Recitatif, page 5
“Put them in my car. It’s right here.”
And then I saw the dark blue limousine.
“You married a Chinaman?”
“No,” she laughed. “He’s the driver.”
“Oh, my. If the Big Bozo could see you now.”
We both giggled. Really giggled. Suddenly, in just a pulse beat, twenty years disappeared and all of it came rushing back. The big girls (whom we called gar girls—Roberta’s misheard word for the evil stone faces described in a civics class) there dancing in the orchard, the ploppy mashed potatoes, the double weenies, the Spam with pineapple. We went into the coffee shop holding on to one another and I tried to think why we were glad to see each other this time and not before. Once, twelve years ago, we passed like strangers. A black girl and a white girl meeting in a Howard Johnson’s on the road and having nothing to say. One in a blue and white triangle waitress hat—the other on her way to see Hendrix. Now we were behaving like sisters separated for much too long. Those four short months were nothing in time. Maybe it was the thing itself. Just being there, together. Two little girls who knew what nobody else in the world knew—how not to ask questions. How to believe what had to be believed. There was politeness in that reluctance and generosity as well. Is your mother sick too? No, she dances all night. Oh—and an understanding nod.
We sat in a booth by the window and fell into recollection like veterans.
“Did you ever learn to read?”
“Watch.” She picked up the menu. “Special of the day. Cream of corn soup. Entrees. Two dots and a wriggly line. Quiche. Chef salad, scallops…”
I was laughing and applauding when the waitress came up.
“Remember the Easter baskets?”
“And how we tried to introduce them?”
“Your mother with that cross like two telephone poles.”
“And yours with those tight slacks.”
We laughed so loudly heads turned and made the laughter harder to suppress.
“What happened to the Jimi Hendrix date?”
Roberta made a blow-out sound with her lips.
“When he died I thought about you.”
“Oh, you heard about him finally?”
“Finally. Come on, I was a small-town country waitress.”
“And I was a small-town country dropout. God, were we wild. I still don’t know how I got out of there alive.”
“But you did.”
“I did. I really did. Now I’m Mrs. Kenneth Norton.”
“Sounds like a mouthful.”
“It is.”
“Servants and all?”
Roberta held up two fingers.
“Ow! What does he do?”
“Computers and stuff. What do I know?”
“I don’t remember a hell of a lot from those days, but Lord, St. Bonny’s is as clear as daylight. Remember Maggie? The day she fell down and those gar girls laughed at her?”
Roberta looked up from her salad and stared at me. “Maggie didn’t fall,” she said.
“Yes, she did. You remember.”
“No, Twyla. They knocked her down. Those girls pushed her down and tore her clothes. In the orchard.”
“I don’t— That’s not what happened.”
“Sure it is. In the orchard. Remember how scared we were?”
“Wait a minute. I don’t remember any of that.”
“And Bozo was fired.”
“You’re crazy. She was there when I left. You left before me.”
“I went back. You weren’t there when they fired Bozo.”
“What?”
“Twice. Once for a year when I was about ten, another for two months when I was fourteen. That’s when I ran away.”
“You ran away from St. Bonny’s?”
“I had to. What do you want? Me dancing in that orchard?”
“Are you sure about Maggie?”
“Of course I’m sure. You’ve blocked it, Twyla. It happened. Those girls had behavior problems, you know.”
“Didn’t they, though. But why can’t I remember the Maggie thing?”
“Believe me. It happened. And we were there.”
“Who did you room with when you went back?” I asked her as if I would know her. The Maggie thing was troubling me.
“Creeps. They tickled themselves in the night.”
My ears were itching and I wanted to go home suddenly. This was all very well but she couldn’t just comb her hair, wash her face, and pretend everything was hunky-dory. After the Howard Johnson’s snub. And no apology. Nothing.
“Were you on dope or what that time at Howard Johnson’s?” I tried to make my voice sound friendlier than I felt.
