Everybody Loves Somebody (12 page)

A few days into June, when the girl began to understand that her mama wouldn’t be home any time soon, she made herself nice
and sick with a throat so swollen she could hardly swallow and a fever hotter than the hottest day in Harlem. She knew that
her sweat didn’t smell as sweet as Mama’s, but Granny paid no mind to the stink. When the child couldn’t even stand on her
own two feet one morning, Granny slung her over her shoulder like one of those burlap sacks full of potatoes she bought at
the market and carried her five blocks to the hospital, where she was told to have a seat.

Now Granny wasn’t one to do, necessarily, as she was told, but on this occasion she didn’t have much of a choice, what with
dozens of sickly souls clamoring like the multitude for salvation and many more just politely waiting their turn, silent except
for their coughing and heaving and their wailing children. The girl noticed that what she at first took to be a pillow held
by the woman next to her was really a baby bundled in its mother’s arms. It wasn’t asleep—its little eyes were half open,
dull as the eyes of an old dog, while the mother’s eyes were glittering and so fixed on the wall clock they might have been
attached to it by thread. After a while the girl grew bored waiting for the baby to do something interesting, and she shut
her own eyes and lay across Granny’s lap, the sounds of the hospital melting together, dripping in ice-cold drops onto her
skin, making her whole body twitch and tremble. She’d come in red-hot and here she was shivering from the worst cold she’d
ever felt. She kept trying to cover herself with whatever was available—her granny’s apron, her own dress folded back over
her arms, even a corner of the blanket belonging to the sick baby, but when she tried to snatch the blanket her hands were
yanked back by Granny, who could do no better than wrap her own thin arms around the girl and try to squeeze away the shivers.

The girl gave up hoping to feel warm and instead let the fever’s blizzard bury her in drifts of snow until she could breathe
only in quick sucks, as though she were taking in air through a straw. The
clackety
sound her teeth made reminded her of Granny’s cart rolling up Lenox Avenue early in the morning, the girl’s favorite time
of day, when the stores were still closed and the few people walking along the sidewalk all had places to be—women with plastic
flowers in their hats, men in fancy bellhop uniforms. The folks the girl liked best were those who stopped to buy the potatoes
Granny roasted in a foil tent on her kerosene stove. Sometimes they would chat with Granny while they ate their breakfast,
and the girl would bask in their voices, though she paid no attention to the meanings of words, didn’t care at all what grown
folks had to say to each other, whether it was a conversation held over a roasted sweet potato or over her own sick body,
which by the time she became aware of it again had been moved from the wooden folding chair in the waiting room to a gurney
in a hallway. A doctor in gold-rimmed glasses poked and probed at the girl while Granny stood to the side, arms folded and
that look on her face suggesting she was getting ready to give the spectacled man a good licking. To spare him, the girl managed
to rasp, “I don’t need nothing,” though at first the words stuck in her parched throat, so she said it again, provoking the
man to laughter.

“You need plenty!” he said, which made the girl think he knew something about her that Granny didn’t. She closed her eyes
and returned in her mind to her grandmother’s cart and the buttery lips of strangers shining in the morning light.

She woke in a different bed, found herself lying between crisp white sheets, and though her jaw was stiff and her throat ached,
her teeth weren’t chattering anymore. She was just a little too warm instead of unbearably cold, a preferable sensation, since
it made her feel as if she were tucked against Mama’s sleeping body in their shared bed. Granny stood in the same stern position,
and when she saw that the child was awake she launched into an account of the tribulations caused by the girl’s sickness.
“You be acting like the Queen of Sheba the way you go on...” The girl just stared at the dirty white wall and thought about
how much better she felt, listening again only when Granny started telling how that baby in the waiting room had died in its
mama’s arms without ever having been examined by a doctor, and you can be sure Granny wasn’t going to let the same happen
to her own kin.

