Everybody Loves Somebody

by Joanna Scott

  “Sure is me!” the girl said, surprised and proud to be singled out in front of Mr. Dosan, especially since the implication of the waitress’s disbelief was that she had grown with such amazing speed that she was hardly to be known. “I’m my mama’s girl!” she announced, smiling boldly back at the waitress while Mr. Dosan looked on. But her pride didn’t last long, for Mr. Dosan was quick to root out the truth from the waitress, which was, simply, that the girl had been left behind, abandoned by her mama, who had “gone and turned herself into one of those crazy angels, got a bed and three meals a day over there at the kingdom.”

  An angel. Meaning that Mama had already passed through the gilded door in the sky, leaving her grandmother and her only child to fend for themselves. Meaning that the unspoken presumption, the glue of her soul, was false: she would never see her mama again, not in this life. No more tickling and laughter, no more romps in front of disapproving Granny. Her mama had gone and turned herself into an angel. Her mama had gone and was never coming back. Her mama had abandoned her. Her mama—

  “You say she’s abiding at one of those kingdoms?” Mr. Dosan asked the waitress, his voice inexplicably calm in the face of such a terrifying revelation.

  “One Hundred Twenty-sixth Street, last I hear. Calls herself Miss Love Dove. Miss Love Dove!” With that Mr. Dosan and the waitress both began to laugh, or at least he chuckled scornfully while the waitress hooted. The girl looked on, dumb as a fish in a bowl staring out at the world, colors and shapes beyond the glass making no sense, no sense at all. Her mama was an angel and these two grown folks thought it all right to laugh. If she had been a different sort she would have slapped Mr. Dosan, plunged a fork into the waitress’s thigh, and run out of the lunchroom. Instead, she concentrated on keeping her tears from streaming down her face, succeeded for about ten seconds, and then gave up and let the tears do just as they pleased. Most everyone in the restaurant turned to see what the fuss was about, but Mr. Dosan just leaned over the table and covered her hands with both of his, the first time he’d ever touched her, while the waitress smoothed her hair, the two of them treating the girl like a baby who deserved to be indulged.

  Once the waitress had disappeared into the kitchen again, the other customers had turned back to their food, and the girl’s noisy sorrow had quieted down, Mr. Dosan twisted his lips as though spitting out a bitter taste and said, “So your own materfamilias has seen the light!”

  “She an angel?” the girl whispered, keeping her voice low because she didn’t want to know the answer.

  “She’s a fool.”

  “She ain’t!”

  “She believes that crimp is God, Sheebie!” he said, suddenly so formidable that the girl felt afraid of him. She withdrew her hands and sank back against the cloth cushion of the booth, trying to disappear inside it. “He has gathered all the misfits of the world together to worship him,” Mr. Dosan said, scorn making him spit out the words.

  “Mama ain’t no” the girl began, but the waitress, who’d come back to the table with their coffee and ice cream, interrupted: “Word is, you eat much as you want for fifteen cents at one of those kingdoms, chicken and brussels sprouts and mashed potatoes”

  “I’ve seen that man myself, driving around in his shiny Cadillac,” Mr. Dosan countered.

  “All that food for fifteen cents. Ribs and apple pie and pudding...”

  “Wearing fancy suits...”

  The waitress slid the sundae in front of the girl, who had never in her life had quite enough to eat. She began scooping up chopped nuts and whipped cream, scraped the warm chocolate syrup out from the sides of the glass bowl. After letting a spoonful of ice cream melt on her tongue she decided she didn’t like ice cream anymore because it made her cold inside, and she would rather be anything but cold. She wondered if all those feasts at the kingdom kept her mama warm. She pictured her mama wearing angel wings made out of tissue and wire, her mama plump as Santa Claus, her mama standing in some heavenly choir while the man she thought was God stood behind the pulpit the way Preacher Vernon did every Sunday at the Metropolitan Baptist Church.

