The Accidentals Page 28

  There were weevils in the flour, but nothing’s perfect. I sifted them out.

  The next morning I opened the heavy front door to let some light in through the glass storm door. Where had the New Orleans winter gone? The azalea out front was blooming to beat the band, waving in the breeze. My caladium was unfurling pink and green and white. A male bluebird was flitting in and out of the yard, calling out the words our mother made up: where, where, where are you? (Where indeed? How the body drives us!) He was scouting my nest boxes, which I suddenly realized hadn’t been cleaned in two years. I headed out into the yard and opened them up and scooped out the nesting debris. Leaves and twigs and a tiny pile of twig-like bones. Had the house sparrows visited last year? Would they return?

  I was tired after all that, but it was a satisfied sort of tired, not an I’m-dying sort of tired. I slept hard that night. The next morning, when I looked in the mirror, my bald head, which normally shone like a piece of rounded glass in the morning light, wasn’t shining. I found this worrisome. I’d gotten used to the shininess, had come to think of it as somehow festive, despite the moon craters in my skull. I peered into the mirror more closely. Then I saw the down. It was coming in unevenly, patches of it here and there, as if my head were growing one of those wild feathery hats women used to wear. It was coming in white. I would be an old woman now.

  I WENT OUTSIDE and fed the dogs. One of my favorites, a little gray pit bull named Silly because she often was, licked my hands, sensing some excitement beyond the chow, her pink jowls loose and wet. After they finished breakfast, Silly and the others cavorted, tossed some bedraggled toys in the air, making me understand they had missed me. I came back in, and they all rushed in behind me, dragging their toys, shaking them enthusiastically. As they milled around my legs, I made coffee. I made it extra strong, then stood at the kitchen counter and drank the first cup with milk and sugar, lots of sugar. Then I ate a bowl of cereal, chock-full of vitamins and fiber. Sugar on it too. After that, I had another cup of coffee and, with it, a banana.

  Then, without giving it a second thought, I picked up the phone and called Grace. She was crying when she answered. She thought it was Jim, she thought he was calling to say I’d died. I told her I hadn’t and wasn’t going to in the foreseeable future.

  I said things had taken an odd turn, a surprising turn.

  I said I needed her to do one thing for me, a favor. I told her to build a fence around her backyard, a tall fence. Also to stock up on antihistamine. I was coming and I was bringing the dogs. I was coming to stay.

  26

  Ed Mae

  I RECOLLECT IT NOW, WHAT IT WAS I WAS DOING THAT morning. It came to me last night right after I took out my teeth. I was just standing there, holding them in my hand, waiting for the Polident to stop fizzing in the dish. I looked out the window at the lightning bugs playing in the first dark. A little sliver of moon was cresting over the dark line of trees in the field behind the house. And then here comes Baby Girl, riding that moon like a rocking horse, saying, saying, saying my name.

  I say, Baby Girl, ain’t you taken enough skin off my hide? And she just laughs that little laugh of hers and keeps on saying it, saying my name. And that’s when it came to me, rolling like thunder over flat land.

  There was this one child at St. Vincent’s didn’t have good sense. He was big, four or five years old, but he still wore a diaper and stayed in this old playpen parked in the corner. He played there all day and slept there all night, not causing anybody any trouble. It was like he knew he was too big a baby and needed to be specially good or he’d get shipped up to Baton Rouge and end up in one of those places for the feeble-minded.

  Then one day he got to fooling around in his dirty diaper. After that, every morning I’d put these big old rubber britches on him, but somehow or other—you could count on it—he’d get into his pants and get to fooling around. It gave him a truckload of pleasure. Always had a big smile on his face when we caught him at it, gave new meaning to the expression shit-eating grin.

  So that was the job of work I’d set out to do, been told to do by those white girls. That’s why it took me so long to get back to Baby Girl. This other one had gone and dirtied up his pants and smeared it all over his face, looked like one of those blackface minstrel singers back in the day. The fix he was in! I had to scrub him up with a wet cloth and change the diapers, the clothes, wipe down the playpen. Then take all his mess to the laundry to boot. He kicked and carried on while I cleaned him up. I had to grab his legs and wrestle him down. Not one of those white girls helped me. I remember wondering what was going to happen when he got bigger and stronger. I hoped I’d be history at that place by then, which in fact turned out to be true since that was the very moment Baby Girl went under and drowned herself.

