Red at the Bone

by Jacqueline Woodson

  I get it, she said. I get it now.

  They ate bologna-and-cheese sandwiches, barbecue potato chips, and Oreo cookies sitting on the library steps. Washing it down with Coca-Cola. Years later, Iris wouldn’t remember what they talked about as they ate, but she’d remember CathyMarie’s laughter, the shape and warmth of her calloused hands. And after Melody was born, when she was back in school (the neighborhood public school now, with its loud students and burned-out teachers), she easily pulled down A’s and remembered CathyMarie telling her that she was smart, that her brain wasn’t crushed yet by time and people hinting at her lack of possibility. Go do something, CathyMarie had said. You don’t have a single excuse not to. Nothing’s haunting you.

  Iris wished she would have asked at that moment, What haunts you? By the time she was out of her own head and old enough to know this is what she wanted to know, CathyMarie had been dead for years.

  By Easter of that year, CathyMarie was in hospice care. Cancer in her liver, lungs, and marrow had withered her to pale skin holding tight to bone. By then it was too late for anyone to hold on to any part of her. Even Iris, who at nearly eight months pregnant, had come to love the way CathyMarie laughed, throwing her head back like Aubrey, and how she spoke of the power of water. It always called me home, you know. Always beckoned to me. Still does. Some days I take the train out to Brighton Beach just to walk there. Just to be close to it. To hear it. Smell it and try not to feel so landlocked here. When she said unilateral and quadratic and coefficients so slowly and carefully, Iris thought, This woman acts like we have all the time in the world to get this algebra thing done. All the time in the world. How little they both knew then.

  Thirteen months later, Melody took her first steps across the sand at Coney Island, laughing as her tiny feet bent at the ankles, her dark brown toes sinking. Aubrey grinned as she walked toward him, holding his arms out for her to fall into. The wind blew her hair wild and this made her laugh harder. It was overcast and too cold for springtime, the beach nearly empty. Iris’s parents stood bending into each other. Beside them, Iris held CathyMarie’s ashes in her arms, cradling the box.

  Isn’t it early for her to be walking?

  No. Because she’s brilliant, Aubrey said. We created a child and now here she is walking.

  Iris saw him glance at the box, then press his face into Melody’s nearly nonexistent neck. She watched him, wondering if her daughter’s neck would ever grow long and thin like CathyMarie’s. Aubrey seemed old now. So much older than seventeen. How’d it get to be this? he’d choked out that morning between bouts of sobbing. I barely know your family and now it’s all I got.

  He leaned over and kissed Iris, gently on the cheek, leaving the wet of his tears behind.

  And now, Melody was pulling away from Aubrey and grinning with those few teeth in her mouth—tiny white perfect teeth.

  Take one of these food stamps and go get me . . .

  Iris blinked, stared out at the water.

  We should do this, she said.

  Aubrey looked up at her. Then nodded.

  Aubrey carried Melody over to the grandparents. Then together, the two of them walked toward the water. When Iris put her hand inside the box, CathyMarie’s ashes were surprisingly warm. The wind lifted up as they sprinkled them—sending the white dust of her gently out over the ocean.

  10

  I too am singing America that morning in September.

  Sitting at the Black Breakfast Table that becomes the Black Lunch Table at noon. Sitting between Malcolm and Leonard. Across from Clariss and Tenessa. Down from May and Nettie, whose real name is Wynett—how can a sister be given such a fucked-up name? Wynett. After some corny-ass country singer and it’s not like I’m trying to trash Wynett or her parents who I haven’t met but I would like to see because I want to know what people who name a chocolate sister Wynett are thinking. And she’s my girl so I don’t mean any disrespect whatsoever cuz we all laugh at it. And we laugh loud. At everything. And give no damns that the white kids be looking at us like we don’t even belong at that school, in their lunchroom, sticking tongs into their salad bars. Fuck no. Don’t even know they’re in the presence of royalty when they ask, How come you all sit together? without checking their own all-white tables. So we laugh loud, jump first in line on Fried Chicken Fridays, and eat it with our hands, even though I’m not allowed to eat it this way at home. I’m not at home, thank you very much. I am at this damn Country Day School that’s not in the country and duh on the Day part. I am spending my years watching white girls snatch basketball-playing brothers into hallway corners and behind the pool and the brothers letting themselves get snatched.

  They just want to know if the hair is as smooth below as it is on top, Leonard who doesn’t play ball or get snatched tells the table. Their mamas will slap them silly if they bring those Sallys home. And we laugh. Loud. Watch the ballplayers sit at their own black table and the white girls blend back into their white worlds, tossing their hair over their shoulders. Tearing their chicken away from the bone with forks and delicate fingers. Eating it past the point where any of us eat it—where it’s not cooked all the way through near the bone.

  And when they ask us shyly—because they always do—if we’re Prep for Prep or A Better Chance, we roll our eyes, smirk at each other in that way that brings color to their cheeks.

  Nah, I say. I got the same thing you got—grandparents paying cash money for me to go here.

  We say, They think we all getting educated on layaway.

