Come a Stranger

  One of the things that struck her hardest about the Tillermans’ house was how like her own it was. The rooms were bigger and more worn down, there were more rooms and a lot more land around outside, but it was a house that took naturally to being filled with people.

  The other thing that struck her was Maybeth. Her eyes wanted to stay on the girl, but Mina could tell that would make her uncomfortable, and it wasn’t as if it was only her blonde prettiness that made Mina want to stare. Mina couldn’t figure out what it was, and she could see that Jeff knew better than she ever would how to act around Maybeth. Maybeth made her think of a dogwood tree in blossom. She watched Maybeth sing, all wrapped around within the music. She tried to name to herself the color of the girl’s cheeks. It was like nothing she had ever seen, except milk maybe. It was rich white, tinted with some creamy color underneath. It was a beautiful color.

  Looking at the little girl, listening, her mind wandering, Mina just barely stopped herself from jumping up and yelling, Whoo-ee. Oh, Tamer Shipp, she thought, you’re right. Colored does cover just about everything. She knew him better than to wonder if he had known what he meant when he said that.

  CHAPTER 22

  In the middle of that week after Thanksgiving, when the house had finally settled down and been cleaned up after the mess it got into by being crowded with family, Mina got home just in time for dinner. She’d been at the library with Kat and Sabrina, working on a science paper, a fact sheet that was supposed to teach them how to use scientific sources. Belle was cross at her for not being there to help with the dinner preparation. “If you think I’m going to do the washing up too, you’re wrong,” she told Mina as they sat down.

  “I don’t. I’m not,” Mina said. “I told Momma where I was going.”

  Everybody seemed pretty snappish at the table, except Louis. But Louis never got snappish. Mina asked him what was wrong. He shook his head; he wouldn’t say or couldn’t say. Momma dished up the pork chops and rice. Mina’s father, she knew, was tired from trying to fix up Miz Hunter’s house for a church activity building. Things kept costing more than he’d planned on and taking longer, and people didn’t always do what they said they’d do to help. Belle had probably had a fight with her present boyfriend, or was between boyfriends; Mina couldn’t keep up. Momma was worried about something, and Mina thought she knew what. Zandor’s letters were getting shorter and telling less, which meant there was something he was carefully not telling. Mina bent her head while her father said grace, adding a silent thanks that her own life was going awfully well. For once, they ate in near silence. Mina tried to start a couple of conversations, talking about the science assignment, but there were almost no responses.

  Finally, her father laid down his fork and knife on the empty plate. “Mina, we had a visitor today. Your mother and I.”

  “Oh?” Mina asked.

  “A Mrs. Abigail Tillerman.”

  “Oh,” she said. Uh-oh, she thought. Her father was going to tell her something he thought she didn’t want to hear.

  “I opened the door, and she was standing there, and she said she’d come to put a face to the bogeyman,” he told Mina.

  Mina couldn’t help it. She laughed. She could just see Mrs. Tillerman doing that. She couldn’t wait to tell Dicey.

  “It’s not funny,” her father said.

  “Mina turns everything into a joke,” Belle said. “She’s a regular clown.”

  “Belle,” Momma corrected, “that’s not a kind thought.”

  “Well, how would you feel if everybody was always talking about your sister?”

  “I’d try not to feel jealous,” Momma snapped back.

  “You think I’m jealous?” Belle didn’t like that. “I’m embarrassed, not jealous.”

  “Why bother?” Mina said. “It’s my problem, not yours. If it’s a problem.”

  “If you girls would save your squabbling for some other place, I’d be profoundly grateful,” Mina’s father interrupted. “I want to ask Mina why Mrs. Tillerman felt it necessary to come calling.”

  “To meet you, Dad,” Mina said. “Because—she probably knows what people say about her and. . . .” She couldn’t think of how to finish.

  “It’s not a family I’m sure I want you associating with,” her father told her.

  “You don’t even know them.” Mina didn’t like what her father was saying, didn’t like him saying it, and didn’t like this feeling of being angry at him.

  “I know enough,” he said.

