by Diane Munier
Whatever this was, it felt serious, at least to me.
That’s the last I remembered, and I let my eyes close and I felt this kind of safe feeling and this kind of overwhelming feeling with him so near, a warmth inside and a shaky kind of energy, like something got ripped open in there and I didn’t know if it would boil over or explode or stay put. I wouldn’t give it up or change it…it was a chance I had to take…I had to allow…laying there by Danny on that magic carpet.
So we listened and drifted. And the next thing I knew I woke up.
I didn’t know where I was for a minute, but my forehead had burrowed into the side of someone. At first I thought I was lying next to Mama and real quick realized no, warmer, harder, bigger. My head was roofed by someone’s armpit and his arm snaked along my back seeming to hold me to him. My face had been smashed against his side. My hand rested on his chest and it rose and fell and his heart beat slow and solid. It was Danny.
I heard voices, yelling from below. Danny was waking up too, and I lifted my head and we looked at one another. The record had ended but it was making a sluffing sound cause the needle was riding the margin.
And I heard the yelling again, Lonnie, then her wail, Mama, then Lonnie.
“Lonnie’s home,” I said, sitting up.
Danny sat up, too, his hair sticking up. The yelling and crying....
“What in the hell is going on down there,” he said.
“He can’t know you’re here. Did you drive?”
“I walked.”
“You have to get out.” I said to Danny.
“What are they doing? Should you call the cops?” he said.
“No. Just go. Get out.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Sounds like they’re killing each other.”
“Then stay in here. Don’t come out. If he sees you he’ll kill you. Do you hear me? He can’t see you in here.”
“Hilly, he’s not going to kill me. Call the cops on his drunk ass. Let them handle him.”
“Stay here no matter what. Promise me.”
“I don’t think you should go down there. That drunk asshole….”
“Stay here.” I scrambled to my feet and went to the door. I stuck my feet in my shoes and looked at Danny. He seemed poised to follow me. “Stay here,” I said again.
I went into the hall closing my door solidly behind me. I walked to the landing. Mama was screaming at Lonnie not to bring his bar-room crap into her house. He was telling her to get the hell out of his way. He was really drunk.
I walked a few steps down the staircase and saw them struggling over a chair. Another chair had fallen over near them. Apparently he was trying to bring these into the kitchen and she was fighting him. He was so drunk she wrestled the chair from his grip and threw it aside but he grabbed her at the back of the neck and bent her over that chair yelling, “Pick it up.”
At first she wouldn’t, her arms swinging loose.
“Let her go,” I yelled rushing down the rest of the stairs.
Now she grabbed at the place where he gripped her neck, but she couldn’t get him off. I pulled on his arm trying to get him to let her go. Finally she picked that chair up like he demanded.
He pushed her toward the kitchen. The three of us were tangled, her holding the chair. I had to let go as he shoved her through the narrow doorway. In the kitchen he forced her to bend forward and set the chair.
As soon as he let her go she turned to him and grabbed his hair. He grabbed hers. I tried to pry them apart. Lonnie’s elbow hit me in the shoulder. I flew into the refrigerator rattling the contents. I cried out cause it hurt. That made him stop and let go of her. She released him and ripped open her robe.
She wore a half slip, the dark hair between her thighs showing through it, but above, the breast, the regular sag with the big nipple, but the other misshapen, pulling wrong and the deep purple showing through it like a pomegranate under her skin.
I gasped same as him. He was already yelling at her. But I couldn’t take my eyes away. All this year this secret had grown. All this year we had carried it but I had not realized. I had not understood.
“What the hell is it?” Lonnie said.
“It’s you,” she said. “You have killed me.”
Lonnie looked scared. “What is this?” he yelled at me as if I had created it.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“…and everything I ever loved…ever loved you killed,” she said.
I went to her and pulled her robe together. “Shhh, Mama,” then to Lonnie, “Can you drive to the hospital?” I put my arm around Mama and led her to the hall so I could leave her there and find her shoes.
“Right now? We don’t need to go now. I’ll…take her to the doctor in the morning.” I knew his fear of doctors. Of life.
“She needs to go right now. This looks bad,” I said trying to stay calm.
“I don’t want to go,” she said.
“Shhh,” I said. “It’ll be all right,” I told her.
“She don’t need to go,” Lonnie said.
“I don’t want to go,” she said.
There was a knock on the door then. I took a few steps to it and opened it. There stood Danny. He had this deep look, worried. “Hey Hilly,” he said. “How…you doing?” His eyes were going from one of us to the other.
It had to be three or four in the morning. I didn’t want to laugh, not nearly, but there was no explaining this.
“Lonnie…I’m going to let Danny take us. You stay here and we’ll be back after the doctor sees Mama.”
“I don’t want to go,” she said.
“I need my truck,” Lonnie said.
“I’ll bring it back,” Danny said holding out his hand for the keys and more than that holding Lonnie’s gaze for a few seconds while he waited. Lonnie dug in his pocket and slapped them into Danny’s hand.
I got Mama’s feet in her shoes. “We won’t be long,” I said like we were going somewhere cheerful.
