Folly (18 page)

She didn't stay long. She wanted to be home with the children for a while before she had to go to work. She watched T.V. with the boys. Martha's smell was still close, but her peace was gone. She felt remote from her children, though she had wanted to be with them. She was building toward doing something about the situation, which she knew could not go on. She could not balance them off with Martha like a teeter totter, herself as the fulcrum. When she was with Martha sometimes she could almost forget them and leave herself off as a mother. When she was home with them, she found herself moving off from Martha. Either way meant a pull inside her, and she did not have a joint in her middle. Somewhere there were people who managed to pull off these balancing acts, women who never told their children, Martha had told her about them, but she knew she could not be one of them. She would have to lay everything out, then see how they would deal. What would it mean to them?

Ultimately, nothing, she thought. She was the same person they'd always had for a mother, who for years now had not cared to have much truck with men. And they were the same children tomorrow or yesterday plus or minus a little growing up. They were connected to her, and yet separate. Especially Mary Lou, who was trying harder and harder to establish her separateness. Skeeter, too, held himself aloof from the family, but she didn't think he knew much of himself apart from them. Tiny had not moved off yet; he would be with her regardless of who she was.

Instinct told her Mary Lou would be the hard one to reckon with. She probably would have felt this out further if it hadn't tripped her up so with anxiety. As it was, in all her pondering about what it would be like for Mary Lou to know she had a lesbian mother, she never did cross the thought that it might be a relief to her daughter's own quandary.

20.

Lenore woke up early but lolled in bed, celebrating Sunday. She was half glad to be alone, half sorry, and wondered what Betsy was doing at that same moment. It was impossible to imagine them both in bed at the same time because the time difference was so mammoth. They had once thought they'd talk to each other on the phone but synchronizing the time was too difficult; they'd settled for letters and signals. Lenore wasn't sure how strongly she believed in ESP but concentrated hard now on Betsy, trying to hook up long distance without benefit of Carolina Telephone and Telegraph, a free wave length. She pictured Betsy relaxing with the other women, maybe playing cards. She had a momentary image of Betsy sitting down to write her a letter. That was her own intention turned around—she was planning to write, soon as she got out of bed. She laughed out loud thinking about how she was going to tell Betsy, “Wait 'til you hear all the folks I got that book passin' around to. And you thought there wasn't nobody to give it to in Victory. Whole town will have it read by the time you get back.”

She was also going to ask Betsy if she ever felt touched by these ESP concentrations and if she was aware of sending them down to North Carolina, because every so often Lenore felt Betsy pop into her mind right in the middle of something else, maybe say hello, maybe hold her hand a minute, maybe touch her face. She liked the idea that she was feeling these things because Betsy was sending them. Some people would think she was going off like ripe bananas, but her reluctance in asking Betsy was not that; it was that she might say no, she wasn't sending anything, and then Lenore would have to figure she was making it all up.

The other thing she feared to ask, because she was afraid the answer wouldn't be what she wanted to hear, was when Betsy was coming home. Even if it was months away, she figured she could enjoy the countdown if Betsy's actual presence was at the end of it. Suddenly, she had more friends than she'd ever had before, and she was even able to talk about herself more deeply with them, so how could it be that she ended up feeling more lonely now than ever? Her body yearned for Betsy's return. She stretched and yawned and then curled back up, unsatisfied. She wished she had someone she could tell about her visit with Sabrina the night before.

She had gone by the diner and invited Sabrina to stop at her place again, but Sabrina had turned the invitation around, told her to come by her house after supper, and given her directions before she'd even had a chance to consider her reservations. So, she'd found herself headed in for the fifth house on the right after turning off Main. She had never in her life gone in there to visit anyone. She had been down that road a few times before, not driving herself, or suggesting it, but riding around on a Saturday night with other kids, before she had quit school, and someone had come up with the idea they should go down that road to where the church was and see if they could see some Black folks holy rollering. They had sat with the car motor off, lights off, just beyond the church, at a point where you could not exactly see because the window was up high, but you could hear, and they had listened to the singing and praising going on inside, holding their breath, slouched down low in the seats, hands over mouths against giggles. Lenore had always stared at the window even though you couldn't see anything. Finally, they would roar away, the noise of their muffler meant to disturb the people inside, and break into laughter. Lenore wished that just once, someone in the car, anyone, namely herself, would have asked what the hell they thought they were laughing at. As she turned into Sabrina's driveway, she realized she had always wanted to hear the service through.

