by Pearl Cleage
After a while, running the nursery program settled into a pleasant routine and they could finish all their business in half an hour, but they didn’t want to be finished that quickly, so they started talking about other things, like men and sex and how they were supposed to raise their kids without any jobs. The meetings got longer and longer and louder and louder. Joyce did a lot of listening and the girls did a lot of talking. A lot of loud talking, which is what people tend to do when they finally find somebody who will listen.
One time they were making so much noise, the choir director stopped his rehearsal and sent one of the lesser sopranos down to remind them that there were other activities going on in the building. A couple of weeks after that, somebody brought in a magazine article and they started talking about man-sharing and things got pretty heated between two women who had been best friends but who had been unhappily sharing the same trifling brother for two years.
Each one was waiting for the other one to get tired of the hassle and bow out gracefully, but neither of them would break and now he was asking them to have three-way sex. They were tired of having their business whispered about in the street, but they knew everybody knew and the man-sharing discussion set them free. They confronted each other in the middle of the Sewing Circus, but after a few minutes of shouting, they realized they liked each other a lot more than either one of them liked him. They burst into tears and forgave each other everything. The resulting reconciliation got so rowdy that one of the altos told the first tenor that Joyce was running a three-ring circus over in the fellowship hall, and the name just stuck.
“The only problem,” Joyce said, “is that we got a new pastor about six months ago. Reverend Smith was so old, he didn’t care what we did as long as we didn’t burn the place down, but he finally retired and now we’ve got Reverend Anderson and his wife, Miss Gerry, and I think she’s going to be a royal pain. They came from a big church in Chicago where he had put together this giant youth program, but now they’re here and even though he hasn’t said anything to me, she keeps telling me how much they really want to channel the church resources into the more traditional areas of Christian education and missionary outreach. When I ask her about the youth program they had in the city and whether or not it could work here, she starts talking in tongues.
“That’s one of the reasons I want to go independent and open my own center.” Joyce leaned toward me again. “I know the Circus is helping these girls and I’m not about to let Gerry Anderson mess it up by making them read Bible stories about obedience and chastity when they want to talk about domestic violence and birth control.”
I looked at Joyce with her eyes shining and her voice full of the urgency and passion of the cause and I remembered how much I liked growing up with her and Mitch. In most houses, when the kids wake up late at night and the grown folks are still up talking in low tones, the discussion is about money or trouble. In our house, it was about the design and distribution of a handbill, the best place to hold a meeting or stage a rally. I’d stand in the kitchen doorway and watch them until one or the other saw me and sent me back to bed. I remember feeling lucky because I lived in a house where people didn’t just fuss about what was wrong with the world. They tried to fix it.
Joyce finished her tea and her story at the same time and Eddie’s truck pulled into the yard like he’d been out back listening for his cue. He had his hair tucked under one of those multicolored knit hats that the Rastas wear and he was bringing bad news. Last night, while he was dropping me off here after we ate, somebody broke out two windows in the front of his house. He wasn’t here but a few minutes, so either somebody just happened to see us leaving or they had been watching the house. They didn’t take anything, but he’d spent the morning cleaning up and replacing windows.
“Who do you think did it?” Joyce said. I was trying to imagine who would shatter the calm of such a perfectly peaceful place.
“Don’t know,” said Eddie with a graceful shrug. “But I will.”
Something in the way he said it chilled me. He must have felt my reaction because he turned to me with a smile that successfully distracted me from anything but the whiteness of his teeth in the middle of that beard.
“How you doing?”
“I’m fine,” I said, glad he couldn’t read my mind.
“Good.” He nodded and turned back to Joyce.
“So how’s Eartha and the baby?” Eddie lifted the hood of her car and peered inside.
Our news wasn’t much better than his. There was still no word from the missing mama and the hospital hadn’t called yet with any more of the baby’s test results. Joyce said she was giving them another hour and then she was just going to drive back over there and be a pest until they told her what was what.
We made a strange little threesome, standing there looking at each other, trying to figure out what else could go wrong with this day, then the phone rang and Joyce went to answer it. Eddie leaned back against the truck and smiled directly at me for the second time that morning.
“I have a message for you,” I said, suddenly remembering.
He looked at me, still smiling. “A message? From who?”
“From that kid at the liquor store yesterday.”
“Frank? The bad man? Where’d you see him?”
“Joyce took me by his house looking for Eartha. He said to tell you to stay black.”
I didn’t say the stuff about Kung Fu since I had been thinking that, too, and it made me feel guilty when Frank said it out loud. Eddie just shook his head.
“Youngblood always looking for some contact,” he said. “Bumping through the world, looking for that contact.”
Joyce came back out to say the hospital had finished with the baby’s tests and she seemed all right except for the cocaine, which she would have to deal with through withdrawal just like any other junkie. A hell of a way to spend your first couple of days in the real world. They had told Joyce a lot of crack babies scream when anybody touches them, but this one seems to be comforted by it. That was all it took. She came to the door with her keys in her hand and her purse already slung over her shoulder. Joyce was big on comfort.
