Leaving Cecil Street

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  Shay started backing out of the room, fixed her eyes on the Virgin Mary cast in stone, she wasn’t Catholic but she sent up a prayer to the statue anyhow that this was all a dream, that she would wake and be where she should be at this moment, at work at her summer job at the Municipal Services Building where she answered the phones and watered the windowsill plants and made sure that everybody had sharpened pencils and rubber bands and paper clips. Please, please, let me wake up and be at work where I should be right now, she mouthed to the statue as Alberta sat zombielike in the straight-back chair. She turned to run then. To go where? she asked herself. Home? To do what? Watch The Edge of Night, or cover her head with her pillow, or vomit, cry hysterically, pull out her hair, curse God, pray. What would she do when she got there? What would she say to her own mother, how would she even walk through her block again? Everybody must know by now. She felt as if she was sinking. How could she go back home? She turned to run anyhow, at least to get away from Alberta’s spite, to deafen her ears to Alberta’s unintelligible ramblings that Shay guessed were attempting to summon all the forces of hell to rise up against her right now. And just the sound of Alberta’s voice so filled with hate propelled her to run, and as soon as she had sufficiently distanced herself from Alberta’s presence, the reality of what had happened at BB’s came crashing down over her head with much too much weight. She was ready to just drop right there on the highly waxed marbleized floor. That’s when she felt arms reaching out for her, catching her, familiar arms. Wonderful arms. Her father’s arms.

  JOE ALMOST CRIED now when he saw Shay, so relieved, so grateful that Shay wasn’t the one to leave BB’s on the stretcher. Almost cried too realizing that Neet had. Though he wasn’t a religious man, he prayed with everything in him that Neet would be okay.

  “It’s okay, Daddy’s Girl, it’s okay,” he said as he almost smothered Shay, he held her so tightly. “Whatever has happened, it’s okay. Let’s get you home, come on, let’s get you home.”

  Shay collapsed into her father’s arms. She cried, “Daddy, Daddy, I’m so sorry, Daddy, Neet, Daddy, Neet’s hurt, and it’s all my fault, I talked her into going to Miss BB’s Saturday-morning house and things went wrong, and Miss Alberta said she might end up sterile and it’s all my fault.” She inhaled the sweet remnants of the Niagara spray starch clinging to her father’s shirt. She didn’t want to let him go. Though she’d barely spoken to him since seeing him on the el platform with Valadean, he was holy to her right now. She cried into his shirt that she couldn’t go home, Neet almost died because of her, how could she ever walk down Cecil Street again? “Please don’t make me go home, Daddy, please. Maybe we could go to Aunt Maggie’s instead, anywhere but home.”

  Joe allowed Shay to rail on. He squeezed her neck some more, patted her back, smoothed her ’fro, then he put his finger to her lips to quiet her. “Listen to what I’ma tell you,” he said. “Listen good so you’ll understand and never forget this. Nothing on God’s earth should ever keep you from going home. I don’t care what you did or didn’t do, who you helped or never meant to hurt, what the people in the street say to your face or behind your back or around the corner, nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, Shay, should ever keep you from going home. Now, I’m gonna take your hand in my hand, and we gonna put one foot in front of the other, and we going home. Okay, Shay? We not even gonna hesitate when we come to the bottom of Cecil Street. We gonna round that corner like we got every right to, we gonna keep on stepping. No jive. We going home.”

