The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou (34 page)

That’s true, he was a low-life bastard. He should have given me a chance to refuse his proposal. Out of my head and into forgetfulness went the memory that I had wilfully initiated my one sexual tryst. My personal reasons and aggressive tactics were conveniently obliterated. Self-pity in its early stage is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.

Curly stood in the center of the baby-sitter’s living room and said all the mother-liking things: “Sure is a fine baby … Looks just like you … He’s gonna be a big one … Check those feet.”

Back in the car it never occurred to me to put up resistance when he said we were going to his hotel. I wanted to do what he wanted, so I sat quiet.

As we passed through the hotel lobby, I felt the first stirring of reluctance. Now, wait a minute. What was I doing here? What did he think I was? He hadn’t even said he loved me. Where was the soft music that should be playing as he kissed my ear lobe?

He sensed the hesitation and took my hand to guide me down the carpeted hallway. His touch and confidence rushed my doubts. Obviously I couldn’t stop now.

“Make yourself comfortable.”

He removed his coat and I sat quickly in the one large chair. On the dresser, amid cards and toiletries, stood a bottle of whiskey.

“May I have a drink?” I had never drunk anything stronger than Dubonnet.

“No. I don’t think so. But I’ll have one.” He poured the liquor into a glass he took down from above the face bowl. Water sloshed around and he gulped it down. Then in a moment he stood over me. I wanted to look up at him but my head refused.

“Come here, Reet. Get up.” I wanted to, but my muscles had atrophied. I didn’t want him to think of me as a dick teaser. A cheat. But my body wouldn’t obey.

He bent and took both hands and pulled me upright. He enclosed me in his arms.

“You nearly ’bout as tall as me. I like tall girls.” Then he kissed me, softly. And slowly. When he stopped, my body had gone its own way. My heart raced and my knees were locked. I was embarrassed at my trembling.

“Come over to the bed.” He patiently pulled me away from the chair.

We both sat on the bed and I could hardly see him, although he was a breath away. He held my face in his large dark hands.

“I know you’re scared. That’s natural. You’re young. But we’re going to have a party. Just think of it like that. We’re having a love party.”

My previous brushes with sex had been just that. Brushes. One violent. The other indifferent, and now I found myself in the hands and arms of a tender man.

He stroked and talked. He kissed me until my ears rang, and he made me laugh. He interrupted his passion to make some small joke, and the second I responded he resumed lovemaking.

I lay crying in his arms, after.

“You happy?” The gold in his mouth glinted like a little star.

I was so happy that the next day I went to a jewelers and bought him an onyx ring with a diamond chip. I charged it to my stepfather’s account.

Love was what I had been waiting for. I had done grown-up things out of childish ignorance or juvenile bravado, but now I began to mature. I became pleased with my body because it gave me such pleasure. I shopped for myself carefully for the first time. Searching painstakingly for just the right clothes instead of buying the first thing off the rack. Unfortunately my taste was as new as my interest. Once when
Curly was to take me out to dinner, I bought a smart yellow crepe dress with black roses, black baby-doll shoes, whose straps sank a full inch into my ankles, and an unflattering wide coolie hat with veil. I pinned a small cluster of yellow rose buds on my bosom and was ready for the fray.

He only asked me to remove the corsage.

Curly had said at the beginning of our affair that he had a girl who worked in a San Diego shipyard and her job would be up soon. Then they’d go back to New Orleans and get married. I hastily stored the information in that inaccessible region of the mind where one puts the memory of pain and other unpleasantries. For the while it needn’t bother me, and it didn’t.

He was getting out of the Navy and only had a couple of months before all his papers would be cleared. Southern upbringing and the terror of war made him seem much older than his thirty-one years.

We took my son for long walks through parks; when people complimented us on our child, he played the proud papa and accepted. At playland on the beach we rode the Ferris wheel and loop-the-loop and gooed ourselves with salt-water taffy. Late afternoons we took the baby back to the sitter and then went to his hotel and one more, or two more, or three more love parties. I never wanted it to end. I bought things for him. A watch (he already had one), a sports coat (too small), another ring, and paid for them myself. I couldn’t hear his protestations. I wasn’t buying things. I was buying time.

