Mama Day

by Gloria Naylor

  The talking just outside the kitchen makes the silence inside seem heavier while Bernice shifts her weight from one leg to the other, watching Miranda, who is right comfortable stirring her punch and tasting it for sweetness. Little Caesar starts whining and reaching out to the table.

  “You want a little?” Miranda says, and the child nods. “You got a tongue—ask for it.”

  “Give me some juice.”

  “That ain’t how nothing is gotten in this house. Mama Day, may I have some juice, please.”

  “Please.”

  “Now, that’s nice. Come on here and get it. But you gotta walk like the big boy you are.”

  Bernice puts him down and he takes his little knobby-kneed self over to Miranda. He eyes her kinda suspicious while drinking his punch, two hands grasping the cup tight. Finishing it up real quick, he holds the cup up to Miranda with a big grin on his face. And he starts looking puzzled when she don’t take it from him.

  “Let me tell you something about please,” Miranda says, taking his hand. “It ain’t happy in the world all by itself. It gets real lonely without its twin brother—thank you.”

  “Thank you, Mama Day!” He’s so happy with himself that he lets the cup drop. Bernice cries out and runs over, scaring him more than the cup that’s rolling on the floor. Little Caesar glances up at Miranda. “Oooh, look what I did, please.” He’s out the kitchen before Bernice can catch him, and Miranda laughs.

  “You got a smart one there.”

  “I’m telling you, he’s a trial.” Bernice smiles, picking up the glass cup. She turns it round and round in them thin fingers of hers, watching the rainbows reflected off its edges. Her face is serious when she finally meets Miranda’s eyes. “I never thanked you for my son.”

  “And you were right,” Miranda says, taking the cup and giving her hand a gentle squeeze. “I ain’t in the business of miracles, so I wasn’t the one to thank.”

  There’s only a scattering of folks left around now, what Miranda calls the second-class riffraff. The first-class took off when there wasn’t any liquor and these others will wait till you throw ’em out just for the heck of it. That might not happen before next Tuesday from the looks of Abigail. She’s running around dishing up pie and refilling glasses. Poor thing, Miranda thinks, she’ll keep at it until she drops. Another half hour and she’ll shoo their butts out of there. It may not be my house, but that’s my sister. Looking around for the rest of her family, she finds Cocoa is still on one side of the room and George on the other, listening to Dr. Buzzard tell him and Junior Lee about the time he scared off them twelve haints in the south woods. That story is close to making Buzzard a legend in his own right.

  Miranda motions for Cocoa to come over and sit down next to her. “Folks is thinking it’s mighty peculiar, you and your husband ain’t passed a single word all night.”

  Cocoa lets out a sigh and there’s no fight in her voice. “I don’t care what people are thinking. I wouldn’t even be here if you and Grandma hadn’t gone to so much trouble. And believe me, he’s not worth it.”

  “Whatever it is, it ain’t so bad it can’t be patched up. I done seen him watching you two or three times when your back was turned, and he looked about as unhappy as you’re sounding. Why don’t you go over to him and make nice? Save the rest of the evening.”

  “After the things he called me, I should be the one to talk to him? He should live so long.”

  “You done called other people awful things, right in that very room. Called somebody an overbearing, domineering old woman, and that somebody didn’t stop talking to you for the rest of your life. If my memory serves, that somebody came to you the next day and said she was willing to let bygones be bygones …”

  “If I was ready to apologize for being a selfish, ungrateful heifer. Yes, I remember, Mama Day.”

  “The point is that if you care about someone enough, you give ’em a chance to take back the things they may have said in anger. And you oughta make the first move.’”

  “Yeah, always the woman.”

  “’Cause we got more going for us than them. A good woman is worth two good men any day when she puts her mind to it. So the little bit we gotta give up, we don’t miss half as much.”

  Dr. Buzzard done just about roped and tied that last haint for George and Junior Lee when he sees Cocoa coming across the room. He leans over and tells George confidential-like that he got a cure for pruning them wild tree branches in his back yard, and since they was friends, he’d give it to him at a discount. George just shakes his head. Then how about a tradeoff? His tree pruning kit for George helping him get better mileage out of his still, him being an inventor and all. Junior Lee tells Buzzard he’s out of his head, this here is a railroad man. George is trying to explain to them what he really does for a living when Cocoa puts her hand on his arm.

