Duet for Three Hands (5 page)

In the mirror, she examined her reflection, wondering if the last several days had changed her. No, it was the same face as the one William kissed only days ago. She touched her cheek, thinking of that last kiss, wishing she’d held his touch for a moment longer, had kissed him properly like when they’d first been married. If only she’d known to say a final goodbye instead of taking for granted his promise to return for lunch.

She undid her dark blonde hair from the braid she always wore and began to brush it. One hundred strokes will keep it shiny, her mother always advised. Thick, it reached the middle of her back and was crimped from being in the braid so that it appeared to have movement, like a wheat field swaying in the wind. It was her eyes, her mother once said, that made her pretty. Framed by thick lashes, they were a light blue that looked like a hazy sky one day and the blue of a tropical sea the next. Her mother had said to her the day before she left for university, “Your eyes are remarkable, Lydia, and make you a great beauty. Use your beauty for good, as it’s a great responsibility.” A great beauty? This was not true to anyone but her mother. Lydia suspected that women never saw themselves as they truly were, no matter how they stared at their own reflections. And their mothers? They surely did not see their daughters as they truly were, for love distorted their view. At the time, she’d dismissed both her mother’s compliment and her advice, knowing her face was long, her lips thin, and there were the freckles—they covered almost every inch of her almost pointy nose. Simply awful. There was the problem of her height, as well. She was tall, way too tall for a woman.

Tall women could not be beautiful, Lydia thought, so she put aside her mother’s words and became accomplished and educated instead, not worried over her appearance until the day she met William.

She was in Atmore during a break from college with a friend from school who was born and raised in Atmore. The second evening of her visit they’d gone to a dance at the Grange. There he was, looking at her from across the room, with a slight smile on his face. His name was William, she learned later, and he worked at the bank. But at that moment she knew only that he was tall (taller than she) and handsome in a no-doubt-he-was-of-English-descent kind of way, blond and fair-skinned, with dark blue eyes. He raised his hand in greeting. She quickly looked away but not before she saw him grin wildly at her. A blush started from her toes and ended at the top of her head.

Later, waiting on the porch for her friend, she heard the door creak, and when she looked up he was there again. She watched as his breath caught and he smiled at her once more. He thinks I’m lovely, she thought. How wonderful it was. The way he looked at her, really looked at her, as if she were truly beautiful, made it true. For even with her height and unusually large hands, he’d thought her a great beauty, just as her mother had. During their years together, he’d been a man of a thousand compliments, with a rebuttal to every self-criticism she might utter. Now she would be no one to any man. She would no longer have the privilege of feeling beautiful in the particular way that love brings.
William, who will help me decide which hat to wear?

She moved to the bed, bone weary. The room consisted of a simple wooden bed frame, a quilt in a pattern of red stars over the bed, and, in the corner, a rocking chair where she’d nursed both her babies. Perching on the side of the bed, she imagined slipping under the cool sheets but somehow could not move. It was the prospect of sleeping alone in their marital bed—impossible. Her fingers traced the outline of a star on the quilt, and she pulled his pillow onto her lap. Had she been a good wife? Please, God, let it be so.

She wept silently into his pillow. After the tears stopped, she made the bed up again, her strong hands halting their work only long enough to breathe in the scent of her husband from his pillow. Tobacco and shaving cream. At the window, she peered into the backyard. Fireflies had come to the dark, sparks of undaunted light. They never ceased to delight her. Often William captured them in a jar for the children, tiny gifts that were really only a loan, for they were let out into the world before bedtime. None of them could keep anything beautiful trapped for long.

William’s voice came to her again.
Sleep with the children.
Nodding, as if he were in the room, and holding the pillow close to her chest, she crossed the hallway to her daughters’ room. Pushing Birdie gently into the middle of the bed, she climbed in, placing William’s pillow under her cheek.

Birdie shifted in her sleep, making the purring noise of a kitten. Lydia snuggled closer. She stayed in the same position for most of the night, the yearned-for yet elusive sleep thwarted by the hollow, fearful pain in her chest that felt like a vise. Outside the windows, the crickets chirped a rhythm that after a time began to sound like:
I’m afraid. I’m afraid. I’m afraid.

Finally, just before dawn, the crickets ceased, and the emerging day fell silent. She might have uttered a response to fill the quiet, but nothing came, not even the sound of William’s voice.

