“Mayor’s girl.” He sniffed. “Come and go when she please. Too good for my couch, is what it is.”
“That’s not what it is. I’ve told you what it is.”
When I pulled away this morning, he was sitting on his porch gazing off into the graveyard trees, singing mournfully,
Mo pas connin queque quichause
Qu appe tourmenter moin la.
Now, I sit here feeling homesick. Not for Dallas or my job. I’m sure of that. What, then? My fish and birds? How long can I stay away? What are my plans?
I lock the door and head downstairs, meeting, on his way up, a middle-aged man carrying cabbages. In his slender hands they look like skulls. He asks me how long I’ll be around, warns me about several broken steps if I go past the fifth floor. He laughs and says the building is haunted. A soldier is said to appear at night in one or another room, his uniform hard to place, asking, “Are you with us or against us?” He wishes me a pleasant stay.
The desk clerk watches Mr. Spock subdue a rubbery beast. Outside, cottonwood fuzz fills the air. An Arco gas truck grinds its gears past the railroad tracks. The phone booth door won’t shut all the way. I punch Shirley’s number and cover my ear with my palm.
A man answers. I ask for my friend.
“Telisha?”
“Yes. Who’s this?” Though I know right away who it is. My fingers tingle.
“What’s up, sugar?”
Jesus. “How are you, Dwayne?”
“You know. Free-styling, whiling it all away. You? You’re — where? Houston?”
“That’s right.” So she couldn’t resist his snake oil. Did he whisk her away to the Strictly Tabu? Pull his dark side shit?
“Shirl’s in the shower. We’ve got Rangers tickets. Afternoon game.”
“Tell her I called, will you? Checking on my pets.”
“Will do. Listen, when you’re back to town, T, what say we have us a reunion? Some dancing, a drink or two? I kinda feel we parted on a sour note, and I’d like to make it up to you.”
“I smell a dead cat on the line.”
He laughs.
“Tell Shirl I’ll try her again.”
“She may be busy for a while. My girl do not play, see.”
“Good-bye, Dwayne.” The receiver feels hot. I place it in its cradle and slump against the booth.
Back inside the building, the stairs seem nearly insurmountable. My knees are Silly Putty. Food sizzles behind closed doors. Korean or Vietnamese. Heavy garlic. Rice. My bed jiggles when I throw myself on it. Weary, dizzy with heat, I’m out soon, dreaming of buttons, fingers, tongues.
When I wake, I get up, splash water on my face. The faucet-stream is yellow. I undo my blouse and open a window. A roach slithers from under the sill and out through a rip in the screen.
Homesick for Mama. Is that it?
Or is this about sex?
Buck up, T. Stay focused. Remember why you came: searching for the men. Cletus, Daddy. Bullshit. They’re far too distant — always were — for me to really reach. I’ve found they answer nothing.
And hell, I don’t want to think about sex right now, the smell of gin, the messy wetness, a cold, hard hand on my breast… the breath of the heat, the pull of the dark bayou swelter … somewhere, the whoo-ing of owls … the leer of the shut-in boy, Dwayne’s cocky assurance that he knew what I wanted, Reggie’s charming grin … his skin against my neck, arms, wrists.
Pillow tight between my legs. Stop this. Think of Ariyeh. Call him an asshole. Go ahead. “You’re a fucking asshole, Reggie!” I shout at the walls. “You’d be like all the rest!” But the cottony pillow feels fine against my chest, soft, giving, warm … no. Get off this. What else? What else?
Mama’s quilts? The patterns Barbara showed me?
Yes, all right. I sit up, set out thread, shirt collars, scraps, and cuffs. Barbara gave them to me once we got back from Huntsville. “A running stitch is simple,” she told me. “You work the needle in and out”—in and out, baby, in and — damn it, girl, concentrate! — “so each stitch is divided from the next by a little space. The smaller the stitches, the more you’ll make what looks like an unbroken line, but that kind of humbuggery ain’t important. Nothing wrong with a big of stitch — ‘Toenail Catchers,’ we call ‘em. Anyways, to sort of limber up your fingers, hon, maybe it’s best you start with a straightforward diagonal.”
Seamstress? Well. Let’s see about that.
I thread the needle. Soon, linked strips emerge, the color of milk chocolate. “Don’t worry ‘bout right and wrong,” Barbara had cautioned me. “Improvisation is the key to lively work. Taking the familiar and jazzing on it — repetition, revision — losing yourself even as you’re discovering what you can do.”
As I work, a noisy kiddo scurries down the hall. Did my great-grandmother or my grandma Jean make quilts in the late afternoons in Texas City, while Mama flew through the building with her dolls, lamb stew bubbled on the stoves, and men made their way home from flaming refineries?
I close my eyes. Do I have a feel for the needle, the way Sarah Morgan did? Stitch in, stitch out … forward, back … now and then … awful pains, labored breath … yes, the building is haunted … or I am … I slip into a rhythmic trance, slip out of myself, a brittle, spinning leaf, blown back through the years … oh my Lord, oh my hands, the knuckles ache, my spine’s bent, but I tug and tighten the dyed cotton thread the way I have for decades, taking patterns now from the Negroes who’ve sheltered me in my shame. Bearing a black man’s child: my sin, my exit from the garden.
And why did I do it? Passion? Spite? Curiosity? Are the motives any clearer to me than they are to anyone else, or was I merely responding to life, its bawdy surgings, borne in my small, white frame? Wasn’t I using my fundamental privilege as an American, the will to freedom, to snatch any identity I wanted — or believed I required? Repetition, revision. Improvisation. White hands toggling, tying, wrapping, winding, pulling forth from dusty castoffs old Negro patterns, liberty maps, the chance to start anew.
But the price, the price is far too steep. Awful pains. Cletus, lost now in a nondescript meadow. Me, wasting my last days in exile, in a city that stinks of oil. Jean, the child Cletus gave me, heeds no pattern in her life. What freedoms can she choose? Drudge work for others and the forceful attentions of men. Born into my exile, my limitations, she has only a meager scrap pile from which to piece her way.
A thumping on the stairs down the hall. The little girl, Helen, Jean’s child. For her, the garden is just a rumor, a myth of vanished generations; no map, no matter how lovingly stitched, can lead her back to Paradise. I’m patient with her each night after supper, training her to thread the needle, to cut the flour sacks for batting. I show her flying geese and the drunkard’s path — it’s all right if it’s crooked, child; Evil travels in straight lines. She does well sometimes. But afternoons, she whips up and down the stairs, desperate for escape. Well. God knows this is no place for a child, especially a girl with skin as fair as hers, who can see, even at this tender age, the cruelties of difference and disparity. Already her future is beyond my poor imagining. What do I hope for her? What did I hope for myself? What can I give her and her children but a legacy of rootless confusion, a fissure between two worlds? Ah, what have I done, what have I done? I open my eyes. I’ve pricked my thumb with the needle; a fat blood drop wets the cloth.