by Joyce Meyer
When Jean flew into the family room that day, I held my finger over my lips so she wouldn’t say anything. I had the receiver to my ear. If she blurted one word, Mrs. Patterson would hear us and we’d both get caught. As my sister pantomimed for me to hang up the telephone, Jean looked like she was about to erupt with news.
When I hung up the phone she said, “Now you’re going to get it good.”
“What?”
“Jenny, what were you thinking?”
“It’s our party line. If we have to share it with everybody, I have a right to listen.”
“Not that.” Jean’s face was fraught with drama. I knew it was something big because she didn’t breathe one word about my missing hair. She didn’t even seem to see it. “You get yourself down to the yard.”
I took the steps two at a time, not having any idea what my sister could be so worked up about. But the minute I shoved open the door, I understood. The roots of the maple tree in our front yard had grown so old and thick, they’d turned sideways. There beside the lumps in the sidewalk stood Aurelia, her feet planted just as firm and stubborn as the tree trunk that towered over her beside the curb.
My whole insides felt torn to pieces. If I’d ever been scared before, it had never been anything compared to now.
Aurelia had a puzzled look in her eyes. She’d come all this way. She must have pictured me racing out to greet her.
I froze on the stoop above her, standing my ground beside twists of wrought-iron railing.
Receiving Aurelia at my house would be a perilous mistake. She had no idea how dangerous this was. If Daddy found her here, there was no telling what he would do to her.
I hissed at her, mean as a snake, so she’d get the point and go away. “What are you doing here? You got no right coming over like this.”
“Why don’t you get over to my house anymore, Jenny? One minute, you’re coming every day and the next thing, you don’t show up at all.”
Standing there in the yard, Aurelia seemed to shimmer from the heat. Everything else remained motionless, from the bees that hovered beside the white hawthorn blossoms lacing Mama’s flowerbed to little Scott Stinnett down the street who’d given up on his scooter with the bell on the handle and left it propped against a brick wall. Even the breeze, which had been fretting the leaves high among the branches, held its breath.
A posse of boys who’d spent most of the morning acting out the details of the next war (all of us were already thinking there would be another war soon—“Buzz-zz-zzz, I’m a German warplane. You can’t shoot me down.” “Ra-tat-tat-tat-tat. Fall down. I killed you.”) had disappeared for Kool-Aid inside.
Aurelia pleaded, “You going to invite me in or anything?”
“No. I’m not. Only place you ought to be invited in is a loony bin, if you ask me. You got no right.” I glanced over my shoulder at the Shipleys’. Depending on where Mama sat at the Tupperware party, she might see Aurelia out the window.
Daddy had taken off walking a good half-hour ago, headed to the electric company because he wanted to argue the bill. He’d taken one look at the BTU’s drawn by the air conditioner he was so proud of and he’d unplugged the unit for good, after which he’d cursed at all of us, pulled out his favorite rifle, and threatened to shoot anyone who tried to start it up again. No matter if it topped 110 degrees tomorrow, he ranted, that air conditioner was going back to the store.
“You haven’t been around in almost two weeks. I come to find out why. We miss you.”
I advanced toward my friend in distraction, one hand hanging loose and the other knotted at my side. Someone had started up the street. Even though the figure was only a dot, I knew it was Daddy coming.
“Aunt Maureen even made buttermilk biscuits one day, she was so sure you’d come around. She was quoting Scriptures and everything—” She stopped mid-sentence. “What did you do to your hair? It looks like you got attacked by a buzz saw.”
“You go away. Right now,” I blurted out, ignoring her critique of my coiffure.
There could be no mistaking the resentful swing of Daddy’s arms or the resolute cadence of his steps as he strode up the street. Even from here I could tell he was on the warpath. They must have made him pay up on the electric bill.
