Blanche Passes Go

by Barbara Neely

  “I’m Doretha,” the one who hadn’t spoken said, then pointed at the tallest girl. “This is Murlee, and that’s Lucinda.”

  “I’m four yearth old,” Lucinda volunteered.

  Blanche set cookies and drinks in the middle of the table. “Would you girls like milk or lemonade?”

  “We’ll all have milk,” Murlee told her. “It’s better for us.” Her voice and look dared her sisters to disagree.

  “It goes better with cookies, too,” Doretha added.

  “I want milk and lemonade,” Lucinda said. Both of her sisters gave her a shut-up look.

  Blanche poured three glasses of milk, a glass of lemonade for herself, and a small one for Lucinda. She set a plate and paper towels, quickly folded into hats, in front of each girl. They giggled their delight with the napkins in little-girl gasps, then watched her, waiting.

  “Help yourselves to the cookies, please.” She nudged the cookies closer to them. From the looks of surprise on their faces, Blanche figured helping yourself to the cookies was not a regular event in their lives. Their thank-yous were breathy and real.

  They didn’t so much attack their cookies and milk as concentrate on them. Every bite and sip was taken with full attention and care. No crumbs were allowed to escape. They wiped their mouths gently, as though unwilling to bruise the paper towel.

  Doretha finally looked up from a cookie long enough to gaze around the room. “We like your house,” she said as though they’d all conferred.

  “It’th pretty,” little Lucinda said. Murlee nodded her head and finished her milk.

  Blanche didn’t ask if she’d like more, she just refilled Murlee’s glass, which got her another look of surprise. Blanche was starting to get pissed off at the thought of girls too poor to expect a second glass of milk. Or was it poverty? Blanche used the pretext of getting a glass of water to check as much of their bodies as she could see for bruises.

  “We have to go now,” Murlee announced so suddenly Blanche wondered if they’d caught her examining them.

  “If y’all don’t help me eat these cookies, they’re going to go to waste. You help yourselves, and I’ll go tell your mama where you are.”

  “It’s all right now,” Doretha said. The other two nodded in agreement.

  “Well, at least have a couple cookies to go.”

  The girls looked up at Blanche, then at each other, and finally at the plate of cookies.

  “Okay,” Murlee said for all of them as she reached for another cookie.

  “I’ll walk you home.” Blanche opened the door for them, each with a cookie in each hand. She wasn’t about to let them walk in on their parents fighting.

  “No!” Murlee and Doretha said in unison.

  “It really is all right now. Really,” Doretha said.

  “Daddy went off in the car,” Lucinda added.

  Blanche remembered hearing a car go roaring down the street a bit ago.

  “And Mama”—Murlee looked to her sisters for the end of the sentence but got no help—“doesn’t like us to bring home company,” she said.

  Blanche wanted to grab the child and hug her to safety. Instead, she stood on the stoop watching the girls walk across the street. She still felt she should introduce herself to their mother, but didn’t want to disrespect the girls’ wishes. They likely knew more about how to handle this situation than she did, poor things. Their mother stepped out onto the porch; she raised her hand to the left side of her face as the children grew close to her. Trying to hide a bruise or a cut that couldn’t be hidden for long? Blanche remembered reading that most women were liable to get hit by a man at least once in life. But wasn’t once enough? The girls ran to their mother, their faces turned up to her like pansies to the sun. As she talked, Murlee gestured over her shoulder toward Blanche, then turned and waved to her. Their mother raised her hand and nodded in a way that Blanche decided meant thanks. Blanche waved back and was relieved to go in the house and shut the door behind her.

  When Ardell arrived, Blanche was still so upset about the girls, she hardly gave Ardell a chance to get in the door before she started talking about them.

  “These three little girls from across the street come to visit today. Well, not exactly come to visit.” She told Ardell about the girls and what was going on in their house. “I feel real bad for them. They must be scared half to death.”

  Ardell set the two shopping bags she was carrying on the table. “Their mom’s scared, too,” she said, turning toward Blanche.

  “Yeah,” Blanche agreed. “But she can do something about it.”

  “Like wait until he’s asleep, bash him with a iron skillet, then run like hell, like you told me after the first time Harvey slapped me?”

  Blanche sighed. They’d been over this too many times before. As usual, Ardell was just making excuses for women who stayed with men who beat them as regularly as the clock struck five. Over the years, Blanche had heard women give every reason from “I know I can change him” to “I worked too hard to get this house to leave and let him have everything,” with a whole lot of “But I love him”s in the middle. None of it made any sense to her. She joined Ardell at the table and began unpacking the bags full of raisins, sweet red and green peppers, and chickpeas for the cold couscous salad Blanche was to make for tomorrow.

  Ardell fiddled with the stem of her spectacles. “You still think all a person has to do is walk out. That ain’t how it works. You oughta know. You didn’t press charges against Palmer!”

  “If Palmer had been raping me three times a week, do you think I’d have hung around and waited for him?!”

  “Oh, I get it! It’s okay to let somebody rape you once and get away with it.”

