And Do Remember Me (12 page)

“Well, I don’t believe my eyes! What you doing here?”

“I had to come to see you before we left.”

“Where yall off to this time?” Mae Ann asked expectantly.

“We’re going to New York to live.”

“Well,
scuuuuuuuse
me,” Willie and Mae Ann sang in raucous, joyous unison as Jessie settled on the sofa, blushing, flushed by the warmth of their affection.

“God, Willie, it’s been so long, too long,” Jessie said, her eyes clutching the sight of her brother’s gentle clean-shaven face, her senses overwhelmed by the scent of his starched uniform.

“Mae Ann told us everything you been doing,” Willie beamed.

“The old man would croak if he saw you now,” Junior said, entering the room noiselessly, his brittle glance rolling like marbles over Jessie. “On the way to New York City. Look like I shoulda run away too.”

“You couldn’t keep your ass outta jail long enough,” Mae Ann snorted, “that’s the only place you was running.” A huge Afro ballooned around Junior’s face, tapering into Edwardian sideburns. A toothpick hung limply from his lips.

“I’m going straight this time,” Junior said. “I’m going to Jackson next week to get into a methadone program.” He stood fingering the slender gold chain around his neck. His words were slick, unreliable, the promises dissolving as they were made.

“How long have you been out?” Jessie asked.

“Two weeks. Got out early.”

“Just make sure you don’t go back,” Mae Ann scolded him as she headed back toward the kitchen.

Junior had been jailed so often for robbing stores, stealing
cars, that Jessie couldn’t recall his latest offense. But she did remember that Mae Ann had told her last year that Junior was now using drugs.

“You looking good,” Junior concluded as though Jessie was an expensive new car or fashionable suit. “I’m going to finish my dinner, I’ll be right back,” he winked at Jessie.

“They shipping me out to Viet Nam,” Willie said, reclaiming her attention, his arm thrown possessively around Jessie’s shoulder.

“You know you don’t have to go,” she told him confidently.

“What you mean I don’t have to go?”

“Lincoln and I know people who’ve left the country to avoid the draft. We know how you could get to Canada.”

“That ain’t me, Jessie, you know that ain’t me,” Willie said, shaking his head. Jessie wondered who Willie
was
now. In fleeing her father, she had lost Willie as well. He had been her favorite. She’d sat hour after hour on the back porch watching him carve his tiny animals, the effortless, easy affection between them offering Jessie a refuge she had rarely found in their house.

“Are you trying to prove you’re a man?” she asked, recalling their father’s brutal beating of Willie and Junior.

“Naw, it ain’t nothing like that. I just got to do my duty.”

“But it’s a bad war. We’ve got no business over there.”

“You ever heard of a good war?” Willie shot back.

“All I know is
this
war isn’t worth your blood.”

“Well, I’m going anyway. I go over there and I come back with plenty of benefits.”

“You still carving and drawing?” she asked hopefully.

“I ain’t got time for that no more,” he said, pulling out a picture of his girlfriend, whom he told Jessie he planned to marry when he returned.

Gently placing the photo back in his wallet, Willie said, “So this acting stuff is for real?”

“It’s for real.”

“One day you’ll be famous. That what you want, Jess?”

“She already famous,” Mae Ann said, thundering into the room. “The only Foster to make something of herself.”

They sat together in Mae Ann’s tiny neat house and talked about everything except Chester and Olive Foster. Junior sat in their midst, jittery, wired, unable to sit still, as unknown to Jessie as a stranger. Because she couldn’t bear to think about Willie’s departure, she plied him with questions about high school friends. Later in the evening, Willie and Junior left together. On Mae Ann’s front porch, Jessie hugged Willie tight and told him, “Come back, Willie, please, come back.”

“M
Y, MY, MY
,” Mae Ann said, arranging her large frame in a chair across from Jessie. “If Chester Foster could see you now.” They had settled in the kitchen after Willie and junior left. Mae Ann’s fleshy, overweight body was concealed by a dingy robe, her hair was uneven and studded with lint.

“What’s wrong, Mae Ann?” Jessie asked softly, longing as she asked this to retrieve some measure of Mae Ann’s spunk, which their father had never been able to defeat, the crazed stubbornness that had set her hightailing it away from Davis Road, out of their father’s grasp, rebuking their mother’s silence. That fire had saved Mae Ann and now Jessie feared it was gone.

“What you mean?”

“You don’t take care of yourself, you just let yourself go.”

