Like Sisters on the Homefront

by Rita Williams-Garcia

  Lynda was not the only fast one. Gayle was fast too. She could have been in track and field. In fact, she tried out for the hundred-meter hurdles when José was a tadpole in her stomach upsetting her Rice Krispies in the morning. Like she told the track coach, who thought she had talent, “Kinda hard making that hurdle when you have a baby in your belly.”

  Gayle didn’t bother with Joycie’s doorbell since Joycie wouldn’t be home the whole summer. Joycie Mama, Miss Minnie Collins, let Joycie go to Africa with her dance troupe to study real deal bush dancing. It was written up in the Amsterdam News, the City Sun, and all those black papers.

  Gayle could have been a dancer too. Not like Joycie. No one could touch Joycie. It wouldn’t surprise Gayle if Joycie came back with stories of them Africans trying to make her their queen.

  Terri’s corner house was her last hope before turning around and going home. Terri’s house was the only one on the block guarded by an iron fence. Gayle unlatched the gate and pushed the stroller in and up the walkway. Terri didn’t have a lot of talent for dancing onstage or clearing high hurdles, but Terri was reliable. Gayle could always depend on Terri to watch José while she went over to Troy’s.

  Gayle pushed the doorbell. No one answered. She rang the bell again. Again. Again. Maybe Terri was asleep. Terri often didn’t get up until noon, so Gayle searched for a stone small enough to throw up to her window.

  “All right, all right. Who that ringing my bell?” It was Terri Granny.

  “It’s me, Gayle. Terri up?”

  “Up? Up? She up and outta here to school.” Terri Granny stuck her head out, then back in. She looked like a hen.

  “School?”

  “Summer school or get left back,” quipped Terri Granny. “Seems like you could use some more schooling.”

  “Puh-leez. September be here soon enough.”

  “Look like you needs something. Got too much time on your hands and nothing going on upstairs and that says one thing. Trouble.”

  “I ain’t in no trouble. That be Junie causing a ruckus.”

  “I heard about you. Up to your navel in quicksand,” Terri Granny said.

  Why everybody gotta be in my A to Z? “I asked for Terri, not a lecture, Granny. Just tell her to call me. It’s important.”

  Terry Granny muttered something about a private secretary then closed the door in Gayle’s face.

  “Well, excuse me!” Gayle fumed. “Talk about rude.”

  She pushed the stroller down the walkway and stood outside the iron gate. Not a one of them home, she thought. Not a one.

  This felt worse than being left hanging by Troy or José’s father. Part of the fun of not knowing when she’d next see them was in adding yet another episode to the soap opera when either one of them did materialize. But being without the girls, her sisters, was being cut off from life itself. Without her girls to hang with or provide amusement she was genuinely lost. Her imagination didn’t tell her to board a bus or subway train to see what was out there beyond her block, the Forty Projects, and Jamaica Avenue. She couldn’t go but so far, anyway. The little traveling she did made her cramp up and she felt herself spotting blood. “Now why didn’t I strap on some Kotex?” she asked. José couldn’t tell her. He could only drool.

  She wheeled the stroller to the park and sat down, hoping someone she knew would wander through. Luckily she had had the sense to pack a jar of baby food and a bottle of juice since José was starting up his “feed me” nonsense again.

  Full and content, José dozed off for his noontime nap. It would have been nice if he had stayed awake long enough to play. As it was, Gayle sat without a book or magazine to read, a Walkman to listen to, or a soul to hear her tale. She came desperately close to flagging down a friend of an acquaintance but decided the girl was too far away.

  With her foot hooked underneath the stroller basket, she rolled the stroller back and forth and stared beyond the greenish brown pond and the soccer field, over to the other side of Baisley Park. José’s father and his family lived across the park. She, Terri, and Lynda used to venture over to the other side of the park and sit there waiting for José’s wife, Gloria, to come out. Lynda and Terri were supposed to hold Gloria down while Gayle stomped on her. The one time Gloria did come out, Gayle saw that she wasn’t the old, old woman who José said had tricked him into marriage. Gloria was about José’s age, nineteen or twenty.

