Rita, before she was Luscious, her mind bending and her body coming apart on the inside and Manny not allowing her to scream or breathe, and when he’s done he don’t even look at her—he just looks down at the bloodstains on his pants and tucks back in the paper money sticking out of his pockets, but he leaves the nickels that have fallen onto the bed.
Manny Evans finds the bathroom just fine now and returns to Erasmus, his Pall Malls, and liquor, and proceeds to win three more domino games.
* * *
Rita buds in the spring along with the knurly limbs of elms and oaks. Her belly pushes out in mid-April, coinciding with the tulip and daffodil blooms, and all the beauty of the season rests in the glow of her skin, but her eyes are as cold as the long-gone winter.
“Who?” her parents ask, even though their minds have wandered over the young men who have spent time with Rita on the porch, the ones who called out to her from open car windows, music blasting, Rita’s name lost in the lyrics and strain. They assume Jake’s son Marshall or the Tompkins boy, Pierce.
“Coca-Cola man,” Rita says, rubbing her stomach and looking off at nothing. Erasmus can’t stop smoking, and Bertha keeps moving her hands up and down her arms.
“The Coca-Cola man?” they say together, and exchange glances before looking back at her.
“Hmmm,” Rita sounds, and looks down at her swollen bare feet. “Mama, where the pail at?” she asks as if the conversation is over.
Bertha remembers her own pregnancy and her feet, swelled up and burning at the bottoms, but she can’t go for the pail because Erasmus is reaching for another cigarette—even though the one he lit a moment ago is still burning in the ashtray.
“White man, then?” Erasmus asks, and holds his breath.
Rita’s eyes roam around the kitchen and then look up at her father. “No. Colored man,” she says, and her eyes move to the ceiling and then down to the floor and then to the window that looks out into the yard.
“Girl, have you taken leave of your senses?” Erasmus laughs before lighting his cigarette and inhaling. His laughter is reeling, and it makes the hair on Bertha’s neck stand.
“Why you say that, Erasmus?” Bertha asks, moving closer to Rita.
Erasmus’s laughter rocks him, and his cigarette falls from his mouth.
“What’s so funny? Why you laughing so?” Bertha’s head swings between her husband and her child. “Man, you crazy or something?” she asks, rubbing at the hairs on her neck and taking another step that puts her right next to Rita.
Erasmus composes himself and bends down to retrieve his cigarette from the floor. Both women see the thin sheath of hair on the top of his head, and Rita thinks that in a few years he will be bald like Manny. She shivers.
“This here is 1942,” Erasmus says, wiping the tears from the corners of his eyes and sticking the cigarette back between his lips. “And I ain’t never seen no colored man driving no goddamn Coca-Cola truck!” Laughter consumes him again, and the house seems to shake with it.
It’s too late to sit her in a tub of mustard water. Rita is too far gone for that, so they send her over to Fenton, over to Mamie Ray’s place.
* * *
Mamie Ray, black, short, and stout, with a tangled mass of orange hair that spread out around her head like a feathered hat imparting her with a buffoon-type peculiarity. She had a dead right foot that was larger than her left and hands too small for her body, or even a five-year-old, for that matter.
When Rita stepped off the bus, Mamie Ray, body lopsided from years of dragging around her dead foot, was standing on the curb, waiting.
“You Rita?” Mamie asked as she grabbed the girl’s elbow with her tiny hands. She hadn’t really had to ask that question; Bertha had described her child to a tee, and all Mamie needed to look for were the eyes. “Ain’t seen another pair like ’em, ever,” Bertha had said to Mamie on the phone.
“Yessum,” Rita replied, her eyes struggling with the woman’s orange hair and twisted body.
“How far along you think you is?” Mamie asked, looking down at Rita’s stomach.
“Don’t know.” Rita took a step backward.
“Well, you know when you ’llowed him on top of you. What month it was?”
