“I knew we shouldn’t have come,” Sheila said. “I knew it.”
Ernestine stared at Sheila until Sheila was forced to raise her eyes. Then, Ernestine laughed, and said, “My. I must have a dirty mind, Sheila. I didn’t know that you could even say that word.”
Then real hatred choked off the air. Something bottomless occurred which had nothing to do with what seemed to be occurring in the room. I suddenly felt sorry for the sisters—but Ernestine didn’t. She stood where she stood, one hand on her waist, one hand hanging free, moving only her eyes. She was wearing gray slacks and an old blouse and her hair was untidy on her head and she wore no makeup. She was smiling. Sheila looked as though she could hardly breathe or stand, as though she wanted to run to her mother, who had not moved from her chair. Adrienne, whose hips were wide, wore a white blouse and a black, flaring, pleated skirt and a short, tight, black jacket and low heels. Her hair was parted in the middle and tied with a white ribbon at the nape of her neck. Her hands were no longer on her hips. Her skin, which was just a shade too dark to be high yellow, had darkened and mottled. Her forehead seemed covered with oil. Her eyes had darkened with her skin and the skin was rejecting the makeup by denying it any moisture. One saw that she was not really very pretty, that the face and the body would coarsen and thicken with time.
“Come,” she said to Sheila, “away from these foulmouthed people,” and she had a certain dignity as she said it.
They both walked to their mother, who was, I could suddenly see, the witness to, and guardian of their chastity.
Mrs. Hunt rose, then, oddly peaceful.
“I sure hope,” she said, “that you’re pleased with the way you raised your daughters, Mrs. Rivers.”
Sharon was peaceful, too, but there was a kind of startled wonder in it: she stared at Mrs. Hunt and said nothing. And Mrs. Hunt added, “These girls won’t be bringing me no bastards to feed, I can guarantee you that.”
“But the child that’s coming,” said Sharon, after a moment, “is your grandchild. I don’t understand you. It’s your grandchild. What difference does it make how it gets here? The child ain’t got nothing to do with that—don’t none of us have nothing to do with that!”
“That child,” said Mrs. Hunt, and she looked at me for a moment, then started for the door, Sharon watching her all the while, “that child——”
I let her get to the door. My mother moved, but as though in a dream, to swing the locks; but I got there before her; I put my back against the door. Adrienne and Sheila were behind their mother.
Sharon and Ernestine did not move.
“That child,” I said, “is in my belly. Now, you raise your knee and kick it out—or with them high heel shoes. You don’t want this child? Come on and kill it now. I dare you.” I looked her in the eyes. “It won’t be the first child you tried to kill.” I touched her upside down coal scuttle hat. I looked at Adrienne and Sheila. “You did pretty well with the first two—” and then I opened the door, but I didn’t move—“okay, you try it again, with Fonny. I dare you.”
“May we,” asked Adrienne, with what she hoped was ice in her voice, “leave now?”
“Tish,” said Sharon; but she did not move.
Ernestine moved past me, moving me away from the door and delivering me to Sharon. “Ladies,” she said, and moved to the elevator and pressed the button. She was past a certain fury now. When the elevator arrived and the door opened, she merely said, ushering them in, but holding the door open with one shoulder, “Don’t worry. We’ll never tell the baby about you. There’s no way to tell a baby how obscene human beings can be!” And, in another tone of voice, a tone I’d never heard before, she said, to Mrs. Hunt, “Blessed be the next fruit of thy womb. I hope it turns out to be uterine cancer. And I mean that.” And, to the sisters, “If you come anywhere near this house again in life, I will kill you. This child is not your child—you have just said so. If I hear that you have so much as crossed a playground and seen the child, you won’t live to get any kind of cancer. Now. I am not my sister. Remember that. My sister’s nice. I’m not. My father and my mother are nice. I’m not. I can tell you why Adrienne can’t get fucked—you want to hear it? I could tell you about Sheila, too, and all those cats she jerks off in their handkerchiefs, in cars and movies—now, you want to hear that?” Sheila began to cry and Mrs. Hunt moved to close the elevator door. Ernestine laughed, and, with one shoulder, held it open and her voice changed again. “You just cursed the child in my sister’s womb. Don’t you never let me see you again, you broken down half-white bride of Christ!” And she spat in Mrs. Hunt’s face, and then let the elevator door close. And she yelled down the shaft, “That’s your flesh and blood you were cursing, you sick, filthy dried-up cunt! And you carry that message to the Holy Ghost and if He don’t like it you tell Him I said He’s a faggot and He better not come nowhere near me.”
