Tayari Jones: Silver Sparrow

I couldn’t picture Daddy and Raleigh kicking my mama out of her own home, closing the Pink Fox and sending her back to renting a chair in another woman’s shop. But then again, two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have pictured them enjoying a whole second family, eating dinner twice on Wednesdays. When I didn’t work hard to keep my mind on its chain, I could picture my daddy, naked but for his glasses, draped in a chenil e bedspread, a churning mound over Dana’s pretty mother, her hair spread over a satin pil owcase.

I GAVE MY MOTHER ten days for her hard mourning. My thinking was that people general y got a week off of work when someone actual y died.

During this set-aside time, I comforted her as she mooned over old photo albums. I knelt beside her as she turned out my father’s top dresser drawer, sending change, matchbooks, prophylactics, and even a tiny jar containing my baby teeth crashing to the carpet. When her nervous stomach stole her appetite, I didn’t force her to eat the meals I prepared. When her appetite returned, I didn’t stop her from eating cans of cake icing, one buttery spoonful at a time. I figured it was her right. On the tenth night, I started what they used to cal “tough love.” At the first sound of her sniffling, I hardened myself and said, “Don’t be so sad. You need to be angry, pissed off. If I was you, I’d be in the kitchen boiling up a pan of grits.”

Mama tightened her arm around me under the sheet. “Don’t play like that.”

I was kidding, but then again, I wasn’t. It seemed that there should be some sort of consequences for what my father had done.

“Even if he threw me out of this house,” Mama said, “I wouldn’t do what Mary done.”

“At least Mary’s famous. Everybody in the whole world knows what she did. And besides, we are not going to get thrown out of this house,” I said.

“Let’s say I file for divorce and we get a good judge that says I can stay in this house. You know James is going to just move in with them. When I was coming up, people used to say ‘It’s a mighty poor rat ain’t got but one hole.’”

Crowding me in my own bed, my mother talked her greatest fears aloud. Did I think that Miss Bunny knew al along? I said that Daddy was probably the one who gave Gwendolyn the brooch, not Miss Bunny herself. Mama said then she was glad that Miss Bunny was gone to glory before she could see al of us shamed like this. I said that yes, that was probably a blessing. In a drowsy voice, Mama pointed out that ful -time students could finish beauty school in a year. Dana and her mama could get certified and take over the Pink Fox. I said, “Dana doesn’t want to do hair; she’s going to Mount Holyoke. She is going to be a doctor.” My mother turned herself over and caught me again in a tight spoon. “Your father’s going to pay for that. There won’t be anything left.”

She gave her little sigh that signaled that the schnapps and Tylenol had final y gotten the best of her and she was drifting to sleep. The clock on my bed table glowed 2:13 a.m. “Good night, Mama.”

“Chaurisse?” she said.

“Ma’am?”

“Do you think he did it because I’m not pretty? You know, I wasn’t yet fifteen when we got married. Gwen, she probably knows how to do things that I never heard of. She probably reads Cosmo magazine. And look how she keeps herself up. She looks like a dark-skinned Lena Horne.”

While my mother was competing for the title of Most Brokenhearted Person Ever, I kept retracing my steps, trying to figure when I came to a crossroads and took the wrong turn. When it came to parents, I was a mighty poor rat. It’s not like I could have chosen a spare set in case my folks went crazy on me. Mama and Raleigh got lucky. When their biological situation didn’t work out, they ran over to Grandma Bunny. I didn’t have anyone except James and Laverne.

My mother’s body was heavy as a sandbag; my arm pinned under her was starting to hurt. I twisted free of her. It had been ten long days.

“Mama,” I snapped, flexing my tingling arm. “Stop whining. Stand up for yourself. Grab a broom. Put sugar in his gas tank. Something.”

My mother sat up, turned on the bedside lamp, kicked off the covers, and climbed out of my bed. The skin on the undersides of her arms shook as she jabbed her finger in my direction.

“Don’t you turn against me, Bunny Chaurisse.”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” I said. “I just want you to be more . . .” The word that came to mind was black. My mother’s crying sadness reminded me of white women in movies, the kind who are liable to faint if something happens that they can’t handle. “I want to see you fight back. If there was ever a time to boil up some grits, it’s now.”

Mama bal ed her hands on her hips. “Let me tel you what you don’t understand. Al Green got out of that bathtub and Mary almost kil ed him with those grits. I heard he had to get skin from his back stitched onto his privates. Is that what you are tel ing me to do to your daddy, Chaurisse?”

“No,” I said. “I was just trying to say that you should —”

“Al Green’s privates aren’t even half of this story. While he was lying there naked, burnt up with blisters, she took a pistol out of her purse, pressed it to her chest, and blew it wide open. Mary died right on top of him.” My mother’s breasts heaved under her worn nightgown. “Don’t talk about what you don’t know about. It wasn’t the grits that made him get right with God. It was her blood.”

My mother heaved herself out of my bedroom, leaving me squinting in the lamplight. I lay in my bed for another hour imagining the four of us —

me, Daddy, Raleigh, and Mama — in our separate rooms staring at our own separate ceilings. I didn’t sleep again that night. At a quarter to six, I found my mother sitting at the kitchen table peeling a mountain of potatoes. Some had turned brown with the air, but the one in her hand was white and wet.

“Did you sleep, Mama?”

“No,” she said. “I thought I would make a potato soup. I would make a lot, so we could freeze it.”

“Mama,” I said. “Go lay down.”

“I don’t want to sleep in my bed.”

“Go sleep in my room.”

“You put me out,” she said, looking up from the potato. She had cut the peel so thick that there was hardly any vegetable left.

“No, Mama,” I said. “I’l lie down with you.”

We went back to my bedroom. I held the covers back and fol owed behind her. This time, I was the one who curved my body around hers.

Mama said. “Let me finish tel ing you about Mary. She left a note. They found it when they came for her body. It said, ‘ The more I’m trusting you,the more you’re letting me down. ’”

I KNEW BY THEN that I would never have my mother back, not in the way I had known her al my life. When you have seen your mother shattered, there’s no putting her back together. There wil always be seams, chipped edges, and clumps of dried glue. Even if you could get her to where she looks the same, she wil never be stronger than a cracked plate. I climbed in bed beside her and closed my eyes, but I never relaxed enough to forget who I was and what had happened to us. At seven thirty, the old ladies showed up, ready for their clips and dips. It was a miracle that she hadn’t missed a single appointment up until then. My father may have taken a wrecking bal to our lives, but not a single nap in southwest Atlanta went unstraightened. This is why I let my mother pretend to sleep as I eased myself out of bed and down the back steps to open up the shop. I let the old ladies in, explaining that my mother was feeling poorly this morning. I opened her heavy appointment book, rescheduled the clients, and then cal ed the other ladies on the page. I blamed it on a virus and everyone clucked that it was going around. Then I cal ed my high school, pretended to be my mother, and explained that I was the one feeling poorly. I blamed it on the same virus and no one seemed to care. Then I phoned Witherspoon Sedans and explained to the answering machine that I hated my father and I never wanted to see him again.