by Julie Smith
Corey had phoned and told the whole sorry story. Talba felt a sudden automatic jet of fury, but humiliation smothered it. She covered her face with her hands. Darryl said, “I think she needs to be alone,” and what happened next was at least as amazing as Corey’s ordering Michelle from the restaurant.
Miz Clara said, “You take her to her room— will you? In case she needs any help.”
Even in her stupor, Talba knew that her mother had just given Darryl permission to enter her daughter’s bedroom, indeed to stay with her all night if need be. She was too far into her turtle shell to contemplate the meaning of it.
She lay down on the bed without even thinking, but Darryl lifted her shoulders, took her by the arms, and pulled her to a sitting position. “You can’t sleep in that.”
And she had let him take off the African-print jacket, the three silver necklaces, the beaded belt, and, finally, her green dress and bra. He had let her keep her panties, but she wriggled out of them. “I’m cold.”
He found her a T-shirt to sleep in, and asked her if she wanted him to stay. She shook her head, once again unable to speak. He kissed her forehead and left.
She heard him talking to Miz Clara, but she was past caring.
Chapter 19
Her mother woke her as usual: “Who you think you is, Queen of the May?”
But it was Saturday, and Talba was damned if she was getting up. Miz Clara was gone by the time she got around to it— she worked every other Saturday for a lady in the French Quarter. A note on the kitchen table noted tersely that: Darryl Boucree is as fine a Christian as I have ever seen.
Not just any old thing could amuse Talba that morning, but that did. She’d never asked Darryl if he was a Christian; she herself was not, though she’d never mentioned that fact to Miz Clara.
She made herself coffee, and as she waited for it, considered a drink instead. She wasn’t really going to have one, she knew that in advance. But the idea was certainly appealing— anything to avoid the shame of the previous evening. The shame and the ramifications:
Corey would never be able to go back to his favorite restaurant.
Michelle would divorce him, and he’d never see his child.
Miz Clara would choose between her children, and she’d pick Corey.
Darryl would never call her again— no one would date a crazy person.
Did she dare call him?
She didn’t think so.
She found his note when she went to make her bed, pinned to the pillow like a good-bye in a country song. She picked it up with dread. But all it said was, “Your Grace: Call me, why don’t you? Your faithful servant.”
What to make of that one? “Faithful” was good, maybe all wasn’t lost. Then again, maybe it was. If the news was bad, she wasn’t ready for it.
On the other hand, the note poked her out of her shell. She was ready for something— but what? She went back into the kitchen, poured herself a second coffee, and sat down to think.
Uh-uh, that didn’t work. Too painful.
She wasn’t actually conscious of any transition, was simply aware that she was back in her room, sitting at the computer, having utterly renounced her vow of the day before, to forget about her father. This thing wouldn’t wait.
The only thing was, she couldn’t get what she wanted online. She’d give anything to be able to hack into the Times-Picayune library. Frustrated, she wondered if the public library was open on Saturday, and then had a better idea. She had a friend at the paper, a reporter who’d once done a story on her— maybe Jane Storey would look up what she wanted. She gave her a call.
Unfortunately it meant telling a lot of her personal business, but that was what it took to get a reporter intrigued. Even so, it looked like it wasn’t going to work until finally Talba blurted, “Dammit, Jane, I’m a baroness! You have to do what I say.” A good laugh, it seemed, was almost as good as information. “All right, all right.” Storey giggled. “Anything you say, Your Grace,” and went off to check the old files.
It was a thumb-twiddling thirty minutes before the phone rang. “Hey, Baroness, I think I’ve got it. Listen to this: ‘Body Found in Apartment.’ But I warn you, it’s not pretty.”
“I can handle it.”
“Okay, here goes. It’s mercifully short.”
It was only about two paragraphs, and all it said was that Denman Wallis had been found in his own living room, dead of a gunshot wound. Or that was almost all— it said he’d been found after neighbors reported a foul smell. The body was in an advanced state of decomposition.
