The Color of Family Read online

  Antonia took Jackie’s hand and smiled thankfully. With the other hand, Antonia put the locket into her coat pocket. She looked around the street where passing cars were getting scarcer by the minute, with the falling ice that only now began to irk her. Then she turned to look deeply into Jackie’s eyes and said, “There’s nothing happening out here for you, girl. Why don’t you come on inside and have some tea with me. Besides, you don’t want anybody who’d come by here tonight because they’d have to be unbalanced to be out here on a night like this looking for sex.”

  Jackie laughed heartily, then said, “I guess you’re right, Miss Antonia.” And she followed Antonia up the steps and down the path. When she got to the end, she hesitated. “Are you sure it’s okay? I mean, I see the way Dr. Jackson looks at us out here, and the way he hurries you on when you stop to talk to us.”

  “Oh, who cares,” Antonia said sharply. “I’m not okay with him sleeping with Cora Calliup, but he’s doing it, so to hell with him. Besides, this is my house too.”

  When they stepped into the front hall, Antonia noticed how Jackie shuddered, then rubbed her hands and arms now that she was inside the warmth of the house. Antonia smiled, took Jackie’s jacket, and laid it with her own across the settee, then led her into the kitchen. As she went to the stove to get the teakettle, she saw Jackie take a seat at the kitchen table—in Junior’s seat. Antonia poured out the water that had been standing in the kettle and put more in. When she set it on the stove, then turned on the burner, she said, “Don’t look so tentative.”

  Antonia walked toward the table, picking up a container on the counter as she went. Once she sat, she opened the container and said, “Do you want a brownie? They’re fresh-baked, and not Duncan Hines either. Fresh-baked from scratch.”

  “Thanks,” Jackie said as she reached over and took one out. “You know, Miss Antonia, I don’t know what it is I said that changed your mind, but I sure am glad that you didn’t go and get in Dr. Jackson’s face before you really know what’s going on.”

  Antonia plucked a napkin from the holder in the middle of the table, took a brownie from the container, then broke off a piece. She held it in midair and said, “You know, I’m not altogether sure what it was you said, either, except that your words made me think of what I’ve always said, which is that I would never leave a man for cheating on me because cheating is just a symptom and not the problem. As long as you’re willing to get to what the problem is, then you can make the symptom go away. That’s what I’ve always believed, but I guess it’s a lot easier to believe that when your husband isn’t cheating on you. Once your husband cheats on you, the rules change and the dynamic shifts.” She ate the morsel of brownie and continued, “Anyway, what you were saying about things being different than they appear made me think of that, and I’m only going to know that by getting to what the problem might be.”

  “There you go,” Jackie said excitedly. Then her expression grew curious as she finished her brownie. “So what do you mean by the problem?”

  “Well, what I mean is, what’s going wrong in the marriage, maybe, or in his life, or our life together that made him use cheating as the solution.”

  “I see,” she said as she chewed another bite of brownie. “So I guess maybe it’s the same thing that makes men come to me, huh?”

  Antonia looked at her suddenly with that bolt from the blue and replied, “Well, I suppose you’re absolutely right.” Then she got up and went to answer the whistling kettle. She set two mugs from the cupboard down on the counter and took two chamomile teabags from the Mason jar where she kept them, put them in the cups, and poured water in each. And as she took the cups of tea to the table she saw Jackie looking at the CD on the top of the stack that sat on the edge of the table, pushed against the wall.

  “‘Babyface—MTV Unplugged NYC 1997,’” Jackie read aloud. “Is this yours, Miss Antonia?” Jackie said with joyful surprise in her voice.

  “Yes it is. Do you want to hear it?”

  “You listen to Babyface?”

  “I do,” Antonia said, getting some pleasure from this young woman’s reaction. “What is it, you think I’m too old for Babyface?”

