“Uh huh, it would.”
“Well, we was talking about some people we used to know when we was little.”
“Was my mamma little?”
“Of course.”
“What happened?”
“Well, some old boy we knew name John L. and a girl name…”
Damp-faced, Nel stepped back into the kitchen. She felt new, soft and new. It had been the longest time since she had had a rib-scraping laugh. She had forgotten how deep and down it could be. So different from the miscellaneous giggles and smiles she had learned to be content with these past few years.
“O Lord, Sula. You haven’t changed none.” She wiped her eyes. “What was all that about, anyway? All that scramblin’ we did trying to do it and not do it at the same time?”
“Beats me. Such a simple thing.”
“But we sure made a lot out of it, and the boys were dumber than we were.”
“Couldn’t nobody be dumber than I was.”
“Stop lying. All of ’em liked you best.”
“Yeah? Where are they?”
“They still here. You the one went off.”
“Didn’t I, though?”
“Tell me about it. The big city.”
“Big is all it is. A big Medallion.”
“No. I mean the life. The nightclubs, and parties…”
“I was in college, Nellie. No nightclubs on campus.”
“Campus? That what they call it? Well. You wasn’t in no college for—what—ten years now? And you didn’t write to nobody. How come you never wrote?”
“You never did either.”
“Where was I going to write to? All I knew was that you was in Nashville. I asked Miss Peace about you once or twice.”
“What did she say?”
“I couldn’t make much sense out of her. You know she been gettin’ stranger and stranger after she come out the hospital. How is she anyway?”
“Same, I guess. Not so hot.”
“No? Laura, I know, was doing her cooking and things. Is she still?”
“No. I put her out.”
“Put her out? What for?”
“She made me nervous.”
“But she was doing it for nothing, Sula.”
“That’s what you think. She was stealing right and left.”
“Since when did you get froggy about folks’ stealing?”
Sula smiled. “OK. I lied. You wanted a reason.”
“Well, give me the real one.”
“I don’t know the real one. She just didn’t belong in that house. Digging around in the cupboards, picking up pots and ice picks…”
“You sure have changed. That house was always full of people digging in cupboards and carrying on.”
“That’s the reason, then.”
“Sula. Come on, now.”
“You’ve changed too. I didn’t used to have to explain everything to you.”
Nel blushed. “Who’s feeding the deweys and Tar Baby? You?”
“Sure me. Anyway Tar Baby don’t eat and the deweys still crazy.”
“I heard one of ’em’s mamma came to take him back but didn’t know which was hern.”
“Don’t nobody know.”
“And Eva? You doing the work for her too?”
“Well, since you haven’t heard it, let me tell you. Eva’s real sick. I had her put where she could be watched and taken care of.”
“Where would that be?”
“Out by Beechnut.”
“You mean that home the white church run? Sula! That ain’t no place for Eva. All them women is dirt poor with no people at all. Mrs. Wilkens and them. They got dropsy and can’t hold their water—crazy as loons. Eva’s odd, but she got sense. I don’t think that’s right, Sula.”
“I’m scared of her, Nellie. That’s why…”
“Scared? Of Eva?”
“You don’t know her. Did you know she burnt Plum?”
“Oh, I heard that years ago. But nobody put no stock in it.”
“They should have. It’s true. I saw it. And when I got back here she was planning to do it to me too.”
“Eva? I can’t hardly believe that. She almost died trying to get to your mother.”
Sula leaned forward, her elbows on the table. “You ever known me to lie to you?”
“No. But you could be mistaken. Why would Eva…”
“All I know is I’m scared. And there’s no place else for me to go. We all that’s left, Eva and me. I guess I should have stayed gone. I didn’t know what else to do. Maybe I should have talked to you about it first. You always had better sense than me. Whenever I was scared before, you knew just what to do.”
