Tempest Rising (19 page)

She walked away from the steps toward the game of rope. Somebody else was jumping in the center, and Bliss was off to the side, surrounded by a group of cute girls. Shern waved Bliss’s coat in her face. “I said we have to go.”

“Just five more minutes, Shern, please.” Bliss jumped up and down. “I just want to get one more turn, please, Shern.”

“Please, Shern, let her have one more turn.” The cute girls were a chorus surrounding Shern, jumping up and down, giggling. “Please, Shern, please, Shern.”

Shern glanced back at the steps at the holy woman. She was sitting straight and still on the steps, her eyes clamped, her head bowed, her hands a temple in her lap. Only her lips moved.

“Don’t pay any attention to her,” Bliss said, and then she lowered her voice. “My friends said she stinks.”

“She does stink,” one of the cute girls said.

“But her daughters have the best rope on the block,” said another.

“Please, Shern, just five minutes,” Bliss continued to beg. Shern wondered how Bliss couldn’t see what she had just been through, that she’d almost been pinned to that shed kitchen floor and forced wide open, that she’d almost drowned inside her own thoughts, that she was confused and starting to whirl around in that dark space again. And Bliss couldn’t see it, couldn’t see beyond her bratty desires to jump double Dutch. Victoria would have been able to see it. As soon as she ran up the street, Victoria would have sensed her dread, would have left the rope game, politely told the girls that she had to go because her sister needed her. Now she wanted Victoria. Now she wished it were Bliss instead of Victoria at the clinic with a hurt leg.

She tried to answer Bliss, to tell her to stop being such a selfish brat, to put the rope down so they could go. But go where? Back to that house, to that shed. She formed her lips but couldn’t form her words, and only a moan pushed through her lips.

Now Bliss did see it. “Shern,” she yelled, almost frantically. “Shern, what’s wrong? Why you acting like this? Talk to me, Shern.”

“What’s wrong, Shern?” the chorus of girls called.

“I—I want Victoria,” is all she could say.

“Victoria?” one of the girls asked.

“Who’s Victoria?” asked another.

“What she crying about?” asked a third.

Bliss reached up and pulled Shern’s head to her shoulder. She patted her back in the center of the widening circle of neighborhood girls. “Victoria’s our sister,” Bliss whispered over her shoulder. “Fell and hurt her leg and had to go to the clinic.”

“My sister fell last summer and broke her arm, and she’s fine now,” one of the girls said.

“My sister fell off her bike and had a concussion for a solid week, and you wouldn’t even know it now,” said another.

“Don’t cry, Shern.”

“She’ll be okay, Shern.”

The holy woman was praying out loud now. Shouting from the steps where Shern had just been. “Touch, Lord. In Your Holy Name, Lord. Touch. Touch.”

The circle of girls moved in closer and collapsed around Bliss and Shern in the center. Shern was shaking, and one of the girls pulled a scarf from around her neck and handed it to Bliss. “She acting like she cold; wrap this around her neck.”

Another offered a tam. “Cover her head; my grandmother says you can catch the grippe if your head gets too cold.”

“Let’s play squeeze the lemon,” another called. “I’ll bet we can keep her warm for real.”

Shern was crying out loud now, a cathartic cry. The louder she cried, the tighter the girls moved in
around her, propping her up, stroking her with their fatty words plump with urban adolescent wisdom. She could still hear the holy woman calling on the Lord to touch. And now she could hear the corner boys too, warming up for their evening of a cappella on the steps across the street. “Look at me,” they sang. “I’m as helpless as a kitten up a tree.”

Shern took it all in. The praying, the corner boys singing, the philosophizing from the warm, tight circle. She leaned completely on Bliss. Allowed her baby sister to take her weight while the circle of neighborhood girls propped them up.

R
amona wouldn’t be going to see the apartment tonight after all. The rental agent had just called her at her desk adjacent to the bargain basement stockroom. Told her that her credit hadn’t gone through. Overloaded, he told her. All of her charge accounts meeting or surpassing the limit. Ramona protested. “I can afford it,” she said. “Forty dollars a month is right in line with the income/expense ratio. Please, you’ve got to approve my application,” she insisted. The rental agent listed off Ramona’s creditors, and Ramona fought back tears as he did. It was her mother. Mae had apparently opened up charges all over the city in Ramona’s name that Ramona knew nothing about. She hung up the phone and then banged her fist on the ink blotter that covered her desk. “I hate her!” she said out loud.

