“Uh-huh,” he said. “I see.” I looked up at him again. He was rummaging in the bag, counting the Tootsie Rolls and nodding. “It’s a good thing, ma’am,” he said, still talking loudly, “that you caught this when you did.” He nodded at me. “You’re a fortunate little girl, truly fortunate. Your mama loves you. She doesn’t want you to grow up to be a thief.”
He stood back up and passed the pennies to the salesgirl. He stretched a hand out like he was going to put it on my head, but I stepped back so that he would have had to bend forward to reach me. “Son of a bitch,” Grey would have called him, “slimy son of a bitch probably eats Tootsie Rolls all day long.” If he reached for me again, I decided, I’d bite him, but he just looked at me long and carefully. I knew I was supposed to feel ashamed, but I didn’t anymore. I felt outraged. I wanted to kick him or throw up on him or scream his name on the street. The longer he looked at me, the more I hated him. If I could have killed him with my stare, I would have. The look in his eyes told me that he knew what I was thinking.
“I’m gonna do your mama a favor.” He smiled. “Help her to teach you the seriousness of what you’ve done.” Mama’s hand tightened on my shoulder, but she didn’t speak.
“What we’re gonna do,” he announced, “is say you can’t come back in here for a while. We’ll say that when your mama thinks you’ve learned your lesson, she can come back and talk to me. But till then, we’re gonna remember your name, what you look like.” He leaned down again. “You understand me, honey?”
I understood. I understood that I was barred from the Woolworth’s counters. I could feel the heat from my mama’s hand through my blouse, and I knew she was never going to come near this place again, was never going to let herself stand in the same room with that honey-greased bastard. I looked around at the bright hairbrushes, ribbons, trays of panties and socks, notebooks, dolls, and balloons. It was hunger I felt then, raw and terrible, a shaking deep down inside me, as if my rage had used up everything I had ever eaten.
After that, when I passed the Woolworth’s windows, it would come back—that dizzy desperate hunger edged with hatred and an aching lust to hurt somebody back. I wondered if that kind of hunger and rage was what Tommy Lee felt when he went through his mama’s pocketbook. It was a hunger in the back of the throat, not the belly, an echoing emptiness that ached for the release of screaming. Whenever we went to visit Daddy Glen’s people, that hunger would throb and swell behind my tongue until I found myself standing silent and hungry in the middle of a family gathering full of noise and food.
It was not only Daddy Glen’s brothers being lawyers and dentists instead of mechanics and roofers that made them so different from Boatwrights. In Daddy Glen’s family the women stayed at home. His own mama had never held a job in her life, and Daryl and James both spoke badly of women who would leave their children to “work outside the home.” His father, Bodine Waddell, owned the Sunshine Dairy and regularly hired and fired men like my mother’s brothers, something he never let us forget.
“Awful proud for a man runs cows,” Beau said of him once, and Glen was immediately indignant.
“Daddy don’t have to handle the cows,” he told Earle. “Farmers all over the county bring him their milk, or he has it picked up. Daddy just processes the milk, bottles it under the Sunshine label, and his trucks deliver it.”
“Oh, yeah,” Earle nodded solemnly. “That’s a big difference, that is. Man don’t run cows, he just leases the rights to their titties.”
Glen looked like he was going to spit or cry but controlled himself. “Just don’t say nothing about my daddy.” He almost growled. “Just don’t.”
Earle and Beau let it go at that. Glen couldn’t help what a shit his daddy was, and it was never smart to talk bad about a man’s people to his face. With the passage of time, Glen had gotten more and more peculiar about his family, one moment complaining of how badly they treated him and the next explaining it away. Worst of all, he insisted that we all had to go over to his brothers’ or daddy’s places whenever there was any kind of family occasion, though it was clear to me that they were never happy to see us. We wound up going over to Daddy Waddell’s place at least once every other month. In the Pontiac with the top down and paper scraps blowing around on the floor, Reese and I would lean over the front seat to watch Mama try to keep her hair neat in the whistling wind and listen to Daddy Glen lie.