  And Malcolm, who rocks Prep for Prep, and Clarris, who’s killing ABC, just look them up and down—from dirty sneakers to baseball cap. From polished toenails to ponytails.

  We play Tupac loud, blast Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, and Outkast as we walk in a black group away from the building at the end of the day, step into ol’-school dances like the wop and cabbage patch. We cheer on Malcolm voguing, his body moving like water. We laugh and curse loud on the train and watch folks choose another car and act like we don’t give a shit that they’re afraid of our Black Group.

  But that morning in September, as we run from the Black Breakfast Table to the television in our homeroom, we blend into a single child crying as newscasters tell us how much we don’t yet know.

  Shit, we say out loud.

  They’re bombing us.

  Jesus fucking Christ.

  We say, My father is in that building. My mother. My sister. My brother. My uncle. My aunt. My grandmother. My grandfather. My friend. My father. My father. My father. My father. My father. My father. My father. My father. My father. My father. My father. My father. My father. My father. My father. My father. My father. My father. My father. My father.

  My father.

  11

  The first plan had been a road trip. The whole family piling into Po’Boy’s Volvo for the eight-hour drive to Ohio. But Aubrey didn’t drive and Po’Boy didn’t think it was a good idea to subject a three-year-old to that kind of time in a car.

  Aubrey tried not to look at Iris as he told Mr. Simmons that he agreed. Tried not to look at her too much at any point in the planning. The thing he had with Iris felt like a hole opening up in front of him. He wanted to know why she was leaving him. They had made something. No, someone. Together. And yeah, they had made something too. A family. A family that filled every floor of this house, spread out into all the rooms, echoed through the hallways, and yelled up and down the stairs. A family that splashed bathwater onto the floor as they lifted out of tubs. A family that wiped Melody’s mouth and behind and swept up crumbs from around her high chair. A family that walked to the Häagen-Dazs on Seventh Avenue for cones and ate them sitting on their stoop. They laughed at Eddie Murphy movies, and on the now too rare occasion when Iris let him make love to her, it felt like their bodies were holding on to the earth. When he kissed her, he wanted her to swallow him, wanted to be all the way inside of her—his love was
deep like that. And the family was the three of them, but then it was Po’Boy and Sabe too. And it was the people at their church who had watched them for years before seeing that they were good people, God’s people, inviting them to picnics in the park and bus outings to the Statue of Liberty, Chinatown, Great Adventure.

  Again and again he asked why Oberlin. Why so far away. Why was she leaving them. He asked what Po’Boy refused to ask. What her mother grew somber and silent about.

  This is what we knew I’d do, Aubrey.

  He knew what she wasn’t saying. That the house felt small with him and Melody in it. Wrong. That she didn’t want to live with him. Didn’t want to raise anyone’s child. Pregnancy was one thing, but being someone’s mom was another.

  He knew the long list of schools that accepted her had been her escape route. Oberlin was farthest away.

  And what am I supposed to do for four years? he finally asked one night. I’m just supposed to wait for you?

  She pressed into him, whispered, I love you, Aubrey, and he felt his body relax and grow hard at the same time. She was all he had now and she knew it. It was a strange power. Jump for me, Aubrey. And he jumped. Only after would he ask, Why?

  They had grown. After Melody’s birth. After his mother’s passing. After her parents brought him into their house, they had grown fast. Aubrey shaving at sixteen. Gaining six inches by seventeen. Taking on a part-time job in the mailroom at a law firm that turned into a full-time job when they graduated.

  He knew she hated that he found happiness in this—a job in the mailroom of a law firm, their top floor in her parents’ house, the baby crying until he rose to comfort her. His being able to do this. He knew she didn’t understand how this was enough.

  In the end, she flew. Alone, the whole family waving goodbye at the airport. Melody in Aubrey’s arms asking if she was coming back soon. Matter-of-fact. Like she was asking for a glass of water. Like maybe it didn’t really matter either way. Then, in the next minute, burrowing her head into her father’s shoulder and crying like the world was breaking.

  And then there was the day during freshman year when she had called to tell him about her dream of his mother. About the fire and how she’d screamed herself awake. It was late in the evening, long after he had put Melody down for the night.

  That fast, Aubrey, she said. That fast some grandiose dream of a future can just . . . go out.

  He knew what grandiose meant but still tried to break it down in his head the way his mother used to tell him to do. Dios—the Spanish word for God. Grand—huge. It made some strange new kind of sense to him.

  I miss her, he said. I miss you.

  He could hear Iris softly crying on the other end.

  I know, she said. I know you do.

  He held the phone cupped between his shoulder and chin, pressing his ear into it. Wanting her closer, beside him. Even through the tears, though, he could hear the distance in her voice. Had it ever been anything other than this? He couldn’t remember.

  Every day it feels like I forget something else about being young, Iris was saying. I tried to say the rosary the other day. Just to say it because I don’t really care about it. But it was something I used to have to say every day all the time. I couldn’t remember past “Hail Mary, full of grace.” Even that chalky taste of the communion wafer. I don’t remember how it felt on my tongue.

