Girls Like Us Read online

  “She’s lost her manners,” Evangelist told Mr. Melvin. “Know better than to ask grown folks questions like that, child.”

  “Pardon, Ms. Flossie,” Mr. Melvin said before laying his large hand overtop hers and winking at her. “It’s value in an inquisitive child. And, by goodness, it’s a good question. If I may, I’d like to answer it. With your permission, of course.”

  “Of course.” Evangelist softened like left-out butter. “My home is your home, kind sir.”

  “Angry I am, child.” Mr. Melvin turned his wise eyes onto Izella. “Angry for my mama’s mama who was brought over here in a big boat with no choice in the matter. Angry for my mama who picked cotton and nursed babies that wasn’t hers. Angry for my daddy who sharecropped for thieving men. Angry for your mama who works her body and brain and hands bare with little recognition outside of her living room. Angry for these five men here with me who have to deal with my long-winded tongue.” He chuckled. “Angry for they wives having to deal with the bad blood, too. And for they children for having to dodge it. Also, child, I’m angry for you.” He stared at Izella, or through her. “And you.” He then rested his gaze on Ola, who became noticeably uncomfortable.

  “Why us?” Izella asked before she realized it. “Sorry, I…”

  “It’s okay, Babygal,” Evangelist said in an uncharacteristically sweet tone; she really liked this man.

  “Come here.” Mr. Melvin motioned Izella and Ola to stand in front of him. “I got something to tell y’all.”

  Izella and Ola slowly made their way to his chair.

  “Look here, both of you,” he told them. “Times are getting better. But it’s slow as a drip carving out a crater in rock. My mama’s mama was a drip. My mama was a drip. I’m a drip. Your mama is a drip. And you both drips, too. Drip, drip, drip, drip. All of us. Slow, steady, making a tunnel to break the dam of real freedom.

  “One time, when I was a boy, younger than both of you, I held a penny in my hands and flipped it high up in the air. It stayed up so long that I sat cross-legged there in the dirt, and waited all afternoon for it to come back down to me. The sun was so bright, I had to look away from it. I tapped my bare feet, drew faces in the ground, held my breath, turned circles, and spun and spun and spun. When the penny finally came back down, it had lost its copper color and was all dented up and battered. It came back different, but more valuable. Not more valuable to any other man in the world, though, you see?

  “If I walk in a store and slide that penny over the counter, any old man will just see a beat-up penny that’s lost its copper. He’ll see a penny that’s been clear to hell and back and came out not worth nothing but a single cent. But I see something different. I see me—an old, strong, resilient, powerful thing that may not be worth much of nothing to the world, but to God, I’m worth everything.

  “I swear that thing flipped up so high it touched heaven, God kissed it, and sent it back to me.” Mr. Melvin lifted the penny from his pocket and handed it to Ola. “I only got one. I wish I could split it right down the seam for y’all gals, but I can’t. You keep this for me. I feel like it’s done just about all it can do for me.”

  The entire room was in tears. Everyone, that is, except for Izella.

  Izella never cried. It wasn’t her way.

  * * *

  The next day, Walter held Ola as they walked up Mrs. Mac’s cracking pathway. Izella followed closely as an extra precaution in case Ola fell backward.

  Ola was in bad shape. She’d moaned throughout the night, and Evangelist nearly beat the door down at midnight. Izella had to lie about stumping her toe on the bed frame to get her to go away. Walter wouldn’t leave Ola’s window. He stood beside the crack, whispering sweet encouragements to Ola all night. Through her moans, she begged him to go home and get some rest, but he refused.

  Mrs. Mac burst through the screen door like a teenager. It was as if she were growing younger every day. Three days before, she had been a bedridden woman on the verge of death, but now she looked like a fifty-year-old. And a good fifty with shiny, silvery-gray, shoulder-length hair, glowing brown skin, and a springy, purposeful step. She’d been reborn through Izella and Ola’s agony.

  “Come on in, chillun!” she said, revealing a mouth filled with aged, sturdy teeth. “I got y’all ready some ginger-root tea made.”

