“Women you run with lately are too damn old for you anyway. Who’s this new one? Older than me, I bet.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” He wanted to say more, to shift the tone back to the familiar, but she was looking at him over her shoulder in that heating-up way. He felt self-conscious folding the paper lengthwise then up in back as if he were on the subway standing up. She had told him often, more a warning than an observation, that he handled a newspaper just like his father, and used it the same way too—to block her out. He knew he should put it down, get rid of it. But instead he leaned over and smacked her across the behind. “Oh, I don’t know, I kind of like old ladies,” he said playfully, trying to smooth over whatever had put the edge in her voice. She swatted him with the potholder and beads broke from her caftan and rolled toward his feet.
“You need to be serious, my friend,” she said in a tone she usually reserved for Bobby. “What the hell have you to offer any woman with anything at all on the ball? No degree, no place of your own, no bank account, no prospects even of a good job. And the only time you had anything to offer was that trip to Puerto Rico and that you won in a contest.” She set the coffee jug down hard on the table and more beads scattered to the floor. “And if you keep futzing around with your music, bub, you won’t have doodly squat.”
He was grateful for the “bub.” But something hot and sour spread across his back when he bent to retrieve the beads, something like fear. Things weren’t going right. He didn’t know this tune. He’d missed a beat somewhere. “I can tell you’ve been dealing with white girls.” Khadeja’s voice rang in his ear. “Your rhythm’s off, your rap is lame, your music’s weak.” He tried to concentrate on what his mother was saying, but he couldn’t catch the swing of it. “Damnit, Louis, you’re twenty-four years old. Too damned old to be a child prodigy, you know.” She dumped clean spoons on the table, and the clang resounded long after she’d gone back to the stove to get the water.
Louis was stunned. This was the sort of line she might run out to Bobby, but never to him. She’d always assured him he was special, was better than the, was above the, didn’t have to bother to. Nothing to offer? He looked at his mother, but she was a blur. Her anger was sudden and total and disfiguring. This was the woman his father had drawn for him on summer visits—a brimming-over woman growing indistinct with rage. This was the woman he’d defended to his father, to his brother, to his ladies who always let slip some Freudian innuendo about what she’d done to him. But what had she ever done to him but love him, lift him, cheer him when he couldn’t even hold the strings of the violin down? What had she ever done but fume and storm when reports were unkind, or when someone snitched that they didn’t live in the district, wrassle the principals to the mat? And when he performed, there she was in front row perfect poise, applauding just him. Sold her washer and dryer to buy a guitar and amp when he’d thought that was his ax. And recently offered to sell her kiln when he and Khadeja worked up a movie script.
He wondered if he was as much a blur, a distortion to her. He squinted at his mother and at himself as through a frame, as though he stood in the yard with his father, his brother, the women and a camera. And it was all there in the glass: a candle-lit kitchen, the enormous spray of dried flowers and the one wet rose, himself hugging a newspaper as if to ward off a blow, his mother coming toward him with a pot of steaming water, her jaws puffed out with more words to slug him with.
“I work like a slave to get you off to college, and what do you do? You drop out of school because you don’t feel like taking exams. Don’t feel like taking exams.” It was the sort of sneer that used to punctuate her harangues about their father, he and Bobby holding their breath, afraid to look at each other and find their father there.
“Have that kiln running around the clock and take in clumsy students without an ounce of sensitivity in their whole bodies. Why? So there’ll always be fare for you to come home. And what do you do? You hit town looking like you just jumped out of one of those hippy freak thrift shops, and not even straight out, just to give these bastards something to gloat over.” She looked up suddenly as though the neighbors had gathered in the yard and any minute she might raise the window and spit in somebody’s eye. “And they always hated us, ohhhh, cause I was nobody’s easy woman and my boys weren’t nodding their lives away on the corner. Damnit, Louis, I have done my job. I have raised my boys. I have stuck to my craft. But what the hell are you ever doing but knocking up some woman right and left and draping it over with some romantic crap. You know, damnit, you know? I mean, shit, Louis.” She poured hot water in the coffee jug and the hairs on his arms cringed.
