by Ann Petry
The street was wrapped in silence. It was dark. The houses across the way were barely visible. Even the concrete sidewalk under her feet was recognizable as such only there where she was standing. By now she ought to be used to this early morning darkness, only she wasn’t. It made her uneasy inside, and she kept turning her head, listening for sounds and peering across at the silent houses while she shifted the brown-paper bag from one arm to the other. It was the overcast sky and the threat of snow in the air that made her feel so queer.
Last winter there had been more mornings when the sky was a clear, deep blue and the sun spread a pink glow over the street. She had been filled with content then because she was free from the burden of having to pay rent and she was saving money to get her false teeth and getting little things to make Jones’ apartment cozier and more homey.
She looked at the gloomy gray of the sky, at the dark bulge of the buildings, at the strip of sidewalk in front of her, and she saw the whole relentless succession of bitter days that had made this the longest, dreariest winter she had ever known. And Jones was the cause of it. She was used to going to work in the early morning dark, to coming home in the black of winter evenings; used to getting only brief and occasional glimpses of the sun when she made hurried purchases for Mis’ Crane, and she had never minded it or thought very much about it until Jones changed so.
The change in him had transformed the apartment into a grim, unpleasant place. His constant anger, his sullen silence, filled the small rooms until they were like the inside of an oven—a small completely enclosed place where no light ever penetrated. It had been like that for weeks now, and she didn’t think she could bear it much longer.
Things had only been nice that time he had the headache. He had talked to her all evening and come to stand close to her while she washed the dishes and he wiped them, and then later on for the first time he asked her to do something for him.
When she went to get the key made for him, a happy feeling kept bubbling up inside her. She waited impatiently while the man fiddled with the metal that would eventually come out of his machine as a key, for she had been certain that Jones would move back to the bedroom that same night, would once again sleep beside her.
That was another thing. Though the apartment had grown smaller, the bed had grown larger; night after night it increased in size while she lay in the middle of it—alone. It wasn’t right for a woman to be sleeping by herself night after night like that; it wasn’t natural for a bed to stretch vast and empty around all sides of her.
But when she came back with the key, he said his headache was too bad, that he’d stay outside in the living room. The next evening she had hurried home from work, looking forward to a repetition of the pleasant evening they spent together the night before, and he had acted so crazy mad that she stayed in the bedroom with the door closed, so she wouldn’t see him and wouldn’t hear him. But the hoarse wildness of his voice came through the closed door in a furious, awful cursing that went on and on.
The sound of his own voice seemed to increase his fury, and as the minutes dragged by, his raging grew until she thought he would explode with it. She sat down on the bed close under the cross and put her hand in the pocket where she kept the protection powder the Prophet gave her.
Maybe she should go see the Prophet again. No. He had done all he could. He kept her from being put out, and Jones still wouldn’t try to put her out, but she didn’t want to stay any more.
Her eyes blinked at the thought. Her mind backed away from it and then approached it again—slowly. Yes, that was right. She didn’t want to stay with him any more. Strange as it seemed, it was true. And it just went to show how a good-looking woman could upset and change the lives of people she didn’t even know. Because if Jones hadn’t seen that Mis’ Johnson, she, Min, would have been content to stay here forever. As it was—and this time she acknowledged the thought, explored it boldly—as it was, she was going somewhere else to live.
Jones had never been the same after Mis’ Johnson moved in, and he got worse after that night he tried to pull her down in the cellar; got so bad, in fact, that living with him was like being shut up with an animal—a sick, crazy animal.
Worst of all, he never looked at her any more. She could have stood his silence because she was used to it; could even perhaps have grown more or less accustomed to the rage that forever burned inside him, but his refusal ever to look in her direction stabbed at her pride and filled her with shame. It was as though he was forever telling her that she was so hideous, so ugly, that he couldn’t bear to let his eyes fall upon her, so they slid past her, around her, never pausing really to see her. It was more than a body could be expected to stand.
