by Tayari Jones
19
UP A NOTCH
AFTER RUTH NICOLE ELIZABETH’S Sweet Sixteen, my father and Raleigh became obsessed with the idea of a party for my mama. Speaking across the radio waves, Lincoln to Lincoln, they used words like soiree and salon. On Saturday morning they got themselves al gussied up in their three-piece suits and headed to the Hilton to find out how much it would cost to rent the Magnolia Room for the evening of June 17. After they’d gone my mother asked me, “Where are those two headed looking like a couple of undertakers?” They told the events manager at the Hilton that they wanted whatever Harold Grant had ordered for his daughter, only “up a notch,” which translated into premium catering — miniature crab cakes, a roast-beef station, and four hours of open bar. Waiting at the airport for fares, my father flipped through bridal magazines, pul ing out pages that he liked, tucking them into the inside pocket of his uniform coat.
The invitation, they decided, would say “semi-formal.” Yes, “after-five attire” sounded classier, but they didn’t want anyone to be confused. “And,”
Daddy said, “irregardless of what we tel other people to wear, me and Raleigh are going to have on tuxedos with morning coats.”
I flipped through the sheaf of pictures he had cul ed from Modern Bride. The dresses were al part princess, part Renaissance hooker — deep necklines, pinched waists, and very dramatic skirts flaring over stiff crinolines.
I went through the stack twice, searching for something that looked like a dress somebody’s mother could wear. I didn’t even comment on the stock photo of Lady Diana Spencer. “You have to let her pick her own dress.”
“You’re right,” Daddy said. “She’s going to need to try it on, or what have you. We’l show her these photos as a suggestion, just to let her know the sky is the limit.”
DANA CAME TWO Wednesdays after Ruth Nicole Elizabeth’s party, ready at last for her wash-and-set. I lowered her into the shampoo bowl, careful to cushion her neck with a folded-over towel. This close, I could smel her perfume. Today she smel ed like my mother, White Shoulders.
“Your father and your uncle are throwing a birthday party for the Pink Fox?” she said.
“No,” I said. “For my mother. The anniversary is just the occasion.”
“Why?”
“For al the hard work she does.”
Dana sat up from the shampoo bowl and watched my mother as she eased ammonia onto a customer’s roots.
“My mother works hard,” Dana said, “but she never had a party or anything close to it. Do you know that?”
“Lean back if you want this shampoo,” I said, smothering the urge to defend my father’s crazy idea. “And keep your voice down; it’s sort of a surprise.” She leaned back and I turned the water on and squeezed the sprayer. “How does that feel?”
“Good,” she said, but the cords of her neck were stil stretched tight.
“Relax,” I said. “I know what I’m doing.”
I squirted shampoo into my palm and rubbed it into her thick hair, using my nails on her scalp until she moaned.
“Feel good?”
Relaxers are good for business, there’s no doubt about that. Back when everybody got a press-and-curl, they would come to the shop only when they had money. Everybody had a hot comb tucked in the kitchen drawer, and in a pinch you could iron out your own naps. But the relaxer needed to be done by a professional to get the hair bone-straight without processing it right off your scalp. Even my mama was unable to handle the back of her own head. I worked it in for her, forcing the crinkles flat with my gloved fingers. Stil , we both missed the days of the press-and-curl, just for the transformation factor. Used to be when you washed a woman’s hair, it went back to its natural state, the way it was even before she was born. She sat up in your chair with plaits in her head, showing you the way she was when she was smal and used to sit between her mother’s knees. There was magic in taking them from where they were, to where they wanted to be. It was a miracle every time.
Now, you get them under the hose and the hair gets nothing but wet, and you have to content yourself with just a glimpse of the roots. You just reach your hands down under the processed stuff like a blind man trying to figure out if he’s in love or not. Dana’s roots under the pads of my fingers were kinky, strong like ground wire.
“I’m getting wet,” she said.
I whispered. “When we have this party, you’re invited.”
Dana shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“What if you could bring your friend Ronalda? The invitation says you can bring a guest.”
