“I honestly don’t know what to say, Alberta,” he began in a dry, cracking voice. He reached into his T-shirt pocket and pulled out his smokes. “Guess I can’t do this in here?” he asked.
“I don’t own any ashtrays,” she said as she shifted in the chair, and her thighs felt so soft rubbing against each other from the way she’d lavished on the mineral oil.
He let the pack of cigarettes fall on the coffee table and cleared his throat. “My apologies, Alberta. I mean, I swear to you I really can’t explain it, you know, why I never realized, but then you never said, I mean, who would think, I mean, right next door. You knew? I mean, all this time, I mean years and years? Did you remember me? It’s just that one minute I’m playing my horn and the next minute I’m seeing what I couldn’t see, the past, what, seventeen years?”
“And?” she said, wanting him to go on while the oil was still slick along the surface of her skin before she reverted back to what she’d been for the past years, a hate-filled woman in a holy dress.
Joe was still grappling with his words, trying to make her understand how he felt, once he could understand it. Just knew that he was sitting in her half-dark house getting all worked up over the sight of her now with her hair out and her bare legs. He meant no disrespect, he was saying right now, when he hadn’t come back like he’d promised the night that Cheeks was stabbed.
She was thinking, as he talked, that nor did she mean him any. That she knew he had a wife who he loved, knew it was wrong of her to entice him the way she was doing right now, but she wanted to turn her life around, she told herself now. Because she was like a car that was trying to come out of a skid and that had to veer in the other direction to right itself. And that’s all she was doing right now, she told herself, she was just going to the other extreme for a minute while she got back on course. That’s all.
“I mean you no disrespect either, Joe,” she said as she stood and watched Joe walk toward her, watched his strong, dark hands lightly caress the pink satin ribbon that held her thin robe in place. “As God is my witness, I mean you no disrespect.” She was half crying now as she said that she just needed to be held tonight, that’s all. Because she’d been through a lot and she was tired and lonely and sad.
“Oh God, Alberta. Come ’ere. Let me hold you. Let me. Everything’s gonna be okay in the long run,” he whispered. “You right too, ’cause you do need some comforting. I always could comfort you too, couldn’t I, Alberta. Damn.” He ran his thumbs along the perimeter of her hairline, from her forehead to her cheekbones. “It’s such a sin the way you kept all your prettiness all caged up like you were ashamed of it. Don’t you believe the Lord wouldn’t have made you so beautiful if he didn’t want to show you off? Huh?” He smoothed his fingers through her hair. “You pretty as an angel, you know that.” His swollen lips touched the skin on her forehead right where her mother had marked her. He pulled his lips from her forehead and let them slide down the bridge of her nose. “If I don’t hear you say for me to stop,” he whispered, “I’m just gonna assume that you don’t want me to stop. Huh, Alberta, ’cause Lord knows I don’t want to stop, and soon I won’t be able to anyhow. Lord. Alberta. It’s on you, now. Damn. I know you must miss the feel of a man’s arms holding you closelike, tenderly. Don’t you? Let me. Please, Alberta, let me.” He had all of her in the circle of his arms. She was a small woman, slight shoulders, thin arms, her arms hung loosely at her sides. He wanted her to lift her arms, to hold him. Told himself that he wouldn’t go any further if she didn’t hold him too. She was too vulnerable right now, so as hard as it would be for him, if she didn’t give him some kind of signal besides standing here with her passivity intact, he’d just peel himself away.
She lifted her arms and hung them around his neck. How natural it felt, as if she’d hung her arms around his neck every night for the past seventeen years. His mouth was at hers now as their breaths got all tangled up and they could no longer tell which heart was thumping in which chest, whose sobs were whose. He undid the pink satiny ribbon holding the robe together and pulled it through the loops and let it fall to the floor. He slid his hands under the robe and almost gasped at the feel of her skin that was giving off an oily steam. He thought he might explode right there against her in the middle of her living room and there was nothing he could do about it until he felt her pulling him, nudging him, and when he became aware of his surroundings, they were all the way through the house, at the basement door. He scooped her up and carried her down. And the darkness down there was so movable, so loud, that they didn’t even hear the fireworks going off outside. And Alberta thought that it was like cotton down there with Joe. So loose. So free. Finally, free.