  “Would you like some more punch, George?”

  “No.”

  He turns his back to her and when she asks if maybe he’d want another piece of pie, he ignores her and keeps on talking. He takes off his tie clip and when he’s demonstrating how marvelous them little indentations is, Cocoa agrees with him. He stops talking, flat out, waits for her to finish, and then never looking at her, picks up where he left off as if she wasn’t there. There’s fire in Cocoa’s eyes, but since she got her lips pressed tight, it don’t come out of her mouth and the red is left to flare up in her cheeks.

  She ain’t in the mood to talk to nobody now, so she goes out to the back porch. There’s a sliver of a moon, kinda blurry through the hazy sky. Sitting on the steps, arms wrapped around her knees, she looks off in the distance at the east woods. After a while she can make out the dark of the trees from the dark of the horizon from the dark of the hilly ground. And if she breathes real soft, there’s just a whisper of the ocean washing up on the far bluff. The dampness of the night sneaks up on her, but the longer she sits out there, the harder it is to get up and go back into the lighted house. She hears the screen door open and Junior Lee comes out and sits down beside her.

  “If you was my wiiife, I wouldn’t treat you that way.”

  Since Junior Lee ain’t big on hints, he figures she don’t answer because she wants to give him all the space he needs to talk.

  “Yeah,” he goes on, “if you was my wiiife, I’d keep you real happy.”

  There’s more silence and it gives him more encouragement. He moves a little closer to her and Cocoa turns her head to him slowly. Her voice is awful quiet. “I’m going to tell you something, Junior Lee. And I want you to listen good. Right now, I’m angry. And since you’re not the reason I’m angry, I’m giving you a chance to get away from me. There’s no reason for you to be caught in the middle of something that’s none of your business.”

  “But, honey, I want to maaake it my business.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “For a sweet thing like you, I’d do annythinng.”

  It’s a deep, deep sigh for Cocoa. A sigh that says she’s tired of fighting, tired of cussing—and much too tired to explain the obvious to the likes of Junior Lee. Whatever he takes her sigh to mean, it ain’t that. And before she knows it, he’s reached up and yanked the bow loose from her halter top. Cocoa holds her blouse up with one hand, brings the other around to swing at him and knocks her wrist on the porch railing. She don’t hit it bad, but it gives her a reason she’s been needing to cry. She jumps up and runs into the house. Junior Lee is set to run the other way and finds himself staring straight at Ruby.

  “Baby,” he says to the mountain, “she tricked me out here.”

  I tried to imagine what could ever get me to possibly talk to you again after forcing me to meet a whole roomful of strangers, looking like an idiot. And since you’d always said I was not an imaginative man, I came up with nothing. I wouldn’t talk to you in Willow Springs, I wouldn’t talk to you on the plane home, I wouldn’t talk to you back up in New York—I’d never talk to you again. The thought of such a silent fut
ure depressed me during breakfast, not your own silence, which I welcomed since I wasn’t going to talk to you anyway. I was thinking about my children’s college commencement and how strained the whole event would be for them and us. A big leap, indeed, with you sleeping in the room with your grandmother, but I’d had the whole night to worry about the effect on their toilet training, puberty, and choice of mates. What if my daughter married a moron because she grew up thinking that monosyllables were a natural form of communication? She deserved better than that, and so did any son of mine who would never argue back to a football referee. For their sake, I might relent and talk to you once they were old enough to know the difference.

