by Cynthia Webb
Etta Mae looked at me, distress in her face. She was trying to communicate something to me, but I couldn’t tell what. She put down her plate, too, and turned to her sister.
“Now Sapphire,” she began, her voice gentle, “you know that Samantha doesn’t need a man. She’s doing fine by herself.”
Sapphire looked at her blankly, then an expression of comprehension rose in her face. Startled, she looked me full in the face, then, embarrassed, she looked away.
“Laurie is our guest,” Etta Mae continued, evenly. “Now, Laurie, I know that you’ve come for some information, and here we’ve been talking your ear off.”
“I don’t believe it,” announced Sapphire in a loud voice.
Etta Mae, in a voice that combined fire and honey, said to me then, “I do believe that Sapphire and I need to step into the kitchen and take care of a few things. Please excuse us just a moment, Laurie, dear.”
“No,” said Sapphire. “You’re not going to take me off into the kitchen and dress me down like you were Daddy. Uh-uh. No way. It’s not happening.”
In spite of myself, I was rooting for Sapphire. I like that kind of spirit, you know. “Okay,” I said. “You wanna talk turkey, Sapphire, I’ll talk. You know who I am, don’t you, Sapphire? I’m Sammy’s lover.” For a moment, I was startled by how good that felt, how freeing, after the days I’d spent with my parents, hiding the truth. The next moment I was suffused with shame. Sure I could be brave with Sammy’s parents, but I was a low-down, yellow-bellied coward with my own.
Sapphire laughed, a hearty, happy laugh. “Don’t tell me a story like that, Laurie. You think I can’t see that you’re a girl?”
That stopped me for a moment, but I took a breath and went on. “I’m her lover.”
She laughed again, bending over, holding her round stomach. “Samantha is not a lesbian, honey. For one thing, she has three children by three different men. She’s the kind of woman that likes a good-looking man to park his car in her garage, if you see what I mean.”
I was speechless yet again. I looked over at Etta Mae and saw that her complexion was gray and she appeared to be in shock, so I couldn’t expect any help from that direction.
Eventually, I gathered my wits and plunged in again. “Well, both of us are really bisexual.” I didn’t like the way that sounded. Instead of bold and free, it sounded sheepish.
“Why, honey, all that means is that you two are making do until a real man comes along. I understand that, I do. Two fine, smart girls like you two, and good men being few and far between.” Then she lowered her voice, her tone became more confidential. “But Laurie, honey, now you listen to me. When Mr. Right comes along, I know you won’t stand in Samantha’s way for happiness.” Her voice shook a little, then, and I could see tears glinting in the corners of her eyes. “She’s up there in that big city, with three babies to raise, and her own way to make. Etta and me, we worry about her.”
There was a lump in my throat. I could feel her concern for Sammy all the way down to my toes. I wanted all kinds of good stuff for Sammy, too. I wanted to promise Sapphire and Etta Mae that I’d take care of Sammy and the girls. Instead, I waited while Sapphire dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “I care about Sammy,” I said stiffly. “And the girls, too.”
“You don’t have to say that, honey,” said Sapphire, with a pained smile. “We know that. We can see that.”
There was a strained silence. I looked around the room. These two women had spent most of their adult years in this house. It had looked so warm, so cozy, when I walked in. Now I didn’t know. Maybe it was a prison to them. Was Sapphire bitter and unhappy that she had never found a man to take care of her? And Etta Mae had found a man, but it certainly hadn’t done her much good, I thought. Then I thought, yes, he did her good. He gave her Sammy, after all.
Etta Mae cleared her throat. “Laurie came here for some information about Samantha’s father. About Elijah.” The way she said his name made me suspect that she hadn’t said it to Sapphire for a good long time. “This must be very important to Samantha, for her to send Laurie down to see about this. I plan to tell everything that she thinks might help her.”
She picked up the coffee pot and poured some more into my cup. The air conditioner hummed. I realized that part of my brain had been straining all along to hear over it, listening for something outside.
We all sighed. Etta Mae looked at me. “So, what do you want to know?”
“Anything. Everything, I guess. What was he like?”