Chapter 18
NEET SAT STRAIGHT up when she heard the boom boom boom of the fireworks outside. She was groggy, as if she’d had too much sleep, or too little, she wasn’t sure which. She was sure that it was hot in here. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and listened for her mother. Her radiator hissed and she remembered her mother telling her that she was going to start up the heater so that Neet wouldn’t have a recurrence of those god-awful chills. She sipped from the tea on her nightstand and tried to determine whether she was really awake or if this was an extended dream where you woke up and were still dreaming. Had she really cursed at them at the church earlier, she wondered as she started to unpeel the blankets from around her. By the time she pushed the third blanket away and propped herself up in the bed and fingered the blanket’s satiny border, she knew that that fiasco at the church had been real enough.
She dabbed at her eyes with the border of her blanket as she felt a new crop of tears boiling up in her eyes, burning her eyes because she’d cried so much the past few days. Didn’t think it was possible to cry so much. She remembered now how she’d shaken uncontrollably in the cab when she’d told her mother about Mr. G. Her mother had taken her sweater off and wrapped it around Neet and asked the driver to turn on the heat please because her baby had caught a chill. Then she’d listened to Neet as she held her like she was a baby. She’d rocked her all the way home and said her name, Bonita, Bonita, she’d whispered all the way home. The sound of her name oozing through her mother’s lips was like a balm to Neet, smoothing over the places where she’d been damaged, stripped raw, softening the roughness, erasing the pain, healing; healing all the way from deep inside back to the surface of her skin. It had felt to Neet as if her mother’s singular voice had been joined by a choir of angels telling Neet that she was good. She was. Except that the real beauty of it had been that it was just her mother’s voice, nothing like it in the world, she’d thought then, such a simple, precious thing, your own mother’s voice soothing you as you cry. Neet had been so filled up in that instant, so grateful that she hadn’t given up on her mother, she still filled up at the thought. So she cried and blew her nose and felt as if a wicked spell that had been cast over her had been broken.
She finished the tea that had been patient on her nightstand. Now she wanted to talk to Shay, was burning to talk to Shay. She stuffed a pair of jeans over her pajamas and threw a sweater over her shoulders and slid her penny loafers onto her bare feet. She stopped in the bathroom and was perplexed by the sight of her mother’s clothes in the middle of the bathroom floor. Her mother wasn’t in her bedroom and Neet started down the stairs and heard the back door closing as she did. Guessed that her mother had gone to sit out in the yard. She would go sit with her, she thought, once she found Shay. She was halfway through the living room, headed for the front door, when she saw a pack of cigarettes on the coffee table. She picked it up and turned the pack around in her hands. She remembered then that Mr. Joe had helped her mother get her into the house when they’d gotten back from church and Neet was so exhausted that she could barely walk. She told herself she’d thank him by returning his smokes. She put the cigarettes in the lapel pocket of her pajama top and was about to head for the vestibule door when she saw it. A pink satiny ribbon curved along the living
-room floor. This she picked up too and fingered and now she reversed her steps and headed for the back door instead of the front, now she wanted to find her mother and ask her about this most unlikely find on the living-room floor, a pink satiny ribbon that looked like a sash.
She walked through the darkness of the dining room into the yellow-lit kitchen and on through to the back. The back door was unlocked and the black wrought-iron gate was ajar but Alberta wasn’t out here. Alberta often came out here and sat on the back steps at night, but she never used the yard and the alley as an entrance or exit the way that Neet did when she was trying to sneak in and out. She jumped at a sound in Shay’s yard, a scratching and a weak cry. She looked in the direction of the Cyclone fence that separated the yards and saw a patch of white against the ground and told herself to get a grip, it could only be the cat. She walked on through the gate and out into the alley. A shallow column of chilly air moved through the alley and she folded the ribbon accordion style and put it in the pocket with Joe’s cigarettes and pushed her arms through the sweater sleeves and pulled the sweater close around her. Remnants of barbecue smoke drifted in and out of view and Neet had to push back stems of ivy that dangled from the Cyclone fence and protruded into the narrow walkway. She was thinking about that pink ribbon that felt like lead in her pajama pocket.