“What did you say, Ramona?” It was Cass, her orange-haired boss who managed the bargain basement. She turned the corner into Ramona’s work area, pushing a wheeled rack filled with hanging flowered dusters.

“Oh, ugh, nothing. I just broke a nail, hate when that happens.” Ramona kept her fist balled.

Cass smiled and nodded. “I’ll leave this cart here, Ramona. These dusters need to go on the floor first thing in the morning to get ready for the sale starting Wednesday, especially since they’re calling for a big storm tomorrow night.”

Ramona got up and pushed the cart against the wall. “I’ll get right on it,” she said.

“No, Ramona, tomorrow morning’s fine. I thought you were punching out an hour early today anyhow.”

“Change of plans,” Ramona said, and then started removing the dusters from the cart and hanging them on the pole just inside the stockroom door.

“Oh, go ahead and take the hour, Ramona. It’s already approved. In fact, you know what, doll, you can take it with pay since those brass bangle bracelets you selected for the entrance bin sold out by the end of the lunchtime rush.”

“They’re gone?” Ramona asked. “I never made it back down to the selling floor once I packed the bin this morning.”

“Sold out, doll. You’ve got one hell of an eye for what the bargain shopper wants. I just told the real estate guy who called to get a reference on your
character and income potential that you would always have a future with Lit’s.”

Ramona stopped transferring the dusters from the wheeled cart to the bar and looked directly at Cass as if she hadn’t heard right.

“I did, Ramona. I says to him, ‘Listen now, Ramona is one beautiful, conscientious lady. She’s not your ordinary run-of-the-mill Negro.’”

Ramona just stared at Cass, at the half-moon hazel brown eyebrows drawn against her forehead that sometimes made it hard for Ramona to read her because the eyebrows stayed still even as the rest of her face moved. She could tell even without the eyebrows, though, that Cass wasn’t just joking around, and now she was embarrassed for them both. She turned her back and headed deeper into the stockroom, mumbling, “Excuse me, something just occurred to me that I need to check on back here.”

“Really, Ramona.” Cass followed Ramona just inside the stockroom door. “You really do your race proud. You’re never late, never take off a Friday or a Monday, you don’t steal, you know what I mean, Ramona. I told that apartment guy too. Listen, I says to him, when he was hemming and hawing about the effect renting to a Negro would have on the other tenants, ‘You should be proud to have the likes of a fine Negro girl like Ramona wanting to rent from you,’ I says.”

Ramona wanted to sink to the floor, cover her face in the dusters, close her ears. She wanted to turn Cass’s voice off. She wanted to explode. It was
enough that Mae had thwarted her move; she didn’t need to know that powers much larger than Mae were thwarting her too. And what could she do? This wasn’t even Selma, where they were getting ready for the march. She could sit at the counter at Woolworth’s, drink from the same fountain as her boss, and Mae had in fact driven her credit into the ground, so she couldn’t even prove in a court of law that the apartment was denied her for other than legitimate reasons. Her eyes were burning. “Cass, I’m going to be a minute in here,” she called out to the doorway. “And then I think I will take that hour. I’ll see you in the morning. I’ll get those dusters on the floor first thing.”

Her nose was running when she got back to her desk, but she wouldn’t let herself cry. She went to her bottom drawer and pulled out her purse, took out a token for the el ride home, swallowed hard. She didn’t want to go home. She thought about where could she go. Out for a drink maybe, a light dinner. But with whom. Not Tyrone; he kept the shop open late during the week, more eye burning at the thought of Tyrone. She went for her address book. Whom could she call for a last-minute dinner date? Ran her finger up and down the pages, turning the pages. Not him. Married. Please, not him. Ugh, can’t believe I spent time with him. She was almost through the book; she had to sit down at the realization that there was no one she could call at this moment. How limited her world had become, how limited, really, it had always been. How sad,
my God, how very sad. The names and addresses were blurring on the page; she still wouldn’t let herself cry.

Then she came upon Beanie’s name. She stopped her finger at Beanie’s name. It never occurred to her to call up the likes of Beanie, even though she was always promising Beanie that they were going to keep in touch between choir rehearsals. She dialed the number, dialed it quickly before she could talk herself out of it, and got suddenly shy when Beanie said, “Hello.”

“Hi, Beanie, it’s Ramona.” Ramona forced the words out on her pent-up breaths.

“Hey, Ramona, girl, what you know good?”

“Nothing good, girl,” Ramona said, and then wished she could call the words back.

