Will he eat it? Her trembling hands smoothed down the yellowing page. Will this be the one to make the difference? Refusing to succumb to the deadening cold and sleep, she pulled the two blankets tightly around her shoulders and tried to concentrate on the page in her lap. She had gone through six months of the same weekly recipe for tea loaves, so she quickly skimmed over the records of new wheat flour, eggs, milk, and honey to the end, where she would find the additional ingredients that Evelyn Creton hoped would make the crucial difference.
June 14th—Add:2 pinches powdered dove’s heart
6 amaranth seeds
1 pinch snakeroot
So this time it would be the snakeroot and dove’s heart with the amaranth seeds. On June 7, it had been ground ivory-root. On May 31, three pinches of shame-weed.
It was the shame-weed that told her pages ago what Evelyn Creton was actually doing. Shame-weed. The name was so odd it had stuck after all these years. And she remembered being so ashamed of her great-aunt, Miranda Day, when she pulled up in that cab each summer, calling from the curb at the top of her voice, “Y’all better be home. Mama Day done come to visit a spell with her Northern folks.” Coming with her cardboard suitcases, loose-fitting shoes, and sticky jars of canned whatever. Toothless but ready with a broad grin; almost illiterate but determined to give her very loud opinion regardless of the subject or the company. “Child, y’all sittin’ there complainin’ ’bout them wayward boys. Ain’t never seen an onery man yet who didn’t come round if you get yo’self a little shame-weed and bake it up in somethin’ sweet.” And perhaps if she hadn’t been so eager to quiet the old woman, to move her out of the room away from the amused and contemptuous eyes of her teenaged friends, she would have also heard about ivory-root, white pepper, and sassafras. The amaranth seeds, snakeroot, and dove’s heart that Evelyn Creton kept mixing and measuring page after page, month after month. A little more of this, a little less of that. His coldness and distance, the feeling that things weren’t the way they should be must lie in something that she just wasn’t doing right. If she hung in there long enough, he would change. It just took a lot of patience with a little reasoning. Then a lot of reasoning with a lot of patience. You talk more, you talk less—and you’re patient. You cling, you rage—and you’re patient. You just shut up for weeks on end—and you’re patient. Wasn’t that the advice, the very literate advice that she unearthed from sorting through all those books and articles? And there was nowhere else to turn except to her piles of Cosmopolitans and Ladies Home Journals. She wasn’t going out into the woods like Evelyn Creton or Mama Day to dig up shame-weed.
Yes, she was so certain she could make “it” change, forgetting that it had started long before she walked into Tupelo Drive. No toilet articles on the dresser in that exquisite room she was taken to. No extra pillow on the canopied bed. No clothes in her closet. The way it’s always been done here, he’d said. He needed his private space. But then he would come at night. Enter and leave her body with the same quiet precision that she saw when he balanced his accounts, read his newspaper, or dissected his steak. That entrance and exit from her bedroom and her body became part of a natural flow of motion that was Luther. If spontaneity and passion didn’t exist in the rooms they ate in, entertained in, and sat in, how could she expect it in the room she slept in? How could she tell him that she knew from the men before her marriage that it could be—should be—different from this?
Yet she never thought the word unnatural. It hung in the air around her now, sending up the smell of mildew and dust from the pages in her lap. But wasn’t it natural that she accepted his total absence at night after she conceived, since her days were filled with his growing concern about her health and diet? His keeping track of her visits to the doctor and the punctuality with which she took her vitamins and exercise. His being ready to satisfy her simplest or most extravagant demands during her pregnancy. His telling her with and without words that he would give her whatever she needed. Perhaps it was natural to feel that, somehow, she was being unreasonable for thinking she needed more than that. What else could explain his shrinking away, his look of injured bewilderment when she suggested that he still wasn’t doing enough?
