The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart (15 page)

Big Sister thought: I cannot go it alone. I cannot lead. This was where she thought the biggest flaw lay in herself. But Little Sister can, has and will. Big Sister thought this, resentfully. She never ceased to be faintly annoyed by Little Sister’s optimism, and felt this way now, even as she waited to hear Little Sister’s confident: We can do it, come on! In her imagination Little Sister was leaping the barricade of the fallen tree with a single bound, bullets and rattlesnakes repelled by her Wonder Woman–like bracelets, and with a no-bullshit determination pulling Big Sister along with her, through the air.

“I will sit here,” said Little Sister, as if overhearing this fantasy. Choosing a rocky spot, clear of snake holes, she sat down. “Until you decide what we should do.” She settled herself, pulled out a piece of gum, offered Big Sister one and began, herself, to chew. Calmly, into space, like a cow.

Big Sister thought: It’s just like her to sit down, to wait, not to help. To know nothing of housework, or cooking; to pretend ignorance of everything that looked like work. Oven cleaning, for example. She doubted if Little Sister even knew there was such a thing, and had certainly never cleaned an oven herself. What struck her was the way Little Sister had seemed, from the beginning, resigned to going it alone. And because it was apparent to everyone that she would go alone, they leapt forward—or so it had seemed to Big Sister—to help or to accompany her. Over the years she had watched her. And what she’d seen was that Little Sister did only what she pleased. What she pleased to do was smoke, drink, pet with boys, who were always hanging around sick with love at the sight of her, study, read long novels, go with
their mother on long, mainly silent walks … to come home hungry for a dinner Big Sister prepared. Her mother instantly lifting the tops off pots, peering into the oven, complaining about something. “I really prefer it more done, myself.” Or: “Are you sure these greens were washed three times? There’s a feel of grit.” And then her father, gulping down everything without a word, as if he didn’t taste it, and her brothers, saying the biscuits were lumpy and throwing them at each other like rocks.

And Little Sister. The most irritating of all. Because she alone never complained or criticized. She would eat, daintily, as if from a country foreign to siblings, her well-scrubbed left hand in her lap, her attention completely on the flavors of the food. “Wonderful!” she’d breathe, as if eating itself was miraculous. And the taste of food cooked by Big Sister, nothing short of sublime. She would smile at Big Sister, and after dinner she would gratefully, carefully, but completely absentmindedly, wash and dry the dishes. Then she would retire to her room to read, or walk to the mailbox and back, or she would sit on the front porch and, apparently, listen to the crickets. The way she did the dishes, automatically, never noticing them, made it seem that she never did housework at all. It was the same with dusting the furniture or sweeping the floor. Twenty years later Big Sister understood that though Little Sister’s hands were on the broom she swept with, her mind was on alabaster castles and gremlins and dwarves. On knights and round tables that never knew dust and on swords that, through enchantment, remained stuck in stones. Big Sister never remembered Little Sister doing housework because it was as if Little Sister was never conscious of doing it. It was there, she did it, but it had no place in her consciousness. But most of all, thought Big Sister now, because I was there, Little Sister did not feel responsible for it.

That was the difference. And nobody complained.… But wait, they did complain. And what happened? Little Sister would simply put down her book, the broom, the garbage pail, the dish of eggs she’d fried to a crisp, and simply look at the complainers. Being compelled to come back to face them from whatever fascinating place she’d been would have had an obvious impact on her happiness. Who are you, and what are you to me, anyhow? her look said. It unnerved them. They conceded her craziness and left her alone.

The ground on which Little Sister sat was hard. It eventually became uncomfortable. Little Sister watched Big Sister stand there, and look despairingly at the barrier. Did Big Sister really wish to continue? Yes. Little Sister could see that she did. Little Sister rose, pulling herself up by her stick, and followed the thicket-covered fence to the left far enough to see they would become lost in that direction; she then beat her way across to the right, where the thicket grew over the fallen tree. On that side she thought they could wriggle through a sort of hole in the thicket. Big Sister, meanwhile, had this thought herself, but had rejected it. It had something to do with her weight, her size. Could she wriggle through? Would there be “another side” to come out on?

