Tumbling

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  Jeanie laughed again. “Read it as a scholarly pursuit. Not saying I don’t believe in a God per se, I just have a problem with religion. People confuse it so. Turn things over to the will of God that they have responsibility for tending to themselves, then fret day and night over what they need to be leaving to their God.”

  “You saying just leave it alone?”

  “No, child. I’m saying that sound you heard coming from your throat that scares you so is of your own will. You always had control of your own will. From the time I watched you lock that white man in the cellar, even before that, even before you could walk and talk, you were staring people down. Strong will. Will stronger than Willie Mann, trust me, Fannie. You got to confront him. You got the power to make your vision not true.”

  “But what if I can’t look in his face?” Fannie’s voice had desperation running through it.

  “Why shouldn’t you be able to? What? You ashamed about something?”

  “It’s just when I saw it, I wasn’t fighting it at all. You know, I was, you know, enjoying it.” Fannie looked away. She looked beyond Jeanie again to the wall where the Bibles seemed to shove one another for space on the crowded shelf.

  “Maybe the man stirred something in you before you even had the vision. Maybe your vision is as much a wish as it is a prophecy.”

  “But I really have strong feelings for Pop’s nephew; he’s the nicest, most caring person. I enjoy being with him, you know, sexually, he makes me feel good, yet what I was feeling in the vision with Willie Mann, I’ve never felt that, that intensely with Pop’s nephew.”

  Jeanie’s voice went softer, and she patted Fannie’s hand gently over the scrunched-up paper. “You’re human. I know Noon always exalted you some because she thought you could see things, but you’re still human. Won’t be the first time someone smart as you was stirred by a no-good man.”

  Jeanie’s eyes drifted and got such a faraway look that Fannie had to ask, “You? Miss Jeanie.”

  “No, not me. My husband was a decent soul. My daughter.”

  “I didn’t know you had a daughter.”

  “Do. At least I did.” Jeanie answered matter-of-factly as she scooped the pile of envelopes back in front of her and picked up more pages to fold.

  “Died?”

  “In a sense. Man she fell in love with convinced her she was more white than black. Walked out that door twenty-five years ago and hasn’t been back.”

  “How come you stayed, Miss Jeanie? You could have easily passed for white. Lived a life of privilege.”

  “My soul couldn’t. Wouldn’t have wanted to if it could. Too strong-willed to be pretending to be something I’m not. Like you, Fannie. You got to confront that man. Put him in his place and tell him to keep his sorry ass right there.”

  “What about Liz?” Fannie’s voice screeched like a little girl trying to keep from crying.

  “Liz got to come into her own just like you. You never were her keeper. Not really. You never had that kind of power either.”

  They went back to stuffing envelopes in the room that was quiet save the books occasionally shifting along the wall. Fannie settled in the chair and ran her knuckles along the seam of a folded letter. She thought about what Jeanie had just said about being stirred by a no-good man. That’s what she feared the most, not Willie Mann, but the fact that she desired him so. That’s what she needed to confront to make the vision not true. Her desire for the man. Eye to eye. She would.

  She watched Jeanie from across the table and was struck by the softness of her features. Lived right next door to her her entire life and never realized what a pretty woman she was. Even in her old age. Beautiful woman.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Ethel was back in town. Herbie didn’t know yet, not Fannie or Liz, and especially not Noon. Willie Mann knew. He had seen Ethel on South Street buying a pair of shoes. Followed her and learned she had rented a room on Catherine Street. He hadn’t yet figured what to make of it. Didn’t know if Fannie or Liz had summoned her, maybe even Herbie. The whole damned family was falling apart so. Noon more and more defiant about the highway, telling anybody who’d listen how they all had to work together to stop the properties being turned over one after the other, whole blocks at a time. Herbie fidgety, practically living at Club Royale, sitting and staring in the same shot of gin for hours at a time. Willie Mann had learned from the young girl that rented the house next to Fannie and Liz’s that Liz hardly came out of her room anymore and that they must be getting the house revamped because the ferocious knocking coming from Liz’s bedroom would sometimes wake them all up.

