Mama (23 page)

They stopped by to see all of their relatives and friends and watched a lot of TV. They had wanted to go roller-skating but the McKinley rink had been closed—too many fights. There wasn't much else to do. They'd already seen
Battle for the Planet of the Apes,
and the only other thing that was playing downtown was
Pinocchio.
On the last day, Doll managed to reactivate an old junior high school romance, and Angel babysat for Bootsey and David while they went to the drive-in.

The two sisters didn't have a chance to talk about what they'd done until they were back on the plane to LA.

"Was it boring, or what?" Angel asked.

"Sort of, but Bryan wasn't, that's for damn sure."

"You are just too fast, you know that. And Bootsey got on my nerves. She sounded like the Old Woman in the Shoe, didn't she?"

"Honey, Mama don't even talk about furniture and shit the way she did. I swear. What she gon' be like at thirty?"

"All I can say is that we should thank our lucky stars that our big sis got the hell out, or we'd probably still be sitting there in the projects like everybody else," Angel said.

"Give me LA any day," Doll said.

Then they slapped each other's palms in agreement and ordered two ginger ales.

Things got pretty much back to normal real fast. Angel fell in love with that boy Willie, whom Mildred liked about as much as she liked Delbert, and Doll completely immersed herself in Richard. Everybody was in love, and when Mildred showed them the 1.5-carat diamond that Big Jim had given her, Doll and Angel almost died.

"Mama, puleeze. Have you completely lost it?" Angel asked.

"I'm marrying him. Why not? Black women deserve a little happiness too, you know. Especially since ain't nary a niggah been by here to so much as light the pilot on the dryer or buy me a beer. And this man is extremely nice. Treats me like a queen, and I'm marrying him. I don't care who don't like it."

But the wedding had to be put off because Doll started putting on so much weight that Mildred guessed she was pregnant. She knew her daughters very well, almost as well as she thought she knew herself. And Mildred's instincts were hardly ever wrong.

"You pregnant, ain't you, girl? Don't lie. You can't lie."

Doll started crying and admitted it. She'd been too scared to tell Mildred. She had pushed her lovemaking too close and in two different directions, here and in Point Haven.

But Mildred didn't care who the father was. "Keep this baby, girl. Have it and love it. If you grown enough to fuck like a woman and stupid enough to get pregnant and not leave enough time between men, then you old enough to carry the responsibility that goes with it." Then Mildred chuckled. "And to tell you the truth, a baby ain't such a bad thang. I had five of 'em and I survived, didn't I?"

Doll dried her eyes.

"I been wanting another grandbaby anyway, since Freda is taking her sweet time about it."

As the weeks passed, Mildred's maternal instincts took over. Every other day, she came running in the door with something in her hands that would make a baby's life comfortable. She bought rattles, teething rings, booties, and receiving blankets in all colors: white and yellow, mint green, light blue, and lavender, just in case. Mildred didn't know what she wanted, a boy or a girl. It didn't matter, so long as it was healthy and had ten fingers and ten toes.

Big Jim started pressuring her about setting a date, but Mildred kept postponing it. She told him she had too many other thangs on her mind to be thanking about marriage right now. Of course she hurt his feelings, but Big Jim was so in love and so stupid and so desperate that he went along with it. He didn't even know she was stalling.

Mildred hadn't been this happy in so long that Doll had a hard time telling her she was thinking of getting rid of it.

"You what?"

"I want to go to college, Mama. I can still make graduation without showing, but I don't know how I'll ever get my B.A. with a baby."

"Look. You know how many women out here done had a house full of kids and kept on living like it wasn't nothing? Millions. And I'm just talking about the black ones. A baby don't stop no show. It may slow it down, but it don't stop it. You just have to learn to do for somebody else. That's all. And if you want to go to college, you'll go. I'm so sick of people always coming up with excuses about why they can't do this and why they can't do that. You can do anything you want to do. Look. This house is big enough for all of us. I can take care of this baby and you can graduate and take your college classes. Don't worry about it, damn. And I'll tell you another thang. All these women running around here having abortions ain't gon' do nothing but end up messing their insides all up and when they want to have one, they ain't gon' be able to. And ain't nobody having no damn abortions under my roof, I can tell you that right now. So what you gon' do—piss or get off the pot?"