“Maybe, a little. I never did drugs much. Why?”
“I don’t know; you acted sort of like you didn’t want to know me then.”
“Oh, Twyla, you know how it was in those days: black-white. You know how everything was.”
But I didn’t know. I thought it was just the opposite. Busloads of blacks and whites came into Howard Johnson’s together. They roamed together then: students, musicians, lovers, protesters. You got to see everything at Howard Johnson’s and blacks were very friendly with whites in those days. But sitting there with nothing on my plate but two hard tomato wedges wondering about the melting Klondikes it seemed childish remembering the slight. We went to her car, and with the help of the driver, got my stuff into my station wagon.
“We’ll keep in touch this time,” she said.
“Sure,” I said. “Sure. Give me a call.”
“I will,” she said, and then just as I was sliding behind the wheel, she leaned into the window. “By the way. Your mother. Did she ever stop dancing?”
I shook my head. “No. Never.”
Roberta nodded.
“And yours? Did she ever get well?”
She smiled a tiny sad smile. “No. She never did. Look, call me, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, but I knew I wouldn’t. Roberta had messed up my past somehow with that business about Maggie. I wouldn’t forget a thing like that. Would I?
* * *
—
Strife came to us that fall. At least that’s what the paper called it. Strife. Racial strife. The word made me think of a bird—a big shrieking bird out of 1,000,000,000 BC. Flapping its wings and cawing. Its eye with no lid always bearing down on you. All day it screeched and at night it slept on the rooftops. It woke you in the morning and from the Today show to the eleven o’clock news it kept you an awful company. I couldn’t figure it out from one day to the next. I knew I was supposed to feel something strong, but I didn’t know what, and James wasn’t any help. Joseph was on the list of kids to be transferred from the junior high school to another one at some far-out-of-the-way place and I thought it was a good thing until I heard it was a bad thing. I mean I didn’t know. All the schools seemed dumps to me, and the fact that one was nicer looking didn’t hold much weight. But the papers were full of it and then the kids began to get jumpy. In August, mind you. Schools weren’t even open yet. I thought Joseph might be frightened to go over there, but he didn’t seem scared so I forgot about it, until I found myself driving along Hudson Street out there by the school they were trying to integrate and saw a line of women marching. And who do you suppose was in line, big as life, holding a sign in front of her bigger than her mother’s cross? MOTHERS HAVE RIGHTS TOO! it said.
I drove on, and then changed my mind. I circled the block, slowed down, and honked my horn.
Roberta looked over and when she saw me she waved. I didn’t wave back, but I didn’t move either. She handed her sign to another woman and came over to where I was parked.
“Hi.”
“What are you doing?”
“Picketing. What’s it look like?”
“What for?”
“What do you mean, ‘What for?’ They want to take my kids and send them out of the neighborhood. They don’t want to go.”
“So what if they go to another school? My boy’s being bussed too, and I don’t mind. Why should you?”
“It’s not about us, Twyla. Me and you. It’s about our kids.”
“What’s more us than that?”
“Well, it is a free country.”
“Not yet, but it will be.”
“What the hell does that mean? I’m not doing anything to you.”
“You really think that?”
“I know it.”
“I wonder what made me think you were different.”
“I wonder what made me think you were different.”
“Look at them,” I said. “Just look. Who do they think they are? Swarming all over the place like they own it. And now they think they can decide where my child goes to school. Look at them, Roberta. They’re Bozos.”
Roberta turned around and looked at the women. Almost all of them were standing still now, waiting. Some were even edging toward us. Roberta looked at me out of some refrigerator behind her eyes. “No, they’re not. They’re just mothers.”
“And what am I? Swiss cheese?”
“I used to curl your hair.”
“I hated your hands in my hair.”