When I thought back to it years later, I realized that desperate moment was the first time since Antioch Baptist Church that I had prayed. I was so reckless from worrying about Aurelia, there wasn’t time to worry that God wouldn’t hear me or that he would see me the way Daddy saw me, that he wouldn’t think I was good enough for him, that I was too damaged or vile to speak. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Daddy halt. He bought us blessed seconds by giving the Stinnetts the what-for about their boy leaving his scooter where someone could trip on it.
Aurelia knew only the arms of a father who wrapped her against him because he held her dear. She knew only the arms of a man who made up his own music and played it down anytime the idea struck him. Eddie Crockett played for love, and those who heard him—from casual listeners to maestros—would come to the bandstand and ask, “Where did you learn to play like that?” Eddie Crockett loved music and beauty and people. My daddy disdained all of those same things.
I jammed my hand in my pocket to find my penny, but it wasn’t there. I’d left it lying on the table beside the telephone.
Dear Jesus, help her please. Dear God, help her get home safe.
“Darnell says you think you’re too good for us. He says that’s why we don’t see you no more. Is Darnell right, Jenny? Is that it? You think you’re too good for visiting anymore?”
I couldn’t have told you I was crying. I didn’t know until later when I ran into my room to hide and felt my wet face.
“It doesn’t make any difference what I think. You can’t just go showing up like this.”
“You got no idea what it was like getting here. Someone stopped me and said I’d better be coming someplace to work—I’d better be coming to scrub steps or wash windows, and not just catting around the neighborhood. That’s what the person said to me. She said I had no business here. She sounded like you.”
It jolted me that she thought she knew what I was talking about. She thought she’d figured out what was going on. I read it in her eyes just as clear as I’d seen it the afternoon on the Admiral when the purser yanked her arm and said, “You’ll have to stick with your daddy, out of sight. Can’t have you running around on the boat like this. Only Mondays are for the coloreds.” She’d said, “My daddy doesn’t play Mondays.”
I had the chance to set her right. Maybe I should have tried to explain how mean Daddy would be. In those few seconds I could have yelped, “He’ll hit you, Aurelia. He’ll beat us both up, but good.” But back then I had no vocabulary, other than shame. The least I could’ve done was tell her she didn’t have any more sense than a Thanksgiving turkey, that she didn’t know what she was talking about, that I loved her.
If I could be an expert at hiding how scared I was, I could also be an expert at hiding how I felt about Aurelia, for her sake.
The Daddy-speck coming up the road loomed larger. He was growing into a square, dangerous tower of a man. I could see him good now, his face steely, his chest bloating out of his T-shirt. I leaped off the steps and did the only thing I knew to do. Please Jesus, let her get away. I shoved her.
“You go on back to your neighborhood!” I shouted. “I’ll just see you at school.”
“You ashamed, Jenny? You ashamed to be called my friend?” She started in on me, saying I didn’t know how it felt to be her, that I couldn’t know how it was to always wonder if what’s happening is happening to you because you’re colored. “How could you possibly know what that feels like? How could you possibly know?”
“Go.” I shoved her again. Hard. I stomped at her to make my point even clearer. “Get on out of here.”
I watched her back away with hollow eyes and willed her to cut between the two flats across the street, to disappear from sight. I wis
hed she would vanish like a small dark shadow along the sunburned stretch of grass so, not having to look at her, I wouldn’t have to look at myself.
“He can’t play his horn, that’s what I come to tell you,” she said, turning back. “Not with the Six Blue Notes or anybody. Chick had to go out and hire somebody else to be the bandmaster.”
I stared at her, not understanding what she meant.
“It happened at the stove factory. You know, none of us wanted him to have that job anymore. We wanted him to play on the Admiral all the time. He could have gotten plenty of gigs if he hadn’t been thinking he needed to take better care of us.”
“What are you talking about?” I dared her to tell me that news- paper article had been about her daddy. I dared her.