When she had thanked Jane and hung up, Talba closed her eyes to see if she could still run the movie. It was there like before, only now she saw only the blood, a flowing, fearsome lake of it. For the first time she heard a voice— “Sandra! Oh, baby, baby, baby! Oh, baby!” Miserable. Keening. “Come here, baby. You all right. Everything’s okay.” And then arms around her. Being picked up and held by someone.
Not Miz Clara. A man.
Her eyes were open now, staring at the screen, but she was still watching the movie. Only now it was more like a video game, with characters interchangeable at her whim. She played it as it must have happened.
If mother-as-murderess was what they were keeping from her, then who had picked her up? Could it have been Corey?
No. If she was seven, he’d have been fourteen, and even now he wasn’t a big man— as far as she remembered, he’d been a runty teenager. This was definitely an adult. She couldn’t think of anyone close enough to the family to be there at a time like that. There must have been an argument— nobody would argue in front of guests.
Unless the argument was about the guest.
Did Miz Clara have a lover? The idea was so preposterous Talba almost laughed. If she and Corey hadn’t existed, she’d have thought her mother had never had sex in her life— never had the slightest interest in it.
Maybe Miz Clara had learned the hard way.
Talba’s overloaded brain was screaming with the effort of it. Come on, folks, is this worth driving me crazy for? Give me a fucking break!
She realized she was furious.
“Goddam it to hell!” She yelled loud enough to be heard on the north shore and threw a shoe across the room. Unsatisfied, she threw the other shoe. “Motherfucking motherfucker!” No doubt Mrs. Glapion down the block had heard her, but she was well beyond excusing her French.
She sat down hard on the bed and lay back, staring at the ceiling. This is what made me so mad last night. The goddam conspiracy.
They are not getting away with it. There’s got to be something.
There were several things. There was an old cedar chest in which her mother kept— what? She didn’t know.
There was a hall closet that hadn’t been cleaned since her childhood, that she knew of.
And there was an attic.
It was Saturday, and she had all day.
Every instinct told her to go for the cedar chest, that that was where it would be, if it existed. She’d never even known Miz Clara to open it.
But she couldn’t do that quite yet. She was angry at her mother, but such an invasion of privacy was going to require an act of will she wasn’t yet up to.
She figured the heat in the attic would be unbearable, but she was still willing to go there first. To get to it, you had to pull down a door in the ceiling and climb a folding ladder. Armed with a flashlight, she ascended gingerly, on fastidious alert for crawly things.
But it was remarkably clean up there. This was where her mother kept her winter clothes in summer, and her summer clothes in winter. There were garment bags there, and some black-plastic leaf bags closed with a twist of wire.
Talba worried them open. Clothes were inside— clothes of her mother’s that she could remember Miz Clara wearing fairly recently. Certainly nothing from another era. They were probably things waiting to go to the Goodwill, or maybe a rummage sale at church.
She was drenched when she descended and f
olded up the ladder. Okay, it was done. Some iced tea and then back to work.
Was she ready for the cedar chest?
Now or never, she thought. Let’s do it.
She popped briefly by the closet, just to reassure herself, and found it so packed with things she couldn’t identify, she found she actually preferred the chest.
Ms. Clara used the top for a catchall. It was stacked with old church bulletins and boxes of pledge envelopes. There was a little shell-encrusted figure of Jesus on a cross that Talba had brought her from Florida once when she was a child. It made Talba wince, as it had even at age nine, but she’d known her mother loved Jesus, and there wasn’t that much of which Miz Clara did approve.
There was a cardboard stationery box of cards her mother had saved, birthday and Mother’s Day cards from Talba and Corey, which made Talba tear up. Things like that were private; they shouldn’t be seen by anyone but the collector— especially not by the collected. There were some pills, too, and some old magazines, mostly copies of the Watchtower left by Jehovah’s Witnesses. She had heard Miz Clara promise the Witnesses she’d read them, and Talba was sure she still meant to, though some were seven years old and had never been touched.
