A Kind of Freedom

by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

  In the months after Evelyn’s tiredness eased, her weight came upon her, and she snuck through Ruby’s clothes while she was at school. It didn’t take long for Ruby to notice. She’d smirk at dinner as Evelyn reached for another helping, or she’d pinch the flab of flesh hanging over the top of Evelyn’s panties. Evelyn expected her to press for the source of the change, but if she knew why Evelyn was growing, she didn’t say. And one day that same week, Evelyn walked up to her bed and found pants and skirts from Ruby’s closet folded in a neat pile.

  There was still her mother to avoid though. Evelyn tried not to be in the house alone with her. If there were other people in the room, her mother would overlook her, but when it was just the two of them, the older woman had no choice but to notice how much mayonnaise Evelyn added to her sugar sandwiches, or how she answered questions about school too fast or too slow, Evelyn couldn’t be sure which.

  Thursday afternoon, though, when Ruby was still at school and Brother was with the twins and Daddy was at work, Evelyn was so hungry she couldn’t bear to wait for her mother to finish her coffee before she did something about it.

  She backed more than walked into the kitchen, never facing the table where her mother sat flipping through the news. When she made it to the giant jar of pig lips in the corner, she tried to make so little of a disturbance her mother wouldn’t lift her head, but when she finally managed the lid, and leaned the container over to fish for the biggest piece, the juice spilled onto her dress in a dark circle she couldn’t be bothered to wipe.

  That was when her mother set the paper down and cleared her throat.

  “Since when do you eat pickled pig lips?”

  “I’ve always eaten them,” Evelyn said, turning toward her mother.

  “No, that’s a dish I get for Ruby, not you.”

  Then the moment Evelyn had dreaded came to pass. Her mother looked at the dress Evelyn wore. It was one of Ruby’s loosest, the one she wore a week after she found out about Langston, but it still clung to Evelyn’s middle. Evelyn held the pig lip mid-bite, waiting for her mother’s commentary.

  But her mother just turned back to her paper, flipped through it. Evelyn continued with her snack, lost herself in the salt, the sourness, the chewy fat.

  “You satisfied with yourself gaining so much weight?” her mother asked, not even looking up, once Evelyn had finished one and was fishing through the jar for her second. “You think that’s a way to attract another boy, thickening yourself past recognition?” her mother went on.

  Evelyn was so startled by the question—she had been so convinced she had cleared a reaction from her mother—she had to wait a while before an answer came to her.

  “Ruby never had a problem getting men,” she said after many seconds. “I’m still not as big as she is.”

  “Not everybody carries weight the same.”

  No, they didn’t. Still Evelyn wondered about the pig lips. She was almost finished with this one, and she had anticipated putting a third on some white bread and spreading a spoonful of mayonnaise over it.

  Evelyn’s mother sighed, and she looked down at her daughter’s feet. Gazing at her from that angle, she said, “I can imagine how you must be feeling, and for that reason I’ve given it three months. I know you loved that boy, and he loved you, but I just—” she paused here, “Bon-temps fait crapaud manque bounda. I just don’t want you to throw your life away.”

  “I’m not, Mother,” Evelyn said, tempering the part of herself that wanted to exclaim that her life was just beginning really, that maybe it wouldn’t proceed in the appropriate order, but no one would remember that part once Renard was home again.

  “I hardly ever see you studying anymore.”

  “We’re on a break, Mother.”

  “You don’t even read your old books. You just mope around the house, eating, and sleeping, like you’re somebody’s widow. I didn’t raise you to fall apart because some man left you. Look at Ruby; she mourned for a while, but at least she’s going out now. She’s resuming her old life—”

  “He’s not just ‘some man,’ Mother,” Evelyn cut her off.

  Her mother sighed again. “That’s not my point, Evelyn. Whether you knew him well or not—”

  “There’s no question about it really, whether I knew him. I did.”

  “I just don’t want to see you lose yourself, sweetie.”

