The Penny (8 page)
I
’d never seen anything like the Fourth of July Independence Day celebration going on in Aurelia’s neighborhood. Up and down the street, flags flew beside awnings that had been scrubbed bright. People greeted each other from stoops or shouted through open screen doors. Women chitchatted as they shifted their babies from one hip to another. A stickball game had drawn a crowd into an empty lot, and umbrellas spun like pinwheels when revelers ducked beneath them for shade.
When Aurelia saw me, she stood still for a second, like she was blinded by the sight of me. Then she bounded forward, darting between about fifteen kin in her trodden-grass yard. As she wove toward me, I tried to figure out how to show my feelings, to show her how sad it made me that it took this many days to see her again. How if it were up to me, I’d be over here all the time, playing in the water hose, and leaving secret notes in the hollow of the elm tree in Aurelia’s front yard, and devouring Aunt Maureen’s hotcakes with butter and molasses dripping down, and carrying bottles to the confectionery store with her so we could trade them in for two cents apiece.
Maybe it was Miss Shaw and the way she’d talked to me about myself, but I couldn’t stop thinking how Aurelia Crockett being my friend was like somebody giving me a present I didn’t deserve. When she got there, I hadn’t found any words yet. The only thing to do was to hug and laugh and hug again.
“Girl,” she said, “I thought you’d
never
get over to see us again.”
Miss Shaw said my eyes showed I had strength to trust. Aurelia was the one I thought I might be able to trust someday. Let me tell you, trust didn’t come easy. Everyone I’d trusted before had hurt me.
“I don’t have many chances. But I got one now.”
Daddy had finally gotten a decent job from the real estate office—they’d assured him it might last three weeks. They’d hired him, he informed us, to break up cement and pull out metal posts. They’d told him they needed somebody with “arms of steel,” he bragged.
Which meant, for a little while at least, we could count our lives as our own.
I’d used my very first Shaw Jeweler’s wages to hop the streetcar to the Ville and visit Aurelia.
Above everything, I heard the crisp sound of Eddie Crockett’s horn, its running tones and sharp style falling in pleasant chords on my shoulders along with the hot sun. I shaded my eyes to find Aurelia’s daddy above me, his legs dangling from a window ledge on the second story, wailing on his trumpet to beat the band. I waved.
He took the instrument from his mouth and shouted, “How’s the job going, girl?”
I shot him a thumbs-up sign, which he answered with three warm bleats of his horn.
When he began playing again, men in sweat-stained hats bobbed their heads to Eddie’s song, staying one lazy beat behind the tempo.
The Ville smelled like stale cooking and strong coffee and old tire rubber. A swarm of boys raced toward me, playing a game of grab-and-go. Aurelia had told me plenty about how they walked along whistling, searching for the right spot, until they found a sign that said B
EWARE
O
F
D
OG
on a gate, and they’d grab the gate open and tear out of there faster than anything.
There was always something going on at the Crocketts’ house. “We’re burning stuff,” Aurelia said, keeping hold of my arm.
“What?”
“Come see.” She yanked me into a nest of cousins where Darnell was showing Garland how to hold a magnifying glass to catch the sun.
“Get out of the way!” Darnell shoved Aurelia’s leg. “You’re blocking it.”
She grabbed my hand and pulled me down to my knees, where we both watched Darnell’s two hands tighten over Garland’s. “You keep fooling with it,” Darnell instructed, “until you get the whole sun in one place.”
Garland squinted up, peering into the sky.
“Not there, Garland. Down here. You’re bringing it to the ground, like this.”
No less than a dozen eyes followed the lens as Darnell slow-circled the magnifier. It snagged a glint of sun. Darnell adjusted the angle and, beneath it, a pinpoint of light fell on a leaf. “There.” With a light jerk to Garland’s hands, he released them. “Don’t move. Hold right there.”
Garland clutched the handle, trying hard. He sat so still for so long, sweat beaded along the edges of his steel-wool hair. Slowly, the point on the leaf turned brown, then black. Smoke spiraled from it. A flame burst forth.
