Tamara closed the door and went to help Phyllis down the stairs. They sat together in the parlor while Mrs. Grundy busied herself in the kitchen. Tamara’s easy mood had vanished like a soap bubble. What did it matter that she liked to play a little? What did it matter that she’d always been pretty enough to get folks to go her way? Oh, Aunt Winnie had disapproved and loudly, but she’d been an old woman, jealous of that easy power.
Phyllis gave her a long once-over while Tamara glowered. Why was this her choice? Why was this her weight, when she’d kept her head down, she’d kept her hands clean? But the cards pricked at her irritably, as did the memory of Victor, who was dead.
“What’s been eating you, Tammy? What aren’t you telling me? Is it the cards? You’ve sure been keeping them close lately.”
Tamara felt dizzy, in free fall. She reached out for a distraction. “That baby probably won’t be able to pass, you know.”
Phyllis touched the top of her belly, somehow larger again today than it had been yesterday. “You mean Durga.”
“Dev is too brown. She won’t be able to do like you.”
“We could say she was Indian. Or Mexican.”
“Not the same, is it? Mrs. Grundy won’t be shaking her hand, Miss High Yellow.”
“She’s making our meals, Tammy, and cleaning our toilets. I figure it was worth a handshake.”
“It wasn’t worth it to her, when it was my hand I held out there.”
“So she’s another bigoted white lady, Tammy. America’s full of them. Can I help that?”
Tamara drove a fist into the couch cushions, which merely swaddled the force of the blow. “You don’t have to play into it, either! Remember when you came back to the city after the wedding? Remember where you stayed, Phyllis?”
“The hotel?”
“The goddamn Algonquin. These whites up north, they might be too up their noses to put a sign above the door, but I sure as hell couldn’t go through it. Pea, pitch-toed as you are, you still Negro, you still know it, and ain’t none of this Miss Ann bullshit do you any credit.”
Phyllis drew in a sharp breath. She lowered a hand that seemed to have sprung up like a jack-in-the-box. “So where should I have stayed? Since you’re playing moral justice today.”
“In Harlem, how about!”
“Oh, so you live in Harlem now?”
“I don’t live in a goddamn cracker jack box named after a bunch of Indians they also wouldn’t let through the door!”
Phyllis punched out a breath. Then another. Tamara realized that she was laughing, gasping, hysterical. She fell to her side on the cushions and gripped her belly as though the child would otherwise claw its way out of her.
“What kind of a world am I bringing her into, Tammy? What awful world?”
5
A package of letters, courtesy of the U.S. Army, arrived one afternoon toward the middle of March. There was one from Dev, four whole pages filled on both sides with his broad, loopy handwriting. Tamara’s heart tweaked when she realized that he hadn’t sent her anything. She didn’t know why he would. Clyde had written to her, though. She kept the letter, unopened, for a day, trying to savor the fact that at the very least he was still alive.
“Well,” Phyllis asked her, that second day, “you gonna open it? All we do lately is wait, I don’t know why you want to go around waiting more.”
“At least this way I get to control it,” Tamara said. Phyllis nodded at that and put her head on her shoulder.
Clyde hadn’t been native to Lawrenceville like Tammy was; he had come to St. Paul’s from farther south as a student. Aunt Winnie had passed that winter and Tammy hadn’t been able to shake the blues ever since; she had wanted to leave town, but she couldn’t bear to, either. The cards told her to get out of the house, at least, so she went to the summer production of Romeo and Juliet. She sat there riveted to the seat while Clyde delivered Mercutio’s dying monologue. Afterward, she just stood in the lobby while he shook hands and joked and, eventually, noticed her. You liked the show? he asked her. You got a nice voice, Mercutio, she said, and he laughed and held out his hand.
They spent three weeks together. Days sitting on the broken wall outside the malt shop, waiting for the white busboys to give them their burgers from the back door. They’d take them back to the willow tree by the stream in her grandma’s yard and stay until sundown reading parts from plays that Clyde had discovered in the St. Paul’s library. Then she would read his numbers and show him her best tricks. He loved her deck as a piece of art and never once suggested the pawnshop. You can love someone for the smallest things, sometimes. She’d stumble through the door at nearly midnight, and her grandma would just look at her and tell her to be careful.
And then a prominent Negro theater in Richmond offered him a part in their fall season production of Othello. He would play Iago, a villain, for once. I’ve got a sweet face, that’s my problem. Always want me for the hero. She told him he had a big head, but he hardly heard her. He said that it was a good opportunity, that he couldn’t just rot away down in the country. She told him that he had her. He kissed her cheek. Oh, and how many times a day do you tell me about everything you’re gonna do when you get to New York, Tammy? The only thing I don’t know is why you haven’t left yet.
She felt crushed by the indignity of it. She had hated him for not seeing it, for thinking that a bad ending didn’t change the whole play.
But even as young as she was then, Tamara had an oracle
