Li‘l Jay smiled at her, his dimples like half moons on either side of his face. “No!”
“Would you lie to me, little brother?” Margaret said, poking him in the ribs.
Li‘l Jay squealed. “No! No! No!”
Margaret sighed. Mama had taken her to Dr. Nieves a week ago. He swore she was the right weight for her age. He had said she was healthy and alert and had better keep eating if she wanted to stay that way. Mama had told him about the grapefruit diet.
“No grapefruits,” Dr. Nieves said, his eyes serious behind the wire-rimmed glasses he wore. He had been her doctor since she was small. “Those fad diets aren’t healthy.”
Margaret had nodded, remembering how sick she’d felt after eating only grapefruits for a couple of days.
On the way home they stopped at the sporting goods store. Margaret got a pair of Saucony running shoes and a blue-and-red running suit.
Mama walked with her arm around Margaret’s shoulders. “I don’t want to lose you, Margaret,” she had said, her voice low and hollow as though she were holding back tears.
“You won’t lose me, Mama,” Margaret said.
“I will if you don’t eat.”
“I’ll eat,” Margaret promised. A picture of Li‘l Jay and her mom alone came into her mind. She swallowed. “I’ll eat,” she said again, this time really meaning it.
“Here comes a train,” Li‘l Jay said now. Margaret peered at the bridge.
“I don’t see anything,” she said, but just as she finished speaking, she heard the train’s low whistle. A moment later the train, a dark shadow against the bridge’s lights, made its way slowly across. Margaret smiled.
“What do you know, Li‘l Jay?” she asked.
Li‘l Jay looked at her, his dark eyes bright. “Nothing!”
“Yes, you do. You know what’s going to happen, don’t you?” Margaret teased. “You probably know what the next million years are going to be like.”
Li‘l Jay pressed a finger to the window. Margaret stared at it. She remembered the first day Mama and Dad had come home from the hospital with him, a tiny bundle of brown swaddled in white blankets. Jason Tory, Jr. Named for her father. Li’l Jay. She wondered if he’d ever stop being Li‘l Jay.
“Maizon has a daddy,” Li‘l Jay said.
Margaret was silent for a moment. Li‘l Jay had said this as though he were asking how come they didn’t. “We have a daddy, too, Li’l Jay,” she said softly.
Li‘l Jay looked up at her. “Where?”
“Up there,” Margaret said, pointing past the window at the dark sky. “Heaven.”
“Him not coming home?”
Margaret shook her head. “No,” she said. “He has a new home. But he watches us.”
Li‘l Jay stared at her, wide eyed. “Every day?”
“Every day,” Margaret said.
Li‘l Jay touched her nose with his finger. “You better be good!”
Margaret laughed. “You better be good.”
12
You have to have a little more feeling when you’re walking and talking, Caroline,“ Margaret said, sitting across from her. This was the last rehearsal before the play, and Maizon had skipped out early to go see a movie with Cooper. ”I mean, think about it. Here you are, walking home from somewhere the same way you always have, and all of a sudden your route isn’t familiar.“
“I get it,” Caroline said, tossing her hair out of her eyes and beginning again. “The Macons live there,” she said, and pointed over her left shoulder. “So I must live here.” Caroline took two more steps and looked up. “But I don’t.” She looked over at Margaret.
Margaret was holding the script and nodding. “That’s a lot better. Now the line.”
Caroline’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Where there once was, there isn’t now.”
“What there once was, there isn’t now,” she said again.
Margaret smiled. “That was cool. The best I’ve seen it.”
Caroline blushed. “Something happened. I remembered myself in this neighborhood when I first moved here. And it—it took over, how alone I felt.”
“Did you have a lot of friends where you were before?” Margaret asked.
“Yeah. I guess. I had my best friend. We were like you and Maizon. Then I had other friends. I was so scared to move here. Especially when we looked at this apartment and then I checked out the neighborhood—”
“—and saw there weren’t any other white girls,” Margaret finished.