  Shay felt closer to her father than she ever had as they walked the half mile to get home. She felt simultaneously protected and exposed. She knew that her father would buffer any glares at her, halt any questions, even curtail expressions of concern that would likely spill over the banisters as they walked. She realized that she and her father had always been closest when she was in pain. With her mother it was the laughter, the silliness, that fused the two. Her mother had always seemed so ill equipped to walk into the middle of her daughter’s hurt and rearrange her thinking so that her emotions could settle down. She’d wring her hands herself, and go stiff and quiet. But Joe had mastered the steps to heal his daughter’s broken heart as he talked to her in his most soothing voice while they walked. He talked about understanding how sliced up she must feel on the inside, but that she’d have to learn how not to be so hard on herself. He told her how he’d seen his best friend get beat into a vegetable with a banister post all because Joe had stopped to talk jive to a young lady on his way to warn his buddy that a rival gang was after him so he’d better lay low. And when Shay could dry her voice out enough to ask him how did he get over it, he told her that he hadn’t gotten over it. That if he chose to he could pick at that scab right now and be oozing all over the street. “I just had to accept my part in it, Shay. I didn’t wield the banister against him, and if I’d gotten to him that day, what about the next day and the next? I had to get it through my own head that it wasn’t entirely my fault, some of it, but not the whole thing. Just like with Neet, you didn’t cause her to get pregnant, right? And you didn’t put a gun to her head and make her go up to BB’s after she did get pregnant. Right? So that’s what I’m talking about. Be sad ’cause your best friend is going through a trauma right now, that’s a clean, honest sadness. Don’t dirty it up with a bunch of guilt that you choosing to feel. Though I know that you think you have no choice but to feel guilty, how you just supposed to switch your feelings on and off like they’re coming out of a water faucet, I know that’s what you saying to yourself, but you got to keep talking to yourself, every time your sadness over Neet gets clouded with guilt, stop yourself from circling that drain ’cause I know from experience you’ll be spinning out into the ocean in no time and it’ll be darn near impossible to bring yourself back. Just stop yourself, say, ‘I’m sad because of what happened to Neet.’ Just sad.”

  “I am sad,” she said, starting to cry again. “Daddy, I’m so sad.”

  They were at the foot of Cecil Street. The dinner smells that usually met Shay when she turned onto the block this time of day were absent now. No aromas from stewed tomatoes, or sautéed pepper steak, or apples boiling for homemade applesauce to accompany the baked pork chops. Shay had always taken comfort in the smells; no matter what, when she turned onto the block this time of day she got confirmation that life did have a predictable normalcy, a beautiful simplicity, like dinnertime smells mixing in the air above her head. Right now though, whispers of “It’s gonna be all right, baby,” “You gonna get through this, Shay,” fluttered from the porches like crepe-paper banners rolled out to welcome home an injured soldier. She felt injured right now. Felt as if her right leg and arm had been lobbed off because she didn’t have Neet to walk with; felt at that moment that she and Neet would never again walk through Cecil Street like they used to, side by side, girlfriends. That thought swirled around her now, covered her like the absence of the dinnertime smells; made her dizzy. She moved even closer under her father’s arm, trying to hold herself up. And that’s how she was as she stumbled in through the front door of her home.

  Louise grabbed Shay, holding on to her, saying, “Awl, Shay, Mommy’s sorry. I’m so sorry. My poor baby. Poor Neet, oh Jesus, how is Neet? Have mercy, Jesus, poor Shay and Neet.” And even as she gave in to her mother’s hug and nestled her face against the skin on her neck that was loose and cool and smelled of the Charles Revson dusting powder the two shared, she tried to tell herself that she could keep the guilt at bay, even as Alberta’s spiteful words swam around in her head, she told herself she was just sad, that’s all, just sad.

  AND HER PARENTS even tried to banish the just-sad part. Louise and Joe insisted that Shay stay home from work for a few days; they just wanted to keep her close. They felt Shay’s devastation over Neet refusing all visitors. Shay would walk over to the hospital every day to see Neet, and every day she’d come home, her visits declined. She’d just sit in the chair by the window and stare outside. Louise guessed
that she was reliving the scene over at BB’s. Louise and Nathina and Joyce had gone over to BB’s. They’d stripped the bed and shampooed the blood from the carpet. They’d quickly, efficiently turned the bedroom from a crime scene where an illegal abortion had just occurred to a normal back bedroom where a teenage couple had crept to have sex. No crime in that. All of Cecil Street agreed because this block was tight, tight-lipped when necessary to protect their own. “Neet and Little Freddie crept in there to screw and poor Neet must have miscarried during,” they’d say to anyone who wasn’t from here. Even Nathina and Johnetta put their differences aside to make sure that that was the story that was told. But when Louise went in there to clean, she viewed the scene not with her clinical nurse’s eye that was accustomed to pools of blood, but with the eye of a mother whose daughter had witnessed the scene. She shuddered then on Shay’s behalf. Knew that Shay was having a time of it if she kept going back to the scene in that room. So she worked to distract Shay, tried to entice her into a rerun of I Love Lucy or Andy Griffith or Father Knows Best. Shay would sigh. She sighed so much that it was actually a relief for Louise when she’d hear Shay crying. Crying was at least healthy, she thought.

