Love (9 page)

Heed’s own story was dyed in colors restored to their original clarity in bubbly water. She would have to figure out a way to prevent Junior’s presence from erasing what her skin knew first in seafoam.

Once a little girl wandered too far—down to big water and along its edge where waves skidded and mud turned into clean sand. Ocean spray dampened the man’s undershirt she wore. There on a red blanket another little girl with white ribbons in her hair sat eating ice cream. The water was very blue. Beyond, a crowd of people laughed. “Hi, want some?” asked the girl, holding out a spoon.

They ate ice cream with peaches in it until a smiling woman came and said, “Go away now. This is private.”

Later, making footprints in the mud, she heard the ice cream girl call, “Wait! Wait!”

The kitchen was big and shiny, full of grown people busy cooking, talking, banging pots. The one who had said “Go away” smiled even more and the ice cream girl was her friend.

Heed put on a fresh nightgown and an old-fashioned satin robe. At a dressing table she studied her face in the mirror.

“Go away?” she asked her reflection. “Wait?” How could she do both? They tried to chase her from white sand back to mud, to stop her with a hidden wedding gown, but in time the one who shouted “Wait!” was gone and the one who said “Go away” was shunned. Spoiled silly by the wealth of an openhanded man, they hadn’t learned, or had learned too late. Even now she knew that any interested folk would think her life was that of an idle old lady reduced to poring over papers, listening to the radio, and bathing three times a day. They didn’t understand that winning took more than patience; it took a brain. A brain that did not acknowledge a woman who could summon your husband anytime she wanted to. Whose name he kept secret even in his sleep. Oh girl. Oh girl. Let him moan; let him “go fishing” without tackle or bait. There were remedies. But now there was less time.

Christine knew it and had suddenly driven off to consult with her lawyer. One of those so-called new professional black women with twenty years of learning that Christine hoped could outwit a woman who had bested an entire town: defeated her daughter-in-law, run Christine off, and raised herself above all those conniving folks begging favors who, no matter what she did, still threw up behind her back. For as long as she could remember, Heed believed stomachs turned in her company. Truth be told, Papa was the only person who did not make her feel that way. She was safe with him no matter what he muttered in his sleep. And there was no question about what he meant her to have when he died. Will or none, nobody would ever believe he preferred Christine, whom he hadn’t seen since
1947
, to his own wife. Unless it was one of those lawyer-type black girls, full of themselves, despising women of Heed’s generation who had more business sense in their tooth fillings than those educated half-wits would ever know.

Since there was nothing else, the notes for a will that L found scribbled on a menu were legal, provided no other, later, and contradictory writing could be found. Provided. Provided. Suppose, however, later writing, supporting, clarifying the first was found. Not a real notarized will—there was none, and if there ever was one, crazy May had hidden it, as she had the deed—but another menu from a year after the
1958
one, one that actually identified the deceased’s “sweet Cosey child” by name: Heed Cosey. If Papa jotted down his wishes in
1958
and again on whatever subsequent menu Heed could find, no judge would favor Christine’s appeal.

It was not a new thought. Heed had mused about such a miracle for a very long time; since
1975
, when Christine had pushed her way into the house flashing diamonds and claiming it as hers. What was new, recent, was the jolt to Heed’s memory last summer. Lotioning her hands, trying to flex her fingers, move them apart, examining the familiar scar tissue on the back of her hand, Heed revisited the scene of the accident. Muggy kitchen, worktable stacked with cartons. Electric knife, Sunbeam mixer, General Electric toaster oven—all brand-new. L wordlessly refusing to open them, let alone use the equipment they contained.
1964
?
1965
? Heed is arguing with L. May enters the kitchen with her own cardboard box, wearing that stupid army hat. She is carrying an institutional-size carton that once held boxes of Rinso. She is frantic with worry that the hotel and everybody in it are in immediate danger. That city blacks have already invaded Up Beach, carrying lighter fluid, matches, Molotov cocktails; shouting, urging the locals to burn Cosey’s Hotel and Resort to the ground and put the Uncle Toms, the sheriff’s pal, the race traitor out of business. Papa said the protesters had no idea of what real betrayal was; that May should have married his father, not his son. Without a dot of proof, a hint of attack, threat, or even disrespect except the mold growing in her own mind, May was beyond discussion, assigning herself the part of the resort’s sole protector.

