THAT MONDAY LOUISE had her first tooth pulled. A doctor at work referred her to his brother-in-law, a dentist who saw Louise that afternoon. She shook almost convulsively going into the office, she was so nervous, but determined to go through with it anyhow. Shay had been right the other night when she’d yelled at her to get her teeth fixed. Denying herself denied everyone who loved her, she’d realized then. Shay had come down a few minutes after her outburst, her cheeks puffy with air, and apologized. She’d stood in the middle of the floor and just said, “Sorry, Mommy,” over and over and Louise had opened her arms for Shay and patted her back and hoped that whatever else Shay was crying about was dissolving in her tears. Certainly more than sorrow about her outburst since Shay’s outbursts were as common as the hydrant on the corner being turned on without a permit. She’d patted Shay’s back and didn’t pry otherwise about what had Shay crying so hard. She reminded herself that by the time she was Shay’s age, seventeen, she’d already gone seven years without a loving mother to pat her back when she cried.
She was bursting with pride now that she’d pushed herself finally through the trauma of walking into the dentist’s office. Did it on her strength though Nathina had offered her Valium. She had the tooth wrapped in gauze and she stood in the middle of the living room holding it up as if she was Wilma Rudolph bringing home the gold.
Joe was at the kitchen table reading his Evening Bulletin. Shay was in her room. She had found it difficult to tolerate her father’s presence since Saturday evening when she’d seen him on the el platform with Valadean. She was listening to Billie Holiday sing “Willow Weep for Me.” Accepted even as she listened that this was an old person’s song. She should be popping her fingers to Sly or at least James Brown right now. But she was anxious and the song calmed her down. Tomorrow was the day for Neet’s abortion. She’d talked Sondra into persuading her mother, BB, into moving up Neet’s procedure. She was afraid that Neet would change her mind if she had to wait until Saturday. Now she was afraid generally. Afraid that something might go wrong; afraid about the aftermath, how Neet would be emotionally if she really, really wanted a baby now, the emptiness she’d most likely feel. Just plain afraid right now, so the song that was too old for her calmed her down. She switched the record player off at the sound of Louise’s voice and went downstairs.
“Look at the size of that root,” Louise said, beaming as she held the tooth up to the afternoon sun pushing in through her window shears. She tried not to spit as she talked because the hole in her mouth was packed with cotton and her lips were swollen and in that uncomfortable place between numb and feeling.
“How many total you got to lose?” Joe asked, thinking that he could already see her face starting to sag, especially the way she was standing in the light, the light magnified things so.
“Well, he’s gonna pull a couple each time I go. But he just wanted to start with one today—”
“How many total?” Joe asked again, trying not to look at the blood-encrusted thing she held up as if it were her firstborn.
“Just sixteen,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Just sixteen!” Both Shay and Joe said it at the same time. Shay told her that the tooth was disgusting could she please put it away and Joe asked her if she was sure she wanted to go through with it.
“Sure? What do you mean, am I sure? Why wouldn’t I be sure?” She dabbed at the side of her mouth to catch the drainage. “What am I supposed to do, walk around with a bunch of rotten teeth in my head and watch you work a room grinning like a Cheshire cat with your perfect-ass smile?”
Joe blew out a sigh and said, “Look, I hope you not doing this for me, Louise. Hell, I’ve had teeth pulled before and that shit ain’t no joke.”
“Did it hurt, Mommy?” Shay asked, switching loyalties the way she usually did when they argued.
“No, not really,” Louise said, cupping her hand under her mouth. “The worst part was the needle.”
“Needle?”
“Yeah, a needle to freeze my gum, you know, to numb it.”
“Whew,” Joe said, blowing out another long breath of air. “No, that’s not the worst part, Shay. The worst part is when the effects of that needle wear off. Later on tonight her gums gonna be throbbing so bad where that hole is—”
“Shut up.” Louise cut him off, shouting in spite of the semi-numbness and the feeling in the side of her mouth that a dam was about to break. “If you can’t give me some encouragement, just shut the hell up.”
“I just think you need to be realistic about what you doing.”
“Well, it sounded fine to you the other night when I mentioned it, why didn’t you say all of this when I first told you this is what I was going to do?”
“But I didn’t know he had to pull sixteen teeth. Sixteen, damn. That’s half your mouth, Louise.” He shook his head back and forth. “Can’t they just fill ’em and, you know, cap ’em or whatever?”
“That is a lot a teeth, Mommy.”