  What did he know? That they were white. That Mrs. Tillerman didn’t act like everybody else. “You don’t know anything,” Mina told him.

  “I know that, because of them, you’re speaking to me as you never have before,” he pointed out.

  “See what I mean?” Belle said.

  Mina didn’t know what to say. Louis sat unhappily beside her. She looked to her mother for help.

  “Amos, are you being fair?” her mother asked.

  “Why do I always have to be fair?” Mina’s father asked his wife. “Do I have to be fair? Because a man is a minister doesn’t mean he’s got to be perfect, does it? Mina, that woman . . . none of your other friends’ parents have ever felt the need to come calling like that. She didn’t even sit down. We stood in the hallway. She’s not—normal.”

  “Well, I didn’t mind her,” Mina’s mother said. “As I said to your father, she must be all right, she didn’t ask me if I’d come clean her house. I think she came because she didn’t want us worrying, Amos.”

  “Well she’s started me worrying,” he said.

  “She just thinks differently and talks differently,” Mina said. “I like her. I thought she was pretty funny.”

  “See? She turns everything into a joke,” Belle pointed out.

  “And I plan to be friends with Dicey,” Mina announced.

  Her father’s eyes looked like she’d just told him she was pregnant, or wanted to convert to Judaism, or maybe cannibalism.

  “Amos,” her mother said. “Did you ever think how—Americans want everything to be alike? Not different. Like homogenizing milk or . . . the way everybody’s teeth are supposed to be perfectly straight. The white society—all those people on television talk alike, even blacks, you’ve noticed that, you’ve commented on it. The white society wants to erase all the differences. In Europe, Mrs. Tillerman would be called eccentric. That’s not bad, eccentric. It’s bad to call things, or people, crazy because they’re eccentric. Amos, Jesus was eccentric. He said what the majority didn’t want to hear, he acted the way they said you shouldn’t act. Amos?” she asked.

  Mina’s father got up from the table and walked out of the room.

  “He’s worried, he’s worried about you, Mina,” Momma said.

  Mina guessed she knew that.

  “She came to my school,” Louis said. “She was playing marbles with the little kids. It was weird.”

  “My guess is she had her reasons,” Momma said.

  “You know, she’s taken all four of them in,” Mina told her mother, asking her. “There are four kids, and their father ran off and their mother is—I think she’s in some hospital. It sounds like some kind of nervous breakdown, a really bad one. But Mrs. Tillerman is going to adopt them. If it was one of Dad’s congregation that did that, he’d call her a saint.”

  “Have a little faith in your father, Mina.”

  Since the subject didn’t get raised again, Mina guessed she was right to have faith in her father to understand. The next Sunday, he gave a sermon about The Peaceable Kingdom, where the lion lay down with the lamb. He talked about the differences in creatures, in their natures and their needs, in what you could expect of them. He said, at the end, that some people thought it was impossible for the lion to lie down with the lamb. “I don’t believe that,” her father said. “But I do know something. For that impossible dream to become real, to make God’s kingdom here on earth, or to bring ourselves a little closer to it, the lion had better not be hungr
y.”

  “Who is the lion, Dad?” Mina asked him over Sunday dinner.

  She didn’t know at first why he looked at her so lovingly. “You were really listening,” he said.

  “I always listen. This is about my favorite, I guess. But I wasn’t sure who you thought was the lion, and I wondered.”

  “Maybe, anybody hungry is the lion,” her father said.

  “So the slaves were the lion, and the whites were the lamb?” Mina asked.

  “In a way, yes. I’ve been taking your mother’s advice and trying to think with a more historical perspective.”

  “Well, well,” Momma said. “And it’s only taken me, what, twenty-seven years?”

  “I don’t see how anybody can live with another person for twenty-seven years,” Belle said.

  “People change, and keep on changing,” Momma answered her.

  Dicey changed, got silent and withdrawn and—but Mina figured, after the days Dicey had missed from school, probably her mother had died. There wasn’t anything you could say to someone about that, so Mina just kept close, but not too close. Jeff asked her, finally, what was wrong with Dicey, and she told him her guess. He said, “I can see that,” and it sounded like he could. “Their uncle died too,” he said.

