“Oh, go ahead and take the hour, Ramona. It’s already approved. In fact, you know what, doll, you can take it with pay since those brass bangle bracelets you selected for the entrance bin sold out by the end of the lunchtime rush.”
“They’re gone?” Ramona asked. “I never made it back down to the selling floor once I packed the bin this morning.”
“Sold out, doll. You’ve got one hell of an eye for what the bargain shopper wants. I just told the real estate guy who called to get a reference on your character and income potential that you would always have a future with Lit’s.”
Ramona stopped transferring the dusters from the wheeled cart to the bar and looked directly at Cass as if she hadn’t heard right.
“I did, Ramona. I says to him, ‘Listen now, Ramona is one beautiful, conscientious lady. She’s not your ordinary run-of-the-mill Negro.’”
Ramona just stared at Cass, at the half-moon hazel brown eyebrows drawn against her forehead that sometimes made it hard for Ramona to read her because the eyebrows stayed still even as the rest of her face moved. She could tell even without the eyebrows, though, that Cass wasn’t just joking around, and now she was embarrassed for them both. She turned her back and headed deeper into the stockroom, mumbling, “Excuse me, something just occurred to me that I need to check on back here.”
“Really, Ramona.” Cass followed Ramona just inside the stockroom door. “You really do your race proud. You’re never late, never take off a Friday or a Monday, you don’t steal, you know what I mean, Ramona. I told that apartment guy too. Listen, I says to him, when he was hemming and hawing about the effect renting to a Negro would have on the other tenants, ‘You should be proud to have the likes of a fine Negro girl like Ramona wanting to rent from you,’ I says.”
Ramona wanted to sink to the floor, cover her face in the dusters, close her ears. She wanted to turn Cass’s voice off. She wanted to explode. It was enough that Mae had thwarted her move; she didn’t need to know that powers much larger than Mae were thwarting her too. And what could she do? This wasn’t even Selma, where they were getting ready for the march. She could sit at the counter at Woolworth’s, drink from the same fountain as her boss, and Mae had in fact driven her credit into the ground, so she couldn’t even prove in a court of law that the apartment was denied her for other than legitimate reasons. Her eyes were burning. “Cass, I’m going to be a minute in here,” she called out to the doorway. “And then I think I will take that hour. I’ll see you in the morning. I’ll get those dusters on the floor first thing.”
Her nose was running when she got back to her desk, but she wouldn’t let herself cry. She went to her bottom drawer and pulled out her purse, took out a token for the el ride home, swallowed hard. She didn’t want to go home. She thought about where could she go. Out for a drink maybe, a light dinner. But with whom. Not Tyrone; he kept the shop open late during the week, more eye burning at the thought of Tyrone. She went for her address book. Whom could she call for a last-minute dinner date? Ran her finger up and down the pages, turning the pages. Not him. Married. Please, not him. Ugh, can’t believe I spent time with him. She was almost through the book; she had to sit down at the realization that there was no one she could call at this moment. How limited her world had become, how limited, really, it had always been. How sad, my God, how very sad. The names and addresses were blurring on the page; she still wouldn’t let herself cry.
Then she came upon Beanie’s name. She stopped her finger at Beanie’s name. It never occurred to her to call up the likes of Beanie, even though she was always promising Beanie that they were going to keep in touch between choir rehearsals. She dialed the number, dialed it quickly before she could talk herself out of it, and got suddenly shy when Beanie said, “Hello.”
“Hi, Beanie, it’s Ramona.” Ramona forced the words out on her pent-up breaths.
“Hey, Ramona, girl, what you know good?”
“Nothing good, girl,” Ramona said, and then wished she could call the words back.