And then after the baby came, she got so caught up in the natural rhythms that filled her own days. The changes of diapers, the fluctuations of temperatures, the meticulous care of a new human being and an old house. It was so easy to keep busy while she waited for “it” to change. So easy to put faith in the fact that she could well afford that biannual trip to New York and that walk down miracle mile. Looking through the glass-and-chrome counters at the fragrant prophecies extracted from flowers, herbals, fruit, and wood. Picking up the tiny crystal vials that she had only to unstop to “steal a little thunder from a rose,” or have “paradise regained.” The round silver wands that promised that the colored wax they contained would let her lips “say it without a word.” Closing her eyes to “imagine the possibilities” that would come from dusting Silversea, Twilight Skies, or Surefire on her lids. Those bewitchingly beautiful women leaning over the counters chanting the names of Lanvin, Jean Patou, Nina Ricci. She didn’t have the time or desperation for recording, like Evelyn Creton, the number of bruised rose petals and jasmines set to soak in spring water; for pounding musk and civet into orris root and mint; for watching sandalwood and myrrh, sugar and ambergris dry into cakes of incense. She had just enough time to fly back from New York and throw her purchases on the dresser before picking up the natural rhythms of her day, confident that Lancôme had told her to “believe in magic,” so that change was definitely on the way.
Page after page, the woman labored on her hair with the familiar lemon juice and olive oil, and the unfamiliar ragweed, nettle tea, and maidenhair fern. The records were so exact she could almost see her slender fingers massaging that pale face with glycerin, almond paste, and pigeon fat. She had often imagined that the cream-and-ivory women who slept in that canopied bed were incredibly beautiful. She was now haunted by the stinging memories that she could never hope to compete with skin that demanded beige powder and peach rouge. Page after page, until slowly the ingredients began to change.
September 26th—3 parts lanolin
1 part henna
1 part beeswax
November 12th—5 parts mineral oil
1 part raw umber
1 part lanolin
She went back to the top of the book. No, she hadn’t misread these recipes for face cream. Henna. Umber. Henna-umber. Hennaumber—the words began to spin in her mind. It was horribly funny. But the cold kept her shoulders hunched under the blankets and her dry throat made even swallowing difficult, so inside she laughed. Inside, she threw her head back toward the ceiling and howled. Small icy tears formed at the corners of her eyes as the silent laughter pierced through the basement, reaching all the way up to that bedroom for all those nights she went to sleep, her face coated with bleaching cream while she dreamed of being Evelyn Creton in the same canopied bed that Evelyn Creton dreamed of being her.
Unnatural. The word hung on stubbornly as the cold began to deaden her mind. Half of the book was left, but she couldn’t think anymore. She rolled her stiffened body onto the cot and curled into a fetal position under the blankets, cradling the slender volumes next to her chest as she closed her eyes. Unnatural. Did Evelyn Creton ever think that word? Or did she, too, form elaborate visions of afternoon registrations in hotels, morning rendezvous in the back room of his realty office? Tracing his appointment books for the missing hours that could be given to another woman during the day. Because she knew he spent all of his nights at home. She could account for every minute of his evenings. There was dinner, the seven-o’clock news, and then he went out to the mortuary.
Snow was threatening as Willie walked slowly along the wide sidewalk, checking the house numbers against the slip of paper in his hand. He wondered if Lester had made a mistake on the note he’d left at his house: “Meet me at the preecher’s, 000 Fif
th Crescent Drive.” He had never heard of an address like that—which didn’t mean much in this neighborhood. He was through being surprised about anything in Linden Hills. At first he expected 000 to be the house back at the corner, which would have made some sense in a way, but now he was almost in the middle of the block and the numbers kept going up. Did Lester mean 1000 Fifth Crescent Drive? But the number on this ranch house was 528 and there was no way it could jump to a thousand by the end of the street. Willie looked at the note and walked a bit faster. He felt uneasy being out there by himself. No one ever walked in Linden Hills, and he didn’t want to be mistaken for a prowler. Somehow, when he was with Lester, that thought had never occurred to him. He glanced up at the sky; it was a milkish gray and the air had taken on the damp warmth that precedes snow.
“Hey, White. Over here!”