The women were moving. Our faces looked mean to them of course and they looked as though they could not wait to throw themselves in front of a police car, or better yet, into my car and drag me away by my ankles. Now they surrounded my car and gently, gently began to rock it. I swayed back and forth like a sideways yo-yo. Automatically I reached for Roberta, like the old days in the orchard when they saw us watching them and we had to get out of there, and if one of us fell the other pulled her up and if one of us was caught the other stayed to kick and scratch, and neither would leave the other behind. My arm shot out of the car window but no receiving hand was there. Roberta was looking at me sway from side to side in the car and her face was still. My purse slid from the car seat down under the dashboard. The four policemen who had been drinking Tab in their car finally got the message and strolled over, forcing their way through the women. Quietly, firmly they spoke. “Okay, ladies. Back in line or off the streets.”
Some of them went away willingly; others had to be urged away from the car doors and the hood. Roberta didn’t move. She was looking steadily at me. I was fumbling to turn on the ignition, which wouldn’t catch because the gearshift was still in drive. The seats of the car were a mess because the swaying had thrown my grocery coupons all over it and my purse was sprawled on the floor.
“Maybe I am different now, Twyla. But you’re not. You’re the same little state kid who kicked a poor old black lady when she was down on the ground. You kicked a black lady and you have the nerve to call me a bigot.”
The coupons were everywhere and the guts of my purse were bunched under the dashboard. What was she saying? Black? Maggie wasn’t black.
“She wasn’t black,” I said.
“Like hell she wasn’t, and you kicked her. We both did. You kicked a black lady who couldn’t even scream.”
“Liar!”
“You’re the liar! Why don’t you just go on home and leave us alone, huh?”
She turned away and I skidded away from the curb.
* * *
—
The next morning I went into the garage and cut the side out of the carton our portable TV had come in. It wasn’t nearly big enough, but after a while I had a decent sign: red spray-painted letters on a white background: AND SO DO CHILDREN****. I meant just to go down to the school and tack it up somewhere so those cows on the picket line across the street could see it, but when I got there, some ten or so others had already assembled protesting the cows across the street. Police permits and everything. I got in line and we strutted in time on our side while Roberta’s group strutted on theirs. That first day we were all dignified, pretending the other side didn’t exist. The second day there was name calling and finger gestures. But that was about all. People changed signs from time to time, but Roberta never did and neither did I. Actually my sign didn’t make sense without Roberta’s. “And so do children what?” one of the women on my side asked me. “Have rights,” I said, as though it was obvious.
Roberta didn’t acknowledge my presence in any way and I got to thinking maybe she didn’t know I was there. I began to pace myself in the line, jostling people one minute and lagging behind the next, so Roberta and I could reach the end of our respective lines at the same time and there would be a moment in our turn when we would face each other. Still, I couldn’t tell whether she saw me and knew my sign was for her. The next day I went early before we were scheduled to assemble. I waited until she got there before I exposed my new creation. As soon as she hoisted her MOTHERS HAVE RIGHTS TOO! I began to wave my new one, which said, HOW WOULD YOU KNOW? I know she saw that one, but I had gotten addicted now. My signs got crazier each day, and the women on my side decided that I was a kook. They couldn’t make heads or tails out of my brilliant screaming posters.
I brought a painted sign in queenly red with huge black letters that said, IS YOUR MOTHER WELL? Roberta took her lunch break and didn’t come back for the rest of the day or any day after. Two days later I stopped going too and couldn’t have been missed because nobody understood my signs anyway.
It was a nasty six weeks. Classes were suspended and Joseph didn’t go to anybody’s school until October. The children—everybody’s children—soon got bored with that extended vacation they thought was going to be so great. They looked at TV until their eyes flattened. I spent a couple of mornings tutoring my son, as the other mothers said we should. Twice I opened a text from last year that he had never turned in. Twice he yawned in my face. Other mothers organized living room sessions so the kids would keep up. None of the kids could concentrate so they drifted back to The Price Is Right and The Brady Bunch. When the school finally opened there were fights once or twice and some sirens roared through the streets every once in a while. There were a lot of photographers from Albany. And just when ABC was about to send up a news crew, the kids settled down like nothing in the world had happened. Joseph hung my HOW WOULD YOU KNOW? sign in his bedroom. I don’t know what became of AND SO DO CHILDREN****. I think my father-in-law cleaned some fish on it. He was always puttering around in our garage. Each of his five children lived in Newburgh and he acted as though he had five extra homes.
