Original Sins

by Lisa Alther

  He appraised her tall body with sympathy. She stood with her hands on her hips, her weight on one leg. Like a guy, for God’s sake. No waist, no hips, frown lines … Nice tits, though, you had to say that. Not that she’d be likely to let you near them. Any more than Sally would. Virtue ran in the Prince family, from the old guy on down. He remembered once as a little kid going to the mill with his daddy. Old man Prince, Sally’s grandfather, had invited them into his office, sat Jed on his desk, handed him a nickel, and lectured him on the need to save that nickel and turn it into other nickels. “The way to make money, son,” Jed remembered he’d said, “is to spend less than you take in.” As soon as he got home, Jed rushed to the drugstore and bought and devoured a Baby Ruth. The way he saw it, you spent money when you got it—or else somebody would win it or steal it off you. Probably the old man had had spies in that drugstore. He noticed how Sally’s father eyed him now when he picked her up for a date. Here is an unthrifty young man, his glance suggested. At least that was the only reason he could think of as to why Mr. Prince would look at him like that. There was no way in the world he could know that Jed had his daughter on the five-yard line. The truth was, it bothered Jed a lot. He wasn’t used to people looking at him with displeasure. He was his mother’s favorite son. And if you played a good game of ball, you had girls chasing after you wherever you went, especially if you had a nice car like his. He couldn’t understand parents not being delighted that he, Jed Tatro, had picked their daughter from all the dozens of fathers’ daughters that were his for the taking. Not that he had “taken” Sally yet, but her reluctance was part of what made him want her so bad.

  He glanced at Emily’s tits again and wondered if old Raymond had ever tried to feel them up. He grinned. Most likely Raymond was a queer. No sports. No girls, except Sour Pussy over there. Alone all the time in a darkroom down at the newspaper office jerking off.

  Emily seethed with resentment. Jed didn’t have a brain in his head. Why he bothered to wear a helmet when he played football was a mystery. Yet he had the right to look her up and down as though she were a side of beef. Her big breasts were embarrassing enough without his making an issue of them.

  She recalled as a child telling her father about a new friend at school. “She’s a lint-head,” she’d explained, parroting the term she’d picked up from the other children. Her father slapped her hard. “I don’t ever want to hear you use that word again. Those people work for me and keep food on our table. They’re our friends and relatives. They’re no different from you or me.” Emily was doubly startled, not having even realized the term was cruel. With the slap and the lecture came the awareness that her family was in fact different. How, she wasn’t sure. For one thing, they weren’t “lint-heads,” whatever that was. When she went places with her father, people would stop them in the streets and exclaim, “Is this here your little gal, Mr. Prince?” And new teachers every autumn as they called the roll would pause at her name and inquire with respect whether she was the daughter of Mr. Prince at the mill.

  But even being Mr. Prince’s daughter couldn’t shield her from appraising looks from whatever boy chose to run his eyes up and down her body. She clenched her teeth and shot Jed a defiant look. He grinned.

  Emily saw Sally pausing behind the screen door to pat her hair and arrange her brightest smile, before bouncing out and squealing like the imbecile she was, “Why, Jed, honey! I didn’t expect to see you this afternoon.” She picked up the rolling ball and gave a helpless toss toward the goal, then giggled. Jed lumbered over to the ball, picked it up, and dropped it through the net. Sally sighed with petulant admiration and said, “Jed, you’re just a wonder, the way you do that without even trying.”

  “So you finally hauled yourself up off the couch?” Emily inquired.

  Sally and Jed glanced at each other with patient smiles. Jed walked over to the door, stuck his head inside, and called, “Hey there, Ruby! Yall right this afternoon?”

  “Why, I be just fine, Mr. Jed. Law, ain’t you the good-lookingest thing?”

  “Why, thank you, Ruby. You’re pretty good-looking yourself, now.”

  Ruby cackled.

  Jed and Sally climbed into the Chevy. Sally snuggled up against him, and they roared off.

