Cutler 1 - Dawn (3 page)

"You went to Frankie's and got him?" he asked in a whisper.

"Yes."

"If I had been the one, he'd be furious," he said. "No, he wouldn't, Jimmy, he'd . . ."

I stopped because we heard Momma moan. Then we heard what sounded like Daddy laughing. A moment later there was the distinct sound of the bedsprings. Jimmy and I knew what that meant. In our close quarters we had grown used to the sounds people often make whenever they make love. Of course, when we were younger, we didn't know what it meant, but when we learned, we pretended that we didn't hear it.

Jimmy drew the blanket up toward his ears again, but I was confused and a bit fascinated.

"Jimmy," I whispered.

"Go to sleep, Dawn," he pleaded.

"But, Jimmy, how can they—"

"Just go to sleep, will you?"

"I mean, Momma's pregnant. Can they still . . . ?" Jimmy didn't respond. "Isn't it dangerous?"

Jimmy turned toward me abruptly.

"Will you stop asking those kind of questions?"

"But I thought you might know. Boys usually know more than girls," I said.

"Well, I don't know," he replied. "Okay? So shut up." He turned his back to me again.

It quieted down in Momma and Daddy's room, but I couldn't stop wondering. I wished I had an older sister who wouldn't be embarrassed with my questions. I was too embarrassed to ask Momma about these things because I didn't want her to think Jimmy and I were eavesdropping.

My leg grazed Jimmy's, and he pulled away as if I had burned him. Then he slid over to his end of the bed until he was nearly off. I shifted as far over to mine as I could, too. Then I closed my eyes and tried to think of other things.

As I was falling asleep, I thought of that woman who had come to the bar door just as I was about to open it to enter. She was smiling down at me, her lips twisted and rubbery, her teeth yellow and the cigarette smoke twirling up and over her bloodshot eyes.

I was so glad I had managed to get Daddy home.

2

One afternoon during the first week of Momma's ninth month while I was preparing dinner and Jimmy was struggling over some homework on the kitchen table, we heard Momma scream. We rushed into the bedroom and found her clutching her stomach.

"What is it, Momma?" I asked, my heart pounding. "Momma!" Momma reached out and seized my hand.

"Call for an ambulance," she said through her clenched teeth. We didn't have a telephone in the apartment and had to use the pay phone on the corner. Jimmy shot out the door.

"Is this supposed to happen, Momma?" I asked her. She simply shook her head and moaned again, her fingernails pressing so hard and so sharply into my skin, they nearly caused me to bleed. She bit down on her lower lip. The pain came again and again. Her face turned a pale, sickly yellow.

"The hospital is sending an ambulance," Jimmy announced after charging back in.

"Did you call your daddy?" Momma asked Jimmy through her clenched teeth. The pain wouldn't let go.

"No," he replied. "I'll go do it, Momma."

"Tell him to go directly to the hospital," she ordered.

It seemed to take forever and ever for the ambulance to come. They put Momma on a stretcher and carried her out. I tried to squeeze her hand before they closed the door, but the attendant forced me back. Jimmy stood beside me, his hands on his hips, his shoulders heaving with his deep, excited breaths.

The sky was ominously dark and it had begun to rain a colder, harder rain than we had been having. There was even some lightning across the bruised, charcoal-gray clouds. The gloom dropped a chill over me, and I shuddered and embraced myself as the ambulance attendants got in and started away.

"Come on," Jimmy said. "We'll catch the bus on Main Street."

He grabbed my hand and we ran. When we got off the bus at the hospital, we went directly to the emergency room and found Daddy speaking with a tall doctor with dark brown hair and cold, stern green eyes. Just as we reached them, we heard the doctor say, "The baby's turned wrong and we need to operate on your wife. We can't wait much longer. Just follow me to sign some papers and we'll get right to it, sir."

Jimmy and I watched Daddy walk off with the doctor, and then we sat on a bench in the hall.

"It's stupid," Jimmy suddenly muttered, "stupid to have a baby now:"

"Don't say that, Jimmy," I chided. His words made my own fears crash in upon me like waves.

"Well, I don't want a baby who threatens Momma's life, and I don't want a baby who'll make our lives more miserable," he snapped, but he didn't say anything more about it when Daddy returned. I don't know how long we had been sitting there waiting before the doctor finally appeared again, but Jimmy had fallen asleep against me. As soon as we set eyes on the doctor, we sat up. Jimmy's eyelids fluttered open, and he searched the doctor's expression as frantically as I did.

"Congratulations, Mr. Longchamp," the doctor said, "you've got a seven pound, fourteen ounce baby girl." He extended his hand and Daddy shook it. "Well, I'll be darned. And my wife?"

"She's in the recovery room. She had a hard time, Mr. Longchamp. Her blood count was a little lower than we like, so she's going to need to be built up."