“I ain’t allow nothing,” Rita mumbled. “Cold month, I suppose,” she added, and chanced a glance at the oversized foot.
Mamie bit her lip and scratched at her head. “After Thanksgiving but before Christmas and New Year’s?”
“I dunno,” Rita said, and her eyes moved to the tiny hands.
“Uh-huh,” Mamie sounded, and then, “You look strong; you can carry that suitcase.” She wobbled away.
The women who came to see Mamie Ray came fruitful, bellies still flush, hips spreading though, and breasts heavy and sensitive to the touch. They came dry mouthed, light-headed, always spitting puke, and always scared.
Rita thought most of them were ignorant—not ignorant about how it had happened, but how it had happened to them.
Some came wearing the cheap pieces of jewelry their lovers had given them, tacky tokens of affection that bent and turned colors, the mock gold fading and flaking away over time. Just like the men, just like their love.
Rita was too far gone for an abortion; she would stay through delivery and then return home, no one the wiser.
The other women, the ones who wore shame on their faces like masks, they would be gone, if things went well, within twenty-four hours.
Millie Blythe arrived just as June slipped into its last day. She was much younger than Rita, pale skinned with thin reddish-brown hair and large empty eyes. Feeble looking and thin, and Mamie took one look at her and was about to turn her away when her mother shoved roughly through the doorway and into the house.
“She look sickly,” Mamie said after taking another glance at Millie.
“She fine. Always look that way,” the mother said, and then hastily slapped Millie’s hands away from her mouth. “I done told you ’bout that,” she snarled.
Mamie peered at the mother and then down at Millie’s fingers. The child had chewed her nails clear down to the cuticle. “How far along is she?” she asked, her eyes moving to Millie’s vacant ones.
“Just about a month.”
“How old is she?” Mamie squinted at the girl. Millie’s body didn’t have a curve to it.
“She old enough,” the mother spat, and then shot Millie a look of disgust.
“Fourteen?” Mamie asked, ignoring the woman’s sarcasm.
“Eleven,” the woman said, and then cast a cold eye on Mamie.
Mamie didn’t stumble back in surprise, but the hand that held her cane did begin to shake. “Eleven? Lord,” she whispered. She’d never had one that young. “She still a baby,” Mamie said more to herself than to the woman.
“Look, you gonna do it or not?” The woman’s tone was like steel.
“I—” Mamie started to decline again and took a step toward the door; her fingers brushed against the doorknob just as the woman moved toward her.
“I’ll pay you double what you usually charge,” she said, and shoved three crisp fifties in Mamie’s face.
Mamie liked the horses, loved to watch them run. She knew some of the jockeys and had had the opportunity to move her hands across the strong backs of the animals, down their muscular limbs and through their shining manes. In the stands, her body quivered at the sound of their hooves galloping against the soft dirt of the track, making her feel a way no man was ever able to do.
She was a week behind with Otis the protector, who came to collect once a month. He had connections with the police department, and she had to pay him to make sure they would leave her be.
The oil tank had been empty since Memorial Day, but she was careful to keep up with the electric bill, because she did most of her work at night. For now, meals would be cooked on the hot plate, and showers would be taken in cold water. She’d straighten the mess out with the oil company in the fall just before the fi
rst frost hit.
So the money that Millie’s mother was dangling in her face could have been used wisely, but the sounds of hooves beating like a hundred hearts were already pounding away in Mamie’s ears.
“Come and get her tomorrow ’round noon,” Mamie said, snatching the money from the woman’s fingers.
The heat that followed Millie’s arrival was stifling and generous, filling up every inch of the house. So intense, the old paint bloomed and puckered in places on the walls, and the doorjambs swelled and buckled.
Even though there were three empty bedrooms in the house, Mamie Ray put Millie in the room with Rita.
“There,” Mamie said, indicating the empty bed next to Rita’s even though there was one on the other side of the room.
In order to better handle the heat, Rita had stripped herself down to her drawers. She stretched out across the bed on her back, her belly and breasts like mountains of flesh.
