by Pearl Cleage
The woman looked to be in her late fifties and was a lot more dressed up than people usually get around here in the middle of the week. She was wearing a pale blue polyester pantsuit and white sandals with stockings. Her hair, which was pressed and hot-curled within an inch of its life, was elaborately styled and piled like Mahalia Jackson’s when she sang her solo at the end of Imitation of Life. Hardly anybody asks for that kind of hard press anymore. Sister seems to have missed the moment when we decided it was okay for the hair to move.
A thin white scarf was loosely tied under her chin to protect this well-sprayed helmet of hair from even the possibility of a breeze. She smoothed the pants suit over her well-girdled hips and turned to the boy, who was leaning against the car with his hands in his pockets, dragging the jeans down even further. I could see and hear them clearly through the screen door, but neither one had noticed me.
“I’ll just be a few minutes,” the woman said, starting toward the back steps. Joyce’s car was sitting in the yard waiting for Eddie to finish repairing its fuel pump, so they must have assumed she was home.
“How about I go and come back for you?” the boy said without looking in her direction.
She stopped, turned toward him, held out her hand. He didn’t move.
“Tyrone Harris Anderson, what did you promise your grandfather?”
The boy mumbled something.
“I can’t hear you, son,” she said.
“To cooperate,” he said, louder, sounding like a stubborn first grader.
“That’s right. So hand me the keys.”
He slouched over and dropped them in her hand.
“Thank you,” she said. “And don’t sit there in that hot car either. Go walk down to the lake and enjoy the sunshine.”
He looked at her like she had completely lost her mind.
“Go on now!” Her voice carried the sharp edge of someone who was used to having her way.
“All right, all right,” he said, pulling his cap down over his eyes and squeezing the bill until the break satisfied him. “Don’t take all day,” he muttered, strolling down to the dock, my favorite peaceful place, although I would be willing to bet the tranquil beauty of the scene was lost on him. His misery was self-contained, able to bloom anywhere.
She didn’t see me until she reached up to knock and there I was. She jumped back about a foot and gasped.
“I’m sorry,” I said, opening the screen. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I’m Joyce’s sister, Ava.”
“Oh,” she said, smiling with everything but her eyes. “I didn’t even know Joyce had a sister.”
“I’m visiting from Atlanta for the summer,” I said.
“How lovely. Family is so important, especially in these terrible times.” She looked at me, still with that fishy, too bright smile, and then clapped her palm to her forehead the way people do on television when they’ve forgotten something. “Where are my manners?”
She held out her hand with the complete confidence of an incumbent politician ahead in the polls. “I’m Gerry Anderson,” she said. “The pastor’s wife.”
Of course she was. I smiled and shook her hand.
“Didn’t Joyce tell you I was coming by?”
I shook my head. Of course she hadn’t.
The Reverend Mrs. Anderson smiled brightly, but she was clearly annoyed. When I started to explain that Joyce had been spending a lot of time trying to get things straight with Eartha’s new baby, she nodded and clicked her tongue.
“I forgot all about that poor little fatherless child,” she said. “Such a shame. Babies having babies without any thought to how they’re going to care for them. I keep telling Joyce these girls need some old-fashioned lessons in how to say no. All that other just confuses them. We need to teach them how to cross their legs and keep their dresses down. It’s a shame is what it is.”
I agreed it was definitely a shame, but I kept getting distracted by the elaborate construction of her hair. I was wondering how much of it she had grown and how much was cash and carry. I probably should have invited her in, but I was looking forward to a quiet afternoon alone. Entertaining the preacher’s wife was not on my agenda. She waited another beat to see if I’d break down and offer her a glass of iced tea, but I just couldn’t do it.
I looked over her shoulder down to the dock where the kid I assumed to be her grandson was smoking what looked like a big, fat joint and tapping the ashes into the water. He took a final, deep drag, then pinched the fire out and put the roach back in his pocket. Wasn’t he afraid she’d smell it on his clothes when he climbed back into the car beside her?
