Come a Stranger (19 page)

“Far from it,” Mina said. “Yes, thank you, I'd like that.”

“Because Tamer said he wants me to take the High School Equivalency Test—do you know that one, Raymonda? The one that gets you a high school diploma. Because I never did get mine, so I'll have to study,” Alice said. “And I'll have time to make more friends. So I'll be happier,” she concluded happily. Mina just smiled at her, glad at the thought of working for the Shipps, amused by Alice's butterfly mind, the wings of which just touched things gently.

Mina liked the work. Early in the morning, when night coolness still filled the air, she would bike out to the Beerce farm. Mr. Shipp was usually gone by then, and everybody else was in the kitchen, finishing breakfast. Alice would let Mina know whatever plans she had for the day, if she had any. Together they'd get the house tidied, and then they'd do whatever. Alice went out in the afternoons. Somebody or other would come by in a car for her and she'd get in to go to the beach or to the mall or to a movie or just out for a drive. “I feel like a kid again,” she said. “I didn't have much chance to be young,” she told Mina. Dream always wanted to go along with her mother, and sometimes Alice took her. Rainy days they stayed inside. They played board games, or Mina read aloud, or they all baked and frosted a cake. Nice days they moved out of the small house, even if they only went as far as the porch. Alice wasn't doing much studying that Mina could see, but she'd come back from her outings all giggly and happy. She'd take off her high-heeled sandals and sit on the porch with a glass of wine, waiting for her husband to come home so she could tell him what she'd been doing. Sometimes Alice stayed out late for a movie, and Mina made sure Dream knew how to serve up the supper.

Mina didn't even see that much of Mr. Shipp, except she spent her days in his house with his family. She saw him in church, Sundays. Some evenings, if it was rainy, she'd stay and eat out there and he'd drive her home after supper. In late July, Alice went back up north for a week's vacation. Mina practically lived at the Beerce house then. That same week old Mr. Crofter died, and Mr. Shipp sat with him. Mina fed the kids and got them into bed and then sat out on the porch. Mr. Shipp would drive her into town when he got back. Dream was old enough to look after things for a few minutes. If he wasn't too late getting back, he'd ask Mina to wait while he had his dinner, which he'd
bring outside to eat in the cooler air. Most of the time, when they talked, it was just about ordinary things, but the night Mr. Crofter died there was a change.

Mr. Shipp was sitting in the darkness of the porch. He was eating the tossed salad Mina had made. She could hear him crunching on the lettuce and celery and carrots. She was on the steps, feeling tired, feeling happy. In the dark air, fireflies flickered.

“I look at them,” Mr. Shipp's voice came from behind her, “and I'm reminded—we're all like that, aren't we? Like fireflies in the black night of time.”

Mina had her arms wrapped around her legs and her chin resting on her knees. In front of her the little yellow lights flicked on, flicked off. Maybe so, but why did he say night was black. The sky was black, the night was dark. Her mind drifted. She couldn't have been more contented.

“Mina, do you believe in God?”

His voice sounded all right, no longer strained the way it had when he first arrived. His eyes were back to normal. After a few weeks of summer, he was himself again. She'd watched that. But it was a strange question.

Mina had never thought about believing. “That's like asking me”—she tried to think of a true comparison—“if I believe in my own spinal cord. Or something.” She turned around to look at the shadowy figure in the rocking chair. He'd taken his shoes and socks off, taken his jacket and tie off.

“I thought so,” he answered. “Your father too, he has the same feeling. He wears his godliness like his own skin. Some men do. And women,” he added, with laughter in his voice.

“Do you?” she asked him, meaning, do you believe. He knew what she meant, just as she knew that for some reason he needed to talk about this.

“I guess I must. Some people find Him easy, but not me. I don't seem to be able to leave Him alone.”

“Does He want to be left alone?” Mina wondered. For once she felt her own spinal column, held straight as a habit from those years of ballet; for once she was aware of how it ran down her back and everything was built around its strength. Then she forgot it in the conversation.