The girl left the hospital the next morning, still too weak to walk, so Granny pushed her in the cart. She perched in front
like a figurehead nailed to an old fishing rig, smiling at people who smiled at her as she rolled past. Back home, Granny
put her to bed, and the girl spent the rest of the week recuperating, dozing during the day while Granny was away and tossing
and turning through the night, unable to sleep soundly without her mama snoring beside her. Finally the girl couldn’t stand
lying there any longer, and she got up in the darkness and dressed herself. When Granny woke to see the girl waiting in her
polka-dot dress with frayed batting and torn hem, she gave her a good scolding because it was Sunday, and on Sunday little
girls should beautify themselves for the Lord. So the girl changed into her one fine dress, a frilly pink confection, and
they set off together for the Metropolitan Baptist Church.

From then on, everything seemed to fall into place. The only piece missing was Mama, and after a few weeks the child stopped
expecting her to come home. At the end of that boiler-room summer the landlord raised the rent five dollars, and Granny decided
to move. She packed their suitcases and paid two boys a nickel each to carry the mattresses and load their belongings on her
cart. The girl filled a paper bag with her few valuables—a box of seashells she’d scavenged from rubbish on the street, her
dresses, and a charm necklace her mother had given her last year. By the afternoon they were settled in their new apartment
on 134th Street, just a half block up from the river, so if the girl woke early enough she could watch from the rooftop as
the sun turned the strip of water brick red. The apartment was even smaller than the last, but the girl didn’t mind, especially
since they had a toilet of their own, a toilet that flushed! They lived on the first floor, and if a truck happened to be
rumbling by on the street, the girl wouldn’t be able to hear what her granny was saying. So Granny would just raise her voice
and say something like, “When you going to stop pretending you the Queen of Sheba?”—Granny’s favorite admonishment ever since
the girl had been brazen enough to require hospital care. Eventually, after months of supposedly putting on airs, the girl
found the title had stuck, and her granny called her Queen Sheebie if she called her anything at all. In no time her schoolmates
took to using the name, flinging it at her first in fun and then with indifference, so she stopped fidgeting when she heard
it and started turning into Queen Sheebie until, from her point of view, the name seemed more than suitable.

Not that the child had any sort of queenly shine to her. Her coffee skin was splotched with freckles, and her eyes usually
had a startled gleam to them, as if she couldn’t believe what she’d seen. Truth was, she believed too much. She believed that
sinners spend eternity tied to a roasting spit over a huge bonfire; she believed her mother was a sinner, just as Granny said;
she believed that when she grew up she’d have her own huckster cart and sell sweet potatoes and popcorn along Lenox Avenue;
she also believed that the angels were waiting for her granny, tapping their silver slippers expectantly, though Granny never
said as much and instead kept on like a mechanical soldier march, march, marching across a toy-shop floor. But the old woman
had a way of moaning in her sleep that made her sound like she was saying good-bye to life. The girl didn’t think far enough
ahead to worry about who would take care of her when Granny died—she wondered only about that strange moment when Granny would
drift from her bed up to heaven, imagined that the angels would hover outside the window blowing trumpets while the neighbors
came running. The girl only hoped she’d reach the rooftop in time to see her grandmother slip through the gilded door at the
crest of the sky.

But the old woman, with typical stubbornness, wasn’t ready to die. And while the simple effort of rising from her chair and
walking over to the toilet would make her pant, she never complained about her ailments. She complained about Queen Sheebie
plenty, of course, blamed her for the high-and-mighty attitude she must have learned from her mama. The harangues grew worse
when the girl took to heading after school to the 135th Street branch library. But even then Granny never beat her and never
said,
I don’t want you going to that place no more.
So the girl, who hated winter ever since her fever had taught her the truth about cold, bided time in the library reading
room while Granny wrapped herself in old shawls and tended her cart, the slush and snow apparently bothering her not a bit.

The girl liked nothing better than to page through books looking at the pictures, and one afternoon she was doing just this
when a white-haired man pulled up a chair beside her. She felt him staring and was about to move to another seat when he pointed
to the word at the top of the page and said, “Read this.”

“What?”

“Tell me what it says.”