Caroline nodded. “That was pretty scary.”
“Why’d your family move here?”
“It was cheap and my parents want me to grow up around all different kinds of people. Stuff like that. I was thinking about that when I said that line. And that’s why it came out sounding different. And you’re a good director.”
Margaret leaned back on Caroline’s couch, her back against the mirror covering the wall behind her. Caroline sat down beside her with a bowl of grapes. “Want some?”
Margaret shook her head. “I had a big dinner before I came over.”
Caroline smiled and tilted her head. Over the past months Margaret had begun to like her more and more. She had an easy spirit that seemed to allow her to roll with things. That spirit, Margaret figured, must have been what had gotten her through the first year in the neighborhood.
“I’m glad of two things,” Caroline said. “I’m glad you said hello to me on the school bus that first day. I thought I’d be alone for the rest of my life. And I’m glad Maizon asked me to do the monologue.” She shoved a handful of grapes into her mouth and chewed for a moment. “It sort of makes sense to me. I mean, she’s talking about more than just getting lost. Here is this girl who walks home the same way, day after day after day.”
Margaret nodded.
“Then one day, there is not that way to walk home. It reminds me of moving here. All the things that were familiar in my old neighborhood, that I took for granted, just stopped ... being.”
Margaret smiled. Caroline had gotten it. Her interpretation of the monologue was probably different from Maizon‘s, even from her own, but it sort of got to the same point somehow. The monologue was about “change” and how it affects this one girl. But Margaret realized change affected everybody.
“I like it here now,” Caroline said. “I like you and Maizon and Pace.”
Margaret was thoughtful. “Sometimes it’s hard. There’s all this stuff. Maizon doesn’t trust white people so much. I think she really likes you sometimes....”
Caroline nodded. “I know not all the time. She’s a little moody.”
“Yeah. But that’s not about you. At that boarding school she kind of had a hard time. And you know Bo?”
“I’ve heard of him. I think I’ve seen him.”
“You’ll meet him at the play. He goes to Baldwin Prep and he’s real unkeen about white people. Sometimes I feel all divided.”
“People should just like you for who you are,” Caroline said. “They shouldn’t judge you by the other people they met who don’t even have anything to do with you.”
“But sometimes they judge you anyway. It sucks.”
“Yeah,” Caroline said. “It really does.” She crossed her legs in front of her and looked around the living room. “People don’t trust each other immediately. My mom says it takes time. Guess I’ll have to stick around a bit. Wait it out.”
“At least stick around until tomorrow night ... when you debut.”
Caroline giggled. “Who‘d’ve thought it? Me, Caroline Berg. A star.”
13
A light rain had begun falling by the time Cooper and Maizon emerged from the movie theater. Maizon pulled the hood of her raincoat over head.
“What’d you think?” Cooper asked, putting his arm around Maizon’s shoulders. His arm felt warm but unfamiliar. She wasn’t sure if she liked it there.
“It was good,” Maizon said.
“Some strong storytelling,” Cooper said.
>
The movie had been about five generations of a black family living on an island off the coast of South Carolina. Images of their beautiful clothes and the different ways the women wore their hair zigzagged through Maizon’s head now.
“Really good,” she said again.
“Want to stop for a milkshake or something?”
Maizon yawned. “I’m kind of tired. Plus, I got school tomorrow and the play.” She couldn’t help noticing how Cooper’s face fell when she said this. In the past few weeks he had been trying really hard to get close to her. But what if they got close and he turned around and left again?
“Guess you’re right,” Cooper said. “Guess I’ll start job-hunting tomorrow. Look around for a place to live.
Maizon’s stomach jumped. “Where?”
Cooper laughed. “Where will I look for a job or where will I live?”
Maizon looked at him and felt a sense of pride rush through her. Hattie was right. He was handsome. “Both.”
“I’m going to try to get a job over at Baldwin. Got this teaching degree under my belt. Figure that’d be a nice place to work.”
“My friend Bo goes there. He says it helps his self-esteem.”
