NEET HAD BEEN home for almost two weeks and she still wouldn’t talk to Shay, wouldn’t talk to anybody except her mother and the people at her church. She was praying and studying her Bible and trying to prepare for the special session where the elders of the church would exonerate her of her sins. She asked them to call her Bonita because although she thought Little Freddie had given her back her name, since the abortion when she’d say her name out loud, Bonita, she’d feel chafed on the inside all over again, as if she was forced to sit on Mr. G’s lap and he was saying her name. She told herself that she could tolerate the sound of her name from the Reverend Mister and the elders, though really it hurt still to hear her name even from them. Told herself that’s because her insides were still raw from what she’d been through. Raw and scarred. So she studied her Bible, she prayed, she got in and out of cabs to go to church, and she slept. That was her life these days.
SHAY WAS TRYING to come back to normal. Returned to her summer job so that she was at least occupied during the day. Spent most evenings downtown with her mother’s sister, Maggie, who’d treat Shay to nightly sips of Manischewitz Concord grape wine. Wished at times like this that she had a boyfriend. She’d go home and fall asleep trying not to notice that her father was staying out later and later these days. Made every effort to be nice to Louise though the tendency to disagree about the smallest things was still there and she’d forget herself and snap at her mother and then want to recall it because of the hurt look that came up in her mother’s eyes.
JOE WAS STAYING out more and more. Pulling down a lot of overtime. Needed to, he reasoned, because of the added expense of Louise’s dental work. Parceled out every minute beyond that he reasonably could between the Red Moon Hotel and Tim’s furnished pad. Whistled every night coming in to deflect the complex of emotions that might likely show on his face. Spared Louise his kisses because her mouth was always swollen, or sore, or both. Sagging. He’d make general small talk with Louise about something he’d seen from his booth—he’d had to strong-arm an old geezer, he’d said the other night, to keep him from pissing on the tracks in clear view of a rush-hour crowd; he’d tell her about the progress being made for the next block party, less than a week away. And Louise would repeat all over again that another block party this soon was overkill.
WHEN LOUISE WASN’T at work, or at the dentist’s, or in the bathroom soaking her mouth, she was in the backyard looking for the cat. Louise was worried about the cat. Though she should be the last one to worry about the cat since she’d never wanted him in the first place. Louise had had a cat when she was younger that had gotten out of their apartment somehow and was never seen by her again. This was around the time when her mother was sick and Louise had been devastated because she would talk to the cat about how much she wanted her mother to be healthy again. He would seem to understand, purr and lick her under her chin. But he ran away three days before her mother died, and some weeks later Maggie told her that cats can’t stay in a house where someone’s dying; they’ll do everything they can to get away from death. She should have known, Maggie said, that after the cat left it was only a matter of days for their mother. So Louise had a resentment toward cats, having been abandoned by one when she needed him most. She insisted that the gray-and-white thing Joe and Shay dragged home couldn’t live in the house because of what his claws would do to her floors. Insisted that if he was to be a house cat, then he’d have to be declawed. Both Shay and Joe were adamant that the cat shouldn’t be declawed, said if he ever had to defend himself outside the house he wouldn’t be able to. So they put together a little wooden cat house in the yard for him, and that seemed to satisfy them all. But now Louise was worried about the cat’s erratic appetite, had been monitoring his food intake obsessively because she preferred worrying about the cat to worrying over Joe, or Neet, or Shay. She’d rush home from work and go straight to the yard still in her nurse’s uniform to check his bowl. For a couple of weeks, he was eating twice his usual, now he was down to half as much. When she cleaned out his bowl just now, she saw what she thought to be blood-tinged streaks of vomit. She was calling for him now. Wanted to look at him and see if he needed to go to the vet. “Cat, Cat,” she trilled—they’d been no more inventive with his name than that. “Come here, baby, where are you, baby.” She heard motion on the other side of the yard and walked toward the fence that separated her yard from Alberta’s. “That you, Cat?” she said. She gasped and jumped then because she was staring in Alberta’s face.
“Alberta,” she said, hit suddenly, softened suddenly, with all that Alberta had been through. “Alberta,” she went on, “I want you to know, if you need me, I mean, I’m just so, so sorry. Anything, Alberta, please ask, if you need anything.” But now she was talking to Alberta’s back as Alberta turned and walked away from her, up the steps and in through her back door. Louise didn’t know which she felt to the greatest magnitude right now, anger or sadness. She fed the anger. Better to feel that than sad, she thought. Anger was easier for her to shake off. She looked up at her own back door flying open, Johnetta pushing herself out onto the back step. She hated the way Johnetta just took it upon herself to walk on in her house without ringing first. “Yeah, Johnetta?” she said, not even trying to disguise her irritation.
“Girl, come on in here,” Johnetta said, “I just got some news.”
JOE SAW JOHNETTA heave-hoing up his steps as soon as he turned onto Cecil. He’d come straight home today. He hadn’t been straight home in a couple of weeks between spending time with Valadean and staring at his horn as it sat in the middle of the heart-shaped velvet couch in Tim’s furnished apartment. The horn tried to seduce him as if it too were a beautiful woman. Except that he knew what to do with a beautiful woman, every follicle of his being acted out that script; he could tell himself he was being original, inventing moves not yet performed as Valadean writhed and moaned under him, but few things had changed as little since the beginning of time as the moves of a man with a woman. The horn though was different. There was no script for the horn, not as simple as jamming his hardness until it softened. The horn demanded originality, choice. Joe was afraid of what form that expression of choice would take, so he just stared at the horn after disassembling it, putting it back together again while the room expanded and an ocean opened up on the floor between the couch where the horn was and the armchair where he sat.