  I GOT OUT of jail finally, on February 1 of 1986, just a few days after that spaceship exploded in the sky down in Florida and that teacher lady and the others got blown to bits and all the pieces fell into the deep blue sea. That morning us girls who’d stayed clean got to watch the launch on TV, which was a special privilege. I’d studied up best I could on space and galaxies and stars while I was getting ready for my GED. My schoolbooks were old castoffs my Cleve had sent me, but I learned about time and space and how the light we see from the stars is billions of years old by the time it gets to us. How it’s time we’re looking at when we watch the stars, time and light and deep space.

  I was so worked up over getting to watch the Challenger I got up at four in the morning just to be wide awake before the dawning of that new day. That night I dreamed my cell was one of those capsules they seal you up in and I was the schoolteacher lady getting blasted up into the great beyond. I was the one seeing our pretty little planet turning, turning from way up there, relaxing in my capsule like it was my easy chair back home, taking it all in. I stood behind the other girls while we watched, too thrilled to sit. When the whole thing blew up like a firecracker on the Fourth of July and made those two terrible plumes of fire, I felt like I was seeing my own life, starting off with Cleveland and the children, so happy and proud and hopeful, and then busting up right before my very eyes. I was the one whose pieces went every which way, a blasted duck over the cold dark pond of the world, all my loved ones watching.

  BY THE TIME I got out of jail, I felt old as Methuselah. A thousand years old and just plain tuckered out. All those years they had me working the kitchen, cooking up grits and stews and beans in big pots, nasty stuff some of it. I would give myself little pep talks. I would say, Ed Mae, girl, better to be peeling potatoes and picking weevils out of the flour than mopping floors and going from cell to cell, all kinds of meanness locked up inside, all kinds of ugly words troubling the air, mopping up other folks’ filth. Still and all, day in day out all those long slow years, the cooking wore me plumb out. You didn’t get done with breakfast before you had to turn right around and start on the dinner and then the supper. I was on my feet from five in the morning till six at night, seven days a week. My legs swelled and my feet, they about killed me, burning and stinging like I’d been walking on hot coals. At night I had to hang my feet over the edge of my bunk, couldn’t bear to touch my heels to the hard mattress. I had to bunch up my extra uniform under my ankles to get relief, turn my socks inside out to get the softest part. Over the years my hands and arms got all covered in scars from the burns. It’s a hard thing, handling big pots, ladling and pouring. Stirring grits when they’re boiling and splattering all over the stove. Folks hollering at you to hurry up and get the food on the table. Folks talking ugly about your cooking. Try it sometime.

  I was the only one the guards trusted with a knife, why I don’t know, I’d have liked to have chopped them all to bits some days. It was mainly because of the onions that I needed the knife, them and the gristly meat we got every now and again. I chopped every last onion served in that place, rivers of tears rolling down my cheeks. I got good at math. If you count the years I was in that kitchen (23) and then sa
y 365 days to each year (8,395) and multiple that by 10 onions a day, why, that’s 83,950 onions I chopped! Sometimes the knife wanted my hand to slip and slice the soft inside of my wrist. It whispered in my ear, Why not? Why the hell not? But I held the knife firm and steady. Top and bottom off first. Peel the skin and cut in half. Then chop into small bits, prison onions being tough and stringy. I wanted to live to see my Cleve and Mary outside that place. My story wasn’t over, I’d say to myself, my story was just dragging its feet, poking along behind me, like Mary used to do in the grocery store. One day it would catch up, huffing and puffing, and tap me on the shoulder and say, Here I am finally, live me! Hurry, before it’s too late.

  Truth is, you live on the edge of the knife, then one day you slip and fall. When Baby Girl went down in that tub, I went down too. That blade sliced me in half. One half said, Sorry, guilty, oh so guilty. The other half said, Those white girls, they made me do it, they made it happen.

