Original Sins

by Lisa Alther

  The woman in front of Emily and Lou was trembling. She muttered under her breath, “Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up.” Her plastic shopping bag rustled steadily in her shaking hands.

  Finally she stepped out of line, pointed to the waitresses, and announced in a loud voice, “I marched on Washington for these people, but I’ll never make that mistake again!” She stomped out, leaving the room in dead silence. The customers looked annoyed or embarrassed. Emily fought to suppress a grin. Finally Lou gave a throaty chuckle. She glanced at Emily. “It’s OK. You’re allowed to smile.”

  By the time they reached the counter, Lou and Emily were giggling sporadically—whenever Lou whispered with piety, “I marched on Washington for these people!” The waitress looked at them and smiled and drawled, “Boy, some folks sure is in a hurry.”

  Joan and Corinne were no longer speaking to Emily. They took Lou aside and informed her that Emily was racist. Lou said, “Thank yall so much. I do preciate yall telling me this.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Joan, turning up the corners of her mouth at right angles.

  During supper that night Emily put on a white terry-cloth beach robe with a hood. Lou wrapped her head in a rag. Emily, hefting a meat cleaver from the kitchen, chased Lou through the cafeteria while Lou shrieked, “Naw! Don’t do it to me, missus! I be a good nigger!”

  The student body watched, appalled.

  Her first night home for Christmas vacation Emily sank into Earl’s embrace like a solitary marathon runner breaking the tape and collapsing into the arms of the crowd. “God, I’ve missed you, Earl.”

  He held her stiffly. “Have you?”

  “You know I have,” she said, her lips seeking his. From the car radio came the wail of a steel guitar and the fevered voice of Honey Sweet: “A woman needs a man to hold, / Who’ll protect her from the cold …”

  Emily pictured the cascades of blonde hair and the astonishing masses of breast tissue. God, the appeal of it all—to be taken care of, to be relieved of the burden of her own personality. She’d given this up, and for what? To hang out with a bunch of hypocritical self-righteous do-gooders. She was finished with New York. There was no way she could go back there anyhow after her and Lou’s stunt. She’d return just long enough to pick up her stuff. She’d pledge Chi O at State during spring rush….

  “There’s something I have to tell you, Emily.” She looked at Earl. “It’s not easy for me to tell you this, but I have another girl. We’re lavaliered.”

  “I see.” Emily felt remorse, then nothing.

  “She wants me, Emily. And I guess you don’t, or you would have gone to State.”

  “It’s not that, Earl. It was just …” What was it? She could no longer remember why she’d had to get away.

  “What?”

  “Shit, I don’t know.” All she knew for sure was that she wanted to make love. But Earl had moved away, was clutching the steering wheel and resting his forehead against it. Emily rubbed his thigh. “Well, let’s not worry about it.”

  “About what?” He was watching her hand with alarm.

  “About who’s wearing your lavalier.” She began unbuttoning her blouse.

  He stared at her. “It’s not just the lavalier, Emily. I love Dawn. I want her to be my wife.”

  “Fine,” said Emily, removing her blouse.

  “But Emily, I can’t just … I can’t be unfaithful to Dawn.”

  “You can’t?” She’d moved away from his world without even realizing it.

  In bed that night she wept for several hours. What a fool she’d been! She’d turned her back on the love of the best man she’d ever meet. A once-in-a-lifetime guy. And now what? She couldn’t turn back, but she didn’t want to move forward. Apparently she had to stay put.

  The usual cooking smells greeted her as she walked in Sally’s door the next day. Joey sat on the floor intently tearing a newspaper into ever tinier pieces with damp chubby fingers. Sally sat watching “Mr. Rogers” and copying recipes from Family Circle. She was very pregnant. Her breasts sagged and her belly protruded. Tied through a buttonhole was a teething ring, and a clean Pamper stuck out of her shirt pocket. Around her waist was a belt of large wooden beads in bright colors.

  “Still cooking onions?” Emily inquired. “Jed hasn’t figured it out yet?”

  Sally laughed. “All these poached onions, and he’s still complaining that I don’t take care of him like his mama.”

  Abruptly Emily recalled part of her reason for going to New York. She juxtaposed the emotion of domestic suffocation to her grief over losing Earl, and they short-circuited each other. As Emily sat down feeling neutrality, Sally said with a coy smile, “So how’s that sweet Earl?”

