She Got Up Off the Couch (24 page)

“I doubt Mama can cut it today,” Laurie said, watching Pooch amble off down the street. “She’s got three sets and two perms, and a rinse later in the afternoon.” Hair came easy to Laurie, like nothing came easy to me.

I thought about it. I didn’t have long before we were going to Parchman Williams’s house, and between the hair and the shoes, I didn’t want him to get the wrong impression. I only had two other options:my sister, who was likely to stab me in the neck then blame me for it, or Susie’s Cut & Curl, on the other side of town. One didn’t go to Susie’s, even though she was so sweet. She dressed like the Grand Ole Opry and in fact bore a passing resemblance to Loretta Lynn. The more I thought about it, the more she had something of the heartsick miner’s daughter to her. But the reason one didn’t go there was because of Linda Lee. Linda could be funny, she could slap you in the face if you happened to convince her son to eat dirt, she could be terrible mean, she could give you a good dinner if you needed one, she could comb your hair too hard or just right. But you did not cross her. I knew this as sure as I knew not to steal one of my dad’s guns, though I was often and sorely tempted. Also Linda would cut my hair and let somebody else pay later, and I never looked a credit horse in the mouth.

“See ya, then,” I said, starting to pedal away.

Laurie waved good-bye, called out “Bee-ooo-uuutch!” and I about had to stop my bike for laughing.

At home I did the worst possible thing, something I did almost every day. I broke into one of my mom’s dresser drawers and stole from her collection of John F. Kennedy money pieces. I didn’t know how much they were worth, fifty cents, a dollar, something like that, but I knew they added up to a lemon phosphate and a bag of chips if I was starving to death. She collected them not the way my dad collected things — because they were solid silver or pewter or fired raw gunpowder or whatever — but because she had grieved so mightily over Kennedy’s death. She had been vacuuming when the news was announced, and she happened to be passing the television and could see that something was going on without being able to hear what it was. She turned off the sweeper, heard the news, and had to sit down on the couch before she fainted. I’d never heard her say that or anything like it before, that she nearly fainted. So I felt guilty some, every day stealing Kennedy’s face out of her little plastic bag of Kennedys, but not very much, because money is money. Also the whole thing, the sweeping and the fainting, had happened before I was even born so it didn’t count.

I grabbed a few moneys and hopped back on my bike and rode the opposite direction from Linda’s Beauty Shop. I felt guilty about that, too, but again, just barely.

“How much of a haircut will this buy me?” I said to Susie as she opened the door of her shop, handing her the Kennedys.

“Sit down, honey,” she said, in her thick Kentucky accent. Mooreland was absolutely nothing but hillbillies, but some of our flatbed trucks had arrived later than others. She barely glanced at the change, just put it in a jar on her counter. As Linda did, Susie cut hair in the front room of her house, which had been outfitted with tilty chairs and sinks and hair dryers shaped like UFOs. Susie tipped my chair back and washed my hair, and unlike Linda, she didn’t scrub at my scalp with her fingernails until I was certain blood was streaming away with the soap. When she’d toweled off most of the water, she held up pieces of my hair and said, “Whatchoo want me to do here?” with that same tone of hopelessness I’d heard my whole life. On the other hand, she looked in general as if her husband had run off with both her best friend and her coonhound.

“I don’t know. Just cut it,” I said. “I don’t like it getting on me.”

Susie sighed, and turned the chair away from the mirror, starting on the back. Tammy Wynette was playing on an eight-track player in the corner. I had that tape, too, and in fact, d-i-v-o-r-c-e was the only word I could spell backward and forward. Susie cut and cut, sighing, and at one point said something about giving me something “modern.” That meant completely zero to me. Then she turned the chair around, and I looked in the mirror.

I was speechless. Susie was speechless, though her eyes seemed filled with tears. I kept on saying nothing. Tammy Wynette got her heart broken a thousand times. Finally I swallowed. I looked exactly like a rooster. I said, “What do you call this haircut?”

