Knee-Deep in Wonder (5 page)

Their embarrassed getaway checked Helene's efforts but hadn't stopped her from looking for a nappy head at her college graduation, knowing if she found one she would have called, “Where have you been?” But the only head she saw was Aunt Annie b's—her aunt's hair shaved as short as Uncle Ed's.

*   *   *

The way to Lafayette was crooked and full of treachery. Places in town felt like objects snatched out of a sack and thrown down randomly. Barren churches and convenience stores sat at the dead end of farm market roads. No bank or gas station—the nearest bank in Bradley, the gas station in McKamie—just two general stores built side by side. Roads that seemed to know their way suddenly plunged into trees, only to reappear as backyards full of dead cars: a 1962 Plymouth without the fenders, a '59 Ford Edsel with the trunk folded in on itself like a sheet. Ed's map led Helene to shotgun houses empty of everything except decayed wood planks, a half-eaten tin roof, and a table in the backyard with a cloth held down with cinder blocks. What should have been a one-hour trip was doubled because of the lack of street signs. Helene didn't think it took that long because she lost her way but because Uncle Ed had drawn a map that took her to her mother's house the familiar route, as if she should know Lafayette County by touch, like the lining of her pants pockets.

Twelve backyards later, Helene thought perhaps her uncle had drawn the map the way he himself had stumbled upon her mother's house: as an errand gone awry. His way—tinged and overcome with the urge to have a meal, to look civil, and then go to the bathroom—was what had led him to Queen Ester's, for as far as Helene could tell, not a single house of the eleven she saw was home to a toilet.

And while she herself fought the urge to pee, Helene thought about how she could not ask Queen Ester why they had never fought over having her ears pierced, or over the boy when she was thirteen who was too short, too ugly, just too-too, because the time was gone. And the one question that Helene could ask—Just where were you, Mama?—she could answer herself, and to hear her mother say it would have knocked her down. As a child she had circled around Aunt Annie b, riddling her with questions. “But if she just gone, why don't she come back and take me with her?” Her eight-year-old logic reasoned: I'm so small she wouldn't even know I'm with her. Finally, in desperation, Annie b told her niece the truth: her mother was not traveling the world looking for a place to settle, she was always in the same place, but Helene had to stay with her aunt and uncle just the same. Then Helene had turned to praying, nightly chants that Annie b tried to scour away with chores, but Helene was single-minded. She murmured, knees creaking on the wooden floor, full of eight-year-old desire, I want my mama.

And so she began to talk to God. Soft and sweet, she told him that she too wanted to be sky. Once, Helene had heard a rattling at the curtain, and, mid-conversation she had stopped to see who was there. Helene thought it might be God or, better still, her mother. She went to the window and knelt in front of the glass, putting her hands up to meet her mother's; they would have been touching were it not for the pane. Helene whispered, “Mama is you you? Mama?” But Queen Ester couldn't hear her daughter.

Helene thought her mother must have seen her lips move, because Queen Ester raised her voice and pressed her face tightly against the glass. The distortion frightened Helene so much she took off down the hall and ran crying to her aunt that there was a monster outside her window. Sucking her teeth and looking down at the floor, Annie b said to Helene, “Naw, that's your mama.”

Eighteen years ago, but Helene still remembered shaking. Aunt Annie b kissed Helene on the ear and said, “Gone to bed now,” but she was licking her eye tooth, so Helene knew Annie b was mad and waited for the howling to start. When Aunt Annie b opened the door, Helene saw her mother standing on tiptoe trying to see beyond her aunt's shoulder. Helene heard her mother mumbling, although now she could hear the embarrassment as well. “How you been, b? Look like you done moved again.”

Annie b grabbed Queen Ester by the coat collar to whisper something that was intended to slice her in half. “Can't you be decent?”

And it did. Queen Ester fell back from the porch, kicking up dust, pulling on her hair, and in a scream filled with question marks, she repeated Annie b's last word: “Decent? Decent? Decent?” She ran a curve around the house and Helene fled back to her room. Once inside, she saw Queen Ester galloping past the window, her mother's ratty coat waving good-bye as she rushed into the night air.

