Leaving Cecil Street

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  SHAY WAS AROUND the corner at the bus stop waiting for her aunt Maggie. She’d hoped that she’d see Neet so that she could overtly ignore her to make up for the way she’d groveled this morning, begging Neet to come back to herself, crying. Though she consoled herself whenever she thought about it during the day by noting that Neet had cried too. She hadn’t cried out the way that Shay had, but she’d cried just as hard on the inside. Shay knew Neet well enough to be able to tell when she was crying. But during the day Shay could feel her depression lifting, going outward into an anger toward Neet that was at least active. At least she wasn’t just sitting, sighing, crying to herself. The anger was at least energizing, so that if nothing else, it made her move her body. She’d even cleaned her room after she’d gotten in from work. Punched her pillows to fluff them, beat her dresser and her chest of drawers with the dust rag, banged the minutest specks of dust out of the corners the way she hit the floor with the broom, even moved her furniture around, threw it around really, she had so much energy from the outward expression of her anger. Hoped that Neet was up there in her own room while she did this, hoped the furniture bumping against the wall like that was irritating the shit out of her and keeping her from praying or sleeping or whatever she did up there all day. Shay had taken a warm bath after that, settled into her immaculate and rearranged room and started to read. She’d drifted off into a sleep that was so deep and restorative that she felt mildly transformed when she woke. Even her thinking seemed clearer, more upbeat, as she stood on the corner of Walnut and waited for the bus carrying her aunt.

  The bus pulled up and Shay’s aunt Maggie was the first one off. She was limping as she got off and huffing, “Oh Lord, oh my Lord.”

  Shay ran to the curb and grabbed her aunt’s oversize vinyl tote bag and her cosmetics case that looked like a miniature suitcase. “Aunt Maggie! What happened? Why you limping?” Shay asked as she slipped her free arm under her aunt’s arm and kissed her cheek.

  “Oh Lord, Shay, that was so sweet of you to meet your old aunt here at the bus stop, oh Lord.”

  She turned then and looked around her, making sure the throngs of people who’d followed her off the bus had already dispersed. She straightened her back and her steps went quicker and steadier. “You believe that shit?” she said, tugging Shay’s arm so that Shay would lean her head in some. She was short, a good six inches shorter than Shay and barely making it to five feet. “I had to pretend I was a cripple so those lazy, trifling, no-raised sons of bitches would get up and offer me a damned seat. I tell you, Shay, all the civility is leaving this world, the main ones shouting black power don’t even have the power of good manners, and don’t let me start on those motherfucking shaggy-haired hippies. Calling out peace to each other as they got off the bus. Shit, how they gonna sit there in peace and watch a half cripple struggling up the length of the bus looking for a seat? Shit. Peace. I bet none of their peace-saying asses rode a block past the university into the real West Philly. I bet you they ain’t getting caught up here after dark. Peace, my ass.”

  Shay threw her head back and laughed out loud. “You a mess, Aunt Maggie. But you scared the you-know-what out of me, I thought you were really hurt.”

  “Yeah, feelings hurt. The bus driver actually had to pull over and look through his rearview and say, How about somebody offering this lady a seat? And then the bad part about it, the man who got up for me was almost as old as me. Pretty mouth though,” she said, stretching to try to talk into Shay’s ear as they waited for traffic so they could cross the street, “mouth looked like a pussy, it was so pretty.”

  Shay laughed again. Suddenly she wasn’t even missing Neet as much.

  “Any change in your girlfriend’s mood?” Maggie asked, and Shay just shook her head. “’Cause I got our little nightcap in the bottom of my bag,” Maggie said, not missing a beat. “I bought us our Manischewitz Concord grape, and I got a shot glass with your name on it.”

  Shay saw her father coming toward them, dressed all in black, and nudged her aunt to stop talking about the wine and asked her father where was he headed.

  “Your mother decided to slice up a ham to put on the table to add to everything else she’s in there cooking up,” Joe said, his hand cupped over his mouth. “So now she needs a can of pineapple for garnish. Maggie, how you tonight, sweetheart,” he said as he leaned down to peck Maggie on the cheek.

  “I’m doing, I’m doing, and you looking mighty good for a son of a bitch,” she said.

