ALBERTA WAS SITTING on her back steps. The sounds of the party preparations out front filtered into her yard and she could even hear through the opened window the electric mixer going in Louise’s kitchen. She didn’t usually sit out here this early in the day. Usually sat out here in the evening around the time the Corner Boys sang. But she was reversing herself today. Had been reversing herself the past few days. Had gone on the third floor of Lit Brothers yesterday instead of the basement where she usually shopped. Bought a two-piece night set that came to the knee, pink and white with a wide pink satin ribbon instead of the one-color, to-the-floor flannel she usually bought for sleeping. Allowed herself a piece of jewelry hidden under her high-collar dress though self-adornment was against the dictates of her church. Had even reversed herself and told Neet that if she didn’t feel up to it, she could take the day off from church though Neet had declined the gesture and left for church first thing this morning. Alberta had been reversing herself for several days, now that she thought about it, ever since she’d allowed Joe to take up space in her living room and bring up Brownie’s name.
She heard a scratching sound coming from Louise’s yard and she got up and walked to the Cyclone fence. She was barefoot and the dirt yard was cool and hard under her feet. She made a whispery sound, her attempt at whistling, thinking that maybe the cat was back. She hadn’t seen the cat in several days now and she missed the way he’d come and rub against her legs evenings when she sat out here and tried to make peace for the wrong she’d done. She didn’t see the cat though, and went back and took a seat on the steps thinking how she really needed the cat’s soft purring now because she hadn’t been able to get Brownie from her mind since Joe had mentioned him. Though thoughts of Brownie drifted into her mind often enough, it was usually something having to do with Neet as a little girl that made her smile inside: the way he’d let Neet dance on his feet, or swing Neet from his arm and have her squealing, or come in every other night with a special treat for Neet hidden in his hands, behind his back. But now she was thinking about how she’d run Brownie off after all he’d done for her. He’d made her respectable after all, married her though she was pregnant. He’d given the child who wasn’t his a name and treated her better than if she’d been his. And yet Alberta had forced him out after she’d taken up with her church, told him that if he couldn’t join in with her, he couldn’t be with her. He’d told her he was a straight-up Baptist, no way could he go to the extreme measures they advocated with their dress and their having to sever ties with everyone not part of that church body, the denying themselves of the simple pleasures of life. Alberta had said that that’s who she was now, and if he couldn’t be that too, he had to go. And just like that, he’d left.
Though Alberta had not planned on things turning out that way. After Pat was stabbed and spent twenty-eight days in the hospital and then fled the area for Chicago, Alberta changed the tenor of Pat’s Place from a whorehouse to a speakeasy. As much as Alberta hated Deucie for being crazy, for the shame she’d felt being born to a woman who’d bite her newborn’s forehead, she’d often thought how she had Deucie to thank for half killing Pat. That ice pick to Pat’s chest ended Alberta’s nights of being shoved and rammed, handled over and over by greedy, insistent men.
Pat’s other girls took what wasn’t nailed down and left, though Alberta was the only one privy to the whereabouts of Pat’s cash box, which included the deed to the house, paid for in full. She added to what cash had accumulated there in the box by selling liquor on Friday and Saturday nights to the regular faithful drunks. She brought in more than enough to keep the utilities paid and otherwise maintain her modest lifestyle, plus she rented out the rooms on the second floor and was able to significantly pad the cash box so that she could quit this life altogether once she’d discovered she was pregnant. Didn’t know how she’d gotten caught, was careful with all the jellies and foams Pat had given her but figured Pat had probably watered those down like she did everything else. Didn’t know who the father was though she had her hopes that it was Joe. She went into a depression during the early weeks. Cried and vomited and slept and waited for Joe to show up again, sinking deeper inside herself each day that he did not. Were it not for Pops, who owned the convenience store on the corner and who stepped in and tended the bar, she probably would have closed the speakeasy. She came back to herself a little at a time. Started pouring liquor again, listening to the details of the lives of the drunks again, noting as she did who was in town playing at the Showboat or the Bijou Cafe or some neighborhood bar. Summoned all of her energy one cold Saturday morning when the sky was gray and fat with the threat of snow. She went to Eighth and Market and put a baby crib on layaway and registered with a diaper service. She splurged then on a two-piece wool suit with a foxtail collar that hung along the shoulders like a cape. She stopped in a beauty parlor that did walk-ins and the cosmetologists fought over who would do her since her hair was soft and long and a beautiful brown shade with the slightest hint of red. When she went to visit Pops after getting her hair done, he’d let go with a long whistle. Ran and snapped a few Polaroids and inscribed one on the back and gave it to Alberta because he said he’d never known she could look so good. She asked him to tend the bar for her tonight because she was stepping out, he could take his usual cut. He said as good as she looked, he’d tend her bar for free.
