She uncurled herself from the bed and stood and smoothed down her velvet dress. She wiped her face with her hands and then rubbed her hands through her hair; the thick wool of her hair easily absorbed the wetness of her tears in exchange for a slight greasy film. She walked across the bedroom, which was bathed in an orange afternoon sun, and eased the door open and listened for the downstairs sounds. They were eating dinner, she could hear metal against glass, Mae talking; she had an irritating voice, Shern thought, like a fingernail against a blackboard. Now Mae was laughing, sounded like Hettie from across the street was down there too. Good, Shern thought. Ramona’s probably busy serving the meal. Just keep talking, keep laughing, please.
She crept through the hallway, which suddenly seemed long, as she tried to get to the telephone just inside Ramona’s bedroom. How many times she’d seen that phone over the past month when she walked past Ramona’s room. How many times she wanted to pick it up to scream out for her aunts and uncles to come and rescue them. But she had taken Ramona’s threats to heart, plus the phone had a lock on it. She’d seen Ramona pull the key from the pocket to that ugly navy duster she always wore, the one with the huge hideous flowers. Ramona had even sent Shern for the key once when she was getting ready to use the phone in the kitchen and the lock was in. “You, oldest,” she commanded, “go reach in my duster pocket that’s folded at the foot of my bed and bring me down the key that’s in there.”
Shern’s prayer now as she stepped inside Ramona’s room was that Ramona didn’t have the duster on. There was the phone right on the edge of the dresser right next to the door, there was that little cylinder right in the number one on the rotary so that the dial wouldn’t spin beyond that little black tab, and there, thank God, on the foot of the bed was Ramona’s ugly flowered duster.
Shern inched her fingers into the pocket, pulled up a stick of Doublemint gum, went to the other pocket, felt her fingers go weak as she wrapped them around the key and rushed to the phone. It took several tries to insert the key into the cylinder because her hands were slick from when she’d rubbed her hair and now they were sweating too. Finally she turned the key in the cylinder and pulled it out of the number one hole.
Her heart felt like thunderclaps in her chest as she dialed the number, and then she heard it, her uncle Blue say in his sherry-tinged voice, “Speak to me.”
Just hearing his voice loosed a floodgate in her throat. She couldn’t even say hello, just a moan came up from her throat, and then another one, and she had to cover her mouth so that they wouldn’t hear her downstairs.
“Who is this, please? It’s your dime, but it’s my time, so spill it or chill it,” her uncle Blue said.
She tried to speak, but just a huge bubble carrying a sob passed through her lips, and now she could hear her aunt Til in the background. “Who’s that on the phone, Blue?”
And then Blue’s voice got further away as he said, “Some uneducated fool playing on the phone, just breathing hard and saying nothing.”
Then Shern whispered as loud as she could without shouting, “No, it’s me, it’s me, it’s Shern.” And now she was talking to a dial tone and staring in Ramona’s face.
Perhaps it was the utterly defenseless, caught look on Shern’s face; perhaps it was that Ramona too had felt violated in her life by some no-good man’s groping hand; perhaps it was even Ramona’s preoccupation with Tyrone’s changed mouth that made her feel a misty blue kind of sadness that lent itself more to sighing than rage. Whatever the reason, Ramona didn’t perform, didn’t curse and holler, didn’t hit Shern, didn’t demand her to go from her room. She just took the phone from Shern’s frozen hand and put it back on the receiver. Stretched open her palm, calmly told Shern, “Just drop the key right here, please.” Then went to the closet to get her gold and blue choir robe, turned her back on Shern to give her a chance to leave the room.
11
Ramona tried to push the petrified look on Shern’s face from her mind later that night as she stood on the choir loft, decided she didn’t even want to know who Shern was trying to call. She tried to chase Addison from her mind too, Mae, that row house, even Tyrone and his changed mouth. Tried to clear her mind so that she could throw her head back and sing the lead with her choir.
“We doing your song tonight, Ramona,” her choir director had called into the changing room, where Ramona and all the other female choir members had crammed, jostling for space to pull their robes on and check their lipstick, straighten their wigs, fix their bangs, take their cash money from their purses and stick it in their bras.
