Shifting Through Neutral Read online

  I stumbled a little and quickly slipped out of my pedal pushers and tank top, nervously scurrying into the new clothes. The sound of her young, exuberant voice, a new sound in the house, made me giddy, so giddy that I lost my balance trying to direct one foot into the hot pants while standing on the other. When I fell, Kimmie’s laughter tumbled over me, warm and reassuring, like fresh towels straight from the dryer.

  I modeled for her, turning around and around in my pure-cotton outfit, which I knew would never be found in a Penney’s catalog. Kimmie nodded her approval, and I ached with joy.

  “Hey, how nosy are the neighbors around here?” she asked, slipping out of her sundress into a fresh pair of hip huggers.

  “We don’t really know our neighbors,” I said.

  Kimmie cut her dancing eyes at me. “You don’t? That’s weird. I knew all our neighbors when I lived here. Same thing in Louisiana with Papa. Everybody knows everybody down there.”

  “Did your papa live here before?” I asked, imagining Daddy kicking him out, pushing him down the back porch steps perhaps.

  Kimmie laughed. “No. That was…let’s just say that was impossible at the time. Besides, he would never live in this house.” Kimmie ran her hand along the bedroom wall. It needed fresh paint. “Papa’s got his own taste. Contemporary, he calls it. You should see our house. It’s split-level with a patio and sliding glass doors and a sunken living room. Papa had it built. Very Brady Bunch.”

  I changed the subject back to our neighbors. “I forgot, there is Mean Mr. Green,” I offered, not wanting her to think we were that weird, not when she’d just gotten here. She might leave again.

  “Oh, I remember him! Lives in that two-family across the street, sits on his upstairs porch all the time, watches everything and everybody?”

  I nodded. “His house burned down, but they rebuilt it.”

  “I definitely didn’t like him. Is he still nosy as sin?”

  “Yes!” I offered, relishing the chance to connect my life to Kimmie’s again. “He told on me once when I ran across the street by myself.”

  “Oh yeah? I hate a tattletale.” She paused, thinking. “Guess we’ll just have to sit on the back porch, where his greedy little eyes can’t see us, won’t we?”

  Kimmie grabbed my hand and led me down the stairs, through the hall, and out the kitchen door. She plopped down on the back steps and pulled a cigarette out of the breast pocket of her midriff top, slipped two fingers down the slit of her hip huggers, produced a book of matches, and lit up, all in one grown-up motion. “This is our little secret, okay?” she said. “Papa hates smoking inside the house.”

  “I don’t think Mama will mind,” I said. “She smokes.”

  Kimmie puffed. “Yeah, but just the same let’s keep this to ourselves, Rae Rae.”

  I sat on the bottom step and studied Kimmie’s face. I noticed the way her cheeks sucked in each time she inhaled and the way she closed her eyes, tilted her head back, exhaled. Our next-door neighbor had just cut his lawn, and that fresh, grassy scent beneath my nose was so promising of a golden summer unfolding, that I reached out and touched Kimmie’s cheek just to be sure she was really part of it.

  “Hey, watch this,” she said, pushing her mouth into an O shape. Suddenly, little oval smoke rings glided from between her lips. They were so perfect I grasped at one. It disappeared in my hand.

  She smashed her cigarette out with her sandal, picked it up, flicked it across the neighbor’s fence, and turned to me. “How about we go for a ride on that new bike of yours?”

  The thought of Daddy alone in the den popped into my head. This was the beginning of a crushing sense of divided loyalties that I would suffer with that entire summer. But Kimmie grabbed my hand and led me back through the house to the living room, where my new bike was waiting, kickstand erect. We eased the bike out the front door (“Leave the door unlocked ’cause I don’t have a key yet,” she said), and together we carried it down the porch. Kimmie let me ride with her on the banana seat, and we took off. She immediately left the sidewalk and glided into the street as I leaned back against her chest. Pink and purple streamers hanging on the ends of the handlebars fluttered in the breeze as we rode down Birchcrest, over to Margarita. “God, it’s all coming back to me now,” said Kimmie as we flew by houses with dense green lawns and curvy walkways. The sky was like a blue-white sheet stretched out to dry. “I had a lot of fun back then,” she announced.

