“Some times are so bad people can’t ever talk about it.”
Billie is still for a moment. “I better get going. It’ll take me a while to get back and I need to let out the dog.” She feels for the keys in her purse and is stabbed by an uncapped pen.
Her uncle walks her to the door and follows her out onto the balcony. They both lean on the railing, looking into the parking lot.
“It’s really good to see you,” she says.
“Good to see you too. Good to reconnect.” He coughs, then turns to light a cigarette, cupping the flame. “Don’t bother asking Jerry nothing.”
The cars below wash in, rushing up to the stoplight only to brake, red above red.
“I’m not planning on it.”
He nods. “Good, good. I ain’t trying to tell you what to do.”
Her uncle is singing something that she can’t make out over the rattle of window units. He coughs again. He’s still handsome but too thin. He was Grandmomma Ruby’s miracle baby, born after she was forty. Because she’d never gotten pregnant after Daddy, Mom said she thought the doctors had given her one of those “Mississippi appendectomies,” or forced sterilizations.
“Do you want me to get you some water?” she asks.
He holds up his hand, steadying himself with the other on the railing. “Naw, I’m just coming down with a cold. Always do this time of year. My summer cold.”
THAT LAST SUMMER WITH HER MOTHER WAS SO HOT THAT THEY GAVE up cooking and ate everything raw, cold, ready made. Popsicles, red grapes, hard cheese. They gave up on surgery/radiation/chemotherapy, gave up on her being cured, and visitors came to witness Mom’s fading mortality, avoiding talking about her ruthless diarrhea or needle-bruised hands.
At the end of that summer, Billie was nineteen and just starting her second year at Temple University. She rarely slept at the dorm, barely knew her roommate, a redhead from Yardley who slept on the bottom bunk and played the violin. When she came home after class, instead of doing homework she read Weldon Kees, who’d had a dog named Lonesome and parked his Plymouth on the side of the Golden Gate Bridge then disappeared. That summer she had decided that her father might not be dead. After all, she had never been to the so-called funeral and seen the “body.” Maybe he was like the pugilist-poet Arthur Cravan, a nephew of Oscar Wilde and husband of Mina Loy, who disappeared sailing along the coast of Mexico, but might have actually died an old amnesiac in Chile. Then she wondered if maybe her father had killed himself and searched in the library through African American anthologies for poets who had committed suicide and found only one: Mae Virginia Cowdery, 1909–1953.
Her mother spent those days getting smaller under a blanket on the couch facing the balcony. They lived near a mosque and she liked to hear the call to prayer. Billie liked to lie on top of the blanket, near her mother’s hip, but not on her waist because of the fluid. Her mother could lie for hours, her head wrapped in a scarf, watching the light enter and retreat.
The last week before she moved into hospice, she told Billie: “You’re going to need to be tough.”
“I know.” Billie had actually been thinking about turning tough—how she was going to start carrying a knife and wear all black and be alone like a monk, a spiritual athlete who contemplated nature and didn’t give a shit about what other people said.
“You have to be tough.”
“You said.” Jude told her to accept whatever her mother threw at her and gave her Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness and Ram Dass’s Be Here Now, which Billie accidentally left on the train.
“You’ll never be white enough or black enough for some people.”
Billie sat up. Her mother had never said that.
“I know. But what can I say?” Her mother pushed up her sleeves, the veins in her arms red and swollen with collapse. “We didn’t want it to be a burden. We wanted it to be beautiful, and it was.”
Then they both were silent hearing the muezzin’s labyrinthine tenor from across the street. Billie didn’t really believe that her mother could go and leave her here. She knew she would sink into the earth the moment her mother did.
“Well”—her mother shifted under the blanket to reach her glass of lemon water—“at least I get to die high in bed.”
Her mother was a medievalist specializing in the Black Death, Chaucer, the Jacquerie, the pillaging free companies, the Hundred Years’ War—even small talk with her could be morbid.
