“Did Mary Ella tell him about them deer getting into our garden again?” she asked. The deer got into our garden no matter how much fencing I put around the little bit of good soil Mr. Gardiner let us work for ourselves.
“Yes,” I said, though it was me who told him. Mary Ella didn’t like talking to Mr. Gardiner so much. She wasn’t a big talker to begin with.
“Got your wages?” Nonnie asked, like she did every day.
“I’ll give ’em to you soon as I change this boy,” I said, walking to the bedroom. Mr. Gardiner paid us pennies compared to his other workers, but he let us live here for nothing, so we never complained.
I plunked Baby William down on the bed and started tickling the daylights out of him because I wanted to hear him giggle. We rolled around on the bed for a couple minutes, both of us getting the worries of the day out of ourselves. Sometimes I just liked to stare at that boy, he was so beautiful. Black curls like satin when you ran your fingers through them. Black eyelashes, long and thick. Eyes so dark they was nearly black, too. Mary Ella’s hair was even lighter than mine. I didn’t like to think where Baby William might of got all that black from.
There was a rustle of the trees outside the window and Baby William looked in that direction. We worried early on he might be deaf ’cause he didn’t seem to care about noises and Mrs. Werkman and Nurse Ann said he might need a deaf school, so now every time he heard something, I celebrated inside.
“Mama?” he asked, lifting his head to look through the window. It was about the only word he knew, which Mrs. Werkman said wasn’t right. He should have more words by two, she said. I didn’t like how she was always finding something wrong with him. I told her he was just quiet like Mary Ella. Not a jabbermouth, like me.
“It’s just a breeze out there,” I said, nuzzling his sweaty little neck. “Mama’ll be home soon.”
I hoped I wasn’t lying.
* * *
In the kitchen, I fed Baby William on my lap while Nonnie made salad from the last of a chicken we’d been eating most of the week. It was getting near dusk and Mary Ella still wasn’t home. Baby William wasn’t hungry. He kept pushing my hand away and the chunks of squash fell off the spoon.
“He’s always a crab at suppertime,” Nonnie said.
“No he ain’t,” I said. I hated how she talked about him like that. I bet she talked about me and Mary Ella that way when we was little, too. “He just needs some cuddling, don’t you, Baby William?” I rocked him and he hung on to me like a monkey. Mrs. Werkman said we shouldn’t hold him when we feed him no more. He should sit on a chair at the table, up on the block of wood me and Mary Ella sat on when we was little, but I just loved holding him and he crabbed less on my lap. Sometimes when I held Baby William like that, I thought I could remember my own mama holding me that way.
“I doubt that,” Nonnie said when I told her that one day. “She wasn’t much for holding y’all.”
But I remembered it. Maybe I only imagined it, but that was near as good.
Nonnie scooped Duke’s mayonnaise out of the jar and mixed it into the salad, looking out the window the whole time. “Gonna be dark before you know it,” she said. “You better go see if you can find your sister. That girl forgets her way home sometime.”
I let Baby William eat a piece of squash with his fingers. “No telling where she is, Nonnie,” I said, but I knew I had to try or we’d both be worrying half the night. I stood up, handing Nonnie the baby and the spoon, and she set him on the wooden block. He let out a howl and she clamped her hand over his mouth.
Outside, I checked the johnny first just in case, but she wasn’t there. Then I walked through the woods and across the pasture, turning my head left and right, looking for Mary Ella. I walked down the lane that ran next to the tobacco, which looked spooky in the evening light. When I was little, Mama would tell me fairies lived in them tobacco plants. Nonnie said I imagined this, that Mama would never say such a fanciful thing, but I didn’t care. If I had to make up memories of Mama, I’d do it. I used to think someday I’d be able to ask her myself if the things I remembered was true, but Mrs. Werkman said no good could come from me paying Mama a visit after all this time. “No good for either of you, dear,” she said, and by the way she said it I knew she felt real bad about the whole thing.
