by Tayari Jones
“I didn’t mean it like that,” I said. “I just want you to be more . . .” The word that came to mind was black. My mother’s crying sadness reminded me of white women in movies, the kind who are liable to faint if something happens that they can’t handle. “I want to see you fight back. If there was ever a time to boil up some grits, it’s now.”
Mama bal ed her hands on her hips. “Let me tel you what you don’t understand. Al Green got out of that bathtub and Mary almost kil ed him with those grits. I heard he had to get skin from his back stitched onto his privates. Is that what you are tel ing me to do to your daddy, Chaurisse?”
“No,” I said. “I was just trying to say that you should —”
“Al Green’s privates aren’t even half of this story. While he was lying there naked, burnt up with blisters, she took a pistol out of her purse, pressed it to her chest, and blew it wide open. Mary died right on top of him.” My mother’s breasts heaved under her worn nightgown. “Don’t talk about what you don’t know about. It wasn’t the grits that made him get right with God. It was her blood.”
My mother heaved herself out of my bedroom, leaving me squinting in the lamplight. I lay in my bed for another hour imagining the four of us —
me, Daddy, Raleigh, and Mama — in our separate rooms staring at our own separate ceilings. I didn’t sleep again that night. At a quarter to six, I found my mother sitting at the kitchen table peeling a mountain of potatoes. Some had turned brown with the air, but the one in her hand was white and wet.
“Did you sleep, Mama?”
“No,” she said. “I thought I would make a potato soup. I would make a lot, so we could freeze it.”
“Mama,” I said. “Go lay down.”
“I don’t want to sleep in my bed.”
“Go sleep in my room.”
“You put me out,” she said, looking up from the potato. She had cut the peel so thick that there was hardly any vegetable left.
“No, Mama,” I said. “I’l lie down with you.”
We went back to my bedroom. I held the covers back and fol owed behind her. This time, I was the one who curved my body around hers.
Mama said. “Let me finish tel ing you about Mary. She left a note. They found it when they came for her body. It said, ‘ The more I’m trusting you, the more you’re letting me down. ’”
I KNEW BY THEN that I would never have my mother back, not in the way I had known her al my life. When you have seen your mother shattered, there’s no putting her back together. There wil always be seams, chipped edges, and clumps of dried glue. Even if you could get her to where she looks the same, she wil never be stronger than a cracked plate. I climbed in bed beside her and closed my eyes, but I never relaxed enough to forget who I was and what had happened to us. At seven thirty, the old ladies showed up, ready for their clips and dips. It was a miracle that she hadn’t missed a single appointment up until then. My father may have taken a wrecking bal to our lives, but not a single nap in southwest Atlanta went unstraightened. This is why I let my mother pretend to sleep as I eased myself out of bed and down the back steps to open up the shop. I let the old ladies in, explaining that my mother was feeling poorly this morning. I opened her heavy appointment book, rescheduled the clients, and then cal ed the other ladies on the page. I blamed it on a virus and everyone clucked that it was going around. Then I cal ed my high school, pretended to be my mother, and explained that I was the one feeling poorly. I blamed it on the same virus and no one seemed to care. Then I phoned Witherspoon Sedans and explained to the answering machine that I hated my father and I never wanted to see him again.
Daddy and Uncle Raleigh were just guys, like Jamal and Marcus, loyal only to each other. I thought the whole point of growing up was that you got to be somebody’s wife, that you weren’t caught up in some man’s crazy games. And here I was, this only child, told al my life that I was a miracle. I may have been my mother’s miracle, but I was my father’s other daughter. His not-silver girl. My mother wasn’t the only person in this house who had been cheated on.
I DON’T KNOW how much my mother slept, but she got out of bed when she heard the mailman putter by in his little jeep. The RSVPs for the anniversary soiree had been arriving daily. Despite everything, she used an ivory letter opener to open the little envelopes, like she was shucking oysters looking for pearls. Then she stacked the reply cards in two stacks on her dresser. One for yes and one for no. Two days earlier, I had asked her what she planned to do about the soiree and she said it was my father’s problem, not hers.