“I thought we would be pulled over one night on a dark and empty road and made to get out of the car just like in the other Philadelphia.” Her mother would return to this until she stopped speaking. “It was war in Mississippi.”
“It’s all right now, Mom.”
“I’m so glad you were asleep,” her mother said, looking out at the balcony. “But where did you go after that?”
“It’s okay. I’m here.” Billie stroked her mother’s hand.
Was that it? Had Mom been trying to tell her that she had gone missing?
Lola
IT’S NOT LIKE SHE DIDN’T LISTEN. SHE LISTENED AND THEN MADE HER decision. The right damn decision far as she’s concerned.
It’s a little sad to pass these big houses down the main boulevard with their white columns and gilt lanterns and long semicircle driveways under beautiful oak trees, their branches draped above them like these houses are protected, special. Inside, the air condition has probably chilled the glass of the windows and the tiles of the foyer where an entryway table holds a big vase of fresh orchids or maybe peonies (they’re both in season). Don’t nobody else think it’s strange how close these houses are to her nana’s house where damn near everything is falling in on itself like it’s in a twenty-four-hour earthquake? At night, they ain’t even have streetlights to see where they going, like they still living in the days before electricity.
Lola drives over the bridge into the acres of open fields. It looks like most of the cotton seed has been planted. She never chopped cotton herself. But her mother did as soon as she was too big to ride on the end of the cotton sack while Nana dragged it up and down the turnrows. For a while, Nana worked in the fields and at the white lady’s house. But then she took in some washing and the only land she worked was her own vegetable garden.
Lola pulls up next to the house. There’s no car but she can hear a dog barking inside. After Cousin Cliff died, Momma would sometimes drive by here on the way to her auntie’s house, saying they were lucky to not wake up one morning and find out they didn’t have a daddy. Her brother rolled his eyes and slouched back, pulling up the hood of his Chicago Bears sweatshirt. When it first happened, he told Lola that Billie had found Cousin Cliff’s body and the shock of it killed her. Lola didn’t believe him. Aleisha had told her a much better story where Cousin Cliff died in Billie’s arms and she carried him all the way up to the house. Junior said that Billie ran away and was living on a raft on the Tallahatchie, and all summer they looked for her with the toy compass out of a box of Cracker Jack. It was the least they could do, Billie being the youngest.
Momma should have been saying imagine waking up one morning and you have a daddy. Which is kind of what’s happening, now that he’s trying to be more in Lola’s life. They talk on the phone every other week. He calls, not her. He asks about work. Tells her he loves her. But how is that possible when he doesn’t even know who she is?
Nana says he was never good with children. Then maybe he shouldn’t have had any. The strange thing is that sometimes Lola defends him to her brother. Her brother won’t talk to him out of respect for their mother. It ain’t right, her brother says. But it’s not about who is right, it’s about wanting to understand who her father is.
The men in her life seem like they’re around just to disrupt her peace. The other night, she was at her boyfriend’s apartment, rinsing a glass at the kitchen sink, when his phone kept ringing on the counter. It must’ve rung three different times. He was in the bathroom. She leaned over and saw the name of a woman he’d ne
ver mentioned. She didn’t say a word about it, but when he came out of the bathroom it was like he knew something was up and started talking about them taking a trip next month to the Bahamas. Lola lied and said she had to travel for work.
She gets out of the car and walks around the house. Cousin Cliff’s house is smaller than she remembers. How the hell did all the cousins fit in there? Sitting on the couch with Popsicles watching Scooby-Doo, or Underdog, or the Jackson 5ive cartoon. Taking turns wearing the platform shoes one of Cousin Cliff’s girlfriends had left lying around. And why would Billie want to stay in this creepy old shack? You ain’t catch her sleeping in the house where her father had died. Lola gets back in the car and sits in the driver’s seat with the door open, taking a magazine from her purse. This ain’t the way she was expecting to spend her Saturday, but she has to drive back up to Memphis tomorrow. At least this month’s issue of Essence is on Natalie Cole and Nona Gaye, and apparently Maya Angelou is gonna tell her how to love herself at every age. Just as she’s reading that Marvin Gaye’s daughter had a three-year relationship with Prince (she forgot about that!) a car turns off the main road and onto the gravel drive, parking behind her.
