Mama Day Read online

  “I know what you mean. Why, just the other day—”

  “I really gotta go, Pearl. See, I done promised to get these groceries over to Bernice since she ain’t keeping so well.”

  Pearl tries to peer over into the bag, and Miranda shields it from her. She lets out a deep sigh. “Yeah, I know, it’s such a trial and tribulation on my poor boy. A trial and tribulation—that gal staying sick and nervous so much. Sometimes, I do believe she’s putting on ’cause soon as a little music starts playing, she’s off shaking her hips somewhere. And you don’t hear nothing about her nerves then. Some of these young girls will do anything to hold a man—and my boy is so patient about it all. Bears up, he does, and never breathes a word about the miserable life he’s leading. I’m so proud of Ambush—of all my boys. I raised me some decent, Christian children.”

  “Miracles do happen,” Miranda says, turning her back. She walks off before Pearl has the chance to take another deep breath; she can keep talking half an hour on just three lungfuls.

  Abigail has washed and scaled all the things Miranda had brought over from the other place by the time Miranda returns from the store. Little beads of sweat are dotting her upper lip as she pours the boiling water out of the butter churn into the back yard.

  “You there, Sister?”

  “Uh, huh.” Abigail takes the edge of her apron to wipe her face. “I see you timed it so the last of the work was done before you got back.”

  Miranda runs her hands over the old coffee grinder, the cast iron skillets, wire whips—all clean and gleaming. She picks up the ceramic mortar and pestle—amazing, them blue periwinkles look painted fresh after all these years.

  “Woulda been back long ago, but I ran into motor-mouth in front of the beauty parlor.”

  “I know Pearl had plenty of news.”

  “Plenty of bad news—it’s the only kind she carries. But she ain’t talked about what a disgrace she is, not going over to see about Bernice one bit.”

  “You tell her what we trying to do?”

  “I’m old, but I ain’t lost my senses.”

  “Miranda, you sure this is gonna work?”

  “Why, look at this—Mother’s old sewing basket.”

  “It was in the bottom of the churn.” Abigail presses her lips real tight. “Don’t know how it got there.”

  Miranda runs her fingers along the weaving of dried sweet grass and lifts up the lid to look at the faded silk lining. Naw, too much to ask that it still carried a whiff of lemon verbena. “I think I’m gonna keep this. Put my needles and threads in it.”

  “It’s better burnt.” Abigail’s soft voice takes on a sharp edge that’s so unusual it startles Miranda.

  She’s thinking of the child she gave to Mother. But I begged her not to do it. She couldn’t put her own guilt to rest by naming her first baby Peace. Peace was gone, I told her. And now Peace is gone again. She only lost one of her babies to Mother, I lost them all. She’s got much less to forgive than me.

  “We can get rid of the basket. But you can’t burn away memories.”

  “You can let ’em lay be. And I don’t see how giving these old things to Bernice is gonna help her—all of it’s better left be.”

  “We’re giving her time, Abigail.” Miranda picks up a wooden butter mold. “Remember how much it took just to get a pint of butter? The milking of the cow, the hauling, the churning down of the cream—the washing, the salting, the pressing in this here thing. A simple pint of butter. And don’t talk about it going into cornbread—the grinding of the corn, gathering of the eggs, chopping the wood, firing up the stove. Took half a day for a pan of bread, not to mention the other things you needed to put on the table. Looked like soon as the sun set, it was day again.”

  “Lord, don’t I remember. These young people talk about tired. They don’t know tired.”

  “Yes.” Miranda nods. “They can’t dream what it’s like to live that way. Not that I’m wishing it on ’em—them days were rough. But if we can bring a little bit of that back for Bernice, just give her so much time to use that she won’t have any left over at the end of the day to think about anything but a good night’s sleep, nature’s gonna do the rest.”

  “She’s gonna have to do a bit more than sleep at night if she’s having this baby.”

  “Nature’ll take care of that too. Daddy’s mama had seven boys, and her times were even rougher than ours.”

  “Guess that’s why they had such big families back then—kept the woman too worn out to say no.”

  “Or if she said no, she was too damn tired to stop him.”