  “Well, as long as you doing and I’m a good-looking son of a bitch, I guess I can make it through the night.”

  He forgot and dropped his hand and Shay said, “Dad, eeh, what happened to your mouth?”

  “Long story, baby girl,” he said. “But you should see the other guy.”

  They could hear him still laughing as he rounded the corner and Maggie said a string of how-dos as they tunneled through Cecil Street, which had already accumulated a crowd.

  THE FIRST PEOPLE were beginning to stream into the living room at Joe and Louise’s and Louise and Maggie were forced to stop talking about people who lived on the block as they finished setting the dining-room table that had grown to include not only the ham with a pineapple garnish, but Maggie’s macaroni and cheese that she tinted orange with food coloring so that it tasted even more like butter and cheese.

  Joe was still high from having blown into his horn earlier, plus Johnny Hartman was oozing from his stereo console and he thought right then that he had a damned good life. Beautiful wife—or certainly would be beautiful again once her new teeth were ready, nice house that his wife could afford to redecorate every so often, solid, close-knit block, stable job, daughter headed for college, jazz collection that wouldn’t quit, and Acoustic Research speakers to boot. He felt a surge right then. He wasn’t a religious man, except when Shay was baptized or getting an award or Louise was heading up a women’s day, he never went to church, but right then he felt, what? He had to admit it, he felt blessed. He clapped his hands together. “Yeah!” he shouted. “Where’s my wife? Louise, they’re playing our song, dolling, so come on in here and melt into my ever-loving arms because I loves you, baby.”

  “Listen to Joe, he’s such a mess” rippled throughout the living room and dining room. Even Louise said it in the kitchen. But Maggie untied the apron from around Louise’s waist. Told her she better take her fine ass in there and dance with her husband before one of those other bitches in there did. “Go,” she said as she pushed Louise out of the kitchen. “And shake your hips when you walk through.”

  Johnny Hartman was singing “You are too beautiful and I am a fool for beauty” as Louise and Joe swayed together. He cupped her hand in his and held it close to his cheek, and with his swollen mouth looked as if he was about to cry. Now Maggie wasn’t even watching Joe and Louise as she leaned against the archway, her arms folded in a tight clasp across her chest. She was watching the perimeter instead. Looking for a woman whose eyes were tight with envy, whose smiling face was cracking around the edges. Because she’d had two husbands and two who had come close to being husbands, meaning they hadn’t quite made it to the requisite seven years to be considered common law. And she knew that when a man started publicly proclaiming his love like that after all these years he was either drunk or trying to convince himself right along with everybody else.

  Joe’s heart was racing now. He held Louise as close as he could, praying that if he squeezed her hard enough and long enough his heartbeat would settle down. He proclaimed his love for Louise all in her ear, telling her how he loved her so much that it hurt, Jesus Christ, I love you, baby, he whispered, hoping his love for her would be enough because the high he’d felt playing his horn was boomeranging on him now, the way that any high would, leaving you lower than you would have been had you not been lifted up in the first place. He felt a sinking inside now. He held Louise closer still even as he felt himself being pried away.

  THE PARTY AT Louise and Joe’s had grown
to wall-to-wall and after that first slow dance with Louise, Joe forced himself to be happy as he cha-chaed and boogalooed and did every step from the twist to the funky Broadway. His face ached from laughing so hard and a warm tightness was starting to spread across his back and he half seriously wondered if he was having a heart attack. Still, he clapped and did the bop when he moved toward the door because suddenly he realized that the tightness across his back wasn’t coming from inside him, it was in the house, the air inside his house had gotten so close, so claustrophobic. He stepped out onto the porch and inhaled deeply.

