The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (28 page)

The morning the quarantine was lifted, an orderly moved Hattie’s chair into Bell’s room and positioned it next to the bed. Nurses took Bell to have her lungs x-rayed. When Bell returned to her room, Hattie was sitting in the chair crocheting.

“This just touches my heart to see you two in the same room!” the nurse said. “You know your mother has been here day and night. Day and night.”

Bell and Hattie smiled. The old stiffness returned. It had been easy to be comfortable with one another when there was a glass wall between them. She will not ever forgive me, Bell thought. The nurse left the room.

“The nurse told me you can go outside for a little while tomorrow,” Hattie said.

She paused and picked at a stitch in her crocheting. “The weather’s nice. Sunny.”

Bell nodded.

“There’s a little park behind the hospital. You don’t even have to cross the street to get to it. I guess I can wheel you over there.”

Bell reached for her chalkboard, then remembered the doctors had said she could talk. She took a deep breath and said, “Aaaah.” She made the sound tentatively, in the way one might put one’s weight on a leg that had just been removed from a cast.

“Aaaah,” Bell said again. “I sound like a frog.” Her voice was gravelly and cracking.

“I don’t suppose you should try to say much,” Hattie said.

“I guess not,” Bell replied.

Hattie’s crochet hook flashed through the loops of yarn. Bell wished for a window to the outside—a bit of sky or a cloud, anything to draw her away from that room. She concentrated on her breath. There was a slight rattle when she inhaled and a faint urge to cough when she exhaled.

“How did you know to come and get me?” she asked after some time.

“Willie.”

“And how did she know?”

“A girl you used to work with. A fellow you know told her you were sick.”

“Walter.”

Bell wondered if he’d gotten sick himself, if he was somewhere coughing and wasting in some woman’s bed. Walter, that bastard. She wished him well. She clenched her fists to keep from crying at the thought of him.

“A dark-skinned young man came around one day when you first got here. Didn’t say a word to me just stood by the window looking like the devil and then went away.”

“Walter.”

“He didn’t look quite right in the head.”

Bell shrugged.

“Willie said you had been sick for some time. She said you came to see her months ago.”

Hattie rested her crocheting in her lap.

“You told us to go away when we came to get you. You kept saying, ‘Please stop. Leave me where I am.’ I thought it was the fever talking, but I came to understand that you were—”

She picked up her hook.

“I guess you know you can’t go back to that apartment. I don’t suppose anybody told you Daddy and I are buying a little house in Jersey? There’s room for you there.”

“You finally did it, huh?”

“Only took fifty years,” Hattie said bitterly. “It’s just a little place, two bedrooms, but your father’s happy to have you.”

“Are you happy to have me?” Bell asked. She had not intended to say it.

“They said the thick humid air’s no good for you. I guess we’ll get an air conditioner. I never did like them. They give me a headache.”

Bell coughed. Hattie poured ice water into a cup and handed it to her.

“They said you have to drink a lot of water.”

A nurse poked her head into the room. “Everything okay?” she asked brightly. The two women nodded. “Meds in one hour!” she said and ducked out. Hattie watched her disappear down the hallway.

“I can’t stand to think you were going to let yourself die like you don’t have anybody,” Hattie said. “You were all set to take yourself right out of this world, and we wouldn’t have known. Maybe a few months later the police would have come knocking on my door to tell me. Or maybe they never would have come at all. You would have just disappeared from the earth as if you never were,” Hattie said.

She yanked a length of yarn free from the ball in her lap.

“I don’t know what brought you so low. I should have known. I didn’t see you much, but when I did, you looked like something was tearing at you. I never did know what to do about my children’s spirits. I didn’t know how to help anybody in that way.”

“I just didn’t want anything anymore,” Bell said.

Hattie looked at her and shook her head. “Everybody’s been there. Everybody I’ve ever met. But you can’t just … I didn’t when I was way down there. ”

Bell said softly, “I took you there.”

“You mean Lawrence?” Hattie sighed. “No. That hurt me more than I have words to say, but I’ve been in darker places. My children died. There’s no place darker than that, except maybe another child trying to kill herself.”

“It wasn’t suicide,” Bell said.

“Oh, no?”

Bell had rehearsed the moment when she would have to explain herself to her mother, but now that it had arrived, all she could think to do was apologize.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Some things you can’t apologize for, you just have to try to get around them,” Hattie replied. “For your own sake too, so you can have a little peace.”

