Guardian (3 page)

For some moments she stands there. Repeatedly, she forces her lips up so that they curve at the ends. She parts her lips to reveal her teeth. That is what people do to make a smile, but she looks like she is grimacing in pain.

Because she can't smile, Bert stopped her from working in the store except on Saturdays.

Colored people don't seem to mind that her smile is filled with pain. They have an instinctive understanding of what it is to smile when you want to cry. They have to smile at any and every white person they see, no matter how young.

If they don't, somebody might complain to Cap'n Zeph that such-and-such a nigger has a sullen look on his face. A nigger who didn't smile was an uppity
nigger, and there was no place this side of heaven for an uppity nigger.

But many of them looked forward to seeing Mister Bert's wife's face as much as whites looked forward to seeing Bert's.

It takes Maureen a while to understand why she looks forward to seeing the colored faces every Saturday. Their lips turn up at the ends and their lips part to reveal their teeth, but she sees only sadness in their eyes.

One Saturday morning she understands. Smiles begin in the eyes and flow downward to the lips.

Her eyes are dead.

She wonders: “When did I die?”

And that leads her to ask: “Was I ever really alive?”

“I breathe. My heart beats.”

“But there is more to life than that. Isn't there?”

She has never been sure. When she was in high school, the girls talked about their boyfriends and what they did with them and when they were going to get married.

That must be like what it is to be alive, she had thought.

When Bert Anderson seemed interested in her, her spirit brightened.

She didn't know why Bert was interested in her. Her father didn't have a lot of money like his. Her father was a straw boss on Cap'n Zeph's plantation. That was only a little better than being colored.

Maureen had wanted to ask Bert what he saw in her. If he told her what that was, perhaps she could see it, too.

But she had been afraid to ask, afraid he would say he didn't see anything besides how big her breasts looked behind her starched blouses.

His eyes looked at them more than they did her face. But the other girls envied her when they realized she wasn't stuffing her bra with tissue like they were. They said she was lucky Bert was interested in her because he was a good catch.

Maureen thought her breasts must be bait.

The girls said she could let him do anything but never to go all the way. Not until they were married.

So she tolerated sitting in the backseat of his father's car, his hands groping at her blouse, one hand trying to unbutton it while the other tried to pry open her clenched knees.

She had thought his hands on her breasts would make her feel alive. But his hands were sweaty, and his slobbery kisses on her neck only made her feel wet with spit. What she had hated most of all was the wetness in her underpants, as if she had peed on herself, only she hadn't.

He had called her a tease, said she was torturing him, said if she loved him she would let him go all the way. But she couldn't.

What if she did and afterwards, he lost interest, having gotten what he wanted? That was what the girls at school said would happen if she let him.

One night he took her hand and placed it on his pants, against the hardness beneath. She didn't want her hand there, on that thing, and she took it away, but he grabbed it, put it back, and placed his on top and held it there, pressing with all his strength. She wanted to get out of the car, to go somewhere, anywhere, and die. He began to move his hardness against her captive hand, breathing faster and faster until he gave a small cry. His breathing slowed. The hardness beneath his pants went away like a balloon that all the air had come out of. He took his hand off hers. Her hand returned to her, but she did not want it.

One night, not long after this, it happened. Even now, even on this morning when she, a thirty-two-year-old woman, stared at herself in the mirror, she did not understand why, except she remembered thinking that maybe she would feel alive if she let him.

And so she did. And he did and it was over so quickly and all she had felt was pain. She remembered lying there in the backseat, glad she was wearing a dark skirt so the bloodstains would not show, wondering how she could get rid of her underpants without her mother knowing, and she was seized by a loneliness far deeper than the one she had lived in before that night.

Bert did not speak to her in school the next day. She saw him standing with some boys, a smirk on his face, and his friends turned to look at her as she walked by, and she knew that they knew, that everybody in school knew.

And when her period did not come, she knew.

She had thought her parents would be angry, but they seemed almost pleased. Her father, a crude and bitter man, said, “I'm glad you put them big titties of yours to good use.” And her mother added, “You done
good, girlie! The son of the second richest man in town is going to be your husband. You done good!”

They had not had a church wedding, nor had there been any guests, just her parents and his at the judge's office in the courthouse in Shireville.

Bert's parents were angry their son had let himself get trapped by a piece of white trash, which they told her to her face.

