The Sweet by and By (14 page)

“Janice, let’s go.” I grabbed her hand. I wanted to remove her with- out even looking at Brandon.

“It’s okay, April, I’m fine. He gets like this. I’m fine.” “It’s not okay. I’m taking you out of here.”

“Who the hell are you talkin to, bitch? This is between Janice and me. You need to get your ass out of my house, that’s what you need to do.”

“April, just go,” Janice said.

“Janice, do you know what you’re doing?” “It’s better if you go.”

“You heard her, get the fuck out.” Brandon sneered. “I’m calling the police,” I said.

“You do and I’ll fuckin dropkick the dog.”

“April, go, please. I’m begging you to go. I’ll be fine. I’ll see you at home.”

I’m ashamed that I left her, I should have called the police anyway. Not that anything would have happened. By the time someone got there, Brandon would probably have been passed out, and Janice back

out in the living room enjoying the party. She was used to it, that’s what she said. He wasn’t a bad guy, only when he had too much to drink, that’s what she always said. She knew what I thought. That never stopped her.

I sat up in bed. It hadn’t really hit me that I was actually graduating in a few hours until I heard Mama’s voice on the phone, and even then it was like she was talking about someone else. I was going to have a diploma put into my hands before I knew it and be told what amounts to “Congratulations, you’ve done it, now go be an adult and make your life mean something, to yourself, your family, and your com- munity.” “Anything more than that is gravy,” the chaplain had said at baccalaureate. Well, I was interested in gravy. I had worked too hard not to be. When they announced honors last week, I called Mama to tell her I was summa cum laude. First she asked, “Some of what?” but when I explained, she said she never in her life thought she would need to know Latin, but those particular words suited her fine.

The angle of the morning sun made a bright streak through the window, across the night table, now visibly very dusty, and onto the wall opposite. I heard sounds of first stirrings in the hall by my neigh- bors, also likely awakened by their own family alarms in whatever form. Shower spray blasted on tile, voices echoed in the cavernous bathroom. I didn’t think about it at the time, but I would never wake up to that sound again in my life, not that it was necessarily some- thing to be missed, much less mourned, but it occurred to me how quietly experience slips away unnoticed, camouflaged by its relative unimportance. Then at some point you step back and take a look, and what’s in front of you is like a tangled wad of string, all the “un- importants” rolled together in a loose knot, to be recognized as your very own and cherished, or mistaken for trash and discarded. And if you’re lucky, it hits you—that knot of strings, wound and intertwined, is your life, and savoring it is what you want to do. I think about my mother’s work. She sees the biggest part of her job as helping to hold

the threads of a life together, savoring anything at all that can be used to sew something lasting. Determinedly, she will stitch meaning into the fabric of a being, creating, for an old and lonely soul, a protective garment, for a time, against the chill of loss, forgetting, and being forgotten.

The door f lew open, slamming against the particleboard armoire that served to hold whatever clothes a student deemed better than the wadded-up-in-a-drawer variety. Janice threw her backpack angrily on the bed, the force of which jolted the steel frame. “I told him he could fuck himself.” She sneered as though I could enter without pref- ace into her stream of consciousness, which in a way, I could.

I threw the covers off and put on a light bathrobe even though the May sunlight was already heating up the room. I cracked the window for some air and stood opposite her.

“Janice, you need to wake up.”

“I know what you think, April, but it’s not that. It’s only some- times it’s like something snaps and he drinks too much and I don’t know who the fuck he is when that happens, but it’s not like it’s all the time. He loves me.”

“This is not about how he feels about you, Janice, this is about him having a problem.”

“How do you know?” she retorted.

