by Tayari Jones
“Hey,” I said. “Don’t touch my mother.” My voice, feeble in my own ears, gave away how afraid I was. In Gwendolyn’s hands, the blow-dryer may as wel have been a pistol.
“I’m a missus, too,” she said. “You are not the only one. I may not live in as fine a house, but I am a missus, too.”
My mother looked around like she was looking for a place to sit, but every chair was occupied and every eye in the room was on Gwendolyn, who held a sheet of paper folded in two. She thrust it toward my mother like a subpoena. I looked to Dana, who studied her shoes. Whatever that paper was, it was something bad. Mama refused to take it.
“Get out of my shop,” my mother said. “Get out of my shop. This is my place. Get out.”
Mrs. Grant, under the dryer, began to applaud, looking to the other women to join her in this odd banging together of hands, but they didn’t. Like me, they couldn’t stop looking at the folded page.
“Get out,” my mother said. “I don’t care what you got in your hand. You don’t have any paper that has anything to do with me.”
“Take it,” Gwendolyn said. “Take it before I have to read it aloud.”
My mother’s breasts heaved over the sweetheart neckline. She didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands. At her sides, they pumped like a pair of hearts. Gwendolyn opened the paper. She looked at it slowly before glancing up and taking a breath, surveying the room before touching her hair. Gwendolyn licked her lips and although she meant her face to be rigid and stern, I know I saw a flicker of delight tickle her cheeks as she prepared to read. Whatever she had in store, she had been waiting for a long time. I took three steps forward, tripping over Mrs. Grant’s ankles a bit, but I managed to pul the page from Gwendolyn’s hand.
“Good girl,” Mrs. Grant said, like I was a pet.
I unfolded the page. It was a Xerox copy; I could stil smel the chemicals. I was looking at a wedding license issued to James Lee Witherspoon and Gwendolyn Beatrice Yarboro in the state of Alabama the year after I was born.
“This is bul shit,” I said, not to Gwendolyn but to Dana. Gwendolyn kept her arms crossed over her chest and Dana held her hands at her sides like a church usher. Gwendolyn said to my mother, “I am so sorry to have to tel you like this.”
The truth is a strange thing. Like pornography, you know it when you see it. Dana, silvery Dana, was my flesh-and-blood sister. James, my ordinary daddy with his Coke bottle glasses was nothing but a dog. And what did that make me? A fool. I’d invited Dana into my house. Every time I wanted to hang out, she made me beg. And I did. Every single time. “You’re not sorry,” I was speaking to Dana, but I couldn’t look away from the paper in my hands.
“I didn’t send her over here. That’s between the two of you,” Gwendolyn said. “What’s on that document is between your mother and me.”
“Give it here, Chaurisse,” my mother said. I handed her the page and she looked it over. She crumpled the Alabama license and tossed it on the floor. “You think I’m scared of a piece of paper?”
Gwendolyn looked a little confused, like we had fal en off the script. Supporting her large patent-leather handbag with her left hand, she began to rifle through it with her right. With a distressed glance at Dana, she dropped to one knee and rummaged through the bag. “I have something else,”
she said to my mother.
“You don’t have anything I need to see,” my mother said. “So take your little raggedy pocketbook and your raggedy little daughter and get out here.”
At this, Mrs. Grant pul ed up the top of the dryer and started a standing ovation. The clipped noises of her hand bounced off the tension in the room.
“What is wrong with you?” Dana said to Mrs. Grant. “This is not a TV show. This is our life.”
“I have it right here,” Gwendolyn said. “What is done in the dark wil come to the light. That’s what the Bible says.”
“Don’t you even try to confuse me with scripture.” My mother nudged the patent-leather purse with her bare foot darting out from under the white gown. Gwendolyn scooted her bag back in front of her, pouring the contents of her handbag on the tiled floor of the Pink Fox. There were the usual purse contents — lipstick, chewing gum, emery boards, and a hank of keys. In addition, there was a compass, the kind you use to draw circles. She then shook the purse. “It’s in here.” Dana got down beside her and helped repack. Gwendolyn had lost that triumphant look and seemed a little lost, the way Grandma Bunny had when she was on a medication that made her forget who we were.
