The Penny (5 page)

How could anybody believe in me when I was always telling lies?

He kept saying how, if you believed in Jesus, he could make the stains inside you go away.

The stains from what I let Daddy do had soaked deep, and nothing could fade them.

The ache in my heart grew into something much bigger than anything I knew how to put a name to. The only thing I had come here to do was tell Aurelia that if I hadn’t paused for a few seconds and picked up that penny, nothing about my life would’ve changed. I got the chill-bumps up my arms.
If I hadn’t stopped, I wouldn’t be standing here now.
For the first time ever, I felt something gentle take my soul in its hands. For the first time, I forgot to listen to the taunts inside my head.

Maybe because the Crocketts stood beside me. Maybe because I held the penny in my palm. Or maybe because I had a new job or because I’d heard Aurelia say she felt like she was walking on air when she came out of this place, or because I was just too crazy to stop believing in
possibility.

I decided to do it when that Antioch preacher encouraged people to come to the front and pray with him. He called it the “prayer of salvation.” In spite of all my skepticism, after I’d heard those electric words, and thought how I’d like to have my life move smooth like Aurelia’s, and had seen that preacher orating like he wanted to hand me his whole heart in his hands because he knew what was going on inside me, I wouldn’t have stayed in my seat for anything. I remember the heat in my ears as I walked forward, my legs moving of their own accord. When I prayed the words that Reverend Monroe prompted me to pray, my insides seemed to expand with every word. I invited Jesus into my heart, although I can tell you right now I had no idea what I was getting into. I asked him to take over my life and help me do the right things and help me trust in him because I sure wasn’t doing very well trusting myself. I asked him to show me what he wanted to do inside me to make me great, because if something didn’t happen to make that obvious, then
I
sure wasn’t going to figure it out.

And when Reverend Monroe stopped praying and the music started up again and people started chatting and shaking hands and hugging around me, I kept praying a little longer. I added my own parts that I wouldn’t tell anybody else about. I asked Jesus to protect me just like Reverend Monroe had said he would. I told him how I knew it was my fault and that I was ashamed of being so dirty and that I could handle all the hitting in the world if he would just help me do something to stop Daddy from coming to my room at night.

I opened my eyes to a whole bunch of Antioch Baptists waiting in line to congratulate me. I felt drowned in love and sweet perspiration and the smell of lemon ValMor skin-lightener. “You’ve made a joyous decision, child.” The softest hands I’d ever known cupped my face. “The angels are singing now up in heaven.” And I felt like singing right along. After all that, we ate a potluck lunch with all of them and I walked out of that place and headed down the steps to hug my A&P groceries against my chest, feeling like I’d been bathed inside, cleaned up and polished to a gleam and fresh-smelling like soap.

The Crocketts walked with me to the streetcar stop. I can tell you I was walking high the same way Aurelia said she walked high whenever she came out of church with an answer to her problems.

“I got a job just because I picked up a penny,” I told them. “A real job. That’s the reason I got that penny out to show you, Aurelia. It all happened because of that.”

“Girl.” Darnell took the groceries from me so he could carry them. “You tell the biggest stories I ever heard.”

“It did. It got me a job.” I snapped my fingers. “Just like that.”

“Prove it.” I’d learned from that very first day on the steps at school that Darnell was always skeptical.

And just like I’d known she would, Aurelia became my champion. “What do you know, Darnell? You don’t even know how to make an ironing board stay standing. And you talking like you’re the authority on everything in the world.”

So I told them the whole story, about the penny beside the streetcar tracks and the dairy truck and the Elvis record and the robber—all of it. I told them about the Grace Kelly movie and Pete Mason giving chase and the man from the box office saying, “You must be one special young lady.” Then I told how Miss Shaw had called my house on the party line.

By this time, I’d pulled the penny out of my pocket for the umpteenth time and was showing it around. Darnell, who was carrying my groceries in one muscled arm, scrubbed the back of his neck in disbelief. “I don’t trust a word of it.”