Talba took careful note of where everything was and then laid it all out in the same pattern on her mother’s carefully made bed.
She opened the chest. The smell of cedar filled the room. Startled, she jumped as if an animal had leapt out.
Fitted onto an inch-wide wooden shelf that ran round the perimeter of the chest was a sort of shallow drawer that lifted out, divided into two small compartments and one large. Lying there right on top, in the middle of the large one, was something that took her breath away. Her parents’ wedding picture, framed in silver.
She picked it up, taking in every detail. Miz Clara thirty-odd years younger and wearing a white dress! She couldn’t get over it. Absolutely could not imagine such a thing.
It was a long, beautiful, lacy white dress, with veil to match. Absolutely the whole nine yards. Ten minutes earlier, Talba would have bet money that Miz Clara had worn a church dress down to City Hall to get married.
But her mother had been a real bride, as radiant as the cliché held. Talba kept staring, inspecting the picture for signs of her mother’s cynicism, her brittleness, even her stoicism, and all she could see was happiness. And hope. And real hair, she was pretty sure— Miz Clara had been buzz-cutting her hair and wearing wigs for dress-up ever since Talba could remember.
She thought: Why don’t I know about this? What little girl doesn’t know about her parents’ wedding?
A memory came blasting back— Talba playing with her dolls, humming the “Wedding March,” Miz Clara yelling at her. “Girl, you stop that foolishness. You want to end up pregnant at fo‘teen? Ya want to finish school or not?”
She had been nine at the most.
Talk of marriage was as verboten in the Wallis household as talk of Daddy. Miz Clara had always said, “Don’t you ever depend on some man to take care of you. You got one person you can depend on, and her name’s Sandra Wallis. That’s all you got in this world.”
Hurt, she had asked, “What about you, Mama? I thought I had you.”
And her mother had laughed. “Baby, you got to take care of me.”
She looked at her father’s picture. He was handsome. So handsome she was instantly drawn to him, though perhaps that was because she knew she was looking at her father. He was a nice medium brown color, like she was, and he had an Afro (though her mother’s hair was straightened). He also wore a lush moustache, a masculine attribute for which she’d always had a weakness. He was dressed in black tie, proper as you please, standing politely behind his bride. You’d never have guessed he’d become a druggie and die of a gunshot wound.
Talba felt herself tearing up again. What a waste!
She was disgusted with herself: Get a grip, girl. The guy was worthless. Everybody says so.
Still. You only get one father.
There were other pictures in the drawer-like compartment, though this was the only framed one. The others were loose, as if carelessly tossed, though there was nothing careless about Miz Clara. They must be things she couldn’t bear to part with, no matter how much she professed to despise her husband’s memory. The first one Talba saw was a two-by-three-inch photo of herself, snaggletoothed and pigtailed; a school picture, probably from second grade. Again, she felt like an intruder. She didn’t want to know that her mother had saved a picture like this of her, and she knew her mother wouldn’t want her to know. It was far too sentimental a gesture for Miz Clara to acknowledge.
There were more pictures of her, and some of Corey, and some of Aunt Carrie. One that really got to her was of all of them, six-year-old Corey all dressed up in a suit like his dad’s, their father wearing a tie, Carrie and Clara in dresses and hats, each holding a baby daughter, each daughter decked out in white lace. On the back, someone had written, “Easter, 1974.” Talba wondered who had taken it
It was hard, looking at those pictures. She wanted to stare at each one forever, and yet the most cursory glance made her feel so guilty her stomach hurt. The phone rang, and she nearly threw herself under the bed.
Darryl, she thought, and let it go. Pausing now wasn’t going to make it any easier.
She did stare at them for a while, even laid some on the floor and looked at them in the aggregate. There was so much so see… so much it took her nearly an hour to find the flat, green-leather album at the bottom of the pile. It was trimmed with gold and looked bought at a stationery store, an extravagant purchase for someone like Miz Clara. It was no one’s idea of a wedding album, yet that was what it was— and indeed it had a dignity that one of those white shiny ones wouldn’t have had.