“Well, I say, let’s try it,” said Little Sister. But she was smaller. Not slender, but rather curvy, and had never had a problem with her weight. She could surely wriggle through, Big Sister thought bitterly. With a resentment so strong she acted quickly, against her own belief—which was that she was too fat to make it—to plunge into the leafy “hole” before her; Little Sister following close behind.

For several minutes they seemed imprisoned in leaves, branches, briers, tall prickly weeds. If there were snakes they
were in for it: Trapped, they’d be unable to extricate themselves fast enough to get to a doctor.

Oh, well, Little Sister was thinking: If I die, maybe my lover will notice. Maybe he’ll leave his wife. Maybe he won’t leave his wife—which seemed more likely—but will grieve to have missed so much excitement by my early death. Still, being bitten by a snake in a thicket in the woods, miles from help, was not the way Little Sister wanted to go. Except, and here she stopped short, struck by a thought, as she watched Big Sister, as Pioneer, hack away at the bushes in front of her as if murdering someone. Except that, even though she thought Big Sister might not be exactly grief-stricken over her death, she would like to have her Big Sister with her when she died. This was not a thought she’d had before, and certainly not one she’d had on this trip. But now she let herself sink into the knowledge that yes, as children, Big Sister had always taken care of her, in sickness and in health. She had especially taken care of all of them in sickness: through measles, flu, broken limbs even. She had made of herself a service and a comfort, with a soothing bedside manner that Little Sister had loved. Big Sister would never be impatient or mean, as Little Sister felt she might be, toward a sick person. But, Little Sister thought, continuing to walk behind the broad back of Big Sister, when I am not sick, she resents me. She is murdering me while attacking those bushes, even now.

“There’s light!” said Big Sister, as they emerged once more on the path.

Little Sister hated to think of her lover now because this was obviously an important journey; one that belonged to her and to Big Sister. That was the trouble with “being in love”—the person in love was a bit deranged, not herself. Distracted, mentally
harassed. Miserable and locked inside herself. They now approached an ancient oak thick with mistletoe.

“Uncle Loaf’s brother, Tarry, as in Tarry-Along, lived here,” said Big Sister with delighted assurance. “Uncle Loaf’s house is just ahead.”

Little Sister had not known about Uncle Tarry. Why had the brothers lived so close together, she wondered. For protection? Because they owned a small farm during Reconstruction that shrank around them? Because they liked each other’s company so much they enjoyed living practically in each other’s yards?

And, good God, what must it have been like, stuck way back here in the woods, off the main dirt road? Little Sister forgot her lover long enough to feel a familiar terror of the past. She could never return to the past and survive. She knew that. To be a nineteenth-century black woman; to be an eighteenth-century one. How had they stood it? To be a slave. A slave, whose every move was planned by someone else. Not to love where you wanted, who you wanted. With this thought her lover’s face returned. She moved up beside Big Sister who now stood motionless in a small clearing, facing a mass of vines and bushes, and the collapsed gray remains of what had been the kitchen and laundry of Uncle Loaf and Auntie Putt-Putt’s house.

Big Sister’s face was radiant. A condition Little Sister had rarely seen. “I’ve found it!” she said. To this place she had run to find love and dreams and freedom. Here, chewing Uncle Loaf’s tobacco, she had been a person of leisure; as Auntie Putt Putt, always puttering, as everyone said, cooked and cleaned and kept the fields going, or walked to the roadside market five miles away to buy matches, snuff and kerosene.

But they, her parents, had always come after, or sent for her.
She had been dragged from behind Uncle Loaf’s chair and off the sagging porch. Uncle Loaf only mildly defending her. While she was there they treated her kindly. He gave her sticks of peppermint candy. She handed him earthen cups full of water or sweet wine. Auntie Putt-Putt told her stories. “Come back,” they’d call, as she was hustled down the path. “Come back to see us.” And yet Auntie Putt-Putt must have guessed that, though enthralled by her horrible tales, it was Uncle Loaf she really came to see.