“Aunt Maureen’s taking care of him good as she can. He forgets his arm isn’t there. He wakes up trying to play music because he’s got something in his head. He could use some cheering from you, but I’ll go back and tell him, no, I guess not. I guess you won’t be over anymore.”
“No,” I said. “I can’t. Now get out of here before my daddy sees you.”
The hurt in Aurelia’s eyes hit harder and cut deeper than all the meanness my Daddy had ever flung at me. Just like that, the self-reproach I’d carried so long ripened into anger at my father. I thought, Today is one more day I’ll never be able to forgive him for.
It did not occur to me that God had answered my prayer when Aurelia slipped away unnoticed. I made it clear to the porch rail before Daddy came stumping up from the neighbors’. Mama stood beside me with her Tupperware loot. With Mama on the porch and Daddy on a lower step, they stared at each other from the same height. “What have you gone and bought now? We can’t afford junk like that.”
“It keeps sandwiches fresh. It makes lettuce last longer.”
“How many heads of lettuce would we have to save to make up for what you’re spending on that?” I hated Daddy even more for beating Mama down when there was nothing more at stake than burpable plastic. I hated Mama, too, for letting him do it. “Now you go on inside there and get your money back.”
Mama did as he told her. When she returned from the Shipleys’ this time, she was empty-handed.
That night, I did not sleep. Eddie Crockett had never taken me to see the inside of his workplace, but I pictured it something like Aurelia’s preacher had described hell. I saw endless metal shapes moving along a conveyor belt overhead. A furnace roared and singed everyone’s faces. (Did they have furnaces in a stove factory? It seemed like they would.) There wasn’t any escaping the heat. Every time I closed my eyes, I heard the deafening clang of metal, saw the glinting sharp edges of what I imagined a punch press would look like.
I couldn’t stop picturing Eddie Crockett’s hands forming mouthpieces so thin and light that trumpet players waited in line for them. I couldn’t stop hearing the way those musicians in the Ville begged him to bring home extra stove tin.
My throat stayed clogged all night with something I couldn’t swallow. What must it have felt like for Eddie Crockett as he stood there bleeding in the noise, with metal pieces moving all around him?
I pushed my old wounds deeper inside, and forced myself to grieve solely for the fresh ones, for Eddie Crockett’s music and for what I had done to Aurelia. I wondered until the sky began to turn to soft grey velvet outside my window, Is it different when life gets taken from you moment by moment than when it gets taken all at one time?
Chapter Fifteen
I showed Miss Shaw the anger, pain, and darkness of my heart with every task I undertook. I wiped the displays with vicious circles of the rag, leaving wide patches of dust. I placed the tie clips in their case in a jumble without bothering to arrange them. I left the assortment of silver piggy banks and baby rattles in their boxes for someone else to take care of. But no matter how awful I acted at times, Miss Shaw remained the same with me. She was always kind and respectful.
Miss Shaw tried to draw me out, but I answered her with stern silence. She talked to me about everything from James Dean’s smoldering eyes to the army hearings of Senator Joseph McCarthy, but I remained aloof. She asked my advice on everything from how to arrange brooches in the front window to how she might convince Del Henry to stop in more often, to which I raised the dust rag like it was a battle flag and proceeded, with great intensity, to polish shelves.
On the day Mrs. Stella Fordyce came to look at belt buckles for her husband’s birthday, I let her wait so long that, had she been a silversmith, she could very well have hammered out a belt buckle on her own.
“Mrs. Fordyce.” Miss Shaw rose from her desk at last, sidled past with a confused glance in my direction, and offered the woman assistance because I wouldn’t do it. Once Miss Shaw helped her with prices, Mrs. Fordyce made a decision in no time. When Mrs. Fordyce asked if we offered gift-wrapping, Miss Shaw thrust the buckle at me. “Of course we do. Jenny, will you take care of this, please?”
Ordinarily I loved wrapping packages. All summer I’d taken pleasure in adorning small, elegant boxes with paper and ribbon. I’d taken pride in my perfect, mitered corners and my flawless fluffy bows.