Now he wished he was up there in the apartment instead of on his way home, on time for a change, watching newsy-ass Johnetta head into his house. The block felt suddenly narrow. The shade that was usually so delightful on a summer afternoon hung now like a dark shape in the sky, waiting for interpretation. He sighed out his irritation and thought about turning back around. Then he saw Neet walking from her house toward a waiting cab. Her footsteps were slow and precise, old. Only seventeen, he thought, walking like she’s seventy. This hurt Joe as much as the whole tragedy, that Neet’s footsteps would appear so old in the man-looking shoes like her mother wore, long, bag-shaped dress, cap perched on her head. He wanted with everything in him to snatch that hat from her head, could have because he was right up on her now. He opened the cab door instead. “Neet, how you doing, sweetheart,” he said as she slid into the back of the cab.
“Mr. Joe,” she responded, just the way her mother always did. No hello, how are you, no good fucking day. Just said his name, Mr. Joe.
He watched the cab drive off. He turned then and started up his steps and listened to Johnetta’s voice booming through his screen door. “But wait, you ain’t heard the rest,” she was saying. Joe stood on his porch unable to walk in through his screen door as Johnetta’s words came in bursts through the door and she described some blue-black man with a scar from his mouth to his ear who was just around at Sonny’s looking for a woman who’d disappeared a few weeks ago, last seen in a red, black, and green tie-dyed T-shirt. “Said she was headed for this block of Cecil looking for her daughter’s house and ain’t been heard from since. He don’t know the daughter’s name, but I ’clare to God it’s got something to do with Alberta,” Johnetta said.
Joe had heard enough. He couldn’t open his door on his living room and be caught in the teeth of one of Johnetta’s never-ending Alberta stories right now. He lifted his leg over the banister, onto Alberta’s porch, quickly, before he talked himself out of it. He’d been preoccupied lately with how the block had always been a cushion for whoever was going through something, yet they’d pulled themselves out of the path of Alberta’s fall when the tragedy with Neet happened. There’d been no streams of people coming and going with platters of food so she wouldn’t have to cook, or offers to do her shopping this week, or mop down her porch, or just come over and sit and listen to her sigh if she didn’t want to talk. Whether or not she accepted the overtures, the overtures should have been hers to refuse. Didn’t know what he could do, but doing nothing seemed worst of all. So he listened to Johnetta’s nonstop sentences pour through his screen as he rang Alberta’s bell.
He focused on the manila-colored window shade and then Alberta’s face as she cracked the door and said, “Joe?”
His throat went suddenly dry and he had to clear it several times. “Afternoon, Alberta, just stopped to see how Neet’s making out, and you too of course. I just saw her leave and, I don’t know, I thought, you know, I’d just stop and say hello.”
Alberta stepped back and opened the door just enough for Joe to ease in. “Please don’t let any flies follow you in, please,” she said.
Joe turned around and looked over his head in an exaggerated way. “What you trying to say, Alberta, that I’m like that little ole dirty boy in the comic strip who always got a circle of flies over his head?” He laughed then, forgetting himself, forgetting whose black-and-white-tiled vestibule he’d just entered that smelled of Spic and Span. He remembered though as soon as his laugh was done and he was left looking in Alberta’s eyes. She looked as though she’d been crying. He looked away, wishing he hadn’t noticed that.
“You said it, not me,” she said as she continued to look at him.
“Excuse me? Said what?”
“That you was like the little ole dirty boy in the comics with flies always circling your head.”
She turned then and went through the vestibule door and into the living room and Joe followed her, convinced that he’d seen the murky outline of a smile trying to nudge at the corner of her mouth. He knew that was impossible though; he hadn’t seen anything that even approached a smile coming from Alberta in the twelve or so years since she’d gotten caught up in that cultlike church and Brownie left. He’d been wondering about him since he’d told Shay the story of Brownie and the couch. Wondered if Brownie knew about this trauma Neet was going through. Brownie could certainly be one hell of an ally in all of this, maybe break through to Neet father-to-daughter. Maybe he could even track Brownie down, surely it couldn’t hurt; he couldn’t imagine that anything could bring Neet’s disposition lower than it already was. He thought this as he followed Alberta through the tiny vestibule and into the living room. The blinds at the window were opened to halfway and he resisted the impulse to squint from the unexpected burst of slanted light. The room was neat, orderly, and Joe recognized Louise’s good vase on the coffee table; the carnations Shay had arranged so artfully in the vase were gone though the baby’s breath still made a nice adornment.
“Since you’re here I can return the plate the German chocolate cake came in on,” Alberta said as she thought about offering him a seat, then stopped herself from extending her arm toward the couch. “And the vase.”
“Sure, sure thing, no problem, but first, uh, if it’s okay, I wanted to ask you something. Uh, about Brownie, you ever hear from him?” He shifted his feet and looked behind him at the couch, and then resigned himself to standing.
“Brownie?” A mild surprise hung from her face as she stood in the sun and it illuminated all that was dowdy about her, the hairnet covering her head like a cage, the loose gray dress that buttoned all the way to her throat, the clunky lace-up shoes like his grandmother used to wear. He concentrated on the shoes though he wanted to look at her mouth, its poutiness, the sight of her mouth reminding him that though she tried like hell to disguise it, she was in fact a good-looking woman.
“Yeah,” he said, “I was just thinking I’d like to try and catch up with Brownie. You know, old-times’ sake and all.”
“Well, I know nothing about old times’ sake, but I do know you’re not seeing Brownie anytime soon.”
“Well, I know he was boxing over in Europe but I’d heard he was back in the States, what’d he do, leave the area?”
“Try left this earth,” she said.
“No, Lord, no, you not telling me Brownie’s dead.”
