NEET HAD SLIPPED in and made it upstairs un-detected by her mother the same way she’d slipped out earlier, through the back staircase that stopped at her bedroom door. She freed herself from the tight, worldly clothes and dressed for bed and stole under the covers still tingling after her time with Little Freddie. She was lucky tonight. Her mother, Alberta, hadn’t been waiting for her the way she sometimes did. When Neet had crept out, her mother was in the middle of her prayers. Neet knew that Alberta prayed as if she was in a trance, sometimes for an hour at a time. So her initial plan had been to sample the air on the block tonight, the breezy, sugary feel of the block party with Shay at her side, and then creep back in while her mother was still on her knees. But she’d overstayed outside tonight, so she hoped that her mother had fallen into unconsciousness the way she sometimes did after she prayed, or else that she was sitting out on the back steps staring into the night air as if it could do what her prayers could not, make her happy. Neet was content that her mother was either asleep or out back tonight and she considered herself lucky that she’d been able to sneak back in even though Mr. Joe’s loud talking on the porch had almost ruined it for her.
She was lying in bed in a half-dream state twirling a LifeSaver around her tongue as she thought about Little Freddie. He sang bass with the Corner Boys, and though Little Freddie probably wasn’t headed to a four-year college like Neet was, she’d allowed him to cover her with his tall dark self. Had been allowing him to move all over her, all inside of her, since the spring. Though she and Shay had shared everything since they were babies together on the porch, she hadn’t yet brought herself to reveal to Shay what she’d been doing with Little Freddie. It was too tangled up to talk about yet, too complicated and dark.
She tried not to think of the look of confused devastation that had come upon Shay’s face when Little Freddie had kissed Neet and then pulled her toward the bedroom that Peedy, who lived in the corner house, rented out when his parents weren’t home. She loved Shay so much but she hadn’t expected to see Little Freddie at that moment; hadn’t expected to have to choose between being with Little Freddie and appalling Shay with the sight of them going into a bedroom. But she couldn’t see Little Freddie and resist him, especially not after what he’d done with her name.
Neet had given up the name Bonita when she was eight, after she’d allowed herself to be taken in by the concerned watery eyes of Mr. G. Mr. G was always hanging close to her mother at church and Alberta never dissuaded his company so Neet trusted him. Trusted his eyes when he’d soft-talked her away from church on a Friday night while the whole congregation was in the midst of a fire-filled revival and they were either frenetic or uncontrollable or in a stupor. He’d promised Neet a candy bar from the store around the corner. She’d ended up in his efficiency apartment instead, where he’d sat her on his lap, tickled her and bounced her on his lap, moved his filth against her until she started crying that he was hurting her. Though the more she cried the harder he moved, splitting her, the whole time calling her by her full name, Bonita, Bonita, a hundred times he must have said her name, perverted her name through the weak line of his mouth. After that, whenever anybody called her Bonita, she’d correct them as politely as she could, ask them to please call her Neet instead. She couldn’t stand the way she felt inside when she was called Bonita. She felt dirty and chaffed inside, ruined.
But Little Freddie had erased all of that when he’d called her by her full name. Instead of that chaffed, dirty feeling, she’d felt soft and wavy inside, felt innocent again. Believed now that though on the surface she appeared to be transgressing when she lay with Little Freddie, she was actually being cleansed. Believed that time spent with Little Freddie in that dilapidated room where the wallpaper flaked and the mattress was spring exposed had been ordained by God. Felt forgiven now for allowing herself to be soft-talked away from church those nights by Mr. G. Felt so unbound because Little Freddie had given her back her name.
So right now she was laughing in bed, a giddiness about her as the LifeSaver dissolved on her tongue and she thought about the feel of Little Freddie’s fingers against her skin, such a righteous feel. She’d been giddy a lot lately, laughing out loud at nothing in particular. Though she’d been depressed of late too, high and low she’d been the past few weeks. She couldn’t explain it, but right now she was grooving on the high, laughing in her bed as if she was being tickled under her chin.
