She still didn’t answer. She’d been come onto less in the past year than she had even when she was round with Sage in her womb. She thought it had something to do with twisting her hair into locks that the unenlightened still associated with MOVE or Jamaican Rastahs. No matter, her locks certainly weeded out the bullshitting men.
His voice was muffled and low pushing through the face rest and that took some of the charge out of his words and made them easier for her to ignore. Anyhow, she had a firm do-not-date policy when it came to these backs. And now this one’s time was up. She did one more sweep of his back in wide circles. Worked the pressure points in his scalp for thirty seconds. Whispered that he could take his time putting his shirt on as she snuffed the vanilla-scented candle. She left the light on dim, then closed the door on the room off of the kitchen and went to wash her hands and come out of her jacket and give Posie hell for barging in on her like that.
Posie was squeezed up with Sage in Kitt’s newly reupholstered wing chair that sat at a slant at the living-room window. She rubbed her hand up and down Sage’s back. “Uh-oh, baby, your grandmama’s just in a little trouble.”
Kitt let go an exasperated sigh. “Mama, please, how can you be in trouble with me, I’m the daughter, you’re the mother, remember.”
“Oh, I just said that to joke with Sage, but you are upset with me. I mean, look in the mirror and see how your veins are popping.”
“You darn right I’m upset.” Kitt cut her off, snapped at the air in a hushed tone, and then quietly spit her words back at Posie. “How many times have I told you that you can’t just come and barge in here on me when I’m working. I mean it takes time to set a mood, this was his first time and I depend on repeaters, furthermore I don’t even talk, and here you come ready to start blabbering all loud about a bunch of nothing probably having to do with your latest gigolo—”
She stopped herself. If not for the hurt look coming up on Posie’s face then surely for the way Sage stared at her not even blinking.
Posie lifted one of Sage’s soft and thick wheat-colored braids, studied the braid so that she didn’t have to look at Kitt. “Mama’s sorry, darling,” she said to Sage’s hair. “I was so caught up in what I wanted to tell you, I completely forgot you were working. You know I wouldn’t hurt your livelihood for anything in the world.”
Sage reached up and put her arm around her grandmother’s neck and patted the back of her neck.
“Shit,” Kitt said under her breath. “Shit, damn, shit.” Not only did her mother make her feel as if she’d just tied her to a railroad track whenever she corrected some inappropriately immature thing she did, now her daughter was staring at her as if she’d just shot an arrow through Posie’s heart.
But right then Bruce reemerged into the living room, remnants of the vanilla scent still hanging to him, and she had to swallow what was left of her outburst, even as she watched Posie wriggling her hips and struggling to sit up on the edge of her seat, and pulling her stomach in so that her chest protruded just so.
Kitt turned her back on her mother. “I’ll look to hear from you should you like to schedule another appointment,” she said as she started leading him quickly toward the door to the enclosed porch, ignoring Posie who was clearing her throat in the most audible tones. But then she couldn’t ignore Posie when she yelled out, “Kitt, doll, aren’t you going to introduce us?” She sighed and stopped and rolled her eyes.
Bruce turned around and bowed slightly and smiled.
“Uh, Bruce, this is my mother, Posie, and my daughter, Sage,” Kitt said, trying not to let her agitation slip out in her tone.
“Police officer?” Posie asked as she stood and extended her hand.
“No, Mama. He works at the university.”
“Teach there?” Posie was all smiles, and even laughing between her words when she noticed his wedding-band finger was bare, had been bare, skin tone nice and even going up and down the entire finger.
“No, uh, I work in development; may I call you Posie?”
“Well, if you don’t I’m just going to hit you, I am.” She slapped his arm playfully. “I hope you enjoyed my daughter’s massage. She’s the best, I want you to know that.”
Kitt rolled her eyes in her head. Bad enough when she thought Posie was coming onto the man for herself, now she was realizing that this embarrassing scene was on her, Kitt’s, behalf.
“I agree, Posie,” Bruce said as he held on to Posie’s hand. “I already proposed, but she wouldn’t talk to me.”
