dish and not the one he was eating with. “What did Brownie die from anyhow?” she asked instead.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? What you mean, you don’t know?”

  “What did I say, Louise, I don’t know. I hadn’t intended on going over there. Intended on coming home until I heard Johnetta in here talking loud and saying nothing.”

  “Wait a minute, that particular day Johnetta was saying something. According to her some big black man with a gun in his pants pocket and a scar from his mouth to his ear was around at Sonny’s asking ’bout some woman who fit the description of the one who had the Corner Boys all riled up at the last block party. The man said she’d been missing for weeks. Said when he saw her last she had on a red, black, and green tie-dyed T-shirt—”

  “Louise, I know the story—”

  “Well, tell me this, then,” she said, still trying to talk with her mouth closed, so her words were muffled, “how you go next door to find out where Brownie is and you find out he’s dead and you don’t know what killed him?”

  “I forgot to ask, okay? I was just so shocked I forgot to ask. And then she pissed me off so much.” He bit down on the toast, and crumb shavings that looked like sawdust came out of his mouth as he talked.

  “Well, I’m trying to understand what pissed you off so much.”

  He wanted to say he was trying to understand it too. That he’d felt as if he’d been assaulted when he’d left there. “I was pissed because I didn’t know that Brownie was dead,” he said, trying to put some finality to his tone.

  “Joe. The man’s been dead for five years.”

  “Well, I didn’t know the man was dead and I feel as if I should have known—”

  “Well, wait a minute now, she didn’t owe you an explanation about her ex-husband’s life or death status.”

  “Well, I didn’t see you jumping at the chance to go over there.”

  “You right about that. I’m not comfortable around the woman outside her house, I’m sure not gonna compound my discomfort by going inside her house if I don’t have to.”

  “Well, they went through a trauma, Louise, shit, and you call yourself a Christian.”

  “What? She try to convert you?”

  “All I’m saying is that Neet went through a terrible thing and if I can do something to help her pull through it I’m gonna at least try, if for no other reason than because of my own daughter who has been devastated by this whole thing as well, and on top of that, Neet doesn’t have a father—”

  “But you didn’t know her father was dead when you went over there.”

  “So.”

  “So all I’m asking is what were you doing going over there?”

  “You know what, I’m going into work today.” He shoved back from the table, dragging his chair as he stood, knowing how Louise hated to have chairs dragged across her flawless floors. “Gonna see if I can pick up some hours. If I got to be getting shit, I might as well be getting paid.”

  “Well, good, I should make a dentist appointment, getting teeth pulled is more enjoyable than trying to have a conversation with you.”

  He felt bad when she said that, knew how tormented she was over all the dental work. “Look, Louise,” he said. “If we don’t have to talk about Alberta, I won’t go to work—”

  “If you got to put conditions on what we talk about, then go the fuck to work,” she said.

  She huffed out of the kitchen. She went upstairs, first to the bathroom to soak her mouth. She muffled sobs at the feel of the grains of salt separating from the warm water and attaching to her gums. She grabbed one of her good display towels, the dusty rose with the brown embroidered trim that matched the bedroom. She held the towel to her mouth and cried into it so no sound would escape. Either that or tell Joe that if their marriage had come down to him sleeping on the couch, then he might as well make it official and leave, parade whoever he was running around with out in the open. There, she’d allowed herself to think it. Had been feeling it since the night he was five hours late getting home, but now was the first time she’d allowed the feeling to form a concrete thought and stream through her conscious mind. She wanted to get hysterical and tear up the bathroom in a rage. She went into her bedroom instead. Added one more thing to the bags needing to go in the cellar, the green silky robe Joe had given her last month for her birthday. She made sure it was hanging over the top of the bag as she moved that bag to the front of the closet.

  NEET AND SHAY STEPPED out on the side-by-side porches at exactly the same moment this Friday morning. Neet was on her way to church, Shay to work. At first they were like people who wake the morning after someone close has died and in those first seconds of consciousness don’t remember the loss; they stretch and maybe even smile if the sun is pouring in through the window shears, until the reality falls and clicks into place like a cage locking and the loss takes over the room, blocking the daylight. Neet and Shay looked at each other at first as if they were about to go to the banister and kiss on the mouth the way they’d always done. But the reality of what had happened at BB’s thickened the air between them, turning it muddy, and they both stared straight ahead as they walked down their steps, the activity in the street of the booths going up a welcome distraction.

