My Mother the Cheerleader (13 page)

W
hen my eyes snapped open, my chest sank and the breath left my body as I took in my surroundings. I was still lying on the wet ground beside the twisted frame of my bike. The driver of the milk van, the hobo, the Negro workman, and the lady of the evening all approached me at once.

“Oh, damn it,” the milk van driver muttered.

“You okay, girl?” the lady asked.

“You done hit her,” the hobo said, pointing at the milk van driver. “I seen it. I seen it all. You hit her.”

“She came out of nowhere,” the driver replied. “Dere's no way I could've avoided her.”

“Can you move, sugar?”

Good question. I slowly shifted different parts of my body, but everything seemed stiff, as if all my limbs had been frozen. After a few jerky movements my body came back alive. I saw my legs move before I felt them, then I felt my arms, torso, neck, hands, face, tongue, fingers, toes. I could feel everything. Thank the Lord. And I didn't perceive any real pain except for some scraped skin off my palms and knees. The lady offered me a hand up.

“Better not try to move her,” the Negro workman suggested. “We should call somebody.”

“You think you can get up, sugar?” the lady asked.

“She came out of nowhere,” the milk van driver said again. “Right out of da dark.”

I reached for the lady's hand, and she pulled me to my feet.

A police siren wailed in the distance, fast approaching.

“Son of a bitch,” muttered the milk van driver.

“Here comes da law,” chanted the hobo. “Dey gonna fix you good.”

The lady of the evening quickly caressed my face and said, “Take care, sugar.”

She slunk back into the shadows just as the police cruiser came into view and pulled to a stop beside my bike.

“You came out of nowhere,” the van driver hissed at me as two officers emerged from the car. “I didn't do nothing wrong. You hear?”

“He done hit dis girl!” the hobo called as the police approached. “Done hit her with his van, he did. I saw da whole thing.”

“All right, calm down, y'all,” the police officer said.

“You okay, kid?” the other officer asked me, kneeling down to take a look.

“She came out of nowhere,” the van driver piped up. “I drive this route every single day. Never had a ticket in my life.”

“Dat what happened?” the officer asked.

“I didn't see it happen.” The Negro workman shrugged.

“Dere was nothing to see,” the van driver said. “She came out of nowhere.”

“He done hit her! I saw it!” the hobo chimed in.

“Shut your trap,” said the first officer.

“Are you okay, kid?” the second officer asked me again. “Looks like you've got a couple of scrapes.”

“I'm okay,” I said, surprised by the sound of my own voice.

“What happened?”

“He didn't do anything,” I said, nodding at the van driver. “I wasn't looking where I was going is all.”

“What are you doing riding around at dis hour?” he asked me.

I didn't respond.

“Does your mama know where you are?” the first officer asked.

I didn't respond.

“Look, kid, we know you can talk,” he said.

“We're not trying to get you in trouble,” the second one said. “We just want to get you home where you belong.”

T
he short ride in the back of the police car helped snap me back to the harsh reality I was facing. Nothing can make your brain stand up at attention like fear. I wasn't sure what I'd discover when we got back to the house. Would Royce and Clem still be there? Was my mother okay? If she was okay, I knew I'd be facing some serious trouble. I had just destroyed my most expensive possession—my bike. If only I had sustained a decent injury, even something as small as a broken finger, I might've been granted some leniency. With just a couple of scraped knees to my credit, I had
good reason to expect every known punishment short of the death penalty.

When we arrived back at Rooms on Desire, the two police officers escorted me to the door. They knocked once, but no one answered. They knocked again, even louder. The tension rose as we waited. Finally, Charlotte Dupree answered the door. She must have come looking for me after my hysterical visit to her house. A wave of relief swept through me at the sight of her. Before any words were exchanged, I ran into Charlotte's arms and she held me tightly against her body.

“It's okay, baby,” Charlotte said, eyeing the police suspiciously.

“Are da girl's parents around?” one of the officers asked.

“Her mother's asleep,” she said.

“Well, wake her up. We need to talk to her.”

“She's sick,” Charlotte replied. “She needs to rest.”

“Don't you give us any lip,” he replied curtly. “We found dis girl lying on the side of the road. She got hit by a van.”

