Marsha Hunt - Joy

In fact, anybody looking at that picture Tammy’d handed me of her and Brenda would have assumed that the sorry looking baby on Tammy’s lap was somebody else’s, except that Brenda did get her mother’s high forehead and widow’s peak. It was two shames though that on Brenda they were so oversized, they didn’t flatter, so whereas Tammy’s high forehead and widow’s peak was a beauty feature with the way she wore her hair swept back, on Brenda the forehead was so broad and her hair was so thin and scraggly like chicken fluff, that Brenda’s widow’s peak looked more like a receding hairline. Which ain’t too helpful on a girl.

Poor Brenda didn’t never grow enough hair to sweep it back off her face so it looked neat nor could she comb it down on her forehead in a bang to make her forehead look smaller, and I would have said that it was cruel of God to birth any girl child so plain that had such a pretty mama. But to his credit, he did make up the difference with them diamond vocal cords he lavished on Brenda. Not that any of us knew it at that time or they showed in that baby picture of her with Tammy that I was meant to be admiring that evening sitting over at Tammy’s.

All that my naked eye and anybody else’s could of seen was a super pretty young girl half smiling and a verging on ugly baby grinning with not but four teeth in her whole mouth.

‘This is sure a pretty picture of you and Brenda,’ I lied a little like Joy had taught me, and handed it back to Tammy. ‘And don’t kid yourself,’ I added to sprinkle some truth on what I’d said, ‘Sherman wasn’t all that clever with the camera. You got God to thank some too, ’cause you was fine as you wanted to be.’ That made her happy, and while it was true of the young Tammy in the photograph, the actual one sitting by me, though good looking, had aged quite a bit, though it couldn’t have been more than nine years since that picture was taken, ’cause Brenda wasn’t but ten. Tammy’s sweet innocent look that she had in the picture was gone and it wasn’t just because of the sophisticated blond streak at the side of her temple. Pretty features ain’t all that makes a woman beautiful. How she holds them counts for something too, and from the first that I met Tammy when she came to look at the furnished apartment we had advertised in the Tribune she always looked worried and under strain, even when from time to time she’d belt out that barroom laugh of hers if something on the television’d give her something to laugh at.

But that evening setting in her place in Oakland, I’d finished my coffee, it was getting dark and I still didn’t have what I’d come for which was a baby picture of Joy.

‘I can’t wait for you to show me the ones Sherman took of Joy,’ I said, but no sooner than them words petered out of my big mouth, Tammy’s friendly air iced over and she gave me a chilly look which unnerved me about as much as I expect she wanted it to.

‘Sherman never took any of Joy,’ she said in that tight-lipped way folks’ll try on whenever they mean not to be questioned no further. But I was ready to bite the bullet, because why would a father take all them wonderful pictures of two of his children and not take none of the third? Seeing as Joy was born between Brenda and Anndora, it took some explaining for Joy’s sake if nobody else’s.

‘That’s a doggone disgrace,’ I said daring to push the point further. I say dared ’cause not but a week before we was setting there going through them pictures, Tammy had been over my place and showed herself to have a sharp, ugly tongue when she cussed out my baby sister Helen twice in a night. I got to admit that Helen was blind falling down drunk and deserved a tongue lashing. So setting there in Tammy’s living room while the sweet sounds of her three children playing below drifted through the kitchen window, I tried to laugh a bit to make out that what I was about to say to her was a joke. But I figure she could tell that I meant it.

‘Didn’t Sherman favor Joy?’ I asked.

She didn’t let me finish her daughter’s name before her lip curled back like a dog about ready to bite. ‘You have one big damn big hell of a nerve to say something as nasty as that,’ she said. Then she yanked back the few pictures I was still holding in my hand. I’d been kneeling down on her wine rug in front of the coffee table which was piled with the photos that we’d been through and she was perched on the edge of the naughahyde grey-green sofa bed that had a tear in it, so I leapt up quick thinking that I best go home ’fore she said something that would make me do something that wasn’t Christian. Like hit her. ’Cause if I want to, I can have as much temper as the next one. So forcing myself to sound friendly and polite I said, ‘Freddie B will be expecting his Friday night fry-up to be on the table when he gets home from work, so I best do my duty and get to cleaning that mackerel I bought him this morning.’

Tammy didn’t try to fake no pleasantries like I did that evening. Without saying so much as ‘goodbye’ or ‘dog kiss my foot’ she stalked off into her bedroom through the double doors and slammed them so hard it’s a wonder the full length mirrors screwed on them didn’t crack. I was stunned ’cause it wasn’t like I’d said nothing all that bad about her husband, so it didn’t make no sense that she got as mad as she did, but I put it down to her caring more about Sherman than I’d realized, ’cause I wouldn’t of put up with no woman making no remark about Freddie B if he was dead neither. But still, ’fore I let myself out, I went to the kitchen window and called the children in ’cause I feared their mama was in such a temper she’d forgot she’d left them out playing in the night air.

After that ding dong with Tammy, for the whole month of April, she wouldn’t say nothing but a begrudging ‘morning’ and ‘evening’ to either me or Freddie B if she happened on us in the hall, and I got tired of him asking me what she could have been in such a huff about. But something told me not to tell him how I’d been trying to get a picture of Joy and had said something to Tammy about her husband not favoring Joy like he did Brenda and Anndora that got Tammy so mad.

It perplexed my poor husband to see me mope around when he’d come in from work, but what I couldn’t explain was that once Tammy stopped speaking, Joy stopped slipping in to see me in the afternoons, and she wouldn’t even take none of the cookies I’d baked for her if I offered it to her and Brenda in the hall after school. She’d give a meek smile and say, ‘We can’t take food from strangers,’ like she did when we first got to be pals.

Brenda acted like she was scared to look at me when she’d say, ‘Hello Mrs Ross,’ hardly loud enough for me to hear and all formal after I’d got so used to all of ’em calling me Baby Palatine. Even Anndora, who I suspect was born with her nose stuck up in the air, and didn’t never take notice of me anyhow, so when she didn’t give me a smile, I was used to it. She didn’t take to nobody outside her immediate family and her mama didn’t teach her that it was rude to look through people like she didn’t see them.

My baby sister Helen said not to pay it no mind at first. Then she got mad when Tammy wouldn’t bother to speak to her neither. ‘Evict her black ass!’ Helen said one day loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear. ‘Throw ’em all in the street! You don’t have to put up with that uppity mess.’

As the Bangs’ apartment door was directly opposite ours, it made me feel real uncomfortable with them not being neighborly, ’cause wasn’t nobody else living in the fourplex but them and us, since Mr Houseman wouldn’t get the plumbing fixed in them two studio apartments up at the front. But I just prayed night and day that things would get to rights, so that I could have Joy back.