  The girl said she needed to get home. Mr. Dosan stayed right beside her as she headed up Seventh Avenue. Later she would remember an unusual expression on his face, a puckered look, as though a drawstring had been pulled inside his head. “Where is the refuge for our children?” he demanded. “Nowhere in this world! Abandoned by those who bred you...” He fell silent for a long minute, and then, with the suddenness of a radio switched on, he launched into his personal account of the “woes of mankind,” including causes, consequences, and remedies, the words spilling from his mouth like water over the sides of a cup.

  At first the girl was still so involved in imagining her mother as a false angel that she didn’t pay much attention to him, and when she did try to listen, his speech seemed as obscure as an argument held between two people in a foreign language. He left out the usual pauses so the sentences blended together and spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth. He might as well have been talking only to himself. Now the teacher who had introduced the girl to written language was just a hunched, drooling old man dressed in baggy trousers without suspenders, a string tie, and a cheap flannel jacket, spouting wild talk as he walked along, throwing out words like advancement,disorder,anarchy, and fidelity, obviously expecting the child not only to comprehend but to agree with him.

  People stared at both of them—she felt the weight of their eyes, their judgment, and, even worse, their pity. They would assume that this foolish old man was her daddy.

  He ain’t! she wanted to shout. I don’t have nothing to do with him! As they passed a bakery window she noticed a stocky woman standing behind an empty bread shelf, her face partially hidden by the lettering on the glass, though enough of the woman was visible for the girl to know what she was thinking: the girl had herself to blame. But it wasn’t her fault that Mr. Dosan had decided to supervise her education. She would have gone on minding her own business and never bothered with book-learning. What use were books if this was their effect? Going on about something he called individuation, circling around his vague ideas of social improvement and the importance of educating the young. Mr. Dosan thought himself a genius equipped with enough knowledge to save the world, except that the liars and drunkards kept getting in his way. Liars and drunkards were the bane of mankind. Liars and drunkards had failed in their duty to society. Liars and drunkards—

  “I got to go,” the girl announced, and with that she raced up Seventh Avenue without looking back, turned the corner onto 135th Street, leaped over flattened cardboard boxes soggy from the rain, ran as though she were being pursued all the way home.

  During the days that followed she joined her granny on the street. She didn’t want to see Mr. Dosan again. No, that wasn’t it. She didn’t want Mr. Dosan to see her, for she sensed that he had expectations and had chosen her to fulfill them. He’d been training her like a dog to perform extraordinary tricks, and she’d been trying to please him. Probably wanted to marry her as soon as she turned thirteen. Well, she wasn’t having any more to do with him, she knew that much!

  Granny kept asking her, wouldn’t she like to spend the afternoon at the library, and the girl kept declining, indicating that she wanted nothing better than to sit on the curb beside the cart and watch people going about their business. She hadn’t told her granny about Mr. Dosan, though now she wished she had, since Granny might have been able to explain why some old folks accepted the dispensations of God and some flew into a rage over the littlest something. Why hadn’t Mr. Dosan come straight out at the beginning and told her what he hoped to accomplish? And what did he really know about drunks? Her own mama was never kinder, never more fun than when she’d been boozing, the girl could have testified. Take a tired, hungry woman, fill her up with cheap gin, and you’ll put her in a laughing mood. Sure, the girl could tell Mr. Dosan a thing or two about juniper perfume. Who did he think he was, stealing his ideas from books?
Who was he? It occurred to her that she knew next to nothing about the man. Where did he live? Where did he work? Did he work at all, or did he live on handouts?

  Why did it matter anyway? She shrugged off her curiosity and pretended that her afternoons at the library belonged to some hazy dream. She was finished with all that. But the one remnant of the dream she couldn’t ignore was the bit of information about her mama, who had turned into an angel and was living at “the kingdom,” whatever that was, on 126th Street.