  Soon the yellow jackets and pond mosquitoes drawn in by the fruity smell of José’s lunch forced Gayle out of the park. She wheeled her stroller home. At least there she could catch the soaps on TV until Terri and Lynda came home.

  Shoot. Mama home. Must not have gone to work. Junie still on the couch as usual. Figures.

  Gayle lifted her son out of the stroller and snuck upstairs to her room. Her mattress had been stripped and the blinds and windows were raised as high as they could go. When she stuck her hand in her top dresser drawer to rummage for Kotex her fingertips drummed wood grain. She looked in the drawer. Empty. Every one of her dresser drawers had been cleaned out. She pulled out the bottom drawer used for José’s clothes. Empty. She opened her closet doors. Only winter clothes. Mama had gone crazy and was exorcising her room.

  “We’ll see about this,” she said, putting José in his crib. “All she gotta say is ‘Clean your room’ and I’ll clean it. She don’t gotta be going through all these changes.”

  Gayle trotted downstairs looking for answers. She shook her brother. “Junie. Junie.” He opened his eyes, saw his sister, cussed, and rolled over. She smacked him lightly on the head. That was when she noticed a cheap plaid suitcase and two A & P shopping bags standing next to the TV.

  She heard Mama’s footsteps marching heavily up the basement steps. She sped into the kitchen to meet her.

  “Where my clothes?”

  Mama calmly pointed in the direction of the TV.

  “You puttin’ us out?”

  Still calm, Mama shook her head. “I’m packing you up and sending you home.”

  “Home? Home?” And it registered. She knew exactly where “home” was. Mama, that Junie-loving, good-time-killing cow, meant down Souf. “I ain’t goin’ down there,” Gayle declared, forgetting herself. Forgetting you don’t tell Mama what you “ain’t” doing, certainly not with your neck snaking figure eights. “Unh-unh,” she resumed, louder. “And if you think I’m leaving my man and my friends you crazier’n I thought.”

  “You’ll find out just how crazy . . . keep talking.” Mama took a step forward.

  With nothing to lose, Gayle said, “We gon’ find out ’cause I ain’t going.” She went along with the abortion because she could always have another baby. But now Mama was talking crazy. She was supposed to give up her friends and her man without a squawk.

  “Don’t try me,” Mama sang, her voice frightfully unstable.

  “Well I’m trying,” Gayle said, taking the final step. And that did it. Neither could back down.

  Junie sprang from the sofa to get Mama off of Gayle. As Mama turned to get the best of Junie, Gayle took her opportunity to fly upstairs and lock her door.

  She needed to get to the phone in Mama’s room, but with Mama raging downstairs, wild enough to turn on Junie no less, Gayle didn’t dare leave her room. Her girls. How was she going to get to her girls? One word to them, they’d knock on Troy Mama house. Then Troy be up here quick. And when he finds out it was Mama who made her scrape out his baby he’ll turn this place inside out with some sho ’nuf fireworks.

  Gayle took José from his crib and lay him on the mattress next to her. She fondled his curls and put her thumb in her mouth and stared at the ceiling until she fell asleep on the stripped-down mattress.

  3

  WHOEVER HEARD OF GOING to the airport on a bus? You s’posed to go in a taxi or in somebody car. We traveling on a bus with a suitcase and shopping bags. Then gotta walk ten miles through the parking lot ’cause Mama too cheap to spring for a cab.

  Gayle struggled, grumbled, and o
ccasionally glared at Mama, who moved through the parked cars like a bulldozer.

  José, joined to his mother’s waist and chest by a cloth carrier, blew raspberries and babbled new sounds. He loved being outdoors, the rocking motion of his mother’s gait, and the vibrant thump of her heartbeat. His mommy, his mommy, his mommy, his mommy.

  Gayle wondered when it would end. When she could rest. When he would learn to walk. All seventeen pounds of him strained her back, while her baby bag loaded down with baby supplies—not to mention José’s “bankie”—oppressed her shoulders.

  How could she make it with her back bent and her legs heavy with exhaustion? Even Rasheeda Davis could maneuver better. Rasheeda Davis was the only physically handicapped eighth-grader at her school. Struggling with her load, Gayle could use a tip from Rasheeda Davis, who continued to excel in school in spite of her leg braces.

