Joy

I didn’t have a minute to be pleased, ’cause Tammy harped up, ‘We won’t be having anymore church visits in here. And Brenda,’ she called loud enough to be heard over the Lassie episode that Brenda was watching like it was her life in danger up there on the screen instead of Lassie’s master, Tommy, ‘Brenda! Turn that doggone TV off and go take that good dress off before you ruin it. I don’t know what on earth possessed you to put on something like that anyway.’ Neither Joy nor Brenda was tattle-tale enough to say I was the one that picked them dresses out the closet for going to church in.

At ten years old Brenda could sulk better than any child in the world and she kicked the leg of the coffee table on purpose just to let us all know that while she was about to take off her dress like she’d been told, she wasn’t happy about having to do it in the middle of Lassie and if a commercial hadn’t come on when her mama told her to get up, I don’t reckon she’d of done it no way.

Tammy still didn’t get up herself to make a effort to fix nothing for them girls, so I offered to let them come over to my place for a snack. ‘I’m willing to rustle up some roast pork sandwiches, if anybody’s interested,’ I said, and quite honestly would have emptied my fridge I was so happy just to be setting with Tammy and the children and talking like normal neighbors.

Tammy stretched. ‘Oh would you, Baby? You’ve done so much already today, but it would be wonderful if you’d fix something for Joy and Brenda.’ They was likely only to get a can of Heinz hot dogs and baked beans off her anyway, ’cause Tammy wasn’t much for fooling around in the kitchen. On the one hand I could understand it, ’cause she worked all day. But on the other, there was a lot of women holding down jobs way harder than Tammy’s in a office and had more kids to feed when they got in than she did, and they still managed to put a proper cooked meal on their table every night. What surprised me was that she would make the effort too, once she had that John Dagwood to fool with. But I wasn’t to know that then. At the time, I lifted myself up from the hard wooden upright chair I’d been sitting on for that hour and called into the bedroom for Brenda and Joy to follow me over to my place for a bit of something to eat.

‘Y’all ready to tuck into some of my chocolate cake with butter cream icing?’ I called.

They come tumbling out of that bedroom lickety-split and as we walked out the front door, Tammy’s phone rung.

I hadn’t never heard Tammy talking on the telephone in the three months that she’d been renting that apartment and I figured that what Joy had whispered to me about ‘Mama having a boyfriend’ was exactly right.

‘I bet that’s that John Dagwood,’ Joy told me as her, me and Brenda took the three steps across the hall into my place.

I was singing that night in my kitchen while I dished up two plates of supper for the girls, and was about as happy as I recalled being the morning in ’45 when Freddie come back to me in New Orleans from overseas after the war. Both times my feet wasn’t touching the ground, and both times Freddie B noticed.

‘Happy as a sandboy, ain’t ch’you, wife?’ he said slapping me on my behind, and Joy blushed as she caught him doing it, ’cause she had just walked in the kitchen. ‘You wasn’t s’posed to see that,’ he said swooping her off her feet and lifting her on his shoulders. ‘Baby Palatine –’ Freddie talked like Joy, who had taken off her party dress when Brenda did and was in her flannelet pajamas, wasn’t there.

He practically had her head touching the ceiling ’cause she was so high up perched on my husband’s shoulders – ‘you reckon Dorothy Dandridge looked like Joy Bang when she was little? I bet Dorothy wasn’t as pretty,’ he said and reached his long arm up to tickle Joy under her armpits ’cause that’s where he knew she was the most ticklish.

She got to giggling and struggling so, I feared she was gonna fall, and said, ‘Y’all get out of my kitchen with that foolishness, ’cause next thing you know there’ll be a accident and Tammy’ll want to tan my hide.’

And the whole truth was that I didn’t want to never do nothing again that could upset Tammy, ’cause I saw how easy it was for her to turn her children against me.

After that breakup we’d had, I vowed to watch my mouth, hold my tongue and never ask too many questions or say nothing that would make Tammy force Joy to stop being friends with me again. So I didn’t dare breathe another word about Joy not having baby pictures, though it was still puzzling why her daddy didn’t take none, and I wasn’t goofy enough to mention Sherman’s name, even if Tammy brought him up, ’cause she made it plain she didn’t want him talked about unless she was doing the talking. And as I noticed that the kids never mentioned him, nor Wilmington, I sure wasn’t gonna stick both feet in my mouth neither.

With that call that Sunday evening being from John Dagwood, just like Miss Joy suspected, Sherman didn’t get mentioned much therein after no way.

