Authors: Diane Mckinney-Whetstone
Tempest Rising (12 page)
Victoria nodded and then spit. She could feel granules of salt separating from the warm water and sticking to her gums. She wondered if the salt would eat through her gums the way the salt had eaten through the concrete on their front steps the year of the big ice storm. “Damn salt,” their father had cursed as he’d surveyed the smooth pebblestones peeking through the concrete. She imagined that’s how her teeth looked now, eaten away like their steps that year.
“Leave your glass in the sink when you done. I got to get in the shed and get the laundry ready for me to drag out to the Laundromat tomorrow evening.”
Victoria held a gulp of salt and water in her mouth as she watched Ramona walk away. Ramona’s button-down duster was navy with bright yellow tulips. Victoria thought the tulips too overpowering for the navy. Small white daisies would have looked better. A hint of lace is better than a twelve-inch ream, her mother used to say when she’d tell them that they’d always know when someone wasn’t used to much because they’d overdo. Victoria could tell by the overdone tulips that Ramona wasn’t used to much. Suddenly she felt sorry for Ramona that the tulips were too big and Ramona didn’t even know it.
She spit the water and salt in the sink and then limped into the shed behind Ramona. She heard Ramona complaining to the overflowing basket of dirty clothes and winced when she heard her say, “Little rich bitches.” She cleared her throat behind Ramona.
“What the hell you doing in here?” Ramona turned sharply, pulled her mind from Tyrone’s mouth again, and grabbed at her chest. “You scared the shit out of me. Go back on in and sit down and get off of that leg.”
Victoria just stood there at first, tasting the salt that lingered on her tongue and watching Ramona clutching at her duster, the overdone yellow tulips seeming to spill out through her fist. She was struck by her beauty again, and she had to look away. “Can I help you do something?” she asked, putting her voice toward the small block of light coming in through the shed window.
“What you gonna help me do and you can’t even walk?” Ramona answered.
Victoria forced herself again to look at Ramona, at the brittle outline of her otherwise soft face. “I just thought I could help you do something,” she said, her voice strong considering the pulsing of the salt settling into her gums. “You’re always so—so busy cleaning and everything, I just thought…” Her voice trailed off as she turned away again toward the light of the window.
Ramona pointed her face at Victoria as if the child had just called her some heinous, filthy name. “What did you just say?”
“I just thought—I just—”
“You don’t want to help me”—Ramona mocked Victoria in a slurred voice—“and please stop looking at me like that, just stop it.”
Victoria’s eyes were smoky with tears.
Ramona could no longer stand the benevolence of that face staring at her, or the storm of feelings in her chest, or how tight the shed was with the overflowing basket of dirty clothes. And now it was as if she could see all the fosters who’d ever lived there prance before her view. Even that big, ugly sixteen-year-old boy who everyone said was half retarded who’d snuck into her bed when she was twelve, and was pawing and biting all over her, and at first she thought she was dreaming, so she just lay there trying to wake herself up until she smelled the Glover’s Mange that Mae had rubbed in his scalp so his hair would grow. And that mixed with the sound of elas
tic snapping against her skin as he tried to get her pajama bottoms down, and the feel of his mouth against her breasts jolted her, and she realized then she wasn’t dreaming, and she hollered out for her mother, and Mae ran in and saw what almost happened. She told him to pack his paper bag, he was leaving in the morning, and then she sent Ramona for the ironing cord, stripped her, and whipped her like she was trying to make a racehorse run. Told her it was her fault, she had probably been smiling up at the boy, shaking her butt in front of him, pressing up against him when nobody was looking, little heifer, she knew the boy was backwards, hadn’t she caused it to happen? Mae asked her that night as she whipped her and told her it was all her fault.
Ramona could almost feel the skin on her back blister even now standing here in this shed when she thought about how Mae had beat her that night. She looked around the tiny shed for something to distract her from the cloud of feelings rising in her chest. Nothing. Just the overflowing basket of dirty clothes, and the small square of a window, and Victoria’s face, looking up at her now; it was small too, and needy, a niceness about it.
So right then she did the only thing she could do. She slapped Victoria’s face right across her already swollen mouth. She slapped her as if she were every foster child who’d ever crossed the threshold into Mae’s house. She slapped Victoria’s face as if with that slap she could erase every situation that would
have a child taken from its real home and placed with Mae. She slapped her so hard her own hand stung and now throbbed. Then she grabbed Victoria to her, almost buried her in the bright yellow tulips of her duster; she pressed the child’s head to her chest and gently pummeled her back. Her feelings were so conflicted, like jagged lightning bolts popping through the clouds in her chest, she didn’t even know what to say. She just held Victoria to her and listened to her cry.
