“I just hope you didn’t hurt his feelings, that’s all. You know how you can talk sometimes, and everybody might not understand you like I do.”
“Now, I like that.” She turned her head toward the table. “I talk the way I’ve talked all my life, miss—plain and clear. And the folks around here don’t have any trouble understanding me. That little peanut-headed boy got my message right off that you were only thirteen years old in spite of them long legs and whatever lies you been telling him about your age, and you didn’t care to be keeping company. And I said that if that’s the reason he keeps hauling his little greasy behind over to this side of the road, he just better haul it back the other way.”
“I can’t believe you did that.” Laurel rolled her head in her hands.
“Well, believe it,” Roberta said, “’cause I did. And his feelings didn’t seem to be hurt one bit. No, as a matter of fact,” she continued slowly, “his feelings seemed right healthy when I invited him to supper tonight as long as he was willing to sit at my table and behave himself like a proper gentleman.”
She took Laurel’s kiss stoically and glanced at her back as she ran toward the bathroom. “Yeah, I thought that would get your butt out of that wet suit.”
Later that evening they sat on the porch together, Laurel’s head resting in Roberta’s lap, the crickets and bullfrogs competing as hard to give them sound as the fireflies and stars did to give the light.
“You know, you getting too big for this,” Roberta said as she stroked the thick, wavy hair.
“I wish I didn’t have to leave you.” Laurel sighed and buried her head deeper into Roberta’s lap.
“It ain’t me you don’t want to leave, it’s Mr. Yes, Ma’am-No Ma’am over there.”
They laughed again as they had while washing the dishes about the Morgan boy who had come to supper with his tie so tight he could hardly swallow, and so nervous he had answered each of Roberta’s offers of food with both Yes, Ma’am and No, Ma’am.
“No, really, Grandma. You don’t know how awful it is at home.”
“I seen your awful—nice big room to yourself, color TV, record player, and all kinds of gadgets. I should have it so bad.”
When Roberta’s son had announced his sudden marriage last year to a woman she had never met, she made it her business to take a twenty-eight-hour bus trip and do just that. She arrived on their doorstep with four suitcases, two packed with her clothes and two that were empty. She stayed just long enough to find out what she wanted to know: whether or not she would have to fill those two other bags and use the extra one-way ticket safely tucked away in her pocketbook.
“Well, I hate it there now.”
She felt the slender shoulders tense as the words hissed through the girl’s clenched teeth.
“Your daddy should hear you talking like that, it would break his heart. He’s worked real hard for you, Laurel. You know, some men wouldn’ta saddled themselves with a baby all alone, and you weren’t much more than that when your mama passed. I tried to get him to leave you down here with me then, but he felt that you were his responsibility. And he’s done right well by you. I know it ain’t easy for you to share him now. You’ve never really had to share anything, have you? But I think you’re old enough to understand that grown men have needs, Laurel. Needs that can’t all be satisfied by a little girl. And I got to give him credit; he coulda married a long time ago, but he was waiting for the right one—not so much for himself, but for you. And your new mama seems right nice.”
“She’s not my mother. My real mother would never treat me the way she does.”
The hand that was stroking Laurel’s hair became as still and glacial as the next words: “What has she done to you?”
“She won’t let me cut my hair.”
Roberta expelled a burst of air that burned her lungs as it left. “Lord have mercy! You been laying here whining ’cause of that? I oughta cut your throat.” She shoved Laurel’s head from her lap.
“No, really, Grandma.” Laurel sat up and leaned over. “I have a chance to swim in the city-wide competitions, but all this hair slows my official time.”
“So braid it up and pin it to your head, like you do here.”
“I do, and that’s just it. It’s too bulky to fit under a cap and these braids are added surface friction. And in the water that can make a lot of difference.”
“I don’t see what difference a few ounces of hair can make. And she’s right not wanting you walking around looking like a scalped Indian. Besides, the Good Book says that a woman’s hair is her crowning glory.”
“See that, you’re taking her side—just like Daddy. He’s always taking her side about everything. I thought at least you would understand. But no one understands.”
