A Kind of Freedom

by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

“God, no, Aunt Ruby.” Sybil shook her head.

  “Well, is there a man at least?” Aunt Ruby went on.

  “Let her say it, Ruby,” Daddy said, his mouth full.

  Mama and Jackie glanced at each other, then looked away. Neither felt up to Sybil since she graduated law school ten years earlier. It wasn’t the accomplishment itself. Jackie loved visiting Sybil’s office, looping around Lee Circle past the streetcars ambling onto Poydras, peering up at the Superdome scaling the sky. Her sister had always said she wanted to be a lawyer, but given she didn’t start law school until she hit thirty, everybody believed she’d talk her dream out until it was drained of all its power. Still, she had done it, and Jackie felt a vicarious surge in her own confidence when Sybil passed the bar. No, it wasn’t the accomplishment itself that made Jackie dread her sister’s presence. It was the way Sybil tried to make her feel about it.

  Daddy though was proud on all accounts. It was as if Sybil’s achievement had brought them closer. Jackie had been his favorite growing up. He had fawned over her when she was a girl, enraptured by her descriptions of her best friends’ Uptown houses: their wide-open pools and terraced decks. The two drifted apart some when Daddy opened Action Academy. Jackie was in high school, and she had her own life, cheerleading practices and Terry’s football games, and it was Sybil who had helped Daddy most days, bleaching the changing tables, folding spare clothes, and driving to the discount warehouse every week for boxes and boxes of baby wipes. Then Jackie got married, and Sybil went on to law school, and now Daddy sat with his mouth gaping as his oldest daughter went on about her cases. If she paused for even a second, Daddy would jump in with yet another question: How she’d decide whether to settle or go to trial, whether she had considered advertising like that fellow Morris Bart. If so, he had thought of a slogan: No Need to Retort, I’ll See You in Court.

  “Well, you know that contract I was trying to snag with Taco Bell, Daddy,” Sybil went on now. “I think it’s going to work out this time. They called me in twice for an interview. I met with the regional manager.”

  “The regional manager. Isn’t that Jack Jackson? He used to try to talk to me back in the day,” Jackie said to have something to say, but Sybil snapped back in that tone she’d used since childhood, “Jack Jackson manages the Taco Bell in the East of New Orleans. I’m talking about the manager of the Taco Bells all over Southeastern Louisiana.”

  Jackie didn’t say anything to that, just kept her head down, scooped out some more rice.

  “That’s great, baby, that’s really something,” Daddy said again, his mouth wide enough to fit the table through it.

  Sybil was beaming too. “I know, Daddy. It’s been a long time coming. I can’t do criminal law anymore. It’s starting to eat at me, all these black men on the street.”

  Daddy nodded. “Not to mention how dangerous it is.”

  It was as if it were a conversation between the two of them and Aunt Ruby, Jackie and Mama were just some fixtures to navigate around, a table leg that dangled, a chair that creaked when you applied too much weight. Jackie suddenly tried to fumble through her past for fodder, which high-end Creole boy had asked her out, her playdates with the Haydels and Davieliers, but it was no use. She was thrilled to hear T.C.’s wails, but Sybil stood up the same time she did, as if she had as much right to the room where the baby slept.

  “Let me see him, Jackie, it’s been so long.”

  Jackie nodded, smoothed her hands down the front of her work pants, which were already covered in dried paint.

  “Just wash up first,” she added, but Sybil was already out of the room.

  Sybil pranced back in with the baby on her shoulder, who to Jackie’s dismay didn’t cry. He’d stare up at Sybil, then jerk his head back in his mother’s direction.

  “He’s trying to figure out who has him,” Mama said.

  “He’s confused by the resemblance,” Daddy said at the same time, though the truth was Jackie and Sybil didn’t resemble each other in the least. Sybil had come out more like their father, with his bunched-up nose and lips; her skin was lighter than his, but not by much, and her hair wouldn’t lay flat if you dared it. Jackie on the other hand was tall and skinny with a size C cup and skin like the inside of an almond. Her hair fell down her back, and she sometimes spiral-rolled it and wore it curly, but mostly she let her mama straighten it, and that was when it reached her behind.