  Joe came home with a new gift for Shay every evening for the next week. Charms for her bracelet, hoop earrings, strings of love beads. Louise went out and bought yards and yards of the most expensive fabric from New York Bargain House on Sixtieth Street and told Shay she could pick out her patterns over the weekend. And when Shay reminded her mother that Neet would be home on the weekend, could her mother bake a cake for Neet, could they take it over there then to welcome Neet home on Saturday, Louise even agreed to that. Though she abhorred the thought of setting foot inside Alberta’s house, she promised Shay that yes, of course she’d bake a wonderful cake and the two of them could take it over on Saturday when Neet got home. Louise, just glad that Shay could formulate a full sentence without her words going to suds the way they’d done the whole week since Neet had been carried from BB’s on a stretcher, even agreed to go into Alberta’s house with Shay.

  THE WHOLE OF the block of Cecil Street was in a state of mourning. And in the midst of feeling sorry they did the inevitable, started splashing blame around.

  Johnetta said that Little Freddie should have protected himself so that Neet wouldn’t have gotten caught in the first place. Sondra said that Neet was too far along, that she knew once she got up there that something wasn’t right. Louise maintained that the aftermath, Neet’s inability to come back emotionally, her refusal to see even Shay, was all Alberta’s fault, said that if Alberta had raised Neet in a real church, a religion with a name at least, then Neet would have had something to cling to when tragedy struck. “She never stood a chance of coming through this thing with her head on right,” she’d say to Joe when they worried openly about the effect Neet’s sudden hard-heartedness was having on Shay. Joe blamed the hospital, said he’d believe to his dying day that if Neet did end up unable to have children, it was the hospital’s fault. Said they would have taken every measure to make sure a white girl left the operating table with her womb intact. He swore that they looked at little Neet and even if they didn’t let it pass through their lips, they let it fester in their hearts, he said as he banged the table or wall or mantelpiece, that any children she might have gonna just end up on welfare anyhow, so why we gonna go to extra pains to spare her womanhood? He’d shake his fist then and say he knew that’s how it went down. “Hell, yeah, they were able to save her life and her uterus.”

  Louise couldn’t entirely disagree, since she worked in a hospital and knew the discrepancy in the level of care. And not just between the races, had seen it also when it came down to being between men and women. So even though Louise would maintain that Joe’s views were extreme, she did agree that Neet was at the bottom of the hierarchy, black, female, child. “Furthermore, the child should have been able to go someplace to get a clean, safe procedure anyhow without being made out to be a criminal. Should be legal anyhow,” she’d say.

  After they blamed everyone from Little Freddie’s father for not explaining well enough the facts of life, to the courts that wouldn’t hurry and make abortion legal, to the hygiene classes at school that showed a lot of pictures of naked people and kept the teenagers all hot and bothered; after they blamed Sondra for even attempting such a thing, her mother, BB, for setting a bad example on the one hand, refusing to do the procedures on teenagers on the other hand, because who needed the procedure more than some young unmarried, unemployed emotionally underdeveloped teen; after they blamed the people who lived in the house on the corner for running off to cater on weekends and leaving the house essentially unsupervised, and whoever gave BB the instruments Sondra used that might have been defective in the first place; after they blamed Alberta and her church and even Neet’s father for walking out when Neet was six, they’d whisper and lower their heads and make sure that Joe and Louise weren’t anywhere near, and mouth the name. Shay. They had to mouth Shay’s name because they all loved her too and it would hurt too much to give the name sound. But Shay had influenced Neet so, they said; Shay was there, helping Sondra all the way, Shay talked Neet into it anyhow, Shay. They even blamed Shay. Blamed everyone, everything even remotely associated except for Neet herself. Because they couldn’t fault Neet, because perhaps if Neet had been a privileged child, do-good parents, private school, sleepover summer camps, clothes from the upper floors at the department stores in town, perfect in the way she carried herself that was too thick and syrupy, if she’d been that type of child she would have been easy to blame. But she wasn’t that type of child. Her life was so full of blemishes: crazy mother that she had, always dragging her off to that farce of a church, back-handing her to the mouth every other minute, forcing her to sneak and lie; abandoned by her father when she was six, broke her heart when her mother forced her father, Brownie, out. No, they couldn’t blame Neet. Because in some ways Neet was a fill-in for them and all that was unfixable about their own lives, their own feelings of having been abandoned by the likes of a Brownie, of having struggled against their personal tyrannies, their own dour-faced Alberta who tried so hard to keep them bound. So they wouldn’t, couldn’t blame Neet. One of Cecil Street’s brightest flowers. All they could do for Neet was grieve. And that’s what the whole of Cecil Street did. After they stopped splashing blame around from their silver ten-gallon buckets, their hearts ached so on Neet’s behalf and they lowered their heads and grieved.