Once she had been merely another of the loud defenders of colored-owned businesses, the benefits of separate schools, hospitals with Negro wards and doctors, colored-owned banks, and the proud professions designed to service the race. Then she discovered that her convictions were no longer old-time racial uplift, but separatist, “nationalistic.” Not sweet Booker T., but radical Malcolm X. In confusion she began to stutter, contradict herself. She forced agreement from the like-minded and quarreled endlessly with those who began to wonder about dancing by the sea while children blew apart in Sunday school; about holding up property laws while neighborhoods fell in flames. As the Movement swelled and funerals, marches, and riots was all the news there was, May, prophesying mass executions, cut herself off from normal people. Even guests who agreed began to avoid her and her warnings of doom. She saw rebellion in the waiters; weapons in the hands of the yard help. A bass player was the first to publicly shame her. “Aw, woman. Shut the fuck up!” It was not said to her face, but to her back and loud enough to be heard. Other guests became equally blatant, or just got up and left when she entered their company.

Eventually May quieted, but she never changed her mind. She simply went about removing things, hiding them from the kerosene fires she knew were about to be lit any day now. From grenades lobbed and land mines buried in sand. Her reach was both wide and precise. She patrolled the beach and set booby traps behind her bedroom door. She hid legal documents and safety pins. As early as
1955
, when a teenager’s bashed-up body proved how seriously whites took sass, and sensing disorder when word of an Alabama boycott spread, May recognized one fortress—the hotel—and buried its deed in the sand. Ten years later, the hotel’s clientele, short-tempered and loud, treated her with the courtesy you’d give a stump. And when waves of Blacks crashed through quiet neighborhoods as well as business districts, she added the Monarch Street house to her care. Controlling nothing in either place, she went underground, locking away, storing up. Money and silverware nestled in sacks of Uncle Ben’s rice; fine table linen hid toilet paper and toothpaste; tree holes were stuffed with emergency underwear; photographs, keepsakes, mementos, junk she bagged, boxed, and squirreled away.

Panting, she comes into the hotel kitchen carrying her loot while Heed argues about the waste L is causing by her refusal to open the cartons, use the equipment, and thereby produce more meals faster. L never looks up, just keeps dredging chicken parts in egg batter, then flour. An arc of hot fat escapes the fryer, splashes Heed’s hand.

Until recently that was all she remembered of the scene—the burn. Thirty years later, lotioning her hands, she remembered more. Before the pop of hot fat. Stopping May, checking the Rinso box, seeing useless packets of last New Year’s cocktail napkins, swizzle sticks, paper hats, and a stack of menus. Hearing her say, “I have to put these away.” That afternoon the new equipment disappeared, to be found later in the attic—L’s final, wordless comment. Now Heed was convinced that May’s particular box of junk was still there—in the attic. Fifty menus must have been in it. Prepared weekly, daily, or monthly, depending on L’s whims, each menu had a date signaling the freshness of the food, its home-cooked accuracy. If the fat hit her hand in
1964
or ’
65
, when May, reacting in terror to Mississippi or Watts, had to be followed to retrieve needed items, then the menus she was storing were prepared seven years later than the
1958
one accepted as Bill Cosey’s only will and testament. There would be a lot of untampered-with menus in that box. Only one was needed. That, a larcenous heart, and a young, steady hand that could write script.

Good old May. Years of cunning, decades of crazy—both equaled the simplemindedness that might just save the day. If she were alive it would kill her. Before her real death she was already a minstrel-show spook, floating through the rooms, flapping over the grounds, hiding behind doors until it was safe to bury evidence of a life the Revolution wanted to deprive her of. Yet she might rest easy now, since when she died in
1976
, her beloved death penalty was back in style and she had outlived the Revolution. Her ghost, though, helmeted and holstered, was alive and gaining strength.

An orange-scented road to Harbor was what Christine expected, because three times the aroma had accompanied her escapes. The first was on foot, the second by bus, and each time the orange trees lining the road marked her flight with a light citric perfume. More than familiar, the road formed the structure of her dreamlife. From silly to frightening, every memorable dream she had took place on or near Route
12
, and if not visible, the road lurked just beyond the dreaming, ready to assist a scary one or provide the setting for the incoherent happiness of a sweet dream. Now, as she pressed the gas pedal, her haste certainly had the feel of a nightmare—panting urgency in stationary time—but freezing weather had killed the young fruit along with its fragrance and Christine was keenly aware of the absence. She rolled the window down, then up, then down again.

Romen’s version of washing the car did not include opening its doors, so the Oldsmobile sparkled on the outside while its interior smelled like a holding cell. She once fought a better class of car than this because of an odor. Tried to kill it and everything it stood for, but trying mostly to kill the White Shoulders stinging her sinuses and clotting her tongue. The owner, Dr. Rio, never saw the damage because his new girlfriend had the car towed away before the sight of it could break his heart. So Christine’s hammer swings against the windshield, the razor cuts through plump leather; the ribbons of tape (including and especially Al Green’s “For the Good Times”) that she draped over the dashboard and steering wheel he only heard about, never saw. And that hurt as much as his dismissal had. Killing a Cadillac was never easy, but doing it in bright daylight in the frenzy of another woman’s cologne was an accomplishment that deserved serious witnessing by the person for whom it was meant. Dr. Rio was spared, according to Christine’s landlady, by his new woman. A mistake, Manila had said. The new woman should have let him learn the lesson—observe the warning of what a displaced woman could do. If he had been allowed to see the result of getting rid of one woman, it might help the new one convert her own rental in his arms to a longer lease.