  Emily hurled the ball at the goal. She didn’t like playing Wicked Witch to Sally’s Dorothy. But those two irritated her. They were so infernally pleased with themselves, with their friends and their school. Not that she didn’t envy them. Yes, she wanted to be asked to join Ingenue. It had been painful the night the Ingenues arrived en masse at her house. She thought they had come to invite her to join and was quickly combing her hair before going downstairs. But as she began her descent, she saw them laughing and exclaiming and embracing Sally in the hall. She watched from the upstairs window as they trooped down the sidewalk to their cars, and she tried to figure out why they had never invited her to join, what she lacked that Sally had. Pep, she had concluded. Sally was invariably enthusiastic and cheerful. Emily often studied her as she walked down the hall at school. She sauntered, her face paralyzed into a wide smile, turning in a dozen directions at once, so as to make eye contact with every student and grace them with a “Hey there, how you?”

  In contrast to herself, who usually slouched along the edge of the hall, staring at the floor and clutching her books so as to hide her chest. She didn’t know how to be like Sally. She probably would be if she could. But Sally was petite and graceful, not lanky and gawky. Peppy, not moody. Emily had tried out for cheerleader two years in a row. She’d been eliminated in the first round of voting by the student body both times. She knew the cheers perfectly, had practiced in the shower and in the back yard and in the den for years, as had almost every other girl in town. “Who’s gonna win, win? Who’s gonna win, win now?” But she lacked … pep. Which Sally had in abundance. For which Emily hated and admired and envied her.

  Ruby sat in the car looking straight ahead, with a jar of bacon grease in her lap. Her bony brown arms and legs were folded up like fried chicken wings. Driving through the underpass toward Pine Woods with freight cars clattering overhead, Emily asked, “How’s Donny these days?”

  “He be just fine. He play basketball over at the colored school this fall.” Her jaws resumed their slow gumming of tobacco.

  “I know. I see his name in the paper sometimes. He’s a star, isn’t he?”

  “That what he tell me.”

  “I haven’t seen him in a long time. How come he never stops by the house anymore?”

  “Well, honey, Donny, he be a big boy now. He got him his own plans and his own friends.”

  “Well, tell him hi for me. I wish our schools played each other in basketball so I could watch him.”

  Ruby’s toothless jaw sagged with disapproval. “Whites and coloreds don’t play ball together, Miss Emily.” “They do in the NBA.”

  “Well, honey, they don’t in Newland, Tennessee.” “Well, they should.”

  “That ain’t for you and me to say, now is it? And don’t you go round talking like that. Else your mama fix you good.”

  “I bet my mother would agree.”

  “Mrs. Prince? Law, honey, I knowed your mama before she was borned. I reckon I know what she thinks about most things.”

  Ruby always took this stance of knowing far more about each member of the Prince family than anyone else—and in most cases, more than the individuals themselves. She’d worked for Emily’s grandparents, had raised Emily’s mother. Maybe she really did know what they thought?

  Emily pulled up in front of Ruby’s red-brick apartment building. Her doorway opened onto a narrow porch that overlooked the street. Other apartments faced inward on a series of interlocking courtyards, landscaped with bare earth and straggly clumps of weeds. Beyond the apartments were fields that stretched down to the willows bordering the river. Ruby was always marveling over the changes she’d seen in her lifetime—from shacks and sticky clay roads, to brick apartments and paved streets
and sidewalks.

  She glanced at Emily. “Sure do wish I had me something to fry in this here grease.”

  Emily cleared her throat and looked away.

  “A little old chicken neck or something.”

  Emily stared straight ahead.

  “Sure do gets sick of rice and beans all the time. Law, some days I doesn’t even have the strength to pick myself up outen the bed.” She sighed.

  Still not looking at her, Emily emptied the contents of her change purse into Ruby’s outstretched hand. She was always shocked when Ruby pulled this.

  “Why, I declare! We thank you, Miss Emily! What a lovely thoughtful thing to do!”

