Joy

Just as he got out the door, that’s when a little towhead white boy come up and got ready to put his finger on the bell like he couldn’t see the door flung wide open and me bent over the bottom step with the pail and brush.

‘Don’t ring that,’ I told him. ‘What you wanting?’ I was fed up with neighborhood children laying on the bell every afternoon while I watched the TV and begging money for everything from them same old tasteless brownie cookies year after year to school raffles. And not none of it did I ever need nor want.

Joy’s little voice was practically singing when she piped up loud to say, ‘That’s Bernie and he’s my best friend from class.’ She was all ’a sudden rocking on both feet, she was so happy to see that knock kneeded boy. ‘I’ll be right down Bernie, but I have to get my present and tell my mama I’m leaving.’

She disappeared in the doorway and I gave him the once over like I would an untold number of straw headed boys that would come to that door looking for Joy over the next ten years.

Bernie’s hair was near enough the color of Joy’s organdy dress and though he was freckled and plain as any Tom Sawyer, you could tell by the way she got kinda giggly and giddy that she thought he was the cat’s pajamas. And her not but eight.

That day, I watched her march off proud, swinging Bernie’s arm to and fro as high as it would go. And I heard their small feet in their best party shoes crunching across gravel stones of the building’s parking lot before they climbed into his daddy’s blue De Soto. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that them children made a pretty picture with him in a fresh pressed white long-sleeved shirt and bow tie. She had a white satin ribbon tied in a big bow and streaming down around her fat ponytail and both ponytail and ribbon swung back and forth with her and Bernie.

I got on with my Saturday chores and didn’t think no more about little Joy that afternoon, so it surprised me when evening fell and she was ringing our apartment bell.

‘You come visiting?’ I asked her when I opened the door a crack to see but not be seen. Me and Freddie B was already in our bedclothes though it wasn’t but six thirty, ’cause back in them days our treat on a Saturday night was to tuck up on the living room sofa and watch whatever was on the TV soon as we cleared away our supper dishes.

Joy didn’t answer and looked sheepish when she handed me a wad of something wrapped in a children’s party napkin. I could tell right away from the squidgy feel and sweet smell that it was fresh layered icing cake. ‘What’s this?’ I asked her anyway, ’cause I was embarrassed that she’d brought us something. I wasn’t use to getting no gifts, especially from no children.

‘It’s some cake from the party I’ve been to,’ she told me. She was scared to look me in the eye when she said it.

‘Lord, child, Mister Freddie B didn’t mean for you to bring him back no cake. Not for real. He was just kidding you on!’

‘I saved my piece for him and asked the lady to cut it in half, so there’s a piece for you too. It has jellybeans on it too.’

It wasn’t till Joy was grown that she owned up that she’d snitched that piece of cake, but at the time I thought she’d deprived herself for our sake and receiving it made my eyes tear up. Joy waited like she wanted to come in, standing at my door by herself like a little brown angel on a mission from heaven and what with the strong smell of sugar and vanilla coming off the paper napkin parcel in my hand and the sight of her in that yellow organdy dress in the dingy passage that I was forever sweeping, my mind drifted to Freddie B’s favorite passage from the Bible that says ‘Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares’.

I didn’t ask her in that night ’cause we sure wasn’t really dressed to take in company with me in pincurls readying for our service first thing Sunday, but I went down to the gadget store below us that following Monday and picked her up a little doll baby. It wasn’t but a $2.98 one, but I decided that I would keep it in my place, so’s in case I could coax her over for a visit, there’d be something to give her to play with.

I’d bought her a bat and ball as well but I’d broke it trying it out by the time she finally come to visit me proper, and I even had a twin cherry popsicle on hand in my freezer compartment, which I couldn’t get her to take ’cause she said her mama didn’t like her taking food from folks.

‘But I ain’t folks,’ I said to her. ‘I’m your buddy, and what’s mine is yours.’

It didn’t never matter to me that Joy wasn’t my own flesh and blood. From the beginning, it brightened my spirits to have her to think about, and as Freddie B took to bringing little trinkets home for her like I did without me telling him to, I believed she was the little girl I’d prayed for and used to get him to call her our God-sent child.

