Jake shut his eyes. He didn’t think about that anymore, because if he did, it made him want to throw up.
The milk began to curdle in his stomach then, as he couldn’t help remembering that night.
“No,” Rosalie had said to him in those three days they’d courted after he and Emma had first arrived from New York.
That was fine. He hadn’t wanted to rush her. After all, it was a marriage of convenience. She’d come to him in her own time. But the days and weeks and months had passed, and then one night he gathered all the courage that his need had constructed, like water building behind a dike, and reached out a hand.
She jerked away. “No!”
“But, Rosalie.”
“No!”
“I’ll be careful.” He could be, if she were a virgin. Was Rosalie a virgin? He didn’t know. And he’d bought condoms. They were underneath his handkerchiefs in his dresser drawer.
“No.”
He couldn’t talk to her about it. Whatever would he say?
So he let the time slip past. Rosalie treated Emma like her own. Why, it was practically as if she were her own, as if he’d come to believe the lie. He couldn’t leave his baby, and he couldn’t take her away, not now, not once Emma had a home.
The months turned into years. Emma was two, three, four. And then the night had come that he hated to think about, the night he’d tried once more. Only once more.
He’d been to the Ritz to play dominoes, and though he didn’t drink at all anymore, that one night he did. Mr. Vance was celebrating his birthday, treating everyone to beers.
“Come on, Jake,” they’d urged him.
“No.” He shook his head.
“Come on, be a sport.”
He always felt so separate. Why not? He reached for the beer. Why not have a sip or two and step inside?
He’d had three—or four, he’d lost track. It had been so long, the alcohol went straight to his head.
He decided to walk home that night; wobbling a little here, floating a little there, he convinced himself that this night would be different. Rosalie would be waiting for him wearing a flirtatious smile and little else.
She was asleep. He edged himself onto the bed and laid his hand over her breast.
“What are you doing?” Her voice was stiletto sharp. She sat straight up, instantly awake.
“Ro…I…th-th-th….” He couldn’t get it out.
“You thought what? You got yourself all drunked up,” for she could smell the alcohol, “and came home with that on your mind?”
Jake jumped out of bed, that hand which had grazed her breast now holding his belly as if her words had stabbed him, which they had. He barreled out the door, barely making it to the backyard, where he doubled over. An almost-naked man in boxer shorts, he vomited into the grass. He heaved the beer and the shame over and over until there was nothing left. Then he sat in the wooden swing he’d hung for Emma from a green iron frame and pushed himself back and forth. The tears ran down his face, and he let them flow unobstructed from his chin. When he pushed off with his feet again, the tears flew in silver arcs into the night.
He thought of catching his tears in Rosalie’s watering can and throwing them in her face. He thought of bundling up Emma in the night, going back north to his sister Ruth’s house. But when he was standing on Ruth’s doorstep, how would he explain? Then he thought of every hurtful thing that anyone had ever done to him. He cried and swung and cried some more. Finally exhausted, he curled into a ball in the swing and fell asleep.
He awoke at dawn. The Cloutiers’ yellow tomcat had jumped up on the arm of the swing and was staring him in the face.
“Go way,” he growled.
The cat licked its whiskers, then his toes. It tickled, but he couldn’t laugh, for he remembered where he was and why. He was still alive, he found, even if he didn’t want to be.
He tried to sit up. At first his limbs were so stiff and frozen, he couldn’t. Slowly he warmed them, stretching like the cat. Then, not knowing what else to do, he got up and went inside and took a bath. He didn’t speak to Rosalie for almost a month after that, but eventually his hurt and need, flowing along like the river of his days, smoothed out.
No, he didn’t think about it much anymore. And, in a way maybe Rosalie was right. There could be that slip. There was always that chance, that a condom would break, and another child would be born. And look where that had ended, Helen lying dead on the floor.
But sex made Emma too, Jake, a voice whispered. Emma too. Yes, Emma, the only thing in the world that made him smile.
Darling Emma with her yellow curls, posing for the camera in her dancing costumes, holding out her little pink skirt and cocking one hip to the side. She was so pretty—and so smart. Already she talked a mile a minute. With that Southern accent, she reminded him of Helen, though he would never tell Rosalie that.
“She sounds just like you,” he said instead. He couldn’t get over Emma. Not even in school yet and already she was talking about things sometimes he didn’t understand. He was growing shy with her. Who was this child, chattering to herself in mirrors, talking with customers in the store, understanding what they wanted from him before he did?
Did that brightness come from Helen? But then, he had to admit Rosalie had done her part, was a good mother, so proud. She stayed up late into the night sewing for her, making little pleated dresses, silvery tutus for her dancing classes. “Dresses like I never had,” Ro said. She read story after story to her, day after day, as soon as Emma was old enough to listen. At four she could read for herself. Now his Emma at five and a half read almost as well as he could. Yes, Rosalie had kept her half of the bargain, even though sometimes she was brusque with Emma. Well, that was her way. That was his way, too, now that he thought about it. Why did the two of them have such a hard time opening their mouths and arms and just letting soft words and caresses flow out? If only I could, he thought, if only I could relax my tongue, let the words flow like honey.
