Tempest Rising

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  But now Shern was wide-awake, listening to the night sounds, feeling them twirl in her stomach, and needing to go to the bathroom. But how could she go to the bathroom? The bathroom was at the other end of the hall. She was afraid to go, afraid that that Addison might be crouching in the shadows of the upstairs hall. She’d have to hold it until morning. Now there was a river between her legs at the thought of holding it until morning. She’d have to go now.

  She wrapped herself in her lime green velour bathrobe and pulled the belt tight around her waist, the shawl collar close against her neck. The robe still smelled like the Bonwit Teller box it had come in, like the sweetness of the sample bath crystals that had been tucked into a silk purse in the corner of the box. “Ooh, Mommie,” she’d said when she’d opened the box, “oooh, it’s like something a grown lady would wear, ooh, I love it, Mommie.” She pushed her hands into the oversized slit pockets of the soft, sweet-smelling robe. Her finger went straight through a hole in the pocket. Her mother had cut a small square of the fabric when Shern went to a sleep-over party at the home of a new friend. Clarise didn’t know the people well enough to feel entirely comfortable, so she’d cut the square and put it under her pillow and told Shern to make sure that she slept in the robe that night so that she would return safely to her. Shern had laughed at her mother and called her silly and superstitious. Now she swallowed the cotton that came up in her throat at the thought of her mother. Wished she had a piece of her mother’s robe that she could put under her pillow to make sure her mother was returned safely to her.

  She pulled back the bedroom door ever so slowly. The hallway smelled like the barbecued chicken Ramona had cooked for dinner. She hoped the barbecued chicken smell wouldn’t get into her robe; she didn’t want to carry the smells of this house back with her when she finally returned to her real home.

  She half skated, half slid down the hallway. The plastic runner covering the wall-to-wall carpeting was cool and slick against her bare feet. She held her breath until she was at the opened bathroom door, rushed in and closed the door, and quickly and firmly affixed the lock.

  The bathroom was small and warm. A pink night-light softened the black-and-white ceramic tile, and Shern felt safe in here with the door good and locked. She sat on the toilet for a long while and listened to the sounds of the cellar heater hum and pulse through the radiator and mix with her own stomach growling. She hadn’t eaten dinner, had stayed cloistered in that bedroom all afternoon after she’d bungled that phone call, tensed up, expecting Ramona to rush in the room any minute and berate her the way she’d expected when Ramona caught her with the phone in her hand.

  The radiator clanged, and Shern jumped; she settled back down when she realized it was just the heater shutting off. The bathroom went silent. That’s when another sound came into focus. A quiet and dark sound. She squinted, as if the squinting could help her hear. The way she’d squint when she’d heard Ramona’s bed creaking and Tyrone’s muffled breaths, which seemed to sift through the walls and land sharp and hard against her ears and made her feel nauseated and clammy, and warm and confused. This sound she heard now didn’t come from Ramona’s room, though; this sound came from the basement straight up through the radiator, it seemed. She could almost taste the dust on her tongue as she tried to picture the basement filled with all of Mae’s retired furniture, couches and end tables and lamps turned sideways or upside down to take up less room because there were so many pieces down there, much of it looking practically new. She wondered why Mae seemed to replace her furniture so often. Her own mother had prided herself on the mahogany china closet that had been the uncles’, the handmade cedar chest that had been the aunts’. “Junk, they make such junk now,” her mother would say, and turn up her aquiline nose as she fingered a mass-produced vase, or lamp, or bookend.

  Then Shern heard the sounds again. As if the air in the basement were being chewed and spit. She could make out the words, horrible words, now they were piercingly clear. She could hear Victoria’s name, so now she had to listen as Mae called Ramona a worthless, whoring hussy.

  “Let that child fall and hurt herself, I should knock the living shit out of you.”

  Crying. “I’m moving from here. I’m not putting up with you anymore and your deranged self.”

  “You just try it. I don’t know where in the hell you think you going where you can live as cheaply as you do here.”

  “Cheaply! All the money I give you.”

