The Dear One

by Woodson, Jacqueline

  “I REALLY APPRECIATE YOU LETTING ME STAY HERE, MS. Harris,” Rebecca said to Ma at dinner. “This house is lovely.”

  The words sounded as though they’d been rehearsed a thousand times. I grimaced, picking silently at my tofu. It tasted rubbery and bland beneath the mounds of barbecue sauce.

  Ma and Marion took miniature bites and chewed them slowly. “I’m glad you’re here,” Ma said. “We could use some company in this empty house.”

  “How far is the doctor from here?” Rebecca asked.

  Marion wiped her mouth and took a sip of water. “I found one who accepts Medicaid on Berkeley Street. She sounds like a nice woman. I made an appointment for Wednesday. I was hoping I could take you, or that Catherine would be able to, but my day is chock-full.” She looked at Ma. “Yours isn’t any better, is it?”

  “Not Wednesday,” Ma said. “I have meetings until four-thirty. Then, one of our members is celebrating ninety days’ sobriety, so I want to be there.”

  A few years ago Ma and Marion stopped drinking and started going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. At the meetings other people who have stopped drinking help them get through “one day at a time.” Ma gets scared sometimes and thinks that if things get too hard, she’ll start drinking again. At the meetings people sit in a big circle and say, “My name is Joe S., and I’m an alcoholic.” Then everyone says, “Hi, Joe,” and Joe feels welcomed. Ma cried when she said the word alcoholic for the first time, she told me later. She had never called herself that before, and to her the word sounded like a curse.

  “That’s right,” Marion said, stirring her tofu around in the barbecue sauce. “But Bernadette is free Wednesday. She could take you, Rebecca.”

  “Doesn’t she have school?” I asked.

  Marion shook her head. “She’s taking Wednesday and Thursday off.”

  “When she was my teacher, she never took a day off.”

  “And you’re all the better for it, Feni,” Marion said, laughing.

  “Is Bernadette my age?” Rebecca asked.

  Ma and Marion exchanged looks and smiled. “She’d like to be,” Marion said. “Bernadette’s my girlfriend. We’ve been together more than eight years now.”

  “God, I’m surrounded,” Rebecca mumbled. “Is that the only appointment you could get?”

  “It’s the earliest,” Marion said. “Dr. Greenberg said she couldn’t give us another until a couple of weeks from now, and with you being close to your last trimester and all, Rebecca, we need to get you started on childbirth classes. Catherine and I will alternate as coaches.”

  Rebecca nodded and asked, “What’s ninety days’ sobriety?”

  “Marion and I don’t drink,” Ma said, and she explained Alcoholics Anonymous to Rebecca.

  “Any other questions? Like how much we weigh? Or when do we go to the bathroom?” I asked.

  “That’s enough, Feni,” Ma said sharply.

  Beneath the table Rebecca bumped against my leg hard.

  I bumped her back and made the table shake. Ma and Marion looked at each other and said nothing.

  “Clair mentioned that you’re giving the baby up for adoption,” Ma said. “Do you know the couple?”

  “I’m gonna meet them. They’re coming here sometime soon. All I know is that they can’t have kids and they want a baby, so they’re going to adopt mine. I wasn’t going to let them at first. But me and Ma talked.”

  “Adoption is a good thing,” Ma said. “I mean, if you’re sure that’s what you want.”

  Rebecca shrugged. “I don’t know. Who cares, anyway? I could have more babies. I just hate the way people act about it. You’d think nobody in the world ever got pregnant when they was fifteen. My grandmother had her first baby when she was fifteen. And her grandmother was thirteen. People all the time staring and whispering behind my back. Like I care.”

  “People are going to judge you no matter what you do,” Marion said. “Don’t worry about other people. Worry about you.”

  Rebecca looked at her for a minute before she smiled. “You all think it’s wrong, don’t you? I mean, that I got pregnant.”

  Marion looked at Ma, then back at Rebecca. “Well, it’s certainly not the best time, don’t you think? With Clair sick and you still in high school. Later would have been a lot better.”