"Thank you, Doctor. Thank you," Daddy said, still pumping his hand. The doctor's lips moved into a smile that didn't reach his eyes.

After we went up to maternity, all three of us gazed down at the tiny pink face wrapped in a white blanket. Baby Longchamp had her fingers curled. They looked no bigger than the fingers on my first doll. She had a patch of black hair, the same color and richness as Jimmy's and Momma's hair and not a sign of a freckle. That was a disappointment.

It took Momma longer than we expected to get back on her feet after she came home. Her weakened condition made her susceptible to a bad cold and a deep bronchial cough, and she couldn't breast-feed like she had planned, so we had another expense—formula.

Despite the hardships Fern's arrival brought, I couldn't help but be fascinated with my little sister. I saw the way she discovered her own hands, studied her own fingers. Her dark eyes, Momma's eyes, brightened with each of her discoveries. Soon she was able to clutch my finger with her tiny fist and hold on to it. Whenever she did that, I saw her struggle to pull herself up. She groaned like an old lady and made me laugh.

Her patch of black hair grew longer and longer. I combed the strands down the back of her head and down the sides, measuring their length until they reached the top of her ears and the middle of her neck. Before long, she was stretching with firmness, pushing her legs out and holding them straight. Her voice grew louder and sharper, too, which meant when she wanted to be fed, everyone knew it.

With Momma not yet very strong, I had to get up in the middle of the night to feed Fern. Jimmy complained a lot, pulled the blanket over his head, and moaned, especially when I turned on the lights. He threatened to sleep in the bathtub.

Daddy was-usually grouchy in the morning from his lack of sleep, and as the sleepless nights went on, his face took on a gray, unhealthy look. Early each morning he would sit slumped in his chair, shaking his head like a man who couldn't believe how many storms he had been in. When he was like this, I was afraid to talk to him. Everything he said was usually gloom and doom. Most of the time that meant he was thinking of moving again. What scared me to the deepest place in my heart was the fear that one day he might just move on without us. Even though sometimes he scared me, I loved my father and longed to see one of his rare smiles come my way.

"When your luck turns bad," he would say, "there's nothing to do but change it. A branch that don't bend breaks."

"Momma looks like she's getting thinner and thinner and not stronger and stronger, Daddy," I whispered when I served him a cup of coffee one early morning. "And she won't go to the doctor."

"I know." He shook his head.

I took a deep breath and made the suggestion I knew he wouldn't want to hear. "Maybe we should sell the pearls, Daddy."

Our family owned one thing of value, one thing that had never been used to mend our hard times. A string of pearls so creamy white they took my breath away the one time I'd been allowed to hold them. Momma and Daddy considered them sacred. Jimmy wondered, as I did, why we clung to them so tenaciously. "The money it would bring in would give Momma a chance to really get well," I finished weakly.

Daddy looked up at me quickly and shook his head.

"Your momma would rather die than sell those pearls. That's all we got that ties us, ties you, to family."

How confusing this was to me. Neither Momma nor Daddy wanted to return to their family farms in Georgia to visit our relatives, and yet the pearls, because they were all we had to remind Momma of her family, were treated like something religious, they were kept hidden in the bottom of a dresser drawer. I couldn't recall a time Momma had even worn them.

After Daddy left I was going to go back to sleep, but changed my mind, thinking that it would only make me feel more tired. So I started to get dressed. thought Jimmy was fast asleep. He and I shared an old dresser Daddy had picked up at a lawn sale. It was on his side of the pull-out bed. I tiptoed over to it and slipped my nightgown off. Then I pulled out my drawer gently, searching for my underthings in the subdued light that spilled in from the bulb in the stove when the stove door was left down. I was standing there naked trying to decide what I should wear that would be warm enough for what looked to be another bitterly cold day, when I turned slightly and out of the corner of my eye caught Jimmy gazing up at me.

I know I should have covered up quickly, but he didn't see I had turned slightly and I couldn't help but be intrigued by the way he stared. His gaze moved up and down my body, drinking me in slowly. When he lifted his eyes higher, he saw me watching him. He turned quickly on his back and locked his eyes on the ceiling. I quickly drew my nightgown up against my body, took out what I wanted to wear, and scurried across the room to the bathroom to dress. We didn't talk about it, but I couldn't get the look in his eyes out of my mind.

In January Momma, who was still thin and weak, got a part-time job cleaning Mrs. Anderson's house every Friday. The Andersons owned a small grocery two blocks away. Occasionally Mrs. Anderson gave Momma a nice chicken or a small turkey. One Friday afternoon Daddy surprised Jimmy and me by coming home much earlier from work.