  “You don’t give me shit.”

  “And all I do for you around here.”

  “You don’t do shit.”

  “All the money you gamble away.”

  A slap.

  “Hit me again, here.”

  “And what you gonna do, you gonna hit your mother back, huh? You just try it and I’ll have Bernie put your ass under the jail, you worthless, mean, no-good hussy.”

  “If I am worthless, if I am mean, you made me that way.”

  “Awl, get outta my face, go cock your legs open for that little ol poor country boy you saddled up with. That’s why you let that little girl get hurt like that. Go on and get out of my face before I hit you in your mouth this time. Disrespecting me, you—you.”

  “You just a crazy miserable old lady.”

  A slap.

  Sobbing. “You just wait and see, I’m getting outta here, just wait and see.” Footsteps on the stairs. The plastic on the couch in the living room screaming, then settling to a low, steady moan.

  Shern jumped up from the toilet and slid along the plastic hallway runner back into the bedroom. She closed the door and leaned against the door to catch her breath. She undid her soft lime green robe and tossed it on the other bed and squeezed back into the bed her sisters shared. She burrowed her head in her arms and prayed for morning to find them back in their real home, prayed that she was caught in a nightmare that she hadn’t been able to wake from. She didn’t know, though, that there had been another Donald Booker sighting on Dead Block that evening. That Hettie had hollered across Addison Street to Mae, “Hear that evil spirit of that missing white boy was kicking up in the park again and now the Lawsons can’t find their German shepherd puppy.” And that whenever there was a Donald Booker sighting, which happened five, six times a year and was never, ever substantiated, an agitation between Mae and Ramona would sprout up like a well-fertilized weed and cause such consternation, arguments, even fights sometimes worse than the one they’d just had. All Shern knew was that the bad air between Mae and Ramona might spread to her sisters and her, might cause Mae to slap at them.

  Her chest was on fire. She got up again and grabbed her lime green robe and wrapped herself in it. She climbed back in bed, nestled her head under the robe’s collar, and pushed her finger through the hole in the pocket her mother had cut. She clamped her eyes shut and swallowed her sobs as she thought about the sound of her uncle Blue’s voice earlier that day. Eventually she fell back to sleep dreaming about the aunts and uncles.

  12

  Blue’s sherry-induced euphoria of Sunday afternoon had lifted this Monday morning, and now his clear head told him he had hung up the phone too fast. He stood next to Til as she mixed around in the steaming pot of linseed and coconut oils for the next batch of soap they were readying.

  Til didn’t even have to turn to look at him to see something was wrong. Blue was the closest to her in age, and from the time they were children, whenever he stood right next to her not saying anything, just weighing down the air with his sighs, she knew something had bothered him so deeply he was getting ready to cry. “What’s the matter, Blue?” she asked, pausing over the huge pot to reverse the direction she stirred. “Hangover wrapping around you like a spider’s web?”

  “For your information my mind’s quite clear, thank you.”

  “Well, what then? Don’t tell me you and Show didn’t finish fashioning the molds. Now, you’re the ones who insisted on doing ovals instead of squares this year, so it’s up to you to have those molds
ready when the tallow is.”

  “Molds done, Til. Coconut flecks heaped in a mound ready to be pinched into the honey, cellophane wrappings measured and cut, Ness and Show just counted them out, two thousand, right?”

  “So if everything’s in order”—Til stopped stirring and looked directly at Blue—“why does the air all around you feel like it’s wearing steel-plated boots?”

  Blue couldn’t hold it. Started crying like he was five years old. “I can’t believe what I did, Til, Til, I feel so bad.”

  Til banged her wooden ladle against the side of the stove. “Stop crying, Blue. Now toughen up and tell me what you did.”

  Ness and Show were standing in the kitchen doorway. Show carried the vat of honey for mixing with the tallow, set it on the floor next to the stove, reached into his back pocket, and pulled out his white cotton handkerchief, which he handed to Blue.