“Now, Bruce.” Posie preened and let her eyelashes go into a flutter. “That’s only because she was working. Tell him, Kitt, you talk, can’t stop talking once you get going good on a subject you like, cooking for instance, now, Bruce, my daughter can sure ’nuff cook, can outcook me any day of the week, tell him, Kitt.”
Kitt didn’t answer.
“I mean even my grandbaby loves her mama’s cooking and my Sage is one picky eater, don’t you, baby?” Posie tickled Sage in the small of her back. “We’re just so proud of our darling, Sage.” She poked Sage, propelling her. “Show your mama how much you love her cooking.”
Sage ran to Kitt then and grabbed her around the waist and burrowed her head in her stomach, and as sometimes happened, Sage caught her mother off guard and Kitt lost her footing and they both would have landed on the floor except that Bruce was standing right there, arms opened like a wide receiver, so that Kitt ended up pressed against his heavily starched blue-and-white-striped shirt inhaling his unisex cologne with remnants of vanilla mixed in.
Posie stood back now, satisfied at the scene going on in the middle of Kitt’s living room. Kitt struggling to get her balance, Bruce pulling her off of her center so that she’d have to lean on him, Sage holding on to her mother, which amounted to pushing her even more against Bruce. Go ’head and push, Sage, Posie thought it so intensely that it was more a prayer than a thought. Because she reasoned that her daughter needed a man in her life so badly right now that Posie could taste the need herself and her own mouth would get dry and she’d roll her tongue around and get ready to find herself something soft and wet to quench her thirst until she remembered that she had a man, always someone coming and going in her world even at the age she was, that what she was feeling was just a sympathy dry mouth for her daughter’s needs. Just wasn’t natural to swear off men the way Kitt had done, probably why she was fixated on putting Verdi and Johnson back together, confusing her own nature with Verdi’s. And this one who Kitt was peeling herself from now, and apologizing to, and saying Sage is just sooo demonstrative sometimes, this one Posie could see had some nice arms under that blue-and-white-striped shirt, the best arms: strong, unmarried, holding-down-a-good-job kind of arms.
She was so filled with anticipatory excitement over this desirable potential of a mate for Kitt, she forgot all about what she’d wanted to tell her when she’d barged in on Kitt’s session. That Johnson had called. Asked that Kitt please call him first chance she got. She braced herself for the telling-off she was about to get as Kitt walked back in from the enclosed porch and Posie ran and grabbed Sage and fixed her eyes on Kitt to go wide and sad with a pleading to them. And Kitt just stood there and stared at her mother with that look that said that she couldn’t decide whether Posie was a blessing or a curse.
Kitt just shook her head and said, “Mama, you are just so pitiful.”
“I just can’t help myself, Kitt.” Posie rushed her words and made a steeple of hands and pressed them to her mouth and whispered, “Forgive your mama for being the way she is.”
Then Kitt looked at her watch, told Posie it was almost time for her breathing treatment. Then focused on Sage, tried to hold a stern face when she looked at her and said that before she took her grandmother’s side again she should remember who feeds her.
Sage barreled for her mother, arms outstretched, mouth wide open as if she were about to take flight. Undaunted. Many things were still a puzzle to her, especially why her thoughts me
lted into the bumps on her tongue no matter how hard she tried to make them stand up and march through her lips into words, but this one thing she knew for sure, the fiery glow around her mother when she set eyes her way, a warming blaze of colors that leaped and danced and chased off the cold, steely things like silvers and icy blues. She saw her mother’s love as a flame, felt it too as she pressed her head into the soft heat of Kitt’s stomach and closed her eyes tightly and allowed her mother’s glow to surround them both, all yellow and orange with a hint of brown and red. Posie joined in the hug and Kitt put her arm around her mother too, even as Posie’s hair that Kitt thought was way too long for a woman her age rubbed against her face, it was so soft against her face.