One day after work he took me to the sitter’s. He sat and held the baby. His silence should have told me something. Maybe it did, but again I didn’t want to know. We left in a quiet mood. He only said, “I want me a boy like that. Just like that.”

Since we weren’t heading for the hotel, I asked where we were going.

“I’m taking you to your house.”

“Why?”

No answer.

He found a parking space a half-block away. The streetlights were just coming on and a soft fog dimmed the world. He reached in the
back seat and took out two large boxes. He handed them to me and said, “Give me a kiss.”

I tried to laugh, to pretend that the kiss was payment for the gifts, but the laugh lied. He kissed me lightly and looked at me long.

“Reet. My girl friend is here and I’ll be checking out of the hotel tonight.”

I didn’t cry because I couldn’t think.

“You’re going to make some man a wonderful wife. I mean it. These things are for you and the baby. I hate to say good-bye, but I gotta.”

He probably said more, but all I remember is walking from the car to my front door. Trying for my life’s sake to control the angry lurchings of my stomach. Trying to walk upright carrying the awkward boxes. I had to set down the boxes to find the door key, and habit fitted it into the lock. I entered the hall without hearing him start the car.

Because he had not lied, I was forbidden anger. Because he had patiently and tenderly taught me love, I could not use hate to ease the pain. I had to bear it.

I am certain, with the passage of time, that he loved me. Maybe for the loveless waif I was. Maybe he felt pity for the young mother and fatherless child, and so decided to give us what we both needed for two months. I don’t know. I’m only certain that for some reason he loved me and that he was a good man.

The loss of young first love is so painful that it borders on the ludicrous.

I even embarrassed myself. Weeks after Charles left, I stumbled around San Francisco operating in the familiar. The lovely city disappeared in my fog. Nothing I did to food made it interesting to me. Music became a particular aggravation, for every emotional lyric had obviously been written for me alone.

Charles had taken that journey and left me all alone. I was one emotional runny sore. To be buffeted about emotionally was not new, only
the intensity and reason were. The new pain and discomfort was physical. My body had been awakened and fed, and suddenly I discovered I had a ravenous appetite. My natural reticence and habit of restraint prevented me from seeking other satisfaction even if it could be found.

I began to lose weight, which, with my height and thinness, I could ill afford to do. The burst of energy which had propelled me into beauty salons and dress shops was now as absent as my gone lover. I longed and pined, sighed and yearned, cried and generally slouched around feeling dismal and bereaved. By eighteen I managed to look run down if not actually run over.

My brother Bailey again was my savior, a role he fulfilled most of my early years.

He returned to the city after some months on an ammunition ship, and came to the restaurant to see me.

“My. What the hell’s happened to you?” The way I looked seemed to anger rather than worry him. I introduced him to my employer. She said, “Your brother. He awful little, ain’t he? I mean, to be your brother?”

Bailey thanked her smoothly, allowing just the tail of his sarcasm to flick in her face. She never noticed.

“I said, what’s the matter with you? Have you been sick?” I held in the tears that wanted to pour into my brother’s hands.

“No. I’m okay.”

I thought at the time that it was noble to bear the ills one had silently. But not so silently that others didn’t know one was bearing them.

“What time do you get off?”

“One o’clock. I’m off tomorrow, so I’m going out to get the baby.”

“I’ll be back and take you. Then we can talk.”

He turned to Mrs. Dupree. “And a good day to you, too, madam.” Bailey did little things with such a flourish. He might have been the Count of Monte Cristo, or Cyrano saying farewell to fair Roxanne.

After he had gone, Mrs. Dupree grinned her lips into a pucker. “He’s as cute as a little bug.”

I busied myself amid the pots. If she thought likening my big brother to an insect would please me, she had another think coming.

—

The baby crawled around the floor of my room as I told Bailey of my great love affair. Of the pain of discovery of pain. He nodded understanding and said nothing.

