Silver Sparrow

by Tayari Jones

  It took him some time to find the words. She could hear him making the tortured noises, not exactly grunts, as he tried to make his mouth, lungs, and voice box coordinate so he could speak. Mama who had been struck dumb herself several times in the past few days, pitied Daddy at that moment.

  She asked him the question again, grateful in a strange way to be able to speak any words at al . “James, did you rape me?”

  From his bed, there was a spasm of movement.

  “No, m-ma’am,” he said. “That is something I did not do. My mama asked me the same thing, she made me put my hand on top of her good Bible and tel her the truth. No. I have never forced myself on any girl. Can’t nobody say that about me. And why you asking? You was there. You know that you laid yourself down on this very bed. Nobody pushed you.”

  And Mama did recal herself reclining, and no one had pushed her.

  Daddy spoke slowly, letting each word out one at a time. “And I kept asking you if I was hurting you. I said, ‘You okay?’ and you didn’t say nothing different. And you didn’t cry. When it was al over you just put al your things back on and said good-bye to me. You said it real polite. You said,

  ‘Good-bye, James.’ And then you and your cousin left. I was on the front porch waving and you didn’t even look back.”

  “But I didn’t know,” Mama said.

  “You didn’t know what? You didn’t know you could get pregnant?”

  In the dark of the bedroom in her pul ed-apart marriage bed, Mama turned her face into the pil ow. She had known she could get pregnant. Her mother had told her that when she first got her cycle, but she hadn’t known exactly how it happened and that it could involve something as lovely as a cut-crystal punch set. She hadn’t known it could happen so quickly, with so little pain and no blood at al . She hadn’t known that there would be no proof for nearly two months, no sign whatsoever that anything was amiss. She hadn’t known that the events of an afternoon could get her kicked out of school and thrown out of her mother’s house. She missed her Murphy bed in the living room and the boiled bathwater. When she had withdrawn from school, they had taken her school books away from her. They were raggedy volumes, castoffs from the white-children’s school, with their handwriting on the pages, giving away the answers before a person could figure them out for herself. Mama had gone through al her books with a rubber eraser, rubbing out al the marks that she could, and she covered each of them with book covers she fashioned herself from butcher paper and tape. If she couldn’t have her books back, she wished now that she had been al owed to take those covers off. They were hers. She had made them herself.

  After a while, Daddy said, “My mama also says that a lot of good marriages get off to peculiar starts. People get together just like us, because of circumstances, and they are stil together, so this doesn’t mean nothing bad. And the only thing that matters, real y, isn’t how come two people happen to get married, but that the folks are married before the baby gets here. Nobody wants to say that their child is a bastard. That’s the thing that’s important.” Then he lowered his voice. “Look at Raleigh. He’s a bastard.”

  “My daddy never married my mama,” Mama said. “I never seen the man.”

  “But that’s okay. Al you can think about is the future. That’s what my mama says.”

  Mama lay in the dark. She had been wearing her girdle too long and her feet were starting to tingle. She longed for her mother. She had never slept anywhere but her own home. She pressed her hands to her abdomen. She knew that sometimes women died while having babies, and she thought that if she were lucky, this is what would happen to her.

  After several minutes had passed, Daddy spoke again. “My mama also says that I shouldn’t worry too much about you crying yourself to sleep.

  She says it is only natural, but that nobody should worry too much, because you’l cry yourself out in a couple days.”

  Mama was getting sleepy, but she had another question. “How’s the baby going to get out of me?”

  Daddy was stammering so hard, she thought that he was going to strangle. “T-t-talk to my mama. She’l explain everything to you.”

  “And she did,” my mother told me, that day in the funeral home as we prepared Miss Bunny for her grave.

  Mama kept saying, “Miss Bunny was good to me al my life, and we are going to do right by her. We are going to fix her up perfect.” There wasn’t much for me to do. I handed Mama what she needed and tried not to look at Grandma Bunny’s frozen face. When I did peek, I had to admit that Mama did a fine job. Once Grandma Bunny was dressed, rouged, and finger-waved, there was no trace of the great sadness that weighed her down at the end. Mama held on strong until it was time to pin on the aquamarine brooch that Grandma Bunny had loved so much she wanted to be buried in it.

