“I don’t think I’m too good for anyone,” I said. “But nobody will play with me.”
Peacie pulled out a cigarette with her long fingers, lit it with a kitchen match, and blew the smoke out over my head. “Humph. And why do you suppose that is?”
“Because my mother is a third base.”
Peacie held still as a photo for one second. Then she took her feet off the chair and slowly leaned over so that her face was next to mine. I could smell the vanilla extract she dabbed behind her ears every morning; I could see the red etching of veins in her eyes. I thought she was going to tell me a secret or quietly laugh—the moment seemed full of a kind of mirthful restraint—and I grinned companionably. “She is,” I said, in an effort to prolong and enlarge the moment.
But I had misread Peacie completely, for she reached out to grab me, squeezing my arms tightly. “Don’t you never say that again. Don’t you never think it, neither!” Her voice was low and terrible. “If I wasn’t resting my aching feet, if I wasn’t on my well-deserved break, I would get right out this chair and introduce your mouth to a fresh bar of soap.” She let me go and put her feet back up on the chair. The ash was long on her cigarette; the smoke undulated upward, uncaring. Peacie would not break from staring at me; in a way, that was worse than the way she’d squeezed me.
I began to cry; I had called my mother a third base rather in the same way I would have called her a brunette. I didn’t know exactly what it meant. I knew only that the kids in my neighborhood had once called her that and that it seemed to be funny—it certainly made them laugh. Those kids were all older than I; I was the youngest by three years, so it was doubtful they’d have been interested in playing with me anyway. But they had had a good time calling my mother a third base that day; they had giggled and jostled one another and continued laughing as they walked away.
“You hurt me!” I told Peacie. “I’m telling my mother!”
“If you wake her up,” Peacie said, “I’ll wear you out like you ain’t never been wore out before.”
“I wish only Mrs. Gruder would come here because I hate you!” My voice cracked, betraying my intention to sound fierce. I walked away, headed for the comfort of the out-of-doors: the high, white clouds, the singing insects, the wildflowers that grew at the base of the telephone poles. Behind me, I heard Peacie say, “I like Mrs. Gruder, too! Umhum, sure do. Mrs. Gruder, I like.”
Eleanor Gruder was our current nighttime caretaker, who stayed until ten every evening. She wasn’t mean, like Peacie could be, but she wasn’t very interesting, either. After she’d put my mother to bed and was waiting for her husband to come and get her, she’d sit on the sofa with her hands folded in her lap, staring out at nothing, a little smile on her face. At those times, she reminded me of Baby McPherson, the retarded girl who used to live in our neighborhood and spent her days sitting out on the top step of her front porch, smiling in the same vacant way, her underpants showing. I would sit in my pajamas waiting with Mrs. Gruder, sometimes reading, sometimes dozing, and then, after her husband pulled up outside the house and honked for her, she would remind me to turn out the porch light and lock the door. Always, I turned out the light—electricity was expensive. But I never locked the front door. If I needed to get out, it would have to be quickly.
Mrs. Gruder was probably in her sixties and to my mind ancient. She was a big, fat, strong woman who liked to comb my hair, which fell to my waist. She did not jerk and pull and mutter like Peacie; rather she was almost worshipful, and so gentle I fell into a kind of starey-eyed hypnosis. She was married to a German man named Otto who gave accordion lessons and would never meet your eye. I had once heard my mother wondering aloud to Peacie about where he came from and what in the world he was doing here.
Mrs. Gruder was kind, but she made me feel suffocated. She offered me chocolate hearts wrapped in gold foil that came all the way from Munich, but it was the dark, bitter chocolate that I did not like. She read books to me, but her voice was flat and lifeless and she did not make up anything extra, or ask questions about what I thought was going to happen, or dramatize using different voices. These were things my mother always did. Even Peacie would stand still against the doorjamb, dust rag in hand, to hear my mother read.
