Net of Jewels

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “You don’t have to tell me to. Let me get my shirt on, for God’s sake.” I pulled it over my head and walked into the next room and picked up the baby.

  “He’s hungry,” Malcolm said. “You need to feed him, Rhoda.”

  “I know he’s hungry. Jesus Christ.” I sat down cross-legged on the bed, pulled my shirt up, and gave the baby a breast. “Oh, God, I love him so much. Look at him, Malcolm. Look how hard he sucks. Isn’t he wonderful? Isn’t he the prettiest baby you ever saw in your life?” I bent over him, caressed his head with my hand.

  “Then how can you talk about killing one? Goddamn, Rhoda. Sometimes I think you’re crazy.”

  “I’m not crazy. I just don’t want to die. You try getting your stomach cut open sometime and see how much you like it. I’m scared to death I’ll get pregnant.”

  “If you do, you’ll have the baby. I’m telling you that much. You aren’t killing any baby of mine.”

  “Stop being mad. Don’t be mad at me. Look, he can’t eat now. He’s getting the hiccups because we’re fighting.”

  “Well I guess he ought to get used to that. I’m going out. I’ve got to get out of here.” He was at the door. He had the car keys in his hand. I got up from the bed, carrying the baby, and moved in his direction. “Leave me alone,” he said. “I’ve got to be alone for a while. Your family’s driving me crazy, Rhoda. You aren’t the only one who’s going crazy. I can’t wait till we leave for Atlanta. I don’t know if I can take another week.”

  “Then go on,” I screamed. I went into the other room and put the baby back into his bed. As soon as I put him down he started screaming. I went back into the other room and stood in front of Malcolm. “Goddammit. Leave if you hate it so much. I can bring the furniture alone. I’ll bring Fannin to help me. Go on. I don’t care. Pack your clothes and go on now. Leave today.”

  “Okay, I will. But don’t leave the baby in there crying just because you’re mad at me.”

  “You’re going?”

  “Yes, I am. I need to start getting ready for school.” He was back in the room. He pulled a suitcase out of a closet and started throwing clothes in it. He threw in three ironed shirts, two pairs of ironed and folded khaki pants, some underwear and socks and T-shirts, and went into the bathroom for his shaving kit.

  I went into the baby’s room and picked him up and brought him back to the bed and sat down upon it and gave him a breast but he wouldn’t take it now. He was hiccuping from crying. I watched Malcolm packing.

  “Be sure and see Pepper Allen when you get there,” I said. “You can take her out and buy her some peppermint ice cream. Her little cutey favorite.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Rhoda. What are you talking about now?” He had the suitcase in his hand. He was leaving. I bent my head down over the baby and began to cry. Tears were rolling down my face and falling on the baby’s head. I was about to drown my tiny little baby in my terrible, terrible tears. “Please don’t go,” I sobbed. “I love you so much. I can’t stand it if you leave. We’ll go tomorrow together. Tomorrow we’ll go to Atlanta and start our life. Oh, Malcolm, please don’t leave me.” He put the suitcase down upon the floor and came back to the bed and put his arm around my shoulder. With his other hand he began to touch the baby’s back with his finger. “I won’t get an abortion,” I said. “I swear I won’t. I don’t know what made me say a thing like that.”

  “I’m sorry I got mad. I really need to get out of here, Rhoda. I can’t work for your daddy another day. I’m so goddamn sick of being dirty.”

  “Okay, we’ll leave tomorrow. We’ll leave as soon as we get packed in the morning. Call Minx and make sure the apartment’s ready.”

  “It’s ready. It’s a new development they just finished building.”

