Shifting Through Neutral Read online

  “Daddy?”

  “Sit up for me, okay? Put this napkin between your legs, okay?”

  “What?”

  “Here’s a prescription for pain. Take this instruction sheet and read it over, okay?”

  Look grateful.

  I knew the routine.

  After my father chose to distance himself from me, Mama put Kimmie in charge of my care. In fact, I have no conscious memory of my parents during that time, as I thought Kimmie was my mother. Eight years old at my birth, she was still a child herself, caring for me with gusto and ignorance. My first memories are of playing Go Fish. “Do you have a two?” I’d ask, believing in Kimmie. “Nope, Rae Rae. Gotta go fish,” she’d say. Into the pile of cards splayed across the carpet I’d go, looking for a two. We played and played away the years while Mama waited for her lover to come and whisk her away, us girls in tow. She waited and waited. And then, in 1967—during that summer when the smell of violence permeated our open windows as brown-skinned men with no jobs roamed the streets looking for excuses to release their rage while a heat wave bore down on their better judgments—Mama lost her mind. She couldn’t handle the responsibility of a not-yet-potty-trained child, a restless preteen, an unwanted husband, and a looming race riot. She broke down, and Kimmie was soon sent to live with her father, the very man who wouldn’t come.

  On the day she left, I sat on the carpeted stairs of our house eyeing Kimmie through the banister, my pudgy hands grasping the railings, a jailbird in soiled underpants. She eased her thin arms through the spaces and hugged me, oval travel bag dangling off her shoulder, tears lining her eyes, swirled metal between us. And then my big sister was gone: a cool air hitting my legs, the door closing. Out of the echo of her disappearance, Daddy scooped me into his arms and carried me up the stairs. My face rested against his foreign one, the stubble from his unshaved chin tickling my wet cheek, rough and reassuring, the Temptations singing “You’re My Everything” somewhere outside a window as he gently placed me on my parents’ bed, where I would sleep each night between them as consolation.

  I was told Kimmie had gone to a mysterious place called Louisiana, where she had safe roads to walk and her own papa to care for her. I missed her terribly and didn’t understand why I couldn’t be with her, as she was the only one who fed me affection and love alongside my buttery sweet oatmeal, the only one who shared my secret world of hiding places, and the only one who kept me from being afraid of the dark. I wanted desperately to follow her to Louisiana with its multiple syllables and musical vowels, my body aching for the unknown highways that would get me there.

  Still, I found rich comfort in that brief span of days following her departure, lying between Mama and Daddy in their huge bed, feeling the combined warmth of their bodies as I hung my leg over his thigh, rested my hand on her shoulder. My mother and father, who had been strangers to me, suddenly felt like solid bookends of protection. Not once did I wet the bed during the night. Kimmie’s disappearance had just begun to lose its sting when, curled between my parents dreaming about Captain Kangaroo, I suddenly awakened to a rush of cold air and a strange, outdoor sound; I sat up, found Daddy gone. I climbed out of bed, tiptoed to the open window, and looked down, where I saw Daddy’s silvery new Olds creeping along the street. The driver’s door was open, and a figure was working the steering wheel and walking the car, guiding it forward. When the car reached the corner, I saw Daddy get in, heard him slam the door, turn the motor, and drive off, lightly screeching the tires. I didn’t understand how he got away without awakening me, hadn’t yet realized parents could be sneaky. I turned to look at Mama. She was wide awake, her eyes hardened, her big lips tight. She knew more than I did. “Get back in the bed,” she said.

  I climbed back in, clinging to her, wrestling with the edge of sleep. Again I awakened abruptly—this time to a loud firecracker boom and an orange light ripping the darkness outside my parents’ bedroom window. I sat up. More loud shots. Mama bolted up, grabbed me roughly, and dragged me out of the bed onto the floor, where we crouched beneath the window. “Stay down!” she whispered harshly. “Stay down and don’t move!” I smelled smoke. And then I heard the sound of sirens. Disobeying Mama, I rose on my knees, peeked out the window. The house across the street, Mean Mr. Green’s house, was burning furiously. Cottony gold flames consumed the huge oak tree in front of it, and its thick branches danced like headless puppets in the early-morning sky. Firefighters blasted their water hoses at the house, the tree. I started to cry, certain Daddy was out there escaping and wanting him here, at home—to be the other half of my protection. I had no faith that Mama, whom I barely knew, could handle me without assistance. I grabbed the hem of her nightgown. “Where’s Daddy?” I screamed. “Where’s Daddy?!”

