The Sweet by and By (15 page)

P.S. I borrowed your dark green earrings, OK?

Love, J.

Resilient as always, she was on to the next thing. I hoped I would see her later but knew it was unlikely with Brandon in the picture. Riffling through the few clothes I had not already packed, I searched for the coolest thing I could find to wear under the suffocating syn- thetic material of my graduation gown. I settled on a rust colored linen blouse and matching skirt. I had decided not to walk around campus in my cap and gown, but I wanted to put it on once in front of the mirror. The mortarboard fit, and surprisingly, I was ordained as

one of the extremely few people in the world who don’t look idiotic wearing one. Maybe it had to do with the size of my head, I don’t know. I stood looking in the mirror, feeling ready. I looked ready for the next thing, med school and whatever else. My stomach growled. I needed to eat something before the ceremony, or I’d have to wait until after to go to lunch with Mama and Althea. I told her that I didn’t want her to spend a lot of money, that I’d be just as happy with something simple. I meant it, but I knew even then that alongside Mama’s pride, my instinctive reserve would be negligible, especially with Althea involved. She didn’t have children of her own, and I was hers by effect, especially on occasions when having a daughter was a desirable accessory for her extremely busy life.

“Where do y’all have in mind, Mama?” I had asked. “You’ll have to make a reservation to go anywhere today because State is graduat- ing too.”

“You just don’t worry about it,” she answered. “It’s gon be our surprise.”

I put on some earrings. I probably would have worn the ones Janice took, but it didn’t matter. Instead I chose some antique-finished silver ones, and a silver chain with a cross that had belonged to Grandma, the one thing she wore every day of her life. I rubbed my fingers over the cross, it had tarnished some from years against my grandmother’s skin, sweating at work or at home, which was also mostly work. I didn’t feel particularly religious, but I had wanted that cross when she died. I wanted to wear the strength of her years and the changes she saw living them. I wanted her life to rub off on my skin and become part of my body, not relegated to memory alone. I dropped the talis- man inside my blouse and unzipped the gown, disrobing and throw- ing it over my arm. I decided to meet Mama and Althea downstairs because if they came up to the room, Althea would have had more than a few comments about the way we had decorated it, and of all times, I didn’t need to hear that on the day I was moving out. I was

leaving it forever anyway. Already I found myself caring about other things. Even if I couldn’t name them, they were the real pieces of the future, poised to spring into my path, like a roomful of invited guests on the other side of a door, waiting to yell, “Surprise!” and rush in to celebrate an occasion with me, only me, at the center of it. I pushed open the heavy front door of the building and strolled into the bright- ness, out onto the perfectly watered and trimmed green lawn, the sort that should be a prerequisite for all college campuses. The smell of cut grass and f lowering trees overwhelmed me as I shielded my eyes against the sun to see Mama and Althea walking toward me, cameras dangling.

“Hey!” Mama yelled. “We’re late cause Althea was bound to try on a hat. I told her nobody was gon wear a hat to graduation, it wasn’t like Easter Sunday.”

Althea had obviously succeeded because she was holding a dark blue wide-brimmed beauty with a black satin ribbon on her head as she broke into a run. “Look at you, girl. Look at you!” she was half laughing, half crying. “It’s your day, April!” The standard line she de- livered was no less sincere for having been spoken to every honoree at every imaginable occasion, but seeing the two of them run across the Shaw University campus, it felt true, specifically for me. I held onto my mortarboard, for a minute I couldn’t catch my breath, and then I broke into a run too, squealing my way into their outstretched arms.

c h a p te r th i r te e n

Rhonda

T

he Grove Swim and Racquet Club has a long, curvy drive- way that runs down a hill through tall pine trees on both

sid

es and then opens up into a wide space that looks like some-

body decided by-God to build a swimming pool for their neigh- borhood and also by-God to dig up anything and everything in the way to make room for it. Besides a huge L-shaped swimming pool and a baby pool with a fountain in it, they also put in twelve tennis courts and a two-story brick building that looks to me like it oughta be a bank but has drink machines and wood benches outside. All my imagined pictures of how nice it must be were a whole lot prettier than how it really was once I was standing there looking at it for the first time. The Grove sure ain’t a grove anymore.

