Broken Wings

  I looked at him with eyes as coldly realistic as those eyes of his, and he turned away quickly.

  Daddy wasn’t good at lying to anyone, even to me. To my way of thinking, that was a weakness. I used to wonder how he could be a good salesman. Everyone lies to everyone about everything, I believed. If the story of Pinocchio were true, everyone in the whole world would have a long nose.

  “I’m sorry I can’t do more for you, Phoebe,” he continued. “I don’t like putting my responsibilities on someone else, but I’ve spent many a restless night worrying about you. At least I’ll know you’re safe. You understand all that now, right, Phoebe? You’ve got to be happy about that.”

  I didn’t answer him. I stared out the window. This sleepy residential world looked like another planet. There were no bright lights, no music pouring out in the streets, and no one standing on any of the street corners. Everyone was locked safely behind his or her doors or gathered around television sets like cave people gathered around fires.

  Then I thought that somewhere in the night, Mama was laughing. I was sure. She was listening to music and having a good old high time of it. Did she even pause once to think about me? Did she ever wonder about me? Or did she force herself to forget me? I had no doubt that she would probably say I was better off with her sister than I was with her. Mama never tried to pretend she was good.

  “I’m born to raise hell,” she would tell me, and she would laugh.

  Am I born to raise hell, too? I would wonder.

  “I hope you’ll behave yourself, Phoebe,” Daddy suddenly said as if he could read my thoughts.

  He said it like a prayer.

  And what are prayers, I thought, if not just little lies between yourself and God?

  2

  At Aunt Mae Louise and Uncle Buster’s

  I never really believed I was saying good-bye to anyone or saying good-bye to my home in the city. In my heart I truly believed I would be coming back sooner rather than later. Back at the apartment that night, Daddy hovered about like a nervous soon-to-be father, pacing in front of my door while I packed with little or no enthusiasm.

  “Don’t take any of those wild clothes of yours, Phoebe. You’ll just steam up your aunt and uncle. Leave them here,” he pleaded. “None of those rings in your nose and your belly button, and no cigarettes. For God’s sake, no cigarettes. She becomes a banshee when she sees people smoking, a truly wild spirit warning people of impending death.”

  It irked me how afraid of Aunt Mae Louise he was.

  “I don’t have any cigarettes and I don’t have any wild clothes, Daddy. I’m not wearing no old lady’s clothes just to please her.”

  “You’ve got to make this work,” he said. “Take it slowly, a day at a time. I’ll come by as much as I can, and I promise I’ll take you places on weekends.”

  “Where you going to take me, Daddy? Some kiddy fun park?” I threw back at him.

  “I’m just trying to make it work,” he protested. “We’ll go to a movie or I’ll take you to a nice restaurant, whatever, but I’m not bringing you back here to mingle with those juvenile delinquents, so don’t ask.”

  “Right,” I said, looked at a miniskirt I knew would set off Aunt Mae Louise, and then tossed it on the closet floor.

  “Maybe I’m better off with some strange foster family,” I muttered.

  After I packed, I called Sylvia and told her what was happening.

  “You’re movin‘?”

  “It’s temporary,” I said. “Believe me.”

  “Right. You ain’t that far away anyhow,” she said. “You come in on weekends and stay with me.”

  That cheered me up until I considered that Aunt Mae Louise would probably not allow it, and Daddy had made it clear he wouldn’t. I wasn’t going to put up with it, I vowed. I don’t know why I’m packing so much, I told myself. I’ll be coming back so fast, it’ll make Daddy’s head spin. Either that or I’ll just run off like Mama.

  “Maybe you and Beneatha could come out there, too,” I suggested to Sylvia.

  “What’s to do out there?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. When I find out, I’ll tell you.”

  “Good luck with that,” she said.

  I was so depressed I couldn’t sleep, so I went back out and saw Daddy was sitting in the living room staring at the television set. I could tell he didn’t care what he watched. His eyes were glassy, and he didn’t even realize I was standing beside him.