C
larise was trying to come back to her right mind as she sat in her room at the Pennsylvania Institute. The aunts and uncles had just left her bedside this Sunday morning, and now they headed for church, like they had every Sunday for the past month. Clarise turned her chair toward the window so that when they walked through the courtyard, she would be able to see them. She tried to remember what she had wanted to think about while they massaged her hands this morning, but that pinging had kept firing in her brain and felt as if small pebbles were exploding, as if bath oil beads were bursting and oozing their contents, coating her brain until her thoughts were squishy and sopping and she couldn’t even hold on to them. The pinging was always a prelude to that navy-blue haze that would drop over her, confusing her so that she couldn’t tell
where the haze ended and her own body began—like that morning last month when she sliced at her wrists and wound up here.
And now the pinging was especially irritating because it was interrupting that something that she needed to be figuring out, a revelation that had come to her and then retreated, the way her thoughts did her sometimes, as if her thoughts were playing a child’s game of tag, calling out to her, “Catch me if you can.”
She’d noticed, though, that her thoughts took a seat in her brain when she first woke up, hung around some so she could mull over them. But right after her morning medication her thoughts turned to vagabonds, drifting in and out like aimless smoke until the smoke darkened to that blue haze. So this morning she had taken only one of her pills, hoping to forestall that thick navy haze. The other pill she slipped inside the generous tuck around her pillowcase; she would take it later, she told herself as she inhaled deeply to try to remember the burst of insight she just had. Nothing was coming to her though. Just the smell of White-All shoe polish that her nurse used every morning in the utility room next door; she’d hear her walking down the hall in her street shoes, she guessed, while she left her nurse’s shoes there to dry.
She sighed deeply since she couldn’t remember, decided to think about her Finch and all the questions still unanswered about the way he vanished. She squeezed her eyes shut and was seeing the
hastily written note that Finch had left on her bureau, probably the last note he penned before he disappeared. After Clarise had calmed Shern, Victoria, and Bliss that Tuesday when both Finch and his “steady Eddie” Tuesday night brownies were absent from the house, and she’d knelt with the girls while they said their prayers at the sides of their beds—“Please, God,” let our daddy be okay,” they’d prayed—Clarise had stumbled, choking on her pent-up tears, into her bedroom. There, right in the center of her dresser, a corner of the paper pressed beneath her velvet-lined wooden jewelry box that played “Sincerely” when it was opened, was Finch’s note. “My darling Clarise,” it said, “I’ve gone crabbing in the luscious salty waters right off of the Maryland shore. Here is the recipe for the brownies that our precious daughters devour so. Feel free to substitute pecans for walnuts. All my love, your Finch.”
He had in fact gone down to the Maryland shore, Clarise was certain. And he had rented the crabbing boat from his second cousin Harel. Harel had produced a mimeographed copy of the receipt, had turned it over to the Maryland police investigating the boating accident. Apparently Finch had netted a good catch too; crabs still clung to the floor of the boat when it washed ashore. The police and the coast guard could not say for certain what made Finch take the small, rickety boat into deeper waters. They surmised he was trying to make it across the inlet to the other side of the shoreline, also
known for copious crab catches, when the storm came up and the boat capsized. It must have happened suddenly because Finch wasn’t wearing a life jacket even though Clarise always thought him to be no better than a moderate swimmer.
Now as she sat at the window, waiting to see the aunts and uncles walk through the courtyard, she wondered why he’d left the note upstairs on her bureau. Why not in the breakfast room on the tack board or in his office, where he listed the schedule of halls she’d need to check out, even in the dining room on the fancy notepad next to the phone?
Then there was the passbook for the savings account. He’d always kept it in the top drawer of his chest right next to the thin nylon socks he wore to church. Suddenly it was in the bureau drawer where Clarise stored her lacy French-cut bras, the ones she’d wear when the girls were at their Scout meetings on Friday nights and she’d primp into his studio, where Finch was preparing the food for some lavish Saturday event, and she’d have her top unbuttoned, two, three buttons down, and just the hint of her flesh pushing itself up through the lace did as much for Finch as if she’d paraded in there butt naked. He’d work the dials on the stove then, like a pilot putting his craft on automatic, and turn his attention to Clarise, who’d unwrap her nature all over him and whine and hiss and coo so until Finch was singing opera by the time he got back to his stove.
