It was Thursday already and anyway you knew he was itching by the way he tapped his feet double time.
He said, “Don’t nobody want to take a ride? Don’t nobody want catch some of that sweet air in their mouth? Hunh? Stuffy in here, ain’t it, Lin? Pam, you not hot? Roy Jr.? Marian? Sugar, what about you?”
And he coughed and fanned himself with a newspaper and then a magazine and finally with his hands the size of New York. He let his corduroy thighs open and close and squish his dick to a firm beige triangle between them.
“Naw Daddy, we fine. We like it this warm, right ya’ll? Too cold outside.” Pam said that. She was oldest and meanest.
But those words weren’t filling. He swallowed them with tight lips. Sure, he sat a spell. Quiet. Hummed made-up things to himself. Watched Marian whisper something to Sugar and then Sugar whisper back. After a while though the humming turned angry and he pressed his fat lips so close they blended with his chin and he became just two eyes, a nose, and fury.
He said, “Ya’ll gonna have to take a ride! Shit!”
And Pam gave her lap her hands. Her eyes went soft and she found Linda to look at. Standing sideways in the middle of the den with her thumb shoved to the roof of her mouth, Linda might as well have been a woman with all that ass stretched out behind her and those breasts bubbling up over her bra like beer. Except she twisted her hair with one finger like a young girl does.
“I been working all day. I’m damned tired, damn it,” Roy said.
And Marian and Sugar stopped their faint talk and smiles. Would have stopped their blinking and breathing too, if they could.
“I work hard for ya’ll and I need some time or something…for myself. Can’t I spend one hour of one day alone? Without a begging wife and hungry kids hounding me? That’s a bunch of bullshit if that’s what you telling me! A man big and grown as me, working hard as I work, one day after the next, can’t get a minute!”
So they collected the ankles and bare feet beneath them like fruit. And ran. All six of them. Even Pam, but the mother especially. From the kitchen sink, where Justice had listened with hands trembling in dishwater, she darted and began gathering the thick wool coats and earmuffs and mittens. She picked up things accidentally (toilet paper rolls, hair barrettes) she was so scattered. Her feet barely brushed the floor she moved so fast. She said “Please God, please God” under her breath and tripped over the loose hem of her skirt. Even the baby, Roy Jr., for whom the excitement meant nothing, stayed out of her way and pretended he was busy when all he was doing was counting new teeth with his tongue.
Big Roy went on hollering from his seat by the window, to speed things along maybe. He spelled out a list of everything new any one of them had. Sugar’s new oak dresser, for instance. Reminded them of how they came by these things—47 and a half BACKBREAKING hours of overtime. He asked them in a voice loud as it was deep if he was being unreasonable? Longing for some privacy and space where he could just sit and breathe and not hear bigheaded children questioning, farting, fighting…fucking with his head?
By the time “fucking” was out of his mouth Justice and the children were in the master bedroom. She held her arms in a crooked circle with their winter things inside it. When she tried to pass the clothes on, they pressed their hands to their sides and shook their heads no. They were lined along the wall like five cans of beans. And they were all so alive. With those questions nearly tripping out their mouths.
She said, “I’m trying, ain’t I?” And gave them another chance at the coats. “I’m trying! If one don’t make it, well, I think that’s better than none. That’s basic math. Ain’t it?”
And eight brown eyes found Linda to look at. She was third in line either way you counted. Big as a plum among raisins. And as dark. Pam shaped her lips to call her mother “bitch” and “damn dummy” but got no chance to spin them.
“Don’t you answer that,” Justice said. “I’m not asking that for no answer. “I don’t want to hear nothing right now. All I need to hear is the air in and outta my nose and ya’ll running to that car. Stop looking at me.”
But they didn’t.
All Justice had was her face to tell the story with. The clothes took up her hands and her knees were too busy knocking to help.
