Mama (6 page)

"I ain't never had my own bike," Freda said. "I want some fabric 'cause I start homemaking class next semester. Boy, what I wouldn't give for a sewing machine. Then I could make all of our clothes!"

"I don't want no homemade clothes," Bootsey said. She was three years younger than Freda.

"Why not?" Freda asked.

"'Cause they look too homemade." Bootsey stuck her tongue out at Freda.

When Christmas was two days away, Mildred hollered to Freda from her bedroom. "Can you come in here for a minute?"

Freda came to the doorway.

"Close the door, baby."

Freda closed it suspiciously and stood in front of it.

"Sit down," Mildred said, patting the mattress next to her. Freda sat down. Mildred had a worried look on her face. She'd counted her money ten times and every time it came out the same. She didn't have enough. There was no way she could stretch it to get the kids' things out of layaway. Somebody was going to have to do without—at least wait till she got her check after the first of the year. She knew the younger kids wouldn't understand. But Freda was almost twelve, and half grown. She could fry chicken better than Mildred, could put together a meal without even thinking about it, and had more common sense than some grown people Mildred knew.

"Freda, your mama gotta explain something to you and I want you to try to be a big girl and listen to what I'm saying, okay?" Now Freda was even more suspicious because Mildred never used this sweet tone of voice and had never asked Freda to close the door so they could talk.

"Okay, Mama, but you know I'm already a big girl."

"Yes, and Mama appreciate everythang you've done around here, from watching these kids for me like they was yours, and keeping this house in running order when I ain't here. You been doing a helluva job, baby, playing the mama, and you know I been working hard to make things better for all of us since your daddy been gone, don't you?"

Mildred was beating around the bush and she knew it, and so did Freda. But this was hard, and Mildred couldn't figure an easy way to do it.

"You be a teenager before you know it, won't you, baby?"

Freda nodded, trying to figure out what Mildred was getting at and wishing that whatever it was she'd hurry up about it and get to the point. The "Peanuts Christmas Special" was coming on TV in a few minutes and Freda didn't want to miss it.

"Well, baby, mama's money is real low and I got some decisions I gotta make and quick." Mildred gripped her hands together like she was praying. "If I don't pay this gas and light bill ain't nothing gon' shine on Christmas in this house, and we'll freeze to death if I don't buy no coal. Now you know the kids won't understand, and all I want is to see y'all, all of you, happy. I can only get a few toys for the little ones, you understand me?"

"Yes," Freda said, beginning to understand what Mildred was getting at. And although her chest was filling up with air and her training bra was rising and falling as if she had breasts, Freda was trying hard to be as strong as Mildred.

"All of y'all needs boots and new coats. I can't have y'all going to school or church looking like a bunch of vagabonds, can I?"

"No, Mama."

"Well, when I get all this stuff out the layaway, and buy a few toys, pay off these bills, we'll do good to get a chicken on Christmas, let alone a ham or turkey. Mama was just wondering if you could be a big girl and wait until after New Years, when everything'll be on sale. I can get the rest of the kids' thangs, too. I'll buy you that pink mohair sweater we saw in Arden's window. By February, I'll get you that sewing machine I heard you talking about. At least lay it away. Can you just let the other kids enjoy this Christmas? Can you do that for your mama?"

"Yes, Mama, I can wait," Freda said before she knew it.

Tears were welling up in Freda's eyes, and Mildred could feel something pulling at the center of her chest. She knew Freda didn't understand. She was still a child. Mildred's heart was signaling her to reach over and pull her oldest daughter inside her arms. But she couldn't. A plastic layer had grown over that part of Mildred's heart and it refused to let her act on impulse. She never showed too much affection because that made her feel weak. And she hated feeling weak because that made her vulnerable. Who would be there to pick up the pieces if she let herself break down? Mildred felt she had to be strong at all times and at all costs.

Freda wanted her mama to hug her, but she was afraid to make the first move. She didn't want Mildred to think she was being a baby about this whole thing. At that moment, Freda couldn't remember Mildred ever hugging her, or any of them. The two of them sat there stiffly, like starched shirts, but underneath, Mildred and Freda mourned for themselves.

