Tempest Rising

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  The streetlamp in front of the five-and-dime popped on, and Ramona shrugged off the whispered enticements of the Jean Naté. What was the sense in eating into next week’s bus fare just to make herself irresistible to Tyrone when she was only going to have to sneak him up to her tiny bedroom? Piece of car he drove barely had a back seat, and surely he couldn’t afford a room at a drive-in motel, much less a lavish suite somewhere downtown where Ramona thought she belonged.

  The March wind was starting to gurgle and belch on Sixtieth Street, and Ramona pulled her coat collar up around her ears. She was glad she’d worn her good trench coat with the genuine suede trim; she always wore her good clothes when she got her hair done on Sixtieth Street lest the loud-talking women in the shop think she was needy. They knew she made a half-decent living as the assistant buyer in Lit Brothers bargain basement, and she didn’t want anybody to guess her real financial nonworth, how Mae was always siphoning her money, talking her out of generous bits of her pay week after week while Ramona watched in horror as her hard-worked-for dollars slipped through her own fingers into Mae’s card-playing hands like Johnson’s baby oil. So Ramona wore her good trench coat with the genuine suede trim in order to cover up for Mae.

  Ramona straightened her back and brushed at her new French roll. She turned from the five-and-dime window and made her way toward the Sun Ray drugstore on the corner. Decided if the sun could do her thing with the night so boldly, she could certainly stop at the Sun Ray, treat herself to a Coke, sit at the counter, and listen to the els go by. She hoped she wouldn’t run into any of the gospel choir, who’d surely want to talk. She wanted instead to try to think about Tyrone. Wanted to try yet again to summon up those tingling feelings that glittered that she thought she should have for Tyrone. Except every time she tried to think about Tyrone in the dreamy-eyed way appropriate for a woman allowing herself to fall in love, she’d end up sighing to herself, the way she guessed the sun would have sighed had she not been able to beckon the night; it wasn’t Tyrone’s face she’d see at all. It was a face more formed, hardened, lined in ways that stirred Ramona’s passions. She felt cheap and common when she thought about that face in such a gushing, silky way. It was Tyrone’s father’s face. Ever since she was a teenager and would giggle to her best friend Grace how fine she thought Perry was, he’d had that effect on her. And Grace would tell her he was too old, old enough to be her father, and what did her father look like anyhow because on The Edge of Night somebody was in love with an older man and it turned out just to be a need for a father figure? But Ramona never knew her father; some high-yellow sailor who came and went with the ships at the navy yard was all she knew, so she told Grace that couldn’t be it because Perry was brown as a chocolate snap cookie, and probably as sweet.

  She shifted on the stool and nestled her body against the frame of the stool, which was padded and covered in red vinyl, and ignored the conversation bursting around her so that she could chase away thoughts of the father and try with everything in her to fall into mink-lined thoughts about Tyrone. She drew hard on her straw and swallowed a gulp of Coke. The cola was sweet and strong and fizzed all the way up into her head and threatened to push back out through her nostrils. There it was again, Perry’s face instead of Tyrone’s, all etched with lines that were gullies of entrenched manhood, signs of hard living that now that she was in her twenties Ramona knew often made tender lovers.

  She shook the image of Perry again, now she had to. The whistle that still blew at five as if it had people to dismiss was sounding at the abandoned bread factory. It was almost time for her meeting with Vie; she had to go.

  The plastic chair covering kept wanting to talk as Ramona listened to Vie going on and on about the blowout down at the office she’d had over the placement of the three foster girls waiting in the car. Vie was a big-busted, big-hipped woman and was sweating on the couch, even though it felt like wintertime outside, and squirming and forcing the air under the plastic to sigh and squeak almost right on cue so that Ramona didn’t even have to utter “unhunh,” and “mn,” and “is that so?”