“All right, now,” Ella, the alto, boomed. “We ain’t done your song in weeks, Ramona. I’m ready for you, girl.”
“Oh, hush, girl,” Ramona said, shooing Ella from the mirror so that she could smooth on her frosted peach-toned lipstick. “Ain’t nothing but a song.”
“I got your nothing but a song,” said Beanie as she swept a single loose hair from Ramona’s meticulous French roll into place. “The way you close your eyes and start to moan and carry on when you do that song, honey, honey, honey, I’m praying for you that all you thinking about is the Lord and you not having some blasphemous thoughts about that cute country boy you done snagged.”
The changing room seemed to slant like a ship making a hard turn, they all laughed so hard.
“Beanie, that’s your mind in that gutter,” Ramona said. “Now shut the heck up and give me back my pressed powder before I tell everybody what you whispered to me last Third Sunday.”
“Ooh, ooh, tell us, Ramona,” the whole dressing room begged as if it were singing in a run.
“Watch yourself, Ramona.” Beanie put her hands on her hips and feigned sternness.
“It ain’t nothing, y’all”—Ramona tried to keep herself from laughing—“just that Beanie was telling me that Freddie, the usher, wears a toupee.”
“Ooh, no, he doesn’t,” Ella said as she slapped Beanie on the back, “and how would our Beanie come to know this?”
“Came off in her hand,” Ramona said, pressing tears from her eyes she was laughing so hard.
More room-slanting laughter.
“But wait, wait”—Ramona tried to catch her breath—“that ain’t the funny part.”
“Ramona, you know like I know you better save your lungs for the song you gotta sing,” Beanie said.
“Beanie, tell it, please, y’all got to hear this,” Ramona gasped.
“Awl, shucks, y’all.” Beanie pushed her way to the center of the tight room. “Everybody knows Freddie is like my man now, okay. We christened our relationship ’bout a month ago.”
“Unhuh,” and “Yeah, we know,” and “Okay, none of us in here is gonna put the moves on Freddie” floated through the changing room.
“So all I did last Third Sunday,” Beanie went on, “was describe to my bigmouth sister in song, Ramona, over here how I was running my fingers through what I thought was his hair, you know, I’m into it, maybe I was pulling the man’s hair a little rougher than I should have, and the toupee came off in my hand, scared me so bad, I thought I had pulled up my own body parts, like darn, is this man making me explode so much my own stuff is coming off?”
Now it was as if the ceiling had caved in on the close room. They laughed so hard they staggered into one another and fell all over the changing-room floor. Ramona laughed too, leaned up against the ledge under the mirror, arm pressed into her stomach; she laughed like she rarely did. In fact, it was only during these precious minutes when the women of the choir fused together in this tight closet of a room that she laughed like this. She had no girlfriends with whom she could laugh like this; her mean streak she knew would quickly alienate any woman who would seriously try to be her friend. So even though her choir members made overtures when she’d see one or the other on Sixtieth Street, the el, at Penn Fruit, or Miss D’s beauty parlor, they’d call out, “Hey, girl, call me, we got to talk,” Ramona never did call. She blamed it on her day job, tending to the fosters, try
ing to keep Mae off her back, spending nights with the man/men in her life, told herself that closeness between women was a frivolous endeavor that she would get around to one day when she could finally siphon off some free time. She really meant when she could sustain a decent attitude and keep her mean streak at bay. But during these segments when they changed in and out of their choir robes, sharing makeup and man stories, tucking one another’s bra straps so they wouldn’t show, knocking elbows and shoulders and behinds, Ramona felt loose, unfettered, like she rarely did.
But now she was standing on the choir loft, the giddiness she’d felt in the changing room was gone and her insides were locked again as she looked around the congregation and tried not to see the longtime married couples like Mr. and Mrs. John sitting right in her view, holding hands, Mrs. John elegantly middle-aged with her center city–coiffured hair, Mr. John glinting up at Ramona, vestiges of his and Ramona’s passion-filled trysts hanging in his eyes. And seeing it in Mr. John’s eyes made Ramona’s own eyes turn inward and recall it for herself.
