Joy

I could see her bite her tongue for letting go of that much in front of me. It was easy to tell that Tammy didn’t like to talk about him, and whereas I first thought it was ’cause she was still mourning, I began to wonder. His body hadn’t long been in the ground ’fore she picked up and decided to give herself and them girls a fresh start by moving West on the advice, so she claimed, of a girl in her typing pool in Wilmington, who had an aunt in Oakland.

As Tammy handed me a shiny black and white photo, about eight by ten inches of her holding Brenda as a toddler, she said, ‘Sherman was really good, wasn’t he? I think so many of them look professional.’

She was right. The way he used the lights made a soft halo around both mother and child in the picture I was holding and he’d got them to sit semi-profile but still look straight at the camera. It looked like he took ’em in a studio, but Tammy said they was actually setting on the toilet seat with a gray wool blanket tacked on the wall behind them.

It was abvious the picture had been taken after the war, ’cause Tammy had her hair swept up in a smooth fat pompadour roll at the side that was fashionable in them days. And she was wearing a dark box shoulder dress that had big white cloth buttons down the front and a square scooped neckline with heavy white broderie lace trim around it that made me notice for the first time that she had a swan’s neck. There wasn’t a blemish to be seen on her young, wide-eyed face, and if they’d had colored calendar girls back in the forties, Tammy would for sure have been eligible.

Looking at that picture, it was easy to see where Joy and Anndora got their best features from.

Their mother had Anndora’s delicate bone structure and perfectly shaped Kewpie doll lips, Joy’s big slanted almond eyes and pointy nose and Brenda’s only redeeming feature, skin as smooth as a baby’s butt. Although Tammy wasn’t ebony like Brenda and had a unusual skin tone halfway between Anndora’s pale complexion and Joy’s rich dark chestnut color.

In fact, anybody looking at that picture Tammy’d handed me of her and Brenda would have assumed that the sorry looking baby on Tammy’s lap was somebody else’s, except that Brenda did get her mother’s high forehead and widow’s peak. It was two shames though that on Brenda they were so oversized, they didn’t flatter, so whereas Tammy’s high forehead and widow’s peak was a beauty feature with the way she wore her hair swept back, on Brenda the forehead was so broad and her hair was so thin and scraggly like chicken fluff, that Brenda’s widow’s peak looked more like a receding hairline. Which ain’t too helpful on a girl.

Poor Brenda didn’t never grow enough hair to sweep it back off her face so it looked neat nor could she comb it down on her forehead in a bang to make her forehead look smaller, and I would have said that it was cruel of God to birth any girl child so plain that had such a pretty mama. But to his credit, he did make up the difference with them diamond vocal cords he lavished on Brenda. Not that any of us knew it at that time or they showed in that baby picture of her with Tammy that I was meant to be admiring that evening sitting over at Tammy’s.

All that my naked eye and anybody else’s could of seen was a super pretty young girl half smiling and a verging on ugly baby grinning with not but four teeth in her whole mouth.

‘This is sure a pretty picture of you and Brenda,’ I lied a little like Joy had taught me, and handed it back to Tammy. ‘And don’t kid yourself,’ I added to sprinkle some truth on what I’d said, ‘Sherman wasn’t all that clever with the camera. You got God to thank some too, ’cause you was fine as you wanted to be.’ That made her happy, and while it was true of the young Tammy in the photograph, the actual one sitting by me, though good looking, had aged quite a bit, though it couldn’t have been more than nine years since that picture was taken, ’cause Brenda wasn’t but ten. Tammy’s sweet innocent look that she had in the picture was gone and it wasn’t just because of the sophisticated blond streak at the side of her temple. Pretty features ain’t all that makes a woman beautiful. How she holds them counts for something too, and from the first that I met Tammy when she came to look at the furnished apartment we had advertised in the Tribune she always looked worried and under strain, even when from time to time she’d belt out that barroom laugh of hers if something on the television’d give her something to laugh at.

But that evening setting in her place in Oakland, I’d finished my coffee, it was getting dark and I still didn’t have what I’d come for which was a baby picture of Joy.

‘I can’t wait for you to show me the ones Sherman took of Joy,’ I said, but no sooner than them words petered out of my big mouth, Tammy’s friendly air iced over and she gave me a chilly look which unnerved me about as much as I expect she wanted it to.

