Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing Part 14

"Umm-hmm," Jason murmured, taking a bite of the hot biscuit.

"And those Genene girls, didn't he have one, then the next, then the next, till all three of them lived here at one time or another, every one of those girls coming up from the country to go to school. And they went, too, every one of them, and their parents decent hardworking people. But you know what I'm saying, about the expense and all. And the whole time, Mr. Mac not saying a word to anybody, except something about how he needs help down at the real estate office. I guess there might have been something they could have done, but who could for the life of them say what a country girl would know about all that work Mr. Mac is always doing. You know what it is I'm saying."

Jason nodded, swallowing and chewing almost simultaneously.

"And don't tell me anything about loving that child," she went on. "Oh, mercy, think I'd like to die myself than have to live to see the day something happen to that child, then die again to keep from living long enough to see Mr. Mac have to go through it." She turned on the water in the sink full force. "He's been like something right out of the grave himself, walking and breathing, but not much more. Oh, Lord, I thought I'd never see this day."

Jason looked at her, soap rising from beneath her hand swirling under the stream from the faucet. His large eyes clouded over. "It's a terrible thing," he agreed.

"Terrible ain't even the beginning of it." Mrs. Johnson turned to face him and the boys. "If I weren't afraid of blasphemy, I'd talk about pestilence and flood; that's how bad this thing strikes me. Must be near on to h.e.l.l and d.a.m.nation."

Earl's and Lucas's eyes met across the table, their mouths motionless as they contemplated Mrs. Johnson.

"But I ain't saying nothing about that subject in this house." The boys resumed their contented chewing. "Got to remember the good times, especially now you've done gone and brought her soul's house on home." She stared at Lucas and Earl. "You boys brought her in here okay, yes? You been gentle and careful like with a lamb?"

They bobbed their heads.

"Good. I wouldn't want nothing more to disturb that child on her way to glory, and praise the Lord, I know that's where she's bound."

"Praise the Lord," Jason responded, bowing his head briefly as if in prayer.

Mrs. Johnson's words seemed to have caught up to her, and her eyes filled with tears. "Oh, Lord, that was one sweet child," she said mournfully.

"That she was," said Jason.

Sirus now heard silence in the kitchen. He had been aware of Jason's being there and of what his presence represented: the things they needed to discuss. But as long as he heard the voices, that moment seemed distant. Now, in the silence, it was a presence standing beside him. This was the moment he had been dreading, what he wished he could avoid, to face yet again this stillness that was supposed to be his Mattie.

When Aileen left the house yesterday, fled, really, she had insisted that she would never be able to sleep, knowing that her baby would be coming home in a box. She could not bear to see it, she told him. And she warned him, pleaded with him, not to let them make Mattie look like someone else. "They're always doing that," she said tearfully. "Remember my father's mouth, how they filled it with cotton and his cheeks were all puffed out so that he looked like he was pouting and angry? Or they get the color all wrong. She's our child, a bright chestnut, a happy child," she kept saying. And Sirus had promised that he would be careful, that he would handle this detail, make sure it was done right. But how on Earth could he do it, he wondered. Where would he find the strength to look in the coffin, much less talk with Jason about anything else that might need to be done?

He looked around the room. The sun was streaming through the window behind him; he felt it hot on his shoulders, spreading a warmth that his muscles yielded to in spite of himself. If he closed his eyes, with the feel of that sun, he could escape this room, he could once again be a small boy on his parents' tobacco farm, the sun reflecting on the tall gra.s.s that ringed the house. In that imaginary field, lit by this sun, he could keep his eyes closed, and what he sensed was not this coffin but something else, something more closely resembling a mysterious presence. He felt that if he were to turn and approach this inexplicable something, it would be with antic.i.p.ation, a feeling tinged with yearning.

Drifting with the sun's warmth, he felt himself sink deeper into this scene. He became aware of an altered sense of time, a feeling of long hours, long days, no, long years, bringing him to this point. He kept imagining himself as the boy in that gra.s.s, looking to this future, and if he were to open his eyes, then or now, what he'd see would hold all of the years that had gone by. He could feel all of the tension held in his body over the past two days flow out of him. Gone were all the times he had held himself in check, all the movements toward or away from someone. All that was left was this thing, this something. As he drew nearer in his imagination, his heart swelled so that it nearly burst with antic.i.p.ation.

