I called Mama that night. I made Daddy teach me how to dial the one, followed by the necessary ten digits. When she heard my voice, she sounded pleased. “Oh!” she said. “Rae!”
“I got the box, Mama. Thank you.”
“I thought you might want to have some of her things,” she said. “She had so many nice clothes.”
“I love everything you sent.”
“Take care of them, okay, Rae?”
“I will, Mama.”
There was a pause, and in that silence Mama must have weighed a dilemma—whether or not to speak Kimmie’s name. “She could really dress, couldn’t she?”
“She sure could. I liked that outfit she gave you to wear for your card party. Remember? It looked good on you, Mama.”
Then she let herself say it. “Kimmie just knew what looked good.”
“Kimmie knew just how to match things together, the right colors and everything,” I chimed in.
“She sure did.”
And so it went. Mama and I were the closest witnesses to Kimmie’s life that last summer, to the small moments and the big ones. Sharing that connection made ours a sweet, tight bond, we with our mutual memories. It was in its own way a perfect relationship—both of us getting a piece of what we needed from it.
Those intense telephone conversations lasted for three years, alongside Mama’s ritual of sending me more of Kimmie’s clothes for my birthday. Together these two events gave my life a steady reassurance that had been lacking even when Mama lived with us. The clothes were keepsakes of my big sister’s, but more important, gifts from Mama. She was so stylish and sophisticated that I wanted to wear what she deemed worthy. I craved her advice, fashion or otherwise.
Most of the pieces I could get away with wearing because I simply pulled them tighter with belts or let them hang loose, and in that weird fashion moment that was the seventies, no one thought it odd. “That is so cool,” girls would say to me about a pair of baggy bell-bottoms or a flowing maxiskirt engulfing my beanstalk body. “Thanks, this used to be my sister’s,” I’d say, keeping things vague so no one had to know she was dead. I wasn’t even sure she was.
What I loved most about our talks was Mama’s voice. She sounded exactly as she had that night before the funeral when she held me close and told me, “You’re all I have left. You’re it.” We spoke in low voices, our lips brushed against the mouthpieces, ever so intimate, the smell of Jungle Gardenia permeating the telephone wires.
I felt something akin to happiness during those preteen years, with my mother a phone call away and my father at arm’s reach. Only once in that time did an event impinge to upset my precarious joy: the psychic Jeane Dixon’s prediction that the world would end on New Year’s Eve of 1973. Mama said folks could mark their calendars based on what Jeane Dixon said. I didn’t know how to prepare for the end of the world. That night shortly before midnight, I stood in the doorway of Daddy’s room and held my breath until I was sure I saw Daddy’s body rise and fall, rise and fall. And then I went to bed, reciting the prayer Kimmie had taught me: Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.
One day not long after Jeane Dixon’s prediction Mama called, her voice broken up. “Stevie is in a coma,” she said. “Car accident.”
“Oh no!” I said, even though I hadn’t gone near a Stevie Wonder song since Mama had left.
“I just don’t understand,” she said. “Why?”
I was silent, unable to answer her, feeling doom roll over our telephone relationship. So this was the end of the world.
She didn’t call for a couple weeks, and I tried to accept this tiny Armegeddon, but then one day the phone rang, I answered it, and she simply said, “He woke up.” I could hear “Boogie On Reggae Woman” playing in the background. She was quiet before she added, a note of envy in her voice: “Some folks attract miracles. Those are the ones to hang around.”
I tried to think of someone in my life who had been lucky. I couldn’t think of anyone.
The rift between Daddy and me came along with my entry into Hampton Junior High. I was twelve and wanted to hang out with Lisa LaBerrie and go roller skating at Northland Roller Rink, eat corned beef on rye with mustard at Lou’s Finer Delicatessen, buy the top 45s at Mike’s Record Shop on Avenue of Fashion and make up dance routines to our favorite songs.
