I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots

by Susan Straight

  “I guess you see Pearl beena pass,” Rosie went on. “She near you mama.”

  “We go fe see em now,” Marietta said. “We gon take these.”

  Rosie looked at all the baskets. “You want fe buy these? You ain’t make no basket yourself? You ever was restless too much fe make basket.”

  “They gift.”

  “Then take em, huh? You ain’t have fe pay,” Rosie said sharply, stacking the smaller ones inside each other.

  Calvin pulled out a hundred-dollar bill, and Nate shoved him. He put five twenties on the counter and scooped up the baskets. “We better go, Mama,” he said.

  She felt a rush of warmth when they stepped outside; with all the people surrounding them in the apartment, she’d been afraid to talk to the boys, afraid they had forgotten her. She’d thought it was gone, the way they could stand near her as children and know what she felt, sense her fear. The car slid past the houses, past the huge Angel Oak, and she said, “Right here.”

  She bent at the graves, her mother’s first, and left the blue dishes she had bought. She left new gold hoops for Aint Sister. And then she opened the Mason jar of pennies and bits of blue glass, every piece of sapphire or aqua or turquoise glass or shard she had picked up since she went to Charleston, all the sharp pieces the boys had carried out from the vacant lot; she scattered them over her mother’s leaves and dusty plastic flowers.

  The stone was there—half covered with twigs and leaves. She knew no one had touched it. They think haint move it here, and haint be vex if they put finger on it. Mm-hmm—I haint, I be vex. She lifted the stone for the Africa woman and put new gold hoops underneath, in the wet black dirt.

  The car wouldn’t go any farther up the lane than Pinkie’s, and no one came out onto her front step. “Come on,” she told the boys, and they ducked into the moss-dangled tunnel.

  “Mama, you crazy?” Nate said, but she led them to the bare spot where Aint Sister’s house had been. Brick dust and triangular chunks of pale brown mud were in a pile; they had broken the chimney when they took the house.

  Her mother’s house was nearly hidden in a tangle of vines. The pump was gone, but plants hadn’t covered a small patch of ground where she’d always dumped the wash water. “All that bleach and pee from you diaper,” she said, “nothing grow there.” She knew they couldn’t get through any of her old paths to the water, so when they started back down the road, she closed her eyes to see it, the shine and slap of water near her feet.

  They wouldn’t let her pack. “You don’t need none a this, Mama, we get everything new. No, you can’t take that chair. I’m tellin you, Carolanne gon take you shoppin everywhere.” Nate put everything back in its place.

  “Leave it for whoever gon rent this place,” Calvin said.

  “Who gon rent this place?” Tiny Momma muttered. “Somebody I don’t know, cain’t even borrow a egg if I needs one.”

  “It’s only me leave, not everybody else on the block got egg,” Marietta said gently. “You got Miss Alberta borrow egg.”

  “Shoot, she no more able to walk to the store half the time as me. Don’t eat nothin, pick like a bird. How I gon make a whole cake? Who gon eat it?” Tiny Momma’s hands were small as biscuits, her fingers short, against the empty boxes. “You two ain’t even gon let you mama take her pots?”

  Tiny Momma’s long braid was loose. Marietta had braided that spider-web-soft hair when Tiny Momma had pneumonia and couldn’t get out of bed for a month. She had combed the silky, matted hair until the head swayed in sleep.

  Marietta moved to the wall to take down the photos, and Tiny Momma said, “Baby Poppa the one got em started.” She watched Marietta handle the photo of Freeman smiling over a teddy bear, of Nate and Calvin in their high school and college uniforms, but she waited to hold the one of Baby Poppa in the team picture. Marietta remembered that when he’d told the officials he was their father the coaches looked at this short red man, bent at the back from years of work. “They didn’t say anything,” Baby Poppa had crowed again and again. “What could they say? You too old to have kids?” She touched his small, glossy face.

  “Why she want to take pots?” Nate came back into the apartment to challenge Tiny Momma. “She should be glad to leave em behind.”

  “Cause she know these pots. She know just how they gon cook some-thin. You buy them new pots they got in the store now, them cheap cute things, you don’t know they gon burn you food till after they been done ruined it.”

