Finding My Thunder

by Diane Munier

  He got in the car without saying anything and started it up. He pretty much sped away from the curb and down the street in the opposite direction from Naomi’s house. I said, “Where we going?”

  And he said, “Somewhere we can talk.” And I felt sick to my stomach.

  So we drove out of town like we did those nights Mama was in the hospital. When Dickens got out I’d slid by the door and he didn’t pull me over by him. I had my arms folded over my chest. He asked me if I wanted to go to the cemetery and I said, “I don’t want to right now. But…thanks.”

  “You don’t have to always thank me,” he said and I didn’t have an answer.

  So we went in another direction and ended up near the quarry. He parked down some dirt road and we got out and sat on the hood on the car. He said…, “You want to tell me what you were doin’ goin’ upstairs with those men that way?”

  “What do you think?” I said.

  “What I said before,” he said looking at me, eyes all intense and him angry. “You have no sense of self preservation. If you were going to war…you’d be shot first day. You’d go right in the jungle and say come and get me. Oh…and you’d forget your weapon, too.”

  “Really? You think I haven’t been strong in my life?”

  He quelled a little. “I didn’t mean that….”

  “You don’t know what you mean. So just shut up.”

  We sat there staring ahead, a foot apart, the hood warm under our butts on this warm night, our heels hitched on the silver bumper. We were looking into trees that inclined downhill. Chipmunks were pretty busy rustling through there.

  “I can tell you this…you ain’t ever going back there,” he said.

  “You can tell me?”

  “Don’t get all women’s lib on me either. You’re too naive to be in a place like that.”

  “Oh. I get it. You’re going back. And you can report to me. About the dogs.”

  “I ain’t goin’ back there.”

  “Oh I’ll bet. I saw how it was when they got around you. Just like at school. You love the attention. You have to have it I’ll bet.”

  He glared at me, his lips stacked mean.

  “Sometimes…I don’t know what I’m doing with you,” he said.

  I gasped a little. I slid off the car and stood. “I’m not enough.”

  He reached for me but I stepped away. “Why do you say that?”

  “You can get women….”

  “Anyone can get those women.”

  “You’re just saying that so I don’t think anything about those men.”

  “All we were there was new meat. You do realize….”

  “I didn’t go upstairs to be new meat. I went up with Robert to see the room where they play their music.”

  “I know that…but you….”

  “It’s not like with Sukey. Did you think of that?”

  He shook his head.

  “They weren’t going to do anything I didn’t want.”

  “He was pulling on you.”

  “I could have gotten out of it. Robert was there, too.”

  “He had his hand on you and he was pulling. He was coming on to you. You do know that you are defenseless if a guy wants to force you?”

  “Yes. Your brother taught me that.”

  We just looked at each other.

  “What happened that time with Sukey?” he asked, his face…terrible.

  “You saw….”

  “I know what I saw. But…what was it? Was it going to be rape?”

  “I didn’t even know about rape when that happened…but I knew it was real…what he was gonna do. I’ve never thought about it. Like…shoved it down. The main thing was you…you broke with me. It’s like that’s all that mattered. But…I have dreams sometimes…and he was…in real I mean…his hand was working between us…and he used his weight to hold me there…and his hand was…unzipping….” I had my hands on my face, I was breathing too shallow, but I could hear the grunts, feel the angry fumbling, and what he said, “Bitch…bitch.”

  Danny flew off the hood and let out a roar, then he turned and hit the hood of the car and it dented and he kept hitting it.

  I tugged on his shoulder, “Stop it.”

  He did but he pulled away from me and walked toward the trees, his hands dug into his hair.

  “It was a long time ago,” I said. Why were we even talking about it?

  He turned to me and let his arms flop to his sides. “No. When we went to the boy’s farm? You told that boy, the one I flipped off…your name. Hilly. There’s not too many of those. That’s what Sukey wanted to talk about tonight. It’s like…he’s sick. He’s dwelling on this. And I brought you there to that farm…like led you in to it…and Tahlila…that’s my fault, too. Taking you to that place tonight. All my big ideas…that are going to get you hurt…just like when we were kids…only now we ain’t kids…so….”