I never told anybody I went to see Wade. I thought it was pretty brave of me just showing up, but then I also thought what the hell, if it’s too weird, fuck it, I’ll just leave. I’m all the time having to talk myself into stuff. If I only did what came natural, I woulda quit a long time ago.

The asphalt parking lot was full of cars that day, mostly brand- new ones, like shiny cellophane candy wrappers scattered in the sun. They said on TV it was gonna be ninety-three degrees by the middle of the afternoon but it already felt like twice that much to me, standing in cutoff shorts on blacktop that turned

into a frying pan in summer. I guess everybody that didn’t have to work for a living thought the pool was the only place to be on a Monday in August. I can’t say I blame em.

A long red convertible wheeled into the lot close to where I was, so fast it sent pebbles and dirt f lying. Some of em hit me in the legs, baby yellow jacket stings, like the driver was trying her best to tear up the pavement that her own club dues had paid for. That seemed like a dumb thing to me, but I really do wonder if maybe when you’re rich you feel like you’re bound to tear up something every once in a while just to remind yourself that you’ve got plenty of money to either fix it or buy something else. Believe me, there’s lots of times I don’t give a damn and don’t mind if you know it, but I try to take care of what little bit of something I’ve got. Maybe one day I’ll have some more and if I do, I hope I’ll stay the same.

A fat lady was working hard to lift herself out of the red car, wearing a long kaftan sort of wraparound dress, big as a bedspread, with lime green and pink ferns and monkeys hanging by their tails printed top to bottom. She breathed hard and fanned herself once she was on her feet and steady. I kept my distance. I noticed she was wearing shoes with shells on top of them and kitten heels and I wondered if she might not be better off in a f lip-f lop. She lowered her wide round sunglasses and looked at me over her nose, but I reckon she decided she didn’t know me and didn’t need to, so she reached into the backseat, pulled out a tote bag full of magazines, and tucked a plastic bag of carrot sticks into it. Shit, I thought. I was positive I was the only one who either didn’t belong or wasn’t invited by a “belonger.” The woman slammed her car door like she meant business, and I started to move my tail out of there, but she walked to the gate and inside, not paying me any more mind. So I stayed where I was, standing by the chain-link fence that went all the way around the pool, staring through little diamonds of wire. If I stared hard enough at the crisscrosses, everything else started to blur, but if I looked in the holes, the spaces between the wires, to

what was on the other side, the fence went away. All those metal
X
s started to look like nothing but a soft gray spiderweb f loating at the edge of my eyeballs. I was playing, going back and forth, back and forth from plain to blurred ’til I thought I might give myself a head- ache messing with my eyes that way. I reckon I had been doing it for about twenty minutes when Wade blew the whistle hanging around his neck and yelled, “Adult swim!”

He stretched his arms up over his head like he was stiff from sitting a long time and glanced in my direction. “Hey!” he hollered out in a different voice, not his serious lifeguard yell, but a “I’ll-be-damned” kind of voice, still loud enough to make a few women look up from their lounge chairs. Wade jumped down from the high lifeguard stand at the edge of the water, his chest and arms were all oiled up and his skin already dark brown even though the summer was only half over. He waved at me. I wished I hadn’t come. Why did I come? Two girls in bikinis wrenched their heads around to see where he was going, spotted me, and when they saw him walking over, huddled into each other whispering. I oughta have known better than to come down here to the Money Pile, I thought. That’s what Grandma called it, I can hear her. “You’re exactly like your mama, too big for your britches. You got somethin to learn about the world, girl, mainly that it’s theirs and not yours and never will be.”

I waved back to him, really more of a half-assed wave, and started to leave on the little Yamaha cycle I had borrowed while my car was being fixed.

“Hey! Hold up!” he said, wiping his face with a faded blue towel that looked like it had seen better days, or too many chlorine sum- mers. I got a lot better towels than that, I thought, and I use peroxide every day of my life. Hair chemicals are strong, and if you don’t think so, look around you next time you’re strolling through Wal-Mart.

A few adults, mostly older ones, were taking the pool away from a bunch of disappointed children who couldn’t understand why they

had to get out so a handful of ladies with wiggly rubber f lower caps could dog paddle back and forth without ever getting their heads wet. I figured the girls near Wade’s chair might go in the water too now that they were out of danger of being splashed or hit in the head with a beach ball, but I got real clear that getting wet was not in their plan, no matter how hot it got.