“Well, let me leave something for her then,” she said finally, handing me a large envelope. It was addressed to Joyce, in care of the church, and it was open. Gerry wagged her finger, frowning. “You tell Joyce the Good Reverend is not happy about this. Your big sister’s been a bad girl.”
A bad girl? Joyce was forty-two years old. No wonder this woman got on her nerves. I wanted to say, Don’t you know opening mail that isn’t addressed to you is a federal offense? But I had a feeling that would make me a bad girl, too, and one per house is usually plenty.
I just smiled again. “I’ll be sure and give it to her.”
She looked at me hard for a minute and I had the feeling that she knew exactly what I was thinking because when she smiled her good-bye, this time it never got beyond the corners of her mouth.
“Tyrone!” She called his name just as he came up behind her and reached for the door. The boy was high, but he was definitely on his J.O.B. “That’s a good boy,” she said. “Tyrone, honey, this is Mrs. Mitchell’s sister, Mrs. . . . ?” She looked at me.
“Ava Johnson,” I said.
He mumbled something that I guessed was supposed to be a greeting of some sort and took his grandmother’s elbow, half helping, half pushing her into the car. She jerked her arm free and her look drew him up sharp before she pretended to soften it with that cold smile. “Slow down, son. Grandmother’s moving as fast as she can.”
He slammed the door and she handed him the keys when he slid in beside her.
“We look forward to having you in church on Sunday,” The Reverend Mrs. said. “Both you and your sister. The title of the Good Reverend’s sermon will be ‘No Hiding Place Down Here.’ “
I felt like I should say amen or something, but Tyrone’s patience was at an end and he turned the car around quickly and was gone. It wasn’t until later that I wondered what Frank had been doing driving the minister’s car to the liquor store.
• 13
i was sitting on the dock with a drink in my hand and my toes in the water, enjoying the last of the sun, when Joyce finally pulled in, blowing the horn and waving out the window like there was any possible way I might miss her entrance. I knew that meant the hospital had agreed to let her bring the baby home and I mentally said good-bye to the hope of any more peace and quiet around here.
Joyce had always loved kids and she took it hard when both of hers died the way they did, but the idea never appealed to me. I’m too selfish to be somebody’s mother. Joyce would say all that changes once you hold your own kid for the first time, but I figured, why risk it? There were plenty of people who wanted to have children and a lot who didn’t but ended up having them anyway. I never felt like my small contribution to the overpopulation of the planet was critical to anybody’s agenda, especially mine.
Joyce had stopped by the mall to pick up what she called “a few little things for the baby,” who would be arriving via social worker on Wednesday morning. She had a bunch of tiny nightgowns and sunsuits, six receiving blankets, an infant seat, and twelve boxes of disposable diapers. She also got a small crib (assembly required) and a musical mobile to hang over the baby’s head that had brightly colored stars and moons twirling slowly around to the theme from Doctor Zhivago.
We hauled everything into the kitchen, including the crib. I mixed another drink and lit the kettle for tea while Joyce gave me
the details.
“What’s her name?” I said.
Joyce shook her head. “She doesn’t have one yet. Eartha didn’t stay around long enough to name her, and you heard Mattie say she doesn’t care.”
“What she said was she didn’t give a fuck.”
“I stand corrected,” Joyce said, and the way she said it made me feel like shit. I brought her a cup of tea and hugged her.
“I’m just being mean,” I said. “I missed you today, so I did the wife thing and attacked you as soon as you came home. Sorry!”
“Hold it,” Joyce said. “I was a wife and I never did that.”
“So I was just doing the asshole thing, is that what you’re telling me?”
She laughed and drank a long swallow of her tea. “I’ve been calling her Imani. It means ‘faith’ in Swahili. What do you think?”