She sighed. “You know I can’t hardly get out of the house.”
“Wel , bring your mother.” Dana’s head jerked in my hands, so I made the water cooler. “Is that better?”
“Chaurisse,” she said with a shaky voice. “I just can’t come, okay?”
“Why?”
“For one thing, Ronalda wil be gone by then.”
“Gone where?” I helped Dana sit up and wrapped a clean towel around her cold, wet head.
“Gone back to Indiana,” she said, and told everyone in the shop what had happened. Ronalda, it seemed, had taken Nkrumah on a quick errand and the little boy was hit by a car. Not bad enough for him to spend the night in the hospital, but bad enough for the kid to scream and hol er so bad that you would have thought he was dying. Somebody cal ed the police, and one thing led to another. Ronalda’s father and her stepmother were having the biggest, most complicated fight ever. And the little boy wasn’t even hurt. That’s the thing Dana couldn’t get over. But her stepmother was completely hysterical.
“Fairburn Townhouses can be a little shady,” Dana admitted, “but only at night. And that’s where Ronalda’s boyfriend was staying, so that’s where she had to go. You can’t explain that to Ronalda’s parents because they are real y bourgie people, you know what I mean?”
My mother said she knew.
What was Ronalda supposed to do? Leave Nkrumah by himself in the house? So, Ronalda didn’t have any choice but to carry him with her. “They used her like a maid, you know what I’m saying? You never saw her without that little boy on her hip.”
Ronalda loved this boyfriend and was having some problems and she couldn’t just ignore him. “He was in need!”
According to Dana, the parents claimed that they didn’t like the boyfriend because he was twenty-four and in the army, saying that he was too old to be going out with a high-school girl, but the truth was that he didn’t have enough education for them. And besides, the boyfriend was having serious, serious trouble and he needed a friend and fifty dol ars. Nobody could accuse Ronalda of being fair-weather.
She went to Fairburn Townhouses to deliver the money — which she earned from watching that bad little boy and everything went fine until Ronalda went inside to say good-bye to her boyfriend’s mother. While Ronalda was just trying to be polite, the little boy ran out into the parking lot and got hit by a car. Tapped by the car, real y. But stil . Police were there in five seconds. Asking Ronalda if Nkrumah was her child.
Her stepmother got there and started freaking out because Nkrumah had this tiny cut on his eyebrow. You would have thought he had been shot or something.
“You can understand that,” my mama said.
Yes, Dana could understand her being upset, but there was no cause for her to act out how she did. Being talked to like that was worse than being spit on. And now Ronalda had to go back to Indiana.
My mama said, “That’s a shame, for everybody. I’l pray for al of them.”
“No,” Dana said. “Pray for Ronalda. She’s the one who needs it most.”
My mother looked up from her work. “I got prayers enough for everybody.”
Dana picked up the edge of her cape and dabbed at her nose. “I am going to miss her so much. And it’s not her fault. She can’t help who her mother is.”
My mother put four or five clips in the Jheri curl and joined me at chair no. 2 and took over
the blow-drying. She murmured to Dana the way you would talk to a crying baby that needs help fal ing asleep. As my mother brushed her hair forward, Dana closed her eyes before it covered her face like a shroud.
I finished Dana’s hair wel before the five-thirty rush, but she stayed on, talking to my mother. Her mood had mysteriously brightened as she asked questions like she was a friendly reporter. What did my mother like to eat? Did she think it made so much of a difference where a person went to go to col ege? Could she give her some advice? My mother opened like a flower, laughing at Dana’s jokes and swatting away her compliments. Only one question seemed to hit the wrong note. “Mrs. Witherspoon, would you say you’re a happy person?”
Mama set the curling iron on a wet towel, frowning as it sizzled. She licked her finger and touched it to the hot metal, stil frowning. “I don’t know,”
she said.
“And whose fault do you think it is? Who do you blame?”
Mama looked a little dizzy. To her customer, she said, “Kids these days. They are more sophisticated than we were.”
The customer said, “Nobody is truly happy.”
