Tiny Dancer (12 page)

The sun dropped from out of the sky leaving a pale thin paste along the rim of pine trees.

I wished I could stop all those thoughts from churning around about my sister.
For one, how people try to say nice things like ‘God must have needed her,’ stuff like that.
Why would he need her? Daddy needed her, and Vesta. They’re both lost, like a big wind came in and blew us all to a different place. Every day I wake up and look over at my sister’s bed. And then I realize we’re never going back to where we were.

I had that feeling stirring that said I had to admit to myself what was what instead of what was expected. That was when I realized that not since my mother left had I been happy.

The clouds over Theo’s house divided, like old chewing gum pulled apart. It was like the doors opened to the hospital. I had not let myself think too much about that night in the hospital. I knew so little when they were wheeling me from the emergency room to a room in the children’s ward except those bright lights glaring down at me. Vesta had finally nodded off in a chair after accepting light sedation. Daddy tried to sleep beside me in a reclining chair. All he could do was pace.

Once I woke up yelling but my nurse gave me another blessed white pill. The nurse finally told Daddy to go down to the cafeteria since he kept getting in the way of nursing rounds. It was good people were telling him what to do. I did not believe Daddy was up to decision-making.

Daddy stepped out into the hallway saying he was going for a carton of milk from the cafeteria.

The white pill was taking over just as a large black man came aside my hospital bed. He touched my arm, his thumb inserted under my hospital band.

I gasped upon sight of the happy face leaning over me, serene, like he had come to carry me off to some distant peaceful place. He had a hooked nose and eyes dark as a pony I had once ridden at summer dance camp. He said my name like he knew me. He knelt beside my bed and watched me until I fell into my drug-induced slumber. I thought he might be an angel sent to take me out of the pain.

Now
, watching Reverend Theo rock from his back porch, it all came back to me. He was the big black angel kneeling next to me that night. How he slipped around security and got into the whites wing of the hospital was beyond me. There Reverend Theo stood that night keeping vigil over me yet never having said word about it since. He had kept me at such a distance at first but it was not because he did not like me. The walls between us were not walls we erected. Slowly, we had found a way around them.

How to get back was the big dilemma of the moment.

             
                                                        * * * * *

The kitchen windows dripped with the sweat of the stew on the back burner near to bubbling over. I turned it down searching the kitchen for Vesta. I headed into first the living room and then the den calling out to her.

Climbing the staircase, the sound of voices drew me to their door. This time Daddy was mad. He yelled so
loud I felt a pain on Vesta’s behalf. Their door flew open unexpectedly. I stepped aside, not saying word to Vesta who looked less than happy to find me standing so close by. “Eavesdropping are we?”

“Just passing through
,” I said, refusing to be drawn into her circus.

I walked quietly past. But once inside my room, I slammed my door.

That night I only half filled my dinner plate excusing myself upstairs. I was becoming as skilled as Daddy, learning the fine art of escaping the tension hanging over the things remaining unsaid.

Remaining invisible and out of their line of fire, Vesta might not notice me slipping away to the Miller
’s house tonight.  But I had no sooner slipped through the sunflowers than I ran smack into Reverend Theo waiting for me on the other side. “I can’t let you visit any more,” he said.

“I
have to,” I said. “My house is a house of death.”

“Your stepmother won’t let it happen, you coming over all the time.”

I begged him but it did not matter. He sent me home even after I manipulated him with tears.

I resigned myself to being miserable the remainder of the summer. I retreated each day to my room, mailing off letters to schools, collecting a whole cardboard box of information about universities while deciding how far away I could go for my studies. If Claudia Johnson could earn a scholarship, so would I. I would study night and day, I decided.

I closed the curtains so as not to see those sunflowers looking so happy without me. I opened an atlas to draw points on it to mark each university from my stack. It might as well be a pleasant place, a change of pace from home. I organized the colleges into categories in a notebook especially noting the ones near the ocean or that offered winter skiing as a class. I seldom saw snow for more than a few days in North Carolina at least here in the Sandhills.