My mother had perfected speaking in coordination with the rising and falling action of her respirator. She could talk only on exhalation, but most people couldn’t tell the difference between it and normal speech. Also, she was able to come out of her “shell,” the chest-to-waist casing to which the ventilator hose was attached, for an hour or two at a time. At those times, she practiced what was called frog breathing, using a downward motion on her tongue to force bits of air into her lungs. Seeing my mother out of the shell always gave me a kind of jazzy thrill; she almost looked normal.
Now I crouched silently and watched Peacie’s slim ankles as she mounted the sagging steps, one, two, three. I reached out my hand but stopped short of grabbing her. Just before she opened the screen door, she said, “I seen you. Devil.”
“I don’t care,” I called up through the floorboards.
“You’d best get out from under there,” she said. “Get stains all over your clothes.”
“No!” But I whispered it. I lay on my back and looked at the sunlight knifing its way through the cracks between the floorboards, admiring the way it fell like a series of golden veils. Something could be made of all this. When Suralee got home from shopping with her mother, I would enlist her creative services. We would make this a place where we could talk comfortably about our plans to walk to Memphis.
I finally had a friend. Suralee Halloway—my age almost exactly, our birthdays were one month apart—had moved here in February and lived with her mother, the Divorcée, at the end of the block. Noreen Halloway had hair like Marilyn Monroe, and she had the mole above the finely formed lip, too. But her face was wide and bland, her body short and pudgy, probably due to the divinity she ate before bed every night. She wore high heels and tight skirts and low-cut blouses and jangling bracelets and wide belts that must have been painful. She tottered off to her job as a doctor’s receptionist every morning, full of immoderate good cheer, and returned pale and defeated-looking. She would come wordlessly into the house, open a Tab, slip off her shoes, and lie on the sofa reading a magazine, rubbing one foot with the other in a way that drove Suralee crazy. Then Noreen would make dinner, and the dinner was always awful. Suralee liked to eat dinner with us, even if all we were having was fried gizzards, rice, and greens. Little as we had, my mother told her she was welcome anytime—and so was her mother. Not that her mother ever came.
Suralee did not get along with other kids. They could not see her charms. But I did: her very name; her double-jointedness; her new-from-the-box saddle shoes with their bubble-gum-colored soles; her natural curls; the way my mother called her “overly mature”; her wild black dog named Shooter; her artistic ability; the cut-out photos of movie stars she kept on her walls. Most admirable was her skill at playing every one of her parts in our many plays with total sincerity—I believed she was a bus driver, a distraught mother, a dead person, a movie star, Jesus of Nazareth. She imitated Peacie perfectly—I thought even Peacie liked it.
I lay down and daydreamed, thought of how I might decorate under the porch, just to get started. I had scarves I could use. I could bring some dishes under here, some playing cards. Old magazines. I could make it an office, a place for Suralee and me to write our plays.
After a while, I heard the screen door squeak open and then Peacie saying, “Didn’t I tell you get out from under there?”
I stayed silent.
“Diana?”
I held my breath.
“I know you there and I’m telling you for the last time to get out.” She waited, then played her trump card, “And beside that, your mama want you.”
I scrambled out from under the porch and pushed past Peacie. “It’s ‘Your mama wants you,’” I said. Peacie pulled the door shut after me
and pointedly hooked the latch. “And it’s ‘besides,’ ” I said.
“Says who?”
“Says me.”
“That ain’t nobody. Wash your hands now, we fixing to eat breakfast. You probably got the ringworm, playing in the dirt like a dog. And no shoes as per usual. You wash up good. I made biscuits, and my sister sent strawberry jam eat with them.”
“I want sausage gravy with them.”
She stared at me. “You best wash out your ears, too. I ain’t hear nobody say nothing ’bout no sausage gravy.”
I went into the dining room, my mother’s bedroom, to see what she wanted. Peacie had done her makeup well this morning; she was even wearing a little blue eye shadow. She had a red ribbon tied in her short black hair, and she was wearing her gold hoop earrings. She wore a man’s white shirt over black pants, and red Keds. I moved over to her chair. “Bend down,” she said, and when I did, she kissed my forehead. “Good morning.” Her mouth smelled like Ipana toothpaste.
