10
BECAUSE Venita was childless she thought she could make herself invisible. She cloaked herself in her sorrow, in her emptiness. Thinking herself unseen, she walked through All-Bright Court watching the children openly. She and Moses had been trying to have a child since they were married, three years.
At first she thought she might just be stupid, that she simply did not know what she was doing. She did not know how to call a baby, so none would come. As a girl she had been stupid about babies. Up until she was thirteen Venita thought babies came from cabbage patches.
Even though her parents grew cabbages in their garden and she never saw a baby there, she continued believing that was where they came from. She looked under the tender leaves of the young plants and between the waxy leaves of the older ones. When she was seven she pulled up an entire row of young plants, one after another she pulled them from the loamy soil, liking the sound when she pulled them, the soft ripping as the roots let go of the earth. Secrets were here. Each time she pulled up a plant she looked to see if a baby was there, a tiny head or maybe a tiny hand or foot buried in the warm soil. Her mother did not see her until she had pulled up the whole row, and then her mother ran screaming from the house. Venita did not connect the screaming with herself and what she was doing. She jumped up to see what was wrong, and when her mother got to her, she knocked her to the ground. “Girl, you done lost your mind?”
Venita was going to answer, but her mother had smacked the air out of her. Her breath flew out of her mouth like a bird. It flew from the garden while she lay on the ground, trying to weather the storm of her mother’s fury.
When Venita was thirteen she had the chance to find out where babies came from. She was asked to stay home when the time came for her mother to have a baby. The other times, she and the other children had been sent to their Aunt Hattie’s or Aunt Thelma’s. Her mother’s sister Hattie came, and so did a midwife. They had her father take the kitchen table into her parents’ bedroom. From dawn until well into the night the women walked calmly through the house, in and out of the bedroom. Drinking coffee, eating spoon bread and butter beans. Her father was out on the porch, and a group of his friends had gathered. They sat drinking and smoking and playing dominoes. They played even in the darkness, by the light of a kerosene lamp. Sometimes moans came from the bedroom, but her mother did not yell out. Venita was either ignored or in the way. Feeling no sense of purpose, she wandered out into the garden.
It was late, and the ground was frozen. A blue and cold dampness was in the air. The air clung to her, made her breath appear before her, a series of diminutive clouds drifting off into the night. Venita felt like crying. She was cold and scared, wearing one of her father’s old sweaters. And not only that, there were no cabbages. Where was a baby going to come from? How could a baby push through the petrified earth even if there were a cabbage? She did not even hear her aunt calling her at first.
“Venita. Ve-ni-ta. Come here, you silly gal.”
She ran into the house and her aunt told her to bring her mother some water. Hattie met her at the bedroom door. Venita could not see much beyond her in the dim light of the bedroom, but she could see her mother was unconscious and sweating on the table. Venita thought she was dead, but then she saw her mother stir, and heard her moan. She noticed the blood, hiding in the folds of sheets. Venita was frozen there. Her feet were cold. She wanted to watch but was grateful when Hattie pushed her aside and shut the door. She wandered out to the porch and sat with the men.
They were drinking some peach wine her mother had put up. Her father gave her a splash in a tin cup. It was hot and sweet.
“Is your mama fenna have the baby?” her father asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What your aunt-nem doing in there?”
“I don’t know.”
“What you mean, you don’t know? What you was doing in there?”
Venita began crying, puffing out enough clouds to fill a stormy sky. Her father calmed her down, filled her cup with wine. “Huh,” he said. It was an apology.
She cried softly and drank the wine. Her father went back to his game, slamming dominoes down on the plank porch. Venita did not notice her hands were numb.
Morning was coming. A grayness was pushing its way into the sky when a cry came from the house. It woke Venita where she had fallen asleep on the porch. She went inside to find her father in the kitchen. The women made him wait before they would let him in to see the baby.
Venita went in with him. It was a boy, and there he was with her mother. They were in the bed. Her mother was asleep, her hair gone back and drawn up tightly on her head. The midwife handed her father a sack and told him to take it out back and bury it.
Venita thought he was taking it to the garden, and she headed in that direction.
“Where you going?” her father asked. “Come on.”
He led her to the back corner of the yard and beat at the earth with a spade. It broke in big chunks, yielding a small, shallow hole.
“It probably ain’t deep enough,” he said. He placed the sack in the ground and pressed the clods back into the hole.
