Hand over my mouth, I rushed indoors and upstairs. All kids live in secret fear that there’s one thing they mustn’t do or say. Once they’ve blurted that, love and home will never take them in again.
• • •
MOMMA, after six sad weeks of this, mellowed into Mrs. Peacemaker. She tried to make me feel I won’t too underfoot. I knew otherwise but where else was I welcome?
One Sunday Poppa sat heavy in our porch swing, and for the first time in ages, I crawled up onto his lap. His arm made a easy automatic bundle of me. His face, the color of a flowerpot, grew gold and silver nibs. Along his jaw, I did Itsy-Bitsy Spider.
“You’re a royal mess okay,” he said, and wrapped me closer to his bony front. “Look, just because your old pap lives in the doghouse full-time, that don’t mean you got to. If you’re smart—and you are, seeing as how you take after your momma’s side and your aunts—you can choose anything, Minute Waltz. ‘Anything’ covers a peck of ground. If you’ve got all that, why in this world try and act like me? Heck, I wouldn’t if I could help it. I got assigned it.—Tell Poppa why.”
He waited. I clamped on, spooked he’d set me down, shove me away like Shirley had, like Momma did.
I held for dear life on to his shirt, like I was some baby monkey, petrified of heights but treed for good.
He pushed on, “Because you know what your old daddy thinks you’re getting ready for?” My cheek pressed Poppa’s breastbone. I made a questioning sound—balled and locked against him, either eye gone huge. I was about to hear everybody’s unspoken plan for me. Church bells rang. Mrs. Smythe’s canaries made their feathers sputter.
“Why, choosing the perfect fellow, silly britches.” I held on so. “Look, after all, you’ll soon be going on fifteen, right? A long engagement. How does that grab you, My Second Hand? Let’s face facts, pip, you ain’t ever been what you’d call a good student, not like Shirley and them others. Which ain’t to say you’re not smart, understand. But what your momma calls ‘higher learning’ don’t seem real likely for you, right? And you’d go pure stir-crazy sitting forever on this porch with the likes of me and her. So, what’s left a girl? What? I’m asking you. In your own words.”
I felt thick-mouthed, slow. I leaned harder against him. People seeing me from the street wouldn’t think it a bit strange that a child my age could sit in her poppa’s lap, and yet what was this poppa hinting? He caught my upper arm, just a wee bit rough, proving he was asking me for real here.
I mashed closer, wanting to be either safe or noplace at all. “Tell Poppa. What’d be good for you, gal? What comes next? What? I’m asking here.”
I swallowed and tried it, “Perfeck fell …”
He nodded, “Perfect fellow. Glad … Glad that dawned on you, too,” he wagged his head Yes. Only then did our swing move.
I was just coming up to fourteen. “And don’t you worry,” he squeezed me in a nicer way. “When it happens, Runt Funny, and once you’ve moved, you won’t be able to even keep me out of your house. Why, your momma and me we’ll come visit most every Sunday you want us to. You see if we don’t, why wild horses …” I held this man. Had to. Who else?
I felt too bushed or dulled to cry. “Runt? You in there?” he tried and tickle me alive. He made his best worst face. His hairy nostrils looked like burrows where shy animals live. It scared me suddenly, a whole grown man this close.
“I’VE STOPPED blaming you,” Momma told me at dinner. “I think of it as ‘we’ now. You worked to capacity—some genes have held you back, is all. We are poison. Even when certain persons try speaking to me downtown, it feels a good deal forced. Invitation-wise, this household is a ghost ship, The Flying Dutchman, return to sender.—Lucille, no cotillion would touch us, not for a sizable bribe. Believe me, I have made certain overtures. And even if we should turn up on a list now, I couldn’t go through with it. I mean … it’d be like traveling all the way to the New York Dog Show and expecting a blue ribbon for …”
“Enough,” Poppa yelled, struck the table.
“For some three-legged animal. Some three-legged dog!”
She wobbled from the table, coughing up the stairs. Two of us were left.
Since she’d dashed off like a child, that made us left here, a couple. He said, “Pass the butter beans.” I did. I knew, if we were the couple, our marriage was a bad one. I missed her being here. I knew she tried. I forgave Momma’s not yet feeling ready to forgive me. Years I’d seen the woman playact at being hurt over little snubs. Now that she really felt it, deep, her pain scared and stirred me. She wore the same dress all one day and clear into the next. She bumped into the furniture like some old-timer losing eyesight.