“I’m telling you just that. Brownie passed about five years ago. Old devil of a wife had his remains cremated so fast that my poor child didn’t even have a chance to say a proper Christian good-bye to her father.” She pressed her eyelids tightly and tilted her narrow chin toward the ceiling as if she was praying.
“Well, don’t look so shocked,” she said when her eyes were back to Joe. “We all going that route sooner rather than later.”
He mumbled out how sorry he was to hear about Brownie, could he do anything, for Neet, or he cleared his throat, for her.
“It’s not like it just happened, not like we need chicken and potato salad for a fifty-person repast.”
“Well, I’m just hearing about it, so it is like it just happened for me.”
Alberta was struck then by how naturally Joe was taking up space in her living room. She couldn’t remember the last time a visitor who wasn’t part of her church had. This was wrong, she knew, giving him this much of an audience, worldly nonbeliever that he was. Even though she left him standing, she had still let him in, was still talking to him in ways that she rarely talked to people from the outside. Next thing she’d be having to confess to letting this man in her house the way Neet was on the way to the church to confess right now. How hard it had been the day before to leave Neet in the lower sanctuary, the dozen and a half disciplinarian Saints gathered to hear her put into words what she had done so that they could condemn and then forgive her. It had to be that way, the Reverend Mister had said as he’d gently led Alberta upstairs, away from the circle that had formed around Neet, chanting. The Reverend Mister had taken Alberta’s face in his hands and with great tenderness and skill had kissed one cheek, then the other, then spoke directly in her eyes as he pointed out that Neet had to confess to the intention of the act, that she had intended to commit murder, that that’s what separated God’s law from man’s, on the one hand, and the nature of man from the nature of beast, on the other, the level of intention. He’d whispered to Alberta then and said, “My dear sister Alberta, there are other sins as well, not just her murder of the baby in her womb, your daughter surrounded that act with a whole web of sins: the lying to you, the actual sin of coupling with a man outside of marriage. Other sins too, my dear sister Alberta,” he’d said.
“They won’t, you know, hit her, they won’t hurt her, will they, Reverend Mister? She’s still weak from her surgery,” she had said and cried even as she’d said it. He’d dabbed at her tears with his thumbs and promised that Neet’s condemnation would be only as severe as it needed to be, but it would be better for Neet, and for her, if she went on home, and perhaps she should send Neet to her sessions from here on and not actually come with her. When he talked into Alberta’s eyes like that, with that haunting whisper to his voice and her face so gently molded between his hands, it was as if her will was a shimmering strand of a thread and his voice was the perfect touch of air to have her swaying in the direction he wanted her to go. But even though Alberta had acquiesced, allowed Neet to stay there yesterday, to go without her today, she felt uneasy, a gnawing in her stomach, as if she’d chosen wrong. Now she was picturing Neet the way she’d been when she’d left her at the church yesterday. So poised, sitting in the center of that circle, trying so hard to be righteous. Alberta went soft when she thought of Neet sitting like that.
Joe was going on and on about Brownie, man, what a good guy that Brownie had been, Joe was saying, always so personable, always so helpful, always had a good, hearty laugh for you. Alberta interrupted him because she was about to cry, over Brownie, over Neet, needed to cry, but she couldn’t cry with Joe standing in the middle of her living room. “Listen, Joe,” she said, “I have some things that need my immediate attention, you know, that you interrupted me from when you rang the bell…”
“Oh, uh, sorry, Alberta, if this is a bad time.”
“It is, really and truly it is. I’m just going to get your plate and then you really do need to be on your way.” She talked with such a flourish that she didn’t even realize that she had already started to cry until Joe’s face told her that she had, such concern, such sympathy covering his face and she couldn’t tolerate him looking at her like that so she turned in a huff and rushed into the kitchen to get the plate.
Joe followed her into the kitchen and when she grabbed the plate from the old-style chrome-rimmed Formica table and turned and saw him standing there as if he was ready to hug her or otherwise lapse into some showy expression of condolence, she was outraged. “Are you some kind of fool?” she said, and her voice screeched from a combination of the sobs caught in her throat and from her voice going so suddenly loud like that.
“I, uh, I’m sorry, Alberta, but you just started crying from out of nowhere and I just wanted to make sure, I mean, you seemed—”
“Seemed, nothing! You got some bold nerve following me through my house. You don’t have to go home, but you gotta get the—you gotta get on out of here,” she said, censoring the expression that Pat used so often to the drunks who’d want to linger at her speakeasy bar past closing. Y’all ain’t got to go home, but you gotta get the fuck outta here, Pat would say. Alberta hadn’t heard those words in years and they just flew out of her mouth before she could even think about what she was saying.
“Whew, where you learn to talk like that?” Joe asked, eyeing Alberta now as if she were suddenly a stranger, though he had to admit that she was a stranger, really, how well did he even know her, really?
She pushed the plate toward him even as she looked down at the worn marks on her tiled kitchen floor. “Here, could you just take your wife’s plate and go please?” Her eyes were stinging from a fresh crop of tears needing to fall and she sniffed and swallowed hard and then looked up at him. “Please, could you just go please,” she said again.
Joe took the plate and his feet went to cement and he just stood there. He felt the need to do something, say something. Frail, looking woman just breaks out in tears right in front of a man he has to do something, whether she’s a cold-skinned Holy Roller who takes a man down with a look or not, the right thing was to do something, at least help settle her down before he left, at least help her to stop crying. She pushed past him though, like a cold snap of air, and he had no choice then but to go on back into the front room. She was standing at the vestibule door wiping her face with the sleeve of her dark-colored dress when he got there. He touched her elbow and she yanked it away and opened the vestibule door with such force that the door hit her right on her forehead. “Holy shit, Alberta, are you okay?” he said as he grabbed her arm for real this time to pull her back away from the door, as if the door had wheels or feet and was coming in for another attack. He tried to look at her forehead, to make sure that she hadn’t busted it wide open, hard as the door had hit, but she was covering it with her hand and telling him that she was fine, Just go, get, just go, she yelled at him now.
