I looked at Ruth and giggled.
Thirteen
The next day at dusk I found myself gazing up at palm trees. The sky was deep blue. Los Angeles was beautiful, I thought. I was walking around with Hot on a leash. In front of the Martinez house next door their Chihuahua, Chili, was yelping. Gilbert Martinez, thirteen, tall, and black-haired, came out on his front porch and that was when I fell in love. Hot barked and Gilbert came over to the fence.
I was expecting him to speak Mexican but he said, “What kinda dog is that?”
I said, “A weenie dog,” and he smiled at me. I think that’s how love starts, with a look and a smile. At least that’s how it started with us. Uncle Bill called to me from an open window and told me to come inside.
“Gettin dark,” he said. “Gather up your sister.”
I screamed, “Ruth!”
Ruth yelled, “What!”
Gilbert turned, walking toward his porch, Chili right behind him. He turned around, looked at me, black eyes gleaming in the setting sun, mariachi music flowing like a breeze.
Ruth raced me to the door and pulled it open, and I let Hot off the leash.
We weren’t in the door good before Aunt Olivia asked us, “Who was that I heard yelling in the street?”
Ruth said, “Leah.”
I said, “You too, Ruth, you was yellin too.”
Aunt said, “Ladies don’t yell and scream so the whole neighborhood can hear them.”
We replied, “Yes ma’am.”
“Get washed up because Mrs. Pittman is about to serve supper,” Aunt Olivia added.
“Yes ma’am,” we said again.
We were washing our hands when Ruth took some of the water from her hand, flicked it in my face, and laughed. Then she pulled my ponytail and said, “I seen you talkin to that Mexican boy.”
“You saw me, not seen.”
She said, “I saw you smilin at him. What was you ... were you talkin bout?”
I told her, “Nuthin. He asked what kinda dog Hot was and I told him a weenie dog. That’s what, nosy.”
Ruth pulled my ponytail again. “You gonna marry him, huh? Then you gonna have to speak Mexican.”
“He doesn’t speak Mexican. He speaks English.”
Ruth danced out of the room and bounced down the steps, saying, “Leah gotta boyfriend! Leah gotta boyfriend! He speaks Mexican! He speaks Mexican!”
Uncle spoke from his easy chair. “Mexican is not a language, Ruth. He speaks Spanish.”
Ruth replied, “Oh. Leah gotta boyfriend! He speaks Spanish! That don’t rhyme, Uncle Bill.”
“Doesn’t rhyme, Ruth.” Uncle Bill kept reading the newspaper.
Ruth rolled her eyes.
After dinner, I took my red rose box out of the closet, opened it, and held the picture of Mama and Daddy. Their smiling faces brought tears to my eyes.
Aunt Olivia knocked, opened the door, and came into my room. She sat beside me on the bed and we looked at the picture together.
“My sister was a beauty,” Olivia said and tears began to make wells in her eyes too. “I remember when your mama and I were girls, walking the dirt roads in Sulphur, barefoot, holding hands while we walked to the cotton fields, coming home tired, dusty, and hungry. We would drop our nickels and dimes into a jar by the door. Rita and I would smile at each other.” She paused. “I shouldn’t have waited so long to tell her I was sorry. I regret that.... I’ll always regret that.... Glad I have you and Ruth to remind me of her.”
Aunt Olivia put her arm around my shoulder, kissed me on the head, and said, “You want to talk, all you have to do is knock on my door or take me aside, Leah. I don’t want you to ever feel alone.”
I wanted to tell her that I was never alone, that the angels watched over me, that my best friend, my sister, Ruth, was right across the hall in the yellow room, that Hot was nearly always at my feet, that my books kept me company, that she wasn’t my mama, sassy and strong, that Uncle Bill wasn’t my daddy, who dreamed out loud. Instead I leaned into her and soaked up some love. I hoped Mama and Daddy would understand.
Fourteen
The houses that lined our street were painted yellow, white, pink, pale green. The lawns were well-watered and trimmed. On this block, our neighbors were colored, white, Mexican, Japanese.