“A Rooster,” Susie said, and wiped the tears off her face.

I rode to my sister’s little house, praying she was home. I prayed like this:
Jesus, if you don’t make Melinda be home, I’m gonna make those forty days in the desert look like a cakewalk.
I
threatened
the Lord. She was there all right, and when she opened the door, instead of saying, as she generally did, “What do you want to eat?” she said, “Oh my God, I’ll get the hat.”

I’d been the one to find the hat at Grant’s last winter and it was like stumbling on a pile of rubies. It was just a white yarn bowl, like a white ball cut in half, elastic around the rim, but coming from the crown, where on a normal hat there’d be a puffy ball, there was
a long red yarn braid.
This was a hat that came with its own hair. I don’t know why it hadn’t been thought of before. In many ways it was better than my wig (which was a “fall,” and so held on with a comb) because the cats were less likely to steal it. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d seen my wig flying out the door in PeeDink’s mouth. Sometimes he just sucked on it and sometimes he tried to kill it. I think it was a combination of a rat and a baby to him. Of course, he had fallen out of many a tree, and so his relationship with a wig was bound to be complicated.

I put the hat on as if it would save my life. Lindy said, “It’s awful doggone hot outside for that hat.”

“You got another suggestion?”

She studied me a minute. “What happened? Did you try to mow your head?”

“I’ll have you know this is a modern haircut, Melinda, called a Rooster.”

Melinda covered her mouth. “Did you go to
Susie
?”

I nodded.

“Oh ho ho, oh this is going to be rich,” she said, sitting down at the kitchen table. She was filled with glee: a very bad sign.

“Linda don’t have to know.”

“She
doesn’t
have to know, and yes, she does. How many people do you think walk around Mooreland sporting the Rooster? Exactly one little idiot child. And could you tell me…are you wearing shoes? Is that a FLOWER?”

I stood up to leave. I swung my head around so my long, bright red braid nearly hit my sister in the face. She just batted it away, and as I slammed the screen door she was still tapping on the table with her fingernails, another of her signs of evil happiness.

On Saturday evening we got in the truck to go to Parchman Williams’s house. I sat between my parents and put one denim sandal on either side of the gearshift. I pulled my red braid over my shoulder so I wouldn’t sit on it. We drove out of town silent, Mom thinking her thoughts, Dad smoking. I for one was desperately trying to imagine what was about to happen. I figured the best plan would be for me to act like everything in my life was just black, black, black. Here were the black things I knew:
Sanford & Son.
“We was robbed! We was robbed!” Very funny.
Good Times.
Funny + disturbing. The dad in that show, for a reason I couldn’t put my finger on, reminded me exactly of my brother. He had the same uprightness and intensity; he flared his nostrils when he was vexed. I mean he
looked
like my brother to me, even, a fact I had not yet told anyone. Maybe I could say that, I could say, “Ah, of course, my brother is black.” Black people ate things but I didn’t know what. I could say, “This week at the Newmans’ I had my favorite breakfast, fried beef brains and scrambled eggs, and then afterward we went out and did black farmwork.” Black people wore clothes, but surely not the same ones I wore, and they lived in…that was it. They lived in tenements, and
so did I.
Sure, the Sanfords had a junkyard, but we had my dad’s shed. And okay, in
Good Times
the elevator never worked, but at our house we often didn’t have running water. I started to feel slightly more comfortable. Mom asked did I want to sing, and I said yes, I always said yes to singing. I meant to ask did she happen to know any Negro spirituals, but she chose “Down by the Old Mill Stream,” a good choice because it had two parts, and we ended up in a little vaudeville harmony that pleased my dad, although he never said so.