“I have it, Mama,” Dana said, quietly, but not so soft as a whisper.
“Wel , give it here,” Gwendolyn said. “Why did you make me get on my knees before these people?” She waved her arms to take in not just me and Mama but the customers, maybe especial y Mrs. Grant, who was stil standing, as though this were a basketbal game in the final seconds.
“Mama, don’t do it. I have it, but don’t do it.”
“It has to be done,” Gwendolyn said. “Give it here.”
“Please,” Dana said. “Don’t make me.”
“You started this,” Gwendolyn said. “You started this whole thing.”
“Just go,” Mrs. Grant said. “Take whatever you have and just go. It’s not right, you coming. This is her home. You cannot come to her home. ”
“Shut up,” Dana said to Mrs. Grant. “You just shut the hel up. You don’t know us.”
Mrs. Grant straightened herself to her ful height. She was gaunt, like she spent her whole life dining on nothing but chicken broth and saltine crackers. “I don’t know you. But I know what you are.”
“Give it here, Dana,” Gwendolyn said. “These people don’t care about you.”
But I did care about her, and I cared about my mama. “Don’t give it to her,” I said to Dana. I couldn’t imagine anything more devastating than the black-and-white document she had already given me, but just because I couldn’t imagine it didn’t mean that there was not a blow beyond my imagining. “Dana.” She final y looked at me, and I hoped that there was something on my face that deserved mercy. I had never done anything to hurt her. I had scraped al the skin off my shoulder for her.
“Dana,” said Gwendolyn. “Look at me.”
Dana sighed and reached into her purse, the same fake LV she was carrying that day we met in the SupeRx. She looked exhausted. I couldn’t believe that it had been only last summer that we were stealing from the drugstore. Fast friends is what they cal it when you connect with someone like that. When you talk about it, you say you are like sisters.
She kept her fist closed tight around the object and passed it to her mother. Using her free hand, she tried to close Gwendolyn’s fingers into a fist as wel , postponing the moment that we would see the flush of aquamarine and flash of crystal. For a moment, I forgot how to breathe.
“No,” my mama said.
“Miss Bunny left it to Dana.”
“No,” my mother said. “Miss Bunny would not do me like that. We buried Miss Bunny in her brooch.”
I shook my head, remembering the day we prepared Miss Bunny and Raleigh took his awkward picture. I remembered my father’s long hug and the star-shaped press against my cheek.
“No,” my mother said. “No.”
“Ask Raleigh,” Gwendolyn said. “You know Raleigh can’t tel a lie.”
Mrs. Grant, stil on her feet, walked toward Dana and Gwen wagging her finger. “You cannot do this.”
I was close enough to Dana to touch her. “Look at me. You are not my sister.”
She turned and said, “Yes, I am.”
Mrs. Grant said, “What’s your last name, then?”
Gwendolyn said, “This isn’t about names. It’s about blood.”
Cold as anything, Mrs. Grant said, “I didn’t catch your family name, either.”
Not for one second did I forget whose side I was on, but I felt a little ashamed for Dana and her mother. Every time Gwen went to speak, Mrs.
Grant cut her off, aski
ng again about her name, like it was an exorcism. Meanwhile, my mother, stuffed into her party dress, held her mouth open like she was singing a silent opera.
“Get out,” I final y said.
Seeming exhausted and maybe even grateful to be dismissed, Gwen took a step toward the door, but Dana took a step in my direction. “Can I have it back?”
“What?”
“Miss Bunny’s pin. It’s the only thing I have.”
I squeezed my hand around the brooch, letting the sharp pin press against my palm. “It’s mine.”
AS THEY LEFT, Dana looked over her shoulder mournful y and mouthed something that I couldn’t decipher. Al my life, I’d wanted a sister. How many times had my mother said how sorry she was that I was an only child? That’s what happened when you want something too much. Life, it seemed, was a long con, rotten with dirty tricks.
Near the door, Mrs. Grant knelt as my mother sank to the floor in her pale almond gown. I know I should have been at my mother’s side, but I went to the glass door and watched Dana and her mother walk to the curb, struggling against the steep grade in their heels. Maybe I could have run after them, shoved Gwendolyn to the ground to defend my mother’s honor. Perhaps I should have demanded some sort of truth from them, but at that moment I didn’t want to know anything more.
