Shifting Through Neutral Read online

“Me too,” whispered Kimmie.

  Then Mama fell asleep.

  Kimmie placed her tarot cards back into the little velvet pouch they’d come out of.

  I grabbed at her hands. “But what about my future? My other question?”

  “We’ll do it another day, Rae Rae,” she said. “I promise.” She looked at Mama, full of sympathy. “She’s so thin. Has she been doing all right?”

  I had no idea how to answer that question. “She stays in her room a lot,” I said, shrugging.

  Kimmie looked at me. “Doing what?”

  “I don’t know.” I was getting nervous, feeling as though I’d been a bad daughter for not paying better attention to our mother, not watching her closely enough for signs of breakage. “She listens to Little Stevie Wonder a lot.”

  Kimmie laughed, that sparkling giggle that I’d already come to crave like cream-filled cupcakes.

  “Well, that’s a promising sign! She’s still got good taste in music.” She looked over at Mama, the furrow gone from her brow, love bouncing off her face. “Should we leave her here to sleep?”

  “Well, she never sleeps downstairs.”

  “Oh. I guess not.” Kimmie shrugged. “Okay, then help me get her up.”

  We nudged Mama so she could at least walk with our help—me holding one arm, Kimmie the other—as we led her up the stairs. I thought I heard Daddy’s footsteps below, but I couldn’t be sure. We got Mama to her room; Kimmie slipped shoes off her feet, eased legs onto the bed, and guided her to lie down. That done, Kimmie stepped back, brushed her hands together. “There. She can get undressed if she wakes up.” She sighed, a heavy sigh. “I think I overdid it today, what with the drive up here and that bike ride and all.” She looked over at Mama. “It’s been a long time coming, today. And it’s been a long day.”

  I followed Kimmie’s gaze and watched as Mama coiled into a ball, easing her hands under her cheek, a bit of a smile on her face. As I turned to leave, I noticed too that the twin bottles of pills were gone from her nightstand, no longer standing guard. We stepped into the hallway, and Kimmie walked to her room—her room!—waved at me, then closed the door. I stood staring at her bedroom door. And then fast as I could, I ran downstairs to the den.

  Despite myself, I was mad at Daddy. I hadn’t seen him all day, and I couldn’t believe he’d slept through everything. It was strange for him to sleep during the day. That was Mama’s thing. I pretended I was mad at him for missing my birthday, but it was really for being too fat to wear blue jeans and a plaid shirt, for having headaches that kept him from driving the highways from North to South and back. I wished that I could join Kimmie upstairs in her room and spend the night with her. But I felt too guilty just thinking about it, and so I reluctantly entered the den.

  He was sitting upright, one arm lying nonchalantly across the back of the sofa. On the radio, Bill Withers sang for somebody to lean on. Daddy wore one of Mama’s old nylon stockings stretched across his forehead, tied tightly as he often did to fight back the migraine. He looked like a has-been pirate. I regretted that I hadn’t brought a cool washcloth with me.

  “You have fun out there, Brown Eyes?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Nice being with your sister again, I bet.”

  I nodded. “She gave me this outfit for my birthday.” I paused. “Thanks for the bike, Daddy.”

  He smiled. “You like it?”

  “I love it! Kimmie and I went riding on it and…”

  “I got you something else, too.” He pointed his head in the direction of the little end table, where a cake sat waiting for me. Not just any cake, but a bustlike replica of my own face, with black icing for my hair and brown icing for my skin.

  “Wowww!” I said, dazzled by the odd beauty of the cake, its strong resemblance to me. Beside it sat a small carton of ice cream that had begun to melt.

  “You’ll never guess the name of that ice cream,” said Daddy. “Rae’s Sunshine Swirl.” He winked at me. “How ’bout that? Rae’s Sunshine Swirl.”

  Daddy cut a piece of cake, slicing right through a section of the face and hair to the chocolate beneath, then scooped out a hunk of the ice cream; he served it to me on a little party plate, then set me on his lap; I dipped my finger into the brown and black icing and licked it away. Nothing had ever been so yummy.

  “Me and your mama are getting a divorce,” said Daddy, just as I’d put a tiny piece of cake into my mouth. “You know what that word means, divorce?’”

