“Huh?” Neena asked, turning to face him. She knew that Angela Davis was too young for Montgomery; she assumed he was joking.
“Angela Davis,” he said. “You know who she is, don’t you? She was a fine something back in the day with her militant self. Yeah, that Angela Davis had a head of hair, hair didn’t even budge when they turned those fire hoses on us.”
She looked down again, at the worn vinyl flooring, and said Jesus to herself. Then suggested that they stop at one of the thousands of liquor stores on Baird Boulevard so that he could get what he liked to drink, thinking the quicker for him to pass out with. He told her, no need, he carried his pleasures with him at all times, right in his car trunk. She was relieved that at least he didn’t say in his pants.
He turned into the parking lot of a roadside motel that boasted twenty-four-hour cable. “Lovely rooms at this place,” he whispered in her ear as he checked in with a debit card, then once inside the room that smelled of Lysol and bug spray he tossed his coat on the bed, barely giving Neena a chance to hang hers in the closet before he was grabbing at her, pushing his fingers through her hair again, telling her how much he loved her hair. She held him tightly and sniffled and when he pulled himself back to look at her, to ask her what was wrong, was she thinking about that two-timing husband of hers, she looked down at the wheat-colored carpet and mumbled out that she had just had a female procedure done the day before and she was limited in her womanly abilities, forcing the tears again, “but oh, my, my, my, we can improvise,” she said, as she pulled him in a slow drag and used her knee the quicker to bring his essence down, which badly spotted her skirt, thank goodness it was black, wool.
She went into the bathroom and wiped the skirt and while she was at it washed her stockings with a thimble-sized bottle of shampoo. She tried to focus on everything outside of herself: the emerald green of the shampoo seeping into the nylon, the sweet minty smell; anything so that her interior would remain integrated, so that she wouldn’t separate from herself and start floating around in this bathroom and see herself with an objective detachment, that she’d just gone into a ghetto bar and allowed herself to be picked up and brought to some roadside dive. She hung the skirt and stockings from the showerhead even noticing the graceful way the neck to the showerhead curved, like a swan’s, she thought, as she went back into the bedroom and sat in her turtleneck and panties next to Ramsey while he ha ha-ed at the television. “A Green Acres marathon on tonight. I swear this is some funny shit,” he said. He seemed so wide awake, so sober, she wondered if it was just water in that bottle, not vodka.
She sat there for a full two hours watching the unintelligible banter, trying not to think about her mother; when her mother was buoyant she would sometimes talk in an accent like that, calling Neena and Tish darling the way Zsa Zsa was saying it now; whatever else she was saying had Ramsey shaking the bed, he was laughing so hard. She rolled her eyes up into her head, thinking he was intentionally trying to spite her by not finally passing out.
She got up to go to the bathroom. She locked the bathroom door and sat on the side of the tub and asked herself what was she even doing here. She’d not done anything this low-budget ever. She tried to convince herself that she’d only gone into that little neighborhood bar in West Philly because of the lit apostrophe, because she felt that’s what her life had come down to as well, the nomenclature blacked out, the apostrophe still glowing orange-red though. Told herself that she’d only left with Ramsey because he had wide shoulders and she thought that he’d be content to let her lay her head close to his heart for a while. She told herself she’d just wanted to fall asleep counting heartbeats. Wondered if that was even possible anymore, did such softness even exist.
The stockings were swinging as they hung from the showerhead. She felt them. They were damp, but dry enough, she thought, deciding she’d tell him she was ready to go. Go where? Where? Nan’s!? She felt a scream edging up her throat. She certainly couldn’t go to Nan’s in the middle of the night like this. Couldn’t go there period now that she’d acted like a common street whore. Nan would smell her wrongdoing the way she always had. She jammed a fist into her mouth so she wouldn’t scream. Sat down on the side of the tub to try to focus on her breathing. The stockings swaying from the showerhead made shadows on the wall and she was getting the picture of a fresh-killed piglet swinging over the sawdust-covered floor of a Ninth Street butcher shop. The image making her think of her mother, the way her mother would sometimes stop at the butcher shop window and stare in at the piglets swaying and twirling, blood dripping from their mouths frozen in midair. Freeda would point to the mouths. “It’s so sad,” she’d say. “They’re smiling; probably thought they were headed for a romp in the mud.”
