“I want to talk to Mommy,” I said.
“She’s not here.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s gone to her sister’s, your aunt Clare, for some very much needed R and R.”
“I want to talk to her,” I whined. “Call her on the telephone.”
“She won’t speak to you. She didn’t want to be here when you were returned this time, Teal. She couldn’t stand the idea of it.”
“No.”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s true.”
He leaned forward on his elbows, folded his hands together, and glanced at his watch.
“There’s a car outside, a limousine, waiting for you.”
“What are you talking about, Daddy? Now?”
“Now is almost too late for you, Teal. Yes, right now.”
“But my things.”
“Everything you need is already in the automobile.”
I shook my head.
“I’m not going anywhere, Daddy.”
“I pulled some strings and, believe me, paid a lot of money, twice as much as your private school costs, to get you a spot right now, Teal. Someday, I hope, you will appreciate it. I realize you won’t for a while, but that’s a bitter pill I’ll swallow.”
I kept shaking my head.
“Where is this school?” I asked, seeing how determined he was.
“It’s wherever your last chance resides,” he said.
Instinctively, I backed up and suddenly hit what felt like a stone wall. I turned to see Tomkins smiling down at me.
“Tomkins will handle your transportation,” Daddy said.
Panic swirled around me.
“Where’s Carson?”
“He’s gone home.”
“I’ve got to go up to my room and see if there is anything I need that you didn’t put in the car, Daddy,” I said, playing for time.
“You didn’t think about any of that when you ran off with your mother’s car and my money earlier, Teal, did you? Why would anything matter to you now?”
“Please, let me call Mommy?”
“I don’t understand all this interest in us suddenly, Teal. You didn’t speak to your mother before you ran off, did you? You didn’t speak to me or Carson. I’m giving you some of what you want—an escape from us,” he said.
That wasn’t what I wanted from my family, I was about to tell him. I wanted love and concern. I wanted attention and I wanted to feel wanted, but I said nothing. We were like oil and water, Daddy and me. For the moment, I was too angry and stubborn to do any more pleading. Send me to another school, I thought. See if it matters.
“Good-bye, Daddy,” I said.
“Good luck to you, Teal. I really mean that,” he said.
I turned and marched out of the office. Tomkins was right behind me. As we went by the stairway, I glanced up at it. Tomkins thought I might make a mad dash up to my room, I guess. He sped up so that he clearly blocked any such move on my part. He opened the front door.
There it was, as Daddy had described, a long stretch limousine.
At least I’m going in style to wherever I’m going, I thought.
What surprised me was that there was another driver. What was Tomkins here for, then? This driver was in a chauffeur’s uniform. He got out as soon as we appeared and opened the rear door for me. To my further surprise, Tomkins followed me into the limousine and sat across from me.
“Are you going to a new school, too?” I asked him.
He stared coldly at me. What was Daddy doing, making sure I didn’t have the driver stop and jump out somewhere? This is getting ridiculous, I thought.
The chauffeur got in, and we started away. It was funny how I didn’t look back at the house with any sort of sadness the last time I had left it, but for some reason, perhaps because of Daddy’s tone of voice and his strangely calm, almost defeated demeanor, I did now.
When I glanced at Tomkins, I saw a smirk on his face.
“That’s a lot to throw away,” he muttered.
“You don’t know anything,” I spit back at him.
“Of course not. No one but you knows anything,” he replied.
We drove on, and I quickly realized we were heading for the airport. Daddy hadn’t been kidding when he said far away. The limousine was permitted to go through a special gate and directly to a small plane.
“What is this?” I asked.
“This is an airport and this is a plane,” Tomkins said.
“Very funny. Why am I going on a private plane?”
“You’re so special,” he replied with that same small cold smile on his lips.
The plane’s engines were started as we approached. The door was opened as we pulled alongside. Tomkins got out quickly and held the limousine door open. The chauffeur sat staring ahead. I hesitated, my body feeling like it had sunk into the car seat.
“Let’s go. I have other things to do today,” Tomkins snapped. When I still hesitated, he leaned in. “Do you want me to embarrass you and pull you out of the limousine?”
“Where am I going?”
“Hey, my job was to bring you here. The guy in the pilot’s seat knows where you’re going. Move,” he ordered.
I had no doubt he would pull me out, so I stepped out of the limousine. The wind whipped around us. Tomkins took my left arm, pinching it at the elbow with his thick fingers and directing me up the small stairway. I lowered my head and got into the plane. There was no one else there.
The door was slammed shut.
“Buckle yourself in,” I heard. I felt the plane begin to move.
I looked out the window. Tomkins was getting back into the limousine. It sped off as the plane turned and the engines were revved up.
What about my things? I realized. I hadn’t seen anything taken from the limousine and put onto the plane.
“Wait!” I shouted at the door between me and the cockpit.
The roar of the engines drowned out my voice.
“Where am I going?”
The plane began to roll faster and faster and soon lifted into the air.
I looked out the window.
“Mommy,” I whispered.
The sun went in behind a cloud as we rose higher.
Across the way, I saw my face reflected in the opposite seat’s window.