  “I didn’t let Palmer get away with raping me! What was I supposed to do? You think the cops would really have cared? You think I ever woulda got another job around here if I turned him in? What the hell did you expect me to do?”

  “Well, did you ever think that maybe that woman across the street don’t have no more choice than you had?”

  “She could up and leave! If Palmer had turned his back on me for one second…”

  “She’s got three kids!”

  “That’s all the more reason to get the hell out of there!”

  The two old friends stared at each other, neither willing to back down. Blanche could feel misery rising around her calves like flood water. It had been so long since she and Ardell had had a real fight, Blanche had forgotten how it made her feel: like she was trying to rip off her right arm and beat herself over the head with it.

  “I gotta go pick up some tablecloths,” Ardell mumbled. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Hey.” Blanche held out her hand, but Ardell was gone. Blanche went to the sink and washed the peppers. Shit! She didn’t need this! She grabbed her sharpest knife and began whacking the peppers in half as though they were the cause of her fight with Ardell. She hadn’t even had a chance to tell Ardell about Maybelle’s barrette.

  She turned from the peppers to the phone before it finished its first ring, glad for the caller and the distraction.

  “Malik. How you doin, honey?”

  “I’m okay, Moms. You should see me. I’m really bulkin’ up!”

  “Don’t come home no hulk, now! How’s camp goin?” She felt a slight change in the vibe coming through the phone, and it focused all of her attention on him.

  “Moms,” he said, in a pay-attention voice. “These little guys. I don’t know, it’s weird. The ones I’m in charge of, they follow me around and act like…I mean, most of them are almost my age, but they treat me like I’m a…”

  Like I’m a man, Blanche completed his unfinished sentence in her mind. Was she ready for this? Did it matter? “Well, that’s why you got picked for the counseling job, honey. I told you, you’re a good leader.”

  “Yeah,
but these guys come to me with their problems. I mean real problems. Like this kid who wets the bed, and the one who cries all the time and says his parents dumped him here ’cuz they don’t want him around. Another boy didn’t change his underwear for a week, and I had to talk to him and…”

  Blanche was aware of a kind of heaviness in Malik’s voice, as though he was feeling the weight of his coming adulthood. Manhood. She didn’t know how to help him with that particular part of his growing up, but a good person was a good person. She was certainly up for helping him with that.

  “It’s a lot of responsibility, Malik. But I know you can handle it. And you’re smart enough to ask for help when you need it. Those kids are lucky to have you, and I bet they know it.”

  “Man! What I wouldn’t do for a piece of your baked chicken and a biscuit and some garlic mashed potatoes and broccoli with…”

  Blanche knew there were mothers who’d be thinking about how to send this boy a care package full of his favorite foods about now. She felt fortunate not to be one of them. “Soon’s you come home we’ll have an all-favorites dinner,” she said.

  They talked a minute or two more about the food and the state of Malik’s socks and underwear. When she hung up, Blanche felt cushioned from the sharp edges of her fight with Ardell. Malik was a child who made parenting worth the effort. She didn’t know where he was going, but she knew he’d get there.

  She began slicing and chopping the peppers, giving herself over to what she was doing until she, the knife, and the peppers performed a perfect dance whose tempo was set by the movements of her hands and arms. She rested in the comfort of her momentarily quiet mind until the phone rang again.

  Blanche gasped as she realized who it was. She excused herself to the knife and the peppers and answered the phone.

  “Woman, you are harder to reach than perfection,” Thelvin told her.

  “Hey, Thelvin, how you doing?” Blanche was a tad flustered. She’d known it was Thelvin on the phone before she answered. There was no denying what that meant. “I got your message,” she said.

  “And I got yours, but I’m tired of messages and thinking about you. And I needed a break from those crazy Amtrak white boys. So I switched schedules with a brother who owed me a favor. I’m back in town for a couple days. What say I pick you up in an hour or so.”

  “Sounds interesting, Thelvin, but not tonight, thanks.” Despite the distance Malik’s call had put between Blanche and her fight with Ardell, Blanche was feeling a bit too needy to play fast and loose with Thelvin. She also didn’t like his thinking that, just because he’d decided to change his schedule, she’d be waiting for him. He should have called her first.

  Thelvin was silent for so long Blanche asked if he was still on the line.

  “Sorry. Just disappointed, I guess.”

  He sounded like it, too. She could change her mind. But every one of her slave ancestors set up a howl at the very idea of letting somebody else decide who she should see and when. It was more important for Thelvin to understand this about her than it was to play out some romance thing where he had to see her when he decided he had to see her.

  “What about tomorrow?” he asked. “You still too busy to see me?”

  “I didn’t say I was busy. I just said not tonight.”

  “So you’re not busy. You just don’t want to see me, is that it?”

  “Hey—where you going with this, Thelvin? You ain’t trying to say the only reason I can have for not seeing you is being busy? What about being tired? Or having a headache? Or just wanting to stay home by myself? You got to understand, I like you a lot, but I can’t be on call. I…”

  “Leo got anything to do with this?” he asked as if she hadn’t even spoken.

  “You’re way out of line, Thelvin, way out. This ain’t about Leo, it’s about who I am.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “I’m hanging up now,” she told him. “You give me a call when you ain’t got me confused with a piece of property you own somewhere.”