But then she looked up and there was her mother’s face. The face just hung there over the bed and at first appeared as if it wasn’t even attached to the rest of her mother’s body. A Kewpie-doll face her mother had that would have fit on the top of one of those grass-skirted dolls they sell on the boardwalk at Atlantic City, Neet always thought. With those soft brown eyes, almost shy eyes, and her cottony hair that was out now and not pulled back so severely under that hairnet. Her long flannel nightgown was open down a few buttons at the top and her skin glistened in the dark room. Her mother had sensitive skin that Neet would rub down when Alberta came home during the summer months especially sun exposed after a day selling fruit from the roadside stand the church had set up. Alberta would cry when Neet gently spread cream to the areas that were most sore. She would cry and say that all she had in this world was Neet and Jesus, that’s all, just Neet and Jesus. Neet would love her mother all over again. Though she never really didn’t love her, but often the love was so mingled with despicableness and Neet would get confused and she didn’t know what she felt. Like now, as her mother’s face appeared over her bed and she snatched the pillow from under her head.
“Get up,” Alberta said in that voice that sounded as if she had an infected throat. “Get up, you hell-bound liar, you. Got the nerve to pretend that you’ve been in here all along. Get up.”
Neet scurried to jump out of the bed and Alberta raised her hand and Neet grabbed her hand in midair. She didn’t know what made her do it. She’d never raised a hand to block a face slapping before. Maybe the fact that she’d become a woman made her do it, but the fact that she’d grabbed her mother’s hand at all like that frightened her. What next, would she raise her hand to hit her own mother, would that be next since she’d already crossed the line? Would she slap that Kewpie-doll face until welts came up, choke her mother’s slender neck until all the veins burst behind her soft brown eyes? In that instant as Neet looked at her mother’s face, a mixture of rage and hurt that Neet would dare raise a hand toward her even if it was to keep from being hit, Neet knew that she was capable of picking up the porcelain lamp with the heavy brass base that sat on her nightstand, knew that it was within her constitution to use that lamp and smash her own mother’s Kewpie-doll face. Just the knowledge that she was capable of such an act of defilement against her own mother crumbled her. “Oh, Mommy, I’m sorry,” she said with a gasp. “As the Lord is my witness, I’m so sorry, Mommy. Please forgive me, Mommy.” She dropped her hand and hung her head and collapsed even though she was still standing. In that pivotal moment, when she glimpsed the ugliness that made up the lining of her heart, she did the only thing she could think to do. She got saved.
Alberta watched, petrified at first as Neet raised her arms and her head slowly, with such symmetry, such grace; she looked like a lovely swan taking off in flight. But then her face went contorted and she started shouting Jesus, Jesus, in that drawn-out rhythmic way of the Saints. Alberta realized what was happening to her child as Neet started jumping up and down and running through the small bedroom. She knocked over that porcelain lamp as she ran, and books and the chair at her desk, even tilted the heavy wooden desk. She pounded the walls and she shouted unintelligible phrases as she moved convulsively through the room.
Now Alberta wanted to cry herself because finally, after all her prayers, her counseling sessions with the Reverend Mister and the other Saints, the older, wiser ones who Alberta would confess to that she feared her child was incorrigible, and they’d reiterate in that singsong way that had Alberta hanging on their every word that she must not spare the rod, that she must train up that child, that she herself must be even more diligent in her service to the church, keep herself set apart from the ways of the worldly, that the Lord would stop by to visit her child one day, one day, one day.
So Alberta just got out of Neet’s way. She moved what she could so that Neet wouldn’t hurt herself, and then she just got out of her way. She sobbed quietly as she stood in a dark corner of Neet’s room and Neet stretched out on the bed and let go with a series of uninterrupted shrill cries. Alberta just stood there and sobbed; it was a happy cry as she let the Spirit of the Lord finally come down over her child.
IT SEEMED TO Joe as if they’d been standing on Alberta’s porch for a while now, ringing the bell after polite intervals. Though Louise had tried to talk Shay out of coming over here and getting involved in what should remain between a mother and her child, Shay had refused to relent. And Joe wasn’t about to allow Shay to come here by herself, so he’d ignored how Louise darkened her eyes when he told Shay to wait, let him throw on some clothes, he would come too.
“I don’t know, Daddy’s Girl,” he said to Shay. “Sounds like it’s quieted down in there. Maybe your mother’s right and we got no business doing this, maybe we should go on home.”
Shay was about to agree. But right then a sudden burst of a bright light showered down on them from over the top of the door, and they both squinted.