Sapphire snorted. “Worthless,” she said.
Etta Mae gave her a stern look, but Sapphire didn’t seem fazed. “He was a handsome man,” Etta Mae said. “Looking at Samantha, you can tell that, can’t you? Yes, her daddy was a fine figure of a man.”
Sapphire didn’t say anything.
“Smart, too,” Etta Mae continued, speaking slowly. “Sharp as a whip.”
“Too dang smart for his own good, that one was,” said Sapphire, under her breath, but loud enough for us to hear.
Etta Mae ignored her. “Well-spoken. Charming.”
“A paragon of virtues,” mocked Sapphire.
Etta Mae glared at her. “You liked him, too. You thought he was terrific. You told me so every time he came courting. You encouraged me.”
“I didn’t tell you to run off and marry him. Daddy said for you to wait, and I told you to listen.”
They continued to stare at each other across the coffee table.
“So you married Elijah Wilson, then what?” I asked.
Etta Mae began to speak, but she didn’t answer my question. She spoke in a dead voice, as if she was in a trance.
“Daddy wanted me to stay here with him. He said he just wanted me to wait, to make sure.” She opened one arm in Sapphire’s direction, then let it drop. “What he really wanted was for me to wait forever. Like her. Like Sapphire. Forever, in this house, with the two of them. To wait on him, until the day he died, like she did.”
“Well, you showed him, didn’t you?” snapped Sapphire.
“So I ran away with Elijah, and he took me down south to a... a... I can’t even call it a house! It was out in the woods, on Piney Woods Road. Nearest town was Port Mullet, and that was a good drive over bad roads away.
“Good Lord in heaven, I still remember the day when we drove up. That row of shacks, trash everywhere, boards over windows. No yards to speak of, just sand and sand-spurs. Rusting little house trailers, dirty babies all over the place.”
She stopped for a moment, then continued. “I knew Daddy had been right, then. We’d been married less than twenty-four hours, and already I could see I’d made a big mistake. But I had to see it through. There was no going back until I’d seen it through to the bitter end. Oh, I knew right then that it was gonna end bad. I couldn’t see exactly what it was that was going to happen, but I knew what it was going to feel like. That’s right. I knew it when they came to me to tell me Elijah was drowned, and I was a widow. There was nothing for it then. Nothing to do but turn around and come back home to Daddy with my tail between my legs. Beg his forgiveness and beg him to take me in so I’d have a home for my girls.
“And he never let me forget it, either, all the years he lived. He’d been right, and I’d been wrong, and the good Lord had punished me for my stubborn headedness, he’d say. Punished me, but not cured me, he’d say, anytime I dared to disagree with him. About anything. Anytime my opinion wasn’t the same as his. Anytime at all.”
Etta Mae was staring off into space. Sapphire looked angry. I was angry, too. Angry at Etta Mae. Sure, things had been hard on her. Real hard. Harder to a factor of ten than anything I’d ever been through, for sure. But still I thought, she should have kept fighting. She shouldn’t have come back here to live under her father’s thumb. She should have gone somewhere, anywhere, raised her girls on her own. She should have done something. Yeah, I was real good at judging what someone else should have done in circumstances I’d never faced. A whit
e girl with all the advantages, who couldn’t even tell her folks the truth about her own life.
The phone rang. Sapphire got out of her chair reluctantly and went into the kitchen to answer it.
I hated Etta Mae right then. I hated her for giving in, for knuckling under to her father. I hated to think what it had been like for Sammy, growing up in that atmosphere.
In a few moments, Sapphire came back. She didn’t sit down. She just stood in the little archway between the dining room and the living room.
“Who was it?” asked Etta Mae, finally.
Sapphire smiled then, a bitter smile. “I was just going to ask you that. Or maybe I should ask Laurie.”
The import of her words hit me, and time congealed around me. The moments felt like molasses in the air. Time felt like something I couldn’t move through. Then all of a sudden, everything sped up. I had been hating Etta Mae for bringing up Sammy in an atmosphere of oppression and shame. This poor woman, who had done her best, and raised the fine, free woman that Sammy had grown into.