“I just want to help you,” he said. “Why won’t you let people help you?”
“If you want to help me, take your hand off of my arm and get out of my house.” She had stopped crying now and the ice was back, at least in her voice. Not in her eyes though, Joe noticed just before he turned and walked on through the vestibule and out of the door. There was something else hanging in her eyes dead center and Joe tried to shake it as he walked across his porch.
Alberta rubbed her forehead as she watched Joe stomp across the porch to climb over the banister; her forehead was hot and beginning to throb, though she didn’t know which burned more, the spot on her head where the door had hit, or the one on her arm where Joe’s hand had just been. She went to the kitchen for ice. Shouldn’t have been surprised that Joe’s touch was still like fire, pulsing with life the way it used to all those years ago.
ALBERTA WAS ALWAYS cold back then. She’d been severely neglected as an infant raised in the speakeasy/brothel by Jeffery’s stepmother, Pat. The neglect had left her always feeling cold as a result, though Pat had never planned to have to accommodate a newborn given the nature of the business that she ran from her house. When Jeffery called every day from prison telling Pat that Deucie had given birth to a baby girl, that Deucie’s mother decided she couldn’t take the child, and could Pat claim the child since she was the legal stepgrandmother, Pat had told Jeffery, “No!” and slammed the phone in his ear. Every day for a week she slammed the phone in his ear. But one time when he called he added that Pat could get a relief check as long as the child was in her care, so she was persuaded then. Plus, Jeffery said that he’d be out the following month and he’d take over with the baby after that, and they probably wouldn’t keep Deucie locked up in the crazy house much longer than ninety days, he’d promised. So Pat signed to have the baby released to her care on a Monday in case they needed to inspect where she would live. She did no business on Mondays and the house became a normal one. Mondays she cleaned all morning to get rid of the six nights of filth that had accumulated there. Then she’d sleep all the way through until Tuesday afternoon.
So Alberta went to live with Pat on a Monday. What was supposed to be a short stay took on a permanence because Jeffery couldn’t manage to stay out of jail. He was in fact released the next month as he’d said he would be. He was anxious to do right by his baby girl, have a hand in her raising. But on his way to retrieve his child he saw the most beautiful stuffed teddy bear in the window of Lit Brothers department store. Thought he should present such a gift to his baby girl. He walked up the street to the PSFS bank and handed the teller a note, was surrounded by police before the teller even started filling a bag with dollar bills. Pat had screamed at him when he’d made his one call from the Round House to tell her he’d been rearrested. “You stupid motherfucker,” she’d shouted at him. “Robbing a bank is a federal offense. Why didn’t you just steal the gotdamned stuffed toy?”
So Alberta was trapped with Pat in a never-ending series of Mondays where Alberta would suffer gross neglect. Not that Pat didn’t neglect her the other six days. But the other six days Alberta had the sad, honest drunks who sat at Pat’s makeshift speakeasy bar. They’d pass Alberta from hand to hand and smile and coo. They’d rub her gums down with whiskey-soaked napkins when she was teething because they knew the importance of dulling pain; let her sip the juice from their bowls of collards when she was colicky because some nights that’s about all they could keep down too. They’d tell her the stories of their lives because at least she listened without condemnation. They demanded that Pat change the child’s diapers with regularity because they’d shitted and pissed on themselves recently enough and knew what torture it was to remain for too long in your own waste. They’d lift Alberta close to their chests and let her head find the warm spaces in the crooks of their necks because they felt like throwaway babies too. But too bad for Alberta that the drunks weren’t there to care for her on Mondays, because on Mondays Alberta would cry for hours while Pat slept. She’d cry for food, she’d cry to be changed, to be held, looked at, talked to. But mostly she’d cry because she was cold on the inside, no matter how insulated the footed pajamas she wore, on the inside she was always cold. So that even when she got older she became accustomed to layering her clothes because she chilled easily. And though she was a pretty girl, soft brown eyes, nice lines to her cheekbones, subtle cleft to her chin, she was so pale and thin, and with all those clothes heaped on her all the time, she developed the affect of a homely child.
Pat put Alberta to work almost as soon as she was old enough to walk. She taught Alberta how to run the towels through the wringer washer, and then she slung a low line in the backyard that the child could reach so that she could hang them. She even taught her how to light a cigarette from the gas stove. And once Alberta started first grade—she’d skipped kindergarten because Pat said that the child’s preference was to be at home with her—Pat made up for all that help she wasn’t getting during the week by teaching Alberta how to take orders at Pat’s Sunday dining-room speakeasy bar.
By the time Alberta was ten, she excelled at slinging shot-size glasses and wineglasses and brandy globes and beer mugs. She knew weights and measures like fingerfuls and nips. Don’t ask her to fry an egg, but step back and watch her uncork a bottle of bubbly in record time. At least Pat would show her off that way. Would whisper to whoever was new at her bar, “They say she’s Jefferey’s. Her mother’s a schizoid, she don’t bond with people, more like a wild animal than a person. So I took Alberta in to live with me when she was seven days old, had to, mother might have eaten her alive, as it was, tried to bite her head off. Never verified that she’s really Jeffery’s, but my girl can sure tend a bar.”
