Instead of mocking or laughing she looked searchingly at him and said, “I’m troubled about all that.”
“How so?”
She made a discarding motion with the gathered fingers of one hand and said, “I sometimes feel this yearning for children — it’s like, I don’t know, a searchlight of happiness has found me out in some swamp of myself and I think a child is that light, but then I feel very calm and cool about the whole thing and believe I have so much to do in this life that I am not interested in children or not interested right now or in this situation or in that person and I just let it sink away from me. Like when you’re thinking about eating a peach and don’t for some reason and you just forget it.”
“What is that?”
“Oh, I’m not making sense, am I?”
She was speaking rapidly and almost frantically, as if she had herself caught on to something and wanted to elude it.
“The professor says it’s good to marry early and have children early and all that — get started,” he said, “on what life’s really about.”
“I don’t think you can avoid that — or avoid the opportunity.”
“Shoot. You ought to ride the trains. Wasted lives. Ruined folk. And then you come to town and you see most people — those that got a chance — white or colored — can’t get away from that study quick enough.”
He too was talking fast. He didn’t want her to go away, that was why. Probably she wouldn’t come back. Maybe if he tried everything she would go for one something. But he was going too fast.
“Can I buy you a lemonade?” he said.
She would sit up nights trying to feel at ease enough on the earth to go to sleep. Some nights she thought the fighting in her would never stop. It was always the same: whether or not she was a good girl, a girl God could love. Girl a man could love. She didn’t believe she was that girl. In the half light of her college room, with her roommate’s little tuk. . tuk. . tuk snores gently percolating in the next bed, she would wrestle with herself and always lose. She would rediscover herself as a bad person who could never get free of her badness. Always she would begin silently to apologize: I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. But not even this let her sleep. Only the vague exhaustion that came over her, thoughts like musty gray shadows settling around her, tucking the space like moss. This boy pushing her was scary.
A breeze felt around in the trees. Down the street a couple of little girls playing hullygully.
“No, I can’t do that,” she said.
“No lemonade? Everybody needs lemonade. Except for my foster uncle Herman who got his stomach tore out during the war — everybody but him.”
“I have to be at Annie’s for supper.”
“It’s still early.”
She gave him a look that stopped him.
“All right,” he said, dashed. Then, brightly, “Can I ride with you over to your house? I’d like to air out a little and I can start from there.”
“Oh yes,” she said, abruptly lighthearted. She put the car in gear and they drove slowly through the narrow, tree-lined streets.
“Why don’t you talk more about little things?” she said. “All these big topics wear a person out.”
“You mean like love and marriage?”
“And the rest. Look at this.” She held her right hand out, showing on her middle finger a ring with a cut violet stone.
“An amethyst,” he said.
“Aren’t you smart.”
She was patronizing him and they both knew it, but they both knew it was because she was a little hurt. He didn’t rebuke her.
“My father gave this ring to me. Or it was passed down to me after he died.”
He wished he had a ring to give her. “Let me look at it.”
He took her hand in his and with the fingers held together it was as compact and slim as a mockingbird; opened (his fingers brushing her skin as if there was a magic he could unsettle and start with a gentleness), the palm was a pale, yellowish tan, beautiful. He tried to hold it but she spread her fingers. Then she closed them and let him hold her hand and they both knew she was doing this, doing what she’d come to in this way, her hand relaxing in his so it felt softer, yet at the same time more full of life. Gently she pulled away from him.
“I can’t drive,” she said in a small voice.
They said nothing for the last block.
She pulled into the dirt driveway and parked beside the sturdy brick house with the big shocks of daylilies blooming against it. He wanted to sit in the car and talk, keep her with him somehow. Her flattened, coarse, springy hair caught the fading light as she got out. It was impossible that in a minute she’d be gone.
“I thought. .,” he said, but she was already around the side of the car, opening the door for him.
He reached to touch her hand on the windowsill but it was gone too quickly and she had already turned to climb the two white painted steps to the little porch. She stopped, pivoted on one foot, looked down at him still sitting in the car and thanked him for going riding with her.
“Come with us in the van,” he blurted and he saw in her eyes that the offer touched her, that she yielded to it and let it enter her and he thought he could see it in the moment of early twilight swing through her, circulating, but she only smiled, a smile diminishing in clarity and strength as she slipped further away. As she reached the door he thought she almost turned back but she didn’t. She gave him a small, sliding wave, a soft almost slicing motion of hand, as she went in. The screen door and then the white paneled main door closed and it was as if she had flown from the world and left him there.
He let out a small cry. He wanted to rush after her, overturning rooms until he found her and made her let him touch her fingers again, made her let him kiss her and have her.
But he only sat there, still inside the car — like a dummy, he thought later, walking home — dressed up in thriftshop clothes, with cotton ticking in his hair.
The next morning the sun came up through thin peach-colored clouds and seemed to Delvin to be filled with the promise of love, but he had to stay where he was because a group of fifth-graders was coming to tour and the professor had an early appointment with the negro dentist who visited that area on Thursdays (he needed a filigree on his bottom teeth, which were worn down to stubs and hurt) and so he did not get over to the charmed house before nearly noontime. He could smell greens cooking as he walked around to the back door.
Celia was not there. She had left at first light to get to Birmingham before it got too hot.
“Well, it surely is hot,” he said, a look on his face that made the woman who cooked for the family think she’d hardly seen a person look so catercornered to hisself. She wanted to laugh at him, but as the laugh rose in her it changed to pity.
“She left a letter for you,” she said, this woman about whom he was wondering if she could tell him what he was supposed to do now—what now?
“A letter?”
“It’s right here on the speckle table,” she said as if he was inside the house, but she hadn’t let him in, and she turned, went away and got it and brought it to him.
He accepted the letter like a starving man told the banquet was not for him but he could have this chunk of cold cornbread here. Those riches! But still, here was food.
Like a dog, he thought as he went down the steps with the letter clasped against his chest, I scurry off to eat my little mess of leftovers in secret.
But he was not bitter, not yet, or ever would be really. Even later, out in the rain-drenched cotton fields of the state prison system as he trudged barefoot along the rows chopping nutgrass with a hoe, he would not cast blame on her.