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

by Susan Straight

  He would walk next door, pound for a minute, and when she looked outside in the gray dark, she could see Nate put the food in his mouth as he leaned into the dashboard light.

  Jump around like crickets in these new condominium rooms, run and lift weight in the morning, then don’t know what for do rest a the day. Talking bout rookie mini-camp over but official training camp start in July—that almost two month away.

  A scratch of tires, quick as a burp, squealed again and again ahead of her. The line of cars waited to get out of the walls. Only one street led into the square of houses, and each car rushed through the stop sign, slowing just a second so the drivers could stare at her and past her; then they swerved out to join the line snaking up the hill to the main road and the freeway.

  They turned away from her quickly. She tensed, made herself breathe. She’d forgotten about them for a while. Her clothes, her back. Damn, that woman big. Damn, that woman black. Is that a woman? The knock on the condo door—Uh, excuse me, I’m looking for the lady of the house. Oh, the owner? She held her shoulders tight, breathed, until she crossed between two cars. The first time she’d walked—Uh, need a lift, buddy? someone had said behind her. When she turned, a security guard leaned out his car window, growing a sunset across his cheeks. “Sorry, uh, sorry. Are you lost, ma’am?”

  Her clothes were wrong. Already, through the open patio doors of their adjoining balconies, she’d heard Carolanne say on the phone, “We look black enough, okay? It ain’t like there’s a whole lot of us in the complex—try none. And what’s she gonna wear? She ain’t fitting into no Spiegel’s. I gave her the catalog, okay?”

  That first week she’d lived here—when Carolanne had tried to smile and not study her, when she didn’t know if she could just open their door or if she had to knock—she’d stood outside, hearing Freeman’s cries after the boys had left, and pushed the door open. She had seen the way Carolanne looked at her clothes, her scarf, but she didn’t know what Carolanne was trying to tell her.

  “Where you going, anyway?”

  “Just walk, what wrong with the baby?”

  “He’s had diarrhea.”

  “I stop at the store when I walk for some more rice—you can give he rice water.”

  “There’s no store around here you can walk to—this is Anaheim Hills.” Carolanne squinted at her. “You can’t drive, really? You’re exercise walking?”

  Marietta felt the air on her palms. She carried nothing in her hands, she had finally realized, no weights to swing or tiny radio with headphones or little white towel. By nine or ten each morning, when she watched out her window, she could see the other women from the condos walking, usually in pairs, wearing pink or yellow or lavender sweatsuits, white shoes, white headbands or visors. They swung their arms and weights, their feet round and hard on the pavement. They were dressed right; she looked like she was headed to a store or cemetery or house that needed cleaning. “Great workout, huh!” one had called to her, and she thought, Carry you some grocery, two baby, and a basket of peach fe exercise. Walk to the store—two mile.

  But there was no store here. Squares and circles of streets inside the walls, and she’d gotten lost in one that first week, a maze of white stucco fronts and square-closed garages all the same, staring like boxes on the game shows Carolanne watched sometimes. Tiny trees like feather dusters in planters along the walls. She was almost home now, back to the huge sign that said “EDGEWILD OAKS—LUXURY CONDOMINIUMS IN THE ANAHEIM HILLS.”

  She had forgotten about these two trees. The huge gnarled oaks and branches that reached out past their fenced-in planter—one on each side of the guard gate where she had to nod each time to the eyes. A woman came out of the section of cobblestone road between the two trees. “Aren’t they beautiful?” she said when she saw Marietta and smiled. She wore a purple sweatsuit and purple hoop earrings. “I’m always so happy to see they left them here.”

  “I never knew oak trees live in California,” Marietta murmured.

  “California live oaks,” the woman said. “Do you work in the neighborhood?” She smiled again and stretched her arms behind her.

  “No. I live here with my son.”

  “Oh! Where are you from?” The woman’s voice was southern-soft.

  “South Carolina.”

  “I’m from Georgia!” she said. “I didn’t expect oaks, either.” She smiled once more and began to walk quickly, her arms pumping like she was boxing with the air.

