The Penny (12 page)

When Del said, “Nothing much,” it was everything I could do not to jump from my hiding place and shout,
Tell her you like her! Tell her you want to take her to Rigazzi’s!
When Del said, “Guess we’d better get going,” Miss Shaw exhaled a deep breath and I could hardly stand it, either.

That was the first time I realized you could be left alone by someone who admired you just as much as you could be left alone by someone who thought you weren’t worth much. That was the first time I realized there are plenty of different kinds of loneliness.

“Of course,” she said, standing in a pond of isolation. I could feel her disappointment clear from my lair in the display case.

Chapter Fourteen

W
e shared a party line with the Smiths, who lived opposite us upstairs, and the Pattersons and the Shipleys, who lived below. The telephone rang in our kitchen only when someone dialed Parkview 7-5768. But every so often when Mama or Jean or I wanted to dial out, we would pick up the receiver and roll our eyes—cut off from the world once again by the prolonged and delicious conversations of Mrs. Ralph Patterson and her best friend, Miss Mona Miner.

That afternoon, Jean stood with her arms crossed and passed the time, shifting her weight resolutely from one hip to the other, the receiver cocked against her ear. She initiated long sighs loud enough to be heard as far away as DeBaliviere Boulevard. Then she shifted her weight again and flopped her wrist against her forearm, her jaw extending ostrich-like with irritation.

All of that, and the chattering women still ignored her. At last Jean said, “Ex
cuse
me, but there are other people who need to use this line. Could you
please
finish your conversation so
others
can use the telephone?”

That was the problem. The conversation never quite finished. From across the room I could hear the babble of apology as the two women assured my sister they were just winding up, that they’d hang up in a minute or two, that she should have let them know sooner if she’d been waiting.

So Jean hung up and waited some more. I watched her hold down the switch with one finger while she stealthily lifted the handset to her ear. In a silent motion, she released the switch. If Mrs. Patterson was still on, she didn’t even hear a click as Jean joined the conversation. Jean listened for a while and then said as loud as she dared, “Is someone
still
on this
line
?”

“What could they be talking about for so long?” I asked when she gave up and returned the receiver to its cradle.

“Nothing much,” she said. “Mona Miner’s brother got picked up for siphoning gas out of someone’s car last night. And Mrs. Patterson didn’t like the chuck roast she bought at the butcher’s this morning. He trimmed it wrong and left too much fat.”

Although these specifics did not appeal much to my imagination, the idea of eavesdropping did. It gave me a feeling of power, knowing I could listen in any time at my discretion.

I learned the skill of party-line snooping from my sister. Like Jean, I kept my finger on the button while, phantomlike, I lifted the earpiece to my head. Like Jean, I lifted my finger off the switch with the stealth of a spy.

Mrs. Patterson’s daughter had problems with breast-feeding her baby so she’d given it up and tried Similac. Miss Mona’s family reunion was next week and they made her promise to bring a caramel pie. Mrs. Patterson’s arthritis had flared up. Miss Mona’s brother’s wife had told him she was leaving him after the gas-siphoning incident.

Poor Billy had been trying to call Jean for a week, and every time he managed to get through on the line, she hung up on him. But I didn’t blame Jean. Who could tell who else might be listening? Our eavesdropping adventures always reminded us that we could never be too careful. It would be as easy as pie for Daddy to catch wind of things.

Both of us learned so much over the party line that summer, you’d have thought I’d have heard about the man who got his arm cut off, too. But, I didn’t. Daddy made me go to the barbershop, and that’s the first time I heard about it.

Daddy said I was way overdue for a haircut. He said he didn’t like the way I kept brushing my bangs to one side and pinning them back with a bobby pin. He thought it made me look fast and too old for my age, like I wanted to chase boys.

I didn’t dare tell him that Miss Shaw told me I looked amazing that way, that she’d showed me in the mirror how it brought out the shape and color of my eyes.

I took my seat in the high brass chair, and Daddy’s favorite barber, George, tied a black plastic cape under my chin. George raised the chair with three pumps of the pedal. He got the comb good and wet, tapped it on the sink’s edge, and went about untangling my bangs. He worked on them until they were sopping and stuck flat as a flounder to my forehead. “How’s that look to you, Mr. Blake?”

I couldn’t see because of the water in my eyes. My bangs dripped clear down past the tip of my nose. I heard the perverse pleasure in Daddy’s voice. “Take as much as you can off the top, George. Make her look more like a boy.”

