She Got Up Off the Couch (25 page)

Rose and I had always been in agreement that my sister was the most beautiful person alive. She looked exactly like the sort of girl who would stay with the squirrels and little birds and sweep up the cabin while the Dwarfs were at work. But since she had gotten married, she’d lost a lot of that shine. I didn’t know where it went, or why. There was no one to ask, or even any way to say it out loud. But Libra Williams was of a different order.

She walked toward us with her hand out, a welcoming gesture by a benevolent royal. Her hair was very short and waved against her head, black with gold streaks, just like the living room. I could dream, I could pretend, I could outright lie, but that was not what was happening under my hat. She was tall and thin, broad-shouldered. Her skin was the creamy brown of chocolate milk made exactly right. She was wearing gold hoop earrings, three gold chains around her long neck, gold rings, gold bracelets, and a silky pantsuit in some sort of jungle print. As with Parchman, there was the flurry of activity, the kindness to my mother, the dance around my dad, an offer to me of a Shirley Temple with an actual cherry. Libra called up the stairs for their son, Tyrell, to come downstairs for dinner, and Mom told me to go wash my hands. I stared at her blankly for a moment.

“Go wash your hands before dinner,” she said again, this time with her teeth a bit clenched. I considered saying, “Mom, I eat rocks, for heaven’s sake,” but then it occurred to me I could see the bathroom if I pretended to obey her, so I went.

And lucky me, because here Parchman had outdone himself. The carpet was black, the shag was shaggier, and the walls were papered in shiny gold paper with lion’s heads. But the best part was that the sink and toilet were both gold. Not Harvest Wheat. Not some Pale Avocado. Shiny gold, like Libra’s jewelry. I was afraid to touch them. It didn’t make a lick of sense to me that people peed on jewelry. I decided to go ahead and wash my hands, but the faucet, which was also gold, had a ball on top I couldn’t figure out. There was no Hot or Cold. I pushed the ball and nothing happened. I pulled my hand back. I could easily destroy this thing and that would be the end of me and My Black People. I tried turning it, and it moved around freely, but no water came out. Finally, I pushed it up and out came water with a force I can only describe as wealthy. There was no initial spit of rust, no hesitation, no gaps. Before I knew what I was doing, I put my hands under the force, just to feel it, and then because there was a guest soap shaped like a seashell, I used it. I washed my hands, and dried them on a towel embroidered with a white “W,” and walked out and held them out to my mom and said, “Ta-da!” She patted my hat and whispered, “Thank you.”

Tyrell was nine. He was gangly and never stopped moving. His arms and legs seemed battery-operated. Black people, it turned out, ate exactly what white people ate: meat loaf, mashed potatoes, green beans, dinner rolls. Tyrell and I were given plates with dividers, which I found to be the height of civilization, as food touching made me spitting mad. We were also each given a Shirley Temple drink, and there was the real cherry, and I couldn’t believe how things had turned out. The rubber snakes, the King Midas bathroom, the incredible beauty and kindness of Libra. And free Shirley Temples. I wanted to live with them, and I was willing to change my name to something interesting, like Bocephus.

Tyrell’s room was covered with posters of black athletes and musicians, and in a frame above his bed, a photograph of Redd Foxx with Parchman, signed “To Tyrell, Mind Your Daddy.” I could hear our parents downstairs, the kind of continuous conversation and laughter that made me want to grow up. I never told anyone this, but I could not imagine a better age than thirty-five. I would someday be grown-up — I thought about it at night, lying awake — and I would drive tractors and own wolves. I would turn up my Glen Campbell records so loudly the wolves would howl, and at dinner we would have milk shakes, and I would erect scarecrows everywhere, I would have an army of scarecrows.

That had been my plan until I saw the home of Parchman Williams. Now I was thinking maybe I would have real snakes and a black panther and an entertainment center.