For the first time, she saw a picture of her grandmother. Her grandfather had died when Carrie and Clara were in high school, and her grandmother, when Talba was a baby. Talba thought it odd that there were no photos of her anywhere in the house— but then, there were no photos at all. They were all, it seemed, in the cedar chest.
If her father had parents, they hadn’t come to the wedding— perhaps he had come from too far away for poor folks to travel. Aunt Carrie had been maid of honor, and there was a best man— someone named William Green whom Talba didn’t recognize. He’d be difficult to trace with a name like that, but she could try. There were no bridesmaids and no groomsmen.
The photographer evidently hadn’t shot pictures of the guests as well as the wedding party, in the casual manner of the late nineties. But there was a face she knew. There was a great shot of the bride and groom saying their vows, the preacher’s solemn brown face peering out above their clasped hands. And he was someone she knew. He was a man she remembered from her childhood, when her mother had made her go to church every Sunday— the Reverend Clarence Scruggs, as nasty an old devil as she’d ever met in her life.
Old. The thought chilled her. Maybe he was dead. Still, though— she remembered the Easter finery— her parents had gone to church. She looked closely at the pictures, and there could be no doubt— it was the same church her mama went to to this day. Surely someone there would remember her father. Someone. Surely.
There were no papers, no other clues in the shallow compartment. What on earth was in the chest proper? She tugged the container off its narrow shelf, no easy job, since the chest was probably two and a half by five feet.
It was only about a third full, and what was in it was underwear. A satin robe and nightgown; some lacy slips and panties. She knew instantly what it was— her mother’s trousseau.
Talba had been a fairly decent history student— she was perfectly aware of the turmoil of the sixties. She knew all about Black Power and Black Panthers and Black Is Beautiful. (And personally, she thought of herself as black—”African-American” was too cumbersome and sounded like a euphemism. She’d run across the old rallying cry, “I’m black and I’m proud” and wondered whatever had become of it.) When
all that was going on, her parents were getting married. Her mama was shopping for a trousseau, dreaming a dream.
It was enough to make you cry.
She felt around in the bottom of the chest, just in case, and, in fact, felt something hard, something in a little plastic envelope. Fishing it out, she beheld her mother’s diaphragm, which she dropped like it was radioactive. Quickly, she pushed it to the bottom and fluffed some underwear around it, so maybe Miz Clara would never know her daughter had done this. Talba was numb with remorse.
She had the whole thing back together, church bulletins, seashell Jesus, and all in ten minutes. She would die, would absolutely, no question, croak if Miz Clara ever knew she’d touched her diaphragm and eyeballed her undies.
She went in her own room and flopped again on the bed, feeling the turtle response setting in.
Uh-oh, she thought. Gotta fight it. She breathed some, counting the breaths, a technique she’d learned from a boyfriend who was into martial arts. In fact, she promptly went to sleep, which was full-tilt turtle, she knew from experience, but she slept only a few minutes, waking refreshed and hungry.
She took a shower, fixed herself some lunch, and made up a story to tell when she called the church. She checked her voice mail, but if Darryl had called, he wasn’t owning up. Maybe it was Corey, she thought, and realized for the first time she was going to have to apologize to Michelle.
Oh, God. Maybe I could find a fairy godmother to turn me into a real turtle. Permanently.
A machine answered when she called the church. The days of full-time church secretaries were apparently over— but then it was Saturday. Still, things would be going on there. Maybe some ladies cooking for a needy family, something like that— maybe someone’s house had burned down, and they needed a casserole.
Aha! She had an idea. The latest church bulletin was on the cedar chest, and she was in luck— it listed a White Elephant Sale for the Wednesday Night Prayer Group. That meant plenty of ladies, some of them old. Most of them, probably. She thought about taking the plastic bags from the attic, but the minute she did, Miz Clara would declare the missing garments her favorites— there was a law about that.
