by Tayari Jones
She stopped brushing. The floor was cold under me, but I could feel the warmth of Ronalda’s thigh through her jeans. I wanted another of the sweet wine coolers, but I couldn’t ask for it because I had somehow forgotten how to speak.
“Don’t cry,” Ronalda said. “I have a secret, too. My mother’s not real y dead. I just tel people that. She’s alive, she’s just negligent.” She pronounced the word careful y, as though she were reading it from a legal document. “The principal at my school cal ed child services on her. She left me by myself for two weeks. While she was gone is when I broke my leg, trying to wear heels, and there was no one to come and pick me up at the school. The principal put two and two together and the next thing I knew, my daddy drove al the way to Indy and carried me back to Atlanta with him. He drove al night and it was snowing bad, bad, bad.”
“Where was your mama gone to?”
“I don’t know. She even took the hot comb. I asked her when she was coming back and she said, ‘Tomorrow,’ but I knew she was lying when she started putting my little brother’s stuff in a bag, too.
“She loved that little boy like nothing in the world. Before he was born, she used to drink, drink, drink! She even drank Crown Royal when she was pregnant with me. I’m lucky I didn’t get born cross-eyed, retarded, or something. But after Corey, it was like she fel stupid in love with him. She cut out the drinking, stopped slapping people around. She even made hot cocoa a couple of times on Sundays. Before Corey, I thought that my mama just didn’t like kids, but when Corey was born and I saw the way she carried on about him, I saw that it wasn’t that she didn’t like kids, she just didn’t like me.”
“She likes you,” I said. “She’s your mother. Everybody’s mother likes them.”
“I think maybe she loves me,” Ronalda said. “I mean, she kept food in the fridge and a roof over my head. But she never liked me. Now, my little brother, she could just eat him up. That’s why she took him with her when she left.”
“It’s not like that,” I told her. “You get equal love.”
“Do you have a brother?” Ronalda asked.
I said no.
“If you have a brother, it’s the worst thing. If your mama has a boy to care for, she wil show you the kind of love she is capable of. And once you see that, you wil never get over it. You wil be lonely for the rest of your life.”
I had no response for her. I didn’t know how my mother would react to a boy in our lives, but I knew that my father always wanted a son. James was at our apartment when Laverne went into labor with Chaurisse, six weeks early. Raleigh came to the house, and James stood up from my mother’s table, leaving his pound cake half-eaten. My mother tel s me that she fel on her knees beside my bassinette and prayed that Laverne not give birth to a boy. “A healthy daughter is what I asked the Lord to give. That wouldn’t put too much pul on his heart.”
“My father has another kid, but a girl,” I said. “With his wife.”
“Count your blessings,” Ronalda said. “And hope they don’t have any more kids. You don’t want to go through what I been through.”
I tried to tel myself that she was right, that I was lucky. But second best is second best, no matter the reason why.
To Ronalda I said, “Let’s have another cooler.”
She opened the drawer and we took the last two, putting us at four each, which was about a cooler and a half too many. This we knew even as we let the warm sudsy drink foam into our mouths. We stumbled out of her stepmother’s study into the rec-room part of the basement. Ronalda looked through her father’s records and decided to play Richard Pryor just to hear him cuss.
“How do you feel?” Ronalda stretched herself on the carpet in front of the imitation fireplace.
“Sick.”
“It’s a secret, al right?” she said. “Everything about my mother is a secret.”
“Same for mine.”
7
I DARE YOU
MY MOTHER WORKED very hard for a living. This was no one’s fault. Even women who were wives had to do their part to keep the family fed. When I was smal , she took a few classes to learn travel-agenting — thinking she could work from the apartment, using our telephone — but sometime in the midseventies she got sensible and took night courses at Atlanta Junior Col ege to become a licensed practical nurse. For the most part, Mother was fortunate in her scheduling — seven to three — but sometimes she was assigned eleven to seven, and on holidays she pul ed doubles. When she came home those mornings while I was eating my breakfast, she soaked her feet in a pan of saltwater and rubbed the red bites on her neck where the stethoscope pinched her.