In the kitchen, the starchy scent of the peeled potatoes was suddenly stifling. It’s strange how a smel that has been there al along can suddenly slam you, like a memory. Waiting for my mother to handle her odd business at the mailbox, I remembered myself at the science fair, wearing a rabbit-fur jacket. I remember the other girl in an identical coat, a silver girl, with dark skin and hair hanging to the middle of her back. I’d seen her in front of the Civic Center and again when I stopped by the ladies’ room. I remembered the smel of the blue toilet water. It was Dana. Of course it was. I remember thinking, “This girl wants to hurt me.” How old had I been? Thirteen? Something like that. I ran out of the bathroom like I was running for my life. The roots of my hair tingled. My bladder had been so ful that I unhooked the button on my waistband. When I final y made it home, the pee had leaked a little bit and I washed my panties out in the sink, so Mama wouldn’t know. Dana. How long had she been nibbling at the edges of my life? When I saw Raleigh and Gwen in the park that day, was it real y a coincidence? I put my face into the cradle of my arms and inhaled my own scent, which was Dana’s smel , too. I couldn’t escape the odor of her because she smel ed just like me and just like my mother and my father and this house. Anaïs Anaïs, White Shoulders, menthol cigarettes. This is what made up the air of our lives, and theirs, too.
My mother final y returned from the mailbox. “Anything good in the mail? Anything besides RSVPs? We are going to have to decide how to handle the party thing, you know. It’s only three weeks away.” She didn’t say anything, and I worried that I shouldn’t have mentioned the party and her strange obsession with who planned to come to a soiree that was never going to happen. She fanned herself with a postcard. “What?” I said, trying to read her face, to figure out if what she had in her hand was good news or bad. I reached for the card the way you might try and take a sharp object away from a baby, but she jerked her hand back.
“You wil not believe this. You wil not fucking believe this.” She smacked the postcard on the table like it was the high joker. The edge of cardboard got wet with potato juice.
I picked up the dry corner and held the card to my face. The front of the card featured a photo of a giant smiling peanut that resembled Jimmy Carter. “Howdy!” I frowned and flipped it over. The message on the back was written in block letters that I imagine you would find on a ransom note
— anonymous and menacing at the same time.
BIGAMY IS A CLASS C FELONY. IN JAIL YOU WILL NOT BE A
ENTREPRENEUR. YOU WILL BE JUST ANOTHER NIGGER.
“Wow,” I said, running my fingers over the card. The words were written so hard that you could feel the imprint of the words across President Peanut’s front teeth. “Is this good or bad?”
My mother looked at me like I was the one who had gone crazy. “Bunny Chaurisse Witherspoon, whose side are you on? That bitch is trying to destroy our family. You see she addressed the card to James and sent it over here, to this house.” My mother nodded her head with something that looked like satisfaction. “If she’s sending mail over here, it’s because he ain’t sleeping over there. ”
I swear to God that she smiled for the first time in two weeks. “But Mama —”
“Listen to me. That bitch is just jealous, and she wil not be satisfied until she has destroyed everything I have worked for. This is serious now.”
“Mama, it was serious the whole time.”
“Don’t use
that tone of voice with me. I am stil your mother.” I regret not turning my eyes away, because she looked in my face and saw that this wasn’t true in the same way that it had been two weeks ago.
“Mama,” I said, “what Daddy did is against the law.”
“Statutory rape is against the law,” my mother said, and softened her tone at my kicked-dog yelp. “Baby, I am not saying this to be hurtful. I am just saying that I could have cal ed the police on Jamal Dixon. You were what, fourteen? But I knew that wasn’t the best way to handle it. Yes, men do things that are il egal, but cal ing the law is not the way to handle private, family business. It’s entrapment, anyway. And she knows it. You know she forced him to marry her. And now she wants to press charges. Crazy heifer.”
