Silver Sparrow (9 page)

Ronalda’s had started to grow back at last. It was now long enough that it could be straightened and set with brush rol ers. There wasn’t enough to catch in a ponytail, but at least people had stopped cal ing her bald-headed.

“Your hair is so pretty,” she said.

“I look just like my mother,” I told her, so as not to seem conceited.

“Me, too,” she said. “I look like she just spit me out.”

“You have a picture of her?”

Ronalda shook her head. “I didn’t bring anything with me from home. Just a paper sack with a change of clothes and a box of Kotex, but to look in my face, it’s like seeing my mother. Except that I am a nice person.”

I didn’t press her, but I wanted to know more. I’d heard some stories from Marcus. His mother was friends with Ronalda’s stepmother. Ronalda, said the stepmother, had been living like a wild child in Indiana. No adult supervision. None whatsoever.

“What is your mother like?” Ronalda asked me.

I wasn’t sure how to answer. My mother was difficult to describe. Presently, she was at work, taking people’s blood pressure, listening to their hearts. In a couple hours, she would be home, cooking dinner like a regular mother. I almost told Ronalda that my mother was like a superhero with a secret identity, but that wasn’t real y true. My mother’s secret self was almost identical to her real self. You had to real y pay attention to see when she shifted.

“My mother is named Gwen.” I drank some more of the wine cooler. There was a tightness in my forehead and a pleasant vacant feeling below.

“Does she like Marcus?”

“She can’t like what she doesn’t know about.” I laughed.

“My stepmother doesn’t like Jerome. She says he’s too old for me, just because he’s in the service. I’l tel you exactly what she said. ‘Although you may be mature physical y, the mind can take a while to catch up.’ I was looking at her like she had gone stone crazy and then she had the nerve to say that she was a virgin when she married my father. She said it with this little smile on her face.”

I knew the little smile she was talking about. You see it on the faces of girls who were born to be somebody’s wife. That virgin-smile was plenty annoying on the faces of tenth-grade girls, but on grown women it was infuriating. One good thing about having a mother like mine is that she never went and got al superior on me.

“You know her favorite word?
Inappropriate.
Seems like the only appropriate thing for me to do is to babysit.”

“Does she pay you?”

“Yeah,” Ronalda said. “I get al owance. But sometimes I don’t want her to pay me. I want it to be like I am just someone in the family, but I don’t want to get took advantage of, either. Next week, my stepmother is taking her nieces to see
The Wiz.
She asked me yesterday if I wanted to come along. I said yes at first, and then she told me that she was going to have to buy an extra ticket and I might end up sitting by myself in the balcony or something. So I told her I didn’t want to go, that I don’t like plays. But real y I have never seen one before.”

She looked so unhappy that I wanted to touch her, but I didn’t know where to put my hand. I ended up stroking my own shoulder. “I would go to see a play with you if you wanted to see one.”

“I don’t want see one,” she said. “I just wanted to be invited somewhere.”

“I go places with my mother,” I said. “But not any place special.”

Ronalda looked at me as though she couldn’t imagine an unspecial mother-daughter outing. It was like I had told her that I had money, but not the kind you could spend.

“Real y,” I said.

Ronalda put her hand in my hair again. “Did you bring a brush?”

I knelt on the tile floor between her knees while Ronalda sat up on the desk pul ing the brush through my hair. Al my life people have wanted to play in my head. On the very first day of first grade, the teacher took me into the lounge and undid my ponytails. Ronalda wanted to know if I was tender-headed. I murmured that I wasn’t, resting my face on her thigh.

“Tel me what you were about to tel me,” she said. The bristles against my scalp felt firm and good. I knew she was probably brushing out my curls, but I didn’t ask her to stop. “Tel me. Tel me about your mother.”

It was as though she had pul ed the truth out of my head. “I’m il egitimate.”

“Join the club,” said Ronalda.

“No,” I said. “It’s worse. I’m a secret.”

“Oh,” Ronalda said. “You’re an outside child?”

“Yeah,” I whispered.

“That’s okay,” she said. “A lot of people are.”