“What’s in the croaker sack?” Venita asked.
“The afterbirth. Let’s go.”
Venita did not ask for any more of an explanation. She went inside and up to bed. As she was falling to sleep, she thought that this was what it must feel like to be old. Stiff and tired, wanting nothing but rest and feeling like all that came before was a confusing dream.
No, it was not because she was stupid that she had no children. Venita figured even stupid women could have children—plenty had. If she wasn’t stupid, maybe she was just unblessed. Unblessed wasn’t the same as cursed. It was not that she had offended God.
There was a lady back home who had. She would wander through town mumbling, her hair matted like a sheep’s coat, her clothes tattered, carrying a dirty rubber doll wrapped in a threadbare diaper. Venita’s mother told her about the woman.
“That woman cursed. When her was a girl no bigger than you, her family-nem had a cat that had kittens. They needed that cat to keep mice out the house, but they ain’t need no litter of kittens to feed. Her family-nem couldn’t afford it. So the mama tied them up in a sack and told her to take it down to the creek and throw it in. There ain’t no sin in that, ’cause the Lord understand. He know how much you can bear. He would lift they soul up right out the water. Pluck they soul out.
“But that girl was a regular hardhead, had a head like a regular rock. She thought her mama was being mean, so her took it in her head to be mean too. Before her got to the creek her threw the sack in a trash can that was on fire.
“Them cats was screaming and yelling to get out the bag. Now, her family-nem didn’t find out ’bout it then. But when her grew up it all come out. Ain’t nothing you can’t do in the dark that don’t come out in the light. When her grew up and took a husband, her ain’t had no one baby. Her had a whole litter, five or six, all born at the same time. All born live, too, and crying just like them kittens. Every last one died. Her told her family-nem. Her was raving. All ’bout kittens and a fire. They say her was in shock, you know. Her ain’t never come out it.
“The Lord dried her womb up, turned her womb into a barren field. That’s the way of the Lord.”
Venita had never done anything that would cause God to curse her. But how could the women in All-Bright Court know that? All they could know was her emptiness. So she tried to hide from them in broad daylight, to make herself invisible while she was hanging clothes, shopping, sitting on the porch. She longed to know one of the women.
Venita was not invisible. Mary Kate had seen her, so boldfaced, looking at her, at her children. Mary Kate knew she looked at the children because she was empty, but Mary Kate did not know Venita looked at her because she was lonely. Mary Kate had never taken out time to consider that possibility. In the nearly four years since Venita moved in, she had never said more than “hey” to Venita.
Four years had filled up quickly. Four years of diapers and sheets and work clothes strung on lines. Up until ’65 she had a wringer washer. She had four years of sprinkling, starching, ironing. Four years of grits, redeye gravy, beaten biscuits, fried porgies, fried chicken, fried tomatoes, fried corn, fried pork chops, smothered pork chops, field peas, black-eyed peas, corn bread. Four years of scrubbing the floors, the children, the walls, the dishes, the toilet, the tub. Four years of making love, rocking babies, changing diapers. And not just these four years, but the six years of her married life had been spent taking care of everyone else, of everything else. She had never had the time to contemplate her own loneliness, or anyone else’s. And if you had asked her, she would have thought she had said more than “hey” to Venita. She would have thought she knew her. She had never taken out the time to notice that whenever she spoke to Venita, Venita looked shocked.
It was Samuel who challenged what she knew. He challenged who she thought she was, and she took his challenge as a threat.
It was another dismal Saturday in the dead of winter, and the weather had been so bad that Samuel had not seen the sun in more than a month. He and Mary Kate and the children were watching television, and he was already in a bad mood because Mary Kate wanted to see Mission: Impossible instead of Get Smart. Mission: Impossible had a black person in it. Samuel had told her, “I don’t want to see no Negro sweat for a hour. That’s all they let him do. He always be crawling under stuff, fixing it. He ain’t nothing but a handyman.” Mary Kate didn’t say anything. She was holding the baby Mary. But he put his foot down when she wanted to watch The Hollywood Palace because Sammy Davis Jr. was going to be on.
“He not no Tom,” she said.
“He is. What he going be doing? Bowing and scraping and shining shoes. A big smile and tap dancing like a black monkey on a string. That’s what he going be doing.”
“He help Dr. King, you know that, working for our rights. You just jealous. He making big money.”
