All the Finest Girls (15 page)

I kneel down before the pictures. Philip is older than I am. A year and three months older, which sounds like two years, since he is eleven and I am only nine. He plays with me anyway. But it is Derek who is my best friend. In the trip I’ve planned in my mind, the one I’ve drawn a hundred times, Derek and I are inseparable. Where we go is ever changing; what we do fills a drawing pad I keep on my desk.

I take him to the deep end of the pool and show him how to press all the air out of his body so we sink together to the bottom, enjoying an underwater conversation no one else can hear. We ride horses into the forest, and Derek saves me from a wood demon disguised in the base of an oak tree. He sits across the dinner table from me and shares a plate of spaghetti. We count raindrops on the car’s back window, flash peace signs at passing cars. When night comes, Derek and I bundle under the covers and fear nothing.

“Gwan,” Lou says, holding out the round-tipped scissors to me. “Make dem nice and den I’ll be finished here. I’ve got to close dis box for Dilly to take me to de post office in de morning.”

On Philip’s card, I draw a fire engine and a picture of me in my turkey costume. Alongside the truck I make a giant Christmas tree, festooned with glitter and twinkly lights. Lou says there are no pine trees on St. Clair. I’ll bring the boys a tree when I make my visit. For Derek, I draw only me in a dress, my skin a shade of brown darker than my own. I sit back and admire the turquoise ribbon on my smooth hair and the way my dress waves around my knees. But the nose is no good. It’s too long and where it ought to be straight, I’ve drawn an ugly bump that makes me look like a witch. The more I try to fix it, the worse it looks. I scribble and scribble, feeling the heat rising around my chest and neck. I break the point on the crayon, then crumple the card and throw it across the room, narrowly missing Lou’s face.

“Why are you trowin’ dat away?”

My drawing is terrible. “Because I hate him!” I shout, stomping my foot and screaming until my throat hurts. “It” is what I meant, not “him.” But that’s what I’ve said. Lou gets up and grabs me by the shoulders.

“Yah stop it! Stop it right now!” Lou has never yelled at me before. When I look in her eyes, I see a terrible look. I fall instantly silent.

“Yah trying me completely now. I’m sick of it! Yah hear me? Yah cyaant hate Derek, and yah cyaant love him neither. Yah don’t even know him! Arright?”

Without wasting any time, she recovers the card and smooths it out on the bed, her back to me.

“Now let’s have a look, hmm? Let’s look. Ooh, dat’s nice, Addy. Sweet and dandy. Look, yah made de dress so pretty. Please let me send it to Derek?”

I can’t answer her, can’t speak. The snowflakes outside have gotten harder and smaller, and come down like spitballs.

I’m sorry, Addy, sorry I snapped at yah. He’ll love dis. Please, Addy?

My eye falls again on the photo of Derek. A sunny day. He’s standing in front of a fence, dressed in a starchy white shirt and olive shorts. With his hand, he’s shielding his eyes from the sun. I get down low sometimes, to see what’s hidden by the shadow, but I can never see beneath the swatch of darkness. I wonder if he’s looking at me.

Lou puts the card in the box and turns back to her wrapping. Yesterday we went down to Danbury and Lou bought Philip a pair of track sneakers. She lays them in a square of paper, but instead of taping it closed, she runs her finger over and over along the stripes. She’s been singing quietly along with the music on the radio.

Chri-ist divine.

Her voice breaks on the last word.

“Why is Derek only in the second grade?” I ask. “He should be in third.”

Lou doesn’t answer me. I’ve asked this question before and I know the reason.

“I said why is he only in the second grade?”

“I told you, Addy,” she finally answers. “He was having some troubles wit his spelling and such. Dey left him back.”

“Why was he having trouble? What’s wrong with him? Is he retarded?”

Lou sighs, turns to me. Her face is streaked with tears.

“Quit it now. I’m pass tired. Just quit it.”

I reach out for the rest of my brownie, though I’m not at all hungry. In fact I feel sick. When I’m done I squish the crumbs on my fingers. While Lou tidies up the room around us, I peel off two sections of the orange and place them in the back corners of my jaw, then get up and take a look in the mirror.

