The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart (16 page)

And yet.

Now she began to understand that the dream was about her own longings, not about her lover’s wife’s. For though she blocked any feelings except rage and contempt for Blaze, of course their friendship, or, rather, relationship, remained unresolved. Unfinished. It was as if they’d been playing an engrossing game of chess and someone unconnected to the game, they had thought, had suddenly snatched away the board. There they sat, startled, unprepared to continue without a structure, on opposite sides of an empty table. Nothing connected them anymore.

She would pretend later that her only girlfriends growing up were black. Blaze, no doubt, had pretended her only friends were white. And they had each gone to bed at night determined to forget and forget and forget. She had never set foot in Blaze’s house again, after her father’s comment. She wondered if anyone had explained to Blaze what had happened. Now she could imagine the cruelty of it, from Blaze’s point of view. To return home, expecting to see the bright face of your friend, someone you loved, and to have that bright face, without explanation, never again appear.

What is not remembered emotionally, Little Sister had thought, is not remembered. But look at her adult friends. They were so often Blaze all over again. And in fact, it was through these white women who were her friends as an adult that she discovered what Blaze was like. She no longer remembered Blaze herself at all, but these women were invariably timid, sweet, docile, confused, morally lazy, loving and generous. They
would not stand up for themselves, however, and she would soon feel the rage—because if they could not stand up for themselves, and they at least had the power of whiteness in a white supremacist society—they would certainly never stand up for her, or for real friendship or sisterhood with her. Yet, seeking to complete the “game” with Blaze, she picked these women again and again. Whereas her black women friends were chosen primarily for their challenging spirits, however envious, competitive, flighty, or, yes, confused and morally lazy they might be. The ones she really adored would stand toe to toe with the devil himself and yell Fuck you so loudly he’d cover up his ears.

Her mother, because she needed to work, was not able to escape “Miss” Blaze, and called her that, always, even if there were no house guests or other young white people who’d come to call.

“No,” she would say to Blaze who asked her to call her what she’d always called her, “your daddy says you’re a young woman, and young women are called ‘Miss.’ ” It was a wedge between them. Deliberate and effective.

Was that it? Was that the source of the rage? Not what was attempted against Little Sister, which her mother helped her to escape by not permitting her to return to Blaze’s house, but what was forced on her mother, who could not escape? Little Sister had lived out her childhood at a time and in a place that permitted her to see both a remnant of slavery and a possibility of freedom. But the possibility of liberation was the gift she was unable to give her mother, just as the remnant of slavery, “Miss” Blaze, was the burden her mother refused to pass on to her.

Little Sister was unaware that her thoughts were causing her to glower. Or that she was staring at the surface of the lake as if a
monster lurked just beneath. But she heard chuckling, and noticed Big Sister was looking at her.

“Stop frowning, you’ll get wrinkles,” she said. She sat on a blanket she’d brought from the backseat of the car, and sat oiling herself in the warmth of the afternoon sun.

“Changes, changes,” said Little Sister, smiling briefly. “Does anything ever turn out the way you expect it to?”

“I don’t think so,” said Big Sister. “I never even thought it would be warm enough today to swim.”

Little Sister nodded, and returned to her thoughts.

She thought about how hard it was to read the stories she sometimes received at the women’s magazine where she worked because in them white women were talking about their closeness to the black women who had nurtured them. Each time she read such a story, she encountered her rage afresh. Embittered by the possibility, the probability, that their black servants
had
nurtured,
had
loved them, as one particularly sincere writer wrote, “unconditionally.” It was a love compelled by forced circumstances and forced familiarity—similar to the forced affection one felt for certain likable white characters on TV. There they were, every Saturday night: Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, the
M*A*S*H
contingent; and they were silly and witty and bright. And you cared about them because they were there, and you liked television, and they were the best white folks to watch in a predominantly white medium.

Perhaps she was enraged because she had hoped love between maid and miss was impossible. That was obviously what every little girl whose mother was a maid hoped. For how could you compete with the little girl who had everything, could buy
everything, including your mother? And had been buying your mother for centuries.

You could hate your mother for loving someone for whom she had to work. Perhaps. But how could you, since she worked for your benefit, because of you? The pain was because you felt she loved against her will. Because “If you can’t be with the one you love,” as the song went, “love the one you’re with.”

Now she felt the source of the tension she experienced, working at the modestly integrated, white women’s magazine. She could not complain about the behavior of the women toward her. They went out of their way, for the most part, to welcome her, to support her, to assure her they recognized her value not only to them, but to the world. And yet, each time she walked into the office she had to seclude herself for several minutes in order to get hold of her breathing. And she was there by choice. But not totally.

The black woman who cleaned the office at night was there, like her mother, because she, doubtless, had children and herself to feed. She knew that that woman too had difficulty breathing, as surely as her own mother must have had. Or maybe not. Because cleaning an empty office was just a job. Working with the white women every day was somehow more, because you were drawn into relationship with them, and sometimes you genuinely cared. So perhaps the question was: Is not affection or love something pitiful, and degraded, when it is compelled by circumstances beyond your control? And when to choose not to love, or to feel affection, represents a greater danger to the soul than one’s simple inability to do so?