“Are you hurt, baby?” Charlotte asked me.

I shook my head no.

She knelt down and examined my skinned knees.

“We'll get those bobos all cleaned up right quick,” she said.

“We still need to talk to one of her parents.”

“Look, it's past midnight and everyone's asleep,” Charlotte pleaded. “Couldn't you just come back—”

“It's okay, Charlotte,” my mother's voice called from the shadows at the top of the stairs.

“You da girl's mother?” one of them asked.

“Yeah,” she responded. “She's mine.”

“We need to speak with you, ma'am.”

She slowly descended the stairs. As she came into the light, I gasped. She had suffered minor cuts and bruises from Royce before, but nothing like this. I barely recognized her. Her entire face had been transformed into a swollen red mask. One side of her face had grown significantly larger than the other. The skin around and under her left eye was severely bruised a brownish-purple color. The white
of the eye was flooded with blood, so the whole eye was a dark red. Her right cheek had a massive raised bruise, so it looked like she had a small baseball lodged beside her teeth and gums. She walked slowly and deliberately, as if any sudden movement would cause her more pain.

“What da hell happened to you?” one of the officers asked.

“Had an accident. Fell down these stairs.”

“All dat from falling down some stairs?” the other officer asked doubtfully.

“I've never been Ginger Rogers,” my mother quipped.

“You should see a doctor,” the other officer said.

“I just need rest.”

She winced in pain as she came to the bottom step and moved toward us.

“You sure dere isn't anything you need to report to us? Or anybody?”

“Not unless you want to arrest the stairs or my clumsy feet.”

“Well, your family had quite a bad night. Your
daughter had a little accident too,” the first officer said.

“She's fine, but her bike got wrecked,” the other added.

“She really shouldn't have been riding around at dis hour,” the first continued.

“She went to borrow some rubbing alcohol from a neighbor for me,” she lied. “Come here, Louise. Let me take a look at you.”

I disengaged from Charlotte and slowly moved toward her. I saw her one clear eye watching me closely. When I was beside her, she stared at me. Her good eye was filled with tears that did not spill over down her face. She touched my hair, brushing a few strands out of my eyes, and then she let her hand come to rest on my shoulder.

“Thank you for returning her, officers,” she said. “But now I think we could all use some rest.”

“You sure dere's nothing y'all need to report, ma'am?” one of them asked her again.

She paused a moment before responding. For that moment I truly thought she might say something
about Royce and Clem, or even Morgan. But she didn't.

“Yes. I'm sure,” she said. “Good night, gentlemen.”

“Just keep her off da streets at night, okay?” the other one said, nodding to me.

After they left, my mother kept her hand on my shoulder for a long moment. I felt her grip tighten, yet I wasn't sure if she was applying more pressure as some sign of reprimand or affection, or to hold herself up. After I heard the police car drive away, I waited for her to explode, but she never did. She released her grip on my shoulder.

“Help me back up the stairs,” she said to neither of us in particular. “Please.”

Charlotte and I flanked her and helped guide her back up the stairs to her room. It was a long, painful journey.

“Okay, just take it nice and slow,” Charlotte advised.

With each step her leg muscles jerked and tightened. When we finally got to the door of her room,
I could see she had worked up a sweat. She turned to me. Her eyes looked at me with a strange sadness, as if she were trying to remember something and forget something at the same time. She reached out her hand and gently touched the side of my face with her fingertips.

“Go to bed, Louise.”

And then she disappeared inside her room.

T
he next morning she did not emerge from her room at her usual time to join the other ladies down at the school. In fact she stayed in her room with the door closed the entire day. Charlotte and I went back to our business-as-usual routine of taking care of things around the house and tending to Mr. Landroux. We didn't talk much. There didn't seem to be much to say. Charlotte brought my mother a pot of tea in the morning and a pitcher of lime juleps in the afternoon. After she returned to the kitchen with the empty pitcher, I asked, “Is she okay?” Charlotte shrugged. “She isn't
talking much. But the swelling's gone down a bit.”

