“Glen, honey.” Mama leaned forward. “I know it’s hard, but James is your brother, and baby, we’re just about broke. We’re not gonna have the rent if you don’t get it from him.”
“Anney, you don’t understand.” Daddy Glen brought his hands up to cover his face completely. “James never said nothing about paying me at all. Hell, he never even asked my help. I just went over there, just did it. I never talked to him about money. I couldn’t. Hell, I don’t even think he wanted my help nohow.”
Glen brought both his fists down hard on his thighs, pounding them half a dozen times before he lifted his hands and held them in front of him, open and extended. “I’m sorry, Anney. God, I’m so sorry.” Tears pooled in his eyes and slid down his cheeks. His hands began to shake. “But it an’t just hard. It’s impossible. I can’t ask James for nothing. I can’t ask none of them for shit. It would kill me.”
Mama sighed and looked away. “Well ...” She hesitated and then reached out to take the hands that still hung in the air. “Well, we’ll just see, then. There’s other jobs, other things we can do. We can get Earle’s help to move, maybe stay with Alma. Something.” She looked into Glen’s face, but whatever she hoped to see there didn’t come, her eyes kept shifting away, then back.
“Oh, Glen. Baby, it’ll be all right. We’ll do what we have to do. Don’t you worry.”
After that things seemed to move irreversibly forward. We moved and then moved again. We lived in no one house more than eight months. Rented houses; houses leased with an option to buy; shared houses on the city limits; brick and stucco and a promise to buy; friends of friends who knew somebody had a place standing empty; houses where the owner lived downstairs, next door, next block over, or was a friend of a man had an eye on Mama, or knew somebody who knew Daddy Glen’s daddy, or had hired one of the uncles for a short piece of work; or twice—Jesus,
twice
—brand-new houses clean and bought on time we didn’t have.
Moving had no season, was all seasons, crossed time like a train with no schedule. We moved so often our mail. never caught up with us, moved sometimes before we’d even gotten properly unpacked or I’d learned the names of all the teachers at my new school. Moving gave me a sense of time passing and everything sliding, as if nothing could be held on to anyway. It made me feel ghostly, unreal and unimportant, like a box that goes missing and then turns up but you realize you never needed anything in it anyway. We moved so often Mama learned to keep the newspapers in the cardboard dish barrels, the pads and cords and sturdy boxes.
“Don’t throw that away. I’ll need that again before long.”
The lines in Mama’s face sank deeper with every move, every failed chance, every “make do” and “try again.” It got to where I hated moving worse than anything, and one hot summer day I took a butcher knife and chopped holes in Mama’s dish barrels, though all that came of it was a swat across the seat and the same old line.
“Don’t you know how much that cost?”
I knew to the penny what everything cost. Late on Sunday afternoons, Mama always sat at the kitchen table counting change out of her pocketbook and juggling bills, deciding which could not be paid, not yet, anyway. Rent was eighty dollars a month, too much by far when Daddy Glen had been bringing home only sixty dollars a week. Groceries ran as much as the rent, and that was only because we got vegetables from my aunts’ gardens and discount meat from the man who sold ground beef and chicken to the diner. Then there were the clothes Reese and I were always needing, uniforms for Mama and Daddy Glen, and shoes. Shoes were the worst. Dresses could be passed on from cousins or picked up now and then at church rummage sales. But shoes wore out or were outgrown at a frightening rate. Until the ringworm got so dangerous, we went barefoot all summer long.
Though I had never complained before, suddenly I wanted new shoes, patent-leather Mary Janes—not the cheap blue canvas sneakers I was always getting at $1.98 every seven months or so. I wasn’t a baby anymore, I was eight, then nine years old, growing up. In one year I went from compliant and quiet to loud and insistent, demanding shoes like the kids at school wore. I wanted the ones with little tassels behind the toes but was willing to settle for saddle oxfords. I knew there was no chance of getting a pair of those classy little-girl patent-leathers with the short pointy heels, but I looked at them longingly anyway. Mama just laughed and bought me penny loafers.
“Who do you think we are, girl?” she said. “We an’t the people who buy things for show.”