“We won’t stay long,” he would always promise, and Mama would smile like she didn’t care at all. We gritted our teeth. We knew that he would not have the nerve to leave before his father had delivered his lecture on all the things Glen had done wrong in his long life of failure and disappointment.
“Your daddy wants his daddy to be proud of him,” Mama once said. “It about breaks my heart. He should just as soon whistle for the moon.”
It was true. Around his father, Glen became unsure of himself and too careful. He broke out in a sweat, and his eyes kept flickering back to his daddy’s face as if he had to keep watching or miss the thing he needed most to see. He would pull at his pants like a little boy and drop his head if anyone asked him a question. It was hard to put that image of him next to the way he was all the rest of the time—the swaggering bantam rooster man who called himself my daddy.
“Old Glen’s a cock and a half,” my uncle Earle would tease. “An’t nobody better take a bite out of his ass. Boy’ll get you down if it takes bare bone to do it.” Which was true enough. Half a dozen times I came home from school to find Mama and Glen sitting at the kitchen table with that white-eyed scared look that meant he’d jumped somebody who’d said something to him and lost yet another job.
“Man can’t keep his temper,” Granny complained, but grinned in spite of herself. Everybody did. It was the one thing that saved Daddy Glen from the Boatwrights’ absolute contempt. The berserker rage that would come on him was just a shade off the power of the Boatwrights’ famous binges. “You mess with one of those boys and you reap the whirlwind,” people said of my uncles, and after a while of Daddy Glen. Tire irons and pastry racks, pitchforks and mop handles, things got bent or broken around Daddy Glen. His face would pink up and his hands would shake; his neck would start to work, the muscles ridging up and throbbing; then his mouth would swell and he would spit. Words came out that were not meant to be understood: “Goddam motherfucker son of a bitch shitass!” Magic words that made other men back off, put their hands up, palms out, and whisper back, “Now, Glen, now, now, Glen, now, hold on, boy...”
“Your daddy’s a son of a bitch himself, a purely crazy pigfucker,” Grey was always telling me with a little awe in his voice, a hunger to be half again as dangerous. I’d smile and nod and bite the inside of my lips, replaying in my head two separate movie images: Daddy Glen screaming at me, his neck bright red with rage, and the other, impossible vision just by it, Daddy Glen at his daddy’s house with his head hanging down and his mouth so soft spit shone on the lower lip.
“I hate to go over there,” Mama said, “hate standing around waiting for his daddy to notice us.” She was brushing our hair out fine and loose and putting little barrettes up on the peak where she wanted it to stay back. Reese and I stood still and said nothing. We knew we were not supposed to pay attention when Mama talked about Daddy Glen’s people.
“Whose birthday is it?” was about the only safe thing to ask, since it was always somebody’s birthday, or a wedding or christening. The Waddells didn’t have as many cousins and aunts and uncles as we did, but the women still made babies—somebody was always celebrating something.
One Sunday it was a double, a birthday for James and one of his kids. “One of the children,” Daddy Glen’s sister-in-law Madeline corrected me. “Kids are billygoats.”
Goddam right, I thought, staring over at my puffy cousin in creased pants, an eight-year-old copy of his fat ugly father. They served us tea in the backyard, just us—Anney’s girls, they called us. Their kids went in and out of the house, loud, raucous, sc
ratching their nails on the polished furniture, kicking their feet on the hardwood floors, tracking mud in on the braided rugs.
“Those little brats need their asses slapped.” Mama was sitting with us at the picnic table in the garden, out where no one could hear her. She’d come to check on us where we sat in our starched dresses, our faces as stiff as the sleeves. Reese and I were sweaty and miserable trying not to wiggle around on the benches, to look well-behaved for Mama’s sake and stay out of the way of those kids who hated us as much as we did them.
“When are we going?” we kept asking Mama, knowing she couldn’t tell us but asking just the same.
“Soon,” she’d say, and light another cigarette with shaking hands. Mama didn’t smoke in Daddy Waddell’s house, though no one ever told her she couldn’t. They just didn’t leave ash-trays out. But I once saw Madeline smoking over the kitchen sink, dropping her ashes down the drain. It made me wonder if all of them went off in the kitchen or bathroom to smoke, pretending the rest of the time that they didn’t have any such dirty habits.
