misunderstanding that makes you seem like a tramp. I was standing in the choir closet with Jamal Dixon, the preacher’s son. We were talking. He was talking, real y, I was just listening. At that point, I was one hundred percent driven snow. Jamal was sharing some heavy stuff, about his mother. Apparently, she drank al the time. Every day. She hid bottles in the laundry room behind the hot-water heater. She drank out of a wineglass; she drank out of her toothbrush cup. She crashed the reverend’s Coupe de Vil e at three in the afternoon in the parking lot of Kroger. It was getting to be a problem. “Can you tel ?” he asked me.
I shrugged. “I wouldn’t put anything past anybody.”
I didn’t mean it, about putting what past who, but it was something I often heard my mother say. It was the perfect response to a woman getting her hair done complaining about their husband. This way, you could agree without talking bad about him. So when the couple reconciled, the wife would stil be comfortable getting her hair done in your chair. If you want to be a hairdresser, you have to understand the way people are wired.
I felt sorry for Jamal. With his blinking eyes and twitching lips, he looked like he was about to cry right there, and I knew enough of men to know that he didn’t want me to see it happen. I turned my face to the robes, keeping my hands busy making sure al the hangers were turned the right way. Jamal kept on about his mother and how she gets carried away with the peppermint schnapps and how his father won’t do anything about it but pray. The family would be together in the living room on their knees, holding hands and breathing in the boozy-minty smel that beamed out from her lips and even from her skin. He swore that even the butter she scraped on his toast in the mornings tasted of peppermint. I didn’t tel him about my own mother, who could be, on occasion, a little bit boozy-peachy. She never crashed any cars or did anything to hurt anyone, but she swil ed Fuzzy Navels on Monday afternoons, dabbing her eyes at her soap operas.
Jamal told me that he wasn’t sure he believed that God is looking in on each and every one of us. He said he had some questions about the whole dynamic with the sparrow. He agreed that God made the world; the universe had to come from somewhere, but after that, who knows who’s in charge? I was thinking that the human mind and the power of suggestion are real y something, because I could sort of smel something like Doublemint on the rocks. He kept going and I pressed my lips together, imagining what peppermint schnapps must taste like.
The robes parted on the rod, Red Sea—style, and who was there but Mrs. Reverend Schnapps herself, tal and steep as though she had been designed by an architect. I had to hand it to her; Jamal’s mother’s asymmetric junior-miss flip had been cut by someone who real y knew what she was doing.
“Jamal,” she said. “That’s enough, son.”
“We weren’t doing anything,” he said. “Just talking.”
“Is that what you cal it?” said Mrs. Reverend.
As I waited on the curb for my mother to pick me up, Mrs. Reverend told everybody how worried she was about me. The women on the usher board and some of the deaconesses were told to pray for me. Even while Mrs. Reverend’s words were tel ing them to pray, her tone was tel ing them to remember Salome. Even before my mother confirmed this to me in a whispered-but-urgent conversation in her bedroom, under the watchful eyes of the wig-heads, I knew the women at church were aiming their sharpened prayers at me.
I was a quiet girl back then. Not that I was shy, I just didn’t have anything to say.
“I haven’t told your father,” my mother said.
“Told him what?”
“About Jamal Dixon.”
“There’s nothing to tel .”
“I know, baby,” she said.
I was stil defending myself a week later, as we drove to Decatur for my appointment with her ob-gyn. The last time he saw me, I was being born. I told him the same thing: “I’m not doing anything.”
“It’s just to regulate your cycle,” he said.
Heading home on 1-20, we hit a traffic jam, and I tried again. “I’m not doing anything.”
“Do you know how lucky you are that these pil s exist? Do you know how lucky you are that I am taking you to the doctor?”
“But I’m not doing anything,” I said again.
“Take them for me, baby,” Mama said. “Just to be on the safe side.”
JAMAL DIXON WAS the first one. We arranged to meet at Marcus McCready’s house one afternoon after school. While I stared at a Jayne Kennedy swimsuit poster on the ceiling, he apologized for his mother’s behavior. He didn’t mean to get me involved. He knew I was a nice girl and he felt bad that everybody was talking about me like that.
“I don’t care if people talk about me.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “She was never like this before.”
“I understand,” I said.
He looked at me and turned his head. “What grade are you in?”
“Ninth,” I said.
“I’m a junior,” he said.
I didn’t tel him to stop or to come hither. I was curious, real y, to see what would happen. Jamal looked like a younger, thinner version of his father, whom I’d often admired standing in the pulpit with his arms outstretched in his beautiful robes. He preached in a thunder-deep voice, but he sang sometimes in a sweet Al Green tenor.
“You’re a nice girl,” Jamal said in the tone you might use to soothe a dog that may or may not bite.
“Pretty?” I said.
He nodded. “You have nice lips.”