I let go of a breath I hadn’t even known I was holding. This was what it was to have a friend, someone who knew exactly who you were and didn’t blame you for it. I twisted to look at her, but if she knew something important had passed between us, her face didn’t show it.

I asked her, “Was your father married to your stepmother when you were born?”

She shook her head. “No. They got together back when they were both living in Indy. He got her pregnant the night before he left to go to Notre Dame.”

“At least he claims you. I wonder sometimes what would happen to me if my mother passed away. I wonder if my father would take me in.”

She stopped brushing. The floor was cold under me, but I could feel the warmth of Ronalda’s thigh through her jeans. I wanted another of the sweet wine coolers, but I couldn’t ask for it because I had somehow forgotten how to speak.

“Don’t cry,” Ronalda said. “I have a secret, too. My mother’s not real y dead. I just tel people that. She’s alive, she’s just negligent.” She pronounced the word careful y, as though she were reading it from a legal document. “The principal at my school cal ed child services on her. She left me by myself for two weeks. While she was gone is when I broke my leg, trying to wear heels, and there was no one to come and pick me up at the school. The principal put two and two together and the next thing I knew, my daddy drove al the way to Indy and carried me back to Atlanta with him. He drove al night and it was snowing bad, bad, bad.”

“Where was your mama gone to?”

“I don’t know. She even took the hot comb. I asked her when she was coming back and she said, ‘Tomorrow,’ but I knew she was lying when she started putting my little brother’s stuff in a bag, too.

“She loved that little boy like nothing in the world. Before he was born, she used to drink, drink, drink! She even drank Crown Royal when she was pregnant with me. I’m lucky I didn’t get born cross-eyed, retarded, or something. But after Corey, it was like she fel stupid in love with him. She cut out the drinking, stopped slapping people around. She even made hot cocoa a couple of times on Sundays. Before Corey, I thought that my mama just didn’t like kids, but when Corey was born and I saw the way she carried on about him, I saw that it wasn’t that she didn’t like kids, she just didn’t like me.”

“She likes you,” I said. “She’s your mother. Everybody’s mother likes them.”

“I think maybe she loves me,” Ronalda said. “I mean, she kept food in the fridge and a roof over my head. But she never liked me. Now, my little brother, she could just eat him up. That’s why she took him with her when she left.”

“It’s not like that,” I told her. “You get equal love.”

“Do you have a brother?” Ronalda asked.

I said no.

“If you have a brother, it’s the worst thing. If your mama has a boy to care for, she wil show you the kind of love she is capable of. And once you see that, you wil never get over it. You wil be lonely for the rest of your life.”

I had no response for her. I didn’t know how my mother would react to a boy in our lives, but I knew that my father always wanted a son. James was at our apartment when Laverne went into labor with Chaurisse, six weeks early. Raleigh came to the house, and James stood up from my mother’s table, leaving his pound cake half-eaten. My mother tel s me that she fel on her knees beside my bassinette and prayed that Laverne not give birth to a boy. “A healthy daughter is what I asked the Lord to give. That wouldn’t put too much pul on his heart.”

“My father has another kid, but a girl,” I said. “With his wife.”

“Count your blessings,” Ronalda said. “And hope they don’t have any more kids. You don’t want to go through what I been through.”

I tried to tel myself that she was right, that I was lucky. But second best is second best, no matter the reason why.

To Ronalda I said, “Let’s have another cooler.”

She opened the drawer and we took the last two, putting us at four each, which was about a cooler and a half too many. This we knew even as we let the warm sudsy drink foam into our mouths. We stumbled out of her stepmother’s study into the rec-room part of the basement. Ronalda looked through her father’s records and decided to play Richard Pryor just to hear him cuss.

“How do you feel?” Ronalda stretched herself on the carpet in front of the imitation fireplace.

“Sick.”

“It’s a secret, al right?” she said. “Everything about my mother is a secret.”

“Same for mine.”

7

I DARE YOU

MY MOTHER WORKED very hard for a living. This was no one’s fault. Even women who were wives had to do their part to keep the family fed. When I was smal , she took a few classes to learn travel-agenting — thinking she could work from the apartment, using our telephone — but sometime in the midseventies she got sensible and took night courses at Atlanta Junior Col ege to become a licensed practical nurse. For the most part, Mother was fortunate in her scheduling — seven to three — but sometimes she was assigned eleven to seven, and on holidays she pul ed doubles. When she came home those mornings while I was eating my breakfast, she soaked her feet in a pan of saltwater and rubbed the red bites on her neck where the stethoscope pinched her.