Kitt was the first to notice a change in Verdi that fall of ’71. Noticed it in the profound dearth of her contacts. Noticed that she and Posie had been eased out to the periphery. Knew that it was unlike Verdi to go for so long without calling and begging for Kitt to come visit her, or inviting herself over for a meal, or just calling and sighing into the phone, trusting that Kitt would be able to interpret the sighs and say something that would give her relief. But Verdi wasn’t calling and even when Kitt would call her and try to entice her over with mouthwatering descriptions of the pot of this or that she had working with Verdi’s name on it, Verdi declined, begging it off on all the booking she had to do. Kitt had even taken to sending covered plates down to Verdi’s dorm via Posie’s latest man. Felt as if the reasons for her dread over Verdi coming to school here were blooming to fruition, that Verdi would shut her out, defer to her charm-school upbringing, and begin to see Kitt as an embarrassment, a practical nurse with a basic high-school diploma in home economics who had never even been presented at a debutantes’ ball. She could have accepted the ouster from someplace far, had Verdi enrolled in a school in the south, but from right in the same city, almost down the street only two miles away, was too close, so close that just the thought was breaking Kitt’s heart.
“I wonder why we haven’t heard from Verdi Mae,” Kitt had been saying to Posie almost every day for the past month, unable to disguise the hurt in her voice. But in what Kitt considered a rare bout of wisdom coming from her mother, Posie had cautioned Kitt that once Verdi became entrenched in university life it might feel as if they were losing her for a while, that Verdi was in fact embarking on a lifestyle that they didn’t, couldn’t know. That they had to allow her space and time and not make her feel as if she had to choose campus or them, that Kitt and Verdi would always be close as sisters, but for right now Kitt had to let Verdi be.
And Kitt had let Verdi be. Never mailed the letter she penned telling Verdi to just forget they were blood if she insisted on ignoring her so; didn’t demand otherwise when Verdi’s floor mates kept Kitt holding on the phone for five, ten minutes at a time only to return saying that Verdi couldn’t come to the phone right now; refused to go down to that campus even, especially after the gathering in the high-rise dorm when she’d suffered through fifteen minutes of Verdi’s history professor eyeing her up and down with a discernible upper-crust disdain. Kitt had decided that socializing with her cousin would have to happen on her home court so that she could have the advantage of familiarity.
But now she discarded that resolution. Decided about seven one Friday evening that she could no longer stand the torture of waiting to hear from Verdi. That she’d have to examine her in the flesh herself and allow Verdi’s eyes to tell her what she thought the dearth of contact already had told her, that Verdi no longer wanted Kitt in her life. “Tomorrow morning,” Kitt told Posie, “I don’t care what you say, Mama, I’m getting on that D bus and going to check up on our girl.” But then she remembered that she didn’t have anything to wear, remembered how incongruous she’d felt at that gathering in the high-rise when she’d worn one of her pleated kilt skirts from high school, one of Posie’s low-cut ruffled blouses. Moaned as she piled her bed high with her closet’s offerings of doesn’t-matter-what-they-look-like clothes because she wore a uniform to work, the rest were clothes for wearing to church, an occasional sequined number for being dragged to a cabaret in when Posie got it in her mind every so often to help Kitt find a boyfriend.
Posie sauntered in and out of Kitt’s now disheveled bedroom every fifteen minutes or so offering her oversized pearls, or tight mohair sweaters, or rhinestone-studded belts. And after a string of “no,” “no thank you, mama,” “no way you’ve got to be crazy if you think I’m wearing that, Mama,” Kitt tried to explain to the confused look in Posie’s doe eyes that she needed something collegiate looking. “You know, kind of hippieish, but toned down.”
And then Posie sighed and said that if she really thought that it was that important, even though personally she thought that Kitt could show up in a burlap wrap and Verdi would still be thrilled to see her, but if it would make her feel not so sad about herself, she should just have to hop on the el and try to catch Lit Brothers before they closed. And Kitt said that she didn’t have that much money, that she had put most of her paycheck in the bank. And Posie left the room and came back then and pressed three twenties in her hand, told her to hurry so that she would make the store. And when Kitt asked if Posie’s boyfriend the limo driver could give her a fast ride up there, Posie lowered her head and flashed a smile that vacillated between embarrassed and naughty, said, “Mama got to keep him here with me, baby. You know, got to give him a proper thank-you for those twenties he was so generous and easy about giving up.”
