When we five girls heard the bus start up, we did something we hadn’t planned to do. Without any one of us suggesting it, we all took to our heels again and ran through the woods to a dusty crossroads far from the clearing, a spot we knew the bus had to pass. Through some extraordinary, even magical, coincidence the same plan had occurred to all of us. When the bus came rattling up to the crossroads a few seconds after we got there, the five of us, like guerrilla fighters, dashed out of the bushes onto the road. “Stop the bus! Stop for a minute!” we shouted.
The bus slowed and halted, with a squeal of gears, and the Thunderbirds stuck their heads out of the windows. We could see Marvin Jones’s platinum streak shining beside Belinda’s patch of dyed red hair. “We wanted to sing your song,” said Ellen, and without further ado we all began clapping our hands and chanting the profane verses that belonged to the Thunderbirds. “What the word / Thunderbird…”
We probably looked ridiculous—five girls in cutoffs, football t-shirts, and moccasins, clapping and trying to perform like a group of tough guys on a city street corner—but we felt natural, synchronized, as if we were doing a good job. When we had finished, the Thunderbirds—still hanging from the windows of the bus—gave us a burst of grave, polite applause. Marvin Jones leaned farther forward out of the window. “That sounded good,” he said. “And we’re sorry to leave.”
The two groups looked at each other, and it seemed for a minute that some obscure misunderstanding was about to be cleared up. Then the bus started up and moved slowly away through the trees.
An Old Woman
Early one Saturday morning my mother and I had a long, monotonous argument about a nifty pair of French jeans that I wanted to buy at Saks. My mother said that the jeans were overpriced and indecently tight, and that she and my father didn’t give me an allowance to have me waste it on any fad that came along; I contended that the jeans were a necessity, that I had fewer pairs than any other girl in the neighborhood, and that she just wanted to keep me badly dressed and looking like a child.
We were driving around doing errands. Mama sat up very straight behind the steering wheel, looking prim and slightly ruthless in a dark-green suit, and I slumped in the seat beside her, biting my nails and tapping the toes of my sneakers with boredom. After stopping in at Saks, we had bought some groceries, picked up some flats of marigolds at Korvettes, dropped in at my orthodontist’s office to see about a possible crack in my retainer, and stopped at Mrs. Rindell’s house to deliver some tickets Mama was selling for a benefit given by her club, the Wives of Negro Professionals. It was a hot, hazy morning, one of a spell of unseasonably warm September days in Philadelphia. Along City Line Avenue the trees were slowly turning brown, and in the diffused light the big street with its crowded shopping centers and dense streams of traffic looked as if it had been lightly powdered by a fall of yellowish dust—it was the same yellow tint that comes over old Polaroid snapshots.
There was one more errand left to do: my mother indicated a brown bag that held a quarter of a poundcake wrapped in wax paper. “I want to take this over to poor old Mrs. Jeller,” she said. “Roosevelt Convalescent Home is only five minutes away, and we can just duck in and say hello, and then we can go home.”
“Oh, God, Mom—do I have to go in?” I asked.
“You certainly do,” said my mother emphatically. “Mrs. Jeller was one of your father’s most faithful parishioners a long time ago—possibly in early Christian days—and it would be a pleasure for her to see you. Sit up straight, and stop gnawing at your thumb.”
The convalescent home wasn’t five minutes away, it was twenty-five, the amount of time it took to go from the crowded thoroughfare of suburban shopping centers at the edge of town to a run-down, oddly deserted city street lined with boarded-up row houses and brick apartment buildings. The wheels of our car rattled on the cobblestones between the trolley tracks; at one end of the street I saw a group of little girls jumping double Dutch, their thin brown legs flying between the whirling ropes.
Old Mrs. Jeller’s room opened off a shiny red linoleum corridor on the eighth floor of a tall, dismal building of pale, graffiti-covered brick. The room was a tiny cubicle half filled by a double bed covered with a yellow satin spread; a big television with the picture on but the sound off flickered in the corner. The air was smotheringly hot and smelled strongly of liniment. When I came with my mother through the doorway, I was embarrassed to see Mrs. Jeller seated bare-legged on the bed, wearing a short, rather tight cotton shift that revealed the shape of her large, limp breasts. The old woman was brown-skinned, with a handsome square face; her loose gray hair bounced in a wild frizzy mass around her shoulders, and she kept tossing it back from her face with a petulant gesture that was like a macabre parody of the way a flirtatious teenager might behave. Her expression, which had been drawn and querulous, brightened somewhat when she saw us.
“Come on in, pastor’s wife, and sit down!” she called out to my mother in a voice that seemed over-loud and silly to me. She gestured us toward two rangy oak side chairs that looked as if they had come out of a country parlor. “Me and