Yes, she would move somewhere else. It wouldn’t be on this street and she wasn’t going to tell him that she was going. She took a final look at the sky. She would try to get her things under cover in some other part of town before the snow started. Mis’ Hedges would get a pushcart man for her. She glanced at the street. It wasn’t somehow a very good place to live, for the women had too much trouble, almost as though the street itself bred the trouble. She went to stand under Mrs. Hedges’ window.
The window was open, and though she couldn’t see her, she knew she must be close by, probably drinking her morning coffee. ‘Mis’ Hedges,’ she called.
‘You on your way to work, dearie?’ Mrs. Hedges’ bandanna appeared at the window suddenly.
‘Well, not exactly’—Min hesitated. She didn’t want Mis’ Hedges to know she was moving until she was all packed up and ready to go. ‘I ain’t feeling so well today and I thought I’d stay in and do a little work ‘round the house. I was wondering if you saw a pushcart moving man go past if you’d stop him and send him in to me.’
‘You movin’, dearie?’
‘Well, yes and no. I got some things I want moved somewhere else, but I haven’t got my mind full made up yet about me actually moving.’
Mrs. Hedges nodded. ’Bout what time you want him, dearie?’
Jones had gone out of the apartment wearing his paint-splashed overalls early this morning, so he was probably painting upstairs somewhere and wouldn’t come back down until around twelve o’clock or so, and the man could load her things on the cart in a few minutes. It wouldn’t take her very long to get them together, so by nine o’clock she should be gone.
‘Tell him ’bout eleven,’ she said, and was startled because her mouth seemed to know what she should do before her mind knew. She hadn’t thought about it before, but she needed to sit down in the apartment and really decide that she was going to get out, for it never paid to do things in a hurry. At the end of an hour or two, she would have her mind full made up, and she’d never regret leaving, because she would know it was the only thing she could have done under the circumstances. Queer how her mouth had known this without any prompting from her mind.
‘’Bout eleven,’ she repeated.
‘Okay, dearie.’
When she opened the door of the apartment and walked into the living room, she saw that Jones was standing by the desk. He was tearing some letters into tiny pieces. The small bits of paper were falling into the wastebasket, swiftly and quietly like snow.
He didn’t hear her come in, and when he became aware of her he turned on her with such suddenness, with such a snarling ‘What you doin’ in here?’ that she backed toward the door, one hand reaching up toward her chest in an instinctive gesture aimed to quiet the fear-sudden hurrying of her heart.
‘What you doin’ here?’ he repeated. ‘What you doin’ spyin’ on me?’
The fact that she moved away from him seemed to enrage him, and he started toward her. His eyes were inflamed, red. His face was contorted with hate. She thrust her hand in her coat pocket, groping for the small box of powder, reached in further, more frantically. It wasn’t there. She explored the other pocket. It, too, was empty.
As he approached her, she shrank away from him, half-closing her eyes so that she shu
t out his face and saw only his overalls—the faded blue material splashed with thick blobs of tan-colored paint and brown varnish; the shiny buckles on the straps and the rust marks under the buckles.
He would probably kill her, she thought, and she waited for the feel of his heavy hands around her neck, for the violence of his foot, for he would kick her after he knocked her down. She knew how it would go, for her other husbands had taught her: first, the grip around the neck that pressed the windpipe out of position, so that screams were choked off and no sound could emerge from her throat; and then a whole series of blows, and after that, after falling to the ground under the weight of the blows, the most painful part would come—the heavy work shoes landing with force, sinking deep into the soft, fleshy parts of her body, her stomach, her behind.
As she waited, she wondered where she had put the powder. She’d had it only yesterday in her coat pocket and last night she’d put it in the pocket of her house dress. That’s where it was now, in the pocket of the dress hanging in the closet—the dress with the purple flowers on it that she’d bought in that nice little store on the corner where the lady was so pleasant, only the dress had run when she washed it and the purple flowers had spread their color all over the white background, muddying the green of the small leaves that were attached to the flowers.
