“That door is open. You can just walk in.”
She hesitated and wiped her hands on her jeans. “You sure?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Just open the door.”
She pushed the door open and walked into the kitchen careful y, as though she was walking on a just-mopped floor.
“You okay?” I asked her.
“Is this where you eat dinner? In the kitchen? Or do you have a dining room?”
“You don’t have to whisper,” I said. “We eat in the kitchen.”
“Where do you sit? How come you have four places set? Who eats with you?” She ran her hands over a chair and picked up a checkered place mat.
“Are you okay?” I said again.
“Where does your father sit?”
I pointed to the chair nearest the window. “Right there.”
She sat herself in that seat and set her hands on either side of the place mat. She nodded, in a satisfied-seeming way.
“Are you sure you’re okay? Do you want a Coke?”
“Yes,” she said. “Can you pour it in a glass?”
I poured the Coke over a handful of ice cubes and handed it to her. “So what’s the deal?”
I talked to her like we were old friends, another trick I’d learned from boys. Talk familiar and you’l get familiar. This was different from what I felt even for Jamal. This thing I felt for Dana originated under my scalp and stretched itself behind my ears, snaking down the back of my neck and down my spine. Girls like us, the ones who have been found out, our nerves are on edge like broken teeth.
“You told me to come,” she said. “You gave me your card.”
“You don’t want to have short hair, trust me,” I told her.
“I thought I might like to have an Anita Baker cut. Low on the sides and fluffy up top.”
I shook my head. “Short cuts are for people who can’t grow hair.”
“Where’s your father?”
“My dad?” I shrugged. “Working the line at the airport. What difference does it make?”
“Doesn’t make a difference.”
“Okay, so what’s up?”
I wanted her to admit that she was curious about me. I know how people act when they have an interest. When boys do it, my dad cal s it “sniffing around.” I heard him say to Raleigh, “I never thought it would bother me so much, al these hard legs sniffing around my daughter.” It’s a good way to say it, capturing that animalness of people. But it’s not just boys. Girls do it, too, when they want to know more about you.
She didn’t say anything, she just looked around our kitchen like she had never seen one before. She stood up and opened the drawers, picked up a spoon and frowned at her reflection. “Can I open the fridge?”
I shrugged and she pul ed open the door, taking a long look, like she was counting my mother’s cans of Fresca lined up on the door racks. She shut it and opened the freezer side. “No ice maker?”
I shrugged, but I felt embarrassed. “Ice trays make good ice.”
“Y’al have al new appliances? Electric range?”
“I don’t care,” I said. “My mama is the only one that cooks.”
“She cooks every day?”
“We go out to dinner sometimes. Al of us. Red Lobster. Piccadil y.”
“Did he ever take her to the Mansion?”
“Maybe, on their anniversary. Now sit back down. Stop trying to get me off track. Tel me why you came over here.” This was a trick I used with Jamal. I made him say exactly what he wanted.
“You don’t want to know,” she said, returning to my father’s chair. She sniffed the air like a rabbit. “I smel cigarettes.”
“My dad smokes like its going out of style.”
Dana whipped her head toward me. “You mother lets him smoke in the house?”
“There’s no
letting
him do anything.”
Underneath us, I knew my mother was wondering where I was. On busy days, my job was to get the clients into the shampoo bowl as soon as possible. A woman with a dry head can walk out if the wait becomes unbearable, but if she’s dripping wet, she won’t go anywhere. I wanted to get Dana back downstairs. Get her in the shampoo bowl and make her my hostage.
“Are you going to let me give you a wash-and-set?”
“I haven’t decided. I have a lot on my mind. I’ve been trying to tel you that.”
I looked at her careful y and turned my head to the side. “Are you pregnant?” I whispered.
She laughed. “Why do people think that is the only problem a girl can have?”
“Are you?”
“I thought I was one time.”
“Me, too.”
“It was stupid because I’m on the Pil .”
“Me, too!”
“But nothing is foolproof.”
The coincidences were making me loopy. “I know!”
She smiled and moved her hand like she was going to touch me, but she didn’t.
“I have too many things on my mind. I’m applying to Mount Holyoke,” she said. “Early decision. Where are you going to col ege?”
“Don’t know yet.”