Yes, that was what he was feeling, he thought giddily, a kind of rejoicing. Things were not as they seemed, he wanted to shout. Look, look, something wonderful has occurred, and he was the only one who knew or was allowed to see it. Privately, secretly, he alone was going to be given a glimpse, permitted only once in a lifetime, of something he couldn't name. And almost joyously, he opened his eyes and turned his head, and as he did, the living room slid into view. What was visible was not this magnificent presence, but the coffin, suspended. The vision faded, not all at once, but as a dream fades. His giddiness slipped away, and then his trembling hope, and the overwhelming joy he had expected to taste. One by one his senses returned him to himself, and what he saw and heard and felt was exactly what was here in this room-and no more.

He was alone. There were no sounds around him. He rose from his chair and lay his hand atop the coffin. She was gone. He ran his hand along the curved top of the molded lid. It was both smooth and cool. If he were to lift the cover, she would lie before him, lifeless. Her smile, her laughter, her smell of leaves and tart apples, her plumply muscled arms folded over her painfully angular legs would be shrouded, still. They would never move again, never explode from the center of the room. The cool, quiet body lying in this box would never again hurtle toward him, take his breath away. Now they were at an end. Now they were removed to a region of memory and shadow. Now he would never experience her again.

He heard Jason come into the room and felt his warm presence beside him as distinctly as a bell pealing in his ear.

"We have a few more things to discuss," Jason said quietly, resting his arm across his friend's shoulder.

"Yes, of course." Sirus's voice was close to breaking. He reached into his pocket for something, anything, and his hand came out empty. "I need my gla.s.ses, my pen," he mumbled. He backed away from Jason and the coffin, then turned, stumbling over his feet. He regained his balance, hurried across the front parlor, and disappeared up the stairs.

Your Child Can Be a Model!.

BY DAVID HAYNES.

Football pools. Rumor mongering. Daylong seminars on the changing face of the twenty-first-century consumer. Apparently this is what Americans did at work. Sheila had no idea. Eighteen months ago she'd been a housewife. Who knew the gla.s.s on top of a copy machine could support a grown man's behind?

When Whispering Pines Junior High School rings her cellular to tell her that her son Briggs has been sent home from school for misbehavior, Sheila is arrayed across the entrance from her boss's, Marketa Winthrop, office in the sort of pose a really bad exotic dancer might mistake for s.e.xy. She is trying to keep the production manager from stabbing Marketa Winthrop with an Exacto knife. The knife is right there in his hands, its edges bristling with bits of rubber cement and trimmed copy. Marketa Winthrop wants the blushing beauties on the bridal announcement page arrayed in alphabetical order. Ralph Johansen has his own scheme. He waves the paste up in Sheila's face.

"Ugly, bootiful, ugly, bootiful." He fingers the alternating faces and a.s.sumes the bizarre and unrecognizable accent he adopts when he is angling after a date with her. Gypsy or marginally Latino, she thinks, but who could imagine? Ralph is from Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

"It's ten o'clock in the morning," Sheila says to the a.s.sistant princ.i.p.al. "What do you mean sent home?"

"Dismissed. Until you bring him back for a conference."

"You can't just send children home," she says. She keeps Ralph at bay with her foot.

"I weel now keel her with my ber hends," he seethes. Olive-skinned and vaguely ethnic like the villains on daytime television, Ralph has steely black eyes and a goatee, the same look sported by pictures of the devil on low-budget religious tracts.

"Important call," Sheila mouths, but Ralph ignores her.

"Che ees evil, no?" He grabs her free hand and kisses the darker side, licking it with his tongue. Why did cute men have to be so nasty? Or maybe it was the other way around.

"I've got a district policy manual right here on my desk that says that I can send Briggs home. And my file says you agreed to this plan, two weeks ago."

She did? Sheila doesn't remember, but she might have agreed to anything John Antonio said. Twenty-five years later she could still be intimidated by junior high a.s.sistant princ.i.p.als.

"Jou are bootiful when jou are engry." The s...o...b..r on her hand tickles. She stifles a giggle.

"I'm sorry you find this amusing."