  I struggled to swallow and shook my head no. I’d never heard that one in Miss Wheeler’s third-grade class. It sounded sharp and dangerous.

  “It means your mama and me won’t be married anymore,” he said. “And I’ll be gettin’ up out of here.”

  This news made me cry. I wanted to ask if the divorce was because of Kimmie’s arrival, but I didn’t. He said nothing more, just rocked me in his arms as I thought about my new, banana-seated bicycle and wondered, would I get to take it with me when Daddy and I left? In silence, Daddy scooped the melting ice cream and fed me, the taste of salt from my tears mixing with the caramel sweetness of Rae’s Sunshine Swirl.

  In the early days of Kimmie’s return, a shot of normalcy injected itself into our familial vein: Kimmie, Mama, and me together in the breakfast nook each morning, eating toast and scrambled eggs served on yellow floral-patterned china rescued from the attic. We clinked our silverware against our plates and asked each other to pass the butter and the jelly and moved through the motions of a small family used to this daily ritual, rather than what we were: a mother with two daughters who’d been kept apart for years. I’d asked Daddy to join us, thinking maybe his presence at the table would change his mind about the divorce. I didn’t want to leave, certainly not now when I only had Kimmie for the summer. Detroit summers never lasted as long as its winters.

  “I ain’t never been much for eating first thing in the morning. You know that, Brown Eyes,” Daddy offered as an excuse. “All I need is a piece of bread to put a little something on my stomach before I take my Stanback.”

  One evening Kimmie walked in on us as Daddy and I were watching The Flip Wilson Show. It was the best part of the show—when the comedian swished across the room in a psychedelic pink and purple dress and high heels, saying, “What you see is what you get, sucker!” Daddy and I loved when he played Geraldine, and Kimmie caught us both in mid-laughter.

  “Hey, Daddy Joe,” she said.

  “Hey there, young lady.” Daddy wiped a tear from his eye with a knuckle. “Look at you, all grown up.”

  She came closer, leaned over, politely kissed him on the cheek.

  “Glad to be back?” asked Daddy.

  “Yeah, I am.” Kimmie paused. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Why would I mind?”

  She laughed nervously. “I know I caused you some grief back in the day.”

  He shook his head. “Nah. Grief was already up in this house. You just caused us to deal with it.”

  Kimmie nodded. “Well,” she said, looking around the den, “things are different, aren’t they?”

  “You been gone a long time.”

  “But I remember it all like it was yesterday.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. I remember you always dashing out of the house with that hat you wore everywhere, jumping into your cool blue Mustang, zooming down the street. You always had somewhere to go.”

  Daddy chuckled. “That car was more trouble than it was worth. Couldn’t drive it to work. If I’d a pulled up to the gates of GM’s plant in a Ford, they woulda directed me to the nearest unemployment office.” He shook his head, tickled by his own gall.

  Kimmie shifted her weight, looked at him. “It’s good to see you, Daddy Joe.”

  He winked at her. “You too, Kimmie. You too.”

  “You had a Mustang?” I asked as she backed out of the room.

  “In another life,” said Daddy, whose attention had already returned to the tail end of Flip Wilso
n’s Geraldine skit.

  For the next few weeks, Kimmie and Daddy formed a comfortable reacquaintance. Sometimes she would run into him in the kitchen, and they’d banter easily with each other, talking about old times. She remembered all sorts of fun things about him unbeknownst to me—that he could sing and dance and tell dirty jokes. I couldn’t get used to this phenomenon, the realization that Kimmie knew Daddy before I did, that he was her father before she went to live with her real one. I envied their history.

  Mama started cooking dinner, venturing into the kitchen every evening with Kimmie’s help. Together they fried things—egg-plant, catfish, green tomatoes, cornbread. Kimmie showed Mama how to make various types of batter with egg or cornmeal or breadcrumb or some combination of the three. As it turned out, Cyril was a good cook, and Kimmie had learned this one culinary trick from him.