“You’re not angry?”

“Of course I’m angry!” she looked at Bell as though she’d have liked to shake her by the shoulders. “I probably always will be. But I’ve been mad all my life, and I finally figured out that I couldn’t keep carrying that with me. It’s too heavy and I’m too tired. Time will take care of it, like it does everything else.”

“You know that Willie has a whole forest growing in her back room?” Bell asked.

“She did when she lived across the street. I imagine she still does.”

“She made me some medicine out of those plants she has. I … I threw it away.”

“I knew a juju woman in Georgia. She could make a blind man see. Everybody thought she was crazy.”

They sat in silence. Bell noticed the heart monitor was gone. She tried to remember when they’d taken it out of the room. Lawrence had probably cursed her to Hattie that night outside of Wanamaker’s. He’d caught up to her and told her how Bell had lied and manipulated him. Bell shut her eyes against the memory. She hoped she’d never see him again. He had called Hattie his friend, but Bell supposed he still loved her. She wanted to know how their affair had ended. She imagined there had been bitterness between them and years of separation, after which they had met again, recently and by chance. It was too painful to think Lawrence had been her mother’s only friend over the decades of Hattie’s loneliness, and Bell had destroyed that too. She wanted to tell her mother she didn’t think anyone decent had ever loved her, aside from Lawrence, and that after the first month, her relationship with him didn’t have anything to do with Hattie. Bell continued seeing him because he was a good man and because he cared for her. Bell and her mother had in common that joy at stumbling upon love after years of disappointment.

“I saw you and Lawrence on the street when I was a little girl. I never forgot him. I took up with him out of spite and I’m sorry even if apologizing can’t make it any better,” Bell said. She blinked away a tear that had formed at the corner of her eye. “I wanted some of the happiness I saw in you when you were with him. I wanted to see if he could make me feel that kind of joy.”

“My God, but you are hard to love,” Hattie said.

“You never laughed like that with us, the way you did with him.”

“You leave my memories alone! They’re mine. Me and Lawrence all those years ago, that’s mine and you can’t have it.”

“You won’t ever forgive me, will you?” Bell asked.

“I have spent the last eight years trying. I’ve succeeded as much as I ever will,” Hattie said. She rewound the ball of yarn. “The new house has a nice front yard—I’m going to put flowerbeds in. It’ll just be a little garden, but I can spread out. I never felt like I could spread out.”

“Ha! I feel like all I ever did was spread all over the place.”

“Like a house on fire. You never did learn that sometimes all you have is your own dignity and self-control.”

Ruthie had said once that Bell and Hattie were just alike. It wasn’t true. Hattie was stronger than Bell could ever be. She didn’t know how to tend to her children’s souls, but she fought to keep them alive and to keep herself alive. That was more than Bell could say. All of them—Hattie and Willie and Evelyn and even ruined, crazy Walter—were little lights; sparks flying upward in dark places, trying to stay alight though they were compelled toward ash. They were nearly extinguished one moment, then orange and luminous the next. Who was Bell to have tried to unmake herself in the face of their strength? Maybe it was her cowardice as much as her betrayal that Hattie could not forgive.

Hattie stuck the crochet needle through her ball of yarn. “I’ll bring you some soup tomorrow,” she said.

“Alright,” Bell replied.

Hattie gathered her things: she put her crocheting and her sweater into a cloth bag. Bell remembered seeing her mother put clothes into a cloth satchel a long time ago, maybe a year after she first saw Hattie and Lawrence from the school bus window. Bell’s stomach tightened, she didn’t want that memory.

Bell was a little girl hiding in the recess under the stairs. Hattie shouted at August, and later he’d banged out of the front door in a rage. Afterward Hattie sent all of the children outside. She was crying. “Go on! All of you, go to the park!” she shouted. She waved her arms and shooed them out of the house like stray cats. She went upstairs and came down holding Ruthie and carrying a bag. A shirt fell out of the satchel, and Hattie put Ruthie down on the couch and shoved it back in. She picked up the baby, opened the front door, and stepped outside with such finality that Bell had scrambled out of her hiding place.

“Ma? Ma where you going?” Bell said.

The satchel fell from Hattie’s hand as she whirled to face Bell. “I told you all to go to the park!”

“Are you going to come and get us later?”

Hattie slapped Bell with such force that the girl staggered.

“Don’t you ask me anything! Don’t you ever ask me anything about my business!” Hattie shouted and hurried down the porch steps.