  Marietta said, “He don’t have to know nothing bout cook, just bring the food to him and he eat.” She wiped the bottoms of the cast-iron frying pan and the rice pot. Corn bobbing like rafts; piles of greens simmered to a tight web of softness, laced with ham; oxtails that Tiny Momma stirred with turnips and potatoes for coughing boys.

  “She takin them pots,” Tiny Momma said, lifting her chin. She rubbed the oilcloth, Marietta saw, since there were no beans to snap, nothing to peel. Who else would ever know her like Tiny Momma? Know about the pots, the steam in your lungs that meant you were feeding your boys all by yourself? Who in California would sit at the table even when there was nothing to do and not much to tell? She thought of Rosie and the daughter-in-law. Would she and the fingernailed, green-eyed girl sit somewhere, their voices so slow and regular that Freeman would fall asleep as if they were ticking clocks? She felt a sharp twist in her chest—Aint Sister dead and Marietta never knowing that she had been a Tiny Momma to everyone, to her own mother.

  She reached into a cupboard and got down the jars of tea, the spider, and put them with Rosie’s baskets into a box. “You think you gon get sick in California?” Tiny Momma smiled. “You might have to drink some a that tea, huh?”

  Marietta nodded. Why I take Pine Garden with me? That all I have for take, after twenty year in Charleston? Take old Pine Garden to California? She hesitated, then went to the closet to get the wooden box. Now it held dust, one photo, shells, and the birth certificates Coach Terrell had gotten for the boys in high school. He had gone to someone in the government to say that the originals had been lost. She put the wooden box in, then a pile of magazines she had culled carefully. She said, “I’m finish now.”

  Just when the sun came up, when fog still wafted along the piazzas, Nate and Calvin put the boxes in the trunk, and Marietta carried out a bag of biscuits, pound cake, and chicken. “I don’t know if I want everybody lookin at us go,” Calvin said, sounding uncomfortable. “Time for just get on the road.”

  “How you know they ain’t want say goodbye for me?” Marietta said, putting her hand on his shoulder.

  But when Jesse and Joe and the rest stood against railings, sleepy, rubbing hair and the skin over their nipples, they called out to Nate and Calvin. Miss Alberta stood in her doorway, and Tiny Momma sat on the top step, wrapped in a blanket like a child. “Y’all take the interstates all the way cross,” Joe said. “Don’t get on no little highways.”

  “Man, nothing gon happen,” Nate said. “If a cop pull us over, we just tell him we play for the Rams, like we tell em in L.A.”

  “Shit, boy, you ain’t in no L.A.,” Joe said. “Just stay on the interstate. You won’t see nothin, but nothin won’t see you, neither.”

  Tiny Momma called, “They mama take care of em. Go on. Longer you stay, harder it is for me to see you.”

  Marietta closed the door, the press of Tiny Momma’s elbows still tingling in her sides, the push of the fingertips like dimples in her palms. The windows went down silently, startling her, and Nate shouted, “We gone!”

  He pushed the buttons to raise them back up when they headed toward the highway. “When it get hot, we got air-conditioning, and this antenna get every station we need to hear. Just sit back and chill, Mama.”

  His voice had changed already. Two languages. “You two give Tiny Momma some money?” she said sharply.

  “We gave her two grand, Mama,” Calvin said.

  “How much?”

  “Two thousand. I told her we’d send a t
housand a month.”

  Marietta said, “You sure you don’t want she come to California, help Carolanne with the baby?”

  “Mama, we ax her over and over. She don’t want to leave Baby Poppa,” Nate said.

  Tiny Momma visited his grave every afternoon before the sun went too low, sitting there to talk to him for a few minutes, weaving words around the wrought iron and trees in the cemetery. Marietta had hidden a whistle and the picture of Mean Joe Greene she had torn from Sports Illustrated on his grave, in the grass beside the headstone. She knew Tiny Momma would find them soon, but Tiny Momma didn’t believe in leaving things for spirits.

  “We can take 26 and then 20 to Atlanta,” Calvin said, looking at the map. “Like Joe said, interstate all the way.”

  “We gotta see what’s the fastest, man. I ain’t goin out of my way just to stay on no interstate, it could be a whole lotta miles wasted,” Nate said.