Eddie wasn’t finished with the repairs, so at his suggestion and his assurance that he didn’t mind walking home, Joyce agreed to take the truck. I told her I’d have something on the stove whenever she got back. She kissed me and half nodded like food was the last thing on her mind.
After Joyce pulled off, I sat down on the steps. I could hear at least four or five different birds, squawking or singing as the spirit moved them, and I closed my eyes to see if I could identify any of them like we used to do in school, but I couldn’t. Living in the country, I’d learned to recognize bird calls. In the city, I learned to recognize sirens.
One bird was singing louder than all the others, almost as if to insist that I remember his name. I concentrated, but nothing came to me.
“Cardinal,” Eddie said.
I opened my eyes and he pointed at the bright red bird swaying on a low-hanging branch above the porch.
“It’s a cardinal,” he said again, as if I had spoken the question out loud.
He slammed the hood and wiped the oil off his hands on a rag, reached up and pulled off his cap. His hair fell to his shoulders in a cascade of softly coiled locks. It was so pretty, I smiled, and he saw me.
“Did you grow your hair for religious reasons?” I said as he stuffed the cap into his pocket.
He hadn’t wanted a drink last night and he told me he was a vegetarian. I was curious.
He shook his head. “It was Mitch. One night him and Joyce were watching a documentary about Bob Marley, and Joyce started talking about how much she liked his dreads and how she wondered what they felt like and how sexy they were. After a while, Mitch started worrying about what would happen if Joyce ever really met a man with dreadlocks and he told her since she liked them, he was going to grow her some. Then he said I had to do it, too, since he wasn’t going to b
e the only dreadlock in Lake County, but he couldn’t make it through the Buckwheat phase. Not enough patience.”
I must have looked confused.
“That’s when your hair is growing but hasn’t really locked up yet, so it’s just standing all over your head looking like Buckwheat. He kept getting mad because people would ask him if he’d forgotten to get a haircut or comb his hair or something. Joyce promised him she wasn’t going to run off with a Rasta and told him to go on and cut it if he wanted to, which the brother did that very afternoon.”
I think that’s probably the reason dreads never caught on any more than they did. Sisters always like having enough hair to toss around, but we’re rarely prepared to endure the indignities of the in-between stages. That’s why extensions were born. Even my clients who decided to really lock up wanted some help getting started.
“Most people twist their hair to avoid all that,” I said.
He shrugged and raked his hand through his hair. “Misses the point,” he said. “Learning to have the patience to let nature take its course is half the lesson.”
“Is that why you didn’t cut yours?”
“I don’t know.” He smiled again. “Yes, I do. I didn’t do it because everybody thought I was going to.”
“Defiance,” I said. “One of my favorite reasons for doing anything.”
That was the damn truth. The problem is, Eddie’s defiance got him a head full of beautiful dreadlocks. My rewards weren’t always quite so spectacular, but I bet his weren’t always that way either. There was something in his face that made me think he’d seen enough and done enough that there was nothing I could say that would shock him. Which is not to say he couldn’t be surprised. I didn’t have enough information to speculate on that yet.
• 11
i’ve been masturbating like a madwoman for two days. I feel like I haven’t been touched by anybody but me in a hundred years. I woke up last night with my hand between my legs in the middle of a seriously scandalous dream involving me and two guys I had sex with once during a particularly heated political campaign. Not at the same time, of course. I had one on the night of the primary victory and one on election day. But in the dream, the three of us were all there together, rolling around on the couch in the candidate’s inner sanctum.
That’s probably what woke me up. I hate politics. Plus, even in my wild days, I had pretty strict rules about some things. I was never interested in groups or animals, most especially snakes, which had their fifteen minutes of freakish fame during one memorable summer when somebody had a girlfriend in from New Orleans with navy blue fingernails and a seven-foot boa constrictor she liked to wear around her neck. Needless to say, whenever she appeared, Negroes lost their minds.
It’s hard to think about that stuff now without beating myself up for being so stupid, but I think I’d feel that way even if I hadn’t gotten sick. I used to justify some of the things I did then by saying, well, at least I’m having a lot of great sex, but you know what? I wasn’t having a lot of great sex. Some of it was fun and exciting, but a lot of it was just sweaty and boring and seemed like the quickest way to finish the evening without hurting anybody’s feelings.
Once I took the test and admitted the results, everything changed, of course. Folks who used to spend whole evenings trying to look down the front of my blouse would now break out in a cold sweat at the very thought of having sex with me. Some gay friends who’ve been positive for a couple of years tried to tell me that it gets better once you complete the transition from what they called your preplague lovers to your new postplague relationships, but I have my doubts. Most straight brothers are still in such denial that when you fess up, their first reaction is to run in the opposite direction as fast as they can. That pretty much leaves a bunch of people you wouldn’t fuck on a bet or who are already sicker than you are.