  Malcolm’s cousins, Minx and Henry, had rented us a larger apartment in a new development near their house. We had talked on the phone about it a dozen times but I was still worried. I had begun to worry about all sorts of things since the baby came. The slightest little ailment would send me into paroxysms of hypochondria. I had never been sick in my life until the operation. My body had always been able to tolerate anything I did to it. Now I began to imagine that things could go wrong. They had kept me on Demerol for many days in the hospital, even after I began to nurse the baby. I have always thought that played a part in the hypochondria. Also, the private duty nurse who sat with me at night was full of superstitions and dire warnings. By the time she left she had instilled a full measure of caution in my unlettered little twenty-one-year-old mind. She had once taken care of an infant who died mysteriously in the night and she told me the story a dozen times. After she left I would get up every hour or two and go to the crib to see if the baby was still breathing.

  “Call Henry and make sure they moved the beds into the bedrooms,” I said. “They weren’t sure when they could deliver them.”

  “They moved them in. Minx said they did it Tuesday. You want me to call them again?”

  “Yes. I want to make sure things are ready before we leave here. I won’t have anyone to help me when we get there. I won’t have anyone to help me take care of him. You sure aren’t going to help. I know that much.”

  “Oh, God, you’re going to start that again.”

  “You won’t even pick him up. You can’t even change his diaper. Did Minx say they got the diaper service? They know where to come?”

  “She said they did.”

  “We have to get a washer and dryer put in as soon as we get there. Daddy said to get anything we need.” I sat back against the pillows. The baby was calmer now. He had begun to play with the nipple. He was going to settle down and eat. I stroked his head. As long as he was still and didn’t cry I adored him. But when he cried and wouldn’t eat, I didn’t know what to do. I rocked him and walked around the room and sang to him and danced with him but sometimes he just kept right on crying.

  “You don’t have to go to Atlanta,” Malcolm said. “You can stay here with your mother’s maids. You can do anything you want to do, but I have to go back to school. I have to go and finish my degree.”

  “I know you do. I want you to. I love you, Malcolm. I just want to make sure everything’s going to be all right.”

  “It will be all right. The apartment’s ready. Minx and Henry are waiting for us. So tell your folks we’re leaving. Because I’m leaving here tomorrow, Rhoda, whether you go with me or not.” He turned and looked down at me and I had to choose. Either I packed up my baby and went to Atlanta to be a wife or I would never be loved again. I was ruined now. I had a baby and fat around my waist and it was Malcolm or no one. Besides, I had never had any real attention or tenderness from my father. Why would I expect it from any other man?

  We had rented a trailer a week before to carry the furniture my mother was giving us for the apartment and the paraphernalia for the baby and the boxes of books I took everywhere. The trailer was half packed already. As soon as we woke up the next morning we finished packing. We unscrewed the pieces of the crib and put that in. We folded up the bassinet and the bathinet and the high chair and the stroller and stuck the books underneath and closed the back and locked it. We stuffed the suitcases full of clothes in the trunk of the car and locked the trunk. We put the wicker baby basket in the backseat and then we got into the car and began to try to leave. My parents were hanging on the windows of the car trying to give us advice and money and some more furniture and the phone numbers of doctors in Atlanta and begging us to stay another day. We drove off finally with them still calling after us and drove down beside the park and out onto the highway leading north and east to Atlanta. Hotlanta, Georgia, where we were going to be happy forever and ever and ever, amen.

  “Are you going to hold him all the way to Atlanta?” Malcolm said. “Can you put him back there in that bed?”

  “In a minute I can. As soon as he falls asleep. Why?”

  “Because I want you to sit over here and put your hand on my dick. Because I want to see
how it feels to be alone with you.”

  “That’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard you say. What made you say that?”

  “I don’t know. I just feel good. Roll down the other windows, will you? It’s going to be so hot today. It’s going to be ninety-five all the way to Atlanta.”

  “I hope we have everything we need. Are you sure the apartment’s going to be ready?”

  “Minx is going there this morning to have it cleaned up and make sure the lights and water are turned on.” He reached across the seat and found my hand and held it. “Come over here. Bring him too. Get over close to me.” I moved to his side. The highway opened up before us, two lanes of beautiful new asphalt highway that led all the way to Guntersville Lake and on to Atlanta. All the way to our new home. I looked down at the sleeping baby. The most beautiful baby in the world. I stood up on the seat on my knees and very very carefully laid him down in the basket in the backseat and turned back to my husband and cuddled up beside him. “Yes, it’s me and I’m in love again,” he started singing. “Ain’t had no loving since I don’t know when.” He was laughing and singing and driving our blue Chevrolet down the highway as fast as it would go.

