Mama’s hand touched my chin, trailed along my cheek, and stroked my hair. “You’re my pride. Do you know? You and your sister are all I really have, all I ever will have. You think I could let you grow up to be like that?”
I shook my head. The tears started again, and with them hiccups. Mama went and got a cool washcloth to wet my face. “Don’t cry, honey. It’ll be all right. We’ll take care of it, it’ll be all right.” She put the Tootsie Rolls in a paper bag and gave me a handful of pennies to carry. She kept talking while she brushed my hair and then hers, called Reese in and told her to stay on the porch, turned the heat down on the beans that were cooking on the stove, and walked me out to the car. She told me about when she and Aunt Raylene were girls, how they had worked for this man out past Old Henderson Road, picking strawberries for pennies every day for weeks, going through the rows and pulling loose the red ripe ones for him to sell in his stand by the side of the road.
“Only the ripe ones, he kept telling us, but it was so hot and the dust was so thick, sometimes we’d pull up the ones that weren’t quite ripe, you know—green ones, or half-green anyway. We’d hide them under the ripe ones when we set them up for him. People would buy a box and then get home to find those half-ripe ones, call him up to complain. He’d get so mad, but we were just kids, and his yelling didn’t bother us so long as he kept paying us for the work.”
“What’d he pay you?”
Mama waved her hand as if that didn’t matter. “Not enough, you know, not enough. Strawberry picking is terrible work, hurts your back, your eyes. You get that juice all over you, get those little prickers in your hands. An’t enough money in it even for children, even if you eat as many as you can. After a while you don’t want any anyway.” She laughed.
“Though Raylene sure could eat a lot. Faster than you could see, she’d swallow handfuls of berries. Only proof she’d been eating them was her red red tongue.”
She stopped the car in front of the Woolworth’s, cut the engine, and sat for a moment, her hands resting on the wheel. I looked out at the big display windows, where stacks of plastic picnic baskets, little tin office waste cans, and sleeveless cotton sundresses on hangers were squeezed behind ratty stuffed animals and tricycles with multicolored plastic streamers on the handlebars. The thought of going back in there with Mama made me feel sick to my stomach and almost angry at her. Why couldn’t she just let me promise never to do it again?
Her hand on my shoulder made me jump. “Your granny found out what we’d been doing, ’cause we got lazy, you know, and started putting more and more green ones in the bottom of the boxes. Grandpa laughed about it, but your granny didn’t laugh. She came over there one afternoon and turned half a dozen boxes upside down. Collected a bucket of green strawberries and paid the man for them. Took us home, sat us at the kitchen table, and made us eat every one of them. Raylene and I puked strawberries all night long.”
“You must have hated her!”
Mama was quiet, and I got scared. I didn’t want her to think I hated her. I didn’t even want to be angry at her. I clamped my teeth tight and tried not to start crying again.
“There an’t no other way to do it,” she said quietly. “I hate it. You hate it. You might hate me for it. I don’t know, and I can’t say what might happen now. But I just don’t know no other way to do it. We’re gonna go in there and give the man back his candy, pay for what you ate, and that will be all there is to it. It will be over, and you’ll be glad it’s settled. We won’t ever have to mention it again.”
Mama opened the door briskly, and I followed her numbly. There was a flush on her cheeks as she walked me back to the candy counter, waited for the salesgirl to come over, and stood me right in front of her. “My daughter has something to tell you,” she said, and gave me a little push. But I couldn’t speak. I held out the bag and the pennies, and started to cry again, this time sobbing loud. The girl looked confused, but Mama wouldn’t say anything else, just gave me another little push. I thought I’d strangle on my tongue when the manager walked over to us.
“What’s this?” he said in a booming voice. “What’s this? You got something for us, little girl?” He was a big man with a wide face and a swollen belly poking out from under a buttoned-up vest. He stooped down so that his face was right in front of me, so close I could smell the sharp alcohol scent of after-shave.
“You do, don’tcha, honey?” He looked like he was swallowing an urge to laugh at us. I was suddenly so angry at him my stomach seemed to curl up inside me. I shoved the bag at him, the pennies.
“I stole it. I’m sorry. I stole it.”
