Читать книгу Joy - Marsha Hunt - Страница 8

As I stood in my living room still in my nightdress that hot March ’Frisco sun was beating on me, and I looked down at Joy’s snag-a-tooth picture that I was still holding in my hand, and then I wiped the glass in its frame to a high shine with the hem of my nightdress. Not that it was so needing it, ’cause I don’t have no dust setting on things in my place. Never did. Never will.

Looking at Joy grinning in that picture made me so sad. She had a smile as big as a Dixie watermelon and could flash them perfect teeth of hers faster than any Marilyn Monroe. And like Freddie B who’d said it from the first he saw her, I believed Joy Bang was born to be a star. With her looks and personality, she could of had her own television show if she’d of had Brenda’s voice. But then, everybody ain’t born to have everything.

I thought about my poor husband laying peaceful in our bedroom and worried about how he would take hearing that something had happened to that girl that he so loved to spoil when she was a kid.

Freddie B would of give Joy the last dollar in his pocket if she’d of asked him for it, and she had in January which is exactly why we didn’t have no savings to stretch over this last spell of his being laid off. Joy needed that $2700 more than we did at the time and I was glad Freddie B was quick to lend it to her with no questions asked, though it would have been nice if she’d been able to pay him back last month like she expected. But we both understood that she was still pinched herself ’cause some back-up singing she was booked for got cancelled.

I didn’t like to say that it didn’t make sense her borrowing from my husband when that bony faced Rex Hightower should have been seeing her over them tight periods. ‘What’s a boyfriend for,’ I used to ask Joy, ‘if he’ll let you run around scrambling for your next meal and he’s rich enough to buy the Golden Gate Bridge.’ With her following him all ’round the globe and singing for free on his recording sessions, then claiming she couldn’t charge her own boyfriend, I wasn’t surprised he treated her any-which-a-way. ‘Act like a dishrag and Rex will treat you like one,’ I told her, but still she jumped everytime he called and that wasn’t often enough from what I knew.

Smart and good looking as Joy was, who knows what she could have made of her life had she given herself half a chance to settle with one of her own kind. But she loved them white ones and I could see it right from when I had my very first talk with her. I remember that Saturday afternoon good. It was my day for cleaning the hallway and stairs of our building on Grange Street. Her and her mama and sisters hadn’t long been living there, and Joy come out on the landing to watch me.

‘Stand back, child,’ I said to her. ‘’Cause you don’t want to get none of this here dust on your dress.’ As soon as I said it I was shamed of myself for sounding gruff. I didn’t mean her no harm, but I didn’t know her mama at all at that point, and I didn’t want Mrs Tamasina Bang out fussing with me about getting her child’s fancy dress dirty.

With the front door open downstairs there was enough light coming in on the landing where Joy was standing for me to see some of the fine detail on her pale yellow organdy dress which had a lacy starched smock with bits of deep yellow satin ribbon tied to it. It was that kind of party dress that all little girls wish they had at one time or another.

Joy was about eight and seemed shy, lolling there by the door of her mama’s apartment, and though I’d bumped into her and her mother and sisters on the street, during their first month on Grange I hadn’t had no time to take a good look at each of the children except to notice how different they was from one another. It was the youngest in her stroller that caught my eye, ’cause with them big green-grey eyes and mass of auburn curls, Anndora was a real heartbreaker. Not that Joy wasn’t cute. It was just that as a toddler Anndora was perfect looking.

Anyway, seeing Joy that Saturday afternoon standing by herself on the landing, while I did the stairs, I was quick to see what a nice looking child she was. I don’t have much time for children that’s too forward, but she didn’t even have to open her mouth for me to sense right off that she had a mild nature.

What was strange was how ’round about that time in my life I had been praying to the good Lord to send me a sweet little girl. True, I’d been praying for one of my own, but beggars can’t be choosers, and I was prepared to get a child however I could. Even if it had to be one borrowed. Not that I knew right off that Joy was the one God sent.

While I peeked up at Joy on our hall landing that Saturday, Freddie B opened our apartment door to come out and saw Joy sparkling in that organdy dress. He whistled at her like them builders he worked with did at grown women passing ’em by and said, ‘Hubba, hubba, ding-ding-dong!’ When she hung her head blushing, I waved at Freddie to cut out making the child feel awkward. But once he gets going with the kids, it ain’t no stopping him. He got a way with them anyhow, always has done which is why I felt bad back in them days that I couldn’t bear him none.

Freddie B, all six foot four inches, looked like a beanpole giant towering next to little Joy.

‘Wisht I had me a camera,’ he said to her.

‘Hi Mr Ross,’ she said in a nice clear voice, as nectar sweet as some of them children I’d seen Art Linklater interviewing on his afternoon kiddie show.

‘Baby Palatine,’ Freddie B called down to me ’cause I was still sweeping, ‘this girl looks good as Dorothy Dandridge, don’t she?’

‘She don’t know nothing ’bout no Dorothy Dandridge, fool,’ I told him.

‘Yes I do,’ Joy said to set me straight. ‘She’s a Negro movie star.’

‘And quick as a whip she is too,’ hooted Freddie B. ‘You tell Baby just where to get off. You ain’t been living in no cardboard box, tell her,’ he laughed and his bottom lip drooped like the piece of snuff he had tucked in it was gonna fall out.

‘Don’t you let no snuff dribble on my clean floor, man,’ I said to him.

But he was too busy monkey-shining for her to take any notice of what I said. Like a big kid he was back then ’fore old age got a hold of him. And me.

‘You want to take a ride with me downtown so I can show you off at Capwell’s Department Store?’ he asked Joy. ‘I bet you’d be the prettiest gal in there shopping today.’

I answered for her. ‘Freddie B you know better than to be offering to take her someplace without offering them sisters of her’n. That’s playing favorites, and what’s her mother gonna say anyway.’ He was always putting his size twelve foot in it. Right from that day forward he would forget and offer Joy what he didn’t never give Brenda or Anndora.

Joy said, so polite-like, ‘Thanks, Mr Ross, but I’m waiting to go to a party.’

‘A party!’ Freddie B yelled like he was invited. ‘Is there gonna be some cake and ice cream?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Joy bashful and hardly able to look up from her hands that she was wringing slow just to have something to do with ’em. ‘It’s a birthday party, so I guess …’

‘You better not come back here without some cake for me,’ he said, grinning to show off his big gold tooth before he run down the steps two at a time to get into his new Lincoln. It sat parked in our space in the lot by the side of the building.

I swatted him on his pea head as he passed me and chided, ‘Stop worrying that poor child, ’cause she don’t know what a fool you are. And stop by the barber shop ’fore you bring yourself home, ’cause you’re needing a haircut.’

Just as he got out the door, that’s when a little towhead white boy come up and got ready to put his finger on the bell like he couldn’t see the door flung wide open and me bent over the bottom step with the pail and brush.

‘Don’t ring that,’ I told him. ‘What you wanting?’ I was fed up with neighborhood children laying on the bell every afternoon while I watched the TV and begging money for everything from them same old tasteless brownie cookies year after year to school raffles. And not none of it did I ever need nor want.