The block party had thinned out considerably when Neet turned onto Cecil Street, at least this end of the block had. Storms of people were crowded at the other end though, and Neet could see the last of the fireworks draining through the sky. Neet tried to see down there to locate Shay. She was so out of breath from that short trek through the alley and her heart was beating so fast and so loudly that she could feel it in her ears. She realized she could never make it down to the other end with her stamina so diminished from this flu or whatever she had and the exhaustion from the near fight at the church. She inched her way up the street, trying to make it back home. She got to her house and collapsed on the steps. She tried to take slow, deep breaths and then jumped and turned sharply when she heard someone coming down the steps on Shay’s side. It was only Joe. She lifted her hand in a weak wave. “You scared me, Mr. Joe,” she said.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart, and what you doing out here anyhow? Thought you were out for the count earlier.”
“I was, but then I woke up and I was looking for, well, first I was looking for Shay, then my mother. It’s been a long night, Mr. Joe, I feel like I’m dreaming. Maybe I’m sleep deprived. Were the fireworks good?”
“I, uh, I didn’t see them. My stomach’s been messed up, I was, uh, just in the house trying to recuperate.”
“Well here, Mr. Joe, I almost forgot, you left these when you helped me out earlier. Thanks, by the way.”
She reached into the lapel pocket of her pajamas and pulled out the pack of cigarettes and the pink satiny ribbon came out too. The spotlights around the cup-and-saucer ride were turned on full blast and illuminated Neet’s hand right then as she extended it to Joe. He looked from her hand to her face and back and made no move toward her hand.
“Well, aren’t these yours?” she asked, and then she looked down at her hand and saw the ribbon and was about to say, well, of course the ribbon’s not yours, Mr. Joe. But then she couldn’t say it because of his expression caught in the revolving bright lights, his face so drained of color suddenly, so pulled back in that instant until it seemed as though she was seeing him through a fun-house mirror and his head was set a yard back from the rest of his body. It was all beginning to click into place: the ribbon, the clothes on the bathroom floor, the thump of the back door closing, the gate left open, him missing the fireworks over some excuse of a stomachache, his expression right now, even his voice that was so dry and strained sounding.
“The cigarettes are mine,” he said. “Thank you, Neet. Mnh.”
Neet didn’t say anything else as he took the pack of cigarettes from her hand. She watched him light a cigarette and take a deep drag and stare off into the lights surrounding the ride. Then he walked down off the steps. She just sat there and held on to the ribbon as its satiny pinkness shocked the night. She wanted to cry again. She was crying, thinking that perhaps her mother had used Mr. Joe the way she’d used Little Freddie, as an attempt to reclaim her goodness. Sobbed at the irony, that her mother’s church had never been able to do that, convince her that she was good. Cried now wondering what about her mother’s life had been so damaged that she needed that church in the first place. Alberta would never talk about her upbringing, her parents, other than to say that they had both disappeared when she was born. So Neet cried over her mother’s past, or rather the absence of it, the fact that it was so horrible that she’d felt the need to try to erase it. Even Neet understood that that was impossible. She pulled the sweater tighter around her shoulders and felt herself going into chills again. Thought she should go back in the house and get under the covers. But she was crying too hard to even pull herself up to standing. Crying so hard that at first she didn’t even feel the hands rubbing against the sweater, going up and down her arms, warming her. Didn’t even have to look up when she did. Knew these hands, always there for her when she needed them most, since they were babies and they’d reach their hands out to be picked up over the banister so they could be together. Shay’s hands these were. Shay, her girl. Her girl, Shay.
