Meridian (7 page)

When blacks were finally allowed into Sacred Serpent Park, long after her father’s crops had been trampled into dust, she returned one afternoon and tried in vain to relive her earlier ecstasy and exaltation. But there were people shouting and laughing as they slid down the sides of the great Serpent’s coil. Others stood glumly by, attempting to study the meaning of what had already and forever been lost.

“WHY ARE YOU
always so sourfaced about it?” some boy would breathe into her bosom in the back seat of his car during the fifties. “Can’t you
smile
some? I mean, is it gon’ kill you?”

Her answer was a shrug.

Later on she would frown even more when she realized that her mother, father, aunts, friends, passers-by—not to mention her laughing sister—had told her nothing about what to expect from men, from sex. Her mother never even used the word, and her lack of information on the subject of sex was accompanied by a seeming lack of concern about her daughter’s morals. Having told her absolutely nothing, she had expected her to
do
nothing. When Meridian left the house in the evening with her “boyfriend”—her current eager, hot-breathing lover, who always drove straight to the nearest lovers’ lane or its equivalent, which in her case was the clump of bushes behind the city dump—her mother only cautioned her to “be sweet.” She did not realize this was a euphemism for “Keep your panties up and your dress down,” an expression she
had
heard and been puzzled by.

And so, while not enjoying it at all, she had had sex as often as her lover wanted it, sometimes every single night. And, since she
had
been told by someone that one’s hips become broader after sex, she looked carefully in her mirror each morning before she caught the bus to school. Her pregnancy came as a total shock.

They lived, she and the latest lover, in a small house not a mile from the school. He married her, as he had always promised he would “if things went wrong.” She had listened to this promise for almost two years (while he milked the end of his Trojans for signs of moisture). It had meant nothing because she could not conceive of anything going more wrong than the wrong she was already in. She could not understand why she was doing something with such frequency that she did not enjoy.

His name was Eddie. She did not like the name and didn’t know why. It seemed the name of a person who would never amount to much, though “Edward” would have suited her no better.

As her lover, Eddie had had certain lovable characteristics—some of which he retained. He was good-looking and of the high school hero type. He was tall, with broad shoulders, and even though his skin was dark brown (and delicious that way) there was something of the prevailing white cheerleader’s delight about him; there was a square regularity about his features, a pugness to his nose. He was, of course, good at sports and excelled in basketball. And she had loved to watch him make baskets from the center of the gymnasium floor. When he scored he smiled across at her, and the envy of the other girls kept her attentive in her seat.

His hair was straight up, like a brush—neither kinky nor curly. A black version of the then popular crew cut. He wore brown loafers, too, with money in them. And turtlenecks—when they were popular—and the most gorgeous light-blue jeans. Which, she was to learn, required washing and starching and ironing every week, as his mother had done, for dirty jeans were not yet the fashion. His eyes were nice—black and warm; his teeth, perfect. She loved the way his breath remained sweet—like a cow’s, she told him, smiling fondly.

Being with him did a number of things for her. Mainly, it saved her from the strain of responding to other boys or even noting the whole category of Men. This was worth a great deal, because she was afraid of men—and was always afraid until she was taken under the wing of whoever wandered across her defenses to become—in a remarkably quick time—her lover. This, then, was probably what sex meant to her; not pleasure, but a sanctuary in which her mind was freed of any consideration for all the other males in the universe who might want anything of her. It was resting from pursuit.

Once in her “sanctuary” she could, as it were, look out at the male world with something approaching equanimity, even charity; even friendship. For she could make male friends only when she was sexually involved with a lover who was always near—if only in the way the new male friends thought of her as “So-an-so’s Girl.”

