She lifted the cover on the boxy hi-fi stereo. Her stack of Sam Cooke 45s were already disked up and sitting on the spindle, waiting to fall. She flicked the lever and sat on the velvet ottoman and waited for the stereo to go through its rotations. The ottoman was the only piece of sitting-on furniture in the room that wasn’t swathed in custom-made plastic covers. The covers were seam-stitched in royal blue thread; Mae insisted that they match the carpet. Ramona tried not to look at the royal blue–bordered chair covers. Tried not to remind herself how much money Mae squandered. Mae had even taken to calling Lit Brothers furniture department, pretended to be Ramona, and ordered nightstands, lamps, face-sized mirrors. When Ramona challenged her shortened paycheck with the bony-necked accountant, said she’d only charged a Maybelline face powder and a tube of lipstick that week, and the accounting person came down on the selling floor and pulled Ramona from a customer who was just about to purchase a half dozen Hawaiian print shirts and showed Ramona the order sheet for a nightstand and lamp and mirror, Ramona had feigned a lapse in memory, focused on the bones jutting out in the accountant’s neck, and said yes, she’d ordered the nightstand and lamp and mirror but she didn’t think the deductions would start until the following week. She was too embarrassed to let anyone know her own mother had such tangled, knotted ways, that she could be so mean and devious to her only natural child.
The stereo clicked loudly, and then Sam Cooke’s voice rushed in like a mushroom of air that wrapped Ramona up, and for an instant she felt like she was riding on the music, floating, like Sam Cooke’s voice was floating through the room as he sang about the change that was going to come, and for an instant it didn’t matter that she was almost to her mid-twenties, unmarried, barely able to save two quarters to move from this house filled with plastic slipcovered furniture and child after child showing up for her to have to help her mother raise.
She sang out loud that a change has got to come and danced herself around the room in wide circles until footsteps on the porch startled her away from the music and dropped her with a jolt. “It’s about fucking time,” she muttered as she ran to the front door and snatched it open, ready to grab Shern, Victoria, and Bliss into the house one at a time by the throat. It wasn’t the girls, though. It was Tyrone, grinning sheepishly and shivering against the wind.
“My lucky day,” she said, voice tinted with sarcasm, “you’re early, and they’re late.”
“I’m not here yet for our—you know, our date.” His face broke into an apologetic grin. “Me and my pops was just riding through here, my doggone car broke down again—”
“Your car went again?” She wanted to scream it.
“Yeah, bad plugs, I think. Anyhow Pops picked me up—”
“Your car went again.” This time she sighed it, resignedly. She looked beyond him to the black-on-black ’65 deuce and a quarter parked in front of the door. “I thought you said your father was with you. No one in that car.” Her breath caught in the top of her throat at the thought of his father.
He let the opened storm door rest against his back. He touched his finger lightly to her lips. “If you let me, I’m trying to tell you my pops had to stop in ’cross the street at Miss Hettie’s, had to drop off a printing job. So I figured I’d ring your bell and steal a kiss from my baby doll.”
He whispered it and smiled and ran his finger through her hair. “Nice,” he said, “so soft, brings out your cheekbones swept up like that too.”
Ramona jerked her head and pulled his hand from her hair. “Please, I just got it done this afternoon, and you ready to mess it up already.”
“No, I’ll wait till tonight to mess it up.” He winked.
“Yeah, well, where we going tonight besides here?” She folded her arms across her chest and tapped her foot impatiently.
“Well,” he stammered, “thought you were the only one minding those girls till your mother gets back on Tuesday. How we going anywhere when you have to baby-sit them?”
“That oldest one is thirteen,” she said, now tapping her fingers across her arm to the same impatient rhythm of her feet. “Shit, I was taking care of a whole roomful of foster kids by the time I was thirteen, cooking and cleaning for them too. So if you had a plan of a nice evening for you and me, that oldest one is more than grown enough to stay here for a few hours and watch those other two. I guess that’s why we ain’t been nowhere decent the past month, you feigning it off on me having to watch those girls. Well, consider yourself on notice, I don’t have to spend every waking minute with them, okay?”