  The baby seemed to soften Sybil. Expressions and words Jackie would never associate with her sister sprang out of her now.

  “You’re so handsome, yes, you are, just as ooey gooey as a shmooey wooey.”

  Jackie and her mama burst out laughing. Soon the whole room was in stitches and that ease that sprang from the mirth smoothed Jackie on the inside as she loaded the dishwasher, wiped down

  the counters.

  Sybil’s comment was more jarring because it was unexpected. “Have you heard from Terry?”

  Mama, Daddy, and Aunt Ruby had been cooing over T.C., but after Sybil’s question the room went silent. The thing was, everyone knew not to bring that up.

  Jackie shook her head instead of answering, almost as if she didn’t trust her own voice.

  “Good, the farther away he stays from you, the better. You and that precious angel.”

  Jackie tended to feel the same way, and if anyone but Sybil had said it, she would have stressed her own agreement, might have added that even though she sometimes let him in the house, she

  had closed off any part of herself that was vulnerable to him:

  She spoke in one-word sentences, she didn’t look in his eyes, and she never went over their past, how being with him in the beginning reminded her of the stories her daddy had told her about courting Mama. She had really believed their love was as full.

  But Sybil spoke so authoritatively about matters she hadn’t earned the right to dominate. Jackie had let her have the edge on almost every subject: the work, the money, the house, the car. And now she was trying to edge her way into a part of life she didn’t understand, and Jackie had had enough.

  “You don’t get it,” she snapped.

  Sybil smirked, paused for a minute as if she was considering whether or not to speak. “What exactly don’t I get?” she asked finally.

  “I mean to say,” Jackie stammered, “that it’s a complicated situation, not one you can sum up with one sentence the way you just tried to.”

  Mama stepped in. “You want the rest of this milk for the baby?” She held up a bottle, shook it in Jackie’s face to get her attention.

  Even Aunt Ruby tried: “You better be careful, Sybil. Every shut eye isn’t asleep.”

  Sybil just ignored them. “Nothing complicated about crack,” she went on. “He’s either on it or he’s not, and chances are he is. So he needs to be gone.”

  The thing was, Sybil had never even had a serious boyfriend. She had ideas about what she would do in Jackie’s situation: call the police on him, or burn all his things. Sometimes she’d ask Jackie questions she already knew the answer to just to get her riled up.

  Did he even call you on your birthday, Jackie? What kind of man can’t remember to celebrate his own wife’s thirty-second? And you’re the one stuck with the baby while he’s out doing God knows what.

  But her commentary didn’t work. It was true that Jackie felt overwhelmed—reading to the baby at night, making sure she stared at him while she spoke so he could see her lips moving, choosing the stroller, the car seat, the pediatrician. Making every goddamn single decision alone sucked every drop of energy out of her core. But Jackie knew Terry couldn’t help that crack had eaten up his mind, that if he had been himself, he would have sent her favorite flowers, petunias, just like old times, or taken her to dinner at Dooky Chase’s, and maybe a part of her was slumped in on itself, pricked free of air, but she couldn’t transfer that feeling into full-fledged anger.
r />   In fact, standing here now beside her sister who had never laid beside a man in bed, listened to his dreams, then saw them dashed at every turn, who had never become so entwined with someone it was impossible to kick him out without feeling like a part of herself had been rejected, she had a sudden urge to defend Terry. Jackie wanted to tell her sister that she’d run into Terry’s white coworker a few months earlier, the same one who’d started Terry using, and the man had bragged to her that he’d been promoted. She might tell her too that both of Terry’s grandfathers had been alcoholics, that Terry’s daddy was one too, but he had abandoned Terry when Terry told him he was going to rehab, told Terry a real man would be able to stop on his own; she wanted to explain that Terry had been captain of the football team, president of their class, valedictorian of his pharmacy college, and though she hated his new track, she understood his sudden need to just breathe.