I couldn’t help it. Just for a change, I wished we could have things like other people, wished we could complain for no reason but the pleasure of bitching and act like the trash we were supposed to be, instead of watching how we behaved all the time. But Mama’s laughter shamed me. I wore the penny loafers with only token protest.
“Don’t worry about it,” Mama’s friend Mab told her. “Children are happier with dirt between their toes.” But I noticed that her girls turned up for school in saddle oxfords, and at church in patent-leather pumps, and sniffed at Reese and me in our discount loafers. I wasn’t sure what Mama noticed, what she could afford to notice, but when I sat with her on Sunday afternoon and watched her run down her columns of figures, I suspected that she saw everything and hated it all. She’d look out at my flushed and sweating stepfather muscling the lawnmower around the edges of the yard and sigh into her coffee cup.
“We an’t gonna be able to stay here,” she’d say, and I knew it was about time to move again.
One winter we spent three months staying over with Aunt Alma, who had bought a new house on no money down. None of us expected her to keep it, and the bank filed papers on it almost as soon as we’d arrived. Something happened to me, something I had never felt before and did not know how to fight. Anger hit me like a baseball coming hard and fast off a new bat. The first day at the district school the teacher pursed her lips and asked me my name, and that anger came around and stomped on my belly and throat. I saw tired patience in her eyes, a little shine of pity, and a contempt as old as the red dust hills I could see through the windows of her classroom. I opened my lips but could not speak.
“What’s your name, now, honey?” the woman asked me again, speaking slowly, as if she suspected I was not quite bright. The anger lifted in me and became rage.
“Roseanne,” I answered as blithely as if I’d never been called anything else. I smiled at her like a Roseanne. “Roseanne Carter. My family’s from Atlanta, just moved up here.” I went on lightly, talking about the school I’d gone to in Atlanta, making it up as I went along, and smiling wider as she kept nodding at me.
It scared me that it was so easy—my records, after all, had not caught up with me—that people thought I could be a Roseanne Carter from Atlanta, a city I had never visited. Everyone believed me, and I enjoyed a brief popularity as someone from a big city who could tell big-city stories. It was astonishing, but no one in my family found out I had told such a lie. Still, it was a relief when we moved that time and I went off to a new school under my real name. For months after, though, I dreamed that someone came up to me and called me Roseanne, that the school records finally exposed me or one of those teachers turned up at my new school. “Why’d you tell such a lie?” they asked me in the dream, and I could not answer them. I didn’t know. I really didn’t know.
One month, Earle announced that he had finally sold that old wallhanger Beau had foisted off on him to some fool from Greenwood who couldn’t tell the difference between a decent shotgun and a piece of corroded junk. He insisted on loaning Mama a little money, telling her that she was better than a bank for him. “You know how I am, Anney,” he said. “If I keep cash, I’ll just throw it away on nothing at all. If I give it to you, then come the time when I really need it, I know you’ll give it to me if you got it, and if you don’t, well then, at least you’ll feed me. Won’t you, little sister?”
Daddy Glen got mad at Mama for taking the money, as if she had done it just to prove he couldn’t support us. He screamed at her that she had shamed him. “I’m a grown man,” he yelled. “I don’t need your damn brother to pay my way.” He spent a week not speaking to any of us, and when Earle dropped by to visit, Daddy Glen grumbled that he didn’t have time to shoot the shit, and drove off like he had work to do.
“Too much pride in that boy,” Earle told Mama mildly. “If he don’t lighten up a little he’s gonna rupture something. Hell, we all know we got to help each other in this life.” He winked at me, hugged Reese, and teased Mama till she giggled like a girl and made him a fried-tomato sandwich. When he got ready to leave, he gave Reese a quarter and me a half-dollar.
“You’re growing up, honey,” Uncle Earle told me. “You’re gonna be as pretty as your mama one of these days.” I smiled and rolled that half-dollar in my palms. Earle had lived alone since his wife left him, and he spent most of his evenings either out drinking or over at one of his sisters’ houses. Before Mama had decided she was going to marry Daddy Glen, Uncle Earle was always around, but we saw less and less of him all the time. For a moment then, I wished we lived with him so Mama could take proper care of him and he could give us coins and make Mama laugh.
