Boaz Brown (6 page)

Watching them pace around the room as the Mexicans moved their furniture upstairs was rather exciting from my perspective. When I got the chance to peek between the slats of our blinds, I saw a little girl. Finally, a girl! I went outside to play with her that evening, and we played dolls until the lamps came on. Never mind the fact that she didn’t speak a word of English and I didn’t speak a word of Spanish. Words weren’t important. Smiles, hand gestures, and laughter were all the communication we needed to have a good time.

Momma told me to make sure I took a good bath that night. “Those Mexicans are nasty,” she told me. “It’s all right to play with the little Spanish girl outside, but don’t think you’re
 
gonna
 
spend the night over there with her and her kind. Don’t even ask.”

“What’s Spanish?”

“It’s the way they talk. It’s a different language,” she told me as she double-checked my scrubbing efforts.

“How come she speaks a different language?”

“Cause she ain’t learned how to talk English yet.”

“Is she ever gonna learn to talk like we do?”

“I don’t know. Probably.” Then Momma said under her breath, “She should have learned it before she got here. They ought to make ‘em all learn it before they cross the border. That’ll cut out a lot of this mess.”

I envisioned a group of teachers meeting the Spanish girl and her family at a bus station and then teaching them English in a matter of minutes. “Can I teacher her English, Momma?”

“You ain’t got time to teach her English.” She stood me up and wrapped a towel around me before lifting me out of the tub. “You need to worry about your own education first.”

* * * * *

The answering machine blinked the number
 
2
 
when I got home. The first message was from my brother, wishing me a happy birthday. The second was from my mother, checking to make sure that I was coming over for dinner. I picked up the receiver and called to assure her that I would be there in a few minutes.

“You gonna bring the rolls?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I replied.

“Well, come on, then.
 
Me
 
and your daddy’ll be
 
waitin’.”

I hung up my church clothes and put on an all-season denim dress with a split up the back.
 
Too
 
risqué
 
for my church, but fine for Sunday dinner with the parents.
 
I slid into a pair of low-heeled mules and pulled my hair back behind a headband.

I took the old familiar back roads to “the hood.” It was beautiful scenery—always had been, until you got across the tracks. I glanced down at my panel, making sure that my doors were locked. As much as I loved the hood and my people, I couldn’t deny the uneasy feeling I had in this twenty-first-century Brockmoore
 
neighborhood. It wasn’t the same since most of the original homeowners moved out. The new owners, younger and poorer, didn’t give two cents about their property or the neighborhood. Their yards were unkempt, their nonfunctioning cars sat propped up on bricks in front lawns, and dangerous-looking dogs were chained to stakes in the ground.

And yet, it was my hood, my stomping ground. I had roots there, even if the ground was less than desirable.
 
If I can’t fit in here, where do I fit in?

 
It had all been so simple when I was a teenager. Everybody knew everybody. I wasn’t allowed to socialize with all the kids in the neighborhood, but I did know their names and they knew mine. I could ride my bike and pump Jonathan on my handlebars without worrying about some strange white man kidnapping us.
 

Now almost everyone looked strange. Addicts as skinny as the hungry African children on television walked the streets, giving me gestures and then blank stares. They wanted to know if I sold drugs. Their beckoning made me feel blessed and ashamed at the same time.
 
Blessed because it could have been me.
 
Ashamed because I thought, could I have done something to change this?
 
It also made me wonder how much of the problem was due to addicts’ bad choices and how much was environmental, system- oriented.

My parents’ house looked as if it had landed on the wrong street, with its new coat of paint and well-tended lawn. The chain-link fence around the front yard kept the neighborhood kids from making a shortcut across their corner lot. Momma and Daddy had put
 
their everything
 
into that house and refused to move, even after someone tried to break in a few years earlier. They were getting old, and I feared for them sometimes, but 700
 
Dembo
 
was their little piece of America.

When I stepped inside my parents’ house, I could smell Daddy’s mouthwatering fried chicken from the porch. Lord knows, if that man couldn’t do anything else, he could
burn
. Everything he made tasted like heaven.

The screen door gave me a quick swat on my behind as I crossed the threshold, and I followed my usual path to the kitchen. Past the off-limits living room and the hall bathroom was the large central kitchen. I wasn’t much of a cook, but I liked the feel of that room; it seemed to branch off into the other rooms of the house. The kitchen’s aromas roamed into every passageway and every corner. Some of the kitchen’s old tiles were torn, but they had been worn so much that they’d smoothed out with time; as though they were supposed to be that way, ripped edges and all.

Jonathan and I had tried to convince Momma to resurface her counters, but she’d refused. Aside from the refrigerator, everything in that kitchen was at least fifteen years old. The cabinets were dull olive, and the wallpaper was a sad pattern of flowers and teapots. All of Momma’s pans, some of which were on the stove, were missing their handles. But she said she wouldn’t dare part with them. “That’s when they get good,” she’d said. The ever-present supply of leftover grease in the Crisco can sat between the stove’s eyes, ready to fry up anything at a moment’s notice.

