by Jesmyn Ward
The automatic doors to the airport entrance slid shut behind Joshua and a blast of cold air hit him in the face and the chest. Luggage carousels sat embedded at regular intervals along the corridor to his right and his left. Crowds of people surrounded the few carousels that moved; the people shuffled wearily, yawned with pasty mouths. Once in a while someone would dart forward and pull a taut, fat piece of luggage from the belt and drag it out of the way of the crowd. The family had gone to pick up Cille from the airport for the first time when Joshua was fifteen, and from that one trip, he knew that the carousels were usually slow, and that Cille’s luggage always seemed to be last on the belt.
He passed a mother and a small girl sitting in the waiting area: the woman held the child in her lap and rested her chin on the girl’s braided brown hair. The little girl wore shorts and her legs hung bare and slack next to her mother’s long skirt. They were both dozing. Joshua looked for Cille and wondered if he would be able to recognize her immediately when he saw her. He pictured her as he last saw her: eating corn bread at the table, magenta lipstick that came off in smudged kisses on the golden top of the bread. He walked past the woman and the little girl again, and stood on the wall in the middle of the corridor. He felt as if he could not swallow, and every time he saw a short, pecan-colored woman with smooth skin and shoulder-length hair, he was startled. Joshua scanned the hallway and wished that he had a hat to pull over his face.
Cille stood on the outer rim of the baggage carousel nearest Joshua. She was wearing a tank top and long white pants, and she had a black carry-on bag slung over her shoulder. She was thicker than he remembered: the round plump circle of her upper arm was fleshier than when he had last seen her, and so was her face. Her hair had been curled into stiff ringlets; she must have fallen asleep on the plane because several curls in the back were smashed flat. She looked tired. In the profile of her body, her soft, falling chin, and the slight pouch at her stomach, Joshua saw Ma-mee. A man wearing a pink polo shirt and moccasins squeezed past her to elbow his way to the front of the crowd to pull a suitcase away from the pulley. Cille looked at him, her mouth slightly open, and rolled her eyes. Joshua was surprised at the sudden shock of electricity through his chest and up out of his throat that urged him away from the wall, that urged him to grab the man, to push him so that he lost his fat-fingered grip on his luggage and fell. Before he knew what he was doing, Joshua was walking toward her. Part of him would have liked to remain on the wall, unseen and watching her.
“Hey, Cille.”
She turned to him and her hair moved like a dark cloud and obscured part of her face. Her eye shadow was smudged. Her face froze slack and soft, and then her eyes wrinkled and creased at the corners, and she was smiling, and she knew him.
“Joshua.”
Cille held her arms out, bent at the elbow, to him. Joshua embraced her. He placed his fingers delicately on her back; he touched her with the pads of his fingertips as if he were balancing a basketball. Cille was patting his back lightly, repeatedly, as if she were burping an infant. He inhaled her. When he was younger, he remembered her wearing perfume that came in small, golden bottles that were shaped like shells, bottles that he could almost close in his childish fist. There were five of them. He wondered if she still had them. She smelled the same, she smelled to him like the day she left and they’d taken that picture that neither he nor Christophe wanted to take. He was so nervous. She drew back from him before he straightened and stood.
“You got another bag?”
Cille nodded, and Joshua saw a spray of fine lines at the corners of her eyes, light as chicken scratchings in sand, as she smiled another small, closemouthed smile.
“The gray one with all the flowers on it.”
The man who had brushed past Cille was gone. Joshua wove through several people who stood still as pillars on the rim of the carousel with muttered, breathy “excuse mes,” and before her suitcase disappeared behind the black plastic curtain leading beyond the wall to where the baggage handlers were throwing luggage, he pulled it from the line. The belt clanked and whined as it shuffled past, and behind its spinning protestations, he heard the baggage handlers crying to each other in broad, black New Orleans accents. The vowels sounded from their mouths long and sliding; he imagined their tongues to be pink shovels.
“Hey, now! Watch, there! You missing one, yeah!”
Joshua walked back to Cille. He was tempted to throw the suitcase over his shoulder like a case of chicken. He stopped abruptly in front of Cille. He wondered if she could smell his cologne. He wondered if she liked his outfit.
