Dave says, “You can catch up with her at the park. She just needs a little time to take this all in.”
My neck skin crawls at the sound of his always-cool Danish voice, his everything-is-going-to-be-okay-just-you-wait-and-see way of looking at everything. His green eyes. My green eyes. His long legs like mine. Dave being sensitive just like me. That was so nice for a while. It made me feel like I belonged, that I was a pea in his pod, but all of a sudden, I don’t care about any of that. I want to shake Dave and shout, Stop bein’ such a cold fish! Be fiery for once! Bring Troo back!
“Wait’ll they get a load a this at the park today,” Mother says, holding up the ring so she can admire it from a distance. The sunlight coming through the kitchen window catches the diamond and a hundred tiny squares of dancing light surround us. It is just blinding.
This has gotta be the biggest Fourth party ever.
The grassy part of the park is jammed with kids of all sizes and ages. Everybody’s got a bike or coaster wagon or a baby carriage decorated to the nines. After the contests are over there will be games, and then everybody in the neighborhood will sit down together at picnic tables to eat hamburgers and hot dogs, kielbasa sausage, brat-wurst and Dixie cups of ice cream and as much free lemonade as they want.
Dave brought along a folding chair for Mother and set it at the edge of Jack Hoyt Woods next to Mrs. Callahan, who saved her a spot.
Dave pins on his judge’s badge and disappears into the crowd after giving me a chuck on the chin and Mother a kiss on the cheek. I would usually stick close to her, make sure that she had one of my lanyards around her neck so she could whistle for me to get her whatever she needs, but I’m not ready to forgive her yet for what she did to Troo. So I leave her there basking in the shade with her best friend, who right away starts salivating over the diamond engagement ring and says, “Jesus H. Christ… it’s… it’s the size of… you must give one helluva-”
Mother scolds, “Betty!” but she laughs louder than I have heard since Daddy was alive.
I’ve worked my way over to the edge of the crowd of jammed-together kids. I’m jumping up and down on my tiptoes, but I can’t see Troo, who I can usually spot easy because of her hair.
I would love to see Henry, too, but my boyfriend can’t come to the festivities because he could get stuck in the eye with a flag on a stick, which really happened once. Henry started bleeding and went white, and then a little blue around the mouth. The nurses at St. Joe’s gave him a special decorating badge before they sent him home with some extra blood. So he can’t come for the decorating and eating part of the party, but he can see the fireworks from the safety of the drugstore stoop. I’ll stop by on our way home and we can talk about our favorites.
Thank goodness, there’s Ethel. She really sticks out because she is so big and brown. She’s not with the other grown-ups, who are lounging around the refreshment booths. She’s up on the hill, looking down at where the zoo used to be. I’m dreading seeing what she’s seeing, but I really need to talk to the smartest woman I know. I also might be able to see Troo from up there. I know her. My sister wouldn’t skip one of the biggest bashes of the year even if she is, as Ethel would say, “fit to be tied” over the annulment news.
Ethel’s not in her white nursing dress. She’s got on a skirt of some kind of print I’ve never seen before. It’s many shades of green and very jungly. On her top half, she’s wearing a pale pink blouse that sets off her skin below her broad-brimmed hat that’s got fruit hanging off it. She looks scrumptious. I bet her boyfriend, who is standing next to her, would love to take a bite outta her. His entire name is Raymond Buckland Johnson, but he lets Troo and me call him Ray Buck the same way Ethel does. He is almost too handsome to look at without blinders. His hair doesn’t have coiled bounce the way Ethel’s does. He wears it parted on the side, slicked with something that looks like it’s never gonna dry out called pomade, which is the colored version of Brylcreem. Ray Buck is the snappiest dresser. Crackling crisp, always. Today he’s got on a snowy white shirt and matching pants and loafers that are a cool blue. Ray Buck goes over the moon for shoes. He doesn’t get them at Shuster’s, though. Negroes have their own shoe shops in the Core.
“Happy Fourth!” I shout to them when I’m a few feet away. Ethel spins around at the sound of my voice and says, “Well, look who we got here, Ray Buck.” She plants her hands on my shoulders and doesn’t seem surprised to run into me even though she is pretending she is. “Don’t you look like a breath a mountain air this mornin’, Miss Sally?”
She expects me to answer, “How kind of you to say so,” which I do, even though I probably look more like a breath of midnight in the swamp in my seen-better-days cutoff shorts and wrinkly yellow T-shirt. In all the excitement, Mother didn’t remember to braid my hair so it’s loose and snarled up. Ethel is just being polite, as always. When she opens up her school with her secret inheritance that she’s gonna get from Mrs. Galecki’s Last Will and Testament, by the time she’s through with them, the children who are lucky enough to attend will be able to beat out Miss Emily Post when it comes to manners.
“How do, Miss Sally,” Ray Buck says with a little bow and I go swoozy. If Ethel didn’t adore him and I hadn’t already promised to marry Henry Fitzpatrick, I would ask this bus driver to wait for me even though that is dreaming a dream that can never come true. Negroes cannot marry white people, but if they could, I would be the first in line. Ray Buck is from the South the same way Ethel is, but not from Mississippi. She calls him her “Georgia Peach,” and I would have to agree with her. He just oozes with juice. If Troo can have a crush on Rhett Butler and Father Mickey, I can have one on Ray Buck. Not only is he good-looking, he tickles my funny bone. When he stands sideways, because he is a little hunched over on top, he looks like a question mark, which makes him look curious all the time and that cracks me up.
I got a new vocabulary word I have been waiting to use on them. “You look ravishing this morning, Ethel. Simply ravishing. You, too, Ray Buck.”
Ethel’s lemony grin doesn’t cheer me up like it normally does because even though I told them not to, my eyes have moved down to where the zoo used to be. The bulldozers and the men that run them have this special day off, too. The only things I still recognize in the mess of broken-up white concrete and black iron bars is the moat around Monkey Island and our favorite climbing tree that hasn’t gotten knocked down yet. Daddy’s and my bench should be sitting below the tree, but it’s not. I should’ve rescued it. Now it’s gone forever, too.
I ask Ethel, “Remember how last Fourth of July everybody went over to visit Sampson?” He was the best part of the zoo, not only for me and Daddy. Everybody thought he was the cat’s meow.
Ethel takes a frilly hankie from between her bosoms, dabs at her broad face and says to Ray Buck, “I swear this humidity’s thick enough to slice and serve. Would ya mind fetchin’ us something cool to drink, sugar?” She waits until her beau heads down the hill toward the booths and then she says to me, “I hiked up here thinkin’ you might show up thinkin’ about that gorilla.”
“Oh, Ethel.” Could there be a better best friend than you? For a woman with bunions, it is no easy feat getting up this steep hill.
“Just ’cause they moved him, it’s not the end of the line,” Ethel says. “You can always go visit him at the new place.”
“That’s what everybody keeps tellin’ me, but… I don’t think it’ll be the same. Do you?”
“Hardly nuthin’ is, honey.”
“He’s gonna forget about me,” I say.
“Oh, ya couldn’t be more wrong ’bout that.” She’s fanning herself with one of the newspapers that she almost always has in her hand. She thinks it’s important to know the goings-on not just in the neighborhood, but in the whole world. “I read in the Reader’s Digest just last month how gorillas got longer memories than elephants.”