Up From the Blue (21 page)
“Dad’s looking for you,” he said. “And he’s not happy.” Phil took a step back and pumped the weights again. His shoulders, biceps, and the seriousness on his face were like a man’s, but his smooth chest and round cheeks still a boy’s. “You look weird,” he said, staring at my hair.
“You do, too,” I told him, turning toward the staircase when I heard Dad call my name.
“I told you he wasn’t happy,” Phil said.
Tucking the necklace under my shirt and the book into the waist of my pants, I went downstairs to face my father.
“Where were you?” he called from the kitchen.
“Outside,” I said, the lies coming easier. I wondered if I smelled of Momma’s perfume.
“Don’t you think it would have been more appropriate to stay with Phil on his birthday?”
“I’m here now.”
“The day’s practically over,” he said. “And don’t you think you took more than your share?”
“It was really good cake,” I said, setting the knife on the counter.
“Well, it’s drying out now because you forgot to cover it.”
He was right there and could cover it himself if he didn’t have to prove a point all the time. Momma never bossed me around this way. I set the lid over the cake, made an exaggerated effort to clean the counter, then turned to leave.
“Just a minute,” he said.
I froze, the brush bristles jabbing into my arm, sure that he smelled the perfume or noticed the book bulging at my waist. I could not risk reaching to my collar to feel if the necklace was showing.
He stared for a long while before he said, “Don’t you have something to say?”
There were words I didn’t like to say. Words like “thank you” and “sorry” just stayed there like a fist in my throat. After some thought, I said, “I’ll get ready for bed now. Good night,” and waited a little longer to see if Dad would accept that.
“All right,” he said. “Go on.”
When I went to my room, I set the gifts from Momma on my desk and itched my arm where the bristles had poked me. Then I cleared all of the items out of my bed. I no longer had to wake myself in the middle of the night. Instead, I could fall asleep, thinking how she called us the best of friends. I wondered if that meant she would eat candy with me in the clubhouse or listen to the same song over and over until we got all the words right. I
wondered if she would come upstairs someday to see my room, if she’d like the things I kept in it.
As I dressed for bed that night, admiring the tiny braids in the mirror, I noticed red marks where Momma had held me. All night I touched what I knew would become bruises, hoping they’d be slow to fade.
I
RECORDED EVERY MEETING WITH
my mother by placing a small checkmark on my calendar: five visits in March of 1976, daily visits for the first week of April, a series of skipped days, a day where I’d visited twice, and now, at the beginning of May, a long gap of almost a week since I’d seen her.
During the time in-between, I studied anyone and anything I believed would impress her. I remembered the names of her heroes: Nikki Giovanni, Bob Dylan, James Agee, Martin Luther King Jr., Golda Meir, Ralph Nader, Desmond Tutu, and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. I listened to her stories about showers built to trick and poison people, penniless families in swirling dust, a lonely painter who cut off his ear for love.
My mind was more and more with my mother.
What is she doing right now? Is she thinking of me? What could I do today that she’d like to hear about later?
At first, I loved the secrecy. I liked the yearning—how waiting to be together built to something almost unbearable.
But something had changed. It began to prick at me—how our time was always cut short at its height. I’d become more reckless about seeing her, standing near her door midday, tiptoeing downstairs before I was sure Dad was asleep. I read the books she gave me in broad daylight, left my notebook of clues lying about. I was no longer satisfied seeing Momma here and there in the middle of the night; I wanted her in my daily life.
And I had a plan. Every time I passed Phil’s room and found it empty, I stole a coin from his silver dollar collection. I didn’t feel guilty about taking his coins because he no longer counted them or added any new ones. When I began taking them, the box was so full it wouldn’t latch. Now I could see the bottom.
I’D SPENT MOST OF
my effort on the cover page of my report, and that was because reading Momma’s book had become painful. Even on the first page, I got stuck on words like “statisticians” and “Freudian sophistication.” The story picked up with girls eating chalk to stay thin—if I wasn’t already so skinny, I would have tried it myself—but after that, the book became dull again, so dull that whenever I opened it, the words swam around on the page, and I couldn’t make myself read them in the right order.
“Mr. Woodson?” I loved standing by his desk.
“What do you have there, Tillie?”
“The Feminine Mystique
. It’s taking me longer to do my report than I thought.”
Mr. Woodson put his long fingers on the cover of the book.
“And I was wondering if maybe I can just do the chapter on ‘The Forfeited Self.’”
“Tillie.” He said it quietly. He didn’t say anything else for
a long time. His brown shoes sighed up and down as his toes curled inside of them. “I was hoping you would choose a book that you could discuss with your peers. I wanted you to pick something all your own and have fun with it.”
“I’m having fun.” I showed him a smile, but was pretty certain it was the kind I gave the camera—a look that said,
Quick! I can’t hold it much longer.
Mr. Woodson leaned over and put his elbows on his legs. His face was beautiful up close. I’d never looked at it straight-on before. “Please tell me who gave you this book.”
“My mother.”
“Your mother.” Mr. Woodson took a deep breath. “Tillie, I have never met your mother. Does she live with you?”
I said nothing. How could I? If I told about our time together in the middle of the night, if I told him how I snuck food to her and we spoke in whispers so Dad wouldn’t hear us, he might call my home. And if he did, Momma would be in danger.