  My father entered the room while Mama was fumbling with the brooch. She stuck herself with the pin and left a faint streak of red on Miss Bunny’s col ar. “D-d-don’t worry about it,” he said, slipping the brooch into his pocket. I turned away, staring into the hot plate, where the straightening comb steamed. Behind me, I heard the hiss of film advancing as Uncle Raleigh snapped our picture. As I was blinking from the flash he took three or four more.

  “Don’t worry, Raleigh,” Mama told him. “We got Miss Bunny looking real nice. It was the least I could do.”

  Uncle Raleigh said, “I miss her already.”

  “Me, too,” Mama said. “When my son was born, with the cord around his neck, just as dead as anybody, as stil as Miss Bunny here on this table, she took care of me. She washed me, put me in bed, changed my linens.”

  By the time she delivered, Mama had gotten used to being married, used to living with Daddy and Raleigh. It was too late to go back to school; she wouldn’t be al owed. After they buried that baby boy in the churchyard, she had said to Grandma Bunny, “You going to send me back?”

  “Not unless you want to go,” said Grandma Bunny.

  “SHE DID RIGHT by me, righter than rain, and righter than my own mama,” my mother said.

  “I miss her,” Uncle Raleigh said again. He turned away from where she lay on that metal table. My mama took the straightening comb from the hot plate and set it on a wet towel. While it sizzled, she turned toward Uncle Raleigh and laid her hands on his back and pressed her wet face to his clean shirt.

  My father and I stood there, left out of their embrace. Miss Bunny was our blood relative; we weren’t her took-ins, but we loved her, too. “C-c-come here,” he said to me, spreading his arms. I sank into his hug, which smel ed strong with tobacco, and maybe a trace of gin. He clapped me on the back like I was a baby with colic. I believe he kissed my hair. Against my cheek, I felt Grandma Bunny’s brooch stashed in his lapel pocket. I pushed against it harder, hoping to emboss my face with the jeweled star pattern.

  13

  ONE HUNDRED PERCENT DRIVEN SNOW

  “YOU NEVER KNOW,” my mother said to me. “You never know what means what.”

  “True,” I said. I was just nine years old, give or take, but I had learned not to interrupt my mother when she was on a rol , especial y not when she was talking to me in the deep voice she used with the women in the beauty shop. She didn’t talk this way to al of them, of course; different people got different treatment, just as some people had to pay for every clip of the shears and other people got their bangs straightened for free. On that day, in the car, she talked the way she did with the longtime customers, the ones who got their lips waxed on the house, the ones who cal ed me

  “Miss Lady” and cal ed my mother “Girl.”

  “George Burns cheated on Gracie,” Mama said. “Can you believe that?”

  I didn’t believe or not believe it, as I wasn’t absolutely sure who George Burns was. “The man who plays God in that movie?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Him. He hasn’t always been old, you know. He was young and handsome and he was married to Gracie.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I remember.” This was the key. If I t
alked too much, asking her to clarify, she would remember I was a kid and then she wouldn’t talk to me like this.

  This was a long time ago, way back when Jimmy Carter made a fool of himself by tel ing Playboy magazine that he had committed adultery in his heart just by looking at pretty women and thinking the wrong kind of thoughts. My mama thought it was touching how devoted the president was to his wife, but my father got al discombobulated watching Johnny Carson crack jokes about it on TV. Daddy said, “He came home every night to Rosalynn, right? I tel you me, white folks look for things to worry about.”

  “I don’t know,” my mama said. “I like the last part of what he said, about people not judging each other.”

  When she said this, Daddy scooted closer to her on the couch, touching her cheek with his glass of gin-and-tonic. “You got something you don’t want to be judged for, girl?”

  Mama laughed and pushed the glass away. “James, you are so crazy.”

  “I’m just getting started,” he said.

  MAYBE IT WAS because I spent half my life in my mother’s beauty shop, but it seemed that I knew quite a bit about marriage, even when I was just a little girl. It was probably a bad sign when I touched my kindergarten teacher on the knee when she looked unhappy and said, “Marriage is complicated.”