  And so there they were, Kimmie and Mama, leaning into each other’s ear, laughing at jokes that all began with “Remember when…” Other times, they were together in the living room, Mama between Kimmie’s legs as Kimmie bent over her, scratching the dandruff from her scalp. I’d get close enough to see the dirty white flakes land on Kimmie’s golden arm, the sight making my mouth water as I longed for dandruff of my own.

  “Shhh,” Mama said once as she saw me peeking around the den corner. “Little pitchers have big ears.” They stopped talking until I left the living room, treating me like a spy. In truth, Mama was afraid I’d tell her business to Daddy, ruin her plan. That was when I began to understand the equation: Kimmie was for Mama, Daddy for me. No intersection. And so I accepted the pairing off and waited for those occasions when Mama and Daddy were distracted and Kimmie and I could sneak away and be together.

  Meanwhile, Mama put her heart into the kitchen—practicing for the soon-to-be single Cyril?—the way a new wife aims to prove herself worthy of the role. Never mind the rest of the house. She didn’t plant flowers or dust tables. She simply cooked. And she was rusty—burned the chicken sometimes, put too much Lawry’s seasoning salt on everything, left her cigarette burning on the Formica counter until it fell and singed the linoleum.

  As my mother and sister forged a new dynamic, my life with Daddy didn’t change. He stayed in the den. I still rubbed his forehead with a cool compress every night; he still let me have the last swig of Pepsi after he took his medicine. I still slept on his back.

  Whatever Mama had prepared each evening, Daddy and I ate together on snack trays in the den while Kimmie and Mama had their dinner at the breakfast nook. I could hear them talking and laughing, the little black-and-white television on the kitchen counter blaring Archie Bunker’s bark or Tom Jones’s croon or Mary Tyler Moore’s whine, TV voices mixing in with theirs.

  “Come eat with us,” Mama said once, shocking me as I headed toward the den. I stood there, balancing the plates in both hands. “It’s not going to kill him if you eat with us for a change, Rae,” she urged. And so, hungry for inclusion, I did.

  “Not interested in eating dinner with your boring old daddy no more, huh?” he said later, smiling as the hurt poured from his eyes. “Guess you girls got things to talk about.”

  The next day when Mama beckoned, I shook my head no. She sighed, dismissed me with a flip of her hand. “Go on, then. Be with your daddy, if that’s who you prefer.”

  When I entered the den, Daddy was eating potted meat and mayonnaise slapped on white bread, washing it down with ice-cold pop. “Can you make me one of those?” I asked, pointing to his sandwich.

  “You need to go on in there, eat what your mama cooked,” he said. “Growing girl needs vegetables.”

  “What vegetables?” I asked. “Everything has cornmeal sticking to it.” Daddy laughed until the extra flesh on his belly jiggled, and I breathed easier, knowing we were okay again.

  There were other rejections by me over the years, none of them conscious. Slights more than anything else. Times when he wanted me with him and in my teenage fecklessness I chose instead parties or trips to the new mall or Derek’s backseat. Choices that haunt.

  I walked quickly to Daddy’s hospital room, my senses assaulted by the smell of alcohol, the sight of those polished white floors, and the silent footsteps of nurses and orderlies striding in rubber soles down the long, narrow hallways. Entering the room, I was startled by what I saw: Daddy propped up against the pillows, covered by a feeble white sheet. The tubes and IVs didn’t disturb me. It was seeing him in a bed flat on his back. Daddy always slept on his stomach, a sight that had comforted me. His prostrate position made me think of that floating, meaningless euphemism “laid to rest.”

  He popped open his eyes. He took a few seconds to focus, and once he recognized me, held out his hand. I moved to grab it, leaned in, kissed his lips. They were dry, chapped.

  “I’m worried about you,” I whispered, reaching in my bag for my lip balm.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” he said as I dug my finger into the Chap-Stick, dabbed it across his parched mouth.

  “How’s your head?”

  “Hurtin’.”

  Instinctively I rose, entered the bathroom and wet a washcloth with cool water, returned to his bedside, placed it across his forehead.

  “You’re going to be all right,” I said.

  “No, I’m not.”

  I took a deep breath, and it hurt, as though a tiny straight pin was lodged in my chest. “They give you anything for the pain yet?”

  “Suppose to, but they haven’t.”

