I couldn’t help but chuckle. Linda smiled in my direction, assuming she’d be let in on the joke at any minute. “They called her a whore,” I said. That’s not what I wanted to say, but killing Shelby made me strong.
Linda’s eyes flapped open at whore.
“They should call her what she is. Everybody knows it,” I said, my voice sounded crusted.
“Well, she can serve as an example for all of us,” Linda began. She riffled through her bag, trying to divert my attention. “Okay, let’s go ahead and get started.”
“What I was asking is, will she go to hell? You know like Hitler, like that?” Sarah-Donna worried the threads dangling from her cutoff jeans.
“Yeah, maybe she can die, and we can all learn something,” I said. “That would be good.”
Linda winced to Sarah-Donna who looked from my face to Linda’s not sure what to think.
“No, no,” Linda said, as calm as ever, but I could hear the gathering of forces in her voice. “Remember what we said about the condition of the dead, about hell and hellfire? Besides, any of us can turn our lives around at any time . . .”
“I heard it on the radio,” I said. Though I hadn’t heard a word. Linda hadn’t looked at me straight on yet, but now she twisted in her seat to face me.
“You heard it?” Linda said. “Are you sure?” Linda said willing me to recant, daring me to say I’d heard about Shelby from a friend of a friend, in a checkout line, maybe she even hoped I would.
“I heard it,” I said.
“Well,” she sighed in a kind of conclusion, “that’s enough about such a terrible thing.”
“Yeah. She’s gone now, that’s enough,” I pulled out the study book from my scuffed-up bag and flipped loudly through the pages. Somehow, I kept coming back to the happy pictures of a clean new world, its edges rounded and safe.
“She’s got people in Florida,” I said. “But she’s gone now. Long gone from here,” my voice cracked but I kept going, “She can ruin somebody else’s neighborhood now.”
“This talk isn’t useful,” Linda snapped. “We don’t learn anything, and we are here to learn and teach,” Linda’s book slid off her lap onto the hardwood floor. She smiled at Sarah-Donna. “We don’t have much time.”
Sarah-Donna read each of the paragraphs, and Linda asked her questions printed on the bottom of every page. The three of us were on the same latitude and longitude, in the same rickety little house, even reading the same words, but I was breathing different air.
I wouldn’t be Linda’s friend. Never. But at least in that moment, I didn’t need it. It was liberating to walk away from the burning building, the stink of charred wood behind you. That the good feeling doesn’t last is tragic and obvious.
* * *
After a few months, I stopped waiting for Shelby. She said she’d come back to the restaurant to talk sometime—no date—just some time. She had asked me to visit her, preaching or not, but she didn’t give me an address; only a direction. I’d spent a lot of energy trying to figure her out, but mostly I daydreamed about her, imagining us together: getting ready in the bathroom, me burning my eyeliner pencil to rim my eyes with the thickest black line like Cleopatra. Shelby on the toilet, her bony knees pressed together, panties puddled between her feet, laughing and talking over the trickle of piss. I had no idea, not even any imagination what might happen next or where we might go or what people did in their remote ordinary lives or how anyone ever made it through or out and over or ever got anywhere intact or even alive without huddling for fear, sick and disgusted with the desire of the world, but paralyzed about what to do. Neither of us would know how to act with the well-adjusted, but for a long time, it was enough to replay in a loop the dream of our sparkling entrance, watch us strutting in once, thirty, a thousand times. Though I told no one, I was embarrassed that Shelby was so important to me. And lately, when I catch myself thinking about her, wishing for her to appear, I am just ashamed. The same vile feeling as if someone smacked a nasty word in my direction that I pretended I didn’t hear.
