Silver Sparrow (6 page)

I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned around to see the woman judge.

“You put together a good project,” she said. “But you real y need to work on the way that you present yourself.”

I raised my penciled eyebrows.

“Don’t get defensive, dear,” she said. “I am tel ing you this for your own good. Woman to woman.”

I didn’t say anything. She gave my coat a little pat as though it were a pet and then she walked away.

I went out and stood in front of the civic center, holding a pencil to my mouth as though it were a cigarette. It was a goofy habit, a little tic I had picked up from James. He was always taking short breaks from whatever he was doing to smoke one of his Kools. Even though my mother let him smoke in the house, he sometimes stepped outside to light up, and I often went with him, standing on the patio and watching him hold the match behind his cupped hands. When he did it, it was like the only thing that was happening in the world was taking place just inches in front of his face.

It was November and freezing already. Spending my fourteenth-and-a-half birthday this way couldn’t have been a good sign for the year to come.

Since I was hidden behind a white pil ar, I went al the way and ground out my little golf pencil on the heel of my penny loafer. Commingled with the noise of cars zipping down Piedmont Avenue, was the sound of mewing. Peeking out from behind the pil ar, what did I see? Chaurisse Witherspoon standing right in front of the glass doors, crying like her heart was breaking.

I wasn’t exactly shocked to encounter her at the civic center. Al the public schools sent a few students to the fair. As my mother would say,

“People are going to see people.” So the sight of her wasn’t what had me al discombobulated. The thing that set off twitches at the corner of my mouth was the fact that Chaurisse was wearing a waist-length rabbit fur, too.

Shivering behind the column, I tried to think of a story that would let me believe that my father hadn’t lied to me when he gave me the coat. Why James would go to so much trouble to deceive me this way? It wasn’t like I hadn’t known al my life that I wasn’t his main daughter. If he had just admitted to buying the damn jacket in a store, I would have been prepared, in a way, for the possibility that there was one for Chaurisse, too. Why had he burst into my home in the middle of the night, letting me believe that he had seen this coat on the poker table, spread over a pile of chips, and thought of me, and only me?

It’s funny how three or four notes of anger can be struck at once, creating the perfect chord of fury. I thought about my father kissing my cheek with his rum breath. I thought about the guidance counselor and her smug talk about exclusivity. And who was the female judge to tel me anything about the way I handled myself? I looked out again at Chaurisse. The coat looked terrible on her, as it was my size, not hers. She couldn’t even button it up around her round middle.

I emerged from behind the pil ar stil woozy with rage, but I only planned to look at Chaurisse. I was just going to fil my eyes with her as I walked through the double doors. This was al I had in mind. Who would believe me, but this was al I had planned to do. No talking, no touching, just a good look.

This, I now know, is how people go crazy and do things they regret. Look at the woman who almost kil ed Al Green. I am sure she cooked those grits, ful y intending to eat them for breakfast. Then he did something that set her off. After that, she probably picked up the pot, just to scare him a little bit. Next thing she knew and the boiling grits were al over his face. There was a name for that kind of thing. “Crime of passion.” It meant that it wasn’t your fault.

Chaurisse stood in front of the civic center looking anxiously toward Piedmont Road, bouncing on the bal s of her feet. She had quit crying but was sniffling and wiping her nose with the back of her hand. She looked over her shoulder and said, “Hi.”

I said hi back, while taking in the details of the jacket. It was the very same garment, right down to the crystal buttons on the sleeves. This was my sister. As I understood from biology, we should have fifty percent of the same genes. I took her in, searching for something common between us.

James was al over her face, from her narrow lips to her mannish chin. I looked so much like my mother that it seemed that James had wil ed even his genetic material to leave no traces. I stared hard until I found something that proved that we were kin — stray flecks of pigmentation on the whites of her eyes. My own eyes showed the very same imperfection.

I must have lingered a little too long, because Chaurisse felt the need to explain herself. “I left my graphs at home. I’m so stupid.”

I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. It’s just the science fair.”

