“You see storm last year,” she said. “Worse storm then.”
“Yeah, but this looks real dangerous to me. The street could be hit at any time.” His chest touched her shoulder blades. Her nose pressed the glass and she couldn’t see their reflections.
The soft breath over her eyes, the tickle of his mustache there. He flicked off the light beside the door and his lips touched her eyebrows, the side of her cheekbones, her jaw. They pressed her neck soft as she had felt her own mouth on her arm. When his fingers slid up the back of her neck, cupping her head, something flew back and forth between her hip bones. Think with she hip… He pulled at the scarf, and the pads of fingers went through her hair.
The stairs in the alley were dark, and her head felt naked and cold. He held her scarf, kept a finger on either side of her neck, the palm at the back, and she went up the narrow stairway ahead of him. She couldn’t see anything inside his apartment, but his hands went to her temples and he bent his head to hers. “I didn’t know,” he said. His lashes brushed her cheek.
I don’t know, I don’t know. He don’t know. They lay on his bed and her hands felt rough at the sides of his back, where she touched ribs when he stretched to turn the sheet down. She pulled her fingers away quickly, but he caught them and put them behind his neck. I don’t know. His tongue touched her teeth. He don’t know. She opened her mouth.
When she woke, afraid to move at first, he was breathing harsh and slow in sleep. Even his shoulders moved, nudging her. She had only been asleep for a few minutes. What had hurt her was heavy against her leg, and she tried to touch it without waking him—the end was soft as new skin after a blister had peeled off. His hand came over hers, and gathering her up—was he still asleep?—he pushed her face into his neck and pulled at her hips again.
He was gone. “Where the hell he been?” Frank shouted. “He stuck in some girl’s bed.” He turned to Marietta. “Excuse my language, Marietta.” Frank had to take money and wrap fish while she started the cooking, and he hated to reach into the case now. “I’m going upstairs and make sure some woman didn’t kill him.”
After lunch, he sat and ate with Marietta. “Sinbad like your Uncle Hurriah,” he said suddenly.
“I never see my uncle,” she said. “But I hear so much. I know.”
“Here and gone people. Not just men like that, you know. You got women like that, too. My granma, after slavery time, she went around all by herself, couldn’t settle.”
On the third afternoon, he came in, shirt clean and pressed, gray moons under his eyes. “I gon let you go, you do this again,” Frank yelled.
“You love me, Frank. I bring the ladies in and they buy lots of fish,” Sinbad said, going around Marietta polite and slow to the counter. “Hey,” he said, and then, to a customer, “What can I get for you, ma’am?”
Gloria came soon, her eyes pale-clear as honey, and purple shadow on her lids. Her fingernails rested pink on his shoulders, and Marietta felt that same twisting below her stomach, imagining his fingers, hers, raking through hair. Or did all women like that—the lines of rubbing through her hair that made her eyes close? They had to like it, because he knew how to do it, right away.
In the quiet morning, darker because fall had come, they stood at the counter pushing fish into the ice. “I thought you go see some tree in Boston,” she said.
“What?” He didn’t look up.
“You come here for gates, you read about thing all the time. You can see cherry tree in Washington, in spring. Disneyland in California anytime. Up there by Boston, tree change color in the fall.”
“You been reading too, sound like. So where you gonna go?” He closed the case.
“I ain’t here and gone.”
He nodded.
She walked home that night, pulling her coat around her. Her room was cold, and she sat in her clothes on the bed, looking through the magazines, piling them in a stack. Outside the window, she saw the piazzas and the street, cigarettes flowing and bobbing, white clothes swaying on a line where someone had forgotten to bring them in.
He watched her the next day, but he said nothing until they were in the back. “Next question?” he asked, pulling at his chin.
Was it warm between you leg for two day? Do it be warm every time? Only first time? She bent her head to the knife. “Sinbad you basket name.”
“What?”
“I said, Sinbad you basket name.”
“Yeah, I heard you, but I don’t understand. You talking that island talk.”
“What you mama call you—Sinbad. What your outside name?”
