“Just trying to understand what I just read.”
“Tell me about it,” he said as he sat back down quickly. “Might help it sink in if you try to explain it.”
She stared at her page again.
A ham was baking in the oven. He could smell the cloves. “You not in trouble?” he asked.
She raised her eyebrows as she underlined words in her book.
“You know, family way kind of trouble?” He asked it quickly, sneaked it in as he took a breath so that it sounded like a whisper.
“Herbie!” She slammed her book shut. “How could you ask me that?” Thinking that if he only knew how careful she was, how careful Pop’s nephew was. And now the fact that he’d asked her meant that he assumed they were doing it, and she was embarrassed at the assumption, even if it was true, so the only respectable response was for her to act as if it wasn’t. “I’m appalled that you even think that, could form your lips to—”
“Fannie, Fannie,” he said defensively, “I mean, Pop’s nephew been hanging around here more and more. You know, and I’ve never actually talked to him about his intentions, I was just waiting to see if anything really developed, so”—sweat started to shine on his brow—“awl, I feel stupid now. I had no right to ask you that. You’re eighteen years old, for Christ’s sake. I’m relieved, though. Damn.” He stood up. “I’m just gonna take my dumb, relieved behind from this table and let you study.”
“Herbie.” Fannie called him back.
“Yeah,” he said from the dining room.
“Liz could probably use some talking to.” She hunched her shoulders ready for his barrage of excuses of why he couldn’t.
“Lord, Jesus, Fannie, please,” he said. “I’d do just about anything for you, you know that, but please don’t ask me to talk to Liz. You know me and Liz can’t be in the same room ten minutes without going at it. I can’t talk to that girl.”
She didn’t have to turn and stretch to look in the dining room to know he was shaking his head. And now he was mouthing the word “damn.” And now scratching his head, considering it.
“What about?” he asked, right on cue.
“Nothing in particular. You know, just tell her you’re there for her, if she ever needs it, you know in a fatherly sort of way.”
“Like she don’t know that. Come on, Fannie, I know there’s bad air between Liz and me, but she got to know if she needs me, I’m there.” He walked back into the kitchen. “You understand what I’m saying, I know you do.”
Fannie did. She shook her head that she did. “I just wish you and Liz talked more, that’s all. Like you talk to me.”
“Don’t try to be a snake charmer, Fannie. Liz and you are different, different temperaments. If I’d tried to ask her what I just asked you, it wouldn’t exactly come off like, what’s his name on Father Knows Best, talking to his daughter, you know a hug and that soapy music they play. I might be trying to pull one of those butcher knives out of my chest right about now.”
Fannie laughed, an embarrassed laugh as she thought about Pop’s nephew again.
Herbie noticed her embarrassment; she looked away, and a rash of red flooded her forehead. He was so unaccustomed to seeing her like that. He sighed and walked back out of the kitchen. “I’mma change and see if I got the nerve to step back outside to that cold. Hit the club maybe. Tell Noon don’t hold dinner for me, rib night at Royale.” He paused. “If you think of it, tell Liz I asked about her too.”
Right now Liz was in her walk-in closet, where the hole had grown along the seam from the floor to almost the ceiling, where she kept her thick wooden coat-tree, and along the baseboard, the full width of the closet, where she kept her shoe boxes stacked. She promised herself that when the hole got yea big, she’d stop. Until it was yea plus several inches, and she was adding another shoe box. Sometimes the hole seemed to have legs and feet the way it crawled along the wall, and the outline got jagged like a river on a map, and she’d use her butter knife to scrape off chunks in a straighter line because the jagged edges were hard to look at. The chunks were easy to take, though. She laid a piece of its substance inside her mouth; it almost melted like a clump of brown sugar and turned to that glistening gravy that left hardened crumbs along her tongue.
She worked the crumbs between her teeth as she told herself that her life was darn near perfect so she wouldn’t cry right now. Had been perfect in the eight months since her high school graduation, she told herself. Summa cum laude. And chosen by her classmates as the best dressed. And won a scholarship to Lincoln U. And got a promotion at her part-time job at Wanamaker’s from the stock room to the selling floor, which meant an automatic charge card and 25 percent discount; even though her main job was to keep the racks in order and go for coffee for the assistant buyer, she was one of the first black persons ever assigned to the store’s exclusive third floor.
