Where the Line Bleeds (3 page)

He had known she was talking about his smell, his hangover, his dirt.
He had given her a small, thin smile and backed away. Christophe left
the room without trying to hug her, and Joshua followed. After they both
took showers, Cille came to their room and embraced them both. Joshua
had followed her back to the kitchen, wistfully, and saw her hand a small
bank envelope filled with money to Ma-mee. She left. Joshua thought
that on average now, she talked to them less and gave them more.

He couldn't help it, but a small part of him wished she would be there
when they got home, that she had come in late last night while he and
Christophe were out celebrating with Dunny at a pre-graduation party in
the middle of a field up further in the country in a smattering of cars and
music under the full stars. Wrapped in the somnolent thump of the bass,
Joshua closed his eyes, the sun through the leaves of the trees hot on his
face, and fell asleep. When he woke up, they were pulling into the yard,
Dunny was turning down the music, and there was no rental car in the
dirt driveway of the small gray house surrounded by azalea bushes and
old reaching oaks. Something dropped in his chest, and he decided not
to think about it.

Ma-mee heard the car pull into the yard: a loud, rough motor and
the whine of an old steel body. Rap music: muffled men yelling and
thumping bass. That was Dunny's car. The twins were home, and judging
by the warmth of the air on her skin that made her housedress stick, the
rising drone of the crickets, and the absence of what little traffic there
was along the road in front of her house, they were late. She'd pressed their gowns and hung them with wire hangers over the front door. She
thought to fuss, but didn't. They were boys, and they were grown; they
took her to her doctor's appointments, cooked for her, spoke to her with
respect. They kept her company sometimes in the evenings, and over the
wooing of the cicadas coming through the open windows in the summer
or the buzzing of the electric space heater in the winter in the living room,
described the action on TV shows for her: Oprah and reruns of The Cosby
Show and nature shows about crocodiles and snakes, which she loved.
They called her ma am, like they were children still, and never talked
back. They were good boys.

The front screen door squealed open and she heard them walk across
the porch. She heard Dunny step heavily behind them and the sound
of wet jeans pant legs rubbing together. The twins' light tread advanced
from the front porch and through the door. The smell of outside: sunbaked skin and sweat and freshwater and the juice of green growing things
bloomed in her nose. From her recliner seat, she saw their shadows dimly
against the walls she'd had them paint blue, after she found out she was
blind: the old whitewash that had coated the walls and the low, white
ceiling had made her feel like she was lost in an indefinite space. She liked
the idea of the blue mirroring the air outside, and the white ceiling like
the clouds. When she walked down the narrow, dim hallway, she'd run
her fingers over the pine paneling there and imagined she was in her own
private grove of young pines, as most of Bois Sauvage had been when she
was younger.. She'd breath in the hot piney smell and imagine herself
slim-hipped and fierce, before she'd married and born her children, before
she started cleaning for rich white folks, when she filled as many sacks as
her brothers did with sweet potatoes, melons, and corn. She spoke over
the tiny sound of the old radio in the window of the kitchen that was
playing midday blues: Clarence Carter.

"Y'all been swimming, huh?"

Christophe bent to kiss her.

"And drinking, huh? You smell like a still."

Joshua laughed and brushed her other cheek.

"You, too!" She swatted him with her hand. "Y'all stink like all
outside! We going to be late. Go take a shower. Laila came over here to braid y'all's hair, but left cause y'all wasn't here, your Uncle Paul coming
in an hour to take us to the ceremony, and y'all know y'all worse than
women-take forever to take a bath. Go on!" Under the smell of the
worn sofa upholstery, mothballs, pine sol, and potpourri, she smelled
something harsh and heavy. Something that caressed the back of her
throat. "That Dunny on the porch smoking?"

"Hey, Grandma Ma-mee," Dunny said.

"Don't `hey Grandma Ma-mee' me. You dressed for the service?"

"I ain't going." His voice echoed from the porch. The sweet, warm
smell of his cigarillo grew stronger.

"Yeah, right, you ain't going. You better get off my porch
smoking..."