Mr. Woodson breathed in deep again, held it there, and after a long while, his breath came through his nostrils, smelling like coffee. “Sometimes,” he said, “I feel like the Tillie I know doesn’t come to my class anymore.”
He seemed to be waiting for me to say something, but he hadn’t asked a question, or not one that I understood, so I just watched him tap his fingertips together. I liked his hands, which were brown on the back and pink underneath. “Tillie,” he finally said, “don’t get lost. Don’t lose that thing you have.”
“Thing?”
“Forget the book report. What happened to your poetry?”
“You like my poems?”
“I think you’ll make a very fine writer some day.”
He palmed the top of my head like a basketball, and left his
hand there as I counted to seven in my head. I wished he’d kept it there longer, at least so I could have counted to an even ten.
I SCOURED MY ROOM
until I found the pages of watercolored poems I’d created two months earlier. I’d chosen colors I preferred more than real life: magenta skies, lime green trees, pink-and-orange checkered birds. I had written those poems the day I had my fever, the day I discovered my mother. I turned page after page of wrinkled papers and found where I’d ripped out the poem I’d given her about the moon.
The last page was a painting of the ladybugs I knew so well from the days Momma didn’t wake up. I knew all their shades of red—some deep, some faded like fabric left out in the sun. I knew how they could unlock their red shells and release the little wings that were sheer as black pantyhose. I must have drawn a hundred of them here: red blobs with the paintbrush, not bothering to make them into circles. The black spots were sometimes on their shells and sometimes just nearby, as if I’d been painting too fast to care.
At the bottom of the paper was an arrow. And when I turned the page over, I discovered a note from my teacher that I hadn’t noticed before:
What I know about the young poet, Tillie Harris: She signs autographs. She knows about dandelions, Darwin, and Denmark. She laughs with her whole face.
When I read this, I felt the way I did with Momma—important, noticed—and I decided:
This is the day. This is the day I’ll free my mother.
We’d escape to who-knows-where, she’d read to me from her books, and tuck me in somewhere far from here.
• • •
Outside, Dad pushed the reel mower across our lawn, mowing squares inside of squares, with a rhythmic
Cha cha cha. Cha cha cha.
In the old house, I’d sit on the porch while he mowed, and whenever he came close, I’d ask him a question:
Why is the sky blue?
Always, he gave a long, scientific answer before mowing another square. When he came close again, I had another:
Where does the sky end and space begin?
His answers, which I paid almost no attention to, made me giggle, simply because I’d found a way to get his attention.
If the earth is round, why don’t the people living on the bottom fall off? And why aren’t they upside down?
At some point, he’d call me “Pest,” and a smile would spread across my face.
When my father got to that final strip of grass, the very middle of all of those squares, he’d stop. That was my cue to hold the handle of the mower myself. And because I was not strong enough to push it without his help, he stood behind me, his hands on the outside edges of the handles, and we’d walk the last strip together. That was a long time ago.
I stood by the screen door, hands in my pockets, where I fingered the last of Phil’s silver dollars. My plan was almost ready. To my father, this was just a day like any other with ground beef thawing on the counter for dinner and a call placed to the dentist. He’d made an appointment for Phil to have the silver cap replaced with porcelain, something I was curious to see, but Momma and I would be long gone by then.
While my father mowed smaller and smaller squares, I snuck to his room and slipped his car key off the wicker table. Then, for no reason except curiosity, a good-bye, maybe, I opened his closet to see everything so tidy: shoes lined up in pairs, ironed slacks hung over hangers. I would be leaving behind this orderly world with rules for how everything must be done.
I rummaged through his drawers next, and beneath his socks I found handfuls of medals he’d won, and behind those, the pitiful doll I’d made for him last Christmas, along with old cards I’d written even before we moved here: happy father’s day, best dad. I didn’t know he’d saved them, and something ached where I didn’t expect.
As I stood back at the screen door again, seeing that Dad had finished mowing and now wiped the blades dry with a hand towel, I reminded myself: He wasn’t the same man. I felt the coins in one pocket, the key in the other, knowing I couldn’t stay in two worlds any longer.
P
HIL, WHO NOW EXERCISED
dutifully before bed, curled weights to his chest, fifty reps on each arm, grunting with every one of them. Dad washed the last of the dinnerware, closed the creaky door to the dishwasher, then emptied his pockets onto the wicker table beside his bed. These were the sounds to listen for as our family called it a day.
Sitting on my bed in the dark, I counted the silver dollars, passing them one at a time from my right hand to my left, waiting for the quiet. My clothes pinched at the waist, and I couldn’t bend my knees very far because I’d dressed in layers—my biggest pair of jeans over pajama bottoms over shorts, and on top, a t-shirt and pullover sweatshirt—so when we made our escape, I’d have a change of clothes. I loaded the coins, my dad’s car key, and the butter knife into the pouchlike pocket on the front of my sweatshirt, and when I was certain Dad was asleep, I walked stiff-legged down the stairs.
Each step clanked, just slightly, but I was so jittery, I couldn’t slow myself down. I’d had enough of my father’s gray world. I slowed past his room, remembering the sock doll in his drawer, knowing that when I left him behind I would have to leave the good as well. I breathed in, held it tight, and kept going around the corner. Down the last flight of stairs, a coin dropped from my pocket and landed with a loud
plink
before bouncing to another step. I started to bend down to find it when I barely caught the others from sliding out the same way. I had to leave it and go on.