And then, as if life weren’t perfect enough, on her graduation night, right while she, Fannie, Julep, and Julep’s cousin walked home from Bookbinder’s, where Julep’s parents had taken them for dinner, Willie Mann walked up behind them, grabbed Liz around the waist, and kissed her on the lips to the gasps of Julep and her cousin and Fannie’s scowls. He took her back to the wine cellar, presented her with an exquisite pair of solid gold earrings, and finally, after having put her off for two full years, he gave in that night and took her on the couch. She hadn’t even gotten pregnant that night and went the next day to be fitted for a diaphragm.
She shifted her teeth. The more she tried to concentrate on how good her life was right now, the more she wanted to cry. She’d overcharged on her employee card, and the amount she owed far exceeded her paycheck. The assistant buyer liked her, though. Liz could tell because she asked her opinion on colors and fabrics before she went to her sales meetings. So she’d arranged for Liz to work Monday through Friday for a week. It would mean missing a week of classes, but she could work off her debt and then go back to her regular hours. She’d told Liz she’d arrange that for her anytime; she thought all that college business was a waste anyhow; you could have a real future here, she’d told her.
So bad enough she’d missed a week’s worth of classes, leaving each morning with her books in her bag so Herbie and Noon wouldn’t know, last night, right on that couch in the cellar of the club while she sipped dry sherry and looked at Willie Mann’s perfect smile, she’d gone and sold out her dear Noon. Listed for him the subjects of the strategy sessions Noon and Jeanie hosted right downstairs in Noon’s dining room. Told him who was challenging the tax assessments, who was wavering, who’d probably sell by spring. She’d stopped herself and covered her mouth and begged him please not to use the information against Noon. She just forgot, for a minute, that they were on opposite sides. He circled her lips with his fingers. Told her that deep down she knew they were on the same side. He respected her loyalty, he said, but she was settling—again. She knew they deserved more than that little Lombard Street row house, didn’t she? He kissed her. Didn’t she know it? He kissed her again. Didn’t she have to admit they were on the same side? He was all over with his kisses. Until she closed her eyes and arched her back and whispered, yes, yes, they were—yes—they were on the same side.
She crunched down hard on another sandy-colored chunk and liquefied it into paste, but the inside of her mouth stayed dry, and a sharp edge scraped the roof of her mouth so she tasted blood too. Plaster, blood, and guilt.
It was then that she heard Noon calling her. “Liz-zy.” Noon almost sang her name, which Liz knew meant that she was pleased about something. So Liz reached in the top shoe box, where she always kept her soft white handkerchiefs, and quickly wiped her mouth. She was neat with her habit. Covered her clothes with plastic so the dust wouldn’t settle on her nice wools, and soft cottons; dusted down the closet floor, and rubbed her tongue against the cut in her mouth as she went to the top of the stairs.
She saw Noon sitting in the deep green chair, and Fannie sitting along the chair’s
arm holding on to a thick textbook. She breathed in deeply as she walked down the steps and noticed Noon swinging a tattered brown shopping bag with such a broad grin on her face that it puzzled Liz. Noon had been so tensed up over the road, snapping at her and Fannie for little reason, bundling up and sitting out back by herself for sometimes half the night, more and more agitated over each property sold and then left abandoned. She couldn’t imagine what had caused this sudden change in Noon’s disposition.
“Well, hurry it,” Noon said to Liz as she noticed her slow walk down the stairs. Her voice bubbled with excitement. “Can’t hardly wait to say what I got to say. What you doing anyhow, up there so quiet?”
“Studying. Midterms coming up, can’t believe how much work I got to do.”
Fannie looked up at Liz and immediately knew what she’d been doing. She’d stopped arguing with Liz about it for the most part. An occasional “Would you get out of that fucking plaster hole,” if Liz had been hitting it often that Fannie knew about. But Liz timed her episodes when Fannie was least likely to be around, so it was only times like these, when she’d have to stop abruptly, that Fannie could see it in her eyes.
“What’s up?” Liz asked, smoothing at her hair as she sat on the deep green couch across from Fannie and Noon. The crumpled brown shopping bag swayed lightly in Noon’s hand.
