She said that she didn’t want to come by herself and Uncle Raleigh said that was just fine because he wanted her to bring a friend for me to meet. And Diane said she had a cousin here who was sixteen, same age as her. She didn’t say your name. If she had said your name I w-would have said no way because you were too young to be sp-sp-spending time with us in that way.”
Mama said, “But when I showed up, you knew it was me.”
Daddy said, “I didn’t mean for nothing to happen. We were al having a good time and you didn’t seem scared or anything and everybody was just having a good time. You re-m-m-member, you were having a good time, weren’t you?”
Mama remembered that day and she did have a good time. She couldn’t forget the tinkle of the crystal cups against the crystal punch bowl and the sweet hot taste of the liquor. It had been fun. She could admit that much to herself, but not to Daddy. She knew that something wrong had been done unto her, that she was more sinned against than sinning and she wouldn’t say that she had enjoyed herself, because that was al part of the trick, wasn’t it? “I was too scared,” she said.
“You didn’t seem scared. You were asking me for more punch, remember? And I didn’t let you have it because I didn’t want you to get sick. I was trying to look out for you.”
Mama whispered her next statement. She said it quietly, as it was a word more shameful than the one everyone kept saying,
It took him some time to find the words. She could hear him making the tortured noises, not exactly grunts, as he tried to make his mouth, lungs, and voice box coordinate so he could speak. Mama who had been struck dumb herself several times in the past few days, pitied Daddy at that moment.
She asked him the question again, grateful in a strange way to be able to speak any words at al . “James, did you rape me?”
From his bed, there was a spasm of movement.
“No, m-ma’am,” he said. “That is something I did not do. My mama asked me the same thing, she made me put my hand on top of her good Bible and tel her the truth. No. I have never forced myself on any girl. Can’t nobody say that about me. And why you asking? You was there. You know that you laid yourself down on this very bed. Nobody pushed you.”
And Mama did recal herself reclining, and no one had pushed her.
Daddy spoke slowly, letting each word out one at a time. “And I kept asking you if I was hurting you. I said, ‘You okay?’ and you didn’t say nothing different. And you didn’t cry. When it was al over you just put al your things back on and said good-bye to me. You said it real polite. You said,
‘Good-bye, James.’ And then you and your cousin left. I was on the front porch waving and you didn’t even look back.”
“But I didn’t know,” Mama said.
“You didn’t know what? You didn’t know you could get pregnant?”
In the dark of the bedroom in her pul ed-apart marriage bed, Mama turned her face into the pil ow. She had known she could get pregnant. Her mother had told her that when she first got her cycle, but she hadn’t known exactly how it happened and that it could involve something as lovely as a cut-crystal punch set. She hadn’t known it could happen so quickly, with so little pain and no blood at al . She hadn’t known that there would be no proof for nearly two months, no sign whatsoever that anything was amiss. She hadn’t known that the events of an afternoon could get her kicked out of school and thrown out of her mother’s house. She missed her Murphy bed in the living room and the boiled bathwater. When she had withdrawn from school, they had taken her school books away from her. They were raggedy volumes, castoffs from the white-children’s school, with their handwriting on the pages, giving away the answers before a person could figure them out for herself. Mama had gone through al her books with a rubber eraser, rubbing out al the marks that she could, and she covered each of them with book covers she fashioned herself from butcher paper and tape. If she couldn’t have her books back, she wished now that she had been al owed to take those covers off. They were hers. She had made them herself.
After a while, Daddy said, “My mama also says that a lot of good marriages get off to peculiar starts. People get together just like us, because of circumstances, and they are stil together, so this doesn’t mean nothing bad. And the only thing that matters, real y, isn’t how come two people happen to get married, but that the folks are married before the baby gets here. Nobody wants to say that their child is a bastard. That’s the thing that’s important.” Then he lowered his voice. “Look at Raleigh. He’s a bastard.”
“My daddy never married my mama,” Mama said. “I never seen the man.”
“But that’s okay. Al you can think about is the future. That’s what my mama says.”
Mama lay in the dark. She had been wearing her girdle too long and her feet were starting to tingle. She longed for her mother. She had never slept anywhere but her own home. She pressed her hands to her abdomen. She knew that sometimes women died while having babies, and she thought that if she were lucky, this is what would happen to her.
After several minutes had passed, Daddy spoke again. “My mama also says that I shouldn’t worry too much about you crying yourself to sleep.
She says it is only natural, but that nobody should worry too much, because you’l cry yourself out in a couple days.”
Mama was getting sleepy, but she had another question. “How’s the baby going to get out of me?”
Daddy was stammering so hard, she thought that he was going to strangle. “T-t-talk to my mama. She’l explain everything to you.”
“And she did,” my mother told me, that day in the funeral home as we prepared Miss Bunny for her grave.
Mama kept saying, “Miss Bunny was good to me al my life, and we are going to do right by her. We are going to fix her up perfect.” There wasn’t much for me to do. I handed Mama what she needed and tried not to look at Grandma Bunny’s frozen face. When I did peek, I had to admit that Mama did a fine job. Once Grandma Bunny was dressed, rouged, and finger-waved, there was no trace of the great sadness that weighed her down at the end. Mama held on strong until it was time to pin on the aquamarine brooch that Grandma Bunny had loved so much she wanted to be buried in it.