“No, that’s a lot of years of neglecting myself. I didn’t grow up like you did, Shay, twice a year at the dentist without fail. My only sister had to scrape and scuffle after our mother died just to keep me in decent clothes, and to keep a roof over our heads, a dentist was a luxury when I grew up. Furthermore, they say having children is the worst thing for a woman’s teeth, leaches all the calcium right out of them.”
“Cut the martyrdom crap, Louise.” Now Joe was shouting too. “Don’t do that, don’t try to make Shay feel responsible for the condition of your mouth. That calcium-leaching business is bullshit anyhow. I know women who had ten kids and still got perfect teeth.”
“Well, of course you would.”
“And furthermore, you grew up better than anybody I know.”
“Look, all I’m saying is that I took a big step today to do this, and I was proud of myself because it’s something I’ve been afraid to do. And if you two can’t be at least a little sensitive, then just leave me the hell alone.”
“Mommy, um, there’s, like, blood dripping out of your mouth,” Shay said.
Louise ran into the kitchen and spit into the sink. She was crying in the sink because now her gum was starting to throb and she really didn’t know if she could go through all that it would take to have the teeth pulled, to adjust to dentures, to restore her smile to the way it used to be. She used to be able to take over a room with her smile. And now not just her smile had lost its appeal but everything about her presence that had once seemed so vibrant and energetic, so young. It was once common for the male patients to joke around with her: Louise, I promise I’ll take my medicine if I can have a date with you when I’m out of here, they might say. Or even just the reaction to her from all types of men, the way they’d suddenly pull in their stomachs, or otherwise correct their posture when she approached, or bestow a level of attention on her, rush to offer a pen, or seat, or cigarette. Or the slackened jaw when some of them took her presence in, the glint in the eye from others, the “mnh” disguised in a cleared throat, all of which made her feel so desirable. There it was, she hated to admit it, such a trite, and superficial, notion. This was the sixties after all and women were finding their voices en masse and coming to the recognition that their species was also one of substance, that womanhood had to do with so much more than bearing children and pleasing a man. And here she was crying and spitting into her kitchen sink because she was no longer experiencing those cues that told her that she was pleasing to a man. Her sister, Maggie, had warned her that this would happen. She’d begged Louise not to rush into marrying Joe. Told Louise that she was such an odd kind of beauty and she should take advantage of it while she was young, meet a man this month who’d take her to Coney Island, next month to Hollywood, someone to buy her a fur for Christmas, another to buy her a sapphire for Valentine’s Day. There would be time to fall in love, to settle down in the by-and-by, but her look did something to a man so she should use it to her advantage while she was young, while she could. Because guaranteed, the attention would stop one day, so she should create memories that she could curl up with, and if she was also surrounded with palpable things accumulated during those times, well, the more the better. Louise would laugh at her sister and say, Maggie, you’ll turn me into a whore. Maggie’s response was always, You show me a woman, I’ll show you a whore. Joe was nice enough, Maggie would try to persuade Louise, but he was so ordinary. “You deserve extraordinary.” But she hadn’t been able to talk Louise out of marrying Joe.
And that’s what Louise cried over now, Joe. Cried because he’d been so calm when he’d come home five hours late Saturday night. They’d barely spoken, barely touched since then. She spit blood into the kitchen sink, almost gagging.
Joe and Shay were at her back. Joe poured salt into a glass, said he was going to make her a nice warm saltwater mix to rinse her mouth with. Shay said that she would fix dinner, that Louise should just rest, just put her feet up and she’d make soup. “Would you like soup, Mommy?” Shay asked, trying not to cry herself though she believed that was the hardest thing for a child to do, watch her own mother cry.
Louise tried to shoo them away. “Don’t be silly, Shay,” she said. “I’ll cook. I’m fine, really, go on now, if y’all gonna hover over me like I’m an invalid and I just had one little tooth pulled, what you gonna do this time next week when I’m down four? Y’all better save your tending-to skills for when I’ll need them most,” she said. Composed now. Embarrassed by her outburst the way she’d always been embarrassed by her own displays of emotion. Had even tried not to cry at her mother’s funeral. Held her tears in for so long that she peed herself. Then she cried over ruining the beautiful white dress trimmed in black velvet that Maggie had paid a fortune for. Allowed herself to cry over the dress because she could compose herself after that, whereas tears over her mother gone would be unstoppable. Now she told herself that it was the tooth she cried over, not Joe. The rotten, disgusting tooth that should have been pulled from her head years ago. As long as she was crying over the tooth, her tears would be quick and easy to dry. “Go ahead, really, I’m fine. Shay, you might want to check the cat’s bowl, he’s been eating double his usual the past few days. Go ahead. I’m fine. Just fine.”
