by Pearl Cleage
As soon as Eddie left and we got inside, Joyce threw her arms around me and started apologizing for being late and asking me if I’d eaten enough and apologizing some more until finally I said, “Hold it! This is the part where you get to ask me how I’m feeling and I get to say I’m feeling fine and you get to look at me hard to see if I’m lying and if I’m not, you get to hug me again and say, welcome home, little sister. You look great!”
She teared up when I said that, and her body felt soft and plump when she hugged me. I’ve had clients whose husbands died and they blew up like balloons in no time. It’s a lot harder to take care of your body when nobody’s going to see you naked.
“Welcome home, little sister,” she said. “You look great.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Now tell me everything.”
Turned out the seventeen-year-old new mother had been lying about keeping up with her appointments for prenatal care and hadn’t seen the doctor since her second visit. The doctor said they had tried to contact her, but all the information she’d given them was bogus, which was really unfortunate since he had some bad news. Before she had stopped coming, she had tested positive for HIV. When the doctor told her after the delivery, she freaked out and started screaming that they were lying and she didn’t have to stay and hear no more shit from them about what she had or didn’t have and to just hand her back what she came with and she’d get the hell out of there.
The doctor finally gave her a sedative and Joyce sat with her until she calmed down and went to sleep. The baby’s tests wouldn’t be back until morning.
“What did he think her reaction would be?” Joyce said. “He just told her outright. No preparation or anything. She’s lying there with a brand-new baby and he just tells her like that? He didn’t even give a damn. He might as well have been talking to a chimpanzee.”
Joyce looked like hell. Her hair needed rebraiding. Her sweats were working overtime to accommodate her new hips and thighs, and her sandals were tired Woodstock wanna-bes.
“How’s your diet coming?” I said.
She tried to get her feelings hurt, but I wasn’t going for it. “I’m working on it,” she said.
I just looked at her.
“I’ve lost fifteen pounds,” she said.
I raised my eyebrows.
“Okay, ten.”
I knew the best she could claim was holding steady, and she knew it, too.
“So sue me,” she said. “I had a couple of months when all that stood between me and taking a tumble was a bowl of Jamoca Almond Fudge and some homemade Toll House cookies.”
I should have known. The dread tumble. When my mother committed suicide, some religious group sent us a bunch of pamphlets they had put together for the bereaved loved ones struggling to understand. We were pretty desperate for some kind of straightforward way to talk about what had happened, but when we read these little booklets, they were mostly full of ways not to talk about it, or if you did, to be sure you put the weight on the dearly departed and not on yourself.
Coping with guilt seemed to be a major deal for these particular pamphleteers, and one of them suggested that even using the word suicide gave it too much guilt-producing power. The left-behind loved ones were encouraged to try out new words or phrases to describe the indescribable. The author offered several suggestions, including the fairly generic “slipped away,” the slightly more judgmental “took a wrong turn,” and, our all-time favorite, “tumbled into the abyss.” After that, whenever we talked about suicide, we talked about “taking a tumble.”
“I just couldn’t believe he wasn’t coming back,” Joyce said. “At first I kept thinking if I could make it through that first year, I’d be okay. But I wasn’t okay.”
“It takes time,” I said.
“I know.” She took my hand. “This is terrible, but sometimes I used to sit here and make lists in my head of all the people who deserved to die more than Mitch.”
“I know that game.”
“Not one of my favorites.” She shook her head as if to make sure there was no part of her brain still secretly taking names.
“Better now?” I said, remembering one night after the funeral when I got up and found Joyce sitting in the dark by herself holding Mitch’s glasses and crying.
“Much better,” she said. “Once I stopped feeling guilty about living off the life insurance money and quit working for the state, I got so busy with the Sewing Circus, I didn’t have time to be sitting around here driving myself crazy.”
“Guilty?” I said. “Why?”
“When the check first came, it felt like blood money to me. How much could they pay me to make up for Mitch?”