  “You can’t talk like this to me….”

  “I’m leaving. I’m enlisting tomorrow. Tomorrow, Hilly. What I realized tonight? I have to break with you so I can go. I have to.”

  “Not tomorrow,” I whispered going to him. “You said you needed me. I love you. We already talked about this…we have a plan….”

  “Just stay with Naomi and go to Temple and be the girl you’ve always been. I’m…I’m nothing but trouble. You have school starting. Two weeks you’ll be back there. You have to make it there. They’re cruel. Just do like you know. You’ll be okay. I’ll be gone. Don’t think of me so much.”

  I made some kind of sound like an animal and collapsed against him. He dragged me back in the car and he was trying to speak kindly to me.

  “Why?” I kept asking. “Why are you doing this to us?”

  “I don’t have a choice,” he said back, viciously. He was crying and we backed out of where we were. I had no sense of it, just the car moving. I was screaming, begging.

  When we got to Naomi’s he put the car in gear and got out to wrench my door open. His hand was firm on me and he led me to the gate. “Go on inside, Hilly. Go in there.” He wouldn’t look at me and his voice was concrete.

  I heard Naomi come out on the porch but I wouldn’t look at her, wouldn’t look away from him. “You’re killing me,” I said.

  Now he did look at me, madder than ever. “Don’t you dare let me do that. Don’t be your mother.”

  Then he got in his car and pulled away.

  Finding My Thunder 29

  Don’t be your mother.

  That’s all I could hear Danny say. Not I love you, I need you. Just…don’t be your mother. I was wearing her skirt when he said it. Her skirt!

  What did that mean anyway? I knew what it meant. How did he know? He’d heard it, seen it that night we took her to the hospital. What I said. What I didn’t have to say those two long weeks she was dying.

  He’d been in my life, deep in. He didn’t want me to die over him. To stop living.

  Well, I had news for him, you don’t barge into someone’s life then rip yourself back out and tell them how to feel about it!

  Oh, the anger made me so tired.

  Naomi let me lie around for three days. After that she said Jesus had set the example of resurrection. I heard them whispering out in the hall, not that either one could whisper. I heard the errant jingle. They had their tambourines. Oh Lord, not those voo-doo curse rattling instruments of auditory torture.

  Sister Debra started, around the door of my room, “Praise Jesus, twenty-three times Jesus did say, get up, get up, take up your bed and walk child.”

  Oh Lord, it wasn’t even going to be real singing, just their own made up songs, like bad Motown opera. I put my pillow over my head and screamed into the mattress, but it didn’t stop them. They were shaking the tambourines and Naomi sang now, “You got to get on your feet…you got to pick up that sick bed…that bed of suffering and tell the devil no more, no more.”

  “Yes, Lord…,” the other one sang, Mary Wilson to Naomi’s bad Diana
Ross.

  The tambourines were shaking and chiming and one would sing the convoluted words and the other would amen and they’d switch off that way and I was hunkered down, pillow over me, and cursing now, just for my own ears, long strings of the worst words even though I’d made that deal, but this was…just….

  The pillow was whipped off my head, then used as a weapon. It hit me on the backside a few times so I think they must have heard a few of my expressions.

  The bed dipped, really dipped. A hand on my back. I had my toes curled so tightly one of them made a cracking sound.

  “Now you can’t stay in this bed,” Sister Debra said. “You got to get up and carry on.” She was digging through my greasy hair trying to uncover my face. I turned my head away from her.

  I wished I could sink into this ticking, into the batting and live like a spring in the middle, just be a mattress spring until it was over…my life…this world…the war…high school…this moment.

  “Ain’t no one I know hasn’t had some hard things. But where would we all be if we didn’t try to keep going? The Lord will meet you, but he won’t reach down and pick you up. You got to get up first. You got to want to get better.”