She watched Big Sister floating on her back in the water, the oil she had slathered on earlier making a greasy circle around
her. She thought of her lover, of their trips into the country. The way they would pick an especially hot day to go exploring the countryside in, and then swim in every lake, in every park, they came to. How they would lie on the grass, smoking grass. How she liked to sing with him. How he sang. And yet, no matter how happy they were, there was his wife, and the child, and Little Sister’s obligatory worrying about them all. She was beginning to wonder how anyone ever had the strength to have affairs.

Lying on her back, watching the sun begin to sink behind the pines that ringed the lake, Big Sister began to feel like someone other than, different from, her usual oppressed self. She found herself immersed in a memory whose energy seemed about to suck her out, permanently, from her former life of gloom. This felt very strange. And yet, and this occurred to her for the first time: Something odd like this always happens to me when I spend time with Little Sister! She was remembering the day that she had had a different experience, from all the earlier ones, of Uncle Loaf and Auntie Putt-Putt.

She was eighteen, a young woman, and about to go off to school, several small towns over, to learn to be a veterinarian. She was dressed in a green plaid jumper, a crisp white blouse with a pointed collar, and her first pair of high-heel patent-leather slippers, which she wore with stylish Red Fox stockings. Her hair was waved away from her face and reached a kind of crest on top. She wore gold earrings and a necklace she’d received from her current boyfriend. The one she would have married if she’d had sense. She had liberally anointed herself with a cheap, bright-smelling perfume.

For years they had not really said much beyond “Howdy,” or
“How you?” To which the answer was, invariably, “Oh, tolerable. You?” They did not go beyond these preliminaries now. Big Sister settled herself, not behind Uncle Loaf’s chair, as she’d done as a child, but beside him, in a chair identical to his own. He sat as usual, leaning backward against the wall in a wooden chair near the water shelf, which Big Sister noticed had recently been repaired. The last time she had visited, the nails had been coming loose, and the shelf, under its gallon bucket of water, sagged. She noticed that the railing of the porch had also been straightened where it bulged near the steps, and the steps themselves strengthened.

Auntie Putt-Putt came out of the kitchen, crossed the porch in front of them carrying a basket. She wore a large round straw hat, a faded yellow print dress made from feed sacks, and an ancient pair of sneakers without backs, so that her heels looked hard and gray as she walked down the steps and toward the garden.

Then, and Big Sister could not believe her eyes, Uncle Loaf brought his chair down onto the porch floor with a plop, went into his private room, the “front room,” and returned wearing his own large straw hat, washed thin and very faded khaki shorts (for he had fought in World War I and returned home “shell-shocked,” a word that everyone in the family used in discussing or describing him, but the meaning of which no one knew) and a soft white cotton shirt. On his arm he also carried a basket made of white oak strips, with a broad curved handle the color of his deep brown skin. He moved quietly and calmly down the steps toward the garden and his wife, Big Sister following, on her toes, protecting her shoes against the scraping rocks, wood chips and chicken doo-doo. Surprised. Flabbergasted.
Wondering. Unbelieving. What was this? It was as if the quiet oak tree in the yard had suddenly shaken itself and begun to meander down the road.

Big Sister stood in the shade of the corncrib’s overhang, watching. Auntie Putt-Putt did not seem to notice anything different. Nor did Uncle Loaf. Their goal was to collect the tomatoes that she sold to the local store, where they got their kerosene. Uncle Loaf started on a row next to Auntie Putt-Putt’s but coming from the opposite direction. So that, as Big Sister watched in wonderment, forgotten by these two old people in their green universe hidden from the world, they met, but still did not acknowledge each other’s presence, or the fact that a miracle had occurred. They stood a moment, swaying, their backs against their hands, shifted their baskets, and continued serenely along their separate rows.

When Big Sister was leaving them, they sent tomatoes to her family. Still Uncle Loaf said nothing, and, for once, Auntie Putt-Putt seemed out of ancient family gossip. Uncle Loaf went to his room and returned with a handful of silver dollars. He handed them to Big Sister. “Far away,” he said. They did not kiss her. They had never kissed her. They were people of the hug. Their hug, reserved, as they were, was the circle of the world known so far, the rounded silence of their hidden universe. And she had walked out of their embrace, free at last.

Recalling this day now, as she lay once again beside Little Sister, who had fallen asleep, Big Sister began to feel health, balance of spirit and soul return to her. She saw that she too had been seen as someone deserving of getting away. Not Little Sister alone. She too had been supported. Not just frightened and burdened down with other people’s children and horrible tales of woe. She too had been helped.

As she thought of this, and turned to Little Sister to tell her how that last day of her childhood had been, she noticed that though usually so cheery and confident, she had started, in her sleep, to weep.

“Ah, wake up, Little Sister, it’s not as bad as all that!” Big Sister said gently, shaking her.

And true to her irritating self, Little Sister, tears still rolling off the side of her chin, opened her eyes and endeavored to smile.

“Oh, cut it out,” said Big Sister. “I see those tears!”

“You do?” said Little Sister, surprised.

“Yes!” said Big Sister emphatically.

More tears appeared instantly in Little Sister’s eyes. She began to sob, much as she had when she was a child. She cried, leaning against Big Sister’s shoulder, until there were no tears left. And sure enough, soon she was smiling for real, because she was with her Big Sister, after all, and they were celebrating the close of a very happy day.