“I’m thinking about it,” she said.
“We’ve been going out serious like this for two years,” Clarence said.
“I know.”
“So it’s a special night.”
My mother looked at him, so handsome in his blue suit, always blue, never black. Black was for his working hours, when he hovered behind his father, as the undertaker’s understudy. Her pale yel ow frock with puffed sleeves and an empire waist had seemed elegant on the pattern envelope.
She didn’t care much for the finished product, but having spent too much time tracing the pattern and reinforcing buttonholes, she couldn’t just throw it away because of a puckered neckline and an unflattering cut.
Shifting her eyes, she noticed a red carnation on the car seat beside Clarence. “You lost your boutonniere.” She picked it up and pul ed the hat pin from his lapel and busied herself reattaching the flower. On the radio, Smokey Robinson complained that “a taste of honey is worse than none at al .”
Clarence grabbed her wrist, not too hard, not like a threat, but firm. “I already paid for the room.”
“You did?”
“I wanted us to be together someplace nice.”
My mother said, “You sure are taking a lot of liberties for this to be Sadie Hawkins Day.”
“Sadie Hawkins means that ladies get to ask the fel ows out on a date, but it doesn’t mean the fel ows just sit around twiddling their thumbs.” He smiled. His teeth were pretty and white like marble headstones.
“Wel , let me have my Sadie Hawkins Day,” Mother said.
“Let’s get engaged and then we can go to Paschal’s.”
“What are you saying?”
“Wil you marry me?”
Clarence let go of my mother’s wrist, literal y giving back her hand, and rubbed his chin and the soft whiskers that were just starting to grow there.
He looked out the window. My mother started getting nervous, wondering if she had overplayed her hand. There was much at stake besides just her heart and her pride. Her father worked for Clarence’s father and her relationship with Clarence had put her own father in a good position. And besides, if she didn’t marry Clarence, who would she marry? She was already a senior in high school.
“Don’t you want me?” she whispered.
Final y Clarence spoke. “Hel yeah, I want you. This just isn’t the way I thought this was going to happen. But okay, we can get engaged. We’re engaged right now. Okay?”
My mother nodded, limp with relief.
Clarence started the car and they drove toward Paschal’s.
NOW, CLARENCE WAS long gone and she was again wearing the same homemade yel ow dress, not because she had come to like it but because the empire waist accommodated her changing figure. She was afraid to tel my father that she was four weeks late. Everyone knows that this is the hardest thing that you can ever tel a man, even if he’s your husband, and my father was someone else’s husband. Al you can do is give him the news and let him decide if he is going to leave or if he is going to stay.
My mother was too frightened to speak the words, so she wrote them on a scrap of paper like a deaf beggar. As he read, the stutter raised in him so badly, he couldn’t even get out the beginning of his response. My mother reminded him how much he wanted a baby. Laverne had been lying beneath him for a ful decade, but she had not been able to give him what he most wanted. It had taken my mother only a few months. This baby was determined to be born, conceived despite al their caution. My mother told him that I was destiny.
At last he said, “You’re giving me a son.”
James sat on the porch swing at the rooming house and thought it over. She could see him processing it, going over it al in his head. He would think a while, and then look over at her — not at her face, but at her stomach, looking at me. Mother admits to feeling a little jealous. Al he was thinking was that he could final y get to be a daddy, that he was going to get himself a junior. He and Laverne had had a baby boy a long time ago, when they first got married. The baby was born feetfirst and didn’t even live long enough to take his first breath. James rocked on the porch swing, thinking that here came his second chance.
While he was celebrating the idea that he could final y be a daddy, saying that he couldn’t wait to tel his brother, my mother popped the question.
She said it in a playful tone, like she was inviting him out for an ice-cream soda. “James,” she said, “let’s go get married. Make an honest woman out of me.”
Just moments earlier, he had been al motion, but now it was like somebody had pumped him through with embalming fluid. Final y he came out and said, “I am not leaving Laverne.”
Mother knew he was serious because he cal ed his wife by her name. It made her remember her own father. When she had left Clarence, she knew her father was through with her because he said, “You’re no better than Flora.”
When James said he wasn’t going to leave Laverne, Mother tried to act like he had misunderstood her, like she hadn’t been suggesting that they run away together and live life like normal people, giving me a chance at ordinary life.
“Who said anything about leaving anybody? Marry me, too. Let’s drive to Birmingham, get married in Alabama.” Of course she knew the marriage wouldn’t be legal, but it would be something, better than nothing. Even an il egal marriage would save me from being a bastard. This was al she was thinking. Mother says it was Wil ie Mae who pointed out that getting him to marry her, making him a bigamist, a criminal, would give her something