  Nodding her head as if pleased by the discovery of this side of Antonia, Jackie remarked, “I don’t know, Miss Antonia. I mean, I knew you was cool, and everything, but I had no idea just how cool you really are.”

  “Just because I like Babyface’s music?” Antonia laughed, quite enchanted by the closing of the generational abyss between herself and Jackie through music. Then she said, “Well, I don’t want to burst your bubble or anything, but I do happen to think that Babyface is a perfectly silly name for a grown man to call himself.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” she said with a giggle as if she were a pubescent girl talking about rock stars with one of her peers. Then she continued, “Except that I think he goes by his real name these days, but I don’t remember what that is.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter. He’s talented, and that’s all that counts, so it doesn’t much matter what he calls himself.”

  “That’s the truth. Like Louis Armstrong. What kind of name is Satchmo? Sounds too close to sambo, but he sure could play that horn.”

  And now it was Antonia’s turn to look at her with a stunned glee. “You know Louis Armstrong’s music? That’s hardly the music of your generation, any more than Babyface’s is the music of mine.”

  “Well, I played trumpet in a band when I was at Lemmel Middle. So they had one of those assembly programs at the school where this Dixieland band came and entertained us, and they played some Louis Armstrong music. That just did it for me. I fell in love with the way he played that horn, and I would try to imitate him. I’ve always said that one day I would go to New Orleans and see where it all began and listen to that music.”

  Antonia smiled at her own little slice of heaven. There had always been something drawing her to Jackie, but she never knew what to name it, how to see it, or the best way to hear it. Now she knew. “Jackie, do you know that I’m from New Orleans?”

  “No way!” she said with as much excitement as if she were sitting there talking to Satchmo himself. “I never knew that. Oh my God, why don’t you still live there? Why’d you come to tired old Baltimore?”

  Antonia considered the best answer for a few seconds, then said, “To tell you the truth, I’m not altogether sure why or how I ended up in Baltimore, except that it mostly had to do with Junior’s career. He wanted more than anything to be over at Hopkins, so here we are. I suppose if I had had things my way, I’d still be in New Orleans.”

  “Oh man, I can’t imagine what it was like growing up there with all the good music and the good food.” Then she stopped, looked down at her tea, and back up at Antonia with a certain shame in her eyes. Nonetheless, she continued, “And women like me add color to the place, not shame.”

  Antonia stared into her tea as she put dollops of honey into it. She thought of shame and its nature, and she thought of how a shameful life was not in what one did, but in how one did it. Whether in Baltimore or New Orleans, what Jackie did with her body and soul was not shameful because she did it honestly. She hid from no one—except, perhaps, she thought, from the occasional cop, but that was a legal matter. Mostly, though, she did not hide from herself. But for Junior and Cora, whether in Baltimore or New Orleans, what they were doing was full of nothing but shame, because they lived in deceit; and they hid, from their own souls, from each other, from her. Shame, shame, shame on the both of them.

  When she realized she’d dropped more honey than she’d wanted into her tea, she hurriedly put the honey dipper back into the jar, saying, “You’re a good girl, Jackie. Don’t ever let anyone make you believe that you’re not.”

  Aaron stacked five plates on the edge of the counter then put five mismatched napkins on top of the stack. He carried them into the dining room, where Maggie was busy unfolding the tablecloth. He still placed the pile of plates and napkins on the table, so
distracted was he by wishing he’d not gotten on the phone within a minute after leaving his mother’s house two days ago to tell Ellie about their mother’s luncheon at Clayton Cannon’s. Despite that he doubted his mother’s story, Ellie was compelled to call this impromptu family dinner-summit sans their mother the night before Antonia was due downtown. And so here he was, heading back into the kitchen and plucking five forks and five knives from the drawer, then examining each one for spots and encrusted bits of food which his dishwasher was known to leave behind every now and again. And as he scraped with one thumbnail, he wondered if he’d actually heard right when he heard Ellie say something about taking their mother for a psychiatric workover. He may have even heard her say something about their mother needing to go to a home. Aaron really couldn’t be certain since the mere mention of the words Ma and psychiatrist spoken by Ellie in the same sentence and with such certainty sent a puff of fog into his mind that clogged his ability to perceive anything as real.