It happened that about a month before Joy’d brought me and Freddie that birthday cake, I’d been to buy some new shoes in a flood warehouse sale at Hodgeson’s which was the cheapest place in Oakland to get quality shoes. I ain’t never been one for wasting my husband’s money on clothes, but I’m partial to fancy shoes and have been since my school days in New Orleans when I had to walk a mile shoeless to the schoolhouse everyday, summer and winter. I swore then that when I got grown I’d have more shoes than the law should allow, and even though I usually like to wear a old pair of slip-slides around the house, I always got me at least half dozen nice dress shoes tucked in shoe lasts in the closet. I don’t see it as waste, ’cause I can feel low spirited and put on a pair of pretty shoes that can get me smiling in no time like somebody that’s got something to celebrate.

So, at Hodgeson’s flood sale, when I laid eyes on a real unusual pair of royal blue lace-up high heels, I was determined that I was gonna have them, the only trouble being that they had just that one pair, size 3 1/2. They wasn’t but $5.95 which was even cheap for back then, and they had a beautiful 2 1/2 inch splayed heel and was laced up with leather up the front from about a inch in from the toe. There wasn’t no way I could get my big brogans in ’em, ’cause I been a size 8 since I was sixteen, but I bought them anyway. Luckily, it’s snatch ‘n’ grab at them flood sales, so nobody from the sales department was around to ask me what I was doing buying them 3 1/2 shoes for my big flat feet.

I knew Freddie B wouldn’t of been proud of me spending his hard earned money on high heels too small for me or anybody I knew to wear, but I took a hankering for them that much that I bought them anyhow, and decided on the way home not to show him ’cause he’d of only had to see them come out their paisley box to be asking what I’d bought such weeny shoes for. Not that he complains about spending on clothes if he reckons I’ll wear them. In fact it was me that fussed when he spent all that money on my real expensive red fox stole for our tenth wedding anniversary in ’53.

Anyway, I didn’t let him see them shoes and tucked the box they was in that said ‘P-a-p-a-g-a-l-l-o, Made in Italy’ all the way in the back of our deep clothes closet where he didn’t never look. And some days, when I got fed up staring out the window at folks passing and there wasn’t nothing good on the TV, I’d dig that shoebox out the closet. I felt like Grace Kelly or somebody just knowing the high heels was mine, and it didn’t worry me one bit that I could only get my toes in them.

Anyway, one afternoon, about a week after Joy’d brought me and Freddie B that piece of birthday cake, I had ’em out when there was a knock at my apartment door. As wasn’t nobody living in the building at the time but us and the Bangs directly across the hall, I figured it was one of them and opened the door more than a crack. I was real glad to discover it was Joy and got that excited at seeing her that I invited her in before I remembered that I had them shoes sitting out in the middle of my living room floor.

She’d come carrying the rent money for her mother and wanting a receipt, so I told her to have a seat on my sofa. Of course, being a girl after my own heart, the first thing her eyes fell on was them royal blue shoes.

‘Golly, Mrs Ross, aren’t they the swishiest high heels! Golly! Golly!’ Joy cried out and plopped herself straight down by them on the floor, so she could oogle them up close.

I could tell from the fuss she made of the soft leather that she had a natural eye for a first class item, and it tickled me to see a little girl’s eyes dance more excited that afternoon about them shoes than I was when I bought them.

‘Papagallo,’ she read out loud holding up the box lid. She was sure a good reader and didn’t falter at that strange looking word like I did, and when I told Freddie B how good she could read it wasn’t long before he was paying her twenty-five cents every Friday night to read him Psalms out the Bible. Joy’s face beamed proud as she read the rest of what was on the shoebox lid. ‘Made in Italy.’ She looked at me. ‘Made all the way in Italy where Mama says all the best shoemakes come from and they’re my second favorite color after red.’

Boy, oh boy, my heart was doing a rumba to have that pretty child sitting on my living room floor grinning at them blue shoes like they was made of gold. The color of them heels actually clashed with the basic blue running through her plaid skirt and the baby blue blouse she was wearing, but I didn’t mention that. Instead I said, ‘They’d look good with that outfit of your’n. You want to try them on?’

‘Mama says we mustn’t put our feet in her new high heels, because we might break the bridge,’ Joy said sounding woeful while she pulled her long, thick ponytail around to stick the end of it in her mouth.

‘Don’t go sticking dirty hair in your mouth,’ I chastised her like I would of my own.

