Tempest Rising (5 page)

“Family Court, case managers, attempted suicides, I feel like I’m stuck in a bad dream that’s not adding up to anything that looks like sense. Just doesn’t add up, Ness,” Til said, seeing and not seeing the American flag standing behind a counter and between a door to an inner office and a wall where Lydon Johnson peered down from a scalloped gold frame. “Just doesn’t fit in with everything I know about Clarise’s constitution; she’s just not the kind to try to take her own life, just not, no way, just not.”

“I agree with you, Sister,” Ness said as she reached across to help Til pull her coat off her shoulders. She let her fingers rest on the fox-foot collar. “Remember how Clarise loved this collar when she was a little thing, used to call it her pet.”

“Do tell, she surely did.” Til sighed and then laughed and said, “All the children had some kind of relationship with this collar: Shern would try to feed it; that little Victoria would run, scared it was gonna come off the coat and bite her; and little Bliss would threaten to beat the collar up for her sister.”

“What you talking about?” Ness laughed too as she undid the buttons on her own coat. “Remember
when Blue grabbed the coat out of your hands and threw it on the floor and told Bliss to go ahead and beat it up, stomp it to bits, he told her.”

“He sure did with his old silly self, probably had been sipping sherry when he did it, my good coat too.”

“And you let her do it too. You remember that part?”

“I do.” Til smiled. “Some of my best times been spent at Clarise and Finch’s on Sunday nights. Lord have mercy, and now Finch is gone and Clarise—mnh, I can’t figure, Ness, I just can’t figure. I do believe she was gonna come back to herself.”

“She was, I believe it too.”

“She was gonna get over Finch. It was gonna take her time, but she was gonna do it for the daughters.”

“And still can, Sister. This is just a temporary setback, I do believe. We’ll collect the daughters and help them and Brother and Brother and ourselves too; we’ll all get through this, Sister.”

“You’re nothing but right, Ness. The disturbing thing for me right now is that we have to sit here and wait for some case manager to make a—a what did they call it, a determination? Determination of what is my question.”

“Mine too, Sister. Now I definitely agree with you on how absurd that is. I mean, after all we’re the only known living blood relatives those daughters can lay claim to.”

“So why is my stomach flopping around like a tuna caught in a net over the fact that we even have
to sit here and wait like this, like we’re applying for a job selling secondhand TVs?”

The door next to the wall propping the American flag and under the Lyndon Johnson glossy opened, and Til looked beyond Ness’s furrowed brow and felt her heart tear. “Ness, this is a bad dream, it’s very bad, don’t turn around and look behind you, just talk to me, Ness, talk to me calm, talk to me sure.”

“I’m right here with you, Sister. Now you just breathe in and out deeply a few times. Whatever it is can’t be made better if you throw a fit, and by the looks on your face you’re headed in that direction.”

“Ness, haven’t we tried to live right?”

“We have.”

“Never hurt anybody unless it was to protect ourselves or something belonging to us.”

“Say it true, Sister. Say it true.”

“Use only the purest ingredients in our soaps, even been good stewards over the land Daddy left in our charge.”

“Well, well, well, Sister, you know what you talking about now, earning enough leasing fees on that land to keep us in stead for all our natural-born days should the soap business dry up.”

“Don’t complain much either, take each day as it comes, like the Word instructs us to.”

“What you leading up to, Sister? Come on with it now.”

“We send our tithing envelopes even when we don’t make it to the service.”

“Sister, Sister, I’m trying to stay with you, but
you seeing something right now that’s got your face fixed like Satan himself is standing behind my head. You might as well as go on and tell me, ’cause you getting ready to explode anyhow. Tell me right now, Sister, tell me slow and soft and easy.”

“Ness, it’s that old, spiteful woman. The case manager for the daughters. It’s that fat-assed, pipe-mouthed, venom-spewing, Line ’Em Up Larry’s spiteful sister, Vie.”

Til’s voice went higher and louder with each description of Vie. Ness reached across and put her hands on Til’s knees because now they were going up and down too.

Then Vie shouted across the room, “You can call me what you want, but you’re a convicted felon, attempted murder, remember, Til, and I’m not placing those girls with you.”

It seemed to Ness as if the room were moving; it always seemed that way when Til was about to throw a fit. She was a solidly constructed woman, and even now in her sixties she had more muscle mass than fat. Til stood, and Ness did too and grabbed her, to hold her, to talk to her, to calm her down. But Til slipped through Ness’s grasp like lard.