  She must have been as startled by my outburst as she was by the spread of the riot onto our street. “We’re safe inside the house,” she offered, shakiness crouching beneath her words. “Come on, get away from that window.” But I was suddenly hysterical, uncontrollable in my fear that she wasn’t enough. “But where’s Daddy? Where is he?!”

  “Stop screaming, Rae,” she hissed, fumbling with the nightstand lamp until it crashed to the floor. “I can’t take it. Really. You’re working my nerves.”

  Mama grabbed her flowered telephone book, nervously lit a cigarette, and called Mr. Alfred, Daddy’s closest friend, demanding that he tell her where Daddy was “with that fat bitch.”

  She wasn’t fat. She was plump and buxom. When she showed up at Daddy’s funeral, I knew who she was immediately. She sat quietly in the back row. Dressed in a tidy white suit. Beechnut skin radiant beneath a tasteful white hat. Looking like the kind of woman a man should run away with. When she went to view the body, she leaned over Daddy, opened the button of her jacket, pulled a small gardenia out of her bosom, and placed it in the lapel of his white suit. There they were in matching outfits, this flower ritual shared between them from a love life long ago interrupted. I felt we should all turn away from such an intimate moment. And I was oddly proud that the last time she got to see him, Daddy looked good—his mustache trimmed, his taut face smooth and pain-free.

  For two whole days and nights, Mama cared for me with an intense focus she would never again muster up on my behalf. I remember so well those days, how it felt to discover that this woman was my mother, that I was her child. Suddenly, she became important to me, to my survival, and I watched her carefully for signs of escape. If one parent could sneak away, so could another.

  That first day she was right on top of me, saying, “Stay where I can see you” and “Please don’t do anything crazy, okay?” She didn’t really know what kind of little girl I was, having left me in Kimmie’s hands for so long; and now she had to figure out on the spot what I was capable of, what I wasn’t. This while a riot raged somewhere beyond our door and unknown dangers floated overhead like an ominous Goodyear blimp.

  I obeyed Mama, in part because I was an obedient child, and in part because I felt sorry for her. She had to concentrate mightily to stay on top of everything—to feed me and lock the back door and remember where the fire extinguisher was kept. This four-bedroom house was suddenly so big to her. I knew every room and drafty crevice—from attic cubbyhole to basement playroom—as Kimmie and I had explored them thoroughly together. I knew where to hide if the need arose, and I sensed that Mama did not. She seemed lost in her own home. Fueled by empathy, I secretly hid my smelly training pants and went to the toilet on my own for the first time—so as not to give my mother more to worry about.

  That night we watched fed-up black, brown, and yellow men clash with white police as we sat in our nightgowns before the den’s floor-model Magnavox television. Mama kept her arm tightly around me. I was shocked by the shoving and pushing and anger spewing from the screen. “Are they coming after us too?” I asked, terrified of those navy blue uniforms, those billy clubs.

  “Of course not,” said Mama. “Those people there, they have nothing to lose. But we�
��re different. We have this house.” She paused. “You remember that. It’s important to have something you’re not willing to lose.”

  Her words comforted me. That was the only piece of advice my mother ever gave me, and over the years, I clung to that advice, used it as a way of justifying my bouts of selfishness—and as a way of rationalizing hers. No matter where she goes, I told myself, she won’t abandon this house.