  At that, her father walked in, and her mother stood to fix him a plate he wouldn’t eat. Evelyn noticed for the first time that if she had changed in those last months, he had too, that his hair had thinned around the middle and that his pants were bulky between his legs. He didn’t look up at her. He didn’t look at any of them anymore. He passed through more than occupied the place, his head down, his shoulders hunched.

  Evelyn looked away too; she hardened any pity she felt toward him, the way she calcified her sadness after Renard left, and she realized how flat her life before him had been.

  Renard was coming home though; in his last note he had said it, then he’d signed it “Don’t worry about anything, I’m safe, and I’m yours,” but she had considered the sentiment so much at that point the words themselves had no effect.

  She reached back into the jar.

  She thought about Renard in some unimaginable place across the sea, her picture the one she’d taken at her last debutante ball, upright beside his bed frame, and she smiled to herself. She walked to the icebox and swiveled a dollop of mayonnaise out of the jar with her finger, stuffed it in her mouth, then bit halfway into a pig lip.

  It was November in New Orleans but still unseasonably hot, and Evelyn had taken to dimming the lights, drawing the drapes, and running ice cubes over her skin. She still kept up the charade of going to school, and sometimes she’d carry a book to bed before she fell asleep inside it. Otherwise, the house motored on without her. As Mother had said, Ruby was perking up, going out most Saturday nights. Evelyn didn’t think there was another man in the picture yet, but knowing Ruby, he was just around the corner. Daddy came home for dinner as if in allegiance to the family they had been, but instead of complimenting their mother on the meal, he spread it around on his plate, then excused himself. And Mother could be found upstairs any hour of the day, limp amid the out-of-season drapes and rugs.

  A scene like that might have depressed Evelyn if she were living inside it, but it was impossible to notice it beside her world of promise. She knew just the place her own family would live, a little shotgun in Tremé, so close that she could see her parents but set apart from her childhood house enough that she and Renard could start their own life. She hadn’t decided how she’d get the money, but she knew with nearly two years of college, she could pick up a secretarial position. She was too big now, but once the baby was here, she could leave it with Miss Georgia and set to looking. In her airier dreams, her husband Dr. Renard August Williams, was head of hematology at the Negro hospital at Flint-Goodrich, and since she had graduated top of her class at Dillard, he often called on her to assist him.

  She’d tried to get more detailed in her imaginings, but what did she know about hematology? She’d quit nursing school halfway through, and that was three months ago, one third of the way through a pregnancy that was gobbling up her mind. So she’d think about the house, how it would be so fine her mother would be embarrassed to remember how she’d treated her. Evelyn would learn the proper way to prepare tea for a lady, what order to serve the snacks in, which fingers to lace around the arm of the teacup, who should pour the first cup. Her daddy would visit every Sunday and hold her hand on the way out to the Cadillac she and Renard had bought him. He might not say anything, or maybe he would, but either way she would know he felt silly for how wrong he’d been. That baby of hers, he’d say or want to say, had salvaged not only Evelyn but all of them.

  “You just going to lie around all day dreaming?” Ruby walked hard into the bedroom wher
e Evelyn was draped over her bed.

  “What else is there to do?” Evelyn barely looked up from

  her pillow.

  Ruby stomped her foot in front of her. “School for one, girl. But I guess you forgot about that. I ran into Rose Haydel today, and she told me that you haven’t gone in months. I argued with her. I called her a two-faced low-life lying sack of potatoes right there in front of everyone, said she was just trying to spite me and my family by making up garbage, but then her worst enemy got in my face and repeated her, said everybody knew it.” Ruby paused then, seemingly for effect. “I looked around the circle that had formed, and it was true, everyone was nodding their heads. God, Evelyn.” Her voice rose and it didn’t seem as if she were putting on a show anymore. “I’ve never been so humiliated in my entire life. I walked all the way home thinking about what they’d said, going over it in my mind. I thought the worst part was how foolish I looked out there, but the more I thought about it, the worst part was that you’ve been walking with me every day for two months just pretending, and for what, all in the service of a lie?”