“Christophe waiting outside with the car,” he mumbled. She nodded and hitched the carry-on further up on her shoulder. Her rings glittered gold. He expected her to walk ahead of him toward the door. “You want me to get that?” Cille shook her head, and her hair swung across her face again as she turned and began walking for the door.
“Let’s go.”
Joshua followed her. She walked listing to her side to balance the bag on her hip. He fell in line next to her and slipped his fingers under the strap on her shoulder and pulled it. He settled it on his own collarbone; he was unbalanced, but he didn’t care. She had looked like she was limping.
“I got it,” she said from behind him, her arms now weightless. Her hard-soled sandals clicked on the tile.
“It’s alright,” he offered.
Joshua walked through the heat lurking like a fog before the automatic sliding doors. The doors hissed open and he heard Cille stop next to him, and he looked down at her. Sweat was beading in a mustache over her top lip.
“It always seem hotter down here than in Atlanta,” she said.
Joshua grunted. The Caprice’s engine was loud and hoarse, and as Christophe pulled up to the curb, Joshua felt as if he were seeing the car for the first time. The gray-blue paint had an old, solid sheen to it. The trunk was silent, and Joshua looked back and saw that the cop was harassing a man in a black Lexus who was parked at the corner with his yellow hazard lights blinking. The man was arguing with his hands as a woman in heels made her way to him. All they needed were some new tires; rims, perhaps, around New Year’s if he could save up enough money. Christophe bent quickly to unlock the trunk, and Joshua was careful to position her bags on the top and the sides of the speakers: he didn’t want them to shift and pop anything. Christophe would kill him, and they couldn’t afford new speakers. Christophe opened the front passenger-seat door for her.
“Hey, Cille.”
“Hey, Christophe.” She held her arms out to him as she had to Joshua, and he moved in to hug her. Joshua saw he patted her on the back as she had patted him, and that Christophe was the first to move away.
“You sit in the front,” Joshua said to her, as he opened the back door and climbed in the seat. He began rolling up the window. She hated riding with the windows down. Christophe and Cille slid in the car at the same time on opposite sides of the Caprice, and Cille rolled up her own window slowly. Christophe turned on the air conditioner and in the backseat, Joshua grimaced. He swore he could smell a hint of weed in the air blowing from the vents even though he had sprayed them with Febreze before they’d left; it smelled like stale hay. Christophe blew on a CD, wiped it on his shirt, peered at the back, and then slipped it into the CD player.
Horns sizzled and Al Green wailed. Normally, Christophe would turn up the volume until it sounded like Al was sitting in the backseat, until Joshua could almost imagine him as a young, wiry man, his teeth white and sharp in his dark face, looking as if he’d jumped from the album cover, sweating and screaming his song in their ears. Dunny would laugh at them when they listened to Al Green like that, but Christophe would tell him that Al Green could bump. Joshua would just close his eyes and listen to the music. It was like jumping into the river for the first time after a long, cold winter, immersing himself in the warm embrace of the water after surfacing from the kind of winter where frost froze the grass to knife blades overnight and the pi
pes under the house burst if they didn’t wrap them with blankets. Now, Al sounded timid.
“Thank God the air conditioner work in here. I felt like I was going to melt out there.” Cille paused. “How y’all like the car? Eze sent me pictures.”
“It’s real nice. Thank you,” Christophe said. He turned off the airport drive and onto the entrance ramp for I-10. Traffic was light; Christophe passed an old pickup truck with moldy lumber on the back going forty, and then a small black sports car sped past him so quickly he almost missed it. Cille laughed.
“Traffic in New Orleans still the same.” The air conditioner was blowing hard and Joshua could feel the sweat drying on his skin until it felt grainy, as it had when he and Christophe were younger when they’d play in the ditches and in the red-dirt roads and let clouds of dust settle over them. Joshua saw the Canal Street exit and wondered if Christophe would take it, if they would go back to Mississippi the way they came. He knew Cille hated taking 90; she thought the route was too long and too circuitous, and she said she didn’t want to risk a flat out there in the middle of Klan country. Joshua hoped Christophe would take the exit anyway, would feign ignorance; Joshua could imagine the way the light would shatter across the windows in prisms as the sun set behind them. It would be a shame to ride with the windows closed. Joshua felt Christophe press on the brakes as the car slowed. Cille put her hand on the back of Christophe’s headrest and spoke.