Two days of that and
I could not stand it any longer. I opened my curtains. Reverend Theo had put in rows and rows of vegetables for his fall garden. On the far side of the yard he had built a double parallel wall of chicken wire and fence posts. In between the two walls of chicken wire, he had strewn straw. Within the straw, he planted red potatoes. I remember him telling the men about it. Unlike potatoes hidden under the blanket of ground, small pink orbs hung from the vines in plain sight, thus, his wall of potatoes.

He was at work installing a mini water tower beside his house. I knew Vesta would use that
eyesore as another reason to hate him. There he worked, whistling so happy, like he did not even think about me at all any more.

Maybe it was time I hated him too. Maybe I did need to stick to my own kind.
I dropped to my bed and sobbed.

                                                                      * * * * *

The moon was so bright Monday night it seemed like daylight pouring into the bedroom. Maybe that was why I thought I was dreaming again when a thin figure leaned over me, staring down at me. The moon outlined the shadowy person from behind as she held out a queen’s scepter. I pulled the covers down from my face to look at what I perceived as an apparition.

“Flannery.”

I yanked down the quilt. “Vesta?” I shook myself awake, turning on the table lamp so I could pull on my eyeglasses. Vesta hunched over me holding the regional championship trophy.

“Did you know this was broken? Did you break it?” she asked, accusing me, of all things, of vandalism in the middle of the night.

“Vesta, you’re not in your right mind. I didn’t break anything.” I was about to flip off the table lamp when she sat across from me on Siobhan’s bed. No one had dared sit on the sacred pink bedspread all year.

“It’s broken. It just seemed like something you’d do, you know, being careless,” said Vesta. “A joke, maybe?”

“That would be a sick joke.” I was fully awake now. I sat up and leaned against the headboard clasping my hands around my knees.

She
held the trophy in both hands. By lamplight I saw it was just as she said, the little Irish dancer once adorning the top of the trophy was broken off. She started speaking in such a low and rambling way I thought for a second she was sleepwalking. “If you didn’t do it, then who? Is it Siobhan, trying to haunt me?”

“You’re tired. Here, you lie down.” I sighed, slipping out of my bed. It took little effort for
her to crumple onto Siobhan’s bed. Then I was surprised to find how easily she let me her tuck her in, slipping her weathered feet under the coverlet. She dropped the trophy onto the floor succumbing to my attention. I dabbed my stepmother’s cheeks with a tissue but surprisingly she didn’t raise a fuss about me touching her. I do not know how long must have lay crying in her room before coming to see me, but the circles under her red-rimmed eyes indicated she had been genuinely upset. She thanked me and then she closed her eyes. She fell asleep so fast it made me feel useful to her for once.

I lay awake for the few minutes it took to hear
her breathing easy, but no sooner had I turned off the lamp than my door opened. Daddy had gotten up in the night having heard his women talking. “Vesta’s not in our room,” he said, but then he saw her form in Siobhan’s bed, the moonlight enfolding her in long fingers.

“Was she fighting with you?” asked Daddy.

I shook my head for what would be the point of explaining Vesta’s fear? If he doubted my sanity for believing Siobhan was visiting me in my dreams he would certainly throw the net over us for discussing the whys of the broken trophy in the middle of the night.

He went back to his room. I pushed the broken trophy under my bed to hide it. I felt a strange justification in being the one to put it out of sight. Maybe a few months would pass and no one would ask about it. Then I
would throw it into the waste can, the one that was once filled with dead funeral flowers. I saw the bottom of the trophy stand still poking out from under my bedspread, so I kicked it entirely out of sight. 

I did wonder how it had fallen and broken in such a way. Vesta was slurring her words and that could mean that she had doubled up on her sleeping medicine. She must have gotten up in the night and knocked the trophy off the shelf.