  No use seeking sympathy from Mama on how heavy José was. Mama kept stories in reserve for such occasions about toting Gayle in one arm and Junie in the other because he was so sickly. Besides, Mama was already carrying the two shopping bags, suitcase, and her big old pocketbook full of all that money she wouldn’t give Gayle but would pour on Junie ’cause Junie her precious son, which didn’t faze Gayle ’cause one day Gayle would get her own money and spend it all on her son and not toss Mama a rusty, crusty penny.

  “Why we couldn’t take the stroller?” Gayle wailed, shifting José to one side. “How’m I gonna get around with no stroller?”

  “You won’t need a stroller. Just keep still ’steada flying here and there. Flying is what got you where you at.”

  “Yeah. At a airport,” Gayle said.

  They walked between the yellow cabs lined up against the curb and went inside the terminal. Not once did Mama seek out an accommodating face for directions, as if the details of the trip had been fixed in her mind for some time. She and Gayle went straight to the right line, got up to the right counter, paid with Mama’s credit card, went through the metal detector, and sat outside the boarding gate.

  Gayle wanted a soda and a sweetcake before getting on the plane. Mama said to wait for the plane snack because they charge you double in airport shops. From that point on Mama didn’t stop talking. Not about anything Gayle could appreciate, such as missing her or José, or calming Gayle’s fear of flying, but about dos and don’ts. Mostly don’ts.

  “Don’t be starting no stuff. Brother won’t put up with any coming and going and talking out the side of your face. Do act like you know better, y’hear. Don’t be eatin’ up all their food and lying around watching TV, and don’t be dragging when they call. Don’t get on their phone calling up the world. I’ll reach out and light you up long distance if I hear of it. Do speak up when you’re spoken to, and do call grown people Miss So-and-So and Mr. So-and-So.” Don’t, don’t. Do, do.

  “Dog,” Gayle groaned. “That’s it? I’m the slave girl?”

  “There’s a connection in Charlotte with an hour layover,” Mama went on. “Don’t go wandering around. Above all, do be where you s’posed to be. And don’t miss that flight calling me talking about ‘oops.’ I’ll oops you into tomorrow. And don’t—and I do mean don’t—find your way back to my doorstep till you’re sent for.”

  Like everything else in her fourteen-year-old life, Gayle had no say. When José was born Mama filled out the birth certificate application at the hospital on account of Gayle’s poor spelling and her general confusion with written instructions. Instead of listing José Cortez as the father Mama wrote “Father Unknown.” Instead of listing the baby’s name as José Emanuel Cortez, Mama wrote “Emanuel Gates Whitaker.” Gates? That’s a part of a fence, not a name. In spite of Gayle’s protests, Emanuel Gates Whitaker stuck to all the papers that later followed. Just like the abortion, the baby’s name, and now the airplane going south, Gayle had no say.

  She could see the mighty white bird on the runway. She had never been on an airplane. To Gayle, traveling involved a bus pass to destinations close enough to walk back from if necessary. The farthest she had ventured out of South Jamaica was going to a rap concert at Yankee Stadium up in the Bronx with Troy. The thought of being thousands of miles in the air where birds didn’t fly was not appealing.

  “Why we can’t take Greyhound?”

  “’Cause,” Mama said, humoring her, “you can’t get off a plane at fifty thousand feet up.”

  “Why we can’t take a train down Souf? S’pose we gotta pee?”

  “’Cause,” Mama said, “you can’t accidentally miss the train at the rest stop. The rest stop is in the back of the plane.”

  “Mama, that don’t even sound right,” Gayle said. “Whoever heard of going to the bathroom in a plane? You could hit turbulence in mid-pee or something and mess up your clothes.”

  Mama told Gayle to stop acting simple, then reminded her to be where she was supposed to be when the plane landed. “Brother’s not happy to begin with. You puttin’ him out.”

  Gayle sank her face down upon her baby’s soft hair. If only she could have gotten word to her girls last night. Gayle was sure Lynda Mama would take her and the baby in. Lynda Mama loved the baby. And why hadn’t Troy shown up? He was probably at her house thinking he still gonna be a daddy. Too late now.