‘Sherman never took any of Joy,’ she said in that tight-lipped way folks’ll try on whenever they mean not to be questioned no further. But I was ready to bite the bullet, because why would a father take all them wonderful pictures of two of his children and not take none of the third? Seeing as Joy was born between Brenda and Anndora, it took some explaining for Joy’s sake if nobody else’s.

‘That’s a doggone disgrace,’ I said daring to push the point further. I say dared ’cause not but a week before we was setting there going through them pictures, Tammy had been over my place and showed herself to have a sharp, ugly tongue when she cussed out my baby sister Helen twice in a night. I got to admit that Helen was blind falling down drunk and deserved a tongue lashing. So setting there in Tammy’s living room while the sweet sounds of her three children playing below drifted through the kitchen window, I tried to laugh a bit to make out that what I was about to say to her was a joke. But I figure she could tell that I meant it.

‘Didn’t Sherman favor Joy?’ I asked.

She didn’t let me finish her daughter’s name before her lip curled back like a dog about ready to bite. ‘You have one big damn big hell of a nerve to say something as nasty as that,’ she said. Then she yanked back the few pictures I was still holding in my hand. I’d been kneeling down on her wine rug in front of the coffee table which was piled with the photos that we’d been through and she was perched on the edge of the naughahyde grey-green sofa bed that had a tear in it, so I leapt up quick thinking that I best go home ’fore she said something that would make me do something that wasn’t Christian. Like hit her. ’Cause if I want to, I can have as much temper as the next one. So forcing myself to sound friendly and polite I said, ‘Freddie B will be expecting his Friday night fry-up to be on the table when he gets home from work, so I best do my duty and get to cleaning that mackerel I bought him this morning.’

Tammy didn’t try to fake no pleasantries like I did that evening. Without saying so much as ‘goodbye’ or ‘dog kiss my foot’ she stalked off into her bedroom through the double doors and slammed them so hard it’s a wonder the full length mirrors screwed on them didn’t crack. I was stunned ’cause it wasn’t like I’d said nothing all that bad about her husband, so it didn’t make no sense that she got as mad as she did, but I put it down to her caring more about Sherman than I’d realized, ’cause I wouldn’t of put up with no woman making no remark about Freddie B if he was dead neither. But still, ’fore I let myself out, I went to the kitchen window and called the children in ’cause I feared their mama was in such a temper she’d forgot she’d left them out playing in the night air.

After that ding dong with Tammy, for the whole month of April, she wouldn’t say nothing but a begrudging ‘morning’ and ‘evening’ to either me or Freddie B if she happened on us in the hall, and I got tired of him asking me what she could have been in such a huff about. But something told me not to tell him how I’d been trying to get a picture of Joy and had said something to Tammy about her husband not favoring Joy like he did Brenda and Anndora that got Tammy so mad.

It perplexed my poor husband to see me mope around when he’d come in from work, but what I couldn’t explain was that once Tammy stopped speaking, Joy stopped slipping in to see me in the afternoons, and she wouldn’t even take none of the cookies I’d baked for her if I offered it to her and Brenda in the hall after school. She’d give a meek smile and say, ‘We can’t take food from strangers,’ like she did when we first got to be pals.

Brenda acted like she was scared to look at me when she’d say, ‘Hello Mrs Ross,’ hardly loud enough for me to hear and all formal after I’d got so used to all of ’em calling me Baby Palatine. Even Anndora, who I suspect was born with her nose stuck up in the air, and didn’t never take notice of me anyhow, so when she didn’t give me a smile, I was used to it. She didn’t take to nobody outside her immediate family and her mama didn’t teach her that it was rude to look through people like she didn’t see them.

My baby sister Helen said not to pay it no mind at first. Then she got mad when Tammy wouldn’t bother to speak to her neither. ‘Evict her black ass!’ Helen said one day loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear. ‘Throw ’em all in the street! You don’t have to put up with that uppity mess.’

As the Bangs’ apartment door was directly opposite ours, it made me feel real uncomfortable with them not being neighborly, ’cause wasn’t nobody else living in the fourplex but them and us, since Mr Houseman wouldn’t get the plumbing fixed in them two studio apartments up at the front. But I just prayed night and day that things would get to rights, so that I could have Joy back.