  “She too evil for me stay over there,” Nate said, sitting on the black leather couch with Calvin. He had brought his cherry Kool-Aid with him, in a plastic bottle that he tilted to his mouth for long swallows. “She don’t want this stuff around, talking bout, ‘Why you can’t drink somethin cept sugar water? Poor people drink Kool-Aid. You got money—buy them Perrier or somethin.’” He unscrewed his face from the imitation. “Them Perrier taste like bubble spit. She gettin on my nerves.”

  “Kool-Aid make you tongue all red, like a dog from hell,” Calvin said, and Nate tried to touch his chin with it.

  “L-l-l-aahh,” he gargled. “So?”

  “Maybe she just tire from run around in this heat,” Marietta said. “She been had for take the baby day care and go to she dance class.”

  “Ain’t nobody said she gotta take Freeman down there. Place cost big money, and you said you want for watch him anyway. Don’t ax me all the scientific reason she gotta have him in day care, cause I don’t even want for think about it. Now she fixin for go shopping and want me come. Uh-uh.”

  Calvin changed channels on the huge television with the remote control, switching back and forth, driving her crazy. Sixty-eight channels, and he and Nate would sit there for hours, blip zip blip, sports channels and music videos and shooting, loud cheers and then high laughter flying around the room until they found something they liked.

  “Man, go get me a towel,” Nate said. “You couch sticky as hell less I put on long pants and long sleeve.”

  Calvin raised his eyebrows, not looking away from the guitar player and the girls in black underwear. Marietta saw a wild wind blow the girls’ long hair. “What you talk bout ‘Get me’? I look like you valet? Heat made you foolish? You ain’t taken no shower, man. This real leather.”

  “And real sticky. Now you sound like Carolanne, too. Take a shower—go clean up. You all funky. Hell, she know we gon go back out later and lift weights, get all sweaty again. I ain’t takin no two shower a day—both y’all crazy.” They could hear his arms peel away from the cushion.

  “Leather ain’t practical,” Marietta said, getting up to check the chicken frying in the kitchen. Calvin liked wings and drumsticks for snacks.

  “But it look good, don’t it?” Calvin called to her, and she smiled.

  She turned the spitting chicken and moved the paper bag holding the flour and spices. Cook some okra later, if she could get Carolanne to bring some from the store. She go to the store every day, seem like. The vegetables from the big stores were waxy and too hard, but Marietta hadn’t seen a fresh vegetable or fruit stand anywhere, on all the streets and freeways they’d driven.

  She went next door and knocked. Carolanne opened the door after a few minutes, but she held the edge against her. “I’m not dressed,” she said. Her eyes were small and bare, tight like she’d been asleep.

  “I just want to know you going to the store,” Marietta said. “I need some okra.”

  “I’ll be over in a while,” Carolanne said, already pushing on the door. “Tell Nate he has to come because we’re going to look for more furniture for you.”

  Marietta didn’t say anything to Nate when she was back in the kitchen. He and Calvin lay sprawled on the couch, watching the television and laughing at the music videos. Nate had been complaining about Carolanne for days; she had heard them shouting through the screens, the walls. Maybe Carolanne was angry because Nate spent his time over here, even brought Freeman to eat because Carolanne didn’t want to cook much. Too hot, she said, an
d she did seem to be suffering from the heat, for some reason, her face puffy and movements slow. Marietta thought Carolanne should be used to the heat, she’d been born in Los Angeles and lived all her life here, but even Calvin told her that Carolanne didn’t seem right. “She tripping” was all Nate would say.

  The boys’ voices echoed off the mostly bare walls, hollered above the television, and she shook her head. How were they planning to last until July? Everything had moved so fast since the day of the draft, and now time was stalled, Nate and Calvin like fish much too small for the glass bowl someone had put them in.

