I don’t turn around even though I know it must be RD standing on the front steps watching me. I look at Kimberly, her tiny white body cupped in my hand. Her moonstone eyes shine in the moonlight. Her round base feels so smooth it’s hard to believe she’s only made of clay. I do it fast, pulling my hand behind my head to get more thrust, throwing her as far as I can into the night sky. The streetlamp captures her flight, and for a moment it looks like she might keep going, like she might just fly on out of here.
CHAPTER FIVE
Memory, a Treacherous Thing
(Louise, Late Summer 2000)
Tiny left a message while I was at exercise to say that she just fired her housekeeper, Brenda, for not showing up to work for the third time this month, and would I please call her back and give her Faye’s number?
How to respond? I know that Faye needs all the work she can get, but I also know that she will never live up to Tiny’s impossible standards, that Tiny might very well fire her within a month of hiring her. Also, Tiny would not be nearly as forgiving as I was if Faye’s daughter were to take something from her. (Not that I think Missy would steal from Tiny. I am almost positive that her stealing from me was a onetime deal.) But if she were to take something from Tiny, Tiny would probably have the poor girl arrested. She would say she was using “tough love,” just as she did when she sent her daughter, Helen, to rehab at Charter Peachford after Helen got caught drinking for the third time. (In addition to the expression “tough love,” Tiny is also fond of both the law and the saying “Three strikes and you’re out.”)
Missy needs love, that’s for sure, but I’m not sure how “tough” it needs to be. From what Faye tells me, it sounds as if Missy is extremely threatened by Faye’s fiancé, RD. She even tried to accuse RD of taking the bird when I discovered it was missing. Faye says that she is fed up with Missy acting up, getting in bad moods, and talking back.
“And now stealing!” she exclaimed when I finally reached her on the phone. “That girl is going to get the belt.”
I wanted to suggest some other form of punishment but I had to remind myself that that was not my place, that people from other cultures and classes handle things differently. I did tell Faye that Missy sounded like a typical preteen to me and to watch out, the ride only gets bumpier.
Faye said that Missy had actually been acting more childish than usual, that after years of seeming indifference she had become fixated on her absent father (of course Faye didn’t say “fixated,” she said “all broody over”). She said that Missy had this idea that she was going to see her father again and that when she did she would give him my bird. Which shows that Missy really hasn’t been thinking clearly at all. I mean, what would a deadbeat daddy do with a delicate little piece of painted clay?
Anyway. That’s all in the past. And that’s exactly what I told Missy when Faye brought her back to our house the next week. I told her I was sorry that I had implied on the phone that she was no longer welcome at my home, that everyone needs a second chance, and that I hoped she didn’t get into too, too much trouble after I phoned her mother back once Missy hung up on me. I told her that while of course I was sad that the stolen bird had shattered, ultimately it was just an object and we should all try hard not to cling too tightly to things. We should practice detachment.
“Believe me,” I said. “I know how hard it can be to be surrounded by beautiful things you can’t have.”
I could tell by the set of her jaw and the hunch of her shoulders that I had said the wrong thing, that I had offended her. I didn’t mean to do so. I was only thinking of how I feel every time I go to the Signature Shop over on Roswell Road and am tempted to drop thousands of dollars on some fabulous piece of folk art, though it’s rare for me actually to buy anything from there. It’s just too expensive. The only time I actually get art from the Signature Shop is when John Henry buys me something as a gift. Granted, I have always told the salesperson exactly what it is I want so that she can guide John Henry right to it.
Though my statement to Missy about beautiful things might have been clumsy, I said it with good intention, and deep down I think Missy knows that.
Tiny would not be so well intended. Tiny thinks I let my help get away with murder. Once I told Tiny that I always have to remember to take out the recycling before Faye comes or else Faye will just put it into the Herbie Curbie with all of the other trash.
Tiny screamed, “Good Lord, Louise, you are her boss! If she is doing something wrong you need to tell her instead of driving yourself crazy proofing the house for her potential mistakes!”