  Little Freddie went back to occupy his space on the steps of that house on the corner where the Corner Boys still made magic. Every evening as the sun dropped behind the basketball court at Sayre Junior High, the Corner Boys blended their untrained voices that rose over this little block of Cecil Street and made an arc of sound and then hung there. They teased the approaching night with their songs, Little Freddie’s voice prominent, a newness about it now, a grief-tinged strength that enriched his vibrato, so that he was able to sustain his highest note, and even when his voice sounded like a plaintive wail as he took the lead in “Tracks of My Tears,” or “Sitting in the Park,” or “Misty,” it was masterful and so controlled.

  There was an air now between Shay and Sondra and Little Freddie. Though they hardly shared conversation, they’d maybe pass each other on the street and say hello, carefully, in quiet voices, as if they were tiptoeing around in a room where a relative had just died. They’d lower their heads out of respect and go on their own disparate ways. But it was there between them anyhow. A sameness that only they could recognize in each other, as if what they had gone through at BB’s together that day had accumulated itself into air that covered them like a loose drape.

  Part Two

  Chapter 9

  DEUCIE HAD BEEN affected by all the commotion in the street. The sirens and the people crowding onto the block. The noise. The sadness. The sadness had even sifted down here to her dark, dusty home. This felt like home now and she even had a routine working. She’d clean
during the day when the slant of light through the window and her strength and a break in the headaches allowed. Had folded the clothes that Joe had left all over the place neatly back into the chifforobe. Found a cracked vase in one of the crates that she was able to use to rinse her leavings down the drain in the cellar floor, leavings nice and soft from the cat food. Even lucked out on a washcloth and a plastic bottle of doll-baby shampoo taped inside the box with the Tiny Tears doll. Bathed herself as best as she could using the shampoo for a liquid soap. Smelled nice and sweet when she was done, smelled like strawberry taffy.

  But still she’d been affected by the commotion in the street. The one woman’s screams that had gone right to her chest when she heard her crying out No, no, she’s my child, no. Let me fix it, let me. So sad.

  Deucie knew what that felt like. A mother’s drive to get to her child in the midst of trauma, believing that if she could just get to her, just kiss her forehead, like magic she could make it all okay. She’d felt that maternal drive during one of her releases from the mental hospital. When she’d left the hospital that time, seventeen years ago now, she set out to see her child. She’d purposely not tried to locate her during other periods when she’d been released. She wanted her daughter to grow up in a secure home with her sense of self intact before knowing who her natural mother was. She’d stopped drinking during that stay at Byberry and felt somewhat worthy now of meeting the child face-to-face. She went immediately to Jeffery, who was, as expected, doing a stint in the Holmesburg prison. She went into a rage at what he told her. That their daughter hadn’t been placed with a well-to-do black family who lived in a three-story single home in Chestnut Hill, as he’d led her to believe. He’d led her to believe it, he swore, because he was afraid of what Deucie might do to Pat, might try to kill Pat. “Talk about evil stepmother,” he said, “that bitch won’t even make my bail anymore. So you do what you gotta do, Deucie. That woman’s got our daughter slinging whiskey bottles and who knows what else at that house of ill repute.”