Shifting Through Neutral

by Bridgett M. Davis

  “Just go on, do as I say. Gone to your room.”

  He meant it. She had finally convinced him that sharing a room with her father wasn’t healthy for a girl my age. Now that I was his sole responsibility, he had to think of these things, she pointed out. How did it look, she wanted to know, for a man’s daughter to join him in his bedroom after his wife has left, taking over her mama’s spot? And Daddy, for all his protectiveness, was a bit overwhelmed by this new role as a single parent. You have to worry about all manner of things with girls, Aunt Essie explained to him. You’ve got to think of the consequences of things later on down the road. He thought about it. She was a woman. Maybe she knew best.

  And so I had to go.

  I stumbled out of Mama and Daddy’s bedroom, crossed the darkened hallway, paused at my own unused room, and entered Kimmie’s. I flipped on the light and could see the rectangular spaces where the posters had hung, the spot on the wall Aunt Essie had scrubbed clean, and a thin layer of incense ash on the shelf where Kimmie’s altar had been. I climbed onto the bare mattress, curled my body like an unborn baby’s, rocked back and forth. But the flimsy membrane inside ripped loose, and without warning I was crying and crying circles of salty tears that slid sideways across the bridge of my nose and seeped into the naked pillow—nine years old and alone in bed for the first time in my life.

  Part Two

  Merging

  Choose a safe space to enter. Then blend into traffic.

  WHAT EVERY DRIVER MUST KNOW

  With both my mother and sister gone, I connected them in my head as one lost love called KimmieMama. Believing their fates the same enabled me to lie to myself. They were both gone but alive, and we would hear from them soon. Kimmie’s funeral I blocked out as some kind of ritualistic freak show that had nothing to do with reality, everything to do with adults’ weirdness. I was adept at illusion, having practiced it all those years in that house when my parents lived up and down and didn’t speak to each other and we all pretended it was okay. Mama and Kimmie were in some predicament they must escape from, after which they would call from a highway pay phone. This mental trick of denial worked well for a few days, days spent beneath the dining room table daydreaming about the reunion, plotting out what I would wear and would say, what it would feel like to once again hug KimmieMama.

  In that time, Aunt Essie was there, caring for me and for Daddy. I told myself she and I were a team and it was our job to make sure Daddy had what he needed beyond his pills. I provided the warm compresses for his head, and she provided his meals and clean clothes. I still resented her for persuading Daddy to kick me out of his bed, but I knew enough to know we needed her. One morning as she washed my hair, my head bent over the kitchen sink as she poured a bowl of warm water along the nape of my neck, Aunt Essie murmured into my ear, “Surprised we haven’t heard none from your mama yet.”

  “Maybe she can’t get to a phone,” I said.

  “That ain’t it,” she answered. “She called and gave me her number soon as she arrived in Louisiana.”

  I lifted my head up out of the sink basin, letting the water run off my hair, down my back, as I turned to Aunt Essie. “You talked to her?”

  “Put your head back in the sink, Darlin’. You getting the floor all wet.” She guided my face to the running water, and I cupped my hand over my mouth as I listened in disbelief. “You and your daddy were sleep. Lord, she called about one in the morning must’ve been. Wasn’t no sense in waking up folks at that hour. Ain’t like any of us done got a lot of rest lately. I just took down the number and told her to call back later. Figured she would have by now.”

  Hearing this news pierced my fantasy. I cried into the kitchen sink, my tears flowing down the drain.

  I kept dreaming about Kimmie and Mama. Different scenarios of the same thing: they were both in the Volvo, Mama sometimes in the front and other times Kimmie. The dreams always included the crash itself, and then I’d wake up. It was simple therefore to shift my thinking after Aunt Essie’s revelation and tell myself they’d both died in the accident. I preferred that scenario anyway. It’s not that my mother never calls me; it’s that she’s dead. Throughout that first year after she left, whenever the subject came up, I told people my mother was dead. Teachers, classmates, the Brownie troop leader.