“I’m not jealous. I think he putting on a act. He don’t care nothing ’bout Negroes, marrying that white woman. I see Negroes like him every day, breaking into a goddamn buck-and-wing every time a white man come by. I can’t stand to see a Negro act like that. You want to see our son grow up and be like that?”
“Me?” Mikey asked.
“Yeah, you. What other son I got? Don’t you grow up and be no white man’s nigger, hear me?”
“Samuel, stop talking like that.”
“Like what? You need to get out in the world. All you do is set in the house and keep to yourself.”
“You think all I do is set here all day? Who you think look after your kids, clean the house, wash—”
“That ain’t what I’m saying. I know you do all that, but you don’t know nobody. You ain’t got one girlfriend. Tell me that you do,” Samuel said.
“How many friends you got? Who you bring ’round here?”
“Most of them rumheads I know I wouldn’t bring ’round you and the kids. You know I go out, play some cards, go to the diner sometime, to the hall. You don’t do nothing.”
“I be tired. Don’t you think I be tired?” Mary Kate asked.
“I ain’t saying you not tired. I’m saying I’m starting to think you hankty.”
“You going sit there and call me stuck-up in front my kids?” She felt fire in her throat and jumped from her chair. She had been holding Mary on her lap. The baby rolled onto the floor and started crying. The baby’s fear spread to the other children and they began yelling.
Mary Kate circled Samuel’s chair. “Hankty, hankty, hankty,” she said over and over, her voice getting higher and higher each time she said the word. She came to a stop in front of his chair. Samuel was scared. It was like he poured water on a wildcat. She looked as if she were going to scratch him to death.
“The baby,” he said. “Look at the baby.”
She did not look.
“It ain’t me that said it. I just heard it said.”
“Who said it?” she pressed.
“You know how Negroes talk.”
“Who said it?” she asked.
“I don’t know. You know Negroes always talking, always got to have something to say. That’s our problem. We talk too much.”
“I don’t know ’bout ‘we.’ You don’t know when to shut up,” Mary Kate said.
“I’m shutting up right ’bout now,” Samuel said.
“Well, you should,” she said. She picked the baby up from the floor. Samuel grabbed Mary Kate and pulled her onto his lap.
“Don’t you be trying to make up to me.” She began patting the baby gently on the back. “And what ya’ll was screaming for?” she said to Mikey and Dorene. “Ya’ll little pitchers got big ears.”
“What that mean?” Mikey asked.
“That mean don’t be minding grown folks’ business. Hollering like ya’ll crazy.”
“Let’s put the kids to bed now,” Samuel whispered.
Mary Kate got up from his lap. “What you going to go and ask a hankty woman that for?”
“Come on, baby. Let it die.”
“So, now I’m your baby?”
“Yeah. You know that,” Samuel said.
“Samuel, do you really think I’m hankty?” she asked. She was serious.
Samuel looked at her. “Naw. I told you I never said it. I say you keep to yourself too much. I’m a stand by that. You can be mad at me if you want to. It’s the truth. You need to get out, make you some girlfriends for your own good.”
“I’m not mad,” Mary Kate said. “Dorene and Mikey, ya’ll go on upstairs.”
“What about the baby?” Mikey asked.
“Don’t worry ’bout her. You do what your mama say,” Samuel said.
Mary Kate went and sat back down on Samuel’s lap. “You know,” she said to Samuel, “putting the kids to bed and going upstairs with you is how I stay in trouble.”
“It ain’t trouble. I’m your husband. We going to have a boy this time. I can feel it. You carrying a boy.”
In the last few days of winter, when warmth was beginning to push its way up through the earth, Mary Kate took on Samuel’s challenge. She had stopped in the Red Store with Dorene and Mary, and Venita was at the counter. Mr. Jablonski was weighing a piece of salt pork for her. At first, she walked past Venita like she did not see her, leaving Venita to feel secure in her guise of invisibility.
Venita was staring at Dorene. Dorene had taken off the woolen scarf that covered her head. Her hair was greased and parted into a series of interconnected braids that ran off the back of her head. To Venita, her hair looked like a newly planted spring field.
Mary Kate saw Venita staring at Dorene, and said, “That pork any good?”
Venita started. She was being summoned from her hiding place.
“Of course the pork is good. You know my meat is always good,” Mr. Jablonski said.