Cooper nodded. “That’s why it’s there. It’s a different kind of school, you know.”
“Bo says being a black man in the world is harder than anything else. But how does he know? He’s just a teenager. And what about black girls?”
Cooper bit his bottom lip. “You start learning early how the world hates you. Somehow I think it’s harder for men. I might be wrong, though. But black men aren’t just hated, people are afraid of them too. I think that starts making them feel like they’re monsters.”
“But those boys are all segregated over there.”
“A lot of people believe that’s what they need right now—support right from the start. Later on, when they go out into the world, they’ll feel good about themselves. They’ll feel strong.”
“How come they don’t feel good now?” Maizon shook her head. “I don’t get it.”
“It’s this,” Cooper said slowly. “So many times when you open up a newspaper or turn on the television, you see a black man having committed a crime or something else negative. You start associating those images with all black men....”
“That’s sometimes how I feel about white people—every time I see a commercial or television show and there aren’t any blacks around. Or when I look at a magazine and all the models are white, I start thinking that they make me feel like I’m the ugly one. Then I start hating all of them.”
“No hate is justified,” Cooper said. His voice wasn’t angry, but there was a sternness to it that Maizon wasn’t sure she appreciated. “But it’s what the world does to people. It makes some of us feel ugly and it makes some of us look like criminals, like angry fools. It seems this country picked black men to do the last part to. That’s why Baldwin is so important. I wish there was a school like Baldwin Prep for black girls. Maybe it’ll happen.” Cooper was silent for a moment. When he started speaking again, his voice was softer, wistful. “I wish there had been a school like Baldwin when Iwas growing up. Maybe I wouldn’t have run off and left you, afraid of all the responsibility I thought lay ahead of me.” He sighed. “Some things you don’t know.”
Maizon listened. After a moment she realized she was barely breathing. She had gotten caught up in Cooper’s speech and couldn’t help but feel how angry he was beneath his words. It was a little bit scary, but she wasn’t afraid. The anger seemed to make him bigger. It made her feel good, protected, like there was someone strong in the world, looking out for her. She smiled and squeezed Cooper’s hand.
“This Bo guy. Is he your boyfriend?”
Maizon felt the heat rise to her face. “No. My friend. I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“Why not?” Cooper teased.
“‘Cause I don’t want one,” Maizon said. “Got better things to think about.”
“Like what?”
“Like my play tomorrow. Are you still going to come?”
Cooper nodded. “That’s if you want me to.” After a moment he said, “You know that was one of your mama’s dreams—to be a writer.”
Maizon swallowed. Her mama. “What were some of her other dreams?” she whispered. She wanted to know everything about her mama. Grandma had told her everything she knew. Now it was Cooper’s turn.
Cooper slowed down. The rain had faded into a cold mist against their faces. Every now and then a car, its lights bright, moved slowly down the street. Otherwise, the neighborhood was quiet.
“She was beautiful,” Cooper said, his voice catching. “Every time I remember her, I remember how beautiful she was. You know”—he looked down at Maizon—“when you first walked in that day I got to your grandma‘s, I thought I was gonna drop into a dead faint the way you looked so like her.”
“Grandma says I do too.”
“You and your grandma pretty close, huh?”
Maizon nodded. She couldn’t remember a time when Grandma wasn’t in her thoughts. If someone had asked who you loved most in your whole life, it wouldn’t take her a second to answer.
“Yeah,” Cooper said. “I can see that. It’s nice.”
“Why’d you leave?” Maizon asked suddenly. “Why didn’t you stay at Grandma’s?”
Cooper shook his head slowly. “I couldn‘t,” he said. “I was young. I was scared. I had just lost the person I loved most in the world. When I felt that helpless bundle in my arms, I knew I wasn’t strong enough to give you what you would need to survive. Your grandma was the only woman that could do that.”
“What about your parents?”
“My mother died when I was seventeen. Breast cancer. I never knew my dad.”
They walked along without speaking for a few minutes.