  It was easy to keep up this new lie for two reasons. First, I decided I hated my mother—for making Kimmie leave in the first place, for leaving herself, for being the one who survived, for not calling me. And besides, Daddy acted like she was dead. He never mentioned her name to me again, never spoke of her in the reverent tones he once did. And Aunt Essie only referenced her in the most disparaging asides. Watching TV, she’d see some inappropriate behavior involving a mother and say, “A woman have a child, she need to act like she’s somebody’s mama,” supposedly referring to a soap opera character or some neglectful event she heard on the news. But I always knew to whom she was referring.

  With Mama dead in my heart, I missed Kimmie acutely. To escape my own grief, I spent every day after school and on weekends in my playhouse, where I created scenarios of family togetherness with the help of a couple dolls and Terrance Golightly. He’d come over, and we’d go down into the basement and play House. I was always the Mother, always in control, and he was always the Daddy, always sick and stretched out on the reclining lawn chair that substituted for a sofa bed in the playhouse. We easily graduated in our convoluted make-believe scenarios to “doing it.” It was his idea, something he’d learned about from his big brother; I liked the dangerous nature of it. He said all Mommies and Daddies did it. We took off all our clothes, and he lay on top of me, rubbing against my smooth belly. I enjoyed the feelings it aroused in me, loved how it blocked out the pain of missing Kimmie and hating Mama yet gave me quick pleasure at the same time. I loved too the way his little taut body felt against my own, his chest angular and hard, penis like a Vienna sausage. His smell was a new one for me, that combination of bubble gum and wet dog, breath like sweet corn. And yet in the combination of all those new smells I recognized something familiar: the aroma of maleness. Playing house with Terrance got me through those early weird, sad weeks after the accident. I’d done the same thing all these years later, used a sweet guy as an ink blotter for spilled sorrow.

  Meanwhile, in an attempt to draw me out of the basement—not that he ever knew what we were doing down there—Daddy began building the tree house for me in the backyard. For days and days of that Indian summer, he was out there pounding and sawing and sweating. Aunt Essie stood on the back porch with me as we watched. “Being a doggone fool!” she called out to him. “You got no business in your condition exerting yourself like that.”

  I thought her no fun and judgmental, and I began spending less time in the basement with Terrance, more out in the yard with Daddy. One day after Daddy had been working for hours on the tree house, he stood up against the tree trunk, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief and trying to catch his breath. He couldn’t stop wheezing. Aunt Essie snatched me, pulled me aside. “You don’t want him to have a stroke out there, now, do you?” she hissed, her mustache in my face. I shook my head no. “Then go talk to your daddy, tell him to stop that nonsense before it’s too late.”

  “You tell him,” I said, smart alecky.

  She looked at me, shaking her head. “All right, Miss Backtalk, I will.” She marched off, confronting him on the back lawn.

  Before then, it really had not occurred to me that my father could die from his headaches. Riots and random violence I knew about. But from his own illness? Never crossed my mind. Once Aunt Essie corrected that oversight, it dawned on me that the pills weren’t miracle drugs after all. I became terrified of what loomed as a possibility. As we sat in the den watching TV together one night soon after, I asked him right out, because I had to know.

  “Are you going to die, Daddy?”

  “Someday.”

  “Well, when you do, I want to die too.”

  “
Don’t talk like that. You gonna live a long, long time after I’m gone.”

  “I want to be buried with you.”

  “Don’t you say things like that, Rae Rae. It hurts me to hear you talk like that.”

  I shut up, but I didn’t stop thinking about Daddy dying, and my joining him.

  What I did stop thinking about was Kimmie. As the days got shorter and colder, I didn’t miss her anymore. It was as though she was a warm weather fixture, and it didn’t seem odd at all to me for snow to be on the ground and no Kimmie. After all, by December more time had passed with her gone than had passed with her back in my life. I was used to her absence, used to not having her around. What had been different—a treat from heaven—was the sweet summer we had together. That was my first experience with the waning of grief. When she did cross my mind, I thought of her fondly and missed her in the oblique way I had before she ever returned. In fact, I decided Kimmie was a gift that had been given to me and then taken away. Twice. Even now when I hear that expression Indian giver, Kimmie’s face, shiny Pueblo earrings dangling from her ears, moves across my mind’s eye.