  We got to Atlanta in five hours and went straight to the new apartment. Minx and Henry were waiting for us with two bottles of champagne and the floors waxed and flowers on a table Malcolm’s mother had sent up for the hall. There was a small living room and a dining room and a modern kitchen with lots of shelves. There was a staircase that led to an upstairs hall and two bedrooms and a bathroom. It was a palace compared to the garage apartment where we had lived the first year of our marriage. The master bedroom was already furnished with a new bed and a beautiful hooked rug that Minx had made for us. We plugged in the record player and drank the champagne and Minx carried the baby everywhere and would not put him down. She and Henry had never been able to have a child although they had been married for twelve years. “I will be his fairy godmother,” she kept saying and Henry went out for more champagne and we drank that too.

  Later, when Minx and Henry left, I fed the baby breast milk now abundantly laced with alcohol and he went to sleep and Malcolm and I went into the bedroom and lay down upon the bed and made him a baby brother. “I love you,” I kept saying. “I love you to death. I love you so much I can’t stand it.”

  “Do it like that,” Malcolm said. “Do it harder. Like that. That’s the way. That’s what I want.”

  “Do you love me? Say you love me. Swear you love me. You have to love me.”

  “Of course I love you. Don’t move. Make it last, Rhoda. I want to make it last.”

  So now and forever afterward it would be Malcolm and Jimmy Martin, my little boys. Malcolm and Jimmy this, Malcolm and Jimmy that. Don’t fight, stop fighting, stop yelling, stop tearing everything up, you’re driving me crazy. My sons, my glorious sons, whom I am doomed and blessed to love. What wild little boys, people would say. Those are the wildest little boys I have ever seen. Are they twins? No. How far apart are they? Ten and a half months, I would answer. We weren’t very good at birth control.

  Strangely enough I was good-natured about the second pregnancy. Because of it Daddy sent us enough money to get a nurse for Little Malcolm so my life was easy and except for worrying about the coming operation I was peaceful for the next eight months. We had planned on going to Dunleith for the birth but again my body could not wait and began to push the baby out a month too soon. I began to have pains one morning right after Malcolm left for school. I called a taxi and went to the hospital and was rolled into surgery all alone. A wise doctor shot me full of drugged courage so I had the illusion I was brave. I was so drugged I thought it was hilarious. Hilarious when they gave me a spinal. Hilarious when they cut me open and pulled Jimmy out. I looked down beside the operating table at the huge pads soaked with my blood and all I thought about was how much weight it would make me lose. I won’t even be fat this time, I remember thinking. How great. I get the baby out of me and get my figure back at the same time. Sew me up tight, I kept muttering to the doctors. Make my stomach flat.

  “Do you like him?” I asked Malcolm, when he appeared at my bedside that evening. “Do you think he’s beautiful?”

  “He looks like a monkey. Where’d he get those ears?”

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” I said, sitting up. “If I ever get pregnant again I will get an abortion. I mean it this time. I’ll never do that again as long as I live. You ought to see the blood. Sheets full of my blood were on the floor. My blood was everywhere.”

  “Well, you’re all right, aren’t you? They said you were fine.”

  “You didn’t even bring me flowers. Why didn’t you bring me flowers? When is my momma getting here?”

  “She’s driving here now. I would have brought some flowers, Rhoda, but I barely got here. I was taking a test in calculus when they found me. I had to go home and shave. I hope to God I passed it. I guess they’ll let me take it again.”

  “Get me some water,” I screamed. “Get out of here. He does not look like a monkey. He’s a beautiful baby. I hate you. Get out of here. Don’t you ever touch me or talk to me again.”

