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

by Susan Straight

  “I don’t think so. I want to wait. They said they might come by tonight, you know. And don’t tell him we went to the Gardens. He hates it when I go.”

  “I give Freeman a bath,” Marietta said.

  “Thanks.”

  She poured water on his head, over his tightly scrunched eyes, and thought maybe Carolanne was right. This was different from feeding Nate and Calvin, giving them peach pits to play with. Maybe Freeman need more than play and go outside and feed chicken. Maybe I don’t know nothing bout raise child now.

  Nate and Calvin came a while later, but Freeman was still awake, because he’d napped too long in the car and wasn’t sleepy now. While Nate sat on the couch, looking tired, telling Marietta and Carolanne about the smog that seemed worse on the practice field today, Freeman pushed at his knees and then cried to be held. Nate picked him up and Freeman lifted Nate’s T-shirt to poke at the blacker skin of his nipples.

  “Quit,” Nate said. “You always doing that. I told you it tickle.”

  Freeman thought that was funny, and he leaned forward and bit Nate’s left nipple. “Shit,” Nate shouted. “I thought you said he wasn’t doin this no more!”

  “That hurts, man,” Calvin told Freeman, who smiled.

  “Nate,” Carolanne said, and then Nate leaned forward and bit Freeman on the arm, hard enough to leave faint toothmarks.

  Freeman screamed, taking in a long breath and then screaming again. Carolanne rushed over and pulled him away from Nate’s chest. “What the fuck are you doing?” she yelled.

  “Teach him don’t do that shit.”

  “What you teachin him? No—you teaching him that if you bigger, it’s okay to bite or hit. We talked about this, Nate!”

  Marietta took Freeman from Carolanne’s hands and went into the bedroom. “You gon have fe cry, sweetie,” she said to his twisted face over the crib bars. She was frightened. “You need fe go sleep now.”

  Hurrying back to the living room, she saw Calvin stand up and go to the sliding glass door. “I ain’t even in the mood,” Nate shouted. “I come home for a fuckin hour and I want some rest.”

  “I don’t care. That was two seconds that could traumatize him.”

  “I’ma show him how it feel,” Nate shouted, louder. “He don’t like it, either.”

  “You’re showing him that the biggest person gets to do whatever he wants.” Carolanne went closer to the TV, because Nate sat back down and stared at the screen.

  Marietta said, “Carolanne,” but she didn’t look away from Nate’s face, the gap showing where his mouth hung open slightly.

  “He do,” Nate said. “Get to do whatever the fuck he want.”

  “Not here he don’t. Don’t look past me at the damn TV.”

  “Nate, man, let’s get on back. We got a hundred-dollar fine if we late,” Calvin said.

  Carolanne went to the couch and pushed Nate’s shoulder. “I said don’t look at the damn TV when I’m trying to tell you somethin.”

  In the moment of quiet, they could hear the thin thread of Freeman’s crying, and Marietta remembered her pulsing breasts, the boys’ unending squalls out the window. “Goddamnit,” Nate said, leaping up from the couch. “This my fuckin house, I’m working my black ass off for pay these bill, and you in my face every minute! I feel like bit you to stop you damn mouth!”

  “Carolanne, leave he be, he ain’t right,” Calvin said, moving between them.

  Nate spun around the room, so big and wide he knocked into the ficus tree by the couch. “What in hell we got fucking tree for in the house?” He picked up the pot and threw it at the wall; the leaves brushed soft against the wallpaper, but the black dirt rustled down to the carpet.

  “Quit, Nate—see, man, that shit Bulk give you make you crazy!” Calvin shouted, and he slipped around Nate to hold his arms.

  “This ain’t you house, nigger, let me go,” Nate yelled. “Let go.”

  Carolanne’s mouth opened wide. “What?” She curled her fingernails and Marietta put her hands on Carolanne’s shoulders to hold her, too. “What the fuck—you takin something? You on something? Nigger, don’t you fuck up my life! Shit! Shit! All them times I had some dude flash something in my face, smoke somethin—you fuckin with my whole life!” She cried like Freeman, mouth stretching wide, black at the corners of her eyes, and she tried to get past Marietta. “I go back and ain’t nobody around, they all dead or wackheads, and you want to fuck with my life.” She broke away from Marietta and slapped Nate.