  Izella went in first. The house had been rearranged completely, and despite the dust, it was relatively clean. A solid green-velvet settee with wooden claw-feet had been flipped right side up, the oak coffee table glistened, and the thick fibers of the purple area rug were still a hodgepodge from a brisk broom sweep. But the dramatic focal point of the room was the curio. The day before it was covered with a large, dirty sheet. It was out now. Magnificent and terrifying. Candlelit mahogany, tempered glass, as tall as the ceiling, and as wide as the full back wall, it dominated the small room. The curio itself was beautiful in a priceless sort of way, but the insides made it startling.

  Men.

  Every glass square held a hand-carved man. They looked to be made of acrylic and driftwood and sawdust and red dirt. Their eyes mismatched buttons snatched from random garments. Some had pipes hanging from their mouths, and others had no mouths, only shut zippers. One especially disturbing figure boasted a real train conductor’s hat—it looked to be the only item in the curio that wasn’t carved or molded. Izella counted forty-nine men—seven rows by seven columns. She had always been good at her multiplication tables. There was one empty slot at the very top. The fiftieth.

  Ola’s loud moans snapped Izella back.

  “Ahhhh.” Ola yelled out a guttural, deep sob.

  It sounded very much like a constipated bowel movement multiplied by a million, Izella thought. She sprang to her sister’s side. Walter looked so shaky and terrified that she feared he’d let her drop.

  Izella caught Mrs. Mac smiling at her sister’s despair, and the instinct to run shot through her body.

  “Sit her down here, child.” Mrs. Mac motioned toward the circular dining table with four cushy chairs, as if expecting them. “The gravid one next to me.”

  Mrs. Mac had already placed piping-hot ginger tea at each place setting. The smell was sharp, like needles to the nostrils.

  “Sip it slow,” Mrs. Mac told Ola. “The root will unruffle that babe.” Without permission, she lifted Ola’s sweat-filled shirt, placed her hand on her lower stomach, and closed her eyes. “It’s no wonder you screaming, child. She a jumping jack in there, twirling and leaping like a hopscotch.”

  “She?” Ola said, perking up. “I’m having a little girl?”

  “Sip,” said Mrs. Mac before lifting the cup to Ola’s bottom lip. “Better?”

  Ola lifted her chin to force a swallow; then she smiled. “Better.”

  “That root tells them old babies to quit their jig,” she said, satisfied. “And yes, this is as girly a girl as I seen in a minute, child.”

  A tear squeezed from the corner of Ola’s eye, and she looked at Walter. “A baby girl,” she told him.

  He didn’t smile or cry or anything; he just shook his head in silence.

  They ain’t no parents, Izella thought. They barely teenagers. The both of them.

  “How do we get rid of it?” Izella interjected.

  “You shut your filthy mouth!” Ola spat. “Ain’t no getting rid of nothing happening here. I’m having a girl, you hear?”

  “Where you gone raise up this girl you gone have?” Izella asked angrily. “Evangelist’s house? Where she gone sleep? At the foot of our twin bed? Get real, you stupid girl! Your head is lost in the clouds.”

  Ola couldn’t think of anything to say. Her hurt was too overwhelming to steer through by herself, so she looked to Walter. He was still shaking his head and rocking back and forth, arms folded tightly. They were a mess of their own making.

  Mrs. Mac reached for Ola’s hand. “You ain’t got no place to put no baby, child. You ain’t even got no place to put yourself.”

  Ola
wailed. Not in physical pain—it was a bottomless, indescribable pain. A realization that she was the only somebody in the world who wanted her baby girl to breathe the free air. Even more than that, a realization that everyone around the table was right. Walter was a broken boy, and she had nothing in the world that belonged only to her—even her tiny bed was half Izella’s. They couldn’t possibly raise a baby. She searched her mind for someone to blame. Walter was too frail. Mrs. Mac was too foreign. Evangelist was too blind. Izella was left.

  “I’ll never forgive you for this.” She locked eyes onto her sister like an eagle to prey, and then turned her gaze to Mrs. Mac. “Go on, then—take my baby girl back to heaven, where she belongs.”

  Mrs. Mac smiled, rubbing friction between her palms. “What are we waiting for, then?” Mrs. Mac pulled a crisp white sheet from a water basin in the center of the table and poured a beef-talla-smelling hot liquid from a heavy steel pitcher. Then she uncovered a small red bowl of cluck and guts, squeezed them with her fingers, and dropped them, too, into the basin. Finally, she lifted a bar of lye soap from her deep, sewn-on pocket and worked the slop into a lather. “All right, kids. This baby needs to be thrown into the wash.”