“But could you be?” Dana said with her eyes on Mama.
“I’m happy,” I offered.
“I’m not,” said Dana. “I think I’m lonely.”
“Oh, honey,” Mama said, and invited her to stay for dinner.
We both looked a little melancholy when Dana said, “Thank you, but I have to go.”
She also refused a ride, so I walked her down Lynhurst to the bus stop.
“Do you get lonely?” she said.
“Sometimes,” I said.
“It’s because you’re special. It’s hard for people to understand you.”
I shrugged because I was as ordinary as scrambled eggs, but I appreciated the compliment. “Is being special how come you’re lonely?”
“No,” she said. “I’m lonely for al the regular reasons.”
We got to the bus stop, which was marked by a concrete pole lumpy with several layers of white paint. “You don’t have to wait with me,” she said.
“I don’t mind. Make sure you tie your hair up at night. Sleeping directly on the pil owcase gives you split ends.”
She said she would try to remember. “What’s the real reason your dad is giving your mom this party?”
Her face was kind, but I felt a chil of fear work its way from my hands up to my elbow. “I guess because he loves her.”
Maybe my face showed her something that I didn’t mean to display, because she reached out and touched me on the arm. “Everybody loves you the most, al your life, and you probably don’t even know it.”
I gave a tense laugh. “I need more than just my parents to love me.”
She whispered, “I love you. Can’t you tel ?”
I didn’t say anything at first. It was as though I was suddenly struck with my father’s stammer, but the words were jammed up in my head, not in my throat. Sometimes I wondered if Dana actual y liked me. She could be sarcastic and even a little mean. Could there be other people out there loving me who had just never mentioned it to me? I thought of Jamal, five hundred miles away in Hampton, Virginia. Did he love me as he studied for his exams, as he pledged his fraternity, as he chased doctors’ daughters, taking them out to dinner, asking them to meet his parents? With the exception of my kindergarten teacher, no one outside of my family had ever claimed to love me. It was jarring, dumbfounding, and very exciting.
“See?” she said. “You couldn’t even tel .” She shook her head like she couldn’t believe how blind I was. She twisted away at the sound of the approaching bus. “Don’t you feel like we’ve been friends a long time?”
“Yes,” I said, stil reeling with al this talk of love, spinning with the possibility of secretly having been adored al my life.
As she boarded the bus, she looked over her shoulder sadly. “You didn’t say it back.”
“Say what?” I said as the doors closed. She made her way to a window seat, but she didn’t look my way even though I stood on the corner waving like a child.
• • •
THERE WAS NO dissuading my father when he got his mind wrapped around a Big Idea. When he wanted to start Witherspoon Sedans, nobody thought it was a good plan except Raleigh. Miss Bunny, God bless the dead, wanted him to get a job driving for white people. Even my mama was iffy about the plan. She thought that maybe he should go into the army, use the GI Bil to go to col ege and veteran’s benefits to buy a house in Macon. He says he knew in his gut that he and Raleigh were meant to be their own bosses, and now he knew in his gut that my mother desperately wanted a formal party. “I know what I know, Buttercup.”
“But I’m with her al the time,” I said, as we left the stationery store. “When there is a big party coming up, she says, ‘That don’t make no kinda sense.’ And she gets migraines during debutante season.”
My father raised his eyebrows. “Is that so?”
“It’s so,” I said.
“You ever hear of sour grapes?” Daddy said.
He opened the glove compartment and fished out a monogrammed handkerchief. “You’ve got something on your chin.”
I touched the cloth to my face. “She’s not jealous.”
“You got to learn how to listen sideways to what people are saying to get at what they real y mean.” He pul ed up in front of the shop. “Don’t fight me on this. We’l do something for you one day, too.”
“I’m not having sour grapes, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
Daddy lowered his window with a smooth electric motion. “I’m serious. You’l get your party, too.” He touched the brim of his hat, and I felt myself smile as the car eased down the driveway.
THEY DECIDED TO spring the news on her on a Monday afternoon as she was sitting on the couch having a Fuzzy Navel and watching her stories.
