Silver Sparrow

“It’s up to you,” he said.

The car was heavy with the scent of the solid perfume he had given her; if he recognized it, he didn’t say.

“Tel me about yourself,” he said.

“I don’t know,” Mother said. “I don’t know what to say.”

“You can say whatever you want.”

It was strangely comforting to talk to the back of his head like this. It was what she imagined talking to a priest would be like. Wil ie Mae went into the confessional every week. Mother was tempted to join her, but she didn’t want to have to pretend to be Catholic. She didn’t like to lie.

“I was born here in Atlanta. I used to be married, but I’m not married anymore.” He didn’t say anything, so she kept talking.

“I’m twenty years old. Did I tel you my name? It’s Gwendolyn, but people just cal me Gwen. Oh, I don’t know what else to say. I never knew my mother. And I didn’t march with Dr. King. I went to Spelman to see him lie in state, but the line was so long and I had to go to work. I live in a rooming house because I don’t have a lot of money.”

He kept driving, but my mother didn’t say anything else. She wanted to get out of the car. That would be the good thing about talking to a priest, how you said what you had to say and then you got to leave. But she was trapped here in this Cadil ac, getting sick from the smel of her own perfume. “I think I’m ready to go now.”

Without turning toward her, James said, “B-but we didn’t have coffee yet.”

“I don’t feel wel .”

“I know that I’m married,” James said. “I am not asking you to do anything that would make you feel low. I just want to have coffee with you. I have never b-b-been out for coffee or for dinner with a woman be-before.”

“Except your wife,” Mother said, regretting immediately the note of sarcasm in her voice. “It’s not my business. Sorry.”

“N-n-not even with her,” he said with a sadness that was palpable. “It’s a long story.”

“My life is a long story,” my mother said.

“Mine, too,” said my father.

Then they both chuckled that the conversation had come round again. She imagined it like a circle, a child’s bal , or even the whole world.

And this is how it started. Just with coffee and the exchange of their long stories. Love can be incremental. Predicaments, too. Coffee can start a life just as it can start a day. This was the meeting of two people who were destined to love from before they were born, from before they made choices that would complicate their lives. This love just rol ed toward my mother as though she were standing at the bottom of a steep hil . Mother had no hand in this, only heart.

3

NOTES ON PRECOCITY

EVEN THOUGH MY FATHER was a bit on the short side and wore glasses thick as a slice of Wonder bread, there was an uprightness about him that inspired a brand of respect. Even after everything that happened, he never lost this. Much of the esteem he enjoyed had to do with being profiled as a local entrepreneur once in the Atlanta Journal and twice in the Daily World. Witherspoon Sedans was a smal fleet — three cars and two drivers: himself and Raleigh Arrington, his adopted brother and best friend. I could probably count the times that I have seen my father dressed like a regular person and not like a driver. There was no shame in it, however. After al , he was his own boss. When you have to wear dress blues and a hat and you work for white people, you’re wearing a costume. You’re no better than the monkey decked out in a red jacket with gold braiding. But when it’s your own company and you picked the uniform yourself out of a catalog, when it was ordered in just your size and didn’t need to be hemmed or let out, wel , that was different.

It’s no coincidence that he was wearing his uniform when my mother met him that famous afternoon in Davison’s. It’s remarkable, the way he seems almost fused with his clothing. It made him more confident, and when he was confident he stuttered less. And when he stuttered less you hardly noticed his heavy glasses; he seemed tal er.

James was an easygoing man, master of his emotions. “The key to life,” he told me once, “is to avoid the highs and the lows. It’s the peaks and val eys that mess you up.” He liked to behave as though his uninflected disposition was because of some philosophical leaning, but I knew it was because passion of any sort brought out the stammer and turned him into a freak. Anyone who has ever seen James when the stammer rode him could tel how much it hurt him. His face and neck seemed to swel as though the words were trapped in there, painful and deadly like sickle cel s.

And final y, with a jerk, spasm, or kick, the sentence would break free, unfettered and whole.

My parents didn’t real y fight. The most they ever did was “have words,” which was my mother’s expression. Their disagreements were rare because of James’s little-from-the-left-little-from-the right disposition and also because there was no time for bickering. James ate over at our house only once a week, and once or twice a year he spent the night. When we received him in our apartment, seated him at our table, we treated him like the guest he was. We poured Coke with the meal, said grace like it was Sunday, and even let him smoke in the living room. My job was keeping him in clean glass ashtrays. He said his wife, Laverne, made him stand on the porch with his cigarettes, even when it rained.

Most children probably remember their parents’ arguments with a stone-in-the-stomach ache. In the seventh grade, I read a novel cal ed It’s Not the End of the World, about divorcing parents. My teacher gave it to me, quietly, in a plain brown sack, after my mother explained to her that she and my father were separated but possibly reconciling, the perfect falsehood to explain his inconsistent presence in our lives. The book was about a girl who was torn apart by her parents’ fighting. I thanked my teacher for the gift, but my feelings could not have been further from those of the traumatized heroine of that Judy Blume book. When my parents argued, it was over me; for the brief duration of their spats, I was at the center of