“Good morning.”
“Scratch my left arm, will you? Just above the elbow.” Although my mother could not move anything below her neck, she could feel everything. I scratched for her until she said, “Good.” Then she said, “Are you making trouble already? Did I hear Peacie yelling at you?”
“No, ma’am.”
She stared at me, a little smile on her face.
My shoulders sagged. “Yes. But it was her fault.” I backed up to sit at the foot of my mother’s unmade bed. Later, I would have to make it, and God forbid there be a wrinkle anywhere when I was done. Peacie wanted the sheets pulled so tight you could flip a coin off them. “Why do they have to be so tight?” I once asked, and Peacie said, “On account I said so, first and foremost. Nextly, it look nice.” She sniffed in her high and mighty way and turned away.
“Crazy old fool,” I muttered under my breath.
“What’d you say?” she asked, and I said nothing. “That’s right,” she said. “That’s the sum total your opinion.”
I’d been making the bed, feeding my mother, helping her with the female urinal, and putting her limbs through range of motion since I was five. Peacie wanted me to start learning more so that we could let Mrs. Gruder go; we’d never really been able to afford her. But if we didn’t have her, all of my mother’s care from 5 P.M. until when Peacie came at six the next morning would fall to me. I was simply not ready. Nor did I want to be.
I felt it was enough being alone with my mother at night, which I’d been doing since I was ten—information that we went to great lengths to hide from our social worker, Susan Hogart, who was due for another visit any day now. Peacie’s sister, Willa, had been instructed that if anyone called her house asking for Janice, she was to assume the role. My mother and Peacie both made references to “Janice” in ways casual and believable whenever Susan came. For my part, after a few cursory exchanges, I was always sent outside to play. My mother told Susan it was because she didn’t want anything that came up in their discussions to be upsetting to me, but in fact it was so that I wouldn’t reveal the fact that “Janice Peterson” was me.
“Did you hear anything last night?” my mother asked.
“Yes, ma’am. Real loud gunshots over in Shakerag.” Peacie lived in Shakerag, a community of Negroes not far from us. I’d never been there, but everybody knew about it. They had their own grocery store there, their own café and juke joint, their own ways.
“It wasn’t gunshots,” my mother said.
“What was it, then?”
She looked at me, seeming to consider something, then changed her mind.
The noise from Shakerag hadn’t bothered me. I always slept lightly at night, getting up a few times to change my mother’s position or give her the bedpan or a drink of water—and always fell easily back to sleep to the distant, humming sound of her respirator. Suralee asked me once if it wasn’t awful getting up so often at night, and I told her no, privately wondering if it wouldn’t be boring sleeping straight through. I had seen things, getting up at various hours of the night: shooting stars, the glowing eyes of an owl or some other animal in the backyard, spectacular dawns, sometimes headlights from the nearby highway, the beams elongated and searching and melancholy. When the wind rustled the trees at night, it bordered on being scary, so there was a coziness to being inside and watching. I liked the nighttime anyway, for its qualities of mystery, drama, even evil; I felt privileged to be able to look at the glowing hands of the alarm clock and see it reading 4:17 A.M. I might not be allowed to drink coffee or wear lipstick or hike my skirts up as high as I wanted them, but I could say with complete honesty that I was up “all hours of the night.”
We had an arrangement with Riley Coombs, the old man who lived across the street, whereby if either my mother or I needed someone in an emergency, he would come, but it was of little comfort to me. Riley didn’t move very quickly. He didn’t hear so well. Luckily, the only time we’d needed him was one winter night when we had a storm and the power went out. My mother hadn’t needed to call me; when her respirator stopped, the silence woke me as surely as an alarm clock would have. I raced downstairs to the backup generator, but when I flicked the switch it didn’t go on. She told me calmly to go and get Riley. She was able to frog-breathe long enough for him to come over and make the relatively minor adjustment that was required. My mother wanted to pay him, but he refused, standing there in his long johns and unlaced boots and ratty raincoat, his hair sticking out from the sides of his head, his eyes downcast. He would never look at my mother, but he did volunteer himself wholeheartedly to her in this way. He made sure I watched him fix the switch that night, gestured with his chin for me to come and sit beside him while he did it; and there was in his wordlessness a mild admonition: I should have been taught this already.
