The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  “Are you out of your mind, Tatro?” inquired Morris.

  “I think your beating has addled your brain,” agreed Justin.

  Emily gazed at him with uncomprehending sympathy.

  Raymond looked back at them. His conclusions were self-evident. How could they fail to be overwhelmed? “But just think about these cats up here sitting on their asses in yacht clubs and getting dividend checks in the mail. While my father, who’s worked for that mill for thirty-five years, is living in a wooden box on cinder blocks.”

  “So what?” asked Morris.

  “What about you, Justin?” demanded Raymond. “That mansion in Newport built on money from the slave trade.”

  Justin looked startled. “That was over a hundred and fifty years ago.”

  “What was?” asked Maria.

  Justin ignored her. “Besides, I’m using the bread the system yields me to try to alter that system.”

  “But I don’t see why Emily and I are responsible for what goes on in the South if yall aren’t responsible for what’s going on up here.”

  “Thanks for the analysis, Raymond,” said Justin. “OK, now what about this benefit next month, people?”

  Raymond’s book came out and received modest reviews. At a meeting Justin said, “Saw your book today, Raymond. A very handsome ego trip.”

  Raymond looked at him with distress. “I was trying to make a political statement.”

  He chuckled. “What about?”

  “About the similarities between Negroes and poor whites in the South.”

  “Not a bad rationalization for ripping off the project.”

  “Ripping off the project?”

  “All that time you spent wandering around the woods playing Hamlet, while the rest of us had to canvass your territory.”

  “I was non-functional, Justin. You could see that.”

  “Yeah, you let your personal emotional dramas destroy your revolutionary potential.”

  “I guess I did.” “I don’t guess, I know.”

  “Man,” said Morris, “you really did a job with that book, Raymond.”

  “What do you mean?” Raymond asked warily. “Well, I mean, the way you romanticize poverty, man.” He laughed derisively.

  During the meeting Raymond thought about his book. He hadn’t meant to romanticize his subjects. But he had intended to convey their dignity and decency and generosity, whether in spite of, or because of, their material deprivation. Wasn’t that a valid point? Apparently not, to FORWARD. Was there nothing he could do to earn Justin’s and Morris’s respect?

  Maria came up afterward. “You did a nice job with the book, Raymond.”

  “Thank you.” He’d just been thinking about those farm wives—their loyalty, fidelity, forbearance. Maria, he’d finally realized, was nothing more than a camp follower, running from man to man as his stock rose and fell on the power exchange. It was no coincidence that she’d taken up with Carson right after that day when Justin had put Raymond down about registering the Randalls. Even if his penis was about to fall off from disuse, Raymond wouldn’t entrust it to Maria again. Let’s face it, he reflected, she was just along for the writhe.

  “You’re such a strange guy, Raymond. So aloof and lonely and determined to be an outsider. Newland’s really scarred you.”

  He stared at her with disdain. “Everything that’s best about me is a gift from Newland.”

  She shrugged. “OK, if you say so.”

  The next day he stayed home from work to go with his camera to the tip of Manhattan to the cotton exchange, to stand in the balcony looking down at the trading floor. Men formed tiered rings around the central desk and shouted and gestured frantically with their hands. They raced back and forth to telephones. The floor was littered with wadded papers. A hum like a swarm of angry bees filled his ears. Men like those at the party the other night were making and losing thousands of dollars gambling on the cotton crops that the farmers in his book hadn’t even planted yet, crops the farmers themselves would earn several hundred dollars on, after months of tilling, hoeing, spraying, and picking in the hot sun.

  He climbed on an uptown bus. When the driver handed him a transfer, he smiled and said, “Thank you, sir.” The driver looked at him through narrowed eyes: What are you a nut or something, buddy? The bus passed through the Bowery, where drunks lay sprawled in doorways and up against mission walls and staggered through the traffic asking drivers for quarters at stoplights. He got off the bus in the East Fifties and walked west, past the elaborate townhouses of the corporate executives. He stood on Park Avenue and stared at the businessmen walking in and out of the glass and steel office buildings. On Fifth Avenue he paused in front of Tiffany’s. In the display window was a turtle like that worn by the woman at Justin’s party. He walked inside. The guards eyed him and fondled revolver handles. He asked a startled clerk how much the turtle brooch cost. The answer was twelve thousand dollars. He headed for Times Square. A woman in a tight dress with thick makeup handed him a card. On one side was a price list. On the other, a photo of her, naked, lying on a leopard skin, smiling. A Negro man in a flashy suit and slouch hat sidled up and said from the corner of his mouth, “Hey, white boy, you want you some brown pussy?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “I can give you a real good price on it.”

