Perhaps silence was best, now, after so long. Anything could happen if she let those five-year-old questions come rolling out of her mouth. Kenny might begin to question her, might ask her what there was about her mothering that made him want to treat a woman like a piece of toilet paper. And what would she say to that?
It was illness that had finally put an end to her visits with him. She’d written the first letter—a note really—to say she was laid up with the flu. A hacking cough had lingered. She hadn’t gotten her strength back for nearly two months. By that time their correspondence was established. Letters full of “How are you? I’m fine.… The weather is … The print shop is … The dress I made for Mrs. Rothstein was …” were so much more manageable than those silence-laden visits. And she didn’t have to worry about making eye contact with Kenny in a letter.
Now Myrna stood staring out the kitchen window while Kenny ate his bacon and eggs. The crisp everydayness of clothes flapping on the line surprised her. A leaf floated into her small cemented yard and landed on a potted pansy. Outside, nothing had changed; the world was still in spring.
“I can’t go through this again,” she mouthed soundlessly to the breeze.
“Come talk to me, Ma,” her son called softly around a mouthful of food.
Myrna turned to look at him. He smiled an egg-flecked smile she couldn’t return. She wanted to ask him what he would do now, whether he had a job lined up, whether he planned to stay long. But she was afraid of his answers, afraid of how she might respond if he said he had no job, no plans, no place to stay except with her and that he hadn’t changed in any important way.
“I’m always gonna live with you, Mommy,” he’d told her when he was a child. “Always.” At the time, she’d wished it was true, that they could always be together, she and her sweet, chubby boy. Now the thought frightened her.
“Be right back,” she mumbled, and she scurried down the hall to the bathroom. She eased the lock over so that it made barely a sound.
“He’s my son!” she hissed at the drawn woman in the mirror. Perspiration dotted her upper lip and glistened around her hairline.
“My son!” she repeated pleadingly. But the words were not as powerful as the memory of Crystal Roberts sitting in the courtroom, her shoulders hunched and her head hung down, as though she were the one who ought to be ashamed. Myrna wished him never born, before she flushed the toilet and unlocked the door.
In the kitchen Kenny had moved to take her place by the window. His dishes littered the table. He’d spilled the salt, and there were crumbs on the floor.
“It sure is good to look out the window and see something besides guard towers and cons.” Kenny stretched, rubbed his belly, and turned to face her.
“It’s good to see you, Ma.” His eyes were soft and shiny.
Oh, Lord! Myrna moaned to herself. She turned her back to him and began carrying his dirty dishes to the sink: first the plate, then the cup, the knife, fork, and spoon, drawing out the chore.
“This place ain’t got as much room as the old place,” she told him while she made dishwater in the sink.
“It’s fine, Ma, just fine.”
Oh, Lord, Myrna prayed.
Kenny came to lean against the stove to her right. She dropped a knife and made the dishwater too cold.
“Seen Dad?”
“Where and why would I see him?” She tried to put ice in her voice. It trembled.
“Just thought you might know where he is.” Kenny moved back to the window.
Myrna remembered the crippling shock of Buddy’s fist in her groin and scoured Kenny’s plate and cup with a piece of steel wool before rinsing them in scalding water.
“Maybe I’ll hop a bus over to the old neighborhood. See some of the guys, how things have changed.”
He paced the floor behind her. Myrna sensed his uneasiness and was startled by a wave of pleasure at his discomfort.
After he’d gone, she fixed herself a large gin and orange juice and carried it into the living room. She flicked on the TV and sat down to stare at it. After two minutes of frenetic, overbright commercials, she got up and turned it off again. Outside, children screamed each other to the finish line of a footrace. She remembered that Kenny had always liked to run. So had she. But he’d had more childhood than she’d had. She’d been hired out as a mother’s helper by the time she was twelve and pregnant and married at sixteen. She didn’t begrudge him his childhood fun. It just seemed so wasted now.