  Ruby nodded as she unfolded her limbs and slowly pulled herself out of the car. She figured she deserved it. She couldn’t hardly get by on what the Princes paid her—wouldn’t have got by at all without the money Kathryn sent down from New York City for Donny. Yet Mrs. Prince was a Tatro, and Ruby was a quarter Tatro herself, which maybe nobody but her knew about. According to her mama, back on the Virginia farm during slavery times one of the Tatro boys took a fancy to Ruby’s grandmaw, who was a young girl then herself. This white boy would ride out to the field where the niggers was hoeing corn and nod at this girl. Just a nod was all. Then he’d ride off and wait there in the woods. When Ruby’s mother was borned high yaller, seemed like that nobody noticed. Ruby herself was almost as light as her mother, though Kathryn and Donny was a good bit darker. When Ruby was little, everyone used to say all the time, “Law, ain’t she the purtiest color?” And all her life people in Pine Woods had treated her extra special.

  But respect didn’t put pork on the table. That you had to get ahold of however you could.

  As Emily drove away, she saw a young man in maroon pants and a matching Banlon sports shirt sauntering along the sidewalk. Although this tall loose body scarcely resembled Donny’s short skinny one, she knew from the jaunty walk, with the head thrown back and the hands stuffed in the pockets, that it was he. She slowed down and yelled through the open window, “Hey, Donny.”

  He looked startled, glanced over at her, and said nervously, “Hey there.”

  “It’s me—Emily.”

  “Yeah, I see you there.” He grinned quickly, then stopped grinning and looked down at the sidewalk.

  “I haven’t seen you in a long time.”

  “No, ma’am, I reckon not.”

  “How you been?”

  “Just fine, thank you, ma’am.”

  “You’ve grown.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Your grandmaw says you’re playing basketball.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He poked a crack in the sidewalk with the toe of his tennis shoe, then looked off across the dusty school playground where some boys were playing football.

  Emily had been around Ruby and Kathryn and him enough to know that their not looking at you as you talked didn’t mean they weren’t listening or weren’t interested. Still, he did look uneasy. Emily couldn’t think of anything else to say. She continued to smile too brightly.

  The hell with him. Boys. Who understood them anyway? One minute they’d be snickering at some dirty joke. And the next minute they’d be opening the door for you, or pulling out your chair. Then before you knew what was happening, they’d have their tongues halfway down your throat and their hands all over you. People could say what they liked about Raymond Tatro, but at least he left her alone that way. From watching her mother and Sally, she knew the way to enthrall a male was to ask him questions about himself, and then listen with feigned fascination to his lengthy answers. That was how you got a reputation for being a brilliant conversationalist. But it wasn’t working with Donny. She couldn’t think how else to behave with him. That “ma’am” stuff was so creepy, made her feel like his mother. Fortunately, at the rate they were going, they’d only be seeing each other once every decade or so, so it didn’t really matter.

  “Well, nice to see you. See you around, hear?” “Yes, ma’am.”

  As she drove off, Donny looked up, wanting to motion for her to come back. But he still couldn’t think of what to say. You didn’t talk to white girls the way you did to colored girls. But how you did talk to them was a mystery. Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am. That was the most he’d ever said to a white woman in recent years. His only contact had been to mow their grass, or to buy things from them at store counters. You smiled, no matter what crazy thing they asked you to do. You smiled and you smiled and you smiled.

  But Emily … she was OK.

  He started thinking about her pond and about floating around on inner tubes. He looked way up the hill, past the mill village, to the Castle Tree. He smiled remembering his commando stunt, which none of the others had ever confessed to not being able to do.

  His eyes shifted to the huge half-dead oak in the schoolyard—the Lynching Tree, it was called. Years ago, when Pine Woods had been a collection of shacks, white men had come from town on horses and dragged out a man called Nigger Joe. They made him stand on his head, then strip naked except for a bowler hat he always wore. They strung him up by the neck on a branch of that oak, cut off his rod, and left him hanging there—for refusing to move off the sidewalk in town as a white woman passed. Or so the story went, as told by old Granny Tatro in her head cloth and long skirt: “Lord, they kluxed that man something turrible.” Sometimes in the schoolyard Donny and his friends would glance up uneasily at the old tree in whose shade they were playing mumbly-peg with their jackknives.

