“Jamal,” she said. “That’s enough, son.”
“We weren’t doing anything,” he said. “Just talking.”
“Is that what you cal it?” said Mrs. Reverend.
As I waited on the curb for my mother to pick me up, Mrs. Reverend told everybody how worried she was about me. The women on the usher board and some of the deaconesses were told to pray for me. Even while Mrs. Reverend’s words were tel ing them to pray, her tone was tel ing them to remember Salome. Even before my mother confirmed this to me in a whispered-but-urgent conversation in her bedroom, under the watchful eyes of the wig-heads, I knew the women at church were aiming their sharpened prayers at me.
I was a quiet girl back then. Not that I was shy, I just didn’t have anything to say.
“I haven’t told your father,” my mother said.
“Told him what?”
“About Jamal Dixon.”
“There’s nothing to tel .”
“I know, baby,” she said.
I was stil defending myself a week later, as we drove to Decatur for my appointment with her ob-gyn. The last time he saw me, I was being born. I told him the same thing: “I’m not doing anything.”
“It’s just to regulate your cycle,” he said.
Heading home on 1-20, we hit a traffic jam, and I tried again. “I’m not doing anything.”
“Do you know how lucky you are that these pil s exist? Do you know how lucky you are that I am taking you to the doctor?”
“But I’m not doing anything,” I said again.
“Take them for me, baby,” Mama said. “Just to be on the safe side.”
JAMAL DIXON WAS the first one. We arranged to meet at Marcus McCready’s house one afternoon after school. While I stared at a Jayne Kennedy swimsuit poster on the ceiling, he apologized for his mother’s behavior. He didn’t mean to get me involved. He knew I was a nice girl and he felt bad that everybody was talking about me like that.
“I don’t care if people talk about me.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “She was never like this before.”
“I understand,” I said.
He looked at me and turned his head. “What grade are you in?”
“Ninth,” I said.
“I’m a junior,” he said.
I didn’t tel him to stop or to come hither. I was curious, real y, to see what would happen. Jamal looked like a younger, thinner version of his father, whom I’d often admired standing in the pulpit with his arms outstretched in his beautiful robes. He preached in a thunder-deep voice, but he sang sometimes in a sweet Al Green tenor.
“You’re a nice girl,” Jamal said in the tone you might use to soothe a dog that may or may not bite.
“Pretty?” I said.
He nodded. “You have nice lips.”
I was a little afraid, but I knew I was now on the safe side.
“Don’t touch my hair,” I said. “Don’t mess it up.”
He said he was sorry. He said it twice.
Then I was different, although I looked exactly the same.
THE PILL WAS A SECRET between my mother and me. My father was not to know about the peach dial pack, the white pil s tasteless but potent and those seven green sugar pil s that al owed the blood to come. This was women’s business. Besides, my father loved me best when I was his baby girl, his Buttercup. Fathers are that way. Al they want is that you be clean, entertaining, and adoring. When he came home from work, I fetched Daddy a gin-and-tonic, kissed the top of his head, and petted his tired shoulders.
ALTHOUGH FATHERS ARE SIMPLE , husbands are not. Marriages are tricky, but children bring love into even the most complicated situation. They are gifts from God. I was my mother’s miracle child, a replacement for the baby boy who died. It was a close cal , my entry into the world, four weeks early. They almost lost me, too. I spent more than a week in an incubator. My mother couldn’t commit to loving me until it was clear I was going to live, but my daddy was al in from the start, bal ing his hands into fists, muttering, “Come on, champ. Come on.”
If we were real Africans, my daddy would have held me up to the sky like Kunta Kinte’s daddy did. Instead, he took me to Olan Mil s and bought portraits, even paying extra to have the images printed on stretched canvas, etched with brushstrokes. He made a large donation to the church and gave up smoking. Of course, the habit got the better of him after a week and some change, but he never smoked in my nursery. The wal s of our house have to be repainted every year to cover the yel ow smoke-tinge on the wal s, but my bedroom remained the same hopeful pink of my birth announcement for six years. My father loved me. My birth changed him. Everyone says so.
14
A SILVER GIRL
THE SUMMER BEFORE my last year in high school was a hard one for our family. Grandma Bunny dying nearly kil ed al three of my parents. I can’t say which one of them got hit the hardest, because al of them fel apart in their own ways. For Uncle Raleigh there was no comfort except in crying.
We would be eating dinner and he would put a spoonful of potatoes in his mouth and his lips would start shaking and he had to excuse himself from the table. His eyes streamed when he was driving, but luckily the passengers didn’t see anything but the back of his head. My daddy drank and basical y let himself go. The bitter scratch of his unshaven good-night kiss wil always, for me, be the sensation of grief. My mama didn’t change herself in any way that you could easily put your finger on. She stil opened the shop at seven thirty, taking care of the old ladies who got up at five, and she closed down at eight thirty, having taken care of the women who worked in offices. Everything was almost the same with her, but she went about her business in a way that put me in the mind of an old matchbook. You can scratch the head against the strip in the same way you always have, but you are not going to get any kind of spark.
I was as devastated as anyone, but I didn’t have much to take my mind off my grief. There was Jamal, but every time we were together, he made me kneel on the floor with him and beg Jesus to forgive us. After Grandma Bunny passed, I didn’t feel like asking Jesus for much of anything. I guess I should have practiced my flute — that was the whole point of going to the performing-arts magnet — but I wasn’t exactly a virtuoso and who can take comfort in doing something that you’re bad at? That left only the mal .
Greenbriar wasn’t the best place to shop. It wasn’t straight-up ghetto like West End, but it wasn’t swanky like Phipps Plaza, either. Stil it was close enough to my house that I could go there without planning to. Sometimes I would start at 10 a.m. when the mal opened and systematical y work my way through every shop, even the rent-to-own furniture place. I could spend an hour in Pearle Vision staring in the mirror through empty eyeglasses. I would do anything to keep from being alone with my thoughts of Grandma Bunny. Her leg had been amputated eighteen months before she died. The night before the surgery, she cal ed my mama col ect after midnight. I picked up the phone at the very beginning of the ring —
teenager’s instinct. I accepted the charges and yel ed for my mama. She picked up the extension with a voice dry from sleep.
“Hel o?”
“Laverne,” she said. “It’s Miss Bunny.”
“Miss Bunny,” Mama said, “what you doing up? Where’s James and Raleigh?”
“They in the back room, sleep.”
“Miss Bunny, what’s wrong? If you need something, wake them up. That’s why they down there.”
“Laverne,” said Miss Bunny. “Listen to me, child. I changed my mind. I don’t want this operation. Don’t let them take my leg. What man is ever going to have eyes for me if I don’t even have legs to stand on?”