“I was talking to her,” Mary Kate said, nodding her head toward Venita. “I figure she know more ’bout salt meat than you.”
Venita heard herself say, “It’s awful fat.”
“What do you expect?” Mr. Jablonski said. “It’s pork we’re talking here.”
“My husband like it fat,” Mary Kate said, ignoring him. “How your husband like it?”
“He like it fat. He partial to fatback, but there ain’t none today.”
“Tuesday,” Mr. Jablonski said. “I’ll have some in on Tuesday, and I’ll have some tripe and pigs’ feet.”
Mary Kate left the girls at the counter and went to the back of the store. Venita looked at them. “How ya’ll?” she asked. They both stared at her. Mary could not talk, and Dorene was too shy to speak. Their silence made Venita momentarily disappear.
“You heard the woman speak, Dorene. You speak when grown folks speak to you,” Mary Kate said, returning to the counter. She had two boxes of starch.
“‘Hello’ what?” Mary Kate prompted.
“Hello, ma’am.”
“You know how it be with kids,” Mary Kate said. “You got to learn ’em while they young.”
Venita was silent.
Both of the women signed Mr. Jablonski’s green ledger. Before they left the store, Mary Kate tied the scarf on Dorene’s head.
“Your name Ventrice, right?”
“My name Venita.”
“My name Mary Kate, Mary Kate Taylor. My girls’ names Dorene and Mary.”
Venita walked along beside Mary Kate and the girls, feeling giddy. It was like being found at hide and seek, lurking in the dark behind a bush. It was as if you had dissolved into the bush, folded yourself into leaves, stretched yourself into branches, and now that you were found, were turning yourself human again, warm and water-laden and briny. Running, laughing through the shadows, dodging your pursuer, racing for the safety of home. But as Venita walked, as she, Mary Kate, and the girls crossed the field, she realized she did not want to go home. She was glad they were walking slowly. Mary Kate could not walk quickly. She was carrying the baby low.
They came to Mary Kate’s row first, and Venita hesitated. Mary Kate could see her reticence. “I got to be getting home. My boy coming home for lunch, and I got to get dinner started.”
“Me too,” Venita said. “I mean, cooking for my husband. He on days now.” She stood facing Mary Kate and began backing away.
“Come ’round sometime, hear? I be having some time to visit after lunch.”
Venita did not answer. She broke into a run.
Mary Kate was going to tell Samuel about her, about the way people could be. See, she wanted to say, people crazy. You go all out your way, and they run off like something after them. I’m not going be putting myself out. People can call me what they want to.
It was a good thing she did not say anything, because Venita did visit. It was nearly two weeks later. While Mary Kate was out in the back yard hanging up clothes, Venita came around the corner carrying a brown paper bag. She was turning to go back home when Mary Kate saw her.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” Venita said. “I was going to stop by, but I see you busy.”
“I’m not busy. This my last load, come on.”
The girls were asleep, and Venita and Mary Kate sat in the living room. Venita had brought over a pound cake, a small golden loaf, which she offered to Mary Kate.
“This just the thing for my sweet tooth. It seem like when you carrying, you be having a taste for all kind of things.”
Mary Kate ate four slices of cake. She ate on the move, checking pots on the stove, looking in on the girls, folding clothes. All the while she moved with a slow and gentle grace.
To Venita it seemed the baby was not a visitor to her body but a natural part of it. “You never get tired, do you?”
“I be tired all the time,” Mary Kate said. “Don’t pay no mind to me.”
“You never sit down,” Venita said. “Excuse me for saying that. It probably ain’t my place. I ain’t mean nothing by it.”
“Yes, you did,” Mary Kate said, and she laughed. “You sound like my doctor. He want me to set down and take it easy. But if I don’t do, who going to do?”
“That’s what I say, talking ’bout take it easy. That’s what my doctor say, like he know. When my husband come home from work, he want to eat. He need clean clothes to wear. You know how dirty them work clothes be. My baby need clean diapers. I got to send my boy off to school. Tell me, who going to do?”
“Nobody,” Venita said.
“That’s what I say.”
At dinner that night Mary Kate brought up the visit. “I had me a visitor this afternoon,” she teased.
“I know. I saw him tripping out the back door when I came in,” Samuel said.
“Samuel!”
“Who?” Mikey asked. “Who was here?”