"I don't." Sheila clears her throat to indicate just how serious she is and also to stifle her laugh. These people didn't need more ammunition against her. She bares her teeth at Ralph. Ralph growls in response.

"Where is my child?" she demands.

"He should be landing on your front porch any minute now."

"Briggs doesn't have a key."

"That's for the two of you to work out. Can I expect you for a conference in the morning?"

"You can expect me in twenty minutes." She tumbles into Marketa Winthrop's office, mashing Ralph's fingers in the jamb, and locks the door behind her.

Sheila is Marketa Winthrop's personal a.s.sistant. Sheila gets her dry cleaning, her oil changed, picks up her snack cakes at the 7-Eleven. Marketa Winthrop is a victim of magazines like New Black Woman and Essence and Self. She reads in these magazines how successful entrepreneurs of the kind she imagines herself to be all have personal a.s.sistants: Camille Cosby, Linda Johnson, Jada Pinkett-Smith. Those gals snap their fingers and mountains of annoyance disappear. Marketa Winthrop believes this can happen to her. She believes that by modeling herself on rich and glamorous women, she, too, will become lithe and loved the world over. The Fresh Prince of Bel Air will move into her bed. Who is Sheila to disabuse her of this notion?

"I need to run up to school," Sheila tells her boss.

Marketa Winthrop flips the page of another magazine. "Did Ralph redo the wedding announcements?" she asks. Her boss subscribes to dozens of magazines. Sheila delivers them each morning with a jumbo coffee and a bear claw from the convenience store. Marketa Winthrop spends much of her day paging through the glossies, dreaming of the big move she promises Sheila they will be making soon to the national publications scene.

"ABC brides," Sheila lies. As if the order of suburban princesses mattered.

"Good girl. Because one thing Marketa Winthrop won't be having is a bunch of p.i.s.sy mothers-of-the-bride." Marketa Winthrop always uses both her names, always introduces herself as if the person she were speaking with had been hearing about her for years. "h.e.l.lo, Marketa Winthrop," she'll say, extending her hand. This despite the fact that, as the owner of a chain of suburban weeklies, the only place they might have encountered her name was on the masthead of one of her throwaway shoppers, just above the announcement for the garden club meeting and a full page ad for Cooper's Super Value.

"Pick up some Twinkies on the way back." Marketa Winthrop shoos her on her way with a trill of fingers.

Sheila makes a left by the trusty 7-Eleven, onto the road to Maple Villas, where she and Briggs reside. Washington County scares her. What were farm roads three crops ago are now lined with strip malls and condos and industrial parks, each cl.u.s.ter of buildings shamelessly jury-rigged-cheap Tudor veneer on Ye Olde Shoppes. Months old and the whole shebang already looked worn out. There are no landmarks here. Down in the city, where they had lived with the ex, you navigated using the brewery, the steeple of St. Cecilia's, the smokestacks at the auto plant. In Washington County not even the old-timers knew their way around. "I think you turn down by the old Jamison place. Go another mile or so to where they tore down the silo." Pale faces eyed her with mild contempt, as if a black woman didn't deserve a home on the grange. Or perhaps they blamed her personally for the distant city landing on their former cornfields in all its four-lane glory. Sheila turns past the crumbling sandstone cairns that mark the entrance to her apartment complex. There are no maples and the villas are peach-bricked, generic boxes, with opera balconies and too many yucca plants.

One thing for Briggs: He has the good sense to know when not to push his luck. He is waiting on the porch, just as he knew she'd expect him to be, one less thing to go off about. Fourteen years: She'd depleted her repertoire of responses to the boy. Hysterical mom. Frustrated mom. Blase. Rageful. Shaming. She could mount a full season of one-woman shows-Hey, there was an idea: The Psychotic Divorced Mother's Repertory Company. Rent out a church bas.e.m.e.nt. Sell gin and tonics and Prozac at the concession stand. Begin each season with Medea.

She rolls down her window. "Get in this car and start talking," she orders. She'd save the small talk for the suits at school. Climbing in, Briggs slouched down next to her.

"Well, you see, the thing is, it was just that me and Cedric . . . Oh, by the way: You're looking fine today, Ma. That's a really nice dress."

