Where the Line Bleeds (11 page)

When the house was done, it was small and had an uneven look to it,
as if all those boards had been nailed together crooked, as if they resisted
fitting together cleanly. In those days, Ma-mee had hated waking up early
in the morning to a day of hard work, of housekeeping and planting and childrearing, but somehow it made it easier to do so when the sun crept its
way across the bed early in the morning, and she could rise to look out the
window through the thin white cotton curtains to see beams of it lacing
their way through the rows of corn.

Ma-mee lay in the bed waiting for the rising heat to take form in
the room and grab her by the leg. The ticking clock, the sound of the
scrabbling chickens in the dilapidated coop in a corner of the yard,
and the listing hum of insects saturated the room. The sound was like
another body in the bed with her. She didn't seem to need sleep these
days. When she woke, she was instantly awake and alert. She couldn't go
to sleep before eleven and always woke up minutes before the rising sun
entered the room. She'd taken such pleasure in sleeping when she was
young that her inability to sleep tired her in an abstract way. It marked
her as old, along with the diabetes, the partial blindness, the changes in
the community around her. When she was younger, when Lucien had
been alive and her children had been growing up, some of her uncles and
brothers had been angry, unreasonable chronic drunks. She knew some
of her kids smoked weed. But the crackheads and drugs that seemed to
steal the sense from people, these were new. It made her feel weary and
worn to sit on the porch and squint out at the small dark spots she could
see passing back and forth on the street, a few lonely, solitary crackheads
searching for dealers, cousins or neighbors' children that walked the road
and looked to her like flies crawling across a screen.

She did not like the slow ache of all her movements. It bothered her
that she often dreamt in a language that no one around her spoke any
longer, that she woke still thinking in creole French, to a wide, lonely bed,
an emptying house. Her boys could not understand this. She was afraid of
the lethargic feeling that washed over her sometime that reminded her of
floating in water. She'd feel it while sitting in the chair in front of the TV
staring at the blobs of color and light as she listened to one of the boys
describing a show for her, and it made her want to close her eyes, to blink
slowly, and just stop moving. Later, when she'd lie in bed at night with
her rosary in her hand before she went to sleep and fingered the plastic
beads, the litany of our fathers and hail mary's, she'd absently think that
it was death approaching. She thought of gathering Spanish moss with her mother as a young child to stuff their mattresses with and pausing
to look up at the sky when she was in a patch of sunlight to realize that
the sun was not blinking on and off, but rather, clouds were moving
quickly through the sky. They were passing between her and the sun and
impeding the light. This is what these fits of lethargy and utter exhaustion
felt like to her: a shadow passing over her, a scuttling cloud obscuring her
from the sun of life.

It was tentative, the first touch. It was no more than a tap, really,
there on the left side of her calf. It stung a little through the sheet. The
day would be hot like all the rest. She lay there for a minute, felt the touch
spread, felt the stinging bear down on her leg, and pushed herself up and
out of the bed. It was time to get up. Paul had bought a couple of pounds
of shrimp to the house the night before. She wanted to clean and cook
them before the worst heat of the day, before they began to turn to meal
and stink like warm flesh and sea salt. She pulled on a gown, and didn't
bother with socks or slippers. She'd rather go barefoot.

Even though she had memorized the contours of the house long ago
through habit, it still comforted her to feel her way through the rooms
with her feet, to know that the facets of the house existed as absolutes
even though it all looked to her as if she had her eyes open underwater.
When she noticed the blurriness the first time, that's what she had
thought, that there was excess water in her eye: tears, maybe. Things like
that happened to older people. When she awoke the next morning, it
was still there: a watery film. She denied it, afraid. She prayed and waited
until she woke up one morning and realized the edges had been washed
out of everything. She was drowned. Ma-mee walked to the kitchen in a
sliding shuffle: carpet, wood of the hallway, scratchy carpet of the living
room, the uneven tile of the kitchen.