Tyrell and I ate mostly in silence, and he never said a word about my hat. He seemed to think it was real hair and I understood how maybe the ways of white people were unknown to him, and maybe we all had white heads and yarn braids. When we finished eating we played Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots; then we pulled on Stretch Armstrong until Tyrell fell down. He showed me his miniature foosball table and we played that awhile in silence. He was just quiet, which I was used to because of Julie. But his quietness meant I had plenty of time to think, and I was thinking about the scarecrows and maybe adding suits of armor, when I remembered an evening a few summers before when my family had driven to Indianapolis in the Nova we had then to get White Castles. We’d stopped at a gas station and our German shepherd, Kai, was in the backseat of the car, and as a black family walked down the sidewalk he sprang so hard at the window he nearly went through it, barking explosively enough to leave streaks on the glass. It had been terrifying and unexpected; Kai, who was gentle, and read people so well he knew enemies from friends long before we did. Dad seemed to find it funny, but Mom, I remembered now, had turned around, grabbed Kai’s collar, shushed him, then said to my dad, in a fierce, angry whisper, “You
make him
do that.”

“How did I make him do that?” Dad asked, in his false, innocent tone.

“Because you want him to, because he senses that you hate them.”

“Hate who, Delonda?”

Mom looked out the window. “There’s a child in the car.”

I could hear my parents talking with Parchman and Libra, I could hear the clinking of their plates and glasses. I could not, even for a second, understand what we were doing here, or how we’d gotten here.

“Tyrell, has your dad always been a deputy?” I knew Parchman, like my dad, was a volunteer, so where had all this stuff come from?

Tyrell shook his head no.

“What did he do before?”

He shrugged, said something that sounded like “Own’t know.”

“Does your mom have a job?”

“She work at the drive-up bank.”

I liked this way of speaking. Perhaps I would adopt it for myself. If there was a word or a letter you didn’t need, you just left it out. Earlier he’d said, “This my favorite wrestler,” and I realized, who needed that “is” in there? I knew what he meant and he got to the point faster.

“Did your dad work in a factory, or like on a farm, or something?”

“A
farm
?” Tyrell tipped back on the floor, held his sides laughing. “That man never cut a blade of grass in his life. A farm.”

“Okay, a factory?”

He shook his head. “Naw, no factory. Own’t know what he did, ’cept he move money around. All I can tell you. He move money around.”

I was about to say something, something about our fathers, or at least my own, when Tyrell said, “You wanna watch TV?” I said yes, so he yelled down the stairs, “Hey Pop! We watch TV in y’all’s room?”

Parchman shouted back, “Yes, but you know the rules.”

And then Tyrell led me to Parchman and Libra’s bedroom, and whatever I’d been on the verge of figuring out, I lost for a good long time.

The room was papered in black and gold foil. I know it was foil because I ran my hands over it. And up against one of those walls was a
round bed
the size of a swimming pool, and in fact it was like a swimming pool in that it was filled with
water,
and it was covered with
fur.
I stood dead still with my hand on the wallpaper, but Tyrell just walked over, flopped down on the bed, which swished around underneath him, and slid open a door in the black, arched headboard. The headboard arched halfway
over the bed
is what I’m saying, this was a bed with a
roof,
and when Tyrell pushed the button a television came on in the roof above him and he lay back on big, tiger-striped fur pillows and watched television. Lying on his back. On a round fur water bed. I walked slowly toward him, slipped off my new sandals, and lay down. In addition to the television there were stereo speakers built into the roof, and it was entirely covered with
mirrors.
So I could see the TV, and I could see myself and Tyrell, there was not one thing I couldn’t see on the bed. I lay there perfectly still, thinking,
Rose will never believe me, Melinda will never believe me.
I myself would never have believed me. I tore my eyes away from the mirror and that’s when I saw it: directly across from the bed was a large painting, and it was of nothing but a black man and a black woman, and they were naked as jays. I couldn’t tell exactly what they were doing, and heaven knew that was for the best, but the fact of their nakedness had put a shock on my heart I thought might finally kill me. I tried to not move, to just take it all in, but every time Tyrell laughed at something on TV the whole bed sloshed around and nearly tossed me out. His arms and legs never did stop moving, which I could for sure see now that I was in a bed surrounded by mirrors. And there was that very strong smell again, that strawberry gelatin air freshener, and hair sprays I couldn’t name, and those clothes made for black people and everything was very clean and of course there was the absence of even one real live animal in this house, not a hamster or even a goldfish, only the rubber snakes and the glass panthers and whatnot. I tried to picture Libra in a house with just one little well-behaved snow-white kitten and it was impossible. Not even a black-and-gold-foil kitten. Not with Libra’s fingernails and leather sofas and bathrooms made of melted-down gold jewelry.