24
A MIGHTY POOR RAT
MY MOTHER BANISHED my father from 739 Lynhurst with nothing but the uniform on his back. Didn’t even let him in the house. He didn’t fight, didn’t beg for forgiveness or for his toothbrush. He walked away at a quick clip, like an embarrassed deliveryman after knocking on the wrong door. Once we heard the quiet crank of his engine my mother said, “That wasn’t so bad,” but then she burst into tears and asked me to bring her a Tylenol PM.
She was stil mopping her face with a dishrag when the telephone mounted on the kitchen wal rang. Startled, I looked at my mother. “Answer it,” she said. Although what happened that afternoon had made it clear to both of us that we didn’t know anything at al about our own lives, we stil had enough intuition to know that my father was on the other end of that jangling phone. “T-t-tel you m-m-mama that I understand that she doesn’t want to talk to me. Tel her that I’m sleeping at Raleigh’s. And t-tel her I love her.”
I said, “Yes, sir. I wil deliver that message.”
“Chaur-r-rise,” he said. “How can you be so cold? I’m stil your daddy. This is between your mama and me.”
“This is between al of us,” I said, winding my fingers in the spiral cord, thinking of how many people made up the us. Gwen had left in our mailbox a fat envelope stuffed with al kinds of paperwork, including Dana’s birth certificate. Negro female born alive four months before I was born and nearly died in the very same hospital. Raleigh’s signature skimmed the line beside the word father. (Clipped to it was a ruled index card that said, Do not be misled by this. ) And what about Dana and me? There was no scrap of paper making an official connection between us. I am not the one to believe that our shared blood made us sisters, but having shared a father gave us something in common that looped around our ankles and pul ed tight around our wrists. This was between al of us. The six of us were hog-tied, fastened in place by different knots.
“Bye, Daddy,” I said, so he couldn’t say that I hung up on him.
It went on like this for two weeks, going on three. Mama refused to answer the telephone but also refused to take it off the hook. Phones back then were built with bel s inside, so the ringing was like a fire alarm until I final y picked up. “Just put your mama on the phone,” Daddy said, his voice unstable like an eighth-grade boy’s. “Tel her I’m at Raleigh’s. She can cal back at Raleigh’s number if she don’t believe me.”
Right before Johnny Carson’s monologue, Raleigh would cal himself. “My mama doesn’t want to talk to you, either,” I told him before I even said hel o.
“What about you, Chaurisse?” Uncle Raleigh said. “Can you find it in your heart to talk to ole Raleigh?”
I wasn’t sure what was in my heart. I went to school every day as usual. I scored C’s on my tests, performed passable arpeggios on my flute, as average and as invisible as before Dana Yarboro bul ed our china shop. For the first time in years, I was grateful that my father encouraged me to attend Northside, so far from my neighborhood — the ride to school was about twenty-five minutes by car and forty-five if I took MARTA. Dana was over at Mays High, just down the street. The word had no doubt trickled down a generation from Mrs. Grant to Ruth Nicole Elizabeth and outward from there. Even if she never heard the whispers, Dana was likely on edge like Mama and me as we kept on working in relaxers, scrunching in finger waves, and sewing in weaves. There was no way to know for sure who had heard what, so al you could do was live your life like no one knew anything while being scared that everyone knew everything.
During the seventeen days and eighteen nights of my father’s absence, my mother slept beside me in my canopy bed. It wasn’t my idea, but on the second night she tapped on the door frame, boozy-peachy and pleading. I rol ed over until my backside bumped the wal . The bed sank a little under her weight. “You awake, Chaurisse? I can’t sleep.” She rol ed over on her side, arranging herself around me. My mother’s body was soft and warm, smel ing of schnapps and the oily silk wrap wound around her head. “You’re al I have now,” she said.
“No,” I said. “That can’t be right. You stil have the Pink Fox.”
“Maybe. If I divorce your father, al of our stuff wil be split up. He could buy me out. Him and Raleigh could together, and then they could move that lady and her daughter right in here.”