Joy’s little voice was practically singing when she piped up loud to say, ‘That’s Bernie and he’s my best friend from class.’ She was all ’a sudden rocking on both feet, she was so happy to see that knock kneeded boy. ‘I’ll be right down Bernie, but I have to get my present and tell my mama I’m leaving.’

She disappeared in the doorway and I gave him the once over like I would an untold number of straw headed boys that would come to that door looking for Joy over the next ten years.

Bernie’s hair was near enough the color of Joy’s organdy dress and though he was freckled and plain as any Tom Sawyer, you could tell by the way she got kinda giggly and giddy that she thought he was the cat’s pajamas. And her not but eight.

That day, I watched her march off proud, swinging Bernie’s arm to and fro as high as it would go. And I heard their small feet in their best party shoes crunching across gravel stones of the building’s parking lot before they climbed into his daddy’s blue De Soto. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that them children made a pretty picture with him in a fresh pressed white long-sleeved shirt and bow tie. She had a white satin ribbon tied in a big bow and streaming down around her fat ponytail and both ponytail and ribbon swung back and forth with her and Bernie.

I got on with my Saturday chores and didn’t think no more about little Joy that afternoon, so it surprised me when evening fell and she was ringing our apartment bell.

‘You come visiting?’ I asked her when I opened the door a crack to see but not be seen. Me and Freddie B was already in our bedclothes though it wasn’t but six thirty, ’cause back in them days our treat on a Saturday night was to tuck up on the living room sofa and watch whatever was on the TV soon as we cleared away our supper dishes.

Joy didn’t answer and looked sheepish when she handed me a wad of something wrapped in a children’s party napkin. I could tell right away from the squidgy feel and sweet smell that it was fresh layered icing cake. ‘What’s this?’ I asked her anyway, ’cause I was embarrassed that she’d brought us something. I wasn’t use to getting no gifts, especially from no children.

‘It’s some cake from the party I’ve been to,’ she told me. She was scared to look me in the eye when she said it.

‘Lord, child, Mister Freddie B didn’t mean for you to bring him back no cake. Not for real. He was just kidding you on!’

‘I saved my piece for him and asked the lady to cut it in half, so there’s a piece for you too. It has jellybeans on it too.’

It wasn’t till Joy was grown that she owned up that she’d snitched that piece of cake, but at the time I thought she’d deprived herself for our sake and receiving it made my eyes tear up. Joy waited like she wanted to come in, standing at my door by herself like a little brown angel on a mission from heaven and what with the strong smell of sugar and vanilla coming off the paper napkin parcel in my hand and the sight of her in that yellow organdy dress in the dingy passage that I was forever sweeping, my mind drifted to Freddie B’s favorite passage from the Bible that says ‘Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares’.

I didn’t ask her in that night ’cause we sure wasn’t really dressed to take in company with me in pincurls readying for our service first thing Sunday, but I went down to the gadget store below us that following Monday and picked her up a little doll baby. It wasn’t but a $2.98 one, but I decided that I would keep it in my place, so’s in case I could coax her over for a visit, there’d be something to give her to play with.

I’d bought her a bat and ball as well but I’d broke it trying it out by the time she finally come to visit me proper, and I even had a twin cherry popsicle on hand in my freezer compartment, which I couldn’t get her to take ’cause she said her mama didn’t like her taking food from folks.

‘But I ain’t folks,’ I said to her. ‘I’m your buddy, and what’s mine is yours.’

It didn’t never matter to me that Joy wasn’t my own flesh and blood. From the beginning, it brightened my spirits to have her to think about, and as Freddie B took to bringing little trinkets home for her like I did without me telling him to, I believed she was the little girl I’d prayed for and used to get him to call her our God-sent child.

It happened that about a month before Joy’d brought me and Freddie that birthday cake, I’d been to buy some new shoes in a flood warehouse sale at Hodgeson’s which was the cheapest place in Oakland to get quality shoes. I ain’t never been one for wasting my husband’s money on clothes, but I’m partial to fancy shoes and have been since my school days in New Orleans when I had to walk a mile shoeless to the schoolhouse everyday, summer and winter. I swore then that when I got grown I’d have more shoes than the law should allow, and even though I usually like to wear a old pair of slip-slides around the house, I always got me at least half dozen nice dress shoes tucked in shoe lasts in the closet. I don’t see it as waste, ’cause I can feel low spirited and put on a pair of pretty shoes that can get me smiling in no time like somebody that’s got something to celebrate.

So, at Hodgeson’s flood sale, when I laid eyes on a real unusual pair of royal blue lace-up high heels, I was determined that I was gonna have them, the only trouble being that they had just that one pair, size 3 1/2. They wasn’t but $5.95 which was even cheap for back then, and they had a beautiful 2 1/2 inch splayed heel and was laced up with leather up the front from about a inch in from the toe. There wasn’t no way I could get my big brogans in ’em, ’cause I been a size 8 since I was sixteen, but I bought them anyway. Luckily, it’s snatch ‘n’ grab at them flood sales, so nobody from the sales department was around to ask me what I was doing buying them 3 1/2 shoes for my big flat feet.

I knew Freddie B wouldn’t of been proud of me spending his hard earned money on high heels too small for me or anybody I knew to wear, but I took a hankering for them that much that I bought them anyhow, and decided on the way home not to show him ’cause he’d of only had to see them come out their paisley box to be asking what I’d bought such weeny shoes for. Not that he complains about spending on clothes if he reckons I’ll wear them. In fact it was me that fussed when he spent all that money on my real expensive red fox stole for our tenth wedding anniversary in ’53.

Anyway, I didn’t let him see them shoes and tucked the box they was in that said ‘P-a-p-a-g-a-l-l-o, Made in Italy’ all the way in the back of our deep clothes closet where he didn’t never look. And some days, when I got fed up staring out the window at folks passing and there wasn’t nothing good on the TV, I’d dig that shoebox out the closet. I felt like Grace Kelly or somebody just knowing the high heels was mine, and it didn’t worry me one bit that I could only get my toes in them.

Anyway, one afternoon, about a week after Joy’d brought me and Freddie B that piece of birthday cake, I had ’em out when there was a knock at my apartment door. As wasn’t nobody living in the building at the time but us and the Bangs directly across the hall, I figured it was one of them and opened the door more than a crack. I was real glad to discover it was Joy and got that excited at seeing her that I invited her in before I remembered that I had them shoes sitting out in the middle of my living room floor.

She’d come carrying the rent money for her mother and wanting a receipt, so I told her to have a seat on my sofa. Of course, being a girl after my own heart, the first thing her eyes fell on was them royal blue shoes.

‘Golly, Mrs Ross, aren’t they the swishiest high heels! Golly! Golly!’ Joy cried out and plopped herself straight down by them on the floor, so she could oogle them up close.

I could tell from the fuss she made of the soft leather that she had a natural eye for a first class item, and it tickled me to see a little girl’s eyes dance more excited that afternoon about them shoes than I was when I bought them.

‘Papagallo,’ she read out loud holding up the box lid. She was sure a good reader and didn’t falter at that strange looking word like I did, and when I told Freddie B how good she could read it wasn’t long before he was paying her twenty-five cents every Friday night to read him Psalms out the Bible. Joy’s face beamed proud as she read the rest of what was on the shoebox lid. ‘Made in Italy.’ She looked at me. ‘Made all the way in Italy where Mama says all the best shoemakes come from and they’re my second favorite color after red.’