  When my grandmother politely died in her sleep after Mama’s eighteenth birthday, she left her adopted daughter with a modest estate garnered from years of number-running and poker-party proceeds: a family home and rental property. Three duplexes peppered around the city’s neighborhoods closest to the Detroit River and the Canadian border. Mama didn’t want to live on that side of town, where tough memories taunted her like those half brothers and half sisters she was running from, and she couldn’t wait to sell the house in which she’d grown up. With the proceeds, she purchased a spacious colonial brick in an upscale neighborhood on the west side, where white flight had left behind lovely homes of doctors and lawyers and businessmen who with their families had soared across Eight Mile Road to untainted suburban retreats. A house of solid structure with leaded-glass windows, stucco walls, high ceilings, and a big backyard. A house that would endure. Here she was, not even twenty, my mother, handling the intricacies of post-death financial details. An inheritance. Selling property. Buying a home. It’s no wonder that she soon had a baby. A real house conjures up the need to fill it with a real family.

  She kept the house ablaze with light and played the hi-fi even as the television blared. “I want them to know there’s life going on in here,” she said, the Motown Sound commingling with Walter Cronkite’s stern voice as we crawled on our hands and knees from room to room, below the windows and out of the range of errant bullets. I felt a skewed mixture of excitement and fear at the prospect of facing danger with my mother nearby. That first night as we prepared to climb into bed together, I confessed, uncertain what my bladder might do under the excitable circumstances. “Kimmie usually has me wear a blanket to bed,” I admitted.

  “What?” Mama didn’t immediately understand, but when she saw the receiving blanket and giant diaper pins that had been my nightly attire, she looked devastated. In that moment, I am sure she saw the depth of her own depression and its swirling offshoots—neglect and denial. “Tonight will be the last time you’ll need this, okay?” she whispered. I nodded, suddenly aware that I loved this woman.

  On day two, Mama swiftly potty-trained me. “When you feel that urge, you run to the bathroom, okay?” Things were eerily quiet, the streets deserted apart from remnants of ash and smoke clinging to the air. Mr. Green’s house across the street was a blackened carcass of itself. I was inexplicably happy. “Mama’s going to let the water run in the sink to help you pee-pee,” she told me. By mid-afternoon, men atop huge armored tanks, guns drawn, rolled down our street, yelling orders from megaphones. “Stay inside. Do not come out. This is the National Guard! Obey the curfew. You are forbidden to leave your homes.” Even with the doors and windows closed, their voices penetrated, creating a fear that crept up on me. I crawled into Mama’s slender arms.

  “They see we’re cooperating, they’ll leave,” she said. “All we have to do is cooperate. And stay down.”

  Her assurances kept me calm, but it turns out, she was beside herself with panic. Not over the riots, rather over the prospect of single motherhood. There’d been several near misses with her and Kimmie in those five years before Daddy appeared in her life. Times when she forgot to pick up Kimmie from school, lost her at the supermarket, dropped her off at the wrong corner. She never liked shouldering obligation single-handedly. It made her desperate. But she knew how to hide it. Mostly.

  “Where’s Daddy?” I finally asked, envisioning a tank rolling away with him inside as we sat cross-legged on the kitchen linoleum, me eating Cheerios out of the box, Mama sipping instant coffee. I assumed he had left to join the effort, like a man off to war, and my question was now born of curiosity rather than concern. I felt safe.

  “He’s gone,” said Mama. She gripped the cup tightly with both hands. “And we’re here.”

  I nodded, trusting my mother. Just an hour before, she had gotten Daddy on the phone and pushed against her pride, begging him to come back. She had offered a proposition: Help me raise our daughter. Let’s give her two parents. Every child deserves that. And then once she’s older and can handle things, you and I can go our separate ways. He said he didn’t see how he could do that. Not now. There was someone else to consider. Please, she begged. She’s your daughter, JD. She is. She’s yours.

  What Mama did next as we sat together in the kitchen was what she’d come to do throughout the overwhelming moments of her life. After her breakdown three weeks before, she’d been prescribed an onslaught of Valium to be taken as needed. This was the first time I saw her take one. And I suppose she did it as much for me as for herself.

  “What’s that?” I asked when she popped it into her mouth.