The closed place in the water spread before them. Nel put the iron on the stove. The situation was clear to her now. Sula, like always, was incapable of making any but the most trivial decisions. When it came to matters of grave importance, she behaved emotionally and irresponsibly and left it to others to straighten out. And when fear struck her, she did unbelievable things. Like that time with her finger. Whatever those hunkies did, it wouldn’t have been as bad as what she did to herself. But Sula was so scared she had mutilated herself, to protect herself.
“What should I do, Nellie? Take her back and sleep with my door locked again?”
“No. I guess it’s too late anyway. But let’s work out a plan for taking care of her. So she won’t be messed over.”
“Anything you say.”
“What about money? She got any?”
Sula shrugged. “The checks come still. It’s not much, like it used to be. Should I have them made over to me?”
“Can you? Do it, then. We can arrange for her to have special comforts. That place is a mess, you know. A doctor don’t never set foot in there. I ain’t figured out yet how they stay alive in there as long as they do.”
“Why don’t I have the checks made over to you, Nellie? You better at this than I am.”
“Oh no. People will say I’m scheming. You the one to do it. Was there insurance from Hannah?”
“Yes. Plum too. He had all that army insurance.”
“Any of it left?”
“Well I went to college on some. Eva banked the rest. I’ll look into it, though.”
“…and explain it all to the bank people.”
“Will you go down with me?”
“Sure. It’s going to be all right.”
“I’m glad I talked to you ’bout this. It’s been bothering me.”
“Well, tongues will wag, but so long as we know the truth, it don’t matter.”
Just at that moment the children ran in announcing the entrance of their father. Jude opened the back door and walked into the kitchen. He was still a very good-looking man, and the only difference Sula could see was the thin pencil mustache under his nose, and a part in his hair.
“Hey, Jude. What you know good?”
“White man running it—nothing good.”
Sula laughed while Nel, high-tuned to his moods, ignored her husband’s smile saying, “Bad day, honey?”
“Same old stuff,” he replied and told them a brief tale of some personal insult done him by a customer and his boss—a whiney tale that peaked somewhere between anger and a lapping desire for comfort. He ended it with the observation that a Negro man had a hard row to hoe in this world. He expected his story to dovetail into milkwarm commiseration, but before Nel could excrete it, Sula said she didn’t know about that—it looked like a pretty good life to her.
“Say what?” Jude’s temper flared just a bit as he looked at this friend of his wife’s, this slight woman, not exactly plain, but not fine either, with a copperhead over her eye. As far as he could tell, she looked like a woman roaming the country trying to find some man to burden down with a lot of lip and a lot of mouths.
Sula was smiling. “I mean, I don’t know what the fuss is about. I mean, everything in the world loves you. White men love you. They spend so much time worrying about your penis they forget their
own. The only thing they want to do is cut off a nigger’s privates. And if that ain’t love and respect I don’t know what is. And white women? They chase you all to every corner of the earth, feel for you under every bed. I knew a white woman wouldn’t leave the house after 6 o’clock for fear one of you would snatch her. Now ain’t that love? They think rape soon’s they see you, and if they don’t get the rape they looking for, they scream it anyway just so the search won’t be in vain. Colored women worry themselves into bad health just trying to hang on to your cuffs. Even little children—white and black, boys and girls—spend all their childhood eating their hearts out ’cause they think you don’t love them. And if that ain’t enough, you love yourselves. Nothing in this world loves a black man more than another black man. You hear of solitary white men, but niggers? Can’t stay away from one another a whole day. So. It looks to me like you the envy of the world.”
Jude and Nel were laughing, he saying, “Well, if that’s the only way they got to show it—cut off my balls and throw me in jail—I’d just as soon they left me alone.” But thinking that Sula had an odd way of looking at things and that her wide smile took some of the sting from that rattlesnake over her eye. A funny woman, he thought, not that bad-looking. But he could see why she wasn’t married; she stirred a man’s mind maybe, but not his body.
He left his tie. The one with the scriggly yellow lines running lopsided across the dark-blue field. It hung over the top of the closet door pointing steadily downward while it waited with every confidence for Jude to return.