Boy, oh boy, my heart was doing a rumba to have that pretty child sitting on my living room floor grinning at them blue shoes like they was made of gold. The color of them heels actually clashed with the basic blue running through her plaid skirt and the baby blue blouse she was wearing, but I didn’t mention that. Instead I said, ‘They’d look good with that outfit of your’n. You want to try them on?’

‘Mama says we mustn’t put our feet in her new high heels, because we might break the bridge,’ Joy said sounding woeful while she pulled her long, thick ponytail around to stick the end of it in her mouth.

‘Don’t go sticking dirty hair in your mouth,’ I chastised her like I would of my own.

‘Sorry,’ she said right quick and her expression dipped from sunny to sad like she thought she’d done something real bad, all ’cause of what I’d said. Me. Miss Ham-Fisted.

‘You don’t have to say ‘‘sorry’’ ’cause there ain’t nothing to be sorry about. I didn’t mean to sound rough on you. Who am I to be telling you off. Stick that ol’ hair in your mouth if’n it makes you feel better.’

But she didn’t do it and shifted herself like she was fixing to get up and go.

‘Well,’ I said, dragging the word out and trying to think how I could stop her. ‘It might be the rule over in your mama’s place that you can’t wear her high heels ’cause it breaks the bridge, but here in Baby Palatine’s you can try on any of my shoes that you like and even clump about in ’em.’ With that I bent down to hand Joy the left Papagallo and curtsyed like I was a page giving Cinderella that glass slipper, and her face lit up like a Christmas tree.

‘You’ll really let me try them on, Mrs Ross?’ She giggled all the while unbuckling her brown school shoes that somebody had given a good polish.

‘Not only that,’ I said heading for the bathroom and unhooking the big oblong mirror from off the wall ’cause we didn’t have no full length one in the apartment, ‘but Baby Palatine is gonna get you a mirror so’s you can see yourself in ’em.’ I set it at a angle against the living room wall, ’cause that’s what I had to do anytime I wanted to see myself from the knees down.

Neither of us could believe how near them shoes came to fitting Joy’s feet and she looked like a zillion dollars teetering around in them with her white cotton ankle socks still on. She only wobbled a bit though, she said ’cause the shoes was about a size too big.

‘They belong to you now,’ I told her and meant it. Though they was my newest and favoritest thing in the world, I wanted to give them to her way more than I ever wanted them myself. ‘But,’ I added, ‘… and this is a big ‘‘but’’ … since your mama don’t want you walking in high heels, I reckon you better leave these over here in their box at the back of my closet, and you can come over in the afternoons and wear them. But they gotta be our secret from everybody, ’cause I don’t want your sisters getting jealous and Mr Freddie B don’t know I got them.’

‘I’m good at keeping secrets,’ said Joy running her forefinger across her lips like she was sealing them up. ‘I like secrets better than butter pecan ice cream.’ Then she shared a couple with me no sooner than she said that. She whispered in my ear so not even the walls would hear that she was in love with Bernie Finkelstein and that she wanted to marry Alan Ladd, the movie star, she thought Bernie looked just like. I swore on the Bible that I wouldn’t tell nobody.

Them secret Papagallo shoes was the first big bond me and Joy had between us, and the fact that nobody knew about ’em but us made Joy’s afterschool visits seem all the more exciting to her when she would slip over and double lock my front door leaving Brenda by herself to watch the cartoons as Tammy didn’t get in from work till six thirty by the time she’d also stopped off to pick Anndora up from the minder’s.

Joy loved to hang over in my place playing with that $2.98 doll I’d got her and tipping around like she was grown in them royal blue high heels, licking a popsicle or sucking a toffee I’d got in for her.

After her first few visits, I went to the dime store and bought some more for her to play with, ’cause I didn’t want her to get bored and that little cheap doll neither walked or talked and wasn’t that much fun. Remembering how I liked jacks when I was her age, I got her some and the woman in the dime store sold me a board game she said was popular with her own daughter called Chinese checkers that had pretty colored marbles. Lots of ’em in six different colors.

But Joy’s favorite turned out to be the ball and jacks. She’d sit cross-legged on my polished parquet floor and want to play game after game with me. I pretended not to notice if she cheated, and as my hand was way bigger than hers for scooping up the jacks, I had a advantage over her anyway. So I figured it was fair enough if’n she needed to cheat to win.

When I’d slip a saucer full of homemade lemon drop cookies over to Brenda, she’d hardly look up from the noisy TV set and didn’t seem to mind that my God-sent child played over with me. Though Tammy’d told the kids not to take food off folks, I told Brenda, like I’d told Joy, I wasn’t just folks, and if we didn’t tell Tammy about the cookies, she wouldn’t have nothing to get mad at no way. Both the girls seemed scared of her, but Joy more than Brenda, and it worried me.

Whereas I did a lot of mooning out the window at other women in the streets with their kids ’fore Joy and me got to be pals, I suddenly had her afterschool visits to look forward to, and like I told Freddie B who noticed how I’d perked up and kept my hair combed, I hadn’t never met no child as well behaved as Joy before. ‘You can be bad in here if you want,’ I’d say ’cause she was almost too good and could get so quiet I’d tell her, ‘Go on and bang some pots and pans if you want.’ She was so like a grown woman sometimes though, telling me how good my cakes and cookies was and how much nicer I kept my place than her mother did theirs as she didn’t bother to collect up Anndora’s toys. And Joy had perfect manners and didn’t never forget her pleases and thank yous neither.

My baby sister Helen was kind of jealous that Joy came into my life, ’cause ’fore Joy, I used to put up with Helen laying in a stupor around my apartment when it suited her. Her and my brother Caesar used to come and drink each other under the table, but I lost tolerance for their street corner shenanigans when I thought Joy was likely to pop by, ’cause I don’t hold with getting drunk in front of kids. And neither Helen nor Caesar was content unless they had a bottle of whiskey or wine at their lips.

Helen tried at first to poison my mind about Joy and claimed that the child was too good to be true, and that she wouldn’t trust no eight year old that was so full of compliments for everybody and didn’t never put a foot wrong. She said she had a second sense that Joy wasn’t all she seemed, but with drink in her, Helen’s got a mean streak and it ain’t wise to listen to what she says. ‘There’s Joy telling you how much she likes the gold tooth you got in the front, and there’s you mouthing bad about the child. Now I’ll tell you straight Miss Helen D’Orleans you’re just jealous ’cause I got me a little girl.’

She’d stick out her tongue at me like she was five years old whenever I said something mean to her and had been doing it since she was a kid, but at twenty-seven it didn’t suit her no more.

‘You don’t know where that woman and them kids don’ come from,’ slurred Helen, ‘nor where they’re going to. ’S’pose it’s hell and back,’ she said, and laughed that drunken laugh of her’n. Ever since she was little Helen knew just what to say to vexate me. She could be like a mosquito buzzing ’round my ear, driving me to distraction, and what she said got my thoughts going.

