As it turns out, they were smoking pipes, pipes of marijuana. This was the smoke, hanging in the air as clear as the notes of a lute, that called my brother away.
Because my brother now shunned my parents, I went with them everywhere, as if I could be two children in one. When my father went over the mountain to drink beer and cheap red wine with his writer friends in someone’s garden, up on the hillside above the ocean, I went along. When my mother went into the city to register voters, or into town to shop, or over to Peg’s to garden, I went along. When my father and mother went to stand outside the gates of San Quentin, in silent vigil with other lefties, dad’s writer friends, mom’s old black Christian friends from church, at dawn on the morning someone was going to die in the gas chamber, I went along.
And I went along because I was so profoundly lonely. Mady and I weren’t very good friends anymore. I was no longer allowed at her home, the wonderful house with the huge magnolia tree we used to climb, which bloomed with rosy purple flowers. It was Grandma Bette’s fault, more or less. My parents had been down in the South, my father covering the civil rights marches for a magazine, and Bette was baby-sitting and one day decided to take Mady and me to see Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? She thought it was about dolls. Further, she thought eleven-year-old girls still loved dolls, and I don’t really understand why Mady and I agreed to go, or why they sold us tickets, or how we got past the movie posters that must surely have indicated it was a horror movie. All I remember is that Bette stayed with us until the young Baby Jane does her macabre tap dance, and then she slipped out to go flirt with the homo owner of the bakery across the street, flirt him into giving her some sticky buns; and when she returned, it was to find me watching the end of the scene where Bette Davis serves up the dead bird, with Mady in the bathroom throwing up popcorn and chocolate stars. Grandma Bette asked us both not to mention this to our parents, but Mady was in the back of our car, lying on the floor, staring up with glazed unseeing eyes; and when she got home, she not only mentioned it to her parents, but proceeded to have a full-blown, if brief, nervous breakdown, in the aftermath of which she was forbidden to play with me anymore.
But we did play together for a while, together with another friend named Donna, at Donna’s house, which was up the hill from where I sat on the steps of the church, not far from Mighty Owen Turner’s. Mostly we lay around Donna’s pink bedroom, chewing gum and leafing through old issues of Seventeen magazine that her cousin Punkin had given her. Oh to live in a family with a cousin named Punkin. But one terrible afternoon when I returned from the bathroom, Mady and Donna were smiling too nicely at me. I smiled back, but Mady now was studying my hair, with glee. It was nearly white, curly as a black person’s. I kept smiling. I had in fact begun to beam.
“Want to go into town?” I asked.
“In a sec,” said Mady. “Sit down a sec, I want to try something.” It did not occur to me to say no. I sat where Mady pointed, at Donna’s vanity table, and stared into my lap, as Mady parceled off a small section of my hair and began to braid it. I knew what she was doing. The black girls at my mother’s church braided their hair without needing rubber bands to secure it, and that was what Mady was doing, proving that my hair was just like theirs. And it was, and they held, the little braids she made, while I sat there, frozen, smiling, and she hummed a little tune, like a hunter hums while strapping his kill to the top of the car.
For a while after that, I didn’t play with anyone except my cousin Lynnie. I called her Punkin. But she was practicing her ballet most of the time, and I spent many afternoons endlessly throwing a baseball against the wall next to the garage door, hurtling fastball grounders to myself, to catch with the mitt my brother no longer used.
I had played with other girls besides Mady and Donna since our falling-out, and even spent the night at their houses, but more often than not I wound up alone, abandoned. For instance, right around my brother’s thirteenth birthday, when the blossoms were just appearing on the trees in our yard, the plum and apple and fig trees, I had been banished from the house without having done anything wrong. It was very confusing. My father came into my bedroom quite early one Saturday morning, sat on my bed and woke me. He smelled terrible, hung-over. It was not yet truly light. “Nanny darling,” he said. “Wake up. Your mother and I are having a bit of a bad morning. Why don’t you get yourself ready to go, and I’ll drive you into town.” I had heard them, earlier, when the dawn was just breaking, purple and golden and rose, my mother angry and crying, my father begging for sleep. They had left for a cocktail party the night before at six and were still not home by midnight when I finally fell asleep.