  No surprise, then, that on a drizzly Saturday when Granny didn’t feel well enough to take the cart out, the girl found herself heading toward her mama’s new home. Lenox had the spent, hungover look of a man who’d been carousing all night and didn’t care where he lay down to sleep. The sky had been painted gray, and each bus or motorcar that passed ripped a thin layer of skin off the avenue with its wet tires. As she walked, she let her hand bump along the iron bars protecting store windows. One summer night a few years back, all these windows on Lenox had been shattered when Harlem went wild, busting and burning, having a fine old time of it, or such was the girl’s notion while she’d lain in her bed listening to the distant sounds of shattering glass and sirens. Her mother hadn’t come home at all that night, but the girl never worried, for she knew that if there was fun to be had, Mama would be there. Granny made the mistake of sitting up until morning waiting for the riot to end and Mama to return, wearing herself out so that when Mama did finally saunter in, Granny was too tired to whip her.

  That memory of the riot stirred a more recent memory. The girl recalled how her mama had whispered something to Granny just before heading off to become an angel. What had she said? She hadn’t seemed angry. Of course, Mama only got dopey, never angry. What had she whispered to the old woman? Good-bye? Why hadn’t she said good-bye to her daughter? It wasn’t fair, the way grown folks kept their secrets. And it wasn’t right of Mama to leave home without telling her daughter what she planned to do with her life.

  So many questions the girl had, and the variety of answers didn’t begin to console. Neither did the possibility that soon she’d find out what she wanted to know. It might turn out that she would have been better off never seeing the kingdom with its marble ramparts and towers, or so she pictured it, realizing even then that the actual kingdom would turn out to be unlike anything she might imagine, much grander, she assumed, perhaps with jewels embedded in the walls and huge stone lions guarding the doors.

  It took her more than an hour to find her sparkling castle. She’d walked up and down 126th Street between St. Nicholas and Third Avenue three times without seeing what turned out to be just a sooty brick building that looked like an old bathhouse and identified itself with a hand-painted sign hanging crookedly on the door: welcome to the kingdom. She’d expected to be surprised, but not disappointed. The Kingdom. Why would her mother give up all that she had—a grandmother, a daughter, a paying job—for this? The girl stood in front of the building pondering the sign, working with some effort toward a new comprehension: it didn’t matter what words meant, since you could attach any word to anything and make it stick. You could call a man God and an old bathhouse a kingdom. You could call yourself by any name you pleased. You could walk right out of one life and into another.

  The light, silvery drizzle turned to a heavier rain, but the girl kept standing there, hatless, almost enjoying the soaking, imagining that the rain would wash away the words on the sign, leaving it blank, leaving everything blank, nameless, without memory or guilt, making it possible for a person to snap her fingers and change into an angel. The girl snapped her fingers just to see what would happen, but they were too damp, too slippery to make a sound, and she remained what she’d been since her mama had gone away: Queen Sheebie, the only kin Granny got to live for anymore, reminding the girl that the old woman would probably be wanting something right about then, a bowl of soup or some tea, and with no one to wait on her she’d be steaming like the kettle should have been but wasn’t.

  She would have left then if a well-bred white girl hadn’t accidentally snagged her sweater with the edge of an umbrella as she strutted by, pretending to be the model of perfection, not even apologizing as she unhooked the metal spoke from the loop of yarn. She scooted up the stairs of the brownstone in her dainty high-heeled shoes and entered the kingdom, closing the door behind her with a smack. The girl might have snuck away then if the congregation hadn’t started to arrive, first individually, a few in pairs, then in droves, hundreds even, some flocking down the street and others emerging from adjacent brownstones, the commotion as abrupt and yet as orderly as if the curtain had been raised on a dance-hall stage. Still, the girl would have remained outside the kingdom while the people disappeared inside if an elderly woman hadn’t taken her by the hand and said sweetly, “Come in out of the rain, child.” Mesmerized by this sudden kindness, she let the woman lead her up the steps and into the building that grew in magnificence as soon as the girl entered, not because the exterior hid an elaborately decorated interior, which it didn’t, but because the front hall transformed ordinary people into worshippers, drawing from them exclamations of “Peace, Sister,” “And to you, Brother,” warm embraces, and outbreaks of song. “He has the world in a jug,” a woman caroled. “And the stopper in His hand,” the crowd echoed, merging into a line and filing through a narrow doorway to the tables.