WHEN I CALL Tiny back she answers on the second ring.
“Louise, thank God. Did you get my message?”
The way Tiny acts you’d think she’d had no water for a week and I just showed up at her door with ten gallons of Evian.
“I did,” I say. “But unfortunately you’re going to have to find someone besides Faye to clean for you. Faye is completely booked.”
“Lou-Lou, you are holding out on me and you know it. You said yourself that she’s willing to come any Saturday you need her because she wants the extra work.”
Damn my big mouth.
“Listen, Tiny, honey, I just don’t think Faye would live up to your expectations. I wouldn’t have hired her myself if it hadn’t been for my mother pressuring me to do so.”
Tiny knows a little, but not all, about that situation. I am hoping she will press me for more details so that I can tell her the full story and distract her from trying to get Faye’s number out of me.
“She’s been working for you for forever. She can’t be that bad. And I am desperate! The silver is tarnished, my floorboards are dusty, and I really need someone to iron my sheets.”
“You do not cook. You do not clean. You are an artist!” I exclaim, borrowing from something I once heard Nina Simone say in a television interview.
Tiny knows the reference (we quote it to each other often, for amusement, since both of us cook and clean and neither of us is an artist) but she chooses not to laugh. “It’s just like that damn jar of marbles all over again,” she says.
“Excuse me?” I ask.
“That jar of marbles your father gave you one year for your birthday. Your eighth, I think.”
“I swear I am getting old-timer’s. I have no idea what you are talking about.”
“Are you serious? You don’t remember those big old blue marbles of yours? The ones you kept in a quart-size jelly jar? Lord, you treated those things like Christ had shit them out Himself.”
“Gracious, Tiny,” I say, still surprised (and delighted) by her brashness even though I’ve encountered it my entire life. “I honestly have no idea what you are talking about.”
She expels one of those sighs of hers, like I am two years old and have just knocked over a basket of folded laundry.
“You must have had two hundred marbles in that jar and not once did you give one to me, not once did you share. You said you were afraid I might lose one. And that’s exactly what you’re doing today, Lou-Lou. You are afraid that I’ll offend your maid by actually asking her to do some work and so you are clutching her to your chest like you used to do with that jar of marbles. Well listen, honey, you’re all grown up and it’s time to learn how to share. So hand them over.”
“I can’t,” I say. “I lost my marbles.”
We both laugh at the inadvertent joke, though I’m a little concerned by my apparent amnesia. Big blue marbles? I have no memory of such things.
Of course it could be that Tiny’s making the whole story up or that she had another friend with a collection of marbles and she’s mistaking her for me. Either way, the story reminds me that we are getting old, fast. Not that I need to be reminded. New lines seem to appear on my face daily, and Tiny’s already had a little work done on hers.
Of course, by the conversation’s end, I have given her Faye’s number. The truth of the matter is, Tiny’s will has always been stronger than mine.
I HANG UP the phone, get a Diet Coke out of the refrigerator, and sit down again at the kitchen table, trying to remember those marbles. Nothing comes up. Nothing at all, though Tiny’s story about them certainly makes sense psychologically. Whatever my daddy gave me when I was little immediately took on the greatest value, so of course I would have hoarded them, especially around Tiny, who was always losing things.
Unfortunately, my little flare-up of old-timer’s while talking to Tiny was not atypical. Often when Tiny reminisces about experiences we shared during our youth I have no memory of what she is talking about. Which teacher or boy or put-down or triumph.
The funny thing is, there are certain moments from childhood I remember so clearly it is as if I have a video recording of them filed away in my head. The really bad moments. Those are the ones that stick with me. Like that spring day when Tiny and I were riding our bicycles in front of my house and Daddy drove by with another woman in the front seat of his convertible. Though I was only six, I knew that woman was not supposed to be with him, knew that Daddy was lying when he said that her car was in the shop so he was giving her a ride home from the office building where they both worked, he as a doctor, she as a clerk in the pharmacy on the bottom floor of his building.