Wade put his hands on the fence in front of me. “Hey,” he said again, “how you doin?” His face was inches from the chain links.

“Don’t you have to stay up on your chair?” I asked. “What if some- body drowns?”

“I’m not the only one.” Wade laughed and pointed back to a blond- haired heavyset guy over by the deep end with his nose covered in white. “I do the shallow, he does the deep, and with adult swim, the only one in the shallow is gonna be Mrs. Stockton doing her laps, steady as a heartbeat.”

“What is that white stuff people put on their noses anyway? I’ve always wondered that,” I said, even though I had never wondered it and didn’t really care.

“Zinc oxide! Haven’t you ever used zinc oxide? Mac’s nose always burns and peels all summer, and he says the girls don’t like it. I told him, ‘Son, your nose isn’t the reason you can’t get a date.’ ” He laughed and I did too, not because it was that funny; I didn’t even know who Max was. It just seemed like what you do when someone is being nice and laughs. You laugh back.

In the shallow end, a wrinkled woman in a royal blue one-piece with a white stripe on the angle stepped down the stairs into the water like she was in
Gone with the Wind
.

“She looks old to be swimming,” I said.

“Shoot, Honey Stockton swims like a fish. She’s eighty if she’s a day, and she’s down here every afternoon. Reads books in the shade. And I don’t mean magazines either, she says she only reads the classics, all the books she didn’t find time for when she was young. She won’t

go near that pool if there are children in it, but whenever I blow the whistle she’s off like a shot.”

I watched the woman still trying to make her way down the steps. “I don’t know if I’d say ‘like a shot.’ ” I laughed; he didn’t. I felt stupid for being there, talking through a fence to a boy who wasn’t any more interested in me than the man in the moon. I could tell. Girls can always tell.

“Do you want to come in?” he said, breaking the silence, thank God. “I can sign you in as my guest.”

I guess it didn’t occur to him that I didn’t have on a bathing suit under my shorts.

“No thanks.” I acted cool. “I gotta go, we’re real busy at the beauty shop. There’s a lot of weddings in summer. While the weather’s good. Everybody’s got to get their hair fixed, not just the bridal party.”

“You do hair?” he asked, like he’d never laid eyes on a beautician before.

I know I turned red, I was embarrassed, but then I thought, “What the hell did he think I was, a doctor or lawyer?” I didn’t answer him, which was a good thing because I was mad about being embarrassed, and I prob’ly woulda said something mean. Slow down, Rhonda, I told myself, the whole world ain’t against you. Sometimes I have to be reminded of that, it’s what comes with wanting to stand up for myself. Part of the territory, and it’s a good thing I know it or I’d make myself some enemies without ever meaning to.

“I think that’s great,” Wade went on. “I always knew you had style, Rhonda, seeing you around school. Confident. You didn’t know I knew your name did you?”

He must have seen I was shocked. We didn’t know each other except to say “hey” once in a while.

“I just went and looked in an old yearbook at the class ahead of mine,” he said. “Right there you were. I remember under your pic- ture, where it says, ‘Dreams.’ Yours said: Horse Trainer.”

I softened. “It’s a dream that hasn’t come true yet. Maybe, I don’t know. I shoulda said ‘Hair Trainer.’ ”

“It might be easier training horses,” he said, and f inally, we both laughed together. I’d never known any guys like him. So nice, for no reason other than he wanted to be. He was like a foreign country to me.

“Well I don’t have to look in the yearbook to know you.” I perked up. “Everybody knows you. The golden boy of all time, Wade Stokes.”

“That’s what you think?” His voice changed.

“That’s what everybody says.” I was trying to keep it light. “But do you think that?”

“I know you’re smart and goin to college on a scholarship and your family’s got money, and you’re probably gonna make a helluva lot more of it one day before long. And even if you don’t you’ll prob’ly have everything you ever want. Doesn’t that about sum you up?”

“Maybe not,” he said, looking down at his bare brown feet, and it’s funny, right that second I knew we weren’t f lirting. Not that I ever really had thought we were but why else was I there except hoping he might be interested in me, in spite of believing, cause I’d been told to, that nobody like him would ever be interested in someone like me. He raked his hand through his wavy hair, curlier in the heat and humidity. It was longer than I remembered ever seeing it before.