We Are Taking Only What We Need

by Stephanie Powell Watts

  “If Polo’s not with Jerica,” I say, and the spell is broken. All eyes fix on me, and their faces say, this is all we expect.

  “What are you trying to say,” Shelia yells. “What, Dee? Say it.”

  I don’t see any understanding in these faces that look so much like mine. They are waiting for me to pass over like a quick nasty rain. “Nothing, Shelia. I swear to God. I wasn’t trying to say nothing.” But it’s too late. I grab my pocketbook to my shoulder, stand up, and walk away from the booth.

  “Dee, what are you doing?” Mark says, but Daddy interrupts him.

  “Let her go on,” I hear Daddy say to my retreating back.

  The air outside is cool but not unpleasant on my face and arms. Still, I don’t want to be out in the open. I find my car on the side of the building, but I don’t want to go home yet. I get in the cramped back seat, like a passenger. This feels stupid. It does. But I have to do something, and it is dusk now, the sunset over, but too early for screaming, too early to cry out like a fool. Too early to realize that nobody will stop for you while there is still light. Way too early to know for sure that nobody will listen, good enough or long enough to hear you yelling over and over: I am so afraid.

  We Are Taking Only What We Need

  In my father’s house there were many dogs. Or at least the memory of dogs. Brown or garbage gray with slick short hair, fully grown things with generic faces, like a child’s cartoon idea of Dog. We call them end-of-the-liners, last days-ers, apocalypse dogs. These dogs didn’t bother to bond with us, but stuck out their paws, not to shake hands but so we could slit their wrists and get it the hell over with. All of them were mutts. Every last one. Nobody dropped his beloved purebred on our Carolina dirt road in the middle of the night.

  There were puppies, not many, but a few curly haired sweet things with lying round faces that betrayed us every time they peed all over the rug or kept us up with their crying, their baying, their inconsolable whining for the loss of a body warm with the familiar stank of their own.

  A few of them came to us intentionally from the hands of desperate neighbors who couldn’t stand to drown the whole litter if there was another way. But most were unlucky and landed on my daddy’s land, as unplanned as his children, and just as one-shoulder-shrug tolerated. We are not cruel. We are country. We don’t heart dogs. You aren’t likely to see a black, country woman’s dog in a Christmas sweater. We are not dog mommies. Nobody goes out of their way to get called bitch. We know that God intended dogs to live outside in the relative wild, by their cunning, instincts, and not by whatever faith they put in us. My people don’t need reminding that God might love the sparrow but the dirty mutt fends for himself. Dogs might spend some sad days in search of cool or shelter under a sagging porch, but not in the house, not beside us on the sheets, not with their rough tongues on our faces; not in any communion that feels set apart—just us, just us. In my father’s house, no dog got more love than a day.

  FOR EVERY KNOWN there is a mystery. In the summer of my eleventh year, my mother moved out of Daddy’s house to an apartment across town with her best friend, Dot, and Dot’s boyfriend. For some reason, my brother Cal and I were not surprised and accepted the change like we’d seen it coming. School was almost out for the summer vacation and for the first time in her life, my mother took a full-time job. Daddy had no choice but to hire a baby-sitter. I expected somebody I knew from church, maybe Tonette or Rhonda, bored half-children desperate for an opportunity to impart their just-won knowledge to a couple of younger kids. In my class, two girls have already had babies. Yes, I have hair under my arms. Yes, I understand the world and all its mysteries. No, I was never, ever as pathetic as you. But Daddy fooled us and brought in a stranger. A white stranger. A high-school girl, one of the children of the men he worked with at the shop, no older than Tonette or Rhonda, but infinitely more interesting.

  It doesn’t take much to intrigue a dirt-road child, and our new, white baby-sitter quickly became the subtext to all of our talks and speculations. Is her scalp white too? Her butt? What about her poop? Why aren’t her knees darker than her legs?