After the first couple of months of my involuntary celibacy, I was so crazed that I went to one of those Sunday support group gatherings where a whole lot of HIV people who want to have sex get together and try to see if they can work something out. Everybody gets a glass of cheap wine or sweet tea and then you sit in a circle like group therapy and tell your name and indicate whether you’re just HIV-positive or already diagnosed with full-blown AIDS. I hate that expression. Sounds like a typhoon moving through your body, but those distinctions are important. Some people who’ll give you a shot if you’re just positive won’t have anything to do with you if you’re already standing in the eye of the storm. You’re also allowed to say something about your sexual preferences if you want to be specific.
The first two people to speak were men with AIDS who liked integrated country-and-western gay bars where they could do the Texas two-step without being hassled because they were black. They had lucked out and found each other, but their immediate bonding only depressed the rest of us, who should have had a glass of wine to toast their good fortune and gone home to our memories and our vibrators. But we didn’t. We went on around the circle: teachers, waiters, a musician, trying to sound casual and knowing none of us were attracted to any of the rest of us, except the first two guys, who had already made a date for Friday night, excused themselves, and left.
When it was finally over, I skipped the postconfessional cocktails, went home, ran a hot bath full of the bubbles I used to save for serious seductions, made myself a good, strong drink, and sat in that water until it got stone-cold, thinking about all the fucking I had done and all the fucking I wasn’t going to do, and I realized that the only thing I was sorry about was that I never had a chance to make love.
Joyce told me that she had been in love with Mitch since she was sixteen years old so that in addition to being the only man she had ever had sex with, he was the only man she’d ever even kissed. I envied her that. I still do. I remember looking at the words in Mama’s suicide note in her neat little handwriting and thinking to myself, well, if that’s the price, fuck true love. It’s too scary and too complicated and way too much weight to carry as fast as I intend to be moving. Some people weren’t cut out for it, I told myself, and I was one of those people. The problem was, once I started running, I never slowed down long enough to be sure.
• 12
it’s almost noon and the day is as pretty as any I can remember. I spent the morning like a cat, moving from one patch of sunshine to the other, turning my face to the softness of the breeze off the lake, stretching the last city kinks out of my shoulders. I’ve been here a week and Joyce has been at the hospital more than she’s been home. She invited me to come with her to see the baby, but hospitals are the best place to pick up something random and that’s the last thing I need. I haven’t had any problems, knock on wood, but I don’t take chances. Besides, the truth is, I’ve been working so hard for so long, I was enjoying a chance to just do nothing.
Besides, this little interlude isn’t going to last much longer. Joyce is trying to get Eartha’s baby released from the hospital. She had to get Mattie to sign a form as the baby’s aunt giving Joyce permission to check her out and bring her home until her mother resurfaces or some kind of permanent arrangement can be worked out. All Mattie wanted to know was whether or not what she was signing obligated her to the kid in any way, shape, or form. When Joyce swore to her that it didn’t, literally swore, one hand raised and everything, right there on the front porch, Mattie signed it. Of course, she couldn’t ask us in. Crack addicts never ask you in. They’re afraid you’ll want to get high.
Joyce is ecstatic, although I will confess, I am still less than enthusiastic about spending the summer with a newborn crack baby. But what can I say? When she asked me what I thought, I knew it was a trick. Grown people never ask you what they should do until they’ve already decided for themselves. They don’t tell you that, of course, but they stand there and wait for you to either confirm their good judgment or reveal yourself as not as smart as they thought you were by advising them in the other direction.
So I avoided all tha
t pressure by pausing as if to truly consider the question, then giving her a sisterly smile and telling her to go for it. She was so relieved, she hugged me and promised not to ask me to change any diapers. I probably should have asked her to put that in writing.
It turned out to be a pretty interesting morning, though. I had just finished making myself a serious screwdriver with some of Joyce’s organic orange juice when the same big brown Cadillac that had been the start of so much high drama at the liquor store a few days ago pulled up into the yard and stopped. A tall, slender young man who looked to be about sixteen years old swung the door open slowly, unfolded his lanky frame a section at a time, and looked around. In spite of, or in defiance of, the warm weather, he was wearing a hooded black sweatshirt, amazingly low-slung blue jeans, spotless white designer sports shoes, unlaced, a Chicago Bulls cap, and a bored expression. He looked as out of place in Joyce’s yard as a Siberian tiger.
He sauntered around the car and opened the door for the woman waiting patiently inside. The woman didn’t move until he leaned down and extended his hand in a way that looked strange and old-fashioned, given the boy’s urban-warrior outfit. She grasped his hand firmly and raised herself regally out of the car like Coretta Scott King arriving for the martyr’s annual birthday celebration. Although I’ll never forget that car, I had never seen either one of its occupants before in my life.
