Crave (4 page)

Momma had covered her ears as each bird cawed, flapped, and clawed inside her brother's clenched fists. Still she heard those caws,
those flapping wings over her rumbling belly as she stared into the pot, inhaling the smell of rice, onion, salt, and pepper intermingling with bird skin, muscle, and bones. It pained her to watch those birds die, to see them strutting, enjoying their last meal and then boiling in a pot of water. So young, their slaughter confused her. Understanding some things have to die so others can live is always a difficult concept for a child to embrace. Momma struggled with this, even as she sucked meat off of the birds' bones, even as she licked her plate clean. Hunger had led those birds to their demise. In the midst of her fullness, she might have wondered where it would lead her.

The Way It Is Done
The Way It Is Done

By the time Momma was fifteen, she was the last Boone child home. Her only reprieve from labor she alone had to complete and her daddy's watchful eye were visits with her momma. She'd beg, after finishing homework and chores, to escape Deep Creek's suffocating forest and dusty road so she could find freedom in Portsmouth, with its rows of homes lined like vertebrae and its fast-moving cars cruising the arteries and veins of the growing city. Most days, the answer was “no,” but there were days Big Boone's “yes” came with strict instructions that she go to her mother's and stay there until he either picked her up or her momma took her back to Deep Creek.

She usually abided by her daddy's rules, but like most fifteen-year-olds, she wore his authority like a sweater she could slip out of. If her momma had been drinking, she could slide out of the house and back in unnoticed. That's how she met Pop, slid right into him before she could stop herself.

She first saw Pop when she was fourteen. Her daddy had temporarily closed shop in Deep Creek in order to housesit for his sister, Lina. Aunt Lina had a beautiful home, everything so immaculate and shiny, Momma spent the first day admiring the furniture, the trinkets, the pictures on the walls, taking a mental note of things she hoped to one day possess in her own home. She went outside for a walk and was met by a honking horn. Behind that horn sat Pop, his “honk” the universal sign that he liked what he saw and wanted to get closer. She was only a young girl then and her daddy was near, so close wasn't happening that day, but a year later, when she was able to slide out of her momma's house back to that neighborhood, where her sister now resided, she answered Pop's call.

Pop, at nineteen, fascinated Momma. He'd just finished high school and had enlisted in the military. At 6'5” with a medium build, most women would consider him a tall drink of water. Since Momma wasn't a woman, she considered him an ocean. To her,
his words were like hot caramel sliding down a sundae, and when he danced, she followed every jerk, every twist of his body like a stenographer, transcribing his movements into something she could later read. He was also a singer, and on weekends he'd take her, her sister, and her sister's husband to a club in Norfolk to watch him sing. On those nights, she felt grown, sitting in that club, rocking from side-to-side, transfixed on this man who was quickly becoming her everything. Whenever he spoke to her or around her, she straightened her back, pushed out her breasts and leaned into him. Something was happening to Momma then, something she would unwittingly teach me years later. She was learning to fit her existence around a man's, and being a quick study, she no longer fought to fit into his space; she became his space.

Soon, every motive centered on getting her daddy to let her go to her momma's so she could sneak to her sister's and to Pop. He had an actual girlfriend, one his age, but that didn't stop him from giving her attention, from telling her how pretty she was, and sneaking a hug or a kiss when no one was looking. Then, they began playing games, games that went beyond “truth or dare” or “hide-and-go-get.” Their games often included alcohol, kissing, heavy petting, and sometimes they excluded clothing. While those games perplexed her and oftentimes troubled her, she was with her sister and her sister's husband. She was with friends and a man she was falling in love with, as much as a fifteen-year-old could. She felt safe and she had her boundaries, but the lines around her were moving so subtly, she didn't realize her boundaries were becoming invisible.

