The Accidentals Read online

  Alita sighs. “Miss Ed Mae, please.” (She hadn’t started calling me Mama yet.) “Cleve can’t eat that kind of stuff. His cholesterol is up to 230. There’s too much fat in his blood already. He could have a heart attack.” Now she looks out the window and sighs again. “You got to promise me you won’t go putting any of that stuff in his food.”

  I shake my head and stare her down. I’m thinking about how good a hambone is in beans, how, if you cook it long enough, the marrow will float to the top.

  Alita doesn’t say anything but she doesn’t give me the beans either. I reach for them. She’s taller than me and holds them high.

  “No, ma’am,” she says and now her voice turns. “Do you want your son to have a heart attack? Do you want him to die?”

  There’s only one answer to that question, so I say okay, all right, no ham, no pickled pork, no bacon, no nothing that makes beans beans, and she gives me the beans. “Slice an onion on top of them,” she says. “That’ll give them flavor.”

  The business about clean food cramped my style in the kitchen. I longed to fry up some chicken, make a nice brown chuck roast with carrots and potatoes, but I wanted more than anything to please Cleve and Alita, for them not ever to sit me down and say there was a “nice place” across town and they’d already put in a deposit.

  Sometimes, though, I’d sneak into the kitchen before they got home from work and make the boys some cinnamon cookies the way I used to do for Cleve and Mary. I had to use olive oil instead of butter. (In that house, butter was scarce as snow in July!) The olive oil made the cookies swampy so I put in more sugar and vanilla to cover it. Those boys, they loved my cookies. Poor things, they never got any sweets at home. We’d hide a plate of them in the back of my closet so their mama and daddy weren’t the wiser. As time went on, I’d have them cut out and ready on the cookie sheet when Jerome and Joel got home from school, tired and hungry the way boys get in the late afternoon. They’d sit down at the kitchen table while we waited for the cookies to bake. They’d chat me up about basketball or how this one or that one saw another one doing something, and some afternoons we’d get the plate of hot cookies and head out into my garage room and watch reruns of The Jeffersons, which are a hoot.

  Those sweet boys never once asked me what I’d gone and done to get myself thrown in jail. Maybe Cleve told them, I don’t know. I never did because the words for it never came to me. I was wool-gathering and forgot to remember Baby Girl, that’s what it boiled down to. But the words, they stuck in my craw like gristle. And shame on me for not spitting them out, not owning my crime. I wanted those boys to know how life can turn on a dime, on one second, one mistake the size of an ant, as simple a thing as forgetting to brush your teeth in the morning. I wanted them to be careful, be watchful. I wanted to tell them it can be light-years from forgetting to remembering, they needed to remember everything. But what kind of thing would that have been to say to two black boys? They had double, triple the trouble coming down the pike at them, I don’t care what decade it was or what fancy schools they went to. All they had to do to get into Trouble with a capital T was walk down the street. I’d heard Cleve talk to them about being black men. I’d seen Alita go through their drawers and throw away their sweat shirts with hoods.

  So the five of us, we went along like that, and it got better and better. Alita and me, we get along just fine now. She’s a sweet thing, finally started calling me Mama Ed Mae. She told me she’d lost her own mother when she was five and living in Atlanta. She didn’t say how, but Cleve told me her mother had left her and her little brother with an aunt one Friday morning in October and headed for the Piggly Wiggly, then never came back to get them, which made no sense; Alita’s mother would have cut off her arm for the two of them, she’d never in a million years have left her babies. What was left of her was found in the next county a month later, out in the woods under a pile of leaves. When Cleve told me the story of Alita’s mother, I thought, And now this too, what a mess of a world this is. Even if nobody forgets anybody, even if you’re doing everything right as rain, even if you’re just going to the Piggly Wiggly, you’re still not safe. Tunnels collapse, good people die, nobody pays, and the planet goes on its merry way, turning and turning through the night sky.

  Every now and again, Alita will get tight-lipped. She’ll snap at me, tell me she wants to cook, why doesn’t she ever get to cook. When she acts that way I know she’s talking to me the way she’d talk to her own mother, with no fear or worry that I wouldn’t love her if she acted up. I’m gentle with her, just say, sure thing, honey. I slip off my apron and head for the hills, maybe take a little walk, maybe go sit in the backyard and read the evening paper or just go back into my little apartment and watch the news. After a while, she’ll call us in to supper (not as good as mine would have been) and be all smiles, like nothing ever happened.