“So, drop the penny on the ground again,” Aurelia suggested. “Let me pick it up. I want to try.”

“What?”

“I want to see what happens to me.”

“You have to find your own penny first.”

“Drop that penny. Drop it and I’ll pick it up and see if it works.”

I shoved it under my armpit in horror. “Over my dead body, Aurelia.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to lose this penny. It’s too important.”

Aurelia’s loyalty seemed to waver for a moment. I couldn’t bear seeing her unconvinced. I hadn’t finagled streetcar money and come all this way and snuck into a church and accepted Jesus for her skepticism.

“My sister was standing right there with me when it happened. Jean saw the whole thing.” Even though I knew the last thing Jean would ever do was take my side. “You can ask her.”

“What if it’s not just
any
penny?” Aurelia pointed toward my armpit. “What if it’s just
that
penny that changes things?”

“Then,” I said confidently, “it’s mine.”

Aurelia stopped right where she stood and planted her hands on her hips. She aligned her feet at the same impudent angle as a dress mannequin in Sonnenfield’s display window.

At that exact moment, Darnell’s eyes went wide and his face sort of puffed out. “Aurelia. Look.” He pointed.

We all stared. There beside her toe lay a penny, just waiting for us, as shiny as if it had been struck from the mint that morning.

“You
see
?” I gloated. “I
told
you.”

“Pick that up,” Darnell said, sighting along his finger. “Go ahead. Pick it up. See if something happens.”

“What if it does what you say? What if it changes something I don’t want changed?”

“Everybody gets their own penny, Aurelia,” I said. “This one’s got your name on it. You’re going to miss out if you don’t pick it up.”

Somewhere along the line while we’d been talking, Garland had wriggled out of Aunt Maureen’s arms. Aurelia dropped her mannequin pose and almost stepped right over her penny. “Who cares about such a small thing?” she asked.

“You ought to,” I said.

Just as she finally stooped over to pick up the penny, Garland snatched it up instead.

“Garland!”
You would have thought Aurelia had got the breath kicked out of her.

Beating wings surrounded us. Darnell, Aurelia’s aunt, and I searched in every direction for the sound. The oak tree that shaded us disgorged a flock of crows, their wings thrashing the leaves before they rose on the air, dipping and swirling above our heads.

They rippled black against the heat before they circled and dispersed into the sky. I can still hear in my head the ruckus those crows made that day. Aurelia had missed her chance. And Garland skipped along ahead of us on the sidewalk, holding the penny aloft in his fingers, shrieking with delight.

Chapter Four

W
hen I walked into our kitchen, Mama had the bowl and the pink Sunbeam Mixmaster waiting, ready to make the cake. She saw me coming and started tying on her apron. The heavy bag crumpled when I set it on the counter, bottles clanging. I began to load Daddy’s RC Colas into the icebox, two by two.

“That took you half the day.” Mama kept working at her apron strings. “That grocery sack looks like it’s been to Chicago and back.”

I set the cake mix beside the bowl and adjusted the package so the picture of the perfectly iced confection could be seen from the entire room. Putting the box to rights made our kitchen look like the one from
Time to Eat,
Mama’s favorite cooking show.

“I didn’t ask which flavor. I got us chocolate.”

Jean was engrossed in the
Cosmopolitan Magazine
with Grace Kelly on the cover. “You know,” Jean said, swinging bare toes which she’d painted fuchsia, “this says Grace’s family let her go to New York because they thought she’d last a month and then come home. Did you know that she hated her Philadelphia accent because she thought it sounded nasal?” Jean flipped the page. “Did you know she bought a recording machine for her room and taught herself New British, perfect diction. Can you imagine a girl changing herself, just like that?”

“Jean,” Mama said. “Scoot yourself around the other side of the table, would you? I need a towel out of the drawer.”

“Maybe that’s what I should do. Get a recording machine. I could speak French.” My sister ran her hand through her smooth hair. “I’m so happy for her that she won Best Actress. Did you know that she paid her father back, tuition and board and everything, after she finished acting school?”