And her eyes burned with that strange intensity that always bewildered Roberta. The child was too high-strung. She would wrap her soul around the most trivial things: the slant of sun on a rock, the curve of a wildflower. And they had to be pried gently from her hands because the need for them came from some mysterious valley that opened without warning inside of her. Roberta could tell when that was happening; her voice took on the plaintive echoes that it did at that moment. She was down there now, and Roberta would have to coax her back.
“Laurel, remember the story of Brer Fox and Brer Bear.” It was halfway between a question and a command. “They had stolen Farmer Brown’s chicken, plucked it, and put it in an old gunny sack. And then they met him on the road and he had his huge, double-barreled shotgun over his shoulder and wanted to know what they had in the bag. So they told him it was nothing but an old tomcat they had found and skinned: And when Farmer Brown went to untie the sack, Brer Bear whispered to Brer Fox, ‘What we gonna do when he finds out it ain’t no cat?’ And Brer Fox said—‘Me, you, and that chicken is gonna improvise.’”
She didn’t get the smile she was used to, but she went on anyway. “So you see, sometimes when things ain’t going quite your way and you gotta deal with just what’s on hand, two people can put their heads together and maybe come up with a way to turn what could be a bad situation into a tolerable one.”
Laurel listened, but her eyes were far away and filled with tears. She put her head back on Roberta’s lap.
“What I was thinking,” Roberta said, “is that if we go into town Saturday and get Miss Lucinda to put one of them new relaxers in your head, you could still keep peace at home and your hair would flatten out enough to fit under a cap so you could swim. How does that sound?”
Her only answer was Laurel’s soft breath and the tears she could feel hot and acidic through the thin summer cotton. “I want my mother. I want my mother.”
It wasn’t petulant or whining, but it echoed such an emptiness that Roberta shuddered as she cupped the thick hair in her hands.
“Well, I’m the closest thing to a natural mother you got,” she whispered through the screen and out into the night, “so God help us both.”
Music and water. The two became one for Laurel the next and final summer she would spend in her grandmother’s house. Roberta stood on the edge of the pond, holding a tape player like it was some unpredictable animal.
“Now when I’m in the water, you count to five and push the button I showed you,” Laurel called from the rocks. Wildflowers had been pinned into the two thick braids crossed over the top of her head. And the body that had rounded and filled was curved gracefully over the boulders as she moved into an arabesque that propelled her into the water.
Roberta gasped when she disappeared under a surface that gave almost no evidence it had been disturbed. The five seconds seemed a lifetime and when she pushed in the concave button, the recorder came alive in her hands with the vibration of violin strings that she could feel all the way up to the top of her skull. Simultaneously, the strings pulled Laurel’s arched form out of the water, into a backstroke that hit the surface each time a full note was played. It was difficult to tell whether her body was making the music or the
music her body, as she turned, plunged, and lifted to each change in tempo. She’d disappear with each roll of the bass drums to be resurrected by a clash of cymbals and sent spiraling toward each edge of the shore by the wind from the clarinets. It seemed effortless, as if she’d changed the water into another element. It was liquid air that rewarded every perfect twist and turn by keeping her afloat, keeping her moving, and keeping her free.
She came dripping up on the gravelly dirt, laughing through her heaving chest. “What do you think? I was a little off during the second movement, but I’m working on it.”
Roberta handed her a towel. “I didn’t know you was gonna jump from them rocks. My heart almost fell out of me.”
“Aw, that’s nothing.” She waved her hand backward, not even granting the ledge the dignity of a glance. “When I work with my group, I come off a ten-foot platform and I hold form all the way down. Just imagine, Grandma …” She sectioned the horizon with her hands. “There’s Cheryl, Renée, Connie, and then me—all on these ascending platforms. First strings, Cheryl goes. Second strings, Renée. Third, Connie. And then, crescendo—me. Right through this flowered hoop. It’s wild.”
“It’s insanity.” Roberta thrust the recorder at her. “I don’t know what’s gotten into your father, letting you do something like that. You could break your neck.”
