The Day's Heat Page 26
“Never do,” Willie Mae replied, head down. “Them folks is the best at not talking of anybody I’s ever knowed. ’Cepten to ask where something is, they prides themselves on the quiet—drives me crazy.”
“Have you told them I’m moving into the other house?”
Not slowing her step but looking off as though down the long hall of the past, Willie Mae answered, “Never seed no point in telling them folks nuthin’.”
Other than those questions, and a moment of unexplainable sorrow when their bed was moved and she found one of Charles’s socks, it was as though the Bettlemains did not exist and her husband was just off with Brother as he’d always been—at work or fishing. But Cassie and Lill took the change as a threat and thought their father might not be able to find the right house. They insisted the recliner be moved, with Lill falling asleep in the thing, and Lee giving in, saying to Al, “Please, if you don’t mind.”
“Is Daddy coming home tonight? Does he know where we live?” became the girls’ evening refrain after the move.
“I don’t know,” Lee would answer, halfway truthful.
Furlough the dog also seemed to find the change from one house to the other upsetting. The first night he stayed out in the carport of “the old house”—as they were calling it now—and howled, refusing to come over, although Lee whistled until past midnight. She looked out of the living room window and the back window and saw what had been the Teflers’ view, the crooked pear tree off to the left, a black paper cutout aligned with the moon. I guess I should write Ray and my family and tell them I’ve moved, she thought, but not seriously. The thought trailed off into others: how comfortably they all fit—she and Baby Charlie in one small bedroom, the girls in what had formerly been hers and Charles’s larger one, and the other bedroom for all her sewing paraphernalia.
The next weekend, Lee and Willie Mae painted the rooms of the old house, all pale blue again as Willie insisted. The dark blue rugs were left on the tile floor—the new tenants could have them. As with the Teflers’ house, the painting took one weekend, two days of hard, steady work, except that late Sunday, when they finally finished, there were only three beers left to drink. The two women laughed about the previous week’s three beers apiece.
“Oh, I was in a bad way Monday morning,” Willie Mae said. “Miss Claire kept asking how I felt. The one time I wished she’d hesh up.”
“I didn’t take Cassie to school, didn’t get up until ten o’clock,” Lee confessed. Didn’t have to drive past those damn pecan trees, she thought, and took a long first cold swallow. She was coming to understand how this tart yellow liquid could be a reward for hot, sweaty work, and Charles’s need for its bitter taste after a long day.
“I’s got to talk to you, Miss Lee—it’s important,” Willie Mae started—started and stopped.
“Okay,” Lee encouraged.
The colored woman pulled herself up on the edge of the lawn chair and downed half of her beer with one swallow. “Is your heart done set on renting this here house out?”
“Well ….” Lee couldn’t see where the question was leading, but since they’d worked so hard together, since the night of beer drinking and sitting with Willie Mae’s daughters on her front porch, Lee, and apparently the colored woman, too, felt there were no questions that couldn’t be asked. “I’m kind of counting on the extra $30 a month from the rent, Willie, to take up the slack—what Charles used to give me every once in a while,” Lee explained. “That $100 Claire brought over the other day was out of the blue. And now it’s been another week and there hasn’t been any more.”
Willie Mae drank another swallow of beer and sat hunched, slope-shouldered in the lawn chair.
“Tell it, Leeler.”
“What?” Willie asked.
“It’s what my dad used to say when he wanted us to spit something out. What are you getting at?”
“I’s been thinking and thinking, Miss Lee, trying to conjure a way to buy this house from you, but I knows I can’t.” The dark woman’s round, nyloned head wagged negatively over each word as if she were saying “no” to herself before someone else could.
And perhaps it was this, the denying, that made Lee pause, made her want to say yes, that there was a way, when all she could see and feel were the head wagging “no’s”, too. “I owe money on this house, Willie—like fifteen years of payments still due.”
“I’s thought about that, through and through. I knows you pay every month. I figure I could give you the down money, $200, and then just give you the house payment and a little bit more, like rent—whatever you was gonna charge the people what would move in here. And you could make the payments right on.”