The newspaper must have belonged to Mr. Cyrus Pete, the man who warmed the shaving cream and fetched towels and polished up the barber’s pole by the front door, all sorts of tonsorial duties, because the newspaper was the edition for St. Louis colored people. I’d just wiped my bangs out of my eyes with the intention of fighting to the death for my hair when the headline caught my attention. My bones chilled.

“Can I see that?” I didn’t wait for George or Daddy or Mr. Clyde to answer. I grabbed it up and started skimming the article.

“Hey, sit still,” George threatened. “You go to jumping around like that and you’ll be lucky if you don’t end up bald.”

The story told about a punch-press operator who’d lost his arm when it got caught in a press at American Stove Company. He’d been reaching into the press to remove some metal when he accidentally stepped on the foot pedal. The limb had come off clean. No breaking first or dangling or wrenching in two. Just
snip,
like the metal he’d been cutting, and there it lay, a part of him, beside him.

The man had been rushed to the hospital for surgery, that’s what the story said. I figured there were plenty of Ville people who worked at the stove company. Whoever it was, it wouldn’t be anybody I cared about. Besides, I didn’t care much about anybody down there anymore.

“Isn’t it something?” George asked when he followed my gaze to the story. “Cut his bone right through. Sliced it clean off, just as easy as I’m trimming your hair.”

If this was a trim, then so was the bulldozing going on in outlying St. Louis County. Mama had told me how everywhere you looked, some construction company was plowing under old trees and knocking over farmhouses for more “quality-built” homes like the ones in St. Louis Hills. “No down payment! G.I. loan!” the advertisements hawked.

So was the bulldozing that had taken out the entire neighborhood of Mill Creek earlier in the year because the flats were all falling down and the City of St. Louis intended, in the name of urban renewal, to build a large housing project for working families, both white and black.
Progress or Decay,
the headlines had blared.
St. Louis Must Choose.

I endured the bulldoze of a haircut with the same suppressed dread with which I endured everything from Daddy. When George stepped aside so I could see, I couldn’t have been more horrified. I gripped the arms of the chair and half-raised myself out of it in shock. I felt bare, and so ashamed. The barber hadn’t left enough for me to even comb flat. So many times I’d explained away Daddy’s actions to myself. So many times I’d decided that what happened to me must be okay because I wasn’t worth much—I must have done something to deserve it. Staring at my likeness in the mirror, I felt like I was staring at a stranger. A stranger who had been totally betrayed.

“Oh, my,” Mama said when we walked in the door and she saw my new coiffure. “Jenny, what happened to your hair?”

“Well, maybe if you had taken me to the beauty parlor yourself, it would have turned out better,” I accused her with a fling of my shorn head.

Daddy’s mistreatment and his cruel words drilled over and over into my head how dirty and ugly I must be. Miss Shaw kept trying to show me during all those hours at Shaw Jewelers that I wasn’t as I saw myself. But no matter how she tried to coax me with her stories of iron-strength in my eyes or my uncanny aptitude for numbers or my adroitness at coming up with ideas, I still didn’t believe her. Especially when she told me how pretty she thought I was. I felt ugly inside and out, and I was so ashamed that I wanted to die. I respected Miss Shaw too much to tell her to her face that she was wrong about me. But when the time came to prove my corruptness to myself once and for all, it came in a way that even
I
couldn’t have expected.

When Jean flew into the family room that day, I held my finger over my lips so she wouldn’t say anything. I had the receiver to my ear. If she blurted one word, Mrs. Patterson would hear us and we’d both get caught. As my sister pantomimed for me to hang up the telephone, Jean looked like she was about to erupt with news.

When I hung up the phone she said, “Now you’re going to get it good.”

“What?”

“Jenny, what were you thinking?”

“It’s our party line. If we have to share it with everybody, I have a right to listen.”

“Not that.” Jean’s face was fraught with drama. I knew it was something big because she didn’t breathe one word about my missing hair. She didn’t even seem to see it. “You get yourself down to the yard.”

I took the steps two at a time, not having any idea what my sister could be so worked up about. But the minute I shoved open the door, I understood. The roots of the maple tree in our front yard had grown so old and thick, they’d turned sideways. There beside the lumps in the sidewalk stood Aurelia, her feet planted just as firm and stubborn as the tree trunk that towered over her beside the curb.

