We had another long day at the Center. When I came into the kitchen to make spaghetti that evening, there was a stool by the stove. It was like everything else Cecile brought into her green stucco house. Secondhand. Still, it was unexpected, and I welcomed it. I normally stood by the stove quietly while the food cooked. My feet always ached, but I never complained. Instead, I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and learned to make quick-cooking meals. Cecile had allowed me inside her kitchen. She’d let me cook dinner, wash dishes, and clean up after myself. But she didn’t really want me in there with her. She didn’t want me stretching my neck over her way, ripping open the peace with any talking.
The stool made things different. It was an invitation for me to sit down and be there. Not talk. Just cook. Be. As the spaghetti boiled, pictures flashed in and out of my mind. Flashes of sitting with Cecile and being quiet. It was the welcome that had brought me back. That I’d sat with her before and it was all right. Not in this kitchen, but in the kitchen in Brooklyn. Back when Sarah Vaughan filled the house with her smoky voice, Vonetta was far away crying to be picked up, and Cecile’s stomach was big with Fern.
I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said I was born knowing what to do when I sat with Cecile: Don’t cry. Stay quiet. Want nothing. I could talk, but I’d learned that, as long as I was quiet, I was allowed to stay with her while she tapped against the wall with her pencil, wrote and wrote and said her rhymes over and over. Don’t cry. Stay quiet. Want nothing.
Then Fern had come, and days later Cecile left. Big Ma had moved in and told Pa, “That gal’s dumb as a dry pump,” meaning me. Cecile wouldn’t have minded if I had been born deaf and mute, but Cecile was gone. Big Ma was another story. I quickly learned to speak up around Big Ma.
After we ate our spaghetti, I washed the dishes and wiped the sink down.
Cecile said, “I’d let you help me if your hands were clean.”
My hands were already clean. I had just finished washing dishes. But I soaped them with dish-washing liquid, then rinsed and dried them.
“Stand over here.”
I stood where she told me. For a long while that was all she said, that I stand right there. I looked down on a flat frame with wooden blocks. On the wooden blocks were metal letters facing backward. Backward? They spelled out words, line by line. But you would have to be able to read backward to read the lines.
I wanted to be able to read them. On the counter next to the printing machine was a newly inked sheet of paper with the words printed in the right direction.
Movable Type
Push here
I move
there
Push
there
I move
two squares over
Buy those squares
from under my
feet
I land on
the free square.
Raise my
Rent
I
Pica
Elite
Courier
Sans Serif
Pack light. Leave swift.
I’m that type.
I move.
NZILA
She took the sheet and hung it up to dry.
“I’m going to press down and roll the crank,” she said. I figured I would catch on.
She turned the lever on the side of the printing machine. Her weight pressed into the machine and down on the metal and paper. The rollers spun slowly. The paper pushed its way out onto the tray of backward letters.
When the paper was fully inked, I believed she was pleased. Not that she was smiling or jolly or singing. But she liked what she had done. She studied her printed sheet and held it up to the light. The poem in black ink. Her name, Nzila, in special-shaped letters: large, curved, lovely, and green.
I thought about Cecile’s poem. I figured it was about how she was the type to not be still. But I believed she liked this green stucco house. I think she liked being in this kitchen, mothering and praying over this big machine and these blocks of backward letters. This was Cecile being happy.
“See this here?”
I must have made a move like I was going to touch it.
Cecile spoke sharply. “I said ‘see,’ not ‘touch.’ See.”
I nodded and put my hands behind my back. I was used to busy hands. To doing. I did what she said. I looked.
“Those are the rollers. You feed the paper through the rollers. You feed it even. If it’s crooked, it’s a waste of paper. You crank it steady or it’s a waste of paper. Waste of ink.”
I watched her feed the paper between the rollers and turn the crank. Each time the ink spread evenly on the paper. She hung each sheet to dry.
“Go ’head.” She pointed to the paper and the rollers and the crank.
I almost didn’t move.
“Come on. Let’s see if you can follow directions.”
I took a sheet from the paper stack and held it from end to end so it would go in even. No matter how much I told myself to keep steady, my hands made the paper shake. I was mad at my own hands. I didn’t want Cecile to think I was afraid of doing wrong, but I was.
I didn’t look up at her to see if I had done right in her eyes. I just did what she said and turned the crank slow, hard, and steady until the paper came out on the other side, I hoped, fully inked.
She held up my newly printed sheet and pointed to a spot on the N in “Nzila” that missed the rollers. She shook her head. “A waste of paper.”