Chaurisse shrugged back and said, “I worked hard on my project.”

Then a black Lincoln with tinted windows pul ed up to the curb. I fondled the golf pencil in my pocket as Chaurisse clasped her hands in front of her. The driver of the car blew the horn with a reassuring little toot. My pulse quickened, and I was warm inside my coat despite the winter weather.

My scalp tingled underneath my hair. I guess I knew on some level that it was only a matter of time before James discovered that my mother and I had not abided by the stern order to “stay away from my family.” But who would have thought it was to happen like this, utterly by accident? My heart flopped around in my chest, and I felt my blood racing through my body. In a way, I was glad that it was happening like this, that James and I could discover each other’s deception at the same time. I only wished that my mother had been there.

My intention was to stand brave and defiant. I wouldn’t say a word; I’d just stand beside my sister wearing an identical coat, letting spectacle do al the talking. Maybe his words would bal up in his windpipe and choke him to death. I was so furious that I didn’t know that I was scared, but my body knew, and when the door to the Lincoln opened, my frightened neck turned my face away.

I heard Chaurisse cal out, “Mama! Did you find it?”

I looked just in time to see my sister clap her hands together like a seal.

Chaurisse’s mother, Laverne, was nothing like my mother. She was round like her daughter and had that sort of let-go look that beauticians have on their days off. Her red-dyed hair was pul ed back and fastened with a plain rubber band. A T-shirt that had probably been black at one time, was tucked into what looked to be a pair of pretty satin pajama pants. She seemed relaxed, sil y even, as she waved the orange folder over her head.

She did what she did without thinking it over first.

“You mean this folder?” she said. “What’s it worth to you? I was going to take it to the flea market and sel it.”

“Mama,” Chaurisse said, “you are embarrassing me.” And then she sort of angled her head in my direction.

“Hel o,” Laverne said. “You got yourself a nice coat. You girls are matching.”

I nodded. Laverne wasn’t pretty or showy in the way that my mother was, but she seemed more motherly to me. Her hands looked like they were born to make sandwiches. Not that my own mother didn’t take care of me. She laid out my clothes each night until I was in the fifth grade but never looked quite at home doing it. There was always the feeling that she was doing me a favor. Laverne was the kind of mother you never had to say thank you to.

“My father gave me this coat,” I said.

“Mine, too,” Chaurisse said. She reached out and stroked my sleeve and her touch was charged.

Twisting away from my sister, I said, “He won it for me in a poker game.” I said this to Laverne and it sounded like a question.

With a little slackness in the jaw, Laverne said, “Come again?”

I didn’t say anything, because I knew that she’d heard me, and I could tel that what I said meant something to her. Her face creased and she looked a little less plump and satisfied. To my mind she always looked like a baby that had just been fed, ful of milk and content.

Laverne said to Chaurisse, “Okay, kiddo. Good luck. I got to run errands.”

Chaurisse said, “Okay, thank you,” and ran toward the building.

I stayed out front until Laverne got back into the Lincoln. I couldn’t see her face through the tinted glass, but I could imagine it, her looking at me and my coat. She knew that this moment was important; I had seen it in the set of her mouth as she got back in the car. I turned away, not wanting her to memorize my face just yet. This was just the beginning. Some things were inevitable. You’d have to be a fool to think otherwise.

4

GRAND GESTURE

MY MOTHER HAS PROPOSED marriage to two men in her life. The first was Clarence, the undertaker’s son. On the evening of the Sadie Hawkins dance in 1966, Clarence asked my mother if she would go to Paschal’s hotel with him. “If it’s good enough for Dr. King, it’s good enough for us.” He laughed when he said it, which Mother didn’t like so much. Although everyone knew that Dr. King, Andy Young, and that whole Morehouse crowd frequented Paschal’s restaurant for its legendary fried chicken, Clarence was talking about what went on upstairs in the narrow rooms behind the blackout curtains.

“It’s a joke, Gwen,” Clarence said.

“I’m thinking about it,” she said.

“We’ve been going out serious like this for two years,” Clarence said.

