He listens to her. If nothing else, this. “You want it to be over. But how should it end? How should the world best be? I mean, one thousand years from now? Ten thousand? What is the right place? The place we must try to reach?”
She’s never really had to say, not to herself, let alone anyone other. Every perfect place she starts to name already has a piece of evil slithering through it. She wants to stop talking, to roll over and sleep. She has no answer. But he asks her. This is the conversation, the terms of the contract they must improvise.
“The right place…the place I want… Nobody owns anybody. Nobody has claim on anything. Nobody’s anybody. Nobody’s anything but their own.”
She squeezes shut her eyes. The only place that calms her a little. The only place she can live. The only sane landing place. If it’s the right place for a thousand years from now, why not for her boys? For patience means submission, and waiting is never.
“This is where we go live, then. We call your father tomorrow.”
“He won’t…get it.”
“We call. We talk to him.”
What ignorance. Her father’s right: right about all things. She’s the one trying to get away, trying to trick the truth. She has no right to call and talk to him. All she has a right to is lasting reprimand.
“Remember what we saw,” David says. “Remember what’s coming.”
She can’t decide now whether what they saw even belonged to this world. No: It’s too soon for this life, too far out ahead of anything their children can reach. Something in this place needs race. Some ground-floor tribalism, something in a soul that won’t be safe or sound in anything smaller or larger. The day violence gets them, the day her boys meet those centuries of murder, on that day, they will hate her for not giving them the caste this caste-crazed country finally demands. But until that day, she’ll give them — however illusory or doomed — self. And let the image stand in for the thing.
She will not cut them off from their own. “We call tomorrow,” she says. But tomorrow comes and goes without a call. Shame blocks them, guilty memories. She can’t bear those words again, those accusations cutting her to the quick. She has no answer but this deliberate theft, this criminal leap ahead, this shortcut across one thousand years.
The baby’s coming. “The baby’s coming”: This is her Joseph’s universal cure, his answer to all things. The child has taken ownership of the mystery, this new life from nowhere. He wants Delia to eat more, to make the baby come faster. He wants to know what day the baby will arrive, and when this day will become that one.
Three weeks go by, with no contact from Philadelphia. Then a month. The same fire-forged pride that allowed her father to survive this country now turns to the task of surviving her. She can’t bear it, not with the new baby on the way. Something horrible is happening, fueled by love, something she can’t put right in herself, in her father, a fear as wild as the fear of losing oneself, going under.
She crumples and gives in. She writes a letter to her mother. It’s the child’s first trick, playing on her weaker parent. The letter smacks of cowardice. She types it without a return address, so her daddy won’t throw it out unopened. She mails it from New Jersey, laundering the postmark. She lies from the very first sentence: says she doesn’t know what happened, doesn’t understand. She tells her mama she needs to talk, to work out a way to patch things up. “Anywhere. I’ll come to Philadelphia. It doesn’t have to be the house. Anyplace we can talk.”
She gets a note back. It’s little more than an address — Haggern’s, a sandwich shop on the edge of the old neighborhood, a short-order grill where her mother used to take her when they went shopping — along with a date and time. “You’re right. The house is not a good idea just now.”
The sentence destroys Delia. She’s a wreck until she steps on the train to Philly. She’s showing now, huge with her new one. She needs to get right with her folks before she delivers. Though she’s not due for weeks, this heaviness feels like she could give birth any second. She takes the boys with her on the train — too long to leave them with Mrs. Washington. Her mother will want to see them. They’ll make the meeting easier.
She’s sitting at Haggern’s a quarter hour before she needs to be. It surprises her when her mother walks in with the twins. They’ve just been shopping. It presses on Delia’s chest harder than she can understand. Her mother looks furtive, conspiratorial. But the thrill of seeing her grandsons smoothes out her crumpled face.
Lucille and Lorene: Can it have been that long? Just months, but there’s something new to them, suddenly adult, an earnest show of long skirts and pleated blouses, a new weight in their step. “How’d you girls get grown up so fast? Turn around. Turn round; let me look at you! Where’d you find those shapes overnight?”
Her sisters look at Delia as if she has declared against them. Daddy has said something. But they eye her swollen belly as well, their envy, fear, and hope all rolled into one. Nettie Ellen slings into the booth across from Delia and the boys. She reaches across, taking their pale heads into her searching hands. But even as she fondles them, she murmurs to her daughter, “What in heaven’s name you say to that man?”
“Mama, it’s not like that.”
“What’s it like, then?”
Delia feels weary and older than the earth. Silted, slow, and winding like a switchback river. But wronged, too. Betrayed by her bedrock trust. Hurt by ones who know her hurt. That horrific night: David and her father trading accusations: an Olympics of suffering. The moral leverage of pain. Two men who couldn’t hear their nearness. They’re the ones who ought to be sitting in this booth, across from each other. Not this old fallback alliance, mothers against men. Delia tries for her mother’s eye, just a little flicker to show that the alliance still holds. “He doesn’t like the way I’m rearing up my young.”
“He don’t like you scrubbing these leopards spotless.”
“Mama,” she pleads. Her eyes dart downward.
“Girls? Take your nephews over to that gum-ball game at Lowie’s.” She fishes in her pocketbook for two nickels for her grandsons to feed the mechanical gum-ball claw. The same prehistoric Saturday ritual she and Delia shared.
Delia scurries in her purse to beat her mother. “Here. Here, now. Take these.”
The twins don’t want anyone’s coins. “We’re not children,” Lucille says.
Lorene echoes her. “Come on, Mama. We know what’s happening.”
Nettie Ellen touches the teen conspiratorially. “Don’t I know that, child! It’s your nephews, need a little expert tending.”
The secret appeal overwhelms them. They sweep the boys up the way they used to during the war, when they’d push the infants around the block in strollers. They show their sister up, proving how fierce love ought to be. Then Delia and her mother are alone. Alone as on that day, up in her attic practice room, when Delia first spoke about the man she’d fallen for. How fine her mother had been, after the first shock. How solid and broad, this woman, whom time gives no reason to feel anything but eternal distrust. How good they’ve all been, her family. A blackness big enough to absorb all strains.
“I’m so tired, Mama.”
“Tired? What you tired of?” The warning audible: I was tired before you were born. I didn’t raise you to give in to tired.
“I’m tired of racial thinking, Mama.” The bird and the fish can fall in love. But there’s no possible nest but no nest.
A deep bronze waitress comes by to take their order. Nettie Ellen orders what she always orders at Haggern’s, since time began. Coffee, no cream, and a piece of blueberry pie. Delia orders a chocolate doughnut and a small milk. She doesn’t want it and can’t eat it. But she has to order it. Every time they’ve ever come here, she has. The waitress slides off, and Nettie Ellen’s eyes follow. “You tired of being colored. That’s what you’re tired of.”