Noon half laughed as she stood and wiped at her yellow apron and waved the shopping bag like a banner. “Just got done talking to Jeanie and found out Round-the-Corner-Rose is moving.”
“What!” Fannie and Liz shouted in unison.
“Moving, I said, going back down South.”
“And what about her property?” Fannie was standing now too, looking at Noon with a question mark. Rose’s property was prime, right in the middle of a short block, actually two houses, gutted, redone, turned into one. Noon should be upset; Rose after all was on their side.
“She got to sell it. Needs the capital. Seems someone in her family died and left a lot of land down South to Rose and her thousand cousins. And the cousins are selling the land a little at a time, parceling it out so it’s hardly worth the weeds growing on it. Rose is gonna buy it from all the cousins willing to sell it so it can stay in the family and keep its value. I tell you, that white man’s gonna try and get our property one way or the other.”
“So I don’t see the good news,” Liz interrupted her, not thinking she could stomach her tirade right now, sounding more and more like Next-Door-Jeanie the deeper she got into the project.
“The good news, my darling Liz,” Noon gushed as she walked to the couch where Liz sat and cupped her chin in her hand, “is that you are going to buy Rose’s house.”
“Me!” Now Liz jumped to her feet.
“Liz!” Fannie was just as shocked.
“You!” Noon grabbed Liz and spun her around and almost danced a jig, the brown shopping bag dangling from her arm like an oversized bracelet.
“With what? Thought they wasn’t giving mortgages down here,” Liz said, almost mad that Noon should suggest such an undoable thing.
“Now you know that they not.”
“So Rose is just gonna transfer the title?” Fannie asked, looking at Liz, hunching her shoulders to signal she had no idea what Noon was up to.
“No, already told you she needs the cash.”
“But if we can’t get a mortgage, that means we’d have to buy the house with cash.” Liz was getting more agitated.
“Exactly right.”
“Noon!” both Fannie and Liz said at the same time, exasperation filling their voices.
Noon put her hands to her hips and danced across the living room and looked as if she were doing a holy dance except that they knew she never did a holy dance. She waved the tattered brown double-handled shopping bag and bounced it up and down to the rhythm of her feet and almost turned it into a dance partner. She held the bag high and let it fall open so its contents spilled, and suddenly it was raining money. Right in the middle of the living room. Dollar bills, and fives, and tens and twenties. Twirling and floating and softly landing on the coffee table and the couch and the deep armchair. They papered the floor and interrupted the buffed-up shine. Lightly they fell, taking their sweet time, because they knew about time. Some of those bills had been patient in that tattered bag since Liz was five and had been left on the steps. Fifteen years a secret between Ethel and Noon and then Herbie; Noon had told Herbie, but he never knew how much, how often the envelopes came. Even though Noon hated the ground Ethel walked on, she’d figured the least Ethel could do was provide financially for her own flesh-and-blood niece. So Noon had taken her money, slid the crisp bills from the envelopes each month. Laid them to rest in that very shopping bag Ethel had left on the steps the day she abandoned poor Liz. Every dollar Noon had saved; every envelope she’d burned. Never one for cursing, except when she’d set the match to the fine paper envelopes. “Bitch,” she’d say. “This is the least you could do, provide for your child. Low-down, dirty bitch.”
Liz scooped up the dollars, inspected them, made sure they weren’t play money. Heart pounding, stomach turning. Mouth and eyes and even nose gaping, not even able to talk at first, and then shouting, laughing, asking where? Where did it come from?
Fannie walked slowly to one rumpled green bill that had landed in the corner, away from the center where the mounds rested. She picked it up slowly and put it to her lips, as if her eyes were in her lips and through putting it there she could see. She did see as she pursed her lips against the bill. “Ethel,” she said softly. “Ethel.”
“What Ethel got to do with this?” Liz asked as she threw the money in the air and let it fall down on her as if she were playing in the snow.
“This is Ethel’s money, isn’t it, Noon?” Fannie caressed the dollar and stared off into space, past the money twirling that Liz scooped and tossed. “Isn’t it, Noon?” she asked again, staring at her now, almost looking through her.