  This was my mother’s favorite refrain. She said it at least daily to some woman dripping wet in the shampoo bowl. A shift in pitch flipped the meaning entirely, but the words were always the same. In the car that day on the way to the beautysupply store, talking about George and Gracie, she didn’t say “Marriage is complicated” in a between-the-lines way, like she did when she tried to talk over my head. This time she said it like she needed a word from another language, but she just had to settle for “complicated.”

  I nodded, enjoying the sound of her voice. It was like I was her best friend. And maybe I was. For sure, she was mine. Even before puberty changed the stakes, I never had much truck with girls. Spending so much time with grown women had ruined my timing and dated my speech, making me poor company for my peers. As much as I tried, I never could get any traction. Not that I was an outcast. I got invited to slumber parties and I went, as eager as anyone, but I was no one’s best friend, and the best friend is the only friend that matters.

  “So where was I?” Mama said.

  “You were talking about God.”

  “No I wasn’t,” she said. “I was talking about how irritated I am to be spending my Saturday driving way out here to return this dryer. When I bought it, I asked her, ‘Is it quiet?’ She said it was quiet as rain, and then I turn it on and it sounds worse than a lawn mower.” She lowered her voice and winked. “One of the customers said it sounds like a cheap vibrator.”

  I nodded, although I didn’t know what she meant.

  She adjusted the I Dream of Jeannie ponytail clipped so high up on her head that it grazed the roof of the car. My mother col ected hairpieces, wigs, and fal s like other women col ected Lladró, Swarovski, or souvenir thimbles. She displayed the ful wigs on Styrofoam heads jutting from the wal s of her bedroom like the trophy heads of deer. The half caps and smal er pieces lived in her dresser drawer. Because she didn’t approve of girls dressing up like grown women, she never let me wear them, only al owing me to stroke the stiff curls before laying them back down in their nests of scented tissue paper.

  From time to time I asked anyway, if I could just try on one of the ponytails — I was most interested in Tempest Tousled, a long spiral curl. Other girls I knew made do with towels around their heads as stand-ins for long flowing hair. A boy I knew from church arranged a sour mop on his head just to see what he would look like if he were a white girl. I didn’t want any of these homemade costumes when I knew my mother had a dresser drawer stocked with the real McCoy, but she refused to let me hold the hair next to my face, even if I promised not to try and actual y attach it. “You need to get a handle of what you real y look like before you start playing pretend.”

  If nine years wasn’t long enough for me to figure out what I looked like, I didn’t know how long it was going to take. I had been in kindergarten when I figured out that I wasn’t pretty. That is the worst thing about being a little kid; nobody is shy about letting you know these things. The fireman who teaches you to stop, drop, and rol if you happen to catch on fire — he picks the cutest girl to sit on his knee and wear his cap. At Christmastime, the ten prettiest girls get to be in the angel choir. Plain girls twirl in the candy-cane dance. Ugly girls pass programs. I never handed out playbil s, but I never for a minute thought I would be in the angel choir.

  My parents are not good-looking people, either. My dad is medium everything — medium height, medium age for a father, medium brown, medium afro. His glasses are thick as the bul etproof window at the liquor store. Thank God that didn’t get passed down to me. It’s bad enough living with his hair, fine as spun cotton; even a soft natural-bristle brush pul s it right off my head. My mother, when she isn’t wearing her fal s, could be anyone’s mother — as medium as my father, but a bit on the plump side. If you saw them walking down the street, if you noticed them at al , you would think the two of them might produce invisible children.

  “SO, LIKE I was saying. George Burns cheated on Gracie.” My mother chuckled and used the hand that wasn’t on the steering wheel to adjust her I Dream of Jeannie. “Back before you were born, he had a wife named Gracie and he loved her to pieces. I mean, he was crazy about her. It’s the kind of love that most people never experience. L-o-v-e.”

  I nodded. “Love.”

  “But he strayed. He cheated on her with some tramp. One time and one time only. I think he had been drinking.”

  I nodded.