  “We’re not here to judge, Rebecca,” Ma said.

  “Then how come you’re here? How come you all are letting me stay here? Feni don’t want me in her house.”

  “Don’t put my name in it,” I said.

  “Well, you don’t, do you?”

  “You want me in your house?” I asked.

  “Free country.”

  “We’re here,” Marion cut in, “because we have the things you need to get through this. There is space and quiet here, most times. And even though it doesn’t seem like it with neither of us being able to go with you to the doctor on Wednesday, we do have time to spend with you and make sure you’re all right.”

  “We’re also here,” Ma added, “because we want to make sure you keep up with your classes, finish school, and get a chance to make yourself into someone before starting a family. You’re a bright girl, Rebecca. We don’t want you to slip through the cracks. We won’t have it.”

  “And,” Marion continued, “we’re here because we’re Clair’s friends.”

  “Friends don’t do stuff like this for each other,” Rebecca said.

  Marion picked up a tiny piece of tofu. “These friends do,” she said.

  “I know this isn’t a good time to be knocked up. I really do want to finish school and everything. . . .”

  “You should have thought of that before,” I said.

  Rebecca glared at me, rolled her eyes, and stuck a chunk of tofu in her mouth.

  We ate mostly in silence. Every now and then someone asked Rebecca a question about her mother or sisters and brothers. So, in pieces, I learned where Rebecca came from.

  “What’s Harlem like these days?” Marion asked at one point.

  “The same,” Rebecca said vaguely.

  “I don’t know Harlem anymore, so I have no idea what ‘the same’ is.”

  “The same raggedness. The same poor people. The same grayness. The same greatness. The same beautiful people,” Rebecca mumbled.

  “Do you miss it?” Ma asked.

  “I’ve only been gone a day!”

  “Don’t get snotty,” I said.

  Rebecca sucked her teeth and turned to Marion. “The thing I know I’m gonna miss the most is all the stuff you see. Like once, I was walking down a Hundred Sixteenth Street. It was last fall when we was having all those hurricanes and it was gray and rainy a lot. But this one day it was just kind of cold and cloudy. I was coming back from buying Ma a pack of cigarettes—”

  “Clair’s smoking these days?” Ma asked.

  “She’s trying to quit. She started smoking because of her nerves,” Rebecca said before continuing. “Anyway, there were these three kids and they were sitting on the stairs of this burned-out building. One of them had a Slinky—one of those green plastic ones—and he was trying to make it walk down the stairs like it does in the commercial. Only it wasn’t doing it right. It would just go down one stair and stop. But the kid kept trying and his friends kept watching it.”

  “That trick never works for anybody,” I said.

  “But something about that . . . it just made me realize something,” Rebecca said. “It just made me think that that’s what everything’s all about—things not working out the way they supposed to, the way somebody promised they would.” She looked at Marion again. “It’s always like that. Always the same.”

  Marion shook her head slowly. “I know what you mean,” she said.

  Ma was staring intently at Rebecca. “I look at you and see Clair all over again.”

  “But I’m not Clair. I’m Rebecca!” Rebecca said, without blinking.

  “Do I know that!” Ma laughed, rising from the table. “I wish I could hav
e dessert with you, but I want to try to make a meeting tonight.” Ma carried her plate to the sink.

  “I think I’ll go with you, Catherine,” Marion said, searching her bag for cigarettes. She put one in her mouth before rising.

  “There’s a cake in the freezer. If you put it in the microwave on three, it’ll be room temperature.”

  At the doorway Ma said, “Make sure the kitchen is clean, Feni. I’ll see you both later.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow night, maybe,” Marion said, pulling on her coat before they disappeared out the door.

  “Your moms is really pretty. She has that pretty skin. She probably never had a pimple.” Rebecca ran her fingers lightly across her forehead. “Marion’s nice too. I thought she’d be some big butch on a motorcycle or something.”

  “She has a motorcycle.”

  I got up and began piling the dishes into the dishwasher. Rebecca took one last bite of tofu, then pushed her dish toward me.