Shay was about to insist that she’d stay in and cook dinner tonight, but Joe waved her away, told her with his face that he would handle it from here, she could go on out if she wanted to.
DEUCIE HAD BEEN down in Joe and Louise’s basement for three days now. She hadn’t been able to leave because of the headaches that were coming harder and with greater frequency than ever. She didn’t know if it was the condition of her liver that was igniting her head to ache, compensating maybe, since other than some swollen tenderness in her upper abdomen she wasn’t in much pain from the actual cirrhosis. Still peeing regularly, which meant that her kidneys hadn’t started to fail. Though she’d heard that kidney failure was a soft death, since the chemicals backed up to the brain and produced a nice high. Still, she wondered if she was exaggerating the intensity of the headaches, giving her an excuse to stay in this cellar, because the truth of it was she liked it down here. The house above this understory was brimming with life; with music and anger and joys past and to come, jokes and sorrows and disputes and love. Even the sounds of the block when she lay under the steps at the front of the cellar were soothing. Just like her headaches began in her nose, heightening her sense of smell, they left through her ears, enhancing her sensitivity to sound. So she’d come to under the cellar steps hearing the whoosh of the roller skates outside, the little girls chanting in hand-slapping games, the evening song of the ice-cream truck; those other songs, the voices of young men that held over the block and reminded her of going to church with her daddy before he lost his leg. The day-to-day life she heard up there both inside the house and out on the street seemed the perfect balance of treble and bass to fall over her head as she died. So she decided to make up her dying bed right here in Joe and Louise’s cellar. She’d made a mattress out of some of the sweaters that Joe had left in disarray half hanging from the chifforobe. Though she enjoyed the bare floor against her naked skin, she thought she should have a little softness under her when she died. Everybody deserved that, she thought.
She was ready to die. Each time a headache would take her down into the sweet numbness of unconsciousness she was sure she wouldn’t wake, was sure that she’d be received in her new form light as air and every bit as free. So she was somewhat disappointed that again today she’d come to still alive. She was disappointed and hungry. Didn’t understand the sudden revival in her appetite since she’d been in this cellar, hadn’t eaten this much in the entire month that she’d been with Luther. She took the hunger as a bad sign, hunger was the body trying to go on living. Told herself that she needed to start refusing food if she really wanted to hurry death. But they kept filling that cat’s bowl out in the yard. Made her salivate when she’d venture to the back of the cellar and look up and out of the window and there was the bowl filled to capacity with nuggets of fish or liver or chicken, the juices gleaming. Like now.
She stood on the wooden pony’s back and hoisted her small self up to the window ledge. She crowded herself onto the ledge and sat there and caught her breath. She eased the window open and stretched her hand out but pulled it back quickly when she saw motion. It was the cat coming out of his small wooden cat house. He sniffed at the bowl and then turned his back on it. Squeezed under the Cyclone fence and out into the alley. He did this every time. Then started crying when he came back hours later to an empty bowl. She’d hear him on the porch meowing, then in a few minutes a light would go on in the yard. She’d crept back to the window last night and watched him eat, then watched him go into his little house, no doubt to his litter box, then he’d squeezed under the Cyclone fence but this time didn’t go out into the alley. He went into the dirt yard next door. Snuggled up against some woman’s high-yellow legs as she sat on the steps. That’s all Deucie could see of next door, the ground and the bottom rungs of the steps. The cat purred as the woman reached down and played with his gray-and-white fur. Typical man, she thought. Comes home to eat and shit and then creeps next door. She didn’t really learn to love men until she understood their need to think they were free. Had her heart broken by Jeffery because she hadn’t understood that. But once she understood that, my, my, my, how she could love a man after that. Nothing better in her mind than loving what you didn’t also have to own. Possession was a burden and a curse and turned a person into a slave obsessed and working their ass off trying to keep what they never could own. Once she’d come to that realization it was so easy to let a man go. Especially after she’d let go of her baby girl. Could let go of anything after that.