Bert said it was her fault, that she had led him on, that she had teased him so much that he had lost control and couldn't help himself.

She had not thought loneliness could get any more vast than it had been that night in the back of his car, but when the judge pronounced them “man and wife,” and went on to say, “You may now kiss the bride,” Bert had turned away from her, reached in his shirt pocket for a pack of cigarettes, took one out along with a book of matches, lit it, inhaled deeply, then, turning back toward her, slowly blew a stream of smoke in her face and walked out.

Her loneliness expanded until it devoured all possibilities of life.

Maureen blinked her eyes as if waking from a trance. She hurried downstairs and quickly washed
and dried the breakfast dishes and utensils.

She had just finished when she heard a knock on the door. She hurried to the front of the house, opened the door, and Esther Davis came in.

Maureen looked at her. “You've been crying,” she said flatly.

Esther nodded, and tears gushed from her eyes.

Of all the people Maureen had ever known, Esther was the only one who had always been kind to her. Maureen had been surprised to get a letter from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

And so began a relationship through letters, letters that had gone back and forth from Davis to Cambridge, from Cambridge to Davis. When Esther
moved back, the letters continued. Both women found that words flowed more freely from the nibs of pens than their tongues, though they were together on their weekly trips to the library in Shireville.

On this late morning the two women sit around the table in Maureen's kitchen. Each knows the other's most dreadful secrets; each knows the other's most poignant hopes. In their letters they have exchanged words limned with soul, words they could have never said face-to-face.

But on this day they sit across from each other. It is time. Esther stares down at the table; Maureen's eyes are fixed blankly on something behind Esther.

“I take it things didn't go well,” Maureen says finally in her toneless voice.

Esther shakes her head slowly. “I don't know. I think I may have frightened them, especially Ansel.”

“What did he say?”

“Not much. I think Willie is more of a dreamer than Ansel is. But Willie knows in the very marrow of his bones that there is no future here for him. Ansel can't see farther than someday taking over the store.”

Maureen does not say anything for a while. She
had hoped this son of hers would not be the coward she is. From the moment she first felt him moving in her womb, she had been determined he would escape Davis. Perhaps he would get no further than a different loneliness in another place. That had to be better than the suffocating loneliness of Davis.

“Are you going to leave, anyway?” Maureen asks Esther.

Esther nods. “In September. I have to.”

“I know.”

“I feel guilty leaving you behind, leaving Amanda and Willie. I want to give them money enough so that they can go anywhere they want and get a new start. But Amanda says Big Willie will never leave here. This is the only place he has ever called home.”

“I know how he feels. As much as I hate this place, I think I would hate being a stranger more.”

“You're only a stranger the first day you're in a new place. The second day you already know more about the place than you did the day before.”

Maureen smiles. “You would have made a good lawyer.”

“Then I would have had to put my whole family in prison because I have never known a bigger bunch of
crooks. Yet, I have a life of leisure, a life free of financial worry because of how much of a crook my grandfather and father were. I hate how they made their money, and yet, I am glad for the freedom it gives me.”

Nothing more is said about Ansel.

When Esther leaves, Maureen knows she has only until September, which is not much time at all.

Inside her she senses a kernel of resolve forming. Though small, it gives her life a focus, a meaning, and as the corners of her mouth turn up, she feels a sparkle of light in her eyes.

5.

Late on the afternoon of the same day, Ansel and Willie are sitting behind the store. Each has a bottle of soda from which he drinks slowly, savoring its coldness against the heat of the day.

Finally Ansel speaks.

“What do you think about what Miz Esther said this morning?”

Although Ansel and Willie are the same age, Willie is as old as a cotton field. He knows his survival depends on how well he is able to perceive what a white person wants to hear and then says it before the white person knows that is what he or she wants to hear.

Until Ansel had almost called him that word this morning, he had just about forgotten that Ansel was white.

That could be dangerous. If he forgot that Ansel was, Ansel might remember that he was. And then what?

But his parents had assured him that Ansel and Mister Bert were not like a lot of other white people. They were more like Miz Davis than Cap'n Zeph. But
Willie isn't sure anymore.

“I didn't think nothing about what she said,” Willie answers.

“You figure on staying in Davis the rest of your life?” Ansel wants to know.

“Where else I'm gon' go? And what would I do when I got there, if there was a there to get to.”