Now she thought about the passbook too, couldn’t figure why he’d moved it from his sock
drawer and placed it with her good bras instead. It had taken her almost a week to find it; with Finch missing and presumed dead, she had no reason to dress her breasts so. But on the day of his memorial service—they couldn’t call it a funeral because there was no body to lower into the ground—she needed a black bra since she was in mourning and would be dressed in black from the netting around her hat to the supersheer nylon hose, and her only black bras were lacy and in her good bra drawer. That’s when she’d found the bankbook. That’s also when the haze started to darken her world. As if it weren’t already dark enough because of her grief, which was so tight around her she couldn’t poke a hole in it with her sharpest nail. Finch after all had been her only love since she was sweet sixteen. They’d even breathed in sync, as her aunt Til reminded her when she’d tell her it was okay to grieve. Even when Finch interrupted his breaths to snort occasionally, Clarise would anticipate, would hold her own breath for the count of three; then both their chests would rise again and fall to their own syncopated beat. Now the air around her moaned in grief for this sad solo of a breath that should be a duet.
Her grief, though, had a naturalness about it; it was smoky and foggy and still let in light. But the haze that began to fall right about the same time that she’d found the bankbook was dripping navy, slowly at first, as her doctor increased the prescription for her nerves in small degrees, until there was just the blue. So by the time the insurance policy
surfaced, the one that was above and beyond the substantial whole life policy Finch had left, the one that the aunts had found between the mattress and box spring after they’d stripped down the bed on the twenty-eighth day, the haze was falling and lifting so often that Clarise couldn’t tell if she was blinking erratically, or if the blinds in her room were opening and shutting on their own, or if the daylight was obliterated behind the night only to return again a few minutes later.
She pulled her mind from the haze and her Finch because the aunts and uncles had just emerged into the courtyard under her window. They walked four across, her uncle Blue tall and graceful in his black and tweed chesterfield, and next to him Til with the perfectly straight back, then Ness tipping along in her high-heel boots holding on to Show’s arm, and Show in a ten-gallon top hat to give himself some height. She pressed her fingers to her lips when she saw them and blew a kiss through the chain-link screen covering the window. How blessed she felt to have them in her life. She was about to close her eyes and whisper a prayer of gratitude, but right then she let out a small scream instead. Suddenly she remembered what revelation had tried to come to her earlier as the aunts massaged her hands. It did come to her now, tiptoed into her head, sat in a facing chair, tapped on her knee, said, “Here I am.” She screamed louder now. It had nothing to do with the flickering haze or her Finch, but everything to do with her girls. They weren’t with the aunts and un
cles. My God, my God, why hadn’t she seen it before? They’d never been with them, the whole month she’d been locked away in this crazy house. Wouldn’t the aunts have made sure she talked to the girls on the phone had they been tucked away safely in their Queen Street row house? And if she knew her Uncle Blue, he surely would have snuck Shern in, told the guard she was a young-looking sixteen. At the very least they would have stood the girls in the courtyard under her window so they could blow one another kisses through the chain-link screen. Where were her girls? “My God!” She was hollering out loud now. “My girls, my girls, where are my girls?” She banged against the chain-link screen to try to get the aunts and uncles to hear her, to turn around, to explain to her what had happened to Shern and Victoria and Bliss. She jumped up from the chair, lifted the chair and threw it against the window, picked it up and threw it again. She felt helpless, hopeless, she had to know about her girls.
The nurse was in the room now; she could smell the White-All shoe polish. A whole host of people were in the room; she didn’t even need to turn around to confirm it, their various scents were so crowding the air at her back. And now she was in their clutches, two, four, six, eight sets of hands had her, all talking fast, demanding so many milligrams of this, liters of that, and then the puncture in her buttock, and she could feel it streaming all around her, except now it was tighter than a haze and darker than navy; it was thick like gumbo and black
as pitch tar and completely surrounded her. She couldn’t see through it, or hear through it, or even smell through it, except for the tiniest pinhole that let in a ray of ether that went straight to her nose and kept her hanging on. And of course she couldn’t have known that her status in this mental hospital came up for review that following day. It had been a month. They couldn’t hold her longer than this without her permission. Unless of course she demonstrated that she would pose a danger to herself or others if she were released. Then they could hold her, could even restrict her visitors in fourteen-day allotments. Which of course now they were going to do.