My whole insides felt torn to pieces. If I’d ever been scared before, it had never been anything compared to now.

Aurelia had a puzzled look in her eyes. She’d come all this way. She must have pictured me racing out to greet her.

I froze on the stoop above her, standing my ground beside twists of wrought-iron railing.

Receiving Aurelia at my house would be a perilous mistake. She had no idea how dangerous this was. If Daddy found her here, there was no telling what he would do to her.

I hissed at her, mean as a snake, so she’d get the point and go away. “What are you doing here? You got no right coming over like this.”

“Why don’t you get over to my house anymore, Jenny? One minute, you’re coming every day and the next thing, you don’t show up at all.”

Standing there in the yard, Aurelia seemed to shimmer from the heat. Everything else remained motionless, from the bees that hovered beside the white hawthorn blossoms lacing Mama’s flowerbed to little Scott Stinnett down the street who’d given up on his scooter with the bell on the handle and left it propped against a brick wall. Even the breeze, which had been fretting the leaves high among the branches, held its breath.

A posse of boys who’d spent most of the morning acting out the details of the next war (all of us were already thinking there would be another war soon—“
Buzz-zz-zzz, I’m a German warplane. You can’t shoot me down.” “Ra-tat-tat-tat-tat. Fall down. I killed you.”
) had disappeared for Kool-Aid inside.

Aurelia pleaded, “You going to invite me in or anything?”

“No. I’m not. Only place you ought to be invited in is a loony bin, if you ask me. You got no right.” I glanced over my shoulder at the Shipleys’. Depending on where Mama sat at the Tupperware party, she might see Aurelia out the window.

Daddy had taken off walking a good half-hour ago, headed to the electric company because he wanted to argue the bill. He’d taken one look at the BTU’s drawn by the air conditioner he was so proud of and he’d unplugged the unit for good, after which he’d cursed at all of us, pulled out his favorite rifle, and threatened to shoot anyone who tried to start it up again. No matter if it topped 110 degrees tomorrow, he ranted, that air conditioner was going back to the store.

“You haven’t been around in almost two weeks. I come to find out why. We miss you.”

I advanced toward my friend in distraction, one hand hanging loose and the other knotted at my side. Someone had started up the street. Even though the figure was only a dot, I knew it was Daddy coming.

“Aunt Maureen even made buttermilk biscuits one day, she was so sure you’d come around. She was quoting Scriptures and
everything—
” She stopped mid-sentence. “What did you do to your
hair
? It looks like you got attacked by a buzz saw.”

“You go away. Right now,” I blurted out, ignoring her critique of my coiffure.

There could be no mistaking the resentful swing of Daddy’s arms or the resolute cadence of his steps as he strode up the street. Even from here I could tell he was on the warpath. They must have made him pay up on the electric bill.

When I thought back to it years later, I realized that desperate moment was the first time since Antioch Baptist Church that I had prayed. I was so reckless from worrying about Aurelia, there wasn’t time to worry that God wouldn’t hear me or that he would see me the way Daddy saw me, that he wouldn’t think I was good enough for him, that I was too damaged or vile to speak. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Daddy halt. He bought us blessed seconds by giving the Stinnetts the what-for about their boy leaving his scooter where someone could trip on it.

Aurelia knew only the arms of a father who wrapped her against him because he held her dear. She knew only the arms of a man who made up his own music and played it down anytime the idea struck him. Eddie Crockett played for love, and those who heard him—from casual listeners to maestros—would come to the bandstand and ask, “Where did you learn to play like that?” Eddie Crockett loved music and beauty and people. My daddy disdained all of those same things.

I jammed my hand in my pocket to find my penny, but it wasn’t there. I’d left it lying on the table beside the telephone.

Dear Jesus, help her please. Dear God, help her get home safe.

“Darnell says you think you’re too good for us. He says that’s why we don’t see you no more. Is Darnell right, Jenny? Is that it? You think you’re too good for visiting anymore?”

I couldn’t have told you I was crying. I didn’t know until later when I ran into my room to hide and felt my wet face.

“It doesn’t make any difference what I think. You can’t just go showing up like this.”

“You got no idea what it was like getting here. Someone stopped me and said I’d better be coming someplace to work—I’d better be coming to scrub steps or wash windows, and not just catting around the neighborhood. That’s what the person said to me. She said I had no business here. She sounded like you.”