I thought that while I had his attention I might as well throw in my other sadness. I told him that because my old schoolmates laughed at me, I felt more isolated than I had in Stamps, Arkansas.

He said, “He sounds like a nice guy” and “I think its time for you to leave San Francisco. You could try Los Angeles or San Diego.”

“But I don’t know where I’d live. Or get a job.” Although I was miserable in San Francisco, the idea of any other place frightened me. I thought of Los Angeles and it was a gray vast sea without ship or lighthouse.

“I can’t just tear Guy away. He’s used to the woman who looks after him.”

“But she’s not his mother.”

“I’ve got a good job here.”

“But surely you don’t mean to make cooking Creole food your life’s work.”

I hadn’t thought about it. “I have a nice room here. Don’t you think it’s nice?”

He looked at me squarely, forcing me to face my fears. “Now, My, if you’re happy being miserable, enjoy it, but don’t ask me to feel sorry for you. Just get all down in it and wallow around. Take your time to savor all its subtleties, but don’t come to me expecting sympathy.”

He knew me too well. It was true. I was loving the role of jilted lover. Deserted, yet carrying on. I saw myself as the heroine, solitary, standing under a streetlight’s soft yellow glow. Waiting. Waiting. As the fog comes in, a gentle rain falls but doesn’t drench her. It is just enough to make her shiver in her white raincoat (collar turned up). Oh, he knew me too well.

“If you want to stay around here looking like death eating a soda
cracker, that’s your business. There are some rights no one has the right to take from you. That’s one. Now, what do you want to do?”

That evening I decided to go to Los Angeles. At first I thought I’d work another month, saving every possible penny. But Bailey said, “When you make up your mind to make a change you have to follow through on the wave of decision.” He promised me two hundred dollars when his ship paid off and suggested that I tell my boss that I’d be leaving in a week.

I had never had two hundred dollars of my own. It sounded like enough to live on for a year.

The prospect of a trip to Los Angeles returned my youth to me.

My mother heard my plans without surprise. “You’re a woman. You can make up your own mind.” She hadn’t the slightest idea that not only was I not a woman, but what passed for my mind was animal instinct. Like a tree or a river, I merely responded to the winds and the tides.

She might have seen that, but her own mind was misted with the knowledge of a failing marriage, and the slipping away of the huge sums of money which she had enjoyed and thought her due. Her fingers still glittered with diamonds and she was a weekly customer at the most expensive shoe store in town, but her pretty face had lost its carefree adornment and her smile no longer made me think of day breaking.

“Be the best of anything you get into. If you want to be a whore, it’s your life. Be a damn good one. Don’t chippy at anything. Anything worth having is worth working for.”

It was her version of Polonius’ speech to Laertes. With that wisdom in my pouch, I was to go out and buy my future.

The Los Angeles Union Railway Terminal was a marvel of Moorish Spanish glamour. The main waiting room was vast and the ceiling domed its way up to the clouds. Long curved benches sat in dark wooden splendor, and outside its arched doors, palm trees waved in lovely walks. Inlaid blue and yellow tiles were to be found on every wall, arranged in gay and exotic design.

It was easy to distinguish San Franciscans detraining amid the crowd. San Franciscan women always, but always, wore gloves. Short white snappy ones in the day, and long black or white kid leather ones at night. The Southern Californians and other tourists were much more casual. Men sported flowered shirts, and women ambled around or lounged on the imposing seats in cotton dresses which could have passed for brunch coats in San Francisco.

Being from The City, I had dressed for the trip. A black crepe number which pulled and pleated, tucked and shirred, in a warp all its own. It was expensive by my standards and dressy enough for a wedding reception. My short white gloves had lost their early-morning crispness during the ten-hour coach trip, and Guy, whose immensity matched his energy, had mashed and creased and bungled the dress into a very new symmetry. Less than a year old, he had opinions. He definitely wanted to get down and go to that smiling stranger across the aisle, and immediately wanted to be in my lap pulling on the rhinestone brooch which captured and brought light to the collar of my dress.