Willie had almost gone past the pickup truck. It was backed into a two-car garage large enough to be a small cottage, but it was dwarfed by the brick Colonial next to it. As he walked up the long driveway, he saw that the hinged signpost on the lawn did read “000.”
“Man, I was heading for the end of the street. I figured you meant one thousand.”
“Nope, this is it.” Lester was carrying boxes marked Xmas from the corner of the garage to the truck.
“What kinda number is 0-0-0?”
“My exact question when he called. But you gotta hear the answer to that one from the Rev himself, and, man, it’s a winner.” He shoved the box into the back of the truck. “I tried to wait for you as long as I could, but he called twice this morning all freaked out about the Parker funeral and getting this stuff over to the church for their Christmas party tomorrow.”
“Yeah, sorry I held you up but I overslept.”
“I figured that’s what happened. I could have called you, but you haven’t broken down and gotten a phone.”
“Once they break down that seventy-five dollar installation fee, I’ll be glad to. Until then, my friends gotta write me letters.”
“Except me—I can’t afford the stamps.”
“Why don’t you tell the truth—you can’t write.” Willie unballed the paper in his hand. “You misspelled ‘preacher.’ It has an ‘a’ in it.”
“Well, everybody can’t be a genius with words like you. That’s why we depend on a phone.”
Willie followed him to the corner and picked up a box. “Ya know, I was thinking about that this morning.”
“About being a genius?”
“Aw, cut it out. About having no phone. What if I’m lying up there sick and need to call an ambulance or something. And I was sorta sick last night. That stuff Parker gave us upset my stomach.” He paused a moment. “Did you get a chance to eat any of that cake Nedeed brought?”
“Naw, I was too tired when I got in. I shoved it in the refrigerator, but Roxanne was still up playing some draggy music, so I knew she was in one of her moods and I’d never see it again. And sure enough, about three pounds of roast beef and almost half the cake was gone when I woke up. She’s got this real funny idea about a diet: you don’t get fat if no one sees you eating. I didn’t care about the meat, but I was gonna have the cake this morning with a cup of coffee. And I knew better than to say a word about it, ’cause she’d just start screeching.”
“I’m sorry you didn’t get a chance to taste it, ’cause I was gonna ask you about that. There was something strange about that cake.”
“You said Nedeed brought it—that should explain it.”
“No, I mean strange because he said his wife made it, but it didn’t taste like she did. I mean, it didn’t taste homemade, ya know?”
“Maybe it wasn’t. He bought it at a bakery or something.”
“But why would he lie about it? He went out of his way to say that his wife baked it. I remember that.”
“Look, he was probably too ashamed to say that she wouldn’t do it for him.” Lester leaned on the box he had just shoved into the truck. “He probably came home at the last minute and said, ‘Woman, fix me a cake to take to the Parkers.’ And she told him to go embalm himself. He’s not gonna stand up in a roomful of people and admit that, not a man like him.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” Willie frowned. “But if he was lying about that, maybe he was lying when he said she wasn’t well enough to come out of the house.”
“Maybe so.” Lester shrugged his shoulders. “Hey, maybe he’s got her roped to his bed for safekeeping. Now, let’s face it. If you were as ugly as Nedeed, wouldn’t you have to chain a woman to your mattress in order to get a little action? So give the poor guy a break.”
They both laughed, Willie not quite as freely as Lester. He remembered the way Nedeed had taken on a whole room of people just the night before—and won. Sure, it was a bit too crazy to think of him chaining a woman to his bed. But he was definitely capable of it.
Willie picked up three boxes and balanced them in one hand. “Hey, you didn’t need any help. This stuff is nothing.”
“Yeah? Just wait till you get to those stacked up in the next corner. This is probably just the tinsel and balls and crap, but those others are full of cans and they’ve gotta weigh fifty pounds each. When Mount Sinai has a food drive, it has a food drive. But I don’t know why he couldn’t have had people drop it all off at the church.”
“You mean this is for the Sinai Christmas party? So this must be Reverend Hollis’s place.”
“Yeah, you know him?”
