Tumbling

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  “Your father’s funny,” Julep’s cousin said to Liz. “It killed him to give up Fannie’s hand for someone else to dance with her.”

  “I hate to see him on her wedding day,” Julep said. “When the preacher says, ‘Who gives this bride in holy matrimony?’ he’ll probably look around and say, ‘Well, somebody else better say something, ’cause I ain’t giving her up.’”

  Julep and her cousin laughed identical laughs, and Liz forced a smile. “He’s silly,” she said. She couldn’t keep the ice from her voice when she said it, and Julep and her cousin looked at her, startled. “He’s all right, I guess,” she added quickly. “He doesn’t have a lot of class or anything, but as fathers go, he’ll do.”

  “Speaking of doing,” Julep asked as she flicked a bit of crepe paper from the back of Liz’s dress, “what’s the latest on you and Fine Willie Mann?”

  “You mean since my cup of tea in the wine cellar?” Julep and her cousin squealed when Liz said that, and they joined hands and huddled in a circle so Liz could tell them again how he’d squeezed her hand, and stroked her arm, and understood her as nobody ever had.

  The dance floor was getting crowded. They were looser now, mixing. Long legs and arms moved to the sounds of Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Flamingos. The young men sneaked a grind when the records went slow, and when the music sped up, the ladies, shy and demure at the party’s start, shook their assets and twirled and teased.

  The food was served up from bottomless pans, but with so many throats and other body parts to cool, the punch went much too fast. It was late; Pop’s was closed, so Herbie made a call to Club Royale and asked Big Carl to send over a case of Frank’s orange soda in quart bottles, “Quick,” he said. “Need to bring the temperature down on fifty dry-mouthed teens.” Big Carl responded. In under ten minutes the soda was there, hand delivered by Big Carl’s right-hand young man.

  Liz was in the bathroom when Willie Mann arrived. She was touching up her lipstick, which had rubbed off when she’d eaten a chicken wing. She’d wished Noon hadn’t served fried chicken. The finger sandwiches Julep’s mother always served would have been more appropriate. But she had to eat the chicken. Especially after the disappointment that had washed over Noon’s face when she’d told her that she didn’t think the jacket added to the dress. Right as Noon attached the pearls around Liz’s neck, Liz had blurted it out quickly, then looked away, then caught Noon’s reflection in the mirror. Noon’s soft skin tightened in a way that went straight to Liz’s stomach and made her want to cry. She had to wear the jacket after that and eat the chicken wings and the too-thick slices of ham on lettuce.

  When she walked out of the bathroom and into the gray hallway that connected to their party room, she had a clear view to the dance floor. She had to stop where she was to laugh out loud as Fannie jumped around in the middle of the dance floor imitating Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. They’d tried to get in one afternoon, walked all the way to Forty-sixth and Market, where the show was broadcast, watched the white kids in bobby socks and hoop skirts saunter on into the place like they owned it. And when it came to Fannie, Liz, and Julep, the man at the gate said simply, “Sorry, kids, can’t let you in, capacity limits, it’s the law.”

  “Who wants to get in there anyhow?” Fannie had said all the way home. “This is how they dance.” And she’d kept it up until it broke Liz’s mood and she had to give in and laugh.

  Now Julep was on the dance floor with Fannie, and it was twice as funny, and Liz was just about to pass through the grayness of the hallway, back into the party room, she’d run onto the dance floor with them, Fannie would really put on a show when she saw Liz out there. But then she saw him instead. He walked right out of the men’s room right into that hallway where she stood.

  Black shirt, white jacket, the slicked-back hair, the smile, the smile, the smile. She touched the wall lightly, for support, commanded her knees that they would not buckle, then extended her hand. “Why, Willie Mann, so nice of you to come to our party.”

  “I wished I’d been invited,” he said as he squeezed her hand. “I just dropped off the soda. I’d seen the invitation your father had given Big Carl, but Herbie doesn’t care for me much, and then you didn’t even mention it the other day.”

