Orphea Proud (2 page)

Okay,
you guys—

In the beginning, there was MOM.

Are you with me?

Mom’s name was Nadine.

Nadine reached out for every snotty-nosed, scab-kneed part of me. I had a permanent home on her lap. For hours I would lay my cheek in the curve of her shoulder, sniffing at her neck. Her hair was a crown of a thousand black braids to wind my fingers through. She wore an orange silk skirt permanently stained with the chocolate signature of my kiss. Once when I was three, I hugged her around the legs and pressed
my mouth to her knee after eating an ice cream cone and Nadine refused to send the skirt to the dry cleaners, so that the imprint of my kiss would always be there.

My mom had a voice as soft as fleece that made you feel warm all over when she spoke to you. But after dinner in the evening when my father and his shadow, my half-grown brother Rupert, would go out on business to the church, my mom would sing along with the radio. She liked the “classics.” I can hear her singing “Natural Woman” with Aretha, her voice soaring high and steely above the sound of running water at the sink and the clanking pots and pans.

Nadine was a natural singer, but she’d always dreamed of voice lessons. When the choir director at Daddy’s church found out, he and Nadine got into cahoots. She sneaked off to his house on Saturday afternoons on her way from the grocery store, carrying me with her. The choir director had a funny little goatee sprouting out of the middle of his chin. His name was John. I remember how he would take his place on a shiny black bench while Nadine stood facing him, her body leaning into the side of the open grand piano, bags of groceries at her feet. Sheltering me in the crook of her arm, she propped me up next to her so that my behind rested on a precipice above the strings of the instrument. Beneath the shadow of the piano’s lid, John’s tawny fingers skittered up and down the keyboard, as he led Nadine through her scales. The sound vibrated up my spine. And when my mother hugged
me close, and I laid my hand on her throat, I felt the rush of a magic river. Since my ear was next to her chest, I could also hear her heartbeat and the sharp intake of her breathing. After the warm-up exercises, she would sing another kind of classic, a famous aria from the opera
Carmen
.

“L’amour, l’amour …”
Of course, I didn’t know what she was singing about at the time, but there was aching in her voice.

If Daddy had known about those lessons, he would have been mad. My father ruled with an iron hand. I was forced to sit for hours at the table in front of a bowl of peas, even after the sight of them made me throw up. So, if you ask me to dinner, don’t serve peas. Once when my big brother Rupert was late for his nine o’clock curfew in high school, Daddy switched him with his belt. Though Rupert didn’t cry, I was terrified. So when Daddy walked in unexpectedly one day, while Nadine was singing “Natural Woman” along to the radio, and snatched the plug out of the wall and threw the radio into the sink, I hid under the table. But Nadine was so brave. She picked the radio up out of the sink and dried it off without batting an eyelash. Then she actually laughed.

“Are you trying to get through to me, Apollo?”

Daddy still looked angry. Nadine threw her arms around his waist. She gave him a big fat kiss. “You’re such a mean ol’ man. Don’t know why I married you.”

“Because I’m the biggest, baddest preacher in these parts.” He didn’t look angry anymore. Guess that fat
kiss did it. He tugged Nadine’s hair. “But how’s it look having the preacher’s wife be so reckless?”

“You ain’t seen reckless,” Nadine teased. “I’m only singing to the radio, enjoying myself. And look how you scared little Orphea.”

Nadine smiled in my direction, but Daddy kept his eyes fixed on her face. “Save that pretty voice for Sunday,” he warned. “Next thing I know, you’ll be sneaking off to a dance club.”

Nadine shook her hips. “Would that be such a crime?” My mom had attitude. As far as I know, she didn’t sneak off to a club. But every Saturday we did sneak off to John’s for her voice lesson. One of Daddy’s rules was that she couldn’t wear lipstick, but Nadine wore it then. Lipstick the color of candy apples—I’ve scoured drugstores for the shade. She also wore black kohl on the bottom lids of her eyes. She’d smile at me in the mirror when she was made up. Then off we’d go to the store to throw the groceries into the cart, then hop back into the car and race over to John’s to sing the role of Carmen—with no one in the audience but the piano player and the child in the crook of her arm.

When Nadine sang Carmen, her face lit up so. If Daddy could have seen her, there’s no way he could have stayed mad. But he never did catch her singing at John’s. He died before he had the chance. One Sunday he fell out of his pulpit and that was the end of him.

