the backyard the other day. It was as cold as a witch’s tit out there, but she had to get some bulbs in the ground before the fifteenth of December, she said. So there she was on her knees, digging holes in the ground.”
“So? I miss the point.”
“The point is that she wanted to put those bulbs in. She didn’t have to. She likes to plant flowers. She really likes it. But you should have seen her face. She looked like the unhappiest woman in the world. The most miserable. So where’s the fun? I’ve never in my whole life heard my mother laugh. She smiles sometimes, even makes a little sound. But I don’t believe she has ever laughed out loud.”
Without the least transition and without knowing he was going to, he began to describe to Guitar a dream he had had about his mother. He called it a dream because he didn’t want to tell him it had really happened, that he had really seen it.
He was standing at the kitchen sink pouring the rest of his coffee down the drain when he looked through the window and saw Ruth digging in the garden. She made little holes and tucked something that looked like a small onion in them. As he stood there, mindlessly watching her, tulips began to grow out of the holes she had dug. First a solitary thin tube of green, then two leaves opened up from the stem—one on each side. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. Now several stalks were coming out of the ground behind her. Either they were bulbs she had already planted or they had been in the sack so long they had germinated. The tubes were getting taller and taller and soon there were so many of them they were pressing up against each other and up against his mother’s dress. And still she didn’t notice them or turn around. She just kept digging. Some of the stems began to sprout heads, bloody red heads that bobbed over and touched her back. Finally she noticed them, growing and nodding and touching her. Milkman thought she would jump up in fear—at least surprise. But she didn’t. She leaned back from them, even hit out at them, but playfully, mischievously. The flowers grew and grew, until he could see only her shoulders above them and her flailing arms high above those bobbing, snapping heads. They were smothering her, taking away her breath with their soft jagged lips. And she merely smiled and fought them off as though they were harmless butterflies.
He knew they were dangerous, that they would soon suck up all the air around her and leave her limp on the ground. But she didn’t seem to guess this at all. Eventually they covered her and all he could see was a mound of tangled tulips bent low over her body, which was kicking to the last.
He described all of that to Guitar as though the dream emphasized his point about the dangers of seriousness. He tried to be as light-hearted as possible in the telling, but at the end, Guitar looked him in the eyes and said, “Why didn’t you go help her?”
“What?”
“Help her. Pull her out from underneath.”
“But she liked it. She was having fun. She liked it.”
“Are you sure?” Guitar was smiling.
“Sure I’m sure. It was my dream.”
“It was
“Aw, man, why you making something out of it that ain’t there? You’re making the whole thing into something superserious, just to prove your point. First I’m wrong for not living in Alabama. Then I’m wrong for not behaving right in my own dream. Now I’m wrong for dreaming it. You see what I mean? The least little thing is a matter of life and death to you. You’re getting to be just like my old man. He thinks if a paper clip is in the wrong drawer, I should apologize. What’s happening to everybody?”
“Looks like everybody’s going in the wrong direction but you, don’t it?”
Milkman swallowed. He remembered that long-ago evening after he hit his father how everybody was crammed on one side of the street, going in the direction he was coming from. Nobody was going his way. It was as though Guitar had been in that dream too.
“Maybe,” he said. “But I know where I’m going.”
“Where?”
“Wherever the party is.”
Guitar smiled. His teeth were as white as the snowflakes that were settling on his jacket. “Merry Christmas,” he said, “and Happy New Year.” He waved his hand and cut around the corner to his street. He was lost in the snowy shadows of Southside before Milkman could ask him where he was going or tell him to wait.
Now he closed the accounts book in Sonny’s Shop and gave up on the column of numbers. Something was happening to Guitar, had already happened to him. He was constantly chafing Milkman about how he lived, and that conversation was just one more example of how he’d changed. No more could Milkman run up the stairs to his room to drag him off to a party or a bar. And he didn’t want to talk about girls or getting high. Sports were about the only things he was still enthusiastic about, and music. Other than that, he was all gloom and golden eyes. And politics.
It was that atmosphere of earnestness he provoked that led Milkman to talking about his family more than he would normally do and that also led him to defend with flippant remarks the kind of life he led. Pussy and Honore parties. Guitar knew that wasn’t all he was interested in, didn’t he? He knew Milkman had other interests. Such as? he asked himself. Well, he was very good in his father’s business, for one thing. Excellent, in fact. But he had to admit right away that real estate was of no real interest to him. If he had to spend the rest of his life thinking about rents and property, he’d lose his mind. But he was going to spend the rest of his life doing just that, wasn’t he? That’s what his father assumed and he supposed that was what he had assumed as well.
Maybe Guitar was right—partly. His life was pointless, aimless, and it was true that he didn’t concern himself an awful lot about other people. There was nothing he wanted bad enough to risk anything for, inconvenience himself for. Still, what right had Guitar to talk? He didn’t live in Montgomery either; all he did was work at that automobile factory and sneak off places—nobody knew where—and hang around Tommy’s Barbershop. He never kept a woman more than a few months—the time span that he said was average before she began to make “permanent-arrangement-type noises.”
He ought to get married, Milkman thought. Maybe I should too. Who? There were lots of women around and he was very much the eligible bachelor to the Honore crowd. Maybe he’d pick one—the redhead. Get a nice house. His father would help him find one. Go into a real partnership with his father and…And what? There had to be something better to look forward to. He couldn’t get interested in money. No one had ever denied him any, so it had no exotic attraction. Politics—at least barbershop politics and Guitar’s brand—put him to sleep. He was bored. Everybody bored him. The city was boring. The racial problems that consumed Guitar were the most boring of all.