  “What did he do, Sister?” Ness asked as she stood over the pot and sniffed. “My, my, my, Sister, that coconut smells heavenly; I do think we should go up on the price twenty-five cents a bar this year.”

  “Next year, Ness. Catalog’s already out with the price, and you know that white man that stamps his name on our soap is not budging a penny from his profit to add to ours.”

  Blue honked into the handkerchief and called attention back to himself. “My world is crashing in on me over what I’ve done, and all you two can do is talk profits.”

  “When you ready to pull yourself together and straighten your backbone and talk without a quivering to your voice, I’ll listen,” Til said. And to Show: “That honey’s ready to be sprinkled with the coconut flecks, isn’t it? Let’s have as much out of the way as possible so we can meet the beginning of visitors’ hours at Clarise’s bedside, especially after her relapse.”

  “Lord, Lord, Lord, and she was doing so well too.” Ness sighed.

  Blue cried openly again at the mention of Clarise’s name. He leaned his bent elbow on Show’s shoulder. “Brother, Brother, I can tell you what I’ve done, can’t I?”

  “Speak to me, Blue,” Show said. “You’ve got both my ears.”

  “Brother, I think I hung the phone up right in the ear of one of the daughters.”

  “What!” all three shouted in unison.

  Til went to Blue and pulled him from Show’s shoulder, reached up and put her hands on his forearms, shook him. “Look me in the eye and talk to me. Talk me true, talk me now.”

  “Lord, please talk to her,” Ness chimed in.

  “Yesterday afternoon, when the phone rang and I answered, and I thought it was some pervert just breathing hard and moaning into the phone—”

  “When I asked you who was on the phone?”

  “Yes, yes, yes. I hung up, just banged it down on the receiver. Didn’t give it another thought until I woke this morning with the daughters on my mind and my chest riddled with guilt.”

  “What makes you so sure it was one of the daughters?” Til asked. She stared off into the smoke the boiling soap made. She moved her hands from Blue’s arms and rubbed her own as if she’d just caught a chill.

  “Does anybody ever ring this phone on a Sunday? Think about it,” Blue said, putting his hand to his forehead. “Since Finch’s tragedy has that phone rang once on a Sunday afternoon?”

  “Brother has a point,” Ness said.

  “Damn good point,” Show added.

  “And this morning, as I lay in bed and tried to catch my breath over what I’d done, I realized that I heard her voice as the phone was on the way down. She was saying—she was saying, ‘It’s me, it’s me.’” He hung his head in his hands and sobbed.

  “It was Shern?” Til asked.

  Blue nodded from his hands.

  “It was Shern,” Til said to Ness and Show as if they hadn’t also seen Blue’s head going up and down in his hands. “Distraught too, or she would have spoken sooner. It was Shern.”

  “What we gonna do, Sister?” Ness asked as she squeezed her fingers and spun her hands in circles.

  Til turned the flame down under the pot of boiling soap. “We gonna finish up this batch of soap. We gonna meet visiting hours at Clarise’s bedside, we gonna pass some money down at Family Court and find out where they placed those girls, we gonna say fuck some motherfucking judge’s ruling, we gonna go see about those girls.”

  Over that next week, while the aunts and uncles waited to hear news on the girls’ whereabouts from a buggy-eyed clerk who said he had a friend whose cousin was married to Vie’s assistant, they occupied themselves with their soap. That’s all they could do. Clarise’s visiting hours had been restricted again down to thirty minutes a day after her episode of mania the week before, and since they knew the importance of keeping the hands moving when the heart is standing still, they doubled their usual production of two thousand bars of soap to four.