I couldn’t help looking for Roberta when Joseph graduated from high school, but I didn’t see her. It didn’t trouble me much what she had said to me in the car. I mean the kicking part. I know I didn’t do that, I couldn’t do that. But I was puzzled by her telling me Maggie was black. When I thought about it I actually couldn’t be certain. She wasn’t pitch-black, I knew, or I would have remembered that. What I remember was the kiddie hat, and the semicircle legs. I tried to reassure myself about the race thing for a long time until it dawned on me that the truth was already there, and Roberta knew it. I didn’t kick her; I didn’t join in with the gar girls and kick that lady, but I sure did want to. We watched and never tried to help her and never called for help. Maggie was my dancing mother. Deaf, I thought, and dumb. Nobody inside. Nobody who would hear you if you cried in the night. Nobody who could tell you anything important that you could use. Rocking, dancing, swaying as she walked. And when the gar girls pushed her down, and started roughhousing, I knew she wouldn’t scream, couldn’t—just like me and I was glad about that.
We decided not to have a tree, because Christmas would be at my mother-in-law’s house, so why have a tree at both places? Joseph was at SUNY New Paltz and we had to economize, we said. But at the last minute, I changed my mind. Nothing could be that bad. So I rushed around town looking for a tree, something small but wide. By the time I found a place, it was snowing and very late. I dawdled like it was the most important purchase in the world and the tree man was fed up with me. Finally I chose one and had it tied onto the trunk of the car. I drove away slowly because the sand trucks were not out yet and the streets could be murder at the beginning of a snowfall. Downtown the streets were wide and rather empty except for a cluster of people coming out of the Newburgh Hotel. The one hotel in town that wasn’t built out of cardboard and Plexiglas. A party, probably. The men huddled in the snow were dressed in tails and the women had on furs. Shiny things glittered from underneath their coats. It made me tired to look at them. Tired, tired, tired. On the next corner was a small diner with loops and loops of paper bells in the window. I stopped the car and went in. Just for a cup of coffee and twenty minutes of peace before I went home and tried to finish everything before Christmas Eve.
“Twyla?”
There she was. In a silvery evening gown and dark fur coat. A man and another woman were with her, the man fumbling for change to put in the cigarette machine. The woman was humming and tapping on the counter with her fingernails. They all looked a little bit drunk.
“Well. It’s you.”
“How are you?”
I shrugged. “Pretty good. Frazzled. Christmas and all.”
“Regular?” called the woman from the counter.
“Fine,” Roberta called back and then, “Wait for me in the car.”
She slipped into the booth beside me. “I have to tell you something, Twyla. I made up my mind if I ever saw you again, I’d tell you.”
“I’d just as soon not hear anything, Roberta. It doesn’t matter now, anyway.”
“No,” she said. “Not about that.”
“Don’t be long,” said the woman. She carried two regulars to go and the man peeled his cigarette pack as they left.
“It’s about St. Bonny’s and Maggie.”
“Oh, please.”
“Listen to me. I really did think she was black. I didn’t make that up. I really thought so. But now I can’t be sure. I just remember her as old, so old. And because she couldn’t talk—well, you know, I thought she was crazy. She’d been brought up in an institution like my mother was and like I thought I would be too. And you were right. We didn’t kick her. It was the gar girls. Only them. But, well, I wanted to. I really wanted them to hurt her. I said we did it, too. You and me, but that’s not true. And I don’t want you to carry that around. It was just that I wanted to do it so bad that day—wanting to is doing it.”