And she came back into the house, with tears running down her face, and walked to the table and poured herself a drink. She lit a cigarette; she was trembling.
Sharon, in all this, had said nothing. Ernestine had delivered me to her, but Sharon had not, in fact, touched me. She had done something far more tremendous; which was, mightily, to hold me and keep me still; without touching me.
“Well,” she said, “the men are going to be out for a while. And Tish needs her rest. So let’s go on to sleep.”
But I knew that they were sending me to bed so that they could sit up for a while, without me, without the men, without anybody, to look squarely in the face the fact that Fonny’s family didn’t give a shit about him and were not going to do a thing to help him. We were his family now, the only family he had: and now everything was up to us.
I walked into my bedroom very slowly and I sat down on the bed for a minute. I was too tired to cry. I was too tired to feel anything. In a way, Sis Ernestine had taken it all on herself, everything, because she wanted the child to make its journey safely and get here well: and that meant that I had to sleep.
So I undressed and curled up on the bed. I turned the way I’d always turned toward Fonny, when we were in bed together. I crawled into his arms and he held me. And he was so present for me that, again, I could not cry. My tears would have hurt him too much. So he held me and I whispered his name, while I watched the streetlights playing on the ceiling. Dimly, I could hear Mama and Sis in the kitchen, making believe that they were playing gin rummy.
That night, in the room on Bank Street, Fonny took the Mexican shawl off the pallet he had on the floor and draped it over my head and shoulders. He grinned and stepped back. “I be damned,” he said, “there is a rose in Spanish Harlem.” He grinned again. “Next week, I’m going to get you a rose for your hair.” Then, he stopped grinning and a kind of stinging silence filled the room and filled my ears. It was like nothing was happening in the world but us. I was not afraid. It was deeper than fear. I could not take my eyes away from his. I could not move. If it was deeper than fear, it was not yet joy. It was wonder.
He said, not moving, “We’re grown up now, you know?”
I nodded.
He said, “And you’ve always been—mine—no?”
I nodded again.
“And you know,” he said, still not moving, holding me with those eyes, “that I’ve always been yours, right?”
I said, “I never thought about it that way.”
He said, “Think about it now, Tish.”
“I just know that I love you,” I said, and I started to cry. The shawl seemed very heavy and hot and I wanted to take it off, but I couldn’t.
Then he moved, his face changed, he came to me and took the shawl away and flung it into a corner. He took me in his arms and he kissed my tears and then he kissed me and then we both knew something which we had not known before.
“I love you, too,” he said, “but I try not to cry about it.” He laughed and he made me laugh and then he kissed me again, harder, and he stopped laughing. “I want you to marry me,”
he said. I must have looked surprised, for he said, “That’s right. I’m yours and you’re mine and that’s it, baby. But I’ve got to try to explain something to you.”
He took me by the hand and led me to his worktable.