“That there is Rita,” Mamie said, and walked out of the room.
Millie stood in the doorway, her eyes wide at the sight of Rita.
“You ain’t never seen no naked woman before?” Rita asked as she lifted each heavy breast and wiped at the perspiration that had formed beneath it.
Millie’s hand shot up to her mouth, and her eyes dropped to the floor as she moved to sit down on the bed. Rita’s eyes moved with her.
Rita watched Millie’s head bob and her neck twist and listened to the soft chewing sounds her mouth made as she devoured her cuticles.
When she couldn’t take any more, she rolled onto her side, eased herself up on her elbow, and said, “Ain’t you been fed?”
Millie took a moment to answer. She slowly raised her eyes, and they immediately settled on Rita’s heavy breasts, so she dropped them again. “Yes ma’am,” she whispered.
“Ha!” Rita laughed. “I ain’t nobody’s ma’am, girl!”
Millie said nothing.
Rita cocked her head. “How old you is?”
“Eleven,” Millie squeaked, and her eyes came up again.
“Eleven?” Rita eased her free hand down between her legs and scratched.
“Uh-huh.”
“What’s your name?”
“Millie,” she said, coughed, and then, “Blythe.”
The child was soaked through with sweat. The fine red hairs curled against her forehead and dangled around her ears. She wiped at her face and then the back of her neck.
“Go on and take off your clothes. Ain’t nothing but females in this house,” Rita breathed, and then looked off to another part of the room in order to give the girl some privacy.
Millie looked around the room and then hesitantly started to unbutton the delicate white blouse she wore.
Rita waited until the blouse was off and then the gray pleated skirt. When she turned to look at the girl again, what she saw was a pale thin line of a child with knocked knees and swollen ankles.
“You pregnant?” Rita was perplexed.
Millie’s eyes rolled around in her head and then moved to the tattered window shutters. “Swallowed a watermelon seed.”
“What?” Rita laughed.
“Watermelon seed. Swallowed one.”
“Why you here, then?”
“Mama say Mamie gonna take it out so’s that it won’t grow inside of me.”
Rita bit her bottom lip. “You get your monthly?”
Millie looked down at her hands. “Come January till May, and then I swallowed the watermelon seed and it stopped.”
Rita eased herself up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. “Who gave you the watermelon?”
“Clyde.”
“Who’s that?”
“My mama’s boyfriend.”
“Uh-huh. Sliced it up for you, took it out of the rind and all?”
“Yeah. Most times.”
“Other times?”
“We played a game.”
“I play games too. What kinda game? Maybe I knows it.”
“He pops the watermelon in his mouth and then pass it to me.”
“Pass it how?”
“He press his lips to mine, and push it into my mouth.”
“I don’t know that game.”
“We play it all the time.”
“That’s how you got the watermelon seed?”
“Uh-huh.”
Millie scratched at her nose and then rubbed her eyes before falling back onto the bed.
“He ever put the watermelon seed anyplace else?”
Millie said nothing.
“Y’all play other types of games?”
“Mama said I wasn’t to talk about those.”
Millie laid herself down and soon after was fast asleep, her loud snores filling the hot room.
Mamie came for her in the evening, just past eight, when the streets outside began teeming with people. There was a jazz club two blocks down, a bar across the street, and a chicken and rib shop next door. A Friday night in July on Pearl Street could seem like Saturday midday anyplace else in the country.
“C’mon, girl,” Mamie Ray called out, and walked away.
Millie stirred from her sleep. “Okay, coming!” she yelled back as she reached for skirt and blouse.
“You ain’t gonna take no bath, you know,” Rita said, suddenly mad. Mad at Clyde, Millie’s mother, and Mamie Ray.
“What?”
“You answering like Mamie just ran your bath water.”
Millie looked confused.
“It’s serious what’s Mamie’s about to do to you,” Rita whispered.