Neena tried to shake the image. Did now what she’d always done when she needed to distract herself from thinking about her mother. Blamed Nan. Nan with her tightly curled hair, her oversized patent leather purse swinging from her arm, her look of bewildered sadness during Neena’s growing-up years when Freeda was hours overdue for retrieving Neena and Tish and Nan would slant her chin toward the traverse rod as she closed the gold-brocaded drapes for the night at her living room window. “Looks like your mother won’t be right back after all,” she’d whisper. “Look like y’all here with me for a spell.” So many times Neena had felt a brick drop inside as she heard those words, and she’d fault Nan for her mother’s failure to return. Faulted Nan right now for her circumstance of sitting on the side of this tub. Had Nan just given her Tish’s whereabouts, she could be with her sister right now. What she wouldn’t give to hear Tish’s voice in the real. To be so close, too close, and unable to feel Tish grab her with such a ferocity. My sister, Tish would say, and then pull Neena in a tight hug. And Neena would pretend that she was above such sentimental gushing, even as she’d yield herself so completely to the closeness. If not for Nan withholding Tish, Neena could right now be rubbing her hand over Tish’s stomach, encouraging the baby forming there to keep up the fight. The baby would sense her goodness, her worth. The baby would know that Neena didn’t have the devil in her like Nan always said. Tish knew it too. Nan was really the one with the devil in her. If not for Nan she could right now be turning down the covers in her sister’s guest room. Imagined a leather pull-out sofa, satin-trimmed blanket, flannel sheets with pink pansies.
Damn you, Nan, she said out loud even as she heard Ramsey on the other side of the door gawking at Green Acres. Damn you, she said again, feeling that boulder come up in her chest that often surfaced as a result of Nan, separating her from Nan.
She’d first felt that separation when she was only seven, Tish not quite four, 1978 and Freeda had been gone for about a year. Nan called Neena and Tish in that urgent voice, interrupting their game of jump rope in their cutoff jeans and fraying canvas sneakers. She had a hot bath waiting for them and she scrubbed them down herself with Ivory Soap as if she didn’t trust them to get themselves clean enough. She slathered their elbows and knees with petroleum jelly. She hard-pressed their hair with VO5 that added a sweetness to the acrid scent of burning hair. She clothed them in white cotton blouses that had been freshly line-dried, starched, and ironed, and newly made pink and white gingham skirts with kick-out pleats. It felt like Easter to Neena because she was wearing a nylon slip and her barely walked-in patent leather shoes.
She and Tish looked like Kewpie dolls as Nan paraded them out for a nice long ride on the D bus to Wanamaker’s department store in town. “These here are my grand,” she beamed in response to the multitude of comments from strangers on the bus of how cute the little girls were, how well-groomed. Repeating it over again as they walked along Chestnut Street, and even as they spread out at the counter in Wanamaker’s basement and Neena and Tish laughed as they swiveled on the red leather padded counter stools and Nan ordered them each a vanilla shake and a foot-long hotdog on a hoagie roll. Afterward Nan said they would walk some to help digest the meal. They walked for what seemed like miles s
outh on Broad Street, walked so long that Neena’s church shoes were beginning to rub against the backs of her feet and she could feel holes forming in the heels of her lacey anklet socks. “Where we going, Nan?” she asked. “My shoes hurt. Will we be there soon?”
“We’re going where we’re going and we’ll be there when we get there,” Nan said and Neena clamped her lips together then because she knew when Nan talked like that it could mean a back hand against her mouth if she kept pressing Nan. She tried to ignore the feel of imitation patent leather against her heels even as she wanted to remind Nan that she herself had said the shoes were just for church, that they were cheap shoes with a plastic lining and would mess up their feet if they kept them on for too long. She wanted to ask Tish if her feet hurt too but Tish was on the other side of Nan swinging her arm happily as she walked, and anyhow Neena was now distracted from the feel of the tender skin being rubbed away from her heels because now they turned one corner after another and the streets got smaller and smaller until they were like alleyways that could hardly contain the oversized cats that kept jumping from the steel trash cans, and even turning the cans over so that Neena and Tish and Nan had to step out into the street to avoid the strewn contents that smelled mostly of fish.