Before the skunk, she daily planned my debut guest list. Worried which florist to use. Now when Poppa recalled the down payment on my gown, when he asked if we could get us a refund—Momma give him her most unamused look to date. I was her one child and her schemes for me had always felt a mite ruthless. If only I’d been born as simple as Shirley, that willing to take orders, born as pretty as my onetime friend—store dummy for others to dress up and sell things off of. Not even I thought my face was such a bargain—I tried not to blame Momma for agreeing.
She played piano more. Stayed home all afternoon, the house dark. She left windows open even on cold days so Summit passersby would at least hear how she was the sister of fine piano coaches. She sat rigid: her very upright spine, three octaves of ivory. She concertized, as she called it: This was the large daily favor she doled out to a wormy undeserving world. During her open-windowed afternoons, Momma only risked pieces she knew perfect and by heart. This meant repeating the same five numbers, always in the selfsame order. She never made a single mistake. But Momma had no confidence in one new piece she’d learned for twenty years.
Came the Tuesday afternoon I sat bathing, thinking about nothing—grateful for that. One floor below, in our dim front parlor, Momma stayed after her music, reliable as wallpaper, the same, the same, the same. Then I looked down and saw, between my legs, this long red stripe, a kind of cylinder in water, pushing out past knees. The thing went frayed and feathery at its far end. When, fading pink, it reached my ankles, I stopped smiling. For a second, crazy as poor Shirley with her fit of Ain’ts, I thought that tomatoes’ color had been saved in, then sent out—some stranger knickers-level form of weeping or remembering. But by scooping up bath water near my face—by touching myself—I found: This was no juice but my own. All the red in white me, leaking out.
Slow, moving like somebody real ancient, I crawled free of the tub. I kept eyes aimed forward. I tied on my baggy robe. I went barefoot down carpeted stairs to Momma’s music. There she sat doing her reliable cross-hand runs with no more ado or mystery than a person making toast.
I stood by her black Chickering grand. She wore a Sunday dress on weekdays now, trying to fluff up the self-esteem I’d helped flatten. I waited till she finished her fifth and final concert piece. Done, she turned to me with no expression whatever. I said, “Look, there ain’t no reason I should be bleeding from between my legs, is there?”
Sitting, she drew herself up, fingertips touched her beautiful cameo. “No,” she said. “No fair reason in this world.” Then her features broadened from the inside out. “Yes,” and she fell—face in one arm’s crook—onto keyboard with this slash of spine-crack sound. She laid there weeping, her back bucking like a child’s. I stroked Momma’s neck, the fine and upswept hair. “It’s nothing.” I left out Ain’t this time for her sake. “It’s nothing. I just asked.”
NIGHTS, I heard my people strolling the hallway, no lightning to scare them awake. Discussing the future: mine. Two weeks after bleeding in the bath, I took first serious notice of a big ex-soldier. He’d been keeping eyes on me. (Otherwise how would I have seen so much of his eyes in his eyes?) The uniform, jaw, body all seemed made of solid shoulder, one upright wall—painted mostly gray. For years I thought “soldier” and “shoulder” came from one word. Poppa’s friend
looked back with a readiness unknown since Shirl. Alone as much as I was, I had too much time to think about his gazing at me so. Captain seemed to offer what a best friend my own age was supposed to.—He claimed I brought out the boy in him.
He lingered around the house some evenings, sat beside me in the old porch swing. Poppa joked, flattering the man. Pop kept giving me slow grins and cagey winks I fought not to see. I figured Momma would make quite the fuss over my first caller, and such a wealthy one. I expected her to flirt, to overdress. Instead she acted like Distance come indoors. All day Poppa mentioned how Captain was nice-looking, had a good share of fame hereabout, the big house on Summit long paid for, rental properties aplenty. How onct when General Forrest, old by then, came through here by train, the General waited at the station, asked some black child to run fetch the Captain. From the waiting room’s far side, a crowd watched these two catch up on old times until the 5:42 whipped a grizzled hero off again. Pop pressed his case: “Who else you waiting for, woman, the Lord Jesus? He’s a confirmed bachelor, wouldn’t know what to do. He’d probably throw rocks at it. You expecting Jesus Harvard Vanderbilt Astor or what?”