“I’m glad you decided to take I-10. I’m ready to get home.”
Christophe accelerated and passed the exit. They were streaming past the suburbs of the city and entering a corridor of green low, swampy trees interrupted by strip malls and small cities of apartment complexes. They were made of brown brick and board and always had For Rent banners hanging from their sides: it was all ugly. Cille fell silent in the front seat, and he saw her head angle to the side, her shoulders slump: she was sleeping. He wanted to ask Christophe what he thought about her, whether he noticed anything different, but her lightly dozing presence stopped him. Christophe had been mostly quiet since the Fourth, had answered most of his questions with silences. The trees waved soundlessly and cars cruised past them, and he could see her shoulder at the airport, see where the strap bit into her shoulder and left the flesh there red and tender like a hickey, when he pulled it from her. He and Christophe did not talk until he pulled into the yard in a steady rain, and Christophe asked Joshua if he wanted to wake her up. Christophe left the car to pull the suitcases from the trunk, and Joshua woke their mother.
Ma-mee had made red beans and rice. The day before, Christophe had come home directly from dropping Joshua off and had helped glean the small hard pale beans from the pot that were gray or dense as stones, to find those that could not be cooked. She could only tell so much by feeling them with her hands. She had asked Christophe if he’d had any luck with putting in applications, and after he’d told her no, he hadn’t spoken as he helped. He’d left soon after they were done. She’d felt concurrently guilty and justified about her nagging while she’d ladled spices into the pot along with the beans: garlic, Vidalia onion, bell pepper, green onion, bay leaf, and thyme. When she heard the boys pull into the yard, the beans were bubbling and simmering spicy hot, the biscuits were right to the touch, giving like cotton under her hand, the skin on the chicken was crusted and cooling in a container on the table, and she was sitting in her chair before the television.
When Cille was a toddler, Ma-mee had left her in the yard with the boys and the scratching chickens to bring a load of clothes in from the clothesline, and when she walked out the back door, she found Cille squatting on the side of the house, grabbing fistfuls of tender green grass shoots with clumps of red clay adhering to them with her small hands and shoving it all in her mouth and chewing. Something about seeing her child like that had made Ma-mee want to laugh: the wide, long-fringed eyes, the direct stare, and the earnest chewing. Something else about it made her want to cry: the snotty nose, the dirt stained like vomit down the front of Cille’s chest, her knotted curly hair. Ma-mee had brought Cille in the house, and attempted to feed her things that would make her lose her craving for grass and dirt. It wasn’t until Ma-mee began feeding Cille biscuits every morning for breakfast—dense, floury, chalky biscuits—that she had stopped eating from the yard. Ma-mee automatically cooked them whenever Cille visited: perhaps her child no longer had a taste for them. The twins did. Weeks earlier, Christophe had even begun making biscuits for the family; he followed her recipe but still his biscuits were uneven, spongy soft but riddled with hard rocks of silty flour that startled the mouth. Ma-mee had changed the sheets on the bed in the extra bedroom even though no one had slept on them for over six months, and as she switched the television off, she could smell the lingering, close sweetness of the fabric softener. Underneath that was the aroma of wet wood; the rain had come suddenly, and after Ma-mee heard a slap of thunder, the quick drum of rain rolled over the roof. Below the knocking of the rain on the house like hundreds of hands, she heard a light step followed by heavier steps on the porch. The screen door creaked, and Cille was the first to walk into the living room.
“Mama?” Cille bent to hug Ma-mee and Ma-mee smelled her perfume, baby oil, and something else: perhaps hair spray.
“Cille.” She was rounder than she had been, softer. When Ma-mee hugged her, Cille’s shoulder blade was a barely discernible hump beneath her skin; it was cloaked by fat and reminded Ma-mee of the smooth ripples fish made as they swam inches below the surface of the water.
