The Red Rose Box (6 page)

I expected Mama to make me and Ruth leave the room like she usually did when secrets began to be spoken. Maybe because we were eating in someone else's kitchen, sleeping between someone else's starched sheets, she let us stay. Silence covered us.

Olivia breezed through the door, wearing lipstick and a smile, and no one said a word. More silence.

Mrs. Pittman, head lowered from telling someone else's secrets, said only, “Mornin,” poured a cup of coffee, and offered it to Olivia.

That's when I knew why Olivia's eyes danced only when she looked into her husband's eyes. They had swallowed the same sorrow.

I caught her eyes, smiled into them, and said, “Mornin.”

Gramma got up from the table and excused herself from the kitchen, eyes watering, ready to spill over. Mama kept her tears and began talking about the sights we were going to see. Olivia sat down in Gramma's warmed-up chair, poured some cream into her coffee, then a spoonful of sugar, and sipped. She looked up at Mrs. Pittman and asked for a biscuit, bacon, and two eggs, sunny-side up. Mrs. Pittman looked at Olivia like she was hearing things.

I took one last bite of bacon, excused myself from the table, and took my plate and glass to Mrs. Pittman at the sink. Ruth asked if she could have another biscuit and I went through the swinging door.

The morning lit the house through many windows, and I found my way to the front room and sat on the velvet sofa. I ran my fingers across it. It was smooth and soft. The big window was made of stained glass, yellow, green, red, blue. The glass lamp on the table in front of the window had hanging crystals that caught the sun and covered the wall with shreds of light. It felt like I was in heaven.

I looked down at my pink slippers. When I looked up, Ruth was standing in front of me, biscuit crumbs sitting in the corners of her mouth.

“You need to wipe your mouth,” I told her.

She wiped her mouth with her hands, laughed, and joined me on the sofa. “Why you sittin here?”

“Cuz I want to.”

“Oh.”

I looked around, studying the room, so that I could take the memory home with me.

Then Ruth and I had the same thought at the same time and we found ourselves looking into every corner of that room, peeking in closets, opening and closing drawers quietly like thieves.

There was a bookshelf with what looked like hundreds of books and I looked through some of them. They weren't library books. I could tell. There were three Bibles and a set of encyclopedias.

Ruth found a tiny bathroom with nothing but a sink and a toilet. She pulled down her underpants and sat on the toilet without closing the door.

“You gotta close the door, Ruth.” It was the same thing she did in Sulphur, leaving the outhouse door open, saying she was afraid she might fall in and get covered with lime. I heard the toilet flush.

“Wash your hands, nasty,” I said.

“You sure can get on my nerves, Leah. You sure can.” Ruth turned on the water in the clean white sink and washed and dried her hands. I would do my business later, upstairs, when no one else was around, like I always did at home, looking through the half-moon cut out in the outhouse door at the sky, blue, gray, or midnight black.

The high-pitched bark of a dog drew us to an open side window. He was a little dog, smaller than a fox, shorthaired, and we heard a lady from the house next door call him “Chili.” She spoke a different language. The words sounded like a melody.

“Chili,” I called softly. The word floated through the air and found him. He stopped barking, sat back on his hind legs, opened his mouth, and howled.

I looked at my pink watch. It was only nine o'clock but it felt like I had been here for a long time, in this house where the dog next door was named Chili.

Ruth and I walked through the hall toward the back of the house and I opened the back door. Flowers of every color filled the yard and I wondered if I had found the Garden of Eden. I took Ruth by the hand and we walked down the brick steps into the yard. I touched a drying white rose and its petals fell to the ground. The door creaked and we looked toward the back porch where Aunt Olivia stood smiling, her hair loose, brushing her shoulders. She looked like a princess in a pink satin robe.

“Enjoying my flowers, I see,” she said.

“Yes ma'am,” we said at the same time.

“Call me Aunt Olivia,” she said.

“Yes ma'am, Aunt Olivia.”

She joined us in her garden and told us that the vine that crept along the back wall with red flowers that looked like tissue paper was called a bougainvillea, that the bush with the big yellow flowers was called hibiscus. I wondered if she would test us later to see if we remembered.