Ma-mee heard it: a body rising, someone awake, one of the boys
moving around in their room. She placed the plastic bag of shrimp in the
sink, plugged the drain, and turned on the water so the ice could melt, so
the shrimp could defrost. Which boy was it? The sounds were light and
quick. They were moving fast, and they were trying to be quiet. A drawer
slid shut a little too hard, and she heard a clipped tread. Christophe. So
he would be the one up and running then. She sat down at the table just
in time for him to come tiptoeing into the kitchen and stop short.

"Good morning."

"Morning, Ma-mee."

"You sleep alright?"

"Yes, ma'am." His voice sounded like he'd swallowed a mouthful of
gravel.

"Sounds like you done had better."

Christophe shifted: he was leaning as if he was about to go. He was
thinking of an excuse. She ran her fingertips across the wood of the
tabletop and thought of his thick curly hair. She wanted him next to her,
and she would not allow him to run. He took a step.

"Paul bought some shrimp by last night. Around ten pounds or so."

"Oh yeah?" He hadn't spoken so softly since he was a little boy.

"Yes, sir. More than I can peel by myself. They in the sink defrosting."
She passed her hand across the wood again, and gave him her best sweet,
flirting smile. "I'm glad you woke up so early. I was hoping you could
help me with them."

She heard him brush his hands down the front of his white shirt.
She knew that if she could see details, it would be wrinkled. Clean, but
wrinkled.

"I got to take a shower."

"Alright."

"Yes, ma'am."

Christophe was looking at her, studying her. He whispered, "Yes,
ma am." He walked slowly from the room. Seconds later, she heard the
shower running. She hummed to herself as Otis Redding's harsh, surging
voice wound its way through her head. The cock announced itself from
below the kitchen window, excited by the sounds of movement from the
kitchen. She loved Otis Redding. She tried not to influence the boys with
her affinity for sad love songs, with the melancholy in her that responded
to them, but after Cille had gone to Atlanta and she'd been left alone in
the house with the boys, she'd played his album over and over on a little
portable record player she'd given Cille as a birthday present when she
was a teenager: Cille had left the house without it. The Otis record was
one of a few Cille had left: Otis, Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes, Earth,
Wind & Fire, some boy that looked like a girl on an album cover that called himself Prince. She never listened to that one. But the others, the
others she liked.

She kept the record player in her room now on a dresser in a corner.
She rarely played it.

The small cassette radio player in the kitchen window had taken its
place in the kitchen. The boys kept that radio tuned to an oldies R&B
station, and that suited her. She liked to listen to it while she cooked or
cleaned in the kitchen. Sometimes they would play some of the songs she
liked, some Al Green or some Sam Cooke. Some song where the man
sounded like he'd been crying in the recording booth when he made the
song, like his fingers had been itching with the phantom feel of some
woman on them when he'd hit the high notes in the recording studio. It
was always a woman. She knew that there was something new that played
music now, CD players that played hard shiny discs that looked like small
records, but she was too old for those: her eyesight prevented her from
reading the digital display on the stereo in the boys room, so she figured
it was a waste to fool with it. She felt the shrimp through the plastic bag,
felt the small bodies give under the pressure of her fingers. They were
ready. The shower shut off in the bathroom, and she pulled the plug. The
water gurgled down the drain like a throat: a noisy swallowing.

When Christophe walked into the kitchen in a T-shirt and shorts,
barefoot, Ma-mee had spread newspaper over the table and piled the
shrimp in the middle of it. An empty gallon plastic ice-cream bucket sat
in the middle of the table next to the shrimp. She was waiting on him.
He sat and passed his hand over his face. She thought he must be tired.
She was surprised he wasn't wearing shoes. She expected him to come
to the table in them so he could be prepared to run out the door if his
brother woke soon-after kissing her hastily on the cheek and tossing
some hurried excuse over his shoulder, of course. Christophe was the type
of child to run from something for only so long, but she knew he was
no coward. He would face it. She reached for a shrimp, for the grayishsilvery pile before her, the quivering mass of glistening sea-bodies, and
peeled. The shell came away easily in her fingers; it was hard like plastic
in some segments and gummy in others. Christophe grabbed a shrimp
and followed suit. Ma-mee let the room settle, let the morning sounds gather around them. Christophe peeled the shrimp slowly and carefully:
that was his way around her, and it was the exact opposite of his usual
demeanor. She knew it for what it was: love. The shrimp smelled faintly
like tears beneath her fingers as she beheaded them, broke open their
backs, and made them shed their skins. She hummed a bit of Harold
Melvin and under the table, swung one foot back and forth. He surprised
her by saying something first. She smiled: she hadn't thought the silence
that uncomfortable.