I heard Gilbert Martinez’s dog, Chili, howl and peeked out the window. Gilbert was nowhere in sight. I wondered about the feelings I was having, these butterflies that flew around inside of me, colliding, whenever Gilbert was near.
Ruth sneaked up behind me and said, “Buenos días, señorita.” Those were the words that Mrs. Martinez spoke when we passed by her house while she tended her garden where hummingbirds and dragonflies flew.
It was Saturday, early September. Aunt Olivia always worked on Saturday.
Mrs. Pittman rushed into the room.
She told us, “C’mon, get ready, we bout to discover Los Angeles.”
Ruth sassed, “Los Angeles was already discovered and not by Christopher Columbus.”
Mrs. Pittman sneered. “Someone shoulda washed your mouth out with soap long time ago, Ruth.”
I said, “We should grow a switch tree out back,” and Mrs. Pittman agreed.
It was after noon and she took us to Hollywood’s Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where we saw Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier.
After the movie, we stood in front of the theater, trying to see if our hands and feet fit the concrete molds made by movie stars, tracing their signatures with our fingers.
Gilbert Martinez was sitting on his front steps when we drove up, and I thought I saw a smile come to him as our eyes met. Ruth and Mrs. Pittman looked at each other.
“She’s in love,” Ruth said.
We got out of the car and Gilbert stood up and waved. Mrs. Pittman and Ruth went into the house. I waited for him to approach the fence.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” was all that would come from my mouth.
“Where’d you go?” he asked.
“We saw Davy Crockett.”
“I saw that last week, he said softly. ”My uncle was here from Texas. We took him to Olvera Street.”
The new feelings filled me. “Oh,” was all I could say.
His mother called to him from the house, “Mijo!”
“¿Qué?” he answered.
She said in English, “Come inside, dinner is ready.”
He touched my hand through the fence as we stood under an olive tree at sunset.
“See ya,” he said.
“See ya,” I replied. I wondered if he would have tried to kiss me the way Nathan Shine had kissed Penny Adams if the fence hadn’t been there. I wondered what it would feel like to touch my lips to his.
He walked toward his house, looking back only once. Love.
Uncle Bill and Aunt Olivia were at a meeting of the local chapter of the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Uncle Bill said it was a club for grown-up colored people who didn’t believe in segregation and thought that everyone should be able to vote.
Mrs. Pittman stayed late, fed us our dinner, washed and pressed our hair, saying we only needed a warm comb like Dorothy Dandridge and Lena Horne, her favorite movie stars. “Dorothy Dandridge shoulda won the Academy Award for Carmen Jones, ” she said as she cooled the pressing comb on the towel and passed it from the roots of my hair to the ends.
Sitting with hair still damp, Ruth said, “Remember when the red rose box came and you were dressed up, lookin like Mardi Gras?”
We told Mrs. Pittman, taking turns fast like baseball players striking out, one after the other, about the red rose box, the trip to New York, and how Aunt Olivia used to dance at the Cotton Club but not half naked like Josephine Baker.
Mrs. Pittman said, “It’s not a box, it’s an overnight case. Never seen one quite like it ... covered with red roses.”
“She got Mama and Daddy’s picture in it. She don’t let nobody touch it.” Ruth sh
ook her head, hair shrinking.
Mrs. Pittman came to my defense. “Everybody needs to have a private place for their private things. Everyone.”
Mrs. Pittman finished my hair with pin curls and Ruth took my seat. I looked out the window to see if I could catch a glimpse of Gilbert Martinez in the moonlight.
Ruth asked, “Who you lookin for?”
“Gilbert Martinez,” I replied.
“He’s a fine young man,” Mrs. Pittman said.
“When we gonna discover Los Angeles?” Ruth asked. “Because school’s gonna start on Monday and all we done so far is go to the picture show.”
Mrs. Pittman put the pressing oil down and waited before she said, “Next Saturday, we’ll go to Santa Monica, to the pier, have us some hot dogs, ride the merry-go-round. I’ll just go to the movies on Sundays, my day off, from now on.”
Ruth replied, “So what? Me and Leah could walk all by ourselves to the Leimert Theater on Sundays like ev’ryone else round here. We don’t gotta go all the way to HOLLYWOOD just to go to the picture show.” Ruth looked sideways, about to say something that had fire in it, thought better and pursed her lips, keeping the words inside.