“Oh no, not in the water.” She stared out over the pond. “It can be a little scary when you’re first up there. But it’s all in the balance and how you hit the surface. And it’s the greatest feeling in the world when you do it right, Grandma. It’s like there’s no difference between the air and the water except that the water is safer. Once you get down there and hold still, it lifts you right up, sorta like it was a pair of warm hands or arms. And you come up to all this beautiful music that was really there anyway if you knew how to listen. And then you just move and move and move.” She began to do arabesques, jetés, and pirouettes around Roberta.
“Well, if you wanna dance to all them fiddles, why don’t you go take up regular ballet?”
“Because it’s not the same. It’s—” Laurel stopped as if the need for that question would make any answer futile. “It just isn’t.” Then she smiled. “I’m hungry now. Let’s go home.”
But Roberta wasn’t fooled by that smile. She saw Laurel drawing her thoughts into that private valley that she visited so much that summer while offering everyone else the tokens of her eyes, ears, and mouth.
Roberta touched her shoulder. “I must say you looked right pretty in that water. And with all them flowers in your hair. I guess you’re glad you didn’t hack it all off last year.”
“Uh huh,” Laurel said as she pulled the columbines and daisies out of her braids, crushing them before they were thrown in the dirt.
Roberta knew she had made another mistake. Even a passing reference to Laurel’s stepmother sent her into one of those “moods,” where she picked at her food or settled in the porch swing, staring into space for hours.
That summer she grew especially quiet when it rained. She played one tape over and over. Chopin’s Fifteenth Prelude, she told Roberta, who still called it the one where the man kept plunking off-key. It was just her womanhood coming down, Roberta thought, the insides got to catch up the outsides. And knowing how exhausting that race could be, she would bring her a glass of milk, a slice of peach pie, or some biscuits and jam. “Keep your strength up,” she’d command before going back inside to her ironing.
It was music and water that kept Laurel away the next year. But the phone brought her voice into the house. Summer was the only time she and her group could really practice together. And she wanted a job this year, but she would try to come for a visit before school started. If not, Roberta was still coming up for Christmas, right? No, she didn’t have her eye on some fast-tailed boy up in Cleveland. They sure eyed her enough; but didn’t Roberta always say that looking wasn’t having, and having wasn’t keeping? Well, no boy was going to keep her tied down. Kisses, hugs, and loads of love but it was time to go now. So Roberta didn’t hold her, and she put the phone in its cradle with only a twinge of regret, accepting that it was indeed time for Laurel to do that.
The telephone became an important presence in Roberta’s house. She knew it would ring at the end of each school year, on her birthday, Easter, and the second Sunday in May. It gave her ordered and aging years a predictability that was pleasant, but when it rang at sporadic times because Laurel couldn’t complete the cycle of some triumph or crisis without sharing it with her, it gave those remaining years meaning.
It rang now, insistent and shrill because she couldn’t reach it quickly enough. The act of getting up from over the washtub had to be performed in small increments, making sure the back would unbend, the knees would support the body, and the legs would get her across the room. There was no need to come to graduation because she was going to kill herself, the voice announced dramatically and was told that Roberta would save her the trouble if she didn’t shut up and stop all that crying. She had been accepted at Berkeley and she couldn’t go. That woman had decided to get pregnant and now her father could only afford the state university. No, she wasn’t being selfish. They knew she had wanted to go to California for ages. Hadn’t she worked for the last three summers, saving all her money for this? Yes, the state university had business administration but they didn’t have a decent swimming coach. If she went to Berkeley, she might get a shot at the Olympics. No, California was not full of freaks and mass murderers. She didn’t care what the National Geographic special said, it wasn’t going to fall into the ocean. Why was she bothering to talk to her anyway? This whole conversation was a waste of time. And a waste of money, Roberta reminded her before slamming down the phone—Laurel had called collect.
