Tempest Rising (6 page)

“Nope, no other natural family.” Vie crossed her arms over her chest. “Near as we can tell, Finch, the father, was a merchant marine until he married Clarise, and we haven’t been able to track down any of his relatives in the immediate vicinity. And we certainly not about to go searching through every lean-to down South, especially not for a temporary living situation.” She sat up along the edge of the couch. “You acting like you don’t want this placement, Ramona. I mean, I talked to Mae in Buffalo this morning, and she was near ecstactic about the placement—”

“No, no, no. Of course she—we want the placement. It’s just when they’re so traumatized…and
you know my mother won’t be back for a month—but no, of course we want the placement.”

“I mean, your mother is one of the best, darn near perfect record in foster care, oh, yes, she does. Her name stays at the top of the list, and your name too as her legal substitute.”

Ramona mashed her body harder into the chair and the plastic did a humph. She knew it wasn’t so much Mae’s perfect record in foster care that kept her name at the top of the list, but more Mae’s ability to get the vote out on election day and keep her ward leader drained and satisfied. “How long you think they’ll be here?” she asked.

Vie pushed against the coffee table to hoist herself up. “The mother’s under a court-imposed commitment, at least for forty-five days until she gets evaluated again.”

She went on to describe the girls, told Ramona she was going to love them, such pretty girls. “The oldest has eyes like a china doll, and the youngest, oh, Ramona, cutest little round face with a deep cleft in her chin. Plus they’re smart, nice, you know; they’re the type who’ll probably go to the library on Saturdays instead of sneaking under the el turn-stiles to go downtown to shoplift from McCrory’s, nothing like that last brew you-all had here that made all those phone calls long distance all over the country.”

“What you talking ’bout? Had to put a lock on the phone that I use to this day,” Ramona said, not really needing to know much else about the girls.
She had already read about them in the
Tribune
when their daddy turned up missing. Knew they were raised privileged, lived in Chestnut Hill, thirteen, twelve, eleven. All she wanted to know right now was what kind of hair did the girls have; was it as long and thick as it looked in the newspaper picture? But she couldn’t ask Vie such a thing, was sure that Vie wouldn’t be even able to begin to fathom how many Saturday mornings she’d lost blistering her fingers in a smoke-filled kitchen while she pressed some foster girl’s thick-ass hair. Ramona patted her own hair along the sides of her blond-tinged French roll.

“That hair looking good,” Vie said as she stood, and Ramona could have sworn she heard the plastic covering sigh out a hallelujah. “Can’t nobody do a hard press like Miss D. Even though mine won’t hold a press these days, sweat too much with this personal summer I’m going through, but you won’t know nothing about that for at least the next twenty years.

“I’m having the girls’ former school send the paperwork over to Sayre Junior High so you won’t have to bother with that detail.” She lowered her voice. “Tuition seriously lapsed at their private school, oh, yes, it had, so they may not have been going back there even if this tragedy hadn’t befallen them.” She waved the air in front of her face again. “Let me show them in, Ramona, and start bringing in their things.” She looked around the living room, large for a row house on a small street, and Ramona
followed her eyes, from the mantelpiece, where her prom pictures and high school diploma were nestled in the Woolworth’s gold-tone frames, to the magazine rack, where the
Ebony
s,
Jet
s, and
Philly Talk
s were arranged in sized order. Her Bible was perfectly centered on the speckless coffee table, and even the plastic runner covering the wall-to-wall carpet gleamed. She was glad she’d spent her morning cleaning, and with Mae out of town she’d had to do it only once and not two or three times picking up after the messes Mae left.

“I sure am grateful you and your mother keep such an orderly house,” Vie said as if she’d just heard Ramona’s thoughts. “Not many houses I could just show up at with three children and everything be right in place to just take them in.”

Ramona accepted the compliment with a nod. Then she said “shit” loudly, three times in a row after Vie was out of the front door. Once for each girl, because Mae wouldn’t be back for a month from Tuesday, and even though Ramona had always been the primary caretaker in terms of the cooking and cleaning, and laundry, and making sure the children stayed well groomed, it was Mae who did the sweet talking, who could calm down the most agitated of children by wrapping her words in honey like she was making pigs in a blanket. Ramona just didn’t have that sweet-talking part in her, would barely say good morning to the steady streams of children who’d floated in and out
of here over the years. Wouldn’t know how to say a kind word to them if she wanted to. She’d never wanted to. She didn’t now.