“Uh-oh, what’s wrong? Spill it, girl. That cute country boy starting to show his butt? Huh? The cute ones always do sooner or later, that’s why I keeps me an ugly man. Toupee and all.” She laughed a raucous laugh, and Ramona almost laughed too. Ramona wanted to laugh, then wanted to tell Beanie all about Tyrone’s mouth, and how it had changed, wanted to tell her about the apartment falling through, and how much she hated Mae. She wanted to tell her to put a pot of coffee on, pull down that square-shaped bottle of Manischewitz grape concord, she was on the way over, and Lord have mercy, she didn’t know what she needed more, the coffee or some wine. But she didn’t know how to start, hadn’t been friends with a woman since her friend Grace from high school went away to college. And now she was feeling her chest tighten, and she had to get off the phone before that block of granite came up and took over her chest.
“Ramona? You there?”
“Yeah, Beanie, I just wanted to make sure we had rehearsal Wednesday night, supposed to be a storm tomorrow night into Wednesday.”
Beanie exaggerated a smacking sound. “Awl, shucks, girl, I thought you was calling to talk. I’ll call you if rehearsal’s off, you know that. What you doing later? Me and a few of the girls going over to Sunny Honey’s to have some wings, you want to come?”
Ramona twirled the token along the ink blotter on her desk. “Can’t,” she lied.
“All right, well, listen up, Ramona, and listen up good. I’m here if you need me, I mean that too, girl. All right?”
“Yeah, sure, Beanie. Got to run.”
She hung up the phone and just sat at her desk playing with the token. The air was heavy around her, and now she truly missed Tyrone. Then it occurred to her just to go to the shop and visit him there. She was tired of waiting for him to come around anyhow. And now she wanted—needed—to be with him. That’s what she would do, go straight to the shop and keep Tyrone company until he was ready to close.
She grabbed her coat and purse and punched her time card and headed for the el. Now she couldn’t wait to get there, and the el ride was seeming to take forever. She tried to drive the el herself with her stomach and her breaths, rushing it, but the more impatient she became, the slower the clickety-clack of the wheels against the tracks seemed. Finally, once the el screeched and grunted and sighed to a stop at Sixtieth Street, she pushed past the throngs of people to get through the doors. She ran down the steps, zooming in and out between the slower walkers, and then across the street. She couldn’t wait to tell Tyrone about the apartment, about Mae; she’d never told anyone about Mae before. Maybe she’d cry. For sure he’d take her in his arms. She was at the door. She glanced back across the street at the clock atop the el platform advertising Morton’s salt that said, “When It Rains It Pours.” Almost six. Good, Perry would be gone. She turned the doorknob and pushed the door. The door pushed back. She jangled the knob. It wasn’t turning. She knocked on the door, looked for the sign that said be right back. That’s when she saw it, right in the bottom corner of the window, resting against the manila-colored window shade. The small red and white sign said CLOSED.
“Where the fuck is he?” she said out loud. She walked on down the street feeling like a zombie because she didn’t know what to feel. This kind of anger toward a man was new for her. She’d feigned it plenty of times, stroked their egos and pretended she was having a jealous rage even though deep down she didn’t give a shit. But now she really was angry, and hurt, and disappointed, and humiliated, and sad, she was very, very sad. She counted the days since they’d been together, before Victoria had fallen and hurt her leg; damn, that was well over a week.
She walked faster to do something with all the feelings spinning like a multicolored windmill until it was spinning so fast and all the colors washed together that she couldn’t tell where one started and the other ended. She was right in front of Sunny Honey now. She could almost hear Beanie’s laughter. She walked on past Sunny Honey and was in the next block, and then
she couldn’t explain it, but she turned around suddenly and started to run, could feel a snag opening up in her stockings and rushing up her calf she was running so fast, she’d have to put her shoes in the shop, she thought as she felt the rubber tip on her high heel give and she could hear her heel scraping the cement as she ran. She was back in front of Sunny Honey. She didn’t stop to let herself think or she would have surely stopped herself. She busted through the door, followed the sound of Beanie’s laughter to a booth in the back. Just stood there breathing hard until Beanie looked up.
“Hey, girl.” Beanie jumped up to hug Ramona. “I’m so glad you decided to come.”
Ramona didn’t hug Beanie back. She just stood there with her arms hanging, her purse dangling from her wrist. She did let her head go on Beanie’s shoulder, though. And then she couldn’t even help herself. She just allowed her head to rest on Beanie’s shoulder. Now she let herself cry.