Millie cocked her head. “Mama said it wouldn’t hurt a bit.” Her bottom lip began to tremble.
Rita was already sorry. “I—I . . . Don’t mind me,” she said, waving her hands at Millie. “The heat makes me mean.” She offered her a grin.
Millie leaned forward and looked real hard at Rita’s face.
“Go on, a little ol’ watermelon seed ain’t gonna hurt none.” Rita’s grin wavered behind her lie. There was an awkward moment, and then she stepped forward and embraced Millie.
“C’mon, girl!” Mamie Ray screamed from down the hall.
When Millie came back to the room, escorted by Mamie Ray, she was ashen, almost bleached-looking, and seemed smaller, thinner. Her mouth hung open on one side, and her eyes, glassy and moist, rolled about in their sockets.
Rita shifted her gaze to the floor and then the window. As nice as Mamie Ray had been to her, she hated her at the moment.
Always hated her after the abortions. Hated the smell of ether and the screams that followed. Hated her even more the next day after the sheets (soiled yellow in places where the blood had been scrubbed away) were hung out to dry.
Mamie Ray laid Millie down onto the bed, and without a word turned and left the room.
Rita had heard Millie’s screams, heard the child howl out in pain, the pleas for God and Mama and then the pitiful, confused, Why, why, why!
Millie had lost the very last bit of her childhood, the small piece that her mama’s boyfriend hadn’t been able to kill, the part of her that still looked forward to ice cream, doll babies, and Christmas.
Now Millie lay there, whimpering, clutching her stomach, and whispering for her mother.
Rita stayed put, right in her bed, her eyes holding on to the people who moved up and down the sidewalk outside the window, her mind trying to catch hold of the music that slipped from behind the door of the bar whenever someone came or went. She could separate herself from the sounds of Millie’s body moving against the starched white sheets; she could dislodge herself from the moans and pretend the sick smell that was rising off Millie’s feverish body was barbecued ribs.
An hour passed, and Rita’s eyelids began to droop; her mind was out on the sidewalk keeping pace with the high-stepping colored folk. Her head had even begun to bob, and a slight smile puddled at the corners of her mouth because her baby was still again, allowing her to escape from the cube-size room and Millie’s suffering.
Her hand was on the doorknob to the bar; she was easing the door open, pulling it back, and letting the music creep over her, her foot dangled over the threshold as she peered into the smoke-filled room. Rita could hear laughter, laughter that seemed to soar, reaching a pitch that took over the music and caused the smile to leak away from Rita’s lips.
When Rita was thrown back into the room, her eyes flew open and found Millie, white and lifeless in a puddle of blood.
Millie’s mama didn’t seem too sad. Her eyes were wet, but Rita thought that might have been from the smoke coming off the cigarette she never stopped puffing on.
A man came with her. Rita supposed he was the one, Clyde, the watermelon seed passer. He was short and well built, like the football players who practiced out in the field behind her house.
Rita had stared at him good and hard the whole time he was there—looking sad and holding Millie’s mama’s hand—and still she couldn’t see the defect, the sick twisted part of him that would make him touch a little girl that way.
She’d half expected to see tiny horns pushing out from his scalp or a tail bulging from the back of his pants. Her eyes dropped to his shoes—could she detect a hoofed foot?
She was disappointed to find that his eyes were brown and warm, not the tiny, yellow, beady things she’d expected to see.
His hands moved to Millie’s mother’s shoulders; Rita saw that his pinky was absent the gold ring weighed heavy with onyx that was a sure sign of perversion and distrust.
The man reached into his pocket and pulled a ball-shaped peppermint from its depths. The crackle of the paper upset the mournful silence of the room, and Mamie Ray drew the sheet over Millie’s head just as he popped the candy in his mouth.
There was nothing, nothing at all that Rita could see in him that could warn her he was evil, and so she would walk wary through her years and never allow her trust to settle on any man. Ever.
Loving Donovan Page 5