Mrs. Pittman was holding a rope she wasn’t ready to let go of. “And the Saturday after that we’ll go discover Griffith Park or drive out to Compton to see my sister, Ora, who I ain’t seen for several weeks because I been too busy takin care of the Hopper girls. Then maybe the weekend after that we could try to ride the train down to San Diego and walk over into Tijuana, Mexico, and I could buy me a big bottle of tequila with a worm in it so I could drink it late at night after Ruth dun tried to drive me out my mind.”
No words filled the room as Mrs. Pittman finished pressing Ruth’s hair, and when Aunt Olivia and Uncle Bill drove up, Mrs. Pittman picked up her sweater and her purse, opened the kitchen door, and walked over the threshold into the night. We followed. She backed her car out of the driveway and we watched until the taillights disappeared in the darkness.
I wondered who Mrs. Pittman went home to, if there was someone waiting for her to put her key into the lock and open the door. I wondered if she was loved or lonely. She wasn’t what anyone would call a pretty woman but when you looked into her eyes, there was beauty.
I looked up at the stars and the full moon that lit the summer sky.
Ruth asked, “Why you always lookin up, like there’s not enough for you down here?”
“Just like to,” was all I could think to say.
The truth was that looking at the stars and the moon seemed to take me to another place.
I looked straight into Ruth’s eyes and said, “Mama and Daddy nearby, I can feel em.”
Ruth questioned me, “What bout Miss Lutherine? You think she knows all those things we said about her?”
“She’s pro’bly in purgatory for gossipin and carryin tales,” I said.
“You think Nathan and Micah Shine in heaven?”
“Pro’bly,” I answered. “Didn’t have time to do nuthin too bad.”
Ruth said, “Oh.”
The smell of Mexican food came from the Martinez’s open kitchen window and I took a deep breath.
Aunt Olivia called to us from the open door. “Leah ... Ruth!”
“Yes ma’am?” we replied.
“Come inside. Your gramma’s on the telephone.”
It had been nearly a month since we had said good-bye to her at the church.
“Comin.” We hurried up the front steps.
Aunt Olivia handed Ruth the phone. I stood close to her, trying to listen. “Hi, Gramma,” Ruth said. “Leah’s right here. We gotta dog ... a weenie dog but we call him Hot because Weenie doesn’t sound nice. And Leah gotta boyfriend.”
I took the phone from her hand. “Hi, Gramma.”
“Hi, Leah Jean. Finally got some of the phone lines back up,” Gramma said. “Sulphur’s still a mess. Lord have mercy ... I miss y’all.” It sounded like she was about to cry.
“I miss you too, Gramma,” I said.
Ruth grabbed at the phone. “I wanna talk some more!”
“Wait!” I replied and kept talking. “We start school on Monday and we went to the library and we saw Davy Crockett and Mrs. Pittman is gonna take us to Mexico so she can get something with a worm in it because she said that Ruth is bout to drive her outta her mind.”
Gramma laughed and said, “Sounds like y’all is fine ... just fine. Now let me talk to Ruth a little bit. It’s late here. Good night, Leah.”
“Good night, Gramma,” I said and handed the phone to Ruth.
Fifteen
Monday morning. The first day of school. I was nervous. Aunt Olivia walked us to school, lunch boxes in our hands, ribbons in our hair, brown-and-white saddle shoes on our feet.
It was a two-story redbrick building and I felt tied up inside as I entered my classroom and took a seat. I was in the sixth grade, Ruth fifth.
The teacher had red hair, freckles, and fat ankles. Her name was Mrs. Larson and she wore a smile. Around me sat children of every color. We each had our own desk and our own books. The desks were clean and the books looked new. It wasn’t like Sulphur, where I’d shared an old desk and torn books with two, sometimes three others. Everyone was wearing shoes and what looked like new clothes. I thought about Mrs. Redcotton, remembering how she always called me Leah Jean.