I was crying.
“Poor little rich girl,” I heard myself say.
PART THREE
PHOEBE
1
Mama’s Gone
“Well, she’s gone,” Daddy announced at my bedroom door. “Your mother has really gone.”
I turned slightly in bed and grunted, thinking, why did he have to wake me so early just to tell me that? Then, I peered at him through the slits of my barely opened eyes. He stood in my bedroom doorway, his head bowed and his hands on his hips. He was already dressed for work, wearing his gray suit and tie, looking as perfectly put together as a storefront manikin, as Mama would say.
“Right, Daddy, she’s gone,” I said, and pulled the cover over my head.
“No,” he said, raising his voice. “I mean it. This time she’s really gone, Phoebe.”
I lowered the blanket again.
“What are you talking about, Daddy? She’s really gone? Like this is the first morning you woke up and realized she didn’t come home all night?”
In the beginning they would have loud arguments about that, Mama crying that he didn’t consider how hard she worked and how she needed time to unwind. After a while Daddy gave up complaining and just ignored it, which was usually how he handled every crisis between them.
My mother worked as a waitress in a small jazz joint. Most of the time she spent what she made right there, or at least, that was what she claimed. Either that or she needed this and that for work: better shoes, nicer clothes, beautifying to make better tips. Whatever excuse she came up with, Daddy accepted.
With Daddy on the road selling tools to garages all around the Atlanta, Georgia, area, I was often home alone most of th
e night. Lately, he had to go even farther to bring in as much income as he had before. Because of that, he often had to sleep in a motel and I’d be alone all night, not realizing until morning that Mama hadn’t come home.
“She didn’t leave a good-bye letter for either you or me, but she’s gone! She packed most of her things and took off.”
I stared at him a moment and then sat up in bed. I was wearing one of his pajama tops, which was something I had done since I was four and was still doing at sixteen.
“What things? Her clothes?”
“That’s what I said.”
That was something she hadn’t ever done, I thought. I ran my fingers through my hair before getting up and marching past him to his and Mama’s bedroom.
Her closet door was wide open, and there were dozens of empty hangers dangling. Some of her less cherished garments had been tossed to the floor. There was only one pair of old shoes in the shoe rack. Now that the closet was almost empty, the gobs of dust were more visible. I stared at it and shook my head.
“She took all that and left,” I said in amazement, mostly to myself. Daddy was standing right beside me.
Mama was really on a fling this time. I was sure it was something she had just decided to do on the spur of the moment. She hadn’t given me any hints. I think I felt more betrayed than Daddy, not that Mama and I were all that close these days. She didn’t like being reminded she had a sixteen-year-old daughter. Instead, she preferred pretending she wasn’t much older than that herself, especially in front of men. I was absolutely forbidden to go to the club to see her when she was working, and she warned me that if I ever did, she would act like she didn’t know who I was.
“All her cosmetics, too,” Daddy said, nodding at their bathroom. The counter had nothing on it, no jars of her creams, no shampoos, nothing.
“Wow,” I said. “I guess she did take off for a while.”
“What time did you get home last night that you didn’t even know it, Phoebe, and didn’t even hear her do all this?” he asked. “I’m sure she wasn’t alone,” he added in a lower voice.
Anger didn’t darken his ebony eyes as much as it turned them into cold black marble.
“I was home early, but she was still at work and I was so tired I went right to sleep,” I lied.
Once again I had violated my curfew and come home very late, but I just assumed she was still at the club. I didn’t go to her room to look for her, and if I had and had woken her, she would have ripped into me good. The gin I had drunk at Toby Powell’s house practically put me into a coma anyway. I didn’t even hear my dreams.
“She was threatening me with leaving all the time, but I thought like you,” Daddy said, staring at the empty closet. “She’s always threatening. But this time, it’s obviously more than just a threat, Phoebe. I should have known. I should have expected something like this. I heard rumors about her and that no-account Sammy Bitters.”
“What kind of rumors?” I had heard them, too, stories about her being with him, but I made like I knew nothing.
“Not the kind I’d care to discuss,” Daddy said. “Anyhow, I gotta go off until late tonight. I don’t have any time to worry about this or care. I just wanted to be sure you knew to be home after school and all, Phoebe. No hanging out on any street corners or staying late at some friend’s house, you hear? You gotta stay good. Remember what that judge told you,” he warned.
Along with two of my friends, I had been arrested for shoplifting at a department store. Sylvia Abramson had one of those tools the cashiers use to take off the thing that sets off an alarm, and we used it to steal clothes a few times before we got caught this time. A saleswoman saw me go into the changing room with a blouse, and afterward she went in and realized I was wearing the blouse under my own. They let me walk out of the store before they stopped me. Meanwhile, Sylvia and Beneatha Lewis got caught stuffing panty hose into their jeans.
This was the second time I was caught shoplifting and brought before a judge within one year. If it wasn’t for Daddy, I guess the judge would have done something more than just sentence me to probation and impose a curfew. Daddy kept thanking him. To me it looked like he was begging for mercy, apologizing, taking the blame onto himself, and promising to try to do better as a parent. Before the session was over, the judge did bawl him out more than he chastised me, but he did tag on the threat of having me removed from our home and placed in foster care the next time I got into any sort of trouble.