  The first Christmas after I got out, Billie Jones and my Mary and her girl, Kenyatta, named after this African freedom fighter, came in from Atlanta. Sad to say, I wouldn’t have known my own girl if I’d tripped over her in the street. Dressed to kill in one of those African wraparound getups, fresh braids and hoops the size of oranges in her ears. She hugged me over and over again, and little Kenyatta grabbed me around my hips and held on like I was a tree she was getting ready to climb.

  Billie Jones bunked in with me and that first night in bed we lay there in the dark and talked old times. Billie was fit as a fiddle, and thanked me for leaving her my children. “They made my life worth living,” she said, a catch in her voice. “I can’t think what I would have done without them.”

  When Billie Jones said what she said, I couldn’t find my tongue. Is that why Baby Girl had to die? So Billie Jones could be happy? Why couldn’t Baby Girl have been happy too, got her lip fixed, got taken by some good people? Have her life too? Then I could have had mine and my babies could have had their very own flesh-and-blood mother, not some Billie-come-lately substitute. And Baby Girl’s playful spirit, the pleasure she took in her little life, splashing water, giggling, where did all that go? Poor Cleveland, doing what he’d been told, following orders like a good soldier, then getting blown up in that tunnel, no point to it, no rhyme or reason, no gathering up of the pieces, nothing left to remember him by but a stinking flag. Where is he now? I have my doubts about heaven or hell, but one thing I know for sure: the departed don’t just up and vanish like smoke. They can’t. They got to stay until they get sick and tired of watching the living having all their fine times. They got to stay as long as somebody remembers them, as long as somebody won’t stop thinking them up. Cleve and Mary will always remember Cleveland, he was their daddy and they knew him deep in the blood. But Baby Girl, who will remember her once I’m gone? I was the one what named her, which is something a mother does, but I wasn’t her mother, wasn’t even a good nursemaid. I named her, then I clear forgot her. Which got me thrown in jail, which made Billie Jones’s life worth living. What a joke!

  I throw a look to kill in Billie’s direction, wanting to slap her face for taking her happiness from me and Baby Girl. But I don’t say a mumbling word. I’m in Billie Jones’s debt for life. You won’t hear a word against her coming out of this mouth.

  I’d been dying to see my Mary. Cleve had told me she was divorced and delivering the U.S. mail. Billie Jones, who just had to be taking care of somebody else’s children, had moved to Atlanta to take care of Kenyatta. “You know how I used to love looking into people’s windows?” Mary said. “Well, delivering the mail, it’s kind of like that. I make up stories about people’s lives by their mail. When I put the letters in the box, I say to myself, ‘Here’s some good news about that college he wants to go to’ or ‘This one says a sister or brother is sorry to ask but needs fifty dollars.’” She grinned. My Mary was doing all right, and little Kenyatta said she wants to be a doctor of all things. I told her when she got out, she could doctor all of me except for my feet, which I’d reserved for Alita, I still owed her for my
orthotics, and this made everybody laugh like crazy.

  SO THE YEARS have rolled on by. Kenyatta’s a doctor now, a heart doctor who puts in stents. Joel and Jerome acted up in high school, both of them did, and about drove us all crazy doing dumb stuff, but they got into the University of Tennessee and have done all right. Better than all right. Joel’s in real estate and Jerome is a science teacher in Wilmington, North Carolina, right on the coast. We all visited him in his condo on the beach and I got to see the Atlantic Ocean for the first time and walk along the sand at night and look up at the stars. There was a full moon the last night I was there. I couldn’t get enough of that moon. I sat on Jerome’s deck till dawn, watching it move across the sky. He loves the ocean and thinks he may go back to school so he can study starfish, of all things. He calls them by their Latin name, Asterias rubens, says he loves their musculature, the way they wrap themselves around rocks and shells. I call Mary every Saturday. She tells me she’s getting carpel tunnel from putting people’s mail in their boxes and is applying to work inside the post office. She can pick her poison, I say, she’s got her mother’s feet and if she stands on them eight hours a day, they are going to end up looking like roadkill and feeling worse.