“You should’ve kept in touch,” Maizon said.
Cooper stopped. Turning to her, he said, “I should’ve done a lot of things differently. I’m not perfect. This is me, Cooper Devalle Thompson, starting from scratch.”
Maizon nodded. “I always wanted a daddy when I was younger. I used to cry for you. I don’t cry for you anymore. I outgrew that.”
“I’m not asking you to cry for me, Maizon. Just to give me a chance.”
“Later on, when I got older, I used to say if you came back, I’d treat you like you never lived,” Maizon said.
“Is that what you want to do, now that you know me?”
Maizon thought for a moment. “No,” she said. It wasn’t what she wanted at all.
14
Sit here, Grandma,“ Maizon said, guiding Grandma to a seat beside Ms. Dell’s. The auditorium was filling quickly.
“Hi, Grandma,” Margaret said, kissing her on the cheek.
“Hi, Margaret. You ever plan to visit this old lady again?”
Margaret smiled. “Have to check my datebook.” She put her arm around Grandma. “See if I have time in the next two years.”
Grandma laughed.
“Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” Maizon sang, surveying the row. Hattie was sitting between Ms. Dell and Mrs. Tory, who had Li‘l Jay in her lap. Bo sat beside Mrs. Tory, looking uncomfortable in his navy-blue suit. Maizon winked at him and he waved.
“Where’s Cooper?” Margaret asked.
Maizon shrugged, pretending not to care, but more than once Margaret caught her checking over her shoulder to where two teachers were collecting money at the door. Tonight’s performances were a fund-raiser for the school.
Caroline walked up the aisle and almost strolled right past their row. Maizon grabbed her dress tail and pulled her back.
“Hey, guys!” Caroline smiled.
“Hey yourself!” Maizon gestured down the row. “You know everybody, right? The Madison Street contingent.”
Caroline nodded and waved to the group. “I’m psyched,” she said. “Think we should go in the bathroom and go over everything one more time?”
Margaret
rolled her eyes. “I’m sick of that monologue. I’ve heard it a hundred times.”
“Yeah,” Maizon agreed. “I’m pretty rehearsed out myself.”
“Want to go in the bathroom and gossip then?”
“Okay,” Margaret and Maizon said at once, jumping up from their seats.
“Who’s that cute guy at the end of the row?” Caroline asked, the minute the bathroom door was closed.
Margaret giggled, then began checking under the stall doors to make sure they were empty.
“I don’t know,” she said casually. “Just a guy I’ve kissed a couple of times.”
“Wait a second,” Maizon said, eyeing Margaret suspiciously. “I heard about one kiss that took place about a year ago.”
“Oh,” Margaret said, too casually. “Guess I forgot to mention the other ones.”
Caroline shrieked. “He’s fine!”
“He’s okay,” Maizon said, curling her lip. “Just Bo.”
“Are you guys seeing each other?” Caroline asked.
Margaret shook her head. “Not really. We just hang sometimes.”
“And kiss,” Maizon added. “Don’t forget.”
Margaret put her arm around Maizon’s shoulders. “And kiss.”
Maizon frowned. “Man, I can’t believe it. Where was I when all this making out was happening?”
Margaret shrugged. “Somewhere between Madison and Palmetto, I guess.”
“Yeah,” Maizon said. “I guess I was!”
“You and me, Maizon,” Caroline said. “Old maids-to-be.”
“Boys are still way corny to me,” Maizon confided.
Margaret brushed past her, checking her hair in the mirror. “That’s ‘cause you haven’t kissed one.”
“That’s ‘cause I don’t want to.” Maizon moved in front of her. She stared at their reflections in the mirror. Caroline peered over Margaret’s shoulder. “Look at us,” Maizon said.
“Where did we come from?” Caroline laughed. “And how the heck did we end up together here?”
On their way out of the bathroom they bumped into Hattie.
“Hey! Where are you going?” Margaret asked. “It’s almost time for the performances.”
Between Madison and Palmetto Page 5