Nan stopped finally as they walked through the tiniest alley of a block. She stood in front of a narrow house that looked to Neena as if it wanted to collapse, probably would have fallen long ago, Neena thought, if it wasn’t connected to the houses on either side that appeared to be holding that one up, the front door a marred board of splintered wood, a hole where the knob should be.
“Come on,” Nan said as she pulled both of them by their hands; her voice sounded so cloudy as if she needed to clear her throat. They walked up the three short steps, the steps smooth and depressed in the middle. Nan knocked hard on the door with the foot of her balled hand and then looked at her hand and then looked around as if trying to find something to wipe her hands on. Neena noticed all of a sudden then that the orange-red-tinged air was being overtaken by the night, either that or this tight alleyway of a street was just darker than the rest of the world and her stomach started turning in on itself and she was about to risk a backhand to her mouth and ask Nan where had she brought them. Plus Neena was worried about Tish; Tish was starting to hum the Winnie the Pooh song and Neena knew that Tish only hummed like that when she was afraid. But before Neena could say anything the door crunched open and a man stood in the doorway looking at them, and then looking away and then saying, damn, dragging the word out. A thick gold cross swung from around his neck and kept hitting against a splatter of a grease stain on his pale blue tie, his suit also pale blue, a white handkerchief bunched into his lapel pocket that he pulled out now and rubbed across his brow, his brow dripping with sweat and no doubt, Neena thought, the thick pomade that sat on the top of his badly processed hair. Neena noticed then that his pants zipper was undone, and she guessed that he became aware of it in the same instant because suddenly a briefcase appeared right there, obstructing Neena’s view into his nasty manhood.
“I’m looking for Freeda, I’m her mother, a lady from my church said she heard that Freeda was spotted living over this way,” Nan said and Neena’s heart stopped beating right then because Neena had not seen her mother in over a year. Neena had wished for her mother’s appearance whenever there was a chance a wish might come true, like right before she blew out the candles on her last birthday cake, or when a star seemed to shoot across the sky, or she caught a whiskered dandelion, even before she fell asleep on Christmas Eve. Please let my mother be standing here when I open my eyes, she’d wish. And now here was Nan calling her mother’s name as if her mother might be as close as the other side of this greasy-headed man slopping his false teeth around in his mouth. Neena pushed past him. “Mommy, mommy,” she cried as she ran into the house. “Mommy, it’s me, it’s Neena.”
A short hallway ended on a wide open room that smelled of turnips and whiskey. A rotating fan chopped at the air in the corner and Neena’s eye followed the sound to the other side of the room beyond a mountain of rumpled bedclothes. Then she saw the mattress, the slight woman on the mattress breathing to the beat of the fan; her lacey full slip was rolled all the way up to her waist. Her nakedness glistened and made a screeching sound in Neena’s head like a fork hard-scraping a plate. Neena rushed to cover her with one of the crumpled sheets. She smoothed the sheet over her just as Nan and Tish ran in. Nan calling frantically for Neena, Tish holding tightly to Nan’s hand while her other hand covered her eyes, saying that she was afraid in here. “Let’s go, Nan. I’m scared, I’m scared,” Tish pleaded.
Nan and Neena just stood there looking at each other, the woman snoring on the floor between them. Nan was breathing hard and choking back sobs. “I wanted her to see you and your sister,” she said. “I wanted her to see what she was losing if she didn’t turn her life around. But she’s of the condition to see nothing right about now, already lost you and your sister far as I’m concerned. Come on, Neena.” Nan reached out her hand. “She’s dead to us, let’s go, let’s go.”
“She’s not dead,” Neena said. “She’s breathing, Nan, don’t you hear her, she’s not dead, she’s only asleep.”
“She’s drunk—”
“She’s not drunk either. She’s only sleeping and I’m staying here ’til she wakes up.” Neena kneeled on the mattress and shook her mother.
