He dried it slowly while I watched his hands squeeze down the length of my brown hair and near my breast. I did not pull away when his slender fingers returned to my cheek, grazing it. . and again. I closed my eyes. Felt the hairs on my cheek rise from his strokes and hold themselves there after his pass. My head rested on his hand.
I allowed him to step through my door and felt the hard and soft of him brush by me. In an instant, he woke the whole of my body.
I closed the solid door and waited there. He dropped his bag, pushed me against the wall. His lips were as sticky-sweet as they promised.
But I had to stop him, told him I could not. He said he understood, adjusted himself and picked up his bag. He said he knew what I needed, said, “I can be your first.”
I had been married since I was thirteen, I told him, ten years since my wedding night — he was too late to be first at anything. I put my hand on the doorknob, ready to pull it open when he took my other hand and kissed it like a gentleman’s good-bye.
When he raised his head from my hand, I was captured by the bliss of his baby blues.
In my hesitation, he pushed me against the door, his tongue pressing on mine, then he released me, asked if I still wanted him to go.
In one motion, I lifted his shirt over his head, let him tear my dress, pressed my body against his, and I crawled up him ’til my legs were tethered around his waist; my backside seated in his hands. His trousers fell away.
I let go of my grip around him, rested my feet gently on the ground, his hand cupped between my legs, my pantaloons the only barrier between us. He tore up their seams, from my knees to the crotch, slid his thumb along the ridge of the torn material at the top of my thighs, dragged what was left of it, over to the side, feeling me wet. I wanted him to touch me again.
His weight on my body was light, his kisses like bites. He ran two fingers between my legs and inside me, tapped my warm spot in short pulses. Felt myself engorge.
My hips found his, surrounded him inside me, his size stretching me to my potential. Suddenly, a pure pleasure paralyzed me and I clinched down around him, my eyes wide, my body releasing everything in this world that’s lovely.
I let it happen once more. And again. The third time, we finished together, rocking in each other’s laps.
I fold the diary closed and say to Cynthia, “I’m sorry.”
“Did you get to July, yet?” she say. “I was six years old.”
“I’ve read enough.”
“Just read July.”
“No. . that’s all right.”
“July,” she say, nudging the book.
I open it again, slump down in my seat, flip through the pages.
8 July 1825
Dear Diary,
More and more my good husband has remarked that our child doesn’t favor him — But of course not, she looks like me, I tell him. At seven years old, her features are still developing.
I don’t think he believes me.
He spent most of last month with varying versions of the same accusation. “We all look alike in my family,” he said. “Men in my family can only have boys.” So I asked him who he thought his sister belonged to? He slapped me — deservingly — I told him I meant that anything was possible and maybe being out here, detached from our community, has put us both on edge.
I think my good husband prefers to keep me isolated. Only in the fall does he allow me to go into the heart of Charles Towne, the nearest temple, for the Days of Awe and occasionally to teach children in return for good favors from the congregation. He is committed that way — he is. But otherwise, he manages his hidden affairs out of their sights, except in those days when he allows everyone to see I am fine.
Today, he told me our child has an “independent spirit” like no woman in his family. I told him, maybe she has mine. But that only confused him because he does not know me. Not even after nineteen years. He thinks he does, but he does not.
Then yesterday, he asked me the question that prompted this entry. “Why in thirteen years of trying had you never been pregnant before? Or since?”
I told him I’d prayed and he should not question a gift that God has seen fit to give.
He stopped asking questions.
I close the book again, this time for good, and hand it back to Cynthia, say, “It must’ve been hard for you not knowing your daddy. White folks tend to know.”
“You’re missing the point,” Cynthia say, opening the diary to the back pages and pulling out a loose piece of folded paper. She unfolds it and hands it to me but I won’t take it. I tell her, “I won’t read no more.”
She draws it back in and starts reading out loud. “‘Seventeenth of September, Eighteen Hundred and Thirty.’ I was eleven.”
Dear Diary,
I am writing to you on this piece of torn-out paper because the good husband found you. He was sitting in the outhouse, taking too long, when I found it missing. He had been reading page after page of my life, taking the shortcuts to secrets he has not bothered to learn from me. Thank God he started from the beginning, our fifth anniversary. When I ripped it away from him he only knew enough to ask, “Who’s this rag salesman? And what happened when he came to our door worth writing about?”
I ran away with my book and buried it under the house. But by then, it may have been too late. Things began to come together in his mind — the date, the birth of my beautiful baby girl.
Our anger was equal at first — mine and the good husband’s. His, for what he was almost sure I did years ago, and my anger because he stole something so personal to me. The only difference between us was his hate was unimaginable. So when he said to me two weeks ago, “This girl is not mine, is she?” I should have corrected him immediately, kept up my lie, been forthright about it. But I did not. I took pause.
In the second and a half that it took me to tell him he was mistaken, it was too late. He struck me. And though I lied again, it was my pause that he believed.
I was blind when the beating ended. And in the midst of it, I did not expect to survive. He nursed me to health over the course of a week. But I still do not expect to survive.
I’m leaving him tonight.
Cynthia flips the page over, keeps reading. “‘First of November. My Dearest Leah. I have tried and failed. If we never make it away from your father, I want you to know the truth. You are my daughter whom I will love until the end of time. You must know that you came from a moment of beauty, my first and only moment of such. I do not regret you but I regret what you have suffered because of me.
“‘Dearest Leah. I hate myself for what my selfishness has caused. And now, for not being strong enough to protect you, brave enough to leave.’”
Cynthia folds the note, slips it back inside the diary. “Leah,” Cynthia say. “I hadn’t heard my name since I was a girl.” She relaxes back on the bench, holds the diary on her lap.
“Point is,” she say. “It’s not who my daddy was. It’s who he wasn’t.”
“I’m sorry,” I say again.