You tell that bastard to get his ass out on the street. Whining don’t make money. Cursing don’t get a job. . . .
Bitching don’t make the beds and screaming don’t get the tomatoes planted. They had laughed together then, speaking a language of old stories and older jokes.
You tell him.
I said.
Now girl, you listen to me.
The power in them, the strength and the heat! How could anybody not love my mama, my aunts? How could my daddy, my uncles, ever stand up to them, dare to raise hand or voice to them? They were a power on the earth.
I breathed deep, watching my aunt rock on her stance, settling her eye on the balls, while I smelled chicken gravy and hot grease, the close thick scent of love and understanding. I used to love to eat at Aunt Alma’s house, all those home-cooked dinners at the roadhouse; pinto beans with peppers for fifteen, nine of them hers. Chowchow on a clean white plate passed around the table while the biscuits passed the other way. My aunt always made biscuits. What else stretched so well? Now those starch meals shadowed her loose shoulders and dimpled her fat white elbows.
She gave me one quick glance and loosed her stroke. The white ball punched the center of the table. The balls flew to the edges. My sixty-year-old aunt gave a grin that would have scared piss out of my Uncle Bill, a grin of pure, fierce enjoyment. She rolled the stick in fingers loose as butter on a biscuit, laughed again, and slid her palms down the sides of polished wood, while the anger in her face melted into skill and concentration.
I rocked back on my stool and covered my smile with my wet hair. Goddamn! Aunt Alma pushed back on one ankle, swung the stick to follow one ball, another, dropping them as easily as peas on potatoes. Goddamn! She went after those balls like kids on a dirt yard, catching each lightly and dropping them lovingly. Into the holes, move it! Turning and bracing on ankles thickened with too many years of flour and babies, Aunt Alma blitzed that table like a twenty-year-old hustler, not sparing me another glance.
Not till the eighth stroke did she pause and stop to catch her breath.
“You living like this—not for a man, huh?” she asked, one eyebrow arched and curious.
“No.” I shrugged, feeling more friendly and relaxed. Moving like that, aunt of mine I wanted to say, don’t tell me you don’t understand.
“Your mama said you were working in some photo shop, doing shit work for shit money. Not much to show for that college degree, is that?”
“Work is work. It pays the rent.”
“Which ought not to be much here.”
“No,” I agreed, “not much. I know,” I waved my hands lightly, “it’s a wreck of a place, but it’s home. I’m happy here. Terry, Casey and everybody—they’re family.”
“Family.” Her mouth hardened again. “You have a family, don’t you remember? These girls might be close, might be important to you, but they’re not family. You know that.” Her eyes said more, much more. Her eyes threw the word “family” at me like a spear. All her longing, all her resentment of my abandonment, was in that word, and not only hers, but also Mama’s and my sisters’ and all the cousins’ I had carefully not given my new address.
“How about a beer?” I asked. I wanted one myself. “I’ve got a can of Pabst in the icebox.”
“A glass of water,” she said. She leaned over the table to line up her closing shots.
I brought her a glass of water. “You’re good,” I told her, wanting her to talk to me about how she had learned to play pool, anything but family and all this stuff I so much did not want to think about.
“Children.” She stared at me again. “What about children?” There was something in her face then that waited, as if no question were more important, as if she knew the only answer I could give.
Enough, I told myself, and got up without a word to get myself that can of Pabst. I did not look in her eyes. I walked into the kitchen on feet that felt suddenly unsteady and tender. Behind me, I heard her slide the cue stick along the rim of the table and then draw it back to set up another shot.
Play it out, I cursed to myself, just play it out and leave me alone. Everything is so simple for you, so settled. Make babies. Grow a garden. Handle some man like he’s just another child. Let everything come that comes, die that dies; let everything go where it goes. I drank straight from the can and watched her through the doorway. All my uncles were drunks, and I was more like them than I had ever been like my aunts.