Now Til was at the counter, banging at it over and over. “You have no right holding a grudge against me over what happened more than thirty years ago,” she yelled. “Everybody knew your brother’s pecker was smashed so no way could he be Clarise’s father, but he kept coming around like some kind of psycho, I was forced to go upside his head. Now
you better just turn those girls over to my sister and me or I’m gonna do the same thing to you I did to Larry.”

Vie pressed the security buzzer, laughed out loud in Til’s face, and started backing up toward the door under Lyndon Johnson. “I’m not holding no grudge,” she said, “but I am upholding the law. And as a convicted felon you are unfit, just unfit for those girls to be placed with.”

A crowd had formed in the room, curiosity seekers walking through the corridor. Even Lyndon Johnson leaned as if to see what the commotion was.

Ness picked up Til’s coat, which had fallen to the floor. She squeezed the fox-foot collar to her chest. This was bad, very bad. She tried to hold on to her tears and move faster than the police who had just run through the door, dispersed the crowd, and were now heading with determination toward her ranting sister, Til.

T
he sun was hanging way back in the sky all feisty and red over Sixtieth Street; it could have been on a different hemisphere but was really just on the other side of town from where Clarise and Finch’s heaven of a house stood. It was afternoon on a chilly Saturday, and the doings were at their height. People flitted in and out of their usual Saturday stop-bys: Baron’s Meat and Poultry, Connie’s Cards ’n’ Gifts, Luke’s Good as New Shoe Repair. They were an eclectic mix. Girlfriends called to each other through the throngs of foot traffic, “Hey now, we got to talk.” Men breezed by other men, slapped hands, said things like “My main man, what you know good?” Bow-tied Muslims waved their newspapers with urgent gestures. “Free your minds,” they called; their voices commingling with the high-pitched humming sounds of tambourine-
clapping sanctified women in long skirts and little hats doing a holy dance at the bus stop. The blind man held out his tin cup and jostled with the Jehovah’s Witnesses over prime standing space at the foot of the el. And all through here, the tunes of the Impressions floated from the outturned speakers at the Imperial Skating Rink; they lent smooth cha-cha–able rhythms to the mix as they crooned that everything was all right.

Then Ramona, the saucer-eyed, butter-toned West Philly head turner, emerged from Miss D’s beauty parlor, where she’d just gotten a hard press, blond streaks, and a French roll tucked up high and neat with fifty hairpins. She caught the “yeah yeah” rhythm of the Impressions’ song, but she didn’t sway or finger pop; she carried too much pent-up anger for such outwardly fanciful shows of pleasure. She did smirk at the fireball of a sun, though, which looked to her like a hot-behind woman calling on her lover, the night, to come on and blanket her. She liked to imagine how the sun must be undressing herself for the night right now because such imaginings disrupted the predictability about her own life: her Lit Brothers paycheck down to the penny where she worked in the bargain basement as the assistant buyer; the songs her gospel choir sang every Second Sunday; the catcalls of “Hey, foxy lady,” whenever she walked by the opened door of the Swank Club; more foster children arriving from the state for her mother to raise temporarily, like the
three Vie was getting ready to drop off. Three girls. Ramona especially hated the girls.

She made quick loops through the assemblages of foot traffic on this five-block commercial stretch that fringed a middling-type neighborhood of the not rich, not poor, but sometimes broke till payday; where the consistent salute of the row houses was comforting to the mostly black folks who lived there and made them feel communal and blessed that they owned these patches of property to refinance to send their children to a teachers’ college. Ramona felt neither communal nor blessed, so she avoided conversation with the men who’d want to flirt, the women who’d want to gossip, the children who were never cute to her.

She looked straight ahead as she walked. She felt as she imagined the sun did right now: itching for the night to come, needing to break the routine, be blanketed herself after her hardworking week. Except that Ramona didn’t have the expanse of the sky to put on her seductress dance, only the tiny row house on Addison Street where she lived with Mae, her mother, who had a lazy eye and who made her living by taking in foster children from the state. Nor was the one who Ramona would beckon as powerful as the night. Tyrone. Nice enough, seemed devoted to her, but lacked a city slickness she had come to expect in her men.

She walked fast, deliberately, trying to get what she needed from Sixtieth Street and make it home in
time for her appointment with Vie to receive this new crop of foster children being dropped off. For once Ramona wished her mother would be there—these three girls would most likely be severely traumatized, and Ramona never knew what to do about the traumatized—but her mother, Mae, had gone to see about her ailing sister in Buffalo, so Ramona was left not only to cook and clean and otherwise care for the girls but also to be a pillow for them to cry into when their grief came down. That part she just couldn’t do, especially for the girls.

