Читать книгу Loving Donovan - Bernice L. McFadden - Страница 11

AGE EIGHT

She can hear her mama in the kitchen talking loud to the walls, beating the pots, slapping her forehead with the palm of her hand, and wailing, Lord, why this man do the things he do to me!

Millie cries a little, small tears that cling to her cheeks like the tiny diamond earrings she swoons over in the JCPenney catalog. The same diamond earrings her husband Fred always promises to buy her, but never does.

When Campbell sees those tears, those wet diamonds, she thinks that they are pieces of her mama’s fragile heart her daddy went and broke again.

Millie don’t know why he act the way he do, say the things he say, and he don’t seem to know either, ’cause when she ask him, he just shrugs his shoulders and says, “Baby, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I spent the rent money, stayed out till dawn, had my hand on Viola Sampson’s knee . . . Millie, baby, I just don’t know.”

He don’t ever know, and he’s always sorry.

Sorry is what he says all the time, and whenever Millie hears those words, she behaves as if it’s the first time Fred’s been ignorant and sorry, and she spit and cuss, slap at his head and punch at his chest, holler out how much she hates him, screams she wishes he was dead, and still climbs into bed with him at night.

Luscious says Millie married Fred because Millie felt she was getting old and was afraid she would end up a spinster, sitting out on the porch ’longside Luscious, shooing flies and cuddling cats in her lap instead of babies.

“That’s why your mama married your daddy. I don’t think it was love, not the real kind that makes you walk with your back straight and your head high,” she tells Campbell.

I think I walk with my back straight, and I ain’t in love, Campbell thinks to herself.

“Your mother ain’t never been known to step in any dogshit or get the sole of her shoe messed up with gum. You know why?” Luscious asks, and cocks her head to one side.

Campbell shakes her head and waits.

“’Cause your mama always walks slumped over with her head down.”

Campbell rolls her eyes up and to the left and thinks about what Luscious says, and in her mind’s eye she sees her mama walking to the supermarket, the laundromat, and the butcher shop, head down, her eyes searching the sidewalk for something she won’t talk about.

“Uh-huh,” Campbell says, agreeing with Luscious.

Campbell asks Millie about what Luscious says; she asks, Is it true?

Millie tries to straighten the hump loving Fred done put on her back, and she twists her mouth up like she do on the day before the rent is due and it’s long past seven and Fred still ain’t home with his paycheck, and then she says, “Campbell,” and her daughter’s name is a long wind—and Millie takes another moment to fold her hands across her stomach before she continues.

“Campbell, your aunt Rita is old and feeble-minded and speak on things she don’t know nothing about.”

Millie doesn’t refer to Luscious as Luscious; she calls her by her given name. Rita.

“I don’t know where that Luscious nonsense came from!” Millie screams in frustration. “Her name is Rita Josephine Smith. That’s what’s on her birth certificate, baptismal record, and welfare check, and that’s all I’ll ever refer to her as!”

After Millie say what she got to say to Campbell, she sucks her teeth and waves her off with one hand while she reaches for the phone with the other and dials those seven digits that have belonged to Luscious for what seems to Campbell like forever.

She waits a few seconds, and Campbell don’t hear her say hello or how ya doing or nothing; Millie just jumps right on Luscious and tells her to stop spreading lies and confusing her child’s mind with foolishness.

There’s no hiding her pain from her daughter, and Campbell stays close by while her mother weeps and wrings her hands in frustration until she can’t take it anymore and settles herself down in her recliner. “Get me a beer, baby,” she says to Campbell. “And my headache pills from the medicine cabinet.”

Campbell is too young to know that aspirin don’t come in prescription bottles and are not small yellow pills with the letter V stamped out of their center.

“Thank you, baby,” Millie says, and gives Campbell a sad smile before she pops the pill on her tongue and takes a long swig of the beer.

Campbell will stay with Millie until her mother’s eyes close and her head lolls on her neck. She’ll spend those moments at the window, humming “Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz. It is a soothing tonic for her and Millie during tense times, and there are many of those.

Campbell finds herself at the window, her hands stroking the long emerald drapes, her eyes moving between her mother’s sad face and the street below.

There is a lemon-colored sun resting peacefully in the pale summer sky. It’s quiet except for the chirping of birds and the now and again blast of a car horn.

Not many people roam the streets on that sultry Sunday afternoon, and Campbell’s eyes are growing heavy with boredom when the click-click sounds of a woman’s heels against the pavement—faint at first, and then swelling—pique her interest.

Campbell leans a bit over the windowsill, and her eyes fall on auburn hair and the mocha-colored shoulders of a woman who has a small pink suitcase clutched in one hand while her free hand, balled into a tight fist, punches at the air with every fourth step she takes.

She’s wearing open-toed, strapless baby-blue clogs that whack at her heels as she speeds along. Campbell winces at the sound but notes the fresh pedicure and wonders why Millie doesn’t take that sort of time with herself.

Before the woman reaches the corner, Campbell has the urge to call out to her. For some reason she needs to see her face, needs to see the lines in her forehead and maybe the set of her mouth and color of her eyes.

But she’s only eight years old, and that would be out of place, and Millie would call her mannish and grown and probably twist her ear or pop her upside her head.

So she bites her lip against the urge, and the woman disappears around the corner taking the punching hand and the clicking whacking sounds with her.

Millie begins to snore, and Campbell turns to look at her. She observes the mussed hair and the salty tracks her tears have abandoned on her cheeks. Campbell thinks it’s a shame, a downright shame. But those are Luscious’s words, not hers.

Campbell retires to her bedroom and pulls her journal from its hiding place beneath her bed, opens it to a clean page, marking her name, age, and date at the top, and beginning with:

Ain’t no man ever going to make me cry, make me talk to the walls and wail out to the Lord.

Ain’t no man ever going to break my heart.