  So the years crawled by and I paid out Baby Girl with every single one of those onions I chopped just right and, after a while, it wasn’t about her, it was about people pointing fingers, saying this is black and white, guilty is black, guilty is forgetting. But I tell you, Baby Girl, it was complicated. You and me, we’re on the same side of this. You and me, we’re sisters.

  WHEN I FINALLY got out, I was good for nothing. Shaky and creaky and looking for a good soft easy chair, an RC Cola, and reruns of The Jeffersons. That was my idea of hog heaven.

  When my Cleve came to pick me up, I fell into his arms like an old dog who’d been left on the side of the road to die and managed to find its way home. And here I’d been feeling right proud of myself. Here I’d gone and done my time and gotten my GED to boot, studied hard for it, memorizing the grammar part: those shoes, not them shoes; I am, you are, he she it is. If I could’ve shucked twenty years off my time, I’d have tried to go to college, better myself in the world. I would have studied the stars, got myself some science, maybe some job of work with those space people.

  So it shamed me, the way I wilted and folded up like a box when Cleve’s good strong arms snatched me up and held me tight, so tight I could hardly draw air. I’d used some of the money he sent to order myself a decent dress from the Sears & Roebuck catalog to wear that day. I wasn’t going to look like trash. I’d studied holding my head high when I walked out that gate with the barbwire on top. I had a picture of myself in my head, brave and strong, coming out of the pit of hell, scarred and crippled, with a mouthful of rotten teeth and a pair of broken-down feet, but still alive and kicking. Still a woman.

  But there he was, with his pretty Alita and their two twin boys, Joel and Jerome, and it was like Christmas except that I’d missed so many Christmases and those boys were too big. Billie Jones had been their real granny. Over the years she’d doted on them, bought them presents at Christmas, made them these good fruitcakes. She’d written me about the boys, how much they reminded her of Cleve. She sent me baby pictures, kindergarten graduation pictures, pictures of pretty picnics in the woods, everybody laughing and smiling. When I went to hug Cleve’s boys, an extra granny all beat up by time, they looked sideways at me like I just flew in on a broomstick. But they let me hug them, run my hands over their precious faces, their wiry arms. They stood for it, but I could feel them pull back, fight the urge to run.

  Time, that’s what I saw when I looked at the four of them, the years and years I’d missed. Here I was coming at them from millions, billions of light-years in the past. All of them as strange to me as I was to them, even my Cleve, who didn’t look like himself anymore. He’d turned into the spitting image of Cleveland, which made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Lord, Cleveland, I thought, here you are, landed back on this earth, a full-blooded man, all your pieces put back together, and here I am a dried-up old fool.

  “Don’t want to be trouble,” I said right off as we started our trip back to Nashville, where they lived.

  “No trouble at all, ma’am.” Alita was the first to say it. She was sitting in the back seat with the boys, had made a fuss about me sitting in the front so I could see the view. She leaned up next to me and giggled in my ear. “You can help me keep these three in line. We need another woman in this family. I’m tired of being the only one around here who can boil an egg.”

  Cleve looked over at me. “We’re happy to have you, Mama, we’ve waited a long time. Right, boys?”

  “Yes, sir,” the boys said, which caused me to tear up.

  So here we went, catty-cornering it out of Louisiana and then Mississippi. We traveled through swampland and then, spread out before me like a tabletop, was the pretty, pretty world. The cotton and soybeans rumpled and brown in the fields, farmland flat and rowed up as far as the eye could see. I’d looked at things close up for such a long time my eyes felt stretched like rubber bands to look out over that everlasting land. I looked and looked, but it was like I was seeing the world through smoky glass. I could make out shapes, though: the curve of the earth, the tilt down where the brown land met the gray sky.