  So at the moment all he had to hold on to was his knives and forks. And when each was inspected to his approval, Aaron gathered them up in two clinking, clanking bundles and went back into the dining room. When he found Maggie standing there on the other side of the table with the tablecloth still in her hands, but nowhere close to the table, he regarded her with narrowed, questioning eyes. “Maggie, I thought you were going to set the table. Why haven’t you at least put the tablecloth on?”

  But all Maggie did at first was point, with her head, to the stack of plates and napkins on the edge of the table. Then she said, “It’s a little difficult to spread the tablecloth when the plates are on the table.”

  Aaron looked at the plates then blew out a troubled breath and snapped sarcastically, “It wouldn’t have killed you to move them.”

  “Well, it won’t kill you to move them, either,” she said with a reactionary sharpness in her tone.

  So Aaron simply picked them up without another word, and placed them on the chair at the head of the table.

  Maggie snapped the tablecloth out over the table then let it float down, as if it were being lowered on the wings of small birds, to cover the table. She smoothed out the puckers and then made certain it hung evenly on every side. And after she’d picked up the plates to place one at each end, then two on one side and one on the other, she stood back and twisted her mouth, saying quietly and mostly to herself, “It’s uneven. There should be another person coming.”

  And as he put the knives and forks on either side of the plates, Aaron replied, even though it was clear to him that she wasn’t speaking for the sake of a response, “Well, it’s not like we could invite my mother since she’s going to be the topic of discussion.”

  “Is that what’s bothering you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come on, Aaron. It’s all over your face and in everything you say. You’re bothered by something. Is it this talk that Ellie wants to have about your mother that’s getting to you?”

  He sat down in the chair at the far end of the table and took in every crease in Maggie’s forehead. Even though its incarnation was, he believed, a mere shadow of her murky judgment, maybe of him, maybe of the whole situation, in that look of hers, in the constancy of her judgment, he found an oddly begotten solace. So he nonetheless answered, “Well, yeah, I guess it is. Do you remember how bothered you were when Colette was sixteen and went around telling everybody that she was born in Canada?”

  Maggie chuckled quietly with the memory of her daughter, then said, “Yeah, of course I remember that. I’ll never forget that, because even when I confronted her, she stuck to her story, ‘Mommy, I’m Canadian,’ she’d tell me. But that was a nightmare because it didn’t have any basis in reality and I had some genuine reason to worry about her sanity. There’s nothing your mother’s saying that’s that far outside the realm of possibility, Aaron.”

  He looked at Maggie with stern and steely eyes for several prickly seconds, then said, “Except that Clayton Cannon is not her nephew.”

  “All right, Aaron. That’s what you say, and quite honestly, I don’t believe he is either. But you and Ellie can’t slap a crazy sign on her back just because she believes it. She’s got circumstantial evidence, and peoples’ lives have been broken and redeemed with circumstantial evidence.”

  “Maybe,” he said as he rose from the chair, pushed it into the table, and then continued, “But her circumstantial evidence is weak, Maggie.”

  She took him in with hard eyes that seemed to be filled with some lesson she had to tell. “Maybe this isn’t about circumstantial evidence at all, Aaron. Maybe what this is about is a scared little boy who wants to keep his mommy all to himself. I’m telling you now, you need to get over it, because if that man is your uncle’s son, it’s going to happen, it’s going to come out no matter how much you deny it.”

  And though Aaron knew there was as much truth in the light of what she’d just said as there was in the rising and setting of the sun, it was either in the way she said it, or the way sarcasm had claimed her expression when she said it, but Aaron could only submit to the flash of anger that wanted to claim him. What struck him most in that moment was how she knew no tact when it came to her opinion. “Maggie,” he said, “you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. My mother is my mother and Clayton Cannon will never change that fact.”

