Joy

‘I don’t want you combing on my hair,’ Helen told her, trying to pull away.

‘You better shut the hell up, before I beat you to death with this comb,’ said Toni which made me laugh, and made my baby sister take a swing at Toni who didn’t pay Helen no mind and kept combing ’cause no sooner Helen tried to take that swipe she passed out ’sleep.

But big hearted as Toni was, she took that thing of ‘what’s mines is yours and what’s yours is mines’ to the extreme, meaning that as far as she was concerned, it included men. Not that I was scared she wanted mine, ’cause apart from a couple spinster Sisters at the church wasn’t nobody rushing to get their hands on my husband back in them days. But from the ruckus Tondalayah was making about John Dagwood while she was standing there in my bathroom, I could tell that it wouldn’t of taken no more than a wink of his eye to have her up in his face. And Lord knows I didn’t want no argument with Tammy over Tondalayah fooling with Dagwood ’cause hardly two weeks had passed since Tammy and me’d made up after the mess over Joy’s pictures.

The Tammy-Dagwood courtship started way too fast for me, and Tammy was quick to think that the sun rose out of his behind, ’cause he had some college education and wore a clean shirt and tie every day. But I was itching to tell her that some pimps did too.

Partly what bothered me about Dagwood was that he didn’t have no job and wasn’t out looking for none, though he claimed he was waiting on a position at a insurance company or other. And though I heard Freddie B offer a couple times to take John Dagwood over to the building site where he was working, so Dagwood could pick up some cash for working as casual labor, the guy had the nerve to say flat out that he wasn’t interested.

‘Here is a list of don’t dos,’ little Joy told me she overheard him telling her mother. ‘Don’t porter, don’t garbage collect, don’t work in a hotel, and don’t get your hands dirty.’ And Joy showed me how Tammy doubled up laughing when he said it.

Dagwood … that was what Tammy’d called him for short instead of John. She said it sounded cute ’cause it was like Blondie’s husband in the Sunday funny papers. Dagwood always carried him a dark brown pigskin briefcase, but I told Freddie B that I didn’t believe that nothing was in it but a bottle of VAT 69 whiskey. That’s all he would drink which seemed way too select for a man with no job, but Tammy said that he’d told her that his grand-daddy’d left him a fourplex in Detroit and he collected enough rent off that to pay for the studio apartment he was in over by the Lake District and keep that foreign sports car of his and have extra left over for living off.

I didn’t take Dagwood to be the sort that would steal or ponce or be hanging out on street corners in the middle of the day, but I figured him to be that sort of drifter that’s easy to come, ’specially between some woman’s legs, and easier to go. But I didn’t never say as much to Tammy, ’cause I could see she was crazy about him from the first time I run up on ’em setting together two evenings after Anndora’d got her hand sewed up. I know it was a Tuesday ’cause it was the night for putting garbage out. I’d peeped my head in the Bangs’ front door ’cause it was left ajar like Tammy said she would leave it ’case I wanted to pop in for a chat after the kids was in bed. But I got a big shock when I stepped quiet into her living room from her entrance hall, careful not to wake the kids, and found her with John Dagwood. He was setting with his stocking feet parked on the coffee table and Tammy was there on his lap smooching him with a couple of her sweater buttons undone so her white brassiere was showing. There was a fifth of whiskey, half finished, tucked between them and the arm of the sofa, and seemed like there wasn’t no place safe for me to rest my eyes.

Tammy’s little two bedroom furnished apartment didn’t have nothing in it but second hand furniture that Mr Houseman had picked up at St Vincent de Paul’s, and there wasn’t much of it, thank goodness, ’Cause with the rooms being medium size and Tammy’s brood of three with their toys and whatnot, wouldn’t of been standing room in there had Mr Houseman put more furniture in the lounge in particular. Apart from the naughahyde sofabed, there was just three hardback chairs and two lamp tables that I thought should of matched the coffee table, but Tammy said she didn’t mind they was different. But me and Freddie B’d slapped a couple fresh coats of cream paint on the walls not but a month ’fore Tammy’d rented it and with the overhead light off and the two wine bottle lamps on either side of the sofa that Tammy’d bought switched on, the living room didn’t look bad. And that evening, with the half dozen red roses stuffed in the cutglass vase Tammy’d borrowed from me soon as she got in from work, the place looked homey, even though she’d taken down the framed pictures of Jesus that I had hanging between the two lounge windows that overlooked the side street. Feeling uncomfortable, I was ready to examine every inch of every wall as I stood there and shifted from foot to foot.