Doll decided to have the baby, and as her day approached, she worried more and more about who the child would look like and whether she should tell Richard and Bryan the truth. But Mildred was of the belief that what you don't know won't hurt you. "Look. You yellow and Bryan is yellow and Richard is as black as tar. It's gotta come out either bright as hell or somewhere between brown and black. Wait and see and keep your damn mouth shut before you end up putting your foot in it."

Richard believed the baby was his all along because Doll had never given him any reason to suspect her infidelity. And when she gave birth to a seven-pound nine-ounce baby boy who was so pale he looked white, they went ahead and named him Richard anyway.

With the new baby, Mildred was in her own world. She had changed her mind about marrying Big Jim. She had too much to do now. It was as though the clock had been moved back for her and instead of feeling the angst of her forty-first birthday, Mildred felt like she was twenty-three again. She quit her job at the plant and told Big Jim he could have his ring back if he wanted it, but he told her to just keep it, which she did.

And Mildred, a brand new mother, left little for the real mother to worry about, so Doll enrolled full-time at a junior college. The washer was always soaking diapers and baby clothes, and although Doll was of the generation in which Pampers had become a convenience, Mildred had insisted on cloth diapers. "Pampers are a waste of damn money. You spend a fortune and don't do nothing but throw 'em away." Her electricity bill was twice as high but Mildred didn't care. She bathed the baby in the kitchen sink and talked to him like he could understand her. She oiled him down and lay him on a blanket in the back yard, stark naked, so he could get some color while she pulled up the weeds in her flowerbed or cleaned the swimming pool.

Richard never questioned that this baby was his son, despite his color. He had never known who his own parents were; he had been adopted. He was proud to have brought something into the world he could claim. Even though he had just started working, he gave Doll money every week to supplement her welfare checks and food stamps. His parents saw to it that little Richard had everything Mildred couldn't afford to buy him. They never questioned the color of his skin either. Thought he looked just like Doll, really, and maybe the next one would favor Richard more.

Doll and Richard hadn't seriously discussed marriage. He had brought it up casually when she had first told him she was pregnant, but Doll had said that she wanted to wait and see what happened, that she wasn't sure just how she felt about everything.

Mildred didn't care one way or another if they ever got married, so long as her grandson was there with her, and when Doll and Mildred started bickering over what was best for him—when to pick him up, when to let him cry, when to burp and feed him, how often his diaper should be changed, and who had spent how much on what—Mildred would start getting on her nerves so bad that Doll would threaten to leave. But Mildred didn't want that to happen and quickly smoothed things over.

Doll knew Mildred not only loved little Richard's company but had also started depending on her to pay half of the house note (sometimes all of it). Doll also bought most of the groceries and gave Mildred booze and cigarette money. Mildred had started drinking more heavily and more often, but Doll didn't feel that she could say anything about it yet. Mildred was doing too fine a job taking care of her son.

Angel moved in with Willie, not because of the space problem, but because she was spending so much time at his place anyway and it was closer to campus and he had been badgering her about doing it for so long. Mildred was glad to see her go because it meant she could fix her room up for little Richard. But Mildred didn't trust this Willie. First of all, he was a low-rider. He drove one of those cars that didn't have any handles on the outside, and the windows were tinted too dark. And Willie had no intention of going to college. He had told Mildred that. He said college was all hype. The last thing Mildred wanted was for some homely boy from the ghetto to make her daughter forget all her smarts and scruples. But she couldn't stop her. Mildred figured that after being around so many intelligent and high-class people at UCLA, the girl would come to her senses.

"Just don't forget that you ain't no cheap thrill," she told Angel. "You worth every dime that a niggah spend on you and more. You deserve the best of everything. And as long as you use the brains God gave you, instead of letting them fall by the wayside, you won't steer too far off the track. And I don't care what that slew-footed boy try to talk you into. Don't you come in here talking about you tired of school or it's a waste of time and you gon' quit and settle down. I don't want to hear that shit."