Aunt Alma started talking again, walking around the table, measuring shots and not even looking in my direction. “You remember when y’all lived out on Greenlake Road? Out on that dirt road where that man kept that old egg-busting dog? Your mama couldn’t keep a hen to save her life till she emptied a shell and filled it again with chicken shit and baby piss. Took that dog right out of himself when he ate it. Took him right out of the taste for hens and eggs.” She stopped to take a deep breath, sweat glittering on her lip. With one hand she wiped it away, the other going white on the pool cue.
“I still had Annie then. Lord, I never think about her anymore.”
I remembered then the last child she had borne, a tiny girl with a heart that fluttered with every breath, a baby for whom the doctors said nothing could be done, a baby they swore wouldn’t see six months. Aunt Alma had kept her in an okra basket and carried her everywhere, talking to her one minute like a kitten or a doll and the next minute like a grown woman. Annie had lived to be four, never outgrowing the vegetable basket, never talking back, just lying there and smiling like a wise old woman, dying between a smile and a laugh while Aunt Alma never interrupted the story that had almost made Annie laugh.
I sipped my beer and watched my aunt’s unchanging face. Very slowly she swung the pool cue up and down, not quite touching the table. After a moment she stepped in again and leaned half her weight on the table. The five ball became a bird murdered in flight, dropping suddenly into the far right pocket.
Aunt Alma laughed out loud, delighted. “Never lost it,” she crowed. “Four years in the roadhouse with that table set up in the back. Every one of them sons of mine thought he was going to make money on it. Lord, those boys! Never made a cent.” She swallowed the rest of her glass of water.
“But me,” she wiped the sweat away again. “I never would have done it for money. I just loved it. Never went home without playing myself three or four games. Sometimes I’d set Annie up on the side and we’d pretend we were playing. I’d tell her when I was taking her shots. And she’d shout when I’d sink ’em. I let her win most every time.”
She stopped, put both hands on the table, and closed her eyes.
“ ’Course, just after we lost her, we lost the roadhouse.” She shook her head, eyes still closed. “Never did have anything fine that I didn’t lose.”
The room was still, dust glinted in the sunlight past her ears. She opened her eyes and looked directly at me.
“I don’t care,” she began slowly, softly. “I don’t care if you’re queer or not. I don’t care if you take puppy dogs to bed, for that matter, but your mother was all my heart for twenty years when nobody else cared what happened to me. She stood by me. I’ve stood by her and I always thought to do the same for you and yours. But she’s sitting there, did you know that? She’s sitting there like nothing’s left of her life, like . . . like she hates her life and won’t say shit to nobody about it. She wouldn’t tell me. She won’t tell me what it is, what has happened.”
I sat the can down on the stool, closed my own eyes, and dropped my head. I didn’t want to see her. I didn’t want her to be there. I wanted her to go away, disappear out of my life the way I’d run out of hers. Go away, old woman. Leave me alone. Don’t talk to me. Don’t tell me your stories. I an’t a baby in a basket, and I can’t lie still for it.
“You know. You know what it is. The way she is about you. I know it has to be you—something about you. I want to know what it is, and you’re going to tell me. Then you’re going to come home with me and straighten this out. There’s a lot I an’t never been able to fix, but this time, this thing, I’m going to see it out. I’m going to see it fixed.”
I opened my eyes and she was still standing there, the cue stick shiny in her hand, her face all flushed and tight.
“Go,” I said and heard my voice, a scratchy, strangling cry in the big room. “Get out of here.”
“What did you tell her? What did you say to your mama?”
“Ask her. Don’t ask me. I don’t have nothing to say to you.”
The pool cue rose slowly, slowly till it touched the right cheek, the fine lines of broken blood vessels, freckles, and patchy skin. She shook her head slowly. My throat pulled tighter and tighter until it drew my mouth down and open. Like a shot the cue swung. The table vibrated with the blow. Her cheeks pulled tight, the teeth all a grimace. The cue split and broke. White dust rose in a cloud. The echo hurt my ears while her hands rose up as fists, the broken cue in her right hand as jagged as the pain in her face.
“Don’t you say that to me. Don’t you treat me like that. Don’t you know who I am, what I am to you? I didn’t have to come up here after you. I could have let it run itself out, let it rest on your head the rest of your life, just let you carry it—your mama’s life. YOUR MAMA’S LIFE, GIRL. Don’t you understand me? I’m talking about your mama’s life.”