“What I know isn’t the point. I want you to hear what I’m saying to you. Please.” I picked up my cosmetic bag; I didn’t know what else to say. The signs were embedded inside me like sensors before I was ever conscious of them, from when I was a child. There are the blurry memories of a towering man’s voice and body—still, in my mind, I never see his face. There is no face, it’s all sound, rage. It is my father, screaming at Mama, and when he had a “fit,” as she called it, I was so afraid that I would hide in my room until it stopped, which usually wasn’t until I heard a car start. That blessed sound meant it was over and I could come out and jump into bed, pretending to be asleep so

Mama wouldn’t feel bad that I had heard all of it. She knew I wasn’t asleep, and I knew that she knew, but the ritual saved us having to live through it again by talking about it and instead let us take in the quiet of temporary forgetfulness. A psychologist would say we should have addressed it and may well have been right, but at the time, we did what felt natural, protecting ourselves by licking our wounds privately rather than reopening them in the presence of one another. I believe that fortitude helped form me, perfectly or not.

I was five or six when my grandmother barreled into the yard in her old Oldsmobile station wagon—we didn’t have a driveway. It was a hot summer morning because I was playing outside barefoot, and there was still dew on the ground, which made everything in the grass stick to my feet. Grandma kissed me on top of the head and marched straight into the house. Minutes later, she and Mama made several trips back to the car, loading it with mounds of suitcases, cardboard boxes, and bulging paper grocery bags.

“What are y’all doing?” I asked. My stomach had a knot in it. Grandma said, “Y’all are coming for a long visit at my house,

honey,” and she stopped at Krispy Kreme and got us donuts on the way. They were good and warm, and Mama let me have two, know- ing that I might feel sick afterwards from the heart-stopping combina- tion of sugar and fried dough that for a child in North Carolina was like having heaven in your mouth. It wasn’t long after that drive that Mama started wearing a nurse’s uniform to work every day. We never went home again, and I never asked why. The intuition of a child holds more knowledge of what is real than adults ever imagine is the case.

Until I was twelve, I only heard about my father in bits and pieces, like a crossword puzzle that was never finished, a mix of cryptic clues paired with what were at best guessed-at answers. I saw him even less. He showed up at Grandma’s from time to time, usually when she wasn’t there if he could help it, but he ignored me and went straight

for Mama. The sole consistency of those visits, deeply ingrained, was that they always ended with the same blur of rage in the kitchen that sent me running for the cool pine f loor under my bed to hold my breath for the sound of his car leaving. The long-standing blur came to an end at the beginning of sixth grade. I came home from school and Mama was already home from work, which was strange in itself. She and Grandma were sitting in the living room together, and I could tell they were talking about something serious by the way they looked at me when I burst in the front door with my stack of books. I always carried a big stack of books. When people asked me why I had so many more than the other children my age I said, “I’ve got homework in all of em, what do you want me to do?” They always laughed and someone would say to Mama, “You got a smart one, Lorraine. Willful too. She’s gon do just fine.”

Instead of telling me to get started on my homework before dinner, Mama got up from the sofa and took the books from my arms. She tried to make a joke about how heavy they were and said if all that was in these books was going to have to fit into her little girl’s head, they might have to clean out some of what was already in there. I didn’t say anything because there’s nothing worse for a child than when a grown-up is trying to pretend like everything’s fine when it’s clear that it’s not. Mama piled the books on Grandma’s low coffee table, my favorite place to sit on the f loor and do my homework.

“April, I’ve got to tell you something and I don’t know what you’re gon feel, but I want to say that whatever you feel, that’s all right.”

“Yes ma’am?” I said.

She looked brief ly at my grandmother, then back to me. “Your dad- dy’s dead. He drove his car into a tree in the middle of the night.”