  And she felt restless herself, cooking whenever she could, the boys eating it all right away. Nate kept saying he had to get bigger before camp started. They talked to their agent on the phone nearly every day; he took care of all the money, the contracts, and when she heard the words Calvin repeated into the phone, she knew everything had shifted big-time. It would never be like before—she could study all the sports magazines, their playbooks from the coaches, but she couldn’t plan anything for them now. Carolanne had picked out the condominiums, the little potted plants on the patios. She loved to decorate, she said. And Freeman, the grandboy, still wouldn’t let his Big Ma carry him or hug him often because he didn’t know her yet. He seemed afraid of her height, her headscarf, which he stared at, and he always buried his face in his mother’s legs if Marietta tried to get him to say, “Big Ma,” or pick up a toy and hand it to her.

  She heard Nate and Carolanne’s telephone, piercing through the walls. No ringing phones here, like she was used to, with a bell sound. Carolanne’s phone squealed like Jesse’s wheezing brakes back in Charleston, insistent and then stopping abruptly, mad. No faint echo of metal. Nate and Calvin stopped talking, and the phone creaked again. “Answering machine a get it,” Nate said. “If it’s D.J. and them and Carolanne don’t pick it up, they call over here.”

  The squeal stopped, and then Calvin’s phone burbled. His was an electric bubble, like nothing she could picture in her head, and on the second sound, Calvin picked it up. They would go out and run the street, or the freeways, she guessed, with some of the other rookies who were just as bored, or with Rock Jones, the second-year defensive back. Like stray dogs out to see what they were missing.

  Nate stuck his head back in the door. “Now she sleep again, Mama,” he said. “Something ain’t right, like she sick but not really. You gon check on her?”

  She stood in the still-shady spot between their doors. The sun beat hard on the other side of the buildings. Nate and Calvin slammed car doors, and she heard the loud stereo vibrate against the metal and glass when they left the garage below her. She listened at Carolanne’s kitchen window, which looked out at the valley between buildings, but she heard no talking, no television.

  The chicken was cooling on the counter. She wiped the grease from around the burners, washed the dishes, and stood in the doorway again, not sure what to do. The air was silent except for the low, faint hum of all the huge boxes outside that controlled the air-conditioning, the metal things that stood next to each building, hidden by little walls and bushes. No yard work to do; the landscaping, as Carolanne called it, was taken care of by the condominium people.

  Marietta went back into the shadowy darkness of the living room, where the blinds were drawn on the sliding glass door. The air felt suddenly too cool and stale to her; she had liked being cold a few times in this place, where she could turn the air up that high, but now she felt as if she couldn’t breathe. No screen doors here, either, so you were either inside or outside, or in the car, where the air pushed against your face from the dashboard, too. Nothing between these doors to let you listen, nothing to let you hear footsteps of someone visiting.

  The living room was bare except for the huge black couch, a black reclining chair, a shelf-like stack of black-stained wood holding the stereo against one wall, and a beautiful wooden box Carolanne had bought for Calvin’s cassette tapes and videos. Gleaming ebony shone under the coat of varnish, the corners were rounded and bent as if by magic, and Marietta liked to touch the drawers that slid smooth as oil into water.

  “He was just going to let them lay around all sloppy or put them in a shoebox,” Carolanne had told her. “Men are slobs. That’s why you have to think about every piece you buy when you’re decorating—so it won’t look sloppy, so it’ll work together.”

  Marietta breathed in the smell of chicken and opened the cream-colored blinds to get to the glass door. The walls were creamy, too, but Carolanne was working on something—“black for Calvin’s okay, but we need something feminine for you,” she said. “I saw some things in a magazine—I could show you.”

  Out on these balconies, stretching in a curved line all around her, cutting each condominium in half, Marietta had never seen anyone else. Maybe she came out at the wrong times. A few people had plants and wicker or white metal chairs behind the wooden railings, but most of the balconies were bare. It was different from Charleston, where people turned balconies into jungles of green leaves and hanging stems, where clothes dangled in the wind and people sat outside to shell peanuts, drink iced tea.

  She pulled one of the dinette chairs outside and sat in the sail-shaped corner of shade that was beginning to creep onto the stucco. The stucco was sandy-colored, like the shoulder of the highway—she rubbed her feet across the grainy hardness. All this time she’d known she would leave, been waiting to leave and imagining the place they would end up, she and the boys. Now Charleston, not just Tiny Momma and the others, but the railings and the river, and even Pine Gardens, kept appearing in her mind; they flashed like someone showing off photos to friends.