“This is where my life is,” he said, “my real life.” He picked up a small piece of wood, it was about the size of two fists. There was the hope of an eye gouged into it, the suggestion of a nose—the rest was simply a lump of somehow breathing wood. “This might turn out all right one day,” he said, and laid it gently down. “But I think I might already have fucked it up.” He picked up another piece, the size of a man’s thigh. A woman’s torso was trapped in it. “I don’t know a thing about her yet,” he said, and put it down, again very gently. Though he held me by one shoulder and was very close to me, he was yet very far away. He looked at me with his little smile. “Now, listen,” he said, “I ain’t the kind of joker going to give you a hard time running around after other chicks and shit like that. I smoke a little pot but I ain’t never popped no needles and I’m really very square. But—” he stopped and looked at me, very quiet, very hard: there was a hardness in him I had barely sensed before. Within this hardness moved his love, moved as a torrent or as a fire moves, above reason, beyond argument, not to be modified in any degree by anything life might do. I was his, and he was mine—I suddenly realized that I would be a very unlucky and perhaps a dead girl should I ever attempt to challenge this decree.
“But,” he continued—and he moved away from me; his heavy hands seemed to be attempting to shape the air—“I live with wood and stone. I got stone in the basement and I’m working up here all the time and I’m looking for a loft where I can really work. So, all I’m trying to tell you, Tish, is I ain’t offering you much. I ain’t got no money and I work at odd jobs—just for bread, because I ain’t about to go for none of their jive-ass okey-doke—and that means that you going to have to work, too, and when you come home most likely I’ll just grunt and keep on with my chisels and shit and maybe sometimes you’ll think I don’t even know you’re there. But don’t ever think that, ever. You’re with me all the time, all the time, without you I don’t know if I could make it at all, baby, and when I put down the chisel, I’ll always come to you. I’ll always come to you. I need you. I love you.” He smiled. “Is that all right, Tish?”
“Of course it’s all right with me,” I said. I had more to say, but my throat wouldn’t open.
He took me by the hand, then, and he led me to the pallet on the floor. He sat down beside me, and he pulled me down so that my face was just beneath his, my head was in his lap. I sensed a certain terror in him. He knew that I could feel his sex stiffening and beginning to rage against the cloth of his pants and against my jawbone; he wanted me to feel it, and yet he was afraid. He kissed my face all over, and my neck, and he uncovered my breasts and put his teeth and tongue there and his hands were all over my body. I knew what he was doing, and I didn’t know. I was in his hands, he called me by the thunder at my ear. I was in his hands: I was being changed; all that I could do was cling to him. I did not realize, until I realized it, that I was also kissing him, that everything was breaking and changing and turning in me and moving toward him. If his arms had not held me, I would have fallen straight downward, backward, to my death. My life was holding me. My life was claiming me. I heard, I felt his breath, as for the first time: but it was as though his breath were rising up out of me. He opened my legs, or I opened them, and he kissed the inside of my thighs. He took off all my clothes, he covered my whole body with kisses, and then he covered me with the shawl and then he went away.
The shawl scratched. I was cold and hot. I heard him in the bathroom. I heard him pull the chain. When he came back, he was naked. He got under the shawl, with me, and stretched his long body on top of mine, and I felt his long black heavy sex throbbing against my navel.
He took my face in his hands, and held it, and he kissed me.
“Now, don’t be scared,” he whispered. “Don’t be scared. Just remember that I belong to you. Just remember that I wouldn’t hurt you for nothing in this world. You just going to have to get used to me. And we got all the time in the world.”
It was getting to be between two and three: he read my mind. “Your Mama and Daddy know you’re with me,” he said, “and they know I won’t let nothing happen to you.” Then, he moved down and his sex moved against my opening. “Don’t be scared,” he said again. “Hold on to me.”