Polite as Momma acted toward the Captain, she could make her handshake leave a blue icicle bracelet dangling on any person. Pop scolded her afterwards, said that, around Captain, she carried on like Queen Victoria unamused mid-migraine.
Now every night, my folks paced, talking in low solemn tones about whose house I’d be living in for life. Nobody asked me. Momma admitted she was the one who might seem to favor such “an alliance.” True, other local mothers had perked up, even Mrs. Saiterwaite, on hearing talk of Captain’s interest in unlikely me. I was up to seventy-some pounds. Momma knew this could put us back on the social map. She might just use my debut invitation list for the wedding roll call. Without a coming-out, my value marriage-wise had been cut way back. All this she knew. “But,” she said. “For one thing, the age difference.”
“Happens all the time,” Pop announced. “Juliet won’t but fourteen.”
“Juliet who?”
Silent, Poppa was enjoying the moment, “Mrs. Juliet Romeo, ever heard of her?”
“But, dearest, her young man was that age as well.” Momma always considered Literature the biggest name a person can drop. I sat up in the dark bedroom, listening. But not even Shakespeare had swayed my mother.
“I see Captain’s hand with those yellow nails, huge. They look like a war veteran’s hands would. God knows where they’ve been. And I study our child sitting there, knowing not a thing, Samuel. I’m sorry but it makes me the slightest bit nauseous. It just does. I cannot picture any of it together in the same frame.—You think marriage is easy for a woman, just because ours has been so fortunate. But, dear one, marriage has … more excruciating high F’s than the Queen of the Night’s second aria. Everybody cannot do it. She’s so young, she’s not even seen Europe yet, or for that matter Washington, D.C. I want Lucille spared, is all. I promise you, I’d rather have her remain unmarried like my stick-in-the-mud sisters. I would. You mustn’t rush me on this. She’s our only one—she’s been my hope all these years. Of course I’ve known she lacks finish, but still …”
When Pop started in about Captain’s war record again, Momma—pacing—got louder, claimed she didn’t care if he’d won the thing single-handed. It didn’t matter if he owned controlling interest in the world. “Samuel, he’s older than we are.”
“Look, woman, he wants her. I mean, not to be overblunt, but have you got yourself a good long gander at our sweet Runt Funny lately?”
“Do not call my baby that. You know I loathe your doglike nicknames for her.”
“But have you? I mean really looked?”
She rushed him. I heard her, he’d be holding Momma’s wrists to stop her pounding his shoulders. In bed, I leaned back, hands laced behind my head. She started crying in a low, lost, sour way.
In dark, I grimaced, smiled, I panted out of fear. For years, I’d heard the woman define who-all I might, by accident, turn into: a scholar, society butterfly, overnight beauty? But now—in her tone, the ugly gasps out there—I felt her really fighting suddenly for me myself. Me, plain—like I was and had been all along. But, odd, instead of feeling honored, I turned mean. I did. Just kept hardening my heart to the woman who might’ve saved me. After all, I wondered, where had Mrs. Queen of Night been when I needed her? She’d forever hinted I should keep a eye out for some male person, one holding property and a known name. She had criticized my old girlfriend till I dreaded bringing Shirl downstairs into Momma’s royal presence. And now, for once, I decided I wanted to do exactly what Momma’d told me to, back then. Seemed my best way of repaying the woman for all them daily stings, the sighs, small freezing glances doled my way.—Honey, I believed that, by wedding the Captain, I’d be spiting her.
THAT’S how young I was. I couldn’t know that Pop—a dirt farmer who’d married money hisself—would want the same for his child. (He forgot we now had some dollars of our own.) He’d been so pleased with his own odd step-up, he couldn’t imagine anything finer for his girl. Too, I hadn’t taken this into account: Poppa was a man and so was this admired fellow he planned handing me to. That, you find out later, counts. My being Pop’s blood-own single child, Momma’s being his life and chow line forever—these were listed in one column. In the other rode Captain’s being he-horse male. It won. No amount of years in the porch swing with us females had thrown the ledger balance our own way.