She worried, going up to the house, that it might be the wrong one, but Sabrina was standing on the other side of the screen door. “Seen you drive up. Come on in. This here's Eli,” she said of the child who held onto her leg and moved in harmony with her. “That's my father, Russell James . . . The Reverend,” she threw in as an afterthought. The man sitting at the dining table, intent on a book, looked up and nodded at Lenore. “Evening,” he said in a low, soft voice. Lenore stood with her hands in her pockets, nodded back and answered, “Evening, sir,” barely audible. As he looked back down at his book, she realized it was a bible, one with many ribbon markers, some of which fanned out on
the table. His hands, long, slender fingers, gracefully handled the markers.

“Come on in the kitchen and we'll get us some drinks to take out,” Sabrina said. In the kitchen she inclined her head back toward the man. “He's getting his sermon ready. Everybody else's gone out shopping.” Lenore wondered who all. Sabrina's mother and Aunt lived here and Eli and her father, obviously, but she didn't have the slightest idea who all else. The house wasn't very large, about like the house she'd grown up in, only neater. She wondered if he preached down the road at that church they had spied on. His voice was so quiet. She tried to imagine it rising, tried to imagine this tall, slender man doing antics, leading other folks in going wild with the spirits as she had figured them to do in that church, but her mind blanked. She took the glass of juice Sabrina handed her. She was so nervous about being there and trying not to show that she was nervous that she couldn't hardly follow a single thought through. She didn't know whether being in that carload of kids outside the church was something she should forgive herself for. She wished she hadn't done it. It would be nice to think she hadn't joined in the laughter, but she had.

Sabrina led her out to the front porch, Eli tagging along, still attached to her leg. “Go on, play,” she told him, but he only turned his big brown eyes on her a minute, then back to Lenore.

“Hi,” she said, squatting down to his level. “How ya doing?”

He broke off eye contact, then came back to staring at her. She did the same thing in return, and he smiled. He covered his eyes with his hands, then dropped them and giggled when she imitated him. His face was chubby and soft and she would have liked to pick him up and touch it to her own, but she poked his belly with her finger instead, setting off the giggle.

Neighbors out for a walk talked to Sabrina across the yard. Lenore nodded hello, then, while Sabrina conversed with them, sat, her back against the wrought iron post, feeling conspicuously white. Pale and puny and sandy, straight-haired, she didn't even have a good tan. She thought if she didn't stop feeling so conscious of her skin, she would blush, and she did. She felt the heat in her face and the sweat on her palms just as Sabrina and the neighbors were talking about how nice it had cooled off for the evening. She thought about how frequently this might happen to Sabrina, who must often find herself in a white world and feel conscious of her skin color, and for herself she had gone nineteen years without finding herself in a Black world. For that moment, at least, she thought of Blackness as a richness of color and presence,
and whiteness as a blank, a quality of absence. The hum of the reverend's voice was still in her ears, and farther in the background, strong voices rising in the church, and beside that, Sabrina's directness.

The neighbors had left and Sabrina sat down opposite her. Eli moved a toy truck up and down the cement porch floor between them. “Nice kid,” Lenore said.

“Yeah.” Sabrina smiled. “I think I got lucky there.”

They watched Eli play, Lenore still acutely aware of her color. She lost her self-consciousness only when Sabrina asked, “What's happening with your ma these days? She still sober?”

“I reckon. I hope so. I saw her about a week ago and she was, then. Bitchy, too. In a way it's easier to talk to her when she's high. Sober, she's on me all the time.”

“I guess you got to expect that.”

Lenore agreed, but if the truth be known she hadn't understood to expect it until the words came out of Sabrina's mouth. That was what she appreciated about her directness, it allowed her to look at things through a new view. With most kids her age you couldn't have a serious conversation without a whole lot of messing around, if then. “Someday, I sure hope she and I can hit it off better,” Lenore said sadly, “since she's the only one I got.”

“Yeah, it is one of them one of a kind deals.”

Lenore had vowed she wouldn't go out to her mother's house that weekend. She would give them both a good long span to cool out. She silently reinforced that vow to herself, knowing there was always a temptation to break it, always a lure to the familiar, even if the familiar was only her mother's carelessly wrapped fighter's bathrobe and a fight to go with it.

“How's it for you, being a mother?”

Sabrina drew a deep breath. “Hard to say. It's a lot of different ways. Sometimes I wish I wasn't. He's getting bigger now, but in the beginning I used to hold this little thing and think about how helpless he was, except for having my protection. Now I can see that as he grows up, it turns the other way. I'm the one who's gonna need the protection from him taking over.”