Ansel ponders this for a minute. “I don't think I knew there was a there until Miz Esther said I didn't have to take over the store.” He stops and gazes into the distance as if he is seeing something for the first time.

“I don't have to do what my papa does if I don't want to. I had never thought about that before this morning. I don't even have to stay here in Davis.”

“Good for you,” Willie says. There is resentment in his voice.

“Good for me what?”

“Good for you that you don't have to do what anybody says. Good for you that you can go somewhere else.” Willie does not disguise the contempt he now feels for Ansel.

Ansel opens his mouth to say something, then closes it slowly. He looks at Willie, and he is ashamed.
He had forgotten what Willie cannot forget.

It is only at this moment that he understands the difference in their lives, the difference between one who could imagine that his life could be different, and one who knew that his life would not be, regardless of how much he dreamed.

Ansel wants to apologize, wants to say something that will take away the look of resentment on Willie's face, wants to say something that will take back what he almost called him that morning. But when he speaks, he is surprised at the words that come out, surprised at how fervently they come out.

“We've got to start dreaming, Willie. We've just got to!”

This is the last thing Willie expected Ansel to say. His use of “we” startles Willie. He resents Ansel for thinking that he is in the same position as Willie, but when he looks at Ansel, when he sees the look of anguish on his face, he remembers something his father told him, something that didn't make sense until now.

“Don't never let yourself be angry with white folks. Us niggers, we know things are in a bad way. But the white folks? They don't know that by keeping
us down in a ditch, they got to be right here in the ditch with us. And because they don't know that, they worse off than we are.”

Willie's face relaxes. He wants to dream; he wants to believe there is a there for him.

“How do we dream?” he wants to know.

He doesn't know that by asking the question, he has already begun.

Ansel likes to sit on a stool in the kitchen when his mother is cooking.

The worried, distracted look she wears like an old sweater that should have been thrown away a long time ago vanishes, and she becomes like a cup of hot chocolate on a cold morning.

He and his mother seldom talk when they are in the kitchen together. At such times it is as if all the questions have been asked and answered, so there is no need for either of them to speak.

But on this afternoon, the day after Esther Davis talked to him and Willie, a day when he went to work but early in the afternoon told his father he wasn't feeling well and came home, he needs to talk with his mother, needs to know if it is all right for him to dream.

“Do you ever think about living somewhere else?” he asks.

Maureen is slicing apples for the pie she is making. When she hears Ansel's question, her hands start trembling, but whether from fear or joy she does not know.

“Why do you ask?”

“Just asking,” Ansel responds laconically, wishing his mother would tell him what she thinks for once rather than asking a question to answer his question.

“Yes,” she says so quietly that he almost does not hear. “Yes, I do,” she adds, a little more loudly.

Ansel's heart is beating so fast he is afraid it will run out of beats and stop. “Where would you live?”

“Oh, I don't know. Miss Esther thinks there's no place in the world like Cambridge up in Massachusetts.”

“So why don't you go live there?”

“I wouldn't be any good in a place like that. Too big. Too many people. And what would I do? I don't know how to do anything except keep house and take care of my husband and my son.”

Ansel is silent for a long time. He wants to ask her the most important question he will ever ask
anyone, but what if she gives him the answer he does not want to hear? Or thinks he doesn't want to hear. What then?

Then it occurs to him. What if she says what he wants her to say?

That is even more frightening.

“Ma?”

She turns from the kitchen counter and looks at him for the first time. She hears a tremor in his voice. She knows what is coming.

“Do I have to take over the store when I grow up?”

There are moments in which one word can bestow life or abort it.

A mere word, one syllable from a parent to a child has the power of a commandment from God.

Maureen does not hesitate. “No.”

Ansel does not have to wonder about her answer because her voice is loud and strong.

Her answer surprises him so much that he feels like he is trying to find his balance on the knife edge of the future she has just presented to him.

“Will Papa be mad if I don't?”

Maureen looks into the face of her son and sees
there the fear of and elation at a world of possibilities.

“Yes, but it's your life, Ansel. Being a failure at living your own life as best as you can is better than being a success living the life somebody else says you should live.”

The silence returns. Maureen turns her attention back to the pie, which will turn out to be the best one she has ever made. Though mother and son do not move, they embrace each other in the silence that embraces them.