Games that included Pop, her sister, brother-in-law, and other friends soon became games she and Pop played alone. Sometimes, the games required a bed, but even those she believed she could handle. During heavy petting and kissing sessions, Pop had always stopped when she said, “No more.” She began to trust him, which meant to love him, and she thought nothing of going into the bedroom, lying in his arms, kissing and grinding in order to prove her affection.

Many days found them in the bedroom together, groping one another. At times, they tried to move to the next stage, but she was still a little girl, even if she acted like a woman. Her tears and pleas for him to stop reminded them both of that. Until the day he ran his hands between her legs and up and down her breasts. He wound his pelvis hard, like a merry-go-round, sustaining rhythm, holding her as if she were a ride he could flip off of. She held onto him too, gripping the sides of his arms, feeling his veins bulging under her grasp. She whispered, “Stop. No.”

He muffled her pleas with his lips, all softness. Warm air from his nose ricocheted against the side of her cheek. The next kisses were not soft, not warm. They were the pressing of lips, tongue into her. She pulled away, but the more she pulled the more he pressed. His hand, clenching, hurt the outside of her thigh. His pelvis rotated as he used one hand to restrain both her hands above her head. One kiss erupted into another before she caught her breath. Her mind screamed,
That is enough
, and then her mouth screamed, “That is enough,” and then her mouth couldn't scream anymore and her hands couldn't push anymore, and her legs were open with his thighs wedged between her thighs.

She attempted another “No,” but he, again, silenced her with his lips. She struggled to free her arms, but his hand remained locked around her wrists. Her body tensed, legs tightened, feet flexed, all preparing for impact. Then submission, when nothing more can be done. Only tears were there, pouring down the sides of her face, washing away the girl she was.

When he was done, when he let go, she ran into the bathroom, plunked on the toilet, and stared down. Blood. With so little knowledge about virginity and what happens when it is taken, she wondered from where the blood dripped.

After a knock on the door, there her sister stood, reaching out to comfort her. Momma cried, “Why didn't you come for me when you heard me scream?”

“It's all right,” her sister gently replied, “You're okay,” with care. “This is the way it's done.” She rubbed Momma's back like a teacher, rubbing away tears attached to skinned knees and stubbed toes. She asked, “Do you need anything?”

Momma shook her head, “No,” even though she required much in that moment—an understanding, an apology, an admonition it was not her fault—but she asked for none of those things. She accepted, “This is the way it's done,” even as she shook her head from side to side and cried.

“This is the way it's done,” her sister had said, which meant it might have been done to her. Maybe it had been done to her other sisters too, maybe even her mother. “This is the way it's done” played repeatedly in her mind. What happened, she knew, was wrong, but this is the way it's done.

She repeated those words as she cleaned herself. She heard them as she returned to the living room where her brother-in-law, alone, stood. She searched the room for Pop, but he was gone. She searched for her sister, but she, too, could not be found. Her brother-in-law had been charged with taking her back to her mother's on the handlebars of his bike.

As they rode, she clenched the handlebars, rocking from side to side, working to gain balance. She sat, ankles crossed against the stinging between her legs. Her brother-in-law whispered in her ear as the wind whipped across her face. He said many things, but all she heard was, “Don't tell your daddy.”
This is the way it's done
.

She did not tell the first time it happened, so she couldn't tell each time that followed, each wrestling match in the bedroom, each ride on the handlebars of her brother-in-law's bike.

The first time, she had not wanted it. This she knew for certain. But the second, the third, and each time that followed, she couldn't be so sure. It didn't take much for her to agree to that house, to that bedroom, to that bike. It was the way things were done.

Each time, she screamed. Each time, she cried, but those moments under Pop's gaze seemed fair trade for tears that would
later fall. With each encounter, Momma learned something all women eventually come to know. Loving a man means sacrifice, giving. The act of receiving, of taking, that is the gift he gives her. This is the way it is done.