“Can’t we go home now?”
“No, James wants to show Daddy his new lawnmower.”
“I thought he got a new one last year.”
“This one’s the kind that you can ride on while you cut the grass.”
“Don’t seem the yard’s big enough to need that.”
“Well”—Mama gave a short laugh—“I don’t think James buys anything just ’cause he needs it.” She brushed herself down carefully before going back in, though there wasn’t a speck of ash on her. “You girls play nice, now.”
We sat still, wonderfully behaved, almost afraid to move. “Yes, ma‘am. No, ma’am.” We kept our backs straight and never spoke out of turn, trying to imagine that Daddy Glen would look out and see us and be proud. His people watched us out the windows. Behind them, shelves of books and framed pictures mocked me. How could Reese and I be worthy of all that, the roses in their garden, the sunlight on those polished windows and flowered drapes, the china plates gleaming behind glass cabinets? I stared in at the spines of those books, wanting it all, wanting the furniture, the garden, the big open kitchen with its dishes for everyday and others for special, the freezer in the utility room and the plushy seats on all the dining-room chairs. Reese tugged at my arm, wanting me to talk to her, but I couldn’t speak around the hunger in my throat.
From behind the rosebushes, I heard Daryl and James talking. “Look at that car. Just like any nigger trash, getting something like that.”
“What’d you expect? Look what he married.”
“Her and her kids sure go with that car....”
I pushed my black hair out of my eyes and looked in at one of my wide-mouthed cousins in a white dress with eyelet sleeves looking back at me, scratching her nose and staring like I was some elephant in a zoo—something dumb and ugly and impervious to hurt. What do they tell her about us? I wondered. That we’re not really family, just her crazy uncle’s wife’s nasty kids? You’re no relative of mine, you’re not my people, I whispered to myself. New and terrible words rolled around in my head while the air turned cool on my neck.
To Reese’s surprise, I got up, shook out my skirt, and strolled off for a walk through Madeline’s rosebushes. I put my hands out and trailed them lightly along the thorny stalks and plush blossoms, scooping buds off as I passed. I pulled the buds apart, tearing the petals and dropping them down inside my dress. I even pulled up my skirt and tucked some in my panties, walking more slowly then to feel the damp silky flowers moving against my skin.
Trash steals, I thought, echoing Aunt Madeline’s cold accent, her husband’s bitter words. “Trash for sure,” I muttered, but I only took the roses. No hunger would make me take anything else of theirs. I could feel a kind of heat behind my eyes that lit up everything I glanced at. It was dangerous, that heat. It wanted to pour out and burn everything up, everything they had that we couldn’t have, everything that made them think they were better than us. I stood in the garden and spun myself around and around, pouring out heat and rage and the sweet stink of broken flowers.
8
I was ten, a long-boned restless ten, when we moved to West Greenville so Daddy Glen could be closer to the new uniform plant where he’d gotten a job as an account salesman. Boxing up dishes and pots in the utility shed, Mama found the remains of the love knot Aunt Maybelle and Aunt Marvella had given her. It had been reduced to scraps held together by dust and seemed to have survived only because it had fallen between the bottom of one flower pot and the bowl of another. Mice had picked the ribbon apart from the hair, and bugs had carried off most of the herbs and blood. Even so, the knotted core of the old lace scrap had somehow held all that time. Mama recognized the thing from the color of the ribbon.
“That was a wedding present from your Eustis aunts,” Mama told me, but I already knew what it was from Granny’s stories. As Mama carefully tried to gather it up, the whole thing fell to dust. My stomach cramped, and I wrapped my arms tight around my middle. Impatiently, Mama swept out the shed and packed up her laundry baskets. “Root magic,” she muttered to me.
That week Marvella woke up in the night after dreaming her hair had turned to barbed wire, and Maybelle woke up in the morning sure the rabbits had eaten all their beans. They found instead that a dog had dug up the honeycomb and torn right through the lace. Neither of them told the other what they thought it meant.