  Debra was speaking but these were Naomi’s words. But I was only half-listening cause in my head I was still arguing with Danny.

  So I was her…my Mama. Well who else would I be? I wasn’t Lonnie! How about Danny? Who was he? What if I told him, don’t you be your daddy! Don’t you be your mama! What else? Who else? We didn’t come from more than two people!

  “I get up for myself. I stay up for the Lord.” Debra said.

  I lifted my head like a shot. If I stayed in this bed and became a mattress spring…I would be Mama. If I got out and tried to…live…I’d be someone different. Not Lonnie cause I wasn’t going to use and abuse. I’d be me.

  Much as I hated to, I swallowed my pride and sat up. “I…need to take a shower,” I said, cause the movement had caused a certain ripeness to swirl.

  “Naomi is already running you a bath. You need to get baptized into a whole new day,” she said.

  So I got up, just to get away, to get to the water and the privacy of the bathroom where I didn’t think they would follow, but I didn’t know either. Once I got in there and stripped off…body like a goddess, he’d said, oh Lord…then I got in that warm water. All I could think of was running my hands through his black hair and that song…Nina…and the way he’d bent toward me.

  All of my troubles seemed to get worse…it was always like this for me with a bath, the heat just brought them out and I was submerged in them, and I went under in the silence. I could hear Naomi talking through the door, but I didn’t know what…I just stayed under…and he held me on the water at the quarry that day…I could feel it, feel him…but then I had to breathe so up I came to that pink ceramic tile and those gold fish on the wall burping up those gold bubbles.

  “Okay,” I yelled cause Naomi was still talking. I was gasping a little and I pushed my hair back out of my face and thought of Danny in the water again, dark slick hair, and his face, his eyes, love was there, right there…oh God my heart…my heart, and I sat up straight and water splashed and I gripped the sides of the tub and it broke free then, this deep sound and I had to put my two hands over my mouth, then I reached over to where Naomi had folded a pink towel on the closed seat of the stool and I grabbed that towel and shoved it over my mouth and I cried into this, if you could call it crying cause it was something so deep and strange and it came from the center of me…this sound.

  The water was cold, cold by the time I found a way to rise. Naomi had knocked so many times, but I told her I’m fine, fine, fine, fine. Over and over again it was all I could get out but I was letting her know I hadn’t killed myself or something.

  When I did come out, tugging the tie on the pink robe that was hers but left in there for me, it was quiet in the house. I saw it then, the pink birthday cake sitting on the kitchen table and the special plates and Kool-aid in a pitcher, red of course cause there wasn’t another flavor worthy of swallowing.

  She was sitting in the living room. “It’s my birthday,” I said to her. She had been reading the bible, but she put that down now, and her glasses atop.

  “Happy Birthday. You are sixteen years old today.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You have not eaten for nearly three days. Sister Debra had to leave. She tried to wait but….”

  “I…didn’t know.”

  “I told you through the door.”

  “Yeah…I didn’t understand.”

  “Let’s go have cake and celebrate your life,” she said rising up.

  So we sat around the table and she prayed. She thanked God for me and asked Him to give me the strength to carry on so this old world would be blessed by me and my gifts.

  Then she lit the candles on that cake and she sang “Happy Birthday,” to me. And I said thanks and she cut me a wedge of that cake, cherry like I liked. She set it before me and I did not have the will to eat it, didn’t think my body could take it, I felt so sad. But I did take a bite and it sat in my mouth on my tongue and I closed my eyes and thought of Danny…a hundred pictures of him at once…kissing me so many times…his mouth so sweet…the way he said my name…the feel of his face his jaw his neck.

  I nearly spit it out, but I swallowed it down and opened my eyes and she was looking at me.

  “Well?” she said.

  “It’s…good,” I said and I coughed a little and my eyes watered some more. And I picked up the crisp birthday napkin and wiped my face.

  Then she gave me a card and it was from her and the ladies. Sixteen dollars. “One for each year,” she said.

  “It’s too much,” I said.

  But she shook her head.