Not knowing nothing of Joy and her family before they moved to Oakland left me brimming over with questions that little Joy acted like she wasn’t supposed to answer. So I figured her mother’d had warned her not to go spreading their business, though I did find out that her daddy had had nice dark brown wavy hair like Joy’s and a thin mustache and was young when he died unexpected not long before they’d up and moved West from Wilmington, Delaware. But Joy would go quiet and find an excuse to slip home if I asked about her when she was little, so I stopped prying, till curiosity got the better of me during one of her afternoon visits a couple of months after she’d started coming over.

She was setting in the middle of my living room floor on her fivesies in our third straight game of jacks, when I told her to pop over to her place and bring me some of her baby pictures so I could see what she looked like growing up. I figured that wasn’t nosying in with questions, but was just about looking at photos. That’s when she came back with her snag-a-tooth picture and we had that to-do, ’cause she drew in her two front missing teeth with a pencil and then got terrified that I’d tell her mama.

But like I explained to Joy, it was real baby, baby pictures that I was interested in, and when she claimed her mama didn’t have none, I refused to believe it. ‘Can’t you let me have a see, please, please pretty please,’ I begged like a agitating child. ‘I don’t know no mother in the world that don’t keep her hands on a few baby pictures.’ And I didn’t. Every woman I knew that had a child had some pictures to brag on when they was babies.

So the next day Joy come visiting, I asked her again for a see of some pictures while she was playing herself a game of Chinese checkers and I was ironing Freddie B’s shirts.

‘Don’t you got just one?’ I asked. ‘Not just one bitty, bitty one even?’ I longed to know what my God-sent looked like when she was one or two or three even. ‘Who you was as a baby is important to me, Joy. And the less you tell me the more I itch to want to know ’cause pals is supposed to know everything about each other. Your mama hasn’t got just one?’ I said, showing her that a picture the size of my thumbnail would do me fine.

‘Honest Injun,’ Joy answered like I’d taught her to say instead of ‘Swear to God’ which is what she made me say before she’d tell me something that I wasn’t suppose to know, like how much her mother paid for that pair of beige high heels she bought at Hodgeson’s that I really liked.

‘Honest, Baby Palatine, honest, honest, honest, honest!’ she hollered banging her balled up fist on the floor. It was as close as she got to showing spunk, ’cause up to then she was as polite with me as kids are with strangers, though I’d got her to stop calling me Mrs Ross like I was some old fogy. ‘I only have that first grade picture and I already gave you one,’ she said emphatic and pointing to where I’d tucked it in Corinthians in Freddie B’s big black Bible on the sideboard.

‘It ain’t like you was born during the war when didn’t nobody have the time to think about taking no pictures. I bet it’s that you don’t want me to see ’em.’ Then I took to teasing her. ‘What’s the matter, you was a ugly baby and you’re scared I’ll make fun of you?’

The minute I said that her eyes watered up like she was going to cry, and she rushed to put all the marbles and the Chinese checkers board in their box and put them back careful in the broom cupboard where I kept all her play things.

I was annoyed with myself for upsetting Joy and did my best to make it up by saying, ‘I was just joshing. Any fool can see that …’ Then I stepped away from the ironing board to do a shuffle and swing Freddie B’s work shirt in front of me while I broke out singing, ‘You Must have been a Beautiful Baby’ that I’d heard many a time on the radio. But as toneless as my deep voice is, it’s no wonder that it didn’t make her smile. I wasn’t good with kids in them days. Not like Freddie, ’cause I was too quick to talk to them like they was grown and say things in too harsh a way. Hadn’t nobody taught me better, and funny enough, it was Joy, little as she was, who used to tell me that it was best not to say exactly what was on your mind, ’cause people like to hear compliments and not what you was really thinking. Not but eight and she already knew grown folks’ tricks that I didn’t know. That’s what living in the city can do for kids.

Though she had beat me at jacks for the third time that afternoon before she started playing Chinese checkers, I said, ‘Come on Joy, let’s have another game of jacks. I don’t care about no ol’ baby pictures.’

But they stayed on my mind, so later that evening when her mother had give her and Brenda and Anndora their supper and let ’em go downstairs to play out in our parking lot, I settled down with Tammy for a cup of coffee and asked if she had any old family albums I could see. By then, I’d got up a regular habit of popping over to her place to keep her company after the kids’ supper, ’cause she didn’t know nobody else in the neighborhood and hadn’t made no friends at work.

‘Both my husband and I were orphans,’ she said, ‘so we had no families. I’m sure I told you that we’d met in the orphanage in upstate New York when we were sixteen.’

True enough she’d mentioned it when I asked her for references for renting the apartment, but at the time I didn’t take no notice, ’cause when she said she had three kids I didn’t figure we would end up taking her no way, ’cause the last thing I wanted was somebody’s brood of bad-assed, nappy-headed children to have to scrub up behind. She had also said at the time that her husband didn’t leave her nothing and got hisself killed when a crate fell on him in the shipyard warehouse where they was both working for which her and them kids didn’t get but $5500 compensation from the company.

But setting there cosy in Tammy’s place with a steaming cup of milky coffee in my hand, when I asked to see family photos, she walked straight over to a bureau and unlocked the top drawer and brought out a whole stack of pictures which she seemed quite happy at first to show off. And I got so excited I didn’t know where to put my face.

I don’t know how many umpteen baby pictures of Brenda and Anndora I skimmed over, though I ooohed and aaaahed loud at every single one thinking I’d best be polite. But nice as they were, I was really only wanting to see the ones of Joy, ’cause them other two children didn’t mean so much to me like she did, ’cause Brenda was often broody and Anndora was so spoiled that it was impossible to like her, cute though she was.

When me and Tammy had sifted through nearly the whole pile, about thirty-five pictures in all, and I hadn’t seen one of Joy, I lost patience and asked Tammy in a backhanded way why Joy got missed out. ‘How come you got so many beautiful pictures of your eldest and your youngest?’

‘Sherman. That was my late husband … Sherman.’ Her expression clouded over and she sounded scornful when she seeped out his name that second time, like he didn’t bear her no happy memories. ‘He liked to think of himself as an amateur photographer and loved to use the children as his subjects. He could even do his own developing,’ she added brightening up a bit. ‘I would definitely have encouraged him to start up a photography business but with his depressions, I wasn’t sure that he’d be able to deal with the public.’

I could see her bite her tongue for letting go of that much in front of me. It was easy to tell that Tammy didn’t like to talk about him, and whereas I first thought it was ’cause she was still mourning, I began to wonder. His body hadn’t long been in the ground ’fore she picked up and decided to give herself and them girls a fresh start by moving West on the advice, so she claimed, of a girl in her typing pool in Wilmington, who had an aunt in Oakland.

As Tammy handed me a shiny black and white photo, about eight by ten inches of her holding Brenda as a toddler, she said, ‘Sherman was really good, wasn’t he? I think so many of them look professional.’

She was right. The way he used the lights made a soft halo around both mother and child in the picture I was holding and he’d got them to sit semi-profile but still look straight at the camera. It looked like he took ’em in a studio, but Tammy said they was actually setting on the toilet seat with a gray wool blanket tacked on the wall behind them.

