The Accidentals Read online

  She’d started walking up and down the street in her nightgown. Said she was looking for a bird, some kind of parrot.

  Yesterday June took her for a walk by our house. I was outside getting the mail, enjoying the crisp fall air, the pretty leaves under my feet. “Cleveland’s mother,” Grace called, pulling her sweater down at the shoulder. “Look how my sister is patching me up.” Sure enough she had a little patch on her shoulder, some medicine for the Alzheimer’s. It looked like a square Band-Aid.

  Grace scratched at the patch. “It bites,” she declared and started to pull it off.

  June took hold of her hand and pulled her sweater back up.

  “See the nubs, all fuzzy like antlers,” she said to June, pointing at her shoulders. “They’re coming out now. Look!”

  “I’m looking,” said June and turned her around to go back home.

  “Cleveland’s mother,” she called back to me, “have I grown wings?”

  “Sure do look like it, honey,” I called back to her.

  Alzheimer’s has got to be the meanest joke God ever thought up.

  THE MORNING OF the election I woke up early so I could take a shower before Cleve and Alita left for work. They don’t like me bathing when they aren’t in the house, say I might fall and break a hip and lay there all day, cold and naked as a jaybird. Alita bought me a pair of Crocs to wear in the shower so I won’t slip.

  That girl, she watches over me like I’m her own mother. Sometimes she’ll sit by me on the couch and hold my hand. I’ll look down and see my wrinkled old fingers with the knuckles like walnuts peeking out from her soft-as-velvet fingers, and I think about my little Mary, how she used to want me to hold her hand while she nodded off. How sometimes I’d be so tuckered out I’d fall dead asleep, sitting straight up on her bed, my head drooping over like a sunflower. Some nights I’d just slide down right next to her, in that twin bed of hers, still holding that little hand. I’d wake up in the morning feeling her heat next to me, thinking my Cleveland had finally come on home.

  Election morning I spent in my brunch coat so as not to get my going-to-vote clothes messed up. I started the sauce, canned tomatoes and onions and garlic and peppers and black olives and carrots (I don’t much like carrots but Cleve insists on them, says they’re good for my eyes). My secret ingredient was anchovies, which Alita approved of because they were full of good fish oil. The trick to the sauce was cooking it all day. After I got it going, I started in on myself. I oiled my hair and pulled it back and put some bobby pins in it to make it lay down flat on the sides. I put on my pearl bobs that pinched and creamed my face good so the rouge wouldn’t cake. After the rouge, I drew myself some perky eyebrows. I held back on the lipstick, for worry it’d stain the blouse.

  By this time it was two and I still hadn’t put a bite in my mouth. I was so excited that I wasn’t a bit peckish, but I didn’t want to get light-headed so I went into the kitchen and put on an apron so as not to mess up my outfit and made a peanut butter sandwich, no jelly, which has a tendency to drip. I ate it standing up so I wouldn’t get crumbs on myself. I drank some water, sloshed it around in my mouth, and went back to the bathroom to check my teeth, which looked all right, and used the toilet one last time.

  I got out my purse and my wallet. I made sure my voter card was right there on top. My heart was galloping along like a wild horse, so I sat down and collected myself for a minute. Lipstick! I went back to the bathroom and put it on, a nice shade of peach that went with my coloring.

  But the hair, it still wasn’t behaving. In the past year, it had thinned out and now it was coming out of the pins, and I could see that all the hair mayo in the world wasn’t going to amount to a hill of beans. So I thought about my most prized possession except for my wedding ring—my mother’s hat, which was in a nice box at the top of my closet. Billie Jones saved it for me, I’ll give her that. I got the stool from the kitchen and put it in the closet and fumbled for the hat in the box and popped it on my head. It was a loud thing, green and orange feathers on the top and soft brown wraparound feathers that cupped the sides of my head. Mama had bought it off a lady who was down on her luck. It clashed with my Kenyatta blouse, but beggars can’t be choosers.