  Christmas was filled with lonely abundance. In the past, it had been a time lacking ornamentation, apart from the little plastic tree Daddy put in the den window. There’d always been lots of nuts and clementines around because he’d made sure of that, but dinner was traditionally a simple capon that Daddy had roasted. I could always count on a few select toys—purchased by Daddy with money Mama left on the dining room table. I’d leave Santa Claus a slice of caramel cake and a glass of eggnog, go to sleep, wake up, play, and that was it. Quietly festive. Mama didn’t seem to like the holidays—or rather she didn’t know what to do with them. But this year, Aunt Essie decided to make a big deal of Christmas. She put up a massive silver-limbed tree that changed colors thanks to a little light with a revolving circular filter that threw red, green, and blue hues onto the tree’s branches. She cooked and baked for two days and shopped for gifts that she elaborately wrapped and propped under the tree. “I believe in praising the birth of Jesus Christ,” she said. “Rejoice in the Lord, and your days will be long.”

  Two days before Jesus’s birthday, Daddy hit the number. “Praise the Lord!” he yelled when he found out. Aunt Essie wasn’t amused by his “foul-mouthed sacrilege,” but Daddy was so giddy it was infectious. We were all excited and Daddy and I went on a shopping spree for all times. He walked me into Toys “R” Us, gave me a shopping cart, and said, “Go pick out whatever you want. Hell, I’m your Santa.”

  On Christmas morning I found all my hand-selected toys under the tree alongside a bounty of surprises: board games, paint sets, books, winter sweaters, and a lamb’s wool coat. We ate our big holiday dinner at the dining room table, went out that night to see the movie Sounder, and neither Daddy nor Essie mentioned the fact that December 25 came and went and Mama didn’t call. To me it was confirmation that she was dead. That night as I sat amid my presents, overwhelmed and sad and grateful all at once, Daddy looked at my confused face and said, “I wish every day could be Christmas for you, Brown Eyes.” And during the rest of his brief life, he tried to make that true.

  The ultimate present from Daddy came after his death, in the form of my beautiful white Mustang.

  I never saw Aunt Essie sleep. She was always the first up and the last to go to bed. She told me sleep held no joy for her. “Waste of time, dreaming a lot of mishmash from the past, making you want to look back when life is what’s ahead,” she explained. “You not gonna catch me turning to a pillar of salt.” She preferred keeping busy, and she had a whole slew of ways to do that, besides cooking and cleaning. Even while she watched her “stories” on TV, she was knitting or shucking corn or sewing a hem in a dress. And she looked forward to getting out of the house. “I’m no homebody,” she announced. She liked to walk to the grocery store every day for the fresh air. And by the winter, she’d already found and joined the nearest church within walking distance, Mount Bethel Baptist. That kept her busy on Sundays and a couple weeknights.

  She also brought the community into our home, somehow knowing everybody within no time: the Arab couple who owned the party store on West Seven Mile Road and had just had a new baby, old men from down South who sold watermelons and fresh tomatoes and peaches from the backs of raggedy trucks, young men needing to cut the grass or do some handyman work (she was touched by the teenager who rang the bell, told her he was collecting garbage, and asked if she had any he might take down to the dump for a small donation). She gave away food, wrote letters to “incarcerated boys” with five dollars tucked inside. She lectured strung-out heroin addicts on corners, refusing to step over them as they nodded out. “When you’re a missionary for God’s work, folks will just talk to you. Open up and hand you whole pieces of themselves,” she claimed. I guess for her it was true, because she was forever returning home with a sad story someone told her while standing in line at the bank or the bus stop or the grocery store. Now I see that her decision to leave her Nashville home behind and come take care of her brother and niece up North, that itself was a missionary act.

  I guess Aunt Essie was just what you’d expect a solid, southern black woman to be, but I knew nothing about her type; she was so completely different from my mother, she was like a foreign country, and I studied her just that way, as though she brought with her a whole new language and locale, a different landscape across which to move through these odd days and nights.

