P.S. Be Eleven (5 page)

Miss Marva Hendrix was what magazines called petite. Her Afro was Angela Davis big, but curly like she'd spent a lot of time rolling it up the night before and picking it out. Her dress and shoes were snappy and mod, like Miss
Honeywell's, my soon-to-be sixth-grade teacher. She wore eye shadow—too light and bright for her skin coloring, in my opinion. Her lashes were coated with mascara, and her eyebrows were thick but plucked to form a steep
“I see . . .”
arch. Her nails were icy blue like her eye shadow. Miss Marva Hendrix was everything my mother wasn't.

Big Ma and I must have thought the same thing: Miss Marva Hendrix was almost out of a fashion magazine. No wonder my father wore brand-new shirts that he only trusted with the cleaners.

I didn't like her before I'd seen her. Now that I saw her, nothing had changed.

“Mama, darling daughters—”

This got an eye roll from Big Ma.

“I'd like you to meet . . .”

Heckle and Jeckle giggled and shook and I wished they'd be still. After not having a mother for so long, we had finally met and hugged our mother and lived in her house and said her poetry and cleaned up her kitchen and gathered up her papers and her movable-type pieces after the police messed up her work space. We had just met, hugged, and maybe even loved our mother, smelled the coconut oil in her big braids, and there my sisters were, wiggling like worms in a bait box.

“Miss Marva Hendrix,” Pa said proudly.

I knew better than to cross my arms and roll my eyes. I knew better but I couldn't help myself. My forearms
bolted across my chest, each hand clamped fast around my arm muscles. I at least had enough sense to
not
roll my eyes. I said, “Nice to meet you, Miss Hendrix.”

“Marva,” she offered.

“Miss Marva Hendrix,” I said. Big Ma's firm nod told me to not forget my home training no matter what Pa's lady friend said.

“That's Delphine, my oldest,” Pa said, although looking at us, there was no need to offer that open-faced fact. “This is—”

Vonetta shot up, curtsied, and said in her best showy and crowy voice, “I'm Vonetta. The middle!”

Fern did Vonetta one better, daintily holding out her skirt hem as if she wore a hoopskirt, and said, “I'm Fern, but my mother calls me Afua.” She curtsied on the “Afua.”

Miss Hendrix smiled and nodded, a kind of a bow to Fern's curtsy. “Which do you prefer, Fern or Afua?”

“You can call me Fern.” Then she added, “Only my mother calls me Afua.”

I envied my baby sister. I wished I could just say things. Did she know she had just told Pa's lady friend that she was not her mother?

Miss Marva Hendrix didn't seem to mind. Perhaps it was that Fern was still little and sweet-voiced. Her eyes were bright and aimed to please. Big Ma, however, was none-too-pleased by Fern owning up to her ooga-mooga
name. But Fern's words had given me a spark, and I felt a little better.

Miss Marva Hendrix tugged at Pa's shirt, looked up at him while batting her heavy eyelashes, and said, “No time like the present, Lou.” Her voice was singsongy, but I could hear her
telling
my father. Not asking.

Pa seemed to agree. He smiled at her, turned to Big Ma, and said, “Ma.” Then he said, “Girls,” and turned to each of us. Me first, Vonetta, and then Fern. “I've asked Marva to be my wife.”

Vonetta and Fern squealed. Big Ma put on a polite smile. My father's words ran through me like something I shouldn't have eaten. I felt weak down to my toes and warm all over. Somehow, I managed to do like Big Ma. I put on a polite smile and said, “That's nice, Papa.” I didn't know what else to say.

What else do you say when your father announces he's getting married? What do you say when you don't like his lady friend—can't possibly ever like her—but you don't dare shame your Pa, Big Ma, or, as Big Ma would say, “all the Charleses, Gaithers, and Trotters in Prattville, Alabama.” What can you do when your lip has dropped into a mile-long pout while everyone else is happy, or at least being polite? You put on a smile and say it again. “That's nice, Pa. Very nice,” because none of Miss Merriam Webster's words will show up in time to save you. You remember
how Mrs. Peterson forbade the use of the word
very
in book reports because
very
was fine for fourth graders, but too lazy for fifth graders. Yet here you are, getting ready to start the sixth grade using fourth-grade words. You can't help yourself and add another
very
. “Very, very nice, Papa.”

“You asked her to be your wife?” Vonetta asked. “What did she say?”

It was clear to me, but Fern asked, “Will she?”

Miss Marva Hendrix extended her hand to show the two white stones on her ring finger. “I told your father I will.”

Big Ma said, “My. Isn't that pretty.” She was still being polite. Good old Big Ma.

Vonetta and Fern started another bout of squealing. My old Papa would have reeled in their noise. My new Papa let Vonetta's and Fern's excitement run wild. New Pa bent down and gave Miss Hendrix a smack on the lips to encourage Vonetta and Fern, who obliged him with a lot of high-pitched oohing. Then Big Ma told Pa and his lady friend, “That's enough of that. You're not married yet.” Even so, she said to Miss Hendrix, “Welcome to the family, Marva dear,” as nicely as she could, but she didn't give her a big hug.

Later that night when were all sitting on my bed, Vonetta announced, “I'm the flower girl.”

“Me too!” Fern cried.

“I called it first!”

“But I'm younger and shorter and you're too big, you big fourth grader.”