I held on to him, in an agony; there was nothing else in the world to hold on to; I held him by his nappy hair. I could not tell if he moaned or if I moaned. It hurt, it hurt, it didn’t hurt. It was a strange weight, a presence coming into me—into a me I had not known was there. I almost screamed, I started to cry: it hurt. It didn’t hurt. Something began, unknown. His tongue, his teeth on my breasts, hurt. I wanted to throw him off, I held him tighter and still he moved and moved and moved. I had not known there was so much of him. I screamed and cried against his shoulder. He paused. He put both hands beneath my hips. He moved back, but not quite out, I hung nowhere for a moment, then he pulled me against him and thrust in with all his might and something broke in me. Something broke and a scream rose up in me but he covered my lips with his lips, he strangled my scream with his tongue. His breath was in my nostrils, I was breathing with his breath and moving with his body. And now I was open and helpless and I felt him everywhere. A singing began in me and his body became sacred—his buttocks, as they quivered and rose and fell, and his thighs between my thighs and the weight of his chest on mine and that stiffness of his which stiffened and grew and throbbed and brought me to another place. I wanted to laugh and cry. Then, something absolutely new began, I laughed and I cried and I called his name. I held him closer and closer and I strained to receive it all, all, all of him. He paused and he kissed me and kissed me. His head moved all over my neck and my breasts. We could hardly breathe: if we did not breathe again soon, I knew we would die. Fonny moved again, at first very slowly, and then faster and faster. I felt it coming, felt myself coming, going over the edge, everything in me flowing down to him, and I called his name over and over while he growled my name in his throat, thrusting now with no mercy—caught his breath sharply, let it out with a rush and a sob and then pulled out of me, holding me tight, shooting a boiling liquid all over my belly and my chest and my chin.
Then we lay still, glued together, for a long time.
“I’m sorry,” he said, finally, shyly, into the long silence, “to have made such a mess. But I guess you don’t want to have no baby right away and I didn’t have no protection on me.”
“I think I made a mess, too,” I said. “It was the first time. Isn’t there supposed to be blood?”
We were whispering. He laughed a little. “I had a hemorrhage. Shall we look?”
“I like lying here like this, with you.”
“I do too.” Then, “Do you like me, Tish?” He sounded like a little boy. “I mean—when I make love to you—do you like it?”
I said, “Oh, come on. You just want to hear me say it.”
“That’s true. So—?”
“So what?”
“So why don’t you go ahead and say it?” And he kissed me.
I said, “It was a little bit like being hit by a truck”—he laughed again—“but it was the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me.”
“For me, too,” he said. He said it in a very wondering way, almost as though he were speaking of someone else. “No one ever loved me like that before.”
“Have you had a lot of girls?”
“Not so many. And nobody for you to worry about.”
“Do I know any of them?”
He laughed. “You want me to walk you down the street and point them out to you? Now, you know that wouldn’t be nice. And, now that I’ve got to know you just a little better, I don’t believe it would be safe.” He snuggled up to me and put his hand on my breast. “You got a wildcat in
you, girl. Even if I had the time to go running after other foxes, I sure wouldn’t have the energy. I’m really going to have to start taking my vitamins.”
“Oh, shut up. You’re disgusting.”
“Why am I disgusting? I’m only talking about my health. Don’t you care nothing about my health? And they’re chocolate covered—vitamins, I mean.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Well,” he conceded cheerfully, “I’m crazy about you. You want we should check the damage before this stuff hardens into cement?”
He turned on the light and we looked down at ourselves and our bed.
Well, we were something of a sight. There was blood, quite a lot of it—or it seemed like a lot to me, but it didn’t frighten me at all, I felt proud and happy—on him and on the bed and on me; his sperm and my blood were slowly creeping down my body, and his sperm was on him and on me; and, in the dim light and against our dark bodies, the effect was as of some strange anointing. Or, we might have just completed a tribal rite. And Fonny’s body was a total mystery to me—the body of one’s lover always is, no matter how well one gets to know it: it is the changing envelope which contains the gravest mystery of one’s life. I stared at his heavy chest, his flat belly, the belly button, the spinning black hair, the heavy limp sex: he had never been circumcized. I touched his slim body and I kissed him on the chest. It tasted of salt and some pungent, unknown bitter spice—clearly, as others might put it, it would become an acquired taste. One hand on my hand, one hand on my shoulder, he held me very close. Then he said, “We’ve got to go. I better get you home before dawn.”
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