  It’s a quarter to three by this time, and suddenly I remember the sauce. Here I am about to go and forget it and burn the house down! So I hobble back into the kitchen, open the top to stir it one last time, lift the lid, and damnation! It boils up and splatters the lapel on my navy blue jacket! I go to the sink, get the dishcloth, and try to scrub it off but the anchovy oil leaves a big shiny stain, right there in front where you can see it. What a mess! I hurry back to my room and look around in my top drawer for something to cover it, a scarf, anything. I look among some of the small boxes I keep my jewelry in and come up with a brooch Mary gave me a while back. It’s got rhinestones galore and she gave it to me because it’s in the shape of a star. I hurry to the bathroom (by now I need to go again) and sit down on the commode and put on the brooch. (Alita would say I’m multitasking.) The brooch almost covers the stain. It’s the best I can do. When I get up, I check my teeth one last time and pin the hat to my head with the long hat pin Mama kept on the inside band.

  Just then the doorbell rings. When I open the door, I’m blinded by the afternoon sun behind the woman standing there. In that light, I can’t see her features, in fact she looks like she lost her face. I take a step back, squint up at her.

  “Mrs. Johnson?” she says. “I’m Josie.” She takes a step forward, has one foot inside the front door, pushy in my opinion. Now that she’s out of the light I can see she’s no spring chicken, looks at least forty-five. Her hair is long, dark, and wavy, her mouth pinched a little on one side, like a drawstring purse. She reminds me of somebody, but I can’t place who.

  Then she smiles a big toothy smile. “Are we ready to go vote for the next President of the United States, Barack Obama?”

  “I been ready ever since I was born,” I say. “Let me get my bag and cane.” I use a cane when I go out now, Cleve’s orders.

  She stands in the foyer looking around at the house. Is she surprised I live in a nice house like this, not some dump? Was she expecting to pick up some old sad-sack black lady in sweat pants? Ha! She’s probably wondering why my own people aren’t taking me to vote, maybe she’s thinking I’m the maid.

  “Much obliged for getting me,” I say. “My son’s teaching at the university and my daughter-in-law’s a doctor, and they’re working. I was going to go with them to vote on Saturday but I got sick.” I want her to know what quality of folk she’s dealing with.

  She nods. “Happy to do it. We need every vote we can get, right?”

  So we get into the car and head out.

  “Josie. That’s a pretty name. An old-fashioned name.” I feel obliged to make conversation. This lady’s come all the way across town to take me to the polls. The least I can do is be polite.

  “Short for Josephine. I was named for my mother’s grandmother.”

  “Where your people come from?”

  “New Orleans. My mama and daddy grew up in the City,” she says, taking a corner too fast in my opinion.

  Oh Lord, I think. And here’s one who saw the light. I say, “Where in New Orleans?”

  “Over on Prieur. Near Charity Hospital. My daddy was an ambulance driver.” She glances over at me.

  Charity Hospital. All of a sudden I feel light-headed. That Baby Girl! She’s got her nerve, coming back on me just when I’m having such a nice day. Don’t forget me, she always says when she pops in, don’t leave me behind. She was born at Charity, the nurse what brought her had told me. When’s your story going to be over, Baby Girl? I say back, though I know the answer to that question. Baby Girl’s story will be over when I’m six feet under, and not a minute before.

  We’re pulling into the school parking lot when this Josie turns and looks at my hat like it’s an animal that snuck its way into her car. “Are those feathers real?”
/>   “What feathers?” I say.

  “The ones on your hat.”

  I touch my head. I’d forgotten about the hat. “I think they’re real feathers.”

  She frowns. “Using feathers from exotic birds is against the law.”

  “It was my mother’s. She got it secondhand. I think these are old crow feathers that got dyed.” I pat the sides of the hat where the feathers cup my head.

  Josie nods like that explains everything. She’s making up a story in her head about a black lady working for a white lady with a fancy hat. The white lady gets tired of the thing, says here, Emma or Essie or whoever, you can have my old hat with the stained headband. The feathers, they’re the white lady’s doing, not mine, not my mother’s.

