LOUISE BAKED THE cake for Neet’s homecoming just like she’d promised Shay that she would. Though she pressed her eyes shut and swallowed hard and even said a little prayer that Shay might change her mind about going over there so soon. But Shay hadn’t changed her mind and Louise was reluctantly prepared to hold up her end of the deal and go with Shay to welcome Neet back home.
The cake though was perfect, German chocolate, Neet’s favorite. Shay had sampled a slice from the extra layer while it was still warm and tears had welled up in her eyes when her mother asked her how it was. “It’s delicious, Mommy,” she said. “Thank you, Mommy.”
“I just hope that crazy-ass Alberta lets us through the door, you know how funny she is, she’s probably the one who restricted Neet’s visitors,” Louise said as Shay arranged long-stemmed carnations in one of her mother’s good vases. Shay was excited and afraid as she added baby’s breath to the bouquet. She hadn’t told her mother about the scene with Alberta on BB’s porch or the one later at the hospital in front of the cast-stone Virgin Mary. She reasoned that Alberta was so devastated, so traumatized that day that she had momentarily snapped, and that her good sense, such as it was, had returned by now.
“She’s back, Mommy, she’s back, come on,” Shay yelled as she pressed herself against the radiator and watched the yellow cab pull up.
“Well, let’s give her time to get settled, at least a couple of hours,” Louise called from upstairs, Louise dreading the visit the closer it got. She’d been to the dentist yesterday and had two more teeth pulled. Down four now. Last thing she needed was the stress of going next door, stress seemed to go right to the empty pockets in her gums. She tried to concentrate on what she was doing at the moment, right now going through her closet separating out clothes that she’d probably not wear again. She’d start a box later, get Joe to take it down to the cellar. Though as trifling as he was when it came to anything having to do with the cellar, she was thinking she’d do bags instead so the weight would be manageable enough for her to carry herself. But he hadn’t even fixed the light switch like she’d asked him to do this spring. She sure as hell wasn’t going down to the cellar in the dark.
Shay was calling upstairs again, asking Louise for a specific time when they could go next door. Louise blew out a long breath, “Seven o’clock, Shay,” she said, trying not to let the irritation show, Shay might think it was directed against her, though it was really directed at the idea of going over there. She pushed hard at a group of blouses and the hangers made a screeching sound as they moved along the metal pole. That sound went right through her as she flashed back on all the overtures she’d made toward Alberta in their early years of living here. Thought at first that Alberta was just excessively shy. She would even defend Alberta when the people on the block talked about her, whispered that she was stuck-up or worse, uncharitable was worse. “She’s just quiet,” Louise would say. Though soon enough she concluded that Alberta wasn’t just quiet; she was just mean.
ALBERTA WAS MARRIED then to a strapping, good-natured, good-looking semiprofessional boxer, middleweight division; Brownie, everybody called him. On Sunday evenings in the space of time between dessert and Lassie, the two families would sit on their porches and laugh as Neet and Shay half walked and half crawled, drooling excitedly as they rushed to greet each other at the banister that separated the two houses. One or the other of the parents would hoist either Neet or Shay over the railing so that they could play together on the same porch. Louise would snap Polaroids of the two babies hugging or falling over on top of each other or pointing at each other with smiles on their faces that were so enchanting everybody who walked by the porches would stop, even trot up the steps and have a seat, so drawn in by the baby girls’ laughter and the cozy feel to the porches under the splendor of the tree.
Sooner or later, Eddie, the king of the pinochle table, would walk down and say to Brownie and Joe that there was a game starting up, or if not Eddie, then Frank would say he needed help hooking up his new stereo system, or Will, who was always working on one of his immobile Chevys, would ask if they wanted to help, translated, watch him load a transmission. Or some other man on the block would come and break up the two gathered couples, they’d steal Brownie and Joe away to go do whatever men do when they all disappear together after a meal, as if it was a sin that men and women remain in each other’s company for too long.
After Brownie and Joe would kiss their wives good-bye and walk on off the porch, trying to take their time so as not to appear too eager to leave, an awkwardness would fall between Louise and Alberta. They’d carry on polite conversations about the price of butter that week, or fabric specials on Sixtieth Street, or upping or decreasing the number of quart bottles for the milkman to leave. They’d focus in on Neet and Shay, comment about their sleeping habits and eating and wetting. And then one or the other would yawn, mention that Lassie must be on now, and they’d say a civil good evening and retreat with their daughters back into their own little houses.