  But that morning there was absolutely no need. I didn’t even have to look at you with your grandmother keeping up a constant flow of chatter about how nice the party was and how nice So-and-So looked and how nice So-and-So had filled out and how nice it was that everything was nice. I agreed with her about the people I could remember and asked questions about those I didn’t. I liked Miss Abigail and was trying to make that breakfast as easy for her as possible. She was a genuinely soft woman—a touch high-strung, but with very fine sensibilities that filled her home with lace and chintz. And she obviously believed that vases were meant to hold wildflowers. The best thing I could have done for her was to leave early. I checked and there were no planes scheduled because of the hurricane warnings. I could have taken a train, but that was precluded by an impossible discussion of the whereabouts of my credit cards and extra money given to you for safe-keeping. I didn’t know what your plans were for the day; I had promised to help brace down Miss Miranda’s trailer and tighten your grandmother’s shutters. I assumed that you were staying in Willow Springs; I knew I had to stay. So it appeared that we were to prepare ourselves for a storm.

  The rocking chair is put inside the parlor along with the potted plants that was on the verandah. The upstairs shutters are bolted, the screen door on the pantry is roped tight. Nothing left to do but for Miranda to take a final walk amidst her garden. She stoops to pull off a wilted leaf hereabouts, grab a handful of weeds there or so—like it’s really gonna matter. She’s just walking to remember in case nothing’s left after tonight. They can storm-warn all they want, hurricane-watch till they’re silly—she didn’t have to stand by for no further bulletins. The only news that mattered started coming in a week ago; the final warnings she needed was in them snake trails she had to cross to get to the other place. Them diamondbacks and copperheads was always the last to smarten up. No, next to last; after the snakes came all them meters and graphs down at the Hurricane Center.

  Miranda shakes her head and takes a final look around her garden before she turns her face to the sky. Gray. The color you’d get from blending a bridal dress and a funeral veil. A netted sheet of clouds is spreading up slowly from the southern horizon. Sorta like a web that she knows will get wider and thicker—and much much lower. Maybe not this time, Miranda thinks, but one time a wind’s gonna come and blow this old house down. That’s when it’s soaked up about as much sorrow as it can and ain’t nothing left for it to do but rot in little pieces at the bottom of The Sound. Lord, she’s getting morbid. Well, it’s the weather and the early grieving for the loss that’s bound to come to all her work.

  And she had built that garden back exactly the way it was, though it woulda made more sense to have the pecan trees behind the peach trees, so the taller branches wouldna blocked off the southern light. And she wasn’t as partial to morning glories as she was to the deeper-colored wisteria, but it was to be morning glory vines that twined themselves on the pillars of the verandah. She’d known that without thinking like she’d known that kitchen garden must have a patch of pepper grass. She didn’t cook with it, didn’t use it in her medicines. But somebody had. And it wasn’t Mother—Mother hardly cooked at all. And later she didn’t eat much. Later she didn’t do nothing but sit in that rocker, twisting on pieces of … Too much sorrow. Miranda sighs. Much too much. And I was too young to give you peace. Even Abigail tried and failed. No, this wasn’t your garden.

  That spreading cloud net from the south is just about over the main road as Ruby brings out a little stool to her front porch. She arranges her tiny ceramic jars on the table beside her chair and sits to watch for Cocoa. The jars are still hot from sitting in the boiling water on her stove, and she lays out her pile of colored string beside them. She’s got a new brush and comb in case Cocoa forgets her own, but seeing her off a distance she knows she won’t have to use ’em. She’s coming with a canvas bag on her shoulders, dressed in one of them halter tops and shorts she likes so much. A long-legged stride that Ruby watches intently as the webbed clouds move on northward to cover Willow Springs.

  I had been making a list of what would have to happen before I’d ever speak to you again: a cold day in hell, a heat wave in Siberia, a blue moon (I scratched out a red sun—I’d seen plenty of those here), a winter Olympics in Antarctica, the Super Bowl in Havana, your left ear rotting off followed by your big right toe followed by your middle finger (either hand) followed by …—when one of Carmen Rae’s children brought me that note from Miss Ruby. She had such tiny handwriting for a large woman, it was almost too small to read. I’m sorry I married a fool. Come see me. I could definitely identify with her problem. But as disgusting as Junior Lee was, I could forgive him easier than I could forgive you for treating me the way you did. At least he was a slime out in the dark—you were one in front of everybody. I was called a bitch, I was shoved over a chair, and still I’m the one who tried making up for you to ignore me like a piece of junk? Mister, you don’t know how lucky you were that two old ladies stood between you and disaster.