  He can’t be too happy about how his life was turning out, either, I thought, but I didn’t feel sorry for him as much as I felt he should do something about it, prove he had that spine Mama said he didn’t have. Why was he so defeated? Plenty of my friends lived with a single parent and got by.

  “Why don’t you just get a job here in the city, Daddy?” I asked him. “That way you wouldn’t be away from home and no one could come take me off. Maybe we could move to a better apartment or something, too.”

  “Whaaa?” he said. He looked up at me.

  “I asked you, why don’t you get a different job?”

  He shook his head and smiled like I was asking him to go to the moon.

  “I’ve been doing this too long to change now, Phoebe. Soon I’ll get better routes with better clients. Someone’s retiring. Soon we’ll have a better plan.”

  “Right. Better this, better that, soon,” I said, disgusted, and went to bed hoping to bury my frustration and anger deep into the pillow.

  Damn you, Mama, I thought. If you were running off, you could have at least taken me along. I fell asleep dreaming of it.

  The next morning Daddy was up ahead of me and had my suitcase at the door.

  “Can’t wait to get rid of me, can you?” I told him bitterly.

  “You know that’s not so, Phoebe. You know what’s going on as well as I do. Don’t make this harder than it is for me. Or for yourself, for that matter,” he said.

  Sullenly, I drank some juice, smeared some jam on a piece of toast, and drank a cup of coffee. He sat there turning the spoon around and around in his cup, his eyes down. This might very well turn out to be the last breakfast we have together, I thought, and despite myself, I started to feel sorry for him, imagining him all alone in this dump. What would he do for fun? What would he look forward to in his life now?

  “You gonna go out with someone new?” I asked, and he looked up sharply.

  “What?”

  “Someone new? Mama’s gone for good, so why wouldn’t you?” I pursued.

  When I was very young, I saw him and Mama behave more like a husband and wife, kiss each other, hold hands, laugh, and even dance. I had no idea what had changed it all. It seemed almost to have happened overnight.

  “I wouldn’t go out with another woman while I was still married to your mother, Phoebe. That’s adultery.”

  “Well, she’s doing it.”

  “I’m not her,” he said.

  “But you’re getting a divorce, aren’t you?”

  He nodded slowly, making it look hard to do, like someone who didn’t want to face his troubles.

  “So,” I said, shrugging. “It’s just a matter of paperwork before you can have some fun. Unless you’re just going to join a monastery,” I quipped. His eyes heated.

  “That’s enough of that,” he said. “Contrary to what your mother might have drilled into your head, sex isn’t the end-all of all things, Phoebe. It’s a horse that pulls you along, maybe, but you gotta keep it from going wild. All you’ll do is end up like she will someday, crying over a glass of cheap gin in some dump bar, deserted by men who found younger women and dumped her like yesterday’s newspaper. Just keep that picture in your mind whenever you stop to think about her.”

  There was no doubt that was what he envisioned, or hoped.

  “You really hate her now, don’t you?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “I really feel sorry for her, but the way I feel sorry for someone with a contagious disease. I don’t want to get too close
.”

  “You two weren’t always like that, Daddy. What happened to change it?” I asked.

  He raised his eyes in surprise again. I thought he was just going to tell me not to think about it or say something to pretend it wasn’t so, but he nodded slowly instead.

  “I guess you’re old enough to know. This is hardly the first time she betrayed me with another man. I caught her with someone once before, someone I trusted, too, and in our own home!”

  “Why didn’t you throw her out?”

  “It’s not that easy, Phoebe. I was hoping it would be different,” he said. “She seemed remorseful, and I thought if I forgave her, we’d get back to the way we were. That didn’t happen, but there’s no sense talking about all that now. Let’s just think about the future.”

  “Right,” I said, “the future. Like I have one waiting for me out there.”

  “It doesn’t wait for you. You have to make it for yourself,” he said.