"Aaaw, Ma-mee."

"And take your ass down the street and get cleaned up. You going to
watch my boys graduate. And tell your Mama that I told Marianne and
Lilly and them to be over at her house at around six for the cookout, so I
hope she got everything ready." His feet hit the grass with a wet crunch.
"And don't you throw that butt in my yard. Them boys'll have to clean
it up."

"Yes, Ma-mee."

"Hurry up, Dunny."

"Yes, Ma-mee."

From a bedroom deep in the house, she heard Joshua laughing,
high and full, more soprano for a boy than she expected, and as usual, it
reminded her vaguely of the cartoon with the singing chipmunks in it. It
made her smile.

"I don't know what you laughing for," she yelled.

Joshua's laugh was joined by his brother's muffled guffawing from
the shower. One couldn't laugh without the other. She pulled her dress
away from her front so as to cool some of the sweat there: she wanted
to be fresh and cool for the service. She'd bought a dress from Sears for
Cille's graduation; where this one was shapeless, the other had fit tighter,
and had itched. It was polyester. Ma-mee had given Cille a bougainvillea
flower to wear. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back into the sofa
cushion, and she could see Cille at eighteen, her skin lovely and glowing as a ripe scopanine as she walked to collect her diploma. She had just
fallen in love with the twins' father then, and it showed. Cille bore the
twins two years later, and by then her face had changed; it looked as if it
had been glazed with a hard candy.

Joshua replied; it sounded as if he was speaking through clothing.
Probably pulling a shirt over his head, she thought.

"Yes, Ma-mee."

In the shower, Christophe soaped the rag, stood with the slimy,
shimmering cloth in his hand and let the water, so cold it made his nipples
pebble, hit him across the face. In the bottom of the tub, he saw sand,
tiny brown grains, traced in thin rivulets on the porcelain. He washed his
stomach first, as he had done since he was small: it was the way Ma-mee
had taught him when they'd first started bathing themselves when they
were seven. That was when she had first learned that she had diabetes.

It wasn't until Christophe was fifteen that her vision really started
going: that he noticed that she was reaching for pots and pillows and
papers without turning her face to look for them, and that sometimes
when he was talking to her and she looked at him, she wouldn't focus
on his face. She scaled back on the housekeeping jobs she'd been doing.
She said that some of her clients had started complaining that she was
missing spots, which she'd denied: she said the richer they got, the lazier
and pickier they became. She hated going to the doctor, and so she had
hidden it from them until he'd noticed these things. Late one night after
they'd come back from riding with Dunny, he lay in the twin bed across
the room from Joshua, and told him what he suspected. He'd heard of
people with diabetes going blind, but he never thought it would happen
to Ma-mee.

After Joshua had fallen asleep, Christophe had turned to the wall and
cried: breathing through his mouth, swallowing the mucus brought up
by the tears, his heart burned bitter and pulled small at the thought of
her not being able to see them ever again, at the thought of her stumbling
around the house. He'd talked to his Aunt Rita, Dunny's mother, and she'd
forced Ma-mee to go to the doctor. He'd confirmed she was legally blind.
While Rita sat in a chair next to Ma-mee holding her hand, Christophe
and Joshua stood behind them, half leaning against the wall, their heads empty with air and disbelief, as the doctor told them that if they had
caught it earlier, they could have done laser surgery on her eyes to stop
the blindness from progressing. So then, too late, she'd had the operation.
Afterwards, she sat pale and quiet in the living room that she'd had them
empty of most of the porcelain knick-knacks and small, cheap plastic
vases and shelves so she'd have less to clean and worry about breaking
or banging into. The bandages were a blankness on her face. When the
doctor took them off and proclaimed her healed, she said she could see
blobs of color, nothing else, but Christophe felt a little better in knowing
that at least she wouldn't be closed in total darkness, that at least she
could still see the color of his skin, the circle of his head.