  I planned to visit Miss Ruby after I went shopping for fabric with Bernice. She had brought Little Caesar and he kept pulling off his shoulder straps when it took her almost twenty minutes to harness him to the car seat, making absolutely no sense with her driving less than twenty miles an hour. The hurricane she was worrying about so much would be here and gone by the time we got to the bridge junction. It seemed she couldn’t talk and drive at the same time. She kept putting on her brakes to turn and look at me, her eyes widening at my story.

  “Well, ain’t that nothing? He calls you filthy names, knocks you over a chair, and then hits you in the head with a vase. You’d never guess it by the looks of him—all quiet and sweet.”

  “No, I hit him with the vase.”

  “Well, I don’t blame you—him knocking you over a chair like that.”

  “No, Bernice. First I swung at him with the vase, then he pushed me. And the chair was behind me.”

  “Well, ain’t that nothing? Like you supposed to stand by and hear yourself called them filthy names. A bitch—ain’t it awful?”

  “And a living nightmare.”

  “A living nightmare—ain’t it awful? I’m telling you, Cocoa, these men are something else. And the quiet ones are the ones you gotta watch. Sneaky, you know what I mean? Still water runs deep. Folks always telling me what a saint Ambush is. But they don’t know the half of it—he’s got his ways. Not that I’ve ever been beat up like you.”

  “And you saw how he acted at the party.”

  “I sure did. Just as cool and collected, grinning and laughing with folks like there wasn’t a thing wrong with him having that big bandage plastered on his head. When he shoulda been shamed to his shoes and your feelings hurt like that. Carrying on as if you weren’t even there. Ain’t that nothing?”

  It certainly was. And I decided I wouldn’t speak to you again even if they held the Super Bowl in Havana. Why, you would have to get down on your knees and crawl back. And then by the time we had finished shopping, I was starting to get really depressed because you would never crawl—so how were we going to get out of this mess? Life used to be so simple, on that same road I was taking up to Miss Ruby’s. A lost notebook. A scraped elbow. Finding a double-dutch partner. Those were my biggest worries. And comfort came so easily with
a good report card or being chosen captain in volleyball. Sitting on that little stool and letting her braid my hair brought that comfort back, the day she saved me from a spanking by removing the evidence that I’d been playing down in the ravine. Stickier problems had taken the place of cockleburs, but her huge legs were a fortress I could hide between and her voice was soothing.

  I was brought close to tears when she apologized for Junior Lee. Here was a woman who had done nothing and she was asking me to forgive her. He was a dog, she said, an out-and-out dog. And she’d let him run loose too long. You had to watch your menfolk when they were weak like him, given to all kinds of temptation. And these young girls nowadays, she said, don’t have a bit of shame. Will go around flinging themselves in front of men who ain’t got the good sense to turn away. Yeah, Junior Lee was a trial to her—and it’s time she was judge and jury. A soft hypnotic voice with firm fingers massaging that warm solution into my scalp. It’s gonna make this pretty hair of yours prettier—she kept rubbing and rubbing—and these braids, she’d make sure these braids would hold good. Young girls like these braids nowadays, and it ain’t nothing new. They was twisting up hair with twine from before she was my age. Pick a color, she told me. I let her choose, I didn’t care, it was so wonderful not having any decisions to make.

  Twenty years melted away under her fingers as she sectioned and braided my hair. She’d comb, pull, and loop, giving me the loose strands caught in the teeth of the comb. A gentle nudge and I knew to bend my head, turn it to the left or right. Tight braids. So tight they pinched my scalp up along the temples and nape. Always tight braids to last for two or three days of school. And my palm coming up for the loose strands of hair. A ball of hair in my hands to be burned when we were through. A bird will take it and make a nest—you’ll have headaches all your life. All unspoken and by rote. I felt a void when she was done. A thank you meant hearing my own voice, older and deeper; a walk back home to pass you on a ladder fixing shutters; a need to pretend that your stony face didn’t matter.