She threw the stick down, turned away from me, her shoulders heaving and shaking, her hands clutching nothing. “I an’t talking about your stepfather. I an’t talking about no man at all. I’m talking about your mama sitting at her kitchen table, won’t talk to nobody, won’t eat, and won’t listen to nothing. What’d she ever ask from you? Nothing. Just gave you your life and everything she had. Worked herself ugly for you and your sister. Only thing she ever hoped for was to do the same for your children, someday to sit herself back and hold her grandchildren on her lap. . . .”
It was too much. I couldn’t stand it.
“GODDAMN YOU!” I was shaking all over. “CHILDREN! All you ever talk about—you and her and all of you. Like that was the end-all and be-all of everything. Never mind what happens to them once they’re made. That don’t matter. It’s only the getting of them. Like some goddamned crazy religion. Get your mother a grandchild and solve all her problems. Get yourself a baby and forget everything else. It’s what you were born for, the one thing you can do with no thinking about it at all. Only I can’t. To get her a grandchild, I’d have to steal one!”
I was wringing my own hands, twisting them together and pulling them apart. Now I swung them open and slapped down at my belly, making my own hollow noise in the room.
“No babies in there, aunt of mine, and never going to be. I’m sterile as a clean tin can. That’s what I told Mama, and not to hurt her. I told her because she wouldn’t leave me alone about it. Like you, like all of you, always talking about children, never able to leave it alone.” I was walking back and forth now, unable to stop myself from talking. “Never able to hear me when I warned her to leave it be. Going on and on till I thought I’d lose my mind.”
I looked her in the eye, loving her and hating her, and not wanting to speak, but hearing the words come out anyway. “Some people never do have babies, you know. Some people get raped at eleven by a stepfather their mama half hates but can’t afford to leave. Some people then have to lie and hide it ’cause it would make so much trouble. So nobody will know, not the law and not the rest of the family. Nobody but the women supposed to be the ones who take care of everything, who know what to do and how to do it, the women who make children who believe in them and trust in them, and sometimes die for it. Some people never go to a doctor and don’t find out for ten years that the son of a bitch gave them some goddamned disease.”
I looked away, unable to stand how gray her face had gone.
“You know what it does to you when the people you love most in the world, the people you believe in—cannot survive without believing in—when those people do nothing, don’t even know something needs to be done? When you cannot hate them but cannot help yourself? The hatred grows. It just takes over everything, eats you up and makes you somebody full of hate.”
I stopped. The roar that had been all around me stopped, too. The cold was all through me now. I felt like it would never leave me. I heard her move. I heard her hip bump the pool table and make the balls rock. I heard her turn and gather up her purse. I opened my eyes to see her moving toward the front door. That cold cut me then like a knife in fresh slaughter. I knew certainly that she’d go back and take care of Mama, that she’d never say a word, probably never tell anybody she’d been here. ’Cause then she’d have to talk about the other thing, and I knew as well as she that however much she tried to forget it, she’d really always known. She’d done nothing then. She’d do nothing now. There was no justice. There was no justice in the world.
When I started to cry it wasn’t because of that. It wasn’t because of babies or no babies, or pain that was so far past I’d made it a source of strength. It wasn’t even that I’d hurt her so bad, hurt Mama when I didn’t want to. I cried because of the things I hadn’t said, didn’t know how to say, and cried most of all because behind everything else there was no justice for my aunts or my mama. Because each of them to save their lives had tried to be strong, had become, in fact, as strong and determined as life would let them. I and all their children had believed in that strength, had believed in them and their ability to do anything, fix anything, survive anything. None of us had ever been able to forgive ourselves that we and they were not strong enough, that strength itself was not enough.
Who can say where that strength ended, where the world took over and rolled us all around like balls on a pool table? None of us ever would. I brought my hands up to my neck and pulled my hair around until I clenched it in my fists, remembering how my aunt used to pick up Annie to rub that baby’s belly beneath her chin—Annie bouncing against her in perfect trust. Annie had never had to forgive her mama anything.