Why does this kind of thing happen when it’s just the hottest, I thought? Why? I’m never going to be able to get to sleep with this heat. And then I began to realize that I heard more without the air conditioner on. I heard the sound of my husband’s breath dropping in and out. I heard the sound of my own breath dropping in and out. And I remembered M’Dear talking about breath and gratefulness.
She’d say, “Okay, Calla. When you are most afraid, find things to be grateful for.” And so I began to just let myself hear the sounds of the night. I could hear some traffic rumbling by, but not much. Even in the city, I could still hear the insects making their summer sounds, the comforting hum of the refrigerator. If I had a dog, I thought, I would hear it breathing, but a husband is enough. A husband is enough. This house is enough. This life is enough. I do not want what I do not have. I do not want the air conditioner. I do not have it, and so I do not want it. And the more I dropped down into these feelings of gratitude, the sleepier I became. And the less sweaty. I took off the T-shirt that I slept in. The big old T-shirt of Sweet’s. I still took that off, and my panties, and lay there nude without even a sheet. The ceiling fan roaring on me. I heard that whirring sound and became thankful for it. Thankfulness flooded me, and then so did sleep.
Chapter 30
1977–1978
I hadn’t told but two people that Sweet and I were trying to make a baby. I’d told Renée because I’ve known her all my life and because she loves making and taking care of babies. Then I told Ricky, but not by choice. Even though I worked side by side with him all day long, I managed to keep quiet. Then one night, Sweet said, “Babe, what do you say if I soak some red beans overnight, cook ’em up in the morning, and then have friends over tomorrow night?”
So we did, and Ricky and Steve came. They all started out with cocktails, but I drank soda water. I’d stopped drinking wine with dinner because it was bad for getting pregnant. I’ve never been much of a drinker, and that means a lot in New Orleans. Louisiana does happen to be the birthplace of the go-cup and the drive-through daiquiri stand. But I used to drink a beer or two or some wine with shrimp boils or po-boys at parties and get-togethers. So that night Ricky noticed that I wasn’t even doing that.
So he cornered me in the shop the next day and got it out of me. “I am appalled,” he said, “that my cousin and my dear, dearest girlfriend did not care to share this with me.”
“We wanted to wait until we had real news,” I told him. “Plus, it might be a while in coming. We’ve been saving our money because having a baby makes you think about every dollar.”
Shortly after our talk, a new line of hair products began to stream into the salon. Ricky had turned the shop into a Naturatique salon, where nothing but plant-based products were allowed. He claimed that he’d done it for his health, that eventually all those bad chemicals were going to catch up with him. But Steve told me that the night Ricky heard that Sweet and I were trying to have a baby, he started his research into Naturatique. Ricky did not want me to be exposed to any chemicals that might hurt me or the baby. Once he began to look into it, he became more concerned, because research showed that many of the chemicals cause serious problems in utero.
I couldn’t get over the fact that Ricky would do that for me and my baby. A couple of the customers started to gripe, but there were those who still complained about not being able to smoke in the salon, for heaven’s sake. When they did, I just told them about that beauty shop in Natchez, Mississippi, where a woman lit up a cigarette at the manicure table. Somehow the flame reached the saucer of acetone used to remove false fingernails, and it caught on fire! That woman was lucky to get off with only one side of her hair and both eyebrows singed. Lord knows what could have happened.
When I have my own salon, it will be safe too, I decided. Sweet said that was fine with him. I knew he’d be a real hands-on father. He was already one of the most liberated men I ever knew. He loved to cook and had an ace collection of perfectly sharpened knives. I remembered coming home one day when he was off from work for a week. Sweet was standing there ironing clothes, with a pair of boxer shorts on and no shirt! That body of his was so wiry and strong, I could see all the muscles in his stomach. And what was he doing? He was dancing to the song “Barefootin’.” Just dancing away while he was ironing. I burst out laughing.
“Hold on, hold on a minute!” Sweet said. “All right now, dance with me, my baby. Dance with me!”