“Ma!” Bell called as she hurried away. “Ma! Come back!”

Hattie paused in the middle of the sidewalk. She stopped for a few seconds, and Bell was sure she would turn around, but she kept walking, away from Wayne Street, away from Bell.

“Ma,” she said again, in a whisper, “Ma. Please.”

HATTIE MOVED
toward the doorway of the hospital room with her back to Bell.

“Mother!” Bell called.

Hattie turned.

“You’re coming back tomorrow right?”

“Yes, girl! I just said I was going to bring you some soup,” Hattie said.

“Okay then.”

“Alright.”

She wanted to call out again, “Mother! Come back!” but Hattie had already left the room.

Cassie

1980

I
WOULD LIKE TO
wash my hair, but when I go into the bathroom, I think of the way the water slides off of my body, fouled with particles of dead skin and bits of feces, and I have to return to my bedroom. I can’t stand the sight of water pooling around a drain. Even now in the dry, warm backseat of my father’s car, I think about it and squirm in my shoes; my toes curl over the delicate creases where the fleshy pads meet the balls of my feet. Sala, my sweet girl, is the only clean thing that I know.

This morning Mother suggested that I take a shower before we go to my doctor’s appointment. She led me into the bathroom and turned on the water, reached out to test the temperature as though she were drawing a baby’s bath. I washed briefly, avoiding my hair and the private parts of my body. As the water fell over me, I wanted to throw myself against the shower doors. I stepped out feeling fetid, as though I had waded through a swamp. When I finished, Mother said, “Get dressed.” For the fourth time that morning, she said, “Your appointment’s today.”

I sat on the bed and watched her lay out the clothes she had chosen for me: the skirt and sweater, my panties and girdle. When I was a child, she never did that sort of thing. There was never enough time to set out clothes for nine children. I wonder if she would have if there hadn’t been so many of us. It requires a kind of tenderness, I think, laying out a little person’s clothes. Mother was never tender. She still isn’t. She put those clothes on the bed for me as though they were the ingredients for a roast chicken, as though I were to be trussed. Mother has always done what’s necessary. I suppose she thinks she’s doing that now by taking me off somewhere—though it’s wrong, though she’s wrong. I prayed for her. I wonder if she knows what she is doing to me, if it is conscious and pleasurable to her or if she just does it, like a hijacked spirit acting out someone else’s commands. I sympathize with her. I know how difficult it is to resist certain urges. My urges are abhorrent. They have voices and whisper their suggestions so naturally, so calmly, that if I weren’t careful, I might think they were my own thoughts: look at that man’s crotch, they say; think about how he must look without his pants. Remember? Remember how it felt to be with men? I know, of course, that these are not my thoughts. I know that they come from whatever thing rules this whole business, whatever evil it might be. I can’t tell about Mother and Daddy. I don’t know if they understand the extent to which they have been corrupted. I would like to believe that they don’t. I suspect otherwise, but I haven’t told Sala because I don’t want her to be afraid of her grandparents.

“This too,” Mother said. She held my breast prosthesis out toward me. It trembled in the palm of her hand like half of an underboiled egg. Her hand too, trembled. She blinked too quickly. There was a movement in her throat as though she were swallowing something hard. Maybe she was. Mother always has butterscotch candies in her dress pockets. Right in that moment I saw something grand and terrible in her, a facial expression I recalled from years ago.

I remembered Mother in an apron in the kitchen of my childhood. I stood in the doorway. She tore the leaves from the stems of the mustard greens and washed them in the double sink. Ham hocks simmered on the stove, bones knocking against the sides of the pot. Now and again she stopped and stared out of the window, one dripping hand on her hip, and sighed. Sunlight shone on the side of her face. Her expression was soft and restless at the same time. Something wild was in that afternoon, something dangerous. It wafted through the kitchen like the music Daddy listened to after Mother sent us children to bed—juke music. Blues crept up the stairs and into our rooms. Blues curled themselves around us and vibrated like purring cats against our bodies. That music gave us inklings of things we weren’t supposed to know: my parents hardly spoke at all, hated each other, it seemed to me, but some Saturday afternoons, after they’d had a fight, they went upstairs and closed the bedroom door. I thought of that music too when a woman in a tight dress sashayed in front of our stoop one night, all hips and swagger. Daddy liked women like that. I saw him with one when I was a teenager. They were all wrapped around each other in a parked car while Mother was at home doing what needed to be done. I don’t blame her for being so angry, though I couldn’t help but wonder if she hated us. When that woman peacocked in front of our stoop, everyone but Mother and I clucked her tongue. Aunt Marion said the switching woman was loose, but I thought she was free.