‘Sorry,’ she said right quick and her expression dipped from sunny to sad like she thought she’d done something real bad, all ’cause of what I’d said. Me. Miss Ham-Fisted.

‘You don’t have to say ‘‘sorry’’ ’cause there ain’t nothing to be sorry about. I didn’t mean to sound rough on you. Who am I to be telling you off. Stick that ol’ hair in your mouth if’n it makes you feel better.’

But she didn’t do it and shifted herself like she was fixing to get up and go.

‘Well,’ I said, dragging the word out and trying to think how I could stop her. ‘It might be the rule over in your mama’s place that you can’t wear her high heels ’cause it breaks the bridge, but here in Baby Palatine’s you can try on any of my shoes that you like and even clump about in ’em.’ With that I bent down to hand Joy the left Papagallo and curtsyed like I was a page giving Cinderella that glass slipper, and her face lit up like a Christmas tree.

‘You’ll really let me try them on, Mrs Ross?’ She giggled all the while unbuckling her brown school shoes that somebody had given a good polish.

‘Not only that,’ I said heading for the bathroom and unhooking the big oblong mirror from off the wall ’cause we didn’t have no full length one in the apartment, ‘but Baby Palatine is gonna get you a mirror so’s you can see yourself in ’em.’ I set it at a angle against the living room wall, ’cause that’s what I had to do anytime I wanted to see myself from the knees down.

Neither of us could believe how near them shoes came to fitting Joy’s feet and she looked like a zillion dollars teetering around in them with her white cotton ankle socks still on. She only wobbled a bit though, she said ’cause the shoes was about a size too big.

‘They belong to you now,’ I told her and meant it. Though they was my newest and favoritest thing in the world, I wanted to give them to her way more than I ever wanted them myself. ‘But,’ I added, ‘… and this is a big ‘‘but’’ … since your mama don’t want you walking in high heels, I reckon you better leave these over here in their box at the back of my closet, and you can come over in the afternoons and wear them. But they gotta be our secret from everybody, ’cause I don’t want your sisters getting jealous and Mr Freddie B don’t know I got them.’

‘I’m good at keeping secrets,’ said Joy running her forefinger across her lips like she was sealing them up. ‘I like secrets better than butter pecan ice cream.’ Then she shared a couple with me no sooner than she said that. She whispered in my ear so not even the walls would hear that she was in love with Bernie Finkelstein and that she wanted to marry Alan Ladd, the movie star, she thought Bernie looked just like. I swore on the Bible that I wouldn’t tell nobody.

Them secret Papagallo shoes was the first big bond me and Joy had between us, and the fact that nobody knew about ’em but us made Joy’s afterschool visits seem all the more exciting to her when she would slip over and double lock my front door leaving Brenda by herself to watch the cartoons as Tammy didn’t get in from work till six thirty by the time she’d also stopped off to pick Anndora up from the minder’s.

Joy loved to hang over in my place playing with that $2.98 doll I’d got her and tipping around like she was grown in them royal blue high heels, licking a popsicle or sucking a toffee I’d got in for her.

After her first few visits, I went to the dime store and bought some more for her to play with, ’cause I didn’t want her to get bored and that little cheap doll neither walked or talked and wasn’t that much fun. Remembering how I liked jacks when I was her age, I got her some and the woman in the dime store sold me a board game she said was popular with her own daughter called Chinese checkers that had pretty colored marbles. Lots of ’em in six different colors.

But Joy’s favorite turned out to be the ball and jacks. She’d sit cross-legged on my polished parquet floor and want to play game after game with me. I pretended not to notice if she cheated, and as my hand was way bigger than hers for scooping up the jacks, I had a advantage over her anyway. So I figured it was fair enough if’n she needed to cheat to win.

When I’d slip a saucer full of homemade lemon drop cookies over to Brenda, she’d hardly look up from the noisy TV set and didn’t seem to mind that my God-sent child played over with me. Though Tammy’d told the kids not to take food off folks, I told Brenda, like I’d told Joy, I wasn’t just folks, and if we didn’t tell Tammy about the cookies, she wouldn’t have nothing to get mad at no way. Both the girls seemed scared of her, but Joy more than Brenda, and it worried me.