Chapter 19
THE FIREWORKS HAD ended. Though the thunderclaps of color generally closed out the block party, the music was flowing again at this end of the block. The mounted police had retreated from their stance on Spruce Street, though they’d left calling cards in the form of horse shit. Murmurs of complaints rippled through the crowd about the white racist pigs trying to crash their party. The James Brown impersonator had taken to the stage again in a glowing orange-sequined pantsuit and high-heeled boots. Somebody yelled, “Hey, where’s your cape?” This brought laughter and applause from the crowd. The band leader called back, “Attheend, my man, canwe give thedrummer some, huh!” running his words together so that only every third or fourth one was intelligible. The audience loved it, laughing hysterically. Joe laughed in spite of himself as he moved into the crowd, relieved to see that the cops were leaving. He scanned the crowd for Louise. Saw Valadean and Johnetta, Johnetta whispering something in Valadean’s ear. Valadean put her hand to her mouth as she laughed, and Joe could see that her knuckles were wrapped with gauze. He looked away quickly, his mouth throbbing all over again at the memory of Valadean’s fists punching his mouth to a bloody pulp. He spotted Louise then with Maggie, up on Nathina’s porch. He wouldn’t allow thoughts right now of what he’d just done with Alberta. What he’d just done with Alberta was too complex and he knew he’d grapple with it until his dying day. Joe headed in Louise’s direction, weaving through the bodies dancing out here now. Clara grabbed his arm, and before he knew it he was caught in a dance, unable to get through the tight press of bodies. When the song was over and space opened up, he went directly for Nathina’s porch. But when he got there, Louise was gone. It felt to Joe as if he was looking at a snapshot where Louise’s image had been carefully, meticulously cut away, leaving just the outline of her against the backdrop of Cecil Street.
LOUISE HAD BEEN talking to the man Luther, who had returned to Cecil Street again looking for Deucie. Luther told Louise that he was very attached to Deucie because she reminded him of his mother. “She’s prone to headaches,” he said, his voice cracking even as he halfway shouted to be heard over the drums and the crowd’s enthusiasm for the James Brown impersonator. “Plus, her liver’s gone.” Louise stood so close to Luther under the archway of Nathina’s porch that she could see the sweat glistening on his mustache. She was mesmerized by the scar across his face that hadn’t been properly stitched. She was captivated too by the outline of the gun in his waistband, shadowing against his T-shirt. He was a bad man with his gun and scar and his black, black skin, his heat that Louise could feel moving inside her as they talked. She asked him what hospi
tal should be held responsible for the botched repair job to his face. She was a nurse, she explained, she noticed people’s work, that’s why she was asking. He said he’d stitched it himself. He told her that if she had some time, he could tell her how he’d gotten his face slit in the first place. Most women couldn’t handle the description of how it had happened, he said, but being a nurse and all, he was sure that she could handle it.
Oh, she could definitely handle it, she laughed, as she thought then how easy it would be, given the right set of circumstances, to leave this block of Cecil Street and go home with this Luther, wrap herself around his badness, lose control. She rarely had such thoughts and was getting worked up over this one, squeezing her thighs together, looking right into his eyes that were hard and kind.
“You a pretty lady,” he said. “Married?”
She felt her cheeks going hot and flush as she hunched her shoulders, as if to say she didn’t know. He raised his eyebrows and started moving his shoulders and his arms and his hips and before she knew it they were dancing on Nathina’s porch to the tune of the James Brown impersonator singing out, “I got the feeling, now.” Louise snapped her fingers and shimmied around and around as Luther moved into her back and she could feel the butt of his gun brush against her. She raised her arms and hollered, “All right now.” She pulled her hair straight up and let it fall back disheveled and wild. Luther had his hand on her waist and she slowed herself so that they were moving in perfect sync. His large hands were callused, she could tell as he pressed them against her lightweight dotted-swiss shirt. She imagined how tender his touch would be as he compensated for his rough skin. By the time the song was over and they laughed together, out of breath, Louise was considering inviting him inside Nathina’s house. Who was there to stop her? Maggie certainly wouldn’t; Nathina would probably wink her eye. She reached in and touched Luther’s scar that was the texture of steak gristle. Thought she would pee on herself when she did, and told him that she could definitely handle the story of his scar. But right then she caught a glimpse of Joe far off in her peripheral vision; she hated that she always knew exactly where Joe was in a crowd, even now when she was allowing a desire for another man to build inside her, she was focusing in on Joe.
Leaving Cecil Street Page 24