He had lifted his hand. So it would be the face first and the neck afterward. She closed her eyes, so that she wouldn’t see his great, heavy hand coming at her face, and thus she shut out the overalls and the paint on them and the rusting buckles that fastened the straps.
Nothing but trouble, always trouble, when there was a woman as good-looking as that young Mis’ Johnson in a house. She wondered if white women, good-looking ones, brought as much of trouble with them, and then she thought of the Prophet David with warmth and affection. He had done the best he could for her. This that was going to happen wouldn’t have come about if she had followed his instructions. It was a pity she had been so careless and left the protection powder in the pocket of that other dress.
And then the big, golden cross came to her mind. Nights alone in the bedroom she had sometimes sat up and turned on the light and looked up at it hanging over her head and been comforted by it. And it wasn’t just because of the protection it offered either. There was something very friendly about it and just looking at it never failed to remind her of the Prophet and the quiet way he had listened to her talk.
She took her hand out of her pocket and without opening her eyes, and only half-realizing what she was doing, she made the sign of the cross over her body—a long gesture downward and then a wide, sweeping crosswise movement.
Jones’ breath came out with a sharp, hissing sound.
She was so startled that she opened her eyes, for it was the same sound that she had heard snakes make, and it sent an old and horrid fear through her. For a moment she thought she was back in Georgia in a swampy, sedgy place, standing mesmerized with fear because she had nearly stepped on a snake that was coiled in front of her and she half-expected to see its threadlike tongue licking in and out.
‘You god damn conjurin’ whore!’ Jones said.
His voice was thick with violence and with something else—almost like a sob had risen in his throat and got mixed up with the words. She stared at him, bewildered, reassuring herself that it was he who had made the hissing sound, that she was not back in the country, but instead was facing Jones in this small, dark room.
She was surprised to see that he had backed away from her. There was half the distance of the room between them. He was over by the desk, and his hands were no longer lifted in a threatening gesture; they were flat against his face. The sight held her motionless, unable to deny or affirm his charge of conjuring.
He walked out of the room without looking at her. She ought to explain why she had come back so unexpectedly, but he had reached the foyer before she could get the words out.
‘My heart was botherin’ me,’ she said in her whispering voice. He made no reply, and she wasn’t certain whether he had heard her. The door slammed with a bang, and then he was going up the stairs—walking slowly as though he was having trouble with his legs.
She cocked her head on one side listening, because the room was filled with whispers, and it was her own voice saying over and over again, ‘My heart was botherin’ me,’ ‘My heart was botherin’ me.’ It had a gasping, faintly surprised quality, and she realized with dismay that she was saying the words aloud over and over again and that her heart was making a sound like thunder inside her chest.
Her legs were shaking so badly that she walked over to the sofa and sat down. This was where he slept when she was in the bedroom alone. It was a long sofa, very long, and yet tall as he was, when he was stretched out on it, his head would be about where she was sitting and his feet would have touched the arm at the other end. She wondered if he had been comfortable or had he twisted and turned unable to sleep because he didn’t have room enough. She punched the seat with her fist. It didn’t have much give to it.
What would he have done if she had come and lain down beside him on this sofa on one of those nights when she couldn’t sleep? Only, of course, her pride wouldn’t have permitted it—especially after that experience with the nightgown. She squirmed as she thought of its bright pinkness, its low cut, and of the vivid yellow lace that edged the neck and the armholes.
She had looked at it a long time in the store before she finally bought it. It was the same store where she’d got that nice flowered dress, only this time the lady wasn’t there, and the white girl who waited on her got a little impatient with her, but she had a hard time making up her mind because she’d never worn anything like it before and it didn’t look decent.
‘But it’s so beautiful, honey,’ the girl urged. Her long red fingernails had picked up a bit of the lace edging.