I remember standing there and wondering if I was supposed to cry, but I waited for my eyes to start and they didn’t. Then it bothered me that nothing happened. I was supposed to react. I replayed Mama’s words in my mind and at the end of them, there was still a blank,

like on a math test. I didn’t know the right answer. Nothing came. Without moving, I said, “Can I have a snack?” Grandma jumped up on cue and went to the kitchen where she cut a piece of pound cake and poured a glass of milk. I took it back to her tiny second bedroom, the room that had become my room while she and Mama shared her bedroom, which still had two twin beds in it from when Granddaddy was alive. My room was also Grandma’s sewing room, and she still had an old pedal sewing machine in addition to the newer Singer, which was the source of many of my clothes, and all of my dresses. I sat on the f loor and ate sweet pound cake and waited for something to come into my head about my daddy and the only thing I could get to was the blur with no face and the shouting terrifying voice, and so I would take another bite of cake and let it fall apart in my mouth with a sip of cold milk, going back and forth with cake and milk, until it was gone and I stretched out on the bed in my clothes and fell asleep. I did not do my homework, I did not eat dinner, I slept all the way through the night. The next morning Mama told me we would drive to the funeral, she would take me. I asked her if we had to, and she said yes we did, that I might not feel like it right then, but there wouldn’t be a chance to change my mind later. That day I would learn that you don’t always leave people because you hate them, but instead because you cannot bear the burden of them. The agony of my daddy’s living was my mother’s slow dying, and she was not ready to die. She found it in herself to say no, not knowing exactly what the “no” even meant, but she knew that she couldn’t do any more for the man she had loved and married. She couldn’t watch her life and my childhood drain away slowly, dirty dishwater after the meal is long over.

Mama cried at the funeral, I did too, but I think it was more seeing her cry that got me upset. Grandma did not go. She had not hated my daddy, but she had not loved him either. She had therefore closed the chapter a long time ago and wasn’t interested in reopening it. Soon after, we went back to what had become our life together, rather

seamlessly. My daddy hadn’t been part of it for years, he was less a part now. He was no longer someone whom, had I the desire, I could have sought out and found not more than fifty miles away. He was no more, and we went on.

I had the highest average in my grade, the first time a black girl or boy had ever had that distinction. Mama continued at the nursing home. It had become for her a fertile ground in which she planted an entirely new life, yielding more than she could have ever known ahead of time. Every night, or the ones when she got to eat supper at home, she told stories from her day at work, a little thing that one of her patients had done or said, a private moment shared with her be- cause she had become an intimate by effect, a role that, it must be said, she treated like a royal appointment. Her stories were not a breach of that privacy, rather they were an invitation for us to enter into a way of looking at life, standing in the present with a view into the distance. Her work with old people changed her, and by effect, me, and I found myself looking at my own grandmother differently, the woman who had rescued us in a beat-up station wagon from a monster that I now am able to see as more sad than horrible.

Sometimes I sat at the table with Grandma and did nothing except look at her hands, thinking about everything they had touched in all her years of living. Cotton, tobacco leaves, babies, laundry and strong lye soap, then money in the cash register of the one-room store that Granddaddy ran in the country, less a store than a gathering place for black farm workers with no other place to come together except church one day a week. Until Granddaddy died, she had doled out Coca-Colas and hoop cheese and crackers to more people than she could count. She had handled fabric and thread and made quilts, blouses, dresses, pants, and one time in particular she tried to make a bathing suit for me but it was disastrous, by her own admission, and she never tried such a thing again. She defended her failure by tell- ing me that people were not meant to linger in water anyway, it was

for taking a bath and getting out of before you got sick. I also found myself listening to her voice, the changes in pitch when she recounted something that made her mad, or a piece of gossip from church, or a memory of something that happened to her and Granddaddy so long ago that the details would change every time she told the story. Sometimes she caught me staring at her and said, “What you lookin at, child, you make me nervous as a cat,” but I think, without even recognizing it, she liked the attention. And I learned that attention is a prize in love, the first thing you give and the first thing to go when the new wears off.

The dorm’s capacious bathroom had filled with steam by the time I had let the hot water spray pound my neck and shoulders for as long as I wanted. The hall was quieter. When I returned to the room, Janice was gone. On my pillow, she had written a note on a single sheet torn from a spiral composition book. Her handwriting was surprisingly beautiful for someone who didn’t care much about anything to do with pen and paper.

Dear April, I DO hear you, and I will think about what you said, I promise.Thank you for listening (again). And Happy Graduation . . . to us both!!!