*   *   *

Helene's car stopped at the tip of her mother's wilderness, and what she saw first was as she remembered: a whisper of a path trying to forget itself through tall grass. Frayed rope barely held back bushes on the verge of becoming trees. The trail circled and turned, cutting a route in the trees that beckoned as a resting spot, only to push through and spill out into a swept yard. Whatever her mother did to make money didn't show itself in the front yard—no chickens or pig pen, no sizable garden filled with tomatoes or cabbage. Helene panted as she saw the peeking white of her mother's house, which seemed to stand sweet and alone in the middle of nothing, its arms thrown up in disrepair because its bricked bottom had cracked in several places and the foundations had given way. Faded white clapboard peeled away from the decaying wood underneath, and a railed wooden porch ran the length of the front. All the windows looked misplaced. The whole structure leaned to the left.

Helene didn't mind the leaning, which caused her to tilt her head; it was the door that gave her a bad feeling. Big and rounded at the top, it seemed swollen and almost bulged out of its frame. She stepped into the yard. Clumps of grass grew wild and tangled in unexpected places. Her uncle had warned her about the grass; mean as a miser and ugly, thorns rose from the ground and attacked her open toes. Trying to sneak up to the house was in vain, because the grass was predatory.

Helene tried to find a path where the thorns grew into soft grass as she approached the porch. She saw a screen door through the railing. Helene stooped to remove the remaining thorns from between her toes, and though her head was down she could see the curtain shivering. Just don't put me out before I can make you tell me everything, Helene thought, aching for her mother's voice, and I want it from the beginning. But before she could knock at the door, her mother stood there with the unused smile you give to strangers.

“Hello there,” Queen Ester said, as if she couldn't fathom where she had previously seen her daughter. And before Helene said anything, she thought, Yes, yes, we were once like this, Mama standing in her half-open door, wearing the same housedress, only then the hair was free. And just as before, her mother's physicality made her ill at ease. Neither tall nor short, fat nor thin, light nor dark, Queen Ester seemed beyond description.

When Helene was thirteen, she had bought a bus ticket to Stamps, hitchhiked a ride all the way to her mother's house, and stumbled onto the porch, begging her mother to come out and see her, take care of her, because she couldn't go on living with Annie b. But Queen Ester wouldn't. She'd stood in the doorway, not with the bemused look she wore now but full of rage. She had banged the door closed and called Annie b to pick Helene up, yelling out to the porch, “Annie b is on her way.” They waited together for Annie b, Queen Ester's face appearing and disappearing from her many windows, watching her daughter pace the length of the porch until Aunt Annie b drove up, wrapped a coat around Helene, and walked her to the car.

But this time her mother said hello as if she meant it. Her voice was coated with rust, her hair was pulled back and trapped underneath a green scarf—a mundane sight Helene needed to encourage her to walk through the door. “Yes?” Queen Ester said.

“Mama?”

“Look like you got news, girl.” Her mother sounded hesitant, as if she spoke to someone behind Helene, out of her daughter's sight.

“Mama, I do. I do.” Just get inside, Helene thought, stepping firmly on the wooden saddle between the porch and the door.

“You look good,” her mama said, and Helene walked through in a whoosh, still expecting Queen Ester to blink and know Helene was her daughter and put her out.

Instead she grabbed Helene's hand, stroking her thumbnail. “Well,” Queen Ester mumbled, but her eyes rested somewhere by her daughter's left temple. Helene looked down and saw brown toes exactly like her own. The pinkie toenail was shaped like a wood shaving, just sitting on top of the toe, all of them even and brown with no darkness around the joints. Just like me, Helene thought.

“Mama, I'm sorry I just showed up like this.” She heard her mother's soft wet breathing. Queen Ester untangled her fingers from Helene's and placed her thumb in her mouth. Her next words came out pushed together.

“No problem t'all. Coulda sent word, though. Been nice if I could of met you in something more than my housedress.”

She backed farther into the hallway, lifting her housedress to show its frayed hem. Helene had seen it before—green, with orange and blue flowers.

It was dark inside the house; the shades and blinds had been pulled closed. Groping along a wall for a moment, Queen Ester switched a light on and walked into the living room. She shook her head, then turned to Helene. “Yes, yes.” And while Queen Ester was deciding where to put her sudden guest, just where Helene would fit among familiar things, her daughter tried to shake the feeling that something was awry. Getting into her mother's house shouldn't be so easy.

