Promises to Keep (10 page)
I waited for a break in traffic before crossing over to Marie’s Apparel.
Mom was in the Accessories Department, ringing up a sale. When she saw me, she smiled and held up one finger to indicate she’d be with me in a minute. When the customer finally waddled off, carrying a package under each arm, I dug the aspirin out of my pocket and handed it to Mom.
“Thanks, Roz,” she said. “I appreciate your coming down here.”
“If you have a headache, Mom, maybe you should just go home and rest,” I suggested.
She pulled a bottle of Coca-Cola from under the counter and took a swig of it to swallow the aspirin. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s not that bad. The aspirin should help. How’s everything at home?”
“Fine, I guess.”
“You get your homework done?”
I nodded. “It’s done. I didn’t have much.”
“Good. Well, run on back now. I’ll be home around five-thirty.”
“Mom?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Can I have some money for an ice cream cone?”
She thought a moment, then smiled. “All right. Consider it a reward for bringing me the aspirin.” She dug a quarter out of her change purse and handed it to me.
“Thanks, Mom!”
I ran out of Marie’s Apparel and into the drugstore next door, where they had a soda counter. I lingered happily over the selection of ice cream, trying to decide on a flavor.
“Make up your mind yet, little miss?” The man behind the counter, wearing a white apron and a white paper serving cap, smiled down at me. He waved a metal scoop over the barrels of ice cream displayed in the open freezer. “Plenty to choose from, but they’re all good.”
“I’ll have a scoop of strawberry, please.”
“In a cake cone?”
“Yeah.”
“Good choice.” He dug a ball of ice cream out of the barrel and plopped it on top of a cone. “Here you go, little miss.”
I paid him, thanked him, and went outside to sit on the bench in front of the store. It was empty when I went in, but someone had sat down while I was inside making up my mind. The bench had plenty of room for two, though, so I sat down, squeezing myself close to the armrest.
As I carved lines in the ice cream with my tongue, I studied my neighbor out of the corner of my eye. She was a girl about my own age, with creamy brown skin and black hair pulled back tightly into two stiff braids. She wore a white blouse, a red pleated skirt, and black patent leather shoes, the toes of which shone brightly, reflecting the noonday sun. Clutched in one hand was the stub of a number 2 pencil; she was using it to scribble furiously in a spiral-bound notebook. I listened to the scratching sound of lead against paper and wondered at the words being poured out in small neat rows across the page.
Finally she paused, lifted the pencil to her mouth, and captured the eraser in the snare of her teeth. She looked across the street, squinting in concentration. I couldn’t help staring, even though Mom said it was impolite to stare. I’d been pulled in her direction by the strength of her desire to capture something and put it into words. She must have felt my gaze, because she released the pencil from her clenched jaw and turned to look at me. Her eyes were deep dark pools, at once serene and glowing with life. In the few seconds we sat staring at each other, she seemed to be gathering her thoughts from distant places and bringing her mind back to the bench in front of the drugstore on Grand Avenue.
I was trying to come up with an apology for staring, but before I could say anything at all, she whispered, “I know you.”
I was hardly aware of the streams of melted ice cream dripping over the lip of the cone and down the rutted bank of my fingers. I had forgotten to grab a napkin from the canister on the counter inside.
“You’re in Miss Fremont’s class, right?” she asked.
I nodded. “Whose class are you in?”
“Mrs. Oberlin’s.”
“That’s right. Now I remember. I’ve seen you at school.”
“Yeah. You’re new here.”
“We moved here this summer. From Minnesota.”
She lifted her chin in understanding. “What’s your name?”
“Rosalind. But everyone calls me Roz.”
“Roz what?”
“What do you mean, Roz what?”
“What’s your last name?”
“Anthony.”
“Anthony’s your last name?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Rosalind Anthony.”
I nodded.
She smiled. “That’s a good name.”
“It is?”
“Sure. It flows like a poem.”
“It does?”
“Uh-huh. Don’t you hear it?”
I repeated my name in my head and tried to listen, but it didn’t sound like a poem to me. It just sounded familiar and plain. “What’s your name?” I asked.
“Mara Nightingale.”
“Nightingale?”
“That’s right.”
“Like Florence Nightingale?”
She looked away, shaking her head. “No, not like that. Florence Nightingale was a white woman.”
“So?”
“I’m colored.”
“So?” I said again.
She gave me a sharp look before asking, “You ever been friends with a Negro?”
I pretended to think about that for a minute, though I knew right away what the answer was. Finally I shook my head.
“See?” she said, sounding triumphant.
“See what?”
“It matters that I’m colored.”
“It doesn’t matter to me.”
She didn’t respond. She seemed to be trying to gauge whether or not I was telling her the truth.
I asked, “You ever been friends with a white girl?”
She dropped her eyes then, but her face relaxed. She looked away, bit her lip, shook her head.
“Well then?”
“Well then, what?” she said.
“You want to be friends?”
She smiled again. “All right. I guess so.” She glanced at my lap, back up at me. “You’ve got ice cream all over your shorts.”
I looked at the tiny puddles of pink polka dots on my navy blue shorts. “You want some?” I asked, holding up the cone.
She shook her head. “No.” Then she added, “Thanks.”
“I better eat it fast.” I licked the ice cream, the cone, and my hand in an attempt to clean up the mess.
Mara looked at the notebook in her lap, then closed it.
“What were you writing?” I asked.
“A poem.”
“Can I hear it?”
An emphatic shake of her black braids. “It’s not ready.”
“Okay.”
“But I’ll read you another one, a poem I didn’t write.”
“All right,” I said with a shrug.
