The Women of Brewster Place (15 page)

Her new baby doll. They placed the soft plastic and pink flannel in the little girl’s lap, and she turned her moon-shaped eyes toward them in awed gratitude. It was so perfect and so small. She trailed her fingertips along the smooth brown forehead and down into the bottom curve of the upturned nose. She gently lifted the dimpled arms and legs and then reverently placed them back. Slowly kissing the set painted mouth, she inhaled its new aroma while stroking the silken curled head and full cheeks. She circled her arms around the motionless body and squeezed, while with tightly closed eyes she waited breathlessly for the first trembling vibrations of its low, gravelly “Mama” to radiate through her breast. Her parents surrounded this annual ritual with full heavy laughter, patted the girl on the head, and returned to the other business of Christmas.

Cora Lee was an easy child to please. She asked for only this one thing each year, and although they supplied her over the years with the blocks, bicycles, books, and games they felt necessary for a growing child, she spent all of her time with her dolls—and they had to be baby dolls. She told them this with a silent rebellion the year they had decided she was now old enough for a teenaged Barbie doll; they had even sacrificed for an expensive set of foreign figurines with
porcelain faces and real silk and lace mantillas, saris, and kimonos. The following week they found the dolls under her bed with the heads smashed in and the arms twisted out of their sockets.

That was when her father began to worry. Nonsense, her mother had replied. Wasn’t he always saying that she was different from their other children? Well, all children were careless with their toys, and this only proved that she was just like the rest. But the woman stared around the room, thoughtfully fingering the broken pieces of china, while her daughter’s assortment of diapered and bottled dolls stared back from their neat row with fixed smiles.

They reluctantly bowed in the face of her quiet reproach and soothed their bruised authority by giving her cheaper and cheaper baby dolls. But their laughter grew hollow and disquieting over Cora’s Christmas ritual with the plastic and flannel because her body was now growing rounded and curved. Her father quickly averted his face and busied himself with the other children during the moments that her mother would first hand her the doll from under the tree. Yet a lump still formed in his throat from the lingering glimpse of her melted gratitude for the gift of dead plastic.

He put his foot down on her thirteenth Christmas. There would be no more dolls—of any kind. Let her go play like other children her age. But she does play like other children, her mother pleaded. She had secretly watched her daughter over the years for some missing space, some faintly visible sign in her schoolwork or activities that would explain the strange Christmas ritual, but there was none. She wasn’t as bright as her brother, but her marks were a great deal better than her sister’s, and she was certainly their most obedient child. Was he going to deny her child this one thing that made her happy? He silently turned from the anger that his seeming unreasonableness fixed on his wife’s face, because there were no words for the shudder that went through his mind at the memory of the dead brown plastic resting on his daughter’s protruding breasts.

In his guilt and bewilderment he spent more money on her that Christmas than on all the other children, but they still felt the quiet reproach in her spirit as she listlessly fingered the new sweaters, camera, and portable radio.

“That’s okay, baby,” her mother whispered in her ear, “you have lots of dolls in your room.”

“But they don’t smell and feel the same as the new ones.” And the woman was startled by the depths of misery and loss reflected on the girl’s dark brown face. She quickly pushed the image away from herself and still refused to believe that there was any need to worry. And it would be many months later before she recalled that image to her consciousness. It would return to her after her youngest daughter would approach her with the news one afternoon that Cora Lee had been doing nasty with the Murphy boy behind the basement steps. And she would call her older daughter to her and hear her recount with a painful innocence that it wasn’t nasty, he had just promised to show her the thing that felt good in the dark—and it had felt good, Mother.

And she would then sadly and patiently give an explanation, long overdue, that Cora Lee mustn’t let the Murphy boy or any other boy show her the thing that felt good in the dark, because her body could now make babies and she wasn’t old enough to be a mother. Did she understand? And as she would watch the disjointed mysteries of life connect up in her daughter’s mind and hear her breathe out with enlightened wonder—“A real baby, Mother?”—the image of that Christmas would come smashing into her brain like a meat cleaver. It was then that she began to worry.

“Cora, Cora Lee!” The voice echoed shrilly up the air shaft. “I told ya to stop them goddamned children from jumping over my goddamned head all the goddamned day! Now I’m gonna call the police—do you hear me? The goddamned police!” And the window banged shut.

Cora Lee sighed slowly, turned her head from her soap
opera, and looked around the disheveled living room at the howling and flying bodies that were throwing dingy school books at each other, jumping off of crippled furniture, and swinging on her sagging velveteen draperies.

“Y’all stop that now,” she called out languidly. “You’re giving Miss Sophie a nervous headache, and she said she’s gonna call the cops.” No one paid her any attention, and she turned back toward the television with a sigh, absentmindedly stroking the baby on her lap. What did these people on Brewster Place want from her anyway? Always complaining. If she let the kids go outside, they made too much noise in the halls. If they played in the streets, she didn’t watch them closely enough. How could she do all that—be a hundred places at one time? It was enough just trying to keep this apartment together. Did she know little Brucie was going to climb the wall at the end of the block and fall and break his arm? The way they had carried on, you’d think she had pushed him off herself.

Bruce ran in front of the television, chasing one of his sisters and trying to hit her over the head with his dirty unraveling cast.

“Stop that, you’re messing up the picture,” she said irritably. Now the doctors were saying that his arm wasn’t mending right and she had to bring him back to have it reset. Always something—she must remember to look at the clinic card for his next appointment. Tuesday the something, she faintly recalled. She hoped it wasn’t last Tuesday, or she would have to wait forever for a new appointment.