“Look at that!” somebody shouted. But before we got any further, Darnell pounded the ground to get the fire out.
Aurelia held her hand out for the magnifier. “You’ve done it plenty, Garland. Let Jenny try it.”
The screen door behind us swung open and here came Aurelia’s aunt carrying a colossal watermelon. “You all get on over there and play ball. It’ll do you good.” Aunt Maureen set the watermelon down hard, quoting Scripture the whole way. She could rattle it off as easy as I could recount the alphabet. “Praise be to the Lord my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle!” she announced. To Darnell and Aurelia: “You keep teaching everybody to catch things on fire, this whole place will be gone by morning. As if that box of firecrackers you bought wasn’t enough.” Then, “Eddie, you get on down here and stop persecuting the neighbors. I’m not about to cut up this melon on my own.”
Eddie Crockett folded his legs inside the window. Darnell poked the magnifying glass into the pocket of his jeans. It was clear who held the authority around here.
“Can I do some firecrackers tonight?” I had a way of talking to Aurelia that I couldn’t use with anybody else. I couldn’t tell Daddy what I was thinking, and Mama didn’t respond—I tried to tell her things and she wasn’t there even when she was. I’d open my mouth and she’d just stare at me like she wanted to be invisible, like she wanted to disappear from the room every time I walked into it.
“I’ll talk Darnell into letting you do some black cats. I’ll crack his head if he doesn’t share them with the whole family.” Then, in a voice of conspiracy, “Did your Great-Aunt Flo come visit yet? Mine did.”
I didn’t know any great-aunts. I sure didn’t think I had one named Flo. And as far as I knew, neither did Aurelia.
“You know, Jenny. Have you fallen off the roof yet? It happened to me three times already.”
“Aurelia, why do you keep climbing up there if you keep falling off?”
She kept looking at me like she thought I was missing something big. Finally she plain came out and asked it. “Did you get your period yet? Your Great-Aunt
Flo
? I did. That’s what I’m
trying
to tell you.”
Jean had bragged all about that to me once, too, a long time ago, and said how she’d become a woman and she had to go to the store for a belt and pads because she’d started her monthly courses.
“Oh, sure! Mama talks to me about all the girl stuff.” Which was a total lie. I hated lying to Aurelia. Just another part of me I didn’t see how I could be forgiven for.
“What does she say?”
“About what?”
“The girl stuff.”
I clamped my mouth shut. I’d gone and gotten myself into a corner. “Mostly, that only common people talk about things like that.”
When I made the comment about
common people,
I happened to be parroting Mrs. Blanchard, our nurse at school. She didn’t seem too smart, but at least I could use her knowledge about this and give Mama credit.
“Aunt Maureen says that it’s the way God made a woman to nurture babies. That it’s pure, beautiful. A part of his plan.”
Aurelia had no reason to peer so suspicious at me just then. I expected her to say, “Who do you think you are? Royalty?” But instead she said, “You know that’s the first time you’ve ever talked to me about your mama, Jenny.”
“There’s nothing to say about her, that’s all.”
“What about your daddy?”
I was more than thankful when Garland rapped on my elbow at that moment with a tattered copy of
Henry Huggins
and asked me to read it to him. We found a place on the stoop and I’d gotten about five pages in when Aunt Maureen started rationing out melon slices and a pack of friends showed up to arm-wrestle Darnell. I kept turning pages and reading, my voice swelling louder, trying to ignore the ruckus and the banging on the garden table.
Garland finally gave up trying to concentrate, slammed the book shut between my hands, and went to take a turn at challenging his brother. Darnell let him win. When they finished, Darnell dangled his arm like it was helplessly mangled, like any minute it might fall off. “Garland, what you been eating for breakfast? You killed me, man.”
Then Darnell’s eyes found mine. “What about you? You picked up any pennies lately? You feeling lucky enough to beat me?”
“Luck doesn’t have a thing to do with it, Darnell.”
“That so?”
I straddled the lawn chair, rocking my weight from one foot to the other. “Sure is.”
He scrubbed the floor with the toe of his left sneaker. “You sure?”