  “A vitamin,” she said.

  “What’s it for?”

  She took a sip of coffee. “My nerves,” she said. “They’re bad.”

  “Does it make them good?” I asked.

  Mama smiled. “Makes them behave.”

  “Then you’re happy?”

  She thought for a moment. “I will be in about five minutes.”

  And she was. Like magic, she changed. She became calmer, less paranoid. She let me play outside of her purview in the backyard on the swing set. Out there alone, I pumped and pumped, swinging higher and higher, trying to kick the sky. When I let go, the momentum propelled me through the air until I landed hard on the itchy grass. I was bruised and happy.

  In the evening after a TV dinner, I was right behind Mama as she crawled to the living room and flipped through the handful of albums stacked inside the hi-fi cabinet. She selected one by Little Stevie Wonder, sitting back on her heels as she dropped the LP onto the turntable. His earnest, high voice tumbled out of the built-in speakers, singing earnestly to a friend that the answer was blowing in the wind. Mama hugged herself as she hummed along, still on her knees.

  It was the saddest song I’d ever heard, and I wanted it to stop.

  “Mama?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Will you play Go Fish with me?” I was suddenly missing Kimmie, not because this new life with Mama didn’t satisfy, but because it did and I wanted to blend something into it from my life with Kimmie, to enrich and confirm it. She’d only been gone for days, but that was already a different time.

  Mama shook her head. “I’ll do you one better. Crawl upstairs and get my pocketbook. And come right back.”

  Mama lay on the carpet beside the stereo, her limbs stretched out, ear close to the speaker. She dug through her purse, pulling out a deck of cards and her cigarette case. “I’m going to teach you how to play Tunk,” she said as she placed a cigarette between her lips. “It’s easy.” She shuffled the deck, creating an elaborate waterfall in her cupped hands. It was so lovely, the flutter and blur of the cards, their uniformity, like tiny birds’ wings in motion. Little Stevie’s harmonica electrified the room. It was one of those childhood moments that stay with you forever: the flash of the cards, the drift of the smoke, the beat of the song. I remember how lucky I felt to be there, arched across the carpet on my elbows, so close to Mama I could smell her smoky breath.

  Playing cards, it turned out, was another kind of nerve pill for my mother. As was listening to Stevie Wonder’s music. And smoking Kool menthols. And humming. After she left me, whenever I was missing her mightily, wanting to invoke her presence, I relied on music, cards, and cigarettes.

  “The object is to be the first to have the smallest numbers in your hand,” she said, dealing us each a pile of five cards. “You draw from this deck, throw away high cards, keep the low ones. Work fast.” Luckily, I could already count to thirty. Mama peeked at each card before she p
ulled it from the deck. We played five times before I got the hang of it, before I could settle the anxiousness that welled up in me, my palms sweaty as I rushed to draw low cards before Mama did. Finally, by the sixth hand, I too was taking solace in the slick stiffness of the cards, the repetition of their red and black colors and finite numbers. Time flew.

  “I wish he was my son,” Mama said suddenly, nodding toward the hi-fi.

  “Little Stevie Wonder?” I asked. Still at the age where famous people on television and on records lived inside the electronic box their image or voice came out of, I hadn’t imagined them with mothers.

  Mama smiled, drew her next card, tossed off a queen of spades. “His mother lives right on Cherrylawn. Now there’s a lucky woman! She travels. To all kinds of places—Las Vegas and California and Hawaii.” I didn’t know these places, but the way Mama spoke of them made me certain they were all a stretch of highway away, near Louisiana. “Motown folks live all around here,” she went on, pride in her voice. “Up the street, around the corner, in those big, fine houses along Palmer Woods.” She paused. “But some are starting to move away. Go places.”

  The National Guard rolled off of our block, their megaphone-loud voices growing fainter. Mama drew a new card, tossed it off.

  “Tunk,” I said, laying down my hand. I’d quietly added it up with my fingers and toes, and it totaled nineteen. I thought that was pretty hard to beat, and I was proud of myself.