“But then the house would still be in my name, Willie. You wouldn’t own it. And if something happened, how would you prove you paid? The Bettlemains would give you trouble there.”
“That’s what I couldn’t figure out.” The colored woman’s shoulders sloped more, and she set the empty beer bottle down on the concrete.
“To tell the truth, Willie, the hardest part of buying the Teflers’ house was getting the bank to put it in my name.”
“I knows. I know they give you a time. Theys didn’t want to give my mamma her own house when my daddy died, even when it said clear and proper in the will that it was her’ns. Names on papers can be a hindrance. I seed where you practiced Mr. Charles’s name.”
“I was just doing what I had to, Willie, that is, if I wanted the Teflers’ house.”
“I know, Miss Lee, I knows. We all goes down that road, doing what we has to, to get what we wants. You had to sign Mr. Charles’s name.”
Lee had to laugh, “You know all the secrets, don’t you?”
“Not that it does much good. But I seed you find a way to get that new house, and I figured you could find me a way, too. That’s coloreds’ problem: most times we don’t even know they’s a way. Figure me a way, Miss Lee. I wants this here house more than anything I ever wanted in my life. More’n I even wanted a daddy for my chil’ren, I want this house. It’s a fine place—all bigger, all new paint. You can’t blame me, can you?”
Willie Mae went on talking about her girl Louise and her new husband and their babies needing the house on Thrope Street. How the other daughter and her husband was moving off to Albany, Georgia. “I could move in here with Denny and her baby—just the three of us. I’d be close to work for you. I could help you sew; I could babysit, too, iffen you started to date or something.”
“I don’t know, Willie,” Lee responded. We’re just alike, she thought, trying to find a way. “I don’t know how I’d go about it. I’d have to have $100 a month at least.”
“I figured on that already—me and Denny makes over $100 a week doing laundry for Miss Algebra. Selling us the house, you wouldn’t have no repairs, no taxes, no nothing—that’d save you.”
“Have you thought about this being a white neighborhood, Willie?” Lee asked, not adding: No one will want you here.
“I knows that’s a big hold back. ’At’s why I ain’t got my hopes up.”
But Willie Mae’s hopes showed: had shown in her care all through the painting, shown in each sweep of her arm now toward the house, shown in spite of the down-tilted, disappointed set of her mouth.
Chapter 18
Your cheatin’ heart will tell on you.
Hank Williams Song
In spite of not wanting to, Lee tried to figure a way to sell Willie Mae the house. It was as though the colored woman had presented a difficult puzzle—a game, rather than a real-life situation—and Lee speculated, weighed the idea: Was there a legal way? What would happen if the colored woman and her daughter and granddaughter moved into the house next door? How would the people in the neighborhood react? Even though all the children played together, Lee could not call one of her neighbors—as she could Willie Mae—a friend. But she couldn’t see old Mrs. Harold or the Bennetts carrying placards or burning a cross on her lawn. Still, reason told her it wasn’t o
nly poor white trash that did those things. Hardly a day went by that The Strickland Free Press didn’t report a sit-in or protest somewhere in North Carolina or Mississippi. The stories were on the back pages of the thin newspaper, almost as if not wanting to call attention to what was happening everywhere else.
That’s what’s the matter with you, she thought, accusingly. You’re perverse: you’ll go against the whole neighborhood, go against your own common sense even. That’s why you’re always an outsider: you never go along with what should be, with what would make things easier.
She listed her failings from the beginning: She never could, like Ray, pretend her mother wasn’t a drunk; could not, like Claire, play bridge and keep house and nothing else; did not, as Charles wanted, shut up and not take any chances after they had two children; told lies to her husband and David Palmer, when the truth would have served her better.
“Don’t think about him,” she ordered out loud, as the image of the priest’s face, the feel of his hand against her breast began to form. If she thought about the man, the entire morning would be lost, spent staring out a window, staring without seeing, and she’d be late to pick up Cassie. It had happened before.