“Well, I didn’t know.” Tyrone’s eyebrows receded to the space on his forehead they always found when he was embarrassed. “That’s why I haven’t planned anything, you know, you seem so preoccupied with those girls.”
“Those brats. I’m not hardly preoccupied with those spoiled little rich girls. Mhn. Thought I was gonna have to slap that oldest dead in her mouth this morning. And now they’re late, like they think they’re old enough to run the streets after dark.”
“They don’t seem like the type to be out-and-out defiant, Mona. I’ve gotten to know them kind of well playing tic-tac-toe and checkers with them. Maybe they got lost or something. But I’m sure you’ve told them how to get from point A to B around here.”
Ramona felt her stomach drop a little when he said that. “I’ve told them what they need to hear.” She stopped so her words could stay angry, so her guilt and worry over the girls being late wouldn’t poke holes in her voice and sift through the anger and come out with her words.
He looked beyond her into the living room. Now Sam Cooke was singing “You Send Me,” and the muscles in his arms twitched at the thought of holding Ramona in a close grinding slow drag. He pulled the collar up on his corduroy jacket. “It’s cold out here, baby,” he whispered.
“Well, they dressed warm, I made sure of that, all the coats they came here with got put to some use today. I’ve never seen kids come with so many extra coats, three coats apiece, not counting the suede jackets. Such excess,” she said, shaking her head and sucking in the air through her teeth.
He rubbed his hands up and down her arms. “Come on, let’s get you out of this cold doorway.” He was whispering again. “Can’t have my baby catching no draft.”
“No, I’m just catching hell, saddled with these kids by myself their first month here. And the breaking-in period with any of them is always the hardest. And these three are particularly grief-stricken.” She backed into the doorway, fixing her eyes on Tyrone’s father’s car. Then it was just the closed front door she saw as he pushed it to, then his tan corduroy jacket as he pulled her in close and tried to mash his mouth against hers. She shook herself from him and walked toward the kitchen.
Tyrone tried to hold his good nature against her mood. He’d come to know this side of Ramona that was like splintered wood. Sometimes he wished that she were more like the other women who just blossomed when they were around him. Big smiles, sometimes even a fullness would come up in their eyes and make them appear serious and intense, like if he were to just tap them, their passions would break through in bubbling rivers. He reasoned that Ramona didn’t have to gush like sap oozing from some maple in the spring; she was too beautiful for that, he told himself over and over, with her saucy eyes and healthy legs and fleshy lips. He told himself that now as he watched her walk away.
“Where you say your daddy went?” she asked again. “May be he can give me a ride around the block to see if I see traces of those three.” She talked quickly, hoping to mask the excitement in her voice over riding with his father. “Dummies probably did get turned around. Before they left from here this morning, I told them specifically to be back here before the sun fall.” She said all this with her back to him.
“I don’t know how long Pops is gonna be; Miss Hettie’s probably going through the printing he did line by line. How ’bout if you and me walk and see if we see them?” He caught up with her back and let his hands rest along the side of her hip
s; her Wranglers were stiff, and he rubbed his hands along the curve of her hips and felt an uncoiling of his essence that was so forceful it surprised him. “I’ll ring Miss Hettie’s bell and tell my pops to go on home without me. That way we can walk as long as we need to. We can snuggle against the wind too.” He tried to nestle his chin against her shoulder.
Ramona yanked his hands from her hips and jerked her shoulder upward against his chin. She thought she heard his teeth snap together. “I don’t want to walk.” The words burst through her lips with much more force than she’d intended and sputtered now through the room like a balloon that’s losing its air and flying and falling fast and unpredictably. “If I had wanted to walk, I would have already walked, okay. I want to ride. I’ll be glad when you can piece together enough money to buy a car that runs longer than a day. I mean, even if you had planned something for this evening, we gonna have to be jumping on and off buses like poor people, and it’s all cold out.” She stopped and exhaled and turned to look at him. “Plus I need you to stay here, I mean, if you think your father’ll take me to go look for them. Won’t nobody be here to let them in if you go too. So I was gonna ask you to do that.”