"Don't even, Briggs." Sheila rolls her eyes. Instead of a theater company, how about an anticharm school? She could make piles of money training philandering politicians and your garden-variety teenage-male alternatives to being unctuous when caught with their pants down.

"Out with it," she orders.

"Like I said. Me and Cedric . . ."

"Cedric and I." What did they teach in these d.a.m.n schools anyway?

"Yeah, that. We were sitting in cla.s.s, and we were just sitting there and this one kid said that Cedric had ashy legs and then Miss Stephes said turn around and then Cedric said your mama's breath smells like socks and cheese and then I laughed and then Ms. Stephes said go to the office."

Sheila monitors Briggs' face while she negotiates a turn. Sincerity to contrition, dissolving too quickly to oily self-pity.

"You don't even believe that story yourself," she chides.

"Yeah, I do. That's just how it happened. Except . . ."

And there it was: there was always an "except." Sometimes Sheila thinks she should carry in her lap posterboards with large numbers written on them that she could raise and vote on the most promising rendition. Version two of the story is parallel to version one "except" for the fact that Briggs had been the one making the comment about socks and cheese, and said comment had occurred after numerous attempts on the part of Miss Stephes to quell the squawk fest. Briggs looks gravely off into the distance as he delivers this tale, the same way the elderly grandfathers do on Masterpiece Theater. A gullible person would be moved to tears. Version three of the story, also fairly parallel, went into great detail about the baneful Miss Stephes, who evidently had installed a torture chamber directly beneath her cla.s.sroom specifically for the purpose of making Brigg's life a living h.e.l.l.

"She's evil, Ma. You don't know." Briggs quakes a little, remembering, no doubt, the grip of thumbscrews, the pull of the rack.

Sheila sighs. Another Briggs three-pack. Somewhere in the middle of all these words is the truth. Or a truth. The frustrating thing is that Sheila knows her son isn't really a liar. His father? Now that was a liar. There was a man who could drag himself in at three in the morning, reeking of knock-off Chanel, with a pair of panties slung around his neck, look you right in the eye and tell you he'd spent the evening at the bowling alley. Briggs on the other hand is basically an honest boy. It's the basically part that troubles her. Like filling out your income taxes, with Briggs it was a game of approximations. Round up a little here, round down a little there. This was America: You develop a poker face, tell your best story, and stick with whichever version doesn't get you audited. What Briggs and his father had in common is that they both believed every word that came out of their mouths. Sheila spent sleepless nights worrying about quarters she'd neglected to return to petty cash. Briggs slept the sleep of angels, as serene and innocent as his first nights on Earth.

Sheila makes a left onto a short and nameless freeway that had been constructed for the sole purpose of carrying people like her from one side of the county to the other. What was she doing in a place like this? People like the kind of person Sheila had intended to become lived in the city, in red-brick and ivy-festooned neighborhoods, with coffee bars and cute restaurants that served things like couscous and tiramisu. These days it was the ex and his various s.l.u.ts who got to sit under the ailanthus trees, read the New York Times and sip espresso. Sheila got to go to the 7-Eleven and to junior highs and drive on nameless roads past buildings too slick for growing things.

"Honestly, Briggs," she says. "What am I supposed to say to these people?" That smug and priggish AP, who fired statements at you about your child and then dared you to come up with an appropriate response. Last time it was "We discovered your son and his buddies beneath the bleachers during a pep rally with a pair of binoculars and a flashlight," and then he sat waiting with his fingers folded on his desk.

"Boy, I'm sure you'd hate to do something like that" is what Sheila had wanted to answer, though this was not the sort of response that won you the prize money. "He'll be dead by sunset" was the sort of thing they had in mind.

"We were collecting the money that dropped from kids' pockets." That had been Brigg's excuse for the bleachers, though he really needed to work on his delivery. A truly unfit mother would have given some pointers. Smile and nod, son. Show some confidence. Try not to make each statement sound like a question.

Briggs, Briggs, Briggs. Just look at the darling boy. Wasn't it only yesterday he was burbling in his crib, taking his first baby steps? Now he was arguing with lunch ladies, cruising the hallways like a shark, firing off Vegas-style one-liners. Sunrise, sunset. A veritable storehouse of smarmy remarks, her son: "Hey girl, bring them twins over here." "Stop by my locker so you can meet my friend." "Baby, you know I could rock your world." Briggs could give Ralph pointers on gross. She considered sewing his lips together, but that still left the hands.