  “Hold he now, Calvin,” Marietta said, and she couldn’t believe how calm her voice was. “Don’t let he go.”

  She let Carolanne hit him in the chest until one of her nails caught in his skin and drew a line of blood like magic quick along his neck; red welling in a perfect line, thick and content, not spreading. They all stopped, heard Freeman howl, and Nate shouted at Marietta, looking straight at her, “Who got the advantage, Mama? Why you let she hurt me?”

  Marietta ran for the bedroom and caught Freeman shaking in her arms. She slammed the door and sat with him in the rocking chair while he stuttered breath into her shirt until the front door closed.

  She waited for Calvin the next night He stirred a rain of sugar into his iced tea, clicking the ice cubes together. “Nate stay with Bulk and them tonight,” he said. “They goin over plays.”

  “Okay.”

  He stirred and stirred, looking into the glass that he always held far from him, with almost-straight arms. “Mama, you remember when it hailed?”

  “No.”

  “I was about four. You know you can remember just a picture, not no whole thing but you just see one picture, that all you remember bout something?”

  “I don’t know, Calvin.”

  “We was in the field. Me and Nate was playing and little piece of white, like dots, start falling around me, all around. Come down through the tree. Every time I put sugar in my iced tea, look like that hail, fall down by the ice cube. I remember that sound.”

  She pushed her fingers along the smoked glass, the thick edge.

  “I know you remember when I use to cut myself,” he said.

  “I do. That one hard forgetting.”

  He rattled the ice. “Nate taking steroids.”

  “What you mean?”

  “You seen articles bout em, in the magazines.”

  “He taking pill?”

  “He take pills and he have Bulk give he shot. He think he need the size for go up against the others.”

  “That why he so crazy?”

  “Yeah, steroid mess with he mind.”

  She sat, not knowing what to say. Fish—blood—nothing worked. She saw Calvin’s heart the way it had always been, a sponge, and Nate’s—she had begun to see it square-sectioned, hard-curved: a turtle shell.

  Calvin said, “When I ax he one time, Nate don’t remember no hail. He remember you whup him bout Timmy, and he remember Willie catch a snake. Like we was in two different states or something. Last night, that was all he talk bout—you whup him for Timmy, and you whup him in the back, behind the house in Charleston. He say, ‘Who got the advantage, man?’”

  Marietta put her palms on either side of her head. “Camp gon be over in a week, huh?” she asked. Calvin nodded. She pressed hard on her scarf. “And you two gon to Ohio then, for that first game.” She looked at Calvin’s nicked fingers and arms.

  “I need you take me somewhere, when you come home tomorrow night,” she said, her eyes closed. “Someplace close. You gon teach me how for drive right quick.”

  Rio Seco

  August

  THE BALL OF HER foot against the gas pedal, her finger bones hard on the steering wheel—tiny movements and feeling the response, then heavier or lighter touching the brake: it was only paying attention to what the little motions did, just like hoeing or peeling peaches. Varying the pressure of her thumb against the knife blade and pulling the skin, slicing the hoe blade as close to the rice plants as she could—she pressed the gas pedal and fel
t the car’s movement.

  Calvin had taken her to the empty parking lot of a medical clinic a few miles from the condominium, but he only had an hour or so before he had to get back to camp. Marietta hadn’t seen Nate since the night of the fighting. She heard Calvin nervous, watching her cross the black asphalt and white parking lines. “I can’t teach you nothing in the dark, Mama,” he said. “Why you can’t wait till preseason’s over and we come home?”

  She shook her head, concentrating on the wheels underneath her, imagining what they did when she turned the circle in her hands. “Tomorrow you ax Rock follow you home and take you back to camp. You leave the car. You all gon go to Ohio on Friday for the game.”

  “Uh-uh, Mama, you only been practicing three nights. Where you need for go Carolanne can’t take you?”

  “Boy, I’m a grown woman. Don’t be ax me where I have fe go.” She heard the wheels popping over the grit in the asphalt and remembered all the long cars pulling off the highway toward her.