  “Bullet,” Mina said, without thinking, wondering how she knew that was who it was so certainly. She didn’t need to find that out after all.

  “In Vietnam,” Jeff said, his voice quiet, but angry for some reason. They went out to the Tillermans’ that winter, Jeff more than Mina. Dicey never came to Mina’s house, but Mina thought that had more to do with Dicey wanting to be near her own family than with anything else. Mina thought Mrs. Tillerman didn’t mind having her out there, because if she had she’d have said so, not minding the embarrassment of saying something like that. Maybeth played the piano, Bach, while Dicey and Mina sat to listen. It had been a long time, Mina thought, as the piano notes wound into her ears. Too long a time.

  “It’s the counterpoint I really like,” she said to Dicey.

  “Counterpoint?”

  Mina explained what she remembered. Maybeth wasn’t listening, just playing. Finally, Mina said to Dicey, who sat quietly in front of the fire, with the flames at her back, “There’s such a big difference between knowing about something and actually doing it.”

  “My mother was like that,” Dicey said. She didn’t say any more, but Mina could hear a lot in what she didn’t say.

  “I thought I was going to be a ballet dancer when I was little,” Mina said then.

  “What happened?”

  “I outgrew it—literally,” Mina said, making it a joke. “They told me I’d grown wrong, too big. I used to be tall and skinny and coordinated.”

  “You told me you played tennis,” Dicey objected.

  “They were wrong about me, as it turns out. ‘But it took me awhile to figure that out. It was a special camp, up in Connecticut, for gifted dancers,” Mina said. She made herself add, “They were all white.”

  Dicey looked up at her then, as if she was hearing things Mina wasn’t saying. The piano played on.

  “I used to listen to a lot of this kind of music too. Because of the camp. I stopped that too. Which was stupid of me,” Mina said.

  Dicey agreed. Mina just smiled at her. She could talk to Dicey about almost everything. The one thing she never mentioned was Tamer Shipp and Bullet. She was saving that, just as she was saving the Tillermans for Tamer Shipp when he came back that summer. Because she had that gift saved for him, Mina could get through all the days, waiting.

  The thing she almost didn’t say to Dicey she got around to one early spring day, when a March wind was blowing up from the water, and she had walked with Dicey to work. “Maybe I shouldn’t ask you this,” Mina started.

  “I dunno, Mina; if even you are hesitating, it seems to me that you probably shouldn’t,” Dicey advised.

  “You’ve never met my family.”

  Dicey nodded, not making any excuses.

  “But I wonder—because, you know, you’ve been like a mother to your brothers and sister. The way you take care of them. But there’s more to being a mother than that. You’re your own mother, in a way. That’s what makes you so grown up.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yeah. Or, I think. You know that.” Mina was impatient. “But I’ve been wondering—if you ever need a mother-figure, or a mother-substitute, for something you can’t talk with your grandmother about—I can recommend mine.”

  “I couldn’t do that,” Dicey said.

  “Because she’s black.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Dicey said. “Because she’s a stranger.”

  “That’s why I want you to meet her. My dad too, but he’s a harder nut to crack.”

  “Okay, maybe,” Dicey said. “See you tomorrow, okay?”

  Mina knew how to interpret Dicey’s abrupt exit. It was nothing personal, it was just the way she moved through the world. She was finding that being friends with Dicey was an education in itself. She looked at people more carefully now, whites especially. Dicey had olive undertones in her skin, but Miss Eversleigh’s face was like onionskin typing paper, and Mr. Chappelle’s had a dead white tone, chalky. Mrs. Tillerman, who worked outside except during winter, faded to coffee ice cream color. Zits, Mina noticed with some ungenerous pleasure, looked a lot worse on whites than on blacks.