“L
ook at all this. How we supposed to get this heavy-ass trunk up the stairs?” Ramona said to Shern, Victoria, and Bliss. But she actually said it to the trunk because she wasn’t even looking at the girls. Hadn’t looked at them really in the whole ten minutes they’d been here. That was always the hardest part for her, looking at the fosters when they walked through that door for the first time, when their faces were still coated with the hell they’d been delivered from, evenly spread and matte over their faces like fresh paint. So she looked all around their faces, concentrated on their bodies instead. She noticed that they were slight-built girls, even under the high-quality plaid wool coats. The older two starting to bud out a little, the youngest still round with baby fat, all three of them soft-figured, wouldn’t be much help with the trunk. She decided she’d wait for Tyrone to help her with the trunk.

She went to the closet and pulled out three hangers just so she could do something besides stand there and not look at them. “You the oldest, so you in charge of jackets and coats,” she said to Shern as she handed her the hangers. “Maybe you had live-in help or just day help where you came from, but I’m
the only help around here, and my wages aren’t too damned good, so the least you can do is hang up your own coats.”

Ramona’s words fell on Shern’s unacclimated ears with a smashing sound, like glass milk bottles against a chain-link fence. Shern looked at her sisters to make sure they weren’t crying again, and then she scanned the living room, which was thimble-sized compared to their real home. She felt dizzy now when she thought about her real home. She took the hangers from Ramona and tried to tie her stomach like it was a kerchief, hoping it would contain the creamed corn she’d nibbled at when the social worker stopped them at Horn & Hardart’s and insisted that they put something in their stomachs.

“Put your hats in your pockets,” Ramona said as she watched the older two pull the hats from their heads. Odd-looking hats; she’d never seen a cross-stitch like that, all mixed up with no particular pattern, but it worked well in the hats. Now she was looking at their hair. “Damn,” she muttered under her breath; it was as thick as it looked in the
Tribune
photo.

“My mother tells us to put our hats in our sleeves, so our pockets won’t get stretched out of shape.” It was Bliss talking, pouting, looking up at Ramona like she was nobody she had to listen to.

Ramona looked at Bliss standing back on her heels, basing up at her as if she were her age. She had her mouth all formed to snap at Bliss, to say to Bliss, “Your mother’s in the crazy house, so what
does she know?” But then she heard Mae’s voice in her head telling to mind her meanness. So she tucked what Mae called her meanness in the palm of her hand, closed her fist over it to keep it contained for now, and didn’t talk about their mother. She did stoop to Bliss’s eye level, though. “I don’t care where you stick them as long as I don’t see them all over the closet floor.” She pulled Bliss’s hat from her head. “Doesn’t this go in your sleeve?” She emphasized the “sleeve” and then shoved the hat in Bliss’s hand. She noticed Bliss’s hair was light brown and not as thick as her sisters’. She would have to be the one with soft hair, she thought, the one I’d most like to slip and catch with the hot comb right around the tip of her ear. There was her meanness again; she clenched her fist tighter, trying to hold it in.

Victoria watched the bad current zipping through the living room between Ramona and Bliss, and she immediately slid into her peacemaker’s stance. “Bliss, come on and give Shern your coat,” she said with urgency. She knew Bliss would readily trade insults with Ramona, and she was afraid that Ramona might land her palm right across Bliss’s mouth. Already Ramona seemed to be opening and closing her hand like she was nervous or, worse yet, trying to restrain herself. “Come on, Bliss,” she said again, and tugged on her shoulder.

Then she turned to Ramona. She wanted to tell her please to excuse Bliss, that sometimes Bliss spoke without thinking, that Bliss was the baby,
though, and a little spoiled and didn’t mean any harm. But now Victoria was looking at Ramona’s face, and she couldn’t talk. She was so struck by Ramona’s face, the soft beauty just overflowing from Ramona’s face. She wondered how such harsh, ugly words could come from that face. She cleared her throat. “Um,” she said, and then she remembered her mother’s caution about starting a sentence with “um.” “People will see your brown skin and hear you say ‘um’ and automatically think you’re stupid,” her mother used to say. “You just don’t have the luxury of starting your sentences like that.” So Victoria pulled back the “um,” and now she had Ramona’s attention, and all she could do was stare at Ramona. Now her jaw was locked, and she couldn’t say anything since she’d gone and thought about her mother; she just looked at Ramona and started to cry.