Meanwhile, Daddy was negotiating with the monkeys on his back—one a searing pain, the other a potent drug. He was new to the Demerol injections, hadn’t found the dosage that would, as he put it, “even” him out. Either he took too little and was controlled by throbbing headaches, or he took too much and nodded out. I didn’t yet understand his heavy sleeping, nor did I understand his wide-awake irritability. I foolishly saw it as a rejection of me. Or maybe I used that excuse as an easy out. Either way, the bond we’d shared before was dissolving right alongside my preteen status.
Thirteen was by far the worst year of my life. First, for some reason I still don’t fully understand, I was skipped a grade in school—snatched from my best buddies and thrust into classrooms with older boys and girls who didn’t know me. My homeroom teacher only said I needed a more “challenging environment.” I had recently begun hanging out with one of the “fast” girls in my school. Perhaps they were trying to save me from a life of ruin?
When my fourth birthday box arrived from Mama, included inside—sandwiched between Kimmie’s old granny dresses and miniskirts and peasant tops—was a plane ticket. We had talked a few times about my coming to visit her “when the time is right,” and I had been excited about the future. Now that the future was literally in my hands, I was terrified. When Mama called that Sunday, I announced that I didn’t want to ride on an airplane. “But they’re safer than cars,” she said. “I’d take my chances in the sky over a highway any day.”
What must have seemed irrational to my mother made perfect sense to me. I wasn’t afraid of airplanes; I was afraid of their pilots. My fear of flying stemmed from my fear of accidents in general. I always believed Cyril was careless behind that wheel. And I felt that the best way to prevent an accident was to have complete faith in the one at the helm. Pilots were strangers I didn’t trust.
The terror was real, but I misjudged its cause. It had been four years since I’d seen my mother. What if seeing me made her realize I was a poor replacement for Kimmie after all? Our weekly phone talks had stabilized me, taken the hate out of my heart, made me feel normal and worthwhile, a girl with a mother who loved her and would see her soon. Mama and I shared an intimacy that people can only have over a telephone or in the front seats of cars on long-distance rides, eyes focused on the road ahead. Distant love is pure.
And then there was Daddy, living life as though it were a part-time job, with his this-day-I’m-asleep, that-day-I’m-awake existence. I wanted to talk to him about the plane ticket and was trying to catch him on an “up” day when Aunt Essie said, “Don’t go flapping that thing around JD. He don’t need no reminders of that woman’s conniving.” She was certain Mama was plotting again to take me away from Daddy. “You got no idea how much that hurt him when Vy tried to pull off what she did that day,” she told me. “She just gonna snatch you in broad daylight.”
“You weren’t even there,” I said.
“Oh, but I heard, darlin’. Heard all about it.”
“From Daddy?”
“Who else? That’s why I know what I’m talking about.”
“What did he say about it?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“I do.”
She paused. “He said he felt like murdering somebody that morning.”
“Daddy?”
“Watching them act like some perfect little family, and here he was a sick man and all, come that close to losing you.”
“Did he really say that?”
“Said that and more. I says to him, ‘Well now, JD, you wouldn’t have done nothing crazy on account of Rae.
’ And he says, and I quote, ‘Yeah, Rae saved a few lives that day, including her mama’s.’” Aunt Essie raised her right hand. “As God is my witness, he said it. I got no reason to lie.”
Naturally after that I stalled, pulled two ways. But Mama persisted. “I’ve arranged for you to have your own stewardess on the plane,” she said. “She’ll be with you throughout the flight. And I think you should stay for the entire summer. I’ve got it all planned out.”
This spurred heartbreak, the image of my mother making “summer to-do” lists at the kitchen table of her Brady Bunch–style house, sipping instant coffee as a cigarette burned in an ashtray nearby, her feet clad in nylon slippers. Louisiana. Those lilting syllables, multiple vowels still held their allure. I thought maybe, just maybe, it was worth the risk after all.
But Aunt Essie protested. “What she wanna see you for now?” she asked, hands on hips in fierce protectiveness. “After all this time?”
“She misses me,” I said.
“Hmph.”
“And I miss her.”
“Well, just keep in mind who been here all along, caring for you,” she said. “Just keep in mind what it would do to your daddy for you to leave him just like that.” She snapped her finger.