He waited, pressed the newspaper flat against the table and waited, stared into the yard and saw only the streetlamp and the moon spill and the eyes that were merely his own reflecting in the glass. He waited. When she blew this particular riff on Bobby, there was always the refrain “just like your father,” followed by a chorus or two of “thank God for Louis.” Louis didn’t steal bikes, didn’t break windows, didn’t bring the police to the house at all hours of the night. Louis always remembered flowers. He waited for a hand on the back of his chair, on the back of his neck. But she had moved away from him, had left the kitchen, had left him among the ashtrays and the beads rolling among the leaves and buds shed from the spray of dried flowers.
She was in her bedroom. He could hear the mattress sigh, and he knew she had not flung herself down to cry, but had crawled across the width of the bed and eased her body down, weary. He supposed he should go in to her, massage her back, tell her he would do better. It used to make everything alright when Bobby messed up or his father called up, three sheets to the wind, to say he was tired of busting his balls and she and her boys could go to hell.
Louis examined his hands, half expecting printer’s ink to have tattooed on his palms. He had wonderful hands, Khadeja had recently told him, but she grew quickly indifferent to them when he put down his horn. But then they all had said that and done that. Only his mother had said year in and year out, “Thank God for Louis and his wonderful hands.” He eased them into the loop of the cord and lowered the blinds inch by inch, keeping the moon and the light and eyes from coming in.
THE WAR OF THE WALL
Me and Lou had no time for courtesies. We were late for school. So just flat out told the painter lady to quit messing with the wall. It was our wall, and she wasn’t even from the neighborhood. Stirring in the bucket, she mumbled something about she had permission to paint on it from the owner of the barbershop. That had nothing to do with it as far as we were concerned. It was our wall. We’d been pitching pennies against the barbershop wall since we were very little kids. We’d played handball and pop fly against that wall since so-called integration when the crazies cross town shut the park down and poured cement in the swimming pool so we couldn’t use it. I’d sprained my neck boosting cousin Lou up on that wall so he could chisel Jimmy Lyon’s name on it when we found out he wasn’t ever coming home from Vietnam and teach us how to fish.
“If you lean close,” Lou said to the painter lady, “you’ll get a whiff of bubblegum and kids’ sweat and that’ll fix you. This wall belongs to us kids of Talbro Street.” Lou was standing hipshot next to her beat-up ole piece of car, with out of town plates, jabbing the air as he spoke and sounding very convincing. But she paid us no mind at all. She snapped the brim of her straw hat down and hauled her bucket up the ladder.
“If anybody has a right to do anything to this wall,” Lou shouted up to her, “it’s Mrs. Morris.”
Mrs. Morris ought to take the wall to court as evidence, I was thinking. Last month in the night, some cops got rough with the Morris boy cause he was out late and didn’t answer their questions fast enough to suit them. They rammed his shoulder against the wall and might have done worse if Mr. Eubanks hadn’t happened along. He told the cops that the Morris boy was a fine person, just a little slow. So they let him go.
“You’re destroying evidence,”
I said to the painter lady when she started making big sweeps with her brush. “You’re going to go to jail.”
She went right on about her business, which made me mad. Lou had to drag me away I was shaking her ladder so bad.
“You don’t even live around here,” I hollered over my shoulder. I thought of a lot more to say, but we were passing my folks’ restaurant. And that’s all my mama would need to hear, me sassing a grown-up.
When we came from school, the wall was slick with white. The painter lady was running string across the wall and taping it fast here and there. Me and Lou leaned against the gumball machine outside the pool hall and watched. Then she started chalking the strings with a chunk of blue chalk. Across the way, Mrs. Morris and her boy were leaning out their kitchen window watching. When the painter lady snapped the strings, the blue chalk dust measured off halves and quarters up and down and sideways too. Lou muttered something about how hip that was. But I dropped my book satchel on his toes to remind him we were at war.