All that April, at about half past three on weekdays, I would hear Joy and Brenda let themselves into the main door downstairs, and then leave it to slam shut as they raced each other to our landing to unlock the door to their place. With my ear cupped to my front door, I could hear that they was whispering and trying to be real quiet while they got their door open, and I knew they was scared that I’d come out and either embarrass them by saying ‘hi’ or offering them something. Once, I got the idea to leave the Papagallos in the box outside my door to remind Joy of the good times we’d had, but common sense got the better of me and I baked my baby sister her favorite lemon meringue pie instead.

But that month and a bit of us not speaking must have been way harder on Tammy than it was on me, ’cause I’m sure she’d got used to me doing things for her children. Not just Joy neither. ’Cause me and Freddie did try to remember them other two everytime we handed out quarters and bought double decker ice cream cones downstairs at the soda fountain in the drugstore that Mr Houseman’s son-in-law ran below us. And while Tammy didn’t have neither the time, inclination nor know-how to bake cakes and cookies like I did every week, her children must have been missing them goodies I’d always had for after dinner and weekend surprises.

Me and Freddie B was always buying the girls expensive treats on his pay day like eskimo pies, ’cause we knew that Tammy couldn’t really afford them extras on her stenographer’s salary. She couldn’t earn half as much doing office work as Freddie B did for bricklaying back in them fifties. So we had way more money to sling around than she did, and to top it off, we wasn’t hardly paying no rent to old man Houseman in exchange for managing his building.

Anyway, one Sunday in May, about five weeks after the photo mess with Tammy, when me and Freddie B’d been back from our church meeting for a couple of hours, long enough for him to fall asleep as usual in front of the television, Tammy come banging on our door. Hysterical she was with Anndora sniveling in her arms ’cause Anndora had cut her hand pretty bad playing restaurant and trying to open a can of Spam with a sharp can opener.

Tammy needed for Freddie B to rush her and the children over to Oakland General which was way on the other side of town, but I offered to let her leave Joy and Brenda with me which she did gladly. I was sure glad that I had on my Sunday best when they came and didn’t have my hair nappy. And I could see that Joy was glad to be setting back in my place even though she wasn’t saying nothing to me.

Since the emergency ward was as crowded as I warned Freddie B it would be on a Sunday afternoon with it starting to get real hot in our part of the world, they had to wait around for hours at the hospital ’fore Anndora got them three catgut stitches that the doctor said she had to have.

Expecting they would take as long, while Joy played Brenda a game of Chinese checkers that I told her to take out the broom closet, I made the two big ones their favorite snack of a thick wad of grape jelly, between slices of nice fresh soft white bread and left two covered plates full of pork roast, crackling and greens in the warm oven for Tammy and Freddie B coming in, ’cause him and me was due back to the church at five as usual. And I was determined to be there as the whole congregation was planning to turn out ’cause Sister Hall’s brother Tommy was in town from New York City and was gonna sit in with the choir. He was a jazz trumpeter that showed up from time to time, to play for our church when he was working some clubs in San Fran. Them little bips and bops he added to sweeten Miss Scott’s piano playing always transformed the music and inspired our choir times before when he’d come, and I didn’t want to miss it.

Naturally I was also excited that I had a excuse to have to take Joy and Brenda along with me not knowing how late their mama would be held up at the hospital. I was shocked when they admitted while I was getting them into their best dresses that they hadn’t never been inside no church.

‘Not neither for wedding nor funeral!’ I didn’t bother to ask how they missed getting to church when their daddy died, ’cause it wasn’t my business, but I thought that Mrs Tamasina Bang needed her backside slapped for not attending to them children’s souls. And with all the hoo-ha she sometimes made about colored people being backward, there she was acting backwards herself.

Like I explained to Brenda and Joy ’fore we climbed the bus heading for the meeting, at the First Tabernacle of Saint Barnabus where me and Freddie was members and he was a deacon, the actual building wasn’t nothing but a ol’ grocery store that we was renting till the congregation could collect up enough to do better. But I didn’t tell them that by no way of apology, ’cause I was proud of our church. And with that choir of twelve, including Sister Hall who’d done some gospel recordings, First Tabernacle didn’t need my apologies nor nobody else’s.