Hers was a good job with benefits that included more than health, eye, and dental. Mother had daily access to doctors. As she assisted them by performing the tasks that were beneath them, she asked them about their daughters. What lessons did they take, where did they buy their clothes, and where did they plan to go to col ege? Every now and then, she would chat with the doctors’ wives, mining for personal information, like where they stood on issues like contraception and sex ed in schools (testing out her theory that rich people put their girls on the Pil at twelve). On her break, she took careful notes on a smal pad she kept in her locker. For six weeks in the early 1980s she got to work alongside a woman resident who was even engaged to another doctor. She owed everything, this lady said, to Mount Holyoke, a col ege in Massachusetts. My mother pressed down hard on the notepad and underscored the name of the state. In parenthesis she wrote:
Kennedy, etc.
A doctor married to a doctor! Mother cal ed it the “the trifecta,” even though it was only two things.

Such information was worth the sometimes-odd hours. When Marcus and I first started going together, she worked eight to four in a pediatrician’s office and then looked after private patients from seven thirty to midnight. It was just a temporary arrangement for November since Christmas was right around the bend. At six fifteen when she was heading out, fresh and pretty in white, I promised her that I would spend the evening doing SAT dril s on the new Commodore computer that she had bought with her “own money.” I didn’t like it when she used this phrase, sounding like a child, bragging about what she had done with her babysitting pay. She meant that this gift had come from her, without any contribution from my father. She’d paid for it with the labor of swol en legs and stiff fingers. I didn’t use the computer, but I did appreciate the gift, the thought of it. I didn’t have anything against the machine or the SATs; it was just that the only opportunity I had to see Marcus was when my mother was at work, late at night, between the hours of seven thirty and midnight.

On one particular night, Marcus and I were going to go to Acres Mil to see a movie with a bunch of his friends. I took extra time with my hair and makeup because I knew that Marcus wanted to show me off. I loved being displayed on his arm, held up for everyone to see.

I looked out of my bedroom window, expecting to see Marcus’s two-door Jetta, but instead I found the good Lincoln, the newer one that was real y navy blue if you looked at it close-up. With much agitation, I tiptoed into the living room and through the picture window saw James let himself out of the passenger side. Raleigh was driving. I can remember very few times in my life that I have been alone in the house with my father. If my mother wasn’t home, he always brought Raleigh with him, like I was someone else’s daughter and there was a need to make it clear that everything was aboveboard.

James and Raleigh walked up the sidewalk to our apartment. The buzzer rang, and I knew that it was Raleigh who had pressed it because James liked to use his key.

“Who is it?” I sang.

“Raleigh here. And James.”

I twisted back the deadbolt and undid the chain lock. Seeing them framed there in the doorway, they looked like a comedy duo. My father was shorter than Raleigh but cool-looking. His hat was sort of turned to the side, Detroit-style, so I knew they had been over to the Carousel for a nip. Not enough to be stumbling but just enough to have a little buzz. Raleigh, behind him, was flushed in the face. When Raleigh drank, he loved every person in a three-mile radius. Whereas when James had one leg in a bottle, he just fel deeper into whatever mood he was already in. I didn’t know how he was feeling when he walked into the Carousel, so I didn’t know what was rattling around in his head when he walked out.

I stood in the doorway, hoping they had just come over to drop something off. “Hi,” I said.

“What’s going on?” Raleigh laughed. “You’re not going to let us in? Why you blocking the door?” He bumped my father with his chuckle, but James didn’t join in.

“Come in,” I said, hoping to sound relaxed like my mother, standing to the side. She was so good at making them feel like special company and old friends at the same time. She greeted my father with a fast kiss on the lips each time he walked through the door. For Raleigh, she got on tiptoe and hugged his skinny neck. I just stood by at those times and let her do the welcoming. When I was alone like this, I never quite knew what to do.