Keeping Secrets (9 page)

She took a few steps into the store and stood in front of the ice-cream freezer. It had six doors on top, and if you wanted chocolate you opened the chocolate door and reached down with a scoop into a deep can and took it—unless the ice cream was too hard. She could scoop it if she stood on a stool. And she knew how much it cost, too. Five cents for a double dip, but she didn’t ring it up on the cash register when her friends came over. She loved the cash register especially; that was her favorite thing.

All the silver dollars that came across the counter were hers, kept in a little square cigar box on a shelf under the register. Every couple of months she carried the box downtown to the bank for them to put the money into their vault. The teller initialed the amount and the date with a fountain pen in tiny little numbers in her dark-blue savings book.

“It’s important to learn to save,” Momma always said. “There’s nothing more important than saving.”

Emma kept the little book in her bottom dresser drawer. There was her name, Emma Rochelle Fine, written in ink on the first page. Then all those little bitty lines with dates, and numbers, and initials. The total was the best part: ninety-six dollars. Her mother said it was the money she was going to use toward college.

She guessed college cost a lot. For as long as she could remember her mother had gone to college over in Cypress to finish her degree. Until one Sunday afternoon last spring when she and Daddy had sat on folding chairs in the sun and watched Momma dressed up in a long black robe like the church choir wore and a funny hat with a tassel. The diploma and the tassel were hanging on the wall in their bedroom now.

In the store Rosalie looked up from her conversation with Jake and saw Emma. Her face was red. Was she hot or angry? “Did you finish your breakfast?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. Now put on your sun hat and you can go out and play before it gets too hot.”

“And then swimming?”

“We’ll see. If the Cloutiers go and Anne promises to watch you. Are you going over to their house now?”

“Yes, ma’am. Mike and I are going to play in the canal.” And then she bit her tongue.

“Remember what I told you about that.”

“Oh, Ro,” her father grumbled from behind the meat counter. “They’re just kids.”

“Jake, I told you what I saw.”

“And I’m telling you you’re imagining things. Kids will play.”

Emma flushed with the memory of what her momma had seen a couple of days before. She had been playing with the water hose out in the backyard they shared with the Cloutiers. She and Mike were in their underpants, Anne and Wayne in their bathing suits. They’d been spraying one another, screaming, jumping at the delicious shock when the cold water hit their hot skins. All of a sudden Mike stopped, pulled down his pants, and peed against the trunk of the catalpa tree.

Anne, his older sister, said, “Mike, don’t!”

“Oh, leave him alone,” Wayne laughed, showing his broad white teeth in what Emma thought was a movie-star face. She always felt excited around Wayne, the same way she did when she was close to her cousin J.D. who lived out in the country.

Emma turned from Wayne’s laughter and stared at Mike with her mouth loosely parted. She’d sneaked looks when he was wet in his underwear, but she had never seen a boy naked except for little babies getting their diapers changed. Mike’s pee made an arc like the water spurting out of the fish’s mouth that the mermaid held in the baby pool.

Then Rosalie had turned the corner around the side of the yard, coming to get Emma for something.

“What on earth are you doing!” she’d yelled at Mike, then grabbed Emma by the hand and jerked her into the house. “What were you doing?” she demanded again inside the dark cool apartment as she shook her.

“Nothing.”

Then Emma had stared at the brown and yellow squares of the linoleum on her bedroom floor. This had something to do with down there. She didn’t know what exactly, but Momma always made her feel ashamed about down there. When she mentioned it, it made her feel queasy in her stomach, almost exactly like when Momma gave her an enema. Momma had said, “Mike is a nasty little boy,” and she wouldn’t let her play alone with him anymore.

Now Emma, who really wanted to go down to the canal to play with Mike, said, “Linda and Mo Moore are coming over, too, Momma. They said so.”

Her mother looked at her sharply. “You just make sure that they do.” She straightened the straps of the sunsuit covering Emma’s tiny nipples. Her fingers were always rough, her touch a quick poke, leaving tingling red marks for a few minutes on Emma’s pale chest. “You be good,” she cautioned, and Emma skipped out the front door.

Rosalie watched her daughter’s blonde pigtails disappear from view. She sighed and turned back to the invoices. School had been over for a week and a half, and she had looked forward to a summer of relative ease after her first year of teaching. She liked the work, but it was exhausting leaving before dawn to drive the twenty-five miles into the country to the three-room schoolhouse. Much of the trip was on gravel roads with wooden bridges that threatened to wash out in the winter rains. When she got there, she had to bring in wood and build a fire in the stove before her third and fourth graders arrived. She helped Jake in the store when she got home until it was almost suppertime. Then she would run back into the kitchen and throw something together. Saturdays were spent behind the store’s counter, too. Only on Sundays could she relax, after Sunday School and the church service, with a nap in the afternoon.

She’d hoped to unwind this summer. But look at these invoices. They were a mess.

She stood with her hands on her hips, the yellow slips of paper in her right hand. The papers were covered with sums of money, most of which they hadn’t paid.

“Jake.” Her lips were tight, as was her voice. “Why haven’t these been taken care of?”

“What?”

She knew that look he was giving her, as if she were speaking a foreign language. He was stalling for time.

“These bills. Some of them are past due. Which means we can’t complain when we don’t get deliveries on time. You’d think you could do something right.”

Rosalie bit her lip then. She hadn’t meant to go so far, so fast. But it was too late now. The words were out. Well, so what? She meant them. Almost everything Jake did (and she didn’t think that was ever enough) had to be done over again. Well, she had to admit he was a good butcher, but he knew nothing about keeping books.

Behind the long refrigerated meat display case now, he slammed down the cleaver he held in his left hand. It made a dull thud on the end grains of the wooden butcher block.

