What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day (6 page)

I tried to remember the sound of Eddie’s voice when he said Joyce’s name. A man who is
just a friend
says a woman’s name differently than the man who is her lover. I’ve seen men give away a perfectly successful clandestine affair by casually dropping their girlfriends’ names into an innocuous story without realizing that their tone of voice is suddenly filled with so many memories of sex and secrecy that it immediately sets off alarm bells in the mind of any wife who is serious about monogamy. I used to tell my lovers not to say my name at all, no matter how tempted they were. I knew their lips and tongues and teeth had memories of me that needed to remain between the two of us.

I didn’t remember hearing any of that in Eddie’s voice. When he talked about Joyce, he sounded like he was talking about a favorite cousin.

“It’s not a real circus,” Joyce was saying. “The oldsters just started calling it that because we took over an activity slot at the church that used to be called the Sewing Circle. It was the only women’s group that met regularly other than the deaconesses’, and I knew I wasn’t ready for that.”

Joyce walked over to turn on the flame under the teakettle, and I watched her behind jiggling under the bright fabric of her gauzy skirt.

“It may have actually been a sewing circle a long time ago,” Joyce said, “but when I started going, it wasn’t much of anything. Sometimes they’d get together and take up money to put flowers on the altar, but that was about it.”

Joyce started going to church again after Mitch died. It’s the same church we grew up in, but I knew she hadn’t been for years. I never asked her about it, but I think she wanted to pray and she was too self-conscious to do it at home alone. Talking to God can make you feel like you’re going off the deep end if you’re not used to it. It’s not as weird if there are some other people around doing it too, but if Joyce was so deep into it she was going to Wednesday night prayer meetings, it’s no wonder she was gaining weight.

“Stop looking at me like I’m crazy,” Joyce said. “There is method to my madness.”

“Always,” I said. “That’s one of your finer qualities.”

Joyce said when she started going to church regularly, she realized that a lot of the teenage girls she knew slightly from watching them grow up were there every Sunday, too. They weren’t really religious. It was just a place to hang around together after the service and show off their babies and gossip a little about the boys who never came unless they were forced. Joyce thought they might like a chance to do some more of the same, plus whatever other interesting experiences she could sneak in without scaring them away. They had enough social worker types in their lives already.

Joyce leaned across the table and touched my arm lightly like she wanted to be sure I was paying attention. “These girls haven’t got a chance,” she said. “There aren’t any jobs and there aren’t going to be any. They’re stuck up here in the middle of the damn woods, watching talk shows, smoking crack, collecting welfare, and having babies. What kind of life is that?”

City life,
I wanted to tell her, but Joyce had already gone into action. She invited the girls to come to a special meeting of the Wednesday Sewing Circle to talk about starting a nursery on Sunday morning where they could leave their babies with somebody they trusted and enjoy the services in peace.

That idea brought out nine young women under the age of twenty who had between them a dozen children under the age of five. The discussion was brief and to the point, resulting in a nine-week schedule laying out who was going to staff the nursery room, what her responsibilities would be, what supplies she might need, and how many kids she could handle. Questions were raised and discussed regarding discipline (no hitting; if the kid is uncontrollable, send upstairs for the mother), feeding (bottles with milk and juice and dry Cheerios only), and money for diapers.

Joyce said she thought the Pastor’s Special Fund would kick in a few bucks if they asked the committee, and she also volunteered to stay with the person who was staffing the nursery each week so there would be another set of hands and eyes on all those babies and because, she said to me, grinning like the cat who swallowed the canary, it gave her a chance to talk to the girls one on one in a setting where they were doing something responsible,
by choice,
and where they were surrounded by children.

Joyce is good at this kind of stuff. She went into social work in the first place because she really believes that people
want
to take care of themselves and their children, and if they’re allowed to do that with some dignity, everything else will fall into place. When I used to ask her why she and Mitch didn’t ever leave Idlewild, she said it was a perfect place for her because it was small enough so that if she did any little thing, she could really make a big difference in people’s lives.

