"No, what?"
"I told them I wanted to fill out the birth certificate." Her voice was so soft I had to bend down to hear her, until my ear was only a few inches from her lips. "The nurse says to me, she says, the father always does that, but I tell her, no, no, not this time." She smiled. She looked so proud of herself. "I saw her," she said.
"Saw who?"
"Cecilia."
"Please, Rose." I ran my fingers along the side of her face and down onto her neck. Her skin was still damp with sweat. "I'm telling you, there's no reason to do that."
"It's done," she said. "In ink. Don't worry about it, Son. It's a good idea. It's a pretty name."
I straightened up, and Rose closed her eyes and let her hand fall away from mine.
I walked down the corridor, following the pictures of storks painted on the wall. I went the way their beaks pointed me until I came to the large glass window. So many babies born on the same day in Kentucky. I tried not to look at the names right off. I tried to find the baby that looked like Rose all on my own, but every time I thought I had it right, it turned out I was wrong.
"Who are you looking for?" a nurse asked me.
"Abbott."
"Boy or girl?"
"Girl."
"And you're the father?"
I nodded and she smiled at me. That's what having a baby gets you, smiles from pretty women. She said I should follow her around the back and she tried to find a smock for me, but none came close to fitting. Finally, she decided just to drape a couple of them over my shoulders and she went away and came back with a baby wrapped up in a blanket. "Cecilia Abbott," she said, and put the baby in my arms. "Brand new, new as they come."
But Cecilia Abbott didn't look like her mother at all. She was pale in every way, with hair fair enough to be called white. It was impossible to believe she had been inside of Rose not an hour before, and now lived in the world without her.
"Take her," I said to the nurse, my voice shaking so that I surprised myself.
"No sir," the nurse said, and she laughed at me. "That's your girl now, you best get used to holding her." She led me over to a chair and sat us down. "Not so often we get a baby named quick as that," she said. "Why, we got ones stay here for days, their tags just reading, Baby Girl Smith or Baby Boy Jones. That always makes me sad for some reason. Seems like a body should get named right off."
"Seems so," I said, looking at my daughter.
"Cecilia is a pretty name. Kind of fancy, but I like that. Looks like she's pretty enough to be a Cecilia."
I looked up at her. "You think?"
The nurse ran one careful finger over the soft spot in the top of her head. "You bet," she said.
The nursery closed sharp at four o'clock, and all the babies were removed from the fathers. As soon as she was gone I missed her small weight, her tired face. I went to look in on Rose, but she was sleeping. Everyone was whipped, too big a day. So I went back to the window to say good-bye to my girl. I stood there with the grandparents, most of them younger than me, and waved because her eyes were open. She looked right at me, just for a second, but I swear to God she saw me there, and I loved her. It happened just that fast. It was so complete, so much love, that I realized that before that moment I hadn't loved her. I drew in my breath and felt myself getting taller. For the first time in my life I was glad to be so tall, because it gave me a better chance of protecting her. Something that small would need protection. I knew I could do that.
All around me young women in pink terry cloth robes held the arms of young men, one of them wearing an army uniform, another a marine. They made faces through the glass and mouthed the words Mama and Daddy while they pointed to their chests. I saw myself in them. They were in love, too. All of us in love.
"Which one's yours?" a boy said to me. He was probably nineteen or twenty, but looked younger on account of his being so thin. His skin was broken out all along his hairline.
"That one," I said, and pointed to the plastic box where she lay as still as a chicken egg.
"Cecilia Abbott," the boy read from the card. He had to squint, even though the letters were big. "Well, she's a cutey, all right, and she keeps good company, too. That's my boy, right there in the crib next to her."
"Baby Boy Seidel," I said.
"I'm thinking of calling him Elvis," the boy said, and tapped at the glass lightly with his finger, until a nurse made a face at him from the other side and he stopped.