The new house in West Greenville was so far from any of the aunts’ houses that there was rarely time to stop by and see them. Granny was still keeping Reese for Mama when she could, but it was out of the way to take her to Alma’s and pick her up, and Mama decided maybe it was time to start trusting me to keep us both alive while she was at work. After that we only saw Granny on the Sundays when Mama would let Daddy Glen sleep and take us over to visit with Aunt Ruth or Aunt Alma. “Hate you being so far away,” her sisters would complain, but Mama would just smile and tell them how nice our new house was, how hard Daddy Glen was working. And it was a nice house, with a big wide yard, but it also cost more, which meant Mama had to take on a few extra hours to bring in a little more money. It didn’t seem as if Daddy Glen’s route was working out as well as they had hoped.
“Your daddy’s having to work awfully hard these days,” Mama told us. “You girls be quiet when he gets home. Stay out of his way and let him get his rest.”
“He loves you,” Mama was always saying, and she meant it, but it seemed like Daddy Glen’s hands were always reaching for me, trembling on the surface of my skin, as if something pulled him to me and pushed him away at the same time. I would look up at him, carefully, watchfully, and see his eyes staring at me like I was something unimaginable and strange. “You don’t look like your mama,” he said once, “except when you’re asleep.” Sometimes when I ran by him, his hands would suddenly catch me, half-lift me, and pull me back to him. He would look into my face, shake me once, and let me go.
“Don’t run like that,” he’d say. “You’re a girl, not a racehorse.”
Reese and I joked about that and played racehorses when we got home from school every day, running through the empty house and jumping on the big hassock that sat in front of his chair. One day we chased each other into the house as always, not noticing the car out back, not seeing Daddy Glen until he caught my shoulder in one big hand.
“What did I tell you?” he shouted, and lifted me high, shaking me back and forth till my head rocked on my neck. “You bitch. You little bitch.” My body slammed the wall, my heels knocking hollowly a foot above the floor. I saw Reese run away through a shimmering wave of dizziness, and then I was under his arm being carried down the hall to the bathroom. He kicked the door shut behind us and dropped me.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” I was so frightened I stuttered.
“Not as sorry as you’re gonna be.” He pulled his belt free from the loops and wrapped the buckle end around his palm. “I’ve waited a long time to do this, too long.?
??
His face was pale, his jaw rigid, his eyes almost red in the glare of the fluorescent light over the mirror. I stumbled back against the tub, terrified, praying Mama would come home fast. Mama would stop him. His left hand reached for me, caught my shoulder, pulled me over his left leg. He flipped my skirt up over my head and jammed it into that hand. I heard the sound of the belt swinging up, a song in the air, a high-pitched terrible sound. It hit me and I screamed. Daddy Glen swung his belt again. I screamed at its passage through the air, screamed before it hit me. I screamed for Mama. He was screaming with me, his great hoarse shouts as loud as my high thin squeals, and behind us outside the locked door, Reese was screaming too, and then Mama. All of us were screaming, and no one could help.
When Daddy Glen unlocked the door, Mama slapped him and grabbed me up in her arms. He held one hand to his cheek and watched as I hiccuped and cried into her neck. “You son of a bitch,” she cursed him, and ran water to wash my face.
“She’s my girl too,” he said. “Someone’s got to love her enough to care how she turns out.” His face was sullen, swollen and empty, like he had woken up from a long, long sleep.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Mama yelled, pushing him out the door. She put me on her lap and washed my face, my neck, the backs of my swollen thighs.
“Oh, my baby,” she kept saying. I lay still against her, grateful to be safe in her arms. The air felt funny on my skin, and I had screamed so hard I had no voice left. I said nothing, let Mama talk, only half hearing what she was whispering. “Baby,” she called me. “Oh, girl. Oh, honey. Baby, what did you do? What did you do?”
What had I done? I had run in the house. What was she asking? I wanted her to go on talking and understand without me saying anything. I wanted her to love me enough to leave him, to pack us up and take us away from him, to kill him if need be. I held on to her until she put me to bed, held on to her and whimpered then. I held on to her until I fell into a drugged, miserable sleep.