Love (11 page)

Pfc. Ernest Holder had come to Manila’s looking to buy some fun and found instead a beautiful girl in a navy suit and pearls reading
Life
magazine on a sofa. Christine accepted his invitation to dinner. By dessert they had plans. Desire so instant it felt like fate. As couplehood goes, it had its moments. As marriage goes, it was ridiculous.

Christine parked and pulled down the visor’s mirror to see if she was presentable. It was a move she was not accustomed to, but one she made because of an encounter on her first visit to Gwendolyn East’s office. About to enter the building, she had felt a tap on her shoulder. A woman in a baseball cap and tracksuit grinned up at her.

“Ain’t you Christine Cosey?”

“I am.”

“I thought that was you. I used to work at Cosey’s. Way, way back.”

“Is that so?”

“I remember you. Best legs on the beach. My, you used to be so cute. Your skin, your pretty hair. I see you still got those eyes, though. Lord, you was one foxy thing. You don’t mind me saying that, do you?”

“Of course not,” said Christine. “Ugly women know everything about beauty. They have to.”

She didn’t look back to see if the woman spit or laughed. Yet on each subsequent visit to the lawyer’s office, she couldn’t stop herself from checking the mirror. The “pretty hair” needed a cut and a style—any style. The skin was still unlined, but “those eyes,” looking out, never inward, seemed to belong to somebody else.

Gwendolyn East was not pleased. The whole point of an office was scheduled appointments. Christine’s entrance had been like a break-in.

“We have to move,” said Christine, pulling the chair closer to the desk. “Something’s going on.”

“I beg your pardon?” Gwendolyn asked.

“This will business. She has to be stopped.”

Gwendolyn decided that encouraging this rough client was not worth the so far nonforthcoming settlement fee. “Listen, Christine. I support you, you know that, and a judge might also. But you
are
living there, rent free, no expenses. The fact is, it could be said that Mrs. Cosey is taking care of you when she is under no obligation to do so. And the benefit of being awarded the property is, in a way, already yours in a manner of speaking. Better, maybe.”

“What are you saying? She could put me out on the street any day if she wants to.”

“I know,” Gwendolyn replied, “but in twenty years she hasn’t. What do you make of that?”

“Slavery is what I make of it.”

“Come on, Christine.” Gwendolyn frowned. “You’re not in a rest home or on welfare . . .”

“Welfare? Welfare!” Christine whispered the word at first, then shouted it. “Look. If she dies who gets the house?”

“Whomever she designates.”

“Like a brother or a nephew or a cousin or a hospital, right?”

“Whomever.”

“Not necessarily to me, right?”

“Only if she wills it.”

“No point in killing her then?”

“Christine. You are too funny.”

“You listen to me. She’s just now hired somebody. A girl. A young girl. She doesn’t need me anymore.”

“Well.” Gwendolyn was thoughtful. “Do you think she would agree to a kind of lease agreement? Something that guarantees you a place there for life and support at some level in return for . . . services?”

Christine threw her head back and scanned the ceiling as though searching for a new language to make herself understood. What to say to this lawyer woman shouldn’t be all that hard. After all, Miss East had Up Beach history, was the granddaughter of a cannery girl who suffered a stroke. Slowly she tapped her middle finger on the lawyer’s desk to stress certain words. “I am the last, the only, blood relative of William Cosey. For free I have taken care of his house and his widow for twenty years. I have cooked, cleaned, washed her underwear, laundered her sheets, done the shopping . . .”

“I know.”

“You don’t know! You don’t! She is replacing me.”

“Wait now.”

“She is! That’s been her whole life, don’t you get it? Replacing me, getting rid of me. I’m always last; all the time the one being told to go, get out.”

“Christine, please.”

“This is
my
place. I had my sixteenth-birthday party in that house. When I was away at school it was my
address.
It’s where I belong and nobody is going to wave some liquor-splashed menu at me and put me out of it!”

“But you were away from the property for years . . .”

“Fuck you! If you don’t know the difference between property and a home you need to be kicked in the face, you stupid, you dumb, you cannery trash! You’re fired!”

Once there was a little girl with white bows on each of her four plaits. She had a bedroom all to herself beneath the attic in a big hotel. Forget-me-nots dotted the wallpaper. Sometimes she let her brand-new friend stay over and they laughed till they hiccuped under the sheets.

Then one day the little girl’s mother came to tell her she would have to leave her bedroom and sleep in a smaller room on another floor. When she asked her mother why, she was told it was for her own protection. There were things she shouldn’t see or hear or know about.

The little girl ran away. For hours she walked a road smelling of oranges until a man with a big round hat and a badge found her and took her home. There she fought to reclaim her bedroom. Her mother relented, but turned the key in the lock to keep her in the bedroom at night. Soon after, she was sent away, far away, from things not to be seen, heard, or known about.