Then the Morris twins crossed over the projects and hung back at the curb to watch. The twin with the red ribbons was hugging a jug of cloudy lemonade. The one in yellow ribbons was holding a plate of dinner away from her dress. Some good aromas were drifting out from under the tent of tinfoil, and pale green juice from the greens was leaking on the twin’s socks. The painter lady paid no more attention to them and the gift of supper than she did to me and Lou or the fire hydrant. When she wanted to deepen a line, she just reached around behind her for the blue chalk. When she wanted the scissors to cut the string or lay the blade flat to pry the tape loose, she just fumbled behind her amongst the stuff she had laid out on a sawhorse table. I figured the woman for a rude, no-nose fool. Next to my mother, Mrs. Morris cooks up the tastiest-smelling food in the neighborhood.
Side Pocket came strolling out of the pool hall to see what me and Lou were studying so hard. He gave the painter lady the once-over, checking out her paint-spattered jeans, her chalky T-shirt, her floppy brim hat. He hitched up his pants even though he had on a belt and suspenders and kind of glided over toward the table.
“Whatcha got there, Sweetheart?” he asked the twin with the plate.
“Suppah,” she said all soft like and country, which is the Morris way.
“For her,” the one in yellow said, jutting her chin toward the painter lady’s back.
Still she didn’t turn around. She was rearing back on her heels, her hands jammed into her back jeans pockets, her face squinched up like the masterpiece was taking shape on the wall by magic. We could have been gophers crawled up a rotten hollow for all she cared. Lou was saying something about how great her concentration was. I gave him a butt with my hip, and his elbow slid off the gumball machine and he stumbled.
“Good evening,” Side Pocket said in his best ain’t-I-fine voice.
But the painter lady was acting like a mental case. She was up on the milk crate, over to the step stool, up and down the ladder hanging off it to reach a far spot. She was scribbling all over the wall like a definite crazy person and not even looking where she was stepping. It was like those old music movies where the dancer taps all over the furniture, kicking chairs over but not skipping a beat, leaping over radios and all. Lou looked like he wanted to applaud, but I had my foot on his feet and an elbow in his ribs. It was quite a show, but it wasn’t right. The twins standing there were being ignored. Mrs. Morris and her boy were nearly hanging out the window trying to signal the twins to step up and be bold.
“Ahh,” Side Pocket cleared his throat. The painter lady paused, one foot on the milk crate, one foot on the top of the step stool. “Errr ahhh, these young ladies here …” Side Pocket was running out of words, so I jumped in.
“Your dinner’s getting cold, Lady. And least you could say, ‘Good evening.’”
Then she kind of turned. You could tell she didn’t recognize anybody. I mean, we could have been penguins or bags of laundry she was resting her eyes on for a second till she swung her head back to work.
“Ma’am?” At last the twins stepped forward and not a moment too soon. Side Pocket was sputtering, not used to women ignoring him like that. And Mrs. Morris and her boy were practically out on the window ledge trying to coax the girls forward. “Mama said to bring you some suppah.”
I was kind of off somewhere from hearing Frieda Morris say “suppah” like that, all soft like a wad of cotton, so I didn’t hear whether the painter lady said anything or not. But she did walk over, her eyes “full of sky,” as my grandmother would say, meaning in a daze, a trance, another place. She wiped her hands on her jeans, rolled back a bit of tinfoil, then wagged her head as though it was a horse’s head instead of ham, greens, yams and cornbread.
“Thank your mother very much,” she said with her mouth full of sky too, sounded like. “I’ve brought dinner along actually.” And then, without even excusing herself or anything, she was back on the ladder drawing in a wild way. It was too much for Side Pocket, so he went back into the poolroom with the sides of his mouth pulled down. It was too much for me too, so I dragged Lou away to go meet my Daddy at work.