The Reasons
The Reasons

After the first encounter with Pop, the home Momma had with her daddy no longer fit. Secrets, even the ones we keep from ourselves, have a way of making the familiar unfamiliar. After each rape, she tiptoed throughout her daddy's house even when he wasn't there. When he was home, she hid in her room, door ajar because no doors could be closed in Big Boone's house.

Her period was a week late. Then two. Then three. After a month, she'd stopped counting. She feared something had broken inside her, like Pop's mishandling had thrown her off track. At night, she lay on her back, surveying her body. Her breasts, always big and soft, had grown as hard as grapefruits. Her stomach, which used to be flat, had rounded into a hill under her sheet. Throughout the day, she suffered bouts of nausea, vomiting, then dry heaving when there was nothing left to expel. At night, there was the stabbing hunger, so severe she could not be still. Living in Deep Creek with so many brothers and sisters, hunger had rocked her to sleep many nights, but it had never gripped her as it did when her insides churned and groaned as if she'd forever be empty. She drank water, rubbed her stomach, tried to sleep. Nothing helped. The hunger, unwilling to be silenced, prompted her to smuggle slices of bologna into her room and nibble quietly as she listened for her daddy's footsteps.

She soon decided the problem wasn't her body, but her daddy's home. Its rules had tightened around her like a shoe she'd outgrown. She was newly sixteen, but the time had come for her to travel that same road her brothers, sisters, and mother had traveled. She devised a plan. With only a week to set it in motion, she had little time to be afraid.

That morning, she stood at the living room threshold, her body bent, hovering over the line that separated her from her daddy.
She knocked, though there was no door. He didn't look at her when he belted, “What you want, Pretty?” The syllables collided as he leaned back in his chair, his legs propped on the coffee table, his eyes turned to the window. His belly, visible from behind the arm of the chair, looked like a sack of laundry. His plaid shirt was splattered with splotches of paint and weld burns that had singed through parts of the material. The legs of his pants were rolled, revealing shins and ankles that resembled swollen pork loins bulging through lines of butcher twine.

She walked to his chair and stood in front of him, careful not to obscure his view of the window. She held the paper in her hand, the one that announced she was one of a few students, a sophomore no less, chosen to attend the summer Upward Bound Program at Norfolk State University. She inched the paper toward him as he shooed her. His voice, booming, shook her and the paper she held. “What you want, girl?”

She wanted to turn away, letting what had once been celebratory news die within her, yet she did not move. Everything around her grew quiet. She stood alone in that room, even though her daddy sat in front of her.

“Daddy,” she said to the floor. “I got accepted to Upward Bound. I wrote one of the best essays in class and I was one of the only girls they chose.”

He grunted, wiped his nose, and leaned back, never turning his head her way.

“What the hell is Upward Bound? And who told you to do some essay without my permission?”

“It was an assignment in school, Daddy,” she responded. “They made us do it. I didn't even know it was a contest.”

She prayed he wouldn't smell the lie on her lips. She'd known they would choose the best ones in the school. That's why she had written an outline and sharpened her pencils for a whole minute before she began writing. She'd never liked writing before, but she wrote as if she loved words, as if her need to escape could be funneled from mind through pencil to paper.

“They said mine was one of the best, Daddy. That's why they want me to go, even though I'm so young.”

He looked at her then, his stare so sharp one would think he was whipping her in his mind.

“Don't no-damn-body at no-damn-school got the right to say where you can go and when. Who the hell they think they are and who the hell you think you are?”

She had no answer, as that question never required one. She was nobody next to her daddy, no more than a portrait nailed to a wall. Whatever opinions she had she'd stolen from him, and she could tell his opinion concerning Norfolk State was not one she wished to possess. She considered retreating before dismissal, but she'd learned earlier in life never to turn head or back to her daddy. He could get from one side of the room to another with one jolt of his body.

Big Boone stared at Momma, saying with his eyes what he did not want to say with his mouth. He noticed her long, thin body growing fast. The curls enveloping her face were the same ones she'd worn as a baby. She was auburn brown, the color of sky right before the sun hits the horizon, and she was pretty, true to the nickname given to her years before. She was the baby of the family, but she had never been his baby. Toward her, he had never been soft; so many parts of him hardened before she was born.