The order worked, although she felt the priest’s image standing just at the fringes of her thoughts, and that if she relaxed one iota, the lonely love of the past year would engulf her like an ocean wave. She put the man firmly in the back room of her mind and closed the door, and soon she and Lill set about cleaning the bathroom, with Baby Charlie asleep in his carrier in the hall.
“What would I do without you, little gal?” Lee asked Lill, who trailed a dripping cloth around the bathroom sink while her mother scrubbed the tub.
“I no going nowhere,” the child fussed, her thin, pale lips, two pink petals, curved down in concentration.
“No, thank goodness you’re not,” Lee said, and then sat on the lid of the commode and watched the tiny, rounded arms and perfect hands of her daughter swirl cloth and green cleanser in an imitation of Lee’s own motions. The pleasure of observing took over—as absorbing as watching monkeys in a zoo, but infinitely more beautiful, more linked—the way the child’s largish head turned on its slender column of neck, the pale nape and cheeks velvet with almost invisible hairs shining in the light, the effortless hinged bending of plump knee and elbow, the rising up to stand taller on two miniature feet, the impossibly small dirty toes splayed in ridiculous but perfect balance.
Why was I so unhappy when Lillith was conceived? Lee wondered, and about Baby Charlie, too? From where she sat, she could see the soft rise and fall of his padded stomach in the awkward enclosure of the baby seat. What would I do without my children now? What I thought were curses turned into blessings, all that makes my life interesting and valuable. What would I be without them?
She tried to imagine a life with Charles without children. If she had stayed charming and slender, would he have stayed different from his brother and father? Would she be different today? Without children, would she have stayed in the rental house across from the Bettlemains? Would she have eventually left Charles and gone home to copy Ray’s life: college, independence, freedom? Freedom from what—to what?
The thought of her sister pushed those questions aside. Lee had not heard from Ray in almost three weeks. Charles’s leaving, the new house, and the moving had taken up all her time and energy, and now it seemed that something terrible might have happened out there in Arizona, in the world she wasn’t concentrating on. Lee’s phone number was the same, but no one had called. It was as though she were responsible, had done the act, cut herself off from her family, especially from Ray.
The three-hour time difference made it too early to call, but Lee dialed anyway. Ray’s groggy voice answered on the fifth ring. “For the fucking love of God, Chucky, I don’t have any yet.”
“Ray, it’s me.”
“Oh, kiddo, I’m sorry. That creep’s called all night, and I can’t leave the recorder on. I’ve got a deal coming through.”
“That’s okay, call me back later.”
“Yeah, yeah, cool. We’ll talk later.” The line went dead.
For the rest of the morning, Lee tried to believe that Ray would call back, or that maybe her father would realize how long it had been since they’d talked. Perhaps even her mother would roll over in bed and see the pictures of Lee and the children on the nightstand and say, “Damn, why hasn’t that hard-headed daughter of mine called?” Darcy had done it once, years ago, and used those very words, too.
But eventually, on the way to pick up Cassie from school, Lee admitted that unless somebody in the family died, there would be no calls until Christmas, and maybe not even then.
“You’re my only family,” she told Lill in the backseat and Baby Charlie lying bundled on the front. Tears, which she felt were stupid and self-pitying, formed, but she rubbed them away, switching hands to drive. She fussed: “No grown woman should be homesick after all these years.”
“Hugs and kisses, hugs and kisses,” Lill comforted, her tiny arms coming from behind to grasp Lee’s neck in a strangle hold, and for once she didn’t tell her daughter to sit back down. And for the first time, she didn’t have to keep her eyes from searching under the trees for the priest, didn’t have to tell herself not to look. Forgetting which way she was supposed to turn her head, all she felt were the insistent, smacking kisses from Lill, pressing down on the back of her hair, all she saw was Cassie in the first-grade line, the quick, shy smile with the missing tooth.