  “Mama, why you bring all this food?” Calvin said, taking the biscuit she handed him. “It ain’t like we don’t have money to stop and eat.”

  “If I could eat anything this time a morning, I want biscuits. Tiny Momma biscuit,” she said.

  “How we gon take this woman to L.A.?” Nate laughed, and the car swerved into the fast lane.

  “She think she gon take us,” Calvin said, laughing back.

  They ate while driving, switched, and Marietta fell asleep, woke to hear them speaking the foreign language. Minicamp, condos, Nordstrom’s.

  “You want to drive all night, man?” Nate said.

  “We still three niggers in a new Lincoln, huh,” Calvin told him.

  “Do that mean stop or keep going, bro?” Nate tapped the steering wheel. While dark settled around the windows, they pulled off at a small store. “Texas look too long,” Calvin said. “The sign said Birmingham ten miles away—we gotta decide.”

  “This 20 go through too much a Mississippi for me. Shit, let’s take the little one up to Memphis and go catch 40.” They went inside and brought back six-packs of Coke and candy bars that looked like twigs in their huge hands. Nate peered in at her. “Hey, Mama, you sleeping?”

  She nodded, closed her eyes again, listened to the cars tearing past. Birmingham—where Mr. Ray had a house.

  The smaller highway was more dipping and curved. She stayed settled against the seat and watched the moon rise. Why did it look so different, sitting at the top of the windshield between the boys? They couldn’t be that far away yet, that the moon would change into this strange, glowing yellow—too gold, like cat eyes in the night. There was a ring around it… how far away were they?

  She was frightened for the first time, trying to read the passing highway signs that flashed by too quickly. Not moving, she watched the moon shift to her side window when Nate followed a curve around a hill—now it was white again, round. She was frightened of herself. What was she seeing? Aint Sister or her mother, trying to tell her something? A cat-eye moon turned bone-clean.

  Again, Nate turned the wheel slightly, and the moon slowly swung back to the windshield. This time she saw it change, colored by something in the glass, a bar of color in the upper half. But she stayed silent, closed her eyes again to calm her heart.

  “Feel weird to see Mama sleep, huh?” Nate said after a long time. She’d heard his shoulder on the leather when he turned in his seat to look at her.

  “Yeah,” Calvin said. “What you think about Mason? Can he hang?”

  Their voices were nervous. “He got traded by the Seahawks, right? I don’t know—blood got the heart, like Rock say, but do he got the wheels?”

  “You scared, Nate?”

  “About what?”

  “Camp, fool.”

  “Hilarious, Calvin. Shit, we best not get scared bout no rookie camp. July gon be a lot worse.”

  “So?”

  “Yeah, I’m scared, okay?” Nate sucked his teeth. “Coach gon be lookin at us hard.”

  “You see Johnson gon be there. Remember him when we played Notre Dame?”

  “Yeah.” She heard Nate turn to look at her again. “The condo should be fixed up, I guess. Carolanne said escrow was fixing to close, or whatever it’s called.” Marietta let out a slow breath and thought of Carolanne and the baby. Freeman. His head so big for his body in the pictures.

  “Man, you scared to death,” Nate said. “You always been scary. Remember you calling me into the bathroom when we first got to Charleston, talking bout, ‘Nate, man, I broke the toilet.’ First night!”

  “Shut up, I was only three or something.”

  “Nate, look I make one too big.’” Nate imitated. “It gon break the…”

  “Oh, man, you scared, too,” Calvin whispered. “Man, why Mama don’t want to fly?” He rattled the map. “Oklahoma look long, too. This ain’t like when we was on the plane with the team.”

  “Okay,” Nate said harshly. “Let’s go over the plays. Remember that sweep they kept running, the one we seen on the video? Who I gotta pull? Come on, think…”

  The tires sang below her.

  California

  Anaheim Hills

  ALONG THIS WALL, SHE saw patches of green. The brown cinder blocks must have had narrow gaps somewhere because, when she came closer, every ten feet or so there was a springy vine, a wild ivy or maybe a grape, tumbling out of a crack. But they were so regularly spaced—how had someone planted seeds in the cement?