Alberta would sink a little deeper inside herself when she’d hear this. Sunday after Sunday she’d hear this. Instead of being at somebody’s church like other girls her age, she’d be tending bar and listening to how her mother was no better than a wild coyote, or Doberman pinscher, or yellow-eyed panther, or whatever species Pat had decided would describe Deucie that day. And Alberta didn’t even have any real friends, only the Sunday drunks who came to Pat’s, but no friends at school, nor in the neighborhood. Anyhow, she’d push away anyone who tried to make friends, knowing the attempts would be severed once their mothers found out where she lived. Happened that way with Wilma, who lived on Catherine Street when Alberta was eight. She’d ventured home with Wilma after school one day, liking Wilma’s strength, how Wilma stood up to other kids when they called her Sambo because of how dark she was. Wilma’s apartment was warm and smelled of bacon and coffee beans. Alberta had gotten comfortable on the oversize couch as she waited for Wilma to change out of her school clothes. Then Wilma’s mother came into the room. She looked like the perfect mother to Alberta in her flowered duster, brown-paper-bag curlers twisted in her bang, pretty brown face that seemed shaped for laughter. She was laughing, but when she looked at Alberta, her laugh hung unfinished in the room. She asked Alberta who was she, where did she live. Alberta answered in a whispered voice, the mark on her forehead burning the way Wilma’s mother stared at it. The mother yelled for Wilma then. “Come in here and tell me what you done brought home with you today,” she said. Wilma skipped into the living room wearing one scuffed play shoe with a run-down heel and one good black oxford.
“That’s Alberta, Ma,” she said, putting the other for-playing-in shoe to her mouth so she could unknot the shoelace with her teeth. “She’s my friend. She don’t even call me black Sambo.”
“She’s no friend of yours,” the mother said, pulling the shoe from Wilma, trying to unknot the laces with her fingers and then using her teeth to get the knot out. “She live over in that whorehouse your uncle can’t stay from ’round. She the one whose mother tried to bite her head off. Look at her forehead.” She turned to Alberta then. “I’m sorry, honey, but you got to go on back round Mole Street. I don’t need no extra mess. Got mess enough going on without letting you come ’round bringing your hard luck.”
“She not hard luck, Ma.”
“She is too. Live with a bunch of women taking down somebody else’s man. Plus, her own mother marked her. Wilma, some things not explainable yet. Get me a knife so I can cut this knot out of your shoelaces. And stop kicking your shoes off without untying them first.”
“But, Ma, she’s nice—”
“What I say, girl? No more messes ’round here.”
Alberta hadn’t even waited to hear if Wilma would continue defending her. She’d slid down from the softness of the couch and on out of the living room. She didn’t even turn around to tell Wilma good-bye, Wilma’s mother threatening to hit Wilma with the shoe if she kept giving her word for word. Alberta went on back to Pat’s cured of trying to be friends with anyone from school.
When Alberta was much older, sixteen, she did become friends with Brownie, the slick-dressing semiprofessional boxer. He would come into Pat’s suited down, pointed edge of a cotton handkerchief peeking from his jacket pocket, big straw hat under his arm if it was summer, felt number if the weather outside was cold. He’d try to make conversation with Alberta, tell her what the text was for the service that Sunday, the hymn, ask her if she knew such and such a song, and Alberta, who didn’t do much talking with the clientele anyhow, would mostly stare. Brownie was taken in by her stare, could see she was a cute girl once he got beyond the homely trappings, the layers of clothes that never even matched, the rag always tied over her hair. He would feel for Alberta as the tempo in the dining room picked up at her expense. He was affected by the way her cheeks would fill with air as if that’s where she was holding the hurt. And in the midst of the uproarious laughter that would take over the dining-room bar when Pat got going good, Brownie would lean over and whisper in Alberta’s ear something about Pat that had just occurred to him. “Like her hair, why she always got to have the worst-looking dos?” he’d ask Alberta. “I mean, look at her hair right now, pieces of it pressed, pieces of it tight, none of it smoothed down, puts you in mind of a bird’s nest, doesn’t it? Except it’s not quite as organized as a bird’s nest. You noticed any light-colored flakes on her shoulders, probably not dandruff, probably little flecks of eggshells. Probably a whole family of starlings living up there.” And when it looked like a smile was trying to push up from Alberta’s mouth that was otherwise set, almost pursed in cement, it was so unmovable, Brownie would keep it going. “Tweet, tweet, tweet,” he’d say. Alberta couldn’t hold her mouth closed and pursed like that and she’d allow a smile to break on through.
Brownie showed up at Pat’s especially early one Sunday and told Pat he’d come to take her little barmaid of a granddaughter to church. Of course Pat protested. Hell no, Alberta had to help out at the bar. But Brownie told Pat to just get someone else for the day, and Pat insisted that couldn’t nobody take Alberta’s place behind that bar. So Brownie reached into his pocket, asked Pat how much was Alberta worth for the day. He started peeling off dollar bills and even fives as Pat salivated and said Keep going, you getting there, I’ll tell you when to stop. He told Pat then to go find Alberta something decent to put on and at first Alberta didn’t know which she enjoyed more, watching Pat hop around and fuss over her to get her ready for church, or the feel of the inside of Brownie’s brand-new 1953 Chrysler.
But it was the church that she really loved about that day. She was so enthralled by everything once they left the morning humidity and stepped inside the church, and her self-consciousness about being as old as she was, sixteen, and never having been inside a church dissipated into the fan-swept air. The music, the preaching, the praying, the testifying, the beauty and the melody of all those words put together in combinations like she’d never considered, got inside her body and she cried and she laughed and was made dizzy from the words swirling around inside her. She became like a young child the way she was struck by the minutest of things, the white gloves the deacons wore when they passed out the Communion wine, the pleated sleeves of the choir’s gold and navy robes, the paper fans attached to wooden Popsicle sticks, the felt-lined collection plates, the decorum, the sense of order, even when they lost control and started dancing and shaking convulsively, it had its own rhythm. She felt such a mighty clicking together, such a falling into place that first Sunday, that she begged Brownie to take her back, please, week after week she begged him to take her back to church.