  Joe took in the scene from his porch. Nearly two hundred people curved through his block right now; they looked sinewy and connected, like those mammoth caterpillars in African dances, dozens of feet moving under vibrantly colored cloth as they went back and forth across the street and in between concession stands and rides and makeshift circular stages. He enjoyed all of this collected motion and energy. The infectious laughter of the children spinning in circles on the cup-and-saucer ride made him throw his head back and laugh too. Yeah, Cecil Street needed this block party to get back to itself, he thought, something happened in the air when they all got together like this. He was thinking now how it had been a block-party night last month when he’d lifted his horn from the basement, took another block party to actually make him play. People like Johnetta who noticed such things swore that a new crop of babies turned up every year nine months after the block party. She maintained that old couples broke up that weekend, new ones got together, churches were more filled than usual on the Sunday after because something in the air changed people, made them put down ways, or pick up ways, made them turn around and reverse course, pedal uphill if they’d been having it easy, or coast on down and rest if the road had been rough. Johnetta said—and Joe was inclined to agree, though he was generally not so inclined when it came to what Johnetta said—that it was their coming together for a good purpose that unleashed that spirit of change. The hashing out and in the hashing out getting involved in each other’s lives at a new, deeper level; the touching and agreeing over the same plans, the excitement that built up from the pavements scrubbed extra clean for the event, the cooking and the hammering and the building up. Joe guessed that’s really what it was, they rebuilt their community every summer around block-party time, rebuilt parts of themselves as they did so.

  He leaned against the banister and allowed the air to deal with the droplets of sweat that had formed on his forehead. Picked out of the continuous stream of motion what appeared to be a pair of drunks staggering right for his steps. He was about to say something like sorry, private party until he realized that they weren’t headed for his steps, they were headed next door and it was in fact Alberta and Neet.

  Neet was leaned so completely on her mother that it was making it difficult for Alberta to walk straight and almost impossible for her to maneuver the steps. Joe hopped over the banister, took the eight steps in two skips, and lifted Neet and carried her onto the porch, the whole time asking, “Is she all right, she’s shivering so, Alberta, is everything all right?”

  “I’m okay,” Neet said. “Really, Mr. Joe, I’m okay.”

  “How can everything be all right when the cab couldn’t even get any closer than the corner thanks to all that foolishness in the middle of the street,” Alberta said as she lifted her key from her purse. “Suppose there was a real emergency and a person needed an ambulance.”

  “Ambulances, cops, fire rescue got license to ride on through up the sidewalk. That party going on down there wouldn’t hardly hamper real help getting through,” Joe said as he held on to Neet despite her protests that she could stand up, really she could, she insisted.

  Alberta had the door open and Joe carried Neet inside, on through the vestibule, and Alberta said that if it wasn’t too much to ask, he might as well take her all the way upstairs. She ran ahead of them and had an outstretched blanket waiting for Neet. She covered her while she was still in Joe’s arms and then he eased Neet down onto the bed. Alberta was fussing over her, feeling her forehead, going to the top of the closet to get another blanket, asking her what did she want, did she want soup, tea, really, she should have something cold for chills because that would jump-start her body’s thermometer, and Joe stood there feeling awkward in this teenager’s room, average-looking room, could have been Shay’s room.

  He cleared his throat and Neet said that she just wanted to sleep. That’s all she wanted right now, to fall into a long, deep sleep. Her eyes were puffy and her nose was red and Joe could see that she’d been doing some heavy-duty crying, but at least her shivering seemed to have stopped. “Neet, sweetheart,” he said, measuring his words because his previous attempts at talking to Neet had been such disasters. “Anything I can do, anything at all, Mr. Joe is right next door, you remember that, okay?”

  She nodded weakly and as he turned to leave, she called behind him, “Could you tell Shay please that she was right about what she said this morning. Could you tell her please that she’s still my girl,” her voice cracked as she spoke. “Tell her I still love her, no matter what.”

  Joe had to swallow what felt like a choke hold coming up his own throat when Neet said that. “She feels the same way ’bout you, Neet. In fact, why don’t I go get her, right now. She’d want more than anything to hear that.”

  Neet said that she was really tired, exhausted. She would talk to Shay tomorrow. Alberta told her to rest then. “I’ll make you some tea and set it on your nightstand and every time you wake up, I want you to sip it. You need fluids, Neet.” She felt Neet’s forehead again and asked her if she was warm enough and Neet nodded, already half asleep.

  Alberta turned to Joe. “I’ll see you out,” she said as she motioned Joe toward the door, and her voice sounded as small and as weak as Neet’s. When Joe looked in her face, he could see that she had been crying too.