“It was Miz Reed—and you mind your own business, boy. Samuel, why you stirring stink?” Her voice was rising.
“I’m not stirring stink. I’m happy to hear you had company.”
“You know her husband?”
“Humph.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? You know him?”
“Yeah, I know Moses. He a T-o-m,” Samuel said.
“That spell Tom,” Mikey said.
Mary Kate swatted at him from across the table. “How many times I got to tell you to not be minding grown folks’ business.”
“I don’t know her,” Samuel said. “But I know she barren.”
“How you know?” Mary Kate asked.
“I just know. You know how Negroes talk.”
Venita would come by on Monday and Wednesday afternoons and, sitting surrounded by piles of clean clothes, help Mary Kate eat her way through the end of her last trimester. They ate pound cake, bread pudding, jelly cake, rice pudding, anything that was sweet and homemade. Venita turned out dessert after dessert. She gained weight. Being there with Mary Kate made her feel pregnant. Her face filled in and her stomach rounded out.
Mary Kate would top off each dessert with a handful of starch. If the girls were up, they would beg for some.
“I eat so much of this stuff that it constipate me,” Mary Kate told Venita one afternoon.
“Why you eat it, then?” Venita asked.
“There really ain’t no why. I just crave it. You know how it is when you expecting. You be—” Mary Kate stopped talking and filled her mouth with starch. “When women expecting, they crave all sorts of things. Glodene—”
“Who Glodene?”
“She Isaac mama, that crazy boy mama. Heard say Glodene got to craving for some dirt so bad one time she dug outside her back door and tried to eat some of that. She wasn’t down home, either. She was right over in Buffalo, trying to eat Buffalo dirt. Can you beat that?” Mary Kate said.
“Pass me the box,” Venita said. She poured some starch in her mouth. A little cloud of dust rose from the box and choked her, causing her to spit the starch out. It sprayed out onto the couch, the floor. Mary Kate got up to clean it.
“Let me,” Venita said. She was so embarrassed. If she could have, she would have disappeared. But she had forgotten how.
“Pour some in your hand,” Mary Kate said.
“Naw, I shouldn’t.”
“Go ’head, girl,” Mary Kate said.
Venita picked up the blue and white box and carefully poured a few pieces into her hand. It tasted like nothing, and left her mouth feeling pasty and dry. “I see how you can crave it. It’s good,” she lied, licking the film from the roof of her mouth.
“You think so? If the truth be told, I don’t like it. I just crave for it.”
Going home was hard. Mikey’s return from school signaled it was time for her to leave. Each woman had work to do, corn bread to bake, pots to reheat. For Venita, every parting was like a little death. She went home and her house was empty. She and Moses ate their dinner in silence. She had told him about Mary Kate: “You know that woman with all them kids?”
“That describe half the women ’round here,” he said.
“She nice,” Venita said. “She my friend.”
“A woman with a house of kids don’t need no friends. How she got time to visit with you?”
“She find time,” Venita said. “She my friend.”
“She need a friend like she need a hole in the head.”
Venita did not press the issue. On that night, like on so many others, she made passionless love to him. She had no room for passion. She was filled up with purpose. She would have a baby.
But what Moses said had stuck in her mind. Mary Kate was her friend. How could he even question? Like a hole in the head.
If the truth be told, Mary Kate looked forward to seeing Venita too. She found herself saving up things to say to her, storing them away in her mind, folding them as neatly as sheets. On the days that Venita did not come over, when the house was quiet, the girls sleeping, Mikey at school, Samuel working, the sheets would sometimes come unfolded, all by themselves. Under their own volition they would come billowing down into the house. She would look up from chopping onions, from ironing a shirt, from scrubbing a floor, and realize the wave that was rolling lazily through the house was the sound of her own voice. The words slipped out of her mind. She would stop herself then, sometimes turn on Search for Tomorrow. What if someone came to the door and heard her talking? People would think she was crazy.
On the days Venita did not come, Mary Kate missed her. That was the word for it. Missed. She did not tell Samuel this, but rather lived uneasily with the silences that were punctuated by the sudden fluttering of her voice.
She was becoming acquainted with loneliness. Mary Kate was learning about loneliness from a woman who was newly visible, though Venita brought little of herself when she came; she often only sat and ate and nodded. It seemed that Venita was content with merely being there, that there was nothing left to be said. Both women knew it was not true.