Brownie was so tickled to do it. He was older than Alberta and felt protective, and so he reached into his pants pocket Sunday morning after Sunday morning and paid Pat for giving Alberta the day off, and never asked anything of Alberta in return; just the way her face settled down, as if she was allowing all of that hurt to finally seep from the inside of her jaws, was enough pay for him.
But one Sunday evening after a couple of months of Alberta’s forays into Christian life, as she washed out the sinkful of shot glasses and Pat dried them, checking for especially stubborn red lipstick marks, Pat told Alberta that it was time for her to start carrying a little more of the weight around there.
Alberta just stood there with her arms immersed to her elbows in sudsy water, the kitchen walls recently painted the color of bile closing in on her. She knew what went on in those bedrooms on the second and third floors, and even sometimes during the card games downstairs. Knew it was only a matter of time before she’d have to paste the look of fake desire on her face the way she’d seen the other whores do, especially Penny, who would sit at the bar and talk to Alberta early evenings while she waited for her work to show. One minute Penny would be frowning, complaining about so-and-so who’d just walked in, how he grunts like a pig and sweats brown shit all over her from that cheap dye in his hair, the next minute Penny would be smiling at that same man, making her eyes go half closed, purring breathlessly about how she’d been waiting on him, what took him so long to get to her. Alberta would take it in as if she was being bred for that fake look of desire the same way she’d been bred to tend the bar.
Alberta’s breaths went shallow then as she stood at the kitchen sink and she thought she might faint or vomit. She forced herself to look at Pat instead. Pat had thin lips that stretched from one end of her face to the other. Frog mouth, Brownie would whisper to Alberta when he was trying to make her laugh. “Ribbit,” he’d say, and Alberta would indeed allow a smile to tug at her mouth. She concentrated on the movement of Pat’s mouth now, hoping that in reading her lips she might find that her ears were mistaken, that Pat wasn’t in fact asking her with that wide frog mouth of hers to start turning tricks. Though she’d seen it coming for weeks now. The first time Pat had helped her dress for church she’d told Alberta that she had a cute money-making ass. Then suddenly Pat was giving her bright red lipsticks to wear, nail polishes, cheap perfumes.
Alberta pretended that she didn’t know what Pat was asking of her. “Huh?” she asked, raising her eyebrows and trying to force a dumb blankness to take over her face.
“Come on, Alberta,” Pat said. “You can’t be that damned stupid. You must see how the men look at you even though you got the look of Orphan Annie the way you piles clothes on.”
Alberta knew that was true. She’d been hit on often enough by some of the men who’d take up seats at Pat’s dining-room bar. Knew the difference between that kind of baseness and the genuine affection that Brownie seemed to have for her.
“Now you seventeen, Alberta,” Pat went on. “And to my way of thinking, seventeen is grown, I was sure as hell a woman at seventeen. if truth be told, several of my best men clientele done asked about you, and quite frankly I can swear to you that this’ll be the easiest money in the world a woman can make ’cause once they good and drunk, you don’t even have to do nothing, just let them mount you. And believe me, nine times out often they gonna pass out before they can even get on top of you good, and trust me, they sure not in any condition to do no moving. And when they come to, you know, you give them a look like they the best you ever had, call ’em big daddy. Let ’em walk out with their dignity. All you got to really worry about is not getting caught and I can give you stuff to prevent a pregnancy. Easy money, Alberta, trust me.”
“What if I don’t want to?” Alberta asked.
Pat put down the shot glass and the dish towel and told Alberta to look at her. “As your father’s stepmother I feel it my duty to explain to you right here and now that ninety percent of life, at least any colored person’s life, is filled with doing what they don’t want to do. You don’t want to get up in the morning, you get up anyhow, you don’t wanna brush your teeth, you brush ’em, don’t feel like messing with your hair, you do it anyhow, sure as hell don’t feel like waiting on no bus to get to no job being bossed around by white people all day, what you do? You wait on that bus, you get bossed around. You don’t feel like cooking when you get in, or no man pulling on you when you finally take your tired black ass to bed. What you do? You stand over that stove and cook, feed that worthless-ass man till he’s belching or farting or both, and then you still open yourself up once y’all under the covers. That’s what you do. That’s life, Alberta. I didn’t draw it up that way, I’m just following the blueprint set before me. Now, you can leave here whenever you ready, you can take your cute yellow ass on out there and measure the ninety percent out there of what you don’t want to do against the opportunity I’m offering you. Everybody don’t get this opportunity.”
Alberta didn’t say anything. She turned back toward the sink and searched the water for more shot glasses to wash. The water was warm and felt good as it covered her hands in sudsy ripples. She tried to concentrate on what her hands were feeling, as if she needed some part of her not to be repulsed by what Pat had just said so that she could think about her options. What were her options? Father in jail, mother in the crazy house, outcast at school because of where she lived. No friends other than Brownie and a couple of the old-head drunks who’d cared for her when she was an infant and who hadn’t yet succumbed to liver disease.
“I will allow you to keep all your tips, since you damned near blood,” Pat said, her voice sounding farther and farther away to Alberta though she was talking practically in her ear. “And I will send only the best of them to you. That I will do. Plus, I’ll give you the third-floor room.”
“I don’t want Brownie to know,” Alberta said into the sink. “I think he likes me?”