It was abvious the picture had been taken after the war, ’cause Tammy had her hair swept up in a smooth fat pompadour roll at the side that was fashionable in them days. And she was wearing a dark box shoulder dress that had big white cloth buttons down the front and a square scooped neckline with heavy white broderie lace trim around it that made me notice for the first time that she had a swan’s neck. There wasn’t a blemish to be seen on her young, wide-eyed face, and if they’d had colored calendar girls back in the forties, Tammy would for sure have been eligible.

Looking at that picture, it was easy to see where Joy and Anndora got their best features from.

Their mother had Anndora’s delicate bone structure and perfectly shaped Kewpie doll lips, Joy’s big slanted almond eyes and pointy nose and Brenda’s only redeeming feature, skin as smooth as a baby’s butt. Although Tammy wasn’t ebony like Brenda and had a unusual skin tone halfway between Anndora’s pale complexion and Joy’s rich dark chestnut color.

In fact, anybody looking at that picture Tammy’d handed me of her and Brenda would have assumed that the sorry looking baby on Tammy’s lap was somebody else’s, except that Brenda did get her mother’s high forehead and widow’s peak. It was two shames though that on Brenda they were so oversized, they didn’t flatter, so whereas Tammy’s high forehead and widow’s peak was a beauty feature with the way she wore her hair swept back, on Brenda the forehead was so broad and her hair was so thin and scraggly like chicken fluff, that Brenda’s widow’s peak looked more like a receding hairline. Which ain’t too helpful on a girl.

Poor Brenda didn’t never grow enough hair to sweep it back off her face so it looked neat nor could she comb it down on her forehead in a bang to make her forehead look smaller, and I would have said that it was cruel of God to birth any girl child so plain that had such a pretty mama. But to his credit, he did make up the difference with them diamond vocal cords he lavished on Brenda. Not that any of us knew it at that time or they showed in that baby picture of her with Tammy that I was meant to be admiring that evening sitting over at Tammy’s.

All that my naked eye and anybody else’s could of seen was a super pretty young girl half smiling and a verging on ugly baby grinning with not but four teeth in her whole mouth.

‘This is sure a pretty picture of you and Brenda,’ I lied a little like Joy had taught me, and handed it back to Tammy. ‘And don’t kid yourself,’ I added to sprinkle some truth on what I’d said, ‘Sherman wasn’t all that clever with the camera. You got God to thank some too, ’cause you was fine as you wanted to be.’ That made her happy, and while it was true of the young Tammy in the photograph, the actual one sitting by me, though good looking, had aged quite a bit, though it couldn’t have been more than nine years since that picture was taken, ’cause Brenda wasn’t but ten. Tammy’s sweet innocent look that she had in the picture was gone and it wasn’t just because of the sophisticated blond streak at the side of her temple. Pretty features ain’t all that makes a woman beautiful. How she holds them counts for something too, and from the first that I met Tammy when she came to look at the furnished apartment we had advertised in the Tribune she always looked worried and under strain, even when from time to time she’d belt out that barroom laugh of hers if something on the television’d give her something to laugh at.

But that evening setting in her place in Oakland, I’d finished my coffee, it was getting dark and I still didn’t have what I’d come for which was a baby picture of Joy.

‘I can’t wait for you to show me the ones Sherman took of Joy,’ I said, but no sooner than them words petered out of my big mouth, Tammy’s friendly air iced over and she gave me a chilly look which unnerved me about as much as I expect she wanted it to.

‘Sherman never took any of Joy,’ she said in that tight-lipped way folks’ll try on whenever they mean not to be questioned no further. But I was ready to bite the bullet, because why would a father take all them wonderful pictures of two of his children and not take none of the third? Seeing as Joy was born between Brenda and Anndora, it took some explaining for Joy’s sake if nobody else’s.

‘That’s a doggone disgrace,’ I said daring to push the point further. I say dared ’cause not but a week before we was setting there going through them pictures, Tammy had been over my place and showed herself to have a sharp, ugly tongue when she cussed out my baby sister Helen twice in a night. I got to admit that Helen was blind falling down drunk and deserved a tongue lashing. So setting there in Tammy’s living room while the sweet sounds of her three children playing below drifted through the kitchen window, I tried to laugh a bit to make out that what I was about to say to her was a joke. But I figure she could tell that I meant it.

‘Didn’t Sherman favor Joy?’ I asked.

She didn’t let me finish her daughter’s name before her lip curled back like a dog about ready to bite. ‘You have one big damn big hell of a nerve to say something as nasty as that,’ she said. Then she yanked back the few pictures I was still holding in my hand. I’d been kneeling down on her wine rug in front of the coffee table which was piled with the photos that we’d been through and she was perched on the edge of the naughahyde grey-green sofa bed that had a tear in it, so I leapt up quick thinking that I best go home ’fore she said something that would make me do something that wasn’t Christian. Like hit her. ’Cause if I want to, I can have as much temper as the next one. So forcing myself to sound friendly and polite I said, ‘Freddie B will be expecting his Friday night fry-up to be on the table when he gets home from work, so I best do my duty and get to cleaning that mackerel I bought him this morning.’

Tammy didn’t try to fake no pleasantries like I did that evening. Without saying so much as ‘goodbye’ or ‘dog kiss my foot’ she stalked off into her bedroom through the double doors and slammed them so hard it’s a wonder the full length mirrors screwed on them didn’t crack. I was stunned ’cause it wasn’t like I’d said nothing all that bad about her husband, so it didn’t make no sense that she got as mad as she did, but I put it down to her caring more about Sherman than I’d realized, ’cause I wouldn’t of put up with no woman making no remark about Freddie B if he was dead neither. But still, ’fore I let myself out, I went to the kitchen window and called the children in ’cause I feared their mama was in such a temper she’d forgot she’d left them out playing in the night air.

After that ding dong with Tammy, for the whole month of April, she wouldn’t say nothing but a begrudging ‘morning’ and ‘evening’ to either me or Freddie B if she happened on us in the hall, and I got tired of him asking me what she could have been in such a huff about. But something told me not to tell him how I’d been trying to get a picture of Joy and had said something to Tammy about her husband not favoring Joy like he did Brenda and Anndora that got Tammy so mad.

It perplexed my poor husband to see me mope around when he’d come in from work, but what I couldn’t explain was that once Tammy stopped speaking, Joy stopped slipping in to see me in the afternoons, and she wouldn’t even take none of the cookies I’d baked for her if I offered it to her and Brenda in the hall after school. She’d give a meek smile and say, ‘We can’t take food from strangers,’ like she did when we first got to be pals.

Brenda acted like she was scared to look at me when she’d say, ‘Hello Mrs Ross,’ hardly loud enough for me to hear and all formal after I’d got so used to all of ’em calling me Baby Palatine. Even Anndora, who I suspect was born with her nose stuck up in the air, and didn’t never take notice of me anyhow, so when she didn’t give me a smile, I was used to it. She didn’t take to nobody outside her immediate family and her mama didn’t teach her that it was rude to look through people like she didn’t see them.

My baby sister Helen said not to pay it no mind at first. Then she got mad when Tammy wouldn’t bother to speak to her neither. ‘Evict her black ass!’ Helen said one day loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear. ‘Throw ’em all in the street! You don’t have to put up with that uppity mess.’