  Gayle passed the time fantasizing. She made up scenes of last night with Troy at Mama’s door yelling for her to come out . . . Junie acting up, with his wild self . . . Troy waxing the floor with Junie . . . Mama scared of Troy . . . Troy, Gayle, and José off to Troy Mama house . . . Troy schooling his mama on respecting Gayle . . . Troy Mama serving them pot roast, cabbage, and cornbread . . . Häagen-Dazs for dessert.

  She came to in the airport, still jailed to Mama with José strapped to her belly. Mama didn’t even try to be good company. As soon as the flight was called and the announcement was made for people with small children to board, Mama said “Come on” like there wasn’t a moment to lose and ushered Gayle to the front of the line. She kissed José twice, then waved good-bye and hollered some final dos and don’ts for behaving down Souf.

  Gayle didn’t bother to turn around to hear any of that. She marched up the carpeted ramp and onto the plane, hoping to God Mama had gotten a good glimpse of her backside switching away. She followed a uniform-clad woman to her seat. A window seat.

  “Unh-unh,” Gayle cried. “I ain’t sitting at no window.”

  A friendly but firm voice informed her it was the only seat available. The flight was booked solid.

  Little kids excited about their first plane ride stuck their faces over their seats to gawk at her. Gayle could care less. She fussed and sucked her teeth until another flight attendant rushed to the scene.

  “Miss, if you will be seated, perhaps we can persuade another passenger to trade,” the other flight attendant suggested.

  Gayle didn’t trust her. She was too nice.

  “We won’t be able to do anything until the aisle is cleared.”

  Grudgingly, Gayle loosened the straps on the baby carrier and took her assigned seat. Mama think she so freakin’ funny, she thought. Always gotta have the last laugh.

  Twenty minutes passed without anyone faking an effort to find her a safer seat. The plane began to rumble. The same lying woman in uniform stood before her, grinning and explaining what to do with barf bags and emergency landing gear. The pilot got on the speaker to tell her she was going down Souf to live with strangers who didn’t want her in the first place. Then the plane started acting up, rumbling louder, turning, speeding down the asphalt.

  Gayle peered timidly out of the window then jerked her head back. They were off the ground. A minute later she peeked again. “José! Look. There go that Freedom Lady and her torch. See! And those two giant buildings be on postcards. Look!”

  José smiled up at her.

  Unexpectedly the plane climbed straight up. Gayle crouched down, wrapped her arms around her baby, and squeezed her eyelids tight. When the plane appeared to be flying level she opened her eyes a
nd looked out of the window. New York had gotten away from her. She and her baby were passing through clouds. It just wasn’t right, passing through a cloud. Dead people passed through clouds on their way to heaven.

  The baby didn’t care for any of this plane travel and started crying. Gayle reached into her bag and pulled out a bottle to stick in his mouth. He still cried. Rocking him did not help. His cries progressed to screams. She could halfway tune him out if the nosy people crowding her with their looks would just leave her alone. Particularly the man on the aisle reading his paper. His heavy sighs, the constant folding and refolding of his paper, the head shaking, all directed at her. Didn’t she know she and her son were a disgrace?

  She glared at him. Say something to me. I want you to . . .

  The woman seated between them turned to Gayle, offering fifty-year-old wisdom. “Babies’ eardrums pop from the compression. It helps to have something for them to suck on.”

  “See this bottle in his mouth?” Gayle snapped. “So mind ya bizniz. Okay?”

  The man with the newspaper glanced at the helpful woman. What else could you expect from such a creature?

  Gayle didn’t care. In fact she overcame her fear of looking out the window, preferring the clouds to the people.

  “Is everything okay?” the flight attendant asked.

  Gayle didn’t want to be on no plane going Souf eating dry turkey sandwiches out of a cardboard box no ways. Stomach still cramp from the abortion. Side still smarting from tussling with Mama. Back still sore from hauling the baby around. Cut off from Troy and the girls, being sold to slavery.

  “We fine,” Gayle said, knowing the nice lady didn’t want the real A to Z. “We fine.”

  But the flight attendant couldn’t leave it alone. Compelled to put Gayle at ease, she complimented Gayle on taking good care of her baby brother. “Won’t your mother be proud.”