Mama’s hand squeezed my shoulder, and I heard the breath come out of her in a sigh. I closed my eyes for a moment, trying hard not to get as mad at her as I was at that man.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “I see.” I looked up at him again. He was rummaging in the bag, counting the Tootsie Rolls and nodding. “It’s a good thing, ma’am,” he said, still talking loudly, “that you caught this when you did.” He nodded at me. “You’re a fortunate little girl, truly fortunate. Your mama loves you. She doesn’t want you to grow up to be a thief.”
He stood back up and passed the pennies to the salesgirl. He stretched a hand out like he was going to put it on my head, but I stepped back so that he would have had to bend forward to reach me. “Son of a bitch,” Grey would have called him, “slimy son of a bitch probably eats Tootsie Rolls all day long.” If he reached for me again, I decided, I’d bite him, but he just looked at me long and carefully. I knew I was supposed to feel ashamed, but I didn’t anymore. I felt outraged. I wanted to kick him or throw up on him or scream his name on the street. The longer he looked at me, the more I hated him. If I could have killed him with my stare, I would have. The look in his eyes told me that he knew what I was thinking.
“I’m gonna do your mama a favor.” He smiled. “Help her to teach you the seriousness of what you’ve done.” Mama’s hand tightened on my shoulder, but she didn’t speak.
“What we’re gonna do,” he announced, “is say you can’t come back in here for a while. We’ll say that when your mama thinks you’ve learned your lesson, she can come back and talk to me. But till then, we’re gonna remember your name, what you look like.” He leaned down again. “You understand me, honey?”
I understood. I understood that I was barred from the Woolworth’s counters. I could feel the heat from my mama’s hand through my blouse, and I knew she was never going to come near this place again, was never going to let herself stand in the same room with that honey-greased bastard. I looked around at the bright hairbrushes, ribbons, trays of panties and socks, notebooks, dolls, and balloons. It was hunger I felt then, raw and terrible, a shaking deep down inside me, as if my rage had used up everything I had ever eaten.
After that, when I passed the Woolworth’s windows, it would come back—that dizzy desperate hunger edged with hatred and an aching lust to hurt somebody back. I wondered if that kind of hunger and rage was what Tommy Lee felt when he went through his mama’s pocketbook. It was a hunger in the back of the throat, not the belly, an echoing emptiness that ached for the release of screaming. Whenever we went to visit Daddy Glen’s people, that hunger would throb and swell behind my tongue until I found myself standing silent and hungry in the middle of a family gathering full of noise and food.
It was not only Daddy Glen’s brothers being lawyers and dentists instead of mechanics and roofers that made them so different from Boatwrights. In Daddy Glen’s family the women stayed at home. His own mama had never held a job in her life, and Daryl and James both spoke badly of women who would leave their children to “work outside the home.” His father, Bodine Waddell, owned the Sunshine Dairy and regularly hired and fired men like my mother’s brothers, something he never let us forget.
“Awful proud for a man runs cows,” Beau said of him once, and Glen was immediately indignant.
“Daddy don’t have to handle the cows,” he told Earle. “Farmers all over the county bring him their milk, or he has it picked up. Daddy just processes the milk, bottles it under the Sunshine label, and his trucks deliver it.”
“Oh, yeah,” Earle nodded solemnly. “That’s a big difference, that is. Man don’t run cows, he just leases the rights to their titties.”
Glen looked like he was going to spit or cry but controlled himself. “Just don’t say nothing about my daddy.” He almost growled. “Just don’t.”
Earle and Beau let it go at that. Glen couldn’t help what a shit his daddy was, and it was never smart to talk bad about a man’s people to his face. With the passage of time, Glen had gotten more and more peculiar about his family, one moment complaining of how badly they treated him and the next explaining it away. Worst of all, he insisted that we all had to go over to his brothers’ or daddy’s places whenever there was any kind of family occasion, though it was clear to me that they were never happy to see us. We wound up going over to Daddy Waddell’s place at least once every other month. In the Pontiac with the top down and paper scraps blowing around on the floor, Reese and I would lean over the front seat to watch Mama try to keep her hair neat in the whistling wind and listen to Daddy Glen lie.