‘Come on Baby Palatine. Sit and let me introduce you to Dagwood,’ Tammy said, patting at the free space on her sofa like it was either the time for me to sit or her to be introducing him.

He didn’t even make the effort to stand up when I reached to shake his hand, so right away I knew what kind of hometraining he had. ’cause any man raised right knew to stand up to greet a woman, ’specially as I was obviously older than him, though I reckoned it couldn’t of been more than ten years.

He flashed me a smile and I tried to smile back and said, ‘How d’you do,’ and got my rusty dusty out of there quick as I could, ’cause no sooner than we’d exchanged hellos, Tammy had the nerve to lay a big kiss on his cheek like I wasn’t still there. If he didn’t know no better, she did, and what with them kids right there in that apartment ’sleep, I thought it was a disgrace that they was carrying on so that anybody could walk in on ’em.

‘I’ll latch the door behind me,’ I said, hinting that they should of done as I walked out. But I don’t reckon that they heard me or knew that the door was open or cared, ’cause Tammy was a goner once Dagwood came on the scene.

It was two weeks after that that Tondalayah come visiting and spotted Dagwood down washing his car, and I’ll give her credit that she didn’t never bat her eyes at Dagwood once I’d made her swear she’d keep to herself and respect that he was Tammy property. When Tondalayah died fifteen years later from liver cancer, it nearly broke my heart, and I’ll give Tammy her due, she cried near as much as me and her girls did. Including Anndora. ’cause Toni did a lot more for them girls than Tammy ever knew about over the years, and it was Tondalayah Hayes they had to thank when time came for them to take to the stage and do things right from knowing what to wear to hip shaking.

I hated that she died with no family to mourn her. But we did the best we could, and I kept a black armband on for a whole month after she passed, I loved that woman so. Near as much as I loved Joy, but different. ’cause Toni was like my sister and Joy was like my child which is exactly why I didn’t want nobody as distant as Tammy’s husband Jesse talking to me about Joy and relating either that she was dead or how it come to pass.

But how I want things to be and how they often is, are two different kettles of fish so there I was still holding onto my telephone with Jesse’s husky voice dripping down the line. Richmond to San Francisco.

‘Tammy told me that you’d be calling, but I must admit when the phone rang I thought it was the Sante Fe police department calling me back, because I had just left a message with a fellow I know that moved to that precinct from Chicago.’

‘Why were you calling him?’ I sure do hate it when my curiosity gets the best of me and I start asking questions when I want to be quiet.

‘Because that’s where Joy fell dead from a massive heart attack on that tennis court, and I figured he might help out with dealing with all the paper work so that we can get her body back to New York without a lot of extra cost. Actually, it wasn’t in Santa Fe she died. It was Taos.’

‘Where’s that supposed to be,’ I said, asking a question I didn’t much need a answer to ’cause the ‘where’ wasn’t half as important as the ‘how’ of Joy dying.

‘In the mountains above Sante Fe, that’s why I got on to the Santa Fe police department.’

‘Now I realize that you didn’t know nothing much about Joy, but I can set you straight on one thing. She had enough energy to bury Hitler’s army, and I find it completely impossible to believe that she died from playing no tennis. She took good care of her body. Ate right … used to drive me half crazy reading them food packages before she’d eat something that wasn’t fresh. Exercised. Jogged most every day since she turned thirty, so it don’t make a blind bit of sense that she’d of dropped dead playing no tennis. I refuse to believe it, and if I had the money I’d be right on the plane to see what done happened for real.’

‘I’ve spoken to the coroner himself, and I didn’ get the impression that anything happened other than what he told me which is that Joy was having a tennis lesson, and in the middle of a serve she fell to the ground, in a way that made the tennis instructor first think she’d had a bad cramp. But when Joy didn’ get up and seemed to have a convulsion, this girl that was teaching her called for an ambulance. But Joy was dead before it got to her. Massive coronary is the verdict, and while I can understand that both you and her mother find it unbelievable, it sounded like the truth to me. Why would the coroner have a reason to lie? Joy was nothing to him.’