Her mother was long-suffering, typically, about the marriage; What had she ever done? and so forth. Then dedicated to the well-being of the beginning small family. Eddie was a good boy, it was argued, it was agreed—in her family’s estimation. And he was, by several of the prevailing standards: He was always clean—he bathed, in summer, two or three times a week. His pants, jeans and Sunday, were creased
always.
His shirts starched and not in loud colors. His white buckskin shoes were dirty only when it became the fashion for them to be dirty. When the fashion said otherwise, the buckskins absorbed one bottle of white polish a week. And Eddie was smart: He made B’s and an A in Band. He might become a businessman like his father, who worked in his own lumber company. He did not drop out of school when he got married, but simply worked overtime at the restaurant where he had previously worked after school. He had absorbed the belief, prevalent in all their homes, that without at least a high school diploma, a person would never amount to anything. He was even sorry she was expelled from school because of the pregnancy.

“Do you forgive me?” he asked, burrowing his bristly head into her lap.

“Forgive you for what?” It had not occurred to her to blame
him.
She felt, being pregnant, almost as if she’d contracted a communicable disease, that the germs had been in the air and that her catching the disease was no one’s fault.

“You know I’ve always required a lot.”

“Always?”

“I did it the first time when I was nine, standing on top of a washtub, under the girl’s window.”

They laughed. “Did you know what you were doing?”

“A balancing act. But it
felt
so good!”

When she was not nauseous or throwing up, they laughed a lot, though there was a dizziness about it for her, the laughter seemed muted, as if she did it underwater, and the echo of it whirled sluggishly through her head.

They lived simply. She became drawn into the life of his family. Became “another daughter” to his mother. Listened politely to his father’s stories of his exploits during the days when black people were sure enough chicken-shit.

Considered
chicken-shit, he added. It was her mother-in-law—a plump, rosy-brown woman with one breast, the other lost to cancer—who told her the “mysteries” of life. Astonishing her with such facts as: It is not possible to become pregnant if love is made standing up. Together they bought cloth to make the baby’s clothes. Shopped for secondhand furniture, bought quantities of seasonal foods the two households could share.

And through it all, she sat in the small house not a mile from the school and never thought about the baby at all— unless her mother-in-law called and mentioned it, or something to do with it. She knew she did not want it. But even this was blurred. How could she not want something she was not even sure she was having? Yet she
was
having it, of course. She grew and grew and grew, as pregnant women will. Her skin, always smooth as velvet, became blotchy, her features blunted; her face looked bloated, tight.

She did not, also, think of Eddie very much. She woke to his sweet breath on her face every morning—and wondered who, really, he was. What he was doing there in bed with her. Or she lay with him quietly, after making love, and enjoyed the incredible warmth of his very beautiful young body. So nearly black, so glowing and healthy, so
slim
now, next to hers. She loved the warmth, would do anything for it, his gentleness. She was grateful that he was willing to work so hard for their future, while she could not even recognize it.

“One day,” he said over lunch, “we’ll have a house like Mr. Yateson’s. It will have cactus plants around it and sky-blue driveway and painted blue trim. In the dining room there’ll be a chandelier like the ones in Joan Crawford movies. And there’ll be carpeting wall to wall and all the rooms will be different colors.”

Mr. Yateson was the principal of their school. His brand-new house, floating on the bright-blue driveway and concrete walks that encircled it, sat back from a dirt road that was impassable when it rained and made Meridian think of a fancy-dressed lady without shoes standing in a puddle of mud.

“Um
hum,”
she would nod vaguely at Eddie’s dream.

At the restaurant he worked as a waiter and sometimes short-order cook—hard work, little pay. And yet he was always patient and gentle with her, protective. If he worried he kept it from her, justifying his silence by her “condition.” The worries he was unable to hide were about small things that bothered him: the ironing of his clothes, and even her own, which she did not do nearly as well as his mother (who, finally, in the last stages of her daughter-in-law’s pregnancy, began to collect their dirty clothes each Wednesday to bring them back on Friday stainless and pale from bleach); the cooking, which she was too queasy to do at all; and the sex, which she did not seem (he said) interested in.

One night as he climbed over her—because he could only make love to her by beginning his assault from her left side—he said:

“And tonight, please, open your legs all the way.”