  He thought about her tongue. How soft and smooth it felt inside his mouth. He felt himself growing hard and told her. Sometimes she said things over the phone for him. Sometimes she’d talk in a way that made it feel like she was beside him, telling him what she was doing to him and how.

  Everything, she said. Maybe she hadn’t heard him. Her voice was lighter now, more distant. He wondered if she was high. The wafting of incense through the church. Christ with his robe pulled back to show us his bleeding heart. Like Isaiah 54:7: For a mere moment, I have forsaken you. How come that verse is something I remember?

  You know what I am now, Aubrey.

  What? He had pulled the phone into their bathroom but now realized nothing was going to happen so leaned back against the sink and waited. He wondered if this was how it ended. If this was how people went their separate ways.

  I’m a lapsed Catholic. And maybe that’s why CathyMarie showed me the fire. She giggled and now he was sure she was high. He didn’t ask, though. The thought of her there smoking weed with some dude he didn’t know was too much to take in. It was close to midnight. He wondered if the guy was still there. Standing beside her, rubbing his hand over her back.

  She got quiet. Then asked if he was still there.

  Yeah, Aubrey said. I am. I still am.

  But he knew she was the one who was gone. Iris. His first. His Iris had already left him.

  12

  The birth had been enough for two lifetimes—the baby’s head feeling like it was trying to rip her in half, and then, if that wasn’t everything, the shoulders coming next, broad and bony like Aubrey’s. Worse than that, no one believed her screaming. The doctor saying over and over again, It’s just pressure you’re feeling, the epidural is taking care of the pain. She wanted to curse him out, stuff his body inside of hers so that he could feel this fire of a birth. This crap show of an experience. Pain like someone’s Timberlands marching across her back while every other part of her burned and burned. Maybe this was the hell the nuns had warned of. Iris wanted to remind the doctor that his old white ass had never given birth so how the fuck would he know. But her mother was there, telling her to be strong, telling her she chose this, telling her it would be over soon. Rubbing ice chips across her lips. Saying, I love you, baby. You can do this. You’re my brave girl, Iris. You’re my brave, brave girl. She had given birth to Iris when she was forty. Benjamin dying only awhile after he had lived. She could feel her mother’s fear that this one might not make it. Growing up in Chicago, her mother had known babies born without breath. Had known doctors slapping and aspirating and calling codes. Had listened to her uncle tell stories of teenage mothers losing their babies and sometimes their own lives. Her mother’s hand inside her own trembled.

  Jeez, she’s a beauty, the doctor said. And then Melody was here in the world, red and wrinkled and crying.

  Give her to me. She’s mine. But as the nurse quickly wiped mucus and blood from the baby, then placed her tiny warm body against Iris’s chest, the baby’s eyes squinted open then shut again as though against bright light. Or maybe against Iris’s own confused gaze. Iris felt a jolt of something, something electric and scary running between the two of them.

  Fuck, Iris whispered. Fuck. If she were older, she would have been able to ask the bigger question—What the fuck have I done?

  For days afterward, as nurses came and went, taking the baby and returning her with her shiny black hair neatly brushed to one side, Iris stared out her hospital window and saw the enormity of a life she hadn’t even lived yet. The baby’s eyes carried everything in them—they were almond shaped like her own, but for the few minutes they remained open, she could see that they were already a deep brown strangely flecked with green. The eyes were too beautiful. Too hungry. As they fluttered up toward Iris’s own while she nursed, it was hard not to look back into them.

  She felt like she was falling.

  Each day, her sore and swollen body pressed against a hard wind blowing her own eyes closed. At night she went in and out of fitful sleeps, woke in the dark, sweaty and struggling for air. Where had the air gone?

  Woke at dawn to find the baby still there. Swaddled. Blinking.

  There was a new sickening permanence to everything suddenly. At dawn Aubrey showed up wide-eyed and full of what can I do for yous just as she was guiding her leaking nipple into the crying, twisted mouth of the baby. Even the nurse’s hands, handling her breast like no one had ever done, to show her how to part Melody’s lips with it as thick pre-milk leaked onto her
still bloated stomach and hospital gown. Even the tacky netted hospital underwear and the oversize pad they’d given her felt gross and never-ending. Maybe she’d bleed forever. Be this sore for always. Have someone needing and needing and needing her for the rest of her life.

  Three days later, as Aubrey tenderly tucked the baby into her car seat and sat beside her in the back, nervously hovering, Iris, slow-moving and still sore, climbed into the front beside her father, stone-faced and making plans.

  You good? her father asked, glancing over at her.

  Yeah. Fine.

  You made a pretty baby, you know.

  Thanks.

  He drove slowly, Brooklyn streets inching past them. The baby slept and slept.

  The weeks passed slowly. Day to night to day again, a long, unbroken line of the infant trying to suck the absolute life from her breasts while Iris sat in her parents’ den looking through the college prep books her mother had started buying for her the summer before she entered high school. One arm holding the baby to her, she drafted letters on her parents’ computer with the other one. Oregon, California, Ohio, and Washington State, the keys clicking beneath her right hand, the faraway states like a distant promise.