  “They’re nice and everything, but me, if I was going to be somebody’s mother, I’d make a little time for dinner. They got up from this table like bats out of hell.”

  “They have careers and stuff. Ma works hard to make ends meet.”

  “You sound like a recording,” Rebecca said. “And anyway, you guys are doing pretty well meeting ends. How many rooms in this house. Five? Six?”

  “Well, she does have a career,” I said.

  “Well, she has a daughter too!”

  I sprinkled some soap on the few dishes in the washer and closed the door. “That’s none of your business, and besides, I don’t mind. I like being by myself.”

  Rebecca leaned back. “She has to work on making tofu. It’s really good when you know how to make it.”

  “I hate the way that stuff tastes.”

  “That’s because you’re not grown up enough. Tofu is for mature people like me. It’s like wine. Maybe when you’re older, you’ll like it. Next time tell your mother to throw a hot dog in the microwave for you and just us ladies will eat the tofu.”

  “My mother doesn’t like that junk either. Neither does Marion. They left most of it on their plates. It tastes like barbecued rubber bands.”

  Rebecca stared at the tablecloth.

  “I’m sorry,” I said quickly.

  “For what? For not knowing nothing? You’re just some rich kid way out here in the country. What do you know?”

  “Seton isn’t the country. It’s the suburbs.”

  “Well, you don’t learn nothing in the suburbs either. You stay stuck up in this mansion and don’t talk to nobody. You just a little girl anyway. I don’t care what you got to say.”

  “This isn’t a mansion,” I said, twisting the dish towel in my hands. “It’s just a house. And it’s my house and you’re in it.”

  “Like I want to be. I hate this house. I hate Seton. And I hate you and your mother’s nasty way of cooking tofu.” She got up from the table and made her way slowly to the stairs. “I never wanted to come here. I wanted to stay where I was and have this baby. But my stupid mother thinks it’s the nineteenth century and people shouldn’t know I’m knocked up. Well, I am, so everybody better face the facts. And I’m not some street kid who has to be taken in by a rich family. I got my own family and my own friends, and I don’t need to come all this way from home to bring some eleven- or twelve-year-old who doesn’t know her neck from her elbow into reality!” She stomped up the stairs.

  Eleven

  THE ROOM WAS DARK AND QUIET WHEN I CAME UPSTAIRS. Rebecca looked too still to be sleeping, so I pulled the curtains open. Behind the trees the moon was full. I stared at it for a long time, liking the way the bare branches shot up through its whiteness.

  “Don’t even try talking to me about nothing, ’cause I don’t feel like talking,” Rebecca said hoarsely. She had been crying.

  “I don’t want to talk to you.” I went over to my own bed and began to get undressed. “I just don’t like you coming into my house thinking you can run things.”

  Rebecca turned onto her side. “I don’t care about this house, Feni,” she said softly. “I don’t care about you or your mother or anything. If it was up to me, I’d be back in Manhattan with my sisters and brothers. I’d be back with my boyfriend and my friends. I have friends. I miss them too. They’re gonna write me here. You just wait. I’m gonna be getting mail every day. My friends have lots of money to pay for stamps and envelopes and stuff. They have fancy cars and nice clothes.”

  “You always talk about money and all the stuff people have.” I climbed under the covers and put my hands behind my head.

  “That’s what counts. That’s what matters. The more money you have, the more power you have. You can do all kinds of things if you have a lot of money.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you don’t know! Your family is loaded, so don’t come asking me ‘like what.’ You can take trips to expensive places and buy houses and raise families. If you ain’t got no money or you have to quit your job like my mother did when she got sick, you have to get money from the city to feed all of your babies, and then even after that some of your babies still be hungry. Plus, everybody likes you when you have money. Everybody wants to be your friend.”

  “Just because you have a lot of money doesn’t mean you have a lot of friends.”

  “Well, maybe not you, ’cause you the type people don’t want to go near. My friend Cloe was like you. She didn’t hardly talk to nobody. She kept all of this stuff inside her all the time.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She got stupid and cracked out.”