I’d just come home from school when I heard my name in a stage whisper. I turned to find my dad and Raleigh hiding in the doorway of the guest room.
“She’s in there watching soaps,” Raleigh said. “She doesn’t suspect a thing.”
“I don’t know,” I said, which is the same thing I had been saying to them for the past three weeks. “At least clear the date with her,” I had begged as they plunked down deposits with the caterers, florists, and stationers.
“It’s a surprise, Chaurisse,” they said.
“She doesn’t like surprises.”
“She wouldn’t want a surprise party, but she won’t mind being surprised with a party. Trust us. We’ve been knowing your mother a long time.”
The idea was that I was to walk into the family room carrying the roses Raleigh handed to me, wrapped in a paper cone. Daddy would put on music, Stevie Wonder singing “I Just Cal ed to Say I Love You.” No, they assured me, it wasn’t corny. “It’s s-s-sincere.” Daddy wanted me to walk on the beat “like a bridesmaid.” Once I had presented the flowers, Daddy would hand me the invitation, I would hand it to Mama, and Raleigh would snap a couple thousand photos.
“You g-g-got it?” Daddy asked me.
I rol ed my eyes. “I guess. But mark my words, she is not going to like this.”
Raleigh said, “She’s going to love it.”
Daddy said, “Can you change into a dress?”
I did change into a dress, a red and white polka-dot number I had bought with my own money at Lerner Shops. I even slipped on some patent-leather sling backs, but I didn’t bother with panty hose. You had to draw the line somewhere. I looked in the mirror and painted on some lipstick. I looked a little longer and rubbed some foundation on my cheeks to cover up the acne scars. I couldn’t get Dana out of my head, her knowing looks. I was uneasy with the way she talked to my mother. It was a little woman-to-woman, a little daughter-to-mother, a bit student-to-teacher, and maybe even a splash of vice versa. It was like my mother was a newspaper that everyone could read except for me.
Under my feet, the family room carpet crackled.
Sil y as it seemed, I tried to walk in time with the music.
My mother was curled up on the couch in baggy clothes. She cal ed these outfits her “prison sweats” to distinguish them from the embel ished running suits she liked to wear to the mal . Mondays, in her book, were “grooming optional,” and on this day she had opted to tie her head up in a greasy satin scarf. At her right side, beside the remote control, was a bowl of M&Ms, because diets were suspended on Mondays as wel .
I once heard my father joke to a young man we were driving from the airport. He looked sort of nerdy, clutching a skimpy bouquet of Gerber daises to give to his fiancée. The young man told us that he was meeting his future in-laws for the first time.
“Smart move,” my dad joked with him. “You never want to marry a girl before you see the mama. You need to know what you’re getting.” My dad laughed and the young man in the backseat stared into the flowers, worried about what sort of magic mirror he was about to look into. I took in my mother sprawled exhausted on the couch and I wondered if this was what I was going to grow up to be. If that nervous young man in the back of the limo were to see my mother standing on the front porch waving him in, what would he think?
I goose-stepped toward her with the bouquet of roses and she looked alarmed. I glanced over my shoulder back at Daddy and Raleigh. Here we were trying to do something nice, and we scared her.
“Chaurisse,” Mama said, “what you got there? Somebody sent you some flowers?”
I looked again at my dad, as we hadn’t real y prepared ourselves for dialogue. Raleigh waved his hand, so I forgot the medium tempo of the song and hustled toward her with the roses outstretched.
“They’re for you.”
The rest went almost as choreographed, although I forgot and set the flowers on the coffee table next to the remote, when I was supposed to hand them to her. Daddy looked a little bothered, but he handed me the envelope with the invitation and I forked it over. Mama opened the outer envelope and giggled upon finding the smal er one tucked inside.
“What is this?” she said, grinning as Raleigh snapped her photo.
When she made it to the tiny square of tissue paper that was packaged with the invitation she said, “Ooh, expensive,” and not in the snide voice she used when opening the invitations that clients gave her, but with real appreciation. Then she read it and let out a little yelp.