Turning on every light along the way, Queen Ester took her under the arm and ran her around that crooked house. As if aware she had denied Helene for so long, Queen Ester had a page's worth of explanation for every lamp and carpet. “We got this in Texarkana, and me and Mama sat up most of the night to sew a fringe on it. Feel that, girl. Don't make a lampshade like that no more.” Helene's head swam with all the attention. “You know Mama put up this house damn near by herself. Course she never told me, but when folks come by, they make mention of it.” Everything said was sprinkled with a touch of love. “Girl, you done grown. B sho did take care of you. Tell you that much.”

Queen Ester's house was full of dead-end hallways and closets she introduced as rooms with no windows. They went upstairs first. Seven doors, but six rooms, on either side of the hallway, since the last door at the end of the hall opened to nothing, Queen Ester said. “Mama had a mind to put a balcony back here but never did get around to it. For the best, I suppose.” The room Queen Ester said was for guests had no furniture, just a large green carpet and one rectangular window that hung so low on the wall it almost sat on the floor. Grandmother's office, as her mother called it, had no desk, only an upright wooden chair that stood alone in the middle of the room. On one wall you could look out of six windows the size of picture frames. Queen Ester's bedroom had a welcome mat in front of the door, but the door itself was boarded up.

“How do you get inside your bedroom?” Helene asked.

“I go through Mama's room. Got a door that lets me in the side way.” Queen Ester folded her arms and cupped her elbows as they both stood on the welcoming mat; Helene looked at her mother, waiting for an explanation.

“Why is the door boarded?”

“Fell down one day. Just one day it was fine, and then the next it had a hole in it. And what's the use of a door with a hole in it?” Queen Ester stopped and licked her lips. “Let's go through Mama's way.” In her room there was a twin bed, a chair at the foot of the bed, and an open gray train trunk. The small ironing board attached to the trunk was down and a pair of khaki pants were flung over it. Queen Ester led Helene back into the hallway, and they stood next to another door her mother wouldn't (couldn't) open.

“Cobwebs and Lord knows what all,” Queen Ester said, as she pulled Helene past this closed-up room, down the corridor, which swayed like rolling hills. Queen Ester's mutterings—got this wallpaper in 'thirty-two, and me and Mama put it up real nice—dwindled to nothing as Helene gave only half a mind to her mother's voice. The other half had stalled in front of the closed door. Didn't I hear creaking? she thought, suspecting her mother's too-easy manner. You just don't go from nothing to all this. Fearful that her mother had coaxed her inside only to deny her what she needed to know most, Helene stumbled slightly on an imaginary nail, making her mother pause while she gained a balance she hadn't lost.

It seemed to be the only door that didn't look thrown and askew inside its frame; the knob was polished and gleamed from care. But Queen Ester shuffled down the stair and Helene followed. “I got coffee and tea,” Queen Ester mumbled, pulling her daughter into the kitchen.

Watching the licking flame beneath the kettle, her mama said, “You look good,” but she had said that before, so Helene knew that her mother was waiting for her to speak.

“Annie b died last Tuesday.”

“Say what, now?”

Helene lifted her voice. “Aunt Annie died.”

“You don't say.” Something akin to pleasure marked her face, a sudden glee around the mouth. It was as if Queen Ester had woken. Her eyes looked ready to hold anything, like a jar waiting to be filled.

“Mama?”

“Yes, yes. I hear. Dead?” She swallowed several times and then asked, “What of, baby?”

“Heart attack.”

“Well, if that ain't quick, I don't know what is.” Helene almost said, No, that's not quite right; she struggled till the end, but she didn't. Her mother's joyous eyes stopped her.

“So, how y'all gone take care of it?” Queen Ester stepped back from the stove with the kettle and tumbled hot water into the cups.

“Well”—nervous laughter bubbled to her daughter's lips—“well, Aunt Annie b belonged to Union Baptist, so—uh, there's a group of church ladies helping Uncle Ed with the particulars. I think Uncle Ed had in mind a small quiet service. Annie b would have wanted it that way.”