Somehow we got her in the truck. Danny went to the back and slammed the tailgate shut. Lonnie’s table and two of the chairs were still in the bed.
Mama sat between us in her slip and her robe with her hair wild from Lonnie pulling on it in their fight and surely some bruises I hope they didn’t ask me about. I was in cut-offs and my tie-die T-shirt and my shoulder throbbed and a couple of other places. Danny wore his usual white T-shirt and blue jeans. He was working his jaw as we pulled off.
“The emergency room,” I said.
“I figured,” he said.
At the hospital they helped Mama into a wheelchair and I filled out the paperwork. Danny stood there with Mama in the chair and the nurse. The nurse asked him a few questions and he answered but I couldn’t make it out. I kept writing and handed in the chart. Then they took us to a room and I asked Danny to sit in the waiting room. “I don’t know what they’ll do.”
He nodded, looking at me so serious, like he had something to say but didn’t know how. But he reached out to me and ran his finger over my cheek. He must of heard what I told the nurse…about Mama’s breast.
“Thanks,” I whispered.
So I went in the room with Mama and I touched my cheek cause I could feel him there. And I was ashamed to be with her knowing I’d had comfort when she didn’t have any. And we sat there for such a long time, her slumped on one chair, me hunched on another. Her toes in the canvas slip on shoes turned in and her legs bare and skinny.
And every once in a while she whispered, “I don’t want to show them.” And she’d shake her head for a long time and the ends of her hair frizzed out like a dark kind of halo.
And I said, “They can help.”
And she said, “They can’t help.” The way she said it…it was a knife through me.
I wanted to scream and cry and say why, why, why, but I knew better than to let such a thing out that would do no good.
She had said not to tell and I hadn’t, even though it ate at me, I couldn’t face
it any more than she could…her having cancer. I was scared…so I pretended it was nothing cause the doctor told her most times it wasn’t…and I did nothing, just like she told me…nothing…it was my fault. Lonnie hadn’t killed her. I had.
The doctor finally showed up, and he didn’t look too happy to be called in. He was taken aback when he saw Mama’s breast. He asked a million questions, first and foremost how it got to this point. He was rebuking Mama and I told him not to do that. I said it that way and then he got smart with me and I could smell the alcohol on him and I just took what I deserved.
He sent her for an x-ray and said they were going to keep her. “This is very bad,” he told me. He said it looked like late stage cancer and he didn’t think there was anything they could do for her if it was in her lymph nodes and he could already tell it was as they were swollen. He had never seen such, the whole thing he’d never seen it so bad. I was to come back in the morning and bring my father.
After they put her in a room she was quiet in the bed, almost peaceful. She lay there staring at the wall and she didn’t look at me when I said I was going out for a minute and would she be all right? “Go,” she said. “Go on home. You can’t do nothing.”
And I grabbed a fistful of her sheet and I wanted to tell her she would be fine but she didn’t seem to want it…more of my lies. She was trying to send me away. She wanted to die. She’d wanted to die for years. That’s what I knew. She was going, leaving me. I was never enough. Never was…like she looked past me…and I kept trying to hold on to her…until now…until this.
I ran into the hall and leaned against the wall and I didn’t know if I could breathe, and no one was around and I leaned over and put my hands on my knees. I made myself slow down a minute, but I couldn’t get past it so I pushed into the restroom and turned on the light and kept putting the cold water on my cheeks.
There was knocking on the door. I pulled it open and it was him…through my window, pulling along the curb, through my door, this door, Mama moving away, but him coming toward me, standing here.
He stepped in and I stumbled back and we landed against the wall and I felt the sore shoulder and I welcomed the pain cause I wasn’t dead, I didn’t want to die and Danny had his arms around me and mine were around him.
“I couldn’t find you,” he said against me.
“She’s dying,” I whispered.
He pulled back and looked at me. “They said that?”
After a minute I got a breath and said, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Hilly it’s okay…what’s wrong with her?”
“They…she’s…it’s the worst…he’s seen.”
He held me some more and I didn’t want him to let go. But I willed myself to stop. Other than Naomi, I had never known comfort like this, like Danny. I didn’t know how long he held me, but he pulled me off the wall and stood there with me, his arms tight around me, mine around him and time passed.
Finally I pulled away and he stepped back. “I’m going to stay…so you can go on home. Thank you for everything.” I went to the sink and washed over my face again and he handed me brown paper towels.
“You’re by yourself,” he said.
“I need to stay,” I said. “Lonnie might come when he sobers up. But Naomi will for sure. We’ll be fine now.”
“They’ll help her,” he said.
I nodded. My face crumpled, but I got it to straighten out and wiped over it again. I glanced in the mirror and it was bad.
He pulled me to him and kissed my forehead. It was so kind I almost started crying some more, but I willed myself, steeled myself.
We walked out then, to the door of Mama’s room. I knew it waited for me, my time in there…what I had to face now. “Thanks again,” I said. “When you get to my house, just leave the keys in the truck. He’ll be passed out. Don’t try to wake him. Just…I hope you can sleep some.”
“It’s almost time for work,” he said, smiling a little.
“Well…that thing he said about being late? All bullshit.”