From the telephone company to the restaurant, me and Lou were waiting for a pause to get our two cents in. We wanted to tell my Daddy about the painter lady and ask if he had any good ideas for running her back to wherever she came from. But Daddy was for talking about the trip to the country, how Lou could come with us because the old folks always appreciated another pair of hands on the farm. We forgot about the war for a while and went on in the back of the restaurant to do our chores.
Later that night, come to find the painter lady was a liar. She came into the restaurant and leaned against the glass of the steam table ’lowing as how she was a very starved person. Me and Lou peeked over the service ledge and listened. We’d never really heard her speak more than a sentence or two. She was really running off at the mouth: Was that a ham hock in the greens? Was that a neck bone in the pole beans? Did my mother have any vegetables cooked without meat and especially pork?
“I don’t care who your spiritual leader is,” Mama said in that way of hers. “Eat in the community, Sistuh, you eat pig by and by, one way or t’other.”
We were in the back cracking up. Lou was tearing up lettuce for the salad pot. I was scrubbing out the muffin tins. We were waiting for my mama to fix her wagon cause my mama don’t take no stuff off nobody in her place. Plus, she can’t abide people who don’t speak to elders when they walk into a place, and the painter lady hadn’t said boo to a soul, young or old. So mama waited on everybody else first.
But the painter lady kept right on with the questions, even after she took a stool at the counter. Was there cheese in the baked macaroni, she wanted to know. Were there eggs in the potato salad? Was the iced tea already sweetened with sugar? Mama was fixing Pop Jacobs’s plate at the time, piling on another spoonful of rice each time another stupid question came up. Me and Lou wondered where in the world the painter lady was from that they make potato salad without hard-boiled eggs.
“Do you have any bread made with unbleached flour?”
Me and Lou cracked up, me bending low over the suds, Lou chopping onions, laughing and crying at the same time. I could hear my mama doing that whistle sigh through the gap in her front teeth, but I could also hear Pop Jacobs cackling. He was happy with the whole deal, his plate was heaped high.
Mama finally ran out of customers to wait on first, so she started taking the painter lady’s order. She couldn’t make up her mind whether she wanted broiled fish and a salad or a vegetable or vegetable plate. She finally settled on pan trout once mama assured her that, yeh, she knew how to pan-cook a trout without a lot of oil. But just when Mama reached for a plate to put the salad on, the painter lady leaned over the counter.
“Excuse me. One more thing.” She had a chalky blue finger in the air.
Everybody in the restaurant was holding their breath to hear what the painter lady would say next and whether Mama would fling
the plate. I boosted up on the sink. Mama was blowing a wisp of hair out of her eye, tapping one foot and holding that plate like a Frisbee.
“Yeh?” Mama said. “What is it?”
“Can I get cucumbers and beets in that tossed salad?”
Mama leaned her hot face right close to the painter lady’s and the customers kind of leaned forward too. “You will get,” Mama said, “whatever Lou tossed. Now sit down. And be quiet.” And the painter lady sat down and shut right up.
All the way to the country, we tried to get Mama to open fire on the painter lady. But Mama said she was probably from up north and didn’t know any better. Then Mama said that she was sorry she got on her like that cause she was a decent person, just very picky about her diet.
“As we all should be,” Mama sighed, cutting her eye at the bag of potato chips I’d just finished.
Me and Lou did not want to hear that. Who did she think she was coming into our neighborhood and messing with our wall?
“Wellllllll,” Mama said, pulling into the gas station so Daddy could take his turn at the wheel, “she’s some kind of artistic person. It ain’t easy to get folks to look at your work if you stuck away somewhere. So she’s painting in public. I guess that’s alright.”
Me and Lou definitely did not want to hear that. We wanted to hear something better than that, especially after we told Mama how she igged the twins and turned Mrs. Morris’s hospitality down. Mama got quiet for a long while, the muscle in her jaw jumping. I expected to hear her call the painter lady a “barbarian.” That’s one of my grandma’s words for people who forget to honor the ways. But when me and Lou kept on about it, Mama said to hush cause she was tired. She climbed into the back seat and dropped down into the warm hollow Daddy had made in the pillow.
Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions Page 5