“If I knew,” Tamer Shipp's voice said. “For a long time, I was running away and He was chasing, and now I'm chasing and He's running away. I think, the way I go after Him, sometime He'll turn around and just belt me one, any minute now.” He chuckled. “But I wonder about troubling Him the way I do. How can He be easy, the way the world is. How can I expect Him to be as simple as people are.”

Mina didn't think there was anything for her to say.

“Do you think He has a purpose for you?” his voice asked her.

“I never thought about that,” Mina said. “You feel like He might have one for you,” she guessed, because it was only that feeling that would make him ask her that question.

“I wish I knew. I wish I knew that, and if I knew He did, I wish I knew what the purpose was,” he said. Mina could feel how that question worried him. He didn't need her to say anything. He just wanted to frame the question into words, to get it out from inside her. “I guess I'd better take you home before Raymonda starts to get het up.”

“She doesn't get het up when she knows where we are,” Mina told him. But it was time for her to go.

After that, Mr. Shipp talked more with her, about all sorts of things, none of them really personal, but a lot of them more personal than personal. He talked about his children and what he hoped they'd be like. “I can almost see what they'll grow up like,” he said. “Sometimes.” They were walking down the driveway to
the road. Mina was wheeling her bicycle, and Mr. Shipp was taking a walk, after sitting down all afternoon in a meeting.

“What about me?” Mina asked. She knew by this time that she could ask that kind of question.

“I don't know who you're going to be,” he said, his eyes studying her, interested and sympathetic, with the readiness to laugh behind them. “You'll be yourself, that's all I know.”

“T-rou-ble,” Mina smiled.

“I expect so. Like Selma, she's another one coming along. It's funny, I thought it was my girls I'd be most anxious over, down in Harlem—”

“Down in Harlem, among the coloreds,” Mina joked, remembering their first conversation and knowing he'd understand that she wasn't wising off.

“But it's Samuel. I wish he was stronger sometimes.”

“He's plenty strong, mentally,” Mina pointed out. The late afternoon heat was so thick that she moved in slow motion, her body filmed with sweat, sweat running down the sides of her cheeks and the backs of her calves, sweat oiling her arms. The macadam roadbed shimmered in the heat and showed what looked like pools of oil, but were only mirages.

“I don't know if that's enough,” Mr. Shipp said.

“Enough for what?” Mina rested on her bike.

“Enough to . . . see him through to his own life?”

Mina didn't know the answer to that. She rode off, thinking. Samuel was her favorite, although Selma always handed her a kick. Dream—Dream was growing up into another Alice, so she'd find someone to look after her. Mina didn't turn around for a last look at Tamer Shipp.

Her family teased her about Mr. Shipp. She didn't mind, because they didn't know what they thought they knew, or what they knew wasn't even that close to the truth. “I've never met
anybody like him,” she told her mother. “Sometimes, I'm just so thankful we live now, and not before.”

“He'd not have lasted long as anyone's slave, Tamer wouldn't,” her mother agreed. “I'd have done all right, I think. I don't know about you, after your go-round with that Mr. Bryce. What do you and Tamer talk about?”

“Lots of things. His children. God. People.”

“Somebody should be talking to him about his wife,” Momma said. “She's drinking too much.”

“Just wine.”

“The trouble is, she's so crazy about him. She thinks she's not anywhere near good enough for him and she's afraid he'll see that. I feel sorry for Alice.”

“I don't,” Mina said. If she let the thoughts out, she was plain envious of Alice.

“He knows you've got a crush on him,” Mina's mother said. They were in the kitchen, alone in the house with humid darkness wrapped around outside.

“He doesn't know you really do love him,” Mina's mother said.

Mina didn't know what to say. She got up and poured herself a glass of orange juice. She took out the ice tray and slowly picked out a couple of ice cubes to drop into the glass. Half of her wanted to talk to Momma, talk from her heart. Half of her knew that there was nothing more to be said on the subject.