“Oh, you was gonna ask me to do that?” He stood in the center of the room, watching the balloon fly until it landed at his feet, his arms hung, his eyebrows down now to that lower spot they went to when he was hurt.
“Is that a lot to ask?” She said it softer. She could see how low his eyebrows were. That’s what she’d first noticed about him, when the women’s contingent of the gospel choir clacked about this new, fine guy, Perry the printer’s son, up from Virginia to live with his father, “tall and muscle-bound,” they’d said; “slim waist; wide, straight back; good hair; grin that opens his face and softens the hard line of his nose. Girl, Ramona, you got to see him,” they’d said; “coloring that’s like a purple-brown; mix that with someone light like you, girl, y’all would have some pretty babies,” they’d insisted. But it was his eyebrows that caught Ramona and made her think that for once she could settle into an honest relationship. They were coal black and thick and had their own life the way they dipped and bowed and punctuated in the most genuine way whatever else his face was showing. Now they looked to her as if they wanted to drop to the floor.
“Look”—she walked toward him—“the sooner those brats get here, the sooner I can lose this attitude you the only one here to absorb. You do want me to lose this attitude?” She widened her eyes and fixed them on him. The muscles in her face loosened; she let her hips go in an exaggerated side-to-side swing. “Don’t you, baby? Don’t you want me to lose this attitude so I can be nice to you?”
Sam Cooke was at the end of the song. Tyrone was pudding now, and he knew it. He cleared his throat and licked his lips, which were dry. He moved like a robot. “I’ll go get my pops; then I’ll come back here and wait to let them in.”
Ramona watched him leave. She smoothed at the edges of her French roll, which were soft and silky straight.
6
They landed on the porch, three piles of plaid wool, like they’d just fallen from the sky. First Bliss, then Shern, then Victoria came limping and crying. All the way back to Mae’s they talked about what could have happened: Suppose Larry had had a weapon, suppose Victoria had fallen on her head instead of her knee, suppose Larry was the type to take a young girl back in the woods of the park and do nasty things to her, suppose this, suppose that. They scared themselves so with their own imaginings that they ran as hard and fast as they could, pulling Victoria as she half ran, half hopped. The cold air in their chests had them gasping and wheezing, their undershirts soaked from perspiring, and the porch at the house they hated was such the unlikely welcome sight that they collapsed on it and heaved and coughed while their hearts settled some. Such was the scene when Tyrone clicked the switch to turn on the porch light to the house Mae and Ramona shared.
“Hey,” Tyrone said, walking into the bright light of the porch. “I was hoping that was y’all. It’s about time. Ramona’s out looking for you. Her jaws all tight over y’all being so late.” He stooped and lightly tugged the tassels on Shern’s hat.
Shern slowly unfolded herself from the porch floor and sat up and jostled Bliss and reached beyond her to nudge Victoria. Victoria started to sob fresh all over again.
He walked over to where Victoria was. His eye went to the bloodstain seeping through the knee of Victoria’s brown corduroy pants. “Awl, man. You’re hurt? What you do? Let’s get you in the house.” He picked Victoria up and carried her into the house.
Being lifted and cradled like that reminded Victoria of the way her father used to carry her when she’d fall asleep in the rec room. She’d keep her eyes shut tight and nestle in her father’s arms, fearing that if he knew she was awake, he might make her walk on her own. She kept her eyes opened now. It didn’t matter if Tyrone tried to make her walk on her own, she wouldn’t be able to. Maybe hop. Crawl on her good leg maybe. But the pain in her hurt knee pulsed like the neon sign at the House of Hong Kong in Chinatown, where their father would take them for dinner. She imagined the bright orange letters pulsing on and off, on and off; her knee hurt less when she pictured it that way.
