What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day (5 page)

“Well, at least you got it out of the way when you were young,” I said. “I saved my worst moves until much later.”

“I’ll bet you wouldn’t know a bad move if you saw one,” he said.

“You’d be surprised.”

“Maybe we can compare notes one day.” He picked up both plates and headed for the kitchen.

“It’s a deal,” I said, feeling the weight of the day settling around my shoulders. It was time for me to crash, but I was going to help with the dishes first. I wanted to be sure he washed all the things I’d used in good hot, soapy water. I
know
that’s not the way you get it, but this was no time to be careless.

when we pulled
up into the yard, Joyce was standing at the door reading my note. She turned and ran down the back steps and grabbed me in a big hug. Joyce gained a lot of weight when Mitch died, and even though it’s been two years, she’s still carrying it. Worrying about me probably hasn’t helped her diet much either. Her cheeks were so chubby that when she smiled, her eyes almost disappeared.

She reported that Eartha had a baby girl and thanked Eddie for picking me up. I thanked him for dinner and he asked Joyce if her car was still acting funny. When she said it was, he said he’d come by tomorrow and look under the hood before she went back to the hospital. I wondered suddenly if they were lovers, but it didn’t feel like that. It felt like friends.

As soon as Eddie left and we got inside, Joyce threw her arms around me and started apologizing for being late and asking me if I’d eaten enough and apologizing some more until finally I said, “Hold it! This is the part where you get to ask me how I’m feeling and I get to say I’m feeling fine and you get to look at me hard to see if I’m lying and if I’m not, you get to hug me again and say, welcome home, little sister. You look great!”

She teared up when I said that, and her body felt soft and plump when she hugged me. I’ve had clients whose husbands died and they blew up like balloons in no time. It’s a lot harder to take care of your body when nobody’s going to see you naked.

“Welcome home, little sister,” she said. “You look great.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Now tell me everything.”

Turned out the seventeen-year-old new mother had been lying about keeping up with her appointments for prenatal care and hadn’t seen the doctor since her second visit. The doctor said they had tried to contact her, but all the information she’d given them was bogus, which was really unfortunate since he had some bad news. Before she had stopped coming, she had tested positive for HIV. When the doctor told her after the delivery, she freaked out and started screaming that they were lying and she didn’t have to stay and hear no more shit from them about what she had or didn’t have and to just hand her back what she came with and she’d get the hell out of there.

The doctor finally gave her a sedative and Joyce sat with her until she calmed down and went to sleep. The baby’s tests wouldn’t be back until morning.

“What did he think her reaction would be?” Joyce said. “He just told her outright. No preparation or anything. She’s lying there with a brand-new baby and he just tells her like that? He didn’t even give a damn. He might as well have been talking to a chimpanzee.”

Joyce looked like hell. Her hair needed rebraiding. Her sweats were working overtime to accommodate her new hips and thighs, and her sandals were tired Woodstock wanna-bes.

“How’s your diet coming?” I said.

She tried to get her feelings hurt, but I wasn’t going for it. “I’m working on it,” she said.

I just looked at her.

“I’ve lost fifteen pounds,” she said.

I raised my eyebrows.

“Okay,
ten.”

I knew the best she could claim was holding steady, and she knew it, too.

“So sue me,” she said. “I had a couple of months when all that stood between me and taking a tumble was a bowl of Jamoca Almond Fudge and some homemade Toll House cookies.”

I should have known.
The dread tumble.
When my mother committed suicide, some religious group sent us a bunch of pamphlets they had put together for the bereaved loved ones struggling to understand. We were pretty desperate for some kind of straightforward way to talk about what had happened, but when we read these little booklets, they were mostly full of ways
not
to talk about it, or if you did, to be sure you put the weight on the dearly departed and not on yourself.

Coping with guilt seemed to be a major deal for these particular pamphleteers, and one of them suggested that even using the word
suicide
gave it too much guilt-producing power. The left-behind loved ones were encouraged to try out new words or phrases to describe the indescribable. The author offered several suggestions, including the fairly generic “slipped away,” the slightly more judgmental “took a wrong turn,” and, our all-time favorite, “tumbled into the abyss.” After that, whenever we talked about suicide, we talked about “taking a tumble.”