  “No, thanks.”

  Up Broadway. The benches in its center strip were filled with old people. He’d been forgetting to take pictures. On the sidewalk at Eighty-fifth Street stood an aged ex-whore feeding an ice cream cone to a poodle in a jacket and matching tarn. He put on a telescopic lens and raised the camera to his eye and focused. Before pressing the button, he lowered the camera and stared at it. He took the strap from around his neck. If Maria or Emily had been there, he’d have dumped it in a trash basket or handed it to the nearest junkie. Since they weren’t, he took it into a pawn shop and made a vow to send the money to the Randalls.

  He could almost hear Mr. Fulton at Newland High, stabbing at the blackboard with his pointer and talking about the War between the States: “The real conflict, boys and girls, was between a bunch of farmers and a bunch of used car dealers who treated each other and everything they touched as raw material for moneymaking schemes. Certain aspects of what we were fighting for were worth fighting for, and the war isn’t over.”

  That New Year, back in Newland, Raymond ate a plateful of black-eyed peas, then stood up and raised his glass: “To the New Year. And to the liberation of our homeland.” His family smiled uneasily, not knowing what crazy Raymond was talking about now.

  Chapter Three

  Donny

  The apartment in Pine Woods where Donny and Rochelle lived was identical to the one Donny had grown up in except that it was crammed with furniture. Whenever people at the mill wanted to get rid of something, they told Donny. He’d pick it up and bring it home, whether he had any use for it or not. He hated to turn them down—seemed like it made them feel good to give him something they didn’t want no more. But the apartment was starting to look like a junk shop, however much Rochelle tried to make it look nice, with pot plants in the windows and pictures she cut out of magazines on the walls.

  Nicole, a year old, often refused to sleep on the Hide-A-Bed with Sue and Billy, Rochelle’s youngest sister and brother. So that Donny, Rochelle, Nicole, and the baby sometimes ended up in one bed together.

  “It ain’t that I mind sleeping with my babies,” Donny explained with a grin. They sat watching the news on television. Nicole climbed all over him while Rochelle suckled Isaac. A good-looking man in glasses was referring in a quiet voice to “white devils.” Donny tried to hear what else he was saying, but Nicole was cooing in his ear and bouncing on his lap. His attention became fixed on not allowing her to give him an erection. Sue and Billy sat on the floor playing Go Fish.

  “But when does you and me get any time alone together, mama?”

  “Look to me like any more time alone together, and this whole place
is gon fill up with babies.”

  “Yeah, you more like your mama every day.” They laughed. “You get any more like her, and I’m cutting out,” Donny added with a smile.

  “Yeah, it’s all my doing, ain’t it?” She smiled back. “Well, I reckon we do need us some more room.”

  Donny looked at her and shrugged. “Where we gon get us more room from? Can’t hardly pay for what we got.” It looked like that colored man on the television had got himself shot. Well, you didn’t run around calling white folks devils and expect to live. You could get in plenty of trouble without you called them nothing. Like his grandmaw was always saying, good manners was the best life insurance a colored person could have.

  “I’m fixing to go back to maiding soon as I get this one off of my tit.”

  “You ain’t never gon get that one off your tit. Appears he likes it there almost as much as I do.” He felt a twinge of jealousy toward this tiny brown usurper, with his greedy little gums and his kneading fingers.

  “Your grandmaw’s gon mind them.”

  “Yeah, but I was fixing to save your maiding money for a car”

  “A car?”

  “Yeah, Leon’s selling his Dodge.”

  “Shit, honey, we don’t need us no car.”

  “It’d save me a heap of time not standing around waiting on the bus.”

  “Honey, that’s all you got is time. Why, you don’t need you no car when we can hardly keep food on the table.”