Tyrone let her go softly onto the couch. She sat up so her bent knee wouldn’t touch the plastic covering on the couch. She didn’t want to be the one to give Ramona reason for irritation; blood on the stiff plastic furniture, Victoria was sure, would be a serious offense. Tyrone moved the brass urn that held the powdered blue artificial carnations to the other side of the coffee table so that Victoria could stretch her leg out on the table. He told her that he had been a Boy Scout, so his first-aid training should come back to him. He laughed, hoping Victoria would laugh too.
She didn’t; she winced and let out a cracked moan as she tried to straighten out her knee. She closed her eyes, hoping for the neon sign.
Bliss and Shern pushed through the front door.
“This old crazy man talking about he was our grandfather came out of the park and chased us and made Tori fall,” Bliss said to Tyrone, and then barreled past Tyrone to get to her sister. She flopped on the floor at Victoria’s feet. She blew on Victoria’s knee. “Does that make it feel better? When Mommie used to blow on my cuts, they would feel better.” She leaned her head against the leg of the couch and said soothing words to Victoria.
“Wait a minute, what happened? Somebody chased you? Who chased you?” Tyrone asked as he moved the velvet ottoman in front of the couch where Victoria was. He sat on the ottoman and slowly started folding the bottom of Victoria’s corduroys up to get to the hurt part of her leg.
Bliss was rushing her words telling him what happened while Shern busied herself at the closet hanging her coat. “Whoa, slow down, Bliss,” he said. “You talking faster than I can listen; you know I’m a slow-talking country boy.” And then he got quiet when he had Victoria’s pants leg up, exposing the rawness, the red and pink and yellow that used to be smooth brown skin. He told Shern then that she had to be his assistant, told her what supplies to bring him, while Victoria tried not to holler out as the pulsing to the neon light faded and left just a steady glaring orange that was moving in circles down her leg.
“Just hang on, Tori,” Tyrone said in his softest voice.
Shern tried not to hear his tone of voice. She’d heard him use that tone before, when Ramona and Tyrone’s night sounds sifted through the walls and Ramona would be complaining about them, and Tyrone would try to settle Ramona down. “Well, how do you think they feel, Mona?” he’d asked in a voice that would have felt like lamb’s wool to Shern’s ears if she didn’t hate everything about this house so.
She ran to do Tyrone’s bidding, and Bliss went on with the details of how Larry had made Victoria fall. When Shern got back in the room with the first-aid supplies, Bliss was telling Tyrone how Larry had chased them right to the steps of the closed-down factory and snatched her up and tried to kiss her cheek. Tyrone’s fists were clenched, an
d his jaw was going back and forth, and Shern was surprised that he could look so mean.
He started cleaning Victoria’s sore, and she made hard, sucking sounds. They were otherwise quiet as he worked; he had to be quiet, or he would have used profanity about Larry. He knew Larry from around West Philly, would see him walking especially at night if Tyrone ventured down to do some barhopping on Fifty-second Street; he’d never liked Larry’s haughtiness, the way he’d loud-talk people since he knew he was a decent enough boxer. Tyrone had half listened to Ramona recant the story told to her by Vie about the blowup over the girls’ temporary living arrangement. He was just now making the connection between Larry and the girls, how their mother had been the object of Larry’s delusions of fatherhood. And now his crazy ass was extending that delusion to these girls, who couldn’t even call on their aunt Til to split his head once again. So right now he had to be silent as he worked, while Shern handed him peroxide, then gauze, then cut tape into strips, while Bliss squeezed her sister’s hand. He had to swallow hard and push his anger into a ball in his throat and concentrate on dressing Victoria’s knee.
When he was finished with the knee and sat back and wiped the sweat that glistened on his forehead, Bliss broke the silence.
“Why you want to be with Ramona?” she asked. “She’s all mean and do. And two-faced. You’re too nice for her.”
Shern looked down at her fingernails. For once she was glad to hear one of Bliss’s inappropriate comments.
“Wait a minute, you not being fair, Bliss,” Tyrone said. “Ramona’s sweet.”
Victoria moaned when he said that.
“Well, she is in her own way when you get to know her. Y’all just haven’t been here long enough to see her good side; she got a real sweetness about her. All right,” he conceded, “she can be a little, you know, a little snippy sometimes.”
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