When Daddy Glen came home late that night, he refused to go to bed even though he had to work the next day. He sat out in the living room with the radio on, his expression fixed and angry. Mama sat up with him and tried to get him to talk, but he still wouldn’t speak to her. When we got up the next morning, his face looked thin and white, and his blue eyes were so dark they looked black.
The strained silence lasted for weeks, and even after it seemed to ease, Daddy Glen was different. His face took on a brooding sullen look. At dinner one night I watched him shove his plate away angrily. “Nothing I do goes right,” he complained. “I put my hand in a honey jar and it comes out shit!”
“Oh, Glen,” Mama said. “Everybody has trouble now and again. Things will get better. Just give it time.”
“Shut up!” he screamed at her. “Don’t give me that mama shit. Just shut up. Shut up!”
Mama froze, one hand still lifted to reach toward the bread basket. Her face was like a photograph, black-and-white, her eyes enormous dark shadows and her skin bleached in that instant to a paper gloss, her open mouth stunned and gaping.
Reese dropped her head down into her hands and gave a soft thin cry that turned immediately to sobs. Without even thinking about it, I locked my fingers tight to the edge of the table and pushed myself up to a standing position. Daddy Glen’s face was red, swollen, tears running down his cheeks. Mama’s eyes swept over to me like searchlights, and his followed.
“Oh, God,” he moaned, and Mama shuddered. Daddy Glen stumbled around the table, his hip thudding against the edge, shaking the bowls and glasses. “Oh, Anney. I’m sorry. Oh, God! I don’t want to be yelling at you.” He kissed her forehead, cheekbones, chin, his hands pressed to the sides of her face. “Oh, Anney, I’m sorry!”
“It’s all right,” she whispered, stroking his arms, and trying to push him away. “It’s all right, honey. I understand.”
Reese went on sobbing while I stood gripping the edge of the table with no idea what I had been about to do. I looked down at my hands, my fingertips flattened and white, my nails bitten off in ragged edges. My hands were still, but my arms were shaking. What had I been going to do? What had I been going to do?
Daddy Glen looked at me standing there. “I know how much your mama loves you,” he said, putting his hand on my arm, squeezing tight. When he let me go, there was a bruise, and Mama saw it right away.
“Glen, you don’t know your own strength!”
“No.” He was calmer now. “Guess I don’t. But Bone knows I’d never mean to hurt her. Bone knows I love her. Goddammit. You know how I love you all, Anney.”
I stared up at him, Mama’s hands on my shoulders, knowing my mouth was hanging open and my face was blank. What did I know? What did I believe? I looked at his hands. No, he never meant to hurt me, not really, I told myself, but more and more those hands seemed to move before he could think. His hands were big, impersonal, and fast. I could not avoid them. Reese and I made jokes about them when he wasn’t around—gorilla hands, monkey paws, paddlefish, beaver tails. Sometimes I worried if he knew the things we said. My dreams were full of long fingers, hands that reached around doorframes and crept over the edge of the mattress, fear in me like a river, like the ice-dark blue of his eyes.
6
H
unger makes you restless. You dream about food—not just any food, but perfect food, the best food, magical meals, famous and awe-inspiring, the one piece of meat, the exact taste of buttery corn, tomatoes so ripe they split and sweeten the air, beans so crisp they snap between the teeth, gravy like mother’s milk singing to your bloodstream. When I got hungry my hands would not stay still. I would pick at the edges of scabs, scratch at chigger bites and old scars, and tug at loose strands of my black hair. I’d rock a penny in my palm, trying to learn to roll it one-handed up and around each finger without dropping it, the way my cousin Grey could. I’d chew my fingernails or suck on toothpicks and read everything I hadn’t read more than twice already. But when Reese got hungry and there was nothing to eat, she would just sob, shiny fat tears running down her pink cheeks. Nothing would distract her.
We weren’t hungry too often. There was always something that could be done. Reese and I walked the side of the highway, picking up return deposit bottles to cash in and buy Mama’s cigarettes while she gave home permanents to the old ladies she knew from the lunch counter. Reese would wrinkle her nose and giggle as she slipped the pack of Pall Malls into Mama’s pocket, while I ran to get us a couple of biscuits out of the towel-wrapped dish on the stove.