  “So here’s the good part of the story. He had betrayed his One True Love. What if she left him? He loved her! So he bought her a tennis bracelet.”

  “A tennis bracelet?”

  “Diamonds, Chaurisse. Major jewelry. And he never stepped out on her again. Cheating on her made him get his priorities straight. He almost lost her and it tore him up. So every time he saw that bracelet on her wrist, he remembered how much he cherished her. Don’t you love that?”

  I said, “I don’t know.”

  “And there’s more. This is the important part. Listen to me, Chaurisse. This wil serve you wel the rest of your life.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Years and years later, Gracie was sipping gin martinis with some country club ladies, when George heard Gracie say, ‘I was always hoping that George would have another affair. I want a bracelet for my other arm!” At this, my mother laughed her thick laugh. She knocked her hand against the steering wheel a couple of times. “You get it?”

  I shook my head. “Your blinker is on.”

  “But do you get it?”

  “Sort of,” I said.

  “The point is that Gracie knew the whole time. She just didn’t act al ignorant about it. Two things to learn from that story: (a) you know in your gut who loves you.”

  “So how come he did it?”

  My mother smiled at me. “Sometimes I forget how young you are. I love you so much, do you know that?”

  I turned my face toward the car window. I liked it when she turned her light on me like that, but it embarrassed me, too. “Yes’m.”

  “But here’s the thing to remember, and then we’l drop it.”

  “Okay.”

  “Men do things al the time that they don’t mean,” she explained. “The only thing that matters is that he loves you. George loved Gracie. He loved her so much, that when he dies, he is going to make sure that he is buried underneath her, so she wil always have top bil ing.”

  “But why did he mess around with some other lady?”

  “Chaurisse, you are not getting it. This is the point: If you are a wife, behave like a wife. There is nothing to be gained from acting a fool, cal ing up the other woman at her house, cutting her tires, or whatever. My own mother was like that, always fighting in the st
reets over some nigger.”

  “But how come he did it? Why did that God guy cheat on Gracie?”

  My mother switched on the turn signal and sighed. “Al I am saying is that if you are a wife, act like a wife and not a two-dol ar whore.”

  THIS, OF COURSE, was before I got a reputation for being a fast-tail girl, without even being one. When I was fourteen, I bruised my reputation and lost my virginity. In that order, mind you. Life is crazy like that. The start of it was basical y a misunderstanding, a misunderstanding that happened at church — and there is no worse place for a misunderstanding that makes you seem like a tramp. I was standing in the choir closet with Jamal Dixon, the preacher’s son. We were talking. He was talking, real y, I was just listening. At that point, I was one hundred percent driven snow. Jamal was sharing some heavy stuff, about his mother. Apparently, she drank al the time. Every day. She hid bottles in the laundry room behind the hot-water heater. She drank out of a wineglass; she drank out of her toothbrush cup. She crashed the reverend’s Coupe de Vil e at three in the afternoon in the parking lot of Kroger. It was getting to be a problem. “Can you tel ?” he asked me.

  I shrugged. “I wouldn’t put anything past anybody.”

  I didn’t mean it, about putting what past who, but it was something I often heard my mother say. It was the perfect response to a woman getting her hair done complaining about their husband. This way, you could agree without talking bad about him. So when the couple reconciled, the wife would stil be comfortable getting her hair done in your chair. If you want to be a hairdresser, you have to understand the way people are wired.

  I felt sorry for Jamal. With his blinking eyes and twitching lips, he looked like he was about to cry right there, and I knew enough of men to know that he didn’t want me to see it happen. I turned my face to the robes, keeping my hands busy making sure al the hangers were turned the right way. Jamal kept on about his mother and how she gets carried away with the peppermint schnapps and how his father won’t do anything about it but pray. The family would be together in the living room on their knees, holding hands and breathing in the boozy-minty smel that beamed out from her lips and even from her skin. He swore that even the butter she scraped on his toast in the mornings tasted of peppermint. I didn’t tel him about my own mother, who could be, on occasion, a little bit boozy-peachy. She never crashed any cars or did anything to hurt anyone, but she swil ed Fuzzy Navels on Monday afternoons, dabbing her eyes at her soap operas.