The two women never really connected in a girlfriends sort of way, partially because Alberta was younger than Louise, fresh and inexperienced, not even to her twenties yet. Louise appeared so self-assured to Alberta, which magnified Alberta’s own feelings of inadequacy, ill preparedness. She felt so unknowledgeable about things a young woman setting up house should know. She hadn’t been raised by her natural mother and that was a great embarrassment to her, so she’d stifle any conversations where she might have to talk about her past. Would get agitated by people who probed directly, so Alberta was often agitated with Louise as they sat on the porch on Sunday evenings, having been abandoned by their good-natured buffers, Brownie and Joe.
“Your mother live close by?” Louise might ask.
And Alberta’s expression would freeze. “No,” she’d say, and then find some excuse for having to run into the house.
“What Neet’s grandparents say about her, I know they just love her to death, huh?” Louise might try again.
“’Bout how you’d expect any grandparent to be,” Alberta would say, and suddenly something about Neet would need her attention, maybe her barrette was crooked, or a snap had come undone, but suddenly it was urgent enough for Alberta to tend to that instant and in so doing redirect the conversation.
Louise stopped asking soon enough, even complained to Johnetta that her new neighbor seemed nice enough, but she had some funny ways. “Acts like she can’t half talk sometimes, or like she’s getting mad at you when you do. And don’t try to ask her anything about where she’s from, you know, basic conversation starters, she’ll look at you like you asked her who’d she slept with before Brownie, or some similarly insulting question, then she’ll grab her child and run on into her house.”
Louise was getting her hair done at Clara’s shortly after she’d complained about Alberta to Johnetta. Clara said through the smoke, “I hear from Joyce, who heard from Johnetta, that that young girl next door to you told you to mind your fucking business. She got some nerve, huh, Louise.”
Louise tried to clean it up, insisted that of course Alberta hadn’t said such a thing, never even hinted at such a thing, that she was a sweet child, really, just a little on the quiet side. “You know how Johnetta will make a mound of manure out of a speck of shit,” Louise said, borrowing one of her sister Maggie’s favorite sayings.
When next Louise and Alberta were on their side-by-side porches together, a soft Sunday evening this happened to be, no children playing loud rhyming games in the street or hopscotch or double Dutch because this neighborhood had strong southern roots and they still respected the Sabbath, Louise cleared her throat and decided to move beyond the superficial with Alberta. The way Neet and Shay gurgled back and forth and pretended to carry on a conversation, spurting out their unintelligible words, then laughing, one grabbing the other’s arm or foot for emphasis, and then leaning in as if they were whispering, loosened Louise up some. She told herself that it was downright sinful to withhold herself from Alberta just because Alberta had the tendency to go stiff in the middle of a conversation. Louise let go with a flood of sentences then about her own upbringing. Said she hadn’t been raised by her mother after the age often, raised instead by her sister, Maggie, who still lived downtown. “My mother went quietly in her sleep,” Louise said in a hushed voice. “Female problems, though I’ve since discovered that it was cancer of the ovaries that killed her. Like a lot of colored women back then she tried to be her own doctor. Guess that’s why I went into nursing. I was the one who found her, you know, the morning, uh, it happened. I had just turned ten. And you talking ’bout something traumatic. Lord have mercy, girl, Alberta. I thought I’d never laugh again, or recognize when the sun was out, that thing hurt me so bad. But my sister, Maggie, twelve years my senior, took me in. And though Joe complains about her, even though I’ll admit too the woman is a bit of a loudmouth, curses, you know, loves her Four Roses whiskey, she still did all right by me, really. She gave me a good life.”
Louise glanced up at Alberta, noticed that Alberta’s smooth light complexion had gone to a brownish red and she looked as if she was about to cry. Feeling for me, Louise thought, congratulating herself as she watched Alberta appear to settle deeper into the porch glider.