16
Clarise was on the way back. More than a week since she’d gone hysterical over the girls, and her thinking was shimmering like an icicle catching the sun and making rainbows as it melts. The haze had lifted. Once she’d come back to awareness from that powerful injection they’d given her that Sunday afternoon, and realized that her first thoughts in the mornings were clear as spring water, and as the day progressed they went to cloudy, to mud, she finally made the connection that it was the Elavil pills. So she stopped taking the pills whenever she could. Only when they stood right over her, handed her water, and watched her swallow did she take the pills. Otherwise, especially if it was the morning shift nurse, who always rushed through Clarise’s room in her street shoes while her nurse’s shoes sat in the utility room sopping up the White-All shoe polish, Clarise would hold the pills in her hands, wrap them in the napkin on her breakfast tray, and leave them to go out with the garbage.
Now it was Monday evening, and she sat in the patients’ lounge, knitting and figuring things out. She tried to keep a blank look to her eyes the way she guessed someone’s eyes would look who was actually swallowing all the pills handed her in the pleated paper container. She didn’t even allow her reaction to show as Emma, the silver-blue haired woman who occupied the room next to Clarise’s, began pointing wildly at the window in the patients’ lounge and flailing her arms up and down, saying that the moon was falling out of the sky and it was headed straight for the window. About once a week Emma spotted such catastrophes on the way to happening and the staff would be called to arms, rushing from whatever else they were doing to restrain Emma, get her back to her room, shoot her up with a stream of narcotics that had her smiling and nodding for days after. Clarise had taken note of the beatific expression on Emma’s face before she emerged from her smiling and nodding state of mind. She would imitate that expression later this evening during her session with the psychiatrist; maybe he’d okay her full visiting privileges again. She had missed the aunts’ and uncles’ daylong stays, which had been reduced down to fifteen minutes twice a day after her ranting session the week before. And she certainly understood why the aunts and uncles had lied to her about the girls, knew that the wall separating the aunts and uncles from the girls must have been impenetrable or surely her aunt Til would have knocked it down by now with her sledgehammer will. So she didn’t waste her clarity of thought bemoaning what was done and for the moment unchangeable. Nor did she try to guess where the girls might be. Of course they were alive, well too, she told herself. By law they couldn’t with-old drastic information about the girls from their own mother, she was sure of that. Plus, if she dwelled too much on the dearth of information she had about their whereabouts, she feared she’d drive herself right into another fit of hysteria and they’d shoot her full of that liquid that caused that black, gumbo-textured screen to fall all around her that let in only a pinhole of ether. So right now as she clicked her knitting needles which sounded melodious even against the backdrop of Emma’s screams about the moon falling, resounding through the hallway as Emma was being carried back to her room, Clarise counted the rows of knit and purl stitches she had to do yet before her bright purple shawl was completed. She yawned and settled back deeper in the chair and calmly knitted while she planned her escape.
Clarise wasn’t the only one planning an escape. Shern was too. Right now she was in the small bedroom at Mae’s, undoing the catch on the trunk to pull out extra leotards and sweaters because an unseasonal March snowstorm had been forecast. It was just past one in the morning, and she felt unclasped for a change, a range of motion in her muscles and her feelings that was unusual for her in this house. She had moved the small table lamp to the floor to cast just a smattering of light from down low to guide her fast-moving hands, and suddenly the light shooting upward rounded the hard, angular lines of that room and opened it up some. Victoria and Bliss were snoring lightly, and their rhythmic breaths were settling to her as she worked as quickly and quietly as she could. She was judicious about what she packed; they would need to move like lightning through the night air, and she didn’t want them to be too loaded down. Plus she and Bliss would need to take turns helping Victoria, she was still limping so.