“Where are you applying?”
I shrugged. “A lot of places.”
“Mount Holyoke?”
“If it’s one of the sisters, I did, but Spelman is the only one I care about.”
“If you got in, would you go?”
“I guess,” I said. “But don’t change the subject. Tel me how come you’re here.”
She raised her eyebrows and pul ed her hand through her high ponytail. “Maybe I just wanted to be friends.”
I hated how she talked to me.
I just want to be friends.
People who real y wanted to be your friend didn’t say things like that. If they real y wanted to be your friend, they just did it. They just took your hand, listened to you talk.
“Don’t turn your face away from me,” she said. “I real y came over here to thank you for saving me in the store that time.” She gave a wobbly smile. “You can fix my hair for me if you want to.”
There was a knock on the floor. My mother, in the shop, was jabbing the ceiling with a broomstick.
“I got to get back downstairs,” I said. “I’m on the clock.”
“She pays you to work in the store?”
“Five dol ars an hour.”
“Are you close to your dad?”
I said, “More when I was little. It’s different now that I’m growing up.”
“Me, too,” she said with a bit of a sigh. She waved her hand to indicate her face and chest. “He can’t deal with it.”
I nodded. “I know what you mean. He can’t deal, and he doesn’t even know the half of it.”
“Exactly,” said Dana.
“I gotta get back downstairs,” I said. “You want a wash-and-set or not?”
“I want to see your room,” she said.
“Next time.”
She turned around the kitchen, pivoting on her left foot.
“Your kitchen isn’t anything special.”
“Who said it was?”
When we were leaving, I heard her brass bangles rattle as she slipped my father’s napkin into her fake Louis Vuitton.
We entered the shop through the back door. My mother was blow-drying the client I had shampooed. According to the big clock with shears as hands, we had only been gone fifteen minutes.
“Everybody come back to their senses?” Mama said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Dana said.
“Good,” Mama said to her with a kind smile. “Come back another day and we’l do you something pretty.”
“Tomorrow?” Dana asked.
“Not tomorrow,” my mama said. “I got plans.” She batted her eyes and al the customers laughed. “My husband is taking me to dinner, so I wil be trying to do something with my own hair.” Then she said to Dana, “Now don’t go cutting in your head before we see you again.”
“No, ma’am,” Dana said. She was like a different person now. At first I thought she was trying not to laugh, but now it seemed like she was trying not to cry.
“Show yourself out,” Mama said. “Chaurisse has work to do.”
I nodded and wrenched the top off of a large jar of basting oil. Dana stood at the doorway with her hand on the push bar, looking at us like she was about to go off to war. “Good-bye,” she said.
She couldn’t have been at the end of the driveway before everybody started talking about her.
“Something feels sad about that girl,” my mama said.
“I was about to say the same thing,” said the lady with the lap baby. “I wonder what kind of home she’s going back to.”
“There was a girl like that at my high school,” my mama said. “Had a baby for her daddy. She had that same beat-down way about her.”
“But such a pretty girl,” the old lady said. “And al that hair.”
“Pretty ain’t everything,” I said, surprising myself by speaking up.
“You jealous, Chaurisse?” my mama said.
“No. I’m just saying there could be more to her than just that. And she might have a good home. She could just be lonely. It’s a lot of people walking around that’s lonely.”
SINCE IT WAS a Wednesday night, Mama and I sat down to dinner by ourselves. My mother stood at the counter tossing a large salad. She was always watching what she ate. My mother was on a diet on the day I was born. On the bottom of my foot, there is a birthmark, several smal brown splotches arranged like a little constel ation. These are orange seeds, I am told. There was a rumor that pregnant ladies who consumed lots of vitamin C would lose their baby weight faster. It didn’t work. My mother grew two dress sizes after I was born, firmly lodging her at a size 18, which made her eligible to shop at the fat ladies’ store.
I went into the fridge and pul ed out two cans of Coke, diet for mama, regular for me.
“You want a glass, Mama?”
She said, “Can is al right for me.”
We sat at the table, across from each other, she at the nine, and me at the three. The twelve and the six are for Daddy and Uncle Raleigh, even if they aren’t here.
Mama squeezed a lemon over her salad while I layered mine with Green Goddess.