  “Sweet as ever. But he’s lavaliered to someone named Dawn.”

  Sally gasped. “He’s not, Emily?”

  Emily nodded.

  “You must feel just awful.”

  “I’ve been feeling pretty bad, but I’m all right now.”

  “Do you have someone in New York?”

  “No.”

  “Well, aren’t you lonely?”

  Emily was damned if she’d admit to her baby sister that she might have made a mistake. “Oh, I keep busy.”

  Jed sauntered in in green work clothes, smiling. “Whadaya say, Em? The Yankees won you over yet, like poor old Raymond?”

  “Hell, no. Not hardly.”

  They laughed. “Well, they will,” Jed assured her.

  Emily went to Ruby’s apartment, as she had every Christmas of her life, with a small cedar tree and several presents. Usually Sally came too, but she said she wasn’t up to it this year. Ruby was ill, with what nobody was sure. She sat in a worn armchair, her head swathed in a rag and her body wrapped in a tattered quilted housecoat that had been Emily’s in high school. She was bonier than ever, and her face had a flaky ashen look.

  “Why, I declare!” She smiled, revealing her toothless gums. “Miss Emily home for Christmas!”

  Emily patted her knobby shoulder, then turned down the television on which a young couple was winning a chaperoned trip to Rio on “The Dating Game.”

  “How you doing, Ruby?”

  “Why, I be just fine, Miss Emily.” She spat tobacco juice across the room into the coal scuttle. “How you making it up North, Miss Emily?”

  “Just fine, thank you.” Were a broken heart and a blighted future worth commenting on? Probably not.

  Emily saw Ruby’s apartment as though for the first time. The seat covers and rug were worn and torn. The kerosene heater gave barely enough heat to keep them from seeing their breath. Emily stared at the wasted, toothless old woman. Her parents had been slaves. Emily’s great-grandparents had owned Ruby’s parents. Was this possible? Ruby had cooked and cleaned and ironed for Emily’s family most of her life. Her wages allowed her to live at about the same level, comparatively speaking, as her mother. The only difference was that, if she had had the money and time, she could have come and gone at will. On a plantation she’d have been put out to pasture by now, like a faithful horse. “Freedom” meant she was alone now with her social security checks and Christmas presents from the Princes.

  “Sorry to hear you’re sick,” Emily mumbled.

  “Oh, I just under the weather. I be all right soon.”

  “Kathryn coming home for the holidays?”

  “Naw, she can’t get her no time off this year. Donny, he gon cart me over at his place.”

  “How is Donny?”

  “He be just fine. He got him a little baby daughter now. Plus two of Rochelle’s mother’s children. They just the cutest things.”

  “Where’s he working at?”

  “Over to the mill. Your daddy got him a job sweeping up and all. He like it real good over there.”

  “Well, guess I better be going. I got to do my Christmas shopping.”

  “Well, yall have you a real nice Christmas, hear?”

  “Thanks, Ruby. You too.”

  As Emily was walking
out, Ruby said petulantly, “Your mama didn’t send me no cash this Christmas?’

  “She said you mentioned needing some stuff, so she decided to buy you that instead of just sending money.”

  Ruby stopped munching her tobacco, clamped her jaws shut, and turned her head away.

  “Well, see you,” Emily called. “Say hi to Donny for me.”

  “Yeah. See you.”

  Emily was limp. She could hardly grip the steering wheel. She was literally seeing things differently. Driving through Pine Woods for years bringing Ruby home, she’d look for Donny in the gangs of children, and that was about it. Sometimes she felt vague fear or embarrassment, which made her look straight ahead and drive away fast.

  But today she was noticing how the December rains had turned the courtyards into seas of mud, in which swam rusted auto carcasses, construction rubble, and torn mattresses bursting with sodden stuffing like milkweed pods in an autumn drizzle. A child toting a bucket trudged alongside the train tracks gathering chunks of coal.

  She drove up her driveway. A yellow Victorian structure that could easily house twenty people. Borders weeded and cut back, hedges trimmed, probably by Donny. Why had she grown up here, and Donny in that dark cramped room by the river?