Pat started laughing then. “Likes you, huh?” she said. “Don’t worry ’bout Brownie. He won’t be visiting you in that way anyhow. Can’t. Had it shot off years ago in a street fight that turned dirty. Why you think he only comes around on Sundays? You ever seen him here on a Saturday night when the place is sizzling? Won’t either. Guess he don’t want to be reminded of what he can no longer do. Don’t worry ’bout Brownie knowing. I’ll conjure up some kind of story so he won’t come looking for you no more.”
Alberta was crying now, she was crying as much for Brownie as for herself. She would miss Brownie, miss how proud he used to be escorting her to church; she’d miss church too, but she couldn’t be a prostitute Saturday night and take up space on a church pew Sunday morning. She wasn’t letting any sound out, but her shoulders were moving up and down. Pat put her arm around Alberta’s shoulders and told her that she could put together a nice little nest egg for when she was ready to go out on her own. “I promise you you’ll be able to leave here in high style when the time comes ’cause your tip money gonna add up fast. You ain’t ugly and horsey looking like these other bitches I got working here. Now what you wanna be called, can’t let ’em call you by your real name. Let’s call you C, take the end of your mother’s name. You like that?”
Alberta just shook her head and went back to her dishes. And Pat said she needed to check the stock to see what she had to buy from the State store this week, could Alberta finish drying too. Alberta shook her head again yes. She actually preferred to work alone, preferred having a lot to do. Gave her life its structure when she had a lot to do, especially if it was some rote, repetitive thing, like washing these shot glasses, and drying them, putting them away, slinging the dish towels on the line, pouring vodka or Tokay wine, glass after glass. Sweeping up the crumbs from the beer nuts, mopping down the bar. Solitary things. So she started crying harder now that her chores were about to start being tangled up with another person. Now that she was about to have to start turning tricks.
Pat was still talking, telling Alberta that if it made her feel better, nobody even had to know it was her up there. “We’ll give your room a no-lights rule. How you like that? Though I don’t know any colored man that’s gonna walk into a dark room. Let me think about it. We’ll work it out. Plus, like I said, you have my word that I’ll only be sending you the best up there. The gentlemen.”
JOE WAS ALBERTA’S first. Horn-blowing, happy-go-lucky, intense and gentle and sad, Joe was her first. Still had his horn in his hand when he walked in the room, the room softly lit at first, Alberta’s back to the door the way Pat had told her to do. Pat told Alberta just to leave the lights on long enough for them to get in the room and see what they were getting. She could let the room go black before she turned around so she’d never have to show her face. Alberta whispered out, “No lights, okay,” as she turned the lamp switch and the room went dark.
Joe told Alberta that he didn’t need lights, all he needed to know was that she had a pretty mouth. “You got a pretty mouth, baby?” he asked as he blew out a couple of notes on his horn and then laughed. “Oh you serious too, huh,” he said to her silence, which hung in the air. He propped his horn in the chair and started undressing, talking the whole while. This was the first time he’d done Philly, he said. Liked it here, people here appreciated good sounds. He was from Pittsburgh, he said, no more though. Lost everything that ever mattered to him in Pittsburgh, buried his father, his only sister, and his mother there, he said, sitting on the side of the bed now. Saw his best friend beat down to a cripple-mute. “Five years since I left. Never going back to Pittsburgh,” he said. “You got any places like that you buried? Huh? Come on, baby, talk to me now, can’t see much of your face, least let me hear your voice.”
Alberta was sitting up in the bed. She had on an emerald green robe given to her by Pat. The robe was silky and thin though she was used to flannel in bed, sometimes slept in a flannel gown over a thinner cotton duster because of her tendency to get chills. She was naked under this flimsy robe and the skin on her arms and back and legs was tightening into fine bumps. Joe was all the way in the bed now, the outline of his darkness moving in on her, still talking. “Tell me something, baby, come on, tell me something happy so I’ll feel better about my lot in this life, or even something sad so I’ll know I’m not the only one been through some tough shit.” He was feeling her mouth with his fingers as he talked. Tracing the outline of her lips. “Damn, you got a beautiful mouth,” he said. His breath was right in her face and she inhaled the mist that his voice left in the air. He was kissing her now, pushing against her lips, pulling her to him, all the way to him. His body was so thick and hot as it covered her and moved all over her. But it was too late. She yielded to her always cold self and there was nothing she could do to stop the chills. She shook convulsively and then she cried too. She cried and shook and shook and cried and Joe held her so tightly as he tried to keep his own nature at bay, his heat. He asked her what was wrong, damn, what was wrong, he was only joking when he asked her for a sad story, he said. Damn, damn, damn. And he couldn’t hold on to his nature either as he exploded into her sadness and felt the explosion all the way to his marrow. Had never felt himself explode with such intensity before.
He was quiet afterward. He breathed hard and held Alberta while she cried. Though he hadn’t cried since he was nine, he understood how necessary it was every now and then to create your own river to cross. He patted her back and declined the urge to ask her what was wrong. Life was wrong, just that simple. She was young and soft and colored, a whore. So wrong. He wrapped her up in the covers and rubbed her back until her chills went away. Until there was a one knock at the door signaling that his time was up, and he yelled at the door to just tally him up for the night. He was staying for the night.
Alberta sighed then. Felt her chest open up and she could breathe again. Joe was getting up from the bed, going toward the chair, and at first she thought he was getting dressed to go. She wanted him to go, she wanted him to stay. She didn’t want him to touch her ever again even as she did want him, wanted to feel him move all over her again. Was afraid of that feeling, the conflict, the duality of her that she couldn’t understand. She watched the naked dark outline of him lift his horn from the chair. He put his horn to his lips and started to blow. Blew out “’Round Midnight,” blew it softly at first. Then louder, until the sounds of his horn filled the room, and he might as well have been all over her again with what the sound was doing to her, the way it moved through her and settled inside and nestled there, sound embedded.