  She didn’t say a word though, just turned the water off, reached for the baby, kissed her parents, and walked out.

  The closer she got to her apartment, the stronger her anger grew. In the car, other instances of Sybil’s audacity sprang up for recognition, examination. Sybil had been the one to tell Jackie Terry was on crack in the first place. It was an absurd accusation. Terry had been valedictorian of St. Augustine and Xavier. Then with three offers in his hand, he’d accepted a job at the VA. He fell right in with his coworkers, the white boys from Brother Martin, who’d all gotten the job through connections. Jackie didn’t mind that he went out every other night with them. It was part of acclimating, he’d said, but even if he hadn’t said it, Jackie liked her alone time. As many friends as she had, there was something intoxicating about not having to rehearse every word before it left her mouth, revisit them once they drifted out. Then Reagan got elected with his tax cuts and spending bans, and it wasn’t long before everybody she knew knew somebody who was standing in the unemployment line. Right after Thanksgiving, it was the VA’s turn, and by Christmas, Terry was out.

  Jackie didn’t think it was a big deal—he’d had so many offers he could just go back to one of the pharmacies he’d rejected. But that’s not the way it works, Jackie, Terry had snapped in a tone that was not of him, not of their relationship. He started staying out every night. Those same friends from work had kept their jobs and they were schooling Terry in how to get another one, he’d said. Still she noticed that his lips were cracked when they kissed, that he was never home, and when he was, he was sleeping, that his jeans sagged around the crotch, and that Sewerage and Water Board called her to say their bill was two months late. She just chalked it up to the new pressure of unemployment, even suggested she try to get work again. But he’d snapped at her then too. It wasn’t until Sybil came over for dinner. Terry had burst in their house, all jabber and quick moves, and after he left, Sybil turned to Jackie, said in a pitying tone that she’d seen the same signs in some of her clients, the emaciation, the restlessness. Jackie asked her to leave, threatened to call the cops when she wouldn’t budge. Even though she didn’t believe Sybil, Jackie confronted Terry when he got home. He cried, told her he had a problem, he wanted help, but didn’t know how to get it. He admitted that he started with the friends at work. First pills, then cocaine, and now he was running their savings dry chasing after crack. She vowed to stay with him. She didn’t understand the drug then. He went to rehab in Northwest Louisiana for two months and he came back with a light in his eyes and a calm about him. But it was still a tight market and nobody was hiring.

  After the first relapse, her parents urged her to kick him out, but it was impossible to leave the man she had become an adult with, the captain of the football team who had chosen her for reasons she couldn’t explain. She waited it out for a few years, tossed between his bouts of renewed sturdiness and his collapses. She was ready to defer to her parents until she found out she was pregnant. She told him, hoping the child would be the motivation he needed, and he was clean for the first few months. Terry came home every night, he was the father she’d always imagined he’d be, then one day without warning, he left for coffee she had in her own pot on the counter and didn’t come back.

  With him gone, she didn’t think about the hollow ghost who’d occupied her house the last few years, just the way her sixteen-year-old self would lean into the phone receiver for hours, twiddling the cord around her thumb, the way he’d press his hand into her back and lead her into a room, the way he’d soothe her when someone talked down to her, If they don’t see you as who are you, that says more about them than you, Jackie Marie, and even now she’d repeat that to herself when she needed strength. But it seemed as though she still couldn’t regain her footing. His addiction had blindsided her, and she’d been looking down at the ground while she walked since then, on the verge of falling off a cliff that she wasn’t sure existed.

  She pulled up to Stately Grove, got out the car, lifted the baby. The elevator wasn’t working, so she braced herself for the walk. She opened her apartment door, walked inside, shut it, and slumped against it; she could hear her neighbors upstairs fussing already.

  “You been calling bitches? Answer me, mothafucka, you been calling bitches?”