She turned into Darlene’s hosiery, where they were throwing in a garter belt with the purchase of six pair of nylons. She chose the black garter belt from among the inducements Darlene offered and managed a hurried “uh-huh” and “just fine” to Darlene’s queries about Mae.

“Hear she’s gone to Buffalo to see after her sister,” Darlene said. “Keeping her in prayer, you tell her that; tell her I’m holding her Playtex Eighteen Hour stretch too. Don’t forget now, Ramona. Just came in in that beige color she wanted. A month from Tuesday she’ll be back, right? You minding the foster kids, for her, huh? Better her than me taking that ride; I’d rather walk through Dead Block at twilight and deal with the ghost of Donald Booker than suffer through ten hours on a Trailways bus.”

Ramona didn’t interrupt Darlene as she went on to talk about Donald Booker, the bad seed white boy who had disappeared in the park almost twenty years ago, and to say there’d been another sighting
earlier that day. Ramona hated ghost stories, and this one made her chest go tight. She rushed to get to the door as Darlene’s voice ushered her out, and she left clutching her box of smoke-colored hose. Even though her mother always told her those dark stockings on her light legs looked whorish. “Get the cinnamon-colored; that’s the shade a girl who purports to be a Christian like you should be wearing,” Mae always said. Ramona shook off her mother’s voice about the color of stockings. Least she could do was show off her legs in the shade she wanted, especially after being saddled with grief-stricken girls until Mae got back.

She passed the five-and-dime where the window was done up in an oversized box of Jean Naté toilet water. “The scent for all of his senses,” the sign read. The bright yellow box stopped Ramona, made her back up to gaze in the five-and-dime’s window. She fingered the change from her stockings, which she’d dropped into her coat pocket. “A dollar and nine cents,” the sign seemed to whisper, “splash on this, and he’ll be all over you for a well-spent dollar nine.”

The streetlamp in front of the five-and-dime popped on, and Ramona shrugged off the whispered enticements of the Jean Naté. What was the sense in eating into next week’s bus fare just to make herself irresistible to Tyrone when she was only going to have to sneak him up to her tiny bedroom? Piece of car he drove barely had a back seat, and surely he couldn’t afford a room at a drive-in
motel, much less a lavish suite somewhere downtown where Ramona thought she belonged.

The March wind was starting to gurgle and belch on Sixtieth Street, and Ramona pulled her coat collar up around her ears. She was glad she’d worn her good trench coat with the genuine suede trim; she always wore her good clothes when she got her hair done on Sixtieth Street lest the loud-talking women in the shop think she was needy. They knew she made a half-decent living as the assistant buyer in Lit Brothers bargain basement, and she didn’t want anybody to guess her real financial nonworth, how Mae was always siphoning her money, talking her out of generous bits of her pay week after week while Ramona watched in horror as her hard-worked-for dollars slipped through her own fingers into Mae’s card-playing hands like Johnson’s baby oil. So Ramona wore her good trench coat with the genuine suede trim in order to cover up for Mae.

Ramona straightened her back and brushed at her new French roll. She turned from the five-and-dime window and made her way toward the Sun Ray drugstore on the corner. Decided if the sun could do her thing with the night so boldly, she could certainly stop at the Sun Ray, treat herself to a Coke, sit at the counter, and listen to the els go by. She hoped she wouldn’t run into any of the gospel choir, who’d surely want to talk. She wanted instead to try to think about Tyrone. Wanted to try yet again to summon up those tingling feelings that glittered that she thought she should have for Ty
rone. Except every time she tried to think about Tyrone in the dreamy-eyed way appropriate for a woman allowing herself to fall in love, she’d end up sighing to herself, the way she guessed the sun would have sighed had she not been able to beckon the night; it wasn’t Tyrone’s face she’d see at all. It was a face more formed, hardened, lined in ways that stirred Ramona’s passions. She felt cheap and common when she thought about that face in such a gushing, silky way. It was Tyrone’s father’s face. Ever since she was a teenager and would giggle to her best friend Grace how fine she thought Perry was, he’d had that effect on her. And Grace would tell her he was too old, old enough to be her father, and what did her father look like anyhow because on
The Edge of Night
somebody was in love with an older man and it turned out just to be a need for a father figure? But Ramona never knew her father; some high-yellow sailor who came and went with the ships at the navy yard was all she knew, so she told Grace that couldn’t be it because Perry was brown as a chocolate snap cookie, and probably as sweet.