  MISSIPPI

  21 Weeks

  Missippi craved Evangelist’s cheese grits. She waited in her room for them to arrive every day, pining for them from even before her belly started to grow. They were all she had left to look forward to. Her paper dolls cut from Papa’s old newspapers and marble set only kept her attention for so long. She was fourteen now. Too old for all that baby stuff anyway.

  She’d read from Genesis to Revelation more than twice. It was the only book she was allowed to own, but sometimes she couldn’t understand it. Most of the Old Testament just felt like big chunks of words and strange names strung together, making up nonsense. Only Proverbs made real-life sense to her. She didn’t dare tell her papa that.

  She hadn’t told him about the half-buried copy of The Bluest Eye she’d found peeking from the trash heap at the rec center, either. What were the odds of Missippi showing up at the center that day to pull that particular book out the dump? Destiny sent Pecola to keep her company. A few of the middle pages were torn out, but Missippi used her imagination to fill in the blanks. Destiny also did that, since Missippi had a wonderful imagination. She loved Pecola and Claudia and Frieda. Laughed right along with them and cried with them, too. But Papa would never approve of that book. To Papa, it was the Bible, or nothing.

  He was a good papa, but he stayed gone more than a mama would have, and Missippi’s mama had died long before she was old enough to know what was what. Missippi fantasized about having a mama every minute of every day. She’d daydream about greasing each other’s scalps with Vaseline, playing paper dolls, and cooking cheese grits like Evangelist and her two girls did. And maybe even reading together. Something other than the Bible, though.

  Missippi was a girl without a mama, and for that reason, there were many things she didn’t understand about being a girl. When she’d first got her period, she thought she was dying. She took her soiled panties to her papa. He exchanged them for a quarter and sent her on her way, but he didn’t tell her where to go or what to buy. The following morning, he had to leave for a long haul to South Carolina. She’d spent the quarter on sweets and stuffed paper towels inside herself until a teacher showed her a sticky pad to put on her underpants.

  Missippi wore too-big clothes and knew how to hoe a backyard with her own two hands. She could fix a transmission without a guidebook and change all four tires in less than ten minutes, but she couldn’t fix her rat’s-nest hair to save her own life. Missippi was a girl without a mama, and it showed.

  She heard a knock on the door. “Hello?” asked Evangelist. “I got your grits, Miss Missippi.”

  Missippi jumped from her bed and nearly slid across her bedroom floor to get to those grits. She opened the door to Evangelist. “Thank you for coming. I’ve been looking forward to seeing you.”

  “It’s hot,” Evangelist said before handing over the colorful, crochet-covered pot. “I’ll pick up the pot from you tomorrow.”

  “Leaving so soon?” Missippi asked, obviously disappointed. “Stay a minute. Papa’s out a few days. Haven’t spoken to anyone in a while.”

  “I got company coming to town later on, Miss Missippi,” Evangelist said, irritated by her longing. “Cooking and cleaning don’t get done all on its own, now.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Missippi, intentionally showing distress in her eyes. She was anxious to talk to someone, especially a woman. “I’ll just talk to my paper dolls, then.”

  “Fine.” Evangelist shoved past her and made her way to the kitchen. “May as well fix something up for dinner while I’m here. What y’all got to cook in here?”

  Evangelist wasn’t the type to just sit on a couch and discuss the weather. She needed to move her busy hands.

  “Miss Missippi,” Evangelist said like any mother would say the name of a daughter in big trouble. “Ain’t no excuse for this wrecked kitchen. Come on here, baby in your belly or no baby in your belly. Young girl’s kitchen is supposed to be her heaven. If it ain’t clean and smelling like Pine-Sol, she ain’t got no business calling herself a girl.”

  Missippi hung her head for real this time. It was the first time a woman had shared that bit of wisdom with her. A steadfast, workable snippet to transform Missippi from an engine-grease-covered tomboy into a girl. She decided to hold on tight to it. Clench it into her memory. Clean your kitchen and you’re a girl. I’ll be doggoned, she thought.