Deucie had gone into labor on a Saturday night, Pat’s busiest night. By then she’d taken up residence at Pat’s speakeasy bar while she waited for Jeffery to be released from jail. Jeffery had been in and out of jail for robbing places since that night when she’d hitched a ride with him from Jersey and fallen in love. She couldn’t stand Pat, hard and mercenary, with the face of a frog. She had even considered going back to live with her mother. She’d tried to have a friendly visit with her mother after she’d learned she was expecting, but her mother was horrified by the fact that Deucie was pregnant, plus Deucie could tell that her mother was afraid of her the way she kept eyeing the vase on the coffee table as if she’d need a weapon against Deucie. Deucie was insulted, said, “You know what, Mother, I don’t need this bullshit,” and left. So she was stuck living with Pat, waiting for Pat now to go with her to the hospital. It was a soft spring evening and she went outside trying to walk off the intermittent labor pains while Pat poured the first rounds at the bar and otherwise got the night started enough to leave to accompany Deucie to the hospital. Deucie had walked as far as the Christian Street Y where a line of highbrow colored girls were on their way inside for the spring cotillion. They had the appearance of a rainbow in their lime and yellow and pink and sky blue gowns. She paused to watch them, smiled, wishing that if she had a girl, her daughter would stand in such a line at fifteen or so. But right then she was hit with the scent of pressing oils and crinoline slips and patent leather, which meant that a headache was coming on. At the same time a bearing-down pain moved from her chest to her knees, doubling her over. Her water broke then. She stood there as a puddle formed on the ground between her legs and the girls pointed and giggled and then started to scream as Deucie, completely disoriented from the combination of pains, began shedding her clothes and vomiting and running in circles looking for an alley to curl up in.
When she came to in the hospital a nurse placed a baby in her arms. The baby was perfect, the one perfect thing that had come out of her relationship with Jeffery. Deucie had never known such warmth before, such complete and absolute contentment as when her baby snuggled at her breast. The baby was born outside of the sterile conditions of the delivery room and she stayed in the bassinet next to Deucie’s bed, though most of the time she was curled up in Deucie’s arms because Deucie could hardly bear to put her down. On the morning of her discharge Deucie woke to an entourage of babbling white men hovering over her, but no baby. It took some minutes to understand what they were telling her, that they had taken the baby away just temporarily, they said, until they could do some monitoring, some testing. Deucie panicked, though she tried to remain calm enough to extract from them what was wrong with her child, until she realized that they weren’t talking about the baby, they were talking about her, telling her that in their opinion she wasn’t up to the immediate task of motherhood. In her own mother’s opinion, she wasn’t either; her mother had petitioned the court on the baby’s behalf and provided a compelling argument for their actions today. But her mother, they said, like they themselves, only wanted what was best for her and the baby.
Deucie realized then that they thought she was crazy. She tried to convince them that she was not. Restrained herself from calling her mother a lying low-down dirty bitch as she set out to persuade them that crazy people had no explanation for why they did what they did. She could explain it all. When her mother would catch her stroking the air where her father’s leg should be, asking him if it was better now, was she making it better—her mother had pointed to that as an example of how Deucie had always suffered from hallucinations—Deucie knew she wasn’t crazy, that she was in fact taking away her father’s pain. When Deucie caught her mother holding hands with another man on Broad Street while her father lay dying and she’d fought her, it was only out of allegiance to her father, she said, trying to counter her mother’s claim that Deucie was violent as well as delusional. And when they’d offered as further proof of her unfitness the Jersey cousin’s claims that Deucie had gashed her own face with a switchblade, Deucie’s hand went to the poorly healed slash off olded-over skin just below her cheekbone as she tried to explain that yes, she’d done it to herself but it had been an accident. If the cousin would only have put a leash on the husband, kept him from creeping into her room with his dick in his hands, there would have been no need to have a switchblade in her bed for her to roll over on. By the time they got to the police reports, six times in the past year she’d been picked up from some alley completely naked, she tried to make them understand that the headaches told her to do that, then tried to clean that up, stressed that she meant “told” only as a figure of speech, she never heard voices, she swore. She just felt better when a headache came on, she insisted, if she shed her clothes and curled up on the ground.
The more she tried to convince them that she was sane, the faster they wrote on their pages affixed to clipboards, their passive sterilized smiles smelling of wintergreen alcohol as they assured her that her baby would be well cared for until she herself was fit.
She felt dizzy then, felt the inversion of her world from the absolute contentment of her daughter in her arms to the absolute devastation of her absence. She tried to will the room to stop spinning as she weakly asked if she could just kiss the baby good-bye. But once the baby was nestled in her arms again, she knew that she couldn’t allow them to take her. How could she go through life knowing she’d let some strange people yank her daughter from her breast—white people at that! But fighter though she was, she also knew that they were too formidable with their arm and leg restraints and hypodermic needles and solitary rubber rooms. It came to her then as she kissed the baby’s cheeks and nose and pouty mouth that if she willingly relinquished the child, then they weren’t actually taking her baby away.