"Your son had better learn where those mitts of his belong," Antonio had warned.

Sheila remembers the sweet and endearing olden days at her own junior high, when squeaky-voiced boys would put an arm around you and maybe try to grab a feel. Silly things: They'd pretend to walk into walls. They'd bang their heads into lockers because you were such a knockout. But when you woke up one day and it was your son with the smart mouth and the fast hands and the too-smooth demeanor, the word "endearing" went the way of Quiana blouses and the Jackson Five.

"Understand our position, Miss Braxton. We're responsible for these young women." That's what the John Antonio had said, a leaky hiss on the "ss" in Miss. Well, Sheila thought, fine: but slap a d.i.c.key over the cleavage of Miss C cup over there, and tell the rest of these hussies to stop calling my house at all hours of the day and night.

Didn't any of these people have children of their own? Wasn't there one person at Whispering Pines who had ever been fourteen? Maybe everyone here had been like those AV club boys who at sixteen already wore white shirts and looked like they were about to knock on your door and sell you a subscription to the Watchtower. Maybe they were all like Miss Stephes, right out of teacher college and fresh off the farm. An ordinary brownskin boy like Briggs set her atremble. Imagine! Briggs! Harmless as a calf! What on earth would she do if she ever came across a truly tough customer?

No wonder they wouldn't help you. Sheila had pleaded with Antonio for advice.

"I'll do anything," she'd begged.

He'd inhaled sharply through the nose in that way that all former coaches had of letting you know that they were about to tell you something that anyone other than an idiot such as yourself would already know.

"Bottom line, Miss. Boys need a strong hand. You either find a way of getting him in line, or he'll have to find another place to go school."

What was it they were always saying about how it takes a village to raise a child. Sure sounded good, but try being a mother with a son. Then it became "You squeezed the b.a.s.t.a.r.d out, now you do something about him, or else."

Traffic on the nameless expressway is backed up at the last of its two exits. Traffic is always backed up here, as unfortunately there are no other non-dirt roads connecting the two halves of the barbell-shaped region. In the seat beside her Brigg's long legs have begun bouncing the way they always do when he worries.

"It's a beautiful day today," he cheers, br.i.m.m.i.n.g with false enthusiasm.

"I'm not doing nice," Sheila responds. "Does the word 'mortification' mean anything to you?"

"Ain't she the mom on The Addams Family?"

"Don't try and make me laugh." She gives him the evil eye and then laughs with him anyway. d.a.m.n cute boys. What could you do but shake your head, throw up your hands, and join the fun? She'd even gone to her boss for help.

"I'm having some problems with Briggs," she'd proffered.

Marketa Winthrop had riffled a page in her Black Enterprise. "This Briggs is your boyfriend, right?"

"My son." Which Sheila had told the woman a thousand times.

"And he would be how old?"

"Fourteen. The school called again and . . ."

Marketa Winthrop had cut her off by waving her hand. "Look, honey," she'd said. "Fourteen. Hair on the b.a.l.l.s. I can sum this up in two words: military school."

Ralph, who that day had been compositing personal ads on the computer, shared Sheila's outrage at this comment.

"It would be my hunnor to keel for a bootiful wummun lak jou," he'd said, flashing and flexing his eyes at her. She'd recently had the misfortune of observing her own son practicing the same faces in the bathroom mirror.

"Oh, but you mustn't," she'd demurred. She wondered if the mothers of fourteen-year-old boys were allowed to be ingenues.

"Lat me tek jou avay to peredize," he'd cooed, and she remembers thinking, this is what Eve must have felt like when her big snake came along: scared and excited at the same time.

Sheila had declined. As a consolation prize, Ralph offered her a list of reputable, male-only boarding schools, the efficacy of which he could personally vouch for.

"Jes look vat thev dun for me."

Indeed, she thought. She received similar advice from her parents and even from Brigg's father. Everyone so anxious to dump adolescent males. What was up with that? Maybe there was something she wasn't being told.

"But he's such a sweet boy," she'd told Marketa Winthrop.