Just like my mind had told me from the first I heard Jesse’s voice, he wasn’t the person that should of been telling me none of this, ’cause he didn’t have no special feeling for Joy. I could hear that in his voice. It was Tammy I wanted to be speaking to and I asked him to get her.

‘I told you Baby Palatine that she’s asleep, and with that sedative that I gave her, there’s no way in the world that I could get her to come to the phone now. She couldn’t make any sense if she did anyway,’ Jesse added.

The idea that Joy was laying somewhere dead with nobody with her made me feel sick, and I wanted to talk to Tammy to find out how Rex Hightower figured in it.

‘What the hell is Tammy doing in the bed if her child is dead,’ I asked Jesse. That second I got over feeling sad ’cause the thought of Tammy laying in the bed while Joy was laying in a morgue made me so mad.

All the time I knew her, Tammy’d been so concerned with how she was feeling that she didn’t never let them girls of hers come first. Not even Anndora for all the fuss Tammy made about her. Tammy’s girls didn’t get raised. They just drug themselves up once she got to feeling sorry for herself after Dagwood left in ’56 … maybe it was ’57 … I ain’t never been good on dates, but Freddie B probably can remember exactly, ’cause it was the same year the Yankees lost the world series and he’d bet on ’em. Whatever year it was, I did what any Christian would and didn’t let them girls run wild. As Freddie B and me couldn’t have none of our own, it suited me. But like my baby sister said at the time, that wasn’t the point. True enough, it’s the mama who’s s’posed to take time to mother, but if’n it hadn’t of been for me and Freddie B ain’t no telling what would have happened to them. ’cause from the time Dagwood walked out, Tammy stopped caring about everything, and her kids was the first on the list to go.

But it was real obvious me and this new husband of Tammy’s didn’t see eye to eye about what her duties was supposed to be, ’cause Jesse said, in answer to my question about why she was in bed, ‘There’s not a lot Tammy can do from here, Baby Palatine. Her sitting when she’s exhausted won’t bring Joy back and since Santa Fe will be shut down until nine a.m., she can’t even go ahead organizing the funeral.’

Tammy was probably the last person Joy would have wanted doing that, but how could I tell him as much.

‘You got Brenda’s number?’ I asked him, ’cause I would of rather talked to her than him, since he sounded like Tammy probably had him hoodwinked into thinking that she was suffering. She was good at that. Even I fell for it for a time after Dagwood left and Tammy took to her bed surrounded by any kind of bottle that was made – from hot water bottle to pill bottle to whiskey bottle, though I’d be lying if I said she ever became a alcoholic. But she might as well have been since she stayed in the bed for months with me waiting her hand and foot till I got fed up and stopped bringing her in food, although I kept up fixing meals for them children. Though I have to say Brenda and Joy did a lot for theyselves. And for Anndora.

‘Brenda’s phone’s been disconnected,’ Jesse said.

‘Again!’

‘Yes again,’ he sighed. ‘Her girlfriend Latrice moved to Phoenix for six months for some job training scheme with the Federal Government and Brenda’d run up a big seven hundred dollar phone bill calling her every night.’

‘Seven hundred dollars!’

Joy had told me that Brenda had taken up with a new woman but I was only half listening to her when she said it, because Brenda’d been through so many women it didn’t seem worth taking in the details about her latest at the time, since I’d had enough about Brenda and women from the first she let it out. In fact, if Brenda hadn’t started that ruckus in the papers about being a lesbian, things might have worked out real different for Bang Bang Bang. Although I reckon it was Anndora’s fault as much as Brenda’s that the group split up ’cause Anndora had a tantrum and stopped speaking to Brenda when the story about Brenda hit all the papers. ’cause they had a number one record and wasn’t nobody admitting back then that they was gay, it caused a big stir. Not like these days. Everybody in San Francisco is gay seems to me when they turn out in the thousands for them gay parades. I didn’t blame Brenda, when the fuss started, to take it upon herself to quit. Not that I hold with her laying up with women, ’cause as far as I’m concerned that’s uncalled for. But since she was the one doing all the singing and getting none of the glory, ’cause Joy and Anndora had all of it, she said she didn’t have to put up with Anndora giving her attitude.

Anndora being the youngest was used to having her way. Children born pretty as Anndora got people smiling up in their faces before they’ve earned it, so they start out thinking that life’s a pushover.

