Marsha Hunt - Joy

‘Joy, I can’t keep something like this back from Tammy,’ I said. But no sooner than I said it, I knew that there wasn’t no way I could tell Tammy that I’d found Joy in Artie’s room, ’cause Tammy had grown short of temper back in those days, and there wasn’t no telling what she would of done.

‘You know that Mama won’t let me go to church with you anymore if you tell. And that’ll be the end of choir practice and Sunday school and everything!’ Joy cried.

I knew she was right, ’cause whenever Brenda did anything wrong, which was regular, the first thing Tammy would threaten was, ‘That’s it! Now I put my foot down. It’s all that shit you’re being taught in that damn backward ass church of Baby’s that has you so you don’t want to listen to me anymore. Well, damn the church! I’ll keep you home, if you can’t behave like a human being!’

I was the one that got the three girls inside a church for the first time, ’cause Tammy didn’t believe in nothing and would have been happy if they didn’t. My baby sister said Tammy wouldn’t of let them girls of her’n go to Sunday meeting with me and Freddie at all, except Tammy was so happy to get some quiet and the apartment to herself on Sundays.

That morning of the Artie episode, I looked down at poor Joy, still pleading on her knees. ‘Don’t tell Mama, Baby Palatine? Please? Please? Pretty please!’ She oozed them pleases out, spreading them on thick as molasses.

But I wasn’t in the mood to sympathize when I asked, ‘I want to know first off what you was doing up in Artie’s. Don’t you know it’s dangerous to be in a man’s apartment like that?’

Artie wasn’t really a man. Wasn’t but nineteen, but he was way too old for Joy to be keeping company with, no matter if it was only eleven o’clock in the morning.

‘I wasn’t doing anything bad,’ Joy said before I made her get off her knees and go into my apartment. ‘Artie’s dying from cancer, so I said I’d make his breakfast this morning.’ I thought I caught her crack a smile for a split second while she was wringing her hands and looking down at her feet, though I couldn’t see her face ail that good until I got her inside my apartment, ’cause there wasn’t but one small window around our end of the hall and a couple of the light bulbs in the ceiling fixture was out that give off a decent light. She looked a mess with her red and white checked shirt half out her cotton skirt which was creased. Not nowheres near neat as I was used to seeing her.

‘Stop all that crying, anyway,’ I said to her pushing her away when she went to try to hug on me. ‘That ain’t gonna save you.’

I didn’t know what to think. Joy didn’t never step out of line that I knew of, and being kind hearted like she was and always ready to help folks, it didn’t seem all that strange that if Artie was dying from cancer that she wouldn’t have wanted to do something for him.

But the onliest problem I had believing her was that he looked strong as a ox. Artie was a big strapping blond thing from Idaho who had been a year in the navy ’fore he got discharged. ’Cause of having something wrong with his knee, he’d told Freddie B.

‘Is it knee cancer?’ I asked Joy. She had tears smeared across her face and with her nose running, she was a right sight.

‘Maybe,’ she said, and looked like she was ready to start crying again. ‘He didn’t say.’

I didn’t know what to believe. Cancer seemed awful far fetched. It ain’t like no cold you just catch in the night and I didn’t know whether it was Joy lying to me or Artie lying to her. But I always thought the best of Joy, so I hated to believe she might not be telling the truth as she thought it to be.

‘Now don’t upset yourself. Calm down, and let me give you one of them nice chocolate cupcakes I got left over from that batch I baked for you to take to the picnic’ After she nibbled at it, slow and mournful, I gave her twenty-five cents to ride the bus back over to her junior high school. Wasn’t no need of her missing the whole fun day where I was hoping she’d have a chance to make a girlfriend as she didn’t seem to have one in particular like most girls her age.

‘And stop worrying,’ I said as she stepped out the door, after I made her wash her face. ‘I won’t tell.’

But no sooner than she was gone I headed straight down that hall to tell that Artie to get his duds and get out. Cancer or no cancer, I wasn’t in the least bit interested and I didn’t want no part of him if he was talking to them girls on the sly.

That was one of them times that I knew I had to keep the story back from my husband, ’cause he would have asked me questions that I didn’t have no answers to neither then nor now. Him and me didn’t have no secrets from each other till Joy come along. And it didn’t feel right.

As I stood in my living roomstill in my nightdress that hot March ’Frisco sun was beating on me, and I looked down at Joy’s snag-a-tooth picture that I was still holding in my hand, and then I wiped the glass in its frame to a high shine with the hem of my nightdress. Not that it was so needing it, ’cause I don’t have no dust setting on things in my place. Never did. Never will.

Looking at Joy grinning in that picture made me so sad. She had a smile as big as a Dixie watermelon and could flash them perfect teeth of hers faster than any Marilyn Monroe. And like Freddie B who’d said it from the first he saw her, I believed Joy Bang was born to be a star. With her looks and personality, she could of had her own television show if she’d of had Brenda’s voice. But then, everybody ain’t born to have everything.

I thought about my poor husband laying peaceful in our bedroom and worried about how he would take hearing that something had happened to that girl that he so loved to spoil when she was a kid.

Freddie B would of give Joy the last dollar in his pocket if she’d of asked him for it, and she had in January which is exactly why we didn’t have no savings to stretch over this last spell of his being laid off. Joy needed that $2700 more than we did at the time and I was glad Freddie B was quick to lend it to her with no questions asked, though it would have been nice if she’d been able to pay him back last month like she expected. But we both understood that she was still pinched herself ’cause some back-up singing she was booked for got cancelled.

I didn’t like to say that it didn’t make sense her borrowing from my husband when that bony faced Rex Hightower should have been seeing her over them tight periods. ‘What’s a boyfriend for,’ I used to ask Joy, ‘if he’ll let you run around scrambling for your next meal and he’s rich enough to buy the Golden Gate Bridge.’ With her following him all ’round the globe and singing for free on his recording sessions, then claiming she couldn’t charge her own boyfriend, I wasn’t surprised he treated her any-which-a-way. ‘Act like a dishrag and Rex will treat you like one,’ I told her, but still she jumped everytime he called and that wasn’t often enough from what I knew.

Smart and good looking as Joy was, who knows what she could have made of her life had she given herself half a chance to settle with one of her own kind. But she loved them white ones and I could see it right from when I had my very first talk with her. I remember that Saturday afternoon good. It was my day for cleaning the hallway and stairs of our building on Grange Street. Her and her mama and sisters hadn’t long been living there, and Joy come out on the landing to watch me.

‘Stand back, child,’ I said to her. ‘’Cause you don’t want to get none of this here dust on your dress.’ As soon as I said it I was shamed of myself for sounding gruff. I didn’t mean her no harm, but I didn’t know her mama at all at that point, and I didn’t want Mrs Tamasina Bang out fussing with me about getting her child’s fancy dress dirty.