  Where was she going now? She was just driving, doing what all these other people did day and night, floating along the freeway. Not like she and Carolanne did during the day, with the windows up and the gray-smelling conditioned air cold against her face; not cutting sharp around the corners of filled parking lots, hearing, “Are you leaving now or what?” and “Damn, fool, watch where you going!” Not stopping again and again, pushing through thick glass doors, sitting at a gas station while someone silently filled the tank and Marietta ached in her seat with the idleness of her hands; a card was handed through the window, Carolanne signed it, and the accountant Marietta had never seen paid all the bills every month. Carolanne collected the receipts, thin as onionskins, and Marietta stared at the plastic bags from the malls; she could see the Styrofoam trays holding meat and fish, the clothes pressing against shoes and scarves, the sharp box corners pressing through the filmy bags, thin-white as the membrane under the shell of a hard-cooked egg.

  No. She floated alone now, the last few nights, the windows silently disappearing into their long slits, and the air that was heated and misty-full of smog all day turned cool and invisible in the dark. The hills were black, and she couldn’t see the burned tufts of grass or the lack of trees. She couldn’t imagine ever liking this landscape, ever being able to tell Nate what to do. His face, smooth as hers, but his mouth wider, smiling and boasting and one side curling in scorn at what someone told him about another player; his arms wide as branches, his fingers with dirty white web traces of the tape from practice and games. No spiderwebs to press into torn flesh.

  His face flopped onto the hand bound with her webs, when he was in high school and sitting at the kitchen table, complaining, “Man, I hate all this reading. I can’t tell when I ever be finish. I can’t see nothing. I gotta see something. Give me some wood for chop so I can see when I be finish. Give me all that ice for load. So I learn the name of these dude, all them president and whoever? What I’ma do with that?” And Calvin laughing—because Marietta tried to make him read, and no one made Nate know the names in class. No one at school cared whether he read the books or not.

  She drove on the wide freeway, eight lanes, cars weaving and dodging all around her. She felt Nate’s tiny hands on her shirt, trying to drag her to what he wanted her to see in the yard; he couldn’t believe she was too big for him to move. No fish and crab and shrimp to make him stop kicking in her belly; no rocking in the night or helping him with his belt or telling him that the offensive guard was pulling him inside too often.

  Mama job never finish—but she heard the awful ping and racket of marbles into the shell-like sink and over her feet. Mama keep she job too long. Could she help anyone now? Carolanne had Oprah and Phil; Nate and Calvin had each other. Freeman? The new baby? Was he turning and turning yet, in Carolanne’s water?

  She braced for the rush of cars passing, split around her; she seemed suspended in the middle lane. She pressed down harder and the speedometer said 60. The windows and faces passing her glowed faintly green or red or silver, and she started to cry, her breasts and shoulders shaking with the force of her sobs.

  Never in front of anyone, all those years, she wouldn’t cry, and here she cried in front of a hundred people, a thousand, all these windows and faces—but no one looked, no one saw inside the dark-tinted windows. The road blurred as if rain were pouring down the windshield and she pulled over to the shoulder and put her forehead against the steering wheel, roaring so hard she felt everything leave her lungs, her chest. She was as lonely as she’d been everywhere else—Pine Gardens, Charleston, here in the condominium, in the wide new bed, in the rooms silent while Calvin was at camp.

  She had cried sometimes in each of those places, in a dark room, but never in front of Aint Sister or Tiny Momma. All those Saturdays on the piazza or in Baby Poppa’s living room, watching Calvin smash his chest into someone and seeing cleats fly into his calf; seeing Nate’s lowered head and spread-wide arms knock a white boy ten yards, seeing Nate’s face, his fist, the way the camera went in close, when she was afraid of his huge eyes and the palms slapping him with joy. But then the announcers’ voices would say, “That’s the intensity level Nate Cook needs, he’s a wild man out there against Ohio State.”

  Her shirt front was cold with tears now. The boys—she’d had to be so hard, fearless and tearless as a man all those years so they wouldn’t challenge her or question her or pity her. And Tiny Momma, Baby Poppa—no one saw her crack or wet her face, so that no one could get a hand over her by using one to comfort her.