I spent the better part of the day watching and waiting for Morgan's brother, Michael, to show up and help me find Morgan. Whenever a car passed the house, I was sure it was him. But no one ever stopped. In fact, no one came by the house at all that day except the postman to deliver the mail and Charlotte's friend Julie, who dropped off a small pot of her homemade turtle soup at the back door. How could Michael be so heartless? I wondered. Maybe he just didn't believe me.

Before Charlotte left that night, she put the pot of fiery rice and cheese back in the oven.

“Try to get her to eat something,” she said. Then she echoed the words my mother had said to me three years earlier. “A full stomach is one of the only things that can truly lessen sorrow.” I was left to wonder who actually had the insight first.

At seven thirty I ventured upstairs with a plate of rice and softly knocked on the door.

“Are you My Mother the Cheerleader?” I asked through the door.

“No,” she said. Her voice sounded distant even
though she was just a few feet away behind the door.

“Can I get you anything?”

“No,” she said. “Thank you.”

I retreated back downstairs, fed myself, brought Mr. Landroux his dinner tray, and then closed up the house for the night. Once I tucked myself in bed, I knew I'd have no chance of sleeping. I was way too stirred up. I tried to finish
Jane Eyre
, but the words seemed to scramble in my head as soon as they got past my eyes. So I moved on to something lighter. I flipped through an old issue of
Screenland
with Debbie Reynolds on the cover, but I couldn't interest myself in even the juiciest bits of celebrity gossip: “Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood Share Their Secrets for Marital Bliss,” “Connie Francis Reveals How She First Learned About Boys,” “Bill Holden's Got a Secret!” Nothing. I tossed the magazine aside and just lay in bed, hoping that sleep would come, but it didn't.

All I could think of was Morgan. I wondered if he was awake or asleep, safe or in danger.

Then, sometime well past midnight but before
dawn, I heard my mother finally emerge from her room and walk downstairs. She didn't turn on any lights or the radio. Maybe she was My Mother the Cheerleader and had gone to fix herself something. I quietly got out of bed and slowly tiptoed down the front hall steps. I paused at the bottom of the stairs and scanned the front of the house. No lights were on in the Music Hall, so I assumed she was in the kitchen. But then I saw her silhouette illuminated by the moonlight shining through the front windows.

She sat at the old piano and ran her fingers over the keys without striking any notes. Her head was slightly bent, and her eyes seemed to be focused on a point on the music stand, as if she were trying to decipher some invisible piece of sheet music. I watched her for a moment in silence, until she lifted her head as if she'd heard me breathing. I instinctively stepped back.

“Louise?” she called into the dark.

“Yeah,” I answered after a moment of hesitation.

“Come here.”

I walked over and stood beside the piano, where
I could finally get a good look at her. The swelling in her face had gone down, so it was back to nearly its normal size, but the color of her black eye had deepened and there was still a noticeable mark on her cheek.

“Can't sleep?” she asked.

“No.”

“Neither can I.”

“Can I get you something?” I asked.

“No. Have a seat,” she said, indicating a space on the piano bench beside her. I sat.

“Do you know where this piano came from?” she asked.

She had spun literally dozens of yarns about the piano's origins over the years, so I had no idea which one, if any, held a kernel of truth. Was it a gift to her grandmother from Jefferson Davis? Did her father win it by eating sixteen pecan pies in a contest at the Louisiana State Fair? Was it the sole valuable possession her family had rescued from Ireland when they escaped the potato famine?

“No,” I replied. “I don't.”

“I bought it,” she said. I detected a decent measure of pride in her voice. “Bought it with my own money just after we moved here. When I was a little girl, I always wished we had our own piano. I learned to play on my cousin Imogene's upright, and I always resented her because her parents could afford one and mine couldn't. I was a much better player than Imogene. I thought she didn't deserve to have a piano in her house, the way she used to butcher ‘Für Elise.' Beethoven must've been rolling in his grave every time she got near the ivories. Some kids had to be forced to take piano lessons, but not me. I always wanted to play. And I was good, too.

“Piano music always seemed romantic to me. I used to listen to all the radio serials when I was a little girl. Whenever there was a party in one of the stories, there was always someone playing the piano in the background. It didn't matter if the party was at a penthouse apartment in Manhattan or a grand plantation in Georgia. I always dreamed of going to one of those parties.