“Yeah.” I sat in the chair and positioned my elbow for power.
Darnell spat and yanked his chair closer to the table. Next thing I knew, we were faced off, elbows planted, right hands adjoined, fingers braided, Darnell’s black ones a great deal larger than mine.
“I have arms of steel,” I told him.
“Ready. Set.
GO.
”
He wasn’t doing the fake stuff with me the way he’d done with Garland. He expected to win trouble-free. I caught myself starting to rise on my feet in counterbalance. But then I set myself and made headway. Darnell muscled his way back. If he’d expected to slam my arm down, I surprised him. I gritted my teeth so hard, I thought I might break a few off. No way was I going to let him win easy.
Suddenly, I caught the accusation in his eyes. The way he looked at me, I knew this wasn’t all about arm-wrestling. It was something more, one force pushing against another.
“Don’t . . . know . . . why you . . . always . . . come here.” He spoke through clenched teeth, his eyes glued to our hands.
“I . . . don’t.” I pushed so hard, my mouth flinched. “Don’t come . . . near enough.”
His cheeks inflated with air. He looked like Howdy Doody in the pictures I’d seen at the A&P, only he was the wrong shade. “Makes . . . Aurelia . . . overstep . . . her bounds.”
I quit. Just like that. Darnell slammed my arm down so hard he must have busted a wrist bone. He held on to his arm the same way he had after he’d wrestled Garland, but this time I think he really meant the helplessly mangled part.
“You got nothing to say about what me and Aurelia do.”
I was so mad that even watching him rub his arm in pain didn’t make me feel better. I goaded him about Garland. “Aren’t you going to ask me what
I
eat for breakfast?”
He glared at me, still massaging his arm. “Why would I ask you a thing like that?
You
didn’t win.”
I knew in my heart he didn’t like me coming around because I was white. “People are the same whether they’re one color on the outside or the other,” I said to him. Maybe I didn’t accept myself sometimes, but I sure wasn’t going to give Darnell the chance to heap it on me the way he wanted to. “There’s not much that could keep me away from my best friend.”
When he stood up and walked away, he was still hanging onto his wrist like it was tender.
“What’s he so testy about?” Aurelia asked when she came out of the screen door carrying silver and plates to set the table. “You almost beat him?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You staying for supper? Aunt Maureen’s got Gooey Butter Cake.”
I stared after Darnell.
“Don’t you pay him no mind. He’s just jealous because you got a big-time job is all. All he does for money is put together boxes for the hatchery down the street. Folding and stapling boxes to ship chickens. He even pokes holes in them so the chicks can breathe.”
“That’s not such a bad job.”
I cast about for my belongings—my headband and a coin purse. All of a sudden I got the feeling I’d stayed way too long.
“You were going to do black cats,” Aurelia reminded me.
“I can’t.”
“Come on!” she begged. “We’re putting on pajamas and climbing out to the roof to watch the fireworks over the river. We’re going to watch every show they shoot off over the Mississippi. Can’t you stay?”
“You’re climbing out on the roof again?” I raised my eyebrows, teasing her.
By the way she grinned, she knew where I was headed before I got it out.
We were just two girls again, whispering indiscreetly about Great-Aunt Flo. We shook our heads and shrieked at the same time.
“Why do you keep climbing up there if you keep falling off?”
We got to laughing so hard, I forgot all about Darnell.
I
t was Aurelia’s idea to sneak onto the entertainment boat so we could listen to her daddy playing the horn. They called their band the Six Blue Notes, and the more time they racked up playing weekends on the
Admiral,
Aurelia told me, the more impressive they became.
Playing the trumpet wasn’t Eddie Crockett’s only job. Weekdays, he ran a metal punch at the factory, punching out sections to build stoves. On weekends, I saw him use the scrap metal he’d brought home and shape it, at a workbench not much different from Miss Shaw’s, into trumpet mouthpieces. Every musician I saw begged them off of him. Eddie Crockett told me it was a thing with horn-blowers. Every musician he knew worried with a sore mouth. He liked to build his valves very thin and very deep, to make it easier on a player’s lips and give a big, warm, round sound at the same time.