Mara looked down at the yellow cover of the notebook, where she had written a poem in black ink. She paused just a moment before beginning to read in a clear, strong voice. “ ‘Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.’ ” She looked at me, as though to make sure I had caught the image of that broken-winged bird. I nodded while wiping at my chin with the back of my free hand. She went on, something about life becoming a frozen field of some sort, but I’d stopped paying much attention to the poem, so captivated was I by the passion in Mara’s voice and the look of intensity in her eye.
When she finished she sighed deeply and raised the notebook to her chest, as though to hold the words close to her heart. “That was nice,” I said. “Who wrote it?”
“Langston Hughes.”
“Never heard of him.”
“No, I expect you wouldn’t. He was a Negro poet. He died not long ago. Last spring. May 22, actually.”
I cocked my head. “Did you know him or something?”
“No,” she whispered sadly.
“Well, he wrote a nice poem,” I said again.
“He wrote a lot of nice poems. Someday, I’m going to write poetry as good as his. I’m going to be a writer like him and like . . .”
When she didn’t go on, I asked, “Like who?”
She shrugged. “No one.” Her hand went to a locket the size of a dime that hung around her neck. She gave the locket a squeeze, then slipped it beneath her blouse.
“I’ve got to go now,” she said. “Here come my mom and dad.”
Approaching us from the direction of Woolworth’s was a large man and a slender slip of a woman. The woman carried a shoe box under her arm. Both were dressed neatly, in formal church clothes, though as they came closer I could see their garments were worn and faded, the man’s dress shirt frayed at the cuffs.
“You ready to go home, baby?” the man said. His face was dark and wrinkled like a prune, while his hair was a woolly white cap. He walked with a certain stiffness in his joints, as though, like the Tin Man, he needed oiling.
He’s old
, I thought. Older than most of my friends’ fathers back home. Certainly older than Daddy.
Mara jumped up from the bench, the notebook held tight in her crossed arms. “I’m ready, Daddy.”
“Sorry to take so long,” the woman said. “Al wasn’t in today, and only that young assistant of his was there. He’s good at fixing shoes, but he’s slower than molasses going up a hill in January. He gave me new heels, though. Take a look.”
She opened the shoe box and lifted out one brown pump. Though the heel was new, the shoe itself looked as though it had walked a thousand miles. I wondered why she didn’t just buy a new pair.
“Looks nice, Mama,” Mara said.
The woman smiled and, looking pleased, tucked the shoe back into the box. I couldn’t help but notice that she, like her husband, was older. Her hair was streaked with gray, and her hands were bony and gnarled. Fine lines sliced the skin at the corners of her eyes and dug tiny canals along her upper lip.
“Don’t worry about taking a while, Mama,” Mara said. “I’ve been talking to Roz. I know her from school.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. She and her family just moved here from Minnesota.”
“Well.” The woman smiled at me, a small uncertain smile. “Welcome, then,” she said. “I hope you like Mills River.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said shyly. “I do.”
The man nodded in my direction but didn’t speak.
“Well, come on, Mara, let’s get home and get some lunch.” The woman put an arm around Mara’s shoulder. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.”
As my new friend was being led away, she hollered back to me, “I’ll see you in school, Roz.”
I lifted a sticky hand in her direction and watched her go.
Mara and I saw each other in school on Monday, but only from a distance. We didn’t actually speak until Friday, when an air raid drill sent everyone scrambling for the halls to take cover. All over the school, hundreds of kids dropped to their knees, touched their heads to the wall, and clasped their hands over their necks, fingers locked. We all went along with it because we had to, though we doubted being rolled into a ball would protect us from a nuclear bomb, especially if we suffered a direct hit on Mills River Elementary.
Wally always claimed that a nuclear attack was a real possibility, seeing as how Russia was just itching to bomb America off the globe. Mom said they would do no such thing, since the Russians were every bit as civilized as we were. But whenever they argued about it, Wally brought up the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which he remembered and I didn’t. We might have all been blown sky-high right then, he’d say, and the Russian babushkas would have been dancing in the streets of Moscow.
I figured if there were no chance of our Cold War enemy bombing us, then the teachers wouldn’t interrupt classes and make us line up in the hall like so many rows of sitting ducks. Surely they thought there was some merit to these drills. So whenever the air raid siren went off, I wondered whether all the old grandmothers in Moscow were putting on their dancing shoes.
That’s what I was thinking about when the person in a fetal position next to me whispered my name. I peeked out from under my arm and saw one dark and roving eye peering out from under the arm of the person beside me.
“Mara! What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be with your own class.”
“When the siren went off, I ran down the hall to find you,” she whispered.
“How come?”
“I had to ask you something.”
“What?”
“Did you mean it?”
“Did I mean what?”
“Shh! Quiet please.” It was Miss Fremont, my homeroom teacher. Her heels tapped on the linoleum-tiled floor as she slowly paced the hall. Mara and I retreated like turtles into our shells.
After a moment, as the tapping of her heels grew distant, Mara said, “Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Did you mean it when you said you wanted to be friends?”
“Sure I meant it.”
“All right, then. Can you meet me tomorrow on the bench outside the drugstore?”
“Well, yeah. What time?”
“Around noon.”
“Okay.”
A scrap of paper traveled the distance between her head and mine, propelled by Mara’s index finger. “If you can’t make it, call me. Here’s my number.”
I took the paper, clutched it in my fist. “Okay. But don’t worry, I’ll be there.”
“If we don’t get blown up first.”
“We won’t get blown up,” I said, trying to convince myself as well as her.
“How do you know?” she asked.
Just then the all clear sounded, the wailing siren releasing us from our cramped positions and sending us back to our classrooms. I said good-bye to Mara, and we parted ways, having mercifully avoided the wrath of the Russians once more.