He turned off the iron, and I kicked off my shoes. Then we played that song over and over on that old forty-five record player M’Dear gave me when I was thirteen years old. We just danced and danced, cracking each other up.
Then we wound up making love that afternoon. Afterward, as we lay beside each other, Sweet ran his hand down my belly to my crotch. His hand cupped perfectly around me.
“When that baby comes, I’m gonna help catch him. You got to catch babies when they drop down from heaven.”
His hand was warm against my folds, all relaxed from lovemaking.
“You got to catch ’em careful,” he continued. “If they’re little miracle girls, you got to catch ’em with your right hand.” He kept his hand cupped around me.
“If they’re boy miracles,” he said, switching hands, “you got to catch ’em with your left hand.”
His finger slipped a little ways into me.
“You got to catch those miracles when they’re thrown,” Sweet said, then rolled on top of me again.
“Miracles flying through air like curveballs,” my husband said, and again he entered me.
“Curveballs,” I said, and breathed in deeply. “Curveballs flying through the October sky.”
Sukey’s going back to school inspired me. I knew that if I ever wanted to open up my own shop, I needed more training, so I signed up for business classes at Grassido Community College. Grassido is on City Park Avenue, which is lined with those old live oaks I love, on the fringe of the cemetery zone. New Orleans is so divine and weird at the same time! Fourteen cemeteries all sharing about a square mile of high ground. Sometimes, on the way to Delgado, I stopped by to look at the graves and studied the things people had brought for their loved ones. It always touched me—besides all the flowers, there were lawn chairs for the dead and Xerox portraits of them attached to the gravestones, faded with sun and rain. Once, at a child’s grave, I saw a little toy lawn mower. Oh, it made me cry. I stopped and said a prayer.
Maybe one day I’ll have a baby. I hope she or he will like to play with little toy lawn mowers and a zillion other toys, and will laugh and let me hold him or her like M’Dear held me.
Most of my classes were in bookkeeping, business law, contracts, and other things a small business owner has to know. But I also signed up for some English classes, because I loved English in high school. Mister Robert Peletier, our teacher, asked us to read the play Romeo and Juliet. I’d heard of it, of course, but I’d never read it.
Romeo and Juliet just tore me apart. Those two, they were so young. They were about the age that Tuck and I were—no, they were even younger, like thirteen and fourteen years old—and they loved each other so deeply. Their families had been fighting for centuries. They had been fighting for so long they had forgotten what they were fighting about.
I read the whole play in one weekend. I was out on the screened porch, and I couldn’t stop crying. Juliet had this plan where it would look like she was dead, but she’d really taken a potion from a monk to put her to sleep.
Romeo came out of hiding to see Juliet and thought she was dead. He didn’t know she’d taken a potion and was just asleep. He cried out to her, but she didn’t wake up in time. His heart was so broken that he took his dagger out of his belt and stabbed it into his own heart.
When Juliet woke up, finally, and found her Romeo covered in blood, she began to scream. She held him in her lap, with the blood flowing all down her gown. Sometimes I imagined it like Jackie Kennedy’s pink fleecy suit, with all the blood on it in the back o
f that convertible.
The night I finished that play, I was heartbroken. But when I lay down to go to sleep, my sadness lifted. There was something in the beauty of the way the story was told that lifted me up out of my sadness. And I thought, Mister Robert Peletier is right. Beauty and art are everywhere and can lift us up out of our suffering.
It was at Grassido that I got my T-shirt that said “Another Hairdresser for Nuclear Disarmament.” I got it when my class was called off one day. There I was, with an hour and a half to kill, so I decided to wander around and see if there was something going on on campus.
It turned out that there was a lecture in the auditorium called “Will We Survive Till the Year 2000?”
It had already started when I got there. The woman talking on the stage showed us a screen with one of those detailed diagrams of the human body. I swear, I will never understand why they make those things look so much like a doll with its hair ripped off. I am not kidding, there wasn’t a single hair on the entire diagram, when everyone knows that people have got hair everywhere.