She went home and took a long, hot bath and lotioned herself down with a sweet, thick cream, another splurge of the day. She unrolled black stockings up her legs and put on the suit that was tight through the hips though luckily the baby hadn’t really started to show. She colored her lips in with red and dabbed the same under her cheekbones to blush them. Just a touch of glittering shadow for her lids, no whore’s makeup tonight, tonight she was going out as a lady. She ordered a cab for nine and got to the club right as he was beginning his set. She took a seat in the back and tried not to cry as Joe played “Sentimental Mood.”
The notes he blew went all through her, just like they had the first night they’d been together and he’d tried to comfort her when she’d cried and gone into chills. She was getting filled up and flushed as she listened to him play, the notes settling deeper inside her, filling places that she hadn’t known were empty. Sound into fingers touching the bruised spots, so many bruises, so many men, the feel of them erased right now by what Joe was doing with his horn.
He closed his eyes as he played and she did too, imagined that they were together in the same dark place, the way they’d been, without the benefit of light so that their other senses predominated, making him more familiar to her than if she’d studied him in the light. Though she had studied the look of him too, peeped at him when he played cards at Pat’s, watched him from her window when he left and the sight of him was caught in the headlights of a passing car. So she knew his look too in ways that he didn’t know hers. Not yet, she thought, as he came to the end of his song and bowed and then beamed as he looked around the club and his eyes fell on her. He nodded at her, let a barely perceptible smile tease the corner of his dark lips. She lowered her eyes, acknowledging his, and when she looked up again his eyes had moved on. She realized then that he hadn’t recognized her. She sipped her ginger ale as she felt other eyes on her now coming from the front of the club. A dark-eyed woman with thick, black hair staring at her; Alberta had felt the woman’s severe eyes looking her up and down when she’d first walked in. She wondered now what the woman had seen on her face as she closed her eyes and listened to Joe play. Wondered if she’d seen the desire, the desperation for Joe. Alberta sat up straighter and adjusted her foxtail collar lower on her shoulders, she’d dusted her shoulders with powder to give them just a hint of glitter. The band was on a break and milling around over by the bar.
She pulled her stomach in and stood, though at that moment she felt the baby move. First time she’d felt the baby move. She sat back down so she could pat her stomach, thinking that maybe the waistband on the skirt was too tight, maybe she should undo it so the baby could stretch out some. That’s when she saw the dark-haired woman with the witch’s eyes walk toward Joe as he sipped a drink at the bar. He was surrounded by three or four admirers, but he excused himself to open a path for her as she walked toward him. Alberta felt as if she was watching a collision about to happen, wanted to holler out No! No! as Joe opened his arms for the woman and took her face in his hands and kissed her, a long kiss. Alberta felt the kiss as a jolt, as if she’d just put her wet fingers to fraying live wires. The jolt moved through her and she shook sitting there even as she felt the flutters the baby was stirring up.
The electric mixer in Louise’s kitchen was going full blast now. Louise had always had the conveniences, the soft touches of life. Such a lady Louise was, Alberta was thinking now as she moved down to the bottom step so that she could push her bare feet into the hard, cool, dirt floor of her yard. Of course Joe would end up with a lady, not the likes of her, who he didn’t even recognize sitting up. An ass-on-the-bed bitch was all she’d been to Joe. Better that he hadn’t recognized her so she didn’t have to be reminded of what she truly was.
She’d stumbled out of the club. It was snowing and the whitened streets shocked the night, purified it. Alberta undid the hook on the back of the skirt so the baby could breathe. She cried then. She cried and vomited and stumbled in the high heels she was so unaccustomed to walking in. She had the appearance of a drunk with all the vomiting and staggering, her skirt hanging crookedly below her coat. If it weren’t for the baby, she thought, she would have taken the men up on their offers as she walked, the snow not stopping the serious clubgoers or men on the prowl. Would have found an alley and taken them one after the other, allowed them to moan inside her and deposit their droppings like so much bird shit. That’s all she was, she thought, even as the baby kicked up a storm as if in disagreement, forcing Alberta to vomit, to spit it up, spit it out, get rid of that debased image of herself.
She made it all the way to Christian Street and then she did end up in an alley. The alley was warm and close, a covered breezeway, actually, that ran along the side of a beautiful brick building. A church. Brownie’s church. The church where he’d so proudly escorted Alberta Sunday after Sunday when her innocence was intact. How taken care of she’d felt sitting next to Brownie, the hymns sung with a beat that made her chest expand and she could really breathe, she’d felt so alive when she’d gone to that church.