I remember too the smile she gave me, open and eager, though her teeth were bad, little and sharp, as if she had filed them into points. I remember thinking, That lady must not brush two times a day like I do. She must have bad dental hygiene. (Dental hygiene was a term I had picked up from a film we watched at school titled Healthy Mouths, Healthy Citizens!)
It was one of those spring afternoons that make Atlanta exceptional, when every tree is budding, when the azaleas are flagrantly pink, when the sky is blue, blue, blue, and the temperature is seventy-two degrees and nothing but being outside will do, riding your bike up and down the street with your best friend, seeing who can go the longest with no hands, pretending you are acrobats by lifting one leg behind you (toes pointed!) while you speed through the air.
And then Daddy and that woman ruined everything. Driving by as if they didn’t have a care in the world, as if Daddy’s own wife weren’t upstairs “resting” in her room at that very moment. I was so embarrassed after they left, so embarrassed that Tiny had witnessed it all. We didn’t suspect Daddy of having an affair, nothing like that. We were too young, too unsophisticated to jump to such an (accurate) conclusion. What we did know was that Daddy was spending time with a woman who spoke with a gravelly, unrefined (hick would have been the word we used) accent, whose canary yellow blouse was so tight it strained at the buttons, who smiled at me as if it mattered whether or not I liked her. After all, I was only a child, and back then, children did not count.
Tiny and I only had a brief encounter with her and yet afterwards we knew, knew that she was someone our mothers would consider below them, someone they might whisper was “trash.”
Daddy handed me a dollar bill before they rode away, an enormous sum of money back then, at least for a child. It was bribe money, though he said it was to get ice cream at the soda fountain down on Peachtree. Tiny and I rode over there, me pedaling furiously in the hopes of exorcising all the feelings I was left with after seeing Daddy. I felt mean after seeing him, mean and loaded, a pistol with its safety off. Later, after we returned from ice cream, I made Tiny cry by blocking her from leaving my bedroom, stretching my arms in front of the door and refusing to let her pass even though she said she really, really, really needed to go to the bathroom down the hall.
Bullying Tiny (something she never let me forget, especially once we were teenagers and she was tall and gorgeous and had boys rushing to light her cigarettes while I was relatively short, only “nice-looking,” and much too much of a goody-goody to smoke) gave me the same sort of mean satisfaction I experienced when Mother’s housekeeper, Mamie, came to our home early one morning to tell us that she needed a few days off work. Her son had died in a construction accident in Detroit, and she needed to go to the funeral. I was seven years old and hearing of her tragedy pleased a small, mean part of me. It satisfied me to see her so distraught. It was a terrible thing to derive satisfaction from. If I were religious I would say it was a sin. The only justification I can allow myself is that I always felt so exposed by what Mamie knew about my family. She was one of the few adults in my life to give me constant and steady affection, and yet I resented her for seeing what a mess my mother was, for seeing how obvious it was that my father felt so burdened by Mother, burdened because of what he called her “weak spirit.”
Mamie came to clean on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and would often stay past dinner to care for me because Mother was in one way or another incapacitated (too depressed to get out of bed was usually the case) and Daddy was still at work. From our kitchen phone Mamie would telephone her daughter to tell her she was coming home late. Again.
“It’s the child I’ve gots to stay for,” she would say, her words followed by a series of low sighs and mumbles. “Lord knows what happens to her the days I’m not here.”
Sometimes she would add, “Poor baby,” before she hung up the phone. I always assumed the “poor baby” referred to me. But maybe not. Maybe Mamie was consoling her daughter. Maybe she was the “poor baby,” the poor little black girl whose mama had to spend so much of her time taking care of an otherwise unloved white child.
How I hated being that child, the unloved little girl. Perhaps that is why I have such a hard time remembering much of anything that was good about my childhood.