  “Imagine, Ramona,” Vie said, casting her large arms up and down, and looked to Ramona as if she were getting ready to do some Boardwalk-type dance like the cool jerk or Mickey’s monkey. “That old Til gonna threaten me and I’m on official time, talking about I better let her have those girls or she gonna do to me what she did to my brother all those years ago. Oh, yes, she did. So you know what I did: I had them hold her over. Oh, yes, I did. And I got a restraining order put on her, all of them in that house; they are not to try to contact those girls long as they’re under the jurisdiction of the court unless I say so, okay. First of all, she can’t have the girls ’cause she’s a convicted felon, and we can’t be forced to place any child with a convicted felon that’s not their natural parents.”

  Ramona was half listening to Vie now. She already knew the story of Larry getting his head darn near split in two trying to claim somebody’s baby girl as his own; that story had followed him from downtown up to West Philly, where Vie and her brother moved shortly after Ramona and Mae. Ramona didn’t blame the woman who’d cut him; everybody knew Larry had lost the workings to his manhood during the union riots. Still, every other weekend, even now, Ramona would hear about Larry beating somebody up in some club even though he was well into his fifties. Ship-shop shape, though, since he worked out regularly at the boxing gym on Pine Street; rumor was that he’d even sparred for Sonny Liston in his prime. Ramona reasoned he had to, forced to go through life with a smashed dick like that, had to prove his manhood in other ways.

  Now Vie was talking about how hard she’d had to work to rise from general clerk to case manager, thirty years it took her, plus had to put herself through community college to get her associate’s degree, and she was damned if she was gonna undignify her position and allow those girls to go with that convicted felon Til. “I mean those girls darn near watched their mother bleed to death, do you get my point, Ramona?”

  Ramona nodded and listened to the plastic chair covering clacking under Vie as she shifted around on the couch.

  “Furthermore,” Vie went on, “even if she didn’t have a record from what she did to my brother all those years ago, I still have serious concerns about their lifestyle, all of them in that house, serious concerns.”

  “Lifestyle? What about their lifestyle?” Ramona asked, her focus back to what Vie was saying. “Do they drink and smoke and gamble?” Ramona thought about Mae’s persistent card playing when she asked it.

  “No, actually there are some, well, some gender identity issues, oh, yes, there are—”

  “Wait a minute, are you saying that they’re funny?” Ramona interrupted. “That those girls can’t go with their natural kin because the aunts or uncles might be funny?”

  “I’m not saying it’s anything I can prove, okay, Ramona, but come on, all of them in that house never been married—”

  “Me neither, Vie. I’m a single woman.”

  “Now, Ramona, your womanhood ain’t never come into question, okay—”

  “You single too, Vie.”

  “Look, yeah, I’m single, but ain’t a damned thing wrong with me. Okay. All I’m saying is that as case manager I can use my discretion, and if Til and the rest of that brew really want those girls, they gonna have to go before a judge, oh, yes, they will, and trust me, with the backlog, hmh, they’ll be a long time getting a hearing with a judge, oh, yes, they will.”

  “Yeah, but, Vie, they’re the natural kin to those girls.” Now Ramona shifted, and the plastic covering her chair started to moan and groan. “I mean, if not them, don’t they have any other natural family that could take them in?” She asked it even though she knew Mae would have never asked such a question, wouldn’t want to compete with any natural family for the dollars that constantly flowed through there, payment for the children’s upkeep, and for Mae’s time and bother.

  “Nope, no other natural family.” Vie crossed her
arms over her chest. “Near as we can tell, Finch, the father, was a merchant marine until he married Clarise, and we haven’t been able to track down any of his relatives in the immediate vicinity. And we certainly not about to go searching through every lean-to down South, especially not for a temporary living situation.” She sat up along the edge of the couch. “You acting like you don’t want this placement, Ramona. I mean, I talked to Mae in Buffalo this morning, and she was near ecstactic about the placement—”

  “No, no, no. Of course she—we want the placement. It’s just when they’re so traumatized…and you know my mother won’t be back for a month—but no, of course we want the placement.”

  “I mean, your mother is one of the best, darn near perfect record in foster care, oh, yes, she does. Her name stays at the top of the list, and your name too as her legal substitute.”

  Ramona mashed her body harder into the chair and the plastic did a humph. She knew it wasn’t so much Mae’s perfect record in foster care that kept her name at the top of the list, but more Mae’s ability to get the vote out on election day and keep her ward leader drained and satisfied. “How long you think they’ll be here?” she asked.