We laughed a little. “I’ll go….” he said.
He walked off then and he turned a couple of times and waved.
I went in Mama’s room and sat by Mama’s bed. She had her eyes closed, seemed to be asleep. I sighed looking at her so small there. I scooted closer and touched her hair, smoothed it. My mother-child.
Finding My Thunder 8
The rest of that first morning when they put Mama in I didn’t sleep at all. I watched waterbugs crawl those mint green walls. Rubber soled shoes marched for miles up and down shiny linoleum halls. Carts rattled with medicines and food and machines and bodies hooked up to more carts and bottles of things that dripped. Voices and laughing when no one should, and the intercom scratching and I wondered could anyone hear…did anyone care.
Naomi had marched in to Mama’s room around seven that first morning like a spring storm, clean wind and the washing of water…she rearranged pillows and bottles and chairs like we had hope now…hope. I had my eyes closed when she came in, but they were open now and I’d been watching her but she didn’t know it. She was smoothing the covers over Mama and we finally looked at one another and that which we feared most had come upon us.
“She’s dying,” I said.
“She saw the doctor in January…how is it possible she is this sick?” Naomi said.
I told Naomi about the cancer and everything the doctor said.
And she put her arms out wide and I went to her and she held me up against her cotton dress and the White Shoulders perfume she bought at Woolworth’s. And for a long time of quiet, she was petting me, smoothing me over.
“Did Lonnie call you?” I finally asked.
“So he is Lonnie now? No.”
I was ready to ask how she knew about Mama, if she’d gone to the house, but she spoke again, “It was that handsome one. He come to my door and said I had to come here right away.”
She pulled back and looked in my eyes. “Lord,” she whispered, “where I been?”
“It’s Danny.”
“I know who he is…that little brown one grown up…the one you fancied back.” She smoothed my hair off of my face.
“What?” I said. Brown? And how did she know I’d fancied him? We’d been friends….
“The one who hurt your feelings that day…we made that cake? You like to badgered me to death. Then you came home looking like you’d rolled in the creek and wouldn’t talk about it. I know that Danny. He’s the big deal.”
I’d forgotten what a bird dog she could be.
“But how are you?” she asked.
I shrugged and laid my head on her shoulder again.
“Sister Debra lost the baby you know. That’s where I been. She took it hard with Tad in Vietnam.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. I pictured Debra…joyful on Sunday, dancing and her slip hanging and her always telling me to smile.
Naomi and I parted then and I went back to my chair. We’d been whispering because Mama was asleep, or she pretended to be so she wouldn’t have to deal with us.
“You got to get out in the fresh air now. Go have some breakfast,” Naomi said.
“No Ma’am.”
“Yes Ma’am,” she said back. She was digging in her big patent leather purse with the gold clasp. She brought out two dollars and held them toward me. “Go on now,” she said.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Get some ice cream then,” she said waving them. “You always did want ice cream for breakfast so I’m finally saying yes.”
I stared at her and broke into a smile. I always did want it.
“Go on so I can visit with Renata.”
I didn’t know why she couldn’t speak her piece in front of me. Mama seemed feeble and tiny in that bed this morning, like she was giving up another inch and another inch ever since she got here.
“Get goin’,” Naomi said to me and I took the money and walked out with heavy steps. I didn’t go far, bu
t I stood in the hall and tried to listen.
I didn’t expect to hear Mama speak so soon or so forcefully. I wondered if she wasn’t also waiting for me to leave. “What you gonna do about it?” Mama said.
“About this? What can I do, child? You have given up on yourself. That’s what he done. You forgot how much that girl of yours loves you.”
My hand went over my mouth and I listened hard.
“She don’t need me. She never did.”
“I suppose Eugene told himself the same thing. How true was that?”
After a minute Naomi said, “Don’t have an answer, do you? Guess we don’t get to say how other people feel about us.”
“I been sufferin’,” Mama whined.
“We all been sufferin’, Miss Renata. But there is much to do.”
“I ain’t strong like you,” now petulance had set in.
“I ain’t strong. I am the weakest coward you will ever meet. When I think about my own misery that is. When I let it consume me night and day.”
“You hate me and you got the right. It’s best I go. It’s best….”
“Don’t be sayin’….”
But Naomi never got to finish before Mama started to wail, “He was so little….”
I heard shifting around, “There now…get ahold…get ahold.” And I was surprised at how firmly she spoke.
Mama whimpered some.
“You have hid this disease,” Naomi said, and I could tell by her voice she was touching Mama in some way for she used that same way on me, she would hug you tight while she confronted your sins.
“It’s him,” Mama said low. “He has taken hold in me and grown….”
“Who?”
I could hear Mama gulping and crying some. “That dark one,” she got out.
“You gonna tell me this crazy talk? You got cancer Miss Renata. It ain’t something else. It is only that.”
“No,” Mama said. “You don’t know how he comes….”
“Listen to me. I spoke with your nurse this morning. You are very sick. Looks like you are at the end. You got a very short time to talk to make your peace. If there is someone you want to think about now then think about Hilly. What do you want to say to her before you go?”