There Can Never Be Another Me
Mae and Jonnie called their place Sisters. The name sounded good, but they were actually mother and daughter, separated by little more than twenty years, but mother and daughter nonetheless. Sisters wasn’t a fine dining place, just a tiny room in the front of an old house on Damascus Church Road, with three lightweight dirty tables and chairs bought for a couple of dollars from the recently closed-up Chinese place, aptly named House of Chow. Mae and Jonnie covered the uncleanable tabletops with plastic cloths, set salt and pepper shakers and hot sauce in the middle of each like a bouquet. At first, Mae kept napkins on the tables, but customers would use them like they were the last paper products on earth. Take five when the corner of one would have done fine. Use them to wipe fingers, noses, the tips of shoes, eyes, clean underarms, and save for panty liners. When they were sitting out like that, who wouldn’t assume that there was always more? Sisters wasn’t decorated except for a yard-sale clock, but neither woman cared too much for fussing over things, creating some kind of room with the books just so, the pillows fluffed, no shoes or spilled toys to spoil the scene. Neither cared for the fantasy decorating encouraged. Besides, Sisters was not the establishment to go to if you are looking for scenery, garnishes, or flourishes to please the eye, food piled in artful stacks, or for watching fancy people. The mission at Sisters is to get all you want to eat and go home full. That’s enough entertainment for anybody.
Mae was good-looking for a woman her age. That’s what people always added, a woman her age. She was skinny but carried herself like a big woman with her arms out to her sides like parentheses, always straightening her top over her hips like she had something to hide, smoothing her clothes from the creases her imaginary rolls of fat made, habits probably picked up from years of watching her large mother negotiate the world. Mae would have been pretty except for her black-rimmed lips that she tried to hide except when a big laugh made her forget. When she was a little younger the rumor was she’d open her legs for anybody, though like most things, it wasn’t all-the-way true. She’d been fooled a few times, standing and lying, small and lonesome because somebody said on Saturday night that he’d be around on Monday, but who hasn’t felt some of that?
If Don had been looking for a woman at all, his first glance would have lighted on Mae. She was close to his age, and he’d known her all his life. At one time, that familiarity would have repelled Don. He wasn’t sure when it became a plus, when the unknown and exotic lost their appeal. Don even liked the weave that stretched Mae’s neat little Afro to silky black hair beyond Mae’s shoulders. Hair everybody in town knew had recently belonged to some Korean woman. Hair that everyone knew stood in for the hair Mae pulled out herself the second she discovered her beloved mother would never wake up from her last dream.
At the funeral, Mae didn’t even bother to hide the bald patch but let the world see on her own body a piece of what had happened to her heart. At the end of the service, as she tried to pass by the coffin the pallbearers set up at the door, Mae saw her lying like she had all the time in the world, patiently, like she never was in her real life, and Mae couldn’t stop screaming, for minutes that seemed like hours that had everyone teary in the middle of their own private losses. Mae’s daughter, Reverend Johnson, her boyfriend, everybody tried to tell her different, but she knew that life would forever pale, the luster flaked away like leaded paint. People felt sorry, but they talked about it, saying things like she didn’t need to do all that, and she should have tried to get hold of herself for the children present, but Don admired her for it. When else do you get to rail and plead with God, beg him for a last chance, another day? When his time came, Don used to want none of that uncivilized mess, but the idea that somebody, anybody would say no, made him less afraid.
But Don wasn’t looking for a woman. He was ready to rest for a while. Nothing about the life with a woman ever seemed to work out right. He wasn’t looki
ng, but Jonnie found him. “What you need, Mr. Don?” “You had all you want Mr. Don?” Every time he stepped foot in the tiny restaurant, until she finally dropped the mister altogether. Don knew what Jonnie was doing, feeling out her power, seeing if she could make an old man light up just because she wanted him to. Don understood all that. He decided that he didn’t care.
Friday was fried-fish day, good croakers with crisp cornmeal overcoats on their itty-bitty bodies and black rubbery skin. Mae and Jonnie sold sandwiches every Friday, and the line ran out the door and into the yard. Men and women, but mostly men, crunching and spitting little bones all up and down the pitted road. Four Fridays before Devon’s accident, Don was eating at Sisters like usual, standing in the yard when the Martin sisters, real sisters less than a year apart, started to sing two-part harmony, “His eye is on the sparrow, I know he watches me.” Generations of Martins sing in churches, devil-music bands, and then back to churches, but how unusual for them to break into song just like that. Don loved the combination of their high rich voices, their almost identical faces, and their sweet bow-lipped mouths opening at the same time. He loved listening while he ate the hot-sauce-soaked white bread with the greasy fishy taste of the fresh catch. Jonnie told him later how she watched his face that day. How sad and unloved he seemed, she said. If Don’s face looked sad, he couldn’t help it. Don wanted to tell her that people take the insides of themselves, put it on someone else’s face, but it wouldn’t do any good to tell her that. There are things you learn from words and gestures, the sad human mistakes of others and there are things you can only get through the bitter taste on your own smooth tongue.