  Vie pushed against the coffee table to hoist herself up. “The mother’s under a court-imposed commitment, at least for forty-five days until she gets evaluated again.”

  She went on to describe the girls, told Ramona she was going to love them, such pretty girls. “The oldest has eyes like a china doll, and the youngest, oh, Ramona, cutest little round face with a deep cleft in her chin. Plus they’re smart, nice, you know; they’re the type who’ll probably go to the library on Saturdays instead of sneaking under the el turn-stiles to go downtown to shoplift from McCrory’s, nothing like that last brew you-all had here that made all those phone calls long distance all over the country.”

  “What you talking ’bout? Had to put a lock on the phone that I use to this day,” Ramona said, not really needing to know much else about the girls. She had already read about them in the Tribune when their daddy turned up missing. Knew they were raised privileged, lived in Chestnut Hill, thirteen, twelve, eleven. All she wanted to know right now was what kind of hair did the girls have; was it as long and thick as it looked in the newspaper picture? But she couldn’t ask Vie such a thing, was sure that Vie wouldn’t be even able to begin to fathom how many Saturday mornings she’d lost blistering her fingers in a smoke-filled kitchen while she pressed some foster girl’s thick-ass hair. Ramona patted her own hair along the sides of her blond-tinged French roll.

  “That hair looking good,” Vie said as she stood, and Ramona could have sworn she heard the plastic covering sigh out a hallelujah. “Can’t nobody do a hard press like Miss D. Even though mine won’t hold a press these days, sweat too much with this personal summer I’m going through, but you won’t know nothing about that for at least the next twenty years.

  “I’m having the girls’ former school send the paperwork over to Sayre Junior High so you won’t have to bother with that detail.” She lowered her voice. “Tuition seriously lapsed at their private school, oh, yes, it had, so they may not have been going back there even if this tragedy hadn’t befallen them.” She waved the air in front of her face again. “Let me show them in, Ramona, and start bringing in their things.” She looked around the living room, large for a row house on a small street, and Ramona followed her eyes, from the mantelpiece, where her prom pictures and high school diploma were nestled in the Woolworth’s gold-tone frames, to the magazine rack, where the Ebonys, Jets, and Philly Talks were arranged in sized order. Her Bible was perfectly centered on the speckless coffee table, and even the plastic runner covering the wall-to-wall carpet gleamed. She was glad she’d spent her morning cleaning, and with Mae out of town she’d had to do it only once and not two or three times picking up after the messes Mae left.

  “I sure am grateful you and your mother keep such an orderly house,” Vie said as if she’d just heard Ramona’s thoughts. “Not many houses I could just show up at with three children and everything be right in place to just take them in.”

  Ramona accepted the compliment with a nod. Then she said “shit” loudly, three times in a row after Vie was out of the front door. Once for each girl, because Mae wouldn’t be back for a month from Tuesday, and even though Ramona had always been the primary caretaker in terms of the cooking and cleaning, and laundry, and making sure the children stayed well groomed, it was Mae who did the sweet talking, who could calm down the most agitated of children by wrapping her words in honey like she was making pigs in a blanket. Ramona just didn’t have that sweet-talking part in her, would barely say good morning to the steady streams of children who’d floated in and out of here over the years. Wouldn’t know how to say a kind word to them if she wanted to. She’d never wanted to. She didn’t now.

  “Look at all this. How we supposed to get this heavy-ass trunk up the stairs?” Ramona said to Shern, Victoria, and Bliss. But she actually said it to the trunk because she wasn’t even looking at the girls. Hadn’t looked at them really in the whole ten minutes they’d been here. That was always the hardest part for her, looking at the fosters when they walked through that door for the first time, when their faces were still coated with the hell they’d been delivered from, evenly spread and matte over their faces like fresh paint. So she looked all around their faces, concentrated on their bodies instead. She noticed that they were slight-built girls, even under the high-quality plaid wool coats. The older two starting to bud out a little, the youngest still round with baby fat, all three of them soft-figured, wouldn’t be much help with the trunk. She decided she’d wait for Tyrone to help her with the trunk.