Except for the man wearing a round hat, and a badge, no one saw her cry. No one ever has. Even now her “still got those” eyes were dry. But they were also, for the first time, seeing the treacherous world her mother knew. She had hated her mother for expelling her from her bedroom and, when Chief Buddy brought her back, smacking her face so hard Christine’s chin hit her shoulder. The slap sent her into hiding under L’s bed for two days, so they sent her away to Maple Valley School, where she languished for years and where a mother like May was an embarrassment. Maple Valley teachers were alarmed by acting-out Negroes, but they flinched openly when they read May’s incoherent letters to the
Atlanta Daily World
about white “honor” and misguided “freedom rides.” Christine was happy to confine their relationship to letters she could hide or destroy. Other than a little gossip about famous guests, there was nothing in them of interest to a thirteen-year-old trying to be popular, and as the years passed she didn’t even understand them. Christine could laugh at her own ignorance now, but then it was as though May wrote in code: CORE is sitting-in in Chicago (who was she, this Cora?), Mussolini resigned (resigned to what?), Detroit on fire. Did Hitler kill Roosevelt or did Roosevelt kill Hitler—anyway they both died in the same month. Most of the letters, however, were about Heed’s doings. Plots, intrigue. Now she finally understood her mother. The world May knew was always crumbling; her place in it never secure. A poor, hungry preacher’s child, May saw her life as depending on colored people who rocked boats only at sea. Events begun in
1942
with her father-in-law’s second marriage heaped up quickly throughout the war and long after until, disoriented by her struggle against a certain element in her house and beyond it, she became comic. Yet her instincts, thought Christine, if not her methods, were correct. Her world had been invaded, occupied, turned into scum. Without vigilance and constant protection it slid away from you, left your heart fluttering, temples throbbing, racing down a road that had lost its citrus.

Everyone decided her mother was insane and speculated as to why: widowhood, overwork, no sex, SNCC. It was none of that. Clarity was May’s problem. By
1971
, when Christine came home for Cosey’s funeral, her mother’s clarity had been accumulating for years. It had gone from the mild acuteness they called kleptomania to outright brilliance. She covered her bedroom windows with plywood painted red for danger. She lit lookout fires on the beach. Raised havoc with Boss Silk when he refused her purchase of a gun. The sheriff’s father, Chief Silk, would have let her, but his son had a different view of Negroes with guns, even though they both wanted to shoot the same people. Now Christine realized that May’s understanding of the situation was profound. She had been right in
1971
to sneer at Christine’s fake military jacket, Che-style beret, black leotard, miniskirt. Sharp as a tiger’s tooth, May instantly recognized the real deal, as was clear from her own attire. People laughed. So what? The army helmet May had taken to wearing was an authentic position and a powerful statement. Even at the funeral, having been encouraged by L to substitute a black scarf, she still carried it under her arm because, contrary to what Christine thought then, it was true that at any minute protection might be needed in the enemy-occupied zone she, and now Christine, lived in. In that zone, readiness was all. Again, Christine felt the sheer bitterness of the past two decades tramping up and down the stairs carrying meals she was too proud to ruin, wading through layers of competing perfumes, trying not to shiver before the “come on” eyes in the painting over that grotesque bed, collecting soiled clothes, washing out the tub, pulling hairs from the drain—if this wasn’t hell, it was the lobby.

Heed had long wanted to have May put away, but L’s judgment, more restraining than Cosey’s, stopped her. When the menu was read for the “will” it was taken to be, and “Billy Boy’s wife” was awarded the hotel, Heed shot straight up out of the chair.

“To a nutcase? He leaves our business to a nutcase?”

It got ugly and stayed that way until the lawyer slapped the table, assuring Heed that no one would (could?) stop her from running the hotel. She was needed, and besides her husband had bequeathed her the house, the cash. At which point May, adjusting her helmet, had said, “I beg your damn pardon?”

The argument that followed was a refined version of the ones that had been seething among the women since the beginning: each had been displaced by another; each had a unique claim on Cosey’s affection; each had either “saved” him from some disaster or relieved him of an impending one. The only difference about this preburial quarrel was L, whose normal silence seemed glacial then because there was no expression on her face, no listening, no empathy—nothing. Taking advantage of L’s apparent indifference, Heed shouted that unstable people should not be allowed to inherit property because they needed “perfessionate” care. Only the arrival of the undertaker, announcing the need for immediate departure to the church, kept Christine’s hand from becoming a fist. Temporarily, anyway, because later, at the grave site, seeing Heed’s false tears, her exaggerated shuddering shoulders; watching townsfolk treat her as the sole mourner, and the two real Cosey women as unwelcome visitors; angry that her attempt to place the diamonds on Cosey’s fingers had been thwarted—Christine exploded. Reaching into her pocket, she leapt toward Heed with a raised arm which L, having suddenly come to life, bent behind her back. “I’ll tell,” she whispered to one, the other, or to no one in particular. Heed, having thrust her face into Christine’s as soon as it was safe, backed off. Nothing L said ever was idle. There were many details of her sorry life that Christine did not want exposed. Dislike she could handle, even ridicule. But not pity. Panicked, she closed the knife and settled for an icy glare. But Heed—why had she obeyed so fast? What was she afraid of? May, however, understood what was needed and immediately took her daughter’s side. Stepping forward into that feline heat, she removed Heed’s Gone with the Wind hat and tossed it into the air. Perfect. A giggle from somebody opened a space in which Heed chased her hat and Christine cooled.