  The bending plants, pouring down the wall like little waterfalls, were the only green Marietta had seen since she left the gate of the condominium complex. She looked away from the shady side of the wall to the hills all around her. This was the farthest she’d ever walked, and she was at the edge of the developed land. Red tile roofs, white stucco walls like all the other houses and condos, covered the hills in wide crescents.

  “Tracks,” she said to herself. That was what she had heard Carolanne call them, the curve on curve of houses laid out behind walls. Covering the hills like big smiles, she thought, red lips and white, white teeth. Mouths laughing forever. Baby Poppa saying, “Look at those girls when your sons come home to visit—every mouth for miles gets to grinning.”

  The land was gold where it had been left bare, the grass burned pale or gone in the vacant lots where she walked and the dirt had been leveled for new houses. And the sky was white here in California, already no-color from the heat and it was only the end of May. Sky so bright from the first minute of day, before 6 A.M., not like Pine Gardens, where even on the longest, hottest days the oaks and their long moss curls kept the light spotted and deep. She reached out and ran her hand along this rough wall, touching the vines. This must be an older track, because the street was slightly grayed, like the sun had been working it for a while. Not like the deep black asphalt of the brand-new complex where they lived. Tendrils brushed her fingers; where did the vines find water in the walls?

  There surely wasn’t water anywhere else, only from sprinklers. She knew by the way the gentle slope went before her that the depression ahead wasn’t a river, the way it would be at home, but the freeway again. The same place she had ended up last week, walking down a different road next to another track. She could hear the traffic-wind, and quickly she came to the end of the wall and the hard-packed dirt that was everywhere past the sidewalk. At the chainlink fence lining the banks of the freeway, she watched the cars swim slowly past her. Six-thirty—morning rush hour, Carolanne said. The tips of dried weeds tangled in the wire near her feet, rustling like autumn cornstalks when she nudged them.

  “Don’t think you can go out this early and nobody’ll see you,” Carolanne had told her pointedly when she’d seen Marietta come back from a walk one morning. She’d looked at Marietta’s dusty black shoes, her shirt. “Rush-hour people are out before six.”

  Along the curve of fence, she kept on until she saw one of the green freeway signs, huge because it was so close. BEACHES—an arrow pointed down toward the left lanes. LOS ANGELES—another pointed to the right lanes.

&nbs
p; Nate and Calvin had taken her to Los Angeles one day and the beach the next. L.A. was a too-fast jumble of buildings to her, because she was still tired and dazed from the long drive across the country, but they wanted to show her the university and the dorms where they’d lived.

  But Newport Beach—the blue and sand of this ocean, the huge waves—was a surprise. Nate wore his practice jersey, LOS ANGELES RAMS across the front, and he smiled big as a banana when a blond kid walking close to the water shouted, “Daddy, that’s Nate and Calvin Cook! They got drafted by the Rams and I saw them on TV!”

  Marietta had tried to imagine fishing there, but the broad expanse of sand was covered with towels and people and umbrellas; no reeds or grasses where fish could hide, no point jutting out into the water, no place to see green until they drove to Balboa, a word Nate liked to roll around his tongue. “It’s private, see all the houses, Mama? I’m a have to get you one, oh, next year, most def,” he had said.

  “You best worry bout this year, fool,” Calvin had said.

  “Don’t let your mouth write a check your behind can’t cash,” Carolanne had said sharply behind them. Little Freeman slept, his head lolling on her shoulder.

  Following the line of traffic, the car roofs stacked together tight as Freeman’s toy trains, only gave her a headache. All the exhaust made dancing wavers in the air. At the street that led back up the hill, she turned.

  Hadn’t been here but a month and already she was out of walks. She’d been walking in the space of time after the boys left for the field and before Carolanne and Freeman woke up. The boys had to run and work out early, before the heat and smog filled the air. Every morning, Calvin dressed in his sweats at five-thirty, and when she heard his feet thud on the carpet, she got up to make him biscuits and grits. “Mama, I ain’t eating till we get back,” he said. “Come on, now.”

  “You best get use to good food again, not that McDonald food. How you muscle gon work on air and grease?” She handed him a plate wrapped in foil, for Nate. “Take this and I see you when you back.”