“I could work myself to death in Detroit and Chicago,” she said, “and the problems are so big, nobody would even know the difference.”

Joyce’s plan worked like she knew it would, and more young mothers started using the nursery, so they had to keep meeting on Wednesday to fold these new people into the schedule and to make sure everybody knew what was happening and what their particular job required. The old ladies found all of this less than fascinating, so pretty soon they just stopped coming. What was left was a loosely organized group of seventeen young women, meeting once a week and handling a successful Sunday morning nursery school. Joyce wrote a small grant application and they got some outside funding to offset their costs and buy some toys and supplies.

After a while, running the nursery program settled into a pleasant routine and they could finish all their business in half an hour, but they didn’t want to be finished that quickly, so they started talking about other things, like men and sex and how they were supposed to raise their kids without any jobs. The meetings got longer and longer and louder and louder. Joyce did a lot of listening and the girls did a lot of talking. A lot of
loud
talking, which is what people tend to do when they finally find somebody who will listen.

One time they were making so much noise, the choir director stopped his rehearsal and sent one of the lesser sopranos down to remind them that there were other activities going on in the building. A couple of weeks after that, somebody brought in a magazine article and they started talking about man-sharing and things got pretty heated between two women who had been best friends but who had been unhappily sharing the same trifling brother for two years.

Each one was waiting for the other one to get tired of the hassle and bow out gracefully, but neither of them would break and now he was asking them to have three-way sex. They were tired of having their business whispered about in the street, but they knew everybody knew and the man-sharing discussion set them free. They confronted each other in the middle of the Sewing Circus, but after a few minutes of shouting, they realized they liked each other a lot more than either one of them liked him. They burst into tears and forgave each other everything. The resulting reconciliation got so rowdy that one of the altos told the first tenor that Joyce was running a
three-ring circus
over in the fellowship hall, and the name just stuck.

“The only problem,” Joyce said, “is that we got a new pastor about six months ago. Reverend Smith was so old, he didn’t care what we did as long as we didn’t burn the place down, but he finally retired and now we’ve got Reverend Anderson and his wife, Miss Gerry, and I think she’s going to be a royal pain. They came from a big church in Chicago where he had put together this giant youth program, but now they’re here and even though
he
hasn’t said anything to me,
she
keeps telling me how much they really want to channel the church resources into the more traditional areas of Christian education and missionary outreach. When I ask her about the youth program they had in the city and whether or not it could work here, she starts talking in tongues.

“That’s one of the reasons I want to go independent and open my own center.” Joyce leaned toward me again. “I know the Circus is helping these girls and I’m not about to let Gerry Anderson mess it up by making them read Bible stories about obedience and chastity when they want to talk about domestic violence and birth control.”

I looked at Joyce with her eyes shining and her voice full of the urgency and passion of
the cause
and I remembered how much I liked growing up with her and Mitch. In most houses, when the kids wake up late at night and the grown folks are still up talking in low tones, the discussion is about money or trouble. In our house, it was about the design and distribution of a handbill, the best place to hold a meeting or stage a rally. I’d stand in the kitchen doorway and watch them until one or the other saw me and sent me back to bed. I remember feeling lucky because I lived in a house where people didn’t just fuss about what was wrong with the world. They tried to
fix it.

Joyce finished her tea and her story at the same time and Eddie’s truck pulled into the yard like he’d been out back listening for his cue. He had his hair tucked under one of those multicolored knit hats that the Rastas wear and he was bringing bad news. Last night, while he was dropping me off here after we ate, somebody broke out two windows in the front of his house. He wasn’t here but a few minutes, so either somebody just happened to see us leaving or they had been watching the house. They didn’t take anything, but he’d spent the morning cleaning up and replacing windows.

“Who do you think did it?” Joyce said. I was trying to imagine who would shatter the calm of such a perfectly peaceful place.