Anyway, this woman was pointing to different parts of the body and explaining how “rems” would affect each of them. I knew what rems were—radiation. That’s what they hit M’Dear with when she got breast cancer. Finally, the woman mentioned the word hair. She told us that if a nuclear bomb was to get dropped, people’s hair would melt out in clumps! Without them smelling anything or tasting anything or knowing what in the world hit them.
I was horrified. I saw M’Dear, propped up on her pillows, in the big bed she and Papa shared. I saw her bald head, only tufts of hair sticking up like a crazed, half-plucked chicken. The sounds she made as she bit back the pain. The burned spots on her body left from the radiation.
I wondered if this lady could be telling the truth. It blasted me to think of millions of radiation-melted heads.
Walking home, I couldn’t shake this idea, even with the smell of May in New Orleans, which meant gardenias and magnolias in bloom, their scents almost too sweet. Sweet was napping on the couch when I got home, with the TV on, snoring like a truck stuck in the mud.
I stared at his thick curly black hair and at his lean body, all muscled from working on his boat.
His hair is getting too long, I thought. I am going to have to give him a cut soon. Then suddenly, I saw Sweet’s hair start to melt out.
I swear, I was sitting there in our big comfy chair, and I had a vision of Sweet’s hair getting soft and falling out. And then his eyebrows and eyelashes melted off, leaving him looking like a painting that somebody went off and didn’t finish. His face was smooth, with no male stubble at all—all his whiskers and his mustache gone. And where his denim work shirt sleeves were rolled up, there wasn’t any arm hair. Sweet’s arms were thin and bare, like a starving child’s. They didn’t look like Sweet’s arms at all.
Then it was all over. Everything went back to normal. All I saw was Sweet asleep there on the couch, with his black hair that always pleased me so much, the way it brushed against my face when he kissed me good-bye in the morning. I got up, leaned over him, gave his hair a tousle, and kissed his cheek.
“Come on, babe, wake up,” I whispered. “You know it kills your back if you sleep too long on the couch.”
Then we had dinner, watched a little TV, and went to bed. But before I fell asleep, I thought about hair—about babies’ soft little tufts, and about how when people get old their hair is like baby hair again. I thought about minds so evil that they could build a bomb that would not only poison every organ of our bodies but melt out our hair as well. Besides, if that bomb ever dropped, I’d be out of business. There wouldn’t be any hair left for me to do. Or much of anything to do, come to think of it, for any of us.
The next morning, I sat down and wrote a letter to the president in Washington, D.C.
May 22, 1978
New Orleans, Louisiana
Dear Mister President and Mrs. Rosalynn Carter,
I am a beautician. I work at a salon called Ricky’s in New Orleans, Louisiana. I am a happily married woman who pays taxes, even on tips.
Now, Mrs. Carter, you have chosen the perfect cut for your hair type. You especially have lovely hair for a woman your age, and it is very well kept. Mister President, you’re thinning on top, so I think you’ll strongly relate to what I’m about to say.
I speak as a beautician when I ask you to think, “How would you look as a bald couple?” One nuclear bomb would melt out all your hair. I am a professional in the field of beauty, but I don’t know any cures for radiation-melted hair. And as far as I know, no one else does, either.
The human body is not a Styrofoam wig stand. I, for one, will not think you are a ninety-pound weakling if you get rid of the twenty-megaton bomb. I would like to go on waking up and cooking and doing hair and loving my husband.
If nothing else, please: Think of your looks.
Yours Very Sincerely,
Calla Lily Ponder
Chapter 31
1979–1980
Sweet and I had been trying our very best to make a baby. I’d taken my temperature every day to make sure we hit the right window of time. We’d made love in all the positions that the doctor suggested, like being on all fours with Sweet behind me, or practically standing on my head. Afterward, I had put two pillows under my butt and lain down with my feet propped up on the wall for half an hour. But none of it seemed to work.