“Zip?” my dad called up the stairs. “You ready to go?”

I leapt off the bed as if scalded. “’Bye,” I said to Tyrell.

“Later,” he nodded, still watching TV.

I grabbed my shoes and scooted past the naked painting without looking at it. I didn’t look at what was on top of the black dressers, either, but I did notice, for the first time, a photograph on a small side table out in the hallway. It was an Olan Mills picture, taken when Tyrell was probably three years old. There was Libra, the same air of untouchable beauty. She was the sort of woman my mom called fixey. And Tyrell wearing a small, dark green suit and bow tie. He wasn’t happy. But no sign of Parchman anywhere. I leaned down and looked at Libra’s hands (each fingernail was at least an inch long and in this picture they were scarlet, but tonight they had been a darker red with a gold streak through the center), and there were rings on every finger except the one.

“Zip?”

“Coming,” I yelled, heart pounding as if I’d been doing something wrong.

When I got to the bottom of the stairs everyone was still laughing and talking. There was my mom in her mom clothes, her old glasses, her battered shoes. Libra, Parchman, and my dad made a little triangle and Mom wasn’t in it. She said to me, “Thank your hosts,” as she did every time we went anywhere, which was one of the reasons I hated going anywhere, and it was a stupid rule and made me physically ill, which I’d tried to explain 897 times. Nobody Cares If I Say That, I’d tried to tell her. THE WORLD WILL NOT END IF WE SKIP THAT PART. But somehow, tonight, it was easy. I held out my hand to Libra and she took it. Hers was cool, long, and narrow. She was a very kind woman, it seemed to me, and she deserved to live in this castle. “It was a very nice evening thank you for having me,” I said, as had been drilled into me.

She pulled me to her, tapped the top of my hat. “You’re welcome. Come back anytime.”

Dad leaned over and said something to Parchman, said it in one of his many Dad voices out the corner of his mouth, and Parchman threw his head back and laughed with a great busting-out joy, a way I wasn’t used to men laughing. He pounded on Dad’s back a couple times between the shoulder blades, then Dad was laughing, too, and we were all moving toward the door, floating, really. We floated to the truck in such goodwill, and I sat between my parents and we drove off down I Avenue.

“What an evening,” Dad said, lighting a cigarette.

“It certainly was,” Mom agreed.

“Plain nice people, nothing more to be said than that.”

“Very nice. How did Parchman get that gold toilet, I wonder?”

Dad laughed again, flicked his ashes out the wing. “He spray-painted it. Tub and sink, too.”

Mom laughed, I looked back and forth between them. Dad seemed genuinely happy, which was sure never guaranteed, not one minute of any day, but Mom kept wearing that polite face. I’d seen it a thousand times. I’d seen it when he suggested we get a bigger camper, when he decided we had to move to Alaska, when he explained why he couldn’t fix something broken in the house, why some things needed to wait, wait, and some things needed to be done yesterday, like getting a new truck. I saw Parchman throw his head back with laughter; Kai hit the window, teeth bared.
Because you hate them.

One day the Williamses weren’t there and the next they were a constant feature. Here is the music my dad would tolerate in the Before Time: Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. Glen Campbell, but mostly for my sake. Glenn Yarbrough. Lena Horne. Dean Martin or Frank Sinatra. After Willie we might pause the truck radio on Smokey Robinson, who was said to have quite a bit of talent, all of a sudden. Same with a number of Motown artists formerly unknown in Mooreland, Indiana. Dad wouldn’t go the distance and listen to some of the things we heard at the Williamses’ I thought were especially delicious, particularly Isaac Hayes, who made me have un-Christian feelings. All of my worst crushes were on bald men, beginning with Telly Savalas and staying a long, long time on Yul Brynner. Once I realized there were bald black men in addition to bald tan men I knew the world was opening wide.

I stayed home with my dad while Mom was student teaching in summer school, every day, all day, and Parchman didn’t have a day job, either, and then in the evenings he and my dad were partners on a night shift. Except it seemed they only worked when they wanted to, so we spent a lot of evenings at their house, too. They never came to ours.