“Just a little infection,” Mae had said that afternoon when she’d finally gotten in after that el ride from the clinic with Victoria hobbling behind her. “The doctor gave her penicillin pills and said she’s got to keep that leg elevated at night.” Mae had fixed her lazy eye on Shern as she gave the doctor’s report. “So I’m trusting you to do that, dumpling.” She had squeezed Shern’s chin when she said it. “You girls not gonna be able to sleep all huddled on that one little bed with your sister needing to keep that leg raised, okay, sugarplum?”
Victoria had protested when Shern tucked her into the other twin bed. Said that she wanted to sleep with Shern and Bliss. Shern had consoled her, though, persuaded her by reminding her how close the beds were in that tiny room. “All you have to do is stretch good and you’ll be able to touch me in the other bed.”
Now Shern was lining up their shoes in front of the velvet green couch; she laid a sock on each shoe. She almost started humming, the way she’d hum at home when she did some big-sisterly-type thing, like match three pair of ribbons for their hair, or spoon out the ice cream into the three bowls that she lined up neatly on the counter, or get their Sunday School money from their mother’s purse, three quarters that she’d place one each on top of their Sunday gloves. She stopped herself from humming here, too incongruent a thing to do in this house. She couldn’t stop the electricity in her bones, though. She was excited to be getting ready to steal away from here. They would take the bus that stopped at Sixtieth Street at 2:00 A.M. to three blocks from the aunts and uncles. She had planned it out so well too, without a mention to Bliss and Victoria. Just like how she hadn’t mentioned to them Addison’s violation earlier that afternoon, when he’d trapped her in that shed.
She put a sweater and pair of corduroy pants for each of them on the green couch right above the shoes and socks. She wanted the clothes they would put on shortly to be organized so that they could get dressed while they argued. She knew they would argue. Especially she and Bliss. She had actually considered letting them in on her plan earlier as they got ready for bed and even as they took turns crying the way they still cried some nights before they fell asleep. She didn’t. Thought it best to wake them quickly, tell them to be quiet and put the clothes on. Perhaps in their fogginess they might not even protest.
She started with Bliss.
“Go where?” Bliss said it so loudly Shern had to cup her hand over her mouth.
“To the aunts and uncles!” Shern put her mouth to Bliss’s ear and pushed the words in as hard as she could.
“We can’t just leave here,” Bliss said as she struggled with Shern to uncover her mouth. She grabbed a bit of the skin of Shern’s palm and held it between her teeth.
“Ouch, you didn’t have to bite me,” Shern snarled.
“Well, you didn’t have to try to smother me.”
<
br /> “Keep your voice down then, or I will smother you for real. Now get up and get dressed while I help Victoria get up.”
“You must didn’t hear me.” Bliss flung her legs over the side of the bed and sat up and attempted to whisper. “We can’t just leave here. They’ll find us; then they’ll tag us runaways; they might even throw us in the Youth Study Center.”
Shern had considered that possibility. But she had to take the risk now while she could still walk from here with her knees facing forward, before Addison forced her knees apart and left her waddling in circles like a confused, violated duck. “By the time they find us,” she said forcefully, “Mommie will be better and we’ll be back home.”
Shern could see even through the light of the low-sitting lamp that Bliss’s eyes were brimming over in disbelief that Shern had concocted such a plan.
“And how are we supposed to get there, Einstein?” Bliss had heard Mae use that expression with Ramona. She thought it was funny then; it wasn’t funny now.
“On the bus.”
“The bus?”
“Yes, the bus. I have my milk money from the past month wrapped up in a sock under the mattress. I called the PTC from the phone booth on the corner while you were jumping rope. The last bus that takes us within two blocks of the aunts and uncles leaves at two A.M.”
“And where we supposed to catch this bus?”
“On Sixtieth Street.”
“And how are we supposed to get out of this house with nobody knowing?”
“That’s why we have to go now. Ramona’s asleep, Mae’s out gambling, and who knows where that—that—” She couldn’t say his name or even utter a substitute for his name. She looked at her hands through the lamplight. “We just have to hurry.”
“And how’s Tore supposed to run? I’m sure you figured out in all of your figuring that we’ll probably have to do some running.”
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