“Yeah, girl,” Louise continued, not even looking at Alberta anymore, looking at the remnants of daylight falling over Cecil Street in softened sheets of gray and pink and blue. “I think that’s why I hurried and married Joe, I had, like, this opening in my heart that never really closed up, and at the same time it was like I had no feelings in that opening, you know? I thought a man’s love could close it up, but truth be told my sister did a better job of helping me heal. Such as I’ve healed,” Louise went on, saying things she’d not planned on saying, telling Alberta now how she had never really cried over her mother’s death, cried over other things but not over losing her mother. She began feeling an upwelling of emotion then that frightened her. Movement deep down, she felt as if the ground was shifting and about to release all the gasses trapped there in a huge explosion. She stopped herself. She hadn’t cried over her mother yet, certainly wasn’t going to now, sitting out on this porch. She’d only started talking about it in the first place to loosen Alberta some any. “Mnh,” she said, taking a deep breath, switching the direction of her conversation to lighten it up some. “Just as well, I guess, since men don’t tolerate emotional outpourings too well. I guess you’ve noticed that with Brownie too. Unless it’s nighttime and the bedroom door is closed and you under the covers together, you know. Then they’ll be all in your ear, ‘Here, baby, you just cry, cry all over me, I’ma make it all all right.’ Shoot, they’ll even pick out their body parts for you to cry on. All for you, mind you. You watching your tears rain down all over his manhood making it sprout straight up, but it’s all for you. Girl. What you talking?”
Now Louise was laughing out loud, laughter filling up in her head, thankfully replacing the deep-down stirrings she’d just felt. She gave in to the laughter so completely that she didn’t even hear the babies crying at first, high-pitched cries, as if they’d both been slapped. And when she did hear and shook herself back to the porch, to her screaming child, she saw Shay alone on the blanket on the porch floor, arms stretching up and out as she hollered and bounced herself trying to lift herself to get to Neet. Neet hysterical too in Alberta’s arms, twisting and hitting at Alberta, trying to free herself from Alberta’s hold, trying to get back down on the blan-keted porch floor to Shay.
Louise jumped up and scooped up her child to soothe her even as she tried to be heard over the wails to ask Alberta, What? What happened? Why did she interrupt the babies’ play?
Alberta was already moving toward her door. “I’m sorry, Louise. That’s so sad about your mother. It really is.”
Louise could hear the ice in her voice as Alberta excused herself then, said she’d left something on the stove.
Alberta rushed into her house telling Neet it was okay; Don’t cry, it’s okay, Alberta said as Neet’s cries filled the inside of the house. She shushed Neet and bounced her up and down and went to the fridge for something cold and sweet to pacify her. “Mnh,” she said into the kitchen air as she spooned up tapioca pudding and fed it to Neet, kissed Neet on the forehead as the cold sweet of the tapioca quieted her some. “Waking up to a dead mother should have been my greatest life trauma.” She snuggled Neet even closer to her because she was getting chills and she needed her baby’s body warmth right then. She pulled a kitchen chair out from the table and sat. Neet, satisfied now from the tapioca, spread herself against her mother’s bosom as if she knew already how to keep Alberta warm.
SHAY PASTED HERSELF at the window, her excitement building as she watched the back door of the cab edge open. Alberta got out first, Shay knew it was her as soon as her foot inched through the cab door, the telling piece of drab taffeta material that almost met her shoe. When Alberta was all the way out of the cab, she stood there with her hand out waiting for the cabdriver to give her change, and at first Shay’s stomach started pushing up into her throat because it didn’t seem as if anybody else was in the cab. Until the cabdriver, a wrinkled-looking man, walked around to the back passenger side and opened the door.
“Ooh, Neet, Neet,” Shay said to herself and to the wide-open Venetian blinds at the living-room window, “if you only knew how much I’ve missed you.” She bounced in front of the window as she watched the figure emerge from the back of the cab. She could no longer keep her excitement coiled in her muscles and now she was like a Slinky toy just loose and all over the place. Now she was at the front door and now she had the door open and now she was calling out to Neet. “Neet, Neet, welcome home,” she said, trying not to sound too jovial out of respect for the circumstances, but jovial nonetheless just to know that Neet was really living and breathing. Had had the thought many times over the past week that Neet had died, that they’d kept it from her until they could figure out a soft way to tell her. Now her stomach did inch up into her throat because she was looking at Neet, seeing her. “My God, Neet,” she whispered, “what’s going on with you, my God.”
