Silver Sparrow (2 page)

“Al she did was draw a picture. Kids draw pictures.”

“Go on in the kitchen, Gwen,” James said. “Let me talk to my daughter.”

My mother said, “Why can’t I stay in here? She’s my daughter, too.”

“You are with her al the time. You tel me I don’t spend enough time talking to her. So now let me talk.”

Mother hesitated and then released me. “She’s just a little kid, James. She doesn’t even know the ins and outs yet.”

“Trust me,” James said.

She left the room, but I don’t know that she trusted him not to say something that would leave me wounded and broken-winged for life. I could see it in her face. When she was upset she moved her jaw around invisible gum. At night, I could hear her in her room, grinding her teeth in her sleep.

The sound was like gravel under car wheels.

“Dana, come here.” James was wearing a navy chauffeur’s uniform. His hat must have been in the car, but I could see the ridged mark across his forehead where the hatband usual y rested. “Come closer,” he said.

I hesitated, looking to the space in the doorway where Mother had disappeared.

“Dana,” he said, “you’re not afraid of me, are you? You’re not scared of your own father, are you?”

His voice sounded mournful, but I took it as a dare. “No, sir,” I said, taking a bold step forward.

“Don’t cal me sir, Dana. I’m not your boss. When you say that, it makes me feel like an overseer.”

I shrugged. Mother told me that I should always cal him sir. With a sudden motion, he reached out for me and lifted me up on his lap. He spoke to me with both of our faces looking outward, so I couldn’t see his expression.

“Dana, I can’t have you making drawings like the one you made for your art class. I can’t have you doing things like that. What goes on in this house between your mother and me is grown people’s business. I love you. You are my baby girl, and I love you, and I love your mama. But what we do in this house has to be a secret, okay?”

“I didn’t even draw this house.”

James sighed and bounced me on his lap a little bit. “What happens in my life, in my world, doesn’t have anything to do with you. You can’t tel your teacher that your daddy has another wife. You can’t tel your teacher that my name is James Witherspoon. Atlanta ain’t nothing but a country town, and everyone knows everybody.”

“Your other wife and your other girl is a secret?” I asked him.

He put me down from his lap, so we could look each other in the face. “No. You’ve got it the wrong way around. Dana, you are the one that’s a secret.”

Then he patted me on the head and tugged one of my braids. With a wink he pul ed out his bil fold and separated three two-dol ar bil s from the stack. He handed them over to me and I clamped them in my palm.

“Aren’t you going to put them in your pocket?”

“Yes, sir.”

And for once, he didn’t tel me not to cal him that.

James took me by the hand and we walked down the hal way to the kitchen for dinner. I closed my eyes on the short walk because I didn’t like the wal paper in the hal way. It was beige with a burgundy pattern. When it had started peeling at the edges, I was accused of picking at the seams. I denied it over and over again, but Mother reported me to James on his weekly visit. He took off his belt and swatted me around the legs and up on my backside, which seemed to satisfy something in my mother.

In the kitchen my mother placed the bowls and plates on the glass table in silence. She wore her favorite apron that James brought back from New Orleans. On the front was a drawing of a crawfish holding a spatula aloft and a caption: DON’T MAKE ME POISON YOUR FOOD! James took his place at the head of the table and polished the water spots from his fork with his napkin. “I didn’t lay a hand on her; I didn’t even raise my voice. Did I?”

“No, sir.” And this was entirely the truth, but I felt different than I had just a few minutes before when I’d pul ed my drawing out of its sleeve. My skin stayed the same while this difference snuck in through a pore and attached itself to whatever brittle part forms my center.
You are the secret.
He’d said it with a smile, touching the tip of my nose with the pad of his finger.

My mother came around and picked me up under my arms and sat me on the stack of phone books in my chair. She kissed my cheek and fixed a plate with salmon croquettes, a spoon of green beans, and corn.

“Are you okay?”

I nodded.

James ate his meal, spooning honey onto a dinner rol when my mother said there would be no dessert. He drank a big glass of Coke.

“Don’t eat too much,” my mother said. “You’l have to eat again in a little while.”

“I’m always happy to eat your food, Gwen. I’m always happy to sit at your table.”

I don’t know how I decided that my missing teeth were the problem, but I devised a plan to slide a folded piece of paper behind my top teeth to camouflage the pink space in the center of my smile. I was inspired by James, actual y, who once told me how he put cardboard in his shoes when he was little to make up for the holes in the soles. The paper was soggy and the blue lines ran with my saliva.

Mother caught me in the middle of this process. She walked into my room and lay across my twin bed with its purple checked spread. She liked to do this, just lie across my bed while I played with my toys or colored in my notebooks, watching me like I was a television show. She always smel ed good, like flowery perfume, and sometimes like my father’s cigarettes.

“What are you doing, Petunia?”

“Don’t cal me Petunia,” I said, partial y because I didn’t like the name and partial y because I wanted to see if I could talk with the paper in my mouth. “Petunia is the name of a pig.”

“Petunia is a flower,” my mother said. “A pretty one.”

“It’s Porky Pig’s girlfriend.”

“That’s meant to be a joke, a pretty name for a pig, you see?”

“A joke is supposed to be funny.”

“It is funny. You are just in a bad mood. What’re you doing with the paper?”

“I’m trying to put my teeth back,” I said, while trying to rearrange the sodden wad.

“How come?”

This seemed obvious as I took in my own reflection along with my mother’s in the narrow mirror attached to the top of my chest of drawers. Of course James wanted to keep me a secret. Who would love a girl with a gaping pink hole in the middle of her mouth? None of the other children in my kindergarten reading circle looked like I did. Surely my mother could understand this. She spent half an hour each night squinting at her skin before a magnifying mirror, applying swipes of heavy creams from Mary Kay. When I asked her what she was doing, she said, “I am improving my appearance. Wives can afford to let themselves go. Concubines must be vigilant.”