  “Are you having fun now?” I asked as we turned onto Curtis, my bearings deliriously lost.

  “You betcha by golly wow I am.” Her breath tickled my ear. She stopped peddling, and we glided downhill, thanks to a big dip in the street. We coasted, passing by Greenlawn, Northlawn, Roselawn, Cherrylawn, completely silent and close. Maybe we can just keep riding, I thought. Send Daddy and Mama postcards from the road.

  Just as we reached the main intersection at Wyoming, we saw Terrance Golightly riding toward us on a grown-up bike. He was pedaling so hard uphill that the bike swayed low to each side, pedals scraping the pavement.

  “Heyyyy, Rae of Sun!!!” he yelled as he passed by us.

  “You know him?” Kimmie asked.

  I nodded. “That’s just a boy at my school.”

  “He likes you,” she said. “I can tell.”

  “How can you tell?” I asked, puppy love for Terrance heating my face.

  “Has he tried to hit you yet?”

  “He tripped me once. And another time, he pushed me.”

  “I knew it.” Kimmie turned down a side street, her words snatched by the wind before returning to me in a gush. “Boys and their love taps.”

  As I held on tighter to Kimmie’s waist, I assumed that was a good thing—love taps. Much later, with my boyfriend Derek, I endured pushes, slaps, and assorted abuses because I thought that was what togetherness wrought—love taps run amuck.

  Daddy’s feet were clean. He’d just washed them the day before entering the hospital. They were smooth and soft and now, all for naught. I hated the waste.

  How many times had I watched his foot-washing ritual? Watched him spread newspapers all around the den floor, plunge his feet one at a time into a mop bucket of soapy water, let the roughness soak away. “I say, I say, my brothers and sisters, cleanliness of feet is next to Godliness,” he used to joke as he brandished a razor between deft fingers, about to attack the crusty white skin on his heels. “What did Jesus do when he had free time? Washed the feet of his disciples. Say Amen!” He scraped and sliced, and I watched enthralled, as the peelings fell like petals onto the paper. Once done, he slathered on Johnson & Johnson’s green-colored foot cream, the smell of menthol dominating the tiny den.

  Now, I regretted that I could not lift my father’s lifeless body, roll him over, and wash his beautiful broad back. I ached to see it one more time. Instead, I massaged each clean foot for good measure.

  Once I had asked him to scrape my feet too. He chuckled. “Feel this,” he said, holding up the sole of his foot. I did. It was rugged, the skin cracked and split in places, worn slick in others. “Now feel the bottom of yours,” he said. It was pink and supple. “That’s the difference between a girl and a man,” he said. “Dead skin.” He smiled his thin-lipped smile. “You remember that when you get into a hurry to be grown.”

  The only thing I was in a hurry to do was drive. Years later, on my fifteenth birthday, I enrolled in a driver’s education course. An interminable waiting period with a learner’s permit followed, and then I finally got my license. “This won’t be long,” I told Daddy when we pulled up in front of the license bureau. “I’m going to fly through the road test!” And I did. Afterward, I was so excited, so anxious to legally drive home, I bumped right into a boy. We apologized in unison. Feeling independent with a temporary license in hand, I gave him my number. Back outside, I found Daddy waiting. He looked at me, smiled, and handed me the car keys.

  The boy, Derek, spotted us as he was leaving the building with his father, and he wink
ed at me. By the time my permanent license arrived, Derek and I were no longer virgins. His father, an executive at the GM Proving Ground, had given him an ocean green Pontiac Sunbird as a birthday present, and in the tiny, leather-upholstered backseat of that absurd little car we had sex. As awkward and cramped as it was, we prevailed.

  Many things led to the end of Derek and me, but none so disturbing as what I once witnessed him do to that car. We were returning from Cedar Point Amusement Park in Sandusky, Ohio, when the poorly made Sunbird overheated. We pulled over, and Derek walked the mile or so to a gas station, gripping a tin can upon his return. He lifted the hood of his car and leaned under as though he knew what he was doing. I watched him closely. He poured the motor oil into the antifreeze spout.

  A year later, for my road trip west, I had Mr. Alfred do a complete tune-up. I didn’t want to take any chances that some ignorant soul at a fly-by-night service station might pour the wrong liquid down the wrong hole of my sensuous new car.

