time to boil up some grits, it’s now.”
Mama bal ed her hands on her hips. “Let me tel you what you don’t understand. Al Green got out of that bathtub and Mary almost kil ed him with those grits. I heard he had to get skin from his back stitched onto his privates. Is that what you are tel ing me to do to your daddy, Chaurisse?”
“No,” I said. “I was just trying to say that you should —”
“Al Green’s privates aren’t even half of this story. While he was lying there naked, burnt up with blisters, she took a pistol out of her purse, pressed it to her chest, and blew it wide open. Mary died right on top of him.” My mother’s breasts heaved under her worn nightgown. “Don’t talk about what you don’t know about. It wasn’t the grits that made him get right with God. It was her blood.”
My mother heaved herself out of my bedroom, leaving me squinting in the lamplight. I lay in my bed for another hour imagining the four of us —
me, Daddy, Raleigh, and Mama — in our separate rooms staring at our own separate ceilings. I didn’t sleep again that night. At a quarter to six, I found my mother sitting at the kitchen table peeling a mountain of potatoes. Some had turned brown with the air, but the one in her hand was white and wet.
“Did you sleep, Mama?”
“No,” she said. “I thought I would make a potato soup. I would make a lot, so we could freeze it.”
“Mama,” I said. “Go lay down.”
“I don’t want to sleep in my bed.”
“Go sleep in my room.”
“You put me out,” she said, looking up from the potato. She had cut the peel so thick that there was hardly any vegetable left.
“No, Mama,” I said. “I’l lie down with you.”
We went back to my bedroom. I held the covers back and fol owed behind her. This time, I was the one who curved my body around hers.
Mama said. “Let me finish tel ing you about Mary. She left a note. They found it when they came for her body. It said, ‘
I KNEW BY THEN that I would never have my mother back, not in the way I had known her al my life. When you have seen your mother shattered, there’s no putting her back together. There wil always be seams, chipped edges, and clumps of dried glue. Even if you could get her to where she looks the same, she wil never be stronger than a cracked plate. I climbed in bed beside her and closed my eyes, but I never relaxed enough to forget who I was and what had happened to us. At seven thirty, the old ladies showed up, ready for their clips and dips. It was a miracle that she hadn’t missed a single appointment up until then. My father may have taken a wrecking bal to our lives, but not a single nap in southwest Atlanta went unstraightened. This is why I let my mother pretend to sleep as I eased myself out of bed and down the back steps to open up the shop. I let the old ladies in, explaining that my mother was feeling poorly this morning. I opened her heavy appointment book, rescheduled the clients, and then cal ed the other ladies on the page. I blamed it on a virus and everyone clucked that it was going around. Then I cal ed my high school, pretended to be my mother, and explained that I was the one feeling poorly. I blamed it on the same virus and no one seemed to care. Then I phoned Witherspoon Sedans and explained to the answering machine that I hated my father and I never wanted to see him again.
Daddy and Uncle Raleigh were just guys, like Jamal and Marcus, loyal only to each other. I thought the whole point of growing up was that you got to be somebody’s wife, that you weren’t caught up in some man’s crazy games. And here I was, this only child, told al my life that I was a miracle. I may have been my mother’s miracle, but I was my father’s other daughter. His not-silver girl. My mother wasn’t the only person in this house who had been cheated on.
I DON’T KNOW how much my mother slept, but she got out of bed when she heard the mailman putter by in his little jeep. The RSVPs for the anniversary soiree had been arriving daily. Despite everything, she used an ivory letter opener to open the little envelopes, like she was shucking oysters looking for pearls. Then she stacked the reply cards in two stacks on her dresser. One for yes and one for no. Two days earlier, I had asked her what she planned to do about the soiree and she said it was my father’s problem, not hers.
In the kitchen, the starchy scent of the peeled potatoes was suddenly stifling. It’s strange how a smel that has been there al along can suddenly slam you, like a memory. Waiting for my mother to handle her odd business at the mailbox, I remembered myself at the science fair, wearing a rabbit-fur jacket. I remember the other girl in an identical coat, a silver girl, with dark skin and hair hanging to the middle of her back. I’d seen her in front of the Civic Center and again when I stopped by the ladies’ room. I remembered the smel of the blue toilet water. It was Dana. Of course it was. I remember thinking, “This girl wants to hurt me.” How old had I been? Thirteen? Something like that. I ran out of the bathroom like I was running for my life. The roots of my hair tingled. My bladder had been so ful that I unhooked the button on my waistband. When I final y made it home, the pee had leaked a little bit and I washed my panties out in the sink, so Mama wouldn’t know. Dana. How long had she been nibbling at the edges of my life? When I saw Raleigh and Gwen in the park that day, was it real y a coincidence? I put my face into the cradle of my arms and inhaled my own scent, which was Dana’s smel , too. I couldn’t escape the odor of her because she smel ed just like me and just like my mother and my father and this house. Anais Anais, White Shoulders, menthol cigarettes. This is what made up the air of our lives, and theirs, too.
My mother final y returned from the mailbox. “Anything good in the mail? Anything besides RSVPs? We are going to have to decide how to handle the party thing, you know. It’s only three weeks away.” She didn’t say anything, and I worried that I shouldn’t have mentioned the party and her strange obsession with who planned to come to a soiree that was never going to happen. She fanned herself with a postcard. “What?” I said, trying to read her face, to figure out if what she had in her hand was good news or bad. I reached for the card the way you might try and take a sharp object away from a baby, but she jerked her hand back.
“You wil not believe this. You wil not fucking believe this.” She smacked the postcard on the table like it was the high joker. The edge of cardboard got wet with potato juice.
I picked up the dry corner and held the card to my face. The front of the card featured a photo of a giant smiling peanut that resembled Jimmy Carter. “Howdy!” I frowned and flipped it over. The message on the back was written in block letters that I imagine you would find on a ransom note
— anonymous and menacing at the same time.
BIGAMY IS A CLASS C FELONY. IN JAIL YOU WILL NOT BE A