Looking back, I pieced all this together. As Mrs. Married, I’d have lots of household hours to mull on how it’d happened. But at the time, it was me alone in the dark. Me, minus a best friend to test things out on. Me, at fourteen, with a gland where a brain should be, one headful of revenge, no notion where babies even come from—me, stretched out there in that fine garlanded bed, hands behind my skull, feeling in pretty complete control for once. Ha! I could weep, remembering.—I want to break into my own story, child. I’d scream, “Fire!” I’d rush my own skinny self free of that big white house, get me out in time. Of course, you can’t ever save yourself in time, can you? That’s one thing about time—it’s like the spring water that has to sit a while before it comes quite clear enough to drink, and by then it’s too room-temperature to quench your thirst.
• • •
POPPA would not take Momma’s No answer. He grew sly (I saw how many lessons he’d picked up from her all along—or her/him?—by now it was hard to chicken/egg them). Not since he got excited about the P.O. job was Pop missing off the porch for two days running: He’d bought a box of sticky caramels after finding out these were a certain seamstress’s favorite. He visited the black lady who still held layaway cash on my deb gown. Sweet-talking, passing around candy to all her children and her whole Baby Africa block, Pop egged her into carrying deb-dress money over towards the wedding one. He whipped out a wad of bills, then went to her best bolted silks and flipped through, picking a perfect royal blue for Momma’s gown. Bridesmaids? There would be none—we wanted it to be simple but elegant, don’t you know. Besides, I had no girlfriends. He knew the Captain had a right to wear his uniform to church. Poppa, born too late to fight, he envied that. So my daddy paid for a tuxedo to be built on him, from scratch. (Honey, the man was serious.)
Inviting the seamstress to our house for a unannounced measuring session, Poppa laid in some champagne. He settled beside Momma, showed her a invitation he’d scribbled out in smudgy pencil. “Wrong, wrong,” she had to laugh. “This is on a level with the things young Shirley used to copy, scraps I’d find under bolsters: ‘The Maharajah of Raleigh and Mrs. Incorrigible Maharajah-ette request your presence at a Fountain Gala.’ Pathetic. The only thing you got correct is our names’ spelling. Otherwise, darling, I’m afraid this is so far off it’s nearly ‘Original.’” And when she took the pencil he held there at the ready, Pop gave me this chastened little wink. I got—at that very second—my first strange uh-oh kind of roaring in my ears.
Then I knew I was about to make a major step. Pop, playing dumb, had drawn Momma into so many fidgety details. She had just said Yes without half noticing. Which meant, darling, that I had just said Yeah.
As for my would-be bridegroom, I felt he knew me pretty good. At fourteen, who-all was there to know yet? He offered me my due, right square in either eye. Since Shirl ditched me, nobody’d really met my head-on stare. Captain did.
One night, walking with him, I chose to point out my (our) old tree house. He said he loved trees, certain trees where important things had happened, they could be like friends, could they not? He gave me a rose geranium for my bedroom’s bay window, showed me how to break the leaf and let out scent like a rose’s. Only thing troubled me: To catch you a whiff, you had to go and ruin a whole leaf. He asked did I like pets. Wanted to know my favorite color. Wondered did I love marching-band music as much as he did. I went, “Probably.” Answering as best I could, while seen walking around town with him, I felt right interesting, almost adult. The snooty Saiterwaite girls, out under a new fad for parasols, spotted the two of us, arm in arm. I felt them covet me the Captain. Maybe I was wrong.
Pop, less than three months later, off the books, really set up the engagement. Honey, what’d I know? I believed wedlock’s strongest half was the “wed” and not the “lock.” I thought it would feel like being in a nice clean tub (owing to modesty—one filled maybe chest-deep this time with suds and this go-round in the company of a sweet hard-scrubbing boy my age). I wanted to try everything. Besides, as Poppa pointed out, before Captain came along and proposed, nobody had ever asked me.
The ring itself—offered that autumn, by moonlight in the back-yard garden—was one and a half full carats, it had belonged to the addled Mrs. Marsden, who’d saved it from Sherman’s fires. A beauty, pear-shaped, just alive with lights. For a gal my age, this helped. Alone with it, I talked to my new rock. “Cocked his shiny eye and said, ‘Ain’t you ‘shamed, you sleepyhead?’” I spoke to it the way other girls of my years were yet chatting up each other or their dolls.