“Ain’t that much money in the world,” I said, and I meant it. Mitch was one of a kind.
“You got that right. So I put it away and didn’t touch any of it for a long time. Then I realized how much I really wanted to find a way to fix the things we’d been busy half repairing with all the tired programs that don’t work and the exhausted people who don’t care. Mitch’s insurance let me buy myself enough time to try.”
It was almost funny. In the middle of all the bad things that have come our way, we both emerged as sisters of independent means.
Joyce frowned and shook her head. “That’s why this stuff with Eartha really makes me mad. She’s been coming every week for the last four months, lying the whole time, and for what? Because she’d rather smoke crack than have a healthy baby?”
“What the hell is the Sewing Circus?” I said, but Joyce just yawned, which made me yawn, too. We were both pretty exhausted.
“That’s too long a story to start on this late at night,” she said, “but I’ll tell you everything tomorrow. I promise.”
Joyce’s room was quiet and I had settled into my blue heaven before realizing I hadn’t told her about Eddie punching out the guy in the parking lot. We both had some stories to tell in the morning.
• 9
the hospital called to say the baby tested negative for HIV, positive for cocaine, and that they were going to do some more tests, so Joyce couldn’t see the baby until tomorrow. The other big news was that the mother had disappeared. Not disappeared as in, now you see her, now you don’t. Disappeared as in, got up, got dressed, put on her shoes, picked up her purse, and walked out.
Joyce can’t understand it, but I can. Homegirl’s trying to walk away from that HIV. She’s trying to decide if she’s going to tell anybody or just keep living her life and see what happens. I used to wish I hadn’t taken the test so I still wouldn’t know.
Before I tested, I had been celibate for almost a year. I had had enough of those Atlanta Negroes for a while. They talk so much shit when they’re looking for some sweetness, but they got no heart for the long haul. I figured ten years of rolling around with them was plenty.
Besides, in spite of what people will try to tell you, Atlanta is still a very small town, and the way I’d been living, it was getting downright ridiculous. I’d walk into a reception and there’d be a room full of brothers, power-brokering their asses off, and I’d realize I’d seen them all naked. I’d watch them striding around, talking to each other in those phony-ass voices men use when they want to make it clear they got juice, and it was so depressing, all I’d want to do was go home and get drunk.
Then I started keeping company with a bearded saxophone player who wore two gold hoops in each ear and played regularly at a club downtown. We hadn’t formalized anything yet, but we’d been hanging pretty tough for about three months and he was making me rethink this whole celibacy thing in a serious way. He wasn’t much taller than me, and built kind of round, but he had a lot of style and he could make a sax sound so sweet you couldn’t decide if you wanted to take him or the horn home to bed with you. He’d already been tested, so it was on me.
When I got the results and told him, he sat there and listened to me tell it all and then he picked up his coat and his horn case and walked out the door. No good-bye. No damn
, baby, what we gonna do? Nothing. One minute he was there, then he was gone. That was it.
I went with Joyce to see Eartha’s sister. I had told her about what happened at the liquor store yesterday and I figured, why not meet the rest of what seemed to be a supremely fucked-up family. The woman who came to the door let out a blast of that peppermint-smelling vapor that means crack smoked here, but Joyce didn’t blink. Joyce was a state caseworker for fifteen years and she’d been in most of the houses around here investigating for or against more benefits, custody rights, food stamp eligibility—all the questions that drive poor people crazy. By this time she was kind of like the telephone man or the cable guy: nothing shocked her.
“Hey, Mattie. Is Eartha around?”
Mattie, who looked to be about forty but was probably much younger, frowned at Joyce, confused.
“You the one took her to the emergency room, right?”
Joyce said yes, but the hospital had just called to notify her that Eartha had walked out and taken all her things with her except the baby. This did not sit well with Mattie, who thought we were going to tell her she had to take the kid.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Fuck that. I ain’t raisin’ no more kids, especially no screamin’ crack baby.”