My father told me and Casey he would drop us off anywhere we wanted to go, but we couldn’t come home until the afternoon.
“I have nowhere to go,” I wailed. Casey, tired and angry, asked to be dropped off at the boardwalk, none of whose shops would be open for another two hours, and I got out with him.
“Hey, kids,” my father said. Casey was just about to slam the door. “I’m sorry.” All three of us shrugged at the same time. “Here,” he said and handed us a five-dollar bill.
It was a bright misty morning and only a few cars were on the road. Casey and I walked through town. It was very quiet. During the week now, all over town, machines arrived in the early morning to level the hills, to fill in the swamps, to tear down the building in the railroad yard which housed the turntable where men used to fix the locomotives. All over town the sounds rang out, of backhoes, pneumatic drills, chainsaws, and dump trucks rumbling past like tanks, carrying away the wood and concrete of old buildings, old trees, load after load of soil. Buildings went up overnight, houses, apartment buildings, little boutiques.
“I’m going to go to Owen’s,” he said. We were walking up the hill to the little white church.
“Can I come with you?”
“No. It wouldn’t be cool. Can’t you go to Mady’s?”
“No.”
“Go see Peg and Ed then. Here, you can have the money.”
I didn’t say anything for a while. I honestly couldn’t think of anywhere to go. Casey knocked softly on the side of my head like you knock on a door, and when I looked over, he handed me the five-dollar bill.
“Take it.” His hair was dirty and getting long, but he was very kind that morning. He was like our father. All the fruit trees we passed were in bloom.
I sat on the steps of the little white church for a long time that morning, after Casey dropped me off and kept going, toward Owen’s house. Behind me, above the green hill, were long curvy clouds, gray, like dolphins. Across the water San Francisco was hidden in fog, and way down at the foot of the town, the masts of the boats in the harbor sprang out of the blue-green bay like quills, and there were cars on the road in town, now, people with places to go.
Partly out of this new round of loneliness I started to go to church with my mother again. She was so grateful for the company. She missed Natalie dreadfully, as did I, and we both missed and were afraid of Casey. My father made scrambled eggs and black bread toast for us every Sunday and then settled in with the New York Times, while my mother and I put on our dresses and good sweaters, and walked together to the quonset-hut church in the housing development where the town’s really poor people, mostly black people, lived.
The quonset hut was huge, with a cross on top of the roof, and a pulpit that had once been a podium at the junior high school I now attended. Instead of pews, there were folding chairs in a semicircle, split down the middle by an aisle. There were four stained-glass pictures suspended from the rafters—one of a lamb, one of bread and wine, one of grapes and stalks of wheat, one of a black hand grasping a white hand. There was a huge batik scroll against one wall, in purples and blues and red, with the words from the Book of Micah, where the strong nations shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks, and shall study war no more.
There were usually forty or so people at worship, mostly b
lack and Mexican, with half a dozen whites; the choir of seven black women and one elderly white man sang us several songs and led us in the singing of the hymns throughout the service. They wore their own clothes, not choir robes. They were paid to clean houses by the women in town, who gave them clothes for their children, and sometimes clothes for themselves, and shirts with frayed collars and cuffs for their men, who mostly didn’t come to church. In town you saw the men drive by in old cars, but not at the market and not in the stores; the men, in their frayed Brooks Brothers shirts and scuffed brown shoes, you saw them at the liquor store. I always stood behind my father while he talked to them. I could hardly understand them: they said “fillins” for feelings, “jury” for jewelry.