Recal ing it now, I know that she must have been drinking. Although I can’t remember the moment so wel , I know that just outside the frame was her glass of Asti Spumante, golden and busy with bubbles.

“I am improving my appearance.” I hoped she would smile.

“Your appearance is perfect, Dana. You’re five; you have beautiful skin, shiny eyes, and pretty hair.”

“But no teeth,” I said.

“You’re a little girl. You don’t need teeth.”

“Yes, I do,” I said quietly. “Yes, I do.”

“Why? To eat corn on the cob? Your teeth wil grow back. There is lots of corn in your future, I promise.”

“I want to be like that other girl,” I said final y.

Mother had been lying across my bed, like a goddess on a chaise lounge, but when I said that she snapped up. “What other girl?”

“James’s other girl.”

“You can say her name,” Mother said.

I shook my head. “Can’t.”

“Yes, you can. Just say it. Her name is Chaurisse.”

“Stop it,” I said, afraid that just saying my sister’s name would unleash some terrible magic the way that saying “Bloody Mary” while staring into a pan of water would turn the liquid red and thick.

Mother rose from the bed and got down on her knees so we were the same height. As she pressed her hands down on my shoulders, traces of cigarette smoke lingered in her tumbly hair. I reached out for it.

“Her name is Chaurisse,” my mother said again. “She’s a little girl, just like you are.”

“Please stop saying it,” I begged her. “Stop it before something happens.”

My mother hugged me to her chest. “What did your daddy say to you the other day? Tel me what he said.”

“Nothing,” I whispered.

“Dana, you can’t lie to me, okay? I tel you everything and you tel me everything. That’s the only way we can pul this off, baby. We have to keep the information moving between us.” She shook me a little bit. Not enough to scare me, just enough to get my attention.

“He said I was a secret.”

My mother pul ed me into a close hug, crisscrossing her arms across my back and letting her hair hang around me like a magic curtain. I wil never forget the smel of her hugs.

“That motherfucker,” she said. “I love him, but I might have to kil him one day.”

The next morning, my mother told me to put on the green and yel ow dress that I’d worn for my school picture six weeks earlier, before the teeth were lost. She styled my long hair with slippery ribbons and strapped my feet into stiff shiny shoes. Then we climbed into my godmother’s old Buick, on loan for the day.

“Where are we going?”

Mother turned off Gordon Road. “I am taking you to see something.”

I waited for more information, poking my tongue into the slick space where my nice teeth had once been. She didn’t say anything else about our destination, but she asked me to recite my
-at
words.

“H-a-t is
hat;
b-a-t is
bat.
” I didn’t stop until I got to “M-a-t is
mat.
” By then, we’d pul ed up in front of a smal pink school building trimmed with green. Down the road was John A. White Park. We sat in the car a long time while I performed for her. I was glad to do it. I recited my numbers from one to one hundred and then I sang “Frère Jacques.”

When a group of children spil ed out into the yard of the smal school, my mother held up a finger to stop my singing. “Rol down your window and look out,” she said. “You see that chubby little girl in the blue jeans and red shirt? That’s Chaurisse.”

I found the girl my mother described standing in line with a group of other little kids. Chaurisse was utterly ordinary back then. Her hair was divided into two short puffs in the front and the shorter hair in the back was held down in a series of tight braids. “Look at her,” my mother said. “She hardly has any hair. She is going to be fat when she grows up, just like her mammy. She doesn’t know her -
at
words, and she can’t sing a song in French.”

I said, “She has her teeth.”

“For now. She’s your same age, so they are probably loose. But here’s something you can’t see. She was born too early so she has problems.

The doctor had to stick plastic tubes down her ears to keep them from getting infected.”

“But James loves her. She’s not a secret.”

“James has an obligation to her mammy and that’s my problem, not yours. Okay? James loves you equal to Chaurisse. If he had any sense, he’d love you best. You’re smarter, more mannerable, and you’ve got better hair. But what you have is equal love, and that is good enough.”

I nodded as relief spread al over my body. I felt al my muscles relax. Even my feet let go and settled themselves limp in my pretty shoes.

“Am I a secret?” I asked my mother.

“No,” she said. “You are an unknown. That little girl there doesn’t even know she has a sister. You know everything.”

“God knows everything,” I said. “He’s got the whole world in his hands.”

“That’s true,” my mother said. “And so do we.”

2

A SORT OF CREEPING LOVE

IT WAS NOT LOVE at first sight, at least not on my mother’s part. She didn’t meet my father and feel a shift in her personal chemistry or a change in the rhythm that connected her heart to the rest of her body. It was love, mind you, but not the lightning-bolt kind. She had that sort of love in her first marriage, which had lasted only nineteen months. What she had with my father was a sort of creeping love, the kind that sinks in before you know it and makes a family of you. She says that love like what she has with my father occurs on the God level, not of the world and not bound by the laws of the state of Georgia.

You can’t help but respect something like that.

GIFT-WRAP GIRL WASN’T the job she dreamed of, as she never real y dreamed of jobs. My mother had dreamed only about marriage, and her brief acquaintance with it had left her disappointed. Coming up with another dream was more than a notion, and she had no idea where to start.

For most of her early life, she wasted her wishes on her mother. Flora, my grandmother, ran off when my mother was just three months old. For six days Flora wrapped her breasts in cabbage leaves to dry up the milk and then just up and left one Sunday before church with nothing but the clothes on her back and the money she got when her numbers hit. “No note, no nothing. Just gone.” The tone of her voice when she told this story made me wish my mother had named me after my grandmother, the wild woman. Instead, she cal ed me Dana Lynn, a sly wink at her own name.