“There’s no point in eating salad if you’re going to do that.”
“I know,” I said.
She shook her head at me. “That girl this afternoon, she looks familiar. What was going on with her?”
“I don’t know.”
Mama said, “She nervouses me.”
“She’s al right,” I said. “I kind of like her.’
“She tel you what her problem is? She pregnant?”
“She was worried about going to col ege. That’s what she was talking about.”
“It’s good for her to be concerned about her education. I didn’t finger her for the type.”
“Can’t judge a book by its cover,” I said.
“What are you thinking about col ege?”
“What do you think about Mount Holyoke? That’s where Dana said she was going.”
“Never heard of it, but it can’t be any better than Spelman Col ege. That’s where I would have gone if things had turned out different.”
My mother finished her salad and looked into the bowl with a sort of empty dissatisfaction. She reached for a saltine cracker and ate it slowly.
She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands.
“Your daddy’l be home after while. What do you think he wants for dinner?” She got up and opened the freezer, and found four chicken legs. She set them in a bowl of warm water to thaw. “I should make enough for Raleigh, too.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Might as wel .”
16
THE REST, LIKE THEY SAY, IS HISTORY
WHEN I WAS JUST three months old, sick as a dog with colic, only Daddy could calm me down. I would wake up crying that high-pitched miserable cry and Daddy would get out of bed, go to my room, wrap me up in a couple blankets, and we might spend the rest of the night touring the back roads of DeKalb County in the Lincoln. It wasn’t just the fresh air that soothed me, though I stil like to drive with the windows open, even in winter. It was the going that I liked. Around that same time, Raleigh bought me a baby swing from Sears, Roebuck. He assembled the pink and yel ow contraption with a flathead screwdriver and an Al en wrench. Once it was upright and sturdy, Uncle Raleigh and Mama waited for me to start crying.
Being as I was a preemie, born almost dead, I cried al the time. At the first whimper, Mama and Raleigh scooped me up, strapped me in, and started the swing to rocking. When the whimper switched over into something more in the category of a howl, Daddy was the one who rescued me, told them to give it up.
While he and I were cruising al over southwest Atlanta, down by Niskey Lake, even winding through the beautiful paths at West View Cemetery, Mama and Raleigh were taking the baby swing apart and fitting it back in the cardboard box. Al that back-and-forth did nothing for me. I needed forward motion and the quiet hum of a wel -tuned engine.
We kept up our motor excursions even after I stopped crying in the night. It’s il egal now to drive a car with a three-year-old in your lap, her little palms on the wheel, but this stil remains one of my fondest memories. I can stil remember stretching my hands to grip the steering wheel, Daddy saying, “There you go, Buttercup. There you go.” When I was twelve, it was time to take things to the next level.
Although the state wouldn’t al ow it until I was sixteen, I was ready to drive. Daddy took me for my first lessons at the Ford factory off 1-75. We went on Sundays, when the almost three thousand union workers were home sleeping in, leaving the massive parking lot almost empty.
“You know what?” he said to me on our way to my first lesson. “Driving is the most important thing you can know how to do. When I was a boy, I used to drive for white people, the same white people that my mama cleaned for. At first, when I was fifteen, sixteen, I used to wish I was the one riding in the backseat. I could picture myself walking out of the school building and there being a man in a hat, waiting to take me somewhere.”
“Where did you want to go?” I asked him.
“I didn’t even know for sure. I guess I imagined I would have the car carry me to Atlanta. Or just to a nice restaurant where I could sit down and eat something good, like steak and a glass of sweet tea. Maybe a baked potato. A country boy like me, that was al the finery I could imagine. Sour cream on the potato. I had never even tasted it before, but I always heard white folks asking for it or saying they didn’t want it.” He shrugged and smiled over at me. “You didn’t know your daddy could be so sil y, did you?”
I smiled back at him and tried to imagine him as a boy. I had seen a couple of his old school portraits, the black-and-white tone blurring into something gray and indistinct. JIMMY WITHERSPOON was written right below the col ar of his white shirt. When I stayed with Grandma Bunny for a month each summer, that picture was the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes, but I could never get my brain to accept that this Jimmy Witherspoon with the lazy eye and confident smile was my father.