  So Willie Mann really didn’t know what to make of Ethel’s return or of Fannie saying she needed to talk to him. Right now he was in the wine cellar at Club Royale, fluffing the pillows down there and dusting at the beer kegs. He was moving the inventory around, making it spacious for Fannie just in case. The couch was enough for most of the women he had ever had down there, but Fannie, if he could have a chance at her raw nature, dip into her virgin honesty, topple her prophet status: the one who sees things, who tells it like it is, who sets it all straight; if he could spread her on the couch and even kick over the beer kegs because the spreading was so ferocious, if he could make her normal, tame, ogle over him, be enchanted by him the way women were supposed to be, then he could rest easy. So he moved things around in the wine cellar just to make sure the space was sufficient.

  “Two o’clock,” she had told him, “I’m taking my lunch break from Pop’s at two.” He looked at his watch. It was five minutes till. He dashed upstairs and out of the club. He wanted to wait for her on the street so he could usher her down in the wine cellar through the opening on the side just in case Herbie was at the bar staring in his gin.

  It was April, but the air was thick and gray. Willie Mann would have blended in with the air dressed all in gray himself, except for his yellow-toned skin. He looked up and down the block and was struck by his handiwork. Every property minus two on this long block had been turned over. Even the club, but they were still open for business until the demolition trucks would come, which was still months down the road. He felt good about what he had accomplished. Whether or not he thought of it as good or bad to sell and move, to run the road, to even get a kickback, his goal was persuasion. Bending wills. The stronger the will he broke, the greater the rush. And then he saw Fannie moving up the street toward him. Such a contrast with the landscape of abandoned structures with their lives all packed up and moved away. Fannie’s will had not yet been broken.

  Fannie moved swiftly up the street dressed all in yellow. The gray air needed the yellow as a reminder that spring was already here. Willie Mann twisted his pants at the waist and snatched at his collar. He smiled in spite of himself. Calculated smoothness was his usual effect, smiling on cue, laughing just the right amount of syllables, never with abandonment. But this smile, as he watched Fannie move quickly and gracefully toward him, came up involuntarily, unexpectedly, the way his fullness was coming up on him too.

  “The lady is prompt,” he said as he extended his hand.

  “Where we talking?” Fannie asked, ignoring his hand, not looking in his face either.

  “I thought we’d go downstairs to the cellar. You know, Herbie might be at the bar, and I didn’t know if you necessarily wanted him to see us together.”

  “Necessarily there’s nothing to see.” She pushed back on her heels and allowed the double joints in her legs to pop out.

  “Well”—Willie Mann breathed in deep and smoothed his hand over his slicked-back hair—“since it doesn’t really matter one way or the other, we can just go on around the side down into the cellar. No need to disturb Herb any more than he already seems to be disturbed these days.”

  “Like you care,” Fannie snapped as she followed his outstretched hand toward the side of the building.

  Willie Mann watched Fannie walk in front of him. He could have just grabbed her tiny waist from behind right then and there in
broad daylight. He could have just pulled her body to him and moved against her back right there along the side of the building. He could have mashed his chin into the top of her tall, woolly hair as he held her around her waist. But he wanted to be wrapped in the darkness of the cellar. He wanted the sounds coming from the partying upstairs in the bar to penetrate down through the cellar ceiling and wrap around them with the darkness. So he resisted any sudden moves out here in the cloudy April afternoon.

  The side entrance was a hole in the ground, literally. Its thick wooden door was almost flush with the pavement. The door would trip the drunks as they struggled to get home late at night. It was a simple square. The children jumped hard on it and played foot-type games on their way home from school. It had a latch that flipped over and secured the wooden cover to the ground. Sometimes the latch would catch the high heels of women rushing to get to communion. It was one way to get down to the bottom of the club: Leave the blue air inside Royale, come outside to the side of the building, undo the latch, lift the three-foot wooden square covering, and walk down the iron stairway, right down the hole into the cellar.

