Shifting Through Neutral Page 9

  “Don’t do that,” said Kimmie. “Go to college.”

  Rhonda shrugged. “I don’t know; we’ll see.”

  “Can I have a sip?” Kimmie held her hand out for some of Rhonda’s pop, took a big swig, handed it back. Burped lightly. “My father is going through a little thing right now. He and my stepmother broke up after, I don’t know, a hundred years, and he wasn’t used to being like a single parent. He started getting, like, really strict. One day he tells me, ‘I do not need no boy-crazy teenager to look after right now. I got too much to deal with.’” Kimmie took out another two cigarettes, lit them both, handed one to Rhonda. “Like all I do is think about boys.”

  “That’s all I think about,” said Rhonda. They looked at each other and broke into naughty laughter.

  “Well, I’m not going to say I don’t think about boys most of the time,” offered Kimmie.

  I used the moment to grab my Paddle Ball on the porch steps. I’d gotten so good I could hit the paddle with the rubber ball a hundred times without missing if I concentrated. I could do it either way—with the string long or short.

  “Speaking of boys, guess who has gone and grown up and is looking all fine now and is having a party on Saturday?” said Rhonda.

  Kimmie blew a smoke ring. I missed after fifteen short bats. “Who?”

  “Toby Jenkins.”

  “Toby Jenkins? Wait, let me think. Not that little short guy with the stupid grin and the squeaky voice?”

  “He ain’t short no more, girl. He is about six feet tall, and he’s a football player, and he’s got this deep voice and this nice little mustache. The grin is sexy now.”

  “Nooooo!!! He was such a gump!!!”

  “Well, wait till you see him. He’s cool. You gotta come to his jam with me on Saturday night. It’s a pool party! His mama moved downtown to one of those high-rise apartment complexes. Lafayette Towers. Got a rec room, an indoor pool, everything. They say it’s outta sight!”

  “Oh, shoot,” said Kimmie. “I’ve got to get a new bikini then.”

  I stopped batting my ball. “Can I go shopping with you?”

  “Sure, Rae Rae. We’ll go downtown Saturday morning. Get on the bus early. Maybe get Boston Coolers at Sanders. Ooh, I haven’t had Sanders’s French vanilla ice cream in ages! And don’t even try to get Vernor’s ginger ale in Louisiana. Forget that.” She nudged Rhonda. “You should come with us.”

  Rhonda shook her head no. “I’m working Saturday. Got a job at the Dairy Queen on Curtis. It’s a drag, but it pays. And since I got a car now, I got to keep gas in it, you know?”

  “Wow, you got a new car?!” I asked.

  “It’s not hardly new. It’s my mama’s old one. Sixty-nine Riviera. But it gets me around.”

  “Can you believe I don’t even know how to drive?” said Kimmie.

  “Oh, I’ll teach you,” promised Rhonda. “It’s easy once you get the hang of it. Especially with my car. It’s an automatic.”

  “That would be very cool.” Kimmie paused. “If I could say I really accomplished something this summer.”

  They watched me for a while as I played with my Paddle Ball, long-string style. I stood with my legs spread apart, my free arm out to the side for balance, showing off. Then the string popped, and the tiny red ball flew over the fence into the neighbor’s freshly cut yard, leaving me behind gripping the paddle so tight, I smudged every one of my brand-new, yellow-painted fingernails.

  On his final night in the hospital, Daddy woke up and barked, “Go get her!” He looked right at me. In a clear, unslurred voice, he boomed: “Go get her. She’s right outside, waiting for me. Right outside.”

  Stunned that he could talk at all, I tried to reassure him that no one was there, tried to calm him down. “Go, goddamn it!” he insisted.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, getting up and walking out the room, where I stood in the hallway. “He’s talking!” I whispered to myself. “That’s a good sign.” I walked toward the pay phone with newfound, ludicrous hope, thinking I’d call Mr. Alfred and ask him to get in touch with her. As I passed the nurses’ station and the closed doors of dying people, I made elaborate plans in my head that involved my role as a kind of Nurse Nightingale, with Daddy back home, returning to an optimum health he’d never had. But I got all the way to the pay phone and picked up the receiver before realizing I didn’t have Mr. Alfred’s telephone number with me.