  Abigail laughs. “Now, there you go, getting fresh.”

  “Well, let’s get all this packed. Ambush is coming by to pick me up. Oh, yeah—did my seeds dry?”

  That morning Miranda had taken a handful of pumpkin seeds and shook ’em up in a bottle of saffron water, then another handful of crook-neck squash and mixed them into a little dewberry juice. They were all laying out drying on Abigail’s back porch in colorful rows of yellow and black. Miranda scoops ’em up and puts them in the pocket of her sweater.

  “She got something to keep her busy, and now she got something to hope for.”

  “Bernice gonna know they’re nothing but pumpkin seeds.”

  “The mind is a funny thing, Abigail—and a powerful thing at that. Bernice is gonna believe they are what I tell her they are—magic seeds. And the only magic is that what she believes they are, they’re gonna become.”

  “So churning milk and planting pumpkin seeds—that’s gonna do it?”

  “That should do it till spring.”

  “And then we hope for a miracle.”

  No, Miranda thinks, then we go to the other place. But that she couldn’t share even with Abigail. There weren’t no danger of her sister stumbling across the box of chicks in that front parlor—she never went into them back woods and out to the old house. She’d feed and nurture them there till spring, then pick out the best one. Bernice had said she’d do anything. Well, come the end of March, she’d see. All this gadding about now was to help get her ready; Miranda could do only so much. She could march in that kitchen, tell her for the first time in her life she was gonna learn how to really cook. Oh, she’d keep her exercising. And she’d keep Pearl off her back, giving her them seeds and saying, Every time she comes to visit you plant a black one to carry everything negative she says to you into the ground. And she could even give her hope, saying, Every time you get your monthly, plant a gold one—let the life blood flow out of you into this seed. And come spring, she could tell Bernice, When you take the vines from them gold seeds out into the garden, you’re really taking the life line between you and the baby. And the way you watch that grow—round and full—the life will sure to be growing inside of you. Yeah, she could disguise a little dose of nothing but mother-wit with a lot of hocus-pocus. But it was all leading up to the other place. Nothing would be real until the end. And in the end, Bernice would have to step over the last line all by herself.

  I didn’t tell my friends about the way I spent the weekends with you, because they wouldn’t have believed that I could be having fun simply riding the subways with some guy out to the godforsaken reaches of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. And from a little girl I had been taught that you don’t waste your time telling people things you know they won’t believe. I had seen Mama Day do a lot of things out at the other place, and when I told the kids at school they called me a liar. I got into some awful fights that way, coming home crying with my pinafore torn at the waist. But if I could just bring them here and let them see, I’d say. Folks see what they want to see, she told me. And for them to see what’s really happening here, they gotta be ready to believe. So it’s not that I was hiding you from them. None of my crowd was ready to believe that, one, I’d waste a Saturday morning on the D train to end up in Flatbush, strolling past those old Victorian houses, and, two, I could really like it. Selma could have been following us right in the next subway
car and all she would see behind her Dior sunglasses was a couple getting off the A train at Hoyt and Schermerhorn to grab some hot dogs at an underground stand and then washing them down with cherry colas on a windy boardwalk at Rockaway Park. I can hear her now—“A cheap date.”

  I would have thought that myself, except they weren’t dates at all. I was out with you practically every weekend from the late summer until the end of October, but I wasn’t “going out” with you. You had said you wanted me to see New York, and you did your damnedest. Every inch. Any schoolkid knows that Manhattan is an island, but you have to stand in the middle of the George Washington Bridge on a clear day to really understand: the low sweeping coastline from the south, creeping up into the rocky Palisades on the north end with the Hudson glimmering along its side—the sailboats, the rowers, the gulls. My first reaction was where in the hell did all this water come from? Water that changed from a muddy brown into fingertips of real blue as it wound its way past the north Bronx into upstate. Standing there under and over all that incredible space, I saw how small and cramped my life had been. I actually lived on this island—somewhere down there on Ninety-sixth Street, among all the clutter of those buildings looking as if any minute they would push themselves into the river. And I had told Mama Day I knew New York—God, what a fool I had been. I never admitted that to you, I’d just say thank you when I got off the Broadway line and you were heading on down to South Ferry. We’ll do it again next weekend? you’d ask, just before the doors closed. Yes, I said, I’d like that a lot. I’d leave the subway smiling until I hit Broadway—and then I’d begin to wonder.