I’d left the money tin pulled somewhat forward on the shelf, its lid only halfway fastened. In a fit of contrite guilt, I climbed up, tilted the tin forward and returned the precious few coins. I saw Mama’s neck straighten at the meager clink and I imagined she’d expected me to disappoint her all along. She cracked an egg and the yolk slid into the batter.

I mashed the lid shut and shoved the tin as far back as it would go, trying not to think about Grace Kelly and the moral virtue she’d displayed, repaying a fortune to her parents after acting lessons.

“You missed lunch, you know,” Mama said as she flipped on the electric mixer and the beaters circulated batter into clovers. She let the bowl skim her palm, as if she couldn’t quite believe an appliance could do its job without her direction.

But, no, I hadn’t missed lunch. I’d eaten with the Antioch Baptists, three kinds of meat, mashed potatoes with gravy, green beans, and fruit salad with coconut stirred in. For dessert there had been peach cobbler and brownies and lemon pie.

Mama was flouring the pan, turning it every which way, giving it nervous little pats with her hand. “Your daddy made it home to eat, though. He was asking where you’d gone off to. I told him you’d gone after those RCs he mentioned.”

“Oh.”

She transferred the batter from bowl to pan in massive spoonfuls, then scraped the sides of the bowl with her spatula. “Only he said he didn’t think he’d ever
mentioned
colas.”

“Oh.” Then, “I sure did
think
he mentioned them.” I decided I’d better drop it, seeing as trying to talk my way out of it wouldn’t get me anywhere. I was trapped again. You know the feeling you get when you have to pep talk yourself that, no matter what happens, you did what you had to do? All the way to Aurelia’s that morning, I’d known what the risk would be.

“Jean, open the oven, would you? So I can slide the cake in?”

Jean sighed, slapped the magazine shut, and did as she was bidden.

When Daddy came upstairs, cement and plaster covered his shirt. He washed up with Lava Soap, scrubbing his knuckles while grey suds ran down his wrists in rivulets. He dried them on the tea towel and stretched to retrieve the money tin.

“Now, let’s see what we’ve got here.” His palm was big enough to pry the lid off with one twist.

“It cost me streetcar fare to get to the A&P.”
Say it,
I begged Mama with my eyes.
Say you gave me permission to go. Tell him you said it was okay for me to take the streetcar money, too.

But Mama’s gaze skittered from mine. Some dumb idea, wishing she would speak up for me. She’d let me bear my retribution alone, the way she always did. Then she would wait until he was out of the house and try to make it up to me. At least she could have poured him a soda over ice or something.

Daddy shook the tin at me. Then he emptied it into his hand and sorted through the coins. I couldn’t raise my eyes from his hands. I was at the mercy of them. They held me as surely now as they did when they were wrapped around my shoulders, pressing me down. “You lied to your mother when you said I wanted colas. She let you take grocery money, but you didn’t stop at that, did you? Where is the rest of it?”

“I’ll pay it back.”

“Of
course
you will. Now that I’ve let you accept a job offer, you can be certain I’ll expect you to pay your own way for everything.”

I hated the quiver in my voice. “I will. I’ll do that, Daddy.”

“There’s almost a whole
dollar
missing here.
Where is the rest?
”

As well as I knew him, I couldn’t tell you which he would hate worse. Me stopping to visit the Ville, or me giving hard-earned money to a church. When I’d thrown the money in the basket, I’d been thinking only about saving my penny. I hadn’t been think-ing about giving to God. I hadn’t been thinking about the consequences later.

With everything else I’d been doing wrong, I hadn’t been thinking how I was stealing from Daddy.

“I put some in the collection plate at church.”

He stared at me, his jaw clenched. My answer gave him even more pause than I expected. But it seemed like it wasn’t the stealing he was worried about.

“You went to church?”

“Yes, sir.”

He set the tin on the counter, the loose change still in his hand. “Who do you know who would take you to a church?” He always worked me around to something I had to think hard to answer.