  The doorbell rang, which set Maggie off on a rush to put the napkins underneath all the forks. “You go get the door,” she commanded Aaron. “I’ll unwrap the food and put it out.”

  When Aaron opened the door, he saw his sister’s belly before it was clear to him that she was attached to it. And her coat couldn’t come anywhere close to fastening around it. That gut of hers could have just as easily been the big beer and sausages paunch of a turned-around trucker trying to find his way. He blinked furiously, then shook his head playfully and said, “Good God, Ellie, you haven’t had that baby yet? It looks like you’ve grown just since the other day.”

  Ellie stepped through the door, humorless in that way expectant mothers can get when the subject of their form is broached. She moved past Aaron and said, “Oh that’s real original, Aaron. Do you have any more of your incredible witticisms?”

  Aaron let Ellie and her sardonic challenge pass, extending his hand to greet her husband. “Rick, how’s it going?”

  “I’m hanging in there, Aaron. Just playing the waiting game for this baby,” Rick said with a tension that seemed, with his sheet-white pallor, to speak to the edginess of his eminent fatherhood.

  “Yeah, well, I guess we all are” was all Aaron said as he took Ellie’s and Rick’s coats and laid them across a chair in the living room on his way back to Maggie.

  “Hi, Maggie,” Ellie yelled.

  “Hi, Ellie. Hi, Rick,” she responded through the door that was opened when Aaron walked into the kitchen. She took the last container of food from the bag, then looked sideways at it and asked, “What is all this stuff, by the way?”

  “It’s fried catfish. Ellie loves it, and so does my dad.”

  “I thought you said you were going to Boston Market. Where did you get all this, the fish, the cornbread, the red beans and rice, the fried chicken, and the collard greens?”

  Aaron looked over the food, wondering why she had to ask. They had gotten takeout from that place at least a half-dozen times on their way home from the station, so where else could she possibly think he would have gotten it? “Doesn’t it all look familiar to you?”

  Maggie studied it for a couple of seconds, then with the elation of a child discovering a speck of the world on her own, said, “Micah’s! Oh, wow! This is a treat!”

  “And string beans. Shouldn’t there be a container of string beans in there too?”

  “Yeah, they’re right here.”

  Ellie walked into the kitchen, hand-in-hand with Rick, saying, “Boy, it smells good in here. What’s for dinner?” Then she stopped short and regarded the takeout containers with an iron
ic, skeptical smile. “When you said you’d have dinner for us, baby brother, I thought that meant you were going to be cooking it—you know, homemade food. And Maggie, as good a cook as you are, how could you possibly be a part of this store-bought food caper of his?”

  “Ellie, on Friday when I called you after I left Ma’s and you said you wanted this meeting, I offered to have dinner because I thought it would make things easier, but I never said I would cook it myself,” Aaron said with his voice dancing on the edge of defensiveness.

  And Maggie, with an unyielding conviction, only said, “Besides, girl, once you’ve tasted this food you’ll be glad that neither one of us cooked.”

  “Maggie’s right,” Aaron said with the low-level stirring from the innate pressure he’d always imposed on himself to please his sister since somewhere around the time of his arrival into her life. “I wouldn’t just give you all any old carryout. I got it from that place down on Reisterstown Road called Micah’s.”

  Ellie looked at him with her face twisted in confusion, then asked, “On Reisterstown Road?” She continued without waiting for an answer, “I thought that was a church. I treated a woman at the hospital a few months ago who said she went there, and some of her church people came in one day and prayed over her.”

  “Well, it’s the same place. It’s a church and a restaurant,” Aaron said.

  Through stunned and nearly mocking laughter, Maggie said, “What in the world do you mean, Aaron?”

  “I mean that on Sundays they have church there.”