“I just couldn’t believe he wasn’t coming back,” Joyce said. “At first I kept thinking if I could make it through that first year, I’d be okay. But I wasn’t okay.”

“It takes time,” I said.

“I know.” She took my hand. “This is terrible, but sometimes I used to sit here and make lists in my head of all the people who deserved to die more than Mitch.”

“I know that game.”

“Not one of my favorites.” She shook her head as if to make sure there was no part of her brain still secretly taking names.

“Better now?” I said, remembering one night after the funeral when I got up and found Joyce sitting in the dark by herself holding Mitch’s glasses and crying.

“Much better,” she said. “Once I stopped feeling guilty about living off the life insurance money and quit working for the state, I got so busy with the Sewing Circus, I didn’t have time to be sitting around here driving myself crazy.”

“Guilty?” I said. “Why?”

“When the check first came, it felt like blood money to me. How much could they pay me to make up for Mitch?”

“Ain’t that much money in the world,” I said, and I meant it. Mitch was one of a kind.

“You got that right. So I put it away and didn’t touch any of it for a long time. Then I realized how much I really wanted to find a way to fix the things we’d been busy half repairing with all the tired programs that don’t work and the exhausted people who don’t care. Mitch’s insurance let me buy myself enough time to try.”

It was almost funny. In the middle of all the bad things that have come our way, we both emerged as sisters of independent means.

Joyce frowned and shook her head. “That’s why this stuff with Eartha really makes me mad. She’s been coming every week for the last four months, lying the whole time, and for what? Because she’d rather smoke crack than have a healthy baby?”

“What the hell is the Sewing Circus?” I said, but Joyce just yawned, which made me yawn, too. We were both pretty exhausted.

“That’s too long a story to start on this late at night,” she said, “but I’ll tell you everything tomorrow. I promise.”

Joyce’s room was quiet and I had settled into my blue heaven before realizing I hadn’t told her about Eddie punching out the guy in the parking lot. We both had some stories to tell in the morning.

the hospital called
to say the baby tested negative for HIV, positive for cocaine, and that they were going to do some more tests, so Joyce couldn’t see the baby until tomorrow. The other big news was that the mother had disappeared. Not disappeared as in,
now you see her, now you don’t.
Disappeared as in, got up, got dressed, put on her shoes, picked up her purse, and walked out.

Joyce can’t understand it, but I can. Homegirl’s trying to walk away from that HIV. She’s trying to decide if she’s going to tell anybody or just keep living her life and see what happens. I used to wish I hadn’t taken the test so I still wouldn’t know.

Before I tested, I had been celibate for almost a year. I had had enough of those Atlanta Negroes for a while. They talk so much shit when they’re looking for some sweetness, but they got no heart for the long haul. I figured ten years of rolling around with them was plenty.

Besides, in spite of what people will try to tell you, Atlanta is still a very small town, and the way I’d been living, it was getting downright ridiculous. I’d walk into a reception and there’d be a room full of brothers, power-brokering their asses off, and I’d realize I’d seen them all naked. I’d watch them striding around, talking to each other in those phony-ass voices men use when they want to make it clear they got
juice,
and it was so depressing, all I’d want to do was go home and get drunk.

Then I started keeping company with a bearded saxophone player who wore two gold hoops in each ear and played regularly at a club downtown. We hadn’t formalized anything yet, but we’d been hanging pretty tough for about three months and he was making me rethink this whole celibacy thing in a serious way. He wasn’t much taller than me, and built kind of round, but he had a lot of style and he could make a sax sound so sweet you couldn’t decide if you wanted to take him or the horn home to bed with you. He’d already been tested, so it was on me.

When I got the results and told him, he sat there and listened to me tell it all and then he picked up his coat and his horn case and walked out the door. No
good-bye.
No
damn, baby, what we gonna do?
Nothing. One minute he was there, then he was gone. That was it.