By the time Richard was two, Doll had graduated from the two-year college and had been accepted to one of the state universities. Her grades weren't high enough to get her into UCLA, so it looked like she was going to have to move. She wasn't sure what she was going to college for, but her other two sisters had gone and Doll didn't want to look like the dummy in the family.

"I'm moving," she had said to Mildred one day out of the blue.

"Now, how you gon' watch this boy, go to college all day long, pay for an apartment, and live like you got some sense? You might as well stay here till you get a job and at least till the boy is old enough to know how to act. Damn. I told you I'd watch him. You been coming and going as you please all this time, what's the big hurry now?"

"Mama, I'm old enough to be out on my own. I'm twenty years old! Jesus. I would like to have some privacy. What's wrong with that? You did it, didn't you?" And to that, Mildred couldn't say a word. Her face felt as if it was swelling up and she was perspiring, which she'd been doing a lot of lately, for seemingly no reason at all.

"Hand me that bottle under the sink, would you?" Doll opened the cabinet and pulled out a half point of VO. Mildred poured it in her coffee cup.

Doll kissed little Richard and left for school. Mildred sat at the table and watched him playing with his toys on the floor. She took a sip from her cup. "Baby," she said, "Granny's down to zero now."

Mildred wasn't used to being in a house with no people in it. There was no noise to complain about. Nothing was ever out of place, so she couldn't blame anybody when she couldn't find something. She had told Doll that now she would finally have some time to do all the things she'd been meaning to do. But she had already cleaned out every drawer, closet, and cabinet, and there wasn't a weed left in her flower garden. She looked at Freda's old sewing machine, but Mildred hadn't sewn since high school, and she was not in the mood for mending.

It occurred to her that she could look for another job, even though the welfare checks kept her going. But doing what? She remembered that flier she had taken off the bulletin board in the grocery store about a training program for middle-aged women who wanted to reenter the work force. Mildred hated that word "middle-aged." She applied anyway. They were going to pay her to learn how to type, file, and take shorthand. But before the first class was even over, Mildred realized she didn't have the patience for it. At lunch time, she punched out and never went back.

The house seemed to grow. She couldn't find enough to keep her busy, and she got tired of bugging Angel and Doll on the telephone three times a day. She got irritable. Worse than bored. And so tired, tired of doing nothing.

She was lying on the couch one afternoon, watching TV. When the commercial came that said, "How do you spell relief?" Mildred sat up and said, "
D-R-I-N-K
." She pulled up her tube top and went to the kitchen and poured herself another glass of VO. Then she opened the sliding glass door that led to the patio in the back yard and sat down by the swimming pool. She stuck her bare feet in the cool water and kicked at it. She looked around the yard, then up at the sky. The clouds floated through it like a backdrop against the green mountains. It was so pretty it was disgusting. She splashed her feet up and down and looked at her fat brown hands clasping the glass. They looked hard. Housework, she thought. "Everythang," she said. She clinked her ice cubes around and lowered her head. It felt so heavy. Her tears began splashing into the pool like rainfall. She was afraid to look up again because Mildred didn't want God or anybody else to catch her whimpering like some baby. But she couldn't stop. She felt so empty, like somebody had dug a hole inside her.

"I hate it here!" she screamed out. What did she care about, here? Not these flowers. Not this swimming pool. Not this house. Her kids were gone. And a man? That was the biggest joke of all. So what's the point of staying out here in the desert by myself? In this big-ass house, collecting dust? My kids don't need me no more, she thought, but my daddy might. His arthritis been acting up, and he can't depend on Acquilla for too much of nothing. And Curly done had that stroke. She could probably use some decent company for a change. I could cheer her up. And Lord knows Bootsey could use some help with them kids. "Hell," Mildred said, setting down her drink and easing into the shallow end of the pool, "what good is roots if you can't go back to 'em?"