“Nathaniel Calvin.”
“Why you call Sinbad?”
“My mama didn’t start it, she still won’t even say it. I caught a stick in the eye and had to wear a patch for a while. Like a pirate.”
But the next day, when he followed her through the doors, said, “Shoot,” she was tired of the game. Do Miss Curler wear them thing at night when you sleep with her? How she hair look in the morning, and she eye with no purple and blue? Marietta saw them all, sweaters tight at their chests, hands small and delicate, feet clicking across the floor. I ain’t have a basket name. Only Marietta. You never ax.
“Shoot,” he said again. “Let’s go.”
“You make the coffee?” she asked, and went out to the front.
Something below her navel—like when a drop of water slid halfway down the crease between her cheek and nose, caught there and tickling, both her hands inside a fish, and she almost crying for the sweat-pearl to swell and fall off her skin.
She walked on the street until a night when she saw the shades lit gold, watching until she thought he was there without anyone, and she climbed the stairs to listen.
He opened the door after she knocked and said, “Marietta.” When she stood in the room, with a tiny kitchen in the corner and magazines strewn everywhere, shoes covering the floor like sleeping dogs, he said, “More questions?”
She shook her head. In his bed, she kept her face to the side; in the light from his window, she could see only his fingers clenching the sheet beside her cheek. He was silent, no talking or whispering. His tongue was warm near her collarbone once, his wrists tight.
At work, she said softly, “You don’t say nothing.”
“I didn’t think you came up there to talk.”
She went again, two more times, and when he slept beside her, his breath slowing from what felt like angry to nothing, she dozed, woke, lay afraid to move closer to him and afraid to move away. She had stayed half-awake for so many years, listening to her mother’s cries, waiting for her uncle’s key scratch, guarding against blades in the door; now she was used to the hazy short rest, and she never let sleep sink deep enough for dream spirits to haunt her.
When the light shifted to three or four in the morning, she slid off the sheet and dressed, and then she waited near the door until she heard Michael’s truck or Frank clattering downstairs. She ran around the block and came to the store.
But the last time she went, she slept, hot-sealed sleep near him, and then even in her room sleep began to fall over her at night like a sheet. She dreamed of Aint Sister and Miss Pat, the twin tails of their headwraps facing her when they sat rocking at a fireplace. And sleep fell on her one afternoon at work, like a net thrown onto her head, twirling down from the air. She told Frank, “I sit here for a minute,” in the vacant booth. Her head dropped forward onto her arms, and she woke when voices said, “Hey, you all right?” Lijah and Gene leaned down to her and she blinked.
The warm heaviness enveloped her every day, and Frank said, “You ain’t getting no rest at night?” He frowned. “Something wrong with your blood?”
“I never need no sleep,” she said. “I just catch up now.”
She scrubbed the floor, swept the back room, polished the metal trim on the display case. Sinbad was wherever she wasn’t; he walked carefully around her. At night, she walked to the riverfront sometimes in the winter cold, touching her finger
s to her neck, the knobs of her collarbone, and her throat swelled. The students gathered at Christmas, Stan and Robert still making plans, and she served them with her eyes elsewhere.
Every night now, after work, she walked where she could see the glint and movement of water; the cold air felt good against her cheeks, and she kept her hand closed around her knife, deep in a coat pocket, when she started back to her room. For weeks she walked, and when her stomach, always taut and hard, grew stiffer and rose under her chest, she still didn’t believe there was a baby. All the sleeping, the mullet salty in her mouth, three or four laid aside on a paper towel while she was frying them…
She bought new pants, and under her apron no one could see her belly higher. But in February, walking, walking, the first azaleas blooming in a yard, two men rushed at her, pushing her into a brick wall to get past. A police car swerved around the corner after them, and Marietta felt her heart thumping huge in her chest. When taps and an urgent sort of stroking began in her belly, she leaned harder against the wall. The baby was frightened. The bubbly circles she’d felt rising under her skin for days, like crayfish breathing below the water, turned to thumps, The baby was hers, and it knew her already.