Finally, Freda stood up and walked to the door. With her back to Mildred, she said, "It's okay, Mama. I can wait. I told you I was a big girl and I meant it." She closed the door softly behind her.

Five

I
N THE SPRING
, the weeping willow trees Mildred had planted eight years ago were almost twelve feet tall. She had planted them in anticipation of Freda's sweet sixteen party. Mildred pulled the hose from around the house and put its nose at the base of their thin trunks. Her hands were caked with rich black dirt from where she'd been hoeing and weeding the small garden in the back yard. Each year she planted two rows of corn, a few string beans, some tomatoes and yellow squash, okra and cucumbers, and mustard and collard greens. Though none of them ever did too well, Mildred liked to smell the mixture of grass and spring air, and she liked the solitude of working her own soil. She had just finished cutting down the dandelions that had grown up through the grass. They left a fresh, tart smell around the yard. Mildred loved this yard. It was big enough for the kids to play hide-n-go-seek, and in the winter she'd let the hose run in the side yard and they ice-skated there.

She heard the screen door slam on Curly's front porch.

"Hey, sis'-n-law," yelled Curly. "What you know good?"

"Nothing, girl, just trying to get this garden in some kind of order. These weeds grow like ain't no tomorrow, I'm telling you."

"Got any coffee over there? I'm all out, and Lord knows I could use a cup. The kids is at the playground and I got so much cleaning to do upstairs that I'm scared of what I might find once I start digging in them closets. A cup of coffee sure would be nice."

"Yeah, come on over, chile, I can let you have a couple of teaspoons until tomorrow, and you can have one with me. I don't have no sugar, though. You got any?"

"A drop, just a drop. These kids eat it like candy, but I'ma start hiding some just for my coffee."

Out of all of Mildred's so-called friends, the only one she truly liked and trusted was Curly. The others, like Geechie and Gingy and Sally Noble (folks always said both of her names as if they were one), were good over one or two cups of coffee, but they liked to drink, and when they did they got vulgar and loud and started talking about the first person who popped into their minds. If they got worked up real good, meaning they agreed with each other, they'd forget where they were and who they were with, and say, "Yeah, and that Mildred..." Then Mildred would cuss them out nicely, put them out of her house and tell them not to bring their poor tired asses back until they knew how to act like they had some sense, which, she said, would take about another twenty years.

Curly laughed as she sat down in Mildred's bright yellow kitchen. She had the kind of laugh that would automatically set you off to grinning right along with her, no matter what you had on your mind. Curly didn't have much to laugh about, though. Her big house looked much nicer on the outside than it did on the inside. It was full of dark, rickety furniture, which was why she kept her drapes drawn. And though Mildred loved her sister-in-law like a sister, she couldn't stand being in Curly's house for too long because it depressed her. "Why don't you open those drapes up, girl, and let some light in this place?" Mildred would ask her. And Curly would say, "For what? What's some light gon' do to these dingy walls but let all the hand marks and grease show?" Mildred saw her point.

"You heard from Crook?" Curly asked her.

"Naw, ain't heard from that sorry bastard since I had to beg him for twenty dollars for shoes for Money and Bootsey for Easter. I ain't got nothing to say to him. He ain't working yet, is he?"

"Naw, him and Ernestine still down there living with her mama like savages. It's a shame, girl. I ain't never knew what he saw in that old hussy. She past trifling, ain't she, girl? Ugly as all hell, look like something the cat done dragged in, and I betcha, Mil, if the chile had some teeth in her mouth, don't you think she'd look just like a beaver?" She giggled and Mildred stomped her foot on the linoleum, almost spitting a mouthful of hot coffee in Curly's face.

"Well, I'll tell you, Curly, the way thangs is going around here, honey, I might have to pick up my kids and get the hell on out of here. I can't keep up these house notes. They kicking my behind. And the older these kids get the more they eat and the more they want."

"Who you telling, chile? Mine's is almost a football team. I swear, you lucky, you ain't got a houseful of big-head nappy and hardheaded boys. They stay in and out of trouble. Money don't seem to give you none."

"Not yet, at least, but you know he got his daddy's blood, no offense. How's Crook's health, anyway? Is he still dranking like it's going out of style?"