I couldn’t fully articulate my own dilemma because it was multipronged: I wanted to see Mama, desperately, but I was afraid my physical presence might disappoint her somehow. I also didn’t want to hurt Daddy, couldn’t imagine being away from him; yet I honestly didn’t know what I would do if Mama asked me to live with her. And on top of all of that was Aunt Essie’s intimation that the whole ordeal would surely kill Daddy—or make him kill. The best thing I could do was to develop a fear of flying.
But Mama threatened me, saying that her invitation wouldn’t extend forever. She gave me a week to decide. Out of desperation I came up with a plan. I asked Daddy to drive me down South to see Mama. This was to me a perfect solution. It eliminated my need to get on an airplane; it got me to my mother; it included Daddy in the plans, and it gave me the chance to ride a long stretch of road just as I’d always wanted to do.
“I got to see about that, Brown Eyes,” said Daddy. “Gotta see what Alfred thinks about my car going that far.”
“He can tune it up,” I said, more confident about my plan the more I thought about it.
“And where you think I’m a stay while you visiting with your mama?”
“You and Aunt Essie can visit family in Nashville. She’s always saying how she misses home; you can stay there a while and then pick me up on the way back.”
“You got it all planned out, now, don’t you?”
I nodded, satisfied with myself.
“We don’t actually have family left in Nashville.”
“Aunt Essie has her good friend Lucretia.”
“True. But you do know that Tennessee ain’t nowhere near Louisiana?”
I shrugged. “It’ll be an adventure.”
Daddy laughed.
Plans went along better than I’d hoped. Aunt Essie’s friend, it turns out, owned a boardinghouse in Nashville. “I’ll just tell Lucretia to hold out a couple rooms for me and JD,” she said. “That way, I don’t have to disturb the folks who been renting my house.” And Mr. Alfred put a new transmission in Oldie, as a gift. “Got it at a junkyard, didn’t cost me nothing,” he explained. Mama didn’t love the plan, but she saw it as a decent compromise given that she couldn’t convince me to fly. “Just make sure JD knows that I expect you to stay at least a couple weeks,” she said.
On the morning of our trip, we all piled into Oldie and took off, Daddy driving carefully and methodically. He and Aunt Essie were arguing over the radio dial—whether it should be tuned to the blues or gospel—when the accident occurred. We’d barely gotten out of the city when it happened—hit from behind by an elderly woman driving an old Chrysler. It was just a fender bender like the one Kimmie and I once had, but Daddy’s head rammed against the steering wheel, which gave him a searing, instant headache. Aunt Essie insisted we file a police report and have Daddy checked out at the hospital. And I was instantly enraged with my father. Once again, he was too fat to wear blue jeans and too sick to drive highways and byways. I could not wait to learn how to drive myself, which I saw as the solution to all these unnecessary accidents.
The hospital decided to keep Daddy for a couple days. As soon as an emergency room doctor took his blood pressure, the doctor panicked, awed by the high reading. We called Mr. Alfred to come tow Daddy’s car, and Aunt Essie and I caught the bus home from the hospital. I made the painful call to Mama. She was not at all sympathetic once she realized we were all more or less okay. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you about cars,” she said. “But would you listen? It’s like you want something to happen so I can have that on my conscious too.”
Daddy’s car never did run again. Mysteriously, after it got towed, the motor was gone, brakes shot. Mr. Alfred finally hauled it to an auto graveyard. Oldie was nine years old.
After the aborted trip, I called Mama as usual on the following Sunday afternoon. Her conversation was dry—more distant and perfunctory, too formal. She never mentioned my visiting her again. And within a month, she stopped taking my calls altogether. Cyril would answer the phone. Every time. And every time, he told me the same thing: “She’s sleeping, Chicken. Call back later.”
Hopeful, I continued to wear Kimmie’s hand-me-downs.
A teacher’s strike kept us from returning to school that September. It dragged on and on, into the end of October, and in that time I staved off boredom by reading books. Whatever Daddy was reading, whatever I could grab from the library, I devoured. When I got my hands on Soul on Ice, I read it voraciously, captivated by Cleaver’s admission that he was obsessed with white women. By the end of the book, I decided I could no longer have straightened, “trying to be white” hair; I had to have an Afro. But Aunt Essie, who had washed and pressed my hair religiously every week since her arrival, thought an Afro was too “vulgar” for a girl my age. I ran to Daddy for permission.