“We won’t stay long,” he would always promise, and Mama would smile like she didn’t care at all. We gritted our teeth. We knew that he would not have the nerve to leave before his father had delivered his lecture on all the things Glen had done wrong in his long life of failure and disappointment.
“Your daddy wants his daddy to be proud of him,” Mama once said. “It about breaks my heart. He should just as soon whistle for the moon.”
It was true. Around his father, Glen became unsure of himself and too careful. He broke out in a sweat, and his eyes kept flickering back to his daddy’s face as if he had to keep watching or miss the thing he needed most to see. He would pull at his pants like a little boy and drop his head if anyone asked him a question. It was hard to put that image of him next to the way he was all the rest of the time—the swaggering bantam rooster man who called himself my daddy.
“Old Glen’s a cock and a half,” my uncle Earle would tease. “An’t nobody better take a bite out of his ass. Boy’ll get you down if it takes bare bone to do it.” Which was true enough. Half a dozen times I came home from school to find Mama and Glen sitting at the kitchen table with that white-eyed scared look that meant he’d jumped somebody who’d said something to him and lost yet another job.
“Man can’t keep his temper,” Granny complained, but grinned in spite of herself. Everybody did. It was the one thing that saved Daddy Glen from the Boatwrights’ absolute contempt. The berserker rage that would come on him was just a shade off the power of the Boatwrights’ famous binges. “You mess with one of those boys and you reap the whirlwind,” people said of my uncles, and after a while of Daddy Glen. Tire irons and pastry racks, pitchforks and mop handles, things got bent or broken around Daddy Glen. His face would pink up and his hands would shake; his neck would start to work, the muscles ridging up and throbbing; then his mouth would swell and he would spit. Words came out that were not meant to be understood: “
Goddam motherfucker
son
of a bitch shitass!”
Magic words that made other men back off, put their hands up, palms out, and whisper back, “Now, Glen, now, now, Glen, now, hold on, boy...”
“Your daddy’s a son of a bitch himself, a purely crazy pigfucker,” Grey was always telling me with a little awe in his voice, a hunger to be half again as dangerous. I’d smile and nod and bite the inside of my lips, replaying in my head two separate movie images: Daddy Glen screaming at me, his neck bright red with rage, and the other, impossible vision just by it, Daddy Glen at
his
daddy’s house with his head hanging down and his mouth so soft spit shone on the lower lip.
“I hate to go over there,” Mama said, “hate standing around waiting for his daddy to notice us.” She was brushing our hair out fine and loose and putting little barrettes up on the peak where she wanted it to stay back. Reese and I stood still and said nothing. We knew we were not supposed to pay attention when Mama talked about Daddy Glen’s people.
“Whose birthday is it?” was about the only safe thing to ask, since it was always somebody’s birthday, or a wedding or christening. The Waddells didn’t have as many cousins and aunts and uncles as we did, but the women still made babies—somebody was always celebrating something.
One Sunday it was a double, a birthday for James and one of his kids. “One of the children,” Daddy Glen’s sister-in-law Madeline corrected me. “Kids are billygoats.”
Goddam right, I thought, staring over at my puffy cousin in creased pants, an eight-year-old copy of his fat ugly father. They served us tea in the backyard, just us—Anney’s girls, they called us. Their kids went in and out of the house, loud, raucous, scratching their nails on the polished furniture, kicking their feet on the hardwood floors, tracking mud in on the braided rugs.
“Those little brats need their asses slapped.” Mama was sitting with us at the picnic table in the garden, out where no one could hear her. She’d come to check on us where we sat in our starched dresses, our faces as stiff as the sleeves. Reese and I were sweaty and miserable trying not to wiggle around on the benches, to look well-behaved for Mama’s sake and stay out of the way of those kids who hated us as much as we did them.
“When are we going?” we kept asking Mama, knowing she couldn’t tell us but asking just the same.
“Soon,” she’d say, and light another cigarette with shaking hands. Mama didn’t smoke in Daddy Waddell’s house, though no one ever told her she couldn’t. They just didn’t leave ash-trays out. But I once saw Madeline smoking over the kitchen sink, dropping her ashes down the drain. It made me wonder if all of them went off in the kitchen or bathroom to smoke, pretending the rest of the time that they didn’t have any such dirty habits.