Roadwalkers

by Shirley Ann Grau

  I took college entrance exams; I talked to college representatives (the nuns insisted on that); I still sang in the choir, solo parts now. I learned to do petit point. I smiled nicely when the other seniors got their class rings. I had not ordered one, saying I couldn’t afford to. Actually, I thought they were hideously ugly. If ever I had jewelry, it would be fine and old, like the brooch on the wedding dress.

  I still was on the track team. I still trained methodically, faithfully, diligently, specializing in middle-distance runs. I won twice at district and once statewide.

  And I had a season-long affair with the track coach from Riverside School in College Station, a slender brown-eyed man with the black hair and long thin nose of the Stuart kings in my history books.

  At one of the fall meets—I had just come off the track, sweating and gasping and doubled up with cramp—I felt eyes reach me, touch me, tangibly, demanding. I straightened up and followed the glance backward—like following a string to its end, or a fence to its gate. At the end I found him.

  He was standing a hundred or so feet away, in a group of trainers and coaches and spectators. I studied him carefully as I relaxed, flexing and bending, rubbing my thighs and calves. (St. Catherine’s did not have a trainer.) As my eyes travelled along his steady glance, my breathing quieted and the knots in my legs loosened, leaving only the tight excited feeling in my stomach that I always have at the beginning and the end of a race.

  I walked toward him; he turned away and stared across the field. As I passed, I touched his arm, not furtively but delicately and briefly. I walked on toward the stands, through the concrete passage marked PLAYERS’ DRESSING ROOMS. Out of sight in the shadowy space, I began climbing an access ramp, searching. Old and badly maintained stadiums have a lot of forgotten corners, weedy, littered, sheltered spots. I found one on the second level. It had been a refreshment stand; behind the counter was an alcove storage room. When I turned around, he was there; he had been following very closely. For such a tall man, he walked quietly.

  We made love in a shell of damp crumbling concrete. Overhead were spiderwebs fluffy as summer clouds. Underfoot were newspapers shredded by time and the wind, curled brown leaves blown from some distant tree, the shells of long-dead roaches, and crunching gravelly rat droppings.

  He slipped away first, going directly down to the field. I continued my climb to the top of the stadium, where I walked across the parapet behind the top row of seats, watching the competitions below me.

  “What on earth were you doing up there?” Florence Smith, the St. Catherine’s coach, asked me. “I saw you, we all saw you. That could be dangerous.”

  Ah yes, but…while you were watching me, you didn’t see another figure rejoin the small crowd. You saw only an eccentric black girl, silhouetted against the sky.

  I did not yet know his name. There were no introductions before our coupling. In fact we had not spoken a single word.

  Eventually he told me all there was to know. He taught civics and history and coached basketball and track. He’d wanted to play professional ball. He was thirty with a two-year-old child and a wife who was also the school secretary. I found no relief in his lovemaking, but I found satisfaction enough in the way he looked at me, the intent almost cross-eyed stare of his brown eyes. Anger, desire, disgust, it was all there. I found the emotions exciting, if not the man.

  My interest in athletics increased dramatically. I badgered Miss Smith to enter me in more and more events. I trained hard, fighting through the pain of knees and ankles. Perhaps she was puzzled by my sudden change, but she said nothing. Perhaps she flattered herself that she had truly interested and inspired a student. Whatever. No matter. I competed in meet after meet, small ones and large. He was not at all of them of course. But I knew immediately when he was. I could feel his eyes find me, fix on me. I could feel the connection, our distant union. Even without looking for him, I knew he was there.

  Sometimes I would slip away to him. Never hurriedly, no. Sometimes I delayed for hours, sometimes all day. Before I announced that I was going for a jog.

  “I must get rid of some of my tenseness,” I said. “I must relax.”