I figured it up in the car on the way over. It had been twenty-eight years since I last set foot in a tattoo parlor. And it was love that was making me go again this time, even though this time I wasn't drunk and wasn't seventeen and I was alone. But it was still Cecilia making me go. I am not a superstitious man. I did not believe Cecilia had come back to me in any way. This was for my daughter, a new girl, who happened to have her name.
The best places were always around military bases, but I sure wasn't going to drive all the way to Fort Campbell for a small job like this. There was a place in Owensboro, a colored woman who did them in her house. It had been years since I had heard about her; some guy drunk in a bar pulled up his pants leg to show me where he'd had the skyline of Memphis tattooed above a scar he'd picked up in World War II. I remember the buildings looked neat and orderly and that she'd left the ragged red trail of the bullet to be the Mississippi. "Got a sign in her front yard," the man said to me, running his finger over the rooftops like it was the first time he'd noticed them there. "Says TATTOO. Just like a NO HUNTING or a FOR SALE, 'cept it says TATTOO. I always wondered where she found that damn sign."
There was nothing to say that she would still be there. I had met the man years ago, and there was no telling how long he'd had Memphis with him, but people around these parts don't tend to change much, unless of course they die. Sure enough, after driving around the other side of town for a while, I asked a colored boy out on his bicycle did he know about a woman did tattoos?
"Ma Mamie," he said, and motioned for me to follow. It's not easy, driving a truck slow enough to tail a boy on a bike. This boy, especially, as he didn't seem to be in any hurry to take me anywhere. We went up and down a few streets and then into an alley, where I saw the sign just as the man in the bar had described it. The boy was good to bring me to the door because it was getting dark and the place would have been hard to find otherwise.
"Kid," I called out my window. I wanted to give him a quarter, but he was sailing off over the crest of a dirt hill, not looking my way at all.
I parked the truck and got out. The way it was in Kentucky, in the South back then, was that going into a colored neighborhood was more or less like going into a whole other country. Your neighborhood could be on the edge, you could live three blocks or not even that, maybe just the distance of a field, be as close as from here to there, but the chances of you ever getting there, assuming your business was good, were about as much as you getting to California. Folks didn't mix, plain as that. There was no town meeting, no drawn-out line that said this is where you don't cross, but there was an understanding, and all good folks, colored and white, abided by that.
So when I had the opportunity to find myself on the other side, I looked around. That particular road was dirt and dark, but the snow on the ground spread around whatever light was left. I looked at the same porch on every house, each with a couple of chairs, a stack of empty bushel baskets, some firewood, maybe a flat of empty Coca-Cola bottles. I watched the curtains draw back, a face peer out and disappear. They wanted to know what a white man big as me was doing out in their road come nighttime, though it was clear enough whose house I was standing in front of. They wanted to let me know they'd seen me, that if anything was to happen, they would have seen my face.
It gets late so early in February, and I wanted to make it back to the hospital before visiting hours were over. I knocked on the door, and a girl, maybe fourteen, answered. She had to tilt her head back to see my face.
"Yeah?"
"I'v
e come to see Ma Mamie," I said.
"You want a tattoo?"
I nodded my head.
"You got money?"
I told her I did.
With that she suddenly stepped back and pulled the door open all the way for me to come inside. She was wearing jeans and a thin yellow shirt with the sleeves cut off. There were twisted yellow threads hanging down on her shoulders. Her hair was brushed back hard into a high ponytail that was braided tight. "What're you gonna want?" she said, and pointed to where I should sit down at the kitchen table.
"The date," I said. "Just today's date."
"That's four numbers and two dashes. That's six bucks. You're gonna have to put the cash on the table where I can see it. Lots of folks seem real interested in paying for what they want until they've got it, if you know what I mean."
I nodded and put the money out on the table. I looked into the living room. There was a big console TV, a crucifix, an old divan. "I hope you don't make a lot of noise," she said. "My pop's asleep in the back. He's a security guard, works the night shift." She went to wash her hands in the kitchen sink. "One thing he don't like is being woken up before his time. Where you gonna have this tattoo?"
