Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore (9780385538398) (18 page)

More laughter. Even I smiled. I still had my childhood white leather-bound testaments in a drawer at home.

“You can turn the page just as easily as I can. You can get down on your knees without me askin' it. I'm not here to tell you stories of long ago and far away. I'm not here to point out sin and throw stones. I got my own sins to atone for. I got my own glass house.”

“Amen,” a woman cried.

“Preach,” a fellow parishioner replied.

“I'm tellin' you,” the minister said. “I'm tellin' you here and now that this pulpit does not raise me up above you. It doesn't make me smarter or better, not one whit closer to God. We are all in the same soup down here. And every day we have to reach out”—she raised her arms above her head—“and try to touch Him and feel Him and love Him and most of all we have to do His work.”

The lady minister looked around the silent room. She had us all at that moment.

She was an older woman. Her skin was the brown of an overripe melon. Her face was clear of worry.

“I'm not gonna preach old stories that you've heard a thousand times,” she said. “That kind of preachin' is for the children who are just now learnin' the path up … and the road down.

“What I'm talkin' about is you and me and what we might do to make this world something that reflects the teachings of all the great prophets.”

She stopped again and rubbed her nose with the fingers of her left hand.

“Ruby Jenkins,” she said. “Does anybody out there know Ruby?”

She looked around but no one replied.

“Ruby Jenkins,” the preacher intoned. “She lives six and a half blocks from this church. Ruby has an illegal room at the back of a commercial property. She also has a fever and infected sores on her feet and back. I hear that she's from Tennessee and her family has moved on from these parts.
She's an old woman but she looks older and she feels pain every day. She don't sleep and she cain't walk because of her fever and her feet. She cain't come to God and I believe that God is wondering why no one goes to her. Because you know God does not reside in this house. The omnipotent spirit is not prisoner on Sundays to us in our best clothes and on our best behavior.”

The minister—I never learned her name—looked around the room telling us with her silence to consider her words.

“No,” she continued after that exquisite quietude, “God is not ours. We belong to Him. We are here to do His work. His home is in that back room with Ruby and in the jail cell with some'a your sons and daughters and their friends. He might not even be here today. Your prayers might be on the back burners, in a saved file like in some giant computer. God might not get to readin' your prayers for a thousand years because He is worried about suffering and the pain that we ignore in this fine house we've built.

“But you have to understand, brothers and sisters, that this building looks beautiful in your eyes but it's no more than Ruby Jenkins's room in the eyes of the Lord. You come here to plan your baptisms and say your prayers, to hear stale Bible stories and compare hats. But out there”—the minister pointed to her left—“out there is the real cathedral. This earth is God's palace and real prayer is the succor of sufferin' in His name.

“Ruby Jenkins is one in ten thousand lost and ailing, ten million. There are hungry children and drunken men,
women sellin' their bodies and wise men plannin' the murders of millions callin' themselves God-fearing and thinkin' about sainthood.

“Prayer for us, brothers and sisters, is not the childhood, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep.' That kind of psalm is for children learning to respect and to give thanks. We're here, in this room, to give a helpin' hand, to reach out to the sinner and the lost and the suffering. Don't you think that I or any other pretender to holiness can forgive you. As long as there's a Ruby Jenkins hidden from your view you know that your work is not done, that your prayers are unspoken, that the Lord's plan is unfinished.…”

The minister stopped there, seemingly in midsentence. She turned her back and walked away, through an unseen exit, leaving us in the middle of her sermon like survivors of a boat wreck in the center of a vast lake.

It was the shortest sermon I'd ever heard and also the only one to ever touch me.

After a moment of confusion organ music began to play. The sunlight through the abstract designs in the stained-glass windows seemed to brighten. I felt for Theon and his flight from unhappiness; for Jolie who was on the same reckless journey. And I knew that I was, even at that moment, on the same road but that didn't bother me.

“Let's go,” Newland whispered in my ear.

The sound of his voice made me gasp and giggle. I stood up like a drunken woman and made my way to the parking lot.

Outside I was reunited with my family, known and unknown. Cornell, who was a few years older than I, glowered, and Delilah (to my surprise) smiled brilliantly. Newland had his arm around the lovely Asian woman's waist, and my mother, Asha Peel, came crying into my arms.

“Sandra, baby,” she said.

I held on to her as if for safety in those complex emotional waters.

“Mom,” I whispered.

“This is Mi Lin,” Newland said as they approached the embrace. “She's my wife.”

I smiled and freed a hand to shake.

She grinned with abandon and then laughed.

My mother moved back, holding me only by the wrists now.

“You look so beautiful,” she said.

Cornell's glower became a full-out scowl.

Delilah lifted Edison in her arms and came forward.

“You remember your mother, don't you, Edison,” she said.

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Is it Christmas?”

“No,” my stepsister said. “She's finally come home.”

There was a look of shocked delight on the boy's face. He stretched out his arms and suddenly I was holding him. His weight was nothing, but my own body felt as dense as stone. Edison squeezed my neck and I had to concentrate not to crush his skinny little body in my arms.