Way off to my left, I could see the Gardiners’ house blazing with light from just about every room. I walked faster so I could see the back of the house and the two windows I knew was Henry Allen’s room. I’d been in that room. Snuck in, of course. I would of been kilt if anyone knew. Mr. or Mrs. Gardiner. Nonnie. Lord, Nonnie would have my head! But Henry Allen would keep me safe. Nobody I trusted more than that boy. Even when we was little, he’d take on anybody that said a bad word about me. Back then I couldn’t of known I’d come to love him like I did.
I nearly tripped over my own feet as I watched the windows, trying to see Henry Allen’s shadow move past one of them, but I was so far from the house that the windows was nothing more than rectangles of light. It was real dusky out now, so he probably couldn’t see me even if he was looking. But I felt it anyway, that long invisible thread that connected me and him. It always had.
Down the lane in front of me, a light burned on the porch of the Jordans’ house, the other family that lived on the farm. I knew Mary Ella wouldn’t be there, so I turned around and pretty soon I could see the farmhouse windows again. I stared so hard at Henry Allen’s windows that I near forgot I was supposed to be looking for my sister. I wondered if he was listening to his radio. He had one of them little ones you could carry around with you. He brung it with him whenever we met up at the crick. We had a big old radio, of course, but you had to plug it in. Henry Allen said he was going to get me one of the little ones, and when I thought of having music I could carry around, I couldn’t believe it. The Gardiners even had a television and Henry Allen promised someday he’d show it to me but it had to be a time when his parents and the help was out of the house and I didn’t know what it would take for that to happen. A funeral maybe. I didn’t want to wish for no funeral just so I could see a television.
I looked down the lane ahead of me, wishing I brung a lantern with me because it was getting right dark out. The moon was big, though, and it spilled light all over the tobacco like glitter.
“What you doin’ out here this time of night, Ivy?”
I jumped, and it took my eyes a minute to make out Eli Jordan walking toward me. He was so dark he blended into the night.
I slowed my walking. “Just looking for Mary Ella,” I said, casual like, not wanting to sound worried.
“That girl’s a traveler, ain’t she?” We was nearly face-to-face now and he looked off across the field like he might be able to see her. He was seventeen, same as Mary Ella, but could of passed for twenty. Taller than me by a hand and broad in the shoulders. Nonnie called him a buck. “That Jordan buck can do the work of four men,” she’d say, sounding admiring, and then a breath later add, “Stay away from him, Ivy,” like I’d be fool enough to mess with a colored boy. Wasn’t me that needed that warning. Sometimes I felt like he could look out for me. Other times, I felt scared by his power. Like the day he lifted a giant tree stump from the ground to the back of Mr. Gardiner’s blue pickup, the muscles in his back rippling like water in the crick. He was a boy who could be for good or evil, and I didn’t know which one he was going to pick.
“Did you see her since the barning today?” I asked.
He shook his head and started walking past me toward his house. “Ain’t seen her,” he said, then over his shoulder, “She’ll probly be home when you git there.”
“Probly,” I said, and I started walking again, faster this time.
The moon lit up the rows of tobacco and I went back to watching the lights in the farmhouse as I walked. I put my hand in my shorts pocket and felt the scrap of paper. “Midnight, tomorrow,” Henry Allen had written in the note. Most every day, he left a note for me near the bottom of t
he old fence post where the wood was split. He could tuck the note in real deep and no one but me would know it was there. Sometimes he’d say one o’clock or two, but usually it was midnight. I liked that best. Liked the sound of it. I liked thinking someday I’d tell our grandkids, Me and your grandpa would meet by the crick at midnight. Of course, I’d never tell them what we did there.
I saw a lantern in the distance. Someone was walking along Deaf Mule Road where it ran between the Gardiners’ house and the woods. It wouldn’t be Henry Allen. Way too early. As I got closer, I saw the moonlight fall on my sister’s blond hair, which was out of her braid, loose and wild, a crazy big moonlit halo around her head. She was carrying something and I knew it was her basket with the extras Mr. Gardiner gave her for us. I walked faster till I was close enough for her to hear me.
