Читать книгу Getting Mother’s Body - Suzan-Lori Parks - Страница 8

I never seen Billy wash so fast. Come running up in here, standing out back, pumping water into the tin bucket.

“Get me my special soap,” Billy says. That’s easy for her to say, but I only got one leg. Billy’s got two. I crutch inside the office, getting down on my only knee to reach a little shelf underneath the counter where she keeps her soap, her perfume, and her small tin box. All her treasures lined up there. Right underneath the shelf is where she stores her pallet every morning. The tin box got a lock on it. Billy wears the key around her neck.

When I crutch back outside, Billy got all her clothes off and is hunched over the bucket, splashing her face and armpits.

“I’ma get me that dress in the window. The one with the train,” she says.

“How much it cost?” I go.

“I dunno but I’ma get it,” she says.

“Don’t go stealing it,” I says. She stops her washing to look at me, cutting me in two with her eyes.

“Snipes gived me more than enough money,” she says lathering on the soap, using too much even though she’s in a hurry. The white soap against her vanilla-bean skin makes her look like a horse that’s been running.

“Your mother woulda stole it,” I says.

“I ain’t no Willa Mae,” Billy says. She lathers soap on her face then rubs it off hard with a rag. She don’t favor her mother. Couldn’t be more different looking. Willa Mae was light and fine featured. Billy is dark. But on the good side, Billy got a way with hair and could make a living at it if she wanted whereas Willa Mae didn’t never amount to nothing.

“You went out with your Snipes and you forgot about my hair,” I says.

“I’ll finish it after I get my dress.”

One side of my hair is nicely pressed and the other side’s still wild. Billy’s hair is nice on both sides.

“Your mother woulda loved to see your wedding day,” I says.

“Why you gotta keep bringing her into it?” Billy says. She wipes herself down with her dirty housedress as I hand her a clean one, one of my castoffs, green and faded, but clean and with a good zipper up the front. I’m a size or two bigger than her but the dress fits her tight, especially around the middle. Willa Mae had plenty of “husbands” but weren’t never really married, and now here’s her one child, Billy, only sixteen with a baby inside her and no husband yet. When I was sixteen I lost my leg. I’d like a new leg, but even if we could get the money together for it, I ain’t yet seen one in my color. Me and Roosevelt don’t got no kids. Billy’s soap smells like roses.

“The apple don’t fall that far from the tree,” I says, just to bring her down a notch.

“I ain’t no goddamned apple,” Billy says.