It wasn’t Neet’s apparent frailness that Shay could see in the suddenly angled cheekbones that used to be much more subtle, nor was it the way her complexion seemed washed out to a shade that was more blanched than its usual coloring, which was a Crayola yellow with a hint of red. It wasn’t even the long, shapeless dress that matched in style the one Alberta wore, nor was it the hat, a black felt number with netting that reached down to her eyebrows, the kind Alberta often wore to church and that would have Neet proclaiming to Shay that no matter what, she’d go to church, she’d dress like her mother insisted, unless she could find a way not to, she’d appear to be holy whenever she absolutely had to, she’d toe the line just to keep the peace, but no way, absolutely no way was she wearing that stupid little hat. And yet, disturbing as the hat was now, propped on Neet’s head, that wasn’t the worst of what Shay saw as she stood on the porch, barefoot, with her arms folded up across her chest. The worst of it was the way Neet carried herself. Back straighter than Shay had ever seen it especially when she was forced to wear her holy clothes. Shay knew that Neet so hated to be seen like that and yet the way she held herself right now, it was as if she was proud of her holy deportment. She walked with a stiffness, as if her insides would not be contained if she allowed herself to take a step without having first given it careful consideration. But mostly it was Neet’s eyes that made Shay, standing at the edge of her porch, stifle a scream, because as Neet got closer and closer as she approached her steps, she looked over at Shay’s house, right there into Shay’s face, must have known how anxious Shay would be for her to get home, and there were Neet’s eyes, soft brown like always but also hauntingly blank, like Shay had never seen them, like Alberta’s eyes, my God, they were Alberta’s eyes.
She tried to tell herself that she was wrong as Neet reached her porch and didn’t even acknowledge that she was standing there, tried to convince herself that this was all a part of Neet’s holy sham. But she knew Neet too well. There should have been a sign reassuring Shay that Neet had just taken her sham to a new level. Traumatized though Neet was, Shay should have seen a glimmer, a milder version of the play behind Neet’s eyes that Shay could always pick up when Neet walked alongside her mother and she’d look at Shay as they passed and would allow the slightest twinkle to traipse across her eyes, which let Shay know that they were still on for the town-hall dance, or the movie, or the skating party, the arcade, the basketball game; that as soon as she could circumvent the dictates of this revival, or prayer meeting, or funeral, or special-call service, she’d be back. Have her change of clothes and her Kool filter tips ready because she’d be back. Shay would feel a coating of warm relief spread over her because of that suppressed fear that one day Neet might really catch fire for her mother’s crazy religion. It appeared now that that very thing had happened, that this sanctified demeanor had not been forced on Neet. Now, this was who Neet truly was. And like Neet’s botched abortion, Shay claimed responsibility for this too; it was her fault, hers. There it was, the guilt had broken through the dam of her father’s good reasoning and was now soaking her up from the inside. It was no use, in Shay’s mind. if Neet had really converted, she had carved out a joyless hell of a life for herself. Joyless. And Shay was drowning in guilt over this too.
LOUISE WAS CONFUSED by Shay’s new reluctance to go next door. “What is it? Is it the cake?” she asked her.
“No, Mommy, the cake is perfect,” Shay sighed more than said.
“And the bouquet you put together, now that’s really perfect,” Louise said, feigning cheeriness because really she felt so helpless and fought back her own tears as she watched Shay descending into herself again.
“Maybe tomorrow, Mommy. The cake will keep, won’t it? Maybe we’ll go over there tomorrow.”
Louise didn’t press the matter, thinking it was better not to force Shay. Shay had to be ready emotionally, Louise told herself, the whole time wishing that Joe was home because Shay really needed him right now to help her work through this. Where the hell was he anyhow, as late as it was getting. Off work since four this afternoon.
Joe got home around nine that Saturday. “At the barber’s,” he said to what looked like an accusation getting ready to pounce from Louise’s mouth, the way her mouth was set right then, but it could just be all those missing teeth, he told himself. “We had such a good rap session going about how things might have turned out had Martin and Malcolm come together. Very provocative talk we had going, Louise.” He said this with such sincerity that it didn’t even feel like a lie.
The barbershop part was true enough, he had in fact gone. Though he’d spent the bulk of the time in the lavishly furnished apartment upstairs that Tim kept above the shop. Nathina was always on her husband to rent out the apartment. Tim told her he was trying to rent it out but first he’d have to get rid of the rats up there. She’d ask him why no one else on the block had rats, mice maybe, but not rats. He said that the site where the shop sat must have been a rat breeding ground years ago. Told her there were rats in the shop too, they just didn’t come out when people were around. Offered to take her down there in the middle of the night if she didn’t believe him. She didn’t totally believe him, but she believed him enough not to test his story.