Mrs. Larson had the new students tell about where they were from. She said that most people in Los Angeles were from somewhere else. Donna Peterson, a girl with yellow hair, was first. She said she was from Minnesota, where it snowed a lot. She said she liked to ice-skate, that she had two brothers, and that her father was an airplane pilot. Everyone in the class was asked to welcome her. They said, “Welcome, Donna!”
Then it was my turn. I stood and said, “My name is Leah Jean Hopper and I’m from Sulphur, Louisiana. I came to Los Angeles to live with my uncle and aunt because my mama and daddy died in a hurricane. I have one sister whose name is Ruth. She’s in the fifth grade. I have a dog whose name is Hot.”
Mrs. Larson asked me, “Do you like Los Angeles, Leah?”
I replied, “Yes ma’am.” I wanted to tell her to call me Leah Jean but I didn’t.
Everyone in the classroom said, “Welcome, Leah!”
I ate lunch with Ruth, Donna Peterson, and a colored girl from my class whose name was Michelle Jordan. Michelle Jordan wore pink lipstick and a brassiere that you could see through her white cotton shirt. She was light brown with green eyes. She was the sort of girl boys hover around like bees collecting nectar.
After lunch, Mrs. Larson wrote arithmetic problems on the blackboard. I copied them on my paper and took a deep breath. I looked around the room, watching, wondering if these boys and girls were all smarter than me. I looked at my paper and began to write my answers, remembering that Mrs. Redcotton had said that I was smart enough. Smart enough.
Sixteen
Just as Mrs. Pittman had promised, Saturday afternoon found us staring at the Pacific Ocean from the Santa Monica Pier, sipping Coca-Cola, watching seagulls fly.
I told Mrs. Pittman, “The place where the ocean meets the sky is called the horizon.”
“The horizon ... is that so?” she replied, looking out over the waves. The gulls filled a moment of silence with their song and then she said, “I’m goin to the movies with my sister tomorrow, gonna see The Seven Year Itch with Marilyn Monroe.”
We walked along the pier back toward the beach, took off our shoes, and walked to the water’s edge. We made our footprints in wet sand and signed our names beneath them, just like the ones at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. We walked south toward Venice Beach and by the time we walked back, the tide had come in and erased our trail. We ran up toward the water, letting it chase us, smiling all the while. Then we sat and watched the sun disappear to less than half, orange and glowing.
“Bout time for supper,” Mrs. Pittman said as she dusted the sand from her feet. She put her shoes on and stood up.
&nbs
p; Ruth and I put on our shoes and followed her to the car.
We drove down Pico Boulevard. I was kneeling in the backseat, looking toward the ocean. I turned around and asked, “How come the sun is always in a ball and the moon is always changing?”
Mrs. Pittman answered, “Because that’s the way God made the world. Soon as you get in, best take a bath because you both smell like dead fiddler crabs tangled up with seaweed. Stinky.”
I said, “No such thing as a fiddler crab.”
“Sure is, play you a tune, you listen hard enuf.”
The car pulled to a stop in front of our house and we got out. The lights in the house were on and Aunt Olivia’s car was parked behind Uncle Bill’s in the driveway. Mrs. Pittman said, “G’night,” drove off, and was gone.
Gilbert Martinez was standing outside. He walked toward me and handed me a letter. “Hi, Leah.... Hi, Ruth.”
I took the letter from his hand. “Hi, Gilbert.”
Ruth stuck her tongue out at him. He went back to his house, and we opened the gate and walked into our yard.
“What’s that, some kinda love letter?” Ruth tried to grab it from my hand.
“Stoppit, Ruth.” I pushed her hand away.
The front door was unlocked. I opened it and smelled chili cooking. Aunt Olivia hardly ever cooked, saying she didn’t have a talent for it, and I wondered what it would taste like. Uncle Bill looked up from his paper, smiled, and said, “Good evenin, Leah ... Ruth.”
“Evenin, Uncle Bill,” we replied.
I walked up the stairs, holding the letter, Ruth behind me. I heard bathwater running.
Ruth said, “Olivia must have smelled us coming.”
I told her, “No one can smell like that except Hank De Leon when a possum’s nearby.”
Olivia turned off the bathwater, peeked from behind Ruth’s bathroom door, and smiled. “Nice day?”
The Red Rose Box Page 8