“What I’m gonna take care of myself for? My husband ain’t never here.”

“Willie says he’s a good man.”

“Willie married to him? Willie sleep in the bed with him?”
Mae Ann asked with a grunt and a shrug. “And when he is here, don’t do nothing but sleep.”

“What’s really wrong?”

“Oh, I don’t know Jess, sometimes I don’t think this marriage business much agrees with me; motherhood don’t much either.”

“It can’t be that bad.”

“You been there?”

“No, but—”

“All right, then. I just feel like running away sometimes, you know like I used to do when we was kids.”

“There was plenty to run from then. But you’re a mother now, Mae Ann, a wife, that changes everything.”

“Whole weeks go by when I feel dead, Jess, dead,” Mae Ann whispered, her eyes bright, glistening and sad. “I’m yearning for something I can feel and imagine but can’t name.”

“You ever tell Tyrone?”

“You think he’d understand?”

“Well, what is it you want?”

“I don’t know.” Mae Ann fumbled in the pocket of her robe and brought out a pack of cigarettes. When she had lit a cigarette and emitted a stream of smoke over Jessie’s head she said, her finger tracing the pattern of flowers in the plastic tablecloth as she spoke, “It’s like I want my kids, sometimes I even want Tyrone, but at the same time I want to be free.”

“To do what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe something. Hell, I’d find out. Why I got to know this minute?” Mae Ann asked irritably.

“It just seems like all the married couples I know are heading for divorce these days,” Jessie said wistfully, fingering the edge of a straw place mat on the table. “Remember when we were kids? Nobody got divorced.”

“They couldn’t afford to,” Mae Ann laughed. “I remember asking Aunt Eva a couple of months ago if the men were better
in the old days. She just laughed and said it didn’t have nothing to do with the men. The secret to them marriages was the women. They just stuck it out.”

“You and Tyrone might not have been made in heaven but you two give me hope. I hope yall can make it.”

“Hope is a funny thing, Jess. We all got to make up our own supply, can’t depend on nobody else’s. You not going by the house, are you? You not gonna risk seein
him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Too bad you can’t even holler at Mama. She’d love to see you.”

“How is she?”

“All right. She ain’t working as much as she used to and is home a lot now. Daddy can’t work much cause of them headaches you gave him and I think it’s driving the two of them crazy to be alone together now that we’s all grown.”

“How’s he?”

“You know, the same old bastard he always was.”

“I’ll write you when I get settled up there.”

“You do that.”

“I will.”

“That friend of yours, Lincoln, he seems like a nice fella.”

“He is, Mae Ann. He is.”

“I could tell the time I met him he really loves you, Jess. That man loves you a lot.”

“Mae Ann, sometimes he loves me more than I can stand.”

T
HE NEXT
morning Jessie left Mae Ann’s, intending to head straight back to Atlanta, but she found herself driving to her parents’ house instead. The street was now paved, and a veneer
of progress had settled over the neighborhood. A few new houses had been built and the outhouses dismantled.

Jessie sat in the car and watched the house, wondering what she was waiting for, what or whom she hoped to see. She imagined her mother coming down the front stairs, her father walking up the street. Jessie sat, her hands clammy, wet with perspiration, the onslaught of a familiar fear making her head throb. Still, her fingers wandered now and then toward the door handle. Finally she turned around and headed toward the highway, speeding, risking a ticket, as though she had escaped for the second time in her life.

P
EARL LOOKED
again at the letter from Mae Ann and knew she would not open it. Not with what had happened earlier. She just couldn’t risk it. Not today.

The apartment was sweltering so she turned on the fan, placed it in the window and kicked off her sandals. She went into the kitchen and opened the freezer in a vain attempt to cool off. From the street below the sounds of children playing filtered into the kitchen along with the sounds of an electric piano from somewhere in the building.

She walked the dark narrow hall to the bathroom and began to fill the claw-footed tub with cool water. As she undressed, Pearl gazed in the mirror and saw her face, still young yet strained and unquiet. She recalled standing beside the road outside Columbus waiting for life to come by and claim her. She hadn’t had this face then. Could never have imagined, standing on that road, what her eyes, caramel-colored, clear and sharp, would see, could see that they had not already.
Pearl rubbed her hands across her cheeks as the sounds of a drum and a saxophone drifted into the apartment and whispered for the last time, “In my mother’s house there is still God.”

Lincoln arrived several hours later. The apartment had cooled off and Pearl lay on the bed, sleeping lightly. He lay beside her and kissed her gently, afraid, yet hoping, that he would wake her.