Joyce tried to tell Mattie that’s not what we came for, but the woman was having none of it.
“Call the daddy if somebody gotta take the little muthafucka,” she said.
“Who is the father?” Joyce had her social worker voice on.
“How the hell do I know?” Mattie said. “One of them crack-head niggas she been fuckin’ for some rock.”
“Shut the damn door,” somebody yelled from the other room. “You lettin’ all the damn smoke out, fool!”
“Fuck you!” The woman laughed with a cackle that ended in a huge explosion of coughing and then another evil look in our direction. Joyce took a deep breath. She was trying to be cool.
“The hospital said the baby can come home on Friday—”
Mattie interrupted her. “And if she don’t come home, they ain’t gonna do nothin’ but send her to foster care just like they do all the other crack-head babies, so what difference it make?”
“She’s your niece,” Joyce said, and I could hear her getting mad. “Don’t you think Eartha would want you to keep the baby until she gets back?”
This really struck Mattie as funny. “Gets back? Eartha Lee ain’t comin’ back here till she runs out of other places to go, and that baby be long gone by then. That girl ain’t cut out to be nobody mama, so just call them nice white folks at the hospital and tell them don’t nobody over here want her, so they may as well bundle her little ass up and send her to somebody who do.”
The kid Eddie punched out in the parking lot came and stood behind Mattie in the doorway. He was tall enough to look over the top of her head without straining. The brother of the house.
Joyce looked at him. “Hello, Frank.”
“What the fuck our dumb-ass sister done now?” he said.
“She had that baby,” Mattie said.
“No shit,” he said, narrowing his eyes at me like I suddenly looked familiar. “Well, you see one crack baby, you seen ’em all.”
He laughed, pushed Mattie back inside, and then turned and pointed at me.
“And you do me a favor, awright? You tell Kung Fu I said to stay black, okay?”
• 10
“tell me about the Sewing Circus,” I asked Joyce as we sat on the back porch drinking apple cinnamon tea and trying to get the crack smell out of our nostrils.
Joyce grinned at me. “TSC is you and me,” she said. “It’s the wave of the future and they don’t even know it. Most of the people up here think it’s still 1958 and we’re dealing with some high-spirited youngsters who are just sowing their wild oats. They can’t see that this is something new. This isn’t a phase they’re going through. This is how they are. They don’t know anything. They don’t care about anything. They’re selfish and mean and mad all the time. Who do you think is breaking into these old people’s houses?”
“What old people’s houses?” I said. Joyce was getting excited, and when she gets excited, she talks fast.
“It’s practically an epidemic up here,” she said. “They used to only hit the summer cottages once they were empty, but now they don’t care if anybody’s home or not.”
“So that’s why you started a circus,” I said, trying to bring Joyce back around to the question. “To break up a burglary ring?”
She laughed, and even with the extra weight she was carrying, Joyce looked good this morning. Her skin was smooth, she had parted her hair in the middle and braided it into two thick cornrows, and she was wearing a pair of silver hoop earrings I had given her three Christmases ago. I wondered again how close Joyce was to Eddie. She had sent him to pick me up at an airport over an hour from where he was, which is the kind of favor you ask of a man who has more than a passing interest in you.
I tried to remember the sound of Eddie’s voice when he said Joyce’s name. A man who is just a friend says a woman’s name differently than the man who is her lover. I’ve seen men give away a perfectly successful clandestine affair by casually dropping their girlfriends’ names into an innocuous story without realizing that their tone of voice is suddenly filled with so many memories of sex and secrecy that it immediately sets off alarm bells in the mind of any wife who is serious about monogamy. I used to tell my lovers not to say my name at all, no matter how tempted they were. I knew their lips and tongues and teeth had memories of me that needed to remain between the two of us.
I didn’t remember hearing any of that in Eddie’s voice. When he talked about Joyce, he sounded like he was talking about a favorite cousin.