  When I reentered the room, Daddy said, “I gotta go. She’s waiting for me.” And then he looked out past me. “Oh, I can’t walk,” he said, shaking his head. “I can’t walk, and she’s waiting for me.”

  All night in the chair beside him, I watched his bedsheet quiver from his breathing as a riot of moonlight barged past the heavy curtains and shimmered atop his huge, still hands. Those same hands had once built a tree house for me; built because I’d asked for one, just as I’d asked for a pony and a trip to Disneyland. I never expected to get any of those requests, but there he was one day in the backyard, not far from the apple tree, with hammer and nails and two-by-fours and plywood and a saw. Mr. Alfred had given him an old tire to be transformed into a swing. The lawn was strewn with junkyard salvages, looking exactly like Mama had always fought against: cluttered and low-class and alive.

  Because of his shaky health, Daddy never did finish the tree house. As winter approached, it remained on the back lawn, half done. A few steps had been hammered into the tree trunk and a three-sided frame erected. But it looked forlorn and abandoned, vulnerable to the elements. Over the years it got weather beaten and faded. When feeling low and lonely, I saw that unfinished tree house as the embodiment of our biggest problem as a small family—trying to remain whole in a house so nakedly incomplete.

  For a while, when I was fourteen, I decided there was little that house on Birchcrest could do for me. I tried to stay out of it as much as possible, preferring the house of my friend Lisa LaBerrie, whose home looked majestic with its white columns and stone facade. Inside, the living room was always cool and ever inviting with its blue sectional couch, blue carpet, blue walls. I loved the piano in the corner and the wood-carved dining room sideboard, which showcased a genuine silver tea set. Pictures of Lisa and her sister on Communion Day sat atop the mantel. Sometimes, their fireplace roared. Lisa lived with both of her parents, and when I stayed over for dinner, we all sat around the table together, eating gumbo or étouffée dishes that revealed her mother’s Louisiana roots. That added fact—that her parents were from the place with the multiple syllables and vowels—convinced me the LaBerries were the kind of family to have. A real one.

  Lisa and I stayed in the streets. We were maturing alongside the city’s own adolescence, watching it go from resentful and surly child of white forces to a wild and excited youth of black power. We added another running buddy—Angie Stoddard—and became a threesome. Lisa and I knew each other from our Girl Scout days. But Angie was something new, a fast girl who wore Quiana dresses over her developed body, had boys she was seeing (“Steven and I go together!”), and already knew the intricacies of French-kissing. She had stolen her sexy young mother’s birth control pills out of the medicine cabinet and had already done “It,” describing all the wondrous details to Lisa and me. It sounded frightening and dangerous and worth trying.

  But Angie apparently did something wrong in taking her mom’s pills because she became pregnant and was sent down South to have the baby. When we saw her again at the beginning of eleventh grade, she was a changed woman. Withdrawn and repentant. Born again. Childbirth, she said, was horrible, sparing us nothing as she relayed the details of gushing blood and excruciating pain and a ripped pussy. Lisa and I sat riveted by her tale, the way we once sat listening to ghost stories before a campfire during our Girl Scouting days. Terrified and thrilled.

  Angie concluded that she wanted no part of sex again. Wanted to ignore everything “down there” from here on out. Lisa and I decided that we absolutely did not want to have babies and promised each other th
at we never ever would. To seal our pact, we hooked our forefingers together and whispered in unison, “Girl Scout’s honor! Girl Scout’s honor!”

  Even now, before taking off, I was determined to be true to my oath.

  Accelerating

  Michigan’s Basic Speed Law means you must drive at a “careful and prudent” speed, considering all driving conditions…. Anticipate trouble ahead. Be ready to stop.

  WHAT EVERY DRIVER MUST KNOW

  On that Saturday morning of the pool party, Daddy got up early and took his Stanback for the last time, bathed, shaved. I sat on the toilet lid in the pink powder room and watched as he completed his out-in-the-world ritual. First, he wet his fingers under the faucet and ran them through his hair till it was wet, next raking through it with his skinny, fine-toothed comb. The back part near his neck was the kinkiest, from where he’d slept on it. He dipped his comb in Vaseline and ran that through his hair, over and over. Dip, comb, dip, comb. Soon his hair turned soft and wavy. Good-looking.