“Mama!” I said, no longer using that careful voice you use when talking to babies and alcoholics. “Gwen might not be the only crazy person in the equation. Daddy was with her for almost twenty years. Dana is their kid. Don’t you think he should, I don’t know, suffer?” It wasn’t the right word, it sounded too biblical, but it was al I could come up with.
“I’m the one that’s suffering, Chaurisse.” She walked across the linoleum of the kitchen and dragged the trash can to the corner of the table. Using her forearms, she raked the potatoes into the trash, soiling the sleeves of her sweatshirt. “You and me, we are the only ones that didn’t do anything wrong. We were just living our lives, thinking we were normal people. We are the only people who deserve a say in this.”
“What do you want to happen?”
She tied off the trash liner with a twist tie and sat down in my father’s chair. “I want our life back like it was.”
“Mama,” I said. “You can’t put the rain back in the sky.”
She drew her hand back as if to slap me. I turned my good shoulder to catch the blow, but it never came. My mother took her hand down and held it in front of her face like a mirror. “No, no, no,” she said talking to her hand like it was a smal child in need of a little discipline. “I am not going to let that whore make a barbarian of me. She is not going to take my dignity. I am a wife. I wil act like a wife.”
“Mama, sit down. Do you want your Tylenol PM?”
My mother paced around the kitchen, stil holding her right hand by the wrist like she didn’t trust it to be free. “No,” she said. “You asked me what I want and I told you.”
“I want to move to Massachusetts,” I said.
My mother looked puzzled and I can’t blame her. The impulse came from out of nowhere, but what I wanted more than anything was to be far away from both my parents. “I want a divorce,” I said.
It was too much for me. I should have been preparing for graduation, looking for a white dress to wear under my robe. I told my mother that I wasn’t going to march for commencement and she said, “It doesn’t matter, as long as you get your paper.” We were in deep water, my mother and me. Mama needed help — probably professional help but at least the help of somebody who knew her better than I did. If there was someone else I could have cal ed, I would have. Women on television have friends they can count on. My mother’s favorite TV show was The Golden Girls, about these four old ladies that live together in an apartment, solving each other’s problems, being each other’s bridge over troubled water. With Grandma Bunny a year in the ground, my mama didn’t have anybody but me.
25
QUIZ SHOW
MISS BUNNY’S BROOCH sat in my mostly empty jewelry box. It was an old-fashioned case, one of the things my mother bought me when she started wishing for her own lost childhood. A tinny version of Für Elise plinked out when I lifted the lid. I held the brooch in my hand, proof that my father was somehow living two lives at once. Everyone had been in on this scam, even Grandma Bunny, closed up in her casket.
Is it safe to say that we al went a little crazy in May of 1987? It was like our lives turned into a movie — not the blockbusters you have to go to the theater to see but the ones you catch on television in the middle of the night. Once our lives began to seem made for TV, we al started acting like characters. Who could blame us? There were no real life models for our new reality.
For my part, I acted the role of girl detective. I handled the postcard only by its edges, so I wouldn’t get my fingerprints on it. I tricked my mother into taking a double dose of Tylenol PM, so she wouldn’t stir as I eased her keys from a hook and took the car out in the middle of the day.
Nervously scanning the lanes behind me in the rearview mirror, I made my way to the airport.
Uncle Raleigh was sitting in the blue Lincoln, reading a photography magazine when I tapped on the window. He smiled to see me and I could see how old he had gotten in just a few weeks.
“Chaurisse,” he said, unlocking the door, “come and sit with me.”
I opened the door, and sat on the familiar seat. “Hey, Uncle Raleigh.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” he asked.
I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I’l graduate, regardless.”
“You want me to turn on the air conditioner?”
Overhead I could hear the high-pitched noise of airplanes cutting through the sky. Just under it, there was the smooth crooning of Al Green, talking about he was tired of being alone.
“Daddy couldn’t have done it without you,” I said.
“I figured you would get around to that,” Raleigh said.
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“You didn’t ask me a question. What is it that you want to know?”