Tears slid down her face and salted her drink. Tears for the young Myrna who hadn’t understood that she was raising a boy who needed special handling to keep him from becoming a man she didn’t care to know. Tears for Kenny who was so twisted around inside that he could rape a woman. Myrna drained her gin, left Kenny a note reminding him to leave her door key on the kitchen table, and went to bed.
Of course, she was still awake when he came in. He bumped into the coffee table, ran water in the bathroom sink for a long time, then he was quiet. Myrna lay awake in the dark blue-gray night listening to the groan of the refrigerator, the hiss of the hot-water heater, and the rumble of large trucks on a distant street. He made no sound where he lay on the opened-out sofa, surrounded by her sewing machine, dress dummy, marking tape, and pins.
When sleep finally came, it brought dreams of walking down brilliantly lit streets, hand in hand with a boy about twelve who looked, acted, and talked like Kenny but who she knew with certainty was not her son, at the same time that she also knew he could be no one else.
She woke to a cacophony of church bells. It was late. Too late to make it to church service. She turned her head to look at the crucifix hanging by her bed and tried to pray, to summon up that feeling of near weightlessness that came over her in those moments when she was able to free her mind of all else and give herself over to prayer. Now nothing came but a dull ache in the back of her throat.
She had begun attending church regularly after she stopped visiting Kenny. His refusal to respond to her questions made it clear she’d have to seek answers elsewhere. She’d decided to talk to Father Giles. He’d been at St. Mark’s, in their old neighborhood, before she and Kenny had moved there. He’d seen Kenny growing up. Perhaps he’d noticed something, understood something about the boy, about her, that would explain what she could not understand.
“It’s God’s will, my child—put it in His hands,” he’d urged, awkwardly patting her arm and averting his eyes.
Myrna took his advice wholeheartedly. She became quite adept at quieting the questions boiling in her belly with “His will” or “My cross to bear.” Many nights she’d “Our Fathered” herself to sleep. Acceptance of Kenny’s inexplicable act became a test God had given her. One she passed by visiting the sick, along with other women from the church; working on the neighborhood cleanup committee; avoiding all social contact with men. With sex. She put “widowed” on job applications and never mentioned a son to new people she met. Once she’d moved away from the silent accusation of their old apartment, prayer and good works became a protective shield separating her from the past.
Kenny’s tap on her door startled her back to the present. She cleared her throat and straightened the covers before calling to him to come in.
A rich, aromatic steam rose from the coffee he’d brought her. The toast was just the right shade of brown, and she was sure that when she cracked the poached egg it would be cooked exactly to her liking. Not only was everything perfectly prepared, but it was the first time she’d had breakfast in bed since he’d been arrested. Myrna couldn’t hold back the tears or the flood of memories of many mornings, just so: him bending over her with a breakfast tray.
“You wait on people in the restaurant all day and sit up all night making other people’s clothes. You need some waiting on, too.”
Had he actually said that, this man as a boy? Could this man have been such a boy? Myrna nearly tilted the tray in her confusion.
“I need to brush my teeth.” She avert
ed her face and reached for her bathrobe.
But she couldn’t avoid her eyes in the medicine cabinet mirror, eyes that reminded her that despite what Kenny had done, she hadn’t stopped loving him. But her love didn’t need his company. It thrived only on memories of him that were more than four years old. It was as much a love remembered as a living thing. But it was love, nonetheless. Myrna pressed her clenched fist against her lips and wondered if love was enough. She stayed in the bathroom until she heard him leave her bedroom and turn on the TV in the living room.
When he came back for the tray, she told him she had a sick headache and had decided to stay in bed. He was immediately sympathetic, fetching aspirin and a cool compress for her forehead, offering to massage her neck and temples, to lower the blinds and block out the bright morning sun. Myrna told him she wanted only to rest.