Hers was a good job with benefits that included more than health, eye, and dental. Mother had daily access to doctors. As she assisted them by performing the tasks that were beneath them, she asked them about their daughters. What lessons did they take, where did they buy their clothes, and where did they plan to go to col ege? Every now and then, she would chat with the doctors’ wives, mining for personal information, like where they stood on issues like contraception and sex ed in schools (testing out her theory that rich people put their girls on the Pil at twelve). On her break, she took careful notes on a smal pad she kept in her locker. For six weeks in the early 1980s she got to work alongside a woman resident who was even engaged to another doctor. She owed everything, this lady said, to Mount Holyoke, a col ege in Massachusetts. My mother pressed down hard on the notepad and underscored the name of the state. In parenthesis she wrote: Kennedy, etc. A doctor married to a doctor! Mother cal ed it the “the trifecta,” even though it was only two things.
Such information was worth the sometimes-odd hours. When Marcus and I first started going together, she worked eight to four in a pediatrician’s office and then looked after private patients from seven thirty to midnight. It was just a temporary arrangement for November since Christmas was right around the bend. At six fifteen when she was heading out, fresh and pretty in white, I promised her that I would spend the evening doing SAT dril s on the new Commodore computer that she had bought with her “own money.” I didn’t like it when she used this phrase, sounding like a child, bragging about what she had done with her babysitting pay. She meant that this gift had come from her, without any contribution from my father. She’d paid for it with the labor of swol en legs and stiff fingers. I didn’t use the computer, but I did appreciate the gift, the thought of it. I didn’t have anything against the machine or the SATs; it was just that the only opportunity I had to see Marcus was when my mother was at work, late at night, between the hours of seven thirty and midnight.
On one particular night, Marcus and I were going to go to Acres Mil to see a movie with a bunch of his friends. I took extra time with my hair and makeup because I knew that Marcus wanted to show me off. I loved being displayed on his arm, held up for everyone to see.
I looked out of my bedroom window, expecting to see Marcus’s two-door Jetta, but instead I found the good Lincoln, the newer one that was real y navy blue if you looked at it close-up. With much agitation, I tiptoed into the living room and through the picture window saw James let himself out of the passenger side. Raleigh was driving. I can remember very few times in my life that I have been alone in the house with my father. If my mother wasn’t home, he always brought Raleigh with him, like I was someone else’s daughter and there was a need to make it clear that everything was aboveboard.
James and Raleigh walked up the sidewalk to our apartment. The buzzer rang, and I knew that it was Raleigh who had pressed it because James liked to use his key.
“Who is it?” I sang.
“Raleigh here. And James.”
I twisted back the deadbolt and undid the chain lock. Seeing them framed there in the doorway, they looked like a comedy duo. My father was shorter than Raleigh but cool-looking. His hat was sort of turned to the side, Detroit-style, so I knew they had been over to the Carousel for a nip. Not enough to be stumbling but just enough to have a little buzz. Rale
igh, behind him, was flushed in the face. When Raleigh drank, he loved every person in a three-mile radius. Whereas when James had one leg in a bottle, he just fel deeper into whatever mood he was already in. I didn’t know how he was feeling when he walked into the Carousel, so I didn’t know what was rattling around in his head when he walked out.
I stood in the doorway, hoping they had just come over to drop something off. “Hi,” I said.
“What’s going on?” Raleigh laughed. “You’re not going to let us in? Why you blocking the door?” He bumped my father with his chuckle, but James didn’t join in.
“Come in,” I said, hoping to sound relaxed like my mother, standing to the side. She was so good at making them feel like special company and old friends at the same time. She greeted my father with a fast kiss on the lips each time he walked through the door. For Raleigh, she got on tiptoe and hugged his skinny neck. I just stood by at those times and let her do the welcoming. When I was alone like this, I never quite knew what to do.
