Black Silk (14 page)

Her job at Featherstone Elementary and Middle Schools was dull, but she loved to look at the children and secretly open their
textbooks as they played and hit on each other. Sasha Devine, the little mixed girl, carried
Leaves of Grass
around with her everywhere and sometimes recited,

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d…. And thought of him I love.

Plain silly. Mozelle Mountain, the other mixed girl (part Indian she claimed), stuck her nose in a book called
Confederate Spies and Soldiers.
Stupid girl, stupid book. Harriet-Ann Hutchinson, a full-blooded colored girl, carried
The Dawn of Our World
in her book bag, but it was clear that the pages had never really been turned. Why hadn’t the stupid girl realized the beauty
of those Greek men? They were practically edible! Rhonda shook her head in dismay. She knew a few of their names: Homer, Eurydice,
Cupid, Rex. She searched her mind for the details, but nothing came up. It was so long ago, and Miss Fauset had thrown her
out like a piece of garbage.

After recess was over and the bell summoned the children inside, Rhonda would sit in the sun—no matter how cold or how softly
the snow fell—and bask a few minutes before returning to the hallway. This small space of time outdoors in the yard was like
home, where oftentimes the stark North Carolina sun had been her only real company. The companion of her secret.

She had seen her grandmother take Shame-Billy into the garden and remove his trousers behind the blackberry thicket. The woman
traveled the boy’s hand along her breast, stopping at the nipple, encircling the massive dark space there.—You’re all mine,
the old woman had said.

Rhonda had witnessed this, the boy writhing in pleasure, a brief period of exploration and gasps, after which the pair of
them, thick as thieves, stoically marched up to the house and returned to the garden carrying jars of lemonade. Rhonda had
seen this. She had seen naked butts, breasts, arms, necks, tongues; braids and curls undone. Then a tall jar of lemonade,
sides beading with sweat, the contents sometimes disappearing in one monstrous gulp.

In the yard the janitor would occasionally push his ash can on wheels over in Rhonda’s direction. He would stand in the way
of her light, darkening her awake, then make a simple joke about the weather or the misdeeds of the children. Sometimes his
words contained faint praise.

—Say Miss Rhonda, the janitor would begin.—You looking pretty good there. You looking like you taking care of business. I
know. I do the same myself.

(He knew he was the only one who ever talked to her because to his mind the rest of the teachers were uppity and the principal
was a fag; that left him as the only person to appreciate the glory of Miss Rhonda Robinson. He was old as the hills and until
now did not think anything of removing his teeth from his overall pocket and casually setting them in his head during conversation.
The children made fun of him, leaving nasty notes on blackboards for him to read. He shrugged his shoulder: Hadn’t his own
kids behaved the selfsame way? Hadn’t they called him narrow and dirty, all run away from home in bits and pieces—but that
was years and years ago, and nowadays he was even having trouble remembering their names, the years in which they had been
born, or even the shapes of their heads.)

Mr. Blank approached Miss Robinson on ash-can wheels.—Hey there, Miss Rhonda, he said.

—Hey there, Mr. Blank, Rhonda replied blandly, watching the children scatter around her.—How you?

—Can’t complain, he answered. He held his lips tightly over his teeth.—Kids been treating you right?

—Same as ever.

—You ever think of having any of your own, Miss Rhonda? You’d make a fine woman.

(He’d meant to say
mother.
Mr. Blank kicked himself for this mistake.)

Rhonda nodded demurely; she too noticed what he’d said. He wouldn’t have said it if he had seen her last Christmas Eve. In
fact, his eyes would have popped out of his head if he’d seen the things she and Billy did together. Old man don’t know his
dick from his thumb. She turned and walked away.

That night, Mr. Blank took his dreams about Rhonda to bed. He was still a young man, if you counted desire as proof.

He folded his withered hands in prayer, just like his wife of long ago had taught him, only now he did not pray to Jesus or
to the Lord Most High but to a caramel woman with large knees; he prayed to her loud fruity perfume and its spell over her
shoulders; to the daisy shape of her mouth; to the way she did up her hair in two braided buns on the side of her head like
women from the old days. He prayed to the volume of her behind as she switched down the hallways, shooing children to class.
He prayed to the big words she used, the airs she put on, the way she smiled at the girls, maternal. He prayed to clothes,
in particular to the black-and-pink gingham dress, the one that she had obviously
sewn down
to look more matronly, only for him it was obvious that you could let out a seam here and there and be pleasantly surprised.
She was the stuff of dreams.

—Lord, let me not want, he prayed, before falling asleep.

Back in Auntsville, the meetings between the two lovers had been confined to the vegetable garden in the swarm of a late-afternoon
sun, ticklish groping and instruction until ritual lemonade. She knew boys his age loved to drink, just as they loved tearing
apart insects and running stolen cars and burying them in the field. This one was different, though; he barely touched the
jar.