Even the loose shirts and her apron grew tight by the next month, and Sinbad didn’t look at her at all. They brushed past each other in the doorways, and if he touched her stomach, handing a plate or passing her, even his hand jumped away. Frank made holes in his cheeks, chewing on their insides, but he said nothing to Marietta. The older men in the corner booth creased their disapproval under their hat brims each time they came in.
But the men where she lived scared her the most. Whatever Hurriah had, whether he was her kin or not, the landlord and his friends looked at her now and smiled differently, saw her vulnerable as a turtle, she knew. They laughed: “How the hell she get bigged? Who in they natural mind gon touch that?” She sat up all night on the mattress, baby feet rippling and rolling like corn in the pot, fingering her knife and knowing how slow she had begun to move.
Frank took Sinbad down the street one day, to pick up more boxes, and she had to hand plates to a table of them: Lijah, Gene, Jameson. The baby turned, turned, rolled and twisted and banged against her skin like a fish trying to escape the bucket that crowded him. She went back for more napkins. They murmured when the doors swung, and she knew to listen hard.
“You know Sinbad done done that. Had to be him.”
“The blacker the berry, man…”
“Not when the berry that big, knock you on yo ass in a minute.”
“That ain’t no berry. Ain’t even no pie. That the whole damn tree. Too much for me, man.”
The kicks lifted her elbows. She went close to the boxes and whispered, “All right! I ain’t try for get shed of you. I tired. Now be good, let me get some rest.”
The kicking stopped, to her wonder. Her voice calmed it, and she slid down to the boxes and sat, talking soft. When she heard the bell on the front door, she went back out to the front.
Straight to the table she went, and told them, “Who said anybody done done it?” Sinbad and Frank opened their mouths. She smiled wide, showing them all her teeth. But her lips felt stretched as her belly skin, so she let the smile fall and said, “I done done it.” She went out the door and started down the street.
Would Frank take her? She wouldn’t ask him and have to sit in his car, feel his disappointment fill the windows. She tried not to think of Sinbad, his eyes or hands, the polite half-circle he made of his mouth for her now. I didn’t know, he say. He don’t know. Don, don, don. Aint Sister and don. She wanted to ask Michael, but she didn’t want Miss Pat to know, and he would tell his wife, who tended Miss Pat. She would have to pay a taxi.
He drove in silence over the bridge where she had floated in fear, and the water flashed by in minutes. The trees were thick along the highway; she nodded to the bushes that had hidden the small battoe, and that was what almost made her tell him to turn and go back. But the car sped past the trees and the sandy shoulder, and she saw how she and the others looked from a car, how the basket stands and the women were just blurs to the people driving so fast. The trip was so fast compared to the battoe, the walking, and she strained to recognize the stretch of highway where she never ventured, in the late-afternoon light. She saw the stands ahead, empty for spring, and told him hurriedly, “Stop here. I pay you now.”
“Ain’t no house here.”
“House right there in the wood. No road,” she told him, and when he had spun on the shoulder and gone back, she started through the stand. Where was her trail? It would be overgrown now, she thought, because no one had pushed through the forest for almost two years.
She stood in the brush for a moment, the baby turning, turning, and she thought, I have for go this way. Can’t walk by Pearl store, can’t walk down the road. No. She took the boots from her big bag, slid off her shoes, and pulled the heavy leather over her feet. The slight indentation of the path was still there, and two years wasn’t long enough for real trees to have blocked her way. The vines and brush were thick, though, and she kicked her way through in places, boot first, then bag, then belly.
The shadows were long when she came onto the lane and crossed. Her mother’s house—her house—stood gray and small, branches and leaves all the way up to the porch and shuttered windows. She pushed open the door and stood aside so any animals could rush out past her, or any spirits. Nothing flew through the doorway, and she looked carefully inside.