Which brought to mind that as much as I didn’t have time for Anndora, I would of rather been talking to her even than to Jesse.

‘How ’bout giving me Anndora’s number,’ I asked him.

‘Hang on, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘I’ll see if I could put my hands on it. Tammy’s probably got it in her book somewhere, though I know Anndora’s like quicksilver the way she rushes from place to place. On planes and off planes more than Joy she was.’

I didn’t like to hear him mention Joy in the past tense. It was like he’d buried her already.

Last I’d heard, Anndora had been living in Milan, Italy, and it wouldn’t of surprised me to hear she’d shacked up with some gangster, ’cause all that ever interested her was brassy clothes and flashy cars and she didn’t care how she came by them. Joy said I didn’t give Anndora a chance, but then Joy was the main one who ruined her. When they was little, Joy used to dress Anndora up like a china doll and pull her up and down the streets in a red wagon so that folks would stop ’em to ooh and aaah. Joy wasn’t but four years older than Anndora, but once Tammy went off the rails over John Dagwood, Joy played mother. She had sense but she was too soft, so little as Anndora was, she walked all over Joy and that didn’t never change that I could see even after they got big. Kindness is one thing but you ain’t ’sposed to let people treat you like a door mat.

Helen used to say that she thought part of Anndora’s problem was that she looked too white and thought she was too good to be with coloreds, and it’s true enough that she didn’t never have no colored friends at school, not that there was many of them there to choose from, ’cause Tammy’d got her into a school out of our district and whereas Anndora should have been going to Grange Elementary two blocks away which was almost all colored, Tammy’d put her into a school over by the library, six blocks from the house where wasn’t nothing but white folks and Mexicans living then, though I hear it’s all colored now.

But when I’d go to collect Anndora out the school yard and she’d be standing with them little Mexican children that she was always making friends with, I couldn’t hardly see no difference between her and them.

I hated to think it, but Joy seemed proud that her baby sister didn’t have no color to her. Even Anndora’s fingernails and toenails was thin and brittle like white folks’.

When Bang Bang Bang was touring in Europe, all heads turned when that girl sashayed down the street with them green speckly eyes of hers and that dark reddy brown hair hanging down her back in big waves and ringlets. Them folks in Europe couldn’t believe it was hers and was always asking if she had on a wig and what country she come from. Anndora lapped it up, but over the years, she got to look way older than Joy. I expected as much, and was always telling Joy to be thankful she was brown, ’cause that light skin wrinkles up quick.

Jesse had come back to the phone. ‘Baby Palatine, either I’m not concentrating well enough or it’s actually not in Tammy’s book, because I can’t see Anndora’s number or her address. But I know she’s living in Milan, if you want me to see if I can get her telephone number from the international operator.’

‘Ain’t no need going to all that trouble,’ I told Jesse. ‘When d’you think I should phone back to speak to Tammy?’

‘Give it a few hours.’

‘A few! I’m setting in San Francisco at my wits’ end and I got to wait around a few hours to find out what’s going on?’

‘I understand how you feel, but we’re all helpless. Life takes an unexpected turn like this, and as much as we want and expect the world to stop, everything goes on. That’s something I learned working in the police department. Life goes on.’

I didn’t want no policeman’s lecture, I wanted to know what had happened and why, and I wasn’t gonna get no satisfaction out of Jesse, but I figured Rex might have some answers.

Jesse hadn’t finished talking. ‘Baby Palatine, we plan to drive to New York as soon as Tammy wakes up, because she thinks that’s the best place for us to all be. She asked me to ask you to meet us there if you phoned, and I assume you have Joy’s address.’

With Freddie B out of work two months I didn’t hardly have the money to get across the Bay Bridge on a bus, so getting to New York was gonna take some doing, but I didn’t let on to Jesse.

‘Okay, I’ll meet y’all there. I don’t know nothing about the planes and that, but I’ll get myself there.’

‘I’m sure that’s where the funeral’s going to be held,’ Jesse said, and as I was worried that he would start in talking about Joy again I hurried to get rid of him.

‘You’ve been a big help, Jesse. Thanks. And I’m looking forward to meeting you proper. Bye, now,’ I said and hung up.

Petty things can set me off, but when I got to deal with the big ones, I even surprise myself.