"I got that on tape, Ma-mee, if you want to hear it." He coughed into
the back of his hand. "Uncle Paul gave it to me a long time ago." The
paper crinkled as he used it to wipe. "I could bring it in here and put it
in the tape deck so you could play it sometime. I know they don't play
everything you want to hear on the radio."

She decided to spare him the risk it took for him to go back into
the room he shared with his brother to dig around in the closet and
wake him. She was surprised he'd even offered to get the tape, or for that
matter, that he'd even mentioned he owned it. "Naw, that's alright. For
some reason I done had all these songs running through my head this
morning. I don't know what it is. But I don't want to hear nothing." She
took in a deep breath. "I like it quiet in the morning."

"I ain't really been up this early before-so I wouldn't know."

Ma-mee heard that he was smiling. She laughed in reply.

"Like I don't know," she said. "When your grandfather was alive and
we was younger, I used to hate getting up in the morning. And he loved
it. Woke up right after the sun rose. He had to work, you know; the
carpentry and the yard work and the little bit of corn field we raised for
the animals, so he had to get up early. And Lord knows I had enough
work so I couldn't have slept all day if I wanted to. I made myself get into
the habit of waking up before him, even if it was only for twenty minutes
just so I could come up here and sit down for a second before I started
on breakfast. Just sit and listen. Soak up the quiet. I was snappy as a
snapping turtle when I couldn't get it. And once I got started, I wouldn't
let go neither."

Ma-mee saw a stretch of white in the dusky tan of his face. A smile.

"I ain't no morning person, neither. Too lazy, I guess." He snorted.

She shook her head no, and her hair brushed along her shoulder with
the fine touch of insects.

"You ain't lazy, Christophe. You work good as anybody. You take after
Lucien with the yard work. You better than Paul at landscaping."

He was picking at one particular shrimp. The shell must have stuck
to the flesh. She knew he was trying not to yank away the meat with the
shell. He was trying to be careful, to conserve food. She had expected him
to say something, to reply to her in some way, but he didn't. He pried
at the sharp tail fin with his fingernails. Ma-mee could feel her hands
moving, could feel the naked shrimp falling away from her fingers into
her own neat pile that was twice the size of Christophe's, but it seemed
as if it was happening without her, as if the wet, lukewarm bodies were
sliding through another woman's fingers. She realized she was squinting
as if she could see him. He was stubborn. It wasn't something an outsider
would expect from Christophe, the quick, hotheaded, trigger-tempered
one-but they never conformed, those two. They harbored their secrets
and held onto them: Christophe with his occasional slow, smoldering
anger, and Joshua with his own occasional quick, glancing, irrational
recklessness. Yes, they conformed to character, but these two traded skin
like any set of twins.

Ma-mee remembered Christophe glowering when Cille left: he had
holed himself up in the boys' room and sulked, moving listlessly from
bed to bed, sitting with his back to corners. Once she found him curled
up in the closet in a fetal position, asleep. He refused to talk about Cille,
refused to even say her name when Ma-mee tried to explain why she'd
left them. While Christophe wrestled long and slow with his own grief,
Joshua expressed his pain in erratic flares of emotion: he ran around the
house in circles, sobbing. After hours passed and she could not coax or
threaten him inside, she gave up and let him run, thinking that he would
exhaust himself. Over and over, around and around the house, the only
word she could understand of his garbled litany was "Mama." After half
the day had passed, he quieted. She stepped off the front porch and walked
around the side of the house to find him sitting upright on his knees in
the grass, his legs beneath him, his hands folded demurely in his lap, his
head listing to one side as he nodded off to sleep, his mouth a perfect O.