  Alberta dropped her hand and stood there and showed her eyes, knew how they must look by Joe’s expression, as if he were in here because someone had just died. She didn’t even lower her eyes. What was the sense in trying to hide it? She had been crying. Cried over everything during that cab ride home after she’d followed her mind and gone to the church to bring Neet back. Ended almost in a fight with the Saints, who’d said that they were too close, on the verge really of expelling that devil that had such a hold on Neet. They said Alberta should go, let them have their way, let them break down Neet’s resistance, Neet was too strong willed, they said. But Alberta wouldn’t leave. She remembered her own confessional session years ago when she’d been hit and punched and slapped in an effort to drive the devil away. Beaten, beaten down as they chanted and prayed until they were satisfied that her will was no longer her own. Then the Reverend Mister, who’d otherwise not taken part, came into the candlelit room. He’d nursed Alberta’s bruises and soothed her cries and held cool compresses to her head. He’d kissed one cheek, then the other, and owned her will after that. Even convinced her to put Brownie down. But she’d deserved it, she reasoned, after all, she’d been a whore in her life. She had the memory of countless nameless men to expunge. Neet was so much better than she’d ever been. Neet was honest and sweet and loved. She rose up against the Saints then. Told them no, no, she was taking her daughter home. Reverend Mister came in as they fought over Neet. Raised his finger and said to let Neet go. They held no one there against their will. And Alberta had run from the church, dragging Neet as she did, not turning around, afraid that if she looked at the Reverend Mister’s beautiful face, she’d be under his power again.

  So she’d cried over leaving the church like that, afraid of where her life would go without the confines of that church directing her path. She’d cried over what Neet had said to her on the cab ride home, how Neet had sobbed that she was a good girl, “I’m a good girl, Mommy,” she’d said over and over. “I am, I am.” It had never been her intention to be bad, to disappoint her, the only reason she’d lain with Little Freddie was because
of how he’d given her back her name. She’d then told Alberta how she’d lost her name to Mr. G those Friday nights during revival when she was just eight. Alberta swallowed her horrified gasps. She’d held Neet then, she’d rocked her and shushed her as she felt her own heart tearing at what Neet told her.

  “You are good, Neet,” Alberta said. “It was my mistake, not yours, letting that monster, that devil, take you by the hand. That was my failing, Lord Jesus, not yours, never yours. You’re so good. You’re what’s good in my life. The good in my life is you. Dear, dear Lord, sweet Jesus, what have I done to my child? It’s gonna be all right. Mommy’s gonna make it better. Let Mommy say your name. Bonita. Bonita. Bonita. My good, good child, Bonita. Mommy’s sorry, Bonita. Bonita. So good you are, Bonita.” Then Alberta couldn’t talk anymore because she was crying too hard, even as Neet stopped crying and nestled against her mother’s chest, sighing sweetly each time her mother said her name.

  So Alberta didn’t try to hide her face from Joe, the evidence of her tears. She’d cried over Neet’s scarred womb, realizing now that the scars from the abortion were minimal compared with how she’d been scarred when she was just a little girl. She’d missed Brownie all over again as she cried. Then she’d cried over the sadness in her mother Deucie’s eyes when she’d come into that third-floor bedroom at Pat’s Place and Alberta had known immediately that it was Deucie by pictures she’d seen, plus they looked just alike. She’d put her spit-tinged fingers to Alberta’s forehead all those years ago and told Alberta, “You mine, you ’member that too. You the only perfect thing I ever made. And you mine.” She cried over the softness, the purity of her mother’s touch, realizing for the first time that day that her mother wasn’t a wild animal as Pat had maintained. Her mother was a person, a real woman with sad eyes blaming herself no doubt for her daughter’s outcome, the way she faulted herself for Neet’s. Felt a kinship with Deucie during that cab ride home. A closeness, and she even missed her too. Sorry now that she’d not tried to hunt her down. Alberta cried as if she was a baby all over again on a Monday at Pat’s when Pat slept all day and there was no one to answer the baby Alberta’s cries. She was tired of crying. Tired period. Guessed that’s why she just stood there and let Joe look in her cried-out face, too tired to even try to hide it.