Leaving the bathroom, she tiptoed into a bedroom that smel ed of talcum powder. She figured that room for Grandma Bunny’s. A large white Bible with gold-edged pages sat on a smal night table. In a framed photograph, a man leaned up against an old car. Mama didn’t linger over it, as her mother had a similar photo in her own bedroom; that one was a photo of Mama’s father, and Mama assumed that this was James Senior. She envied his pose, leaning against the fender, head cocked, slanted smile. To Mama, this was the stance of a somebody who was never coming back.
Lastly, she entered the room that was to be James’s and her own. The bed was so large that it embarrassed her. The bedspread was too narrow, not covering the sides of the mattresses. This was where she was to sleep at night, in her nightgown, just that thin covering of cotton. Here she would sleep next to James Witherspoon, a boy she hardly knew who was now her husband. What a word, husband. It didn’t sound like it should have anything to do with her. Inspecting the bed more closely, she saw that this one large bed, the marriage bed, was actual y a pair of singles pressed together. Looking around she figured out that this was the room that the boys shared. She had been so distracted by the bed, its sheer size, and insinuation, that she didn’t see the clues that this was not a space a girl was meant to enter. It smel ed faintly of boy: sweat, fried chicken, and freshcut grass. Mama went to the dint in the center of the bed and pushed until there was a gap between the mattresses. There was only one blanket, and she smoothed it over the bed that she decided would be Daddy’s.
The boys. This is how she thought of them. She stil cal s them that, to this day. In the years that came after, she could think of Daddy as a man, and Uncle Raleigh as wel , but she would always see the two of them as the boys they were when they returned from the long walk home after returning the car.
Daddy and Uncle Raleigh — “Salt and Pepper,” some people cal ed them, because of their coloring — were both hot and filthy. The crisp shirts they had worn to see the judge were damp now and musty. They fidgeted on their own front porch and rang the bel .
Mama opened the door for them. “Come on in,” she said, like this was her house and not theirs, as though she were the lady of this house, as though she were a lady at al . “Y’al want some water?”
Daddy said, “Yeah.” And Uncle Raleigh said, “Yes’m.” This was funny somehow, and the three of them laughed.
“Y’al hungry?”
“Yeah,” Daddy said. “Can you cook?”
Mama shrugged. “Depends on what you want to eat.”
“I’m not hungry,” Uncle Raleigh said.
“Y’al had something to eat over the white people’s place?” Daddy said, “No, we didn’t eat n-n-nothing over there. M-m-mama sent us back here and said we needed to eat at home. She said we needed to get into a routine, with us coming home at a certain time, and you learning how to get the food ready and everything.”
“Oh,” Mama said.
Daddy went on, “And she said that I am supposed to show you where she keeps the starch and everything for the washing.”
“I know how to do laundry already,” Mama said.
“You don’t have to wash none of my clothes,” Uncle Raleigh said. “Miss Bunny says she’l keep doing my things same as always. You just have to take care of James because you’re his wife now.” Uncle Raleigh said this last part in a quiet voice that sounded almost ashamed.
Mama looked up at Daddy, who shrugged. “It’s going to be okay. Once everybody gets used to everything. There’s chicken in the icebox. Mama cut it up already. You just have to fry it. It’l be easy. And she said to tel you that you are welcome here.”
“Y’al two are going to keep going to school?”
They looked at each other, confused-seeming. “Yeah.”
“I can’t go no more,” Mama said quietly.
“Because you’re married?” Uncle Raleigh said.
“No,” James said. “Because she’s p-p-p . . .”
The word seemed to stick in his mouth. Mama had braced herself for it, but it was taking too long to be born.
“Pregnant,” she said, finishing his sentence before spinning herself around and walking toward the kitchen.
This house seemed unsteady to her; the little blue cups in the china cabinet tinkled with her steps. She felt the eyes of the boys on her back as she made her way. It reminded her of the last time she had been here, when she came with her cousin Diane, who was not pregnant, who didn’t even like Uncle Raleigh anymore. The house seemed different now, brighter. The days had been much shorter then; by 6 p.m. it was dark out and she could hardly see Daddy’s face. He didn’t stammer at al when asking her if she had ever kissed a boy. She said yes, although she hadn’t. He asked her if she had done “anything else,” and she nodded. And now she wondered why she had bobbed her head in that lie. He had seemed older then than he did now, three months later. Then he hadn’t been parroting what al his mother had told him to do, what she had planned for him to eat.
On that earlier day, it had seemed like he and Uncle Raleigh were the men of this house, that they lived here by themselves.
Mama recal ed the black hairs sprouting from Uncle Raleigh’s Adam’s apple as he had stirred liquor into the concoction in Grandma Bunny’s punch bowl. The little glass cups hooked around the sides of the crystal bowl tapped against each other with a noise like holiday bel s. It was a dignified object, this punch bowl, the sort of thing that Miss Sparks liked to talk about when she was teaching table manners. According to Miss Sparks, this was how you could tel the difference between crystal and regular glass. Mama had insisted on drinking her punch in the proper dainty-handled cup, laughed, and asked for more. The punch was somehow sweet and hot at the same time.
As he refil ed her cup, she decided that she would have liked Raleigh, had her cousin not already claimed him for herself. She liked the way he always asked everybody how they were doing.
“How are you feeling?” he said to Laverne for no reason at al .
By this time, Daddy was sitting close to her and fondling her hair. She enjoyed the feel of his breath on her neck and even the sweet liquory smel .
He placed a tingly kiss on the very spot under her hair that he’d been warming with his breath. “Is that fine?” he asked her.
She nodded, feeling wonderful and wanting more punch. She held out her cup, but Daddy took it away from her and put it on a cherry wood end table. “Don’t drink too much,” he said.
“You don’t want to get sick.”
“Okay,” she said, obedient as a child.
“Do you want to see my room?” Daddy asked her.
“Okay,” she said again as he took her hand and pul ed her to her feet.
Her cousin Diane, leaning against Uncle Raleigh’s shoulder, said, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
The idea of this made Mama’s head whirl. Diane was three years older and the possibilities seemed endless. She laughed again.
“James,” Diane said, “take it easy with her. She’s just fourteen and she’s not used to drinking.”
“Fifteen,” Mama said, remembering the lie she’d told earlier in the afternoon. “Fifteen, remember?”
Uncle Raleigh said, “James knows how to act. Don’t worry.”
Diane put her hands on Uncle Raleigh’s head. “You know you got some good hair,” she said.
Mama pul ed on Daddy’s arm and he led her to the bedroom. “Let’s give the lovebirds some privacy.”
It was a setup, a plan between the boys. They hadn’t meant to change her life forever, to make a baby and provoke a premature marriage. It was just about the boys hoping to “get a little trim.” These were Daddy’s words to her, later that night after they’d eaten the dinner she’d ruined, chicken burnt at the skin, bloody at the bone. Daddy told her this that night, as they lay in the single beds, each on the other side of the gap. Mama slept in the clothes she’d gotten married in, her school blouse and skirt. She removed her shoes, but not her socks, and climbed into the bed. Daddy, she assumed was in his shorts and shirtless, but she didn’t know for sure because she had turned her face away when he emerged from the bathroom.