  Ruby walked closer to the bed now, so close she could touch Evelyn if she stuck her hand out.

  “What kind of sickness has crept in your brain that you would do something like that? And to me?” Her voice was breaking now. “Answer me. I thought we were close. Sisters, yes, but more than that, I thought we were friends.”

  “I didn’t say we weren’t.” Evelyn still faced the pillow.

  Ruby yanked it from under her face and threw it at her. “You didn’t say we weren’t. You didn’t say we weren’t. Girl, wake up. Either you’re heartsick or you’re brain-dead or you’re—”

  She stopped talking, surveying her sister’s body. She shook her head. “Can’t be.” She pulled up Evelyn’s nightgown without a fight, gasped at what she found.

  “Oh, my God,” Ruby whispered.

  Evelyn could see tears spring up in her eyes.

  “Oh, my dear Lord,” she repeated, still shaking her head.

  The relief that half the weight of all she’d been carrying was finally in someone else’s hands sent Evelyn’s words sputtering out. “I haven’t heard from Renard in weeks. I don’t know if he’s dead or alive. And even if he is alive, what if he changed his mind about me? Or what if it’s not me, if he just doesn’t want a baby?” She pulled her sister to her, buried her head in her shirt, still talking but incoherent to her own ears.

  “Shh, shh.” Ruby rubbed her back. “You don’t want Daddy to hear you.”

  “He’s going to have to know eventually, Ruby,” Evelyn almost screamed.

  “Yeah, but not like this. Mama can help us figure out how to piece it together for him.”

  Evelyn thought she’d rather have Daddy find out because one of his doctor friends delivered the baby than have him learn about it from their mother. All her life, she’d tried to combat that woman’s low opinion of her, convince her she was okay, not better than Ruby but equal. Now the thought that Mother might have been right meant something worse than inferiority. It meant that in all Evelyn’s searching for esteem, she had missed the lesson; she had tried to do things differently in choosing nursing, even in pursuing Renard, but she had ended up in the very same place her mother had predicted. Ruby, on the other hand, might go out there and do something big with her life. Whether she did or not was beside the point; she still had the chance to, and even the freedom of that desire was such a privilege.

  Still, Evelyn didn’t try to convince her sister to keep silent. What would have been the point? She was six months along, and a doctor had never looked at her. If, heaven forbid, Renard didn’t come back, her mother would be the one to teach her how to bathe and feed a baby; her mother who had failed her would be most privy to Evelyn’s own failure, and that, more than the uncertainty of her situation, caused her to sob. Ruby stood and hurried for the door. A few minutes later, Evelyn’s mother walked in alone. When she saw Evelyn, she ran to her, pulled her up into her arms.

  “La pauv’ piti, it’s okay, Mama’s going to make it okay.”

  Evelyn shook her head. “I’m so sorry, Mama. You were right, I’m so sorry.”

  “Hush your mouth, girl. That’s a life in there, a precious, precious life. And God deemed you worthy enough to carry it.”

  Jackie

  Fall 1986

  The next morning Terry got up to make blueberry pancakes, bacon, and eggs. He dressed the baby so Jackie had more time to focus on herself, iron her clothes, set her hair with hot rollers, apply a little lipstick on her cheeks for blush. People at the nursery noticed the change.

  Her mother was the first one to comment. “Jackie Marie, are you humming in this classroom?” This during her break as Jackie stapled leaves and pumpkins to the bulletin board.

  “No, ma’am,” she said on instinct, though she supposed she had been. “It was just a song that I heard on the radio this morning,” she added when she realized her lie wouldn’t hold.

  “Oh, I know, I recognized Anita Baker. But”—Mama paused, smiling—“is there something you need to tell me about? A new friend maybe?” She let her smile extend.

  Mama had been pushing Jackie to start seeing new people, at least go out with her old friends, but she hadn’t been ready to socialize, not then. This morning, though, she felt like calling all her girlfriends, inviting them over for one of her fish fries.