She could read a few words, and that’s what she usually did in the library—searched books for familiar words like
cat
and
the
and
Jesus.
But the word at the top of the page was just a jumble of letters. She couldn’t even make sense of the book’s title, though
she had selected it herself from the shelf. So she clamped her mouth shut, and the man with the dust-mop hair began to read:
“‘Introduction...The subject and method of this book...’” and then he stopped, skipped forward a few pages, and began again:
“‘Chapter one. My African Expedition,’” his voice beginning to please the girl, for on the cover of the book was a roaring
lion, and she’d been disappointed to find that the chapters contained no pictures. With the old man reading, she could imagine
the wounded animals turning to charge, the rifles raised, the hunter pinned beneath a tiger’s paw. But he wasn’t going to
let her get away with dreaming her way through. “Assist me,” he whispered, nearly poking a hole through the page with his
finger.

“The,” the girl said.

“The what?”

“The err-uhh.”

“Roo,” the man corrected.

“Roo,” the girl echoed.

“Rule,” he said. “Rule.”

“Rule. The rule.”

And so it began, her first reading lesson by Mr. Dosan, as he finally introduced himself. She’d long since figured out that
nothing could be learned at school, not with such a din made by thousands of children packed into a too-small building. The
girl, impressed by this man who obviously knew everything there was to be known, accepted Mr. Dosan’s unspoken invitation
and began a course of study that occupied her right through the unkind winter months and dozens of books.

They met after school, finding each other in the library reading room as if by chance, for they never made arrangements to
meet, and they worked for at least a solid hour every weekday afternoon. Thanks to her new mentor, the girl came to understand
the power of embarrassment at about the same rate that she was learning to read. Sometimes she found herself wishing he would
leave her alone, though she never admitted this aloud, and instead tried her best to be a model student, which meant following
his directions exactly, sounding out sentences from whatever dull book he’d chosen from the stacks. He never seemed completely
satisfied with her performance, never told her what a good job she’d done, yet neither did he scold her for her mistakes.
They just kept pushing on, moving farther from “the shores of ignorance,” as he grandly said one day, her dependency upon
him increasing as she came to sense the vastness of this sea of words, all the unrelated information and so many different
meanings that in some ways she felt more perplexed than ever and began secretly resenting Mr. Dosan for knowing as much as
he did. On some afternoons she couldn’t even stand his peppermint breath, much less his instruction, and she began looking
for any opportunity to lord it over the old man and force him to feel as stupid as he made her feel.

By the middle of March, she’d learned a year’s worth of phonics, according to Mr. Dosan, who offered to reward her with a
sundae. They ended up in a lunchroom two blocks from the library, the same lunchroom where Mama used to work. They sat in
a booth by the front window; the grimy panes were streaked with rain, and cigarette smoke turned in spirals beneath the overhead
lights. The girl remembered how she would spin herself around on a stool while Mama blended her an egg cream, and she regretted
that she wasn’t sitting at the counter now. She didn’t recognize the waitress who came over to take their order, but the waitress
recognized the girl right away. She began clucking and shaking her head, denying vocally what she already knew: “You ain’t
Sally’s girl, tell me you ain’t Sally’s girl, that itsy-bitsy thing used to come here to give her mama a hug round the knees.”

“Sure is me!” the girl said, surprised and proud to be singled out in front of Mr. Dosan, especially since the implication
of the waitress’s disbelief was that she had grown with such amazing speed that she was hardly to be known. “I’m my mama’s
girl!” she announced, smiling boldly back at the waitress while Mr. Dosan looked on. But her pride didn’t last long, for Mr.
Dosan was quick to root out the truth from the waitress, which was, simply, that the girl had been left behind, abandoned
by her mama, who had “gone and turned herself into one of those crazy angels, got a bed and three meals a day over there at
the kingdom.”

An angel. Meaning that Mama had already passed through the gilded door in the sky, leaving her grandmother and her only child
to fend for themselves. Meaning that the unspoken presumption, the glue of her soul, was false: she would never see her mama
again, not in this life. No more tickling and laughter, no more romps in front of disapproving Granny. Her mama had gone and
turned herself into an angel. Her mama had gone and was never coming back. Her mama had abandoned her. Her mama—