  Exotic-shaped ovals this soap was, cream-colored with golden patches where the honey had settled in clumps; white flecks of coconut in the honey looked like snowflakes; the coconut and honey scent with a hint of linseed oil drifted through the cellophane and heightened the exotic, tropical appearance of the soap. They wrapped all four thousand bars in clear cellophane. Sent it to the distributor, who would stamp it with a fancy gold label and his French-sounding name and pay them half of the $1.99 price listed in the catalog. Four times a year they did this, and their soap was always the first item to sell out from the catalog distributed to those who could afford $2 for a single bar of soap. Only the distributor knew the fine coconut-honey soap was made by a quartet of American blacks. But the aunts and uncles didn’t mind the anonymity. They understood that maybe rice might sell with a black face attached to it, pancake mix for sure, but not soap, not in 1965, when Alabama and Mississippi were called the places where democracy doesn’t apply to the Negro and cities in the North and East were prone to eruptions of race riots again in the summer.

  So the aunts and uncles worked without recognition, lived quiet, modest lives on their soap profits, plus the money they earned from leasing their daddy’s land. They spent their money on quality rather than show so their possessions could last a lifetime. And always, always, they put up a portion of their earnings for Clarise and the girls to inherit.

  And now a week later they finally heard some news on the girls. It wasn’t really news, though, more like an update that Vie had so many confidential stickers on the girls’ paperwork that it would take at least another two days. And this information only after Til surprised the buggy-eyed clerk as he stepped out of his basement apartment on Broad Street, headed for the newsstand on the corner to buy a tripack of Old Original El Producto cigars. Til walked right up next to him, pushed her voice through the March wind right into his pointed ears, and said, “Either I get their whereabouts, or my money back, or your forehead mounds out to twice its size on a permanent basis.”

  Til agreed to wait two more days. This was Monday morning, Wednesday, she insisted. She’d better know what she needed to know by Wednesday.

  This Monday morning was a vulture for Ramona. A barnyard buzzard. Circling, ready to swoop down and pick at those parts of herself that had died over the weekend, a snatch of her spirit, a fleck of her ambition, little fragments of her soul. She was even dressed in black this morning, ready to go to her job at Lit Brothers bargain basement. She and Mae had fought all week long. Over money: Ramona confronted Mae about calling the store and charging things against her paycheck; Mae told Ramona to look at it as going toward the rent she should be paying. Over Addison: Ramona insisted that he go out and at least bag groceries at the Penn Fruit, offer to walk people home and carry their bags, at least make a couple of dollars a day in tips instead of lying around the house all day, eating all the food, burning electricity running the television all the time; Mae said he’d been through a trauma in Buffalo, he needed time to clear his head. Over Larry: He’d followed the girls home from school one day last week, and Ramona was beginning to agree with what Tyrone had said after the first
time it happened, that he might need to be reported; Mae slapped Ramona then, told her don’t be quoting that poor little old country boy to her, who was gonna pay her bills if Vie stopped placing children with her?

  This most recent fight over Larry happened the night before, and Ramona’s jaw was still sore this Monday morning as she studied the skirt of her black knit set and then thought about what those girls would have for breakfast. She gently dabbed her skirt with a piece of rolled-up masking tape to pick off the lint and decided they would have cereal. She was careful with her appearance, meticulous. Even though she couldn’t afford to shop the upper levels, she doted on her acrylics like they were cashmere, her nylon blends like they were silk. She squinted to make sure she’d gotten all the lint. But it was dark in here for 7:00 A.M.

  She rolled the shades all the way up in the kitchen, trying to get some natural sunlight in there; she even went into the living room and dining room to roll up shades. Then she remembered the shed door right off the kitchen was closed. Her dose of morning light came through that window in the shed. But now Addison was sleeping there.

  She pushed the door open anyhow and tugged on the shade string and let it go quickly. The shade unwrapped to the top of the window with a bang. The noise and the sudden onslaught of light woke Addison, and he sat up, his face fixed in a confused scowl. “Whoa, cuz, what’s your problems, why you gonna insult me with such a rude wake-up? I mean, damn, cuz, I ain’t been here but a week, and this is how you gonna treat me.”

  “Time for anything big and dumb as you to have his lazy ass up.” Ramona went back and sat at the kitchen table and tilted her face to catch the light streaming in from the shed. “If you not interested in any kind of school, the least you can do is get up and go out and try to find a piece of a job to help pay for your room and board around here.”