My mother and I sat down by ourselves and listened to the choir sing spirituals, while the church filled up. Everyone had processed hair. The room first smelled of the hundred burning candles, and as it filled up with people it smelled of starch, it smelled like Peg’s laundry room when she starched and ironed their clothes. Then it smelled of booze and oil, urine, grime. Wino John had come. He was standing next to me, in white cords caked with oil and dirt, a red-and-black checked lumberjack’s jacket dotted with burrs and dried grass. He was scanning the faces of the congregation in disbelief, as if all these people were camped on his living room floor. He looked down at me. Through the beard and the leathery skin, the red-rimmed blue hawk eyes, the small straight nose that was always running, you could see that he must have been an incredibly handsome child. Casey had dressed up as a hobo two Halloweens ago, with a beard and a lot of burnt cork, ragged patched pants, smudged lipstick ringing his eyes, and the resemblance was chilling. He and John might have been father and son.
“Hi, Nanny,” he said.
I whispered back hello, scared because my mother didn’t like him, nice because my father did. There were hardly any trains running now, but a couple of men still lived in the railroad yard. I saw him there often, after school and during the summers, hanging around, often alone, drinking white port or stout malt liquor. My father said that John was very smart. They were the same age. At his own home, in the railroad yard, he was pleasant, polite in a back-woods way; but at church he was, as often as not, a royal pain in the neck. He hissed at things no one else could see and spent entire sermons writing angrily, intently, on dirty scraps of paper or on the mimeographed program. The breast pocket of his lumberjack’s jacket was always filled with paper scraps and pencil stubs and used envelopes into which he stuffed his missives. He then delivered them to our pastor, James, while James was still preaching. James, tall, handsome, black, and radical, had tried for a while to control John’s interruptions, but had long ago given up; now he reached for John’s envelopes as if this were a normal part of the worship service, which in a way I suppose it was. Then John would shuffle, sniffling and hawking, back to his chair. The other parishioners didn’t react to him at all, didn’t seem to notice him except to say hello after the service. They seemed to believe, all but my mother, that maybe he was crazy, always half-drunk, stinking to high heaven, always a pain in the neck, but also surely a child of God.
He was the one person I ever knew of, besides Richard Nixon, that my mother just simply hated.
James came over to our house one afternoon to talk about it with her. The three of us sat out on the porch and drank pink lemonade, while James pretended not to be afraid of our cat. He didn’t take his eyes off Jeffey for very long, and I had the feeling that if Jeffey had jumped up into his lap, James would have screamed. I remember him telling us that day that when there was someone in his life he didn’t like, he thought of the story in the old rabbinical texts, of Moses leading his people out of Egypt, and how after the Red Sea parted, the Hebrews turned to watch the walls of water covering the pharaoh’s horsemen and chariots. And Moses turned to God to thank Him, but saw that God was crying.
“Why are you crying, oh Lord?” he asked, and God answered, “Those were my children, too.”
“That doesn’t sound rabbinical, James,” my mother said.
James didn’t answer right away. He had his eyes trained on Jeffey, who was sitting on the white rattan table, looking at James lazily, evilly, snaking his head up and around from time to time to peer into James’ lap, as if maybe James had a mouse hidden there.
James said, “All I know is, John is my brother. The Lord is his shepherd, too; and you know He told us, feed my sheep.”
This was what the sermon was on, that Sunday, when I smelled John before I saw him, standing beside me, sniffling.
James read us the passage in the gospel where the risen Christ keeps asking Simon Peter if he loves him, and each time Peter says yes, yes, Jesus says Feed my sheep. Then James looked up from the battered black Bible, smiled, looked around at us, sighed.
“I didn’t start my sermon till last night,” he said. “But right after dinner I rolled back my sleeves and started working real hard, real fast. I’d been thinking about it all week, but hadn’t put a word to paper. It was about this passage, about how we must take care of everyone, those less fortunate than we who have so much. It was about the God-shaped hole the early Christians said we have, which can only be filled by God, and how He fills us by giving us the desire to love and serve His children. It was about how we must learn to love our enemies, like Martin is doing in Selma today, loving the racist. Loving the racist. It was about how we must feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, nurse the sick—when all of a sudden my phone rings.