“I didn’t even know they had a working light on this porch,” Joe whispered. “I don’t think I’ve seen this light come on in years.”
He stopped talking then and stood as if being called to attention as the door edged open just a crack, just enough for them to make out the outline of Alberta’s face, half hidden behind her hair. Joe thought that she looked like a ghost, or a witch, he couldn’t decide, just knew that what he could see of her face was so translucent, like if something touched her face right then it would go on through. He got a chill as she stared at one, then the other of them through the crack in the door, such disdain for them, no, such disdain for him. He was so unused to being looked at in that way. He was used to bringing out a smile in people, a wink, a blush, an expanded face, widened eyes. He couldn’t figure it. He was one of the few people on the block who went out of his way to be nice to Alberta. Yet sometimes when Alberta looked at him it would feel as if she’d snagged something inside him, grabbed hold and twisted and made him feel so diminished. He was having a visceral reaction to the way she looked at him now and almost wanted to ask her why. Instead he said, “Evening, Alberta, sorry to ring your bell like this in the middle of the night—”
“What do you want?” She cut him off in that voice that was so dry and cracked.
“Is Neet all right?” Shay spoke up, struggling to keep her voice clear and unwavering. “I could hear screaming through my walls, we all could. Is she all right? Because we can take her to the hospital—” And then she stopped because she thought she was get-ting ready to cry and she didn’t want to give Alberta the satisfaction of seeing her cry.
“Neet’s fine. All you heard was the power of the Lord, though I’m not surprised that you wouldn’t recognize it as such. Not surprised that it would scare you either. Should scare you.” She closed her door then, right in their faces.
Joe and Shay just stood there. Neither moved at first. They just stood there and looked up at the door as if it was still edged open and they were looking at Alberta’s translucent face. Shay pounded the door with her fist then. “You old mean old thing,” she shouted at the door. Then she did start to cry.
“Come on, Shay. Come on, Daddy’s Girl,” Joe said as he reached for Shay’s hand. “Let’s go back home. Come on. Happens again and we’ll do like your mother said. We’ll just call the cops, that’s all.”
LOUISE WAS WAITING by the door when they walked back inside. She’d felt a mix of guilt and anger that on the one hand she had not led their charge as they walked across the porch and climbed over the banister and rang that bell, and on the other that they had totally disregarded her anyhow. But now she just felt relief as they walked through the door. “Awl, Shay,” she said as she took Shay’s face in her hands.
“She wouldn’t even let us in, just slammed the door on us,” Shay blurted out. Louise kissed her cheek and Shay started for the stairs saying that she was tired, exhausted, that it better be quiet over there because she just wanted to go to sleep.
Louise and Joe stood in the living room and neither said anything. Louise was so struck by how Joe looked standing there, his face so disassembled, like she’d rarely see it. As if his face had been a perfectly completed jigsaw puzzle but now the pieces were beginning to shift. So needy he looked. She was rushed then with the realization that he was needy, and she’d been so unresponsive lately. Didn’t know why his presence made her go tight inside, worried some days that she was beginning to hate him the way she’d heard couples sometimes did when they were together for years. But she knew she wasn’t even close to hating him. Just the opposite. Feelings for him ran so deep she was afraid that one day he’d no longer reciprocate, that one day he’d turn his back and walk away from the mostly beautiful life they’d built. Felt sometimes as if that day was already here the way she’d catch a crease on his brow when he looked at her sometimes. She felt old and ugly then. The condition of her mouth didn’t help. But right now he looked so vulnerable, as if something inside him was making him want to cry. She opened her arms then. “Come ’ere, Joe,” she said. “You were right to go over there with Shay. You were. Come ’ere.”
Joe needed Louise’s closeness more than anything right then. He felt as if he had been stripped of some vital piece that kept his workings intact, that kept him the good-natured, charming Joe. Felt it with the horn, felt it again under Alberta’s diminishing gaze. He squeezed Louise so tightly because he needed her to restore him right then, needed her to help him get his balance back, put his firm foundation securely under his feet again. He buried his head in Louise’s chest and she started moving against him, all the while telling him how right he was, and good. “You so damned good, Joe,” she said over and over in his ear as they moved upstairs to their bedroom and he kissed her wherever his lips fell, and held on.