The woman in the driver’s seat pushes up her black sunglasses until they touch a big bun of curls piled on top of her head. She still looks like the little girl in the picture above Nana’s TV of all the cousins living and dead, before they left the Delta or rocked a uniform with MDOC CONVICT stamped on the back, before they never called or still lived with their momma, before they had five kids or lived alone in a two-bedroom condo in Northern Virginia.
Billie gets out of the car, not smiling like she was in the picture, like they all were (except for Aleisha) because they ain’t know yet. They still thought that they would be rich when they grew up and buy their momma a big house, and that the Lord’s love would save them from a world that might find them too dangerous to live.
“Lola?” Billie walks toward her. “I can’t— You look the same.” They hug in front of the porch steps.
“I know maybe you didn’t want us disturbing you, but I’m no good at listening.”
“You’re not disturbing me. I thought you all had moved away.”
“Well, I do live in Memphis.” Lola pulls back so she can see her. “So let me ask you a question, am I intruding? Dee said you needed your space.”
“What? No, I never said anything like that.”
“See, now that’s what I thought. It’s probably what he thinks you need. You know how he is.”
“I don’t know why he said that. Want to come in? Let me grab the dog first. He’s friendly, but it takes him a minute to calm down. You aren’t allergic or scared of dogs, are you?”
“It’s all good. Bring on the pack.”
Billie goes into the house and comes out holding the dog by its collar. He licks Lola’s jeans and nuzzles her hand.
“His name is Rufus.”
Lola pets his head. “Hi there, Rufus.”
“I inherited him from my grandmother.”
Lola follows Billie and the dog into the house. She never thought she’d be walking in here again. Billie offers her the only chair in the room and drags a foldout chair in from the porch.
“So I have coffee, whiskey, and tap water. What will it be?”
“I can tell you that I don’t want water.”
Billie laughs and goes into the kitchen, coming back with two paper cups of whiskey. “Let’s toast.”
Lola raises her cup. “To ‘Rockin’ Robin.’”
“Oh my god, you remember that?”
Their paper cups smash together, almost collapsing.
“Girl, I remember all the singing contests. I’m still proud I won with ‘Clean Up Woman.’”
“Wait, who sang that again?”
“Ms. Betty Wright.”
“Man, it’s weird to be back here.”
“And here you are by the grace of God.” Lola raises her whiskey. They toast again and drink. “This is good.”
“I don’t do cheap whiskey.”
“Mind if I take a tour?”
“Go ahead. I’ll see you in thirty-five seconds.”
Lola walks through the house. In the bedroom, a suitcase and a stack of books sit in the middle of the floor. A damp towel hangs over the closet’s doorknob. The kitchen is decrepit, but the living room has been blessed by a calendar of Dr. King and the Kennedys hanging above Billie’s head as she sits curled up in the folding chair.
“All right, girl, why you staying here and not a motel?”
“It’s not that bad.” Billie straightens her legs. “And it’s mine. Rufus!”
Lola picks up her cup before the dog drinks it. “I would’ve thought this place would have a leaking roof, mice, and who knows what else.”
“Well, there is a mouse living in the bathroom. But he’s very polite.”
“Oh Lord. You know I was in Philly for a conference once.” And they could have passed each other on the street. “How much longer you staying here?”
Billie takes her hair out of the bun. She looks a little like Marvin Gaye’s second wife, Nona Gaye’s momma. The one who was only seventeen when they met. It must be the freckles.
“Less than a week now. This is my vacation. How’s Aleisha?”
“Poor Aleisha, nobody ever told her she could be somebody. She got four too many kids.”
“How many does she have total?”
“Four.”
Billie laughs. “That’s so you. Does she live around here?”
“She moved down to Hattiesburg.”