Tammy was spellbound with ‘John Dagwood this’ and ‘John Dagwood that’. If she’d of been a Catholic, I reckon she should of bowed her head everytime she said Dagwood’s name, like them Catholics is suppose to when they mention Jesus Christ.

I didn’t meet Dagwood right away, but Freddie’d give me a good enough description of him ’fore he ever set foot through Tammy’s door, ’cause soon as Joy and Brenda’d had themselves something to eat and went home, I couldn’t wait to hear Freddie B tell me all about this man that they’d met in the emergency ward.

‘He seemed a nice enough fella,’ Freddie said dragging every word out like he’d said something worth spending a minute over. ‘I think he was from Chicago.’

‘Tammy said Detroit,’ I corrected him. ‘And if you ain’t gonna get it right, don’t tell it,’ I scolded Freddie B. ‘Was he nice looking?’

‘How’m I ’sposed to know that,’ Freddie said, like a blind man.

‘’Cause you saw him, didn’t you?’

‘Yeah, I saw him, but then I saw a whole lot of people setting round that emergency room, and I’d be a’ lyin’ if I told you I knew what any of them looked like.’

I think Freddie B can be ridiculous when he’s so busy minding what he claims is his own business that he don’t know what’s going on around him. He was that way back then when Tammy met Dagwood, and he’s still that way.

But I wasn’t gonna let him get away with not describing the man that Tammy had been talking to, ’cause inasmuch as she kept saying she wasn’t interested in no men, it was kind of juicy to think that she’d stumbled on something at that hospital.

‘Was he brown skinned,’ I asked my husband who had his head stuck in the paper.

‘’Bout my color,’ said Freddie B without looking up.

‘I don’t believe that Tammy’d have no eyes for a nigger black as you,’ I said. And I didn’t. She struck me as the sort that was color conscious and would have shied away from any man as deep chocolate as my husband.

‘Okay then,’ said Freddie just to aggravate. ‘He was white. White as this here tablecloth.’ Which was on the dining table where Freddie B had the funnies spread out beside the sports page.

‘Freddie B! Stop fooling around, now, and pay attention,’ I fussed.

‘Okay.’ He didn’t never have the nerve to tease me too long ’cause he knew I’d get in a huff and wouldn’t say nothing to him for a whole hour and he couldn’t stand it. ‘Okay. He was about my color. Honest, Baby, and he had him a thick mustache that looked like he’d been combing some Brylcreem on it cause it was shining.’

‘Nice looking?’

‘Yeah. What you women would call nice looking, but his hands felt like he ain’t never done a day’s work. Soft as Tammy’s they was when he stood up and shook mine as we was leaving the hospital. I heard him tell Tammy that he was looking for work and I told him to come down on the site I’m working in Palo Alto, but he said he hadn’t never done no building work. I believe it too with hands like a woman’s. I told him all he had to know how to do was use a shovel if he didn’t have no bricking trade like me, but he still wasn’t interested.’

‘Tall?’ I didn’t care as much about John Dagwood’s employment details as I did about if he was good looking. Some women, and I took Tammy rightly to be one of them, only want them a handsome man, but I listened to my mama who told me never to get hooked up with no pretty niggers ’cause they wasn’t nothing but trouble, and thought their asses weighed a ton. That’s how come I was glad to end up with Freddie B, ’cause even when he was young, he looked like the Sad Sack with his slow lanky self. Not that he was dim-witted. Just snail slow. But give him some arithmetic and he could add sums faster than all us, including my brother Caesar who used to get As in math’matics all the time.

‘That Dagwood fella wasn’t tall as me,’ said Freddie B, still with his head in the paper.

‘Well that don’t mean nothing, ’cause who is tall as you but them basketball players?’

‘Wasn’t tall, wasn’t short,’ Freddie B added.

‘Thank God she ain’t taking up with no short ass,’ I said, ’cause that was something else my mama warned me off. ‘Short ass men got a chip on they shoulder,’ she used to tell me and Helen.

‘If you sit patient,’ said Freddie B, ‘you’re likely to see him for yourself, ’cause Tammy told him to come on by whenever he wanted, and with as much jawing as they did in them three hours we was hanging ’round that hospital, I don’t guess he’ll keep her waiting long.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me that! You knew that all along, and was gonna keep it back!’