He had a way of twisting and lightening the spring action of trumpet pumps so a horn would sound altogether different. One afternoon he even showed me how he could make the refrain of a song sound like it was a woman calling.
I got lots more time visiting with the Crocketts than I’d expected because, thankfully, Daddy’s job pulling posts and breaking mortar lasted a full twenty days. They even had him working on weekends.
The humidity pooled over our town, and the sidewalk seared your feet and you felt like you were being steamed alive when you walked around St. Louis. But I felt happy.
Most mornings, I worked for Miss Shaw. She’d been so satisfied with my work that she’d offered me more days at the store. Daddy came home late every night and, when he did, he was so worn out from smashing cement in the heat, he was too tired to mess with us. And no matter how Darnell shoved past me when I showed up in the Crocketts’ front yard, no matter how he hit toward me when we played stickball to show me I was a weak spot, or how he glared at me with the same sharp focus as the sun caught in the magnifier when Garland had about set the whole yard on fire, I chose to ignore him.
Nobody with such an attitude was going to take Aurelia away from me.
I saw plenty of liveliness those days in the Ville. I met people with names like T. Bone Finney and Chick Randle, and one of Aurelia’s friends taught us how to dance.
(No need to jerk around like a housefly, girl,
I remember she said.
Move like you’re writing cursive on the wall with your backside.)
And Aurelia and I found a stray dog and fed it some water and a pork steak before Eddie Crockett shooed it away.
Every place I went, I kept finding pennies. I found one the day I played second base and the ball buzzed my head. Darnell had hit toward me again and I took off running, but I sidled back fast when the outfielder snagged it clean. Next thing I knew, the ball came soaring toward me. I leapt, bobbled it, and came down empty-handed in time to see Darnell make a standup double. And there in the dirt, of which I had a mouthful, laid the penny. I sat up, dusted myself off and turned the penny over in my hand, remembering that Reverend Monroe had said how much I was loved.
I found another one in my seat before I sat down on the streetcar and remembered that Jesus said I didn’t have to be ashamed. I found one on the street when I took Mama’s knives out to be sharpened by the scissor-grinder, and I remembered that God had planted a seed of greatness in me. I found one at the A&P while I waited in line with Jean to buy Lustre-Creme shampoo because Lustre-Creme was the kind Grace Kelly liked, and I thought how the preacher’d said if I put myself in the arms of Jesus, the stains inside me would go away.
One lady even dropped a penny right in front of us on the sidewalk. Aurelia was with me—and I promise you, she saw it. I left the penny on the ground and chased after the lady until she stopped in front of the Laundromat and set her clothes basket down.
“Excuse me, don’t know if you noticed, but you dropped that penny down there.”
“What?”
“You dropped that penny down there, ma’am. Don’t you want to pick it up?”
She smiled halfway, as if she couldn’t quite figure me out. And the story had gotten way too long to explain to her now. “No, child. You keep it. Being as you’re honest and all. It’s just a penny. You want it, it’s yours.”
“God is giving you a message,”
Miss Shaw had said. “
He’s watching over you all the time.”
“Find a penny, pick it up,” Aurelia chanted as I ran back to get it. “All the day you’ll have good luck.”
“No.” I kicked a bottle cap full of dirt and it ricocheted off the curb. “Aurelia, I think it’s more than good luck. It’s a
message
.”
Lots of those pennies I picked up, I spent. But I kept the first one—the one that started it all outside the Fox Theater—safe and hidden in its box. Every so often, when the house grew quiet and I knew Jean wouldn’t come in to tease me, I’d open the lid and take a look. I’d hold it until it grew warm inside my palm, then turn it over and check its date of issue.
Those summer days passed to the tone and brilliance of Eddie Crockett’s trumpet crying. It didn’t take much for even somebody like me to hear that Eddie Crockett’s sound was just as good as anything Miles Davis could do. When Aurelia told him I’d said that, Mr. Crockett picked me up off the floor with his broad-beamed arms. For a minute, I went stiff as a cork, not knowing what he meant by laying hands on me. But he hugged me so tight I thought he might squeeze the air out of me, and I realized he did it out of fondness.