I stared at them in Cecile-like disbelief. How could my own sisters go on and on about being flower girls, wearing pink satin dresses, and getting their hair pressed and curled for Papa's wedding to another woman? How could they fight over Cecile's postcard one day and throw their mother away without a care the next day?

Soon enough, my sisters' wedding plans turned to arguing over how to throw rose petals. I couldn't take another word of it. “Y'all need to quit it,” I said. “Pa and Miss Hendrix are too old to have a fairy-tale wedding with flower girls and harps playing.”

But Fern heard harps playing. She ballet-teetered on her toes to the harp strings plucking in her head, and Vonetta joined her, twirling and leaping. I watched my own sisters through my mother's eyes, happily dancing this woman into our house.

Vonetta wrote:

Fern wrote:

She made the first
A
in Afua extra large and the small
a
with a curly tail to match the way Cecile signs her poems in movable-type printing blocks. A large and fancy
N
and a fancy
z
with a tail.

I said, “Fern, you forgot the period.”

She pointed to the one after her name and said, “There it is.”

I pointed to the word
leave
. “It goes there. After ‘don't leave.'”

She said, “No, it doesn't.”

I said, “It's wrong, Fern.”

She bobbed her little turtle head and snapped, “It's right so don't touch it.”

“Fine,” I said. “Send it that way.”

“I'm sending it that way, and you better not touch it.” She folded her arms, happy to be wrong.

I checked Vonetta's letter and rolled my eyes about the “giant crab” part.

“You shouldn't write all of this stuff about Cecile being big and how that lady Pa's marrying is nice.”

“Cecile is big. Bigger than Big Ma. Bigger than you,” Vonetta said. “And Pa's fiancée is nice and wears nice clothes.”

“Surely is. Surely does.”

“That still doesn't mean you should write it,” I said. How could she use that word?
Fiancée
.
Pa's fiancée
.

“You can't tell us what to write. We have the freedom to write what we want.”

“And to put a period where we want to.”

“And to say Miss Hendrix is nice.”

“Power to the people.”

“Power to the people, right on.”

I wanted to write a letter to Hirohito but I didn't know his house number. If I took a guess and sent it, and the post office returned it, Big Ma would get my letter first. She'd probably open it and read it and tell me I was too young to be writing to a boy.

I decided to write to my mother instead. Cecile had already told me to mind my business about her feelings and about Pa, but I still wanted to know why my parents didn't get married. Why my father bought Miss Marva Hendrix a ring but he didn't buy one for my mother.

Instead, I told Cecile how I tried to help Vonetta and Fern with their letters but they didn't want my help. I said Vonetta and Fern were driving me crazy and that I couldn't wait for school to start so I could officially be in the sixth grade.

I didn't ask her for Hirohito's address like I wanted to. She'd make a big federal case out of it like Big Ma had and write back and say things that made me feel bad or want to scratch my head. I just closed my letter with “Yours truly” and my name.

If Cecile cared where Fern put her period and if Papa's lady friend was nice, or if Vonetta planned on being a flower girl, she didn't mention it in her letter to me. When the envelope with an Oakland, California, postmark arrived, I opened it and gave Vonetta her letter
and Fern hers. I thought they would read their letters out loud, but they took them and ran back to their room.

To me she wrote:

She'd written it again. “P.S. Be eleven.”

I stared at it like it was the wrong grade marked on the bottom of my paper. My mother was a touch crazy, not dumb. But now I felt dumb because I didn't know Billie or why Cecile had written that twice. “P.S. Be eleven.”

I
was
eleven. How could you become what you already were?

“Big Ma, please.”

I'm no pleader or whiner, but I found myself making those sounds at Big Ma in Korvettes department store on school shopping day. Big Ma kept pulling hangers of pleated wool skirts off the rack and putting them back. She paid me no mind. I still hoped she had heard me.

“Can I just try on—”

“You'll try what I give you. Now hush, Delphine.”

Vonetta and Fern stuck their tongues out at me.

I was tired of wearing the same pleated wool skirts my sisters wore, but Big Ma wouldn't hear about anything different. According to Big Ma, we should look like we were prepared to sit at our desks at school and not to
dig ditches in the dirt. Pants-wearers dug ditches, and no female should wear any pants other than underpants. The only exceptions were shorts with matching tops for summertime running around. According to Big Ma, pants were a man's business and no woman had any business in them.

My mother wore pants. Men's pants.

It's not that I wanted them. I didn't. I knew better than to ask for a pair of bell-bottoms or jeans, although Miss Honeywell looked snappy and mod in her shocking-pink bell-bottom pants and matching jacket with big gold buttons. It was all the school talked about. Miss Honeywell, a teacher and a grown woman, was escorted to the principal's office like a bad boy walking the “paddle mile,” while a hallway aide watched her classroom. My soon-to-be teacher wasn't sent home to change clothes, but she never wore her shocking-pink pantsuit or any other pants to school again.

All I wanted was to start the sixth grade with a sixth-grade look. I wanted to pick out my own skirts and jumpers. I didn't care that we shopped at Korvettes and not at Macy's or Gertz. I only wanted to have a say in what I looked like.

Big Ma had picked out three skirts each for Vonetta and Fern in the children's department, and now it was my turn. Nothing Big Ma held up to me had a prayer of fitting.

“Dag nabbit!” Big Ma never swore, but she did that day. Skirt after skirt failed, and Big Ma let loose another “dag nabbit.”