“How you been?”
“Alright. And you? How was the flight?” Ma-mee led Cille into the kitchen. She grabbed a plate and began ladling rice in a bowl. She passed it to Cille and pointed toward the stove. “They got biscuits in the oven.”
“I’m alright. A little tired. It was bumpy.” Cille spooned beans over her rice. The boys traipsed silently to the extra room, their footsteps hitting unevenly on the thin carpet. “I was hoping you’da made something?”
“I was trying to wait for y’all.” Ma-mee passed Cille another bowl to fill for herself. “Boys, I got beans in here!” Ma-mee yelled. “Just some beans and a biscuit, please. I ain’t that hungry.”
Cille placed the full bowls on the table.
“Hot sauce?”
“Boys!” Ma-mee sat down. “Cille, they got a cold drink in the ’frigerator: Coke, I think.” Before Cille could do so, Ma-mee rose from her seat and opened the old pine cabinets. She pulled out four glasses and balanced them against her chest as she walked back to the table. Cille popped the top on the two-liter and it hissed and gurgled. Ma-mee smelled the sugary, acrid smell of it. Cille poured. “How’s your job going?”
Cille pushed Ma-mee’s glass of water toward her and began to fill her own with Coke. She did not fill the boys’ cups.
“Boys!”
“It’s going alright, I guess. We just got a whole bunch of new products in so we had to remodel the floor and move the shelves around. Worked more nights, but that’s more overtime for me, so I wasn’t mad.”
Ma-mee heard the boys shuffle in, and they busied themselves at the counter with their bowls; when Christophe placed the lid to the pot of beans on the counter, he set it down lightly so that she could barely hear it rattle, and when Joshua opened the oven, he eased it open soundlessly on its hinges. They sat down at the table. They were both taller than Cille; the blindness had washed away the defining characteristics that made Cille older, and if it wasn’t for the way she held herself, stiff with her arms crossed before her and her wrists resting delicately on the table, Ma-mee could have imagined that Cille was the boys’ shorter, younger, heavyset sister. Joshua slid a spoon across to Ma-mee so that it nudged at her fingers next to her plate.
“Since we all here, somebody should say grace.”
“I will,” Cille said.
“When you ready.” Ma-mee nodded her head slightly, but kept her eyes on the twins.
“Thank you, Lord, for this food we are abou
t to eat. Thank you for family and for a safe flight. Amen,” Cille said. The twins weren’t churchgoers; Ma-mee couldn’t blame them for it. Since her blindness had set in, she had only been to church on holidays with Rita. She had made them go to church with her when they were younger, but since that visit to the doctor, they had fallen out of going. She didn’t want to argue with them about it. Cille had become increasingly religious the longer she stayed in Atlanta. She had told Ma-mee she attended services at a Baptist church, which Ma-mee had felt an initial irrational negative reaction to: church to her meant Mass and white robes and purple satin sashes and gold communion cups and wine. Later, Ma-mee decided it didn’t matter that Cille went to a Baptist church: at least she had someplace to go, a community, where people knew her. Ma-mee still worried about her, old as Cille was, in that city.
“Thank you, Cille.”
“So, how’s your job going, Joshua?”
“It’s alright. Long hours, sort of boring.”
“What about you, Christophe? You been looking, right?”
“Yeah, I been looking.”
“You know you have to call them, right? They got to know you want it. I don’t give nobody a job at my store unless they call and ask about they application.”
Ma-mee’s beans were spicier than she usually made them. She must have used too much Creole seasoning, too much cayenne. They must’ve been hot to Christophe as well: she heard him gulping down half of his dark drink. The twins’ spoons clanked against the sides of their bowls.
“Y’all hungry, huh?” Ma-mee asked.
“I had a sandwich for lunch,” Joshua said.
“You should eat more. Eating so fast ain’t good for you.”
“Anybody want another biscuit?” Christophe asked as he rose and went to the oven.
“No, thank you,” Cille replied. “Christophe, you going to bring me to get my rental car tomorrow?”