But on their invitation, Big Sister always snuck away from the chores at home, and returned. Whippings didn’t deter her. Being kept home from school to wash the family’s dirty clothes didn’t either. In later years she would think about the imbalance of his sitting at his ease, being served like a prince, while Auntie Putt-Putt worked so hard. But she could not have complained, or even noticed, at the time. Because sitting at his ease was how she wanted him. His sitting there, daring to do nothing, was what assured her a sense of freedom, of escape.

Now she saw it. They dragged her home where she became … Auntie Putt-Putt.

“Don’t go in,” she called to Little Sister, who was poking around the kitchen ruins.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I thought I might unearth some crockery that you’d recognize.”

Little Sister thought: If I had run off here I would have roamed the woods, hung out in the trees. Nature is notoriously more spacious than front porches. But Big Sister had come to sit and then to hide behind Uncle Loaf’s chair, and he had known each time that they would come for her. Never did he say: Don’t take her.

They were jubilant with success on the way home, looking
at the instant photographs that verified their adventure. They pulled into the curved road that led to the cabin in a squall of giggles and gossip, and of bragging. Little Sister was driving and thinking very little of her lover, except to regret his absence from the fun. At the cabin she suggested a swim, and they threw off their clothes and plunged into the lake wearing only their underwear; Little Sister’s a bikini-like set by Lily of France, bronze against her deep brown skin; and Big Sister in a more matronly Maidenform. Black, with a good deal of lace.

Little Sister dreamed frequently of her lover’s wife. “I dreamed,” she said to Big Sister, as they lay drying off beside the lake, “that she, that is, her parents and she, had a maid when she was little. A black woman. I dreamed this woman spanked her, but also cared for her, as black maids do. And that that is why she is longing to reconnect with black women. She misses them.”

“Them?”

“Well, the experience of them that could be embodied in one.”

Little Sister remembered her own childhood and one of her best friends, a white girl named Blaze. Remembered the day her parents brought her to play with Blaze as usual, while her mother cleaned house for Blaze’s mother, and Blaze’s father had said: “Miss Blaze isn’t here today. She’ll be back.…” But she never came back for Little Sister or for her parents, who understood perfectly what they were being told: No more equality. No
more friendship. “Miss” Blaze. And Blaze, like Little Sister, was only twelve years old.

For the life of her Little Sister couldn’t recall anything she and Blaze had done together. They must have waded in the creek behind the house, caught tadpoles, made baskets out of willow rushes. Climbed trees. Played on the swing. She’d blocked the memories, of course. It was all, the experience of being demoted, turned away, blocked by rage. She had thought Blaze had decided it was time her friend called her “Miss” Blaze, but now that seemed unlikely. What child could have been perverse enough to think like that? At twelve or thirteen would it have seemed so important? It might. Because there had been white society, such as it was in those parts, to think of. Her white friends would have been her true peers. They would have been at an age to begin to understand it was possible that their mothers bought the friendliness and compliance of the black women who appeared magically at the back door of their invariably white houses each morning.

There was the rage, a shut door that seemed to be made of iron; but then way behind it, in the fields that encompassed her childhood, under a blue sky that was endless and magnificent, was the friendship, right in there with all the other good things of life. A time of mutual trust and happiness. And an unaware-ness of inequality, only the enjoyment of mutual sweetness. The barely worn dresses Blaze’s mother, and Blaze herself, insisted she take for school, and the firewood, walnuts, handmade rocking chairs her parents gave to Blaze’s family. But Little Sister refused to remember this emotionally. Refused to permit it any validation in her feelings. Because to do so, she felt, would be to become complicit in her own betrayal. And she felt she had been betrayed. No “good ole days” could ever exist for her, once she
understood that even her happiest days rested on a foundation of inherited evil. An evil that said, when she least expected it: “Miss” Blaze.…