  “Do your girls do it, too?” Missippi asked, wanting desperately to be more like Izella and Ola. Peeking through her dingy, dust-covered blinds, she’d been watching them for years. Walking the sidewalks together. Mimicking Ola’s skipping and avoiding cracks in the walkways. Spinning around and around her living room like Izella did sometimes. She’d even asked her papa for bobby socks to be more like them, but he’d given her a firm no and sent her to her room. He was a good papa. But he wasn’t a mama. Not even close.

  Missippi had never spoken to them, but Izella was her favorite. She was less buttoned up than her sister, freer. More likely to wave at folks sitting on the porches and less likely to have straight hair parts. Ola, though, never dared leave her house with a crooked hair part or a wrinkled skirt. She belonged on the cover of Jet magazine, the way she put herself together. But she didn’t seem to like nobody other than her sister. The hundreds of times Missippi had seen Ola walk up and down the street, she’d never witnessed her share a genuine smile with a stranger. And Missippi wasn’t the only somebody to notice. She’d seen other kids shoot dirty looks at Ola behind her back. Looks that said, Who she think she is? loud and clear without saying it in words. But to Missippi, Ola’s attitude never came off as snobbish; it looked shy, reserved, even scared of people on the outside. Actually, on second thought, Ola was her favorite.

  “My girls been cleaning long as they been walking,” Evangelist said with the utmost pride. “They keep house. One day, when they marry, they gone keep house better than any other woman would know how to.”

  Missippi watched Evangelist beam at the thought of her girls marrying and cleaning up. She remained silent and watched Evangelist spill Pine-Sol into pools on the counters and floors. Still smiling, Evangelist continued on. “No man, especially no Southern man, wants a woman to keep a nasty house. I’m training my two. They know how to wipe up, cook, dust, sweep, scrub. And not just they houses, but they bodies, too. A clean temple is as important as a clean house. No good reason left to buy a cow when he can get the milk for free.”

  Missippi watched and thought. Wipe up, cook, dust, sweep, scrub, wipe up, cook, dust, sweep, scrub, wipe up, cook, sweep, dust, scrub, milk for free …

  “You mean,” Missippi inquired, “milk for free to boys?”

  Evangelist pushed herself from the floor, where she’d been obsessively scrubbing at a pool of Pine-Sol. “A girl’s body is her
temple, Miss Missippi,” she said, looking her in the eye, woman to woman. “Boys ain’t got no business tracking they dirty shoes through your temple. They roll in the dirt. Sweat the salt of devilish lust. They dogs, Miss Missippi. Dogs tear down a girl’s temple till ain’t nothing left but bare bones and sticks.”

  Missippi caught sight of her hands—smeared black from engine grease. Her nails filthy from digging up vegetables without gloves.

  “I can clean up, Evangelist,” she said, feeling desperation creeping in. “Wipe up, cook, dust, sweep, scrub, dust … Or is it dust and then scrub? I can do it. I can do everything you say. And I love to read, too, quiet as it’s kept! If I could, I’d have a whole house of books. Boys like smart girls as much as they like clean girls, don’t they? I’m smart and I can fix things and I’m a quick study. I can be just as good as your two if you show me how.” The pity in Evangelist’s gaze was so thick Missippi could cut it with a butter knife. “You looking at me like I’m not worth nothing, ma’am.”

  “Naw, Missippi,” Evangelist said before reaching for her tangled nest of hair. “God says you worth gold. Who am I to say different? But I ain’t gone stand in your kitchen and tell you no lie. Ain’t no man gone touch you after you done went out and did that,” she said, motioning to Missippi’s stirring stomach.

  Missippi couldn’t think of anything to say in response to such meanness. She watched as Evangelist squatted back to the floor to edge away at the poured Pine-Sol like she hadn’t just ruined Missippi’s hopes for a better life. Missippi wondered if all mamas spoke about things they didn’t understand like this mama just had. If mamas made these types of guesses without bothering to ask any questions. If they were all so dumb and cruel and mean and stupid. If so, she thought, she didn’t want one no more.

  * * *

  The following morning, Missippi stood in her tiny checkerboard kitchen, stunned. Evangelist had left the house smelling of pure Pine-Sol. Every dish cleared of the stubborn spots that only the strongest fingernail could scratch away. Every burner on the stove was free of seared-on crumbs and grease. And every pot gleamed, with the exception of the one filled to the brim with grits.