"On my shoulder."
"Then take your shirt off," she said.
I started to unbutton my shirt and then thought better of it. I didn't like the idea of taking off my clothes, any of my clothes, in front of a child. "Where's Ma Mamie?" I asked.
"I'm Ma Mamie," the girl said, not looking around.
I covered up the six dollars on the table with my hand. "That couldn't be true, unless you were making tattoos when you were four."
She dried off her hands and brought out a big fishing tackle box from the pantry. "You may have been to my mother before me. She was Ma Mamie, too. Both of us named Mamie, me for her and her for her mama and on back like that. All of us Mamies. When my mama died, I got the needles. That makes me Ma Mamie. Take your shirt off."
I thought about it for a while. It just didn't seem right. "No," I said.
"I'm good," she said, screwing in the needle on the little electric drill. "All the Mamies are good. That's because we learn from the time we're born, right away. I did my first tattoo when I was eight years old, on my brother. I had to kneel on his chest to give it to him, but it's there today, a little blue star, right there." She tapped the space between her breasts. "It's not half bad, either. If he was here I'd have him show you."
"How old are you?"
"Twenty-one," she said, and started to set up her pots of ink in a row.
"Like hell."
"Don't you talk ugly to me, mister." She didn't look up, but her voice was steady and low. "My pop is sleeping in the other room. I think you best bear that in mind." Then all of the sudden she jerked her head up, like it's all forgotten. "Time is money," she said. "Yes or no?"
It was good and dark outside now, and I needed to get going. If there was another place that did tattoos in Owensboro, I'd never find it before the end of visiting hours. I wanted today's date put on today, not tomorrow. That seemed like cheating somehow. This was the day my daughter was born. I unbuttoned my shirt. "Okay," I said.
I pulled down the top of my overalls and took off my shirt and sat at the kitchen table of a fourteen-year-old colored girl whose father may or may not have been in the next room.
"Cecilia," she said. "Not very good work, if you don't mind me saying."
"It was a long time ago."
"So where you want the date?"
I pointed just beneath her name. "Right there," I said, and tapped the skin.
"I can touch this one up," she said, touching the name the way Rose did. "I can make it darker, prettier. It'll look like new, only better."
"No," I said. "Just leave that one alone."
"I can still do this good," she said, her voice gone all dreamy. She started to wash my arm. "I'll just make it look like it happened all on the same day, both tattoos. I'll mix up a special ink so the new one'll look faded to begin with. You won't be able to tell, not till all the scabs come off, but then you'll see."
I looked at her and smiled. For the first time since I'd come in the door I felt like this would be okay. "That would be nice," I said. "Really nice."
"All us Mamies are pros," she said. "Genetic."
I heard the hum of the needle and looked away. I don't mind what happens, long as I don't have to watch.
It only took her a few minutes and she switched the needle off. "That looks good," she said. She blotted up the extra ink with a little towel and let me see. Cecilia, 2-6-69. It was good. "You want something else?"
"No," I said. "You were right. You do a fine job."
"Come on and let me do something else." She sounded girlish all of the sudden. She stood on one foot and twisted from side to side.
"I would, but I've got to get going. My wife's in the hospital. She's had a baby."
"How about just a little flower. I'm real good at flowers."
"Roses? Can you do a rose?"
"Like nobody," Mamie said.
"Then put a little rose there, under the date. That'll be for my wife."
She changed her needles and flicked the switch on again. "You won't be sorry about this," she said. "This is so pretty." I felt the needle cut into my arm and thought about Rose and Cecilia, everyone there on my arm now, everyone included. "Almost done," she said. "You're being good, just keep holding still."
But just then a woman walked in the front door and let out such a yell that the needle bit deep into my arm and then fell to the floor. Mamie screamed and the woman screamed again and it was all I could do to keep quiet myself.