Aurelia danced around us, “I tell you, when it comes to blowing the horn, Daddy can really play it down.”
And I felt nothing but wonder when Eddie Crockett treated me fine, the same way he treated his daughter.
He showed off, dancing with Aurelia, tilting his head back and playing to the sky. For the first time, I felt like I’d found a world where I belonged.
The S.S.
Admiral
had a brochure out that called it “a ship of luxury, of gaiety, of glamour.” It promised a six-deck steamer with “clean, clear river breezes that make eyes sparkle and cheeks rosy-hued.” The level rooftop guaranteed passengers “a taste of the South of France or Biarritz.” Jean had been on it for her graduation dinner and she’d come home talking about the Three Ring Circus tea room with waiters dressed up like clowns and chairs made to look like lions, leopards, camels, and giraffes. Aurelia had told me plenty of times how playing on the
Admiral
meant something to her daddy. Not because he hadn’t been featured on the bandstand at plenty of music clubs before. He had even played on the radio station. But Aurelia said that the
Admiral
was the first place they’d wanted him to read notes to get his job.
“When they’ve got an old piece of horn, most musicians learn to work that horn from morning until night,” Mr. Crockett said one day while the heat bore down on us so hard, all of us wanted to sit in the shade and do nothing. “What folks got to understand is, St. Louis got genius all over the place. They say the blues and the rhythm come up the river from New Orleans, but the genius comes from right here.” He pointed at the whitewashed step, right where he sat. “That’s the ones that make it, the ones that spend crazy hours playing their instruments.”
Aurelia was scraping the stoop with a piece of broken plaster, leaving scratches between her feet. “Daddy—don’t know why you won’t let us hear you play over on the boat.”
“I told you, girl. You hear us practice any time you want over at Mr. Lamoretti’s.”
“If you’re a genius”—I swatted at a mosquito buzzing in my ear— “how come you can’t read music?”
“Ha.” Mr. Crockett lifted his knee up and crooked his elbow over it. “She tell you about that? That’s why we call ourselves the Six Blue Notes. Six of us went to show Mr. Streckfus what we could play, and I took one look at all those notes on pages he showed us, and I started feeling blue.”
But that was Eddie Crockett for you. He’d gotten the job anyway. He went and figured out something to do to get around the rules.
Aurelia told me that, without telling Aunt Maureen what he’d done, he took his trumpet, invited his band members, paid Darnell fifty cents to go to a basketball game, and the rest of them showed up in Darnell’s stead at his piano lesson.
“Take lessons in your nephew’s place? I never heard of such.” Mr. Lamoretti began to flip wildly through the pages of the music primer above his keyboard. “Mrs. Crockett has already paid the monthly fee, as you well know. Are you sure this isn’t just Darnell trying to get out of practicing?”
“Look.” Eddie Crockett placed the score in front of Mr. Lamoretti’s face. “We just need you to teach us how to play the book, so we can go on the boat on weekends and play parts.”
Mr. Lamoretti, not one to waste a minute if it was paid for, laughed, creasing the book down its middle seam with skepticism. “Well, since you’re here, can you play that? Let’s see what you can do.”
So the Blue
Notes took out their horns and ran a few scales for him, and the next thing they knew, he started ragging it up with them on the piano. By the end of the lesson, he was playing Tchaikovsky while they followed his finger on the page. And Mr. Crockett kept stopping him and saying, “Play that again, Lamoretti. Hear the harmony? You could get that on a horn and a sax; I know you could.”
The
Admiral
advertised a four-and-a-half-hour Saturday cruise, and that’s the one Aurelia wanted to get onto. It left in the afternoon and made a trek along the waters while tourists strolled the decks in their crisp, summer cottons and visited the modern fluorescent-lighted, chromium-trimmed popcorn and newsstand, and a snack bar selling hot dogs. For those who could afford it, the band played for dancing in the ballroom.
