Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

“I should slap your damn face!” Roxanne shouted.

“Why? What did I do, Roxanne?” Agnes came in and set down her grocery bag and purse next to the door, something she always did so as not to forget things on her way out.

“‘What did I do, Roxanne? What did I do?’” Roxanne stood up and nearly fell, and when she took a step, she bumped into the small table beside the chair. “‘What did I do, Roxanne?’ You make me so sick! I tell you I went blind and all you can do is laugh.”

Agnes went to her. “But I thought you were kidding, Roxanne. You know how you kid sometimes.” Agnes touched her arm.

“Well, I’m not kiddin now, you dumb bitch.” Roxanne pulled away. “I don’t know why I bother with you. Why do I waste my damn time with someone like you?”

“I’m sorry, Roxanne. I really am. Here, why don’t you sit down. Please tell me what happened? Dear Jesus.” Agnes made the sign of the cross.

“‘Dear Jesus. Dear Jesus.’ For Chrissakes!” Roxanne sat again and misjudged where she was and so sat on the arm and tumbled onto the seat. “Get me a little vodka from the icebox, and mix some orange juice in it.” Why had she lost her sight and Agnes hadn’t? What did Agnes do with her sight all day anyway? Sell a few buttons here, a few needles there. Not even anough makeup on her face to cover a roach’s back.

Agnes brought the glass with three-quarters vodka and one-fourth orange juice, the way Roxanne liked it. “Here it is.” She waited until Roxanne had a firm grip on the glass and then released it. Roxanne drank nearly half of it in one gulp. They were both facing the large window onto 10th Street, and Agnes looked down to see two boys on the sidewalk counting money and Roxanne heard first a car honking its horn all the way up to R Street, followed by a pickup chugging along. Two cars with well-tuned engines came after the pickup. Roxanne was listening for Melvin’s car. Three more cars went almost silently past her window. It was like Melvin to be late when he knew she needed him. Agnes remembered that soon everyone would have to turn their clocks back one hour. Fall back, spring forward, that was the rule from the nuns arrayed in their black. “Black is not my color, Mama.” “Black’s everyone’s color, Agnes.”

There were playful taps at the door and Roxanne called out, “Melvin? Melvin? That you?” Melvin Foster came in and started singing a medley of Sam Cooke songs. “If he can’t make it,” Melvin said, “I’m gonna go up on that stage and replace him.” He was in a dark blue suit and a bright gray tie, Agnes saw, and he was wearing black Swiss Ballys, the kind with the graceful stitching at the toes. She had seen such in the window of Rich’s on F Street, as she strolled about on her lunch hour.

“Oh, Melvin,” Roxanne said, “where you been, honey?”

“I’m real early,” he said, “so don’t give me none a your stuff.”

“She’s blind, Melvin.”

“She’s blind, she’s blind as a bat,” Melvin sang. When neither woman responded, he stopped, took off his hat, and put it on a peg on the wooden rack. He was nothing if not a man who took the awful silence of women seriously. “Temporary, temporary,” he said after Roxanne had explained as he sat on the arm of the easy chair, his arm around Roxanne as she drank a second vodka. “Fuckin temporary, baby.” Agnes was now only a few feet beyond the door. He remembered how religious Agnes was and he looked at her and said, “Just temporary.”

In the end, Melvin said they had best get to Freedmen’s Hospital, and Agnes asked if she should accompany them.

“Of course, you should,” Roxanne said. “What kinda stupid-ass question is that?”

“Let her alone, Roxanne. She ain’t responsible for this,” Melvin said.

It snowed that night in October, two inches, and people said that was one for the record books.

Through the months of the fall and the winter, Roxanne saw a series of ophthalmologists, neurosurgeons, and psychiatrists from Freedmen’s to D.C. General, and none could tell her where her sight had gone. “It may well be, Miss Stapleton,” a psychiatrist in a darkened, borrowed office at D.C. General said to Roxanne late one morning as Agnes sat in a chair beside the door, “that you could awaken tomorrow and your eyesight will be back.” This woman, who had been imported from Georgetown University, was herself losing her sight, though none of her patients—many of whom were prisoners from the D.C. Jail next to the hospital—had been informed. She saw Roxanne alone that morning for some forty-five minutes and then brought in Agnes, who had been accompanying her friend to many of the doctors’ visits. And when Agnes was not able to come, Melvin had been there. So many of the friends Roxanne lived to party with had drifted away. They might catch her blindness, and blind people couldn’t dance very well, and they certainly weren’t known as partyers. “Or it could be,” the psychiatrist continued, “that when you are sixty or seventy or eighty, you will awaken and be able to see again.” A social worker at Howard University had thought a psychiatrist going blind would know the proper things to say to a woman who was already there. “But then, too, you might die without ever seeing again.” Some of the jail’s prisoners, who knew what no one had told them, called her the Bat, and others called her the Mole behind her back. It was like God to do that shit to a colored woman, the prisoners said—make her a doctor with one hand and make her blind with the other.

That lousy bitch doctor!” Roxanne complained as Agnes led her out to the D.C. General entrance where Melvin, who had driven them there and was outside smoking, was to pick them up. “That lousy, no-good bitch!”

“There is hope there somewhere,” Agnes said quietly.

“Let me fuckin go!” Roxanne pulled her arm away. “You worse than she is, you silly-ass thing. Take that hope shit and stick it up some priest’s ass!” People stopped and stared at her, but Roxanne did not know.

Agnes stood with her arms at her sides, and when Roxanne heard nothing from her, she swung at the place where she had last heard Agnes speak. “You worse than nothin!” It had been more or less this way between them for some time, though that effort to strike Agnes was at the end of a very long road. Neither woman would know it for some time. Agnes leaned to the left and Roxanne hit nothing, then stumbled and caught herself before she fell.

“Hey! Hey!” Roxanne could hear Melvin coming closer. “What the hell you doin out here, Roxanne? Why you actin up?”

“Oh, Melvin baby, I’m tired of this stuff from her and everybody else.” He took her gently by the arm and led her to the nearest wall.

“I know,” he said. “I can only think I know.” He held her shoulder for several moments, and then he turned and faced Agnes, who had a look he could not fathom. He reached across to Agnes and touched her cheek with his open hand. People watched the two. As far as either Melvin or Agnes could remember, this was the first time they had ever touched in such a way. Agnes closed her eyes and moved into his hand.

This was late April, and up until then spring had not been unkind to Washington. It stayed that way until mid-June when the humidity hit, thick and mean and unforgiving, and ordinary people with ordinary lives had to slog and claw their way into a more horrendous beast of an August where they lived each day thinking September would bring them relief. That was not to be so.

“I sometime think I’m gonna lose my mind,” Roxanne said now, and Melvin returned to her.

“You made of better stuff than that,” Melvin said. Agnes went toward the door; he could not make out anything bad in her walking, not hatred or bitterness or even resentment. There was merely—or so it seemed as he saw her step onto the rubber pad before the electric doors and watch them, first one and then the other, open to her—there was just a passable day out beyond the door that she wanted to enjoy before returning to many hours at the shop.