It was strange seeing the outline of her small frame in Siobhan’s bed. Then all at once she turned over, apparently awakened by my talk with Daddy. She said, “Flynn told me that you’ve dreamed about Siobhan.”

I liked her better asleep so I spoke softly, telling her about the green hill daydream since it was the most pleasant to retell. But instead of falling back to sleep
she complained with a degree of jealousy, saying, “I haven’t dreamed of her at all. I think there’s something wrong with me. After all, I’m her mother.”  She got up and slipped out of bed still wrapped in Siobhan’s coverlet.

I had carefully preserved Siobhan’s bed as it had been left, not so much as causing a ripple in her coverlet. Vesta minced out of my room and retreated to her bedroom still wrapped up like a rosebud in the pink
bedspread. I wondered if she would remember anything that had transpired between us tonight. Even if she did remember, I doubted she would admit anything that would make her appear vulnerable.

But I liked how Vesta had needed me. There are things that add to life while others subtract. I considered our minutes on this night an addition.

Daddy left a note on my door telling me he had taken Vesta into Raleigh, his usual way of telling me why he was not underfoot on a weekday off. We were not lucky enough to have two cars like the Johnsons. Vesta often wanted him to drive her to the farmer’s market in the city before the heirloom tomatoes were all taken. He wrote, “If you go into the village, pick up a town newspaper for Vesta. She’s got a recipe published in the cooking section.”

Since being in Vesta’s good graces was a place I had not
visited in a long time, I grabbed change from the kitchen change jar and rode into the village on my bike.

One newspaper remained in the stand in front of Bernie’s Drug Store. I dropped in a dime and took it inside. Bernie’s daughter Ellen wiped down the sandwich counter. I ordered a
cup of coffee and a sweet roll and took my breakfast to a booth. I perused the front page for the cooking section, but then a familiar face drew my eye. I looked twice at the photograph thinking I was surely wrong, but I wasn’t. Calvin Miller and a group of black youths were being dragged in handcuffs from a lunch counter in Rockingham. Calvin was a student at the Friendship College in Rockingham, but I thought he was off for the summer.

Then I remembered he had been missing at the last Miller party. When I asked about him, no one said a word to me.
Now that I thought about it, Theo and his relatives all looked at one another as if they knew something but couldn’t say.

I continued reading the article about their arrest. My stomach nearly turned inside out. He and a group of eight others walked into the downtown diner
in Rockingham and ordered burgers at the lunch counter. The cops appeared to be waiting for them. Calvin was identified as a student from the friendship college but resided in Lost City. Lost City was one of the black communities tucked behind a golf course in Vineland. It was really part of Vineland but wasn’t allowed the rights of Vineland’s township. Ratonda lived there too. They had to use well water, had no utilities, and could not vote.

I found Vesta’s recipe in the cooking section. I don’t know why I was surprised to see that it was Rosetta’s recipe for Chocolate Indians. Vesta had asked me how I made them.

I tore out the recipe and tucked it into my pocket. If Vesta saw the article about Calvin Miller, she might connect the name to Theo. I saw no need to rouse more animosity. I shoved the newspaper into the drug store waste bin before leaving. There was a distant rumble of thunder. A black cloud bank moved in from the southwest.

I climbed onto my bike. I was about to pull onto the street and head out of the village when I saw a couple emerge from the small inn off Main. I
climbed off my bike and pushed it to a corner where I could watch unseen. The young dark-haired man was kissing a young blonde woman. He turned and then I knew that he was indeed Drake Keller. The girl with him was not Marcy. I waited, watching them walk toward Drake’s new Impala convertible. She giggled worse than Claudia. I recognized her as an upperclassman. He lifted the trunk lid and dropped a small case into his trunk. They had spent the night in the Village Inn.

He
drove them up toward Main. I waited and just as he was turning the corner, I waved at him. He looked shocked and then turned his face from me. It was too late, though. I had already seen them.