“What were you thinking?” she asked him later.
“Nothing,” he said, which was true, but she believed that she and Don had shared their first secret moment, mistaking Don’s silence and maybe even ignorance for a strong back.
Later that same day, Don took Jonnie to his home, a tiny rented trailer in the back of Sammie Wilson’s yard. They were both shy. Don had been with girls since he was fourteen and women not long after that. He knew sex wasn’t what you think. Women are all afraid they’ll look bad, have people laughing and shaking their heads because they put themselves on the line, body and all, to believe in something. The idea that they might get ill-used made them crazy. Even a mild woman will break every dish in the house if she whiffs betrayal. Don had seen it. But Jonnie didn’t want to know any better than to believe.
Jonnie sat cross-legged on Don’s ancient couch. Don thought she looked like a spider with all those spindly arms and legs, in her tiny T-shirt, shorts creeping up her high tail. Don felt dirty looking at her slight body and tried to watch her mouth, concentrate on what she was saying. But Don couldn’t shake that Jonnie looked like a child. He’d never hurt a child, a fact even his wife who mostly hated him wouldn’t deny. Still, the creeping feeling that he had suddenly become the kind of nasty, broke-down heel leeching the life out of some young body was hard to take on.
“How old are you?” Don said with as much tenderness as he could, but he realized he sounded harsh.
Jonnie laughed, but she sensed that inside this innocuous question was a test she couldn’t pass. “Old enough,” trying to sound playful, but ending up sounding like a pouty child.
Don wasn’t sure what he wanted to hear or what age would stop the magic, fix the image so they had to stop exactly where they were. There was nothing wrong with sitting with a young woman, even a beautiful one, even one he desired. Nothing in the world had happened that couldn’t be backed down from, explained away as a moment of silly weakness.
“No, baby, how old?”
Jonnie hesitated, played at cleaning her fingernails. “Twenty-three if you need to know.”
“Go on home.”
Jonnie laughed, but she was scared. Don was a grown man with grown children, and she had the power to frighten him. Love is grown in poorer climates, even she knew that, but she wanted Don to be full up with her, consume his thinking, his desires, so much so that he couldn’t remember to be wary and sad. She rolled the tiny T-shirt up and over her head, slowly, though she tried not to think about a striptease, tried to forget about her body nearly flat everywhere except for an inexplicable roll of fat below her bra. She stood up to wriggle out of her tiny shorts, tried not to notice that Don had modestly turned his head. Jonnie wanted to show Don that she was confident, not somebody’s piss-ass child at all, but she wished she had hips to show him, big legs, and a full backside, a body that would make him sure about anything.
“Want to see my birthmark?” Jonnie turned her leg, her inner thigh pointed in Don’s direction, to a dark amoeba-shaped mark the size of a silver dollar that looked like a splat of used chewing tobacco or spilled acid on her otherwise slick amber skin.
“Ugly, ain’t it?” Don said.
Jonnie looked around for her shoes. Don laughed, but he wasn’t sure what to do. He didn’t mean to hurt her feelings. Young women often don’t know when a thing is hurtful or just laughably true, nothing to be done about it.
“It is ugly, but you’re not supposed to say that,” Jonnie smiled, softening her reaction. She slid her feet into run-over sneakers and turned the corner to the kitchen.
Jonnie’s behind eased out of her high-leg underwear as she walked. She pulled the elastic leg hole from one of her cheeks, like she and Don had known each other all their lives. “You want a drink?” she called, her head hanging out of the refrigerator.