  It started like this around dinner, low-grade rumbling that escalated by bedtime, and last night Jackie had almost called the police until she remembered she was stuck at Stately Grove—the last thing she needed was an indefinite enemy. The man yelling just now carried a gun; she knew because she’d glimpsed it creeping out of his peeling brown belt one morning, and then there was the woman downstairs with the gold jewelry and bright red lipstick whom Jackie had heard might be a lady of the night.

  Jackie passed by her bedroom window, which she hadn’t bothered to drape; police cars framed the block like trees lined her old neighborhood, like potted plants had guarded the fresh lawns. Maybe she could just run downstairs and report the noise, which was steady building; she’d be upstairs before anyone could see her. Then again, the streets had eyes sometimes; the last thing she needed was somebody retaliating, calling the police on Terry one night.

  The nightly wail of sirens started as she ran T.C.’s bathwater. But she put them out of her mind as she fell into her evening routine, bathing him, toweling him clean, especially the rolls around his neck where milk tended to gather, greasing his belly and legs with Vaseline, plucking a clean onesie from the hamper, then settling him down beside her. She used to fold clothes; hell, she used to wash dishes and mop floors too, but that was over now. No, she’d nurse him one more time, then they’d sleep until five.

  “You’re blessed,” her mama had said one night. “You didn’t sleep through the night until you were nine months old. Sybil neither.”

  Jackie appreciated compliments like those, but she didn’t need any reminders that her son was an angel. After Terry left, she wouldn’t have made it without him.

  The noise from the couple upstairs picked up along with music from a boombox outside. Rap music, she guessed. I came in the door, I said it before. I never let the mic magnetize me no more but it’s biting me.

  “You mothafucka low-life piece of shit, I nearly died for you and you threw me away for that bimbo.” This from upstairs. Jackie wondered what the man had done to rile the woman up so. She wanted to go and ask her about it, tell her nobody was worth her dignity, but she reminded herself not to get involved. She’d hoped initially that she was just at Stately Grove temporarily but she was saving only $500 a month and Terry was sick as ever—it was starting to look as if she might be walking her son to school from this broken-down parking lot, the sign in its center leaning and chipped. Her daddy had offered to put a down payment on a place in the East.

  “I have more than enough, darling,”

  And he did. He hadn’t finished college but he’d hustled through the rest of his life. His ease had been slow coming—there was a package liquor store that went bankrupt, a cleaners that got held up, and years of selling old cars in c
rooked lots—but Jackie and Sybil always wore winter coats from Maison Blanche, and when Jackie won homecoming queen, her daddy bought her a Lincoln. Still she refused him. Her whole life she had been dependent on a man. She met Terry in high school and grew up beside him. And it was only after he was gone and the garbage needed to go out and the bills needed to be paid by a certain date that she realized she was only halfway grown, like the little girls she saw downstairs some mornings, mismatched foundation caking their face, half shirts revealing their too-taut bellies.

  Jackie settled the baby on his stomach as her mama had taught

  her. He’d slept in her bed the last few months. She told her mama it was him, that he didn’t get a good night’s rest in his crib. But the truth was, she’d lay awake all night if her son wasn’t beside her, the wail of police sirens winding like a snake inside her brain. Without tying her hair or changing out of her daytime clothes, she turned on the television, switched out the light, prayed her eyes would soon close. There was a special on the news about drugs, and while she faded she heard snippets: crisis, hands on horror, a threat to every suburb in America. She didn’t need to open her eyes to know blacks were being handcuffed, carted into cop cars. Funny, the way they were describing it, when she’d seen protesters up and down South Claiborne last week crying out, The War on Drugs is a War on Us.

  Jackie didn’t know whose side she was on. She was still teetering between her narrow options when she heard the knock.

  Nobody ever came by unannounced, especially not at this hour, so she stayed where she was; it was probably some residual noise from upstairs. She didn’t think the man beat the woman, but she sometimes heard bangs and crashes indicating something had been thrown. Another knock, louder this time.

  She knelt slowly, felt around in the dark for the baseball bat she kept under her bed, held it up to her shoulder, tiptoed to the door, afraid to breathe for fear the person on the other side would hear her. She still wasn’t sure what she would do when she arrived.