Without my mother, I was as useless as a single shoe.
“Do you want something to drink?”
“What do you have?” James wanted to know.
I opened the refrigerator wide. My mother had just been to the store, and I was proud of the ful produce drawers, the two dozen eggs safe in their holders, and the glass bottles of juice. “We have Diet Coke.”
James made a face.
“Cucumber water?” This was my mother’s concoction; a doctor’s wife had told her that they serve it at day spas.
“Just ice water is fine,” Raleigh said.
“Go on in the living room,” I said. “I’l bring it out.”
James headed in the direction of the living room, but Raleigh looked over his shoulder.
“My mother’s not home,” I said.
He gave a disappointed little nod and fol owed my father.
Both James and Raleigh preferred my mother’s company to mine, and I couldn’t quite blame them. They belonged to her. Al three of us did, real y.
In the summer, the four of us enjoyed smal parties on our patio. Knowing the neighbors never complained about the music when James’s wax-slick car was out front, my mother cranked up the console stereo in the living room, so the sounds of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes streamed through the dusty screen door, mingling with James’s cigarette smoke, which kept mosquitoes away. My mother would try to dance with James first, knowing that he wouldn’t. She might twirl around shaking her pretty shoulders and gorgeous hair, cal ing his name, until James would say to Raleigh, “Dance with this beautiful woman for me.”
My job was to keep the glasses fil ed with ice and to mix the gin-and-tonics. With a paring knife, I carved perfect twists of lime. When I dropped the curving rind into my father’s glass, he would kiss my fingers.
While my mother was dancing with Raleigh, she kept her eyes firmly on James. When Raleigh held her waist, she let her torso fal backward, her hair leading the way, laughing until she righted herself quickly. She and I had the same hair, but I hadn’t learned yet to make it move for me. When the music stopped, Raleigh let my mother go, his arms fal ing to his sides. I kept my eyes peeled for that moment, so I could be there, ready with an icy glass for his empty hand.
Mother would leave the dancing area — just a smal space between the rusting railing and the wire patio set — to sit on James’s lap and wrap her arms around his neck. Raleigh usual y sank to the concrete floor where he had just been dancing and leaned himself against the railing, not caring about the rust marks on his shirt. I would sit beside him, leaning my head on his chest. My mother, taking a big drink from James’s gin-andtonic, would look over the rim of the glass and say, “Raleigh, you may be white on the outside, but when the music starts you are one hundred percent American Negro.”
Then Raleigh would blush as red as my mother’s shiny toenails and I wondered what it felt like to live inside such disloyal skin.
The last song was always Bobby Caldwel . When he sang, “Makes me do for love what I would not do,” my mother would close her eyes, and James would touch her eyelids. On those summer nights, my parents lived in a space al by themselves, breathing only each other’s air. I sat beside Raleigh, breathing normal y, and he sat beside me, so stil , as though he were taking in no air at al .
But on the evening that my father came to talk to me about life, my mother wasn’t home, so Raleigh sat on the vinyl couch, drinking water and fooling with the 35mm camera strung around his neck with a red strap. This was before he was serious, when James encouraged his photography because it was a good tie-in for the limo business. They could offer marrying couples a package: photos and a ride.
“Can I get you something else?” I said, hoping James would drink his ice water and leave before Marcus came to pick me up.
“No,” he said. “Not unless you want something for yourself.”
“No,” I said, “I’m fine. What about you, Raleigh? You need something?”
“I need a tripod.”
“Sorry,” I said. “No tripods today.”
My father said, “Just sit down. I want to talk to you. You don’t mind if old Raleigh is in here when we talk, do you?”
“Is there something wrong?”
I can’t say for sure if the talk that came next was prompted by the little circle of skin showing below my col ar bone or if he had visited for the very purpose of explaining to me the benefits of chastity, but he told me again to sit down. I did, with a glance at the clock and a certain busyness of breath.