“Come on, Tore, don’t cry.” Bliss wrapped her arm around Victoria’s neck. “And you don’t have to take up for me, I know that’s what you were getting ready to do, but Mommie did always tell us not to stuff our hats in our coat pockets, and I’m not going against what Mommie says for anybody.” She rolled her eyes at Ramona and then pulled her coat off her shoulder.

“Furthermore”—Bliss directed her words at Ramona again—“my aunt Til, and aunt Ness, and uncle Blue, and uncle Show are coming for us anyhow.” Bliss curled her coat around her arm as she spoke. “So we’re not even going to be here long enough for
anything to drop on your old closet floor. And my aunt Til doesn’t play, especially when it comes to my sisters and me.” Bliss continued to pout.

“I don’t play either.” Ramona tried to hold her meanness in her balled fist, but it seeped out between her fingers. Now she just opened her hand and let it take her over. “And you can tell your aunt Til I said so—that is, if you can find whatever jail they threw her in when she tried to jump bad down at the courthouse. Furthermore, the judge fixed it so none of your strange-assed people can try to contact you. And if you try to contact them, you’ll be the cause of never seeing them again. Now what your little fresh mouth got to say about that?” Ramona stopped. Wished she had held her meanness and not said the part about jail. She could tell by the way Bliss was twirling her coat around her arms that the child was more afraid than she was fresh.

Bliss’s coat was almost a ball now, and she mashed it against her stomach. “You’re lying,” she shouted up at Ramona. “My aunt Til isn’t in jail. She’s on her way here to get us, isn’t she, Shern? Isn’t that what you just told me when we were waiting in the car?”

Shern didn’t answer Bliss. She gently pulled the balled-up coat from Bliss’s arms without looking in her face.

“Shern, isn’t that what you said? You said it! You promised me that Aunt Til was on her way here to get us.”

Shern could feel the kerchief in her stomach start
ing to loosen, threatening to come undone. She had promised Bliss that the aunts would be coming for them shortly. Even though the fat social worker had told them they’d be living here for the next six weeks or so, Shern had whispered otherwise to her sisters. She’d had to. She’d needed to tell them, and herself, something so they’d stop crying. And now she wanted to cry all over again, hearing this dark news about her aunt Til. She swallowed hard, but the kerchief in her stomach wasn’t going to stay tied. She felt it open completely now, one end, then the next, and the creamed corn and whatever else she hadn’t eaten that day spilled out of the kerchief. She didn’t even have time to gag. Now she was standing there feeling it seep down the front of her white cotton blouse. She put her hands under her mouth, trying to catch it; now she was gagging, and in between trying to ask where the bathroom was.

“Oh, shit, damn,” Ramona said when she saw it. “Run, go to the kitchen sink, hurry up, and try to stay on the plastic runner. My mother just had this overpriced carpet installed. Shit!”

Shern ran back to the kitchen with Bliss and Victoria at her heels. She spit and gagged into the sink, and her sisters patted her back, and Victoria was crying, “I want Mommie.” Then they all three were crying and moaning, “Mommie, Mommie,” and hugging one another in a circle.

Ramona stood in the kitchen doorway, just watching them. For the thousandth time that day she wished Mae were here, and she never wished for
Mae to be here. Most of her wishing had to do with Mae not being here, sometimes even wishing Mae dead. But at least Mae would know how to respond to this kind of outpouring. Ramona didn’t. She only knew what to do or say with the fosters when they misstepped, when she had to threaten to kick ass. She couldn’t even playact a response to girls crying because they missed their mother.

“Wash your hands good, and rinse your mouth out with warm water,” she called into their circle. “I’ll look through your many bags and find you a top to change into. Your room is the one in the back, the three of you sharing the one room, of course.”

They quieted down and now were just whimpering.

“After you clean yourself up,” Ramona went on, “you and your sisters might want to put your coats and hats back on and go outside, there a few kids your ages live on the block, or you might want to just go for a walk, see what the neighborhood’s like. Fresh air might do you all some good.”