“Hello!” I called.

I heard the television blaring and figured Daddy was in the middle of watching some football game. With the chicken finished, he’d already done his part.

“Hey, baby,” Momma called as she came from the back bathroom. She shuffled into the kitchen toward me, her graying hair pulled back into a soft bun. I could still see the impression that her Sunday hat made on her light bronze forehead. She would not be caught dead at Sunday service without a hat on. She had a dash of her latest discovery, lipstick, on her lips. When I was growing up, Momma had always said that she wouldn’t paint her face. But lately I noticed her branching out, though not so far as to cause the saints to speculate.

Her bifocals dangled near the edge of her nose for just a moment, then she pushed them up with a forefinger and wrinkled up her nose to hold them there for a second and get a good look at me. Her light brown eyes met mine and checked me, as they always did when I saw her. She could decipher my mood with one glance. She could tell I was fine, and unwrinkled her nose so that her glasses could begin their descent into the soft, pink groove near the center of her bridge.

Her thick arms embraced me, but only for a moment. There was work to be done. I hung my coat on the coat rack and rejoined her in the kitchen. I put my purse down in a chair, washed my hands, and grabbed an apron from the stove handle.

Daddy came in and stood over me, scrutinizing my every move. His favorite belt buckle, an oversized silver mold of Texas, pressed into his round stomach. He’d never give it up, even though it was on the last notch. In fact, I think he’d poked another hole in it, just to keep on wearing that belt with his name stamped into the back in big brown capital letters:
JONATHAN.
 

His wardrobe was much like the kitchen decor—old-fashioned and so outdated that it was just about back in style. He wore blue jeans and a T-shirt bearing the Coca-Cola emblem that I recognized from a Christmas long gone. His salt-and- pepper hair had been brushed back with a few unfocused strokes. The deep brown skin poking out at the top of his head shined like a light bulb, as though he had a bright idea.

My father might have been a fashion disaster waiting to happen, but he always smelled good. He splurged on cologne, though he rarely went anywhere since retiring. He said that
 
Grandmomma
 
Smith always taught him that you might be poor, but you didn’t have to be dirty or stinky. As was routine, I ignored his inspections and continued with my duty.

“Hey,” he prodded, “what kind of rolls did you make?”

“I bought ‘em
 
at the store,” I said in answer to his
 
real
 
question, pulling a cookie sheet from the cabinet beneath the counter.

“Hmm,” he said with a frown on his face.

“What’s wrong with the rolls, Daddy?” I asked him, sighing and placing one hand on my hip.

“There’s
 
nothin’ wrong with them. I’m just
 
waitin’ for the day you start
 
makin’ them from scratch,” he said.

“Daddy, I don’t even know where ‘scratch’ is.”

“That’s the problem, now,” he said, looking down his nose at me. “How do you expect to get a good man without knowing how to cook? You watched your momma and me make plenty of meals that you claim you can’t whip up now. Don’t you know the Bible says the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach?”

Momma contradicted him. “That ain’t in the Bible.”

“It ought to be,” Daddy said with raised eyebrows. He pushed his stomach forward indignantly and let his arms dangle at his sides. “They sure left a whole lot out if
 
that’s
 
not in there, ‘cause it’s the truth, so help me God.”

“Well, if you would
read
the Bible for yourself, you’d know what’s in there,” Momma said as she spread low-fat margarine on top of the unbaked rolls.

“See?” Daddy pointed. “Stuff like that—fake
 
butter— probably has all kind of chemicals and preservatives. That’s what’s
 
makin’ people so sick these days—givin’ everybody cancer. I swear,
 
we didn’t have all these problems y’all have today. Now, we had high blood pressure and arthritis and sugar, but we didn’t have all these no-name quick-killing diseases y’all have today. You know why?
 
Because we used natural fat, F-A-T!”

“What else should we be using, Daddy?” I opened that can of worms knowing that he’d bring up something utterly ridiculous like using apple butter in place of light syrup.

He proceeded to tell us, for what was probably the hundredth time, the Vaseline story. He repeated it as though he’d never shared it with us before. “I swear to God.” He held up his right hand. “One day your
 
Grandmomma
 
Smith was in the kitchen about to cook us breakfast. She barely had enough stuff to make the pancake batter—probably just some flour, eggs, water, and powdered milk, but we were
 
gonna
 
eat it because that’s all we had. Momma looked in the cabinets for some shortening or some butter to fry
 
them
 
pancakes up in, but we didn’t have any. All we had
 
was
 
some Vaseline from when she did Debra Jean’s hair, so that’s what she used. And it tasted just fine. I ain’t
 
lyin’! Call my momma on the phone right now and ask her! She’ll tell
 
ya! We ate whatever we had.”