“Heart attack.” I heard Rupert say it. He was talking to someone on the phone. Our father had a heart attack. Rupert was already in college. He helped
Nadine make the telephone calls. Nadine wasn’t his mother. She was only mine. But Daddy belonged to us both. But now he had a heart attack. I was only seven. I didn’t know what it meant. My memory of the funeral was sitting next to Nadine at church in an ocean of people. My stomach was queasy, I remember. I asked where Daddy was, a few weeks after he’d gone. The thought of him disappearing was impossible. He was too tall.

“Where did Daddy go?”

“Heaven,” Nadine whispered.

“Where’s that?”

“In the air.”

That sounded right to me. “In the air” was where Daddy had always seemed to be, at least on Sundays, towering above from the pulpit. It was my favorite view of him, because on Sundays when he preached I saw him from the front. At home during the week, I mainly saw only the back of him. His straight back as he walked out the front door of our house on Sherman Court, a very nice house purchased for him with the help of the congregation but which Nadine got to keep. Our house—with a porch and an old-fashioned parlor in place of a living room and lots of bedrooms on the second floor. He and Rupert were always leaving for someplace important, not always the church, sometimes the car wash. But on Sundays when he preached, I saw Daddy’s face, its thick gray eyebrows and burning eyes. I saw his long arms waving while his voice boomed down, warning the people to be good or
else be sorry. And then one day he went to Heaven, to be permanently in the air.

At the end of that year Rupert graduated. Nadine and I went to see him wearing his cap and gown. He had a girlfriend named Ruby hanging on his arm. She was wearing a blue dress with white flowers. When she said hello, instead of looking at us, she looked at her pale yellow shoes.

Rupert got in Nadine’s face right away. “Why are you here?”

“The school mailed an announcement.”

“That would have been meant for my father.”

She smiled. “We’re your family, too. You graduated with honors. We’re proud of you.”

“You ain’t my family,” he snapped. “But since you’re here, you might as well sit down. You’ll have to hold
her
on your lap, though. The other seat is for Ruby.”

On the ride home from Rupert’s school, Nadine got a headache that nothing would help. She woke up with it for months after. As far as I know she never went to a doctor, even though it meant she had to stop reading to me at night. She said the words seemed double. So I read instead, choosing the book she liked best, an easy-to-read one about a duck named Ping. She smiled while I read. She smiled a lot. Her very last smile that I remember was the following spring, on a day when we went to a fair. She let me go up on the Ferris wheel all by myself. She was afraid it would make her dizzy. So I got on alone. I felt as if I were flying. I also felt very grown-up. We’d lied to the Ferris
wheel guy and said I was ten; I was tall for my age. But when I reached the tippy-top, I felt eight years old and real short. I began to panic. I looked down at the crowd. I saw Mom immediately. Her eyes were on me and she was smiling. Right away I felt calm. Soon after the fair, Nadine went to the hospital. After that she went into the ground.…

As they lowered my mother’s coffin into the pit, I tried to break away. We were far from home. I saw a mountain. We had buried Daddy behind his church. But Nadine wanted to be buried with her people.

Rupert grabbed my wrist. “Be still.”

They eased the coffin lower. The earth was swallowing her.

I whimpered.

“Hush,” said Ruby.

Rupert tightened his grip. I bit him. He yelped and I jerked free. In one giant twirl, I was riding the coffin, my arms stretched across the top, my face impaled on the roses.

“Mom!”

A gasp went through the crowd. They probably thought that I was trying to kill myself. But I was only trying to rescue Nadine. I would brush the flowers and dirt off of the coffin and open it. Nadine would be there, wearing candy-apple-red lipstick and black kohl on the bottom lid of her eyes.

“Fooled you! I’m not dead! Orphea guessed I was alive. Orphea is sharp as a tack!”

Then she’d hug me. That’s all I was after. For one last hug, I threw myself into the pit. But before I could open the coffin, someone picked me up.

I was eight years old when that happened. Rupert was twenty-two. He and Ruby got married and became my guardians. Ruby moved in with us and she and Rupert took over Nadine and Daddy’s bedroom. Ruby stayed home to take care of me. Rupert told me that Ruby’s presence in the house was a great luxury that I should be thankful for. Not too many kids lose their mothers and get them replaced so quickly. Rupert said Ruby had given things up; the deal had been that she could keep going to college when they got married. Because of me, she went to college at night. In the evenings when she left, she tried giving me hugs. But I didn’t like Ruby’s neck. Ruby’s neck smelled like talcum. Nadine’s neck smelled like herself.

That was also the year I stopped seeing in color.