  What was this guy up to? Slowly, the exact same answer began to disappoint more than relieve me—absolutely nothing. He’d only taken up my Saturday or Sunday morning, time I would have spent sleeping late or doing something really exciting like watching my clothes spin around in the dryer at the Laundromat. I had all the rest of the afternoon and the night to see who I wanted or do what I wanted, and he never asked me who or what. And come to think of it, he never told me about his whos or whats during the weekend. The clown was probably married. So why should that bother me? We couldn’t be doing anything more innocent—he never touched me except a light tap on the shoulder when it was time to get off at some subway stop. As a matter of fact, he never held my hand or indicated any desire to—an arm would brush now and again in some crowded spot like Chinatown or the market in east Harlem. I would have had no idea how soft and agile his hands were if I hadn’t dropped that knish in Williamsburg, and he caught it midair and gave it back to me, showing me how to fold the wrapping paper so the steamy potato filling wouldn’t burn my fingers. Pretend it’s a baked yam, he’d said, with those strong teeth of his showing. I know you southerners all eat baked yams. No, he wasn’t married—the clown was probably gay. But then why should that bother me? I’d climb the three flights to my dark studio apartment and usually kick my pile of dirty laundry viciously into the corner.

  What did I want—a sleazy morning where he’s throwing out comments about the way my narrow hips move freely through the turnstiles? Or having to tense up when a crowded train jerked to a stop because it’s an easy opening for him to accidently grab the side of my breast or get in a quick groin rub? The guy is acting like a gentleman, damn it. Is that so complicated to understand? He doesn’t have to be some married wimp, out to spice up his mornings by teasing himself with forbidden fruit, or some closet gay who’s into “straight illusions.” Why is it so hard to believe that what I see is what I see: an ordinary man who only wants you to be comfortable and enjoy yourself?

  George, it’s not that it was hard to believe, I wasn’t ready to believe. Nothing I had met in that world had prepared me for your possibility. So it only stands to reason that I felt what I saw was impossible. I’d end up thinking about you until I dressed to go out that night. One of Selma’s parties or the usual round of dinner dates singing the life’s-tough-on-fifty-grand-a-year-and-you-can’t-find-a-decent-black-woman-anyway blues. And in the middle of all Selma’s high-tech music or his melancholy sigh as he pulled out the gold American Express, I’d hear the sound of hummingbirds in the gardens at the Cloisters. And I’d try to remember if I’d said thank you when I left you that day. I made a promise to myself to speak a bit louder the next time.

  I don’t know exactly when it changed for me—my wanting you to see New York, and then my just wanting to see you. Not being able to pinpoint the time or reason of that transformation made me uncomfortable. But one Saturday morning you were a little late at the meeting place we’d picked out, and the thought of your not coming bothered me. It’s not that I was wasting my time; I usually spent my weekend mornings alone doing what I had been doing with you. The doctors had told me regular exercise was important for my heart, and I’d get bored walking in the same old places. And since I’d been over much of the city many times, it was fun showing it to someone new, seeing it all over again through their eyes. And it had been loads of fun, watching you change. You weren’t becoming different, you were going back to the way you were. The heavy accent of a Greek pastry shop owner, flirting and offering you a taste of something special he’d just baked, would bring out your own accent with a, Why, it’s just as good as Mama makes it, and the two of you would laugh. You’d catch a ball some child had sent rolling into the streets, take their hand, and then stand there chatting with the mother about the dangers of city traffic. And best of all, you’d stopped calling people food. You were learning the difference between a Chinese, a Korean, a Vietnamese, and a Filipino, that Dominicans and Mexicans weren’t all Puerto Ricans. You could finally pick out German Jews, Russian Jews, Hasidics, and Israelis. And when the old Bajan woman took a flower from her cart and pinned it in your hair—“’Cause de child, she pretty some”—your eyes got a little misty, and if you still thought of Jamaicans, Trinidadians, or Antiguans as “monkey chasers,” you never said it aloud again.