“We could do it,” Aurelia whispered. “I could tell Aunt Maureen we’re going to a movie. We could tell her what we’re going to see.”
“No movie lasts four hours.” It scared me, how much like Daddy I sounded. “Your aunt knows that. She’ll knock you up the side of the head when you get home.”
Aurelia looked sideways at me. “No, she won’t. She’d give me a talking to all right, but that’s all. It’d be so different, seeing him play there, not in some dark, smoky place like the Windermere, or one of those bucket-of-blood clubs.” They called them bucket-of-blood clubs because so many fights started up there, she told me. “And Daddy says on the
Admiral
he gets to wear butcher-boy shoes and suits from Brooks Brothers, with collars so stiff with starch he can’t hardly move his neck.”
“He can show you a suit any time.”
“No, he can’t. The whole setup belongs to the
Admiral
. He can’t ever bring any part of it home.”
I let Aurelia convince me. I’d do it for her because, for the summer of 1955, we were playing the part of sisters. I’d never seen her want anything this bad before.
The gangplank of the
Admiral
rose from Laclede’s Landing like a metal serpent. Above it hung a green-and-white striped awning, so in case those present had to wait outside to show a ticket, they could take cover under the shade.
It took a whole week’s pay to buy our entrance before we could board. Ever since that lady at the Laundromat had insisted the penny was mine, “being as you’re honest and all,” I’d started feeling like I was being tested for something. I’d started wishing I could
be
honest, although it felt like everything around me fought to keep me from it. I kept thinking,
If God has something big planned for my life, then I’d better start acting like it!
When Aurelia tugged my arm and pointed to the short, steep plank at the rear with the sign that read SERVICE ENTRANCE, I looked a bellyache at her. Helping her sneak away from Aunt Maureen was one thing. Sneaking onto the boat was another.
“You don’t understand.” She turned away with her arms limp and her shoulders square, like she thought I’d lost my mind. “This is part of it.”
“Is not.”
“It is.”
I snapped open the black velvet purse Jean had passed down to me. “Look, I’ve got the money right here.” But when it came my turn to step inside the booth and say, “Two tickets, please,” Aurelia had disappeared from sight.
“Students?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Both of us.”
“Don’t get seasick. Don’t eat too many hot dogs. Have fun!” He pressed two tickets forward and gestured with his head. “He’ll tear those for you up the gangplank, just outside the door.”
“Thank you.”
When I stepped into the sun, Aurelia said, “Just give me my ticket.” She tried to wave me away.
“You’ve got to get it torn.”
“You paid for it—that’s what matters. Meet me in there.” Then in desperation she whispered, “
Somewhere.
”
I didn’t know what had gotten into her, but I had to let her go. There wasn’t any reasoning, as far as I could tell. I waited to get my ticket torn, mixed in with a jumble of ladies and gentlemen, the ladies wearing gloves like Miss Shaw’s and two-strand pearl chokers and skirts with petticoats so stiff they crackled.
The ladies wore corsages, too and, oh, how good the flowers smelled as they wilted in the heat! I saw Aurelia clamp her ticket in her teeth and, after she’d hidden beside the ticket booth for longer than I could have stood it, she took off. A number of what looked to be waiters had started up the back ramp, and I watched her skip toward them, drum up a conversation, and duck inside that entrance as easy as she’d been born.
She’d left me alone.
Suddenly without Aurelia, I placed my feet together side-by-side. I clutched my velvet bag in both hands, my fingers as straight and pointed as clothespins. Raising my chin, I stood like a fine lady going to a dance. I could have been Miss Shaw, or I could have even been Grace Kelly, standing among so many admirers, her eyes lit with stars.
Jean would’ve been jealous as a snake if she could’ve seen me at that moment.
At the thought of Jean, an ache flickered and began to grow, burst open to all that hollowness I hadn’t known was inside me. Sure, my sister and I did our fair share of quarreling. We might have been rough as nails to each other on the surface, but deep down, we knew how much we needed each other. Jean had been slowly disappearing from me for a while, though. She hadn’t even packed for secretarial school yet, and she was already gone.