“And dey don’t even call me de Godfadda,” I say, thinking of the movie Dilly drove us to see last week. During the entire picture, Lou held her hands near the side of my face. When the scenes were scary or bloody, she flapped her fingers down over my eyes. We loved it. We’ll go again another night. On St. Clair, Lou told me, she sees every movie twice. “So I can burn it in my mind.”

“And dey don’t even call me de Godfadda,” I say again, turning to Lou, who isn’t listening to me.

I walk over, sucking on the soggy orange sections, and sit on the bed where the grown-up scissors lie with the discarded paper. I stick the point into the palm of my hand, hard, until I see a tiny spot of red. Then I give the point a twist. The shock of pain runs up my arm. I twist the metal again, until it slices through my sickness, till it cuts away every single thought inside my head.

14

T
HE MOON WAS
a white teacup by eight o’clock, the stars emerging slowly and arranging themselves into constellations. I followed Philip and Derek, the beer I’d drunk like a spring tide on the banks of my brain. The two men walked along, their heads bent identically, hands shoved into their pockets. For a long time, no one said a word. The night air was still and close.

“Any word from Michael?” Philip asked his brother, who nodded his head almost imperceptibly in response.

“Did you talk to him?”

“Left a message.”

“Where?”

“What do yah mean where?” Derek asked, annoyed. “At home. Brixton somewhere.”

“And?”

Without looking up, Derek veered off the road, leading us through a cut in a hedge of coral vine. Here we met up with a loamy path, different from the one I’d traveled earlier in the day, that switched back and forth along a long hill.

“He called last night. Talked to Marva. He told her it was too far to travel. Couldn’t get enough time off. Said he’d send a check.”

I listened, vaguely, to the men and their conversation, paying enough attention to understand that Lou’s brother was staying in England when he ought to have come home. But honestly, I can’t say I cared much. I was too busy concentrating on the trail before me and pitying myself. Watching Lou’s boys moving on ahead, talking of things I knew nothing about, chafed at me. I felt left out and determined to make myself known.

“What’s too far to travel?” I said, trotting up to the two. Breaking off midsentence, Derek looked at me as though I were a troll emerging from beneath the woodbine.

“
I
came. No problem. I mean, New York isn’t London. But still.”

Neither man said a word.

“Your mom was so great,” I said wedging myself between them and venturing a hand on Derek’s back. It was obvious to me all of a sudden that I hadn’t impressed upon him how I really felt. Knowing that Lou was truly loved would give Derek comfort, ease his anger and pain.

“Really,” I continued, “she was the best. God, I miss her. Have missed her. All these years.”

I looked at Philip, whose mouth was set in a frozen grin. Maybe I’d been wrong about Philip. He wasn’t so bad after all.

“You know what she used to call me? Her white daughter.
You my white daughta! Fah true you are!
She used to say it just like that. And I’d call her my black mother.”

Derek gave me a quizzical look. Did that sound strange?

“Not in front of other people,” I clarified. “Just when we were alone.”

Finally, walking between Derek and Philip, I felt I belonged. Lou had, after all, been a mother to me too. She loved me. But more than that, she
saw
me, like no one else had ever done. Lou looked beneath that tangled disaster of a little girl and found someone loveable. And I, because I was special in her eyes, saw
her
. I looked beyond Lou’s skin color, her accent, everything that made her different. My parents pretended to, but they were just going through the motions.
I
was the one who really got it. For me, there were no distinctions. These men and I were siblings, truly, united at last. We were meant to grieve together. That’s why I was there.

My mind was now tripping around all sorts of germane subjects, and it suddenly seemed I should explain something terrifically interesting: the world I came from.

“You know, most people in Coldbrook, I don’t think they’d ever even seen a black person before Lou came to us.”

Derek was studying me, listening intently, when Philip interrupted. God, he was rude! Skipping in front of his brother and me, he spoke loudly to Derek.

“You remember when Mumma wore that blue dress the first time?”

Philip bent forward to catch his brother’s eye. I opened my mouth to continue speaking, but Philip jumped in again.

“Remember?”

“No. No, I don’t,” Derek finally responded as we reached the end of the path and turned onto a flat road. Philip started walking backward, his long limbs jangling about as he gesticulated.

“Independence Day. You, me, Papa, Mumma, Denise, Uncle Fry. Two other ladies. I don’t know who. At Buck’s Hill! You gotta remember!”