I liked it. I was tired of calling her the baby. I was even starting to feel like it might be okay to have her here. It would mean a lot to Joyce, and this kid deserved a break if anybody ever did. Her mama’s an HIV-positive crack addict, missing in action. Her aunt is a foul-mouthed fool and her uncle is a violent woman hater. She’s batting a thousand and she’s not even two weeks old yet. Besides, I was only going to be here a couple of months before I headed out for the coast. This was Joyce’s real life. It was just a stopover on mine.
We had cooed and oohed over the impossibly tiny baby clothes, debated the relative merits of cloth diapers, and decided to put the crib in Joyce’s room before I remembered Gerry’s visit. I handed Joyce the envelope.
“She says you’ve been a bad girl. That’s a quote.”
“A bad girl?” Joyce shook her head. “As the young people would say, this woman is trippin’. Was this open when she gave it to you?”
“Mail tampering is not my style,” I said.
She withdrew the contents of the envelope, which included a cover letter on some official-looking letterhead, a handwritten note, and about twenty or thirty pamphlets. While Joyce scanned the letter, I picked one up and read the cover: Living with HIV: Power of Attitude.
“What is all this?” I said.
“I’m trying to do some AIDS education with the Sewing Circus and I sent in an announcement for the Sunday bulletin. I also sent away for some pamphlets from the state health department’s HIV clinic, which they were more than happy to send me.”
She indicated the pile of brightly colored brochures filled with undeniably alarming statistics and photographs of bravely smiling people who always had that startled look of disbelief lurking right behind their eyes.
“The only problem is, the Good Reverend and Mrs. Anderson think the topic is inappropriate for—” she read aloud from the handwritten note “—‘discussion within the confines of a Christian church.’ So they declined to put the notice in the bulletin and canceled the meeting until they can ‘clarify things’ with me ‘concerning areas of great importance to us all.’ She signed it ‘Yours in Christ,’ and was kind enough to return my pamphlets.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. I spent a lot of years being ignorant about AIDS because it was new and the information was usually bad or nonexistent. In 1981 they were still calling it a gay cancer and I was still cutting a wide sexual path through a group of ne’er-do-wells whose specific sexual histories I hesitate to speculate about even now. But this plague is more than a decade old now. Claiming it’s too nasty to talk about in front of God is hardly the most effective defense.
People like Gerry Anderson don’t even understand that there’s a plague going on. They’re watching these dumb kids fucking around like it’s 1965 and the worst that can happen is some kind of minor venereal infection that penicillin can knock out in a couple of days. By the time they figure it’s okay to hand out a public health pamphlet, it’ll be way too late. It’s probably already too late.
I remember that guy’s wife who came up to the shop after he got my note about being HIV-positive. All she wanted me to do was take it back. Like calling its name conjures it up and makes it real. Like if I just wouldn’t talk about it, things could get back to normal. I wish I’d had time to tell her to forget all that what-you-don’t-know-won’t-hurt-you fantasy shit. Those wild people from ACT UP got it right: Silence = Death.
“I thought truth was the light,” Joyce said, stuffing the brochures back in the envelope.
“Bad girl,” I said.
Joyce tossed the letter down on the table. “I refuse to think about this anymore tonight. Let’s go swimming.”
“Now?” I hadn’t been in the lake at night since I was a kid, but the mysterious freedom of floating around in the dark was one of my favorite memories. All three of us used to go; me, Joyce, and Mama. Daddy didn’t like to swim at night, so he’d sit on the dock and name the constellations as the stars came out. “You want to go swimming now?”
“This very minute,” she said, pulling me along behind her, tossing me a suit and struggling into one of her others that she hadn’t had on since she gained all that weight. When she finally got it on, a sizeable portion of her butt was still hanging out. She frowned at her reflection in the full-length mirror.
“I’ve got to get back in shape,” she said.
“Don’t let me say amen,” I said, smug and still size seven. I hadn’t been off the circuit so long I’d let things get out of hand yet.
Joyce turned toward me and raised an eyebrow. “I thought you said you were going to stop drinking so much.”
“What’s that got to do with it?” I sounded like a whiny child.
“Nothing,” Joyce said, “except that neither one of us is taking such good care of herself, you know?”