I was stumped. What did I want to know? I was already aware of more than I wanted to be.
“Daddy is real y married to that lady?”
Raleigh nodded. “He did stand up in front of a judge.”
“And you were there?”
Raleigh nodded.
“You signed the paper. I saw your name.”
“This I did do.”
“Why did you help him?”
My uncle shifted in his seat so I could see his face. “I cal ed myself helping Gwen.” Raleigh’s face burned red when he talked, like he was on fire.
He said, “You can’t know Gwen until you see her in a photo. In person, al that pretty is a parlor trick, a distraction, real y. But when I get her in a photograph, you can see her entire life just in the way she holds her jaw. Even if the rol isn’t finished, I develop it right then. I don’t care.”
“What about us?” I asked him. “You take our picture al the time.”
“With you, Chaurisse, what you see is what you get. When you were a little girl, you were just that, a little girl. Even Laverne, for what she has been through, she is exactly who she is, al the time. It’s good. That’s where your beauty comes from.”
I knew he was trying to compliment me, but it felt like an insult. The way people tel a fat girl that she has “a pretty face.” I reached for the door to let myself out, but Raleigh asked me to wait.
“Gwen didn’t do any of this on purpose. You have to take my word on it. I’m tel ing you because I don’t want you to think that your daddy would do this for some two-dol ar whore, because that’s not what Gwen is. In her way, she’s a lady.”
I made a pil ow of my hands and leaned on the dashboard. Every day this situation got crazier and crazier. “What is wrong with you people?” I asked. “Daddy got kids with this lady, you’re talking like you’re in love with her. What is it about them? Me and mama can be complicated. We can be interesting.”
“It’s not a competition,” Raleigh said.
“That’s easy for you to say.”
Uncle Raleigh reminded me a lot of Jamal, the way those nice guys break your heart but manage to make you feel like they’re the ones who have been done wrong. I got out of the car, walked around and stuck my face into the crack where Uncle Raleigh had his window open.
“One more question,” I said. “What’s their apartment number?”
CONTINENTAL COLONY WAS set up to look like something from Europe, maybe a ski
lodge or something — cream-colored buildings with black shutters. The town homes were shaped sort of like stop signs on the top. Their building, 2412, was in the middle of a row of identical houses. I stopped in front, checked my purse to make sure that I stil had the postcard. The edges were buckled from potato juice. I checked my look in the rearview. Mama was in no condition to tighten up my augmentation, so I’d made a headband from a purple scarf to hide the rough edges. I licked my fingers, pushed back a few kinky strands and opened the car door.
The pathway to their home was warped by grass pushing through the concrete. I took some pleasure from this. Our yard was neat and orderly.
The azaleas were in bloom and Daddy had recently painted our mailbox with a fresh coat of white. I stood before the door with my hand on the knocker, trying to decide what I was going to say. I wanted to know why Dana had elbowed her way into our lives. Did she want to know me, or did she want to hurt me? Was it al done under her mother’s orders? What did they want from us? I had no idea how I could extract this information. If there was anything the last few weeks had taught me, it was that people only told you what they wanted you to know. Asking a straight question didn’t necessarily get you a straight answer.
I’d taken my hand down from the knocker and turned toward the car, when the door swept open. Standing there was Gwendolyn wearing a white nurse’s uniform. “Yes?” She looked like Dana’s Ghost of Christmas Future. She wasn’t al glammed up the way she had been when she invaded the Pink Fox. Her pretty hair was bound behind her head and her face was creased around her mouth. “Are you looking for me?”
“I’m looking for Dana,” I said.
Gwen smiled. “Dana is at school. And, if I may be so bold, what are you doing here in the middle of the day? Don’t they have truant officers anymore?”
Her manner was hard to read. It was as though she was amused, like I was a little kid who had done something grown, like order lobster at a restaurant.
“I’m taking care of my mother,” I said.
“Don’t you think your mother has enough people to take care of her?” She kept that tickled-adult tone and invited me in.