“Uh-oh, what’s wrong? Spill it, girl. That cute country boy starting to show his butt? Huh? The cute ones always do sooner or later, that’s why I keeps me an ugly man. Toupee and all.” She laughed a raucous laugh, and Ramona almost laughed too. Ramona wanted to laugh, then wanted to tell Beanie all about Tyrone’s mouth, and how it had changed, wanted to tell her about the apartment falling through, and how much she hated Mae. She wanted to tell her to put a pot of coffee on, pull down that square-shaped bottle of Manischewitz grape concord, she was on the way over, and Lord have mercy, she didn’t know what she needed more, the coffee or some wine. But she didn’t know how to start, hadn’t been friends with a woman since her
friend Grace from high school went away to college. And now she was feeling her chest tighten, and she had to get off the phone before that block of granite came up and took over her chest.

“Ramona? You there?”

“Yeah, Beanie, I just wanted to make sure we had rehearsal Wednesday night, supposed to be a storm tomorrow night into Wednesday.”

Beanie exaggerated a smacking sound. “Awl, shucks, girl, I thought you was calling to talk. I’ll call you if rehearsal’s off, you know that. What you doing later? Me and a few of the girls going over to Sunny Honey’s to have some wings, you want to come?”

Ramona twirled the token along the ink blotter on her desk. “Can’t,” she lied.

“All right, well, listen up, Ramona, and listen up good. I’m here if you need me, I mean that too, girl. All right?”

“Yeah, sure, Beanie. Got to run.”

She hung up the phone and just sat at her desk playing with the token. The air was heavy around her, and now she truly missed Tyrone. Then it occurred to her just to go to the shop and visit him there. She was tired of waiting for him to come around anyhow. And now she wanted—needed—to be with him. That’s what she would do, go straight to the shop and keep Tyrone company until he was ready to close.

She grabbed her coat and purse and punched her time card and headed for the el. Now she couldn’t
wait to get there, and the el ride was seeming to take forever. She tried to drive the el herself with her stomach and her breaths, rushing it, but the more impatient she became, the slower the clickety-clack of the wheels against the tracks seemed. Finally, once the el screeched and grunted and sighed to a stop at Sixtieth Street, she pushed past the throngs of people to get through the doors. She ran down the steps, zooming in and out between the slower walkers, and then across the street. She couldn’t wait to tell Tyrone about the apartment, about Mae; she’d never told anyone about Mae before. Maybe she’d cry. For sure he’d take her in his arms. She was at the door. She glanced back across the street at the clock atop the el platform advertising Morton’s salt that said, “When It Rains It Pours.” Almost six. Good, Perry would be gone. She turned the doorknob and pushed the door. The door pushed back. She jangled the knob. It wasn’t turning. She knocked on the door, looked for the sign that said be right back. That’s when she saw it, right in the bottom corner of the window, resting against the manila-colored window shade. The small red and white sign said
CLOSED
.

“Where the fuck is he?” she said out loud. She walked on down the street feeling like a zombie because she didn’t know what to feel. This kind of anger toward a man was new for her. She’d feigned it plenty of times, stroked their egos and pretended she was having a jealous rage even though deep down she didn’t give a shit. But now she really was angry,
and hurt, and disappointed, and humiliated, and sad, she was very, very sad. She counted the days since they’d been together, before Victoria had fallen and hurt her leg; damn, that was well over a week.

She walked faster to do something with all the feelings spinning like a multicolored windmill until it was spinning so fast and all the colors washed together that she couldn’t tell where one started and the other ended. She was right in front of Sunny Honey now. She could almost hear Beanie’s laughter. She walked on past Sunny Honey and was in the next block, and then she couldn’t explain it, but she turned around suddenly and started to run, could feel a snag opening up in her stockings and rushing up her calf she was running so fast, she’d have to put her shoes in the shop, she thought as she felt the rubber tip on her high heel give and she could hear her heel scraping the cement as she ran. She was back in front of Sunny Honey. She didn’t stop to let herself think or she would have surely stopped herself. She busted through the door, followed the sound of Beanie’s laughter to a booth in the back. Just stood there breathing hard until Beanie looked up.

“Hey, girl.” Beanie jumped up to hug Ramona. “I’m so glad you decided to come.”

Ramona didn’t hug Beanie back. She just stood there with her arms hanging, her purse dangling from her wrist. She did let her head go on Beanie’s shoulder, though. And then she couldn’t even help herself. She just allowed her head to rest on Beanie’s shoulder. Now she let herself cry.