The tacky display, the selfish disregard for rites due the deceased whom each claimed to honor, angered people, and they said so. What they did not say was how delighted they must have been by the graveside entertainment featuring beret, bonnet, and helmet. Yet in that moment, by tearing Heed’s silly hat off, uncrowning the false queen before the world, May became clarity at its most extreme. As it had been when she did everything to separate the two when they were little girls. She had known instinctively the intruder was a snake: penetrating, undermining, sullying, devouring.

According to May’s letters, as far back as
1960
Heed had begun to research ways to put her in a rest home or an asylum. But nothing Heed did—not spreading lies, inventing outrages, seeking advice from psychiatric institutions—could force May out. With L watching and without an accomplice, Heed failed. She was forced to put up with the dazzling clarity of the woman who hated her almost as much as Christine did. May’s war did not end when Cosey died. She spent her last year watching in ecstasy as Heed’s grasping hands turned slowly into wings. Still, Heed’s solution to her problems with May had been a good one, and a good idea directed at the wrong person was still good. Besides, L was gone. Hospitals were more hospitable. And now, with a little coaxing, there might just be an accomplice.

Poor Mama. Poor old May. To keep going, to protect what was hers, crazy-like-a-fox was all she could think of. Husband dead; her crumbling hotel ruled by a rabid beach rat, ignored by the man for whom she had slaved, abandoned by her daughter to strange ideas, a running joke to neighbors—she had no place and nothing to command. So she recognized the war declared on her and fought it alone. In bunkers of her own industry. In trenches she dug near watch fires at ocean’s edge. A solitary misunderstood intelligence shaping and controlling its own environment. Now she thought of it, Christine’s own disorganized past was the result of laziness—emotional laziness. She had always thought of herself as fierce, active, but unlike May, she’d been simply an engine adjusting to whatever gear the driver chose.

No more.

The ocean is my man now. He knows when to rear and hump his back, when to be quiet and simply watch a woman. He can be devious, but he’s not a false-hearted man. His soul is deep down there and suffering. I pay attention and know all about him. That kind of understanding can only come from practice, and I had a lot of that with Mr. Cosey. You could say I fathomed his mind. Not right away, of course. I was just a girl when I went to work for him—a married man with a son and a sick wife who needed care every minute of the day and night. He said her name, Julia, so soft you could feel his tenderness as well as his apology. Their son, Billy Boy, was twelve when Julia Cosey passed, and even though I was only fourteen, it was the most natural thing in the world for me to stay on and look after the two of them. Only a wide heart like his could care that much for a wife and have so much room left over. When Julia Cosey died, Mr. Cosey transferred all of what he felt to his son. Lucky for him, the boy had that insight smart children use with grown-ups in order to stay important. Not by doing what they say, but by figuring out what they really want. A daddy can say “Fend for yourself, boy” when he means “Don’t show me up; hurry up and fail.” Or he can say “I’ll teach you the world,” meaning “I’m scared to death of you.” I don’t know what Mr. Cosey said to his son along those lines, but whatever it was, Billy Boy understood it to mean “Be something I can get up for in the morning; give me something to do while I paddle along.” So it didn’t matter much if he was a very good son or a really bad one. He only had to be interesting. Just by luck, I suspect, he chose goodness. Mr. Cosey was pleased with everything Billy Boy did and said. He lavished money on him and took him everywhere. With his hair parted in the middle and a cap just like his father’s—what a pair they must have been. One getting a trim in the barber’s chair, the other one lounging with customers on the bench; sitting in the bleachers at Eagle games, on campstools at sing-out competitions, at narrow tables in country joints where the most gifted musicians played. They slept in rooming houses or just knocked on a door. Mr. Cosey said he wanted Billy Boy to see men enjoy the perfection of their work, so they went to Perdido Street for King Oliver, Memphis for the Tigers, Birmingham for the Barons. They watched how cooks examined market produce, watermen sorted oysters, bartenders, pool-hall rascals, pickpockets, and choirmasters. Everything was a labor lesson from a man proud of his skill. Mr. Cosey said it was life’s real education, but it looked to me like truancy from his own father’s school. A way to flunk the lessons Dark had taught him.