“I just don’t know,” she sighed aloud, shifted the baby into her arms, and got up to adjust the picture and change channels. She hated it when her two favorite stories came on at the same time; it was a pain to keep switching channels between Steve’s murder trial and Jessica’s secret abortion.

A rubber ball came hurling across the room and smacked the baby on the side of the head. It began screaming, and her eyes blazed around the room for the offender.

“All right, that’s it!” she yelled, charging around the room,
hitting randomly at whoever wasn’t quick enough to dodge her swinging fists. “Now just get outside—I’m sick of you. Wait! Doesn’t anyone have any homework?” She only threatened them with homework when they had pushed her to the end of her patience. She listened suspiciously to the mottled chorus of “nos” to her question, but couldn’t gather the energy to sort through the confused pile of torn notebooks that lay scattered about the floor.

“Awful strange,” she muttered darkly. “No one ever has any homework. When I was in school, we always got homework.” But they had already headed for the door, knowing she had used up her ultimate weapon against them. “And we didn’t get left back like you little dumb asses,” she called out impotently to the slamming door. It had surprised her when Maybelline had gotten left back. Her oldest daughter had always liked school, and there were never any truant notices for her in the mailbox like there were for the others. Take her to the library, the teachers had said, encourage her to read. But the younger ones had torn and marked in her library books, and they made you pay for that. She couldn’t afford to be paying for books all the time. And how was she expected to keep on top of them every minute? It was enough just trying to keep the apartment together. She underscored that thought by picking up a handful of discarded clothes and throwing them into a leaning chair. So now truant notices were coming for Maybelline, too.

“I just don’t know,” she sighed, and sat back down in front of the television. She gently examined the side of the baby’s head to see if the ball had left a mark and kissed the tiny bruise. Why couldn’t they just stay like this—so soft and easy to care for? How she had loved them this way. Taking the baby’s hand in her mouth, she sucked at the small fingers and watched it giggle and try to reach for her nose. She poked her thumb into the dimpled cheek and lifted the child onto her breast so she could stroke its finely curled hair and inhale the mingled sweetness of mineral oil and talcum powder that lay in the creases of its neck. Oh, for them to stay
like this, when they could be fed from her body so there were no welfare offices to sit in all day or food stamp lines to stand on, when she alone could be their substance and their world, when there were no neighbors or teachers or social workers to answer to about their actions. They stayed where you put them and were so easy to keep clean.

She’d spend hours washing, pressing, and folding the miniature clothes, blankets, and sheets. The left-hand corner of her bedroom which held the white wooden crib and dresser was dusted and mopped religiously. As she got on her hands and knees to wash the molding under the crib, the red and black sign in the clinic glared into her mind—GERMS ARE YOUR BABY’S ENEMIES—and she was constantly alert for any of them hidden in that left-hand corner. No, when her babies slept she made sure they went unmolested by those things painted on that clinic poster. There was no place for them to hide on that brown body that was bathed and oiled twice a day, or in the folds of the pastel flannel and percales that she personally scrubbed and sterilized, or between the bristles of the hair brushes that were boiled each week and replaced each month. She couldn’t bear the thought of those ugly red things creeping into the soft, fragrant curls that she now buried her nose into.

She wondered at the change in the fine silky strands that moved with the slightest force of her breath and raised to tickle her nostrils when she inhaled. In a few years they would grow tight and kinky and rough. She’d hate to touch them then, because the child would cry when she yanked the comb through its matted hair. And she would have to drag them from under the bed or out of closets and have to thump them on the head constantly to get them to sit still while she combed their hair. And if she didn’t, there would now be neighbors and teachers and a motley assortment of relatives to complain about the linty, gnarled hair of the babies who had grown beyond the world of her lap, growing wild-eyed and dumb, coming home filthy from the streets with rough corduroy, khaki, and denim that tattered faster
than she could mend, and with mouthfuls of rotten teeth, and scraped limbs, and torn school books, and those damned truant notices in her mailbox—dumb, just plain dumb.

“Are you gonna be a dumb-ass too?” she cooed at the baby. “No, not Mama’s baby. You’re not gonna be like them.”

There was no reason for them being like that—so difficult. She had gone to school until her sophomore year, when she had her first baby. And in those days you had to leave high school if you were pregnant. She had intended to go back, but the babies just seemed to keep coming—always welcome until they changed, and then she just didn’t understand them.

What was wrong with them? If they behaved better, people wouldn’t always be on her back. Maybe Sammy and Maybelline’s father would have stayed longer. She had really liked him. His gold-capped teeth and glass eye had fascinated her, and she had almost learned to cope with his peculiar ways. A pot of burnt rice would mean a fractured jaw, or a wet bathroom floor a loose tooth, but that had been their fault for keeping her so tied up she couldn’t keep the house straight. But she still carried the scar under her left eye because of a baby’s crying, and you couldn’t stop a baby from crying. Babies had to cry sometimes, and so Sammy and Maybelline’s father had to go. And then there was Brucie’s father, who had promised to marry her and take her off Welfare, but who went out for a carton of milk and never came back. And then only the shadows—who came in the night and showed her the thing that felt good in the dark, and often left before the children awakened, which was so much better—there was no more waiting for a carton of milk that never came and no more bruised eyes because of a baby’s
crying. The thing that felt good in the dark would sometimes bring the new babies, and that’s all she cared to know, since the shadows would often lie about their last names or their jobs or about not having wives. She had stopped listening, stopped caring to know. It was too much trouble, and it didn’t matter because she had her babies. And shadows didn’t give you fractured jaws or bruised eyes, there was no time for all that—in the dark—before the children awakened.