Margaret Sexton: A Kind of Freedom

Ruby shook her head, huffing. “The blind leading the blind,” she said. “I should have known not to ask you your opinion.”

Evelyn smarted at that and was tempted to correct her, but she held back. If she introduced Renard now, he would forever be a wedge between them; it was early, but Evelyn already knew that she would see him again.

“Anyway, I’ve already decided,” Ruby went on, “I’m never seeing him again. There’s no way. He’s the type to think too high of himself, and let me tell you his hair is not as straight as it looked the other day, he puts some sort of oil in there, and he’s not as light as we thought either. I still can’t get a read on his family, what they did before his daddy lucked up on that teaching gig, and anyway if Brother’s grades are any indication of the kind of educating they’re doing at Valena C. Jones, that whole family is in a world of trouble.”

Evelyn could tell her part in the performance was over, and she turned to the wall and made like she was sleeping. Ruby kept going for another hour though: The man hadn’t ordered his food the way Daddy would; she could tell he wasn’t used to eating at such fine establishments by the way he asked rather than told the waiter what he was going to have; he talked about the war like he wanted to be a part of it, when everyone knew you didn’t discuss such gruesome matters in front of a lady. Not only that, when they walked home, a white man passed, and Andrew lowered his head and nearly pushed her to the side of the street.

“Daddy never would have done it that way,” Ruby whispered. “He wouldn’t have gotten himself killed, this is Louisiana, but he would have found a way to protect us and maintain his dignity. That’s the kind of man I’m looking for, and that Andrew, he was nowhere close. Let me tell you, Evelyn, you ought to count your blessings that his friend didn’t ask you out. You know what they say about birds of a feather. If Andrew was no count, then that old uneven-hem man must be the bottom of the barrel.”

The next morning, Evelyn slept in, though she heard the eggs cackling, smelled the bacon smoking on the fire. She was so tired she even tarried in bed past the doorbell ringing, then Miss Georgia’s shrill voice and high laughter. Finally she heard her own name.

She shot up, stuck her ear to the door, but couldn’t make out the conversation, just a few smatterings of words here and there, “nice looking,” and “about an hour,” and “I kept an eye out to make sure.” Evelyn couldn’t hear any of her mother’s responses, but it didn’t matter. As she dressed, her late-night excitement faded into the dull certainty that whatever magic had been sparked on that swing had been snuffed out in her mother’s sitting room this morning. Her father hadn’t been home, but he would be in a matter of minutes, and there was no question her mother would repeat what she’d heard, her father would storm in her room and forbid her from even thinking about Renard again, and she’d go on attending classes at Dillard, coming home at night, and barely fending off her loneliness, which was rising above her head.

Still, she didn’t feel sad, just settled in her new understanding that this was life, and she had been foolish to expect much else. As she was about to head to the kitchen for any scraps Ruby had left behind, her sister walked in their room with a sneaky smirk on her face and two biscuits in her hand.

“So”—she plopped on her made-up bed and threw a pillow at Evelyn’s chest—“you didn’t tell me you had a visitor last night,” and as she said the word night , the pillow bounced off Evelyn and hit the floor. “You’re keeping secrets now, huh? Or trying to? You know Ruby always finds out in the end.” She sang the last part of the sentence. “This time it only took twelve hours.”

Evelyn smiled back, but she was afraid. She lowered her voice. “You had a bad time last night. I didn’t want to pour salt on the wound.”

Ruby didn’t answer for a little while. She just played with a thread hanging from the end of her apple-red skirt. Sometimes when she was in a bad mood, Evelyn would volunteer to sew any of her clothes that needed mending. Evelyn wondered if in an hour she’d be weaving a needle through that bright cloth.

Ruby looked up. “Evelyn, don’t be stupid, I’m your sister, your joy is my joy.” She stared at her, her eyes wide and intense. “Anyway, I’m the one who introduced you to this man. What’s his name? Raymond? I should at least reap the rewards of my efforts through you.” She had inched her voice up a notch from its regular octave in an attempt to sound happy, but there was something in her face’s plain affect that made Evelyn certain her sister’s anger was near.

Evelyn sat down next to her to get it all over with. “How’d you find out?” she asked.

“How do you think? Miss Georgia’s loud mouth. Lord Jesus, I can’t change my girdle without her getting word. Let that be a note to you, girl. Don’t do anything in front of this house that you don’t want Daddy to know about because lucky for you Mama happened to be home this morning. If it had been Daddy who answered the door, we already know Ray would be a page in your memory book.” She paused. “And you’d be off at the Sisters of the Holy Family convent by now.” She cackled.

Evelyn shrugged. “Mother’s going to tell him anyway; that’s over now.”

Ruby gripped Evelyn’s wrist and locked eyes with her in a rare show of emotion. “She won’t,” she said. “She would never. That time I got caught holding hands with Langston at the St. Bernard Market, she yelled about my reputation and threatened to lock me in my room, but she never breathed a word.”

Evelyn sighed. “That’s because it was you; it’s different.” She caught Ruby grinning then, the first genuine smile the girl had had all morning.

Evelyn didn’t leave the house the rest of the day; she just waited for Daddy to get word, act on it, but it never happened. Even before dinner when it was just the two of them in the kitchen, and she gathered the silverware to set the table, and he prepared a whiskey straight, he just went on about the patient he’d seen. “Miss Sylvia still hasn’t dropped that baby. I told her husband to walk her up and down Napoleon. That little thing would be out by the morning, but these women don’t listen. You’d think they were the ones who spent the eight years in school. I should take off my stethoscope when I walk in their houses, pass it over, let them listen to my heart beat. I told her, if she goes any longer, she’s going to be delivering at Charity, and she’d have better luck giving birth in a manger than in the Negro ward of a hospital.”

Evelyn nodded and smiled, waiting for him to approach the real transgression. Halfway through dinner, when he and Mother had gone on and on about Mardi Gras preparations, the debutante receptions, soprano recitals, and whist parties; when Ruby pontificated over who would be riding with Zulu this year, how early she’d need to reach North Claiborne to catch the Indians, why the Skeleton Men frightened her; when Mother added that the Million-Dollar Baby dolls were scandalous and Daddy smirked and noted they were just costumes after all, Evelyn realized he didn’t know. And she stared at her mother as if just noticing a subtle feature in the older woman’s face that had transformed her into a different person altogether.

Without her daddy’s interference, Evelyn and Renard spent their free days together. They’d meet at the Sweet Tooth for ice cream and giggle at the owner of the store, who would scoop the ice cream up, toss it in the air, then catch it with a cone. After paying, they’d drift outside to walk, past the women haggling with the butchers over turkey necks and kids gaping at the posters outside the Circle Theater. They didn’t speak at first — the bustling environment seemed to grant permission to their silence — but finally after a few days of the same, Renard’s voice inched out in a cracked whisper.