“Wait a minute.” Liz walked slowly to where Noon stood so that she was looking right in Noon’s face. “Ethel, my aunt Ethel, this is Ethel’s money?”
“Was, at one time.” Noon walked to the deep armchair and fell into it, suddenly tired, deflated, after having waited so long to make this presentation, buoyed by the very prospect, and now in an instant it was done and she was drained.
“Ethel sent all this money?” Liz’s voice was strained as she followed Noon and stooped at the foot of the chair. “When? Why?”
“She sent it over time,” Noon said as she leaned forward and took both of Liz’s hands in her own. “From the day you were left here. She been sending it monthly for your upkeep. Ten, sometimes twenty, lately as much as fifty, sixty, dollars at a time.”
“For me?” Liz had to stop, to swallow and catch her breath. “You saying this is mine, must be thousands of dollars here and you saying it’s mine? Mine? I’m rich? Mine?”
“I think she was sending it for Noon,” Fannie interrupted. “Probably to pay for your food and clothes; you know how you always had to have the most expensive of everything.”
“I had a mind to send it back.” Noon almost sighed. “But I figured the least she could do was provide for your future. So I kept putting it up for you. Figured the day would come when you’d need it for something big.”
Liz’s hands shook, and she could feel Noon squeezing them tighter. A homeowner. She was about to be a homeowner. A deed in her name. Eat-in kitchen. Private bath. Open weave drapes, French Provincial chairs, a shiny copper teakettle. A lock, a key, all night long with Willie Mann, all night long. Suddenly when she thought about Willie Mann, she had to go to the bathroom. She was sweating, and she pulled her hands from Noon’s and ran up the stairs.
She made it just in time before her bowels broke. “Be still, circles,” she whispered to her stomach. “Didn’t tell Willie Mann anything he couldn’t have found out on his own. He’s smart, got good people sense, knows who’s for and against him, hardly needs me to tell him that.
Be still, circles,” she whispered again, the way Ethel would whisper to her when she was small and cried because the circles were spinning too fast in her stomach. “Be still, circles; I didn’t tell him anything that would really hurt Noon. I’ll make it up to her; I’ll help her push her plan; I’ll never sell my house to Willie Mann. My house. My house.” She said it over and over until her stomach settled enough for her to go downstairs and look Noon in the eye.
She walked right to where Noon sat and grabbed her and held her as tight as she could. “I don’t deserve how good you been to me, Noon. Too good, you just been too good.”
Noon stroked Liz’s bright red hair and nodded and smiled. “You deserve me and more. You been a good chile, a sweetheart you been.”
Liz felt the circles again as she sat on the floor and rested her head in Noon’s lap. “But you did the work, you always been there with whatever I needed. I don’t deserve you,” she said again.
Suddenly Fannie was furious as she caressed the faded, crumpled dollar between her fingers. That Liz could so easily discount Ethel’s generosity, just take the money, and buy the house, and let Willie Mann try to swoon her for it. And not have a soft, kind word to say about Ethel. “Don’t forget about Ethel.” Fannie’s voice cut through their embrace and stiffened it. “Wish it was some way you could thank her, Liz. We know how good Noon’s been to you, all of downtown knows. Nobody knows about Ethel, though. I told you she always loved you, I told you she always cared.”
“But Noon did the work,” Liz said weakly.
Fannie wondered how hard Ethel had to work for the dollar she rubbed between her fingers. Did Liz even consider that? Didn’t she wonder like Fannie if Ethel had to stand at some oversized microphone until her feet swelled, until her throat ached from pushing out notes night after night? Did she have to give it up to some club owner to extend her act and watch her drink so it wouldn’t be spiked, making it easy to cheat her out of her due? Did they whisper “nigger” behind her back when she wanted to travel first class and make her go in through the kitchen when she played the finer clubs? Did they schedule her tours with no time off, forcing her to work whether she had cramps, or the flu, or a stiff neck, pink eye, or just sick to her soul? How hard? Fannie wondered. All that money papering the living room now, how hard Ethel must have worked. Selfish bitch, Fannie thought about Liz. If she can just wave her hand over Ethel’s efforts like she’s shooing a persistent fly, how easy would it be for her to do the same thing to Noon. When Willie Mann breathed in her ear, what would stop her from selling out?
Tumbling Page 23