WHEN LIONEL PARRISH CAME HOME, HE HOPED TO GOD there wasn’t any of Matilda’s scent on him. He’d taken a bath before he’d dressed, and he’d taken care to buy Matilda Ivory, just like Jenny insisted on at home. He preferred the grit of Lava. Made a man feel clean. But his wife, Jenny, said he wasn’t no laboring man;he didn’t need Lava.
The children all liked to play with Ivory because it floated. But Jenny didn’t let them melt off too much of the soap with floating it around in the tub. For the youngest, Jenny had made a little red paper sail on a toothpick and stuck it into the flat of the soap. She let Andy push up water walls with his hands to move his boat across the tub. Lionel liked to think of his littlest boy, naked and plump, sailing his cake of soap with its red flag around the bathtub, but that was several years ago when Andy was three. He himself had grown up washing in a galvanized tub in the kitchen, with the water heated on the stove.
“Hi, honey,” Lionel said softly, and softly he closed the home door behind him.
His wife got up from the sofa, left her Ebony magazine there, softly put her arms around him; she breathed in a deep breath. And yes, he decided, he’d pleasure her, too.
“Honey,” he said, “I hired two Birmingham white girls tonight, both with B.A. degrees.”
JENNY THOUGHTHe’s so fresh, so fresh, so fresh and sweet smelling to the rhythm of his thrusting. How she loved to lie perfectly still—she was a good woman—and the bliss of it! She needed him so bad, all of him, and surely he knew that, her lying so still and good, how she needed this and would honor him with as many children as he saw fit to place within her. But this night, he pulled out and left his puddle outside on her stomach.
What was this sorrow, these two little tears like two orange seeds squeezing out of the corners of her eyes? Why did crying come as though something were sad? Why, indeed, when she loved him so and she could hear the breathing of their sleeping children?