As the Bangs’ apartment door was directly opposite ours, it made me feel real uncomfortable with them not being neighborly, ’cause wasn’t nobody else living in the fourplex but them and us, since Mr Houseman wouldn’t get the plumbing fixed in them two studio apartments up at the front. But I just prayed night and day that things would get to rights, so that I could have Joy back.

All that April, at about half past three on weekdays, I would hear Joy and Brenda let themselves into the main door downstairs, and then leave it to slam shut as they raced each other to our landing to unlock the door to their place. With my ear cupped to my front door, I could hear that they was whispering and trying to be real quiet while they got their door open, and I knew they was scared that I’d come out and either embarrass them by saying ‘hi’ or offering them something. Once, I got the idea to leave the Papagallos in the box outside my door to remind Joy of the good times we’d had, but common sense got the better of me and I baked my baby sister her favorite lemon meringue pie instead.

But that month and a bit of us not speaking must have been way harder on Tammy than it was on me, ’cause I’m sure she’d got used to me doing things for her children. Not just Joy neither. ’Cause me and Freddie did try to remember them other two everytime we handed out quarters and bought double decker ice cream cones downstairs at the soda fountain in the drugstore that Mr Houseman’s son-in-law ran below us. And while Tammy didn’t have neither the time, inclination nor know-how to bake cakes and cookies like I did every week, her children must have been missing them goodies I’d always had for after dinner and weekend surprises.

Me and Freddie B was always buying the girls expensive treats on his pay day like eskimo pies, ’cause we knew that Tammy couldn’t really afford them extras on her stenographer’s salary. She couldn’t earn half as much doing office work as Freddie B did for bricklaying back in them fifties. So we had way more money to sling around than she did, and to top it off, we wasn’t hardly paying no rent to old man Houseman in exchange for managing his building.

Anyway, one Sunday in May, about five weeks after the photo mess with Tammy, when me and Freddie B’d been back from our church meeting for a couple of hours, long enough for him to fall asleep as usual in front of the television, Tammy come banging on our door. Hysterical she was with Anndora sniveling in her arms ’cause Anndora had cut her hand pretty bad playing restaurant and trying to open a can of Spam with a sharp can opener.

Tammy needed for Freddie B to rush her and the children over to Oakland General which was way on the other side of town, but I offered to let her leave Joy and Brenda with me which she did gladly. I was sure glad that I had on my Sunday best when they came and didn’t have my hair nappy. And I could see that Joy was glad to be setting back in my place even though she wasn’t saying nothing to me.

Since the emergency ward was as crowded as I warned Freddie B it would be on a Sunday afternoon with it starting to get real hot in our part of the world, they had to wait around for hours at the hospital ’fore Anndora got them three catgut stitches that the doctor said she had to have.

Expecting they would take as long, while Joy played Brenda a game of Chinese checkers that I told her to take out the broom closet, I made the two big ones their favorite snack of a thick wad of grape jelly, between slices of nice fresh soft white bread and left two covered plates full of pork roast, crackling and greens in the warm oven for Tammy and Freddie B coming in, ’cause him and me was due back to the church at five as usual. And I was determined to be there as the whole congregation was planning to turn out ’cause Sister Hall’s brother Tommy was in town from New York City and was gonna sit in with the choir. He was a jazz trumpeter that showed up from time to time, to play for our church when he was working some clubs in San Fran. Them little bips and bops he added to sweeten Miss Scott’s piano playing always transformed the music and inspired our choir times before when he’d come, and I didn’t want to miss it.

Naturally I was also excited that I had a excuse to have to take Joy and Brenda along with me not knowing how late their mama would be held up at the hospital. I was shocked when they admitted while I was getting them into their best dresses that they hadn’t never been inside no church.

‘Not neither for wedding nor funeral!’ I didn’t bother to ask how they missed getting to church when their daddy died, ’cause it wasn’t my business, but I thought that Mrs Tamasina Bang needed her backside slapped for not attending to them children’s souls. And with all the hoo-ha she sometimes made about colored people being backward, there she was acting backwards herself.

Like I explained to Brenda and Joy ’fore we climbed the bus heading for the meeting, at the First Tabernacle of Saint Barnabus where me and Freddie was members and he was a deacon, the actual building wasn’t nothing but a ol’ grocery store that we was renting till the congregation could collect up enough to do better. But I didn’t tell them that by no way of apology, ’cause I was proud of our church. And with that choir of twelve, including Sister Hall who’d done some gospel recordings, First Tabernacle didn’t need my apologies nor nobody else’s.

Once we was on the bus, Joy was acting back to her usual and it was nice to hear her say I looked real pretty, although pretty is one thing I ain’t never really been. Not bad looking, but not much better than ordinary ’cause of my teeth being too long and my cheeks being pudgy even when I ain’t carrying no extra weight which I wasn’t back in them days. I was wearing my white felt had with the black and white mesh veil and had pressed, waved and curled my hair, ’cause it didn’t matter how I used to go around looking on weekdays, I didn’t mess on Sundays. And still don’t. I had a good figure all through them fifties and in that chartreuse suit with the short waisted bolero jacket I had on that Sunday I showed it off, I think, though the skirt kept riding up ’cause any skirt that fitted me snug around the waist like that chartreuse one did was always too tight for me round the backside and didn’t want to stay down. And I knew I had to warn Joy and Brenda ’fore we got to church that a few ladies might get to fainting if the spirit hit them, but the girls wasn’t to worry ’cause that was a powerful sign that the Lord was with us.

From the minute we arrived outside First Tabernacle, the girls had themselves a high time. The church was located on the corner of 7th and Front in a part of town where nobody bothered to sweep the streets and it was tucked between a tailor shop and a bakery, but since neither was open on a Sunday, if it was too hot to wait inside the church before Reverend Earl and his wife Naomi turned up, folks with little children used to congregate outside and some of us could sit on the big wooden ledge of the bakery window which had a big awning that cut out the sun that set in our direction.

Joy and Brenda was my pride wearing their organdy party frocks and out there playing tag with the other children when the pastor drove up. When I introduced her and her sister to him and his wife Joy said, like she’d rehearsed it, ‘Good evening, Reverend and Mrs Earl, I’m very pleased to meet you.’ All that was missing was a curtsy.

He sure worked up a lively sermon that evening and I was thankful that it brought a couple Sisters to their feet. ‘Vengeance must be the Lord’s’ was the theme, and Joy asked me what vengeance meant while the choir was getting situated. I did the best I could to explain. ‘I think it means don’t try to get back at folks if they do something bad to you.’ She smiled and nodded but I could tell she didn’t take it in. Remembering that Joy and Brenda wouldn’t know none of the songs that we’d be asked to join in on with the choir, I whispered to Joy to tell Brenda just to clap her hands.

After the choir got to singing the fourth verse of ‘My Father’s House has Many Rooms’, and Sister what’s-her-name with the dyed red hair started to sing her solo with some trumpet accompaniment by Tommy Hall, Brenda got to waving her arms and hopping from foot to foot like she got a little spirit, but soon as I saw Joy swat her with her Bible study manual, I figured Brenda wasn’t doing nothing but mocking some of my congregation and I chewed her out about it soon as we got outside. Though she swore blind that the spirit had actually hit her. I got to admit she was the one that begged me to take her again and tried to tell her mama all about the choir, and Sister Hall’s brother playing the trumpet and Reverend Earl’s message about vengeance and how Sister Slater broke and run up to him in the middle of his sermon and tried to pull him off the pulpit ’cause the spirit got to her so.