He dried himself off, wiped the mirror clear, and tried not to, but
thought of his father. Their father: the one that gave them these noses
and these bodies quick to muscle. Before their mother left them, he was
someone the twins saw twice or three times a month. They were happiest
when he would stay over for days at Ma-mee's house: the twins would
stay awake and listen to him and Cille talk in the kitchen, and later the
muffled laughter that came from Cille's room. Inevitably, he and Cille
would fight, and he would leave, only to come back a week or two later.
Ma-mee had told them that their father refused to go to Atlanta with
Cille, and that he liked living in Bois Sauvage just fine; that had caused
the final break between them.

After Cille went to Atlanta, he became scarce. His visits tapered off
until a day came when Christophe saw him from the school bus on the
way home and realized his father hadn't visited them in months. His father
was filling the tank of his car with gas at a corner store, and Christophe
jumped. Christophe had nudged his brother, and Joshua had joined him
in looking out the window, in watching their father shrink until he was
small and unreal-looking as a plastic toy soldier stuck in one position:
right hand on the roof of the car, the left on the hose, his head down.
Suddenly trees obscured their view, and Christophe had turned around
in his seat to face the front of the bus, and Joshua, who had been leaning
over him in his seat, straightened up and faced forward. Both of them
stared at the sweating green plastic upholstery of the seat before them:
they were so short they could not see over it.

Christophe wiped a rag over his face and bore down on his nose.
Over the years, Christophe and Joshua would see their father around Bois
Sauvage when they were riding their bikes and doing wheelies in and out
of the ditches, or when they were stealing pears from Mudda Ma'am's
pear tree and carting them down the road in their red wagon, and later
when they were older, walking with their friends and sneaking blunts.
His name was Samuel, and while the boys grew up calling Cille by her
name instead of calling her mother, they didn't call Samuel by his name
because he didn't talk to them, and because they felt more abandoned
by him than by their mother, who at least had the excuse of being "far
away." Whenever they saw Samuel, he was always with his friends, and
had a red and white Budweiser can in his hands. When they talked about
him, they called him "Him" and "He," and any questions or comments
about him from others they ignored, or stared hard at the asker, silently,
until the question evaporated in the air. As they grew older, when he
came up in conversation with others, they called him what everyone in
the neighborhood called him: Sandman. When they were thirteen, they
began to hear rumors filtered from the neighborhood drug dealers, who
had just discovered crack cocaine, and were learning how to cook it from
cousins who were visiting from New Orleans, from Chicago, from Florida:
these rumors explained why he seemed to be skinnier each time they saw
him, why he never drove a better car than his old beat-up, rust-laced Ford
pickup, and why he hung out in his friends' yards so much.

Sandman was an addict. Fresh told it to Christophe one day down
at the park. While Christophe sat on the picnic table bench and watched
Fresh count his money into neat piles of hundreds and twenties and rebag his crumbs of crack and stash them according to size and price in
different pockets on his carpenter's pants, Fresh had said to him, "Boy,
except for your nose, you look just like your mama." He'd paused while he
folded his wad of bills, had looked up and stared at Christophe, weighing
him like a pit he was thinking about buying, and then said, "You know
he on this shit, right?" And in that moment, Christophe knew by Fresh's
look who he was talking about. Everything had clicked into order in his
head like a stack of dominoes falling in a line. "All of them older ones that
used to snort powder when they was young for fun, all of them doing it now. This take them to that other level." Fresh had glared at Christophe.
"Don't never do that shit. I keep my shit clean, still got all the hair in my
nose." Christophe had looked away from Fresh's diamond-studded gold
tooth gleaming in his mouth and had shrugged his small thirteen-year old
shoulders, bony and broad under his too big jersey top, and looked away
across the park to the basketball court, the baseball diamond, the trees
bristling green and rising on all sides. Christophe watched a crow circle
and land at the top of a pine and join about a dozen more so that they
looked like dark flowers blooming in the blowsy needles, and thought
of the last time he'd seen him. He hadn't even so much as nodded at
Christophe: Sandman was sitting on the tail of his pickup in Mr. Joe's
yard and was so drunk he hadn't even known Christophe was the pre-teen
walking past him.