“I know.”

“So it’s a special night.”

My mother looked at him, so handsome in his blue suit, always blue, never black. Black was for his working hours, when he hovered behind his father, as the undertaker’s understudy. Her pale yel ow frock with puffed sleeves and an empire waist had seemed elegant on the pattern envelope.

She didn’t care much for the finished product, but having spent too much time tracing the pattern and reinforcing buttonholes, she couldn’t just throw it away because of a puckered neckline and an unflattering cut.

Shifting her eyes, she noticed a red carnation on the car seat beside Clarence. “You lost your boutonniere.” She picked it up and pul ed the hat pin from his lapel and busied herself reattaching the flower. On the radio, Smokey Robinson complained that “a taste of honey is worse than none at al .”

Clarence grabbed her wrist, not too hard, not like a threat, but firm. “I already paid for the room.”

“You did?”

“I wanted us to be together someplace nice.”

My mother said, “You sure are taking a lot of liberties for this to be Sadie Hawkins Day.”

“Sadie Hawkins means that ladies get to ask the fel ows out on a date, but it doesn’t mean the fel ows just sit around twiddling their thumbs.” He smiled. His teeth were pretty and white like marble headstones.

“Wel , let me have my Sadie Hawkins Day,” Mother said.

“Let’s get engaged and then we can go to Paschal’s.”

“What are you saying?”

“Wil you marry me?”

Clarence let go of my mother’s wrist, literal y giving back her hand, and rubbed his chin and the soft whiskers that were just starting to grow there.

He looked out the window. My mother started getting nervous, wondering if she had overplayed her hand. There was much at stake besides just her heart and her pride. Her father worked for Clarence’s father and her relationship with Clarence had put her own father in a good position. And besides, if she didn’t marry Clarence, who would she marry? She was already a senior in high school.

“Don’t you want me?” she whispered.

Final y Clarence spoke. “Hel yeah, I want you. This just isn’t the way I thought this was going to happen. But okay, we can get engaged. We’re engaged right now. Okay?”

My mother nodded, limp with relief.

Clarence started the car and they drove toward Paschal’s.

NOW, CLARENCE WAS long gone and she was again wearing the same homemade yel ow dress, not because she had come to like it but because the empire waist accommodated her changing figure. She was afraid to tel my father that she was four weeks late. Everyone knows that this is the hardest thing that you can ever tel a man, even if he’s your husband, and my father was someone else’s husband. Al you can do is give him the news and let him decide if he is going to leave or if he is going to stay.

My mother was too frightened to speak the words, so she wrote them on a scrap of paper like a deaf beggar. As he read, the stutter raised in him so badly, he couldn’t even get out the beginning of his response. My mother reminded him how much he wanted a baby. Laverne had been lying beneath him for a ful decade, but she had not been able to give him what he most wanted. It had taken my mother only a few months. This baby was determined to be born, conceived despite al their caution. My mother told him that I was destiny.

At last he said, “You’re giving me a son.”

James sat on the porch swing at the rooming house and thought it over. She could see him processing it, going over it al in his head. He would think a while, and then look over at her — not at her face, but at her stomach, looking at me. Mother admits to feeling a little jealous. Al he was thinking was that he could final y get to be a daddy, that he was going to get himself a junior. He and Laverne had had a baby boy a long time ago, when they first got married. The baby was born feetfirst and didn’t even live long enough to take his first breath. James rocked on the porch swing, thinking that here came his second chance.

While he was celebrating the idea that he could final y be a daddy, saying that he couldn’t wait to tel his brother, my mother popped the question.

She said it in a playful tone, like she was inviting him out for an ice-cream soda. “James,” she said, “let’s go get married. Make an honest woman out of me.”

Just moments earlier, he had been al motion, but now it was like somebody had pumped him through with embalming fluid. Final y he came out and said, “I am not leaving Laverne.”

Mother knew he was serious because he cal ed his wife by her name. It made her remember her own father. When she had left Clarence, she knew her father was through with her because he said, “You’re no better than Flora.”