  Fannie moved down the stairway first. It was more like a ladder propped against the top of the hole than it was a stairway. She had to go down back first. The darkness hit her all at once as her yellow shoes touched the concrete floor. Willie Mann, experienced at climbing down the hole, followed quickly behind her. He pulled on a silver-linked chain, and there was light. Fannie took the room in all at once: the green couch, the beer kegs, the brown cardboard boxes, the lamp with the etched lampshade, the rug that went from the couch to just under a desk that held an oversized adding machine. She saw the whole thing laid out before her just as it had been in her vision. She felt light-headed. Despite her resolve not to let it affect her, despite her repeating over and over Jeanie’s words that her will was stronger than his, despite her getting on her knees that very morning banging on her bed, hollering, “Jesus, Jesus, give me the strength to confront him,” when Fannie saw the cellar lit all at once, the way it matched her vision in every detail, she felt the blood draining from her head, settling in her knees, making them buckle.

  She tried to rationalize the weakness away. Surely in her vision she had seen it all this way because surely Liz had told her all about the cellar when she stretched across Fannie’s bed on graduation night after Willie Mann had plucked Liz from her side as they walked home from Bookbinder’s. And Liz told Fannie she had done it, gone all the way with Willie Mann. She had bled and it hurt and felt so good. No, she hadn’t seen stars or heard explosions. But she did get dizzy from the pain and then the tingle. And he did moan right in her ear until it sounded like a trumpet. And oh, how soft his hair was as it moved against her body. Surely Liz must have dropped in details about the couch and the lamp and the rug. Surely she must have described the feeling that she felt as if she were falling as she walked backwards down the ladder into the cellar. But the more Fannie tried to rationalize it away, the more the weakness grew, and then she couldn’t even look in Willie Mann’s face.

  That she couldn’t look in his face was new for Fannie. She thought she could look in anybody’s face. She thought if Satan tapped her on her shoulder late at night, she would be able to stare in his face, stare him down until he withered into serpent status and humbly retreated. But despite all of her boldness, her vision of laying with this man down here in this wine cellar and now being in this wine cellar experiencing the very thing she’d told Jeanie she feared the most—not being able to look in his face—was making her weak.

  She walked to the desk and fingered the adding machine. She moved her fingers lightly across the humps of large square keys. “So this is where you do your crooked figuring, huh?” Her voice spilled out into the well-lit cellar.

  “The yellow looks good on you,” he said as he moved toward her back.

  “I got to talk to you about—” Fannie talked more to the keys on the adding machine than to Willie Mann.

  “If this is about Liz,” he interrupted her as he moved closer in to Fannie’s back, “I’m not seeing her; she won’t even talk to me. I mean, at this point I want to just tell her to keep the house, don’t sell it now if it’s gonna bust up her whole family. I just hate to see her lose out when they bulldoze it anyhow.”

  “This isn’t about Liz, it’s about me.” And then she turned to face him all at once. “I want you to understand that we cannot be friends, that you are not to be coming on to me with your bullshit lines, I don’t care how many women you’ve swooned, don’t be trying it with me. I’m not about to go under your no-good, evil spell.” Fannie’s eyes were more pleading than challenging. Her shoulders were slumped, more resigned than squared and determined. Even her legs, usually pushed back hard so that her calves popped out, were bent softly. He could even see the bend through her bright yellow pants.

  “Fannie, I don’t know what this talk about spells has to do with anything.” He was walking slowly toward her. His eyes were locked in on the fear in hers. She moved back against the desk. She wished the desk were not there so that at least she would have inches more to go before she had nowhere else to go. Where else was there? Hadn’t it already been laid out before her? Hadn’t she had the vision? She, the clairvoyant one who could look down and expose other people’s demons to themselves. Now here she was up against this desk with nowhere to go, with Willie Mann, her sister’s lover, almost to her, with the substance of the vision all around her, and the voice in her head saying it may as well be now. Hadn’t all the other visions come to pass? Didn’t Noon’s father die, the way Fannie’s vision said that he would? And what about all the strings of lesser scenes that had been laid out before her, whether it was somebody’s accident, or unexpected visit, or hitting the number big? Didn’t they all come true sooner or later? Maybe Jeanie was wrong. Maybe this was bigger than her will.