“That sweet little boy?” Lenore asked, looking at Eli.

“Look at what you talking about, how your ma ain't got it together.”

“I guess.”

Sabrina's dark eyes grew more serious. “I stepped outa messin' around in high school, scattered all over the place, didn't know what I
was doing there except to try to get some education that would end me up somewhere someday, then whammy, Eli bulging up inside of me. I hadn't really given much thought to my body 'til then, and here it was producing. Kind of neat. Then here he was, produced, and that seemed real serious for a girl who didn't know much about what she was doing. Makes you grow up fast. Figure you better know what you're doing. I said, ‘Shape yourself up, Sabrina, in time for this boy.' It's been real good, having him, but sometimes I think I'd like to go back to before.” Sabrina looked off the end of the porch wistfully, as if she had other dreams to follow.

“Yeah, I can see that,” Lenore said. “We must've dropped out of school just about the same time.”

“Is that so? How come you did?”

“Oh . . . didn't seem like I was gettin' much. I thought I'd do better to work full time. My ma wasn't working . . . guess you know that since you started working her job after she left the counter. They were asking me about who I knew for the butcher's job down at the store, so I told them I'd take it myself. I guess sometimes I wish I could go back and finish school.”

“I always thought it would make some big difference,” Sabrina said. “Back when I was a kid, everybody said, if you just get yourself a high school diploma, you'll be somebody. Nowadays, that don't mean boo. If you're Black and you got a high school diploma these days, that means you still nobody. You got to have a trade or a college degree or something like that and a good contact won't hurt you, either. Even if you go to all that trouble to get you a college education, times like this with recession and all, you'll still get cut right back off your job. I be lucky to have what I have down at the counter.”

“Yeah, me too. I reckon if I wasn't at the A & P, I'd be down at the mill.”

“Least those womens got something going there now. They look pretty good to me, walking out like that, staying out like they did.”

“I know, but I still think it would drive me batty to do the same thing all day long . . . or night.”

“True,” Sabrina said. “Least you and me, working with people, we get some variation. Not that it's always desirable.”

Lenore nodded.

“Most of the people don't act like you're real anyway. Do you find that to be so?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well . . . I don't know. They'll call you down, they'll say good morning, but that ain't really meant for you, that's just to tell them they's awake. They puts in their order—sunnyside with grits, coffee black. You not a person taking the order. You the hand with the pad and the pencil, scribbling there, walking off, cracking the eggs on the grill, fixing the plate. They not saying ‘this here's Sabrina waiting on me' or even, ‘that Sabrina sure be godawful slow,' but ‘where are my eggs,' is what they be saying. Sometimes they don't even know do they have the Black waitress or the white waitress. Now that tell you something.”

Lenore laughed. “I guess I know what you mean. I had this one lady come in last week and she said, ‘Now a couple of weeks ago that nice girl who works here fixed me up a small package of stew beef, just right, good and lean.' I felt like saying, ‘yeah, what'd she look like? I'll see if I can find her in the back room.'”

“Least she noticed you was a girl . . . both times.”

Lenore clutched more than was probably necessary, wondering if Sabrina thought her masculine, wondering if Sabrina had ever thought she was gay.

Shortly after that Lenore said she'd better go. Sabrina said she ought to put Eli to bed, but she'd come out and talk some more if Lenore would wait. Another time, Lenore had said, now that she knew where Sabrina lived, she'd come again. She was strongly aware of not wanting to be sitting there on that porch alone, white, and maybe Sabrina's folks would be coming home.

She stretched again, closed her eyes, and tried to picture Sabrina's face. It didn't come easy. In fact, it didn't come at all. She consciously tried to construct it. A rounded face. Eli's flashed for a moment. Did he look like her? She hadn't noticed. She tried to get a sense of the exact color of Sabrina's skin, how black it was? How brown? How did black and brown merge? She could picture Betsy's cheeks, high red after lovemaking, even when she had a tan. She could call up those colors and see them vividly in her mind, whereas, it was as if her brain cells had never been notified of the existence of the dark tones. And now, when she needed them, she wasn't sure how to get them. What she could see was Sabrina's hands, long-fingered like her father's. She could see the line where the darker backs of her hands turned to the lighter skin of the palms. Also, she could see her eyes, the careful looking at you that she did, and the dark brown centers. She promised herself the
next time she saw Sabrina, she'd try to get her down better in her memory. She felt ashamed for not having paid more attention to dark colors before. She wondered if others experienced this. It wasn't the type of thing she'd ever heard anyone talk about.