  Her name was Tammy and I couldn’t make up my mind about her. My brother didn’t like her face. “She looks mean,” he said, but I didn’t see mean as much as vexed, like a princess touring a barn. My mother choked a laugh. “That’s your daddy,” she’d said, like that explained everything. Tammy’s hair was too short for my taste, a boy’s do, and her favorite activity looked to be running her fingers in it, like she couldn’t be sure from one minute to the next that it would still be attached. She wore her shorts too short, and her pale veiny thighs wobbled with the extra twenty or twenty-five pounds she carried below the belt. She was not beautiful. But she liked to laugh and, in unexpected moments, you could feel the weight of her need for you to like her. I was not accustomed to that need, especially from anyone older than me.

  From the beginning of the arrangement, my grandmother did not approve. “Plenty of black children need a job,” she’d said. “What’s wrong with the Banner girl?” Her most surprising comment was an admonition: “Don’t get near her when she’s wet.” My grandmother wrinkled her nose in disgust. “White people smell like wet dog.”

  The novelty of Tammy wore off quickly. She was just another baby-sitter doing as little as possible until it was time for Daddy to drive her home when his shift ended. But just when we had her figured out and settled in our thinking, she flipped the script on us and showed up at our house on a Saturday morning with Daddy. Cal and I were sitting on the floor in front of the television watching cartoons, eating cereal that we made ourselves. We thought our father was asleep until we heard his rumbling voice, along with peals of Tammy’s silly laugh floating down the hall. “Is that Daddy?” I said. Cal shrugged and kept watching a Looney Tune.

  “Look who’s here,” Daddy said.

  “Hey, Portia,” Tammy said in a fawning way that took me a minute to recognize was her being nice, much nicer than she ever was alone with us during the week.

  “Are you going to work?” I said to Daddy, ignoring Tammy the best I could.

  My father grinned, like he’d been caught in a lie. “No, Tammy is here to help me out today.” My father glanced at Tammy and she loosed a giggle, both of them in on a joke I’d come on too late. “She’s on her way to the flea market. Get ready and go with her.”

  I had never been to a flea market before. The one in Reidsville was held every week from Friday through Sunday at the county fairground, and though I knew it couldn’t be so, I held out a wish that a flea market might be a fair, smelling of sawdust and spun sugar with vendors of a different sort, maybe, but still with flashing lights, bright games of chance with cheaply stuffed animals, and rides I loved that creaked with age and nobody-gives-a-damn neglect.

  Our flea market was on a clay hill, and from the car, all I’d ever been able to see were hand-painted signs announcing hours and vegetables, used furniture, antiques, junk, something for everyone. “Can Cal come?”

  “It will just be us girls.” Tammy bent in my direction to better look me in the eye. Even from three feet away, her teenager’s acne-pocked and sleep-lined face made me take a step back. “That’ll be fun, don’t you think?” she asked. I didn’t like Tammy’s sudden adult tone. I wished she would ignore me like she usually did so I could know what to do. “That’s okay. I’ll stay here,” I said.

  “Go get your shoes on,” Daddy said in a voice I knew meant he was done talking. From inside the house, Tammy squealed at something Daddy said, like a child or a pig. How could I have ever liked either of them? If I’d been a different kind of child, I would have locked the door behind me.

  THE REIDSVILLE FLEA MARKET was no carnival. Rows of age-grayed wooden tables filled with what looked like junk: a toaster beside Raggedy Ann, a set of plastic plates next to a funeral wreath still in the plastic, worn jeans someone’s three-year-old had outlasted, toys and dolls long discarded. The whole place looked like the deb
ris from a flood. And I thought of the junk from my own girlhood: baby dolls I held and diapered, or Barbies I made do unspeakable things to each other, the posters and T-shirts of the boy singers I loved, the plastic, backless, high-heeled shoes I coveted with an achy sickness until I finally owned their pink, glittery flamboyant puffiness of feathers—all that life came springing back at me when I looked at the table sagging with other people’s memories.