  A week later they released me from the hospital and I packed up my babies and went home to Dunleith to live. “I can’t stand him,” I told my mother. “He doesn’t love me. He won’t help me. All he does is get me pregnant. He’s going to kill me if I stay with him.”

  “Come on home,” Daddy told me. “We’ll take care of you. Leave that little bastard. I never did like the little son-of-a-bitch anyway.”

  * * *

  Now I was going to be home for a long time. I would be a child again, in my mother’s house with maids taking care of my babies. Meanwhile, in Atlanta, Charles William was building houses while he finished school and Irise had a job working for the chancellor of Georgia Tech. May Garth was also in Atlanta now. She was living in a black neighborhood and going out with a Justice Department lawyer. The only thing I had left in common with them was that we all still loved to drink. Irise and Charles William came home frequently to visit their parents and those visits became the high points of my life.

  “Look at this, listen to this, did you hear about this?” They came in from Atlanta bringing records, books, magazines from Italy, surreal cartoons from France, ideas, gossip, excitement. I began to live for their visits. The rest of my mind was at bay, trapped, shut down, on hold.

  “Come play with your babies,” my mother was always saying to me. “Come take them for a walk, Rhoda. They want you. You should spend more time with them.” And I would dutifully go into their room and open books and read to them out loud sometimes for hours. I liked to look at them and I could read to them or push them in their strollers but I could not stand to be alone with them. My mind could not tolerate their incessant demands. I wanted to be in Atlanta dancing with my friends, reading, thinking, learning, expanding into the world. Instead, I was rolled in the hot sweet taffy clouds of family. On one side my mother and my father and their suffocating cloying love. On the other my wild demanding little boys. Sometimes in the fall afternoons I would put on a skirt and sweater and saddle oxfords and walk the streets of Dunleith trying to be happy, trying to think, trying to understand, but there was nothing to understand. I was bored to death, that was all. Deeply, dangerously, tragically bored.

  Part Five

  CRY SORROW, SORROW, SORROW, YET LET GOOD PREVAIL

  Chapter

  24

  Momentous events had been happening in the United States while I struggled with my personal demons. And I had moved back into the heart of the struggle. North Alabama, nineteen hundred and fifty-nine. The Montgomery bus boycott was over, the Little Rock crisis, the integration of the New Orleans schools, the rise of the White Citizens’ Council, the creation of a whole new school system in the South. It was the most divisive thing that had happened in the United States since the Civil War and there was no middle ground. You were for civil rights or you were agai
nst it. I didn’t know where I stood. I was for it when I was with my friends and against it when I was with my father. “Now the niggers will be all over us,” he said. “They’ll take us over. They’ll mongrelize the races.” He held forth every night, drinking scotch and water on the porch with his cousins. “You turn the niggers loose and the women will be right behind them. Well, I got home just in time to stiffen up your backs,” he would yell at them. “What you boys going to do, Cousin Larkin? You just going to let them take you over or you going to fight?” He would wave his glass in the air and furrow up his brow. Cousin Noisy, his cousins called him behind his back but they could not stay away. The scotch was free and, besides, he was saying everything they were afraid to say, everything they wanted to hear. “I got these grandbabies coming along,” he would say. “I bought some land for the new academy and gave it to them. What you going to do for them, Larkin? How about you, James MacDonald? You going to pitch in or you going to let your little girls go to school with niggers?”

  I listened to it and I would get caught up in the language. He could hold forth with the best of them and debate you into the ground but I did not believe everything he told me anymore. I had come to believe he could be wrong. He had encouraged me to leave my husband and here I was, as miserable as I could be, getting drunk every night to salve my loneliness. Besides, for every fearful statement I heard on the porch at night, I had a different stream of information pouring in from Atlanta. Charles William had given me a terrible book to read, Native Son, by Richard Wright. It made me see the black people around me with different eyes. No matter what they said or how obsequious they pretended to be, they cared. It mattered to them what we thought of them just as it would have mattered to me. The thought cut me like a sword. The thought pierced my heart.