  It was on the tip of my tongue to say, “Like you did?” But I didn’t feel that mean. Instead, I gazed around at our small apartment. I didn’t have any real affection for where we were living. My room was a two-by-four and we had trouble with roaches all the time, but even a rat gets used to its hole, I thought, and for a moment or two when it was time to leave, I paused at the doorway as if I was saying good-bye to a real friend.

  “You won’t regret this,” Daddy said, seeing my small hesitation.

  I said nothing. I just followed him out and into the car. This time it felt like we were in a funeral procession all the way to Stone Mountain. When we arrived, Uncle Buster was at work, and Jake and Barbara Ann were at school. Aunt Mae Louise greeted us without a smile. I supposed that up until the last moment she was praying it wasn’t going to happen.

  Daddy brought in my suitcase, looking like some exhausted road salesman making his last stop. Afterward, he stood in the doorway with a face so sorrowful it made me sick to my stomach.

  “Good-bye, Daddy,” I said. He kissed me on the forehead and hurried back to his car, now looking as relieved as a mouse that had outrun a cat.

  “Let’s get to it,” Aunt Mae Louise told me then, and followed me to my room so she could hover over me as I unpacked my things.

  “Don’t think they’ll let you wear that to school,” she said, pointing at my abbreviated blouse with spaghetti straps. “I don’t know why you bothered packing such a thing and bringing it here. I won’t let you go out of this house in such rags. You got to remember that everything you do now reflects on your uncle Buster and me. Every time you have to decide on something, no matter how large or small, you think of that.”

  I didn’t say anything. When I was finished, she said we were going to the school so I could be registered. I was surprised at how much she had done in preparation for my coming. She had given the school guidance counselor information about me, and he had contacted my school in Atlanta. The new school already had my records. We met with the guidance counselor, Mr. VanVleet, a tall, red-headed man who smiled as if he had been waiting anxiously for me to finally arrive, as anxiously as he awaited some exchange student from another country.

  “We want you to succeed here, Phoebe,” he began. He tapped the folder on the desk. “I see you have had some difficulties at your previous school.”

  Aunt Mae Louise grunted and said,“ ‘Difficulties’ is too nice a word.” She squirmed in her seat, but Mr. VanVleet kept his smile.

  Maybe it’s a mask, I thought. Anyone would need a mask to keep smiling in Aunt Mae Louise’s presence.

  “What we’d like you to do is get you at the proper reading level as quickly as possible. We have a class designed to do just that, and for a while, that’s where we want you to begin. Once you’re at the proper reading level, we’ll be able to schedule you into classes you should be in, but we don’t want to do that until we’re sure you’ll succeed. You understand that, don’t you?”

  I shrugged. None of it mattered to me. I wasn’t going to be here long.

  “Whatever,” I said.

  “Well, look at it this way,” he continued, “you wouldn’t want a third-grade student put in an eleventh-grade class, now would you? How would he or she do? Not too well, right?”

  “You saying I’m like a third grader?” I asked, not hiding my indignation.

  His eyes shifted to Aunt Mae Louise for a second and then back to me.

  “I’m afraid that’s about your reading level, but don’t you worry. We’ll fix that fast if you give it some effort.”

  “You’re going to put me with third graders?”

  I’d be sitting in a classroom with Barbara Ann!

  “No,” he said, laughing. “But with other students who have some temporary reading difficulties. There are some who are older than you, in fact.”

  I felt a little relieved about that, but still suspicious.

  “She’ll do what she has to do to succeed,” Aunt Mae Louise promised him. “She knows how important it is now,” she added, stabbing me with her penetrating glare.

  “That’s good,” he said. “Let me take Phoebe down the corridor to meet Mr. Cody, the remedial reading teacher. You’ll find him to be a very good teacher, Phoebe. He has had lots of success.”

  “Go on,” Aunt Mae Louise ordered, and I stood up and followed Mr. VanVleet out.

  “I know how hard it is to start somewhere new,” he said as we walked. “You don’t hesitate to come to me with any problems first, okay?”