  Off I went, in my warm-up suit with the school name and colors on the jacket. He followed. Sometimes we made love in his car, sometimes behind vacant buildings whose windows said GOING OUT OF BUSINESS. Once my jogging led to a park, and we huddled under a low curved bridge, while flocks of ducks watched us.

  And sometimes I would reject his signals and, ignoring him, go about my business like any serious high school athlete. Then he would find an excuse to come to our area to talk to Miss Smith, an excuse to stand near us, the demure group of girls, so sweaty and tired after competition, gathering our towels and bags, preparing for the trip back.

  He began writing to me. I, who never got mail at school, received a letter from my elderly uncle Ira, who lived in College Station. He’d heard I was doing well in school, he wrote, and he was happy about that. He hoped to see me soon.

  The letters came almost every week. At times a postcard, at times a short note filled with pious hope for my future.

  “I am tired of the game. I am tired of the letters,” I told him.

  “I like writing them,” he said. And continued.

  The track-and-field season ended. There were no more cinder courses for eyes to reach across. The bond between us snapped. The letters from Uncle Ira stopped.

  One of the nuns noticed the change. “My dear, how is your uncle Ira? You haven’t heard from him lately.”

  “He died. He was very old and he died.”

  “I’m so sorry. Were you close to him?”

  “No,” I said, “no, I wasn’t.”

  Graduation practice began for us seniors. The choir met every afternoon at five, the orchestra at seven-thirty. The school’s silver appeared, polished and gleaming in glass cases in parlors and halls. My white dress arrived, made by my mother to the precise pattern dictated by the school, reminding me of the blouses she made for me in grade school, the ones with two tiny illegal rows of tucks.

  My mother and David planned to come to commencement. “That’s right, kiddo,” he told me during our regular phone call. “Your mother has a new dress and I’ve got a new suit and we are coming north to see the place where you have spent all these years.”

  Not so many, I thought, and then added honestly: too many.

  I would go back with them, to the city where I had been born, the place I called home because there was no other location that fitted the word. I would go because my mother was there, and with her I shared a kingdom.

  There, too, in the fall, I would enter the state university. The nuns were very disappointed. You have been accepted at some good schools, they all said, in one way or the other, why won’t you go to them.…

  But I had had enough schools, enough being away in a strange land.

  Late afternoon of Commencement Day I gathered with the other graduating seniors in the school parlors, now filled with flowers and trays of small sandwiches and tiny cakes and bowls of fruit punch and decanters of sherry. We wore our identical white dresses, while our bouquets of red roses waited outside on the cool stones of the loggia. Parents and grandparents and brothers and sisters arrived, tight-clustered family groups, moving with difficulty through the door, like clots in a bloodstream, to find the honored receptacle of their common genes, to greet her with kisses and small muted shrieks of delight. I held myself tall and straight and glided around the edge of the room and waited.

  My mother wore yellow, a candle flame, long and thin and gleaming. Half a step behind her was David Clark, solid, portly, prosperous in a pale gray suit. My mother and I nodded to each other, as we always did, she first, queen to princess. David kissed me on the cheek, as he always did.

  “I need to tell you first thing,” he said, “your mother and I got married yesterday.”

  “She died,” I said without thinking. “She must have died.”

  “Yes,�
� he said, “she died.”

  I had never seen her, but still I knew her, that woman the young soldier had married, not for love, not for passion, but to have somebody to send his allotment check to, some link to an everyday world. That frail sick woman he would never leave, an invalid for thirty years, dying, but never dead. I had thought her eternal like a character in a story. Until now.

  A diamond wedding band glittered on my mother’s long black finger.

  Just at that moment, the hired photographer, who had been methodically circling the room, popping his flashbulbs like firecrackers of light, caught us on his film.

  THE PROMISED LAND

  AND SO I RETURNED to the place where I had been born.

  But my skin no longer fitted over my bones. My feet no longer knew their way through the streets.