  As she walked in, her mother informed her that Ruby had phoned to report that Emily had failed to deliver the Christmas cash. Emily laughed, then fell silent so abruptly that her mother looked at her.

  Later in the loft above the garage Emily was poking through barrels, boxes, discarded furniture, and stacks of magazines. It had occurred to her that she was giving up Earl too easily. If she enrolled at State, pledged Chi O, bought some cashmere sweater sets to replace her turtlenecks, it was entirely possible he’d give this Dawn creature the shove and return his lavalier to its rightful place at Emily’s throat. But if she was going to leave New York, she’d need an extra trunk or large suitcase to carry home the stuff she’d acquired while there. She decided to base her decision on whether or not to leave New York on whether or not she could find an empty suitcase of sufficient size. If so, it would be an omen to proceed.

  She overturned a barrel and spilled some photo albums and bundles of papers on the floor. As she crammed them back in, she paused over a small book with a faded green cover. The pages were eaten into lacy doilies by silverfish. The name of a dead great-uncle was written on the inner cover. The title page read Manual of the United Klans of America.

  … We do not choose to be common men. It is our right to be uncommon if we can. We seek opportunity—not security. We do not wish to be kept citizens, humbled, dulled, by having the State look after us. We want to take the calculated risk; to dream and to build; to fail or succeed …

  Emily stared at the book for a long time, as though it were a dead rat.

  Weak afternoon sunlight shone through the prisms in the windows of the Prince living room. All the colors of the spectrum spread across the pale wall-to-wall carpeting.

  “Those prisms is a real nice idea,” said Mrs. Tatro, her huge breasts straining the seams of her red wool dress.

  “Yes, it’s lovely, isn’t it?” agreed Mrs. Prince. Rainbows also darted around the ceiling from the diamonds that swung from her ear lobes.

  Joey crawled across the rug, grabbing at the shifting shafts of color. “What do you think of this grandson of ours, Raymond?” Mr. Prince asked Mr. Tatro, who perched in his dark suit on a Victorian side chair, his long legs crossed at the knee.

  “Pretty good-looking little fellow,” observed Mr. Tatro, taking a sip of sherry from a small cut-glass goblet.

  “I guess it must run in both families,” said Sally with a laugh, her forearms resting on her large belly.

  “Not real bright, though,” observed Jed. “Just watch him chasing them rainbows all around the room.” Everybody laughed.

  Except Emily, who was in the dining room pouring water into the crystal goblets. She was just realizing what it meant that Ruby had done this chore almost every Christmas she could recall: Ruby had waited on the Prince family at Christmas dinner. And what about her own family dinner?

  The Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing “Joy to the World” wafted out of the living room. Her mother had decided the Tatros would prefer carols to the “Hallelujah Chorus,” which the Princes traditionally played before Christmas dinner, Emily looked out the window and down the hill to the brick apartment buildings in Pine Woods. Yesterday afternoon she’d phoned Earl to go with her to the midnight Christmas Eve service, as they had the two previous years. She intended to tell him afterward of her decision to enroll at State.

  “Uh, I’d like to, Emily,” he’d said. “But I’m going already, with Dawn. I’m afraid I really can’t see you anymore. I’ve just given Dawn her diamond, as a Christmas present.”

  “What do you reckon Junior is doing at this very moment?” Mrs. Tatro was demanding in the living room. “Wonder what church he went to.” Emily smiled sourly. Raymond had told her he didn’t give a shit about Christ, so why would he want to celebrate His birthday? Raymond was probably still in bed, or working at the FORWARD office.

  She studied the table—the damask cloth and napkins, the place settings each with many pieces of silver and china. Wonderful smells came from the kitchen. The mahogany sideboard was loaded down with silver bowls and platters. Polite gentle laughter drifted in from the living room.

  It was all a fraud—a scum of civility over a swamp of injustice, exploitation, misery, and hypocrisy. This house perched over that swamp like an elevated hut whose stilts were planted in termite nests.

  She called her mother in from the living room and explained that she was getting sick and had better go to bed, please apologize to everyone for her. Her mother studied her face, but Emily turned away and headed for the stairs. She simply couldn’t participate in this charade any longer.

  In the morning she drove to Ruby’s. “Well, I declare. Miss Emily again. Now, what you doing back here, child?”

