26
WHEN MARGOT ENTERS THE HOUSE, DELORES IS THERE, HER elbows on the dining table, her head resting in her hands. Grandma Merle is rocking back and forth on a chair next to the bed. Delores straightens up when she sees her daughter.
“She’s with you?” Delores asks.
“Who?”
“Yuh sistah! Is she with you?”
Margot shakes her head. “No, she’s not.”
Delores runs her hands over the purple hair-scarf she uses to cover her thinning braids. “But Jesus ’ave mercy. Where could she be?” It’s eleven o’clock at night. “Weh she could deh dis late?”
“Did you ask the neighbors?” Margot asks her mother, feeling a little woozy from the wine she drank at the hotel. She had sat in a room by herself and poured herself glass after glass. She missed Verdene terribly, but every time she picked up the telephone to dial her number, she lost the courage the wine had given her and hung up.
“Maybe she’s studying late somewhere. .” Margot plops down on the bed and kicks off her shoes. She leans forward, resting her elbows on her knees and rubbing her temples with her hands, eyes closed. Her mother’s talking in her ears, her voice rising.
“Which neighbor?” Delores asks. “Thandi don’t talk to nobody in dis blasted community. She only go to school an’ come home.”
“You know dat for sure?” Margot asks her mother.
“Yuh sistah is not like you. She’s a good girl.”
“Mama, she’s a teenager. She’s not a likkle girl.”
Delores is rocking back and forth like Grandma Merle. “Oh, lawd, what am I going to do?” She sniffs and uses the hem of her blouse to wipe her face. “Yuh see wah me haffi deal wid, Mama?” Delores asks Grandma Merle, who is silent. Margot notices the bruises on her grandmother’s arms.
“Did you ask Grandma?” Margot asks, looking at the old woman, her eyes narrowing. “Maybe she saw something. She sees everything.”
“Yuh don’t see dat yuh grandmother is not a sane s’maddy?” Delores snaps.
“She’s sitting right there. Ask her. You ask her what she sees. Ask her how many things she lets happen an’ say nothing.” Margot sits up on the edge of the bed. In reams of memories, she remembers her grandmother’s knowing gazes. Margot used to like watching her make clothes, the concentration creasing her face. Back then, before her features became indistinguishable, she had high slanted cheekbones, a flared nose, and thick lips between which she held safety pins or threads. Margot kept Grandma Merle company as she hovered over the Singer, feeling they were in an intimate circle, joined together in the humming of the machine that made beauty from scraps.
“You is the mad one,” Delores says. “You don’t see yuh granny mute from yuh was fourteen? You did this to her. Ah have a feelin’ dat is you give di money to Winston an’ mek him run. Yuh mek him tek har heart wid him, leaving jus’ a empty shell of a ’ooman. You! You mek t’ings haa’d fi people.”
“Mama, I don’t know what yuh talkin’ about.” Margot picks up Thandi’s nightgown off the bed and holds it against herself.
“Yuh think me is a idiot?” Delores puts her hands on her hips, her shoulders squared, giving her upper body more proportion. “Because ah you, Winston run ’way. Ovah an’ ovah me t’ink ’bout it. Me ’membah seh you did see where me hide di money! You was di only one who know ’bout dat money. You! Yuh lying snake. You is di livin’ devil in flesh!”
Margot meets Delores’s glare. “And what does that make you?”
“Now yuh sistah is missing and it’s your fault!”
“So everything is my fault?”
“Yes. Yuh is nothing but a disgrace.”
Margot steps back a little, afraid that her mother might pounce on her, hold her down and give her those pinches again.
“If anyone is to blame for Thandi acting out, it’s you,” Delores says. “Yuh brainwash har. The same how dat woman brainwash you. .” Delores says this in a voice Margot could’ve mistaken for tenderness had her mother been a different person. “That was why I had to fix yuh.”
Margot stumbles backward, as far away from her mother as possible. She bumps into the vanity. The mirror crashes down and breaks, the splinters scattering across the floor. Margot holds on to the edges of the vanity, helpless in her ability to defend herself from the memories. The black seeps into her, masking any sentiments, mangling any desire to forgive, hardening the weak pulp of a muscle beating inside her chest.
“You did more harm to me than anyone else,” she says to her mother.
But Delores is defiant, her mouth drawn like a zealot’s, convinced of the good of her actions. “It was the only way,” Delores says. “The only way dat ah could save yuh from yuh ways.”
Margot’s rage finally breaks and she bounds toward her mother like a wildcat. She grabs Delores by the neck and backs her into the peeling wall next to where Grandma Merle sits rocking. Delores fights Margot off her, her hands clamping on Margot’s wrists, Margot’s hands around her neck like brass shackles. Margot doesn’t give up.
“Go ahead an’ kill me,” Delores says. “Yuh might as well save me from this blasted life. Yuh is nothing but a low-down, dirty whore! A nasty, dirty, sodomite whore. And now yuh g’wan add murderer to yuh list. So kill me, yuh blasted fool!”
Margot loosens her grip around her mother’s neck, but her hands don’t fall. “Yuh have yuh place in hell,” Delores growls.
Margot stands there with her hands around her mother’s neck; but the evil look in her mother’s bulging eyes is not enough to make her do what she thought she could. She wants desperately to press her face into the bosom of the woman she wishes had loved her, would hold her, rock her gently, stroke her hair. But Delores only spits in Margot’s face, the slime running down Margot’s right cheek, a thick and slow-moving tear.
27
VERDENE APPEARS ON THE VERANDA, FLOATING LIKE A GHOST in her nightgown. She doesn’t move to open the grille to let Margot inside. They look at each other for what seems to Margot like an eternity. The chirping of the crickets grows around them. Verdene parts her lips like she’s about to say something. The shadow of the moon, big and round, cuts her face in half. Her eyes fall to Margot’s overnight bag. Margot tilts her head to the side, her eyes moist with all the words she wants to say. They weigh heavily, pressed like a rock against her rib cage. If only Verdene would let her inside. “Please?” she asks her lover. But Verdene lifts her head to the ceiling, sucking her quivering lip. When she lowers her head, Margot sees tears in her eyes too.
“Who do you think you are?” she asks.
Her voice is the scratch of a nail, a small cut that burns; it pierces the blackness around them.
“Just let me in, please?” she asks.
“How dare you, Margot? How dare you abandon me when I needed you? And now you come back begging me to let you in?”
“Please?”
Margot watches her move to open the grille, each click of the bolt loosening something inside her, this simple act of mercy.
Inside, the house is immaculate. With her back to Margot, Verdene picks up one of the pillows from the sofa, fluffs it, and puts it back. Margot watches Verdene’s back, the boniness of it. She has gotten down to just skin and bones, the way her vertebrae stick out — round, protruding marbles in the back of her neck, visible through the sheer nightgown she wears. Margot suppresses the urge to wrap her arms around Verdene from behind. When Verdene turns around and peers at her out of a pair of hollow dark circles, Margot’s hand finds the base of her own throat.