Once we was on the bus, Joy was acting back to her usual and it was nice to hear her say I looked real pretty, although pretty is one thing I ain’t never really been. Not bad looking, but not much better than ordinary ’cause of my teeth being too long and my cheeks being pudgy even when I ain’t carrying no extra weight which I wasn’t back in them days. I was wearing my white felt had with the black and white mesh veil and had pressed, waved and curled my hair, ’cause it didn’t matter how I used to go around looking on weekdays, I didn’t mess on Sundays. And still don’t. I had a good figure all through them fifties and in that chartreuse suit with the short waisted bolero jacket I had on that Sunday I showed it off, I think, though the skirt kept riding up ’cause any skirt that fitted me snug around the waist like that chartreuse one did was always too tight for me round the backside and didn’t want to stay down. And I knew I had to warn Joy and Brenda ’fore we got to church that a few ladies might get to fainting if the spirit hit them, but the girls wasn’t to worry ’cause that was a powerful sign that the Lord was with us.

From the minute we arrived outside First Tabernacle, the girls had themselves a high time. The church was located on the corner of 7th and Front in a part of town where nobody bothered to sweep the streets and it was tucked between a tailor shop and a bakery, but since neither was open on a Sunday, if it was too hot to wait inside the church before Reverend Earl and his wife Naomi turned up, folks with little children used to congregate outside and some of us could sit on the big wooden ledge of the bakery window which had a big awning that cut out the sun that set in our direction.

Joy and Brenda was my pride wearing their organdy party frocks and out there playing tag with the other children when the pastor drove up. When I introduced her and her sister to him and his wife Joy said, like she’d rehearsed it, ‘Good evening, Reverend and Mrs Earl, I’m very pleased to meet you.’ All that was missing was a curtsy.

He sure worked up a lively sermon that evening and I was thankful that it brought a couple Sisters to their feet. ‘Vengeance must be the Lord’s’ was the theme, and Joy asked me what vengeance meant while the choir was getting situated. I did the best I could to explain. ‘I think it means don’t try to get back at folks if they do something bad to you.’ She smiled and nodded but I could tell she didn’t take it in. Remembering that Joy and Brenda wouldn’t know none of the songs that we’d be asked to join in on with the choir, I whispered to Joy to tell Brenda just to clap her hands.

After the choir got to singing the fourth verse of ‘My Father’s House has Many Rooms’, and Sister what’s-her-name with the dyed red hair started to sing her solo with some trumpet accompaniment by Tommy Hall, Brenda got to waving her arms and hopping from foot to foot like she got a little spirit, but soon as I saw Joy swat her with her Bible study manual, I figured Brenda wasn’t doing nothing but mocking some of my congregation and I chewed her out about it soon as we got outside. Though she swore blind that the spirit had actually hit her. I got to admit she was the one that begged me to take her again and tried to tell her mama all about the choir, and Sister Hall’s brother playing the trumpet and Reverend Earl’s message about vengeance and how Sister Slater broke and run up to him in the middle of his sermon and tried to pull him off the pulpit ’cause the spirit got to her so.

But Tammy was too caught up telling her own story to me about what had happened in the hospital to take any notice of what Brenda had to say. And whereas I would of expected Tammy to be het up with worry about Anndora who was passed out ’sleep in her mama’s lap from the day’s excitement, Tammy had her mouth full to overflowing with the name of John Dagwood who she’d met in the emergency ward.

‘I felt so sorry for the poor guy,’ she said. ‘His first day in town after driving all the way from Detroit and he had the bad luck to have a truck back into him at a stop light. He said he thought he only had a little whiplash, but being in the insurance business he thought he’d get a hospital x-ray on his back because John Dagwood said if you don’t handle things in the right way you never get any compensation. And after the trouble I had getting compensation for Sherman, I know what he means. Of course, Mr Dagwood said had Sherman been white things might have been different.’ I listened with one ear, ’cause I was too busy noticing how strange and quiet Joy got sitting next to her mama and stroking her baby sister’s little fair arm that was tucked under Tammy’s while Anndora was laying ’sleep with her perfect lips parted looking every bit like one of them baby beauties that was on the Ivory soap commercial. Joy was slowly running one finger up and down Anndora’s forearm and hedging as close as she seemed to dare to sit by her mama who tensed up when Joy got near to her. Tammy acted like somebody who don’t want to be touched and she was not trying to give Joy none of the hug that her Anndora was hogging all to herself.