Mother washed the greens with a look on her face like she wanted to put on her own tight dress, walk out of the house, and never come back. Instead, she said, “Get the cordial out of the credenza.” She poured herself a glass and sat at the kitchen table sipping it. When it was gone, she turned the glass upside down and let the last drop fall onto her tongue. Mother was a beautiful young woman; the house was too plain, too small to contain her. I watched her—it was the first time I understood that she had an inner life that didn’t have anything to do with me or my brothers and sisters. She smiled at me and cocked her head as though she were listening for something. I think she heard blues playing as though they were really there.

The Voice came last night. It’s with me still: a gentle vibration against my rib cage, a ripple in the water, warm as Sala’s breath against my ear when she was a baby. It says, “Go gently.” It says, “Don’t fight.” I know my Bible. God told Jesus that the soldiers were coming; he heard their silver jangling in its pouch and he stayed, waiting. When The Voice comes, I can rest. Too often all I hear are The Banshees screeching at me like hyenas. Sometimes they are so loud I think other people must hear them, but I know they can’t. They are my torment, my Furies, though I don’t know what I have done to deserve them. For days they have been telling me not to feed Sala her dinner. “The food is poisoned,” they said. “The water is poisoned.” I have been fasting so that Sala can eat; when they see that I don’t eat, they won’t poison the food. I don’t mind. I have grown accustomed to hunger.

The Banshees screeched, “Everything is spying on you, everything has ears, everything reports.”

Some of the herbs growing in Mother’s yard would counteract the poison. I tried to get them but couldn’t find the right ones. I go through all of this, all of this to keep Sala safe. I am so very tired and still The Banshees say, “You are failing. You are too small. You and that child are damned.” It does seem as though my life is whipping away from me like a kite in a tornado. I pray for guidance and relief. When I am at my end, when I am going to collapse, The Voice comes and tells me to rest. Mother and Daddy are taking me somewhere today. I don’t believe that it’s a doctor’s appointment despite what they say. I hear the silver jangling.

I try to find whatever loveliness there might be in a thing, even this afternoon as I stepped into the car and Daddy started the engine and Mother kept glancing at me furtively through the rearview mirror.

I try to find the beauty in things. Sometimes I am overcome with it. I have felt as though I were swept up in a sweet June breeze, pirouetting through the sky like one of God’s angels. I have felt like a single note of music, a high C trebling from a singer’s throat, all shimmer and wing beat. It is really something to feel music, to feel as though one has become music. I don’t feel that way very often anymore, but I remember that ecstasy.

Mother and Daddy tell me half-truths. I can’t look at them, so I concentrate on the highway and the waning day. There is a particular kind of afternoon sun that exists only in autumn. A golden light drapes itself over the world of that hour. It falls through the afternoon sky, fine and faint as a swirl of cigarette smoke caught in the wind, nearly transparent. So sweet, that light, insisting softly, goldly against the windows.

I try to find the beauty in things. On dark days I sit in my armchair looking at clouds and I am awed at how rain is made. I think about the vapor rising from the lakes and rivers and the dirty puddles on street corners and how it condenses into pearlescent kingdoms in the air. The clouds take in the particles of water, gorging until rain spills out of them. Then they rain down until they are exhausted into disappearing wisps. These clouds, they sacrifice themselves. It seems to me that everything is on its way to becoming something else, giving itself up in the service of another. In a little while this light will fade. The last few mosquitoes will come out, and the night creatures will eat them. I don’t know where I will be then.

In the front seat my father fiddles with the dial on the radio and lets it rest momentarily on the Christian station. Mother says, “August, stop there. That’s Reverend Bill’s show. I can’t stand you fiddling with the dial. All that static makes me want to jump out of my skin.”

He says, “I want something pretty, Hattie.”

He says, “I want to hear that little song Cassie taught me on the piano when she was a little girl. That’s what I want. You remember that song, Cassie?”