"Chile, that ain't the half of it. You should've seen him and Ernestine the other night at the Shingle. They had a band. Wasn't saying nothing, but girl, they acted like pure damn fools. Him and her just sloppy, I mean pissy drunk, and you know how loud she get."

"Yeah, I know how loud she get," Mildred said, lighting a cigarette.

"They could barely hold each other up. I acted like I didn't know 'em. Fletcher threw 'em both out. And I don't care if he marry that whore, she ain't never gon' be no kin to me, and won't never step one rusty foot in my door neither. She trifling, and besides, you'll always be my sister-in-law, sis."

"He know he shouldn't be doing so much dranking. That man is about as stupid as he looks. Got about as much brains as a field mouse, and he gon' end up back in that sanitarium if he keep this up."

"Well, he ain't been back to the doctor in God knows when, but that's all right. It'll catch up to him. You mark my words. If he live to see fifty it'll be a miracle and the will of God, and I'll tell you, Mil, God'a see fit to it that Crook obeys his laws. Abusing hisself like he do ain't nowhere in the Bible, is it?"

"Honey, I wouldn't know, been so damn long since I read it."

Since Mildred and Crook had broken up, she hadn't exactly resigned herself to being a widow, so to speak, but the men in Point Haven not only bored her to death but barely had a pot of their own to piss in, and if they did, helping out a woman with five kids was not their idea of having a good time, no matter how good she could make them feel in bed.

Mildred had stopped wearing that awful platinum wig, even though she knew she looked damn good in it. Now she wore her own hair, rusty red to suit her reddish skin tone. She let Curly trim it for her every now and then because it grew so fast and got too bushy and thick. A lot of colored women envied her shoulder-length hair. They thought if your hair was long and thick and halfway straight and didn't roll up into tight black pearls at the nape of your neck, you were full of white blood, which made you lucky. In 1966 most colored women in Point Haven wanted desperately to have long straight hair instead of their own knotty mounds. To get it like that, they wore wigs or rubbed Dixie Peach or Royal Crown hair grease into their scalps and laid the straightening comb over the gas burner and whipped it through their hair until it sizzled. Sometimes Mildred didn't feel like being bothered, sitting in that chair for almost an hour just for the straightening part, and maybe another hour to get it bumper-curled. Most of the time she would roll it up with brush rollers and let it go at that. Mildred usually didn't care what people thought.

Whenever she went to the bar, somebody's husband usually offered to buy her a drink. They always had that I've-been-waiting-for-you-to-get-rid-of-that-sorry-niggah look in their eyes. But Mildred would just accept their drink offer, make small talk—usually about the condition of their wives—then turn her back to them and continue running her mouth with her female friends.

Mildred didn't believe in messing around with anybody's husband, no matter what kind of financial proposition they made. The way she figured it, when and if she ever did get herself another husband, she damn sure didn't want a soul messing with hers. She truly believed in the motto that what goes around comes around. She'd seen it come true too many times. Janey Pearl got caught in the Starlight Motel under the Bluewater Bridge, laying up with Sissie Moncrief's old man, and Sissie tried to strangle Janey Pearl with her own garter belt and stockings. Shirley Walker's husband caught her in bed with his brother. Put both of them in the hospital with a .38.

This town was entirely too small to be sneaky and slick. Be different if this was a city like Detroit. Messing around was the surest way to get yourself killed by some jealous church-going woman, especially if she was a Baptist. Them Baptists could get the spirit all right, Mildred thought, right on your ass, and the very words they chastised their children for using would sizzle off their tongues like water hitting a hot skillet.

Mildred didn't have any trouble getting the attention of most men because she was still young—a few months shy of thirty—and well equipped. Her hips didn't exactly curve out now, but when she turned to the side her behind looked like someone had drawn it on, made it a little too perfect, and it was this luscious behind that drew many a man's eye. Even though she still stuffed her bra with a pair of the girls' anklets to give her breasts more cleavage, Mildred wasn't what you'd call promiscuous. She liked to look her best and had gotten tired of sitting around the house all those months getting sucked in by soap operas. It wasn't even so much romance she was looking for as it was to have some fun, maybe roll over and feel a man's body in her bed again. These days no one was there except maybe one or two of the kids, trying to keep warm.