She was only nineteen when she’d tried it with him. She’d just been promoted to assistant buyer, and Mae had bragged about it all over West Philly, and people were stopping Ramona on the street to congratulate her. Then Mr. John pulled up in a rented Fleetwood, backseat strewn with a dozen long-stem roses and an ice bucket cooling off fifty-dollar champagne. “Get in, Miss Ramona,” he said. “I’m going to introduce you to the high-class mature way of celebrating your notable accomplishment.”
She was young and impressionable, so she got in the car, let him take her up to Belmont Plateau, where she’d been so many times, too many times before, with any one of countless boyfriends, they could have been the same they were so much alike, so young, greedy, fast. But Mr. John was at least twice her age, and she tingled at the way the gray in his hair almost sparkled as they watched the city lights come on through the tinted windows of the Fleetwood Cadillac. They sipped champagne as he whispered compliments to her success and her beauty and her brains. She giggled and cooed and blushed inside. His hands were strong and smooth inching up her thighs, his lips hot and coarse barely sliding down her throat, until his hands and lips met a her center and it was so easy, too easy for her to part herself and let him take her, over and over, on the supple leather of the oversized backseat. After that it was those hands and lips and his slow-moving manhood in the best suite at the Airport Motel, or the borrowed apartment of his richest friend, even the back room of the real estate office when his wife took the evening off. And then there was his generosity, the fifty-dollar bills he’d fold into her bra, twice, sometimes three times a month—“Don’t want my baby to have to worry about lunch money,” he’d say—the better-quality stockings he’d surprise her with, six, eight pair at a time. “Love looking at those big, pretty legs under this smooth silk,” he’d croon. She’d go to get her hair done and get up out of the chair and reach for her purse and hear Miss D’s voice whispering, ringing in her ear, “Your sugar daddy done already taken care of it, sweetheart. What kind of mojo you gone and put on that man anyhow? Shit, give me some of that. Let me whip it on my man.” They were together the whole summer into the fall of 1960, discreet; she was very respectful of his wife, never left her fancy underwear around the office, like she’d heard some women did. Then one night, a big night, Mr. John had just gotten the deal to be the closing agent on the abandoned bread factory, could net him thousands in commissions if he could move it, they celebrated so hard at a suite at the Warwick, he’d gulped down water glass after water glass of Johnnie Walker Red, couldn’t do anything but lie back and squeeze Ramona’s finely pressed hair against his chest, talking drunk talk, slurring his words, getting raunchy, too raunchy, so raunchy that Ramona wanted to tell him to shut up because she knew he was about to say something that would turn her insides to ice from then on whenever she looked at him. He did too. Told her she was the best piece he’d ever had, and he’d had some good ass, he said. She was even better than that drooping-eyed Mae.
She looked away from the Johns and tilted the microphone down and slightly away from her mouth so the sounds of her breathing wouldn’t be amplified. At least she didn’t have to vomit now when she thought about it, the way she’d vomited for a solid week after that night. Couldn’t look at Mae for a time either. Not that she was jealous; she knew Mae would spread herself in a flash to negotiate payment of a debt, no difference to Mae between doing that and going under her bra to pull out a ten-dollar bill. It was just the knowledge that she and her very own mother had shared in the one thing that mothers and daughters should never share, even if her time with Mr. John had been spaced years from Mae’s. For a while after that she couldn’t even be with anyone she felt so dented and rusty inside. Like a silver-toned can that’s dropped from up high so many times until even the dents turn a burnt-orange shade of roughness.
Now Mr. John was smiling, blew her a subtle kiss. She rolled her eyes and looked away. Looked instead at the pianist choir director, who was finishing up his prelude to the song; his graceful fingers flittered around the keys in a buildup that was not only gospel but classical, blues, and jazz. He nodded at Ramona, a nod filled with assurances that what was to come was very good indeed. Beanie reached over and tugged the generous pleat in Ramona’s robe sleeve, an encouraging tug. Someone up in the balcony called out, “All right now, Ramona.” And now Ramona felt propped up, protected, ensconced like she rarely did.