“This bigger than me,” she said, whining. She tilted her head to meet her shoulder. “Hell, he bigger than me. His fist’ll eat me whole. One punch to my head and ya’ll won’t have no mother. And who gonna clean after you then? Make you dinner when you want it? I’m just saying there ain’t nothing I can do. I’m trying hard to get us outta here. Ya’ll see that. But if ya’ll all don’t go, well, hell, just be happy it ain’t you. And if it’s you, well…well then…”
And her hands, slight as the rest of her, became warm and one thing became two in her sight. And now she was the mother of ten blurry, bushy-headed things, not five, whose features she could not make out. And her heart, usually tired and weak as one dunk worth of tea, beat against itself so hard its pulse slammed through her neck and her wrists, and if she was still, through her dry-as-winter-leaves lips. She rushed the hazy-faced children using that tone of voice, the one too high that made them pound their hands against their ears and bite the insides of their cheeks. She tossed the coats on top of Linda’s feet, so that she was a bit buried, and poked the other children in their stomachs as if to say, “Go on, go on.” And they grabbed their coats and things with cross hands.
“Somebody ought to smack you,” Pam said, but not loud. “Coward,” she said after that, even more quiet.
And Linda, the second oldest, the prettiest, the one with bread-soft breasts and ass filled to the verge of her panties, always dressed the fastest. She was quick as lightening such evenings. So much so that she missed a button, guaranteed, and absolutely always stood lopsided with deer-dumb eyes. She was this way just then and the mother pointed—“Your coat, Lin…your coat on wrong.”
“It don’t matter!” Pam hollered out over their heads, but the mother snatched those words out the air like they were one single worker bee and said, “Don’t you try it. Don’t you try it ‘less you want all our heads bashed in the ground.” And was not stung.
The six of them made their way to the living room where Roy was still grinding his dick and fanning his squat face.
“Come on kids. Roy Jr., Linda, Marian, Sugar, Pam.” Val threw her trembling arms around their necks and the family posed for its father. “Let’s give your daddy a minute to breathe and collect his thoughts. Working so hard for us, don’t he deserve it?
“I tell you Roy, I know what you mean, needing a minute to yourself. I’m just gonna take the girls and Roy Jr. to that ice cream parlor around the way, and we’ll just set there for an hour or so. You think it’s too cold for ice cream, Roy?”
Together they held six breaths. And together they did not breathe a sip waiting on that answer. Those warm Down coats were buttoned to the collars and their damp hands were shoved to lint bottoms of the pockets. No matter that it was one degree outside, they were hell-hot waiting on Roy. For an entire minute before he spoke, they rocked from their left feet to their right trying hard to disguise Linda among them. But Linda was so tall and so much browner than the rest of them—like yesterday’s soft wet mud on their shoes. They didn’t say one word watching their father in his chair with that newspaper making unsatisfying wind for his face. They didn’t even blink watching those lips decorating that terrible mouth, filled to its pink roof with all those foul words.
“I don’t care if you go to the moon. Just get the fuck outta here.”
And the mother, brown as she was, went cherry red. Her heart might have knocked her chest open like a screen door. Except she gasped and interrupted it.
Everybody, she and Linda included, turned and nearly ran to the front door. They shoved against themselves like there was a fire, or flood one, behind them. Their voices sped up to keep pace with their hearts and even Pam, mean as the devil, verged on crying.
Then Big Roy, from that corner way over there with the newspapers and magazines and firm beige triangle between him said loud enough to be heard over all the commotion and near-crying and heartbeats put together, “Linda, why you don’t stay here with me? Hunh? Sit a spell and talk?”
And fine Linda, eyes dumb as a deer’s, coat plenty warm but buttoned all wrong. With those dumpling-sweet breasts and ass wide as the noon sun. Pretty Linda, tall enough to pinch her lips closed and almost kiss the sky. Linda. Linda, Linda. Linda Tichelle Grant. Miss Linda Tichelle Grant, big in all the wrong places, turned and took her seat next to the corduroy lap. Its zipper stripped back easy as well-used zippers do.
Andria Nacina Cole is in love with writing except when she’s writing. She can’t understand such a painful gift, but recognizes it as such, and says thank you for absolutely every struggling metaphor, simile, attempt at personification, and bit of supposed-to-be imagery. Not too long ago she received Maryland State Arts Council’s top grant prize for fiction and used the funds to launch a women’s writers conference that is aching to be reborn (www.flanked.org). She has published work in Urbanite Magazine (where Such Evenings first appeared), Fiction Circus, Sensations Magazine, and Mary Elise Magazine. She is still in disbelief over her appearance in the Spring 2009 issue of Ploughshares. She has just recently completed a collection of short stories tentatively titled Clean Piles of Daughter.
Top Photo Credit: Alice H van der Plas
good lines
Great read. I love stories that don’t end happily ever after, the ones that feel more truth than fiction.