“Jake, are you coming back in the store?” Rosalie, hands on her hips, filled the doorway.
He hated it when she stood there talking to him as if he were a child. He didn’t answer.
“Jake, I’m talking to you.”
Well, of course she was.
“Are you going to answer me?”
Her voice had grown more shrill, and then its sound narrowed into a little sliver of pain that hurt Jake’s heart. She didn’t love him. She’d never held him. She never would. Oh, Helen, why did you leave me? What am I doing here?
“No! Goddammit! I’m not going to answer you!”
The words burst out of him. He wouldn’t, either. He could be silent for days, for weeks, for months, when he wanted to. Rosalie might think herself a clever horse trader, but he’d teach her to be careful what she bargained for.
* * *
Emma was relieved when the store door slammed behind her. She hated it when they yelled. Afterward everything would get really quiet and her daddy wouldn’t talk for a long time. She couldn’t decide which was worse, the yelling or the silence.
She knew everyone’s house wasn’t like that. Mike’s mother hollered, but only when the kids were bad. She’d smack them on the legs with a belt and everybody would jump up and down like corn popping at the picture show. Then it would all be over and they’d go back outside. Emma spent as much time as she could at the Cloutiers’.
Mike had been waiting for her on his front steps, squinting into the glare, counting Chevys. Emma counted Fords. As of last week, she was ahead.
“She let you?” he asked, handing her a mayonnaise sandwich.
“I told her Linda and Mo are coming, too.”
Mike made a face. Linda’s little sister Mo was a pain in the behind.
Emma shrugged. “They may not, then we’ll just pretend they did.”
They crossed the yard then and walked carefully down the dirt path to the bottom of the canal, each holding a mayonnaise sandwich in one hand a
nd pushing back the blackberry brambles with the other. The blackberries would soon be ripe. They were gigantic, big and sweet, delicious when they were picked in the sun and spurted hot purple juice like jelly into her mouth. But for now Mrs. Cloutier’s sandwiches were enough, the mayo spread thick like frosting on one piece of white bread.
Mike’s mother always had wonderful things to eat. She made banana pudding with vanilla wafers and meringue with little brown tears on the top. Once when Emma was over, they had fried frogs’ legs that Mr. Cloutier had caught with his very own hands. Gigged, he said.
“Watch where you’re going, you’re gonna slip.” Mike shoved the rest of his sandwich into his mouth and grabbed her arm as she started to go down. It had rained like crazy the day before, and there were still little patches of wet.
It seemed like it rained every other day in the summertime. One of Emma’s favorite things was to lie out flat on her back in the yard and watch the clouds roll in. She could see them coming from way off in the distance, tall and puffy like scoops of soft ice cream piled one on top of the other until they must reach to heaven. Suddenly the air would change and the wind would come up and then in the distance she could hear the thunder and see the lightning flash. Sometimes if she was by herself she would just lie and smell the rain on the clover. The bees ran and hid from the wet. And even from the middle of the yard she could smell the odor of the hot sidewalks. She’d lie there until her momma yelled at her: “Get in this house before you get struck by lightning.” Did anybody ever or was it just something grown-ups said?
Sometimes if she and the Cloutier kids were playing when the rain started, they screamed and ran with their mouths open, letting the rain fall right in.
The rain didn’t always swell up gradually, though, giving them the choice of whether to keep playing or run inside.
Like right now. Just as she and Mike licked the last of their mayonnaise and started to argue about what game to play, Tarzan or cowboys, the heavens dumped. Following Mike’s yellow head, his hair plastered in strings, she raced into the culvert that ran under the street and squatted down. The bank was only about a foot wide, edging the murky water that, if you fell into it, made you smell green and dead.
It was so dark under the culvert, Emma couldn’t see a thing. Mike inched his fingers carefully and then goosed Emma down the back of her neck.
“Spider!” she screamed.
Mike upped the ante. “Maybe it’s a snake!”
Emma almost wet her pants. “Miiiiike,” she wailed. And then she heard a giggle. “It’s not funny!”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“You did, too! You laughed!”
“I didn’t.”
Emma was so wound up in the argument, she forgot the possibility of the spider—or the snake.
“If you didn’t, Mr. Smarty Pants, who did?”
“I did,” said a voice from across the canal.
“Yikes!” Both the children jumped up, crashed into one another, teetered on the edge of the water.
Then their eyes adjusted to the dark. There on the other side, not six feet away, squatted two little colored boys.
Of course she knew that Negroes lived right across the canal. The first house of the Quarters was just behind Skeleton Hill, which was what they called the empty lot with the rise in it bordering the ditch. They never played on the hill, because it was on colored property, but it figured large in their make-believe.
Many of their imaginary creatures lived there, including the Green Skeleton who haunted Emma’s nightmares.
Every once in a while they would see a few coloreds playing on the Quarters side of the canal, but not very often. And when they did, they ignored one another just like when colored kids came into the store. Momma had told her she had to watch the pickaninnies, which she did, but she watched in silence. What would she say? Momma said you couldn’t understand them because they barely spoke English, though a couple of times Emma had asked what they wanted and she had understood. Emma didn’t know many of their names. Most of the time she looked right through them like everybody else did, like they were invisible.