“Daddy and Raleigh wouldn’t do that.”
“There’s no tel ing what they might do, Chaurisse. Don’t you get it? Anybody could be doing anything at any time.”
I couldn’t picture Daddy and Raleigh kicking my mama out of her own home, closing the Pink Fox and sending her back to renting a chair in another woman’s shop. But then again, two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have pictured them enjoying a whole second family, eating dinner twice on Wednesdays. When I didn’t work hard to keep my mind on its chain, I could picture my daddy, naked but for his glasses, draped in a chenil e bedspread, a churning mound over Dana’s pretty mother, her hair spread over a satin pil owcase.
I GAVE MY MOTHER ten days for her hard mourning. My thinking was that people general y got a week off of work when someone actual y died.
During this set-aside time, I comforted her as she mooned over old photo albums. I knelt beside her as she turned out my father’s top dresser drawer, sending change, matchbooks, prophylactics, and even a tiny jar containing my baby teeth crashing to the carpet. When her nervous stomach stole her appetite, I didn’t force her to eat the meals I prepared. When her appetite returned, I didn’t stop her from eating cans of cake icing, one buttery spoonful at a time. I figured it was her right. On the tenth night, I started what they used to cal “tough love.” At the first sound of her sniffling, I hardened myself and said, “Don’t be so sad. You need to be angry, pissed off. If I was you, I’d be in the kitchen boiling up a pan of grits.”
Mama tightened her arm around me under the sheet. “Don’t play like that.”
I was kidding, but then again, I wasn’t. It seemed that there should be some sort of consequences for what my father had done.
“Even if he threw me out of this house,” Mama said, “I wouldn’t do what Mary done.”
“At least Mary’s famous. Everybody in the whole world knows what she did. And besides, we are not going to get thrown out of this house,” I said.
“Let’s say I file for divorce and we get a good judge that says I can stay in this house. You know James is going to just move in with them. When I was coming up, people used to say ‘It’s a mighty poor rat ain’t got but one hole.’”
Crowding me in my own bed, my mother talked her greatest fears aloud. Did I think that Miss Bunny knew al along? I said that Daddy was probably the one who gave Gwendolyn the brooch
, not Miss Bunny herself. Mama said then she was glad that Miss Bunny was gone to glory before she could see al of us shamed like this. I said that yes, that was probably a blessing. In a drowsy voice, Mama pointed out that ful -time students could finish beauty school in a year. Dana and her mama could get certified and take over the Pink Fox. I said, “Dana doesn’t want to do hair; she’s going to Mount Holyoke. She is going to be a doctor.” My mother turned herself over and caught me again in a tight spoon. “Your father’s going to pay for that. There won’t be anything left.”
She gave her little sigh that signaled that the schnapps and Tylenol had final y gotten the best of her and she was drifting to sleep. The clock on my bed table glowed 2:13 a.m. “Good night, Mama.”
“Chaurisse?” she said.
“Ma’am?”
“Do you think he did it because I’m not pretty? You know, I wasn’t yet fifteen when we got married. Gwen, she probably knows how to do things that I never heard of. She probably reads Cosmo magazine. And look how she keeps herself up. She looks like a dark-skinned Lena Horne.”
While my mother was competing for the title of Most Brokenhearted Person Ever, I kept retracing my steps, trying to figure when I came to a crossroads and took the wrong turn. When it came to parents, I was a mighty poor rat. It’s not like I could have chosen a spare set in case my folks went crazy on me. Mama and Raleigh got lucky. When their biological situation didn’t work out, they ran over to Grandma Bunny. I didn’t have anyone except James and Laverne.
My mother’s body was heavy as a sandbag; my arm pinned under her was starting to hurt. I twisted free of her. It had been ten long days.
“Mama,” I snapped, flexing my tingling arm. “Stop whining. Stand up for yourself. Grab a broom. Put sugar in his gas tank. Something.”
My mother sat up, turned on the bedside lamp, kicked off the covers, and climbed out of my bed. The skin on the undersides of her arms shook as she jabbed her finger in my direction.
“Don’t you turn against me, Bunny Chaurisse.”