  “I didn’t think you’d want to be in a room full of teenagers.” She looked at the weavings in the black shirt, the marbleized buttons.

  “Liz,” he said, “if I’d known you’d be here, looking like you just stepped out of a fairy tale about a beautiful, very beautiful young lady, I would have been here, and stayed here, and enjoyed myself just watching you laugh.”

  His words were like silk to her in this hallway that was dark and close and out of view. She just wanted the softness of his words to wrap around her, to make her feel rich and precious, the way Fannie must have felt rich and precious when Herbie had bowed and asked her to dance.

  “Tell me the fairy tale,” she said as her eyes moved up the buttons on his shirt. She counted them as she listened to him breathe.

  “Let’s see,” he whispered as he moved in closer, fingered the back of her pearls. “There’s a beautiful lady with red hair who lives with a kindly stepmother, a sister who’s half crazy, and an evil, fire-breathing step-father.”

  Liz smiled and touched the button on his shirt right at his collarbone.

  “She has an aunt who sings who really doesn’t know what she gave up when she left our red-haired girl. If she only knew, she’d take her, you”—his fingers left the pearls and squeezed her neck—“and rock you in her arms like I wish I could.”

  “You can.” Her voice declared it while her eyes begged.

  He pulled his hand from her neck, thrust it in his pants pocket. “Liz, you’re so young, too young. I shouldn’t be talking to you like this—”

  “But I’m sixteen now.”

  “Sweet sixteen,” he said, “so very sweet.”

  “And never been kissed.” She said it seriously, her eyes agreed.

  “Never?” He half laughed.

  “Not in a meaningful way,” she said, thinking that if she were to give in to her urging in this hallway the way she wished she had in the cellar at Club Royale, it had to be now. Now, while Fannie held everybody captive, in stitches, with her floor show; in another minute the song would stop, people would appear in that hallway to use the bathroom or to see where she was. It had to be now.

  She reached up and wrapped her arms around his neck. His cologne was light and easy for her to breathe. She could feel the grains of linen in his jacket as she moved her hands along his back. His lips were thin and soft as she pushed her mouth against his.

  It was a hungry, openmouthed kiss. The longing in the kiss caught him off guard. Made him wonder what she was starving for. Ethel. Maybe, but more than that even. When he could, he peeled his lips from hers. He kissed her nose, her forehead, her chin. “I’ve got to get back to the club,” he said.

  “Take me with you.”

  “You know you can’t go in there, you’re too young.”

  “Those fast girls from Fitzwater Street go in there all the time.”

  “Liz, enjoy your party with your family and friends; this is where you belong.”

  The Ink Spots were singing “If I Didn’t Care.” She watched his tall back in the white jacket move against the close hallway air. She could hardly breathe. Fannie was on the dance floor again with Pop’s nephew; he was getting bolder, holding Fannie the way he did when they met over Julep’s when Julep’s mother was away. Now she could hear the familiar squeals of Julep and her cousin as they ran down the hallway.

  “Liz, Liz, there you are,” Julep said. “You missed him, Liz, he was just here, Fine Willie Mann was just here!”

  “This is the best, the absolutely best party I have been to in my entire life,” her cousin chimed. “Come on, Julep, let’s go check our hair.”

  People were streaming into the hallway to get to the bathroom. Then Noon turned in. “There’s
my baby, I been looking for you. You just missed your sister acting the fool. I’m gonna put that girl on Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour yet. We gonna sing ‘Happy Birthday’ and cut the cake directly.”

  Liz tried to breathe as the gray hallway air caught in her chest. It filled up in her, even down to the circles in her stomach. She couldn’t even understand it when she ran to Noon and hugged her and started to cry.

  PART IV

  TWENTY-THREE

  Philadelphia winters could be brutal; February was the worst month of all. The sun lied so. Rolled out of bed with a wink and a smile across the sky as if it were going to do something, cut through the blustery air or at least melt the ice that settled overnight. Nothing, though. Just hung there looking pretty until it was time for it to go in and anybody outside prayed that maybe the moon would do what the sun hadn’t.