“It’s easy to have children, but it’s a real responsibility to raise them,” he lectured from his high desk. Daddy just kept nodding. “Too many people have thrown and are throwing their obligations onto the state or society. The court isn’t here to take the place of a parent.”
“I know, Your Honor. I am sorry to have my troubles in public.”
“Um,” the judge said. He had asked where Mama was, and Daddy had told him she was at work and couldn’t get free. The truth was, she was home sleeping off a hangover. The judge peered at him when he explained that, and Daddy shifted his eyes quickly. It was like he had a glass skull and you could see any attempted lies tangle up and crumble. He kept rubbing his hands together nervously.
I felt more embarrassed for him than I did for myself, even though Daddy always looks respectable and is always nicely dressed. He says it’s part of his work as a tool salesman. He sells very expensive equipment and says he has to look like someone who would. He’s always telling me a good presentation, a good image, is half the battle in this world. He does his best to get me to dress more conservatively. I tell him he’s just too old-fashioned, but he says it doesn’t have anything to do with fashion. It has to do with being decent.
I told him being decent is no fun.
“It’s like eating sugar-free candy,” I said. He didn’t laugh. He was laughing less and less these days, and now I wondered if he would ever laugh again.
Anyway, without Daddy around and with Mama out and about, working and such, I often violated the curfew, and the evening before was just such an occasion. Daddy told me I was skidding on thin ice. I almost fell through the day Daddy told me Mama was gone. Now that I knew he wasn’t going to be home for dinner, I went off with Sylvia and stayed too long at her house partying with her, Packy Morris, and Newton James, two boys whom the principal herself had encouraged to drop out of school. We made a little too much noise, and Mrs. Gilroy, who lives in the apartment below, went and called the police. They took our names, and I thought they would know I was violating curfew, or they would come arrest me the day after, but no one came.
Daddy found out about it and looked very glum when I came home from school the next day. Mama still hadn’t come home, and the reality of her never coming home was beginning to settle in me like a glob of fresh cement. He was sitting at the kitchen table, nursing a cup of coffee between his hands and coming up out of an ocean of thought like someone who had been deep-sea diving for ideas all day.
“I realize I can’t do this, Phoebe. I can’t look after you, and this can’t continue. You’re just going to go from bad to worse,” he said. He shook his head and drummed his fingertips on the tablecloth, looking like he had spent his last dollar.
His conclusion was that since there was no doubt now that Mama had left us for good, he had decided to deposit me with my aunt Mae Louise, Mama’s older sister. He told me he had already had a preliminary conversation with her and my uncle Buster about it.
“What are you talking about, Daddy? I ain’t gonna live with no Aunt Mae Louise,” I said after he told me. I wagged my head and put my hand on my hip. Usually, I could get him to ease up on any of his restrictions and punishments, but he looked very determined this time.
“This is no life for you here, Phoebe. Not the way things are now. It won’t be forever, but it’s a way to save you. Maybe the only way.”
“I don’t need to be saved.”
“People who need to be saved usually don’t know it,” he replied. “Put on something n
ice. We’re going to talk to Aunt Mae Louise and Uncle Buster tonight.”
“No,” I said.
“You do what I tell you, Phoebe,” he said firmly. “If you don’t, the law is going to come around and take you off one of these days anyway. They’ll go and put you in some foster home with strangers, like the judge said, and I know you wouldn’t like that.”
“Uncle Buster and Aunt Mae Louise are no better than strangers,” I whined.
“Stop it,” he snapped, and pounded the table with uncharacteristically intense anger. I actually jumped back. “Now go get dressed, and don’t put on any of those blouses so short your belly button peeps out. Go!” he ordered, his finger stiffly pointing toward my room.
I sauntered off reluctantly and changed into something that I knew would make him happy, but I wasn’t smiling. All the way out to Aunt Mae Louise’s house, I sat sulking in the car. Daddy went on and on about how this was my biggest and best opportunity to escape trouble and grow into a decent young woman, maybe even go off to a college and become something. He said he couldn’t be expected to make a living and raise a teenage girl who had already been in enough trouble to bring a grown man to tears. He said bringing a girl like me up in the heart of Atlanta’s toughest neighborhood was like planting a rose in a pigsty.
“Not that I’m saying you’re any rose, Phoebe, not by a long shot,” Daddy added. “I’m not one to be blind to my child’s problems and my own. People who do that end up wishing they was born a few minutes earlier or later.”
“Maybe Mama will come back,” I offered as a last resort when we drew closer to Stone Mountain. “At least we should wait a week or so to see.”
Daddy looked at me with those coldly realistic eyes of his, the sort of eyes that would clear fantasies off your own like windshield wipers cleared off rain.
“I don’t fool myself about your mama, Phoebe. She was never satisfied with our life, and you know it. She’s into bad stuff now. And anyway, I don’t want her coming back,” he added with more rage in his voice toward her than I had ever heard. “Not after what she’s done this time.”