  She put up her feet close to the railing and looked at the center strip of landscaping and the balconies facing her. Too hot for most people to come out in the middle of the day. But no one came out in the evening either, no kids, no dogs. People came home from work, she heard their cars growling in the garages below, but then they seemed to disappear straight from the garages, inside until morning.

  She had really come out here to see the stream, she knew. She wanted to walk down the center piece of grass and sit beside it, put her feet in the water, and walk on the white rocks that lined the streambed. It was too blue, of course, and she’d had to study for a while to figure out that the streambed was painted, a pale sky shade. But flowers surrounded the water, growing near the rocks, the dead ones pulled out and replaced as soon as she’d noticed them wilting. When she was a child, she would have thought it was magic, the trickling and the perfect white rocks like giant eggs. She imagined lying near them, flowers against her arms, ignoring the baskets and peaches waiting for her.

  But she’d never seen anyone touch the water or walk near it. She wondered if Freeman wanted to wade in it; Carolanne’s blinds were always closed on the sliding glass door. Rubbing her fingers across the stucco bumps beside her, she closed her eyes to listen for Carolanne’s movement behind the glass a few feet away.

  The first thing she saw was the hand and long red nails around the corner, and then Carolanne. “Why you out here in the heat? You got the air-conditioning on.”

  Marietta shook her head. “I still don’t see how you go long with them nails.”

  “Like I said, the hardest thing is dialing. You’ve gotta have pushbutton phones.”

  “I bet you do,” Marietta said. She smiled at the peach-colored forehead, remembering all the bleaching cremes when she saw how pale the gold skin was under the hair rising black and feathery away from it. Carolanne’s eyes were gold, today, and the powder under her brows was sparkling purple.

  “Air-condition make my nose stop up.”

  “We could get some Mentholatum from the store,” Carolanne said. “Freeman has a stuffy nose, too. Again.”

  Inside, she said she shouldn’t, but Carolanne ate two of the chicken wings. Marietta peeled potatoes and gouged out the eyes with her thumbnail. Carolanne grasped her hand and looked at the hard, thick nails.

 
“Look at this—I have to paint mine with all that strengthening stuff or get mine wrapped, and you just grow these.”

  “They useful sometime.”

  “They have really good potato salad in the deli section at Pavilions. Just pick some up when we’re there,” Carolanne said.

  “I don’t need to save no time,” Marietta said. “Go on and get ready.”

  The potatoes were boiled by the time Carolanne came back with different clothes, redder lips. She looked at the cream carpet and black furniture again while Marietta put on her shoes.

  “I thought we could try purple and green, you know? We need to go to Pier 1 and get some stuff for color.”

  She whipped her small car out of the security gate without looking at the guard. “Don’t you want to learn how to drive?”

  Marietta said, “Maybe. But I rather learn in the Lincoln, case somebody hit me.”

  “You won’t have an accident. Calvin’s a good driver.” Carolanne sped down the ramp and onto the freeway. “I thought we could hit Pier 1 first, then get the food and stuff, and pick up Freeman. My girlfriend called and said something good’s on Oprah. Cross dressers—guys wearing ladies’ underwear.”

  “You watch some crazy things on that show,” Marietta said.

  She did want to learn to drive, she had decided on the long trip with the boys. But the way Carolanne drove every day made her dizzy. Carolanne circled around tight and impatient in the malls and store parking lots, looking for a space, getting angry when somebody dumped packages and didn’t start her car. “Why people so damn slow all the time?” she said, and in the clog of cars on the main streets near the shopping centers, she rocked impatiently. “I hate this mall,” she said.

  People crowded the stores no matter what time they went. Marietta walked beside Carolanne into the jungle cool of the mall; her skin tingled at the cool, hot, cool—car, parking lot, store—over and over. In Pier 1, Carolanne slowed down, considering bright purple pillows and holding them out for Marietta.