All afternoon she lay on her unmade bed, her eyes on the ceiling or idly roaming the room, her mind moving across the surface of her life, poking at old wounds, so amazingly raw after all these years. First there’d been Buddy. He’d laughed at her country ways and punched her around until he’d driven her and their child into the streets. But at least she was rid of him. Then there was his son. Her baby. He’d tricked a young woman into getting into his car, where he proceeded to ruin a great portion of her life. Now he’d come back to spill salt in her kitchen.
I’m home, Ma, homema, homema. His words echoed in her inner ear and made her heart flutter. Her neighbors would want to know where he’d been all this time and why. Fear and disgust would creep into their faces and voices. Her nights would be full of listening. Waiting.
And she would have to live with the unblanketed reality that whatever anger and meanness her son held toward the world, he had chosen a woman to take it out on.
A woman.
Someone like me, she thought, like Great Aunt Faye, or Valerie, her eight-year-old niece; like Lucille, her oldest friend, or Dr. Ramsey, her dentist. A woman like all the women who’d helped feed, clothe, and care for Kenny; who’d tried their damnedest to protect him from as much of the ugly and awful in life as they could; who’d taught him to ride a bike and cross the street. All women. From the day she’d left Buddy, not one man had done a damned thing for Kenny. Not one.
And he might do it again, she thought. The idea sent Myrna rolling back and forth across the bed as though she could actually escape her thoughts. She’d allowed herself to believe she was done with such thoughts. Once she accepted Kenny’s crime as the will of God, she immediately saw that it wouldn’t have made any difference how she’d raised him if this was God’s unfathomable plan for him. It was a comforting idea, one that answered her question of why and how her much-loved son could be a rapist. One that answered the question of the degree of her responsibility for Kenny’s crime by clearing her of all possible blame. One that allowed her to forgive him. Or so she’d thought.
Now she realized all her prayers, all her studied efforts to accept and forgive, were like blankets thrown on a forest fire. All it took was the small breeze created by her opening the door to her only child to burn those blankets to cinders and release her rage—as wild and fierce as the day he’d confessed.
She closed her eyes and saw her outraged self dash wildly into the living room to scream imprecations in his face until her voice failed. Specks of froth gathered at the corners of her mouth. Her flying spit peppered his face. He cringed before her, his eyes full of shame as he tore at his own face and chest in self-loathing.
Yet, even as she fantasized, she knew Kenny could no more be screamed into contrition than Crystal or any woman could be bullied into willing sex. And what, in fact, was there for him to say or do that would satisfy her? The response she really wanted from him was not available: there was no way he could become the boy he’d been before that night four years ago.
No more than I can treat him as if he were that boy, she thought.
And the thought stilled her. She lay motionless, considering.
When she rose from her bed, she dragged her old green Samsonite suitcase out from the back of the closet. She moved with the easy, effortless grace of someone who knows what she is doing and feels good about it. Without even wiping off the dust, she plopped the suitcase on the bed. When she lifted the lid, the smell of leaving and good-bye flooded the room and quickened her pulse. For the first time in two days, her mouth moved in the direction of a smile.
She hurried from dresser drawer to closet, choosing her favorites: the black two-piece silk knit dress she’d bought on sale, her comfortable gray shoes, the lavender sweater she’d knitted as a birthday present to herself but had never worn, both her blue and her black slacks, the red crepe blouse she’d made to go with them, and the best of her underwear. She packed in a rush, as though her bus or train were even now pulling out of the station.
When she’d packed her clothes, Myrna looked around the room for other necessary items. She gathered up her comb and brush and the picture of her mother from the top of her bureau, then walked to the wall on the left side of her bed and lifted down the shiny metal and wooden crucifix that hung there. She ran her finger down the slim, muscular body. The Aryan plaster of Paris Christ seemed to writhe in bittersweet agony. Myrna stared at the crucifix for a few moments, then gently hung it back on the wall.
