I was a little afraid, but I knew I was now on the safe side.
“Don’t touch my hair,” I said. “Don’t mess it up.”
He said he was sorry. He said it twice.
Then I was different, although I looked exactly the same.
THE PILL WAS A SECRET between my mother and me. My father was not to know about the peach dial pack, the white pil s tasteless but potent and those seven green sugar pil s that al owed the blood to come. This was women’s business. Besides, my father loved me best when I was his baby girl, his Buttercup. Fathers are that way. Al they want is that you be clean, entertaining, and adoring. When he came home from work, I fetched Daddy a gin-and-tonic, kissed the top of his head, and petted his tired shoulders.
ALTHOUGH FATHERS ARE SIMPLE , husbands are not. Marriages are tricky, but children bring love into even the most complicated situation. They are gifts from God. I was my mother’s miracle child, a replacement for the baby boy who died. It was a close cal , my entry into the world, four weeks early. They almost lost me, too. I spent more than a week in an incubator. My mother couldn’t commit to loving me until it was clear I was going to live, but my daddy was al in from the start, bal ing his hands into fists, muttering, “Come on, champ. Come on.”
If we were real Africans, my daddy would have held me up to the sky like Kunta Kinte’s daddy did. Instead, he took me to Olan Mil s and bought portraits, even paying extra to have the images printed on stretched canvas, etched with brushstrokes. He made a large donation to the church and gave up smoking. Of course, the habit got the better of him after a week and some change, but he never smoked in my nursery. The wal s of our house have to be repainted every year to cover the yel ow smoke-tinge on the wal s, but my bedroom remained the same hopeful pink of my birth announcement for six years. My father loved me. My birth changed him. Everyone says so.
14
A SILVER GIRL
THE SUMMER BEFORE my last year in high school was a hard one for our family. Grandma Bunny dying nearly kil ed al three of my parents. I can’t say which one of them got hit the hardest, because al of them fel apart in their own ways. For Uncle Raleigh there was no comfort except in crying.
We would be eating dinner and he would put a spoonful of potatoes in his mouth and his lips would start shaking and he had to excuse himself from the table. His eyes streamed when he was driving, but luckily the passengers didn’t see anything but the back of his head. My daddy drank and basical y let himself go. The bitter scratch of his unshaven good-night kiss wil always, for me, be the sensation of grief. My mama didn’t change herself in any way that you could easily put your finger on. She stil opened the shop at seven thirty, taking care of the old ladies who got up at five, and she closed down at eight thirty, having taken care of the women who worked in offices. Everything was almost the same with her, but she went about her business in a way that put me in the mind of an old matchbook. You can scratch the head against the strip in the same way you always have, but you are not going to get any kind of spark.
I was as devastated as anyone, but I didn’t have much to take my mind off my grief. There was Jamal, but every time we were together, he made me kneel on the floor with him and beg Jesus to forgive us. After Grandma Bunny passed, I didn’t feel like asking Jesus for much of anything. I guess I should have practiced my flute — that was the whole point of going to the performing-arts magnet — but I wasn’t exactly a virtuoso and who can take comfort in doing something that you’re bad at? That left only the mal .
Greenbriar wasn’t the best place to shop. It wasn’t straight-up ghetto like West End, but it wasn’t swanky like Phipps Plaza, either. Stil it was close enough to my house that I could go there without planning to. Sometimes I would start at 10 a.m. when the mal opened and systematical y work my way through every shop, even the rent- to-own furniture place. I could spend an hour in Pearle Vision staring in the mirror through empty eyeglasses. I would do anything to keep from being alone with my thoughts of Grandma Bunny. Her leg had been amputated eighteen months before she died. The night before the surgery, she cal ed my mama col ect after midnight. I picked up the phone at the very beginning of the ring —
teenager’s instinct. I accepted the charges and yel ed for my mama. She picked up the extension with a voice dry from sleep.
“Hel o?”
“Laverne,” she said. “It’s Miss Bunny.”
“Miss Bunny,” Mama said, “what you doing up? Where’s James and Raleigh?”
“They in the back room, sleep.”
“Miss Bunny, what’s wrong? If you need something, wake them up. That’s why they down there.”
“Laverne,” said Miss Bunny. “Listen to me, child. I changed my mind. I don’t want this operation. Don’t let them take my leg. What man is ever going to have eyes for me if I don’t even have legs to stand on?”
“Miss Bunny,” Mama said. “Don’t worry about that. Go wake up Raleigh. Miss Bunny, you don’t sound like yourself. Is somebody helping you with your medication?” Then my mama paused, pitching her voice through the air and not through the telephone. “Chaurisse Witherspoon. Please tel me you are not on this telephone.”
I eased the phone back onto the cradle and pretended to be asleep. I lay in the bed, kept up al night by the weight of my grandmother begging to keep her legs, stil hoping to be pretty to someone.
My last stop at the mal was the drugstore. There are two kinds of pretty, my mama always said. Natural Beauty, which is whatever your mama gave you. Everybody can’t be that lucky, so for us, there is Pretty in a Jar. This was for people average or worse, who could use time and cosmetology to put ourselves together. Sometimes she cal ed it “bootstrap beauty.”
In the cosmetic aisle of SupeRx, I laid my hand on an eye shadow crayon. Drawn to the color, I turned it over in my palm, trying to remember where I had seen this particular shade of green before. The gold letters pressed into the side said buried treasure, but that didn’t ring any bel s.
Above the display was a little mirror so you could hold products up to your face and imagine what you would look like with the color rimming your eyes.
It took me a second to register that the girl in the tiny mirror was actual y me. My mother, exhausted by grief and worn down by my pleading, had given in and final y al owed me to augment my hair. That’s the term we used when we talked about it to customers. You never used the word