“What the hell?” he sputtered.

“Don’t you curse at me. Just tell me why you haven’t taken care of these.”

“Because I didn’t want to, that’s why!” Jake bit back. Then he tore off his bloodstained apron and stomped to the rear of the store, slamming the screened apartment door behind him.

Before the sound had even stopped, there was an echoing slap as a little colored boy walked in the front, letting the door close behind him.

Rosalie looked at him and wondered if he had heard Jake yelling. Jake embarrassing her in front of a nigger. It wouldn’t be the first time. She wiped away quick tears with the back of her hand.

“What do you want?” she barked at the child.

The boy lowered his eyes, bit his lip nervously. “I…meat.” He fidgeted as if he had to go to the bathroom.

“Jake!” Rosalie called to the back.

There was no answer. Of course not. Once he had had a fit like that and had raised his voice, there would be silence for a long time, for several days. She’d have to do it herself.

“You stand right there, boy,” she said, pointing with her finger like she did talking to the children in her classroom. You had to watch niggers every minute or they’d steal.

Minutes later, she had the meat cut and wrapped and the charge written up in the book with “johnson, h.,” for his mother’s name, Hattie Johnson, inscribed in pencil across the back.

She riffled through the two wooden cheese boxes full of charge books and wondered how much they were owed. If it weren’t for the nigger trade they wouldn’t have a cent. Even with most of those on credit paying up the first of the month, they didn’t have much. But it was the niggers who kept what little bread they had on their table.

Rosalie hadn’t wanted to locate so near the Quarters when she started her business, but that’s where it was, the only store she could afford, and Zeb Miller had assured her the nigger trade wasn’t bad.

“Just keep a loaded pistol under the counter,” he’d said, “if it’ll make you feel better. Probably never have to use it.”

If she’d had any sense, she’d have used it on him, but nonetheless he had been right about the colored trade. Of course, they were slow payers, and you had to watch the little ones like a hawk so they didn’t slip things out of the candy counter, but all in all she couldn’t complain about the colored trade in her store.

Perched right there on the edge of the Quarters, separated from it only by a drainage ditch everybody called “the canal,” her property had been so cheap that within a few years of paying off the store she’d bought the lot next to it, too, the last lot right on the white/black line. She’d built the little house the Cloutiers rented from her. It had been a wise decision. The rent house brought in forty dollars a month and every penny counted, though she had to do all of the repairs herself. Jake hadn’t proved to be very handy.

Now Rosalie found herself staring into the eyes of the little Negro child. She’d forgotten that he was there.

“What are you waiting for, boy?”

“My momma’s meat, Miz Fine,” he mumbled, lowering his gaze to the floor.

Rosalie pushed the package toward him. That’s what happened when Jake got her so riled up. She got all distracted. Her nerves couldn’t take it. She even found herself being short with Emma, whom she loved more than life.

She’d said that to Emma once. “I love you more than my own life, honey.”

Emma had looked up from Rosalie’s lap, where she was sitting with the book she wanted Rosalie to read to her.

“And how much is that, Momma?”

“Why, everyone loves his own life most of all, child.”

But as she said the words, Rosalie had known they weren’t true. She didn’t love her life at all. She never had, and she never would. Since Emma had come into it, things had been better. She’d been right about supposing that, in the first conversation she’d had with her sister Janey about finding a child. But she hadn’t counted on the problems, the main one being Jake.

What she should have done, if she’d thought more about it, was find a child who had no mother
or
father—an orphan was what she should have sought. Then there wouldn’t have been all these complications—like sex. Though she’d made it clear to Jake pretty early that
that
wasn’t part of the deal. She never had been interested and didn’t plan on starting at this late date. No, sir, thank you very much. Then there were Jake’s grumpiness and his moods, his temper and his foreign ways. New York Jew—he might as well be from Mars for all he knew about how to get along in the world.

And, too, she had to admit, the older Emma got, the child herself was a bit more than she had bargained for. For Rosalie had never really thought about a child having a mind of her own, of her growing up, of her being anything but a beautiful blonde baby. Already, at five and a half, Emma asked hard questions. Why did her daddy talk differently? Well, if it was because he came from New York, why didn’t Momma come from there, too? When did Daddy move to West Cypress? And why?

Rosalie was hard pressed for the answers, for she had convinced Jake that Emma would be better off if she didn’t know the truth, if she thought she was Rosalie’s own. It wouldn’t be that difficult, she’d reasoned; with the exception of Janey, and the rest of her family whom she rarely saw, hardly anyone knew. She had very few friends in West Cypress, had never had the time for socializing.

Jake had fought her about it. “She ought to know about her real mother.”

“
Real
mother,” Rosalie had argued. “Then what does that make me, who’s changed her diapers, raised her, given her a home?”

Jake had continued to grumble, but then things had slid along, and Emma had grown, and once the threads began to be spun, even if by omission, the lie became a fabric with a texture of its own.

But Emma’s questions never stopped. It was astonishing, the things that grew in that child’s mind and plopped out of her mouth. Why, just the other day, she’d come home from Sunday School—which Rosalie had thought would save her and make her like all the other children, even if (though she didn’t know it) she had been born a Jew—talking about the song “Jesus Loves the Little Children.”

“If Jesus loves them all, ‘Brown and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight,’” she sang, “if He loves them all, why do we call the brown and black ones niggers? Why do they have to live in those ugly houses on the other side of the canal? Why can’t I play with them?”

Rosalie didn’t need those kinds of questions. They made her uncomfortable and gave her a headache. Southern children never asked them. She never had. Sometimes she wondered whether Emma’s being born a Yankee had ruined her for life.