  Here’s my problem, I wanted to stop and say. My mother has run off with a cheap con man. My father is too weak to deal with anything and pawned me off on my ogre aunt and uncle. I feel like Cinderella without any hope of any prince and never a glass slipper. Do you have a pill or something that will make all that go away?

  Instead, I was silent and walked along listening to him describe the school, some of its important rules and regulations, and why I could still turn my life around and be successful at something.

  Teachers, I decided, live in a world of fantasy, a fantasy of their own making. If they blinked too hard, they would see their students for who and what they were and they would get so discouraged, they would run out the door. At least that was how I had seen the teachers in my school. Most of them looked defeated and taught to the one or two students who showed any promise at all. The rest were just a nagging reminder of how ineffective they were, and who wants to be reminded of failure?

  But that was exactly what was happening to me at the moment. Failure was being rubbed in my face.

  Mr. VanVleet opened the door, and I looked in at a dozen remedial reading students. There was an expression I had heard at my old school whenever teachers referred to students like this, I thought. They called them mentally challenged. We called them retards.

  “This is a new student, Phoebe Elder,” Mr. VanVleet announced to the group. Some looked as disinterested as they had been the moment before we came. Some brightened slightly with curiosity, and one girl with a caramel complexion and long, reddish brown hair broke into a wide, happy smile.

  I looked at them all and felt as if I had been forced to look into a mirror that hid no blemishes. Was this really where I belonged?

  Mr. VanVleet saw the expression on my face.

  “You’ll make fast progress here, I’m sure,” he said, “and get back on track quickly.”

  The only thing that kept me from turning and running was the realization that I had no place to go. Mama hadn’t left a forwarding address.

  “Welcome, Phoebe,” Mr. Cody said. He was a short, stout man with balding curly black hair, a thick nose, and soft, almost feminine lips. His chin cut in so sharply, it was practically nonexistent. “Sit right here,” he said, pulling the chair out a bit at the desk near the girl with the wide smile. She was still smiling at me that way. Is her face stuck? I wondered.

  Mr. VanVleet pulled Mr. Cody aside, spoke to him softly, and then handed him my file.

  “Okay,” Mr. Cody said. “While the rest of
us work on these exercises, Phoebe, I’d like you to take this little test I’ve designed. It will help me understand how I can best help you, okay?”

  Everyone is so eager to help me, I thought disdainfully. The truth was, they probably wished I never had come.

  He handed me the test, and I reluctantly began to do it.

  “You can’t fail,” Smiley whispered to me.

  “What?”

  “No one ever fails Mr. Cody’s tests. ”

  “I’ll try to be the first one,” I told her. Her smile finally faded.

  “What?”

  “Quiet, Lana,” Mr. Cody told her. “Don’t disturb Phoebe. Just work on your reading exercises.”

  She pulled back into her chair and squinted, looking like she was going to cry.

  Because I had arrived late and all, there wasn’t much time for me to do any more than take the test. I heard bells ring at the end of periods and heard students pass through the hallways, talking loudly, laughing, but none of the remedial reading students got up to go anywhere else. It was clear that all we left this room to do was go to the bathroom and to lunch. I hadn’t understood.

  “Don’t I go to a science class or a history class?” I asked Mr. Cody after the first change of classes was over.

  “For a while you’ll have all that here,” he said. “I divide the day into the subjects and work on the reading that applies to each subject. Everything involves reading, Phoebe.”

  “This is like grade school,” I complained. “I guess they just dumped me somewhere.”

  “Oh, no, no,” he assured me. “We give you and the others here very individualized treatment. You’re very special.”

  “I don’t want to be special,” I muttered.

  The others listened to my complaints with some interest. I was sure most of them felt like saying what I was saying.

  “For now, it’s the best way,” Mr. Cody insisted.

  How was I supposed to meet anyone or get to know anyone, locked up in here like this? I thought. And when I did get out, they would all know I was one of the mentally challenged. I remembered how those students were treated at my old school. They might as well have had leprosy.