  How delicious the kingdom smelled—of wet clothes and clean bodies and fresh-baked cake, such a comforting stew of fragrances that the girl wasn’t afraid, though the old woman who had invited her inside had disappeared in the crowd and no one else paid any mind to her, not even the man passing the collection hat. He looked straight over her head as she entered the dining hall, where the feast laid out was even more elaborate than the waitress had described. Besides plates of fricasseed chicken and spareribs and brussels sprouts there were string beans, asparagus tips, sausage, fruit salad, and a total of eight chocolate cakes set like top hats on the ends of each table. The girl seated herself right in front of a cake, reached up to swipe a finger through the rich frosting, then saw the girl with the umbrella sitting patiently a few seats down, so she tucked her hands in her lap, folded them around the hunger she was feeling, while she waited for the signal to dig in.

  The din faded, and after a long minute of expectant silence, she felt the draft of wafting clothes. She turned in her seat to see the procession of young women—ten of them, no, twenty, more than twenty—floating down the aisle toward the head table. They wore identical white berets and white dresses decorated with ribbons and cloth buttons, and their smiles were so similar their faces looked like cardboard masks, angel masks, the girl thought, remembering why she’d come here just as recognition took hold.

  “Mama!” she exclaimed, jumping up from her seat. But though her mama surely heard, she just smiled that angel smile without turning her head to look and drifted right on past, showing no special affection for her own child, shunning her with that sticky-sweet expression, pretending not to know her. The girl hardly felt the man’s hand pressing on her shoulder, pulling her back, but she obliged without resistance, sat down again as the angels took their places at the head table. Mama had her back to the girl, who knew that you could bore a hole through someone’s heart if you glared long enough. She fixed on that velvety groove beneath Mama’s shoulder blades and above her dress line, was pleased to see her reach behind to scratch her back, but that’s all she did, scratched just once. The only person Mama cared for was the little bald man coming through another door up front. The girl gave up and turned to this man, the center of attention, the kingdom’s king, tucked as neatly as a birthday present inside his blue suit. He was followed by a slight, sharp-featured woman, also dressed in blue, who led the congregation in song while the man, the Father himself, sat and laid a napkin across his lap. The woman sang about justice and truth, and the people joined in the refrain, something about a righteous government, the words as confusing as Mr. Dosan’s spee
ch. All these folks calling for a better world when what they really wanted was to help themselves to the food. The girl could hear the hunger in their voices and would have heard the same in her own voice if she’d joined in. But it didn’t take much thinking to realize that she preferred her granny’s temper to these hallelujahs. She stood up a second time and walked away from the free lunch and her lost mama without offering anyone an explanation, walked straight out of this dingy heaven into the rain and headed home.

  In the days that followed, she kept telling herself that she was through with her mama, just like she was through with Mr. Dosan. She tried feeling angry, but anger made her too jittery. She tried forgetting Mama. She tried hoping that Mama would have a change of heart. Now here was a feeling the girl could tolerate, the hope that her mama might give up all that foolishness and come on home, if not tomorrow then next week or next month, no need to hurry since her presence didn’t much change the routine, and it felt good to be expecting her again, looking forward to the night—surely she would come home at night, just as she used to—when Mama would creep into the apartment trying as best she could not to wake Granny and failing, of course, so there would be an uproar, maybe a whipping, but the three of them would calm down soon enough, and the next morning the girl would tell Mama how she’d learned to read.

  It was this hope, her renewed expectation, that kept the girl cheerful during the long months of Granny’s sickness. Granny wasn’t so sick that she couldn’t huck sweet potatoes and popcorn most days, but at night, after supper, the only meal of the day she ate regularly, she spent hours on the toilet and then was so plagued by stomach cramps she couldn’t sleep. On Saturdays she went over to the clinic on Seventh Avenue and the girl tended to the chores—she washed the laundry in the sink, using hand soap to make suds, then draped wet clothes over the furniture since they didn’t have a wash line. She swept the floor and wiped down the stove and made the beds, and upon Granny’s return at the end of the day she stood to the side of the room, waiting for her hard work to be noticed. But Granny just closed herself in the bathroom without offering a whisper of praise.