“No, baby,” he said. The common domestic gesture, Jonnie’s eager face questioning, eased his tension some. “Yeah, bring me a co-cola.”
She seemed to be staying.
BUT LIKE MOST THINGS, Jonnie didn’t just change Don’s life all at once. She didn’t stay that night, but the next night after the restaurant closed she was there and the next, every day bringing clothes, a lamp, shabby cotton curtains to replace the blue velvet dust catchers in the living room and other small items and knickknacks to mark the place as hers. Don was embarrassed that he didn’t have any of the trappings of a real home, that all of his furniture in the trailer put together wasn’t worth the effort to throw it out. Jonnie didn’t seem to notice, or if she did, she didn’t care a great deal. Don knew he was being stupid, but he thought worse of Jonnie for that acceptance, for being so young and not wanting more.
After a few days, she brought her little girl to visit, Sasha, a sweet little thing with curly hair the color of sand. Don had seen Sasha before at the restaurant, but she always stayed close to her grandmother and never let Mae get more than an arm’s reach from her sight. If Jonnie came to stay for good, Don wasn’t sure where Sasha would end up. You’d have to kill Mae to get that little girl away from her, and Don had no desire to fight. Jonnie might. You never knew what a mother would do to keep her child. Don didn’t want to think about how Jonnie would react if it came to all that. If Don were being honest, he’d tell Jonnie that he didn’t want the girl. His babies were all on the brink of adulthood, and it had been a long time since he’d had to talk to a little child, entertain them, or pretend to be interested in their tiny triumphs. Now he wasn’t sure how much he could fake.
But that wasn’t it. Don knew he shouldn’t blame Sasha but couldn’t quite get over that her daddy was a white man from the Love Valley Church Jonnie belonged to for a short time. The child couldn’t help who her daddy was, Don knew that. She had no say at all over who brought her into the world. But every time he looked at her soft hazel eyes he felt something close to betrayal, a sickly uneasiness that went with anything associated with white people.
It didn’t help that Jonnie met the man at an Eternal Masters in Search of Enlightenment meeting. That’s what they called themselves. Don, of course, called them other things. A whole group of them lived together not in one house but by spells. Two of them, then three, then switch up. Every week they’d met in the leader’s basement and talk and share food. Jonnie missed the talking with people who seemed to be interested about her life
problems and her daily struggles to be good. Religion shouldn’t smell musty, Don told her again and again about her basement church. But she missed it. Especially the dancing. Everyone in the flock was taught to waltz. Dancing is what brought Sasha’s father into Jonnie’s arms and his smooth-flowing rhythm, his careful way of finessing her into turns, his small, dainty little dips. The day he found out that Jonnie was pregnant, he waltzed out of that basement, out of the county, and by the time Jonnie heard tell of him, she couldn’t really remember anything but the dancing that she liked about him. Turns out there’s not that much enlightenment in the world. But even that love gone wrong wasn’t enough to totally sour Jonnie on the Eternal Masters. She loved the idea of good country people, black and white, mostly white in their bare feet, spinning on someone’s old shag carpet like members of the royal family.
Jonnie even taught Don to waltz. He didn’t want to at first and briefly considered letting that be the first time that he told Jonnie no, but he finally decided to wait until he had something more important to protest. As it turned out, he liked it. He thought about loving it but wouldn’t commit to loving a new thing, not at this late date, but he couldn’t deny that the oompah-pah music, the swishing across the floor, holding a woman lightly but with precision like holding a tool, took him out of his head like nothing he’d done in a long time.
The day before Devon’s accident, Don had to get up early to get Jonnie to the restaurant. Saturday was their biggest day, and Mae and Jonnie had hours of preparation work to do to get the lunches and dinners carryout ready.
“You coming by for dinner?”
“I’ll be by to pick you up, but I’m not sure about dinner.”
“Be here by seven, okay? I’ll miss you.”
Don gripped the steering wheel tighter, hoping Jonnie wouldn’t notice. “I’ll be here, baby.”
We Are Taking Only What We Need Page 17