"Goddamn you, girl, giving tattoos!" the woman said. She was a big woman, and her big wool coat and tall black fur hat and the two sacks of groceries in her arms made her seem all the bigger. Mamie stood behind me.
"He was in a hurry," Mamie said straight into my back. "He needed to get going. He couldn't wait."
"What kind of a fool are you?" she said, turning on me all of the sudden. "Letting a child give you tattoos? Get out of my house! Get out of my house!"
I pulled on my shirt and felt the blood on my arm soak through right away.
"Don't you want to see it at least?" Mamie said to her mother.
"I don't want to see nothing."
"I'm good," she said. "Good as you. Good as you ever were."
I rushed past the Mamie at the door and wondered for a second if she had been the one who drew Memphis on the man's leg, or if that story was from a long time ago, and it had been her mother. But I didn't ask. I hurried outside and into my truck and turned on the heater because it always made such a racket and I didn't want to hear what they were saying anymore.
2
BEFORE ROSE there was Cecilia. She came before Saint Elizabeth's and Habit and my daughter. I was not a young man when I married for the first time: forty-five is better than half your life and the folks who know me would say I seemed older than that. But the first time I was in love I was young, young like I can't believe now, seventeen.
Truth is, I was in love with Cecilia a long time before that. I used to say I was born loving her, on account of the fact I couldn't ever remember meeting her. She is in the very first days of my memory. I can see her sitting beside me in Sunday school at the Lighthouse Baptist Church, cutting out stars. Or I see her in the store with her mother, Mrs. Stewart, touching all the bolts of fabric she walks by. I see her at the Fourth of July picnic, not more than four years old, wearing a yellow dress that tied behind her neck and saying the Pledge of Allegiance. Not that I always remember her being a child. Lots of times I think about her when she was seventeen.
I don't think of her hardly at all anymore. It just got less and less over the years and now it's been an awfully long time. There was a time if a man'd told me I would be able to go an hour, much less a day or week, without thinking of her, I would have said he was crazy. But truth is, months go by and she won't even cross my mind. Ev
en in the shower, or while I'm getting dressed, and I know I must still see her name on my arm, I don't see it, or if I do, it's just letters. It doesn't tell me anything anymore. That's one reason, although, God, there are so many I could barely list them, why I didn't want Rose to name our daughter Cecilia. I thought it would stir things up, that every day for the rest of my life I would hear that name, I would speak it myself whenever I called her in to dinner or sent her off to school, and it would remind me of what I had worked so hard to forget. But it didn't, really. It became my daughter's name. When she was old enough to talk we would sit on the living room floor to try to get her to say Cecilia.
"Ce-ci-li-a," Rose would say, putting her face up near the baby's and pointing at her.
"Sissy," Cecilia said, and tapped her chest.
"Sissy come to Daddy," I said, and opened my arms. She ran right into them, climbed me like a tree, to bury her face in my neck.
"Don't call her that," Rose said, standing up. "It isn't her name."
"Well, it's the one she likes, and I'm siding with her." I rolled onto my back and put Sissy up in the air. "Airplane," I said.
"Airplane," she said,
"Oh great, that one she gets." Rose walked out of the room and left us there, making engine noises.
Rose was a good mother. She fed the baby just the way the Spock book said she ought to. She never complained when she had to get up in the night. She dressed her warm. But there was something that nobody talked about that I think ate away at her. Sissy looked as adopted as any child to come out of Saint Elizabeth's. She was blond curls and blue eyes and the doctor said she was in the lower range for size for her age. Her giant, dark-haired parents looked awkward and out of place in the little examining room. It didn't much bother me. For Sissy to be mine I had to make her mine, and I'd done that. But for Rose it was all supposed to come natural. Sissy looked too much like whoever it was Rose'd left behind, so in a funny way, it was more her that got reminded of the past than me.