  Neet’s cab sat at the corner, unable to drive through Cecil Street, and she walked slowly, aware that Shay was just steps behind. She wished she could run. She could feel Shay’s energy blazing up and down her back, Shay’s anger and hurt trying to burn through the black taffeta dress Neet wore. But Neet couldn’t run, could barely walk, the way her insides felt, loosely packed, as if what was left of her insides would slip right on out onto the ground if she separated her legs more than the inches necessary to put one foot in front of the other. She counted her steps so that she could concentrate on something other than Shay’s breath that she could almost feel at her neck. Shay getting ready to say something, Neet could tell.

  Neet bracing herself so that Shay’s words wouldn’t penetrate, she couldn’t let them penetrate, couldn’t allow her efforts to live devoutly to be hampered by
whatever Shay was about to say.

  “It’s gonna be hot today, you’re gonna burn up in that long black dress and that ugly little hat,” Shay said, almost in Neet’s ear, she was that close.

  “Hell’s hot too. I’d rather burn for a day than for all eternity,” Neet replied without turning around to look at Shay, just focused straight ahead at the cab at the corner, raising her finger to let the cabdriver know that she was his fare.

  Like lightning striking, Shay was in front of Neet now, blocking her from moving forward. Neet stopped short because she didn’t have the energy to push Shay out of her face. Shay’s hair was pulled back in a bushy puff, a barrette adorning each side. She’d bought Shay the barrettes at Connie’s on her employees’ discount. Now Johnetta was turning the corner with her morning paper under her arm. Neet looked at the ground so that she wouldn’t have to take in Johnetta’s expression, which was filled with pity for Neet. “Excuse me, please, Shay,” Neet said to the ground.

  “Why are you acting like this, Neet?” Shay said, and Neet could tell how hard Shay was working to keep from crying. “This is not you, Neet. You know this is not who you are. Look me in my face and tell me that this is who you are.”

  Neet couldn’t look at Shay because she wasn’t even sure of who she was. She just knew that at least her mother’s religion held out the promise of pulling her up from where she was now. This place inside her where she’d fallen that was beyond sadness; sadness at least provoked tears, salt and water and life. But she’d fallen to a place of suffocating dust and dryness. Splintered, like the feeling she’d gotten when she’d been handled by Mr. G, though worse because it surrounded her all the time now, not just when she was called Bonita, but every waking minute. So she couldn’t look at Shay because Shay couldn’t help her. Shay was no wiser than she was. If Shay had been even a little wiser, Neet was thinking now, she would have come to understand how much affection Neet had had for that dot that had spread out and grown inside her; she’d loved it really; its absence had carved out a hollow deeper than Neet imagined possible. So Neet couldn’t look at Shay even as Neet recognized how unfair it was to try to make it Shay’s fault. That in and of itself was a sin, she thought now. Her church would never understand it since they’d been filling Neet’s head with the notion that it had been her association with demons like Shay that had caused her current state of damnation, but Neet recognized that trying to make it Shay’s fault was the real sin.

  Shay had her hands on Neet’s arms now, shaking her. Yelling at her that she was a liar for pretending that this was who she was. “You were supposed to be my girl, Neet. My motherfucking girl,” Shay cried. “You promised no matter what, we’d always be girls.”

  Neet could feel a quiet descend over the block as the workmen stopped assembling the party’s machinery to see what was going on. Neet still focused on the ground, the pavement that was a conglomeration of smooth and rough-edged stones fused together in a slab, the cracks that she and Shay would try not to step on in their little-girl rhyming game. Shay was sobbing now, her sobs filling up inside Neet’s head. Now Johnetta was peeling Shay’s hands from Neet’s arms. She was talking in a soothing voice. “Come on, baby, let her go,” Johnetta said as she pulled Shay to her chest. “You can’t rush her to come around any sooner than she’s gonna come around. Neet knows how much we all love her. Come on, Shay, don’t you have you a summer job you got to get to this morning? Miss Johnetta gonna walk with you to the bus stop.”

  Johnetta touched Neet’s arm as she led Shay away. Neet still didn’t look up. Waited for them to turn the corner, the sounds of Shay’s sobs hung back though, followed Neet even as she walked to where her cab waited.

  Chapter 15

  ALBERTA WAS SITTING on her back steps. The sounds of the party preparations out front filtered into her yard and she could even hear through the opened window the electric mixer going in Louise’s kitchen. She didn’t usually sit out here this early in the day. Usually sat out here in the evening around the time the Corner Boys sang. But she was reversing herself today. Had been reversing herself the past few days. Had gone on the third floor of Lit Brothers yesterday instead of the basement where she usually shopped. Bought a two-piece night set that came to the knee, pink and white with a wide pink satin ribbon instead of the one-color, to-the-floor flannel she usually bought for sleeping. Allowed herself a piece of jewelry hidden under her high-collar dress though self-adornment was against the dictates of her church. Had even reversed herself and told Neet that if she didn’t feel up to it, she could take the day off from church though Neet had declined the gesture and left for church first thing this morning. Alberta had been reversing herself for several days, now that she thought about it, ever since she’d allowed Joe to take up space in her living room and bring up Brownie’s name.