The room was exactly as she had seen it last, but for the blanket of dust trembling on the table when she closed the door. The burned-sheet ashes had been swept; the smell hung in the ceiling, where no one could reach it. Dropping the bag on the floor, she went through the doorway to the bare bed and lay on her back. The baby rested too hard on her heart, and she turned onto her side, talking. “This you mama house. Granma house. Great-granma.” The feet traced across her skin, nudging her elbow, and she said, “Go on sleep. You walk soon enough.”
Pine Gardens
HER MOTHER, TWISTING AND wet in the bed beside her until the sheet was soft and slick as an old headscarf—her mother, awake, palming the bones at the bottom of her back, saying, “You was behind here so long, kick me all night…”
Marietta put her thumbs on the round-shell bones there and arched her back. Her father would have been dead then, her mother alone in this room with the kicks, just like she was now. She sat up on the edge of the low wooden bed frame where she had been born, but the old mattress that she and her mother had stuffed and restuffed with moss was gone. She wasn’t sure what to do first. Tired, she thought she could make a pallet and rest, but then it would be dark in a few hours, and the baby wanted fish. The bags of rice tucked into the pot wouldn’t be enough for him, flipping and turning like a dolphin.
Him—why did she always think of the baby as a he? He—because he kicked so much. Laha and Rosie had always complained that boys were hard to carry.
The sun was April-pale through the trees. She circled the yard and found a heavy stick, knowing she couldn’t go past Aint Sister’s or near the dock. She headed down the old lane toward the House, hitting the brush; she thought she could find a way through the branches of the huge fallen oak and then head past the House yard. That old, rotted landing she’d seen when she floated down the waterway was a good place to fish, Big Johnny said, long as you left before dark.
She walked half a mile before the oak-lined road was stopped by the first gate. Pushing it open, she was thinking that she’d have to pull up a crab first to use his meat on her line; aged smelly crab was better. She suddenly remembered the strange white man who’d been leaning on the dock post at the landing when her battoe went past. A bum—or a haint? She pulled out her knife and held it flat against her wrist, whispering to herself, “So sharp don’t even keep blood on the blade. So fast you never see it.”
What had happened to the fallen oak that barred the road? She was way past it—she saw the sec
ond gate, the arched wrought iron greenish, with PINE GARDENS across the top. The wall was crumbled in many places, and she picked her way through an opening.
The House, up this road, was still shuttered. She saw the blank windows covered with weathered boards, faded the same color as her house. My house. Not mama house, not nobody but me. Yeah, and you, she said to the swirl of arm inside her. She looked at the three stories, each with a piazza; many of the spindles were broken or missing, making gap-toothed grins under the closed window-eyes.
A path led past the house and the old summer cookshed. Marietta made her way through the bushes and vines that had been the broad patch of lawn Aint Sister talked about, leading down to the landing. Woods edged the clearing; she said they had protected the House from the storms.
The smell of rotting wood floated to her before she reached the landing. At the bank of the waterway, the boards reached out only a few feet onto the water, and when she saw how splintered and leaning the posts were, she decided to just stand at the edge of the bank and drop her string. We catch a crab, baby. Should go back to the creek, but bad luck for turn round and start over. See? Why I think that? Only been here a minute and think like Aint Sister. Everything bad luck. She took off her headscarf and tied it around the hand that held the line, in case something pulled hard to burn her palm.
Cupped oak leaves on the ground still held moisture from the morning; the day had been cool, and shade always tried to keep water. She breathed in the smell her old days of walking through the woods and knocking against branches on her own trails, hiding on the pine needles. The baby kicked her side, and she said, “I get something for you. Patient, huh? I ain’t forget you.” She felt prickles on her back, thinking that the baby would follow her everywhere, into the woods, to the creek. She would never be alone again.
When she’d pulled up a crab, she took the meat out and baited her hook. Then she stood to throw the line as far as the weight would carry it, pulling it back toward her slowly. The pluck of the flesh into the water was the only sound, again and again. Nothing for bite. Nothing. She threw it and moved a little farther onto the first board, carefully pushing down with her boot, and after the next drop of the line, she heard someone coming down the path, heard feet crushing the sand.
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