  It may as well be now, she thought, as Willie Mann was at her face-to-face. He moved his face into hers as he pulled her to him. She could feel his heart pounding hard and fast, almost thumping to the beat of the music coming from the club upstairs. She felt his hardness against her yellow pants as he pulled her in closer and closer and stretched his mouth wide open to cover her thick lips, to put her whole mouth in his all at once. And then the thumping was no longer coming from the club upstairs, but from right down there as someone was moving down the ladder-type steps. Fannie heard the footsteps.

  She moved her face from his.

  He thought it was so he could kiss at her neck.

  She stretched her neck way up.

  He thought it was so he could move his head on down, undo her bright yellow buttons with his teeth.

  She moved her body in closer to get a better view of the feet making their way down the leaned-over steps.

  He thought it was so he could move his manhood against her thigh and shift it so that it could be wedged between her legs.

  She breathed short, excited breaths as she saw a bright red shoe hit the floor.

  He thought it was from her arousal as he undid her buttons and mashed his throbbing against her in big circles.

  She knew the shoe, the foot, always knew that was how the foot would appear, in a bright red shoe. She used to make Liz tell her over and over every detail about her down to the slant of her foot.

  She made a gasping sound.

  He thought it was because she knew he was getting ready to explode, right there pushed up against her at the desk. He couldn’t get to the light, to the couch, couldn’t even get to his belt buckle, or hers.

  The shoe hit the floor, and a figure all in red walked from the shadow of the leaned-over stairs into the light. The figure was in full view now. Fannie thought her heart would jump right out of her chest. Yes, this was her, more beautiful than even Fannie had imagined, right down here in the cellar at Club Royale. This was Ethel.

  “Willie Mann, you down here?” Ethel called. “You still the same lying son of a bitch you always were?”
<
br />   “Shit!” He spit the word out as he pulled himself from Fannie and turned quickly to see who it was.

  “Oops, did I interrupt you, Willie Mann?” Ethel asked, giggling like a schoolgirl. “You still bringing your young ladies down here, huh? Been doing it since the time you were a teenager, but what you, thirty-two, thirty-three, and you still got to do it down here in this cellar?”

  Fannie stood mesmerized. This was Ethel, not five feet from her. After all the years of constructing an image of her that bolted her to goddess stature, and defending that image over and over to Noon and even Liz; after being ready to kick somebody’s ass for calling Ethel a man-snatching whore or, worse yet, a child neglecter; after fantasizing about trying to hunt Ethel down, to thank her for leaving Liz with them, to tell her that she understood why she’d left Liz the way she did; after years of wanting to jump into Ethel’s head because she was fascinated so by women like she herself was, who were brash and free and generous and didn’t give a good damn what other people thought, here she was standing right in front of her.

  “Miss Ethel, what you doing down here?” Willie Mann asked, nervousness crowding his voice.

  “You tell me,” Ethel said as she stood with her hands on her hips. “You been following me all over downtown. I can’t even try on a simple pair of shoes without looking up and seeing your tall ass peering through the window. I said to myself, let me come down here right now and see what this Willie Mann wants with me. So here I am, and cut the Miss Ethel crap, you ain’t seventeen no more, at least not in numbers. Now maybe in your head—” She laughed in a way that was full of notes and colors. “Who’s the young lady you done slick-talked down here?”

  She walked in closer to the center of the cellar. She was right under the light. Fannie thought that she got more beautiful the longer she looked at her. She had large, round eyes that drooped; her cheekbones were like circles that gave roundness to her face; her nose and her hair were short, her lips round and thick. But it was the coming together of it all that made her beautiful, that and her hourglass of a figure. Fannie suspected that it was her shape more than anything that made men ogle after her. But it was her face, the temptress nature of its arrangement softly set in skin the color of cinnamon, that held them.