  On our first bicycle ride together, Kimmie and I rode and rode until the streetlights popped on. That seemed to trigger our appetites.

  “Hungry?” Kimmie asked.

  “I’m starving,” I said, just realizing it.

  “Me too.”

  We picked up speed, and everything Kimmie had pointed out to me got revisited in a blur: houses where her elementary school classmates lived, the candy store where she bought Tootsie Rolls and Mary Janes after school every day, and the alley where a boy first kissed her.

  As we eased the bike back into the house, it was eerily quiet. I knew it was nearly time for Daddy’s Pepsi and Stanback, his cool compress. But I wasn’t ready to leave Kimmie and didn’t know how to do both—stay with Kimmie and attend to Daddy. I headed upstairs with her.

  “Let me take a quick shower, and then we can fix ourselves some dinner, okay?” said Kimmie.

  I nodded, right at her heels as she entered the bathroom, watching as she peeled out of her clothes. Her yellow panties said “Saturday.” Her bra was like a bikini top, bursting with colors all swished together. I could see now that she was tanned, that the skin beneath her underwear was creamier, like custard.

  “Want to take a shower with me?” she asked. “It’ll be quicker.”

  “I don’t know how to use the shower,” I admitted.

  “Really?” She ran the bathwater, tested the temperature, turned the middle nozzle. Shower water sprayed into the tub like a burst of good news.

  “Daddy always has me take baths.”

  “I love showers,” said Kimmie, slipping out of her weekend panties and psychedelic bra. I bit my lip because I’d never seen a big girl’s body before—not even Mama’s. Kimmie had breasts shaped like scoops of butterscotch ice cream and a patch of hair in her triangle where mine was smooth. I couldn’t stop looking at her, even though something about it felt dangerous.

  “What are you waiting for?” she said. “Take your clothes off.”

  “I can’t.” I pictured myself in the shower, water hitting my hair, wetting it. I imagined how wild and tangled it would be once it dried and the mess it would be in for days and days before Miss Queenie came around to comb it out. Mama never combed my hair. “I can’t deal with her crying,” she’d say to Miss Queenie, handing over the wire-bristled brush. “It’s too much on my nerves.” I didn’t want Kimmie to see me like that, wild haired and compromised. I wanted her to adore me as she had when I was four and she couldn’t bear to leave me.

  “What’s wrong, Rae Rae?”

  “My hair.” I covered it with my hands.

  “Oh, I know what to do about that. Come on, get in.”

  I stripped and stepped into the tub. Kimmie maneuvered me behind her so the water hit her first, soaped her body, rinsed, handed me the huge pink bar of Lifebuoy. I lathered my flat body, and then Kimmie guided me in front of the showerhead so the spray missed my hair entirely. The water felt like a thousand little kisses.

  When we stepped out of the tub, I ran to the linen closet and grabbed two big towels. We rubbed ourselves dry. I’d never felt so clean. Or grown-up. We dressed quickly. Kimmie changed into cut-off jeans and a gauzy Made in India shirt, but I wanted to put back on my new hot pants and halter-top. “They’re not dirty yet,” I explained.

  “Okay, Rae Rae. Hurry up. I’m starving!”

  We agreed on grilled cheese sandwiches. After I pulled out the skillet, the butter, the Velveeta cheese, and the Wonder bread, Kimmie took over.

  “The key is to let them cook nice and slow,” she said. “So the cheese really melts.”

  When they were ready, we ate our sandwiches with tall glasses of cherry Kool-Aid on ice. I didn’t think about Daddy.

  Later we sat cross-legged on the beige carpet, our knees touching. Kimmie held the cards in the palm of her hand, her eyes closed. After several seconds, she looked at me. “I was exchanging energy with the cards,” she said, holding the deck out. These cards were nothing like the ones Mama and I used to play Tunk. They were more frightening, with their beautiful medieval images, dramatic size, and power to tell the future. They reminded me of the gypsy booth I’d been drawn to at the Michigan State Fair, and I knew these cards were the kind of thing you keep hidden in your top drawer, beneath your panties.