He expected her to turn, to run before he became what she'd always known him to be: heavy, pressing, crowding out anything that did not please him. But she stood limp, head down, without confrontation, just standing. He waited for her to plead, for her to say something that would cue him to scream, to order her away, maybe even slap her for talking back. But, she just stood. He had skills when responding to talking, to those working to convince him, but standing, silence was different; he found it difficult to reply when conversation had not begun.

He'd not often had that problem, but something in him wanted to wait for her, to see what she would say, what she would do in
order to capture what she desired. One thing was certain: he did not want her to go. He'd already lost so many: her momma, his sons, his other daughters. Out of them all, she was the one left. Who would he be without someone to lean his power on? She, the coffee table of his life, had been there to hold his drinks, his food, his stress when it grew too heavy for him to carry. But part of him wanted this for her. Part of him was proud of her accomplishment, even though he didn't fully understand what that accomplishment was. She had written an essay that won her something. That must have meant she was a good writer and a smart girl. He and his wife may have given that to her before she was born.

Growing up, Granddaddy had never been a big writer or a reader; he was never good with words. Numbers were his thing. They meant dollars, survival. Words could get you dead. Too much talking meant not enough working. But his baby was smart, even though she hated words and he often had to chastise her into finishing her work for class. She'd written an essay that had gotten her into college before she was old enough to go. That opportunity he wanted to give her, a chance to be more than he could. But no one had ever given him anything. He took to breaking the law in order to get what he and his family needed. That was the world she had inherited. To demand anything less would make her weak and he'd seen to it that none of his girls were weak. So he'd give her work she'd already proven she could do.

He swallowed hard, sat back farther in his chair than the frame had ever intended, and said, “If you want to go, Pretty, write ten reasons I should let you. Write 'em out and I'll think about it.”

Momma sat in her room, writing words that did not flow as they had when she wrote the essay for Upward Bound. The words she wrote for her daddy were reluctant to appear, as if they feared her daddy too. Her writing was disjointed, too much pressure on the paper, her life sketched in scraggly lines. She started, stopped, balled up the paper, started again. She scratched out a word. Wrote another. In between each page she crumbled, her future dipped into a valley. It stalled there, unable to muster energy to creep
up the mountainside. There were moments she was able to press on the gas of her existence, when she barreled up that mountain, revved herself past the downward tug of incline. Then, there was no destination in mind, just the moving reminded her she was fighting toward her own space. Finally, she'd scribbled ten things, ten reasons her daddy should let her leave his house.

“What were those reasons?” I once asked. She said she does not need to remember. I, on the other hand, must know. Did she write she had missed her period and she knew, but really didn't know what that meant? Had the graphite against paper wanted to confess what had happened with Pop, as she, clenching her fingers, burrowed down on blankness, wrestled words into short, simple sentences? Had she fought the urge to write, “I need to get out of here before we all know,” aware he might not read beyond the letter “I?” Those things cannot be known. The past only reveals what it chooses, but I see her as she inspects her paper, as she says a prayer for each word, and takes her future into her daddy's room.

Momma quietly handed her daddy the paper. She quivered as she leaned toward him. He pretended to read even though the curves, the straight lines had always been foreign to him. He cleared his throat and she flinched in response. She looked straight ahead. He stared down. No parts of the house creaked. Even the windows seemed to hold their breath. The ear of the world turned toward him—waited—just as Momma did.

“All right, you can go.” He spoke with heat, as if she were in need of a whipping.

She heard it that way too, but through the heat she heard song. He ordered her out of the room, told her to clean something before he changed his mind. She didn't smile as she left and she didn't look back. I see him and her in my mind and I know what Momma did not; if she had looked back, if her eyes had touched his, she would have seen the smile, the celebration in him.