Joe would have continued playing except that there were knocks coming from the floor below and even cursing in the hall telling him to shut up with the gotdamn horn, take it to the Apollo or the Show Boat but get it the hell outta there. He started laughing then. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness and he could see Alberta just a little. At least her lips that were painted bright red and so pouty and perfectly formed. So he put his horn down and let the sight of her mouth draw him back again.
ALBERTA LOOKED FORWARD to Joe. With the other men she tried to grow a second self. A hardened, impenetrable self. Tried to go blank with the others, hollow and unfillable. Rote. She’d say “hut, two-three-four” in her mind as if she were a soldier on her way to die and the concentration in counting off each step kept her from focusing on the battle that would end when she’d meet the enemy face-to-face and take a bayonet to the stomach. Felt plunged into that way every time one of the others exploded inside her. But she was who she really was with Joe. She was shy and insecure and wanting to be held. She chilled easily. She was sad and lonely. She’d cry with Joe and he’d play his horn and comfort her. She really moved with Joe. Really moved, really felt.
They went on like that for two years. Joe walked into that dimly lit room once or twice a month, as often as he could get to Philly from wherever he was on the road, Alberta turning the lights off before he could really see her face. When there was talking it was mostly Joe. Alberta whispered rather than talked. Joe was loud though. His voice filled the room and Alberta cuddled up to the sound of it as he’d tell her about the clubs he’d played, who he’d played with, what songs, what the people in the audience had shouted. He mixed in stories about his growing up in Pittsburgh, described for her the size of the bullet hole that had gone through his father’s head. Then he’d switch to something light, something funny that he could laugh about, he’d have Alberta laughing too. One night he told Alberta how some woman got saved during his solo at a club in Norfolk. “She started shouting and doing a holy dance right up on the little circle of a stage. People were laughing at first, then they were cussing and yelling at her that she wasn’t in no damn church, get the hell off the stage.” Joe laughed as he told the story. Then he found Alberta’s mouth through the darkness and traced it with his fingers and whispered that he wanted to save her. Would that be possible? “Me and my music, baby, could we stand a chance with you?”
Alberta often laughed on the nights with Joe. But when he said that, she more than laughed. She giggled like a love-struck adolescent. Felt a giddiness that started in her toes, that started all the way to the day she was born; born not to a crazy mother who’d sunk her teeth in the middle of her forehead and marred her for life; born instead to the type of people she’d hear the drunks talk about: a mother who taught school and a father who was a doctor who kept his practice in a poor neighborhood and treated most of the people for free so that the people loved her and her parents and gushed when she walked down the street. The giddiness spread through her as she stared at the three unlit bulbs protruding from the ceiling and Joe nibbled at her ear, felt the giddiness in her chest and she was seventeen, but not like she’d been seventeen standing at the kitchen sink with Pat telling her she had to be a whore; she was seventeen sitting on the back porch of her parents’ summer home in places that she heard about as she tended bar, places like Ocean City. She’d just left church and her hands were still in her white lacy gloves as she sat on the two-seated wooden swing next to the fine boy from the Sunday school class. His hands were dark and strong and warm like Joe’s hands as he peeled her gloves and put her small hand to his lips and kissed her hand, then asked, “Can I stand a chance with you?” The giddiness was filling her up, all the way to her head, as Joe moved from nibbling her ears down to her neck. Usually by the time he started working his mouth the way he was now Alberta would be moaning, not giggling, but she was giggling now, uncontrollably. Her body was a spasm of the girlish sounds denied her throughout her life. Joe was grooving on the sounds, she could tell by the way he was moving, laughing now himself, asking her, What? Was she suddenly ticklish, had he hit her funny bone, tell him so he’d have the secret to know what to do to make her giggle like that. But right then the door burst open and frog-mouthed Pat was shouting that Joe’s buddy had been stabbed in the ass, get him out of here right now or they would never be let back in Pat’s Place again. Alberta had held Joe then, she’d never held him before to try to make him stay. “Let him die,” she whispered in Joe’s ear. “Don’t leave me, please.”
Joe said that he would be back. Had he never not been back? he asked. He kissed her then softly, as if she was his bride and he was on his way back to work after the honeymoon. He got a gnawing in his stomach then. A burst of reason as he sat up in the bed. How could she be his bride, she’d probably been with more men than he had women; he’d been with a lot of women given the lifestyle of a musician on the road. This was wrong, her asking him to stay. She was breaking the rules, he was a john, that’s all. Then he did something he’d never done before, out of respect for her he’d never done it, but something about her desperation when she asked him to stay made him do it. He clicked on the light. She gasped when he did that and her hands went to her face to cover it, her face severely made up with lipsticks and rouges and mascaras, shadows and pencils that perverted her eyes. Though he did see her eyes. They were soft-brown beautiful eyes. He drew in a hard breath, said shit. Then got up and had to leave because he knew when he’d looked at her eyes, the desperation and longing and sadness in her eyes, that he’d fallen in love. Said shit again about having to spend a Friday night in an emergency room with a colored man who’d taken a knife to the ass. They’d treat a white man with a splinter in his finger first. Said shit a third time because it would never be the same again with her. Her asking him to stay had changed it; him glimpsing her under the light had too. In the dark she was a dream, a bit of a goddess who wasn’t completely real, who’d cry over the big things: the condition of humanity, the plight of the colored man, the untouchable, inescapable sadness that came with being alive, which he understood, which he thought she had too. But now she’d pinned down her sadness and made it too specific, made it about her needing him. So he said shit three times and left, promising her that he’d be back before the sun was up good, knowing that he was lying, had no plans to come back. Felt no guilt over it either. Felt hardened in that instant, as if he’d grown a crusty shell where his skin had been.