“I’d like to give her a call. You know, I almost came back here after my mother died.” She rubs her eye, smudging mascara underneath. “I was going to drive across the country, maybe fall off the edge when I got to the Pacific.”
“I’m sorry about your mother.”
Billie stands. “Thanks. Let’s sit on the porch—is that okay?”
They go out and sit side by side on the top step. They’ve sat here before, but last time they had Silly Putty.
Lola wipes the lipstick from the edge of her cup. “How come you didn’t come to his funeral?”
“My mom said I was too little.” Billie finishes her whiskey and crushes the paper cup in her hand. “She never wanted to come back.” Across the road, a line of birds rise and fall in the field. “It made sense to me. She was here during the Movement and then my father died here.”
“The Movement broke a lot of people.” Lola pushes a splinter of wood back into the step. “Do you remember him?”
“A little bit. She talked about him. Got me his books. Showed me pictures. But I have different questions now.”
“You could talk to Dee.”
Billie snorts. “I try. He’s not very forthcoming. How’s Junior?”
“He’s doing good, emotionally. He was in prison for a while. Got mixed up with the wrong people, wanted to be living that type of lifestyle until he finally figured out it’s all an illusion. Nana sent him down to one of our cousins who lives in Tampa.” Lola finishes her whiskey.
Billie stretches her legs down the steps, letting her head drop to her chest. “What was he in for?” She sits up.
“Drugs.” A line of sweat slides down Lola’s back, but the heat relaxes her, the way it asks her to give in. “You know, when you left, we wondered where you had gone. For all we knew, you’d been abducted by aliens.”
“So I was definitely missing? How long?”
“I don’t remember. I was only seven at the time. Nobody told you?”
Billie looks at her. “That’s weird, isn’t it?”
“Maybe your mom didn’t want to traumatize you, or maybe she didn’t want to retraumatize herself.”
Billie turns toward the side of the porch. “When I was little, I was scared of these woods at night. I don’t think I would’ve gone out there looking for him. Unless he called me, or it sounded like he was in trouble, maybe then I would have. And you know what else I don�
��t think I would have done? Hidden in the closet, which is what Uncle Dee said I did. Because I was scared of the closet too.”
“Dee said you were in the closet the whole time? That don’t sound right.”
“Yeah, apparently I fell asleep in there and they couldn’t find me. He said it was for a couple hours, or a few hours, which doesn’t really seem long enough for it to go up on the news. Do you remember if it was the morning news?”
“I don’t know. It was daytime.”
The dog leaps up on the porch and Billie scratches his neck. “Shit. I think there’s something on him.”
Lola leans over and looks through his fur. “Tick.”
“What?” Billie lifts her hands. “I just gave him a disgusting tick-and-flea treatment before we got here.”
“This is the Delta. You can’t beat our version of nature.” Lola gets a pair of tweezers out of her purse.
“Poor dog.” Billie pets his nose.
“I’ll show you how to do it, but you better check him when he comes in or the ticks’ll get on you. You got rubbing alcohol?”
“All I have is ibuprofen.”
“You better get some so you can clean it later.” Lola kneels on the top step. “So look, you get as close to the skin as you can.” Lola brings the tweezers around the tick’s body.
“Gross.” Billie looks away.
“Girl, pay attention. Then you pull up, but don’t squeeze because you don’t want to leave the head in.” Lola pulls it out then walks inside, calling back, “Then flush it down the toilet.”
“Can you grab the whiskey from the fridge?”
When she comes back with the bottle, Billie is stroking the dog’s forehead. “Your first tick, buddy.” Billie holds out an uncrumpled cup. “A double, please.”
“You squeamish.” Lola takes off the top and pours them both some whiskey.
“I’m fine with my blood just not other creatures’.” Billie gets up and herds the dog back into the house. She comes back and sits on the bottom step. “So can I tell you about something strange?”
Lola sips this whiskey slowly. After all, she still has to drive back to Nana’s. “Please do.”
The Gone Dead Page 4