Whereas I did a lot of mooning out the window at other women in the streets with their kids ’fore Joy and me got to be pals, I suddenly had her afterschool visits to look forward to, and like I told Freddie B who noticed how I’d perked up and kept my hair combed, I hadn’t never met no child as well behaved as Joy before. ‘You can be bad in here if you want,’ I’d say ’cause she was almost too good and could get so quiet I’d tell her, ‘Go on and bang some pots and pans if you want.’ She was so like a grown woman sometimes though, telling me how good my cakes and cookies was and how much nicer I kept my place than her mother did theirs as she didn’t bother to collect up Anndora’s toys. And Joy had perfect manners and didn’t never forget her pleases and thank yous neither.

My baby sister Helen was kind of jealous that Joy came into my life, ’cause ’fore Joy, I used to put up with Helen laying in a stupor around my apartment when it suited her. Her and my brother Caesar used to come and drink each other under the table, but I lost tolerance for their street corner shenanigans when I thought Joy was likely to pop by, ’cause I don’t hold with getting drunk in front of kids. And neither Helen nor Caesar was content unless they had a bottle of whiskey or wine at their lips.

Helen tried at first to poison my mind about Joy and claimed that the child was too good to be true, and that she wouldn’t trust no eight year old that was so full of compliments for everybody and didn’t never put a foot wrong. She said she had a second sense that Joy wasn’t all she seemed, but with drink in her, Helen’s got a mean streak and it ain’t wise to listen to what she says. ‘There’s Joy telling you how much she likes the gold tooth you got in the front, and there’s you mouthing bad about the child. Now I’ll tell you straight Miss Helen D’Orleans you’re just jealous ’cause I got me a little girl.’

She’d stick out her tongue at me like she was five years old whenever I said something mean to her and had been doing it since she was a kid, but at twenty-seven it didn’t suit her no more.

‘You don’t know where that woman and them kids don’ come from,’ slurred Helen, ‘nor where they’re going to. ’S’pose it’s hell and back,’ she said, and laughed that drunken laugh of her’n. Ever since she was little Helen knew just what to say to vexate me. She could be like a mosquito buzzing ’round my ear, driving me to distraction, and what she said got my thoughts going.

Not knowing nothing of Joy and her family before they moved to Oakland left me brimming over with questions that little Joy acted like she wasn’t supposed to answer. So I figured her mother’d had warned her not to go spreading their business, though I did find out that her daddy had had nice dark brown wavy hair like Joy’s and a thin mustache and was young when he died unexpected not long before they’d up and moved West from Wilmington, Delaware. But Joy would go quiet and find an excuse to slip home if I asked about her when she was little, so I stopped prying, till curiosity got the better of me during one of her afternoon visits a couple of months after she’d started coming over.

She was setting in the middle of my living room floor on her fivesies in our third straight game of jacks, when I told her to pop over to her place and bring me some of her baby pictures so I could see what she looked like growing up. I figured that wasn’t nosying in with questions, but was just about looking at photos. That’s when she came back with her snag-a-tooth picture and we had that to-do, ’cause she drew in her two front missing teeth with a pencil and then got terrified that I’d tell her mama.

But like I explained to Joy, it was real baby, baby pictures that I was interested in, and when she claimed her mama didn’t have none, I refused to believe it. ‘Can’t you let me have a see, please, please pretty please,’ I begged like a agitating child. ‘I don’t know no mother in the world that don’t keep her hands on a few baby pictures.’ And I didn’t. Every woman I knew that had a child had some pictures to brag on when they was babies.

So the next day Joy come visiting, I asked her again for a see of some pictures while she was playing herself a game of Chinese checkers and I was ironing Freddie B’s shirts.

‘Don’t you got just one?’ I asked. ‘Not just one bitty, bitty one even?’ I longed to know what my God-sent looked like when she was one or two or three even. ‘Who you was as a baby is important to me, Joy. And the less you tell me the more I itch to want to know ’cause pals is supposed to know everything about each other. Your mama hasn’t got just one?’ I said, showing her that a picture the size of my thumbnail would do me fine.

‘Honest Injun,’ Joy answered like I’d taught her to say instead of ‘Swear to God’ which is what she made me say before she’d tell me something that I wasn’t suppose to know, like how much her mother paid for that pair of beige high heels she bought at Hodgeson’s that I really liked.