  “No, Mama,” she said, “just getting back into the swing of things, I guess.”

  Her mother paused, looked up at her on the ladder with her eyebrows arched. “Well, good, then,” she said. “That’s real good. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me,” and she clutched her heart.

  She stood there for a minute longer, waiting to hear more, but there was no way Jackie was about to tell her what the real source of the change was. She remembered the last time Terry came back, that he stayed months, that he’d said all the right things, meant them even, that the baby had started to go to him just like he went to Jackie. But that didn’t stop Terry from leaving, that didn’t stop her from having to tell her family that he was gone, that didn’t stop Sybil from saying I told you so, and Jackie would be damned if she put herself in that position again.

  On the other hand, what was it he had said about staying in the moment? No promises? What was wrong with her enjoying this reprieve no matter how long it played out?

  Thinking about it that way, she relaxed into their new routine. She’d come home to elaborate dinners, crawfish étouffée, his mother’s recipe, or smothered chicken and rice. They’d watch movies, Raiders of the Lost Ark or Friday the 13th, play rummy or just marvel over their baby’s sleeping body, how his hairline was just like Terry’s, a sweet little M, or how he turned his nose up at strangers the way Jackie could sometimes. Jackie relished those moments she hadn’t even known she’d missed. It was rare to find someone who was as invested in talking about T.C. as she was. Even with her mama, she parceled her bragging out. She didn’t tell her the baby was trying to crawl already, that he had said the word Mama; she didn’t admit she wanted him to be the first black president, but with Terry, she could gush, point out that it wasn’t just Mama, T.C. was forming other words too. And they would have to childproof soon because he reached for everything in sight—did Terry see that the other day he’d grasped the remote? Not only that, but he already fit in eighteen-month-size clothes, he slept through the night, he cried only when he was hungry, and all those factors together had to say something, anything, about the prospect of them as a family.

  Jackie even called her old friends again; she didn’t tell them Terry was back, but she let them catch her up on the old neighborhood, who had gotten married, lost jobs, found a hookup since. She’d hang up the phone refreshed, as if life was on her side all of a sudden, as if she had accessed the formula for riding it instead of letting it ride her. Then she’d climb into bed and rest her hea
d on Terry’s chest, listen to his heartbeat like a second hand ticking, and in the morning he’d still be there.

  One day about a month after Terry had returned, she woke up to the baby’s coughs. The doctor said she didn’t have to take him in, but he had never even had a runny nose and she decided to keep him home. She called her mama to let her know they’d be missing school, then nursed him twice as much as normal. She’d been on a cleaning streak already, but she took it to another level that morning, crawling on her hands and knees to clean the baseboards with scotch tape, pouring baking soda and vinegar into the cracks in the kitchen floors, vacuuming the carpet, changing the sheets, bleaching every surface of the house someone might think to touch. When she was done, she sat down for a breather. The baby was still sleeping. She thought about making Terry a welcome-home meal. He was out looking for work; he left every morning when she did and didn’t return until shortly before, but she knew there was only so long he could slog through this city asking for something that didn’t seem to be there without becoming discouraged. She’d caught glimpses of his frustration already. Once or twice, he came home barely talking, looking off to the side of the room instead of right at her, reminding Jackie of a man she’d seen before, weeks before a relapse. She didn’t know if his favorite meal could preempt that route, but he loved her jambalaya and she’d baked some chicken thighs that might go well with it.

  The doorbell rang. She couldn’t imagine who it might be, possibly one of the neighbors; Terry had his own key back now. Of course, Jackie would tell whomever that it wasn’t a good time. The baby would be up in thirty minutes and she had to boil that rice. She walked toward the door, opened it without looking through the peephole, prepared to hand out some tired excuse. She would have gasped when she saw Sybil, but she wouldn’t give her sister the power of knowing she had rattled her. She couldn’t form a single word, and it was Sybil who spoke first.