Walter Mosley - Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore

I pressed the button and chimes filled the air.

Inside the house was dark, shadowy. It was hot outside but cool air was rushing out through the screen.

It came to me that I should walk away at that moment. This was the only appropriate action to take.

“Hello, dear,” Marcia Pinkney said.

She was standing in the haze of the screen door, neither smiling nor frowning, staring into my face.

“You look different,” the slender and small white woman said.

“Can I come in?” I hadn’t spoken since leaving Kip’s house.

“Of course,” the older woman said as she undid a latch and pulled the door open. “Do you have a cold, dear?”

“I’ve been crying,” I said.

“Oh... yes, of course.”

Theon’s mother was short and frail-looking. The white of her dress made her skin seem gray. Her bones were made for birds and other slight creatures but her eyes were dark and magnificent.

She led me through the unlit rooms that were not walled off from one another. To the left was a sunken living room that had green carpeting and violet walls. To the right the kitchen lay. It was a brown-on-brown affair with tall stools and a plank apron that went around three sides of the stove.

Marcia led me through the house to a double yellow door that opened onto a covered patio, which looked out on a waterless swimming pool. The bottom of the pool was littered with dry brown leaves and caked with dirt.

“Something to drink?” Theon’s mother asked me.

A crystal pitcher sat on the coral-colored aluminum table. Sweating, it was filled with a bright green liquid.

“Gin and sweet lime,” she said, as if introducing me to a sentient being.

The baby-blue chairs were made from some kind of space-age ceramic material. It felt like I had to press myself down just to sit. I still had the feeling of weightlessness. As if in a dream I imagined that I could float up above the roof and sail away to Hawaii or even farther — to lands that had not yet been discovered.

There was a silver tray with two unbreakable clear plastic tumblers on it. Marcia poured the tumblers full and handed one to me.

I took a sip. It was very sweet and tangy, not alcoholic at all.

“Were you expecting someone?” I asked.

“You, my dear.”

“Oh?” I felt complimented and at the same time compromised.

“Where do I begin?” Marcia asked.

“The funeral is set for next Saturday at Day’s Rest.”

“Oh.” I could see her thinking of the zoo the memorial service would be.

“You could come the night before to say good-bye if you wanted,” I offered.

“Theon told me that you were very perceptive,” she said through a mild smile. “But I didn’t listen to him. I never listened to him.”

She took a deep gulp from the glass.

I did the same.

“Did you love him?” she asked.

“Often but not always.”

“I blamed you for destroying his life.”

“When Theon and I met he was forty-three and I had just turned fifteen.”

The math pained her. She took a drink and I responded in kind.

“That young?”

“He always liked younger women.”

“You were a child.”

“Not on the street I wasn’t. I couldn’t afford to be.”

“I...” she said, and then took another drink.

I swigged my gin Kool-Aid and waited for the rest.

“I can’t... I can’t bear to think about these things in my house,” Marcia Pinkney said at last. “I told Theon that I didn’t want his sordid business here.”

“He was born here, Marcia.”

“I know.”

We both finished our sweet drinks and she refilled our glasses.

I felt the mental stutter of inebriation when I looked up to see a jet flying high above.

“What was he like?” Marcia asked.

I gazed at her, nearly flummoxed by the question.

“Did he collect stamps?” she added. “Did he play softball?”

“Didn’t you ever talk to him?”

“When his father was alive...” she said, and then paused. “When his father was alive there was a lot of conflict between them.”

Henry Pinkney beat his sons mercilessly. That was why Theon never wanted children.

My dad would beat us and Mom would leave the house , he’d told me more than once. My idea of family is going to the park and watching other people play with their kids .

“When Hank died,” Marcia continued, “I thought that things would get better, but Johnny ran away and Theon turned angry and sullen. I tried to talk to him but he wouldn’t listen. He got that apartment in Hollywood and met that... that awful woman, that Moana Bone. She was the one who turned him into a pimp.”

Marcia didn’t know the right words but I understood what she meant. And anyway, in the end Theon had actually become a pimp of sorts.

“It must have been terrible to feel like you were losin’ your fam’ly one at a time,” I said. The liquor had affected my words. My mother’s tongue was speaking for me.

I felt like a field of wheat undulating under the pressure of otherwise imperceptible breezes.

“Oh yes,” Marcia said with certainty. “I wished that I had a daughter to sit with me.”

“Girl might not be what you wanted neither, Marcia. Moana Bone was somebody’s little girl once.”

“Her mother must curse the day she was born,” my mother-in-law said.

“Just like you and Theon.”

The widow gave me a grieved look and refilled both our glasses.

“Am I really so evil?” she asked.

“I wish none of it ever happened,” I replied.

“Don’t we all,” she agreed.

“No, Mrs. Pinkney,” I said. “No. A lot of people love their hate. They live to hate the people wronged them. You cain’t just have one gang. That don’t even make sense. If you took away the white man’s black man or the black man’s white man, most of ’em wouldn’t even know how to walk down the street right.”

Marcia Pinkney started and stared. She shivered and almost forgot to take a swig of her sweet oblivion.

“I hated you because you were a black girl,” she said, as if it were a revelation — even to her.

“I know that.”

“You do?”

“Yeah.”

“How could you know when I only just realized it right now?”

“Theon told me that when he hooked up wit’ Moana you went to her and begged that she let Theon go. He said you offered her money and anything else she wanted. But when he finally did leave her and got together with me you didn’t even try.”

I could see that Marcia wanted to deny my slurred indictment, that she wanted to say that it was a different time and situation. But she couldn’t put the lie into words.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, and then she began to weep.

I got a little teary too. Not the racking anguish I felt on the mountainside. This was more like a gentle mist than a raging storm. But still it moved me enough to get up and go over to Marcia. I knelt down next to her ceramic chair and embraced her. She was stiff at first but then let go and cried on my shoulder.

After a few minutes of these soft tears she patted my arm and I went back to my chair. We divvied up the last of the delicious drink and stared out over the empty, filthy pool into the polluted sky, through which we could see the bare outline of the San Bernardino Mountains.

The sun was going down but it was comfortable enough outside.

A trio of hummingbirds came by to inspect the scent of the now empty pitcher. Marcia snored gently as I watched the delicate birds inspect this wonderful but inaccessible plastic flower.

One of them did a circuit around my head. Maybe she smelled the sugar on my lips. I thought that it would be nice to be kissed by a hummingbird.