Roberta went to that high school graduation, and Laurel went to Berkeley. But even if Roberta had been invited to her college commencement, she wouldn’t have gone. She had learned to become truly suspicious of anything associated with the state of California. She stopped watching its game shows, and predicted well in advance for her residents the national ills that would come from putting two of its citizens in the White House. And it even reached the point where she refused to buy its oranges and raisins. It wasn’t paranoia or senility; it was just extreme caution. Because all Roberta knew was that she had cashed in her life insurance to send a child she had named Laurel Johnson to the state of California, and it sent her back a stranger.
Laurel Dumont got out of the silver Mercedes and stood in front of the weather-beaten house. The scant material of her halter top clung to her back and she ran her hands over her damp throat. Already she could feel the sweat rising through the pores in her scalp, her closely cropped hair forming tight ringlets at the base of her neck. She was glad that Howard had decided to stay back at the Sheraton, he was finally right about one thing: Atlanta was the only civilized section of Georgia. This place was ungodly hot. But he was wrong about the car; renting the Mercedes didn’t make her seem more at home. Sitting in that heavy, air-conditioned box and trying to maneuver it over these winding, bumpy roads had given her a fierce headache because she had to concentrate in order not to lose her bearings. Landmarks that should have been familiar took on a different shape and size through the tinted glass and over the circular hood ornament. The only way to tell when Clover Road changed into Bennett’s Pass was the texture of the ground, when gravel became clay. But the cushioned springs made it all seem the same, and she’d almost missed turning right at the crucial third pine. As the tires screeched to a halt and she had to do the impossible, back up with a dusty rear window, she might have cursed Howard for leasing the car or cursed herself for making the trip, but that would have taken some clarity about exactly who was to blame, and she didn’t have that. There was just the pervasive feeling that she in that car on that road was wrong.
Wrong. The word slipped out of the mouth, forming an invisible circle of air that quickly solidified to join a similar chain of s
teel links tightening around her chest. Wrong—she and that man back at the Sheraton who could walk into any court and prove their legal right to sign the register “Mr. and Mrs. Howard Dumont” as long as no evidence beyond a ten-year-old marriage license was required. Wrong—she and the house on Tupelo Drive that defied all their efforts to transform it into that nebulous creation called a home. Wrong—she and the career at IBM that she clung to with a desperation mistaken for pride, ambition, or contentment; mistaken for everything but what it was—a mistake. But if she let go of it, what else was left? There would be nothing to cling to except another link in a long chain that contained only totally circular, totally evasive wrongs.
She hadn’t seen them building up behind her because she’d spent so much time captivated by the images in front of her: the Phi Beta Kappa pictures in her yearbook, front page of the New York Times business section, the bridal pictures in the Dumont family album. All before her twenty-fifth birthday, and in all of them she had been smiling. No wonder the world pronounced her happy, and like a fool she had believed them. Perhaps, just once, if she had failed a course, missed a plane connection, or glittered less at Howard’s parties, she might have had time to think about who she was and what she really wanted, but it never happened. And when she finally took a good look around, she found herself imprisoned within a chain of photographs and a life that had no point. She had kept driving because memory told her that there was a point at the clearing of those pine trees. And wedged into it was a house, an old woman, and a beginning.
She stood in front of it now, the house at the end of the road, with its parched lawn and withering borders of marigolds and geraniums. Reddish dust had coated her leather sandals by the time she reached the picket fence. The rusty latch grated against the wooden post, stripping away tiny flecks of white paint. It was amazing how large this yard had seemed once, but she had definitely grown no taller in the last seventeen years, and thank God for that. At eighteen she was already over five-ten and had shuddered to think that she would reach six feet. Now she felt sixty feet tall as she covered the narrow walkway in three quick swings, bending lower than necessary to clear the screened porch door. She was conditioned by years of striding into boardrooms on five-inch heels that gave her the speed and height to announce that she and whatever she had to say were to be taken seriously or not at all. An Amazon. That’s what she’d become. The biggest woman at IBM; she’d allow them that one joke as she sank into the chair next to the executive director and crossed the shapely pillars they had learned to respect. Those feet had kicked down doors, caving in the few faces that were foolish enough to be braced against them.