She sat next to him on the porch swing, where he did not think about insects or lemonade but about how he had just embraced
her, how they had lain across vines of sugar-snap peas and moaned in unison. He had never heard voices travel at the same
time, and found it bewitching. She’d allowed his tongue in her mouth as they sat amid rows of strawberries, a romantic touch.
Through her dress, he massaged the womanly triangle between her legs while she dug her fingers into the earth, upsetting the
birth of radish, carrot, and white sweet potato. She was not like the others. She did not scream, she did not harm his body
or cause a haze to cover his eyes like a cobweb.

He wanted to go on, but she eventually stopped him, the sun hanging like a grapefruit in the sky. Like the other times, they
did not make love. He was a child after all, she reasoned. She only wanted him to know what to do when the time came; said
she was tired of girls being afraid of what they really wanted—soon he would become teacher. Just think of this as a sort
of practice run.

But he did not want to practice forever. He wanted the seasoning of oldness; in his heart he imagined the heat of something
undone and unraveling. He took her in his arms on the porch and uttered the words,—I love you.

Strangely, she shunned him.

Love was not for an old woman with things to teach. She demanded he notice her hips, her thighs, the way her breasts did not
sag like other old women’s. That he should look and dream; that he should measure up to her imagination; that he should not
ask for earth when moon and stars danced in front of his nose. That he should not fall in love.

—Look at my granddaughter Rhonda, Asenath had told him then, wiping away his tears.—Rhonda is a person you can love. She is
not like me at all.

Late in the afternoon on the last day of school, Mr. Blank had pushed his broom up to the teachers’ lounge and watched Rhonda
eat her sandwich: fried chicken cutlet on hero bread, two large sweet pickles, a container of vanilla pudding. He moved extra
slow, emptying the wastebaskets and clapping the erasers clean, touching the teachers’ coats, straightening arms and lapels.
She gulped coffee from a thermos and licked her lips like a cat. Mr. Blank checked the wastebaskets again.

He longed to pass Miss Rhonda and touch her on the cheek. To roll his ash can her way and kiss the velvet off her skin. An
act of solidarity: He and she were terribly alone here. They were not teachers. They had no children. They withdrew themselves
in dreams, he was sure.

Rhonda Robinson wearily glanced at him, then got up to adjust her dress in the mirror.

All he’d really wanted was a taste of Rhonda’s hand. A confirmation.

Mr. Blank went outside the lounge and waited until she miraculously appeared; he walked her to the gymnasium. She was supposed
to help line up the colored kids to be tested for sickle cell, help stop the little ones from crying at the sight of the needle.
Mr. Blank told her he admired such kindness in a person.

—I wouldn’t want to know if I was going to die tomorrow, he said.—I always just want to make the most of my days.

—These are little kids, Rhonda replied, annoyed.—They can’t make those decisions for themselves.

—Still, he continued,—I wouldn’t want to know. I’d want to live my life in the best way possible. Don’t you agree, Miss Rhonda?

—Who wouldn’t want to live their life in the best way? she snapped, opening the door to the gym. Then added,—You know, you
remind me of someone.

—Miss Rhonda! he interrupted, alarmed that he should actually be in her thoughts. This was too much.—There’s something I need
to tell you in person!

But it was too late. Rhonda had already walked into the throngs of frightened children and once more left Mr. Blank behind.

The snow had simmered to almost nothing once Billy reached the exit to West Amity on the Southern State Parkway. Oddly, a
warmth filled the car, a warmth as damp and spongy as spring air. He had to keep his eyes open for the bright pink house.
A shame to ruin a perfectly good house with that color, but what was that his business? The girl had something strange and
permanent against her grandmother, but don’t ask him.

Shame-Billy pulled the car into the driveway; no Rhonda. He waited.

(At their last meeting, when he was fifteen, Asenath had poked her tongue in and out of his ear, sparking his juices into
electricity, but again at the word
love,
she recoiled. There was a warning. If he spoke it again, she would take another boy under her wing. If he spoke it again,
she would lock the gate to her vegetables—forever. What was the purpose in loving, anyway? He had his whole life ahead of
him. And she would be leaving for Long Island sometime soon, to the place where a body could get a regular house, not some
old run-down thing.)

He went through the list in his mind. How he decided to call her bluff. How she’d finally left Auntsville for Long Island
in what seemed to him to be the middle of the night. How he’d cried. How she had left him with only the scent of cloves and
onion on his hands. How he hated the scent of betrayal.

How he took any and every woman who walked by him and ravished them with his new skills. How he broke hearts. The list continued:
How he sent letters to a phantom address called the Plantation and when he received no reply, how he humped one girl after
the other in vengeance. How he moved about aimlessly until about seven years ago, when, retribution in mind, he left for Long
Island, only to have things change.

He’d vigorously sought out Rhonda, but at her door the first time discovered that the years had softened him. Add to that
a house to practically call his own and a woman who answered the door, genuinely happy to see him. A loving woman, a receptive
woman, one who would do just about anything at the drop of a hat. Did not trouble him with the word
love
but would walk on all fours or lie still as a dead person. Things had a way of metamorphosing, like a worm into a butterfly.
A garden of sheer delights.