‘I dunno,’ Min had said doubtfully.
‘And it’s glamorous. See?’ The girl held it up in front of herself, catching it in tight at her waist and holding the neck up with her other hand, so that her breasts were suddenly accentuated, seemed to be pushing right out of the bright pink material.
Min looked away, embarrassed. ‘I ain’t never wore one of them kind.’
‘Why, honey, you’ve missed half of life.’ The girl moved her shoulders slightly to attract Min’s glance. Min’s eyes stayed focused on the front of the store and the girl stretched the nightgown out on the counter, started putting it back into its crisp folds, and said impatiently, ‘Well, honey?’
‘I still dunno.’ The shiny pink material, the yellow lace, the gathers at the bosom, were startling even spread out flat on the counter.
The girl sought desperately for some way to close the sale. ‘Why—why—’ she fumbled, then, ‘Why, any man who sees you in this would get all excited right away.’
Two-ninety-eight it had cost, and she remembered with a pang of regret how that night after she bought it she had put it on. It was a little too long and she had to walk carefully to keep from tripping, but she made several totally unnecessary trips back and forth through the living room, walking as close as possible to the sofa where Jones was sitting. He was so absorbed in some gloomy chain of thought that he didn’t pay any attention until she stumbled over the hem and nearly fell.
‘Jesus God!’ he said, staring.
But after that first look, he had kept his eyes on the floor, head down, unseeing, apparently indifferent. The only indication that he wasn’t wholly unconcerned showed in the way he started cracking his knuckles, pulling his fingers so that the joints made a sharp, angry sound.
No, she could never have brought herself to lie down on this couch with him, and anyway she ought to start packing. Her house dresses and the pink nightgown and the other ordinary nightgowns could go in a paper bundle along with her shoes and slippers and spring coat and what else—oh, yes, the Epsom salts for her feet. The comb and brush and hand mirror could go in the same package. That was about all exce
pt for the cross and the table and the canary cage. She wouldn’t really need the medicine dropper and that red don’t-love medicine the Prophet gave her, but she’d take them, because she might run across some friend with husband trouble who could use them.
Funny how she got to believe that not having to pay rent was so important, and it really wasn’t. Having room to breathe in meant much more. Lately she couldn’t get any air here. All the time she felt like she’d been running, running, running, and hadn’t been able to stop long enough to get a nose full of air. It was because of the evilness in Jones. She could feel the weight of it like some monstrous growth crowding against her. He had made the whole apartment grow smaller and darker; living room, bedroom, kitchen—all of them shrinking, their walls tightening about her.
Like just now when he came at her with his hand upraised to strike; he had swallowed the room up until she could see nothing but him—all the detail of the overalls and none of the room, just as though he had become a giant and blotted out everything else.
These past few weeks she had become so acutely aware of his presence that his every movement made her heart jump, whether she was in the bedroom or the kitchen. Every sound he made was magnified. His muttering to himself was like thunder, and his restless walking up and down, up and down, in the living room seemed to go on inside her in a regular rhythm that set her eyes to blinking so that she couldn’t stop them. When he beat the dog, it made her sick at her stomach, because as each blow fell the dog cried out sharply and her stomach would suck in against itself.
But when he had been quiet and no sound came from him, she felt impelled to locate him. The absence of sound was deeply disturbing, for there was no telling what awful thing he might be doing.
If she was in the kitchen, she would keep turning her head, listening, while she scrubbed the floor or cleaned the stove, until, unable to endure not knowing where he was or what he was doing, she would finally tiptoe to the living-room door only to find that he was sitting here on this sofa, biting his lips, glaring at her with eyes so bloodshot, so filled with hate, that she would turn and scuttle hastily back to the kitchen. Or if she was in the bedroom she would sit on the edge of the bed, watching the doorway, half-expecting to see him appear there suddenly, and then the silence from the living room would force her to get up and look at him only to find his hate-filled eyes focused straight at her.