“Y’all not taking shit,” she said then. “I’m releasing her, you receiving her, but make no mistake, and let the record show, y’all didn’t take her. Hell no. Hell no.” She kissed the baby’s forehead one more time as the nurse leaned in to retrieve the infant. But then she was struck suddenly with the need to mark the child so she’d know her when their paths inevitably crossed again. She opened her lips on the baby’s forehead and pulled the tender new skin between her teeth. She bit down and held the baby’s forehead skin between her teeth even when the blood started spurting and the baby screeched and jerked and the white people started wrestling the baby away. Deucie released the child then, satisfied that she’d marked her so she’d know her again, she willingly let the baby go even as she held on to the puddle of her daughter’s blood that had drained into her palm.
She was involuntarily committed then. In the crazy house, as she called it, until she was declared stabilized enough. Out for a couple of years only to be committed again. Tagged as a wild woman after that so whenever she was released and celebrated her freedom with strong drink and big men and loud talking in hard places and ended up arrested for fighting or picked up from some alley curled up naked where a headache had taken her down, she’d end up right back at Byberry again. Then out on the street again for anywhere from a few months to a few years until another explosive episode would have her back in arm restraints all over again. Once in a while she was out during one of Jeffery’s rare attempts at life outside a jail cell. Those were the best times. Their drunken episodes were softened by talk of their baby girl. Jeffery would tell her how their child had been placed with a well-to-do black family in Chestnut Hill. And though Deucie was burning to see her daughter, she didn’t try to track her down by then because she wanted the child to be well raised first. She had visions of her daughter growing up amidst crinoline slips and lessons at a player piano, a featured soloist on the church’s young people’s choir, blue-ribbon winner in the school’s science fair. Until she learned otherwise. Learned that the child had been placed with Jeffery’s stepmother, Pat. Learned that Pat had forced the child into a kind of servitude working that speakeasy and who knew what else. Deucie went into a rage then. She had to stop herself from thinking about that now. Too frail right now to be recalling that level of rage.
She drew her finger across the bottom of the cat bowl, trying to get the last drops of gravy. Beef tonight. Good. She pushed the bowl back outside the window and adjusted herself on the sill. She’d have a couple of hours here before the cat came back crying over his empty food bowl and they rushed into the yard to feed him. She watched as the legs of the woman next door took her seat on the steps, now another set of legs next to hers, same hue, same shape. Must be mother and daughter, she thought as she sat on the sill and closed her eyes hoping that she’d get lucky tonight and meet the Big Man face-to-face.
NEET HAD COME and sat next to Alberta on the back steps. Usually when she’d peep out the kitchen window and see her mother sitting like that on the steps, staring out into the backyard, miles away, she’d get that thrilling jolt that she had time to leave the house through the front, find Shay, and experience for a couple of hours the normal life of a teenage girl growing up in Philadelphia in the sixties. She’d sneak puffs of cigarettes and hang on the corner and listen to the Corner Boys warming their voices to sing. She’d venture to the movies with Shay, or to a Four Tops concert at the Uptown Theater. They’d go roller-skating on Elmwood Avenue, or to the North Side for a poor people’s rally, or down to Penn to ogle the smart black boys with their beautiful Afros as they planned how they’d room together in the new dorm on Thirty-fourth Street—they’d already been told by the school counselor that they were excellent candidates for Penn, with their high scores and good grades and well-rounded extracurriculars. She’d slip into blue-lit house parties during the time when her mother was lost on the back steps; she’d slow-drag and giggle at the feel of a boy’s hardness coming into its own. And sometimes she’d just sit on the banister with Shay and slurp down cherry-water ice.
But this evening Neet didn’t slip out through the front. She went out onto the back steps and sat next to Alberta. It was humid out and the dinner aromas that had crowded the block hung over the backyard now. Mothers’ voices drifted into the yard calling the younger children in, three, four times until there was a stream of “Don’t let me have to say your name again.” Now the Corner Boys were starting up. Their harmonies multiplied over these back steps, like the mounting dinner aromas, and there was a stillness to outside. Even the mothers who’d yelled and threatened their children over not coming in were quiet as the Corner Boys sang “I Do Love You.” Neet laid her head in her mother’s lap. Her mother’s cotton duster felt good against her face, soft and absorbent, Neet’s face clammy from all the moisture in the air. She felt flutters in her stomach then and she eased her hand to her stomach. Now Alberta was running her fingers through Neet’s hair. Neet settled her head deeper along her mother’s lap and enjoyed the light touches of Alberta’s fingers on her scalp. The stomach flutters picked up in intensity and she allowed herself to enjoy that sensation too. Just this once, she told herself, and for the very last time.