But Tammy was too caught up telling her own story to me about what had happened in the hospital to take any notice of what Brenda had to say. And whereas I would of expected Tammy to be het up with worry about Anndora who was passed out ’sleep in her mama’s lap from the day’s excitement, Tammy had her mouth full to overflowing with the name of John Dagwood who she’d met in the emergency ward.

‘I felt so sorry for the poor guy,’ she said. ‘His first day in town after driving all the way from Detroit and he had the bad luck to have a truck back into him at a stop light. He said he thought he only had a little whiplash, but being in the insurance business he thought he’d get a hospital x-ray on his back because John Dagwood said if you don’t handle things in the right way you never get any compensation. And after the trouble I had getting compensation for Sherman, I know what he means. Of course, Mr Dagwood said had Sherman been white things might have been different.’ I listened with one ear, ’cause I was too busy noticing how strange and quiet Joy got sitting next to her mama and stroking her baby sister’s little fair arm that was tucked under Tammy’s while Anndora was laying ’sleep with her perfect lips parted looking every bit like one of them baby beauties that was on the Ivory soap commercial. Joy was slowly running one finger up and down Anndora’s forearm and hedging as close as she seemed to dare to sit by her mama who tensed up when Joy got near to her. Tammy acted like somebody who don’t want to be touched and she was not trying to give Joy none of the hug that her Anndora was hogging all to herself.

‘You want to come over here and sit on Baby Palatine’s lap?’ I asked Joy in the middle of Tammy saying that John Dagwood had asked for her phone number, because he didn’t know many people in Oakland and thought it might be a good place to settle while he waited for a job with some national insurance firm in San Francisco.

Couldn’t nobody blame Brenda when she gave up trying to tell her mother about our First Tabernacle choir and slumped over to sprawl herself in front of the TV which was blaring all the while her and Tammy had talked at cross purposes. I was glad that Joy’d sidled over to sit on my lap, but at eight she was already a bit too long limbed for cuddling which is why I figured that her mother didn’t like to bother.

‘Did Mr Ross like John Dagwood?’ Joy asked her mama like a grown person trying hard to make conversation with somebody they ain’t got nothing in common with. Nothing like when Joy and me was together and could have us a laugh about Dennis the Menace in the funny papers or what Bernie had told her in the playground at school or her pencil drawings of girls in evening gowns. She was always drawing the same looking white girls with a flip-up hair-do wearing fancy evening gowns designed different, though they had the same heart shaped bodice.

Tammy answered Joy with, ‘Freddie fell asleep after the first hour’s wait and I was very happy to have someone to talk to that looked decent and spoke like he had some education.’ I hoped she wasn’t referring to my husband being one of them who didn’t look nor talk right and she could see I was taking it wrong, ’cause she was careful to add, ‘Of course that emergency ward was as full of riffraff and alcoholics as you predicted it would be, Baby, and I’m glad we won’t have to go back there again, because that young doctor said that any qualified MD can take out Anndora’s stitches as the cut was not serious.’ She lit up a cigarette and without drawing a breath she said, smiling down at Anndora, ‘Can you believe that when John Dagwood asked Anndora her name, she told him and even took the chicklets he offered her. I’ve never seen her take to anyone like that, and I had to mention it to John Dagwood in as much as Anndora wouldn’t even allow Freddie B to touch her. ‘‘You must really have a way with children, because my daughter refuses to talk to just any ol’ body. She obviously likes you. You must have kids of your own,’’ I said to him, and was surprised to hear he’s not even married.’

As soon as Tammy said that, I could see the writing on the wall, ’cause while she was quick to claim that she wasn’t interested in meeting none of them nice young Christian men from First Tabernacle when I offered to set up some introductions, the glisten in her eyes every time she said John Dagwood’s name told the tale of a woman ripe and ready for romance.

‘Sounds like you already sweet on Mr John Dagwood,’ I said. No sooner than I heard myself say it, I knew I was spilling too much of what was in my mind. But Tammy was feeling gay and looking girlish, and didn’t take offense, ’cause she was so relaxed setting there in a pair of black toreador pants with a grey and black striped short sleeved blouse to match. She looked like the kind of girl any stranger new to a big city like Oakland would have been happy to be bumping into his first night in town, and I told her, ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if that fella thought he was pretty lucky to meet the likes of you.’

She blushed and soon as she did Joy turned to me and whispered ‘Mama’s got a boyfriend, Mama’s got a boyfriend,’ in a sing songy voice but not loud enough for Tammy to hear who was off in a daydream anyway, till I reminded her that them little girls of her’n was gonna be needing something to eat ’fore they went to bed, ’cause I hadn’t give ’em nothing but grape jelly sandwiches.

‘Oh gosh,’ Tammy yawned and sighed, ‘I guess I’d better get up and take Anndora to bed.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Joy said like she couldn’t offer fast enough. ‘Do you want me to put on her pajamas like she likes me to, Mama?’ Ain’t many children as willing to help as Joy was, but Tammy took her for granted.

‘Thank you, Joy,’ she said like she was talking to hired help. And Joy straight away slid off my lap to collect Anndora off her mother’s.

Didn’t nobody think that Anndora had been listening to what we was talking about, but soon as Joy rustled her up in her arms Anndora said she wanted to go hear the choir at my church next time Joy and Brenda went.

I didn’t have a minute to be pleased, ’cause Tammy harped up, ‘We won’t be having anymore church visits in here. And Brenda,’ she called loud enough to be heard over the Lassie episode that Brenda was watching like it was her life in danger up there on the screen instead of Lassie’s master, Tommy, ‘Brenda! Turn that doggone TV off and go take that good dress off before you ruin it. I don’t know what on earth possessed you to put on something like that anyway.’ Neither Joy nor Brenda was tattle-tale enough to say I was the one that picked them dresses out the closet for going to church in.

At ten years old Brenda could sulk better than any child in the world and she kicked the leg of the coffee table on purpose just to let us all know that while she was about to take off her dress like she’d been told, she wasn’t happy about having to do it in the middle of Lassie and if a commercial hadn’t come on when her mama told her to get up, I don’t reckon she’d of done it no way.

Tammy still didn’t get up herself to make a effort to fix nothing for them girls, so I offered to let them come over to my place for a snack. ‘I’m willing to rustle up some roast pork sandwiches, if anybody’s interested,’ I said, and quite honestly would have emptied my fridge I was so happy just to be setting with Tammy and the children and talking like normal neighbors.

Tammy stretched. ‘Oh would you, Baby? You’ve done so much already today, but it would be wonderful if you’d fix something for Joy and Brenda.’ They was likely only to get a can of Heinz hot dogs and baked beans off her anyway, ’cause Tammy wasn’t much for fooling around in the kitchen. On the one hand I could understand it, ’cause she worked all day. But on the other, there was a lot of women holding down jobs way harder than Tammy’s in a office and had more kids to feed when they got in than she did, and they still managed to put a proper cooked meal on their table every night. What surprised me was that she would make the effort too, once she had that John Dagwood to fool with. But I wasn’t to know that then. At the time, I lifted myself up from the hard wooden upright chair I’d been sitting on for that hour and called into the bedroom for Brenda and Joy to follow me over to my place for a bit of something to eat.