There were of course no rats, not the four-legged kind anyhow, because Tim used the apartment for the pleasure takings of his married customers. People from as far away as Southwest and North Philly tipped him heavily for the price of a haircut and a few hours upstairs. Prevented them from having to lie to their wives or girlfriends when they returned home and said they’d been at the barber’s. The Cecil Street men rarely took advantage of this amenity other than using it for bachelor parties or smokers. Too close to home to be using if they were running around. “Like shitting where you eat, huh?” Tim would muse when he’d offered it in the past and they’d declined.
But Joe had been up in Tim’s apartment earlier. Not with Valadean though. He’d been with Valadean the afternoon before at the Red Moon Hotel. Though he’d told himself that he wasn’t going to see her again, it just wasn’t prudent with her living across the street, he’d seen her again every other day since the tragedy with Neet last week. Valadean was such a welcome, willing distraction to the heavy mood on the block, the sadness that thickened the closer and closer he got to his house. Could hardly get through his door because of the way the sadness seemed to coalesce there. He could laugh with Valadean and not feel guilty for laughing since she wasn’t emotionally tied to the block. Yesterday they’d tickled each other under the arms and chins and wherever else they were ticklish until they were both hysterical. So freeing to laugh out loud, with abandon like that. Then they’d mixed pleasures in ways he hadn’t done since he was a much younger man. He decided then that he would see Valadean again and again, as often as he wanted to, as often as he could without getting caught. Felt a defiance brewing in him. The defiance egged him on to ask Tim about his rat problem, the code the men used when referring to the apartment over the shop. Joe then pulled his horn from the back of the closet in the living room, where he’d slid it two weeks before. Spent this Saturday from the time he’d gotten off from work until now with his horn. He’d put it together and taken it apart; he’d cleaned it; shined it; sat it on the heart-shaped velvet couch and stared at it. He didn’t put it to his lips though, not yet. Afraid of what would happen once he put it to his lips and transformed breath into sound again. Afraid of how he would feel, afraid of what he’d do after that.
“Yeah, baby,” he said to Louise, feeling truly sincere as he said it, “I spent all afternoon until tonight down at Tim’s.”
“And how about Daddy’s Girl?” He didn’t miss a beat as he turned his sincerity on Shay where she sat so listlessly staring out of the window. “Did you have a nice visit with Neet, how she doing anyhow?”
When Shay said that they hadn’t gone, that she had changed her mind, figured it was better to give Neet a little time at home first, Joe looked at Louise, asked Louise with his face what was going on with Shay. Louise hunched her shoulders, indicating that she couldn’t figure it out either. Joe took over then. He insisted to Shay that he himself hadn’t been able to even begin to move on and really get plain with what had happened to his friend until he’d stood over his buddy’s hospital bed and watched the blankness in his eyes. “He didn’t even recognize me, Shaylala, and at the same time it was as if he was looking right through me, right to my soul. I still get chills when I think about it. Mnh.” He stopped talking then and both Shay and Louise fell silent, out of respect for the pain he was obviously remembering and, from the look on his face, feeling all over again. He shook himself back, then looked at Shay. “What do you say, Daddy’s Girl, you ready?”
“But what if she doesn’t want to see me? What if she’s mad?” Shay whined.
“So she won’t want to see you. So she’ll be mad. Better that you go over there and Neet tell you to go f yourself than avoid that reaction by not going. You can’t control how you’re received, but you do need to go.” He took her by the hand. “Come on, get yourself together,” he said. “We going over there right now.”
Louise hurriedly wrapped the cake in Saran Wrap, grateful that she was off the hook about setting foot in Alberta’s house. She’d fretted herself over the possibility of a confrontation with Alberta, didn’t know how she’d handle one either; it certainly wouldn’t help Neet’s condition to be forced to be privy to a bunch of hollering and cursing between two grown women. Not that Alberta would probably curse, but Louise knew that she surely would if the woman came off at her wrong, or especially Shay, she better not say shit to Shay, Louise had been thinking, and dreading since she’d promised Shay she’d go over there with her to welcome Neet back home. But now a confrontation was much less likely man to woman, as it would be now with Joe going instead of her.
She pushed the bouquet in Joe’s hands and when Shay whispered that she’d made it for Neet, Joe said, “Well, why don’t we give these to the mother? Nothing disarms an angry woman like a pretty vase filled with flowers.”
“Well, why the hell you come home empty-handed, then, Negro?” Louise said to his back as she flicked on the porch light and watched Joe and Shay walk across the porch and then climb over the banister to go next door.