“Sure, his church has been giving that party for years. My mom always took us when we were small. We went to Sunday school at Caanan Baptist, but when Christmas came all you got was a coupla candy canes and a Bible verse pasted on a tree-shaped card. But over at Sinai, man, they went all the way out: sandwiches, cookies, punch—and real toys. They even had them wrapped up in silver and red paper and piled under this huge tree that seemed to touch the ceiling. And Reverend Hollis always dressed up in this Santa Claus suit and gave them out.” Willie laughed. “Ya know, for years I thought the real Santa Claus was black because of that, and they were just lying to us in those picture books at school.”
“Well, for years I thought he should have been black,” Lester said. “Even though this white guy was sitting me on his knee and asking me what I wanted for Christmas, I knew my dad was the one hauling his ass to get it. And that always confused me. God, you’re dumb when you’re a kid.”
“I guess if my mom could have taken us downtown to one of those stores, I would have had the same problem.” Willie shrugged. “But I always thought Christmas was exciting and a lot of that had to do with Reverend Hollis and Mount Sinai. It’s weird how much I can remember looking forward to that silly party.” He smiled to himself. “But maybe it wasn’t so silly. Ya know, after it was over they drew numbers for turkeys and hams, and one year we even got one. But everybody who came took away an armload of stuff: canned soup, pork and beans, tuna fish. Things you wouldn’t eat for Christmas, but it came in handy later on. I guess his name’s stuck with me because he’d lead us to the main chapel for some kind of blessing before we went home, and he’d stand there in the pulpit with his Santa Claus suit and always end up by saying, ‘Remember, Christ gave you Christmas but Reverend Hollis gave you the cranberry sauce.’”
“You’ve gotta be putting me on.”
“Naw.” Willie shook his head. “It may sound stupid now, but it made good sense when you were a kid because sometimes there would be a can of cranberries in our bag. And, man, that was some beautiful church. Nothing like Canaan Baptist. Double balconies, big brass organ pipes, and even a grand piano. You could almost be swallowed up in the red cushions on those seats. And carpet—they even had carpeting in the recreation room, where the party was. And these long, stained-glass windows that made the walls look like rainbows. It sorta made you understand what people meant when they said, house of God. That was some place to be at Christmas.”
“I wouldn’t know, Reverend Masons.” Lester shoved a box into Willie’s arms.
“How would you?” Willie turned and pushed the box roughly into the truck. “That party wasn’t for the kids in Linden Hills.”
“I mean, we were Episcopalians, Willie. And I never had a reason to go to Sinai Baptist any time of the year. Not that I went anywhere much after I got past the Sunday-school age. I just had a hard time accepting all those things they were supposed to be doing in the name of God. The name of which God? The God of the U.S. Treasury if you look at this place. And you can hate me if you want, but I just can’t get all choked up over some joker giving a kid a Tonka truck once a year when his garage is almost as large as my house. That’s an LTD over there, Willie—did you notice? The only thing I can remember them telling me Jesus ever rode was a donkey.”
“Well, our minister at Canaan only drove an old Buick. And it’s a wonder that he got enough out of that collection plate for the gas and oil.”
“I hear Hollis’s church is so slick they don’t depend on no collection plates. They have this con game called ‘tithing.’ Roxanne thought about converting once when she was into her nationalist fever. Said it was more black to be Baptist. But when she found out that all the members of Sinai were expected to give a tenth of their incomes to the church—before taxes—she decided to stay an Episcopalian and just grow an Afro.”
“Maybe that’s why we never joined. I used to ask my mom why she only took us there for the party and she said the services at Mount Sinai were too dry; the folks at Canaan had more spirit. But thinking about it now, I guess she figured there was no point in trying to compete with folks whose ten percent could outfit a place like that when our hundred percent could barely clothe us. Ya know, I never thought about how she must have felt taking us to that party each year and having to sit in those pews.” Willie stared off into space. “Anyway, it’s water under the bridge. And I don’t care what you say, it did make Christmas seem special, so I always thought that Reverend Hollis was a special man.”
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