When I finally missed my period, I was just so happy! I hardly dared to hope that I was finally pregnant. So I waited one more month, and sure enough, I missed another one. Sweet and I were thrilled. We had been trying for three years at this point.
Then I went to the doctor, who examined me and did a bunch of tests. Then he told me, “I’m sorry, but you’re not pregnant.”
“What?” I said. “I mean, I missed my period for two and a half months! I feel pregnant, like all warm inside and emotional, like before I get my period.”
“Well,” the doctor said, “these things happen. If you want to get pregnant very badly, your body can fool itself into thinking that you are. These are called ‘hysterical pregnancies.’”
“What’s wrong with us?” I asked him. “All the tests we’ve had came back normal. And I’ll tell you one thing, Doc: I am not hysterical. If you think I’m hysterical, you don’t know what hysterical is.”
The doctor looked at me like I was the bad student in class. “Many couples are infertile for reasons we can’t explain. All you can do is keep trying. And I suggest to you that you learn more about both hysterical pregnancies and hysteria in general.”
Then he got up, and walked out of the exam room.
“Hey,” I said, when I got home, trying to hide my tears.
“Hey, baby!” Sweet said, sweeping me into his arms and up off the floor, like he often did.
And then I couldn’t help it. I started sobbing. Sweet gently set me down and just held me.
“Tighter,” I said, and he held me tighter.
I told him what the doctor had said, crying, trying to catch my breath. Sweet began to cry too. I could feel his tears on my face, on the top of my head, his shirt getting wet against my cheek.
“I’m so sorry, Sweet,” I told him. “Maybe I could have done something different. I could have had a different kind of diet, or a different kind of—body, or attitude, or—”
Sweet pushed me away just a tiny bit so that he could see my face. He looked down into my eyes. “No, Calla,” he said. “It’s not you. It’s not me. I bet your Moon Lady would say that it’s just not yet time for this baby to fall down from her arms into ours.”
I looked at him. “You’re right,” I said. “You reminded me of just what I need to truly hold on to.”
And we stood there crying, both of us thinking about the baby we wanted so badly, the one that we really thought had come, the one that was not yet in my womb.
That night, we lay in bed and drank a bottle of wine. Ever since we started trying to make
a baby, Sweet had stopped drinking along with me. But that night we had some wine, and neither of us felt like eating. All Sweet wanted was some olives, and all I could eat were some preserved figs that Miz Lizbeth had put up and sent us. I just ate a single fig, very slowly, until my mouth was just holding the stem, which I kept turning around until I’d sucked every bit of sweetness out of it.
After we’d both finished our wine, my fig, and Sweet’s olives, we lay in bed and held hands till we fell asleep.
That night, a dream came to me. I saw a naked little baby sitting on her bottom, playing with a ball or a toy. She was about one year old, sitting with her back toward me. She turned her head as though I had just walked into the room, and she smiled. Then, very slowly, she turned around until she was facing me.
She sat with her chubby little legs sticking out in front of her. She leaned down to reach one foot, pulled it up, and began to play with her toes. Then she started laughing—utterly delighted with her toes!—and looked up at me and gave the most ecstatic laugh!
She was there to give me a message of some kind, but she didn’t have anything to say. All she did was smile and laugh and play with her toes. And I couldn’t help it—I began to laugh too, because she had the kind of laugh that you just couldn’t resist joining in with. Then I woke up and found that I was still laughing.
Sweet had cracked the window open before we went to sleep. When he did, it hit me that whatever baby spirit had tried to come through me in my “hysterical pregnancy” was now flying out of the window. How sad I would be to see it go! But now I had this new baby, this dream baby, who I bet M’Dear would say looked a lot like me.
Well, my laughter didn’t wake Sweet. He just lay there perfectly still, his arms at his sides, looking so peaceful, with no signs of turmoil. I looked at his thick black hair, thankful that he’d listened to me and left it long, especially in the back. He never understood how sexy his hair was. He still didn’t understand why the girls in high school named him Sweet. He was so sweet that it rarely occurred to him that others were not.