  “I’ll get the nurse,” I said, ready to bolt out the door, do something concrete.

  “Nah, just sit here with me a spell. You know how this place is—they liable to make me wait all night.”

  “But if I say something to them—”

  “On your way out you can do that, okay?”

  I nodded and pressed the washcloth into his forehead. Excess water escaped, creating rivulets down Daddy’s cheeks. “What else can I do for you?” I asked.

  He looked up at me, his face mocking deep thought. “Oh, I don’t know. Hold my big toe?”

  A lump gathered rakishly in my throat, and I gulped it down before trying to speak. “You know I will if you want me to.”

  He’d done that for me once. It was the night after Mama announced that it was time for me to sleep on my own, the night before Kimmie returned. I couldn’t fall asleep. I rolled off Daddy’s back, cuddled against him on the sofa, and shook him awake. “Daddy? Daddy?”

  “Yeah, Brown Eyes?” He was groggy.

  I swung my leg over his torso. “Would you hold my big toe?”

  He grabbed it, half sleep, and held on.

  After a few seconds I asked, “Daddy?”

  “Uh huh?”

  “Could you make sure it doesn’t touch the bed?”

  And so he held it up. Moments went by. His arm finally got tired.

  “Well, I will be damned!” he said.

  “What?”

  “You something else, you know that? Got me holding your big toe. And like a fool, I’m doing it!”

  I could tell he wasn’t angry, could hear in fact the pride in his voice. I felt empowered by his rough hand around my foot. Feeling anchored, I drifted off to sleep.

  Now he smiled. “I know you would hold my toe, Brown Eyes. I’m just teasing.”

  I held on to his hand instead.

  On one of the final days, Wendy, the morning-shift nurse with the tired, kind face, pushed her stethoscope into Daddy’s chest and said, “Heartbeat’s getting fainter. We’re real close.” Harboring no illusions about miracles, I didn’t pray, knowing the unthinkable could happen because it already had in my life. Helpless, I sat there and watched Daddy slip away, remembering a childhood day. I am playing alone in the yard while Daddy watches me from the back door threshold. I decide it would be fun to dig to China using my little sandbox shovel, and choose a spot under the apple tree. “Stop that!” he yells. “Don’t you never dig in that spot. I mean never!” He didn’t say it was the very
spot where my brother was buried. It wasn’t until now, as he lay dying, that I figured it out. What was that like, to know what lay in your backyard, beneath the topsoil, mingling with roots and worms and eternity? Children, it seemed to me, were a source of continuous, ongoing pain, a pain worse than a migraine—the kind that offered no warning, no Stanback relief, no way out.

  After Daddy first told me about his lost son, I didn’t think about my brother for years. Not until I was in high school researching a persuasive argument for speech class on “The Health Risks of Childbirth Versus Abortion.” In my research, I read that all miscarriages are spontaneous abortions. When little Joseph fell from Mama’s womb into the toilet, it was because her body made a rash decision to expel him. This insight later made me grateful for the chance to control my own destiny, to decide with my mind what my body would do. I was relieved that everything had been arranged: rest at the clinic in the back room on a cot for a few hours after the procedure, and in the evening hit the road, drive west through the whistling night wind, guided by bright headlights and sound judgment. I wasn’t nervous about going through the abortion alone, having done it before.

  I knew the routine.

  A couple weeks after Kimmie’s return, Mama decided to throw a Welcome Home/Fourth of July party for her. I had secretly hoped Kimmie and I could go see the fireworks at Edgewater Park. Instead, there was this party.

  “But I don’t have any friends in Detroit to invite,” Kimmie said.

  “I do,” said Mama. “It’ll be fun.”

  It was a major undertaking for our mother. She made several lists as she sat at the kitchen table, smoking her Kools and sipping instant coffee: the guest list, the grocery list, the liquor list, the menu, the what-to-wear list.

  One evening when Mama and Kimmie were bent over those lists, Daddy said, “Get your sweater, Brown Eyes. We’re going for a little ride.”

  It had been a long time since last we pulled up to the pretty blue house with the white door.

  “JD?” Her voice asked the question, but her face showed no doubt.