The sun was moving to almost directly over her back steps. She dug her toes deeper into the dirt that was softer below the surface, moist. The mixer in Louise’s kitchen was silent now and she could smell the butter and sugar coming together in the oven over there. It was a miracle she hadn’t lost toes to frostbite that night, sleeping, or passing out, in that alley, still not sure which. When she came to, the sun was rising and the air felt fresh and new. The aroma of yeast rolls baking came to her in waves and warmed her on the inside. She slipped into the church through the side door and tiptoed past the women cooking in the kitchen. She went into the bathroom and cleaned herself up, then stood by the front entrance until she saw him, suited down like a proper man just like she’d known he’d be. Brownie. The only man outside Pops who knew her for who she was—shy, soft Alberta—because he wasn’t privy to how she’d once earned her keep. Her Brownie became her Brownie anyhow after she cried in his arms, told him a concocted story of having been jilted by a sailor who’d gotten her pregnant. She wanted a real life for the baby, she said. She wanted to close the bar before the baby was born, move to somewhere else, she wanted respectability, couldn’t have that as a woman without being attached to a man.
“Awl, Brownie,” she said out loud as she watched a worm emerge through the holes in the dirt her toes were making. He’d been a prince the way he’d acquiesced to her every desire. After she’d quizzed Pops the day she’d closed the blinds in Joe’s face when he’d appeared from out of nowhere asking for C, and Pops told her what he could remember of their conversation, “something ’bout getting married and buying a house somewhere in West Philly, Cecil Street, or somewhere,” Pops had said. Alberta told Brownie she wanted to move to West Philly, heard there were nice houses for sale on Cecil Street. Convinced Brownie that they could rent his house out—though he loved it downtown, insisted that he didn’t want to move from downtown. But he yielded to Alberta on that. Shortly after Neet was born, Brownie told Alberta he’d found the perfect house on a tree-lined street. Cecil Street.
She’d never expected the house to be right next door to Joe and Louise. Almost told Brownie they should move back downtown, especially when she’d be caught on the porch with Louise and she’d remember how much she’d hated her that night when she’d watched Joe kiss her so tenderly. Joe, typical man, was completely oblivious to who she was, not an inkling about who she was. Except for one night when he played his horn on the porch, played “’Round Midnight” with all the passion he’d had when he’d played for Alberta in that third-floor room of Pat’s Place, and his playing moved through her on the porch just as it had back then. When he walked back up his Cecil Street steps that night leaking sweat and looking like a little boy who’d just done some wonderful thing, she’d turned to him from her darkened porch and said, “Nice, Joe. That was real nice.” She used her whispery C voice and she could tell he was trying to figure out how he knew that voice. When he looked at her in the dark, she thought he was close to knowing who she was. But then Louise called him in a sharp, biting voice. And Joe never played his horn again.
The sun was in Alberta’s eyes now, telling her that it was past noon. She’d thought she’d take the bus to Jersey and make a few dollars picking strawberries today. Not that she actually needed the money since she still collected rent from Pat’s house downtown, and she and Brownie had paid for this house with cash. But she did need the torture of that hard work, the sun burning her skin, the stooping and standing, needed to feel whipped, punished, at the end of the day, absolved. Needed her church for that reason too, the severity of it. Though she’d loved Brownie’s church, loved the promises of salvation that poured from the pulpit, the purity of the energy that would fill up the place when the Spirit hit, the goodwill that flowed from arm to arm when they greeted her with hugs, the warmth in the “God bless” they said to her over and over again; though she loved it, could have wrapped herself up in the perfect affection the church showered on her, she didn’t trust it. Trusted only what she knew: that if the truth of who she was came out, that church would do like Joe and refuse to recognize her. They’d pass her by and withhold their affection, give it to a less-stained, less-handled, more respectable version of a child of God.
But her church, the one she put Brownie down in favor of, understood her need to be punished. Even the Bible they studied used only verse that shouted out the unworthiness of mankind. She needed that. Needed to be reminded that she was unworthy, always would be. Needed to know that the best she could hope for was that the next life would be brighter; the only way to know that brightness was by denying herself in this life. Needed to deny herself. Needed to suffer. But she hadn’t suffered picking strawberries today. Hadn’t gone to church today either. Worried now about the fact that Neet had. Neet still weak from her surgery; her forehead had even been slightly warm this morning. She thought she might go to church in a bit and bring Neet home. Just because she needed a religion that bludgeoned her daily didn’t mean that Neet did too. She shocked herself now giving life to such a thought. Another reversal, she thought, and she got a woozy feeling, as if she was on a train that had suddenly changed direction, moving backward now instead of forward.
She heard movement in the yard next door. Heard Louise out there calling for the cat, sounded as if she was crying as she called for the cat. She got up from her steps then and walked to the fence, told Louise that she truly hoped the cat turned up. “I love him too,” she said to the shock in Louise’s eyes. She didn’t wait for Louise to answer, walked back up her steps and into her house wondering what else she would do today that would reverse the idea of who she was.