BITTERLY, CHRISTINE WATCHED CAT, PUSHED BY STELLA, cross the campus. It was only dusk. Push, push, pushy white people. Had no business coming out here to help. Should of come out fifty years ago, when help was needed. And where were they seven years ago when Fred Shuttlesworth tried to enroll children in Phillips High School? Probably sitting inside, that’s where.
(Christine didn’t suppose what she imagined was true. She would have been shocked to know that she had guessed the exact truth. Cat and Stella were safely inside Phillips High School, safely inside, when Reverend Shuttlesworth was beaten with chains in front of the school, his wife stabbed in the thigh.)
Christine supposed the white women had come early to chat with Arcola and Gloria. The white women wanted to be friends. Take charge. They’d be surprised to see she, Christine, was standing there, too, beside Arcola and Gloria. They couldn’t see who she was, leaning against the building, a silhouette against the setting sun. But she could see them, bathed in red-gold. The metal of the wheelchair was like a chariot reflecting the dying sunlight.
Christine thought of Apollo, of Greek mythology, everything white marble. No reference to black people by the art teacher, but the Greek statues had full lips, curly hair sometimes. Christine loved the blankness of the eyes of the statues. That was the way she felt sometimes.
“Christine,” Cat called. “You look like a caryatid standing there.”
“Humph!” Christine turned away, but she knew what a caryatid was. She had learned it just today in art appreciation. Yes, her head felt like she was holding up a building on it. But how did Cat know that? Spooky girl, she’d recognized Christine immediately.
“They said they might come early,” Arcola said to Christine. “Give us a chance to get acquainted.” She sashayed across the little porch and down the one step. “What you got, Cat-girl?” Arcola called pleasantly.
Then Christine noticed: Cat’s lap was full of little roses, all shades of pink.
“Didn’t nobody tell me to come early,” Christine grumbled.
“Hey.” Arcola flashed her pretty smile back at Christine. Was that girl always relaxed? “You was out of here like a shot last night. We didn’t have any chance to ask you.” Then Arcola Miss Impudence winked at her. “You had to get to the Athens Bar.”
“Stella picked them,” Cat said to everybody. She held up her hand, signaling to Stella to stop pushing. “Let’s just sit out here. Probably cooler than inside.”
Awkwardly, Cat suddenly held out a chunk of the roses to Gloria. “For you,” she said.
Slowly Gloria stepped forward and held out her hand. “Thank you,” she said.
Stella reached down and picked up another bouquet from her lap. “These are for you, Arcola.”
They were pairing up. Cat wanted to be friends with Gloria; Stella had chosen Arcola.
There was one bunch of pink left in Cat’s lap.
“The stems are in damp tissue,” Stella said. “They probably need some water.”
Wordlessly, Cat held out the remaining bouquet to Christine.
As Christine accepted the rose bouquet, she muttered ungraciously that they’d put the flowers in paper cups so they wouldn’t wilt in the heat.
“Where’d you get these little roses?” Arcola asked. She put her nose into her bunch.
“Norwood. They don’t have much smell,” Stella said apologetically. (She’d gotten some sunburn;her nose was brighter than the roses.) “They grow wild at the tennis court, all over the fences.”
White girls playing tennis in a pink rose garden—the picture made Christine angry. Not at Cat, though, she wouldn’t be playing any tennis. Christine imagined Cat sitting on the sidelines, probably holding a parasol up over her head. Cat wasn’t sunburned.
Then Christine thought how pleased Diane, her little girl, would be when she brought home roses in a Dixie cup. She had some rose scent in her handbag she could pump on them.
Diane would sit and stare at those roses in the middle of the kitchen table as if they were TV.