  I felt sharp twinges of regret for the school I had left. For the smells of wax and disinfectant, for clanging bells and the steady burbling of girls’ conversation, for the rubber tread of nuns’ heels on hard floors, for the squeak of chalk on blackboards, for the sweaty musky smell of shower rooms after a race, for the cocoon isolation of chapel, for the view from my window of a courtyard and a fountain and flower beds where a single gardener wearily planted pansies year after year.

  I went to the house where I had lived the last of my childhood, the apartment over Leconte’s Drugstore. The building was just as I remembered it; the walls had the same peeling paint; the roof slates were just as mottled; the ridge tiles gleamed dully under the sun. Across the street, behind the tall iron fence, the old people still walked their therapeutic rounds through the scraggly azaleas and the brown unwatered grass. The wheelchairs still creaked out their faintly cheerful sounds. The broken curb at the street corner was the same. The three cracked bricks on the sidewalk outside the front door were still rimmed with green moss. There was still a shadow where my mother’s first sign had hung; and the door still bore the pale pink paint we had put there, she and I together.

  These were our monuments, the physical signs of our passing, in the color of the door, in the screw holes and the edge marks of our sign. They held the shadow of us. Our ghosts lingered at this corner.

  My mother and I had lived so many places, and in each one we left a part of ourselves. We were whittled away by now, thin and hurt, but veteran fighters for all of that, disciplined and able.

  I looked again at the lights in the apartment over Leconte’s Drugstore. I saw shapes moving behind the white curtains. Other people, not us. Then I left and did not come this way again.

  That summer as I waited to begin college, I felt disparate and apart, a stranger in a strange land. This was not the world I had left months before.…That world was lost, irretrievably.

  My mother—my foundation, my epicenter—had changed. Now that I lived at home, I felt it keenly. She was as kind and considerate as ever, perhaps even more, and our work association was as harmonious as ever, but still, things were different between us. (I do not think that she herself noticed the alteration. Only I. And David, perhaps.) Quite simply, she was no longer as interested in me as she once had been. Perhaps she saw me as a burden time had released her from. And perhaps she was right. Perhaps it was so.

  How gradually, how gently we had slipped apart, like the surface plates of the earth, moving ever so slowly, but altering everything.

  I saw my mother as a stranger from a distance. I saw that she was no longer restless, no longer driven from place to place. Comforted and strengthened by her wedding ring, she found roots and community.

  She and David bought a house, a two-story brick, with a neat green lawn edged by boxwood, in a new suburb twenty miles outside the city. They added a Jacuzzi and a sauna—David had begun to have twinges of arthritis. Whether my mother suffered the pains of aging bone and muscle I never did know. She said nothing, seeming impervious or indifferent to things like weather and temperature. She could walk calmly through a thunderstorm; she could work in summer heat without showing the slightest sheen of perspiration on lip or forehead. She seemed to move inside a glass cage, visible, but untouched and isolated.

  After my mother and David selected the house, their domestic instincts seemed exhausted. They asked me to furnish it.

  Everything must be new, my mother told me.

  “But what do you want?” I asked. “What do you want the new house to look like?”

  “She hasn’t time to think about it,” David said soothingly. “She’s worried about the delays in the fall deliveries.”

  “There are always delays in the fall deliveries. And I’ve got to know. I can’t start until I know something.”

  In exasperation, my mother handed me two pages torn from magazines. “Like this,” she said.

  One was Monticello, the other Blenheim. I stopped asking questions and went ahead on my own.

  I chose creams and blues and dark mahogany. I became the proper little homemaker, a disguise I had never assumed before. I ordered furniture and rugs and drew sketches of the finished rooms. It was like putting together a picture puzzle.

  We did not bring with us a single piece of furniture, not a dish, not a pot or pan, only our clothes crammed into new brown packing boxes.

  My mother, suddenly penny-pinching, would not pay for a moving service. We loaded our boxes into one of David’s sight-seeing buses and drove to the new house.