“Don’t know,” said Eddie with a graceful shrug. “But I will.”

Something in the way he said it chilled me. He must have felt my reaction because he turned to me with a smile that successfully distracted me from anything but the whiteness of his teeth in the middle of that beard.

“How you doing?”

“I’m fine,” I said, glad he couldn’t read my mind.

“Good.” He nodded and turned back to Joyce.

“So how’s Eartha and the baby?” Eddie lifted the hood of her car and peered inside.

Our news wasn’t much better than his. There was still no word from the missing mama and the hospital hadn’t called yet with any more of the baby’s test results. Joyce said she was giving them another hour and then she was just going to drive back over there and be a pest until they told her what was what.

We made a strange little threesome, standing there looking at each other, trying to figure out what else could go wrong with this day, then the phone rang and Joyce went to answer it. Eddie leaned back against the truck and smiled directly at me for the second time that morning.

“I have a message for you,” I said, suddenly remembering.

He looked at me, still smiling. “A message? From who?”

“From that kid at the liquor store yesterday.”

“Frank?
The bad man?
Where’d you see him?”

“Joyce took me by his house looking for Eartha. He said to tell you to
stay black.”

I didn’t say the stuff about
Kung Fu
since I had been thinking that, too, and it made me feel guilty when Frank said it out loud. Eddie just shook his head.

“Youngblood always looking for some contact,” he said. “Bumping through the world, looking for that contact.”

Joyce came back out to say the hospital had finished with the baby’s tests and she seemed all right except for the cocaine, which she would have to deal with through withdrawal just like any other junkie. A hell of a way to spend your first couple of days in the real world. They had told Joyce a lot of crack babies scream when anybody touches them, but this one seems to be comforted by it. That was all it took. She came to the door with her keys in her hand and her purse already slung over her shoulder. Joyce was big on comfort.

Eddie wasn’t finished with the repairs, so at his suggestion and his assurance that he didn’t mind walking home, Joyce agreed to take the truck. I told her I’d have something on the stove whenever she got back. She kissed me and half nodded like food was the last thing on her mind.

After Joyce pulled off, I sat down on the steps. I could hear at least four or five different birds, squawking or singing as the spirit moved them, and I closed my eyes to see if I could identify any of them like we used to do in school, but I couldn’t. Living in the country, I’d learned to recognize bird calls. In the city, I learned to recognize sirens.

One bird was singing louder than all the others, almost as if to insist that I remember his name. I concentrated, but nothing came to me.

“Cardinal,” Eddie said.

I opened my eyes and he pointed at the bright red bird swaying on a low-hanging branch above the porch.

“It’s a cardinal,” he said again, as if I had spoken the question out loud.

He slammed the hood and wiped the oil off his hands on a rag, reached up and pulled off his cap. His hair fell to his shoulders in a cascade of softly coiled locks. It was so pretty, I smiled, and he saw me.

“Did you grow your hair for religious reasons?” I said as he stuffed the cap into his pocket.

He hadn’t wanted a drink last night and he told me he was a vegetarian. I was curious.

He shook his head. “It was Mitch. One night him and Joyce were watching a documentary about Bob Marley, and Joyce started talking about how much she liked his dreads and how she wondered what they felt like and how sexy they were. After a while, Mitch started worrying about what would happen if Joyce ever really met a man with dreadlocks and he told her since she liked them, he was going to grow her some. Then he said I had to do it, too, since he wasn’t going to be the only dreadlock in Lake County, but he couldn’t make it through the Buckwheat phase. Not enough patience.”

I must have looked confused.

“That’s when your hair is growing but hasn’t really locked up yet, so it’s just standing all over your head looking like Buckwheat. He kept getting mad because people would ask him if he’d forgotten to get a haircut or comb his hair or something. Joyce promised him she wasn’t going to run off with a Rasta and told him to go on and cut it if he wanted to, which the brother did that very afternoon.”