  By 1959 Herbie knew about February in Philadelphia. He was severely bundled as he headed home from the north side. He’d stopped off at the Moonglo café after work; he’d taken to Arch Street for his physical release. The moans and body thrusts on Thirteenth Street had gotten predictable. And the women there on that third floor ace-deuce-tre knew him well enough now to want to try to talk. Herbie didn’t want conversation. Just wanted to be able to whisper Ethel’s name and pay his tab and leave. Didn’t want the women there thinking they understood him. The way Dottie tried to act as if she understood him. The day when Fannie busted Dottie’s daughter in the nose, Herbie had to drag Dottie home before she and Jeanie started fighting, and then he had to stay to convince Dottie not to call the police and press charges against Fannie. The only way he’d been able to do that was to move with her passion when she’d pinned him against her dining room wall, whispering, “Please, please, Herbie, please. I know what you need.” He avoided Dottie after that, lest she’d be led to believe she understood him. Only three women ever had. His mother, and she was dead. Noon, she was dead in a sense. Ethel, might as well be dead. So he took to Arch Street, where he was a stranger and didn’t have to worry about understanding.

  He turned onto South Street. Even in the twilight he could see how South Street, the whole neighborhood, was starting to show signs of wear and tear. He occupied his mind against the cold by counting who’d moved out in the almost three years since they’d been approached about selling their house: Betty’s Dress Shop had packed up and left, Freddie’s Bar & Grill, Hank’s Clean ’N Press. And the bad part, he thought, is that the properties were just sitting, no one sweeping in front of them, or washing down the sidewalk, or scraping the paint when it peeled so fresh coats could be spread. He trod lightly over the icy remnants of last week’s snow; no one was even shoveling in front of these places. He was beginning to believe that maybe Noon was right when she spouted off about a plot to get them out, not for a road but just so they could come in and redevelop and turn it into a high-priced, ritzy area for white folks to live. Plot or no plot, he knew he didn’t appreciate the way their real estate taxes were shooting up. Got mad about that every time he walked through here, which was why it hadn’t taken much for Jeanie to convince him to join in a class-action challenge to the tax assessment with the thirty other homeowners crowded around his dining room table for one of their long-running meetings. The same lawyer was handling it who’d handled Liz’s adoption all those years ago. He was running title searches to see what these abandoned properties were assessed at. Herbie wished he’d hurry up. He had had to put the tax money in an escrow account, and he could sure use it to help pay Fannie’s tuition at Lincoln. Fannie had alienated so many teachers with her smart mouth, no one recommended her for a scholarship. At least Liz was on a full academic scholarship, thank God for that and for the church, which had chipped in to help Fannie from their education fund. Otherwise Fannie and Liz would have had to flip a coin to see who got to go.

  He adjusted his scarf higher on his face and blew into it so his breath could warm his cheeks. This whole road thing was taking a lot of time and energy to oppose. Noon was running herself ragged over it too. In fact she was actually turning into one of the leaders of this whole crusade. Egged on by Jeanie, of course. They’d sit and talk for hours, and Noon would start using language that sounded foreign, like eminent domain, gentrification. He’d have to stop her, tell her to get an interpreter if she wanted to talk like that. And then she’d always come back to Fannie’s vision, “You can understand that, can’t you?” she’d snap at him. “Chile saw it, plain as day; she said it’s no road. Houses, she saw red-brick well-built houses.” He wasn’t sure about the vision part of it. Had always attributed Fannie’s visions to part lucky guess, part coincidence, part intelligence. Figured when a child had a quick mind like Fannie’s, she just processed the logic without letting the steps show. The way old folks down home said it was gonna rain even when the sun was hot and bright. Then, sure enough, it’d turn dark and rain. If he didn’t know they were basing it on a combination of their swollen joints, the way the birds were taking cover, the direction of the wind, he’d have thought they were psychic too. Tried to explain it that way to Noon. She wouldn’t accept it. As far as she was concerned, Fannie had the gift of sight, and that’s all there was to it.