  Emily handed her an envelope containing some of her own Christmas money. “Mama asked me to bring you this. It got lost in the Christmas rush.” Money wouldn’t make up for it all, but Emily couldn’t think of anything else.

  “Why, I declare. That’s real sweet. You thank her for me now, you hear?”

  “How was your Christmas?”

  “Just fine.”

  “How’s Donny?”

  “He be just fine.”

  Emily studied Ruby’s face and saw it as a mask of deceit. Goddam it, you’ve just sat there all these years, gumming your tobacco and grinning and saying, “We be just fine.” When you’ve actually been cold and sick and hungry and scared and resentful and contemptuous. For God’s sake, why didn’t you say so? She glared at Ruby.

  “And Rochelle and the kids?” Emily asked weakly.

  “They be just fine.” Ruby smiled and shot a wad of tobacco juice across the room. She looked at Emily strangely. “Yall right, Miss Emily?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine, thank you.”

  On the train back to New York Emily felt relief: At least she’d had the sense to get away from that terrible place. Was the setup she’d been born into her fault? No, of course not. But it became her fault if, seeing what she now saw, she did nothing.

  Her parents had been perplexed by her decision to return to New York several days early. She didn’t see any point in telling them how much they disgusted her. They must have seen all along the things she was now seeing. They weren’t stupid. And yet they hadn’t raised her to be aware of the injustice, hadn’t encouraged her to fight against it, had lived with it and profited from it all their lives. She wanted as little to do with them in the future as possible.

  The porter knocked, bowed, grinned, and asked her to sit across the corridor while he fixed her bed.

  “I can do it myself, thank you.”

  He looked startled, then grinned and drawled, “Yes, ma’am, I reckon you can. But it be my job.”

  “Well, it shouldn’t be.”

>   He looked puzzled. “I feel real lucky to have it.”

  “You shouldn’t have to.”

  He grinned and backed down the aisle. “Yes, ma’am. You just suit yourself now.”

  As he helped her down at Grand Central the next morning, she handed him a huge tip. He stared at it, then at her, then grinned the Grin. “Why, I surely does thank you, miss.”

  “Don’t,” Emily rasped. “Please.”

  When she got to the dorm, Lou leaned out her door and called, “Hey girl, how you making it?”

  Emily was unable to reply or look her in the eye, as Lou held her face in both hands and kissed her on both cheeks. “Hey, baby, what’s happening?”

  “I’m so sorry, Lou,” she whispered, squinting and at last understanding the origin of Corrine’s cringe.

  “Sony for what, child?”

  “I didn’t understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “What my people have done to yours.”

  “Shit. You starting to sound like some kinda Yankee. I ain’t no ‘people.’ It’s me—Lou.”

  Emily began avoiding her. She wouldn’t accept Emily’s apologies. “Now listen here,” she’d insist. “What you say is true, but it ain’t got nothing to do with me and you. I don’t need none of this Lady Bountiful action from you. Anyone lets you crawl, I know you gon take it out on them later. You see what I’m saying?”

  Emily began thinking of Lou as a house nigger. More middle class than the white middle class. And when Joan said privately that Lou was an Oreo, black outside but white inside, Emily agreed.

  In American History class they were reading the slave narratives—about Negroes being beaten and tormented, worked like mules, bred like cattle. Emily began saving her allowance and sending checks to NAACP and SNCC, CORE and SCLC and the Urban League. To Save the Children and the Sharecropper Relief Fund. She was promptly put on every mailing list in the nation and was swamped with appeals. Every few days she’d lie on her bed and look through them—droughts in Africa, starvation in Pakistan, slums in Manila. Epidemics here, floods there, little children with hollow eyes and swollen bellies. She studied the mailings and suffered and parceled out her allowance: $7.50 for illiteracy in Alabama, $4 for pellagra in Mississippi, $8 for Negro men on death row in Georgia. She bought by mail boxes of notepaper, decorated with a sketch of flower blossoms and bees. A Negro woman in Florida, with no arms from a birth injury in a backwoods cabin, had done the sketch by holding the pencil in her teeth. As penance, Emily held a pencil in her teeth and tried for hours to sketch bees. She couldn’t. All these brave resourceful people facing insurmountable odds imposed by her forebears.