Remembering back on that evening when I was setting with my husband who didn’t have his bald patch on the crown and wasn’t wearing spectacles yet ’cause he was still young, reminded me that I wasn’t in Oakland in our old place on Grange but was standing in our apartment in San Francisco in such a trance thinking ’bout the past, I hadn’t told Freddie nothing yet and was forgetting to deal with Tammy.

If something bad really had happened to Joy, it wasn’t Christian of me to be feeling sorry for myself when I should have been on the phone giving her mama some comfort and telling my husband that our Godsent child was dead. It didn’t matter what I thought about Tammy’s brand of mothering, wasn’t a woman living that wanted to bury her own child.

So I stood Joy’s snag-a-tooth picture that I was still holding back on the mantelpiece and let the morning sun hit it, and picked up my pale green dogeared telephone file card that was laying by it. That card’s usually in my wallet, ’cause I won’t use no handbag except on Sundays which is why I never use the nice leatherbound address book that Joy give me last Christmas. I peered down at the card as I carried it to the kitchen phone, and after I took that box of Sugar Pops out the trash, I dialed the code for Richmond. Then all ’a sudden something told me to try ringing Joy’s instead which is what I did.

We got one of them fancy-ass phones that chimes out a different music tone for every digit you tap. It aggravates me every time I ring out on it, but it come with the apartment, and we ain’t suppose to change nothing. I tapped out 1-2-1-2 for New York City and traced my finger down my file card to Joy’s number which I don’t know off by heart, ’cause she changed it quite regular, and I didn’t know the new one. But I lost my confidence after it rang once and put the receiver back. ’S‘pose Rex picks up the phone?’ the devil in me said, though I hadn’t ever known it to happen during all the years Joy’d been knowing him. Spoiled as he was with secretaries and assistants and God-knows-who-all he employed to wipe his nose and his behind, he probably ain’t picked up his own phone in them twenty years. All that fame and money can affect a man like two worms boring their way through a apple and leaving it rotten to the core, so ain’t no place for it but the garbage heap. Which is what must of happened to Rex.

When he was young, I understood what Joy saw in him ’cause he was a nice looking boy, being half Comanche. That rudey color he had in his cheeks all the year round made them strange turquoise blue eyes of his stand out even though they was set way back in his deep eye sockets and seemed even more so cause of his high cheekbones. But as he got older, he got gaunt looking and the big dark circles ’round his eyes made him look sickly to me, though it seems that half the white women in the South would shout me down disagreeing.

There’s been times when I’ve seen him singing on the television wearing a cowboy hat and it’s been hard to tell that he’s past forty. But when his gray hair is showing his age is a dead giveaway, though like Joy says, he’s had some gray strands since she met him when he was twenty-five or so. But nowadays when I take a close up look with my magnifying glasses at pictures of him in the Enquirer, it shows that his skin is starting to sag around the jawline, and all the cowboy hats in Texas can’t hide that.

In the beginning I was relieved that Joy took to somebody that was as nice to her as Rex was, ’cause he was always buying her things though not expensive and had that limo of his pick her up and drop her off anytime she was with him. But like I reminded Joy at the time, don’t go falling in love with no limousine, ’cause it won’t never propose to you. But when Tammy told me not to discourage Joy from going around with Rex, I knew all Tammy was seeing was them dollar signs hanging over Rex’s head. ’Cause I agreed with my baby sister Helen who said wasn’t no white guy with that much money gonna do nothing for Joy but fill her full of baby and run off. And to tell the truth, she’d of been lucky if he’d of done that much.

Joy should have found herself a nice colored fella and been married and driving a stationwagon full of her own children. But she was always trying to appease her mama somehow, though as far as I could see Tammy didn’t try to do nothing to please Joy. Tammy didn’t want daughters, she wanted stars: somebody to make her feel important, so she could act like she was a big shot herself. I could see that soon as the girls had their hit ‘Chocolate Chip’, and all ’a sudden she was bragging about ‘my three daughters this, and my three daughters that’.

I stood looking out my kitchen window with the phone at my ear, and I was feeling both mad and numb. Looking but not seeing and listening but not hearing, and whereas the sight of folks seven stories down heading for their work usually got me raring to get into gear and start my chores, I didn’t feel up to doing nothing. It seemed like there wasn’t enough strength in me to tap out Tammy’s phone number and I was staring blank not wanting to talk or be talked to. So when I did finally ring Tammy’s, I was praying her line would be busy. But it wasn’t and I got agitated to hear a man’s voice saying, ‘Hello. O’Mara residence.’

‘Is that you Jesse?’ I asked.