“Mary Ella!” I called out, and she stopped walking and looked around, trying to see where my voice came from. Then she must of spotted me. Instead of walking toward me, though, she ran right across the path I was on, heading for the woods and home, and I knew she was running to keep away from me. She didn’t want to see me. Or me to see her. My sister was a strange one.
By the time I got home, Mary Ella was sitting on the porch rocking Baby William in her arms. Even in the dark, I could tell she was holding him so tight you’d expect him to cry, but Baby William put up with Mary Ella lovin’ on him. She was the only one who could calm him when he got flustrated from not having the words to tell us what he wanted. He knew who’d carried him closest to her heart. Moments like this, they was two quiet souls cut from the same cloth.
“Where you been?” I asked, like I expected her to tell me the truth.
“Had to get the extras from Mr. Gardiner,” she said.
I didn’t bother arguing with her. It didn’t take hours to get the extras unless she had to grow them herself. I didn’t say nothing about how I saw Eli walking home about the same time she was. There was something real breakable about Mary Ella and I was always afraid if I touched her in the wrong spot, she’d crack.
Nonnie came out on the porch, rooting through the basket in the light from the house. “He gave us some of Desiree’s banana pudding!” she said. “Oh sweet Jesus, I wish he’d do that every week.”
“You can’t have that, Nonnie,” I reminded her as I sat down on the stoop. “Your sugar.”
“Don’t go telling me what I can and can’t have,” Nonnie snapped. “You seem to forget you’re my granddaughter, not my mother.”
I shut up. Nonnie was like a little kid about her food. You told her she couldn’t have something and she’d eat it just to be ornery. You reminded her to test her pee, and she’d lie and say she already done it.
I smacked a skeeter. I wouldn’t last long out here. Once you stopped moving, they was on you.
Nonnie went back in the house and came out a minute later with a spoon. She settled into her rocker and set the bowl of pudding on her lap. I couldn’t watch her take that first bite. I heard her let out a sigh.
“I’m at the end of my natural working life, girls,” she said. She’d been saying that for years, but lately I believed it. She didn’t last but two hours at the barn today, and even chasing after Baby William seemed too much for her. It was up to me and Mary Ella to work hard enough to keep Mr. Gardiner happy so he’d let us keep the house. He could have a bunch of real workers in it. A family with a father and sons who could do five times what me and Mary Ella and Nonnie did. I was always afraid one day he’d tell us it was time to go. What we’d do without our house, I didn’t know.
I watched my grandmother digging into the bowl of banana pudding and my sister holding her secrets as close as she held her baby, and I wondered how much longer we could go on this way.
3
Jane
Dr. Carson reached his hand toward me to help me sit up. I clutched the thin fabric gown against my body as I balanced on the edge of the examining table, my legs dangling uncomfortably. He rolled away from me on his stool, then folded his arms across his chest and smiled at me, his thick gray hair giving him a grandfatherly appearance.
“I think your fiancé is a lucky man,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said, although I couldn’t imagine what on earth he was basing that on. I’d barely said a word to him during the examination, too embarrassed to do anything other than stare at the ceiling. Now, though, I had to look at him. He seemed determined to hold my gaze with his own eyes, magnified behind his black horn-rimmed glasses.
“Do you have any concerns about your wedding night you’d like to discuss?” he asked.
It was so strange to be asked that question by a man I didn’t know. My own mother wouldn’t ask me that question. Gloria wouldn’t have, either, and she’d been my college roommate and best friend. And certainly not Robert. I felt my cheeks burn, not for the first time in the last hour. This man had touched my breasts, slipped his fingers inside me, and explored parts of my body even I had never seen. Why should a question about my wedding night feel even more intrusive?
“No,” I said. “No concerns.” I couldn’t wait to leave his office, but there was something more I needed from him. It was now or never, and he waited as though he knew I had more to say. I cleared my throat. “I was wondering if you could prescribe that new birth control pill for me,” I said.
He raised his bushy gray eyebrows. “You don’t want children?” The way he said it was accusatory, and I felt his opinion of me plummet.