  I have a hobby now, stargazing. There are some folks, like my Cleve and his Jerome, who like to look close up, who like to see into the life of things. I’m one for looking far out. On the inside, I used to read about the planets and solar systems and galaxies. I followed the charts and graphs in the science books they gave us to study for the GED. I know Saturn has sixty-two moons and rings. I know the difference between a planet and a star. I know about the Big Bang and black holes. Our cell didn’t have a window, but I drew the planets of our solar system on the wall over my bunk. The constellations Ursa Major, the Great Bear, and Ursa Minor, the Little Bear with his long tail, pointing the way home. Sometimes I dreamed I was traveling in my little space capsule from star to star, galaxy to galaxy, making light-years seem like minutes, like seconds. I drew charts and graphs from the books I read. Jupiter to the west, ringed Saturn in the east, Polaris the great North Star, Leo the Lion, explosions and collisions and comets galore. Our puny galaxy, the Milky Way, a few grains of sand.

  I talked stars so much that Cleve gave me a telescope with a stand I can set up in the backyard. So at night now, I toddle out and stargaze like nobody’s business. I love the way the sky wraps around me like a blanket. If I had another life, and who knows, maybe I do, I’d want to be an astronaut. Just imagine it, being up there and looking back on our measly little planet, then, oh, outward to the great mystery!

  IT’S NOVEMBER RIGHT now, and I can’t take my eyes off Andromeda in the northern sky. Rings of fire! A giant spiral spinning its way through the universe, busy and pretty, over two million light-years away. Andromeda, poor thing, she was stripped naked and chained to a rock by the sea, rescued in the nick of time by her husband-to-be, just before the sea came crashing in over her. How scared she must have been! What if he hadn’t come?

  I’m moving slow now, but Cleve and Alita and me, we’re doing all right, eating our clean food, all thrilled to the teeth about Barack Obama. Now that it’s election season, we watch the news every night. We have our schedule. At six they hurry in. I have supper on, and we watch the first thirty minutes of PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer while the supper heats up and we have our wine. (Cleve says a glass or two is good for you, so I’ve developed a taste for it, look forward to my two glasses of pinot noir, maybe three if there’s something to celebrate.) Then we switch to Anderson Cooper on CNN. Around nine o’clock we wrap things up with Rachel Maddow, who’s new on TV but already my all-time favorite and who I can tell loves Barack as much as we do. Somewhere in there we eat our supper in our laps, not wanting to miss a second about Barack doing this or that.

  Cleve had to go through a whole bunch of rigmarole to get me a voting card because I’m a convicted felon. Convicted felon! What an ugly sound it has! How did he say, My mother is a convicted felon? Did he say she isn’t a bad person, just forgetful? Just an old lady who wants to vote for Barack Obama?

  We’re all three on pins and needles. Cleve and Alita and me, we plan to vote the Saturday before Election Day, but when I wake up that Saturday morning, I have to run to the bathroom and upchuck and then I’m too dizzy to do anything but get back under the covers. They’ve got to go to work on Election Day and want to run home right afterward to catch the first of the returns, so I tell them I’ll get a ride to the polls. The Democrats will send somebody to drive an old black lady like me, somebody who remembers Rosa on the bus and Martin on the balcony and Colored Day at Audubon Park Zoo.

  The next morning, Sunday, I’m feeling fine, just a little weak in the knees. Alita and Cleve head down to Democratic headquarters to call folks to remind them to vote. When they come home, they’ve got me a ride to the polls. The lady what’s going to fetch me will call Monday to get directions. On her way out the door Monday morning Alita hands me a piece of paper with a name and phone number and says, “If she doesn’t call by early afternoon, you call her.”

  On Monday morning, just when I’m starting in on my second cup of coffee, which I make strong enough to walk out the door after pouring out that watery stuff of Alita’s, the phone rings and a woman asks to speak to me.

  “Speaking,” I say.

  “Are you the lady who needs a ride to the polls tomorrow?” I can tell by her voice she’s a white woman, or at least I think she’s white. Her voice has an odd way about it, like it’s fighting with itself.

  “Yes, I am, much obliged,” I say. Here I am, I think, getting driven to the polls by a white woman (I think) to vote for a black president! What a world!

  “Would afternoon be okay? I have to be in court in the morning.”