“You and your aunt Essie should work that out,” he said.
This infuriated me. I decided I didn’t need to work anything out with my aunt. I proceeded to wet my hair, saturate it with lotion, and then tie sections of it with twisted strips made from a paper bag, so as to give it the right balance of curl and nap.
“Now, I told you not to do that,” said Aunt Essie when she discovered me. “You call yourself not listening?”
I ignored her, kept tying my hair.
“I’m talking to you.”
Silence.
“God don’t like ugly,” she warned.
I still said nothing.
“And while you thinking you too cute to answer me, remember this: God ain’t so particular about pretty neither.”
I sighed, wanting to seem bored by her idle God-fearing threats. I shrugged my shoulders for effect.
“You gonna listen to me one day,” she promised. “Do hear me say, you gonna listen to me one day.”
“I don’t have to listen to you,” I spat at her. “You’re not my mother.”
Aunt Essie caught her breath. I knew I’d stepped over a line, but I didn’t care. I had Mama’s telephone number committed to memory.
“Whatever you think of me, you gonna respect me,” she said, her arms folded defiantly across her chest. “I didn’t come all this way, give up my nice home and my friends, to be sassed by an ungrateful little heifer.” Then she waddled off, her curved back boomeranging my shame back at me.
Thirteen was also the year I started my period. It was not at all how I pictured it would be. I’d been waiting forever and was certain I was the only girl in the ninth grade who hadn’t gotten hers yet. It felt like a dirty little secret, my lack of a menstrual cycle. Poised for womanhood, I kept a box of Kotex and a Tampax tampon ready. When it finally came, I stared at this little red stain against my winter white pants and thought how with my blue sweater the combin
ed colors were weirdly patriotic. It was 1976, and the entire nation was in a yearlong bicentennial frenzy. Truth be told, I had nothing to celebrate. Cyril still wouldn’t let me speak to Mama.
Aunt Essie marked this rite of passage with one of her trademark one-liners of wisdom. “Keep your dress down and your panties up,” she warned. Then she told me to go to the store, buy a box of Kotex, get some safety pins, and put a napkin between my legs for protection. “Don’t go buying them tampons neither,” she said. “Don’t nobody but whores wear those. They the only women who got enough room up there for them to stay put.” There was more advice. “You got to be real conscious of keeping your body clean now,” she said. “A woman don’t want to go around smelling like fish gone bad.” I felt an overwhelming sadness as I fumbled in the bathroom with my new sanitary belt and that bulky napkin. Fed up with the cumbersome pad, I secretly used my tampon in defiance. Still, I couldn’t ignore that starting my period meant not only monthly responsibility but also womanly guilt.
Daddy wasn’t much better. When I told him about my period, he mumbled something about being careful around boys from that day forward, abruptly stopped kissing me good-bye or hello on the lips. Rather than feel rejected by him, I felt guilty, as though I had somehow betrayed him by doing this thing called maturing. His actions made me miss Mama more profusely than ever. I was sorry I could no longer pretend she was dead. And yet I turned her memory into a living shrine. I built an altar in my room, where I placed a picture of her I’d found in a drawer. In it, she was sitting on the front porch, smoking, looking out into the distance. Next to that I put a bottle of her perfume and a note Mama had written for me once when I was late for school. I bought an old Stevie Wonder LP from Mike’s Record Shop, and I spun one tune from it over and over on my red record player. “The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind,” he crooned while I stayed in my room for long stretches of time, feeling sorry for myself. I started to grasp the notion that Daddy and Aunt Essie had conspired to keep Mama and me apart. She’d wanted to take me with her that long-ago August morning when she left with Kimmie and Cyril; I believed that what she once told me over the phone was true: Daddy had stopped her because of his own selfishness. I thought that was the worst word in the world—selfish.
Shifting Through Neutral Page 22