  Mina was playing tennis again, as her spring sport, and she thought probably she’d play it all through high school. She’d try out for the tennis team next year. The exercise of playing felt really good to her body, the way it used her whole body, like dance used to. There were only a few blacks who played tennis, but since the ratio of blacks to whites on the tennis squad was greater than the number of tennis players compared to everybody else in the school, the blacks just kind of mixed into that tennis-playing minority. It was a colored team, Mina said to herself, storing the thought up to tell Mr. Shipp. She had gotten a racquet for Christmas and she used part of her babysitting income to buy cans of tennis balls. It wasn’t easy to find someone to play with on weekends, when she had time, until Sammy asked her to teach him how, holding a racquet that Jeff said had been given to him years ago but looked suspiciously new to Mina.

  Sammy was young, and smaller, so Mina had to play gently, but he enjoyed batting the ball back and forth. He never got tired, never got bored. It got so they could have some good volleys. Dicey spent most of her free time on a sailboat in their barn, which she wanted to get into the water for the summer. Mina wasn’t interested in sailing. She was interested in tennis. Teaching Sammy made her own game better in some weird way.

  One Saturday, she suggested they stop off at her house for something cool to drink, before he rode home. He said yes with no hesitation. Little kids didn’t notice color so much, Mina knew; the older you got the more you noticed.

  Mina’s mother was reading at the kitchen table when they entered. Mina had forgotten that her mother would be home. “This is Sammy Tillerman,” Mina said. “Sammy? This is my momma.”

  He stood in the doorway, staring. “Hello, Sammy,” Momma said.

  The little boy didn’t answer. He just stared. Mina went ahead and poured two glasses of lemonade, wondering what was going on. Maybe little kids thought grown-up blacks were different from black children, so you couldn’t relax with them. Maybe kids forgot that black children had black parents. Mrs. Smiths looked at Mina, who raised her shoulders to say she didn’t know what was going on, and then they both looked at Sammy.

  He was standing there with his arms drawn up in front of him. His fists were all balled up, as if he wanted to push his fingernails into his palms and hurt himself. His mouth was stretching out wide, so that it hurt Mina to look at him, trying to pretend that was a smile. He didn’t want to cry, and he wasn’t going to—whites didn’t, not with the same ease blacks did, and they didn’t laugh as easily either, or yell out glad or angry. But this was worse than crying.

  Before M
ina even had time to finish thinking all this and to wonder what was wrong with him, her mother was up from her chair with the pages of the book flipping over. Momma put her arms around Sammy. “It’s all right,” Momma said. “I understand.”

  That was more than Mina did, for a minute. Then she realized that she’d forgotten—but Sammy hadn’t, and how could he—that his own mother had died. Mina was angry at herself: She should have known better than to forget. Sammy just leaned up against her mother’s body, resting there with his head on her shoulder and his face buried into her neck, not crying, not saying anything, just more tired than a kid should have to be. Momma crooned and cuddled him. Mina stood by the table.

  “I’m sorry,” Sammy mumbled, but he didn’t move away from Mrs. Smiths’s arms.

  “Don’t be,” she said, wiping her own eyes dry. “There’s nothing wrong with sorrow. It’s as much a part of God’s world as anything else.” She let him go, but kept her dark hand on his yellow head. “Are you a little better now?”

  He nodded his head.

  “You can come back, anytime, for the same treatment,” Momma said, standing up. “I’m a nurse, you know.”

  Sammy thought that was funny, and he looked up at Momma for a while, while she looked down at him. “Good-o,” he finally said.

  Mina thought to herself, watching, her momma was the kind of woman she wanted to be, wherever else she got to in her life.

  CHAPTER 23

  It was a warm spring, that year. By early May the magnolias were in full flower. Their heavy waxy leaves spread out like dark green hands, hands without fingers—or maybe fingers without hands, thick flat green fingers. The blossoms within also opened out, thick waxy white cups. There was an old song Jeff had sung for her: “Southern trees bear strange fruit.” The song was talking about blacks hanging from the trees, strung up by the KKK, and Mina couldn’t think about that while she went to sleep at night, unless she wanted not to go to sleep. But these magnolia blossoms were pretty strange looking too, she thought, they were strange in their own right. And Crisfield wasn’t really southern, because Maryland wasn’t. Maryland had been pretty well split in half about what side to fight on in the Civil War.