Could he be gone if his tie is still here? He will remember it and come back and then she would…uh. Then she could…tell him. Sit down quietly and tell him. “But Jude,” she would say, “you knew me. All those days and years, Jude, you knew me. My ways and my hands and how my stomach folded and how we tried to get Mickey to nurse and how about that time when the landlord said…but you said…and I cried, Jude. You knew me and had listened to the things I said in the night, and heard me in the bathroom and laughed at my raggedy girdle and I laughed too because I knew you too, Jude. So how could you leave me when you knew me?”
But they had been down on all fours naked, not touching except their lips right down there on the floor where the tie is pointing to, on all fours like (uh huh, go on, say it) like dogs. Nibbling at each other, not even touching, not even looking at each other, just their lips, and when I opened the door they didn’t even look for a minute and I thought the reason they are not looking up is because they are not doing that. So it’s all right. I am just standing here. They are not doing that. I am just standing here and seeing it, but they are not really doing it. But then they did look up. Or you did. You did, Jude. And if only you had not looked at me the way the soldiers did on the train, the way you look at the children when they come in while you are listening to Gabriel Heatter and break your train of thought—not focusing exactly but giving them an instant, a piece of time, to remember what they are doing, what they are interrupting, and to go on back to wherever they were and let you listen to Gabriel Heatter. And I did not know how to move my feet or fix my eyes or what. I just stood there seeing it and smiling, because maybe there was some explanation, something important that I did not know about that would have made it all right. I waited for Sula to look up at me any minute and say one of those lovely college words like aesthetic or rapport, which I never understood but which I loved because they sounded so comfortable and firm. And finally you just got up and started putting on your clothes and your privates were hanging down, so soft, and you buckled your pants belt but forgot to button the fly and she was sitting on the bed not even bothering to put on her clothes because actually she didn’t need to because somehow she didn’t look naked to me, only you did. Her chin was in her hand and she sat like a visitor from out of town waiting for the hosts to get some quarreling done and over with so the card game could continue and me wanting her to leave so I could tell you privately that you had forgotten to button your fly because I didn’t want to say it in front of her, Jude. And even when you began to talk, I couldn’t hear because I was worried about you not knowing that your fly was open and scared too because your eyes looked like the soldiers’ that time on the train when my mother turned to custard.
Remember how big that bedroom was? Jude? How when we moved here we said, Well, at least we got us a real big bedroom, but it was small then, Jude, and so shambly, and maybe it was that way all along but it would have been better if I had gotten the dust out from under the bed because I was ashamed of it in that small room. And then you walked past me saying, “I’ll be back for my things.” And you did but you left your tie.
The clock was ticking. Nel looked at it and realized that it was two thirty, only forty-five minutes before the children would be home and she hadn’t even felt anything right or sensible and now there was no time or wouldn’t be until nighttime when they were asleep and she could get into bed and maybe she could do it then. Think. But who could think in that bed where they had been and where they also had been and where only she was now?
She looked around for a place to be. A small place. The closet? No. Too dark. The bathroom. It was both small and bright, and she wanted to be in a very small, very bright place. Small enough to contain her grief. Bright enough to throw into relief the dark things that cluttered her. Once inside, she sank to the tile floor next to the toilet. On her knees, her hand on the cold rim of the bathtub, she waited for something to happen…inside. There was stirring, a movement of mud and dead leaves. She thought of the women at Chicken Little’s funeral. The women who shrieked over the bier and at the lip of the open grave. What she had regarded since as unbecoming behavior seemed fitting to her now; they were screaming at the neck of God, his giant nape, the vast back-of-the-head that he had turned on them in death. But it seemed to her now that it was not a fist-shaking grief they were keening but rather a simple obligation to say something, do something, feel something about the dead. They could not let that heart-smashing event pass unrecorded, unidentified. It was poisonous, unnatural to let the dead go with a mere whimpering, a slight murmur, a rose bouquet of good taste. Good taste was out of place in the company of death, death itself was the essence of bad taste. And there must be much rage and saliva in its presence. The body must move and throw itself about, the eyes must roll, the hands should have no peace, and the throat should release all the yearning, despair and outrage that accompany the stupidity of loss.