Dry-eyed, I opened my kitchen cupboard and took out that box of Sugar Pops and kissed it before I slung it in the trash.

I ain’t claiming I was thinking completely straight though, ’cause if I had of been, the thing I always say when anybody passes would have come to my mind which is that ‘the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away’, ’cause don’t nobody know as good as him when your train’s come to the end of the line.

But my pea brain didn’t settle on no thoughts as clear as that, ’cause it do often let me down when I’m trying to think sensible, and I needed a clear head to figure out how I was gonna get to New York when the money jar I kept for rainy days was lower than I’d seen it for donkeys’ years partly ’cause Freddie’d been putting his big hand in it to dole out money every Sunday for the organ fund at the church.

That’s the onliest bad habit Freddie B’s got which is trying to act like we can do more than he can afford to when it come to the church collection. I tell him, ‘There ain’t no shame to you being broke and out of work, and all you got to say to Deacon Penrose when they ask for our organ donation is, ‘‘I ain’t got it. Pure and simple,’’ ’cause he probably been out of work hisself and knows that if you could be out earning a wage packet, you would be.’

But Freddie B thinks it ain’t Christian not to give when we get asked.

‘Shoot,’ I tell him. ‘What kind of a mean so-and-so do you think God is, if he held it against a man that worked hard all his life for being a bit short on the church collection from time to time. Anyway, the organ ain’t for God, it’s for Deacon Penrose who claims that organ music is so important for lifting up our souls. A guitar and a tambourine would do just as well, and he knows it good as I do! Like when Brenda and Joy was singing up at First Tabernacle and all we had was that jangly ol’ upright that Sister Fletcher’s sister bequeathed to the church. Brenda still sang good and won them gospel contests, and wasn’t nobody jumping up to the pulpit in the middle of her solos to say, ‘‘She ain’t got the spirit ’cause we ain’t got no organ’’.’

But I can talk to Freddie B sometimes till I’m blue in the face and he don’t listen. So his hands been in my money jar so many Sundays that there was nothing left in it but sixty dollars. Which ain’t nothing, so I tried to think on who I could call and borrow some money off and not leave them short, and the onliest person who came to mind was Sebastian Egerton.

Much as I harped on that Joy would of been better off to stay with her own kind and leave them white boys alone, I would have been more than happy if she’d of settled with Sebastian, ’cause if a man loves a woman crazy, like Sebastian did Joy, that’s who you put down roots with. Don’t matter what color he is. Like me turning up with Freddie B. I didn’t take a mind to marry him ’cause he was either smart nor cute nor light with his lanky self. I married him ’cause he was plum loco about me and with him heading out for the war, I figured I wasn’t gonna find nobody living or dead that loved me as much as Freddie B did. And thank God I did the right thing. Which is more than I can say for how wrong Joy did by shining Sebastian on. She said he was too tall and thin to be sexy.

‘What’s that got to do with anything,’ I tried to say, but even my countrified eyes could see Sebastian didn’t have nothing but a young boy’s body though he must of been twenty-two at least. And though that was six years younger than what Joy was, I reminded her that Freddie’s younger than me by two years but that didn’t stop us from getting hitched up.

‘Here comes Mister Too-Lean-to-be-Seen,’ Brenda used to holler at Sebastian when he climbed on stage with them other three musicians that played back-up for Bang Bang Bang. And Sebastian would just laugh with that shy way he had and pop a toffee in his mouth and walk on over to his keyboards. I hadn’t never seen nobody but my brother Caesar eat as much candy as Sebastian and have a full set of healthy looking teeth and still be the size of a rail. It gave the impression that he was way taller than six foot one inch and what with him being long limbed as well, in body he reminded me of Freddie B when we was young. But that’s where the similarities stopped.

Sebastian was always pushing that flop of blond heavy hair of his back, ’cause it was always falling in his eyes, and from where his hair separated into a natural parting, I could see it was his natural color though Joy was always teasing him that he got that perfect straw color out a peroxide bottle. There’s no denying Joy sure knew her blonds, and when we was all working down in LA for the first promotion tour, Joy said she preferred them tan, blond surfer boys to Sebastian ’cause they had some meat on their bones. It was a shame that she said that in front of Sebastian, ’cause even though he would laugh like he saw the joke in it, I know it probably hurt his feelings with him being so gone on Joy.