  “Where are you going, Daddy?” I asked.

  “To Dr. Corey’s.”

  “But it’s not the first of the month.”

  “Couldn’t wait. You wanna come?”

  I really wanted to go downtown with Kimmie, help her shop for a new bikini to wear to the pool party. I wanted to get Boston Coolers with her at Sanders Bakery. Yet I looked up at Daddy’s strained face and nodded.

  “Okay. Go get dressed. And hurry up, Rae Rae. I don’t wanna be in that doctor’s office all day, not in this heat.”

  I took the stairs two at a time to my room. At first, I forgot why I was there. This often happened. I stood in the middle of the floor, a bit startled, not really knowing much about my bedroom because I never spent any nights in it. Or much time during the day. I knew nothing about how cones of light bounced dust particles across the room on sunny days or how the trees outside my window scratched against the leaded pane at night. And I had no idea where the sweet spot of my bed’s mattress lay. All my possessions were there, true—my books, my clothes, my toys—but it was like secretly investigating a mysterious twin sister’s room, perhaps the wild-haired girl who fantasized about kissing Terrance Golightly. I always had the feeling of spying, rummaging through someone else’s things. It didn’t matter that that someone was I.

  Dressed in culottes and a tube top, I joined Daddy in the front vestibule. The air was humid, July day already hot. Daddy drove carefully as always to Dr. Corey’s office. The car’s air conditioner hummed as we flowed smoothly in the traffic along Livernois Avenue, Daddy having adjusted his speed so that we hit all the green lights. “You been having a good time with Kimmie,” announced Daddy. “That’s good to see.”

  These were separate relationships I had with Kimmie and Daddy, and it made me a little possessive whenever one mentioned the other. I didn’t want to share either of them. I was silent.

  Daddy flipped down the visor against the mid-morning sun. “I think you’re gonna be happy being with her and your mama, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “When I leave, it’ll be okay ’cause you’ll have your big sister.”

  I gripped the dashboard. When he’d sat me on his lap and told me about the divorce, this wasn’t why I’d shed tears into my ice cream. “But I thought I was coming to live with you.” Would I have to run away like Kimmie to be with my father too?

  “You can come over and spend the night with me whenever you want, Brown Eyes. Whenever.”

  “But you said I could come live with you!” I whined. “You said so!”

  “I don’t rightly remember saying that.”

  I tried another tack. “Well, Mama and Kimmie are leaving anyway, and they don’t want me to come with them.”

  “They’re leaving? When?”

  “End of the summer.”

  “You sure about that?”

  I nodded. Daddy slowed to a crawl, getting caught at a red light. The giant pair of foam dice hanging from the rearview mirror bounced around with vigor. “You know, I can’t give you all the things your mama can,” he said. “She’s in a better position to do for you. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “You don’t want me with you?”

  “It’s not that. You know it’s not that.”

  I flopped back against the seat, arms folded. “I already started packing.”

  Daddy turned to me. “You did?”

  “Yes.” I had thrown some clothes, my rock collection, and a few Trixie Belden Mystery books into my purple suitcase, shoved it under my unused bed.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Daddy as he hit the accelerator and sped off, dice dancing a jig. “You something else, Brown Eyes. You know that? You something else.”

  I smiled, pleased that I’d won, barely aware of what I’d given up.

  Inside the doctor’s office, nearly every seat in the waiting room was taken.

  “Hey there, Mr. Dodson,” said Ilene. “How you feeling today?

  “I been better, that’s for sure.”

  She nodded. “We’re gonna get you right in, I promise.” She turned to me. “And you doing all right, Rae?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Growing like a weed with your cute self.” She smiled, her bulbous lips spreading across her wide freckled face, divulging dimples. “Have a seat, and I’ll tell Dr. Corey you’re here.”

  I sat on his lap. He smelled Daddy-fresh—that mixture of Old Spice aftershave, Vaseline, and Jergen’s lotion. I rested my head in the crook of his neck, closed my eyes. Soon Ilene poked her head out a back door and beckoned to us.