"Old man Stratton's selling the garage," he announced. "With those two bigger and more modern garages being built only blocks away, business has begun to drop off something terrible. People who are buying the garage don't want to run it as a garage. They want the property to develop housing."

Here we go again, I thought—Daddy loses a job and we have to move. When I told one of my friends, Patty Butler, about our many moves, she said she thought it might be fun to go from school to school.

"It's not fun," I told her. "You always feel like you've got ketchup on your face or a big mole on the tip of your nose when you first walk into a new classroom. All the kids turn around and stare and stare, watching my every move and listening to my voice. I had a teacher once who was so angry I had interrupted her class, she made me stand in front of the root until she was finished with her lesson, and all the time the students were goggling me. I didn't know where to shift my eyes. It was so embarrassing," I said, but I knew Patty couldn't understand just how hard it really was to enter a new school and confront new faces so often. She had lived in Richmond all her life. I couldn't even begin to imagine what that was like: to live in the same house and have your own room for as long as you could remember, to have relatives nearby to hold you and love you, to know your neighbors forever and ever and be so close to them, they were like family. I hugged my arms around myself and wished with all my heart that one day I might live like that. But I knew it could never happen. I'd always be a stranger.

Now Jimmy and I looked at each other and turned to Paddy, expecting him to tell us to start packing. But instead of looking sour, he suddenly smiled.

"Where's your ma?" he asked.

"She's not back from work yet, Daddy," I said.

"Well, today's the last day she's gonna work in other people's houses," he said. He looked around the apartment and nodded. "The last time," he repeated. I glanced quickly at Jimmy, who looked just as astonished as I was.

"Why?"

"What's happening?" Jimmy inquired.

"I got a new and much, much better job today," Daddy said.

"We're going to stay here, Daddy?" I asked.

"Yep and that ain't the best yet. You two are gonna go to one of the finest schools in the South, and it ain't gonna cost us nothing," he announced.

"Cost us?" Jimmy said, his face twisted with confusion. "Why should it cost us to go to school, Daddy? It's never cost us before, has it?"

"No, son, but that's because you and your sister been going to public schools, but now you're going to a private school."

"A private school!" I gasped. I wasn't sure, but I thought that meant very wealthy kids whose families had important names and whose fathers owned big estates with mansions and armies of servants and whose mothers were society women who had their pictures taken at charity balls. My heart began to pound. I was excited, but also quite frightened of the idea. When I looked at Jimmy, I saw his eyes had shadowed and grown deep and dark.

"Us? Go to a fancy private school in Richmond?" he asked.

"That's it, son. You're getting in tuition free."

"Well, why is that, Daddy?" I asked.

"I'm going to be a maintenance supervisor there and free tuition for my children comes with the job," he said proudly.

"What's the name of this school?" I asked, my heart still fluttering.

"Emerson Peabody," he replied.

"Emerson Peabody?" Jimmy twisted his mouth up as if he had bitten into a sour apple. "What kind of a name is that for a school? I ain't going to no school named Emerson Peabody," Jimmy said, shaking his head and backing up toward the couch. "One thing I don't need is to be around a bunch of rich, spoiled kids," he added and flopped down again and folded his arms across his chest.

"Now, you just hold on here, Jimmy boy. You'll go where I tell you to go to school. This here's an opportunity, something very expensive for free, too."

"I don't care," Jimmy said defiantly, his eyes shooting sparks.

"Oh, you don't? Well, you will." Daddy's own eyes shot sparks, and I could see he was maintaining his temper. "Whether you Like it or not, you're both gonna get the best education around, and all for free," Daddy repeated.

Just then we heard the outside door opening and Momma start coming down the hallway. From the sound of her slow, ponderous footsteps, I knew she was exhausted. A sensation of cold fear seized my heart when I heard her pause and break out in one of her fits of coughing. I ran to the doorway and looked at her leaning against the wall.

"Momma?"
I cried.

"I'm all right. I'm all right," Momma said, holding her hand up toward me. "I just lost my breath a moment," she explained.

"You sure you're all right, Sally Jean?" Daddy asked her, his face a face of solid worry.

"I'm all right; I'm all right. There wasn't much to do. Mrs. Anderson had a bunch of her elderly friends over is all. They didn't make no mess to speak of. So," she said, seeing the way we were standing and looking at her. "What are you all standing around here and looking like that for?"

"I got news, Sally Jean," Daddy said and smiled. Momma's eyes began to brighten.

"What sort of news?"

"A new job," he said and told her all of it. She sat down on a kitchen chair to catch her breath again, this time from the excitement.

"Oh, children," she exclaimed, "ain't this wonderful news? It's the best present we could get."

"Yes, Momma," I said, but Jimmy looked down.

"Why's Jimmy looking sour?" Momma asked.

"He doesn't want to go to Emerson Peabody," I said.