“It was close to eleven o’clock, and the caller was a drunk or crazy young woman, calling from San Rafael, who needed a place to sleep, and she hadn’t eaten all day, and she didn’t have a penny left, had borrowed the dime to call me. ‘How did you find my name?’ I asked, in total exasperation.
“‘I went through the phone book,’ she said. ‘Looking for a reverend.’
“‘But my name begins with an R,’ I implored.
“‘I just found it, Rev.’
“And I knew,” he continued, “that if I stopped, and went to where she was calling me from, and found her a place for the night, and took her there, I wouldn’t be able to finish my sermon. And I knew that if I didn’t, I couldn’t deliver my sermon. So I looked up at the ceiling, shook my head slowly, and said, ‘God? You’re messing with me.’”
All the while the old black man in the corner said, “Uh huh, oh yeah, ay-men.”
And James found her a bed in a county facility for the night, but consequently the sermon was going to be a little shorter than usual, and we were all laughing, everyone was happy, and the pianist spontaneously started playing “Freely, Freely,” and everyone started singing, even though James wasn’t done preaching. While singing I suddenly sniffed the air, like a dog, turning my head while I tracked the scent, of lovely BO, soap, and old red wine. My father was several steps away. I gasped, and my mother turned to me and then saw my father, and the next thing I knew we were walking outside.
I could hear the people singing as I trailed along behind my parents, like a dog. “Freely, freely, ye have received; freely, freely, give.” I couldn’t hear what my father was telling my mother, but Casey was in trouble. He had, as it turned out, been busted.
Casey was in the backseat of the Volkswagen bus glowering, unkempt. He and Owen Turner had been caught driving around in Owen’s father’s car, which was blue inside with marijuana smoke when the cops pulled them over.
“Hi, Casey,” I said.
He was looking out the window and didn’t say anything.
He was in so much trouble. My body, my whole being was red with shame. This wasn’t like when we got yelled at and were sent to our rooms without any dinner. This was big time.
“You’re grounded for a month,” my father said grimly, before sliding the bus’s back door shut, slamming it closed, as if we’d never get out again.
“It’s not fair,” Casey muttered.
“What’d you say?” my father roared, whipping the door open.
&
nbsp; “Nothing.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, it’s not fair, it’s too—”
“Fair? Fair? Fair would be that you’d both be dead.”
My father drove us home. No one spoke. I kept stealing glances at Casey, wishing he would just look back at me for a second. He smelled terrible. I remembered all the times he had been in disgrace before, sent to his room without supper, and how I would sneak him cookies and oranges; but this time was different.
Things never seemed the same again, after Casey got busted. There was often an edge in the air, like bad weather was coming. We weren’t as close to Peg and Ed, or at any rate we didn’t see them as often. One night, while Casey was still grounded, the three of us went over there for dinner, and I walked in feeling safe and happy. I threw myself against Aunt Peg in the kitchen, and she scooped me halfway up, and kissed the back of my neck over and over, then my cheeks, and said how good I smelled, how clean, and how pretty I had become. She was really quite fat by now, her skin soft and pink and smelling like Ivory soap, but she wasn’t one of those fat women who let their cleavage show, like Wendy Harper’s mother, with her big clammy moist bosom, always pulling me into her until I was blind and couldn’t breathe.
Peg was frying chicken, and was going to serve Lynnie and me in the TV room, so we could watch The Wizard of Oz while we ate. It was heaven. Uncle Ed ended up bringing us our food, on TV trays, kissing us both, staying to watch the first fifteen minutes with us. Lynnie took the deep-fried skin off her chicken, and folded it up neatly so that it still fit on her plate, and when Uncle Ed left, I chided her gently, feeling very big sisterly, saying she needed to eat the skin, she was getting too thin.
“Please, Punkin,” I said, “please eat the skin,” but she just smiled nicely at me for a moment, and turned back to the set. “Punkin, I’m serious,” I said, and this time, she smiled tightly without looking at me, and dropped the chicken skin to the ground, where Sarah-Jane gobbled it up. Then we heard my father’s angry voice and turned straining toward the source.