  “I ain’t noticed you starving none,” Donny muttered, glancing at her ample figure.

  “I just ain’t had time to get my figure back is all.”

  “Get it back? Mama, it got such a headstart you ain’t never gon catch up with it.”

  Rochelle started crying.

  “Ah, come on now. I was just teasing. You look fine to me, baby. I sure hate it that I never get a chance no more to show you how fine.”

  “They gon be asleep soon. Then you can show me all you want to.”

  By the time the four children were shut in the bedroom, he’d lost interest. “Baby, I’m just too tired,” he groaned as she lay on the couch stroking the crotch of his trousers. He remembered when they were first married how they’d sit at the kitchen table splitting a beer, and all of a sudden find themselves going at it on the floor while the pork chops burned in the frying pan. Shit, now, with children all over the place, they had to plan it nearly to death.

  The next morning when the alarm went off, Donny stretched and kissed Rochelle awake. They got up quietly, careful to let the sleeping babies in the next room lie. She began frying grits while he pulled on the dark green work clothes a man in the roving room had given him. The trousers were baggy and had to be held up with suspenders. As he walked into the kitchen, he noticed that Rochelle was avoiding looking at him. He knew he looked like a rag doll. She hadn’t bargained on this transformation from a basketball star who slithered around the court in yellow satin shorts, and who swaggered around school in trousers and matching Banlon shirts. But he hadn’t figured on her bulging out of no maid’s uniform neither. A librarian, she’d said. A teacher. He threw back his head in a silent snort.

  “Look at me, Rochelle.”

  She glanced at him, startled by his tone. “What, honey?”

  “Ah, nothing.”

  He sauntered out of Pine Woods toward the bus stop on the highway carrying his black lunch pail. Walking the same route were other men in dark green or khaki or dark blue work clothes, or denim overalls, whom he’d known his entire life. Several were on the board of deacons at Mount Zion with him. They were on their way to yard work on Tsali Street, stockroom or janitorial work downtown, jobs in the yard at the paper mill. Their wives worked as maids, and the families they worked for fetched them and brought them home. Sometimes the Princes sent Ruby home in a Checker cab. She’d emerge from the back seat, toting a jar of bacon grease, pretending not to notice all her neighbors, who’d never been in a taxi, watching her with respect.

  Donny straightened his lanky frame and held his head higher. The first colored man on at the mill. His grandmaw had gotten Mr. Prince to hire him. It was steady, which almost none of these men had. Donny hummed, in between exchanging greetings and remarks about the warm sunny early spring morning. Randall Jarvis, who was on at the paper mill, strode past in his royal blue satin windbreaker with “Building Maintenance” stretched in gold across the back, and “Randall” over the front pocket. Donny eyed it and wondered if he could persuade Rochelle to get him one with her maiding money.

  He began the day by breaking open bales and feeding them into the mixer. The air swirled with motes like a snowstorm, and lint frosted the mixer parts. Donny wore a toboggan cap to keep the stuff out of his hair. When he didn’t, his head ended up looking like a giant cotton ball. This whole thing was a mystery to him. You fed these clumps of cotton through all the machines in the other rooms, and you ended up with huge bolts of light grey cloth that got loaded in trucks and on boxcars and sent places to be dyed and turned into book jackets and stuff. You could call white men “devils” if you didn’t mind getting yourself killed, but you had to confess that they was smart devils. All colored men knew how to do was work till they dropped dead from it. He’d never heard of none who could invent machines to save them from having to work.

  As he swept up trash in the parking lot and emptied garbage cans, he glanced at the red-brick building with its round towers at each corner. He remembered The Five sitting in the Castle Tree looking down here and feeling proud to have the largest mill in the South under one roof in their very own town. Now that he knew what actually went on in there, the place didn’t seem one bit less amazing.

  He felt the spring sun on his back and was glad to be outdoors. One any given day he never knew just what he’d be doing, and he liked it like that. Sometimes he’d watch the white people running the machines—the exact same movement time after time, all day long, every day of the week—and wonder why they didn’t go crazy. He was pretty lucky. Whistling, he studied the rows of late-model cars. On the other hand, doing those jobs paid them enough to buy these big cars. He stopped whistling.