  “Okay, cut with your left hand,” said Kimmie. I picked up half the deck and placed it on the carpet, and she placed the other half on top. “Okay, think carefully about what you want to know,” she said. “You get three questions. Remember, the question has to be one where the answer is just yes or no.” Her hand rested on the deck.

  I didn’t have to think about the first question. “Will you be staying this time?” I asked.

  Kimmie looked up at me, her fingers frozen on the top card. “That’s your question?”

  I nodded.

  “Oh, Rae Rae, you don’t need the cards to tell you that one. I can tell you, I’ll be here for the whole summer.”

  “And then what?” Suddenly, I heard the jingle of a key in the front door and I jumped up, as though I’d been caught at something.

  “Hey, relax,” said Kimmie, just as Mama stepped into the living room, her red lipstick brighter than when she left.

  “What are you two up to?” she asked, tossing her purse on the landing of the steps. She plopped down on the floor between us in her wrinkled white linen pants, crossed her legs, and waited, the way Markita Stoddart always waited to be let into a game of jacks on the school playground. Patiently, with her chin in her hands. She smelled like her signature scent mixed with the outside world. Her eyes shone. “Hmmmm, tarot cards! I haven’t seen these in years,” she said. “Since the last time I was in New Orleans.”

  She and Kimmie used to go there often to see Cyril, back when Kimmie was a little girl and Mama an unwed but cunning mother with a wedding band on her finger and a modest bank account. She spent too much of the money her adopted mother had bequeathed her on those trips, on illicit nights of drink and jazz in Bourbon Street clubs with Cyril at her side and Kimmie alone at the inn, where she always got her own room. Having dropped out of college, Mama used those trips as her advanced education—those secretive visits where the biggest thing she learned was not what she found in the French Quarter but how to take your love for a man and pull it out of your pocketbook, express it, fold it away for long stretches, take it out again, express it. Wait for the next time.

  “Have fun?” asked Kimmie.

  Mama gave her a demure smile. “Your papa says he’ll call to let you know he arrived okay.”

  “Good.” Kimmie nodded in my direction. “Go ahead. Ask your next question.”

  “Yeah, Rae, ask your question,” said Mama. “And after you, I’ll go.”

  I just blurted it out. “Why were you gone so long, Kimmie?” Now that she was back, it felt cruel to have been without her for five whole years.

  “That’s not a question that can be answered by a yes or no,” said Kimmie. “Remember what I told you?”

  �
�Because it wasn’t the right time,” said Mama. “And now it is.”

  “Yeah.” Kimmie laughed nervously. “Now that I’m grown.”

  “Not yet, you’re not,” said Mama, defiant. “It wasn’t that long ago, Missy, that I took you downtown to Hudson’s to get your first training bra.”

  Kimmie stuck out her blossoming chest. “Now look at me.”

  “Yes, just look at you,” said Mama, wistfully.

  She’d missed Kimmie all those years. And she wanted to make up for them. She wanted things to be like they had been during their visits to Louisiana—the three of them eating family-style at a touristy spot where candles burned, Mardi Gras beads hung from Kimmie’s little wrist, and Cyril’s wife stayed away.

  Kimmie drummed her fingers lightly atop the deck of cards.

  “You know what I remember most about back then?” she said to Mama, picking up on a conversation the two of them didn’t need to begin, so embedded was it in their delicate past, like gnarled roots of a fragile ficus tree.

  “Hmmm?” said Mama, stifling a yawn.

  “The way you’d let me sleep with you on the nights Papa couldn’t get away.”

  Mama looked up at Kimmie. “Yeah? But you got to sleep with me at home sometimes.”

  “I know, but somehow it was different when we were in New Orleans. It was more special.”

  Mama thought for a moment. “I guess that’s true,” she said. “It was.”

  I knew then that I was the odd one out. Even though I’d had Mama with me in this house for several years, Kimmie was the one who had slipped off with her into the southern nights. Kimmie was everything: love child, prodigal daughter, beautiful progeny. Their complicated, fierce connection was as impenetrable as it was bruised, and even a nine-year-old girl could see that.

  Mama closed her eyes, stretched out across the carpet, and curled up her knees. “So glad you’re back, Sweetie,” she mumbled.