  She heard a scratching sound coming from Louise’s yard and she got up and walked to the Cyclone fence. She was barefoot and the dirt yard was cool and hard under her feet. She made a whispery sound, her attempt at whistling, thinking that maybe the cat was back. She hadn’t seen the cat in several days now and she missed the way he’d come and rub against her legs evenings when she sat out here and tried to make peace for the wrong she’d done. She didn’t see the cat though, and went back and took a seat on the steps thinking how she really needed the cat’s soft purring now because she hadn’t been able to get Brownie from her mind since Joe had mentioned him. Though thoughts of Brownie drifted into her mind often enough, it was usually something having to do with Neet as a little girl that made her smile inside: the way he’d let Neet dance on his feet, or swing Neet from his arm and have her squealing, or come in every other night with a special treat for Neet hidden in his hands, behind his back. But now she was thinking about how she’d run Brownie off after all he’d done for her. He’d made her respectable after all, married her though she was pregnant. He’d given the child who wasn’t his a name and treated her better than if she’d been his. And yet Alberta had forced him out after she’d taken up with her church, told him that if he couldn’t join in with her, he couldn’t be with her. He’d told her he was a straight-up Baptist, no way could he go to the extreme measures they advocated with their dress and their having to sever ties with everyone not part of that church body, the denying themselves of the simple pleasures of life. Alberta had said that that’s who she was now, and if he couldn’t be that too, he had to go. And just like that, he’d left.

  Though Alberta had not planned on things turning out that way. After Pat was stabbed and spent twenty-eight days in the hospital and then fled the area for Chicago, Alberta changed the tenor of Pat’s Place from a whorehouse to a speakeasy. As much as Alberta hated Deucie for being crazy, for the shame she’d felt being born to a woman who’d bite her newborn’s forehead, she’d often thought how she had Deucie to thank for half killing Pat. That ice pick to Pat’s chest ended Alberta’s nights of being shoved and rammed, handled over and over by greedy, insistent men.

  Pat’s other girls took what wasn’t nailed down and left, though Alberta was the only one privy to the whereabouts of Pat’s cash box, which included the deed to the house, paid for in full. She added to what cash had accumulated there in the box by selling liquor on Friday and Saturday nights to the regular faithful drunks. She brought in more than enough to keep the utilities paid and otherwise maintain her modest lifestyle, plus she rented out the rooms on the second floor and was able to significantly pad the cash box so that she could quit this life altogether once she’d discovered she was pregnant. Didn’t know how she’d gotten caught, was careful with all the jellies and foams Pat had given her but figured Pat had probably watered those down like she did everything else. Didn’t know who the father was though she had her hopes that it was Joe. She went into a depression during the early weeks. Cried and vomited and slept and waited for Joe to show up again, sinking deeper inside herself each day that he did not. Were it not for Pops, who owned the convenience store on the corner and who step
ped in and tended the bar, she probably would have closed the speakeasy. She came back to herself a little at a time. Started pouring liquor again, listening to the details of the lives of the drunks again, noting as she did who was in town playing at the Showboat or the Bijou Cafe or some neighborhood bar. Summoned all of her energy one cold Saturday morning when the sky was gray and fat with the threat of snow. She went to Eighth and Market and put a baby crib on layaway and registered with a diaper service. She splurged then on a two-piece wool suit with a foxtail collar that hung along the shoulders like a cape. She stopped in a beauty parlor that did walk-ins and the cosmetologists fought over who would do her since her hair was soft and long and a beautiful brown shade with the slightest hint of red. When she went to visit Pops after getting her hair done, he’d let go with a long whistle. Ran and snapped a few Polaroids and inscribed one on the back and gave it to Alberta because he said he’d never known she could look so good. She asked him to tend the bar for her tonight because she was stepping out, he could take his usual cut. He said as good as she looked, he’d tend her bar for free.

  She went home and took a long, hot bath and lotioned herself down with a sweet, thick cream, another splurge of the day. She unrolled black stockings up her legs and put on the suit that was tight through the hips though luckily the baby hadn’t really started to show. She colored her lips in with red and dabbed the same under her cheekbones to blush them. Just a touch of glittering shadow for her lids, no whore’s makeup tonight, tonight she was going out as a lady. She ordered a cab for nine and got to the club right as he was beginning his set. She took a seat in the back and tried not to cry as Joe played “Sentimental Mood.”