“What do you mean, open my legs?” she asked.

“I have to fight to get your legs open; you know that as well as I do. They’re like somebody starched them shut.”

She had not been aware that she locked her legs. Now that he had pointed it out to her, however, she found she closed them tighter than ever.

“You just don’t care about it any more,” he moaned, burying his head in the pillow next to hers.

In fact, this last worry surprised her. She did not see how he could feel she was less interested in sex, for she felt she had never shown anything approaching interest. Nor could she imagine why any woman
should.
She loved the warmth, the lying together, the peace. She endured the sex because it gave her these things. She would have been just as happy, happier, without it. But he did not understand this and would sometimes seem hurt and complain. She did not know what to do, so of course she put the blame on any handy thing: her big stomach, the queasiness, the coming baby, old wives’ tales that forbade intercourse until three months after the baby was born (a fact she learned from his mother: that intercourse any earlier weakened one’s brain).

By that time—and it did not surprise her—he had a woman who loved sex, and was able to get as much of it as he wanted every night.

But he was “good” to her, even then. He did not “cheat” and “beat” her both, which meant he was “good” to her, according to her mother, his mother, the other women in the neighborhood and in fact just about everyone she knew, who seemed always to expect the two occurrences together, like the twin faces of a single plague.

But had she lost interest in sex completely? She didn’t know. It was simply that sex was now something that she knew and thought she understood. Before it had been curiosity about her body’s power. Nor was her response to Eddie’s lovemaking as uncomplicated as he appeared to think.

She had not been wandering exactly on those afternoons she had found herself in front of Daxter’s funeral home—that huge, snowy, two-storied building that stood on a hill between a church and an all-night cafe. Daxter’s was owned by George Daxter, an obese half-white man in his fifties. His mother, so the story went, was white. When her parents found she was pregnant by the black man who worked for them, they shut her up in the cellar and threw away the key. They fed her pig bran and a little watery milk. When Daxter was born he was thrown out into the street with the rest of the trash. He was raised by an old woman who later died of ptomaine poisoning. She had eaten some sour, rotten tomatoes Daxter gave her.

Daxter had been after Meridian since she was twelve years old. She would visit the funeral home on Saturday afternoons, as everybody did to see who was new in the viewing room. Daxter would entice her into the small back office where he kept a long sofa and two soft chairs. At first she thought Daxter generous: He gave her candy for a swift, exploratory feel. When she became older—fifteen or so—he would take out his wallet crammed with money, and leave it on the sofa between them while he felt her breasts and tried to pull her onto his lap. The only part she liked was when he sucked her nipples, and she liked to hear his breathing, like his throat was closing, when she let one chubby hand touch the bottom of her panties. She could sit, holding his head against her breasts—where he busily and noisily sucked—and feel the hot throbbing of his passion almost enter her. But his obesity, in the end, was distasteful to her. She had heard that fat men had short, stunted penises. She imagined Daxter’s penis to look like an English walnut.

When Daxter was not around she allowed herself to be chased around the embalming table by his young assistant, an almost handsome man, but dissipated and with a face that—as the saying went—
begged
for pussy. He thought of nothing else. His tool of seduction (his description) was his voice, which he used to describe the act of intercourse. Holding her with her back tight against him so that his penis was like a hard, live bedpost against her hips, he would whisper in her ear: “Think of how it would feel,” he would urge, grabbing one, then both, of her nipples, “to have this big, black, long, ummm ...” and he would press the bedpost against her— “inside you. Slippin’ in and slippin’ out.”

She hated him but was fascinated; she was also far from immune to the voice. The Assistant would manipulate her breasts and cram her between his legs and rub her so against him that her panties became flooded with the residue of her resistance. The Assistant was very clever and so never actually forced her beyond a certain point, but each time he left her with one of his little homilies: “Experience is the best, the
only,
teacher,” and “Just looking at water will never teach you to swim.”