I touched the tip of an orange-and-yellow flower. “What's this?”

“Bird-of-paradise.” She gently brushed the hair back from my face and I looked into her eyes. She picked two yellow flowers from the hibiscus bush and tucked one behind my ear and one behind Ruth's. She told us that there were places on some islands where the women wore flowers in their hair and skirts made of grass.

Ruth smiled and said, “You is a very silly woman, Aunt Olivia ... skirts cain't be made from grass.”

Aunt Olivia swore it was so as we made our way back into the house. Gramma and Mama were in the kitchen. Ruth and I walked upstairs to our bedroom, yellow flowers in our hair. Mrs. Pittman was making the bed.

“Y'all look bout ready for Hawaii.” Mrs. Pittman fluffed the pillows.

“Where's Hawaii?” I asked.

“Islands in the Pacific Ocean ... Pearl Harbor ... where the Japanese bombed us during World War Two.”

“It's not part of the United States of America?” I said.

“No, little ma'am, not yet.” Mrs. Pittman finished making the bed and told us we should get dressed.

Ruth told her, “Leah's tryin to be a smarty-pants.”

“Nuthin wrong with that,” was her reply. “Nuthin wrong with that.”

We ate lunch in the backyard on furniture that stayed outside. I ate my ham sandwich and crunched my potato chips slowly, washing them down with sips of Coca-Cola from the bottle. I was glad Aunt Olivia and Mama had made up; not only had Aunt Olivia been missing from Mama's life, but I felt like she'd been missing from mine.

It was the third day of July and the next day we were going to the beach. The only beach I'd ever been to was Lake Ponchartrain, where we rode for hours to swim in the murky water, passing whites-only beaches all along the way.

“Is the beach here for colored?” Ruth asked Aunt Olivia.

The grown-ups looked around the table at one another.

“No, Ruth,” Aunt Olivia replied. “There are no segregated beaches in California.”

“What's segregated?” Ruth asked.

“When they tell colored where they can or can't go, to eat, to school, to live, to die,” Aunt Olivia answered.

“Like home, like Sulphur,” I added.

“Like everywhere beneath the Mason-Dixon line,” Aunt Olivia replied.

That was the name of the line Mrs. Redcotton had talked about, the Mason-Dixon line.

“Where's the Mason-Dixon line?” I asked.

Aunt Olivia answered, “Boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland, separating the North from the South. Won't catch me on the wrong side of that line again.... Won't ever catch me.”

I was learning about the South, sitting at a table in the North.

The next day Ruth and I approached the blue water of the Pacific Ocean for the first time and I put my foot cautiously in the cool water where white children, men, and women splashed and smiled. I took a deep breath and waded in the water up to my knees, holding Ruth's hand, looking toward the horizon. Freedom.

Later, as we roasted hot dogs on coat hangers over a fire pit, Ruth said hot dogs looked like what she'd seen once between Nathan Shine's legs when he ran out of the house butt naked, his wild-eyed mama chasing him with his daddy's wide belt. I looked at the hot dog, put on some mustard and a little relish, and ate.

I thought about what Micah Shine had said, about not wanting to wind up hanging from a tree. When we got home I was going to tell him that he wouldn't have to worry about being burned to a crisp in Los Angeles, California, near Hollywood, where colored didn't have to sit in the back of the bus unless they wanted to.

The fireworks lit the night sky as we sat on a blanket in the sand and roasted marshmallows, brown, sticky, sweet.

The ocean breeze was cool and smelled of salt and seaweed. I turned to look at Mama and Aunt Olivia. They were alike but different, Olivia delicate, Rita sturdy, both quick to smile, quick to laugh.

Music played and I got up to dance under the moon.

Ruth said, “You cain't dance. It's what everyone says about you, even Mama 'n Daddy.”

“Can too.” I clapped my hands, keeping time, my head bobbing. Mama and Aunt Olivia, Gramma, and Uncle Bill looked at me and smiled. “See,” I said.

“See what?” Ruth rolled her eyes.

I snapped my fingers, “See me dance.” I was free, at that moment, in that place.