“You’re my only family,” she told the children again on the drive home, and this time there were no tears. Lill and Cassie, busy thrashing through school papers, were used to observations from their mother. Secure, they did not bother to nod or even to listen. Baby Charlie, like his sisters—helpless and unknowing—slept, wedged tight on the seat beside her.
Back home, the phone was ringing as Lee entered the door, but she was not surprised when it was not Ray, but only Willie Mae.
“Just checking on you, Miss Lee.” The slow, heavy words came through the line, full of questions.
“I’m working on it, Willie, as best I can. I’ll have to go see a lawyer tomorrow.” Lee answered what was not asked.
Willie Mae dropped the pretense, “Thank you, Miss Lee—more’n I can say. Denny can take care of your chil’ren. But I’s worried. Algebra says I shouldn’t be moving.”
For a second Lee wasn’t sure how the other colored woman came into it. “You told Algebra you wanted to buy my house?”
“She brings the laundry for me and my girls to iron, so I has to tell her everything—that Denny and me might be moving. She’s important, Miss Lee.”
Lee had supposed Willie Mae’s reluctance to talk with the Bettlemains was a natural bent toward secretiveness, but apparently not. “You told her I was going to help you buy the house—over here?”
“Yes’um.” There was a long empty pause after the response.
“Well, I’m trying to figure it out is all I can say,” Lee promised, realizing it was Willie Mae’s choice to tell, and sooner or later someone, everyone, would have to know.
“I can’t wait to see how you gonna do it.”
“Me either,” Lee managed to smile. “But you know the Klan is going to come get us.”
In the voice of the other woman there was no humor. “I knows that bes the truth.”
The next day, after the morning run to school, Lee looked in the Yellow Pages under “Attorneys.” There were no female names, so she settled on a Thomas Basila. She remembered—so long ago it now seemed a dream—a distant Lebanese cousin named Basila coming to Atlanta for a family reunion, and it was the only reference point she could find under the lawyers’ listings of general practice. In addition, Basila, in parentheses under his name, offered one free consultation. Lee intended to use it and to also look like she could pay for more.
Feeling outrageous, using the trick called “back-combing” again—she’d used it on the afternoon of
the rectory—she teased her hair out into great black billows and wore the black and white herringbone suit that, now, was not a bit too tight. All the work painting and moving had worn away the last bit of pregnancy fat from her stomach and hips. Her breasts were high and full of milk. She arched her back and did a half-turn. “One must look well to go to a lawyer’s office,” she informed the reflection in the Sears mirror that hung in the same place as it had in the old house.
But as she drove to Willie Mae’s, there was a feeling of being watched—a white woman taking white children to a colored woman’s home. Still, a long look up and down the clay street showed no one but an elderly colored man asleep on a porch. She left Baby Charlie and Lill with Willie Mae’s daughter.
“I gets to play with the new baby!” Denny smacked her thick lips as if over something good to eat. Her own two-year-old hung onto the back of her skirts as Lill was doing to Lee’s. “She’ll be just fine soon’s you leave,” Denny reassured, and Lee drove off, knowing the assurance was true.
At the lawyer’s office there was a sense of repetition, for there were no real differences between it and the banker’s office she’d been in only a month earlier. You could have set down one in place of the other without noticing: the same leather-buttoned couches and chairs, the same soundless carpets, the same framed, wide-bordered prints of who knows what on the walls, and both offices as cool and damp as tombs from air-conditioning.
If it were this cold outside, Lee thought, we’d all be wearing sweaters.
She waited and in less than five minutes, the secretary, bowing it seemed without bending, showed Lee into an office where a man sat behind a large shiny desk. A disappointment—he was not the Lebanese cousin or any of his relatives, but just a plain old Amacan man, who, desk and all, could have exchanged places with Ramsey of the loan department of C&S Bank. Offices and men sent from central casting, Lee thought; the same useful type: plump, bespectacled, almost featureless, made for business purposes only. Dealing with this lawyer should be the same as with the banker: lots of lies.