  “My mama paid good money for this hat,” I blurt out. “It’s the only thing of hers I got left.”

  She looks over at me and something shifts in her face. “It must be nice to have something pretty of your mother’s. It’s just that I love birds.”

  Then we see the voting signs, and she pulls into the parking lot of Jacobs Elementary. She parks the car, then looks around. There’s a big sign over in a corner that says: “Handicapped voting this way.” She starts the car up again, backs up.

  “What are you doing?” I ask. I’d been working the door handle, fixing to get out.

  “I’ll take you over there, to the handicapped voting.” She points. “They’ll bring the ballot to you. You won’t even have to get out of the car.”

  I raise myself up in my seat and turn around to glare at her. “I’m not handicapped.”

  She throws a look at my cane, which I’ve got firm in my hand.

  “Just because somebody uses a cane doesn’t mean they’re handicapped,” I say, trying not to sound aggravated. “I want to go inside the voting place to vote.”

  Josie glances at her watch. “But look at that line. Don’t you think it’d be a lot easier not to have to stand in line?”

  “Easier isn’t better,” I say. “This one’s walking in on her own two feet. I got dressed proper for this and I’m not sitting in your car or anybody else’s to vote. I bet they don’t even count the handicapped votes.”

  Josie snorts. “I’d like to see that. I’m a lawyer. I work for the ACLU, and I’d be after them like white on rice.” Something in the way she says it makes me look at her again.

  “A lawyer? Where’d you go to school?”

  “I got my undergrad degree from Fisk. Went to Howard for the law.”

  “Howard?”

  “My mama and daddy were Creole. Everybody thinks I’m white.” She throws the words over her shoulder as she gets out of the car, like the difference between black and white doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.

  She comes around to my door and opens it. She puts out her hand. I ignore it, put my cane down on the cement, and push myself up on the door handle.

  We head for the line. It parts like the Sea of Galilee, everybody stepping aside and nodding and smiling. I don’t want special treatment, but by this point I’m glad to get a little of it.

  I get pushed up to the front of the line and show my card to the white man behind the table. He looks at it and gets a funny look in his eye, like he knows something the rest of us don’t. He looks down at his book and finds my name. Then he gets up and walks over to another white man who’s standing under a sign that says “Poll Watchers.” That man goes to a table and types something into a computer. We wait. After a while the man at the computer gets up and walks over to the man behind the table. The two of them whisper to each other.

  Josie slides her hand under my elbow. She watches their every move. “What’s the problem?” she says, loud enough for everybody to hear. “We don’t have all day.”

  The second man, the poll watcher, comes back over. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he says, “you’ll have to cast a provisional ballot since you’re a convicted felon, and we’ll have to verify your card.”

  He says the words loud. Real loud. I’m mad now. I think, Baby Girl, get on out of here, just let me have this one measly day of my life. People around me are sucking their teeth and looking at the floor.

  Josie grabs my hand and about squeezes the life out of it. “She has a bona fide voter’s card. You can’t keep her from voting and you can’t give her a provisional ballot.” She whips out her phone, her hair flying. “I’m calling Democratic headquarters right now, and we’ll get a lawyer out here quicker than you can say Obama. Meanwhile, since I’m a lawyer myself, I’ll hold the fort.” She grins this evil grin, and with that wild head of hair, she looks exactly like a witch.

  I say, “I got this card fair and square. My son is Dr. Cleveland Johnson, and he got it for me. I may be a convicted felon but I didn’t mean to forget Baby Girl.”

  Josie says, “It doesn’t matter what she did or didn’t do. She has a card and it’s good for this election and we’re going to vote in this election unless you’re going to wrestle down two very nice women, one of them a disabled senior citizen, right here in front of everybody, in which case we’ll sue you and win.” Her eyes are slits, she looks like she’s grown half a foot.