  Only the rookie salespeople, the people who thought it might be fun to take a weekend and make a few bucks, worked to make the sale. They had yet to learn that when everything was a rock-bottom, desperate price, you will buy or you won’t—nobody can tell you different. But most of the vendors had the calm resignation of old hands or the damned. And in that last-hour-on-earth way, the sellers resembled the customers, the couples, the occasional lone man in coveralls, the older women with their daughters and grandchildren, all dressed in faded denim and comfortable cotton shirts, a found treasure or two in overused, mostly white plastic grocery bags hanging from their arms like icicles.

  Tammy was comfortable in the group. She knew the rhythm of the crowd and could tell just when to push forward and take her place at a table. She knew to keep her hands in her pockets. Don’t touch unless you’ve made a serious plan to take it home with you. Be coy. No sense in lingering if no item sparkled.

  “I need to get to the Sock Man,” she said and pointed to the end of the row. “He works with your daddy.” She nodded in explanation.

  The long warehouse that was Seagel furniture factory couldn’t have been more of a secret to me if my father worked for the CIA. A few times, I saw him walk into the building or jog out, fine particulates of wood pulp spread across his skin like a rash.

  Tammy and I stopped at the booth of a snaggletoothed man standing at the back of his sock-filled van, its saloon doors flung open. The man had socks everywhere: women’s socks, knee socks, athletic socks, lace-topped socks for babies, Gold Toes for men, even socks that needed garters were flung over an empty box looking long and dangerous like black eels.

  “Hey, Sock Man,” Tammy said.

  “Come here, girl.” The man grabbed Tammy in a big hug, pressed his fingers into her soft back, his fingernails filthy moons. “You looking sweet, baby doll,” he announced too loudly.

  “What kind of deal you got for me?” Tammy teased as she turned her fat face up to Sock Man’s leathery one, looking as wide-eyed and vulnerable as if she were his own beloved little girl.

  “You get what you want, hear?” he said.

  I wanted to be able to get what I wanted. To giggle into my hand while the world opened up.

  Tammy found the box of socks she wanted. I watched her as best I could as I turned over one pair of socks then another, carefully, like I was afraid a lizard might slither from underneath. “You want some?” she said to me. I shook my head. I didn’t have a dime, and I wouldn’t spend money on socks if I did. Tammy picked out three pairs each with festive pom-poms on the back, Sock Man’s most expensive kinds, but he wouldn’t take more than a dollar for all three pairs.

  “You enjoy them footies,” he said, and winked at Tammy.

  TAMMY TOOK HER TIME at the next couple of tables. I wanted to go home. I wanted my mother.

  “Tammy! Tam!” A young man yelled at us from behind. He caught up with us and flung his arms over Tammy’s shoulders. “What are you doing here, loser?”

  “Loser, hell,” Tammy said and shrugged him off of her.

  “Look here at this,” he said and put on a pair of novelty glasses with big black rims and a plastic penis for a nose. “Dick glasses,” he said, barely able to contain himself. “ ‘Spec-dick-acles!’ You get it? They’ve got a whole box of them at Len’s booth.”

  “Freak,” Tammy said, but I could tell she was pleased.

  I couldn’t stand to watch Tammy flirt again and inched away from her and the high-energy boy to a colorful table a few feet away. What I thought from a distance were giant balloons stretched out and flattened turned out to be flags. Not American flags, but fun flags with picket fences, birdhouses, sleeping cats, kids’-art daisies and daffodils, or North Carolina State in blood red and white, the dandy wolf mascot smirking from the flag’s center. I wanted to be the kind of person who flew a flag like this, owned one for each season. I wanted to touch the slick material to my face, feel thick threads of the decorations’ top stitching on my fingertips, but I didn’t dare. A white woman watched me from her perch on a folding lawn chair, the old-fashioned kind with wide nylon strips woven like a basket for the top and seat. She hadn’t spoken to me, and there was no sign that she found me in the least adorable.

  I was about to walk away when an iron bank with the beveled edges of a coffin caught my attention. On the top of the coffin was the coal-black face of a man, soup-cooling lips red and split wide open like a gash, his hands in corpse pose over his chest, grinning even in death. I’d seen mammies before: turn her over and salt comes rushing from her head; open her handles to let her squeeze your ground beef into patties; she is a teapot, a drip spoon; use her any way you want and she is still working, still just as hilarious. But I’d never seen a coffin. I backed away from the table. I wanted my mother. The woman got up from her chair and began to arrange her merchandise, though I had touched nothing. I wanted my mother.