A beautiful and unforgiving black woman came up to Cornell's side.

The world around me seemed to be spinning. I felt like
a youngster drunk for the first time. I had moved so quickly from one world into others. This action seemed to resonate with the minister's sermon somehow.

“We're all going to my house for supper,” my mother said. “You're gonna come, aren't you, Sandra?”

I wanted to say yes. I intended to go. But the overwhelming nature of that day, of the past days, slowed my ability to speak.

“You can bring Theon,” she said.

“Theon died, Mom,” I said, “but I'll be happy to come to dinner.”

“I'm so sorry,” Asha said. “Not that you can come but about Theon.”

“I'll drive you and the little man,” Cornell said to Delilah.

“No, baby,” my stepsister said. “We're going to ride with Eddie's mother.”

“Yaaaay,” my son yelled.

“Uncle Cornell says that you couldn't be my mama no more because you did bad things,” Edison said in the car.

He was sitting next to me strapped down by the adult-size safety belt. Delilah was in the back.

“Is that true?” he asked when I didn't respond immediately.

“Eddie,” Delilah said.

“No, baby,” I said. “What Cornell meant was that the kind of life I was living would have been a bad thing for a child like you. I was protecting you from things that could have made you scared and upset.”

“Like what?” he asked.

“You'll find out one day, honey.”

“Do you still do things that scare a little kid?”

“Not anymore. No. All that is over as of next Saturday.”

“What happen then?”

“I have to go to a funeral and then … and then I'm gonna start a whole new life.”

“Can I come stay with you?”

I looked up in the rearview mirror.

Delilah had long curly hair that was pulled back and tied with a yellow bow. She had a cherub's face and bright brown skin. One might have called her plain if not for the happiness she exuded. Her eyes were kind and hopeful.

She nodded at me.

“I want you to,” I said.

“Then can I?” Edison asked.

“Today is the first day I been back around your grandmother and Delilah and your uncles and aunts,” I said. “And so we have to take a few days to figure out what will happen then. I have to find a job somewhere and a new place to live before I can take you with me.”

“Is this your car?” my son asked.

“Yes, it is.”

“It's nice.”

“Thank you.”

“Maybe we could live in here.”

Delilah laughed and tickled Edison from over the seat.

He laughed too and pretty soon we were all laughing. Before we got to my mother's house Eddie taught me a song about where the little lost donkey goes to get found.

My mother had baked three small butter-basted chickens with white and wild rice stuffing. She quartered the chickens and served them with broccoli spears and canned cranberry sauce. There were three apple-pear pies on the side table for dessert and multicolored pitchers of ice water sweating on the windowsill.

The house I grew up in was small but always seemed large. Even that dining room gave the sense of being a bigger space. It was crowded in there. Along with the people from church there was Winston (who was five), twelve-year-old Margaret, and a baby named James. These three brown children belonged to Yolanda, Cornell's wife. Their father, I was told by Delilah, had been killed in a drive-by shooting.

Yolanda was beautiful in a rough kind of way and looked somewhat familiar.

The sensations of that room cut a deep and wide swath into my memory. The baby crying and Edison's laughter, Newland's perpetual innocence, and my mother's sense of order and decorum. The smells and sounds, even the air on my skin were reminders of a life I once loved, then hated, and finally forgot for a while in a haze of drugs, sex, and glitter.

“Where'd you and Mi Lin meet?” I asked Newland.

He and his bride were seated across the table from me. On my left side sat my son and on my right was my mother.

“Online,” Newland said.

“Really?”

“Lin is from Hong Kong,” Newland explained.

Newland was dark and skinny with a round head like my son's. His expression, since he was a baby, was always one of wonder and surprise. He never had trouble with the gangs or the police. No one wanted to hurt Newly, and he was always willing to help you if he could.

“And you were online pen pals?”

“One night I found this Web site about women from other countries lookin' to be American wives,” my brother said.

“You should know something about that,” Cornell said to me. With that he smiled for the first time I'd seen that day.

“Anyway,” Newland continued, “I send 'em a picture of myself and my house and Spider, my dog. I told 'em that I worked for the post office and that I was a sorter.

“Then for a long time I forgot about it—it was almost a year before Mi Lin send me a e-mail.”

“I told him,” Mi Lin said with a pronounced and yet understandable accent, “that I like what he says more than all the other men, that his pictures were about a real man who lives a real life. His house looks big to me and I like a dog. I work in toy factory and save two thousand dollars. I tell him that if he pay eight thousand I will send him my two for the rest.”

“We were all so worried that it was some kinda scam,” my mother said. “We told him not to do it.”

“But I could tell that she was for real,” my brother argued. “You could see it in her pictures and in the way she said what she said. I wrote her back and said that I wasn't rich and that I didn't even have enough to keep her without her
gettin' a job, and she wrote back that she liked to work. Boy, you know I hit the credit union the next mornin'. I lied and said I was improvin' my house, but you know I was rentin' then.”