  But a hand—was she crying for that, too? She drew a breath in shame: A man’s hand on her back, long fingers laid out in that curve above her hips, Sinbad’s chest much harder than her own arm under her cheek, his lips mistakenly touching her forehead when he turned in his sleep. Carolanne slept on Nate’s chest, her skin gold and young, no veins growing up the backs of her hands and wrists. Nate would catch her shoulders in the bend of his elbow for a minute, then her neck. On television, men put thumbs under the women’s chins to tilt up the pale faces, rested thumbs in the hollow dimples by their kneecaps under restaurant tables.

  Why did the air from the dashboard rise now and make her see this, too—Sinbad’s hands, Milt’s, Nate’s arms holding Carolanne’s hair hard against the pillows? He was grown, a husband.

  She couldn’t help. She didn’t know anything about investments or training camp or the right publicity. She didn’t know how to work the microwave or help with fingernails or shout instructions to soap-opera actresses. She didn’t know about structured playtime or socialization or educational toys. Her cheeks began to dry, taut. She had thought all these weeks that she would make Carolanne sit with her at a table and peel peaches, snap beans, slide the veins from shrimp; ever since she found the blue-tipped wand in the trash, she thought she would help Carolanne see that the delicate motions, done over and over, let you think, let you feed salty-sweet fish and cobbler swimming in thick juice to Nate so that you could speak to him. Carolanne had too much time to think, so she filled her days—she had no time for slow thinking and peach juice running ticklish down her wrists any more than Marietta had had time to sit in the humming dust and coil sweetgrass.

  Cars shot past her, snatching at the air from the open window like a vacuum hose. Sucking hard, letting go, the cars’ headlights disappeared, then someone pulled behind her slowly. Inside the car the brighter beams were blinding, blue-white as lightning.

  Marietta gripped the steering wheel. Should she start the car and drive away? She heard the police radio and the feet approaching her door.

  “Uh, is there a problem here?” the officer said warily from behind the door. “Do you have car trouble?”

  “No, sir,” she said.

  “Please bring both your hands outside the car, sir,” he said harshly. “Show me your hands!”

  She pushed her hands into the air. His face came into view and she whispered, “I just stop cause I have something in my eye, sir.”
r />   “Ma’am, uh, I’m sorry, ma’am. Have you been drinking?” His reddish mustache curled around his mouth.

  “No, sir. I have something in my eye, a bug fly in my window, and I get it out now.”

  “Can I see your license, ma’am?” He peered into the car.

  “My son just teach me how for drive this week.”

  “You don’t have a license?”

  “No, sir. My son don’t have time for take me to get one. He got a game.” She remembered Nate saying, “I just tell em I play with the Rams, man!” She said, “First game of the preseason tomorrow, and my sons go to Ohio. Nate and Calvin Cook, play for the Rams.”

  “What?” He looked hard at her.

  She said, “This Calvin’s car. I just move here from Charleston, and he teach me to drive this week. I get a license soon as he get back from Canton, Ohio. Hall of Fame game.”

  “You’re not kidding, huh? The Cook twins. What does Nate drive?”

  She took in a small bit of air. “He drive a BMW, sir. I don’t remember the number. He wife got a Supra.”

  “And Calvin bought this big gas hog? You know, I can only tell em apart when Nate smiles, cause of that tooth.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who do they play tomorrow—Cleveland?”

  “Cincinnati, sir.”

  “Yeah. I didn’t remember cause I don’t have the day off. Well, Miz Cook, you know you can’t stop the car on the freeway except in emergency situations. It’s illegal. I think your son better get you a driver’s handbook. I’m not going to give you a citation, but I think you should drive real carefully on your way home. Where do you live?”

  “Anaheim Hills.”

  “Must be nice. Well, you’re almost to Rico Seco,” he said. “Remember, no stopping on the freeway shoulder. And tell Calvin and Nate good luck on the season.”

  Marietta started the Lincoln again and waited, but he stayed behind her until she pulled onto the freeway. Rio Seco. She drove off carefully and found the next exit ramp, then stopped on the bridge overlooking the freeway. She would have to get back on, going west, to get home. No stopping on the road, no stopping on the freeway. She had gotten lost in a track that first week and sat down on a curb to rest in the heat, and people stared hard; a security guard in a car cruised past. She couldn’t sit by the too-blue stream in the landscaping. No fish swam there.