  She went to the closet and pulled out three hangers just so she could do something besides stand there and not look at them. “You the oldest, so you in charge of jackets and coats,” she said to Shern as she handed her the hangers. “Maybe you had live-in help or just day help where you came from, but I’m the only help around here, and my wages aren’t too damned good, so the least you can do is hang up your own coats.”

  Ramona’s words fell on Shern’s unacclimated ears with a smashing sound, like glass milk bottles against a chain-link fence. Shern looked at her sisters to make sure they weren’t crying again, and then she scanned the living room, which was thimble-sized compared to their real home. She felt dizzy now when she thought about her real home. She took the hangers from Ramona and tried to tie her stomach like it was a kerchief, hoping it would contain the creamed corn she’d nibbled at when the social worker stopped them at Horn & Hardart’s and insisted that they put something in their stomachs.

  “Put your hats in your pockets,” Ramona said as she watched the older two pull the hats from their heads. Odd-looking hats; she’d never seen a cross-stitch like that, all mixed up with no particular pattern, but it worked well in the hats. Now she was looking at their hair. “Damn,” she muttered under her breath; it was as thick as it looked in the Tribune photo.

  “My mother tells us to put our hats in our sleeves, so our pockets won’t get stretched out of shape.” It was Bliss talking, pouting, looking up at Ramona like she was nobody she had to listen to.

  Ramona looked at Bliss standing back on her heels, basing up at her as if she were her age. She had her mouth all formed to snap at Bliss, to say to Bliss, “Your mother’s in the crazy house, so what does she know?” But then she heard Mae’s voice in her head telling to mind her meanness. So she tucked what Mae called her meanness in the palm of her hand, closed her fist over it to keep it contained for now, and didn’t talk about their mother. She did stoop to Bliss’s eye level, though. “I don’t care where you stick them as long as I don’t see them all over the closet floor.” She pulled Bliss’s hat from her head. “Doesn’t this go in your sleeve?” She emphasized the “sleeve” and then shoved the hat in Bliss’s hand. She noticed Bliss’s hair was light brown and not as thick as her sisters’. She would have to be the one with soft hair, she thought, the
one I’d most like to slip and catch with the hot comb right around the tip of her ear. There was her meanness again; she clenched her fist tighter, trying to hold it in.

  Victoria watched the bad current zipping through the living room between Ramona and Bliss, and she immediately slid into her peacemaker’s stance. “Bliss, come on and give Shern your coat,” she said with urgency. She knew Bliss would readily trade insults with Ramona, and she was afraid that Ramona might land her palm right across Bliss’s mouth. Already Ramona seemed to be opening and closing her hand like she was nervous or, worse yet, trying to restrain herself. “Come on, Bliss,” she said again, and tugged on her shoulder.

  Then she turned to Ramona. She wanted to tell her please to excuse Bliss, that sometimes Bliss spoke without thinking, that Bliss was the baby, though, and a little spoiled and didn’t mean any harm. But now Victoria was looking at Ramona’s face, and she couldn’t talk. She was so struck by Ramona’s face, the soft beauty just overflowing from Ramona’s face. She wondered how such harsh, ugly words could come from that face. She cleared her throat. “Um,” she said, and then she remembered her mother’s caution about starting a sentence with “um.” “People will see your brown skin and hear you say ‘um’ and automatically think you’re stupid,” her mother used to say. “You just don’t have the luxury of starting your sentences like that.” So Victoria pulled back the “um,” and now she had Ramona’s attention, and all she could do was stare at Ramona. Now her jaw was locked, and she couldn’t say anything since she’d gone and thought about her mother; she just looked at Ramona and started to cry.

  “Come on, Tore, don’t cry.” Bliss wrapped her arm around Victoria’s neck. “And you don’t have to take up for me, I know that’s what you were getting ready to do, but Mommie did always tell us not to stuff our hats in our coat pockets, and I’m not going against what Mommie says for anybody.” She rolled her eyes at Ramona and then pulled her coat off her shoulder.