“If she’s a nice girl,” his mother was saying. “You know we love to meet your friends.”
He felt immediate contrition, seeing, in his mind’s eye, her bewildered face, knowing how she wondered why her eldest son should cause, and appear to wish to cause her, so much pain. At the same time he was aware of Ida’s ominous humming in the kitchen.
“She’s a very nice girl,” he said, promptly, sincerely. Then he faltered, involuntarily stealing a glance at Ida. He did not know how to say, Mama, she’s a colored girl, knowing that his mother, and who on earth could blame her? would immediately decide that this was but one more attempt on his part to shock and humiliate his family. “I want you two to meet one day, I really do.” And this sounded totally insincere. He was thinking, I guess I really am going to have to tell them, I’m going to have to make them accept it. And then, at once, Oh, fuck it, why? He glanced again at Ida. She was smoking a cigarette and leafing through a magazine.
“Well,” said his mother, doubtfully, more than willing, albeit in her fashion, to come flying down the road to meet him, “try to bring her to the party. Everybody will be here and they all ask about you, we haven’t seen you in so long. I know your father misses you though he’ll never say a thing and Stevie misses you, too, and we all do, Danny.” They called him Danny at home.
Everybody: his sister and his brother-in-law, his brother and father and mother, the uncles and aunts and cousins, and the resulting miasma of piety and malice and suspicion and fear. The invincible chatter of people, concerning people, who had no reality for him, the talk about money, of children’s illnesses, of doctor’s bills, of pregnancies, of unlikely and unlovely infidelities occurring between ciphers and neuters in a vacuum, the ditchwater-dull, infantile dirty stories, and the insane talk about politics. They should, really, all of them, still be living in stables, with horses and cows, and should not be expected to tax themselves with matters beyond their comprehension. He hated himself for the sincerity of this reflection and was baffled, as always, by the particular and dangerous nature of its injustice.
“Okay,” he said, trying to stop his mother’s flow. She was telling him that his father’s stomach trouble had returned. Stomach trouble, my ass. He just hasn’t got any liver left any more, that’s all. One of these days he’s just going to spatter all over those walls, and what a stench.
“Are you going to bring your girl friend?”
“I don’t know. I’ll see.”
He could just see Ida with all of them. He, alone, was bad enough; he, alone, distressed and frightened them enough. Ida would reduce them to a kind of speechless hysteria and God knew what his father would say under the impression that he was putting the dark girl at her ease.
More chatter from his mother: it was as though each of her contacts with Vivaldo was so brief and so menaced that she tried to establish in minutes a communion which had not been accomplished in years.
“I’ll be there,” he said, “good-bye,” and hung up.
Yet, he had loved her once, he loved her still, he loved them all.
He looked at the silent telephone, then looked over at Ida.
“Want to come to a birthday party?”
“No, thank you, sweetie. You want to educate your family, you get them some slides, you hear? Colored slides,” and she raised her eyes, mockingly, from the magazine.
He laughed, but felt so guilty about Ida and about his mother that he was unable to let well enough alone.
“I’d like to take you over with me one of these days. It might do them some good. They’re such cornballs.”
“What might do them some good?” Her attention was still on her magazine.
“Why — meeting you. They’re not bad people. They’re just very limited.”
“I’ve told you, I’m not at all interested in the education of your family, Vivaldo.”
Obscurely, deeply, he was stung. “Don’t you think there’s any hope for them?”
“I don’t give a damn if there’s any hope for them or not. But I know that I am not about to be bugged by any more white jokers who still can’t figure out whether I’m human or not. If they don’t know, baby, sad on them, and I hope they drop dead slowly, in great pain.”
“That’s not very Christian,” he said, lightly. But he was ready to drop it.
“It’s the best I can do. I learned all my Christianity from white folks.”
“Oh, shit,” he said, “here we go again.”
The magazine came flying at him and hit him across the bridge of the nose.
“What do you mean, you white motherfucker!” She mimicked him. “Here we go again! I’ve been living in this house for over a month and you still think it would be a big joke to take me home to see your mother! Goddammit, you think she’s a better woman than I am, you big, white, liberal asshole?” She caught her breath and started toward him, crouching, her hands on her hips. “Or do you think it would serve your whore of a mother right to bring your nigger whore home for her to see? Answer me, goddamnit!”
“Will you shut up? You’re going to have the police down here in a minute.”
“Yes, and when they come, I’m going to tell them you dragged me in off the streets and refused to pay me, yes, I am. You think I’m a whore, well, you treat me like a whore, goddamn your white prick, pay!”
“Ida, it was a dumb thing to say, and I’m sorry, all right. I didn’t mean what you thought I meant. I wasn’t trying to put you down.”
“Yes, you did. You meant exactly what I thought you meant. And you know why? Because you can’t help it, that’s why. Can’t none of you white boys help it. Every damn one of your sad-ass white chicks think they got a cunt for peeing through, and they don’t piss nothing but the best ginger ale, and if it wasn’t for the spooks wouldn’t a damn one of you white cock suckers ever get laid. That’s right. You are a fucked-up group of people. You hear me? A fucked-up group of people.”
“All right,” he said, wearily, “so we’re a fucked-up group of people. So shut up. We’re in enough trouble here, as it is.”
And they were, because the landlord and the neighbors and the cop on the corner disapproved of Ida’s presence. But it was not the most tactful thing he could have said at that moment.
She said, with a contrition absolutely false and murderous, “That’s true. I forgot.” She turned from him into the kitchen again, reached up in the cupboard and hurled all of his dishes, of which, thank heaven, there were not many, to the floor. “I just think I’ll give them something to complain about,” she said. There were only two glasses and she smashed these against the refrigerator. Vivaldo had placed himself against the record player, and, as Ida stalked the kitchen, water standing in her eyes, he began to laugh. She rushed at him, slapping and clawing, and he held her off with one hand, still laughing. His belly hurt. Other people in the building were pounding on their pipes and on the walls and on the ceiling, but he could not stop laughing. He ended up on the floor, on his back, howling, and finally, Ida, unwillingly, began to laugh, too. “Get up off the floor, you fool. Lord, what a fool you are.”
“I’m just a fucked-up group of people,” he said. “Lord, have mercy on me.” Ida laughed, helplessly, and he pulled her down on top of him. “Have mercy on me, baby,” he said. “Have mercy.” The pounding continued, and he said, “There sure are a fucked-up group of people in this house, they won’t even let you make love in peace.”