  I was so busy enjoying the change in you, I didn’t notice it in myself. Sure, I’d wear any old pair of jeans stomping around the streets alone and the ones I met you in were freshly pressed. I’d gone into taking a moment over deciding which aftershave from two days of not shaving at all. But that had been done without thinking. I did give up one Sunday afternoon game with some thought, but it was only the Bears against the Oilers—both turkeys. Houston may have gone to the playoffs the year before—a fluke as far as I was concerned—but they were doomed for 1980, and I wanted to show you the willow trees in Flushing Meadow Park before they lost their leaves. You had told me that there were no willows in Willow Springs, which was the least of the odd things about the place. Although I never asked, I wanted to know more about where you’d come from, and what it was like growing up there. It should have been a warning sign—my increasing curiosity about the way you spent your life before and after you got off the train at Ninety-sixth Street. If it was a warning, I didn’t listen. Or maybe, I didn’t want to listen.

  But now I heard what was happening loud and clear. When you finally rounded the corner after my half-hour wait, my heart started to beat just a tiny bit faster. It was second nature for me to monitor every change that took place with the rhythm in my chest, so there was no disputing what the sight of you did to me from a distance—flushed and out of breath, a red silk scarf flying over your slender shoulders, those long arms swinging a yellow and black paper bag. This I did not need. Shawn and I had been doing a lot of talking lately—serious talking—about making a go of it, once again. About this time, picking up enough speed to push ourselves on over the line, the stupid, senseless color line that was threatening to keep us away from what five years had built. We didn’t know if we had the energy, but it was worth talking about. And it was comfortable being around her again, thinking of holding a body that you didn’t have to prove anything to. No old ground to go over about who and what you were, no new moods or tics to learn, none to explain. Shawn was a safe haven. And coming around that corner was trouble. Beautifu
l trouble—the full lips, butternut skin, the tight wavy hair catching the sunlight in its brownish red tint. The high-behind, sway-backed walk that moved in sync with something buried deep in my gut.

  This would have to be the last morning I’d spend with you—I couldn’t control what my heart was doing, but I’d made up my mind about that. I could tell you, mission accomplished, you’d seen enough to go out on your own. I could tell you I’d be busy with extra work. Or since I owed you nothing, I could simply tell you nothing at all. Then you came up to me, smelling like a stranded summer day, apologizing profusely for being late, but you’d been to the Coliseum book store, got turned around because it was a section you’re rarely in, pulled out a copy of King Lear—and took my breath away. But I had enough left to take you walking by Riverside Park and to tell you about Shawn.

  There are some times in your life when you have to call upon the best of all God gave you—and the best of what He didn’t. I’ve had a few of those times over the years, and that first walk with you by Riverside Park was one of those very times. A crisp fall day when the trees, the sky, and the streets are standing out in colors too solid and unblemished to be real. The air is more than fresh, it makes your senses come alive—so you’ll remember something as unimportant as a crushed Pepsi can lying in a patch of weeds, a loose awning hitting the front of a building, the sun reflecting off the edge of a Gothic stone in Riverside Church. Yeah, it was one of those days for poetry. One of those days Mama said there’d be …

  I’d tripped on a curbstone crossing the street to the river promenade, and you caught my hand to steady my balance and never let it go. Maybe I was concentrating on how our palms cupped so easily into each other, or maybe I was still thinking about the flip my stomach took from the way you looked at me when I met you earlier—whatever it was, it took me a hell of a lot longer than it should have to realize who the woman was in this “special relationship” that you were telling me about. Now, I’m gonna tell you about cool. It comes with the cultural territory: the beating of the bush drum, the rocking of the slave ship, the rhythm of the hand going from cotton sack to cotton row and back again. It went on to settle into the belly of the blues, the arms of Jackie Robinson, and the head of every ghetto kid who lives to a ripe old age. You can keep it, you can hide it, you can blow it—but even when your ass is in the tightest crack, you must never, ever, LOSE it.