  Daddy sat on the examining table, and within seconds Dr. Corey entered, holding Daddy’s chart against his chest.

  “Morning,” he said. He washed his hands as he talked, still youthful, not yet gray at the temples, unbelievably handsome. “See you got your little girl with you today.”

  “Gotta do something about these headaches,” said Daddy as he rolled up a sleeve. “Nothing’s working. Stanbacks might as well be orange-flavored children’s aspirin.” It suddenly hit me that Daddy had been splayed across his sofa bed a lot more lately. Why hadn’t I noticed?

  Dr. Corey wheeled over the spiggy. He tied a wide black cuff around Daddy’s arm, pumped the rubber ball, and watched the numbers rise. “Two twenty over one ten…no, it’s higher than that.” He frowned. “You may want Rae to wait outside.”

  “It’s okay. She knows about my condition.”

  Dr. Corey shook his head. “Pressure’s real high, JD.”

  “Hell, my pressure’s always high.”

  “I know that, but this is higher than usual. Even for you.” He took the band off, wheeled the spiggy out of the way. He looked down at Daddy. “You been taking it easy?”

  “That’s all I can do, Vernon.”

  “Have you been under undue stress?”

  “What stress is ever due?

  “Help me out here, JD. What’s going on at home?”

  “Nothing ’cept I’m starting to look for me a place.”

  “Well now, that’s a pretty big thing, I’d say. What’s got you doing that?”

  “Things.”

  “Well, things can hurt a man with blood pressure as high as yours. I’m calling the hospital now to—”

  “No!” Daddy barked. “Just give me something.”

  “Nothing I give you is going to bring that pressure down.”

  “I’m talking about bringing some relief.”

  “We’ve discussed this, JD. I don’t think it’s a good idea to just deal with the symptoms—”

  “Yeah, well, I’m begging.”

  Dr. Corey put his hand on Daddy’s shoulder. “Be reasonable.”

  Daddy looked at the floor. “Vernon, how long we known each other?”

  “I’m obligated to warn you…”

  “Rae Rae, wait for me outside,” said Daddy.

  “Why?” I whined. “Are you gonna be okay?”

  “Do as your daddy says n
ow. Wait for me outside.”

  I pushed out my bottom lip as I left the room. Dr. Corey closed the door behind me. I sat in the waiting room, swinging my legs back and forth, counting each swing.

  I can imagine what Daddy said to Dr. Corey, convincing him to administer that first dosage of Demerol, the narcotic pill he would swallow daily for the next three years, before graduating to a more potent form. He told his buddy from high school that he needed to function well enough to take care of his little girl. And then for sure, once we were all settled into the new place, he’d admit himself into the hospital for a complete workup. Sure thing. Right away.

  When Daddy finally came out—two hundred and twelve leg swings later—he was holding a white square of paper. He grabbed my hand with his free one, and I swung our arms, relieved to be going home. Dr. Corey stuck his head out the back door. “Take care, JD,” he said loudly. “And don’t forget what I said.”

  “I done heard you the first three times, Vernon.” Daddy held the door for me. “See you next time, Ilene.”

  “You take care, Mr. Dodson,” she said, waving us off. “You too, Rae.”

  Back in the car, I asked Daddy if we could get Boston Coolers at Miss Ann’s. I knew he wouldn’t feel up to driving downtown to Sanders.

  “I don’t see why not,” he answered, pulling up to the pharmacy on Ewald Circle. We went inside and waited while the pharmacist filled his prescription. I flipped through the August issue of Young Miss magazine, getting more anxious with each passing page.

  During the drive to Miss Ann’s, the little white paper bag sat between us on the front seat. I finally asked what I’d been thinking but holding in through five traffic lights.

  “Daddy, are those pills in that bag?”

  He nodded.

  “Why did the Stanbacks stop working?”

  He looked over at me. “I just need a little something more, Brown Eyes. Something stronger.”

  We rode for several blocks, passing the Pontiac car dealership, Dot & Etta’s Shrimp Shack, and the rickety railroad track where trains hardly ever crossed. “So, now you’re going to be just like Mama before she threw away her pills? Sleeping all day?”