  Keep nothing, my mother had ordered. Disobeying her, I kept my treasure, child’s treasure: a basket of toys. Two dolls with movable arms, carefully wrapped in pieces of hemmed flannel; a black-and-white china dog and a gray elephant with its trunk raised; a purple glass vase; a hand mirror with rosebuds painted on its pink plastic back; a set of jacks tied in blue cloth; a butterfly pin without a clasp; a handkerchief, lace cornered—they all fitted neatly in their wicker container; they seemed so harmonious, so correct, so much a settled organized part of me…that once again I picked up the basket carefully and carried it, as I had done so often before, to my new home.

  The brick house with its green lawns and tall oak trees was only partially furnished. My mother was very strict about budgets, and I’d run out of money before I could do all the rooms.

  “We’ll finish next year,” David promised.

  One bedroom was completely empty, not even carpet on the floor. Each bath had a single set of towels, the only sheets were on our beds. There was no china or silver in the dining room breakfront, no table linens in the drawers. There were no trinkets or bibelots in the living room, no photographs on table or mantel. In the kitchen there was a single electric kettle and a coffeemaker.

  My mother and David were not troubled by the fragmentariness of their world. They were content; they had what they wanted. From their windows they looked out on other well-kept houses with lawns and trees. On Sunday afternoons they smelled the smoke of cherry and mesquite from backyard barbeque pits.

  I noticed something else. My mother’s new kingdom was all one color. The owners of those pretty, neat houses, those Cadillac-filled, garages, those velvety zoysia lawns, they all wore black skin.

  We had not travelled so far after all. From the bleak neighborhoods of my childhood to this—a journey from concrete to zoysia, to be sure. But was it so very far?

  My mother was particularly delighted by the front lawn and carefully inspected it daily for stray dandelions or chickory weed. (Did she remember the green cement lawn of that long-ago house?) David, with his bluff good humor, soon knew all the neighbors, and the sound of ice cubes echoed from our living room at cocktail time, and the smell of mesquite smoke rose from our brick barbeque on Sunday afternoons. There were people my age, too, home for summer vacation, laughing, friendly. We swam in all the neighborhood pools, played tennis, talked about clothes and jewelry and cars; some of us paired off; all of us flirted. Sex was heavy and demanding in the summer heat, as insistent and all present as the stifling smell of waxy gardenias at night.

  The light that had illumined my fantasies, so lovely, so unreal, was
gone. It had faded so slowly I hadn’t noticed its going, only its absence. Now my days were lit by the sun’s burning gases—simple astronomical fact, no more—my nights by a greenish reflecting planet. All because something else happened: a doppelganger rode with me, a second self, a sister under the skin, a betrayer. An ordinary woman, with ordinary needs, ordinary ambitions, who was me.

  The university was about an hour’s drive from my mother’s green-treed suburb, a white ribbon of interstate under the wheels of my blue Mustang, David’s gift to me. The campus—most of it—was very new. The red-clay ground looked torn and raw, even though landscaping crews had laid acres of St. Augustine sod and cast their rye and fescue far and wide.

  Five days a week I parked in the east lot, an expanse of black asphalt, sectioned with white stripes like bones. From there I took a crowded shuttle bus to the center of campus. We all joked and gossiped cheerfully until the bus stopped; then we scattered like kittens scurrying for cover.

  I was not, as I had been in high school, the only black. There were many dark faces in the halls, the classrooms, lounging under the trees. I vanished into the crowd.

  My mother wanted me to take accounting; David told me to take a general business degree. I registered as a fine arts major.

  Classes were no problem. All through that first year my grades rolled back to me, a steady stream of A’s. St. Catherine’s had prepared me well. Despite that, I spent every evening in the library, methodically preparing for the coming day. When I finished, I studied books of art history, of costume design, books of photographs. I sketched things that caught my fancy—all sorts of things, dresses, hats, jewelry—planning to use them in my own designs later.