‘You want to come over here and sit on Baby Palatine’s lap?’ I asked Joy in the middle of Tammy saying that John Dagwood had asked for her phone number, because he didn’t know many people in Oakland and thought it might be a good place to settle while he waited for a job with some national insurance firm in San Francisco.

Couldn’t nobody blame Brenda when she gave up trying to tell her mother about our First Tabernacle choir and slumped over to sprawl herself in front of the TV which was blaring all the while her and Tammy had talked at cross purposes. I was glad that Joy’d sidled over to sit on my lap, but at eight she was already a bit too long limbed for cuddling which is why I figured that her mother didn’t like to bother.

‘Did Mr Ross like John Dagwood?’ Joy asked her mama like a grown person trying hard to make conversation with somebody they ain’t got nothing in common with. Nothing like when Joy and me was together and could have us a laugh about Dennis the Menace in the funny papers or what Bernie had told her in the playground at school or her pencil drawings of girls in evening gowns. She was always drawing the same looking white girls with a flip-up hair-do wearing fancy evening gowns designed different, though they had the same heart shaped bodice.

Tammy answered Joy with, ‘Freddie fell asleep after the first hour’s wait and I was very happy to have someone to talk to that looked decent and spoke like he had some education.’ I hoped she wasn’t referring to my husband being one of them who didn’t look nor talk right and she could see I was taking it wrong, ’cause she was careful to add, ‘Of course that emergency ward was as full of riffraff and alcoholics as you predicted it would be, Baby, and I’m glad we won’t have to go back there again, because that young doctor said that any qualified MD can take out Anndora’s stitches as the cut was not serious.’ She lit up a cigarette and without drawing a breath she said, smiling down at Anndora, ‘Can you believe that when John Dagwood asked Anndora her name, she told him and even took the chicklets he offered her. I’ve never seen her take to anyone like that, and I had to mention it to John Dagwood in as much as Anndora wouldn’t even allow Freddie B to touch her. ‘‘You must really have a way with children, because my daughter refuses to talk to just any ol’ body. She obviously likes you. You must have kids of your own,’’ I said to him, and was surprised to hear he’s not even married.’

As soon as Tammy said that, I could see the writing on the wall, ’cause while she was quick to claim that she wasn’t interested in meeting none of them nice young Christian men from First Tabernacle when I offered to set up some introductions, the glisten in her eyes every time she said John Dagwood’s name told the tale of a woman ripe and ready for romance.

‘Sounds like you already sweet on Mr John Dagwood,’ I said. No sooner than I heard myself say it, I knew I was spilling too much of what was in my mind. But Tammy was feeling gay and looking girlish, and didn’t take offense, ’cause she was so relaxed setting there in a pair of black toreador pants with a grey and black striped short sleeved blouse to match. She looked like the kind of girl any stranger new to a big city like Oakland would have been happy to be bumping into his first night in town, and I told her, ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if that fella thought he was pretty lucky to meet the likes of you.’

She blushed and soon as she did Joy turned to me and whispered ‘Mama’s got a boyfriend, Mama’s got a boyfriend,’ in a sing songy voice but not loud enough for Tammy to hear who was off in a daydream anyway, till I reminded her that them little girls of her’n was gonna be needing something to eat ’fore they went to bed, ’cause I hadn’t give ’em nothing but grape jelly sandwiches.

‘Oh gosh,’ Tammy yawned and sighed, ‘I guess I’d better get up and take Anndora to bed.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Joy said like she couldn’t offer fast enough. ‘Do you want me to put on her pajamas like she likes me to, Mama?’ Ain’t many children as willing to help as Joy was, but Tammy took her for granted.

‘Thank you, Joy,’ she said like she was talking to hired help. And Joy straight away slid off my lap to collect Anndora off her mother’s.

Didn’t nobody think that Anndora had been listening to what we was talking about, but soon as Joy rustled her up in her arms Anndora said she wanted to go hear the choir at my church next time Joy and Brenda went.