  The closer we got to Nashville the more excited I got. My Cleve, he’s at a highfalutin college named after some rich white folks called Vanderbilt. He studies, of all things, lice. What you want to go studying lice for, I asked him when he visited me one time. He said they carry typhus and some fevers, they’re nasty little bloodsuckers, people in poor countries die from them. I don’t ask him if he remembers when he was in second grade and got sent home from school with lice. He cried and cried. Mama, how’d I get lice? Negroes don’t get lice. Which is exactly what I’d said to the principal when he called for me to come get Cleve. This little Negro does, he’d replied, and three more in his class. I’d always kept Cleve clean as a whistle, so I was mortified and took the day off to get the medicine. While I washed that head of his, he was hollering, Wash it harder, Mama, scrub with your fingernails. After I rinsed it, he told me to wash it again, so I did. Then I combed and combed until every last one of those nasty nits was gone. I washed his sheets and towels in scalding water and then grabbed Mary, hollering and carrying on, and treated her too. Now Cleve’s working on a vaccine to prevent the diseases lice cause, has a whole lab full of microscopes. His Alita is a foot doctor, which couldn’t have been more perfect since my feet are a cross to bear. They live in a pretty two-story house with trees in front and back, and they have white neighbors, which I had trouble believing until I saw them going about their business, nodding to me and being friendly and nice, asking how I was doing, saying how nice it was to meet me.

  Cleve and Alita had finished off one side of their garage for me. I had my own room and bathroom, and my own little color TV, so I could have my privacy and they could have theirs. At first I felt shy about going into the main part of the house when they were home. I slipped from room to room during the day when the boys were in school and Cleve and Alita were at work. After my cell, the place seemed like a palace. I would walk around and count my steps. From the guest bathroom to the kitchen was thirty-eight steps! From the kitchen to Joel’s room upstairs was fifty-one! At first I never touched a single thing except Jet magazine, which I couldn’t resist. I didn’t turn on the big TV, afraid I’d break it. I didn’t want to get in their way, you see, didn’t want to end up being the creaky old ma’am who casts a dark cloud, makes everybody feel like they can’t have a good time, can’t be natural with each other.

  So the weeks flew by. (Time is a strange thing. On the inside, one week had seemed like a year, one minute an afternoon.) I got used to the four of them and they got used to me, or at least I hope they did. Alita bought me a nice tweed coat and some warm sweat pants and sweaters. When I told them things looked blurry, they took me to the eye doctor and got me some specs. The doctor said nearsightedness was common in inmates. You get used to seeing only what’s right in front of your face and the part of the eyes that makes you see far away gets lazy. One Saturday Alita took me to her pretty office downtown and made a mold of my knobby o
ld feet and ordered me some orthotics for my shoes, which gave me a whole new lease on life. All of a sudden I was cooking supper for everybody, which I was happy to do to earn my keep, and soon I was going to Kroger with Alita and sometimes Cleve. I hadn’t eaten a single fresh vegetable, unless you count onions, all those years in jail, and the mountains of carrots and collards and beet greens just about knocked my socks off. I loved the way the spray came showering down on them every now and again. It was like being in my own mother’s little side-yard garden when I was a girl, snipping collards and mustards in the rain. Alita and Cleve and I gathered up the vegetables, and I cooked them in those little fold-up wire things and a deep pot called a wok. It was the joy of my life to put those pretty colors down on the table for the four of them.

  Alita and me got into a little fuss just once, and it was about a mess of green beans. Green beans! She wanted me to steam them. She wouldn’t let me snap them, wanted them whole, wanted them crisp. The fight happened right after I’d got there and was just starting up cooking for them.

  I ask her why she was carrying on so about a mess of beans.

  “It’s clean eating,” she says. “Cleve likes to eat clean food.”

  “All my food is clean,” I say, which is a lie given what nasty stuff I had to cook up in prison. I add, “I’ve always washed my food,” which is true.

  Alita’s standing in the kitchen holding the sack of beans in her hand. She looks down at the floor, a little smile playing at her mouth. “That’s not what I mean. Clean food means there’s no lard, no red meat, no butter, not much salt. You season with onions and garlic and spices to make it good, maybe a little olive oil.”

  “No red meat!” I say before I can stop myself. Here I’d been in jail for all these years thinking about ham and pork roast and meatloaf until my mouth watered. “What you talking about, child? I wouldn’t be alive today, and Cleve wouldn’t be neither without red meat! You put pork in green beans. Beans ain’t beans without a piece of ham, a bit of bacon, a piece of pickled pork.”