J
eselle

O
n a cloyingly
hot
day in early September, Mr. Bellmont demanded roast beef for his supper. So after breakfast, Mama left for the market, wearing her yellow straw hat and the brown, cotton dress with the bell sleeves that cupped her muscular shoulders. “Jes, wash up the dishes while I’m gone.” Almost six feet tall and lean, Mama pushed open the screen door using her backside; it slammed against the side of the house and then came to a close with a bang. Mama powered across the yard, scattering the brown, decaying magnolia blossoms with the force of her rapid gait, and then disappeared around the side of the house.

To the hum of the ceiling fan that swirled warm air around the kitchen and offered little relief, Jeselle scrubbed away the morning’s grits stuck to the bottom of a pan, perspiration soaking the collar of her thin cotton dress, where her hair hung in two braids. She was small for thirteen, willowy, with a delicate bone structure. Jeselle looked like her father’s mother, according to Mama, with the same heart-shaped face and dimples on either side of her full mouth. Unfortunately, Jeselle would never be able to judge for herself if this were true or not. Her father and his parents were all dead, buried in the colored cemetery on the other side of town. Jeselle was only weeks old when he died coming home from work, killed by white men for the dollar he’d made that day washing dishes. Mama had come to the rich part of town looking for work and through divine providence, there was no other way to explain it, claimed Mama, she’d found Mrs. Bellmont.

While she worked, Jeselle watched Whitmore in the garden, sketching a fallen, forgotten peach, shriveled brown and punctured with holes from a bird’s voracious feast. The other peaches, harvested in June, were in jars, canned by Mama and lined in neat rows in the cool basement. He sat on the grass under the shade of the peach tree with his sketch pad propped on his knees. His eyes moved from the peach to the paper and back again, while his left hand sketched, holding the pencil in a way both assured and relaxed. With his other hand, he occasionally swiped at flies and bees hovering near his head.

He was growing so tall, she thought. For years they’d been around the same size, but around six months ago, he’d started to grow tall and lean, and now at fourteen—just a year and one month older than Jeselle—he was a full head taller than she.

“Study of a wounded peach,” she thought. She would tell Whit later. It was her job to name his drawings and paintings.

He scrambled to his feet, looking up at the sun, mostly likely estimating the time and what it would do to the light. Then he walked toward the kitchen, stopping on the top step and calling out to her, “Jes, please tell Mother I’ll be back for supper, would you?”

“She won’t like it.” She went to where he stood in the doorway.

He lowered his voice. “I know. But it’s Saturday.” Mr. Bellmont was home all day on Saturday, and Whitmore did whatever he could to avoid seeing him.

“I think he’s still in bed.” Sleeping off the booze from the night before, according to Mama, waking only long enough to dictate the menu for supper before falling back to sleep, snoring.

“But he won’t be for much longer.” He tugged gently on one of her braids. “I’ll bring you a caramel from the candy shop. The biggest one they have.”

Jeselle washed the plates next, hurrying, pining for the next chapter of Pip and Stella that waited for her on the kitchen table. She was like Pip, she’d decided, even though he was a white boy from England and she was a black housekeeper’s daughter in Atlanta, Georgia. They both longed for things they couldn’t have. She wiped her face on the bottom of her apron, feeling as hot and wet as a bowl of boiled collard greens. It was impossible to imagine that the season would change in a few weeks, bringing relief to Atlanta from the early September air that felt so thick and moist it slowed your every movement.

Even the garden seemed lethargic, the squash and pumpkin leaves wilted like spent athletes. Dogwood leaves hung from their branches as if they might at any moment unfurl from their precarious attachment and float unfettered to the rust-colored, thirsty soil. Only the sweet, pink-skinned potatoes hidden under the red dirt were unbothered by this relentless summer. She envied them their cool shelter from the sweltering heat.

Mama returned an hour later, flinging the screen door open with her foot, carrying a small package wrapped in brown paper.

Jeselle, at the table, placed her finger on the last sentence she’d read. Mama’s dress was wet, clinging to the muscles of her back. Without taking off her hat, she set the parcel of meat on the table, her eyes settling briefly on Jeselle’s book, then roaming to the spotless sink and stove, and finally to the hutch, where plates were stacked in their usual places and cups hung from the tiny hooks. Presumably seeing no errors in Jeselle’s task, Mama poured a large glass of water from the tap and drank it in one fluid swallow, her other hand squeezing the rim of the sink. Then, pulling the hairpins from her hat, she took it off and fanned her face.