“Nobody took me.” And that wasn’t a lie, either. “I went by myself.”

Just like that, the money went flying all over the floor and he collared me. “You know what people who go to church think about?”

I had my own fists balled as if I could protect myself. I tried to jerk loose but he hung on tight. “I don’t—”

“They think about being better than other people. They think about being better than me. That’s what they think about. They don’t do anything different than I do, but there they are at church, acting like they’ve cornered the market on living.”

My staying quiet must have made Daddy madder than what I’d done, taking money in the first place. He turned the air blue for miles around, shouting at me. I guessed I deserved this. And at least he wasn’t hitting me. Maybe Jesus had taken me up on my bargain after all.

But when Daddy grabbed my hair and yanked my head upright, no powerful protector stepped in to intervene on my behalf. Nobody came to rescue me, not Jesus, not my sister, certainly not my mother, when Daddy punched me again. He shoved me away and I hit the wall and stared all that meanness right back at him.

Mama had disappeared the way she always did. When I realized she’d vanished from the room again, it struck me harder than any of Daddy’s physical blows.
Why don’t you ever do something to make him stop?

Mama never stood up to him when we needed her most. She never stepped forward when we needed a safe guardian. She always appeared later, her help ill-timed and inept, the same way she’d tried to make it up to Jean by having secret senior pictures made instead of confronting Daddy that they needed to be done at a studio. The same way she’d tried to make it up by overlaying our bodies with wet clothes when Jean had asked to go to the Ambassador Hotel.

When I wiped my mouth, my wrist came away with a bloody smear.
Why don’t you ever stand up for us, Mama?

Jean’s carnation fingernails alighted on the magazine like pink butterflies, her eyes darting away from mine.
Do not be afraid,
Reverend Monroe had said.
The L
ORD
answers them with the saving power of his right hand.

The only powerful right hand that had been flying around this place since I got home belonged to Daddy. The room stayed silent except for the
tick tick tick
of the pink-cat clock on the wall, its eyes shooting back and forth with the seconds, its tail swinging to the beat. Daddy towered over me. I got the feeling he was waiting on me to make one false move. Me, I was waiting for Jesus to show up.

What were you expecting, Jenny?
I asked myself.
What did you
really
think was going to happen?

A cord of disappointment, which had begun its slight tug at my heart, now cinched noose-tight and relentless around my chest. I sat silent in the chair, blood oozing from the cut in my chin, unwilling to wipe it because I liked making Daddy look at it. But Daddy’s anger waned and he gave in to boredom. He left suddenly, shrugging his shoulders in disgust. Jean shoved her magazine aside and said, “You’d think you’d learn to stay out of trouble.”

I glared at her as hard as I’d glared at Daddy. “Oh, why don’t you go pretend to be some stupid movie star? Because, let me tell you, pretending is the only way you’ll ever be what you want to be.”

She glared at me as the kitchen timer buzzed. “I’m not just pretending. You know I’m headed off to school. Not many girls get to do that.” Then Jean said, “The cake’s starting to burn. Where’s Mama?”

I wiped my chin down the entire length of my sleeve. “Who knows?”

“You’re never going to grow up.”

“Who said I wanted to?” I asked. “Who said I want to be anything like you?”

After Jean stalked out the door, I brandished the hot pad and rescued the cake so it could cool. I stood staring at the smooth slope of it.

No matter what, I wanted to hang on to that clean-scrubbed, white-fresh feeling I’d carried with me down the steps of Antioch Baptist. I wanted to take bottomless breaths and know that everything I’d been given was protected there inside me, ready for the right moment to burst open, mysterious and fragrant. I touched my hand to my chest. Once, I’d seen our downstairs neighbor Mrs. Shipley embrace her belly with one curved, careful arm before her baby had been born. I wanted to do the same thing. No matter what happened, I wanted to hang on to hope the way I’d seen Mrs. Shipley holding on to her baby inside her.