‘Baby Palatine?’ I normally liked to hear Jesse’s furry Southern voice, because something about the tone reminded me of my brother Caesar’s voice. Though Caesar’s been dead sixteen years, I can still remember what he sounded like everytime I talk to Jesse.

‘Baby Palatine?’ Is that you?’ Jesse asked again, ’cause I still hadn’t answered.

I didn’t want to talk to him and had to try to think of what to say. I can’t stand for somebody I don’t know good to be giving me sympathy, and I was nervous he would say something mushy about me losing Joy.

Meaning to sound spry, like wasn’t nothing upsetting me, I said, ‘I thought Tammy said you wasn’t home?’

‘A few of us retired dudes that used to go to school together have a regular rummy game on Monday nights, and if we have a few beers, I sometimes feel like I shouldn’t get behind the wheel to drive home.’

Joy once told me that the only thing that irritated her about her mama’s husband was that he wanted to do everything by the book and never stopped being a cop. Not even at the breakfast table, ’cause the things he wanted to talk about that he spotted in the morning papers was all cop stuff. And she said he was always going on about being law-abiding and wanting his family to be. And while Joy wasn’t one to rush around breaking rules for the sake of it, she didn’t pay taxes, nor parking tickets and would speed anytime she thought she could get away with it. ’Cause she didn’t never do nothing that she wasn’t sure she could get away with.

Jesse’s voice wouldn’t quit in my ear. ‘I’d knocked back a few scotches and thought I should bed down on my buddy Edgar’s sofa which is where I was sleeping when Tammy tracked me down, so I don’t know why she made such a big deal of my not coming home like some great mystery was involved. I often don’t come home or call after the rummy game, and leave the number of whoever’s house I’m playing at on the kitchen table. Just like I did last night before I drove the car out of the garage.’

He could have rambled on talking about nothing for a hour, as long as I didn’t have to answer. For one thing, I was relieved not to have to talk to Tammy … until he explained that I couldn’t even if I wanted to.

‘I gave Tammy a sedative and put her to bed,’ he said. ‘She laid there watching the news before she finally dozed off. I think she’s expecting to hear a report about Joy dying, and I didn’t want to tell her that I think that with the girls not having a hit in ten years, it’s unlikely that anybody even remembers them. Let alone will report it on the television.’ For somebody who, according to Joy, was supposed to be quiet, I was surprised Jesse didn’t draw breath. ‘Tammy told me that you’d be phoning and that she’d managed to tell you the shocking news. Sad. So sad, when young people die.’

Tammy’s husband or not, I hadn’t never set eyes on Jesse and though I didn’t want to be mean and think on him as no stranger since him and Tammy’d been married over two years, I wasn’t ready to think on him as family neither, and definitely didn’t want him telling me the details about Joy.

So when he said, ‘I can only tell you what I know myself which is not a hell of a lot,’ I wanted to stop him, ’cause he didn’t know Joy good enough to have real feeling for her. Though Richmond ain’t far from New York City, she didn’t bother to visit him and her mama but three times in as many years. What I was wanting to say didn’t come out though, ’cause another lump was welling up in my throat so I couldn’t speak, and while I pretended to listen to Jesse mouth on, what I was actually thinking about was that he was the only man I knew of that Tammy let into her life or her bed after John Dagwood up and left her in the middle of the first year when her and the kids lived opposite me and Freddie B in Oakland. She never said as much, but a blind man could of seen that she pined and nursed her broken heart like somebody normal would nurse a coronary thrombosis. I thought it was selfish and a waste with them children needing them a nice stepdaddy … somebody decent to help her give them the extras that they had to do without unless they got ’em off me and Freddie.

All these thirty years, I haven’t breathed a word to nobody about the reason Dagwood disappeared or what I’d said to him to make him leave. As it was me, who didn’t have no choice but to send him packing, I felt positive all along that he wasn’t never coming back. But had I told Tammy as much she would of known that I had something to do with him leaving, and much as she was wishing him back, I was praying for him to stay away. And praying is stronger than wishing.