‘Honest, Baby Palatine, honest, honest, honest, honest!’ she hollered banging her balled up fist on the floor. It was as close as she got to showing spunk, ’cause up to then she was as polite with me as kids are with strangers, though I’d got her to stop calling me Mrs Ross like I was some old fogy. ‘I only have that first grade picture and I already gave you one,’ she said emphatic and pointing to where I’d tucked it in Corinthians in Freddie B’s big black Bible on the sideboard.

‘It ain’t like you was born during the war when didn’t nobody have the time to think about taking no pictures. I bet it’s that you don’t want me to see ’em.’ Then I took to teasing her. ‘What’s the matter, you was a ugly baby and you’re scared I’ll make fun of you?’

The minute I said that her eyes watered up like she was going to cry, and she rushed to put all the marbles and the Chinese checkers board in their box and put them back careful in the broom cupboard where I kept all her play things.

I was annoyed with myself for upsetting Joy and did my best to make it up by saying, ‘I was just joshing. Any fool can see that …’ Then I stepped away from the ironing board to do a shuffle and swing Freddie B’s work shirt in front of me while I broke out singing, ‘You Must have been a Beautiful Baby’ that I’d heard many a time on the radio. But as toneless as my deep voice is, it’s no wonder that it didn’t make her smile. I wasn’t good with kids in them days. Not like Freddie, ’cause I was too quick to talk to them like they was grown and say things in too harsh a way. Hadn’t nobody taught me better, and funny enough, it was Joy, little as she was, who used to tell me that it was best not to say exactly what was on your mind, ’cause people like to hear compliments and not what you was really thinking. Not but eight and she already knew grown folks’ tricks that I didn’t know. That’s what living in the city can do for kids.

Though she had beat me at jacks for the third time that afternoon before she started playing Chinese checkers, I said, ‘Come on Joy, let’s have another game of jacks. I don’t care about no ol’ baby pictures.’

But they stayed on my mind, so later that evening when her mother had give her and Brenda and Anndora their supper and let ’em go downstairs to play out in our parking lot, I settled down with Tammy for a cup of coffee and asked if she had any old family albums I could see. By then, I’d got up a regular habit of popping over to her place to keep her company after the kids’ supper, ’cause she didn’t know nobody else in the neighborhood and hadn’t made no friends at work.

‘Both my husband and I were orphans,’ she said, ‘so we had no families. I’m sure I told you that we’d met in the orphanage in upstate New York when we were sixteen.’

True enough she’d mentioned it when I asked her for references for renting the apartment, but at the time I didn’t take no notice, ’cause when she said she had three kids I didn’t figure we would end up taking her no way, ’cause the last thing I wanted was somebody’s brood of bad-assed, nappy-headed children to have to scrub up behind. She had also said at the time that her husband didn’t leave her nothing and got hisself killed when a crate fell on him in the shipyard warehouse where they was both working for which her and them kids didn’t get but $5500 compensation from the company.

But setting there cosy in Tammy’s place with a steaming cup of milky coffee in my hand, when I asked to see family photos, she walked straight over to a bureau and unlocked the top drawer and brought out a whole stack of pictures which she seemed quite happy at first to show off. And I got so excited I didn’t know where to put my face.

I don’t know how many umpteen baby pictures of Brenda and Anndora I skimmed over, though I ooohed and aaaahed loud at every single one thinking I’d best be polite. But nice as they were, I was really only wanting to see the ones of Joy, ’cause them other two children didn’t mean so much to me like she did, ’cause Brenda was often broody and Anndora was so spoiled that it was impossible to like her, cute though she was.

When me and Tammy had sifted through nearly the whole pile, about thirty-five pictures in all, and I hadn’t seen one of Joy, I lost patience and asked Tammy in a backhanded way why Joy got missed out. ‘How come you got so many beautiful pictures of your eldest and your youngest?’

‘Sherman. That was my late husband … Sherman.’ Her expression clouded over and she sounded scornful when she seeped out his name that second time, like he didn’t bear her no happy memories. ‘He liked to think of himself as an amateur photographer and loved to use the children as his subjects. He could even do his own developing,’ she added brightening up a bit. ‘I would definitely have encouraged him to start up a photography business but with his depressions, I wasn’t sure that he’d be able to deal with the public.’