Derek shook his head.

“Before, in the morning, Mumma was clipping a tie on you and you started to cry. Remember that? She thought she hurt you but she couldn’t get you to talk. Finally you say, all sniffly, ‘You so beautiful, Mumma!’ Damn, Papa and I laughed hard.”

I giggled. Derek shot me a look that shut me up. Philip walked close to his brother now, nudging him with an elbow.

“You were small, like three or something. We got new shoes and my feet hurt so bad I thought I’d die, because we walked to Buck’s Hill from the house. You remember that house, past Simon’s pasture?” Philip was working hard to get Derek to join in the spirit of reminiscing, but his little brother wasn’t biting. Giving up my own monologue, I fell behind a couple of steps. Philip continued. “The streets were full of people, nobody driving. Full! Everyone in their Sunday clothes, walking the hill. These big ribbons, in blue and red and green, wrapped around every tree in Eldertown. And fireworks. They scared you, so Papa carried you, and I got mad because it was me with the sore feet. When we finally got there, Papa put us up close, where all the ministers sat. He was in Parliament then, because we were inside a special box.”

We passed beneath a house built into the cliffside, and music drifted out of its open door. A man stood in the darkness of his tilting porch.
All right,
he called out to Derek, who raised a hand in response. Though he hadn’t said a word, I noticed that Derek walked now with his head slightly cocked. It seemed he was actually listening to his brother.

“I’m thinking how heavy that day was,” Philip continued. “Intense. I didn’t know what the hell was going on then, but I remember how everyone was really excited, but there was all this tension too. You could feel it in the air. There were soldiers everywhere, in front of the governor’s house. And when Chesley came out, the crowd cheered. Papa and the rest of Parliament stood up. People threw flowers, and then on top of that I remember yelling. We couldn’t see the Rastas protesting, we were too far forward, but they must have been making a shitstorm outside the courthouse. I saw them later, carrying some kind of effigy. Or maybe I just think I did since I’ve read about it so much. I do know that when the British governor started swearing Chesley in, Mumma told Uncle Fry she could see a fight breaking out behind us. Then you started to cry and Mumma had to take you out of the box. You didn’t stop practically all afternoon. She kissed you and rocked you, bought you a sweet, but you wouldn’t stop.”

“His face was melting,” Derek said, his voice rising over the crush of old seashells beneath our feet.

“Who’s melting?” said Philip.

“Chesley. His face was coming off. I remember that. Me being afraid because he was white and then it got really hot out and he started turning black. His fucking face was coming off. Dripping. Horrible-like. Jesus, that scared me. Was that Independence Day?”

“Yah. Chesley wore some kind of makeup to look more white. And it came off during his swearing in. You remember that? Wow. Yah, it
was
noon in August. Stupid asshole. Ruined him. People were laughing, I guess, but I didn’t notice it. I was too worried about my swelled-up feet.”

“I was always expecting Papa’s face to come off in the sun after that,” Derek said, shaking his head. “Or sometimes I thought I’d turn white when I grew up. I never forgot that. Jesus.”

“Yah, but Derek, don’t you remember after that, the party? At Fort Charles? Went on all night. People were done up, doing the bamboula and bel-air, I don’t know what all else.”

Philip started swinging his arms around, laughing.

“And stick fights. It was a sweet night. Mumma and Papa danced, and Papa leapt around with you on his shoulders. He used to love to ride you on his shoulders. Remember? Called you his boonoonoo boy. Right?”

Derek spoke with quiet bitterness. “Unh-unh. No, I don’t remember anything like that.”

Charging ahead, Philip intercepted his brother’s blackening mood.

“Anyway, night came. The whole of Eldertown lit up. Uncle Fry and the other ladies went off to drink and came back saying someone, a famous actor, was at the Sea Palace. Mumma screamed, and I’d never heard her do that before. We went over to look, but they wouldn’t let you and me in the bar. Denise waited outside with us and we fell asleep in the grass.”

Philip looked to his brother, hoping at last to have jogged his memory, then let the subject drop.

“Anyway, that was something, that day.”

“Richard Widmark,” I said.

Derek and Philip stopped beneath a streetlight and looked back at me.

“It was Richard Widmark. She had a picture of him, signed. It said ‘Happy Independence Day. Best Wishes.’ And his name.”