Like my mama warned me and Helen, ‘A pretty nigger will run you into the ground and you won’t never know what he’s up to nor who he’s up to it with.’ That was John Dagwood. Wasn’t no question that he was a real looker and wasn’t only me and Tammy that had thought it neither. Even Freddie B had to own up that he was nice looking after Freddie’d seen John Dagwood in that emergency ward the time Anndora’d cut her hand. And I had me a girlfriend back then, Tondalayah Hayes her name was, who acted like she couldn’t believe what a heavenly vision loomed before her eyes the first time she spotted Dagwood. And considering her line of work, Toni, as I nicknamed her for short, wasn’t one for falling over backwards over no man. But I recall that’s exactly what she almost did trying to sneak a peek at him from my bathroom window in Oakland after I’d told her that Tammy had taken up with somebody that even Freddie B, not one for noticing things, had said was nice looking.

While Jesse’s voice was still chatting in my ear, I was remembering that conversation I’d had with Toni that took place two weeks after Anndora’s Sunday visit to the emergency ward. Tondalayah had come for a Friday afternoon visit and I told her if she stood in my bathtub she could just about see Dagwood. So Tondalayah was bent over, peering out of the two inches I had opened for her to be able to see him out my bathroom window while he was shirtless down in the parking lot, busy scrubbing down the white walls of his tyres of that little two seater convertible he had that I hadn’t never heard of. She said ‘Nice looking, shit! That’s the understatement of the year! That nigger’s a black prince.’

‘Doggone it, Toni,’ I whispered standing behind her. ‘Keep your voice down, girl.’

‘Oh, you’re so nervous about everything, Palatine. You give yourself the jim-jam-jimmies. The man can’t hear me, and so what if he can? I haven’t said anything bad.’ As Tondalayah stepped out of the bathtub, I could see that she’d left black scuff marks from the rubber soles of her ankle boots, so I reached behind the tub to get a rag and the Dutch cleanser. It wasn’t likely that she’d think to do it herself, ’cause she claimed she had better things on her mind, miles away from housework. What with her being a stripper, I could excuse her for it.

‘He’s got black pearls for eyes and white pearls for teeth.’ She laughed high notes and threw her head back like she was about to go into one of them belly dances I used to see her do when we first met while I was cleaning a strip joint where she worked for a spell down Bakersfield way. Though some of them Sisters at my church used to turn their nose up at her when I’d drag her to First Tabernacle from time to time, me and Toni was real good friends.

‘And who said he was dark?’ She was still rampaging on about John Dagwood. ‘Black as that Turkish coffee they serve me down at the Souk’s Cafe,’ she said and sipped at her beer glass full of red wine. What I liked about her was she could hold her liquor and knew when to stop. Not like my baby sister.

‘He looks hard and supple in all the right places too,’ she said moving over to check her fake chignon bun in the mirror. ‘Body like a welterweight … Shit, Palatine, tell your husband when you see him that Miss Tondalayah Hayes said John Dagwood ain’t just nice looking. No-sirreee-Bob. That nigger is fine as a motherfucking Georgia pine, and I better not get a chance to run my fingers through that good hair, ’cause I could get dangerous.’

‘Aw shut up, Toni, he ain’t even got no hair to speak of.’ He kept it close cut so that you could practically see his scalp and it showed that his head had a perfect shape. ‘And long as them red fingernails of yours is, you’d probably draw blood if you run your fingers ’cross his head anyway.’

‘Dan-ang-ger-ooze,’ laughed Toni and popped her fingers with each syllable, before she let out a squeal and shook like somebody had walked over her grave, and got ready to stand in the bathtub again so she could take another look out the window.

‘You don’t know when to stop, do you?’ I said and closed it shut in case the sound of her voice carried and John Dagwood and everybody else in the neighborhood could hear her.

Tondalayah was so loud she reminded me of country folk which is one of the things I liked the most about her. Good looking as she was, she was down home. No airs. And the other thing I liked was that she was the most generous person I’d ever met in my life. Way more than Freddie B even, ’cause whereas he would give the shirt off his back to kin, Toni would give what she had to any ol’ body that needed it. And not just her money neither. Like the first time she come up from Bakersfield to spend the night in my apartment and my baby sister Helen was setting on the toilet so drunk that she thought she was setting on a chair. So when Toni went in there to have a pee and couldn’t get Helen to move, she run a lukewarm bath and took the trouble to get my baby sister in it. With my help, of course, but the idea was Toni’s and so was the underwear and navy blue pedal pushers that she loaned Helen to put on when we finally got her out the tub. Her and Helen was both five foot three inches and narrow hipped though Helen done put on a bunch of weight since then. Tondalayah had Helen looking like somebody else by the time she got the blue eye shadow and pale orange lipstick on her. And I couldn’t believe Helen was quiet as a lamb while it was going on till Toni went to put a comb through Helen’s hair.