But these kids sitting just across the canal under the culvert weren’t invisible. Now she could see them just fine. She couldn’t smell them, Momma said they smelled, but maybe that was because of the stinky canal.
For a few moments the four of them sat still as if they were playing statue, all squatting on their haunches.
Then Mike moved. “Hey,” he said.
Emma turned her face to him, then realized he was speaking to the boys.
“Hey,” the older of the two said back softly. The sound of his voice seemed to reverberate, wavy like the ribs in the steel culvert overhead.
“My name’s Mike. This,” he nudged her, “is Emma.”
“Hey,” the colored boys both said this time—and stared.
“What’s yours?” Mike asked.
“Marcus,” said the older. “This here’s my little brother James.”
James nodded and ducked his head.
“Hey,” Emma found her voice. Then, because she didn’t know what else to say, she asked, “Where do you live?”
Marcus gestured wordlessly back over his shoulder toward the Quarters.
“We live over there,” Emma volunteered, getting the hang of making this conversation. “Mike lives in the first house. And I live behind the store.”
“We know,” Marcus said.
Emma stared at him in the darkness. How did he know?
Then a shrill sound pierced the darkness. “Mikey? Emma!” It was Linda, calling them.
Mike stood up, stepped over Emma and out of the culvert. Then he poked his head back in.
“Come on, Em. The rain’s over.”
Emma stood and pulled the legs of her sunsuit down. On the other side of the canal Marcus and James stood, too.
“Come on.” Mike waved his hand at Emma. “You going to sit there in the dark all day?”
Well, no, she wasn’t. But on the other hand, she wasn’t quite ready to go, either. Emma didn’t know what it was she wanted to do there, or to say, but she felt as if she’d left a gate hanging open somewhere.
“Okay, okay.” She didn’t have Mike to hold on to this time. He was already halfway back up the path. Emma picked her way carefully. Just as she got to the mouth of the culvert, she slipped.
A strong hand caught her arm and steadied her. She stayed. In the bright sunlight, for the rain had been a sudden shower and now had blown away, she looked down at his brown hand on her arm. It made her white skin look whiter.
“Thanks.” She looked down at her sandals, suddenly shy again.
“You be careful, Miss Emma,” the older one called Marcus said, and then they both turned, the younger brother a shadow to the older, and like dark butterflies they were gone.
Up at the top of the path Linda stood with her hands on her hips. Behind her was the fat little busybody, her redheaded sister Mo.
“What were you-all doing down there with those niggers is what I want to know.” Mo was the most hateful six-year-old Emma had ever known. She didn’t think Mo was going to live to be seven.
“None of your beeswax,” Mike answered. He shot a look at Emma.
He was right, Emma thought. It was none of their business. But why did she feel so funny about it? Why did she feel like Mo would tell on them if she knew about their sitting in the culvert and talking to the colored boys? Had they done something wrong?
* * *
Later that night, after a supper of macaroni and cheese, she and her daddy listened to The Shadow on the radio in the almost-dark living room while her mother did the dishes. It was so creepy, when the door on the radio opened, she could see it. Cccrrrrreeeaaakkkkkkk. It was shivery delicious.
“I don’t know why you let her listen to that,” Rosalie called from the kitchen. “You know she’s going to have nightmares.”
“Oh, Ro. What the hike?” His voice didn’t sound happy, Em
ma thought, but at least they were still speaking.
She loved listening to the radio with her daddy. Sometimes they listened to the Dodgers games too. She adored the Brooklyn Dodgers because they were her daddy’s favorite team.
“Rosalie, it doesn’t hurt her to listen to the radio. She has bad dreams anyway. All kids have nightmares.”
It was true. She did have nightmares. There were things lurking in the dark, waiting to get her.
After The Shadow she had her bath in the claw-footed tub and then Momma tucked her in.
“What do you want to hear tonight?”
“‘The Frog Prince.’”
It was one of her favorites from the red book of fairy tales that came with the encyclopedia. Momma acted out all the parts in different voices.
She loved it at the end when the frog turned into a prince.
“But it’s not fair,” she said at the earlier part where the frog insisted that he eat from the princess’s plate and drink from her goblet and sleep in her bed. “Just because he saved her golden ball from the well,” Emma said. “He shouldn’t expect all that. Why was he so greedy?”
Rosalie laughed. Now, that was a good question.
“Was he a Jew?”
Rosalie looked at her sharply. “What do you mean?”
“That’s what they say at Sunday School. That Jews are greedy. What is a Jew, anyway?”
“Put your arms under the cover, and I’ll pin you in.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Under!”
Emma gave up. When her momma and daddy didn’t want to tell her things, it was always like this. She had another question, the one she was really leading up to. Mike had said that his mother said that her daddy was a Jew. Did that mean that she was one, too? Was it something you inherited? Or was it like having polio, something you caught? If she was one, was that bad or good?
“It’s too hot to be pinned in,” she whined.
Keeping Secrets Page 8
