“Why you always got to be washin’ clothes an’ hangin’ ’em up on a line, Mama?” my younger brother, Newland, asked for at least the hundredth time.
My mother never got tired of the question. She’d always answer, “You have to wash ’em sometimes, baby; otherwise they get all stinky and stiff.”
Marcia Pinkney’s home sat between two other flat-roofed houses in the dead-end arc of a cul-de-sac on a street named Pine Circle. The grass was green and trimmed and the front porch was the length of the front of the ultramodern-looking house. I parked in the driveway and walked across the lawn.
The blue tennis shoes were worn and so I could feel moisture from a recent watering through the soles and sides of the shoes. The cold spots made me smile. I stopped to appreciate this sensation.
The sky above my head was gray from air pollution. A gang of starlings squabbled madly in the limbs of a great oak standing in the left-side neighbor’s yard.
Somewhere, I was sure, a black woman in a white wig was rutting under the high school dreams of Myron Palmer or one of his friends. The woman in the wig would certainly steal my name.
I willed myself to take a step but my legs resisted. I took a deep breath and leaned forward — if my legs refused I’d fall to the ground. Half the way into the fall my right leg jutted forward and I was again stalking toward Theon’s mother’s home.
The door was open but the screen was shut.
I pressed the button and chimes filled the air.
Inside the house was dark, shadowy. It was hot outside but cool air was rushing out through the screen.
It came to me that I should walk away at that moment. This was the only appropriate action to take.
“Hello, dear,” Marcia Pinkney said.
She was standing in the haze of the screen door, neither smiling nor frowning, staring into my face.
“You look different,” the slender and small white woman said.
“Can I come in?” I hadn’t spoken since leaving Kip’s house.
“Of course,” the older woman said as she undid a latch and pulled the door open. “Do you have a cold, dear?”
“I’ve been crying,” I said.
“Oh... yes, of course.”
Theon’s mother was short and frail-looking. The white of her dress made her skin seem gray. Her bones were made for birds and other slight creatures but her eyes were dark and magnificent.
She led me through the unlit rooms that were not walled off from one another. To the left was a sunken living room that had green carpeting and violet walls. To the right the kitchen lay. It was a brown-on-brown affair with tall stools and a plank apron that went around three sides of the stove.
Marcia led me through the house to a double yellow door that opened onto a covered patio, which looked out on a waterless swimming pool. The bottom of the pool was littered with dry brown leaves and caked with dirt.
“Something to drink?” Theon’s mother asked me.
A crystal pitcher sat on the coral-colored aluminum table. Sweating, it was filled with a bright green liquid.
“Gin and sweet lime,” she said, as if introducing me to a sentient being.
The baby-blue chairs were made from some kind of space-age ceramic material. It felt like I had to press myself down just to sit. I still had the feeling of weightlessness. As if in a dream I imagined that I could float up above the roof and sail away to Hawaii or even farther — to lands that had not yet been discovered.
There was a silver tray with two unbreakable clear plastic tumblers on it. Marcia poured the tumblers full and handed one to me.
I took a sip. It was very sweet and tangy, not alcoholic at all.
“Were you expecting someone?” I asked.
“You, my dear.”
“Oh?” I felt complimented and at the same time compromised.
“Where do I begin?” Marcia asked.
“The funeral is set for next Saturday at Day’s Rest.”
“Oh.” I could see her thinking of the zoo the memorial service would be.
“You could come the night before to say good-bye if you wanted,” I offered.
“Theon told me that you were very perceptive,” she said through a mild smile. “But I didn’t listen to him. I never listened to him.”
She took a deep gulp from the glass.
I did the same.
“Did you love him?” she asked.
“Often but not always.”
“I blamed you for destroying his life.”
“When Theon and I met he was forty-three and I had just turned fifteen.”
The math pained her. She took a drink and I responded in kind.
“That young?”
“He always liked younger women.”
“You were a child.”
“Not on the street I wasn’t. I couldn’t afford to be.”
“I...” she said, and then took another drink.
I swigged my gin Kool-Aid and waited for the rest.
“I can’t... I can’t bear to think about these things in my house,” Marcia Pinkney said at last. “I told Theon that I didn’t want his sordid business here.”
“He was born here, Marcia.”
“I know.”
We both finished our sweet drinks and she refilled our glasses.
I felt the mental stutter of inebriation when I looked up to see a jet flying high above.
“What was he like?” Marcia asked.
I gazed at her, nearly flummoxed by the question.
“Did he collect stamps?” she added. “Did he play softball?”
“Didn’t you ever talk to him?”
“When his father was alive...” she said, and then paused. “When his father was alive there was a lot of conflict between them.”
Henry Pinkney beat his sons mercilessly. That was why Theon never wanted children.
My dad would beat us and Mom would leave the house, he’d told me more than once. My idea of family is going to the park and watching other people play with their kids.
“When Hank died,” Marcia continued, “I thought that things would get better, but Johnny ran away and Theon turned angry and sullen. I tried to talk to him but he wouldn’t listen. He got that apartment in Hollywood and met that... that awful woman, that Moana Bone. She was the one who turned him into a pimp.”
Marcia didn’t know the right words but I understood what she meant. And anyway, in the end Theon had actually become a pimp of sorts.
“It must have been terrible to feel like you were losin’ your fam’ly one at a time,” I said. The liquor had affected my words. My mother’s tongue was speaking for me.
I felt like a field of wheat undulating under the pressure of otherwise imperceptible breezes.
“Oh yes,” Marcia said with certainty. “I wished that I had a daughter to sit with me.”
“Girl might not be what you wanted neither, Marcia. Moana Bone was somebody’s little girl once.”
“Her mother must curse the day she was born,” my mother-in-law said.
“Just like you and Theon.”
The widow gave me a grieved look and refilled both our glasses.
“Am I really so evil?” she asked.
“I wish none of it ever happened,” I replied.
“Don’t we all,” she agreed.
“No, Mrs. Pinkney,” I said. “No. A lot of people love their hate. They live to hate the people wronged them. You cain’t just have one gang. That don’t even make sense. If you took away the white man’s black man or the black man’s white man, most of ’em wouldn’t even know how to walk down the street right.”
Marcia Pinkney started and stared. She shivered and almost forgot to take a swig of her sweet oblivion.
“I hated you because you were a black girl,” she said, as if it were a revelation — even to her.
“I know that.”
“You do?”