He looks at me through the rearview mirror. I do not respond. Yesterday Sala asked me the strangest question. She asked me if I loved my mother when I was her age. I can’t remember who I was at ten, only that I tried to be a good girl because I didn’t want to invite Mother’s wrath. I was scared of her—we all were—but I don’t remember if I loved her. What I feel for Sala has eclipsed anything that I thought was love before she was born; it has made me wonder if I ever loved anything before her. As for Mother, I think that I did love her. I think that I still do. That’s what I told Sala.

“You’re not going to find that song, August. Just leave it. Lord, please just leave it,” Mother says.

On the radio Reverend Bill takes calls from people who have questions about the Bible passage he’s chosen to study. A man calls from South Carolina. He asks an interesting question, one that I have had myself. I wait while Reverend Bill pauses to gather his thoughts before responding. I wait for what seems an eternity. I wait so long that I wonder if my father turned off the radio. When the reverend finally speaks, I have already forgotten the question, and his words are slow and distorted, like a record playing on the wrong speed. The more I concentrate, the more it seems that the words have nothing to do with one another. It is disturbing, like seeing a flock of birds stopped to rest in the trees, only to discover, upon closer inspection, that they’re all mixed up and some are robins and some are blue jays and some are orioles. I focus on the minister’s voice. I tune my ear to his pace so the words are whole: apostle and Paul and Damascus. I try to link them like a string of beads. They will not fit together. Mother and Daddy nod their heads to whatever the reverend is saying. I know that I should understand too. Please help me, Lord. These corners in my mind—I turn one and there is a tiger. Leaping.

The Voice is receding. The Banshees edge in. They take each bit of ceded ground and plant their loud and terrible flags; they begin their murmuring. I know how this goes. I am waiting for their awful crescendo. Something dark jumps at the edge of my vision. The Banshees, the three of them black and terrible. Or perhaps they are just large insects outside of the car window. It has become so difficult to distinguish one thing from another. The afternoon is deepening and these little monkeys jump on my shoulders. They bare their teeth and yelp. My heart is beating too quickly. I put my hand to my breast to steady it. “Where are you going? Where are you going?” they chant. In the front seat Mother sits rigid as a toothpick. There is a bit of her neck visible between the cloth of her collar and the place where her gray hair curls under. I look at that patch of skin. It calms me.

“Hear the silver jangling?” The Banshees ask. “Look at your awful mother. She never loved anybody. Tell her she never loved anybody.”

I shake my head at them. I won’t say it. In the front seat Mother tenses but does not turn around. Daddy reaches over and holds her hand.

“Good girl,” The Banshees say.

“Now throw yourself from the car. Open the door and throw yourself out,” they say.

There is a small brown mole in the dusky ivory of Mother’s neck. “Out of the car, out of the car,” The Banshees chant. I reach for the door handle. I grasp it, my hand flexes.

Daddy slows before the exit ramp. Ours is one in a line of cars moving toward it. Now is the time. I could jump out of the car and roll onto the shoulder of the highway. I’ll get Sala from school, and we’ll escape. We’ll go to California or New Hampshire. I visited there once. It was the only time I’ve been on a plane. The day was gray. We flew up and up, and for a long while I couldn’t see anything but thick fog. Suddenly we broke through the canopy of clouds and there was nothing—just the hum of the engine and the blue sky and the sun glinting off the plane’s wings. I felt a weightlessness. I projected myself into the blue and could almost imagine that I was flying, without apparatus, without engine or metal casing, without even my own body, just the best part of myself—my soul?—borne along on the current of air. Wouldn’t that be fine? Wouldn’t that be grand?

I open the car door. I tumble. The side of my face burns; pieces of gravel cut into my palms. I taste metal; my mouth fills with liquid. I stand and run. I don’t brush the bits of road from my coat. My shoes slow me down, so I kick them off and keep running. A wood edges the road. I am moving very quickly. My legs are ten feet long. With each step, I cover an enormous distance. The Banshees are pleased with me; they clack their teeth in celebration. I could go on forever. I take in great lungfuls of air. Atom by atom, the oxygen enters my blood and pumps in waves through my veins; it is tidal, this pumping blood. My heart beats mightily. If I ran any faster, gravity would loose its claim on my ankles, and my feet would pedal into the air. I’d soar above the highway, and the cars would look like lines of speeding beetles, all chrome shine and hubcap glint. Behind me tires screech, horns honk. Someone is calling my name, Cassie, Cassie, Cassie. I don’t need to look back; there’s nothing there for me. I’d turn into a pillar of salt. The Banshees say, “Let them burn.” I run into the coppering afternoon. I’ll run all the way to Sala.