  A white lady lawyer! “Sure,” I say. “What time should I be ready?”

  “Around three? Is that too late?”

  “No, ma’am,” I say, and then I’m mad at myself for calling her ma’am. It’s a hard thing to stop doing. On the inside the guards made us do it, even the white girls at St. Vincent’s made us do it. When I was thirteen, I’d started cleaning houses after school. My mother had taught me to always say ma’am to white women, but to always cross my fingers when I said it. Much as I hated myself for doing it, every now and then a ma’am would pop out of my mouth like a sneeze you can’t hold back. Cleve fussed at me whenever it slipped, said those days were long gone, I was a senior, folks should be ma’aming me, not the other way around.

  The woman made it right by saying it back to me. “All right, then, ma’am. I’ve got your address and the people down at the Democratic headquarters gave me directions from the house to your polling place. I’ll see you around three tomorrow.”

  “Much obliged,” I said.

  “My pleasure.”

  When we hung up, I went back into my room and started looking over my clothes. I wanted to wear something special, a nice outfit. These days I spend my life in sweat pants, which just wouldn’t do. I pulled out the navy blue pants suit Alita got me on sale at Dillard’s. She’d hemmed it once, and then, after I spread out a few years later, hemmed it again. It was nothing to jump up and down about. (I sincerely hope they don’t bury me in it. I’d hate to think of going through eternity in navy blue, which is about my least favorite color in the world.) Then I went looking in my closet for that watermelon pink blouse Kenyatta had given me a couple of Christmases back. She’d said she thought it would brighten up my wardrobe. What a hoot, somebody wanting to brighten up my wardrobe! It seemed too loud for an old lady, and, between you and me, I’d never worn it. But it hit me that it would be the perfect thing to put some kick into that dull-as-dishwater navy suit. I sat down on the bed and pulled off my sweat shirt and sweat pants. I looked down at my old legs, veiny and spotted and ashy with dryness. They looked so worn out I wondered how they even held me up anymore. And my bosoms under my undershirt! They bagged and sagged like last week’s balloons.

/>   I put on the navy pants first, wanting to get those legs out of sight as quick as I could. When I pulled them up, I wished Alita had gotten an elastic waist. I hated anything binding my middle, which had gotten bigger as the years had rolled by. The waist was okay when I stood up but it about cut me in half when I sat down. I unbuttoned the button above the zipper and that helped some.

  Next I put on the pink shirt, which had a nice bow tie, and fitted just fine. Then the suit coat. The arms were long, so I rolled them up, showing the striped lining, which I thought looked stylish.

  When I had the whole getup on, I pulled my black New Balances out of the closet. They looked like overgrown roaches, but there was no getting around in anything else, though I’d have liked to wear a nice pair of shoes, some low-heel pumps, but those days were long gone. I put my inserts into the New Balances and put them on.

  I went back through the living room into Alita and Cleve’s bedroom where there was a full-length mirror. I didn’t look half bad. In fact, with rouge and lipstick and some hair mayo, I thought I’d be getting toward passable.

  The bow tie on the blouse was wrinkled so I took the iron out from the pantry, set it on the stove, and plugged it in. I took off the blouse, put a cup towel on the kitchen counter and stretched the tie out on it, holding the blouse while the iron heated up. Then I pressed the tie, real light so it didn’t scorch, and turned off the iron, unplugged it, and put it back on the stove. I was always real careful with that iron.

  By the time I’d hung everything back up in my closet and changed back into my sweat pants, it was four o’clock, time to start fixing supper. I’d forgotten to eat my turkey sandwich or watch National Geographic or do any of the little things I do during the day. I’d planned a special supper, a good spaghetti sauce, but that took time to simmer and here I’d gone and I’d frittered away the day. So I decided to pull out a pan of leftover whole wheat, vegetarian, soy cheese (what else?) lasagna from the freezer and start warming it up in the oven. I’d make a little salad and that would be that. Save the sauce for tomorrow morning. Tomorrow night we were having company to watch the election returns. My friend Grace next door and her sister June. Cleve and Alita and me had been mighty glad when June showed up to take care of Grace, even if she did bring a pack of barking dogs with her. By the time June got here, Grace’s arms and legs were sticks and there were train tracks in her face. Something sad there, something hard.