  “Where did you get to?” Tammy said, forgetting to be nice.

  “Nowhere. Can we go?”

  The woman looked at Tammy then back at me, trying to figure out our relationship. Tammy sucked her lips and glared at the woman until the woman’s wrinkled face was forced to turn away from us. “Come see what I found.”

  Tammy held my forearm, pulled me gently with her around the corner of the building. A young woman with big curls sat on a small towel beside a cardboard box full of puppies. Three of them scampered over one another, tearing at the side of the box, their nails sounding like a rake against the cardboard.

  “Go ahead and look at them,” the woman said. “They’re pure breeds. I wish I could keep every last one of them, but I got more than I can handle as it is.”

  “What kind are they?” I asked.

  “What kind? The daddy is a German shepherd. He’s been trained good by my husband. If you know anything about a shepherd, you know they are some smart dogs. The mama is a chow chow. See, you can tell here by the tongue.” The woman reached into the box and pulled out the least-excited pup, stuck her finger into his mouth to show his black tongue. “That’s how you can tell,” she said. I held out my arms to hold the tamest of the puppies. I’d never had a pet at all, unless you count the dyed-pink baby chick I had for a day. I had marveled at the soft Easter bird, twitching from fear in the palm of my hand, until it squatted, alive, not a doll at all, and green, runny poop oozed on my hand and I flicked the bird to the ground.

  The puppy stayed calm as I stroked his fur and held him to my chest to feel his heart beating faster than I would have thought possible for such a tiny creature. He turned his flat face to look at me without interest or concern. I was told to love my brother, though I couldn’t yet see why, so I tolerated him, which seemed more than fair. My parents knew I loved them, though what part of that feeling was need I couldn’t say. But this little dirt-smelling dog, I knew I loved.

  “Will Daddy let us have one of them?” I whispered. I needed Tammy as an ally in this venture, otherwise I wouldn’t have a chance. Tammy laughed, tucked a puppy under each of her arms. “We’re taking them all.”

  TAMMY TURNED in the driver’s seat and said, “No shitting in the car,” to the puppies, who stopped wriggling long enough to listen to her. Neither of us admitted it, but we were nervous on that ride home. Neither of us had any idea what Daddy might say.

  “We got something,” Tammy announced as she hopped out of the car. Daddy got up from his position in the lounge chair on the carport and slowly made his way to the car, suspicion halting his walk.

  “What the hell?” Daddy opened the back door and glared
at the box. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking that we can all have one. The kids and you and me. How about that?” Tammy leaned against my father, playfully bumping him with her hip. “They’re pure breeds.”

  “Pure breeds, hell. Look how little they are? They’re too young.” Daddy sighed. “They ain’t even weaned yet.”

  Tammy and I looked at our dogs. They were small, but aren’t all puppies small? How were we to know they weren’t weaned?

  “The woman said she already sold four of them. These are the only three left.”

  “Sold hell. She might have got another fool to take them dogs, but she ain’t sold nothing.”

  “Why do you have to ruin everything?” Tammy yelled. I wasn’t used to anyone talking back to my father. I wasn’t sure what to expect. “Why is everything a problem with you?”

  To my shock, my father looked like an embarrassed boy scolded in front of his friends. I almost felt sorry for him. “You like them?” Daddy said to me.

  I loved one of them, but I wasn’t sure at all how I felt about them all. They were clearly unruly. Three dogs, with all their sharp teeth and nails, nasty habits I knew without anybody telling me, wouldn’t be fun to police. “Yeah, I like them,” I said, trying not to look in Tammy’s direction. She had nearly done the impossible, and the last thing I wanted was to ruin it all by making us look like co-conspirators.

  “Okay, then.” Daddy lifted the box out of the car. Tammy peered into the box, stopped Daddy before he could get the pups to the yard.

  “Look at him,” she said, pointing to one of the dogs. “Look at his little face.”