I pressed the gown tighter to my chest. “I’d like to put off having children for a couple of years,” I said. “I plan to work for a while first.”
“Surely you don’t have to work.” He looked at me curiously. “Not married to a pediatrician.” He’d told me he’d met Robert somewhere in the Raleigh medical community, and I didn’t like that connection.
“I want to work,” I said. Dr. Carson sounded like my mother, who claimed she only worked while my father was alive because his teaching salary had never quite paid the bills, and she only continued to work after his death because the life insurance wasn’t enough to see us through. I knew she loved working in the library, no matter what she said. Robert wasn’t thrilled with my plan himself, though. He never out-and-out said I couldn’t work. He did, however, say it would be embarrassing for him, since none of his friends’ wives worked. Only Gloria, who taught second grade, seemed to understand.
“What do you want to do?” Dr. Carson frowned at me as though he couldn’t imagine a job I might truly want.
“I just graduated from Woman’s College in Greensboro,” I said. “I have an interview this afternoon to be a caseworker for the Department of Public Welfare.”
“Oh, you don’t want to do that!” he said, as if I’d said I was going to pick up garbage in the street. “Nice-looking blond girl like you? That’s so dreary. If you have the itch to work, get a job at Belk’s where you can dress up and sell jewelry or smart little hats.”
“I want to do something that helps people, the way Robert does.”
“You could have gone into nursing, then.”
“I could have, if I could stand the sight of blood.” I smiled as sweetly as I could to keep my annoyance from showing.
“Well,” he said, slapping his hands on his knees as he stood up. “I haven’t prescribed the birth control pill yet and I won’t be starting today without getting approval from the man of the house.” He pulled a cigarette from the Phillip Morris pack on the ledge above the sink and I watched as he lit it with a bronze lighter and inhaled deeply. “Once you’re married,” he said, “have your husband call me with his permission and I’ll write you a prescription.”
I was twenty-two years old and having to ask Robert’s permission was humiliating. Also futile. He would say no. He thought the pill hadn’t been studied enough and the side effects were too dangerous. Plus, he wanted to start a family right away. I wanted a family, too. Three children sounded perfect to me, but not yet.
Dr. Carson blew
a stream of smoke into the air and studied me where I sat waiting, still wrapped in the skimpy gown. “Seems like I don’t see many virgins anymore,” he said. “Congratulations on that. You’re a smart girl.”
“Thank you,” I said, although I didn’t like him passing judgment on me. Besides, it was a miracle I was still a virgin. Robert and I couldn’t keep our hands off each other. We’d come really close to crossing the line, but we decided to wait. If it had been up to me alone, I’m not sure I could have held out.
He pulled the door open an inch or two. “Children are the greatest blessing,” he said over his shoulder. And then he was gone.
Once alone in the room, I slipped out of the gown and began to dress, surprised by the sting of tears in my eyes. I hadn’t gotten what I’d wanted from this visit: foolproof birth control. Instead I’d been patronized and belittled. I wished I’d had the guts to respond differently to him, but that might have gotten back to Robert. I was already wondering if Dr. Carson might call Robert to tell him about my request. I didn’t want to think about any deep meaning behind the fact that I couldn’t be honest with Robert about wanting to take the pill. Everything else between us was good, and thinking about him eased my heart as I sat down on the stool to attach my stockings to my garter belt. Robert and I were a wonderful team together and the one thing I was absolutely sure of was his love. Love made any problem solvable.
* * *
I was still thinking about that miserable appointment as I drove to my interview. My car had belonged to my father and I thought it still smelled faintly of his pipe tobacco, although Robert said he couldn’t smell anything. It reassured me, that smell, and I tried to put Dr. Carson out of my mind. The last thing I needed was to go into a job interview upset and angry. Still, my inability to get the pill now hung over my head. Gloria’s doctor had prescribed it for her months ago, even before it had been approved for birth control. Even before she was married, for pity’s sake. I’d make an appointment with her doctor and hope I could get it in time for our honeymoon.