I tried to get my feelings hurt then, but I knew she was right. If I wanted to be as healthy as I could be, even now, especially now, I had to cut back on all the vodka I was drinking and figure out some kind of exercise I could do that wouldn’t drive me crazy. Speaking of which, a little mental health effort probably wouldn’t hurt either.
“Well, you’re the oldest,” I said. “Tell me what to do.”
“Will you do it?”
“Will you?”
“God, yes! I look terrible. We’ll start a program.”
“Okay.”
“We’ll eat more nutritious food.”
“Who’s cooking?”
“I am.”
“Okay.”
“We’ll exercise regularly.”
“What kind of exercise?”
“I don’t know,” Joyce said. “Anything but swimming until I get a new suit.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s already almost dark outside.”
We picked our way down the gentle grassy slope that ran from Joyce’s back steps down a couple of hundred yards to the thin strip of sandy, weedy beach and stuck our toes in the lake. It was as warm as bathwater. We didn’t see anybody out, but when I whispered to Joyce that we ought to go skinny-dipping, she swatted me on the behind like I was five years old again.
We walked out up to our chins, feeling the murky bottom of the lake oozing up between our toes, and then lay out on our backs side by side. The water was so still, all we had to do was flutter our hands and feet a little bit to stay close and afloat.
“It’s not just the physical stuff,” Joyce said.
That just leaped out at me. The physical stuff is never just to me. Not anymore.
“What isn’t’?” I said.
“Things we have to work on. Remember all those books we bought that day?”
How could I forget them? When Joyce came to Atlanta right after I first diagnosed, we took a whole day and went to every spiritual bookstore in town. Joyce thought this might be a good time for us to start meditating, so we were ostensibly in search of books to guide us in that practice, but I was lying through my teeth. My quest was for the secret of what God really wants so I could do it, be forgiven, and get well. I wanted to live forever, of course, but at this point I was prepared to accept an
ordinary African-American old age, full of high blood pressure and bad feet, but ultimately dying in my own bed in a nice clean nursing home with color TV.
Every place we went had books about dying and preparing for dying, but I avoided those like the plague, no pun intended. I was interested in L-I-V-I-N-G. The dying part would have to take care of itself.
So we bought:
2 books on Buddhism
1 book of daily prayers for positive people (the author meant positive in outlook, but I liked the unintentional double meaning)
1 book on yoga with photographs of blissed-out-looking people standing on one leg with their eyes closed
1 silver sea charm to ward off the evil eye
3 packs of Blue Pearl incense
1 brass incense holder
4 tapes promising to teach us how to meditate in a variety of ways, including one that guaranteed the same results as the traditional methods, but you only had to sit there for three minutes a day instead of an hour.
Joyce was going to wear the evil-eye charm, but she kept looking at the symbols and weird writing all over it and she got nervous that it could be a trick, that the thing might have the opposite power and conjure up the Devil instead of chasing him off. I told her we should have gotten wolfbane like they do in the vampire movies, but she didn’t think that was funny.
Then I started trying to figure out who we could send the charm to. Somebody who deserved some bad luck for doing some evil shit they never had to pay for. But that made her even more nervous since if it was a Devil charm and we sent it to somebody and something bad happened, we would be sort of like agents of the Devil, right?
It was really pretty funny since we had bought all this stuff to help us calm down and we were working ourselves up into a frenzy just trying to figure out how to use it. It’s like reading those magazine articles about reducing stress. I read those articles all the time and I look at the things they recommend and I usually am not doing one single thing on the list. I consider doing them all the time, but I rationalize not starting to work on them immediately by thinking how they’d be so easy to do if I ever really wanted to do them. This is bullshit, of course, since each one of them would require a major redirecting of energy and since I’m already so guilt-ridden about not having done this stuff a long time ago, I could never just take one at a time. I’d have to tackle the whole righteous group simultaneously, or not at all, which brings us back around to why all that stuff we bought that day is still almost untouched by human hands.