She shifted on the stool and nestled her body against the frame of the stool, which was padded and covered in red vinyl, and ignored the conversation bursting around her so that she could chase away thoughts of the father and try with everything in her to fall into mink-lined thoughts about Tyrone. She drew hard on her straw and swallowed a gulp of Coke. The cola was sweet and strong and
fizzed all the way up into her head and threatened to push back out through her nostrils. There it was again, Perry’s face instead of Tyrone’s, all etched with lines that were gullies of entrenched manhood, signs of hard living that now that she was in her twenties Ramona knew often made tender lovers.

She shook the image of Perry again, now she had to. The whistle that still blew at five as if it had people to dismiss was sounding at the abandoned bread factory. It was almost time for her meeting with Vie; she had to go.

T
he plastic chair covering kept wanting to talk as Ramona listened to Vie going on and on about the blowout down at the office she’d had over the placement of the three foster girls waiting in the car. Vie was a big-busted, big-hipped woman and was sweating on the couch, even though it felt like wintertime outside, and squirming and forcing the air under the plastic to sigh and squeak almost right on cue so that Ramona didn’t even have to utter “unhunh,” and “mn,” and “is that so?”

“Imagine, Ramona,” Vie said, casting her large arms up and down, and looked to Ramona as if she were getting ready to do some Boardwalk-type dance like the cool jerk or Mickey’s monkey. “That old Til gonna threaten me and I’m on official time, talking about I better let her have those girls or she gonna do to me what she did to my brother all those years ago. Oh, yes, she did. So you know what I did:
I had them hold her over. Oh, yes, I did. And I got a restraining order put on her, all of them in that house; they are not to try to contact those girls long as they’re under the jurisdiction of the court unless I say so, okay. First of all, she can’t have the girls ’cause she’s a convicted felon, and we can’t be forced to place any child with a convicted felon that’s not their natural parents.”

Ramona was half listening to Vie now. She already knew the story of Larry getting his head darn near split in two trying to claim somebody’s baby girl as his own; that story had followed him from downtown up to West Philly, where Vie and her brother moved shortly after Ramona and Mae. Ramona didn’t blame the woman who’d cut him; everybody knew Larry had lost the workings to his manhood during the union riots. Still, every other weekend, even now, Ramona would hear about Larry beating somebody up in some club even though he was well into his fifties. Ship-shop shape, though, since he worked out regularly at the boxing gym on Pine Street; rumor was that he’d even sparred for Sonny Liston in his prime. Ramona reasoned he had to, forced to go through life with a smashed dick like that, had to prove his manhood in other ways.

Now Vie was talking about how hard she’d had to work to rise from general clerk to case manager, thirty years it took her, plus had to put herself through community college to get her associate’s degree, and she was damned if she was gonna undig
nify her position and allow those girls to go with that convicted felon Til. “I mean those girls darn near watched their mother bleed to death, do you get my point, Ramona?”

Ramona nodded and listened to the plastic chair covering clacking under Vie as she shifted around on the couch.

“Furthermore,” Vie went on, “even if she didn’t have a record from what she did to my brother all those years ago, I still have serious concerns about their lifestyle, all of them in that house, serious concerns.”

“Lifestyle? What about their lifestyle?” Ramona asked, her focus back to what Vie was saying. “Do they drink and smoke and gamble?” Ramona thought about Mae’s persistent card playing when she asked it.

“No, actually there are some, well, some gender identity issues, oh, yes, there are—”

“Wait a minute, are you saying that they’re funny?” Ramona interrupted. “That those girls can’t go with their natural kin because the aunts or uncles might be funny?”

“I’m not saying it’s anything I can prove, okay, Ramona, but come on, all of them in that house never been married—”

“Me neither, Vie. I’m a single woman.”

“Now, Ramona, your womanhood ain’t never come into question, okay—”

“You single too, Vie.”

“Look, yeah, I’m single, but ain’t a damned thing
wrong with me. Okay. All I’m saying is that as case manager I can use my discretion, and if Til and the rest of that brew really want those girls, they gonna have to go before a judge, oh, yes, they will, and trust me, with the backlog, hmh, they’ll be a long time getting a hearing with a judge, oh, yes, they will.”

“Yeah, but, Vie, they’re the natural kin to those girls.” Now Ramona shifted, and the plastic covering her chair started to moan and groan. “I mean, if not them, don’t they have any other natural family that could take them in?” She asked it even though she knew Mae would have never asked such a question, wouldn’t want to compete with any natural family for the dollars that constantly flowed through there, payment for the children’s upkeep, and for Mae’s time and bother.