“Arrgblgh,” was the sound Mina chose to utter, letting her mother think that whatever the words were, they were muffled by orange juice in her mouth.

Mrs. Smiths leaned back in her chair and just laughed, a sound that rolled like music around the room. “I could weep,” she said, still smiling. “I feel for you, honey, and I'm so proud of you—you are such a trouble to yourself—but love gives what's
best in us to us, I think. And I've been thinking, if you can give something to Alice of what's best in her. For Tamer. I don't know the situation, myself, but I do know you . . . so I thought I'd ask.”

“They don't care about the same things,” Mina said, sitting down, holding the glass of juice in both her hands.

“He'd be a hard man to be married to. He'd make you feel unworthy, if you were Alice. Not that he means to,” her momma said. “I'm just asking, honey. I know you're only thirteen, I'm just wondering.”

Mina tried to think about helping Alice, but she couldn't think of anything. She couldn't see herself telling Alice to be more thoughtful about things, and not care as much about good times as about God. She couldn't see herself trying to teach Alice the kinds of things Momma did for her preacher husband, to help him in his work, to help the church in its work.

August came again and with it a heat wave, broken by squally thunderstorms that rolled up the bay. When the storms came, Mina would go out onto the porch to watch them. She'd see the heavy clouds rushing across the sky and feel a sudden cold edge to the wind. The trees, leaning with the gusty winds, would turn up their leaves, showing the pale undersides. First the thunder would crack the sky apart, and then the rain would fall, beating its way into the soil. After the front passed, the rain would taper off, and then the sun would come out again. Steam rose in the yellow light, making the fields of corn like some tropical jungle country. The storms that passed during the heat wave never broke the edge of the day, they just made a temporary respite before things got worse. But the crops were growing well under this weather, the corn tall and tasseled, tomatoes swelling out ripe.

One Saturday afternoon, there was a movie up in Salisbury that Alice said she'd just die if she didn't see, so could Mina please come out extra? Mina had the three children at their little
beach and Mr. Shipp came to join them. He had a towel around his shoulders and just his bathing suit on. His dark skin glistened with sweat. He dropped the towel beside Mina where she sat reading and belly-flopped into the creek. Water sprayed up around, and all three of his children threw themselves on top of him. He played in the shallow water with them, tossing them in, his deep laughter mingling with their shrieks of delight. Then he came out and spread his towel and sat beside her.

“That feels better,” he said. He watched his children. “We're working you overtime. You can go home, if you like. You can stay, if you like. Whatever. It's a little cooler out here than in town. What're you reading?”

Mina showed him,
The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

“What do you think of it?”

Mina thought. She wished she could think of something intelligent to say. But she couldn't. “It gets me so confused—I don't think, I just react. It's hard for me to believe it's true. It makes me glad I live here.”

“I know what you mean. I prefer Baldwin, myself—James Baldwin,” he said, to her expression. ‘That man's got a soul. But I know about what this man's gone through.” He put his hand on the book she had closed beside her.

“I don't,” Mina said. “I'm glad I don't.”

“This isn't a bad place to grow up. Cities are bad places for blacks to grow up in, or try to. I used to live here, years ago, did I ever tell you?”

“You said you went to school here.”

“It was when we were first married and Dream was—just a baby, just a little baby. I finished my last two years of high school here. And collected a few bruises—those weren't easy years. But Alice had some family on her father's side, and she wanted to be near some family.”

“So you already knew people when you came here,” Mina said. That explained how he had so easily become a part of the community, of the church.

“I knew some people from school. Although, we're all so different now, grown up. It's easier now, around here, for blacks. For coloreds,” he corrected himself, a private joke between them. She watched him as he watched the kids and the water flowing in the creek.

“I was quite an athlete in those days.”

Mina looked at his broad shoulders. She could believe it.

“Tell you a story. You want to hear a story, Mina?”

His words sounded like he was teasing, but his voice didn't. Mina thought that, for once, he wasn't saying exactly what he meant and she listened.