And against Sammy’s wishes, I’d brought the threat of physical danger right here, into the home of these two nice old ladies.
“Who was it?” Etta Mae repeated.
“The lousy coward didn’t leave his name,” said Sapphire, with a calm dignity.
I couldn’t wait any more. “What did he say?” I demanded.
“He said...” she began, then walked over to her chair and sat down before she went on. “He said— Now let me try to get this right. I believe he said this, the very best I remember—‘Nigger bitch, you listen up. This is your last chance. One more mistake and you won’t be around to make any more. Same thing with that filthy white whore you got in your house. You send her packing back to that shit-hole of a city where she comes from. You understand me, bitch? Last chance, nigger bitch.’ Then he hung up. That was the gist of it, although I may have gotten a word or two wrong. And, of course, I am incapable of imitating effectively the ignorant, low- down, white trash accent in which he spoke.”
Etta Mae and I started to speak at the same time, then we both stopped. We both motioned for the other to go ahead.
Sapphire ignored us. “This is about Elijah,” she announced. “He’s still doing it. He caused trouble from the first moment he walked into this house. Now he’s been dead all these years and he’s still messing things up.” She looked at me. “Samantha wants to know the truth about her father, but she doesn’t dare ask us herself. She knew we never wanted to talk about it.”
Her voice rose. “Hell, yes, we avoided that subject. The man who ruined our lives.” She stopped, and started again, her voice quieter, under control. “But it wasn’t right of us. If we’d told the child everything she needed to know, she wouldn’t have needed to send Laurie down here, poking around in a mess she’s got no way of understanding. She wouldn’t have stirred up trouble that’s been sleeping for along time. We wouldn’t be getting nasty phone calls. So I’m gonna tell the truth, soon as I get us some glasses of iced tea.”
Sapphire got up and went back in the kitchen, taking the coffee cups with her.
Etta Mae turned to me and spoke in a considered tone. “I do believe I need a cigarette. I’m sure you don’t smoke, Laurie, but would you mind if Sapphire and I indulge ourselves? I do feel the need just now, what with this particular conversation ahead of us.”
I had no objection, of course. Live and let, that’s my motto. But I knew it would have given Sammy fits to see anyone, let alone her loved ones, recklessly risk their health like that. Etta Mae got ashtrays from behind a platter on the highest shelf of the hutch. She went back to her bedroom and came back with a pack of Marlboros.
Sapphire put down glasses of iced tea on coasters in front of us, along with a plate of cookies. Etta Mae passed her the pack of cigarettes, still speaking to me in that polite, but distant way. “We never smoke in company, Laurie. This is an exception.”
Sapphire laughed. “Until Daddy died, we had to sneak out back in the woods to smoke.”
Etta Mae loosened up a bit then. “Lord, yes. Daddy agreed with Preacher Thompson. ‘A woman who’d smoke would do anything,’ that’s what the two of them used to say.”
I laughed too. “Our preacher said the same thing. So Momma would smoke only when Daddy wasn’t home. We’d have to hurry around, opening windows and turning on fans, right before Daddy was due back.”
Etta Mae nodded, smiling. A real connection between us had been established: we knew how it was to be the daughters of a certain kind of man.
Sapphire broke into our sisterhood suddenly. “Did Samantha ever tell you about her sister? About Clara?”
Etta Mae looked stricken.
I answered, “Yes, she did. A little. The fact of her. That she died a few years ago.”
“She didn’t tell you that Clara bled to death on a city street? She was stabbed. By a john, most likely. She was a crack whore. Her own babies both died of AIDS. She would have died that way herself, soon, anyway.”
Again time thickened on me. “Sammy didn’t tell me that. She just told me she’d had a sister, Clara, who died young. I never asked for details.” As I spoke, I was wondering at my own willful blindness. I hadn’t thought to ask why, or when, or how, or to consider what effect her sister’s death might have had on Sammy. I had been a lily of the field, neither spinning nor toiling, just planted there in Sammy’s graces, enjoying myself. And once again I said to myself, “A hell of a detective you are.”
“Clara wasn’t really Samantha’s sister,” said Sapphire.