When I ripped off a piece of birthday paper today, I took great satisfaction in tearing it from the roll. I wadded the buckle inside some tissue and smashed the box lid on. I went heavy on the tape, cut the ribbon with sharp snips, and tied knots so tight that Mr. Fordyce would have to go for a kitchen knife to get the thing open. When I handed it over, Mrs. Fordyce peeked in the sack and exclaimed, “My, but what a wrapping job. How creative.”
Miss Shaw stood beside me and watched while Mrs. Fordyce made her way outside. When she disappeared around the corner, Miss Shaw laid her hand on my shoulder.
“Jenny, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
Miss Shaw had plenty of paperwork left at her desk, but she followed me to the corner where I’d left the broom. She eyed me with concern.
“If there was anything I should know about your life, you would tell me, wouldn’t you?”
“I would,” I lied.
“You promise?”
I promised and went back to punishing the floor with stinging smacks of the broom. When Miss Shaw looked at me again, the lines around her eyes got deeper. She stared at me with such interest that I was tempted to relent and blurt out how dirty I felt. But ever since I’d chased Aurelia away from my house, I didn’t carry my penny around anymore. I’d stopped placing stock in what Miss Shaw said a penny represented. Miss Shaw’s life seemed so right. She would never understand. And I was tired of her telling me about God’s plan for my life and that he was watching over me every minute. I’d had plenty of hope once. Maybe I didn’t believe a word of it anymore.
My job with Miss Shaw had become so important to me, but I believed I was destined to lose it, just as I lost everything else that made me feel good.
“STUPID. STUPID,” the notes that Rosalyn and Cindy put in my locker had read. I thought, I was stupid, all right. I was stupid enough to think that anything in my life would ever change.
But here’s the thing about Miss Shaw: she surprised me. She was different from anyone else I had ever met. When I took my anger out in the jewelry shop, she didn’t react the way I expected her to. Anybody else would have seen that I was no good for a jewelry store and would have fired me on the spot. I waited all day for her to chastise me, but she didn’t. She didn’t sit down and say, “I’m not satisfied with your gift-wrapping, Jenny,” or, “You need to look the customers in the eye when they enter the store,” or, “Could you be gentle with the cash register, please? I’d hate to have to send it away for repairs.”
I know now that God was giving me unconditional love through Miss Shaw—I just didn’t know what it was.
The day Jean left for secretarial school blew in with a violent windstorm. The wind blasted down the street with such force that you almost couldn’t stand up in it. Gusts came so hard that the old dilapidated walls along our street began
to totter. Mortar crumbled. Chunks of our flat fell to the ground and shattered. Just walking outside with your neck bent into the weather, you ran the risk of dust blinding your eyes and trash clobbering you and bricks coming loose and randomly dropping on your head.
“We’re not driving to the bus station in this weather. I’m not getting the car out in this,” Daddy hollered each time he stormed past Jean’s door. “Doesn’t mean a thing to me if you miss going to school.”
She didn’t seem to hear him. She went right on folding her stockings and her nylon slip and her scarves. Piece by piece, she set them inside the round red travel case Mama had bought her at Kresge’s. It had a zipper all the way around its edge and a handle Jean could drape over her wrist like a handbag.
I watched my sister pack up her room and thought about the pictures in the Post-Dispatch of the ladies elected to the secretarial board—the scariest pictures I’d ever seen. There sat all the secretaries at their bimonthly meeting, the officers of the secretarial society—president, vice president, and secretary (would you want to be voted secretary to the secretarial board when you were already a secretary?)—with sharp, self-possessed smiles, glasses as big around as drink coasters, and white carnation corsages the size of small bunnies fastened to their collars. I tried to picture my sister in the midst of a scene like that, but I couldn’t.
I stood in the corner, moving when she needed something behind me, trying my best to stay out of her way.