  SO THE WHITE man stood down and we got my ballot, a regular one, not a provisional one, and Josie came into my little box to help me vote. It was the first time in my life I’d voted so I figured I could use some help. She said why not vote the straight Democratic ticket, but I said no, I wanted to put my mark on the line by Barack Obama, and then I’d consider the other candidates. So that’s what I did, and then she voted the straight ticket, which took no time at all, and finally we swept out of there like Cleopatra and the Queen of Sheba, past the white man poll watcher and his buddies, past the check-in line on the inside and the line that had formed on the outside. Past it all, Josie and me, and by then we were tight as ticks. I was Andromeda and I’d been near drowning and she’d come to rescue me, and I’d sure enough have done the same for her, and who knows, if what goes around comes around, maybe someday I will. Now Barack was going to win, not in Tennessee, but in lots of other places, and he was going to be our President with a capital P, and, Baby Girl or no Baby Girl, it wasn’t going to happen out there in the future, but now, right this very minute, while I was still alive and kicking.

  JOSIE AND I make our way home in the five o’clock traffic. We don’t say much, but there is something between us, an afterlife of all that’s past, a mystery. It’s perched on the seat between us, like a little child. I don’t know this white black girl from a hole in the wall, but something about the tilt of her head, the pucker around her mouth, makes me want to tell her about how what happened with Baby Girl was about time, how me and Baby Girl, we were two fiery comets flashing through the great night sky. Heat lightning, that’s what we looked like from here below. We collided, and Baby Girl, she went down in a blaze so pretty it’s made me hold my breath for the rest of my days. A falling star, that’s what she was.

  I look in the side mirror and see old sun dropping in the sky like an egg yolk to the skillet. I’m thinking I like this Josie. I’m thinking it would be nice if she came inside for some pinot noir and a plate of my good spaghetti and sat down and watched the election returns on CNN with me and Cleve and Alita and Grace and June. And who knows, maybe she’ll say yes to my invitation, maybe the six of us will stay up all night and get tipsy when Barack wins.

  I THINK NOW in terms of light-years. How our puny little lives take hold of time and hitch a ride out to the farthest ledges of the universe. How what we did today—our puny little business on this sweet earth—won’t be seen for billions of years by the folks on those planets in the Andromeda spiral, and maybe not then if they don’t remember to look out for us. How what happened with Baby Girl hasn’t even happened yet.

  There’s a dark energy pushing things along, stellar explosions and supernovae, black holes, dormant and active. We all burn, shapely and bright, in space and time.

  I’m thinking that even if we all drop stone-cold dead tonight, t
here’ll always be a tomorrow somewhere, flying out there ahead of us.

  Acknowledgments

  NO BOOK IS WRITTEN IN A VACUUM, AND FOR THE ACCIDENTALS, this has been particularly true. The support I’ve received in the making of this book has been nothing short of phenomenal.

  There aren’t many editors—or anyone else—who will stand shivering in the frosty air of a busy New York street corner at nine o’clock the Saturday morning before Christmas to discuss anything with anyone, much less book revisions. Heartfelt thanks to Carrie Feron for her beyond-the-pale commitment to my writing. And before The Accidentals flew Carrie’s way, Jane von Mehren made this book possible by agreeing to represent it and offered wise and invaluable suggestions in helping me shape an early draft.

  Some very talented individuals have generously given extensive time and energy to this book. My deepest appreciation to George Bishop, Rebecca Mark, Julie Mars, Anne Raeff, Margaret Randall, and Linda Wagner-Martin.

  As always, I owe a mountain of gratitude to Jill McCorkle for her unwavering support of my writing from the very first. I also thank Elizabeth Spencer, whose no-nonsense enthusiasm for my work has been a shot in the arm on days when I needed it most.

  Some of my most important moments in the conceptualization of this book came at the University of New Mexico Writers’ Conference in Taos and Santa Fe. I appreciate the encouragement and comradery from that writing community, especially Jonis Agee, Pam Houston, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Debra Monroe, Sharon Warner, and Summer Wood. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Sharon for inviting me over the years to lead a variety of writing workshops, whose talented participants taught me at least as much as I taught them.