                                                                     * * * * *

Reverend Theo must have found some of the parts he needed for his irrigation system from the salvage yard. The big yellow barrel he used for his water tower was most likely discarded for its sheer ugliness. Of course, it would not be seen from the front of Battalion Street, just out the back and only in plain sight of where Vesta took her coffee most mornings. Lovely, I groaned.

“There has got to be an ordinance of some sort,” said Vesta, pacing in front of the kitchen sink, sloshing coffee as she ranted. Her sullen f
rown when she glared at me suggested she still nursed a resentment toward me.

I
said, “He’s a farmer. Farmer’s have to have water, don’t they?”

“
              Flannery Curry, who has bewitched you?” asked Vesta. “He’s no farmer.”

             
“I have a headache, could we launch the Second Civil War tomorrow?” asked Daddy.

             
I watched under a cloud of tension as Reverend Theo rolled the big yellow barrel to the far right corner of his house.  I knew the pride of his mission, to grow food to give away to the poor. Dorothea had told me outright. “I think I know why he does it,” I finally said.

             
“To run off the whites,” said Vesta, obviously convinced.

             
“No. He wants us all to see.”

              Saturday morning I finished my college folder, a loose-leaf binder filled with the pamphlets and letters from the universities in Wilmington and others I had written, requesting admissions qualifications. 

             
“I’m jealous, this is amazing.” Claudia lay on her stomach next to me. She had slept over. She was more interested in the section I had created under the label “Beach Universities”. “My mother would never allow me to pick out a college for its location. I don’t think she’s going to like it when I tell her I’ve chosen UNCW.”

             
“What’s wrong with liking the place where you go to school?” I asked, dropping alongside her and smoothing out the plastic cover.

             
“She’s trying to please Daddy who’s got this crazy idea that I should be the first Johnson woman to go to an Ivy League school,” she said, twirling her finger above her head like she often did when she repeated one of her parents’ lectures.

             
“Vesta doesn’t talk to me about college at all. I’m free to decide, I guess, ” I said, although I envied Irene and Dwayne’s involvement in Claudia’s choices. I brightened at a thought. “Maybe we could share a dorm room.”

             
Claudia squealed. “Imagine picking out our room linens and lamps together!”

             
I sat up, my head full of the endless possibilities ahead of us, the two of us acting like women who decide our own fate.

             
Then she grew serious. “I have a question. I’ve called here a few times and when I would ask if you were home, your father would say, ‘Isn’t she with you?’ Of course I would make up something on the spot, like I was just checking to see if you were already on your way over to my house.”

             
I did not answer right away.

             
“You were at the Millers, I guess.”

             
Finally I shrugged. “Not any more.”

             
“I knew it the day of Vesta’s party.” Then she said she did not understand my interest in the old couple, especially a black family hated by neighbors. To my relief, she left it at that and didn’t make me as mad as usual. Claudia was not the type person to understand anyone with ways as different from hers as the Millers were to the Johnsons.

             
Irene collected Claudia within the hour, she said, to take her clothes shopping for back-to-school. I dared not ask Daddy about shopping for school clothes, not with him already under so much strain from his work. Besides, the first four months of the fall semester were as warm as summer and I had plenty of clothes to last until the first frost. I was becoming less worried about my wardrobe as I grew more intent on preparing for a university degree.

             
I closed my eyes willing myself to think about how different life would be on campus. I was not certain that Claudia and I would remain friends that long. We barely managed to make it year-to-year through junior high, so I had my doubts about us remaining friends through high school. I didn’t doubt she would make it into an Ivy League school. If that happened, I was sure I would never see her again. I vowed not to let her know how miserable I felt thinking that thought. Her already swollen head would blow up like a melon.

             
I did wish obsessively though for Billy to be on campus the same time as me, although he never talked about going off to a university life. He mentioned more than once he wanted to travel like a vagabond through Europe staying in hostels and meeting someone new every day. I imagined him differently, though. If I got my wish, he might take off for a short excursion but then return feet on the ground. My imagination ran riot with the thought that Billy would return about the time I was graduating high school.