Apart from that incident, the only times my mother had ever needed me at night on any kind of emergency basis were the rare times when she had a cold and got stuffed up. She would call and I would go down and hold a dishcloth to her nose—tissues were too expensive, and Peacie did laundry so vengefully no germs could possibly survive.
But for the outstanding fact of polio, my mother was remarkably healthy; she suffered an occasional problem requiring hospitalization only once or twice a year; and she always came home in a couple of days. Her nurse’s training had come in handy; she knew what to do to prevent problems. (If I became ill, Peacie worked overtime. I tended to recover quickly.) Sometimes I would awaken on my own and come to stand at the foot of her bed, watching her sleep, making sure. But that was about comfort more than anxiety. It was like when I got a new toy and slept with it: I awakened then for the joy of simply seeing it, and slept better for having done so. It was an odd pairing-off: my worries that something might happen pitted against my belief that my mother, though paralyzed, could nonetheless handle anything. We were in each other’s care in ways simple and profound.
“I want you to change the sheets for me, and then we’ll have breakfast,” my mother said. “The blue flowered ones are clean.”
I sighed quietly and started stripping the bed. Other kids were planning their days, thinking of what to do with their free time. Swimming. Movies. Shopping. Hanging out in bedrooms and listening to new 45s, practicing dances. I had some time, but never a whole day.
“What are you going to do today?” my mother asked. Sometimes it was like she read my mind.
“Suralee’s coming over after she’s done shopping. We’re working on a new play.” I would not tell my mother about under the porch; I needed my secrets from her.
“Would you walk to town for me when she comes? I’ve got enough to give you each money for an ice cream.”
I felt immensely better. Suralee and I could get butter-pecan cones at the drugstore and then sit on the floor to look through the magazines: Photoplay and Silver Screen. True Confessions and True Romance. Soon the big thick fall Seventeen would arrive. All we had to do was to be careful not to spill anything on the pages or bend
them, and we could look for as long as we wanted. Opal Beasley managed the drugstore; she was a grandmotherly type who always inquired after my “dear” mother and patted the top of my head, saying, “Bless your heart.” Suralee hated her doing this and often suggested I tell her not to, but I liked it. And I liked how Mrs. Beasley sent her dumb son, Harley, over on his bicycle with blackberry muffins for us, or shoofly pie, or fried chicken, or tomatoes from her garden. We took all donations, never refused a thing. Some people would leave things anonymously in paper bags or boxes on our porch; others made a point of handing us their donations—they were the ones who searched our faces for what they considered the proper display of gratitude.
We didn’t keep everything, of course: the moldy shower curtains, underwear, the dresses hopelessly faded and missing buttons and stretched at the seams, the cans of food that had passed their expiration date—those we wrapped in newspaper and threw out in the dead of night. My mother lived in fear that we would be discovered discarding something someone had given us; we were too dependent on offerings to risk offending anyone. We took in dishes, clothes, rugs, linens, food, and toys. We had many board games with missing pieces: I once made dice out of rocks. But our Scrabble game was complete; my mother had gotten it new, and she loved it. We played at least three times a week, and my mother was a stickler: You had to know not only the spelling but the meaning of the word. Except when Peacie played with us. Then my mother bent the rules. Last time we’d played, Peacie had put GUKL on the board. “What’s that?” I’d asked. “That’s not a word!”
“Is too,” Peacie had said, but she wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“Oh yeah? Well then, what’s it mean?”
“Means a animal lives in the jungle. In Africa. Got the green eyes and yellow fur, stick out all over him.” Then she had looked at me, challenging me.
We Are All Welcome Here Page 2