I went with Joyce to see Eartha’s sister. I had told her about what happened at the liquor store yesterday and I figured, why not meet the rest of what seemed to be a supremely fucked-up family. The woman who came to the door let out a blast of that peppermint-smelling vapor that means
crack smoked here,
but Joyce didn’t blink. Joyce was a state caseworker for fifteen years and she’d been in most of the houses around here investigating for or against more benefits, custody rights, food stamp eligibility—all the questions that drive poor people crazy. By this time she was kind of like the telephone man or the cable guy:
nothing shocked her.

“Hey, Mattie. Is Eartha around?”

Mattie, who looked to be about forty but was probably much younger, frowned at Joyce, confused.

“You the one took her to the emergency room, right?”

Joyce said yes, but the hospital had just called to notify her that Eartha had walked out and taken all her things with her except the baby. This did not sit well with Mattie, who thought we were going to tell her she had to take the kid.

“Oh, no,” she said. “Fuck that. I ain’t raisin’ no more kids, especially no screamin’ crack baby.”

Joyce tried to tell Mattie that’s not what we came for, but the woman was having none of it.

“Call the daddy if somebody gotta take the little muthafucka,” she said.

“Who is the father?” Joyce had her social worker voice on.

“How the hell do I know?” Mattie said. “One of them crack-head niggas she been fuckin’ for some rock.”

“Shut the damn door,” somebody yelled from the other room. “You lettin’ all the damn smoke out, fool!”

“Fuck you!” The woman laughed with a cackle that ended in a huge explosion of coughing and then another evil look in our direction. Joyce took a deep breath. She was trying to be cool.

“The hospital said the baby can come home on Friday—”

Mattie interrupted her. “And if she don’t come home, they ain’t gonna do nothin’ but send her to foster care just like they do all the other crack-head babies, so what difference it make?”

“She’s your niece,” Joyce said, and I could hear her getting mad. “Don’t you think Eartha would want you to keep the baby until she gets back?”

This really struck Mattie as funny. “Gets back? Eartha Lee ain’t comin’ back here till she runs out of other places to go, and that baby be long gone by then. That girl ain’t cut out to be nobody mama, so just call them nice white folks at the hospital and tell them don’t nobody over here want her, so they may as well bundle her little ass up and send her to somebody who do.”

The kid Eddie punched out in the parking lot came and stood behind Mattie in the doorway. He was tall enough to look over the top of her head without straining. The brother of the house.

Joyce looked at him. “Hello, Frank.”

“What the fuck our dumb-ass sister done now?” he said.

“She had that baby,” Mattie said.

“No shit,” he said, narrowing his eyes at me like I suddenly looked familiar. “Well, you see one crack baby, you seen ’em all.”

He laughed, pushed Mattie back inside, and then turned and pointed at me.

“And you do me a favor, awright? You tell Kung Fu I said to
stay black,
okay?”

“tell me about
the Sewing Circus,” I asked Joyce as we sat on the back porch drinking apple cinnamon tea and trying to get the crack smell out of our nostrils.

Joyce grinned at me.
“TSC is you and me,”
she said. “It’s the wave of the future and they don’t even know it. Most of the people up here think it’s still 1958 and we’re dealing with some high-spirited youngsters who are just sowing their wild oats. They can’t see that this is something new. This isn’t a phase they’re going through. This is how they
are.
They don’t know anything. They don’t care about anything. They’re selfish and mean and mad all the time. Who do you think is breaking into these old people’s houses?”

“What old people’s houses?” I said. Joyce was getting excited, and when she gets excited, she talks
fast.

“It’s practically an epidemic up here,” she said. “They used to only hit the summer cottages once they were empty, but now they don’t care if anybody’s home or not.”

“So that’s why you started a circus,” I said, trying to bring Joyce back around to the question. “To break up a burglary ring?”

She laughed, and even with the extra weight she was carrying, Joyce looked good this morning. Her skin was smooth, she had parted her hair in the middle and braided it into two thick cornrows, and she was wearing a pair of silver hoop earrings I had given her three Christmases ago. I wondered again how close Joyce was to Eddie. She had sent him to pick me up at an airport over an hour from where he was, which is the kind of favor you ask of a man who has more than a passing interest in you.