Yes, only the very worst memories are sharp and clear: the day I found Mother in Daddy’s closet, lying beneath the tightly packed row of his dress shirts, all ironed and starched by Mamie, arranged by color: whites, blues, then stripes. I tried to get Mother to sit up but she would not. I tried to make her talk but she would not answer me. Daddy was at work, it was one of Mamie’s days off, and I was alone with this woman who acted exactly like a corpse except for the fact that she could breathe. It was soon after that she went away for the first time, just to “rest up,” just to “revitalize” her spirit. Did she go to the hospital or to some private beach? No one ever said. Soon after Mother went away Daddy brought home a kitten for me, whom I named Gray-Gray because of her color.
Gray-Gray. Thank God for that kitten. She would arch her back and rub against my legs and sleep with me at night, her warm body relaxed next to mine, her heart beating fiercely in her chest, as if to proclaim, I am alive. I am with you.
While Mother was away—or maybe it was after, after she came back—the woman who was riding in the front seat of Daddy’s car came over to the house before Daddy got home from work. I answered the door and she was there, looking very glamorous with a red painted mouth and an orange pencil skirt that hugged her hips. She was friendly and flirtatious, she cooed over Gray-Gray, and she gave me a pack of Wrigley’s gum. I warmed up to her. I let her in, ushered her to the living room, and offered her a drink while she waited for Daddy.
How funny. I was all of seven years old and I already knew the difference between a bourbon neat, and one on the rocks. Daddy used to have me make his friends’ drinks whenever he and Mother entertained, which was not that often (though when they did, they certainly looked the happy, handsome couple). It was a party trick of his, getting his baby daughter to serve the gentlemen bourbon, the ladies gin and tonics.
It sounds terribly exploitive, I know, but I actually loved doing it, loved getting the heavy cut crystal glasses out of the antique armoire where Daddy kept them, loved using the silver tongs to plunk one, two, three cubes of ice per drink. It was just one of those things parents could get away with back then. If I had, say, trained Caroline to mix a martini when she was little she would have mentioned something about it at school and a group of counselors from Social Services would have shown up at our front door. And Caroline would have let them in and probably would have asked if they wanted their martinis made with vodka or gin. And the next thing you know, I would have
been hauled off to jail.
Miss Winnie, that was what the woman told me to call her, did not want a drink. She said that all she wanted was for me to sit right next to her and let her pet the kitten. Gray-Gray was not supposed to be in the living room. It was the nicest room in the house. The curtains were made of silk and if Gray-Gray were to run up them, they would be ruined.
But I must not have cared, must not have worried about getting in trouble. I hardly did, anyway. Mother would threaten sometimes but rarely followed through. Daddy once tried to spank me but stopped short, though I was already hoisted over his knee.
“Promise to try and always be a good girl,” he said, after lifting me back up and sitting me on his lap. “Your old daddy just can’t bear to hurt his little lamb.”
Funny, considering some of the things he could bear to do. Including cheating rampantly on Mother and, after Gray-Gray had babies, whisking away her kittens to an undisclosed place, most likely the bottom of some murky body of water.
MISS WINNIE AND I tried to talk, but she was distracted and kept looking up at the entrance to the living room, anxious for Daddy to come. And then he did and I could tell right away that he was mad at her for being inside our house.
“Louise, you know you’re not supposed to answer the door to strangers,” he scolded. I had to remind him that Miss Winnie was not a stranger. Hadn’t he introduced her to me just last spring, when they drove by in his convertible? Hadn’t we all smiled at each other and then hadn’t he given me a dollar so Tiny and I could go and get as much ice cream as we could possibly want?
He sat on the farthest sofa away from us, eyeing the decanter of brandy, which rested on a small table just by Miss Winnie’s elbow. He looked at that decanter like he looked at pretty women, but he didn’t rise to pour himself a drink. I thought about asking if he wanted me to get a drink for him, but I didn’t. Instead I held Gray-Gray close to my heart, trying to send a message to her that everything was okay.
Bound South Page 7