“Mama,” Kitt dragged the word out, “why you put yourself in that position on my account?”
Posie fingered Kitt’s collar, moved her hand down to let it rest over Kitt’s heart. “I really do feel it here, baby. What I’m doing is not so bad long as I feel it here. Mama hopes one day you’ll understand what I’m saying, then maybe you won’t think so poorly of me.”
Kitt couldn’t respond. Was too filled with the mix of pride and disdain that her mother’s actions aroused in her, her ability to melt her and harden her at the same time. She wanted to hug Posie for her motives, slap her for her deeds. Settled on a quick peck on the cheek but no verbal thank-you as she rushed out of the house to catch the store.
She shivered at the bus stop on her way to Sixty-ninth Street and wondered what college must feel like, to have your smartness constantly reinforced by being surrounded with ivy and books and the right to protest the war. Kitt thought herself to be smart, though in a different way from Verdi. Thought it was a shame that there wasn’t a campus for people like her, gifted when it came to knowing how to survive. Thought that she’d surely have gone to a major university had she been born to Verdi’s mother, Hortense. So gathered up Hortense was in her mind; like a vase of show roses—Hortense had vision, knew the paths to take where the best blooms were, knew to carry her shears for snipping them off. Tried to instill some of that vision in Kitt when it was her turn to spend summers in the south. Would pull her aside maybe at night when Verdi was asleep, would whisper, “Aunt Hortense would love to see you learn the piano, or take a ballet class, or go to Paris, or wear white lacy gloves, would pay for it myself but your mama’s so hard-hearted when it comes to me, we’re fortunate she lets us have you every other summer.” She’d go on then to give Kitt instruction on men, how necessary it is to train a man how to treat you, she’d tell Kitt, and how to spot the ones who weren’t even worth the instruction. “A man who doesn’t melt over you like hot wax, so that you can remold him into what he needs to be, will bring you nothing but frustration,” she’d insist. “Like a man who walks on the inside and allows you to walk next to the curb is never worth your time,” she’d insist as she stressed to Kitt over and over the importance of always keeping her head even if her emotions were in a spin. “That’s your mama’s problem,” she’d say. “Poor thing just loses her head over and over again. You got a good head, Kitt. I see in you what I don’t even see in the one I birthed, promise Aunt Hortense you’ll always keep your head.” Kitt so valued her private time
with her aunt, wished that her aunt Hortense had been her mother instead, would daydream about it even, until Posie’s breathing condition scared her so, filled her with guilt that it was her wishing that had caused it, banished those fantasies about being raised by Hortense to the deepest pouches in her mind, except that every now and then she opened the pouch just a sliver; she did right now, just for a minute or two, as she made it into Lit Brothers with twenty minutes to spare.
She found her way to the department where Jesus Christ Superstar was pumping through the speakers. Hurriedly selected a tan suede jacket with fringes and a pair of bell-bottomed jeans with an American flag seared on the knees. Walked through the shoe department on her way out of the store and tried on a pair of tan suede boots, also fringed, they fit like skin and she bought those too, even though the salesman was flirting overtly, asking for her number, telling her how her beautiful legs really made the boots. And she tiredly told him unless he was giving the boots away to please stop, that she didn’t believe in playing and paying. She tried not to think about her mother as she counted the change, probably upstairs wiping her bedroom walls with the limo driver right now.
She was nervous the next morning as she sat at a booth in the back of a restaurant just up the street from Verdi’s dorm. Had called Verdi and told her to get her butt over there right that instant so that she could look her over and make sure that some evil campus witch hadn’t cursed her and made her grow two heads or some such thing long as it had been since she’d heard from her. That she’d promised Aunt Hortense she’d look out for her. “So come on, right here, right now,” she’d demanded.
She’d listened for signs of disappointment in Verdi’s voice when she’d shouted, “Kitt, oh my gosh, you’re here, right up the street, sit tight please, I’ll be right there.” Had to admit that she’d heard only a shocked gladness. Was relieved, really.
Blues Dancing Page 7