             
When Drake and Marcy babbled about going off to school, I had watched Billy to see if I detected a wistful longing in his brown eyes. I certainly thought wistfully about him. It was in that instant I realized how often my plans had failed to materialize over just such a distraction. I could not entertain the luxury of throwing myself at a boy like Claudia did. She was thick as otters with Billy’s friends over a mere few days. But she had the Johnsons for parents opening the doors ahead of her, pretty as you please. I couldn’t be distracted. Not even by Billy Thornton.

                                                                      * * * * *

              I awoke the next morning to the sound of Reverend Theo’s lawn tractor. Although I no longer shared in the parties under the Miller’s moon, no one could steal the rumble of Theo’s tractor from me. Its familiar racket was as much a home to me as the little pink house in the center of the sunflowers where I hid out preparing my grand departure from Periwinkle House.

             
The sky grayed threatening rain. Reverend Theo was trying to beat the rain into town, same as always, by cutting his acreage ahead of the showers.

             
Daddy shuffled around in their bedroom, not having left for work since his job with Honest Stan did not start as early as the guard job at Equity National. I crept past their bedroom, seating myself quickly at the top of the stairs. Still dressed in my yellow summer pajamas, I clipped out some threads from a pair of Bermuda shorts that needed re-hemming.

             
What I heard next made me wish I had chosen another spot for my sewing.

             
“I just think that your resentment is not with Flannery but with me. I can’t stand to see you punish her when you’re really mad at me,” said Daddy from inside the bedroom. “And for what, that I’m not bringing home the money you had hoped I would by now?”

             
I cringed upon hearing Daddy confronting Vesta again. Not because she didn’t deserve it but she might blame me for his outburst. It was clear their fight was about me. Even though I had not hammered them about her draining my college fund account, she might imagine a conspiracy afoot between us.

             
Vesta shot back, “I just want you to see her as I do because you can’t see the plain truth—she’s your mirror image, and I don’t mean the good side.”

             
I refrained from knocking on their door and demanding Vesta stop blaming Daddy for the fact that I was like him. Before he had met her, we had liked the way we were. Mama had once accused me of being like him too so we considered it our bond.

             
“I think it’s best for Flannery if we separate,” said Daddy, not at all acting like he was going to back down. “She’s at a vulnerable age. She needs you to be a mother to her. I was hoping you would be.”

             
Daddy’s threats emptied out what little remained of my sense of security.

             
I ran downstairs. Tears stung my eyes as I bolted out the back door. But I wasn’t about to wait for Daddy to drag into the kitchen dejected, only to tell me to pack all my belongings. In spite of my issues with Vesta, the last thing I wanted was change of that scale.

             
Rain pelted my forehead but I was too anxiety-ridden to care. Besides, raindrops are a welcome comfort when troubles come spilling down. I ran past the sunflower forest and its forbidden corridors. I ran until I reached the shed. I pushed against the door and made my way inside. The rain let loose overhead battering the tin roof like bullets. I scrambled through the shed that shuddered as I ran across its feeble planks.

             
I rested my forearms against the bare, framed walls, catching my breath. I turned to try and find a place to squat or sit, but only knocked my right barefoot against an old table leg. A dagger-like pain spiked up my leg along with my anger. I punted a bushel basket into the air and then pushed to the back of the shed. I watched the wind-blown rain through the dirty windows.

Vesta had erected the sawhorses again.
But she had doubly fortified it since her first little blockade. They were stacked three-high abutting the corner of Theo’s tangle of golden flowers. My toes bled but I felt nothing. Nothing except the anger I had tamped down so far back I could only trace its roots to the day my mother left. I threw open the door and ran out into the rain. My yellow pajamas were soaked-through within minutes. I shoved hard against the sawhorse wall. The sawhorses rocked back and forth but were too heavy for me to budge. I screamed at the rain and the wind and hit the sawhorses with my fists. I pushed and shoved until the palms of my hands bled down my arms.