I just looked at her. Waiting for her to go on. Waiting to hear what else I’d overlooked, refused to see.
“Clara was her cousin. Clara was, is, my child.”
“Oh,” I said, brilliantly.
Etta Mae put her hand on her sister’s arm. “You don’t have to go into all this. We can just tell her about Elijah, and leave it at that.”
“I am telling her about Elijah,” Sapphire snapped.
Etta Mae jerked her hand back as if she had been stung. She began to cry, quietly.
“We have never once spoken about this,” Sapphire continued, in a calmer voice. “Not once. We didn’t need to. Etta Mae ran off with her shining knight in August and seven months later, I gave birth to Clara. Wasn’t anything to say. Nothing to ask. Daddy and Etta Mae knew who it had to be. Elijah, you can bet he knew.”
I looked from one sister to the other, unsure what to say.
“By then, Etta Mae knew exactly what she’d married into, anyway. I’m sure she had figured out why her lover-boy had been in such a hurry to get her away and marry her. Why he couldn’t wait a little while, and have Daddy find out that he’d gotten me in the family way. Daddy would have made him marry me, and Etta Mae was the pretty one.”
I looked at her, wondering if it was possible that one had been considered prettier than the other. To me, they looked alike, two bookends.
Sapphire sighed. “I went away to relatives in Mississippi to have my Clara. Left her there. Came back to take care of Daddy. Folks said, ‘Your poor daddy. What you girls have put him through. You should go do for that man.’ As if I hadn’t been through something myself. I left Clara with my aunt, Daddy’s sister, and I came back home. To do for him. To make it up to him. It wasn’t that long until Etta Mae was back here with little Samantha. We sent for Clara, and called her Etta Mae’s oldest. We made their birthdays almost a year apart when it was more like six months. We never discussed it, mind you, we just started doing it. Of course, there were those who knew the truth. People aren’t blind, you better believe that. But the years go by, and you say a thing enough, and people lose interest in what the truth really was. It made Daddy feel better to talk about his widowed daughter and her two girls, and his other daughter, the maiden aunt.
“We never really meant to lie to Samantha and Clara. It was kind of like Santa Claus, you know. A nice story for when they were little, but when they got old enough, why we thought they’d
notice the holes in the story and start asking questions. But, you know, Samantha never did. Finally, we figured she didn’t want to know. Smart as a whip, that girl, but if she still wants to believe in Santa Claus, what could we do? That’s what I thought. But now I know what we should have done.”
Etta Mae had been sitting so quiet through all this that I was startled when she broke in. “What we should have done! I did the best I could! I don’t need you telling me now that I should have done this, or I should have done that! There were a lot of true stories that I never told Samantha. Why should she have been burdened with all this? I wanted her to be strong enough and brave enough to make herself a life. And I was right. Look how far she’s gone, look at what she’s done! If I’d told her the truth about her chances in life, she might have given up before she ever started.”
Sapphire turned and stared at her. “And if we’d told the truth about a black girl’s chances in life, maybe Clara would have been more careful. Maybe she wouldn’t have ended up in the street with her blood running out of her. My God, with strangers just walking around her! And her dying, alone there, with no one who loved her to hold her hand.”
We sat there in that little room. Etta Mae was crying quietly. Sapphire seemed filled with rage and could barely sit still. She kept shifting in her chair, crossing and uncrossing her legs, glaring first at me, then Etta Mae.
There was a buzzing, or maybe a rumbling kind of noise, distracting me. I thought it was the air conditioning again. I almost said something to Sapphire, but I stopped. Then I almost said something to Etta Mae, but I couldn’t. This was for the two sisters, and for Sammy, to work out. I had no part in it.
I was tired and the sound of the air conditioner was really getting on my nerves. I wondered if Etta Mae and Sapphire would take me to a room where I could shut the door, open the window, climb into bed and then lie there, with no noises, no voices, just the sounds of the peaceful country night.
I looked over at Etta Mae. She had a strange expression on her face. Sapphire got up out of her chair. First she flicked off the over-head light. Then she snapped off the lamp on the side table. She walked over and stood beside the window, careful not to stand in front of it. She picked up the edge of the curtain and looked out.