Her barrenness stood between them, a vast and unexplored field. It defined the path they took, a path that was roundabout and safe. Venita did not mention it. Though she was sure that everyone knew, she would not run the risk of putting her business in the street. One does not come into existence to be dismissed as trash. She did not want to tell it, and Mary Kate did not want to ask. This was a game adults played—minding your own business.
If a woman had a husband who beat her to water every night, and her neighbors heard her screaming, if they heard her running down the walls, it was nobody’s business. The real test would come the next day. If the woman was seen hanging out clothes, anyone who had heard her cries would quickly look away, would pretend not to see her. These people lived inches away from one another, and much of what was done did not have to be told. They did not look away because they did not want to know. They looked away because they did know, and looking away was the only way to grant the woman dignity, to go on believing, to let her go on believing she was a woman.
A week before Mary Kate’s baby was due, Venita had a dream. To these people who had followed the highways from the South, who had come from the cotton fields, the cane fields, the fields of rivers of rice, dreams were powerful. To them, waking life did not inform dream life. Dream life informed waking life. Dream life was filled with winged harbingers that swooped into waking life carrying messages that should not be ignored. Daytime dreams, waking dreams, were especially filled with harbingers. During the day, one was trespassing in dream life and was liable to be chased into wakefulness by something that was better left unknown.
Venita, while trying to rest her eyes before going to Mary Kate’s, was swept into a waking dream. It was a winter night, and instead of grass there were cabbages in her back yard. Someone had forgotten to harvest them. Their growth stunted, they were gnarled fists, and Venita pulled at them, trying to uproot them, trying to feel that delicious ripping move through her body, taste the flavor of it in her mouth. But the plants were stuck to the ground. She hacked at them with a hoe, but instead of ripping free, the heads broke off cleanly and rolled through the yard. When she finished lopping the heads off from an entire row, she heard a noise coming from the beginning of the row. Venita thought she was hearing things, but the noise was clear.
When she reached the beginning of the row it was daylight, and there was a baby where she had dug up the first cabbage. The baby was emerging from the darkness, white, colorless, struggling to reach the light. Venita pulled the baby out by a wrist. It did not tear from the ground, but slipped noiselessly into the world. The baby was a girl, and Venita placed her on the ground while she looked for something to wrap her in.
She found nothing. All the cabbages had disappeared. She returned to the baby only to see her slipping away. Something was pulling her, and while Venita ran toward her, shouting, the baby sank quietly into the earth.
The sound of Venita’s own screaming awoke her. She jumped from the couch like it was afire. She was so happy to be awake, to be dropped from the heights of her dream to the safety of her living room, that she felt like crying.
She smelled smoke in the house. Venita ran to the kitchen to discover the pan of bread pudding she left baking in the stove had burned up. She had slept for almost an hour.
Someone was knocking at her front door, and it couldn’t have been a worse time. All she wanted to do was get to Mary Kate’s.
It was Mary Kate. She stood on the steps with Mary wrapped in a blanket and Dorene at her side. “I was worried ’bout you, you not showing up and all.”
Venita stared at them. She was so surprised that she did not think to ask them in. “I fell asleep. I was just resting my eyes for a minute, just one minute—”
“What’s burning?”
“That’s my bread pudding, burned blacker than a hat.” She asked Mary Kate and the girls to come in. “Pardon my manners,” she said. “You must think I ain’t had no upbringing. Come on in.”
Venita was excited to have visitors. It was the first company she had ever had in her house. But she was too distracted to show how pleased she was. She was trying to push the darkness of the dream from her mind, to make her mind a blue and blank sky. But the darkness formed itself into a cloud that filled her thoughts.
She had her company sit in the living room among the starched doilies, the cut-glass ashtrays, the figurines of dogs and cats. In the kitchen, Venita tried to scrape the bread pudding from the pan. It all came out except for about an inch that was stuck fast.
“You don’t have to do that now,” Mary Kate said, slapping the girls’ hands away from the ashtrays. “Come on and set.”
Venita did not answer. She wanted to. She wanted to come and sit, but she could not move. The cloud in her mind was producing flash after flash of memory. A storm was swirling through her mind, and the water from it spilled out of the holes in her head. She cried quietly, and Mary Kate was drawn to her silence.
She left the girls in the living room and went to the kitchen. When she saw Venita there, crying and scraping away at the pan, she stopped. This was none of her business. She was going to turn and leave when Venita looked up.