“Neena, get up from there, you don’t know what kind of germs living in that mattress,” Nan said, tugging with one hand the tail of the starched white blouse that Neena wore, holding fast to Tish with her other hand. Tish with her eyes still closed, whimpering, working herself up to a cry.
Neena pulled herself from her grandmother’s grasp. “Come on, wake up, Mommy, it’s me, Neena, your little girl. Wake up and see how cute I look with my hair pressed out. It’s me, Mommy. It’s Neena, your little doll baby.” She pushed at Freeda to make her turn around, then leaned in so she could kiss her mouth the way she’d always kissed her mother’s mouth. Except that now the face was in full view and Neena could see that this was not her mother’s face, the mouth curving back into a smile certainly not Freeda’s gushy smile, the arms reaching for Neena, pulling her all the way onto the mattress not Freeda’s arms. The arms held her so tightly she could barely breathe. The voice in her ear saying, My baby, my little girl, you came back to me.
“Lord, Jesus,” Nan said on an extended whisper, “you not Freeda,” yelling then for the woman to turn her grandbaby loose, turn her loose right now.
Neena struggled against the woman and the woman held her harder still. She called Neena baby and sweetie and honey and Neena listened for a real name, thinking that if she came across a little girl with that name she could ask her where her mother was and if the girl didn’t know then Neena could tell her. Maybe too that little girl might know where Freeda was; perhaps she’d also been taken to the wrong house by her grandmother just like Neena. Now Neena gave in to the woman’s arms. If Freeda mistook another little girl for Neena, Neena would want that little girl to hug Freeda as well. Now the woman cried, and Neena said, “Don’t cry, Mommy, it’s okay,” even as Nan pulled and yanked and tried to peel the woman’s arms snaked around Neena’s back.
“Neena, you lost your mind, that’s not your mother. Get up from there,” Nan screamed, and Neena wished that there was some way that she could give Nan a signal to let her know that of course that wasn’t Freeda; she was only trying to make the woman feel not so sad. She kissed the woman’s chin and then Nan landed her open hand against the side of Neena’s face. Neena didn’t feel the sting of the slap, felt instead the woman’s arms loosening from around her.
Now Tish let out an extended shriek at the sound of the slap. Tish with her eyes still pressed shut crying, “What’s happening? Let’s go, please let’s go.”
“Who’s hitting her, why are you hitting her?” the woman asked, pointing her finger in the wrong direction toward the wall, her e
yes open but unfocused. “Hit her again and I’ll make you pay,” she said.
“You need to pray to be delivered from this hell,” Nan said as she snatched Neena up from the mattress. “And you need to know if you lay down with pigs you wake up smelling like shit,” she said to Neena as she shook her by the arm. “How dare you kiss such vermin.”
Neena glanced down at the mattress to see if Nan’s words had made the woman cry harder. The woman, though, was already snoring again; Neena already missing the tight thinness of the woman’s arms. Tish screamed inconsolably for them to leave, please could they leave.
They stumbled back toward the front door, Nan shepherding them out of the house onto the narrow alleyway of a street where night was starting to fall; the night somewhat kind at that moment the way the blue-gray air blurred the harshness of that block so that even the cats looked as if they could have been cuddly pets. Nan pulled Neena and Tish close under her arms as they walked, consoling them, and herself, with It’s all right, thank God that wasn’t your mother, it’s all gonna be all right. “Neena, your mouth okay? I didn’t mean to have to hit you like that but that was urgent. Lord Jesus, Neena. You too young to even understand.”
Neena started with the questions. “Who was the lady, Nan? Where do you think her little girl is at? Who do you think her little girl is? What was wrong with the lady? Where do you think Mommy’s at now, Nan? What do you think she’s doing? Who do you think she’s with? You think she’s safe? Is she all right? Huh, Nan, do you think my mother’s all right?”
Nan tried to explain the woman’s condition by saying that she’d fallen into a badness of mind. That her mind made her do things that weren’t the right things to do. Extended that explanation to Freeda, why they hadn’t heard from Freeda, Freeda was suffering from a badness of mind. Tish cried then that she was afraid of Freeda, please save her from catching her mother’s badness.
Trading Dreams at Midnight Page 9