Parchman’s house was on I Avenue, a disappointment, as it was not even remotely the ghetto. If New Castle had a ghetto, I wanted to find it. One of the things on my mind as we parked was how I was going to hold this over Rose: My Black People. Although on the one occasion I’d ventured my new treasure, she had announced that her church, St. Anne’s, had a black family, and the father wasn’t merely black, he was Caribbean and an intellectual. Leave it to Rose to get a black Catholic intellectual before I’d even ridden in the Cadillac.

The Williamses’ house was a perfectly normal two-story, with wood shingles and a cement front porch. But right there, right on the porch, something was going on, because it had a railing (unusual among my kind) made of wrought iron with curly-cues. And the outside light wasn’t white or even yellow for bugs, but a pinkish shade that made me squint up in suspicion.

We were out of the truck and moving to the door and I felt like everything was too speedy, I wasn’t ready. My mom was wearing a dress she’d made and some broken-down shoes, and my dad looked, as always, as if he’d just beat the house in Vegas. We rang the doorbell (a doorbell), and the door was opened and in we stepped.

The house was cool, because there were window air conditioners running in every room. I’d never seen such a thing. In fact, I’d never seen anything like any single part of it.

My dad called him Willy but Mom insisted on calling him Parchman, which he seemed to appreciate, and either way, he was a great, glowing presence, who was suddenly everywhere, shaking hands with my dad as if they’d just met, and telling Mom how lovely it was to finally meet her and how he had heard she was just about the smartest thing to ever grace the planet. He turned to me. “And you, miss? May I take your hat?”

“No thank you,” I said, shaking his outstretched hand,
my very first black hand,
“I’ll just be keeping it on, but I sure like
Sanford & Son.
”

My mom nearly tipped over with shock, but Parchman said, “Now I do, too; I do, too. I met Redd Foxx once upon a time, I certainly did. We had quite an afternoon.” As he led us through the house he told a rambling, quite hazy, and, in Bob Jarvis Land, shady story about spending an afternoon tipping them back with Mr. Foxx, as he put it. Every detail escaped me. I didn’t know what a Universal lot was, or why Parchman was on it, or how it happened that he and Mr. Foxx had shared a long afternoon producing “ripostes of such graciousness Bill Shakespeare would have been jealous.” I glanced at my mom and saw her mentally recording the phrase.

Everything on the first floor of the house was black and gold. The shag carpet was gold, and as long as the grass in our backyard, which my dad wasn’t so interested in cutting. The living room furniture was black leather, and there was an enormous setup against one wall that Parchman called an “entertainment center.” There was a large television in it, a stereo, tall speakers, I didn’t know what-all. We had an entertainment center at our house, too, which consisted of an old television on a milk crate and a hammer lying nearby. The hammer did seem to solve most problems, including a wobbly picture and volume-control issues. The Williamses’ coffee table was glass-topped, and the glass rested on the back of a black panther. On every wall were large paintings of black people doing black things: playing trumpets, dancing in smoky clubs, women flirting around lampposts. And then I saw it: in the corner beside the couch was a wicker basket, and rising out of it was a cobra, obviously made of rubber. I walked toward it and looked inside, and there were a number of rubber snakes, coiled up as if in the noonday sun. A rubber snake was stretched out across the back of the leather couch, and there was another slithering across the entertainment center. But there wasn’t a real animal anywhere, I could feel it, and I could tell that there never had been, and wouldn’t be. The house was filled with a smell that didn’t include animals, but was layered and foreign. There was the strawberry smell as in the Cadillac, and something sweet and smoky (incense, I’d discover later); there was whiskey, and unusual beauty supplies, and a sharp, chemical tang that I realized was acetone. Next to the sofa was a small black table, and on it was a tray covered with bottles of fingernail polish, probably thirty different shades. There was a jar of cotton balls and three different sorts of fingernail polish remover.

What I wanted to do was go from room to room and open every closet door and look in every drawer and smell every single thing, because I was on a different planet, far as I could tell. I was just wandering into the dining room (dark wood paneling, black enameled table and chairs, a family portrait painted
on velvet
), when Parchman’s wife emerged from the kitchen.