“Sir?” I said.
“Don’t cal me sir. I feel like an overseer when you cal me sir.”
Raleigh chuckled. “You can cal me sir whenever you want.”
“You going somewhere tonight?” James asked me.
I knew I couldn’t lie. The makeup I could have explained away but not the keyhole blouse. I shrugged. “Sort of.”
“With who?”
“Some people I know. They have a car.”
“Does your mama know about this?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Would you lie to me, Dana?” James said.
“No, sir,” I said, leaning on the last word.
“Jim-Bo,” Raleigh said, “lighten up.” Then he said to me, “We’ve had a couple of drinks. Pour us a couple glasses of that cucumber water, whatever the hel that is. It doesn’t have alcohol, does it?”
“No,” I said. “It’s just water mostly.”
“Then we need that,” Raleigh said.
I popped up from my chair, just to escape my father, who was staring at the keyhole like he’d only now noticed that I had developed into a teenager. I’d had my breasts for five years now and my period for four. I was past the embarrassment I had felt when things first started changing, when I wore a sweater wel into the spring to hide my bra straps. At fifteen, I threw my box of tampons on the drugstore counter along with my packs of gum and nail-polish remover. But under my father’s eyes that evening, I felt shy again and obscene.
“Sit back down,” James said. “We don’t need no cucumber water. What we need here is to have a conversation. Raleigh, you got eyes in your h-head. What we n-n-need to do is s-s-it down and talk.”
Sitting back down, I faked a cough to give myself a reason to pat my chest and cover the keyhole with my palm.
“You’re going on a date,” James said. “Don’t lie to me.” His voice was turning angry. I looked over at Raleigh, who picked up a magazine from the coffee table and stared at the pages.
“It’s not real y a date,” I said.
“It’s something,” James snapped back. “When did you start wearing so much makeup?”
The real answer was that I started wearing Fashion Fair when Ronalda and I figured out how to swipe the testers from the counter at Rich’s. The eye shadows were fastened down to the displays, but a person could get away with the lipstick and blusher if she knew what she was doing.
James went on, “Look at that shirt yo
u’ve got on.”
I didn’t speak to my father. I told myself to be calm, that he would start to stammer soon, that whatever conversation he seemed bent on having could never take place.
“Where did you even b-b-buy that top? Y-y-y-you’re about to b-b-b-bust out of it.”
“I was going to wear a jacket,” I said.
“She’s just growing up,” Raleigh said. “Both the girls are growing up.”
James shrugged Raleigh’s hand off his shoulder. “That’s easy for you to say. They’re not your daughters.”
I looked up at James. Had he ever spoken of me and Chaurisse in a single breath? It was like we were regular sisters, driving our dad crazy like the light-skinned daughters on The Cosby Show.
“Dana,” James said, “I know your mama has talked to you about this already.” He looked at me for confirmation so I bobbed my head a little bit, stil smiling like fool. “You’re a good girl. I know you’re a good girl. I love you, right? Your uncle Raleigh, he loves you, too. Right, Raleigh?”
“Of course, Jimmy,” he said. “Both of us love you, Dana.” He raised his camera to his face and snapped it at me.
“I love you, too,” I said. “Daddy.” Feeling brave, I repeated the whole sentence. “I love you, too, Daddy.” The word tasted a little sharp, like milk about to turn, but stil , I wanted to say it again and again.
Raleigh pressed the shutter once more, and it was like the Fourth of July. I blinked in the purple flash; the spots left in front of my face were like those little cartoon hearts around Popeye’s head when he looks at Olive Oyl. My father loved me.
He said it, right here, not to please my mother, but just because he wanted it to be said.
MY FATHER LICKED his thumb and reached toward my cheek. There was a part of me that knew that his damp finger meant that he wanted to wipe something from my face, that he was probably aiming for my chocolate raspberry blusher. I understood this in the brain, but my body twitched.
My shoulder rose to protect my face.