  She wanted everything respectable. That meant the house had to look like a woman lived in it. For the most part, she succeeded in making that happen. Plants in the living room, photographs from back home on the mantel, wax fruit in the center of the dining room table. But she never did convince Daddy to take the pool table out of the living room. She griped about it for weeks, begging him to put it in the basement, but Daddy ignored her until we all just walked around it as if it wasn’t there. He never actually shot pool on it, except for that birthday party, and we began using it to hold things—umbrellas, magazines, my homework. It was his one defiant contribution to home decor.

  Aunt Essie took over the never-used guest room as her own. On Sunday mornings, she let me watch as she dressed for church. I marveled at the squat, fleshy shape and heft of her body, how she prepped it for going out. First she put on her girdle, which took some work to get into, much pulling up and resting, pulling up and resting until the wayward flesh fell in behind its elasticized trap. Next came her support hose, a white woman’s flesh tone two shades lighter than her own skin, with elastic bands around the thigh. Protection against the blood clots she was prone to. And then came her long-line bra, which she put on backward, fastening a dozen hooks before sliding it around her wide torso. Her bras were always vividly white. The cone-shaped cups captured her sagging breasts and lifted them to stand-up attention. Nothing like Mama’s wispy, ready-for-a-hot-date lace teddies and matching tap pants. I especially liked to watch Aunt Essie toss baby powder between her thighs and breasts. When she slipped her church dress over her head, it was always the same: a well-made, simply tailored shift in a modest print or solid like the kind on the plus-size racks in the women’s department at Hudson’s. I doubt that Aunt Essie ever ordered clothing from a mail-order catalog.

  On Mother’s Day, she demanded that I go to church with her. Finally. I hadn’t been interested before, and Daddy had resisted on my behalf. But this day being what it was, she’d convinced him that I needed the distraction, so I joined her. She pinned a white carnation to her lapel, then gave me a red one. “Can I have a white one?” I asked. “Like you?” She paused, not bothering to tell me the symbolism of the colors—red if your mother is alive, white if she’s not—and handed over the white one. “Might as well,” she said. “Might as well.”

  It was a full two hours of singing and preaching and fanning. Afterward, I met new people, proudly introduced over and over by Aunt Essie as “my brother’s child.” Until then, I hadn’t known what it felt like for anoth
er to announce your place on the family tree, declare your value by declaring whom you come from. Standing there with Aunt Essie, I felt awash in kinship, protection. Holding her hand as we walked home, I decided she was my new mother and I was lucky to have her.

  When we got home, Daddy stood waiting for us in the doorway. “Your mama called,” he said. “She’s calling back in five minutes to talk to you.”

  I walked inside and stood looking at the Princess telephone in the hallway, afraid to touch it. I stared at the phone until it suddenly rang. I jumped. It rang again. I picked it up.

  “Hi, Rae.” Her voice sounded near, even as I envisioned the space it traveled through the phone wires to reach me. She asked about school. I told her it was fine. She said she hoped we could see each other soon, and that a package was on its way for me. It would arrive by my birthday, she promised. And then the conversation was over, but I kept holding the phone, letting the click sound hit me with its finality, letting the dial tone surge through the earpiece, until an operator came on to remind me that there was a receiver off the hook.

  Just like that, Mama had risen from the dead.

  It was hard to do anything but wait for that package. When the box finally arrived four days later with its Louisiana postmark, Aunt Essie helped me push it into the dining room, where she took a steak knife and slit it open. Inside the box lay piles of clothes. I recognized them immediately. They were Kimmie’s.

  “Well, I’ll be,” said Aunt Essie. “I have never…in my life…seen anything…”

  I recognized the fringed vest and the palazzo pants and the patched jeans with the peace sign sewn into them. Aunt Essie tried to help me take the box upstairs, but I wouldn’t let her touch anything. Instead, I carried every article of clothing up to Kimmie’s room—which was now mine—and put each piece in my closet, one at a time. Some things still smelled faintly like musk oil Kimmie used to buy from the Muslim brothers selling it on street corners. It almost felt like I had Kimmie back, like the Indian giver had half changed his mind.