Regrets over her mismanaged life faded in the glow of Dr. Rio’s memory, as did the embarrassment of her battle with his beloved Cadillac. In spite of the shamefaced end of their affair, the three years with him—well, near him; he was mightily undivorceable—were wonderful. She had seen movies about the misery of kept women, how they died in the end or had suffering illegitimate babies who died also. Sometimes the women were saddened by guilt and cried on the betrayed wife’s lap. Yet twenty years after she’d been replaced by fresher White Shoulders, Christine still insisted her kept-woman years were the best. When she met Dr. Rio, her forty-one years to his sixty made him an “older” man. Now, in her mid-sixties, the word meant nothing. He was sure to be dead by now or propped up in bed paying some teenage welfare mother a hundred dollars to nibble his toes while a day nurse monitored his oxygen flow. It was a scene she had to work at because the last sight she’d had of him was as seductive as the first. An elegant dresser, successful G.P., passionate, playful. Her last good chance for happiness wrecked by the second oldest enemy in the world: another woman. Manila’s girls said Dr. Rio gave each new mistress a gift of that same cologne. Christine had thought it was unique—a private gesture from a thoughtful suitor. He preferred it; she learned to. Had she stayed longer at Manila’s or visited her whores once in a while, she would have discovered at once Dr. Rio’s particular pattern of bullshit: he fell head over heels, seduced, offered his expensive apartment on Trelaine Avenue, and sent dracaena and White Shoulders on the day the replacement moved in. Unlike roses or other cut flowers, dracaena was meant to speak legitimacy, permanence. The White Shoulders—who knew? Maybe he read about it somewhere, in a men’s magazine invented to show men the difference between suave and a shampoo. Some creaky, unhip glossy for teenagers disguised as men that catalogued seduction techniques, as if any technique at all was needed when a woman decided on a man. He could have sent a bottle of Clorox and a dead Christmas tree—she would have done whatever he wanted for what he made available. Complete freedom, total care, reliable sex, reckless gifts. Trips, short and secret lest his wife find out, parties, edginess, and a satisfactory place in the pecking order of a certain middle-class black society that understood itself to swing, if the professional credentials and money were right.

Route
12
was empty, distracting Christine from the urgency of her mission with scattered recollections of the past. How abrupt the expulsion from first-class cabins on romantic cruises to being head-pressed into a patrol car; from a coveted table at an NMA banquet to rocking between her own elbows on a hooker’s mattress aired daily to rid it of the previous visitors’ stench. When she went back to Manila’s, dependent on her immediate but short-lived generosity, Christine poured the remains of her own White Shoulders down the toilet and packed her shoes, pride, halter top, brassiere, and pedal pushers into a shopping bag. Everything but the diamonds and her silver spoon. Those she zipped into her purse along with Manila’s loan of fifty dollars. Manila’s girls had been congenial most of the time; other times not. But they so enjoyed their hearts of gold—gold they had slipped from wallets, or inveigled with mild forms of blackmail—they were staunchly optimistic. They told Christine not to worry, some woman was bound to de-dick him one day, and besides, she was still a fox, there were lots of players and every goodbye ain’t gone. Christine appreciated their optimism but was not cheered. Thrown out of the apartment after she had refused for weeks to leave quietly; prevented from taking her furs, suede coat, leather pants, linen suits, the Saint Laurent shoes—even her diaphragm: this goodbye was final. The four Samsonite suitcases she had left home with in
1947
held all she thought she would ever need. In
1975
the Wal-Mart shopping bag she returned with contained all she owned. Considering how much practice she had had, her exits from Silk should not have become more and more pitiful. The first one as a thirteen-year-old, the result of a temper tantrum, failed in eight hours; the second one at seventeen, a run for her life, was equally disastrous. Both escapes were fed by malice, but the third and last, in
1971
, was a calm attempt to avert the slaughter she had in mind. Leaving other places: Harbor, Jackson, Grafenwöhr, Tampa, Waycross, Boston, Chattanooga—or any of the towns that once beckoned—was easy until Dr. Rio had her forcibly evicted for no good reason she could think of except a wish for fresh dracaena or a younger model for the furs he passed along from one mistress to another. Following days of reflection at Manila’s (named for a father’s heroic exploits), Christine discovered a way to convert a return to Silk in shame and on borrowed money into an act of filial responsibility: taking care of her ailing mother, and a noble battle for justice—her lawful share of the Cosey estate.