  He turned onto Lombard Street, which remained surprisingly intact considering how the blocks all around it were starting to fall. A clear path not troubled by ice or snow ran the entire length of the block. People had even started putting awnings up on Lombard Street. They had just gotten theirs. Bright red. Fannie had talked Noon into getting red.

  He walked into the house, into the kitchen, where Fannie sat at the table staring into one of her oversized textbooks. He yanked on her thick puff of a ponytail.

  “What’s up, daughter mine?” he said as he started peeling off his hat and gloves and scarf.

  “Just the books,” she said, grimacing.

  “You didn’t go in to work at Pop’s today? Saturday. Thought you worked there every Saturday. To hear him tell it, you practically run the place, said he might leave the place to you in his will.” Herbie laughed.

  “Studying. Midterms coming up,” is all Fannie said.

  “Never saw you read this much, ever, not during your whole twelve years of school. Not even last year, when you were a senior.” He pulled back a chair and sat and strained as he kicked off one boot and the other and then sighed. “Ooh, feels good in this kitchen. You in the right spot, I tell you that, ’cause outside’s no place to be.”

  Fannie kept reading.

  He noticed her eyes were frowning as she read. “You sure you and Pop’s nephew didn’t have a lover’s spat, and he convinced Pop to fire you?”

  “I’m sure,” she said nonchalantly. “Actually Pop’s nephew is working for me today, you know, doing me a favor ’cause I’m just swamped.”

  “You mean to tell me,” he said as he got up and walked his boots and coat into the shed kitchen, “you wait to get in your first year at that Lincoln U to let it start getting hard.”

  “I guess,” she said, trying to sound absentminded about it. She didn’t want to admit that she’d fallen behind, way behind. Because then she might have to admit that all those nights she’d spent on campus because she’d gotten so absorbed at the library, she’d told them, and missed the last bus back to Philly, but not to worry, she had plenty of friends in the dorms who would lend her a sleeping bag and floor, it was mainly one friend, Pop’s nephew from Norristown, who’d pick her up at the library, sneak her back to his dorm room at Cheyney State Teachers College, where she never slept on the floor.

  “I guess Noon’s over Jeanie’s,” he said as he came back into the kitchen.

  “You guessed it,” she said, never taking her eyes from the page.

  “And Liz?”

  Fannie pushed the sleeves of her sweatshirt higher on her arms. It was blue and faded and given to her by Pop’s nephew. “Probably in her room doing what I’m doing if she got any sense.” She hoped Liz had that much sense. Probably in that closet going at the wall li
ke somebody crazy. At least she was in the house, though. For a change she wasn’t laying up in that cellar at Club Royale. She’d tried to talk some sense to her just before Herbie got home. Liz had come in from her Saturday job at Wanamaker’s, and after Fannie told her that no one should be spending the kind of money on boots that she was sure Liz had spent on the black suede ones she was wearing, and damn, was that another new dress, ribbed knit at that, how many dresses could a person wear in a lifetime, and she wished she would stop using that light-ass powder on her face, as pretty as the color of her complexion is, if she were Liz she’d tell John Wanamaker, fuck you and this job if I got to be high yellow just to work on the selling floor, after she’d gotten beyond all that, she told Liz she had to start making it to class or she would surely lose her scholarship. But Liz just reminded her that at least she’d gotten a scholarship. And then Liz threw Pop’s nephew in her face, told her not to come off like Miss Polly Pure Bread to her. So Fannie only ended up defending herself, telling Liz how at least she did take that long bus ride every day to go to classes, and by the time she saw Pop’s nephew, she had put in some time with her books. And at least Pop’s nephew could put on a jacket and tie and come by on a Saturday evening, shake hands with Herbie, chat with Noon, and then take her out on a date in a respectable way. She’d like to see Willie Mann try that. Especially the way he was working to undo all the challenges Noon and Jeanie and their group had filed against the latest barrage of zoning notices.

  She didn’t notice that her eyes had drifted from the page and that she was staring off in space. Herbie did.

  “Stuff on your mind,” he said as he squeezed her shoulder.