She opened her eyes and he kissed her again. He and Raj had eaten dinner at a Jamaican restaurant and then gone to Raj’s place and smoked several joints. Now Lincoln was pumped full of longing for Pearl.

But before he could even say hello, she moved out of his embrace and said simply, “I didn’t get the part.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.” She turned away from him as though ashamed.

“I’m sorry, baby,” Lincoln said, reaching for her, trying to pull Pearl close to him to comfort her and to comfort himself. “You worked hard. Damned hard. Hell,
we
worked hard.” He never knew what to say to her at moments like this. He, who had scripted a thousand moves and emotions for Pearl, could not script an adequate response to her pain. And so, bereft of words, he said nothing, merely turned off the lamp beside the bed and removed his clothes and lay beside her. The apartment was as cool as it would get and her body was damp with a light film of perspiration. He kissed her, his tongue deep, rummaging inside her mouth, sliding across her teeth. He could feel her sadness, her defeat. When he kissed her neck, softly, gently, Pearl hugged him tightly and sighed, the sigh wrenched from that place inside her that she never allowed him to touch. He pushed up her slip and his hands were full of her hips. He kissed her stomach and shifted her body beneath him, thinking how perfectly she fit. He was inside her and she was sobbing
gently, the way she sometimes did when he loved her, as though his love was too much for her. A breathless moment of release seized her body and it made her cry louder but he knew he had not really touched her. Spent, Lincoln turned away from Pearl, for she had, as always, turned love into a performance in his arms. For that he would never forgive her.

They slept awhile and then Pearl woke, suddenly, perfectly, the way she often did, finding that she could not get back to sleep. She eased out of the bed, slipped on her robe and went into the kitchen. She poured herself a glass of wine and sat at the table listening to the sounds of the night—motorcycles roaring down Lenox Avenue, music from boom boxes on the front porches of houses on their street and an occasional police siren. Quiet, that was the only thing she missed from the south. Quiet. She could not say peace and quiet for she had never known peace, but she missed the quiet. For the deep, unremitting quiet, the heavy blanketing darkness of the rural south, had always made her think that peace would come next, although it never did.

She wondered why he stayed. Why, when Lincoln walked out the door in the morning, he came back in the evening. Why, when there were times she could not stand for him to touch her. Why, when she woke up in the mornings baptized by a rage so clear and dangerous she wondered why she had not yet committed murder. She slept alone at times like that, on a pallet on the floor or in another room, as though Lincoln’s mere presence was an offense.

Once, in Atlanta, she had thought he would leave. There was an affair with a wealthy white woman who had sponsored a number of fund-raisers for the theater. She lived in Scarsdale and Lincoln began taking frequent trips to New York on business and then Pearl found out the trips were to see the woman. When she asked him about it, for she would not have thought
to confront him, he told her, “At least she trusts me. She shares her feelings. She’s not locked, sealed against me like you.” His charge had begged her for a defense, but she had denied Lincoln even an argument in favor of their love. Pearl merely turned from him and his words, brushing them aside because they hurt too much and rang with a truth she was determined never to touch. Macon had assured her that it was probably a flirtation, a fascination on Lincoln’s part, a seduction by the woman. The affair ended shortly after she told him she knew. It ended as though Lincoln had been merely waiting for her to discover that she could lose him.

They had survived that. She didn’t know how, but they had. They had also survived the night when, in a rage, she looked at him and saw her father’s face instead and came at him with a knife.

S
HE WAS DRINKING
. He knew it. Lincoln lay in the bed listening to Pearl in the kitchen. She was drinking again and there was nothing he could do. Nothing he could say. Once he thought he knew her. He thought this mostly because he loved her. Loved her intelligence, her fragility, loved the way she made him want to take care of her and how self-sufficient she was on the stage and how she honored his plays. He had thought once that he knew her. But he knew now he never would. Just after they arrived in New York, and shortly after she changed her name, she told him about her father. They had spent that day hunting for secondhand furniture in the dusty thrift shops along upper Broadway, and they lay on sleeping bags on the floor because their beds wouldn’t come until the
next day. And she told him. He lay beside her feeling as though something vital, necessary, had been ripped out of him, stunned, flushed all at once with a complete understanding of everything. And when he was able to fight off the feeling of dread and horror that had shrouded him like a veil, he asked, “Pearl, why didn’t you tell me before? We’ve been together six years. Why did you wait all this time?”