She listened for the spaces in the piano keys. Then she closed her eyes, closed her eyes on all her wrongdoing: on Mr. John and every other man she’d been with whom she had no rights to; on the profanity that slid off her tongue like butter; on the hatred she had for her own mother; the meanness she showed the children; the misdirected anger that had made her slap Victoria’s innocent face. She closed her eyes and started to sing about, no, beg for peace.
She was midway through her song about a ship caught in a storm, had sung about the tempest raging, the billows tossing high, no shelter, and no help. And then those wavy lines that she always felt in her chest when she sang this song were moving through her chest. And she was at the part in the song when she was asking the Lord doesn’t he care that she might perish. And the lines in her chest were trying to rise to the top and break through that block of granite that always came up too, sure as those lines did when she sang this song. When she was trying to get peace, whether she was trying finally to leave Mae’s or let herself know honest love, that obstruction would come up, and her insides would go dark, all but obliterating those lines that were wavy and green like fresh-cut grass or a sapling of a girl child trying to live. Then she threw her head back, raised her hands toward the rafters, and in a voice so clouded with emotion that it was as if a fog had settled over the church and turned everything a silvery beautiful blue, she chanted, “Get up, Jesus,” and the church went into a hollering, crying frenzy. Then the choir came in for the refrain, and their collected voices bounced up to the dome-shaped ceiling and hung there until they fell back on the congregation like rain. Ramona just listened to this part, caught her breath as they called for peace, be still, as they crescendoed. And it was always here, while she waited for her cue to rejoin the song, that Ramona’s eyes welled up and the congregation stood on their feet, clapped their appreciation for her for allowing herself to become so Holy Spirit–filled that she had to cry while she sang. Except they didn’t know that Ramona really cried because once again that block of granite had not succumbed to her cries for peace. Once again she’d gotten confirmation that the devil had such a lock on her insides that she would always be mean, deceitful, hate-filled. So she cried out loud and Beanie rubbed her back, and then she rejoined the choir, closed her eyes again on Mr. and Mrs. John, and sang about the peace she feared she would never have.
Shern was wide-awake in this house she hated. It was after midnight, and the velvet bedroom air rippled with the night sounds: her sisters breathing, the occasional clank and hiss of the radiator, the
wind spitting against the window. The sounds were tinged with a starkness as if she could see what she was hearing her senses heightened so. Her senses needed to be heightened, she reasoned, to keep her alert to when that devil-formed Addison was slinking around.
She thought about how she had botched her attempts at communicating with the aunts and uncles earlier. Told herself that it was probably for the better; they might have rushed right over there, gotten themselves in trouble. It would be better, she reasoned, if she went to them. She let the thought of telling Vie about Addison’s violation twist and turn in her head, asking Vie, could they please go stay with their aunts and uncles until their mother was well. But in her mind it was Vie who was keeping her from the aunts and uncles. It was Vie who had assured them that they were going to love it here. It was Vie whose own brother had taunted them and made Victoria fall. Who knows where they’d end up should she complain to Vie? Might end up someplace worse than here. Was there even worse than here? She might be separated from her sisters; that would be worse than here.
She blew a tear-laden sigh into the dark bedroom air at the thought of being separated from Victoria and Bliss. Victoria stirred and whimpered and moaned groggily about her knee hurting so bad and then pressed her head against Shern’s chin and was sound asleep again. Now Shern felt the sound of her sister’s pain in her stomach too.
She drew herself up slowly from where she had been cupped into the twin bed the three sisters shared. Mae actually allowed them more room than the one bed; there was a twin bed next to the one on which they slept, and there was a hunter green velveteen sofa bed under the window. But the girls preferred being cramped to being separated through the night; they’d already lost both parents in a sense, so they locked their bodies into curves on that single bed that accommodated the three in a relatively fitful sleep.
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