Her eyes were a bruised pink, the color of the crushed petals of a damask rose. In her eyes, mixed right in with the blemished rose color, was a question she had been formulating even in her days of invisibility, a question that she was looking for Mary Kate to answer. But the first words that came to her were “I’m all right.”
“Why you crying? You crying for something.”
“Nothing,” Venita said, and she added, “I had a dream.”
She told Mary Kate about her dream, and while she talked she scraped the pan. Venita stopped crying while she told it, but when she came to the end, she started crying again.
“Me and Moses ain’t never going to have children.”
And so here it was. The field that stood between them, so vast and unexplored, reduced to a short walk across a kitchen floor.
“You don’t know that,” Mary Kate said as she walked to where Venita stood. “Ain’t no way of knowing that,” she said, patting Venita on the back just the way she would have patted a baby.
Mary Kate was not convinced of the truth of what she had said. She had said it the way you tell a child, “Don’t be scared of the dark. Ain’t nothing in the dark going to hurt you.” She said it like a well-intended lie. Because you could tell your child not to be afraid of the dark and know there was a world of fear there.
Once when she was home alone at night, when she had only Dorene and Mikey, Mikey came to her. He had heard a noise downstairs. Samuel was pulling some nights so there would be extra money for Christmas, so she had to go investigate the noise. In her sleepy state she got up and tiptoed down the stairs, Mikey at her heels. From the bottom of the stairs she saw the shadow of a man standing in the kitchen. She screamed. Mikey screamed, and they both ran up the stairs. Mikey dove in the bed with her.
“What was it, Mama?”
“What you think it was? Shush now.”
She told Samuel about it the next morning. “That wasn’t nothing but my work clothes throwed ’cross a hanger.”
“No they wasn’t. That’s what them clothes want you to think. Some kind of haint was what it was. Mikey saw it too.”
“What you see, son?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Mama saw something.”
“Mama saw something? Mama saw something?” The pitch of her voice was rising. “He the one woke me up. Talking ’bout he heard something. Talking ’bout Mama saw something. Spent the whole night clinging to me like a little monkey. Had to peel him off my back this morning.”
“You got to stop worrying,” Mary Kate said now to Venita. “The Lord going to bless you. He got something good planned for you.”
“You really think so?” Venita asked. She was calmer. The storm inside her was blowing over.
“Look what he did for Sarah.”
“Who Sarah? She live ’round here?” Venita asked. Just then they heard a crash in the living room.
“Something broke,” Dorene called out.
“Something broke, my foot. What you done touched I asked you to let ’lone?” Mary Kate said. “Come on in here and bring the baby.”
Dorene appeared at the kitchen door holding a squirming Mary. “It ain’t enough you girls make a mess at home, but you to come to somebody else house tearing up. I’m a whip you.”
“Don’t do that,” Venita said. “Come here,” she said to Dorene. “I’m a clean up the mess. It ain’t nothing but a accident, right baby?”
Dorene nodded her head, and when she caught her mother looking at her, added, “Yes, ma’am.”
Venita sat down on a kitchen chair and pulled Dorene up on her lap. “What you was saying ’bout Sarah?”
“Sarah from the Bible,” Mary Kate said, and eased herself down on a chair. Mary climbed into her lap. “The Lord blessed her.”
Venita remembered the story. The Lord had opened up her womb when she was an old woman. “You think he can do it for me?”
“He got something good planned for you.”
Venita smiled and hugged Dorene close to her.
“I got a taste for something sweet,” Mary Kate said. “I got some corn bread at home. We could have that with some Alaga. Would you like that?” she asked Venita.
“I would. I ain’t had bread and syrup in a long while, since I came north.”
“My mama call it a hard-time dessert, but it’s all I got.”
On the walk over to Mary Kate’s, Venita couldn’t help smiling. Mary Kate was blessed. She must know. There was no need to worry. Mary Kate had to know.
If the truth be told, Mary Kate did not know. All she knew was that when she lay with her husband she came up pregnant. Her mother had told her that. “You lay down with a man, you come up with a baby.” It was just that simple.
Venita knew this. She knew babies did not come from cabbage patches, but from men. But what Venita did not think of, what she had never thought of, was going to a doctor. There was nothing a doctor could do. He could not give her a baby. All there was for her to do was wait. When it was time, a child would come to her.