“After your father ran off and we moved back here, I promised myself that I'd get a piano to cheer myself up and bring a little bit of class to this place. I worked as a barmaid at Pat O'Brien's on Bourbon Street three nights a week for nearly a year to help pay for the thing. I'll never forget the day the delivery men dropped it off. A bunch of neighbors came out to admire the piano and give me little compliments about my good taste and how I was really getting the place in shape. But then once it got here, I knew right away I'd made a mistake. No one we ever have staying here really wants to hear someone play the piano. They either want peace and quiet or to go raise hell in the Quarter.”

“Not a whole lot of music lovers,” I said.

“No, not a whole lot,” she agreed with a small chuckle.

We fell into a moment of silence.

“I heard you sing the other night,” I said.

“Did you?”

“It's a pretty song. ‘Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans.'”

“I always thought so.”

“Ricky Nelson sings the same song, you know.”

“I haven't heard his version.”

“It's all right. You sing it better.”

“You really think so?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you, Louise. You know, I always meant to give you lessons…. There are a whole bunch of things I meant to do for you, but…”

She never finished the sentence.

“I think we'd both better get some sleep,” she finally said, “or we'll both be zombies come morning.”

She still moved with discomfort. I let her lean a hand on my shoulder and helped her back up to her room. When we got to the top of the landing, she bent down and gave me a small kiss on the cheek, which took me by surprise.

“You're a good girl, Louise.”

Then she retreated into her room and closed the door.

When I got back into bed, I felt an unusual
patch of warmth spread out across my cheek where she had kissed me. I closed my eyes and fell asleep almost instantly.

 

That day, once again, my mother did not emerge from her room at the usual hour. I wondered if she was going to miss another day of cheerleading. She'd never missed a morning with the ladies until the previous day. Was she afraid to face everybody with her injured face? Or was she having doubts about being out there protesting in the first place? Maybe something Morgan had said had gotten through to her.

I was in the kitchen preparing Mr. Landroux's breakfast tray with Charlotte when there was a knock at the front door. Charlotte's hands were full of flour, so I answered it. When I opened the door, I found Nitty Babcock holding a small hand mirror up to her face while she picked at her front tooth with her fingernail.

“Oh, morning, dear,” she said, returning the mirror to her purse. “Your mother home?”

“She's still sleeping,” I replied.

“Well, let her know da folks from CBS News who were supposed to come by da school on Monday are actually coming by today. Lena Witt heard from her sister, who works at da Chamberlain hotel, and dat's where they're staying. Da film crew, dat is. Shame dey didn't stay here, isn't it, girl? Well, anyway, if she wants to get a good spot, she'd better get down dere early. Lots of da girls are already out dere.”

A moment after Nitty departed, my mother's door opened and she emerged fully dressed in one of her best ensembles, a green polka-dot number with the matching faux alligator shoes and handbag. Her expert makeup job covered nearly all the damage to her face. Her cheek still looked slightly swollen and her eye was still stained dark red, but other than that you really wouldn't have noticed anything. She walked down the stairs to where I stood in the entry hall. She seemed to be moving with minimal discomfort. She checked her lipstick in the mirror in the front hall and reapplied it to her bottom lip.

“Nitty just came by…” I said.

“I heard her,” she replied.

“Are you going to the school?”

“Yes.”

I felt a bitter twinge of disappointment.

“Don't forget to tell Charlotte that Mr. Bayonne is coming by sometime this morning to look at the boiler,” she continued. “But don't let him do anything until I find out the price. Those boys can gouge you.”

She moved to the door.

“Don't go,” I said, barely above a whisper.

She paused and turned to look at me.

“Excuse me?”

“I said don't go.”

She stared at me for a long moment.

“Don't worry, Louise.”

And with that she was out the door. What did she mean, “Don't worry, Louise?” Don't worry about what? Don't worry about her? Don't worry about Morgan? Don't worry about Ruby Bridges? Don't worry about my busted bicycle? Don't worry
about ever going to school again? Don't worry about not having a real mama or daddy? Don't worry about my crooked bottom teeth? Don't worry about not having any friends? Don't worry about Communist spies? Don't worry about Mr. Bayonne quoting a high price to fix the boiler? I was worried about everything. What was she talking about, telling me not to worry?