‘Y’all ready to tuck into some of my chocolate cake with butter cream icing?’ I called.

They come tumbling out of that bedroom lickety-split and as we walked out the front door, Tammy’s phone rung.

I hadn’t never heard Tammy talking on the telephone in the three months that she’d been renting that apartment and I figured that what Joy had whispered to me about ‘Mama having a boyfriend’ was exactly right.

‘I bet that’s that John Dagwood,’ Joy told me as her, me and Brenda took the three steps across the hall into my place.

I was singing that night in my kitchen while I dished up two plates of supper for the girls, and was about as happy as I recalled being the morning in ’45 when Freddie come back to me in New Orleans from overseas after the war. Both times my feet wasn’t touching the ground, and both times Freddie B noticed.

‘Happy as a sandboy, ain’t ch’you, wife?’ he said slapping me on my behind, and Joy blushed as she caught him doing it, ’cause she had just walked in the kitchen. ‘You wasn’t s’posed to see that,’ he said swooping her off her feet and lifting her on his shoulders. ‘Baby Palatine –’ Freddie talked like Joy, who had taken off her party dress when Brenda did and was in her flannelet pajamas, wasn’t there.

He practically had her head touching the ceiling ’cause she was so high up perched on my husband’s shoulders – ‘you reckon Dorothy Dandridge looked like Joy Bang when she was little? I bet Dorothy wasn’t as pretty,’ he said and reached his long arm up to tickle Joy under her armpits ’cause that’s where he knew she was the most ticklish.

She got to giggling and struggling so, I feared she was gonna fall, and said, ‘Y’all get out of my kitchen with that foolishness, ’cause next thing you know there’ll be a accident and Tammy’ll want to tan my hide.’

And the whole truth was that I didn’t want to never do nothing again that could upset Tammy, ’cause I saw how easy it was for her to turn her children against me.

After that breakup we’d had, I vowed to watch my mouth, hold my tongue and never ask too many questions or say nothing that would make Tammy force Joy to stop being friends with me again. So I didn’t dare breathe another word about Joy not having baby pictures, though it was still puzzling why her daddy didn’t take none, and I wasn’t goofy enough to mention Sherman’s name, even if Tammy brought him up, ’cause she made it plain she didn’t want him talked about unless she was doing the talking. And as I noticed that the kids never mentioned him, nor Wilmington, I sure wasn’t gonna stick both feet in my mouth neither.

With that call that Sunday evening being from John Dagwood, just like Miss Joy suspected, Sherman didn’t get mentioned much therein after no way.

Tammy was spellbound with ‘John Dagwood this’ and ‘John Dagwood that’. If she’d of been a Catholic, I reckon she should of bowed her head everytime she said Dagwood’s name, like them Catholics is suppose to when they mention Jesus Christ.

I didn’t meet Dagwood right away, but Freddie’d give me a good enough description of him ’fore he ever set foot through Tammy’s door, ’cause soon as Joy and Brenda’d had themselves something to eat and went home, I couldn’t wait to hear Freddie B tell me all about this man that they’d met in the emergency ward.

‘He seemed a nice enough fella,’ Freddie said dragging every word out like he’d said something worth spending a minute over. ‘I think he was from Chicago.’

‘Tammy said Detroit,’ I corrected him. ‘And if you ain’t gonna get it right, don’t tell it,’ I scolded Freddie B. ‘Was he nice looking?’

‘How’m I ’sposed to know that,’ Freddie said, like a blind man.

‘’Cause you saw him, didn’t you?’

‘Yeah, I saw him, but then I saw a whole lot of people setting round that emergency room, and I’d be a’ lyin’ if I told you I knew what any of them looked like.’

I think Freddie B can be ridiculous when he’s so busy minding what he claims is his own business that he don’t know what’s going on around him. He was that way back then when Tammy met Dagwood, and he’s still that way.

But I wasn’t gonna let him get away with not describing the man that Tammy had been talking to, ’cause inasmuch as she kept saying she wasn’t interested in no men, it was kind of juicy to think that she’d stumbled on something at that hospital.

‘Was he brown skinned,’ I asked my husband who had his head stuck in the paper.

‘’Bout my color,’ said Freddie B without looking up.

‘I don’t believe that Tammy’d have no eyes for a nigger black as you,’ I said. And I didn’t. She struck me as the sort that was color conscious and would have shied away from any man as deep chocolate as my husband.

‘Okay then,’ said Freddie just to aggravate. ‘He was white. White as this here tablecloth.’ Which was on the dining table where Freddie B had the funnies spread out beside the sports page.

‘Freddie B! Stop fooling around, now, and pay attention,’ I fussed.

‘Okay.’ He didn’t never have the nerve to tease me too long ’cause he knew I’d get in a huff and wouldn’t say nothing to him for a whole hour and he couldn’t stand it. ‘Okay. He was about my color. Honest, Baby, and he had him a thick mustache that looked like he’d been combing some Brylcreem on it cause it was shining.’

‘Nice looking?’

‘Yeah. What you women would call nice looking, but his hands felt like he ain’t never done a day’s work. Soft as Tammy’s they was when he stood up and shook mine as we was leaving the hospital. I heard him tell Tammy that he was looking for work and I told him to come down on the site I’m working in Palo Alto, but he said he hadn’t never done no building work. I believe it too with hands like a woman’s. I told him all he had to know how to do was use a shovel if he didn’t have no bricking trade like me, but he still wasn’t interested.’

‘Tall?’ I didn’t care as much about John Dagwood’s employment details as I did about if he was good looking. Some women, and I took Tammy rightly to be one of them, only want them a handsome man, but I listened to my mama who told me never to get hooked up with no pretty niggers ’cause they wasn’t nothing but trouble, and thought their asses weighed a ton. That’s how come I was glad to end up with Freddie B, ’cause even when he was young, he looked like the Sad Sack with his slow lanky self. Not that he was dim-witted. Just snail slow. But give him some arithmetic and he could add sums faster than all us, including my brother Caesar who used to get As in math’matics all the time.

‘That Dagwood fella wasn’t tall as me,’ said Freddie B, still with his head in the paper.

‘Well that don’t mean nothing, ’cause who is tall as you but them basketball players?’

‘Wasn’t tall, wasn’t short,’ Freddie B added.

‘Thank God she ain’t taking up with no short ass,’ I said, ’cause that was something else my mama warned me off. ‘Short ass men got a chip on they shoulder,’ she used to tell me and Helen.

‘If you sit patient,’ said Freddie B, ‘you’re likely to see him for yourself, ’cause Tammy told him to come on by whenever he wanted, and with as much jawing as they did in them three hours we was hanging ’round that hospital, I don’t guess he’ll keep her waiting long.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me that! You knew that all along, and was gonna keep it back!’

Remembering back on that evening when I was setting with my husband who didn’t have his bald patch on the crown and wasn’t wearing spectacles yet ’cause he was still young, reminded me that I wasn’t in Oakland in our old place on Grange but was standing in our apartment in San Francisco in such a trance thinking ’bout the past, I hadn’t told Freddie nothing yet and was forgetting to deal with Tammy.