  She beamed some, like I was on the road to recovery and I knew then, how it was Mama looked at me all those times when I made her a cheese sandwich or a bowl of soup, the hopeful way I stood there or when I brushed her hair and got her to put on clean clothes and I thought we were getting somewhere but she just looked at me…and I knew what she knew now…she wasn’t getting better. Not ever.

  And I chose against that, against a quiet path of suicide, a secret path, a power gone wrong. I would live and maybe he’d come back to me.

  I told him I’d been strong in my life. That’s who I was already. A girl who had been strong but felt weak. For now…I’d work on eating something. And maybe getting dressed. That would be enough for one day.

  A week later Naomi asked me, for the tenth time I’ll admit, to paint the Temple, the sanctuary, that big, dirty white room, that cavern of worship and humanity.

  I didn’t know. Did she not understand how hard it was to tie my own shoes right now? It felt like my eyebrows were made out of cement or something. And my arms? Like lift them and move them around? Kill me now.

  She said I needed to think of others. That was the cure for everything, she said. So with my knotted hair hidden under my bandana and clothes fit for the rag bin, she loaded the painting equipment in the car…and she loaded me and to Snyder Town we did go.

  Well, I had that bargain with God about Danny. It had included painting the Temple. Danny needed God’s protection more than ever. Dickens gave me a note, him scratching on my window like Danny did…not so long ago, only at the other house, the one I’d been thrown out of by my own father. The note said Danny would leave in two weeks for California, the day before school started. He had to be at the airport in Memphis and there was the time of his flight.

  So that very day he planned to enlist he got his draft notice. It was like he had known, Danny had. He had known the very day. I realized the pull in him was deeper than I imagined. He was right about his fate. He knew it was coming and it did. He even knew when.

  The way I’d been raised, at Temple, hearing Naomi, knowing what that pulpit meant to her, how serious she took it…I believed in folks knowing things. Danny had a word about himself. He was burdened with
it. I had fought him on it, but it was so strong in him he knew it was his path. And I respected that. The ladies at Temple would have respected that. A word of knowledge was a big deal.

  I realized he hadn’t pushed me away because he didn’t care, much as it felt that way to me if I looked at it all through the haze of my poor-me. He pushed me away because it made sense to him no matter how he felt. I was drowning in feelings and he was trying to ignore his and do the right thing…as he saw it. If it were possible to love him anymore…I did. The kind of love I had for him grew a big shoot off to the side. It was a selfless love, the kind I’d heard Naomi preach about. I just plain loved him even if he wouldn’t allow himself to return it in the way I craved.

  For now, I wouldn’t shove it down like I’d done when he rejected me before. I’d let it be there. I would let it be true. My truth. I would love him still. I would love him as much as I ever had in a way that made sense to me. And that meant I had a deal with God for Danny’s safety. And I needed to stop feeling sorry for myself—Mama—and throw Lonnie in there too—and I needed to start to keep my side of the bargain.

  I’d like to say this gave me some new energy. But it didn’t. I still felt like dying. Difference was…I refused to.

  California was on the other side of the world. No, that was Vietnam, but California was as far away as he could get without falling straight into the ocean.

  I understood Mama more now. Saw how the black hole opened and said, “Come on in.”

  So we were different cause I wasn’t going.

  So Naomi dropped me off at Temple while she visited at the hospital in Corning and her flock all around Snyder Town.

  I knew the ropes. We were looked out for here, and I got a pass pretty much for I was known as Naomi’s girl, and she was the recipient of much good will in this part of town. So I got by on that mostly. I was going to paint and Sister Lavinia was going to send my lunch. She also wanted to send Derrick to help me as he was pretty much hanging around the house all summer since graduating and waiting for his scholarship to kick in. He was driving her crazy, she said, but I didn’t believe it because she spoiled him to death. But I said, can he paint? Cause he planned to be a doctor and his usual response to doing physical labor of any kind was, “With these hands?” like he needed to keep them on ice for when he became the great healer.