When she’d finished dressing, she sat down in the hard, straight-backed chair near the window to think through her plan. Kenny tapped at her door a number of times until she was able to convince him that she was best left alone and would be fine in the morning. When dark came, she waited for the silence of sleep, then quietly left her room. She set her suitcase by the front door, tiptoed by Kenny, where he slept on the sofa, and went into the kitchen. By the glow from the back alley streetlight, she wrote him a note and propped it against the sugar bowl:
Dear Kenny,
I’m sorry. I just can’t be your mother right now. I will be back in one week. Please be gone. Much love, Myrna.
Kenny flinched and frowned in his sleep as the front door clicked shut.
With her debut novel in 1992, Blanche on the Lam, BARBARANEELY joined a growing number of African American writers who write mysteries set in black America. Blanche is a middle-aged, eggplant-black, African American domestic, full-time mother, and part-time sleuth who lives and works in Durham. Neely’s first book in this series garnered three first-novel prizes: the Agatha, the Macavity, and the Anthony. Neely now lives in Massachusetts, but she resided for some time in North Carolina, where she wrote for Southern Exposure and produced radio shows for the African News Service.
Copyright 1990 by BarbaraNeely. First published in Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Fiction, edited by Terry McMillan (New York: Viking Penguin, 1990). Reprinted with permission of Rosenstone/Wender. No part of this material shall be reproduced in whole or part without the express written permission of the author or her agent.
The Dog Who Remembered Too Much
Elizabeth Daniels Squire
“Mama’s gone, Peaches,” Lola said to me, “and I need your help.”
I held the phone tight, and a shiver of sadness went through me.
I knew Lola meant that her wonderful eighty-three-year-old mother, Bonnie Amons—my next-door neighbor—had died. Lola liked soft-pedal words—“gone” or “passed on” for died, “indisposed” for vomiting all over, and so forth.
Bonnie’s death was my fault. Now, why on earth would I feel like that? I’d been good to Bonnie. I even helped train her dog. “I heard she was much worse the last few weeks since I’ve been away from Asheville,” I said. I looked out into my sunny garden where a robin took a morning dip in the birdbath. Bonnie’s garden adjoined mine on the right. That blooming apple tree was on her land.
“She’d been declining,” Lola said. “Even her mind was going. She talked about changing her will to leave Doc James everything she had if he’d just get her well. Of course, she couldn’t do that without a lawyer.” Suddenly L
ola sounded smug, but then properly sad again. “You’re never ready for loved ones to go, are you? And I arrived to look in about eight this morning and …” She sighed.
I figured there was no easy way to say what she found. But she hadn’t called me right away. My watch said quarter to ten.
Strange, I thought, that Bonnie got so sick so fast. Three weeks before, she’d been a little vague about time, she’d been almost blind, but there was still a lot of spunk in the old gal. She did have to take heart medicine, but otherwise she was full of ginger. Still, she was eighty-three. And nobody lasts forever.
“And now,” Lola blurted, “somebody is trying to shoot George.”
“Shoot George?” Why on earth would anybody want to shoot my neighbor’s little black-and-white volunteer dog? I say volunteer because he simply appeared a year or so ago. And Bonnie couldn’t bear not to feed him, so George—which is what Bonnie named him—moved in and became her mainstay.
“But everybody loves George,” I said. “What on earth happened?”
“Right after I found Mama”—silence while she pulled herself together—“Peaches, she had plainly passed on. I found her and then I called Doc James and Andrea Ann.” Andrea Ann was Lola’s older sister.
“George barked to go out and I let him out and then I heard a gunshot. But thank the good Lord I hadn’t closed the door tight, and George came running in and had one of his shaking fits.”
I knew it didn’t require a gunshot to scare the dog. He had those shakes with new people, especially men, and especially men wearing boots. Somebody had mistreated that dog. But somebody had been good to him and trained him right, because he was an affectionate little dog who would sit or come on command. I figured we’d never know the whole story.
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