“Do you need me to do something, Mama?”

“Go out to the garden and dig up some of them potatoes. Bring in five or six.”

“Yes, ma’am.” She closed the book, silently repeating, “Second paragraph, page fifty-six,” three times in her head.

Outside, the morning sun was bright in the vegetable garden, and it burned into the middle of her bare scalp where she parted her hair. After she pulled the potato plant from the ground, she used a small shovel to dig several inches into the dirt and burrowed her fingers into the dry ground, feeling for the round, hard potatoes huddled together like eggs in a nest. There were five altogether. She brushed the dirt from them until their pink skin was visible and then gathered them into her apron.

Back in the kitchen, Mama had pulled the yellow curtains over the windows so the room had a yellow glow that made the white walls and hutch seem dingy. Mama trimmed blue-tinted fat from the raw meat but stopped when Jeselle came into the kitchen and pointed to the hutch. A tray with biscuits, peach jam, and a pot of tea sat waiting. “You run that up to Miss Frances.”

“Yes, Mama.” Jeselle took the tray, walking slowly, like she was in quicksand. She hated to go to Frances’s room in the morning, especially the last several weeks. Frances stayed in bed most days.

Jeselle came to the open door of the sitting room. Mrs. Bellmont looked up from where she was writing at the secretary’s desk. “Morning, baby girl.”

“Morning, Mrs. Bellmont.”

“Please see if you can cajole Frances into eating something.”

“Cajole, Mrs. Bellmont?”

“Coax, entice, convince. Spelled c-a-j-o-l-e.” She lowered her voice to a whisper, pointing to the locked box next to the desk where they kept Jeselle’s schoolbooks secret from Mr. Bellmont. “I’ll put that on our vocabulary list for next week.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Bellmont.” Feeling fortified, released from quicksand, Jeselle went up the stairs quickly, holding onto the top of the teapot with one hand, spelling c-a-j-o-l-e under her breath.

Frances reclined on a stack of pillows on the bed, a light sheet covering her. The shades were drawn, but even in the muted light her usual alabaster skin appeared sallow and yellow. One hand was on the covers, limp; the other held a handkerchief to her nose. “Girl, there’s the most awful smell in here. I can’t stand it another minute. You simply have to find out what it is.”

“What does it smell like, Miss Frances?” She put the tray on the bedside table and poured a cup of tea.

“Like awfulness.”

“Awfulness?”

“Like something’s dead.” Frances removed the handkerchief from her nose. “Or wet dog, maybe.”

Jeselle surveyed the room. Everything seemed in its usual place: the wallpaper scattered with pink roses; the frilly white curtains with embroidered pink edges; the pink velvet chair; a Bible next to Frances’s framed portrait, taken for a debutante party that never happened; and a vase of white daisies, picked by Mrs. Bellmont from the garden. Jeselle went to them and took a big sniff. This was the offender. They smelled like dirty stockings. “It’s the daisies.”

“Get them out.” Frances sat up slightly, her voice a shriek only in pitch, not volume. “Leave it to mother to try and poison me with those vile weeds.”

Vile was a good word, Jeselle thought. She put her hands around the vase, carrying it carefully, heading toward the door, thinking of synonyms in her head for vile: revolting, repellent. Another hovered near the corner of her mind. What was it? It also started with an r. Repugnant. That was it.

“Girl,” Frances screamed, startling Jeselle so that she almost dropped the vase. “Are you listening to me?”

She turned to look at her. “Yes, Miss Frances?”

“What did I just say?”

“The flowers are repugnant?”

“What?” She wrinkled her smooth forehead, as if looking at a creature, or an anomaly, that couldn’t be explained. “No. My God, you’re a stupid child. I said, ‘Get my hairbrush.’”

“Shall I take the flowers away first?”

“No. Yes. I suppose.” Some color returned to Frances’s cheeks. “Then come back and brush my hair.”

“Yes, Miss Frances.”

Jeselle disposed of the daisies in the small compost heap Mrs. Bellmont kept at the far end of the garden, near a raised box where Mama grew various strange herbs for medicinal purposes—always aiming to cure Mrs. Bellmont’s bad stomach. When she reentered the kitchen, the scent of browning beef and onions greeted her.