  She didn’t wait to see if he was going to call back, just slammed out her front door, needing either to walk or to scream. Damned stupid-assed male! Who the hell did he think he was? Just because she liked him, just because he’d screwed her until she’d run out of orgasms, didn’t give him the right to think she was going to leap every time he said Up! If she saw him every time he wanted, he’d probably take that to mean he could tell her what to do with the time she didn’t spend with him. Men!

  She walked the perimeter of Farleigh’s black community—over to First Avenue, around the corner to Cornwell, and along Green Street. She was calmer now and willing to admit, at least to herself, that part of her irritation with Thelvin was due to her having known he was on the phone before she answered it. This only happened when she cared about people. Was she ready for him to be this important to her? She stepped up her pace as if affection could be outraced. Tiredness overtook her on the way down the hill on Mulberry Street behind Shiloh Baptist Church. She reduced her speed, hardly glancing at the pickup truck turning slowly onto Mulberry from First Street. She was thinking about how Shiloh Baptist Church, like so much of the town, seemed smaller to her now than when she used to get in trouble for playing in the ditch that…The truck sped up. People drove like they didn’t have as much sense as a warthog! Good thing she was on the opposite side of the road. There were no sidewalks here, but she was well out of its way.

  Except that the truck was veering in her direction, heading right for her.

  Blanche ran toward the remembered ditch that had separated the church’s property from the street and hoped it was still there.

  A car horn blared.

  Sweet Ancestors! She didn’t see the ditch. The truck was so close she was sure she could feel the heat from its headlights. There! There! She threw herself into the narrow weed-filled furrow just as the truck rolled over it. She lay sideways, looking up at the wheel of the truck, not five inches from her head. Was it stuck? Would the driver come at her on foot? She choked on fumes as the truck’s engine revved, the truck reversed. Should she get up? The blaring car horn made it harder to think. She was wedged in too tightly to reach her pepper spray. She braced herself.

  “Stop! Stop,” a man shouted.

  Blanche heard the truck moving but it didn’t come toward her. She lay there panting.

  “You cracker bastard!” A car door slammed, footsteps came running toward her. Thelvin was standing over her with a baseball bat in his right hand. He threw it aside and dropped to his knees. “Are you all right, Blanche? Oh Christ, are you…”

  She managed a nod to let him know she was better than she’d expected to be. He helped her out of the ditch that was both more shallow and narrower than she remembered.

  “I saw him heading for you, that son of a bitch. He coulda killed you! Fucking racist dog! They beat a young black kid half to death last year!” Thelvin’s voice sounded stuck in his throat. He hugged and stroked her, rocking her gently. Blanche laid her head on his shoulder. Thelvin held her while she cried from the pain in her side; over almost being run down; and for joy at the sight of Thelvin. She cried so hard she nearly drowned the question of what he was doing there.

  Thelvin was still ranting about the racists in and around Farleigh as he helped her into the house. While he rattled on, he helped her undress, filled the tub with perfect-temperature bathwater, helped her ease into the tub, brought her a drink, and sat with her while she soaked away most of the soreness, although she was left with a large, tender bruise on her right thigh.

  “Blanche, you got to be more careful. You can’t be roaming around alone at night! Farleigh’s changed,” Thelvin said, helping her out of the tub. “More people, more crime. And these racists! We gon have to do something about them. I swear they must be breeding like minks, so many of ’em popping up around here. A brother I know in
Rocky Mount told me…”

  Blanche looked down at the top of Thelvin’s head while he patted her legs dry and continued to talk. I gotta tell him, she thought. It felt like bad luck to let him think she’d been attacked for racial reasons when she knew otherwise. But before she did anything else, she wanted to talk to Mumsfield and Archibald.

  When Thelvin had settled her in bed, Blanche asked for the phone and her handbag. Thelvin gave her a quizzical look but handed them to her without comment. She found Mumsfield’s number and called him. No one answered. She tried again.

  “What’s going on, Blanche?”

  She looked up at him and saw worry written on his face plain as a strawberry birthmark.

  Blanche put the phone down. “I know who did it.”

  “Did…You mean who tried to run you down?” Thelvin moved closer to the bed. “Who? Tell me.”

  “It’s…” She motioned for him to sit on the bed beside her. “I’ve been doing a favor, well, some work, really, for somebody who…”

  “Why the hell you talking about work? You said you knew who’d tried to run you down. I want to know…”

  “I’m trying to tell you, Thelvin!” Slowly, she explained to him what she’d been doing for Archibald, and her last conversation with Karen Palmer, but didn’t mention David Palmer.

  By the time she’d finished, Thelvin had jumped up from the side of the bed to pace the room. “A threatening phone call and a rock through…You should have told me, Blanche! I could have…That no-good bitch! I don’t believe in striking women, but if I could get my hands on her I might change my mind.”

  “Not to worry,” Blanche told him. “I intend to take care of that myself.”

  Thelvin stopped and stared at her. “You got more parts than a airplane! Why the hell didn’t you tell me…And why’re you even fooling around with some white man who…”