  “She went crazy?”

  Rebecca looked at me, letting her mouth drop open slightly. “Crack, Feni! C-r-a-c-k. Crack. It’s little white rocks you buy in a vial and smoke. Hello?”

  “I know what crack is. I just didn’t know that’s how you talked about somebody who was using it.”

  “Learn the language already,” Rebecca said. “God! You’re black. Talk like it.”

  “Kiss off!”

  “Anyway,” Rebecca continued, “Cloe lost it after that.”

  “How old was she?” I asked, not believing that someone young could do something that stupid.

  “Fifteen like me. Only difference between me and Cloe is that she got stupid to get rid of those demons in her head. Real stupid.”

  “Well, I don’t have any demons in my head.”

  “You have those walls all up around you. That’s just as bad. Come a day you gonna want to tear them down brick by brick and gonna find that the cement is all hard. What you gonna do then?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. These walls are about as real as those talking dolls you said you had. You might think you know a lot, but it’s all in your imagination.”

  “I never said I knew a lot. You said it. So it must mean I do. I know you want to ask me all kinds of questions about this baby, but you’re too polite. Rich people don’t do that, do they? They wait until someone offers up the information.”

  “I don’t care anything about your being pregnant.”

  “Now, that’s a lie. I saw how you was looking at my stomach when I got out of that car. And all during dinner you couldn’t take your eyes off of me.”

  I didn’t say anything. It was hard to believe how right she was.

  “Well, go ahead, ask me. We got to live together for the next three months, so you might as well get all that stuff out of your system.”

  “I told you I don’t care,” I said as a thousand questions filled my mind. I wanted to know what had happened, how she’d gotten pregnant. I wanted to know where she and Danny had done it and how many times.

  “You want to know if it’s a boy or girl, right?” Then without waiting she said, “Well, it’s a boy.”

  “How do you know—”

  “Well, I didn’t find out what it’s gonna be, ’cause I can’t keep it, but—”

  “Why don’t you want to keep him?”


  “See, I knew you wanted to know.”

  “You just wanted to tell me, so you might as well go on.”

  “I don’t want to be like my moms. She had to leave school because of me. And then all her friends went on to do all this cool stuff like your moms and Marion. When I first found out I was pregnant, I was going to keep him. But I could always have more,” she said, pulling at the crocheted balls on her bedspread. “Anyway, the Robertses, that’s that couple that can’t have no kids, they’re rich like you all, so he’ll be happy.”

  “Just because you’re rich doesn’t mean you’re happy,” I said.

  “Then trade beds with me.”

  “What?”

  “Trade beds with me. You got that big bed with that soft mattress. I know, ’cause I felt it. That’s how your whole life’s been, isn’t it? All rich and soft.”

  “You must be crazy!”

  “See, I knew you was selfish. Here I am all pregnant and you won’t even give over your bed for one lousy night.”

  “Take it!” I said, pulling my pillows off the bed and walking over to Rebecca’s side of the room. “Is that how you get your way—by manipulating?”

  Rebecca picked up her pillow and headed for my bed, smirking. “Manipu-what?”

  “Look it up!” I said, climbing in bed and turning away from her.

  “Whatever it is,” she whispered, “it works!”

  In the darkness I gave Rebecca the finger and closed my eyes.

  Twelve

  “YOU KNOW WHAT DITES DO TOGETHER?” REBECCA whispered loudly. She was closest to the window now, and I had to look past the outline of her stomach to see into the night, the attic smell of the mattress wafting up around me.

  Downstairs, I heard Ma’s key in the door, then the sound of her heels clicking toward the den.

  “I don’t care,” I said.

  “You know what anybody does together?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You ever been with a boy?”

  “You’re so damned nosy. Why don’t you go to sleep already? Isn’t your baby tired?”

  “No, he’s not tired, and I’m telling your mother you cursed if you don’t answer my questions.”

  “I don’t care if you tell my mother,” I lied.