“It’s not a real circus,” Joyce was saying. “The oldsters just started calling it that because we took over an activity slot at the church that used to be called the Sewing Circle. It was the only women’s group that met regularly other than the deaconesses’, and I knew I wasn’t ready for that.”
Joyce walked over to turn on the flame under the teakettle, and I watched her behind jiggling under the bright fabric of her gauzy skirt.
“It may have actually been a sewing circle a long time ago,” Joyce said, “but when I started going, it wasn’t much of anything. Sometimes they’d get together and take up money to put flowers on the altar, but that was about it.”
Joyce started going to church again after Mitch died. It’s the same church we grew up in, but I knew she hadn’t been for years. I never asked her about it, but I think she wanted to pray and she was too self-conscious to do it at home alone. Talking to God can make you feel like you’re going off the deep end if you’re not used to it. It’s not as weird if there are some other people around doing it too, but if Joyce was so deep into it she was going to Wednesday night prayer meetings, it’s no wonder she was gaining weight.
“Stop looking at me like I’m crazy,” Joyce said. “There is method to my madness.”
“Always,” I said. “That’s one of your finer qualities.”
Joyce said when she started going to church regularly, she realized that a lot of the teenage girls she knew slightly from watching them grow up were there every Sunday, too. They weren’t really religious. It was just a place to hang around together after the service and show off their babies and gossip a little about the boys who never came unless they were forced. Joyce thought they might like a chance to do some more of the same, plus whatever other interesting experiences she could sneak in without scaring them away. They had enough social worker types in their lives already.
Joyce leaned across the table and touched my arm lightly like she wanted to be sure I was paying attention. “These girls haven’t got a chance,” she said. “There aren’t any jobs and there aren’t going to be any. They’re stuck up here in the middle of the damn woods, watching talk shows, smoking crack, collecting welfare, and having babies. What kind of life is that?”
C
ity life, I wanted to tell her, but Joyce had already gone into action. She invited the girls to come to a special meeting of the Wednesday Sewing Circle to talk about starting a nursery on Sunday morning where they could leave their babies with somebody they trusted and enjoy the services in peace.
That idea brought out nine young women under the age of twenty who had between them a dozen children under the age of five. The discussion was brief and to the point, resulting in a nine-week schedule laying out who was going to staff the nursery room, what her responsibilities would be, what supplies she might need, and how many kids she could handle. Questions were raised and discussed regarding discipline (no hitting; if the kid is uncontrollable, send upstairs for the mother), feeding (bottles with milk and juice and dry Cheerios only), and money for diapers.
Joyce said she thought the Pastor’s Special Fund would kick in a few bucks if they asked the committee, and she also volunteered to stay with the person who was staffing the nursery each week so there would be another set of hands and eyes on all those babies and because, she said to me, grinning like the cat who swallowed the canary, it gave her a chance to talk to the girls one on one in a setting where they were doing something responsible, by choice, and where they were surrounded by children.
Joyce is good at this kind of stuff. She went into social work in the first place because she really believes that people want to take care of themselves and their children, and if they’re allowed to do that with some dignity, everything else will fall into place. When I used to ask her why she and Mitch didn’t ever leave Idlewild, she said it was a perfect place for her because it was small enough so that if she did any little thing, she could really make a big difference in people’s lives.
“I could work myself to death in Detroit and Chicago,” she said, “and the problems are so big, nobody would even know the difference.”
Joyce’s plan worked like she knew it would, and more young mothers started using the nursery, so they had to keep meeting on Wednesday to fold these new people into the schedule and to make sure everybody knew what was happening and what their particular job required. The old ladies found all of this less than fascinating, so pretty soon they just stopped coming. What was left was a loosely organized group of seventeen young women, meeting once a week and handling a successful Sunday morning nursery school. Joyce wrote a small grant application and they got some outside funding to offset their costs and buy some toys and supplies.