  As Emily’s car disappeared, Donny waved. Then he shrugged and took his mother’s letter from his pocket and reread it. She was driving down from New York City for another visit. She wished he would go back up there with her to live.

  He crumpled the letter and flung it at the sidewalk and stomped on it, his face contorted. She’d left him, damn it! He’d been a little boy, and she’d just up and left him in the middle of the night without saying goodbye or nothing. She’d been writing and phoning and sending money ever since. She’d come home last Christmas and spent the whole time peeping out the window behind the curtains. But the truth was that she had left him. He remembered smothering his sobs in his pillow every night for weeks. Sometimes walking down the street he used to close his eyes and pretend that when he opened them, she’d be walking toward him.

  She was so beautiful. He had his own private picture in his head, unrelated to the various photographs his grandmaw had scattered around. He always thought of her sitting on the red clay shore of the Princes’ pond making models, her head bent and the sun glancing off her high cheekbones. He leaned down and picked up her letter and smoothed it. She was coming back for him, wanted him to go to New York City. How many times had he prayed to the Lord for this very thing to happen?

  But he had his own life now. If he did well for the next two years, maybe he’d get a basketball scholarship and go to college, the way the guidance counselor at school was always saying. And things was just getting going with Rochelle. He’d kissed her for the first time last night. Under a willow tree by the river. And she’d liked it. He grinned. She’d been scared she was going to like it. She had her six brothers and sisters, and spent most of her time babysitting while her mama worked at maiding. She said she wasn’t about to go doing nothing that might stick her with kids of her own. But she had liked those kisses, and he was optimistic she might like some other stuff before long. Besides, how could he leave his grandmaw? She was practically his mother now, and she didn’t have nobody else.

  How was he supposed to pick up and leave everything? Just because she wanted him to, just because it was convenient now to have him around, like a cat or a dog or something. It was too late. She wanted him in New York City. What about what he wanted? Had she ever considered that in her whole entire life? He crumpled the letter and hurled it to the sidewalk again and place-kicked it into the gutter, then whirled around and stalked home.

  He switched on the evening news and collapsed into an old brown armchair in the dark liv
ing room. Grease was crackling and flying in the kitchen where his grandmaw was concocting supper. On the television screen some colored people in their Sunday clothes sat at a lunch counter having ketchup dumped on them by a bunch of white people who was angry about something or other. His grandmaw emerged and switched off the set. “What you doing, Grandmaw? I’m watching that.”

  “Donny, honey, I don’t like you watching that stuff. I don’t want you getting no smart ideas.”

  “I got to watch it for Civics. It’s our assignment.”

  “Humph.”

  “What ideas you afraid I’ll be getting?”

  “Donny, you growing up to be a fine proud colored man. You do like the white folks says and you be all right. They treat you just fine. All this yelling and carrying on—it ain’t

  right. The Lord don’t like it. You got to learn to be a clever nigger. You clever enough, you gets what you wants without you cut nobody up.” She spat a wad of tobacco juice across the room into a coal scuttle. Donny had learned to take this feat for granted.

  “Aw, Grandmaw, I ain’t gonna cut nobody. Turn that thing back on.”

  “Honey, you don’t know what you likely to do when you gets growed.” And finds out what you up against, she added to herself as she returned to her hot plate and started turning over chicken wings. She munched her tobacco thoughtfully. She’d never known the best way to raise up children—to tell them right from the start how mean-spirited some folks was, or to protect them for long as you could. You had to teach them to mind their manners, or else they’d get smart and get into trouble. But it was downright pitiful to watch them frown and try to understand things even their parents had a hard time understanding. Kathryn’s Buddy was raised to think he could do pretty much anything he pleased. He came home from that war over at France in a big fancy yellow car with a lot of flashy clothes. He had a photo of hisself setting in a bar with his arms around some French girls, white girls they was. He used to pull it out all the time. “That nigger’s gon get hisself killed,” she used to mutter to Kathryn. To him she’d say, “Buddy, honey, you in Newland, Tennessee, now, not Paris, France.” Kathryn thought he was just about the most wonderfulest thing she’d ever laid eyes on, and she up and married him fast as she could.