“The real hell of Hell is that it is forever.” Sula said that. She said doing anything forever and ever was hell. Nel didn’t understand it then, but now in the bathroom, trying to feel, she thought, “If I could be sure that I could stay here in this small white room with the dirty tile and water gurgling in the pipes and my head on the cool rim of this bathtub and never have to go out the door, I would be happy. If I could be certain that I never had to get up and flush the toilet, go in the kitchen, watch my children grow up and die, see my food chewed on my plate…Sula was wrong. Hell ain’t things lasting forever. Hell is change.” Not only did men leave and children grow up and die, but even the misery didn’t last. One day she wouldn’t even have that. This very grief that had twisted her into a curve on the floor and flayed her would be gone. She would lose that too.
“Why, even in hate here I am thinking of what Sula said.”
Hunched down in the small bright room Nel waited. Waited for the oldest cry. A scream not for others, not in sympathy for a burnt child, or a dead father, but a deeply personal cry for one’s own pain. A loud, strident: “Why me?” She waited. The mud shifted, the leaves stirred, the smell of overripe green things enveloped her and announced the beginnings of her very own howl.
But it did not come.
The odor evaporated; the leaves were still, the mud settled. And finally there was nothing, just a flake of something dry and nasty in her throat. She stood up frightened. There was something just to the right of her, in the air, just out of view. She could not see it, but she
knew exactly what it looked like. A gray ball hovering just there. Just there. To the right. Quiet, gray, dirty. A ball of muddy strings, but without weight, fluffy but terrible in its malevolence. She knew she could not look, so she closed her eyes and crept past it out of the bathroom, shutting the door behind her. Sweating with fear, she stepped to the kitchen door and onto the back porch. The lilac bushes preened at the railing, but there were no lilacs yet. Wasn’t it time? Surely it was time. She looked over the fence to Mrs. Rayford’s yard. Hers were not in bloom either. Was it too late? She fastened on this question with enthusiasm, all the time aware of something she was not thinking. It was the only way she could get her mind off the flake in her throat.
She spent a whole summer with the gray ball, the little ball of fur and string and hair always floating in the light near her but which she did not see because she never looked. But that was the terrible part, the effort it took not to look. But it was there anyhow, just to the right of her head and maybe further down by her shoulder, so when the children went to a monster movie at the Elmira Theater and came home and said, “Mamma, can you sleep with us tonight?” she said all right and got into bed with the two boys, who loved it, but the girl did not. For a long time she could not stop getting in the bed with her children and told herself each time that they might dream a dream about dragons and would need her to comfort them. It was so nice to think about their scary dreams and not about a ball of fur. She even hoped their dreams would rub off on her and give her the wonderful relief of a nightmare so she could stop going around scared to turn her head this way or that lest she see it. That was the scary part—seeing it. It was not coming at her; it never did that, or tried to pounce on her. It just floated there for the seeing, if she wanted to, and O my God for the touching if she wanted to. But she didn’t want to see it, ever, for if she saw it, who could tell but what she might actually touch it, or want to, and then what would happen if she actually reached out her hand and touched it? Die probably, but no worse than that. Dying was OK because it was sleep and there wasn’t no gray ball in death, was there? Was there? She would have to ask somebody about that, somebody she could confide in and who knew a lot of things, like Sula, for Sula would know or if she didn’t she would say something funny that would make it all right. Ooo no, not Sula. Here she was in the midst of it, hating it, scared of it, and again she thought of Sula as though they were still friends and talked things over. That was too much. To lose Jude and not have Sula to talk to about it because it was Sula that he had left her for.