She opened the drawer and we took the last two, putting us at four each, which was about a cooler and a half too many. This we knew even as we let the warm sudsy drink foam into our mouths. We stumbled out of her stepmother’s study into the rec-room part of the basement. Ronalda looked through her father’s records and decided to play Richard Pryor just to hear him cuss.
“How do you feel?” Ronalda stretched herself on the carpet in front of the imitation fireplace.
“Sick.”
“It’s a secret, al right?” she said. “Everything about my mother is a secret.”
“Same for mine.”
7
I DARE YOU
MY MOTHER WORKED very hard for a living. This was no one’s fault. Even women who were wives had to do their part to keep the family fed. When I was smal , she took a few classes to learn travel-agenting — thinking she could work from the apartment, using our telephone — but sometime in the midseventies she got sensible and took night courses at Atlanta Junior Col ege to become a licensed practical nurse. For the most part, Mother was fortunate in her scheduling — seven to three — but sometimes she was assigned eleven to seven, and on holidays she pul ed doubles. When she came home those mornings while I was eating my breakfast, she soaked her feet in a pan of saltwater and rubbed the red bites on her neck where the stethoscope pinched her.
Hers was a good job with benefits that included more than health, eye, and dental. Mother had daily access to doctors. As she assisted them by performing the tasks that were beneath them, she asked them about their daughters. What lessons did they take, where did they buy their clothes, and where did they plan to go to col ege? Every now and then, she would chat with the doctors’ wives, mining for personal information, like where they stood on issues like contraception and sex ed in schools (testing out her theory that rich people put their girls on the Pil at twelve). On her break, she took careful notes on a smal pad she kept in her locker. For six weeks in the early 1980s she got to work alongside a woman resident who was even engaged to another doctor. She owed everything, this lady said, to Mount Holyoke, a col ege in Massachusetts. My mother pressed down hard on the notepad and underscored the name of the state. In parenthesis she wrote:
Such information was worth the sometimes-odd hours. When Marcus and I first started going together, she worked eight to four in a pediatrician’s office and then looked after private patients from seven thirty to midnight. It was just a temporary arrangement for November since Christmas was right around the bend. At six fifteen when she was heading out, fresh and pretty in white, I promised her that I would spend the evening doing SAT dril s on the new Commodore computer that she had bought with her “own money.” I didn’t like it when she used this phrase, sounding like a child, bragging about what she had done with her babysitting pay. She meant that this gift had come from her, without any contribution from my father. She’d paid for it with the labor of swol en legs and stiff fingers. I didn’t use the computer, but I did appreciate the gift, the thought of it. I didn’t have anything against the machine or the SATs; it was just that the only opportunity I had to see Marcus was when my mother was at work, late at night, between the hours of seven thirty and midnight.
On one particular night, Marcus and I were going to go to Acres Mil to see a movie with a bunch of his friends. I took extra time with my hair and makeup because I knew that Marcus wanted to show me off. I loved being displayed on his arm, held up for everyone to see.
I looked out of my bedroom window, expecting to see Marcus’s two-door Jetta, but instead I found the good Lincoln, the newer one that was real y navy blue if you looked at it close-up. With much agitation, I tiptoed into the living room and through the picture window saw James let himself out of the passenger side. Raleigh was driving. I can remember very few times in my life that I have been alone in the house with my father. If my mother wasn’t home, he always brought Raleigh with him, like I was someone else’s daughter and there was a need to make it clear that everything was aboveboard.
James and Raleigh walked up the sidewalk to our apartment. The buzzer rang, and I knew that it was Raleigh who had pressed it because James liked to use his key.
“Who is it?” I sang.
“Raleigh here. And James.”
I twisted back the deadbolt and undid the chain lock. Seeing them framed there in the doorway, they looked like a comedy duo. My father was shorter than Raleigh but cool-looking. His hat was sort of turned to the side, Detroit-style, so I knew they had been over to the Carousel for a nip. Not enough to be stumbling but just enough to have a little buzz. Raleigh, behind him, was flushed in the face. When Raleigh drank, he loved every person in a three-mile radius. Whereas when James had one leg in a bottle, he just fel deeper into whatever mood he was already in. I didn’t know how he was feeling when he walked into the Carousel, so I didn’t know what was rattling around in his head when he walked out.
I stood in the doorway, hoping they had just come over to drop something off. “Hi,” I said.
“What’s going on?” Raleigh laughed. “You’re not going to let us in? Why you blocking the door?” He bumped my father with his chuckle, but James didn’t join in.
“Come in,” I said, hoping to sound relaxed like my mother, standing to the side. She was so good at making them feel like special company and old friends at the same time. She greeted my father with a fast kiss on the lips each time he walked through the door. For Raleigh, she got on tiptoe and hugged his skinny neck. I just stood by at those times and let her do the welcoming. When I was alone like this, I never quite knew what to do.
Without my mother, I was as useless as a single shoe.
“Do you want something to drink?”
“What do you have?” James wanted to know.
I opened the refrigerator wide. My mother had just been to the store, and I was proud of the ful produce drawers, the two dozen eggs safe in their holders, and the glass bottles of juice. “We have Diet Coke.”
James made a face.
“Cucumber water?” This was my mother’s concoction; a doctor’s wife had told her that they serve it at day spas.
“Just ice water is fine,” Raleigh said.