  He mopped the hallways to the locker rooms with disinfectant, making swirls down one side, then interlocking swirls up the other side. As he rested on his mop, he surveyed the pattern of dark maroon swirls on lighter dusty maroon. Hearing voices approaching, he began hurriedly erasing the pattern with his mop.

  At the end of the afternoon he got off the bus and joined the straggly line of men walking back to Pine Woods. Their clean, pressed work clothes of that morning were dirty and wrinkled and sweat-stained, the lunch boxes empty. They avoided each other’s eyes in a way they didn’t at church when they wore dark suits and stiff blue-white shirts and stood at the ends of the pews passing the offering baskets.

  The baseball team was practicing in the field next to the high school. He stopped and watched the coach pop flies to the outfielders. Every boy on that team saw himself as a future Jackie Robinson. Donny smiled. He remembered standing at shortstop during practice and watching the line of sweaty men home from work snake past. He’d felt sorry for them. He’d never get caught dead wearing dark green work clothes. He’d be wearing a satin warm-up suit and playing for the Knicks …

  The cheerleaders were practicing a complicated clapping and shouting routine at the other end of the field. Almost every girl on the squad had been after him, but he’d wanted only Rochelle. He wondered if this crop of cheerleaders would find him as desirable. Or was it just that he was a big star back then? Was that what had made Rochelle want him? The cheerleaders, Rochelle, every girl in sight, used to think everything he did was wonderful. Seemed like now, though, he couldn’t hardly do nothing right. Couldn’t get it up when Rochelle wanted it, couldn’t earn enough to get them a bigger place.

  In front of Dupree’s lounged men in sports clothes. They’d been hanging around all day, passing a bottle of Four Roses to celebrate spring. All winter they’d clustered
around the kerosene heater in the pool room, moving away a couple at a time for games of Eight Ball. As the line of sweaty men filed past, those in front of Dupree’s called out greetings, and received tired waves in reply.

  Donny got into cream slacks and a matching pullover left over from high school. The slacks were too tight, and Nicole had chewed some snags in the shirt. As he strolled toward Dupree’s, he glanced into the laundromat. Rochelle was sitting and talking with Charlene as she nursed the baby and joggled Nicole’s stroller with her foot. She looked up and spotted him through the window just as he tried to duck behind the wall. She motioned him to come in. “How you, honey?”

  He pecked her forehead.

  “Just fine. How you?” He sat down, nodding to Charlene.

  “You look real nice, Donny,” said Charlene. “Real springlike.”

  “Thank you. Thought I’d go talk to them boys over to Dupree’s.”

  “Honey, you know I don’t like you hanging around them men.”

  “Mama, I knowed them cats all my life.” Leon had come down from New York City not long ago calling everyone a “cat,” and now the expression was all over Pine Woods.

  “They a bad influence.”

  “Bad influence? What trouble is they to get into around this place?”

  “Now, Donny, listen to me, hon. Them men don’t work without they have to. Most has left their families. Half of them’ll run off to New York City or Cincinnati, Ohio, by the end of the year. We seen it happen all our lives. Honey, I don’t want to lose you.”

  He put his arm around her. “Baby, you ain’t gon lose me.” It was true: The men with families sat on their porches when they got home, and played with their children. They strolled up the street to the soft ice cream stand with their wives and kids. Once they joined the men at Dupree’s, it was usually just a question of time before they left their families, and eventually left Pine Woods. Or ended up in the alley next to Dupree’s drinking liquid shoe polish, after-shave lotion, and paint thinner.

  But as they passed Dupree’s. him carrying the baby and her pushing the stroller, he noticed her sideways glances at the men out front, the increased thrust of her milk-swollen breasts, the added sway to her hips. The men noticed, too, and watched her pass, not daring to comment with him there. But what about earlier in the afternoon when she’d gone down to the laundromat, while he was pushing his mop for her and these babies? He glanced at her. These cats were rested, and hungry for women because they weren’t working. When they did, they spent the money on fancy clothes and let the county take care of their babies. What did she want—a stud, or a husband and father? Looked like she wanted everything.