Meridian Page 6

  And through it all, she sat in the small house not a mile from the school and never thought about the baby at all— unless her mother-in-law called and mentioned it, or something to do with it. She knew she did not want it. But even this was blurred. How could she not want something she was not even sure she was having? Yet she was having it, of course. She grew and grew and grew, as pregnant women will. Her skin, always smooth as velvet, became blotchy, her features blunted; her face looked bloated, tight.

  She did not, also, think of Eddie very much. She woke to his sweet breath on her face every morning—and wondered who, really, he was. What he was doing there in bed with her. Or she lay with him quietly, after making love, and enjoyed the incredible warmth of his very beautiful young body. So nearly black, so glowing and healthy, so slim now, next to hers. She loved the warmth, would do anything for it, his gentleness. She was grateful that he was willing to work so hard for their future, while she could not even recognize it.

  “One day,” he said over lunch, “we’ll have a house like Mr. Yateson’s. It will have cactus plants around it and sky-blue driveway and painted blue trim. In the dining room there’ll be a chandelier like the ones in Joan Crawford movies. And there’ll be carpeting wall to wall and all the rooms will be different colors.”

  Mr. Yateson was the principal of their school. His brand-new house, floating on the bright-blue driveway and concrete walks that encircled it, sat back from a dirt road that was impassable when it rained and made Meridian think of a fancy-dressed lady without shoes standing in a puddle of mud.

  “Um hum,” she would nod vaguely at Eddie’s dream.

  At the restaurant he worked as a waiter and sometimes short-order cook—hard work, little pay. And yet he was always patient and gentle with her, protective. If he worried he kept it from her, justifying his silence by her “condition.” The worries he was unable to hide were about small things that bothered him: the ironing of his clothes, and even her own, which she did not do nearly as well as his mother (who, finally, in the last stages of her daughter-in-law’s pregnancy, began to collect their dirty clothes each Wednesday to bring them back on Friday stainless and pale from bleach); the cooking, which she was too queasy to do at all; and the sex, which she did not seem (he said) interested in.

  One night as he climbed over her—because he could only make love to her by beginning his assault from her left side—he said:

  “And tonight, please, open your legs all the way.”

  “What do you mean, open my legs?” she asked.

  “I have to fight to get your legs open; you know that as well as I do. They’re like somebody starched them shut.”

  She had not been aware that she locked her legs. Now that he had pointed it out to her, however, she found she closed them tighter than ever.

  “You just don’t care about it any more,” he moaned, burying his head in the pillow next to hers.

  In fact, this last worry surprised her. She did not see how he could feel she was less interested in sex, for she felt she had never shown anything approaching interest. Nor could she imagine why any woman should. She loved the warmth, the lying together, the peace. She endured the sex because it gave her these things. She would have been just as happy, happier, without it. But he did not understand this and would sometimes seem hurt and complain. She did not know what to do, so of course she put the blame on any handy thing: her big stomach, the queasiness, the coming baby, old wives’ tales that forbade intercourse until three months after the baby was born (a fact she learned from his mother: that intercourse any earlier weakened one’s brain).

  By that time—and it did not surprise her—he had a woman who loved sex, and was able to get as much of it as he wanted every night.

  But he was “good” to her, even then. He did not “cheat” and “beat” her both, which meant he was “good” to her, according to her mother, his mother, the other women in the neighborhood and in fact just about everyone she knew, who seemed always to expect the two occurrences together, like the twin faces of a single plague.

  But had she lost interest in sex completely? She didn’t know. It was simply that sex was now something that she knew and thought she understood. Before it had been curiosity about her body’s power. Nor was her response to Eddie’s lovemaking as uncomplicated as he appeared to think.

  She had not been wandering exactly on those afternoons she had found herself in front of Daxter’s funeral home—that huge, snowy, two-storied building that stood on a hill between a church and an all-night cafe. Daxter’s was owned by George Daxter, an obese half-white man in his fifties. His mother, so the story went, was white. When her parents found she was pregnant by the black man who worked for them, they shut her up in the cellar and threw away the key. They fed her pig bran and a little watery milk. When Daxter was born he was thrown out into the street with the rest of the trash. He was raised by an old woman who later died of ptomaine poisoning. She had eaten some sour, rotten tomatoes Daxter gave her.

  Daxter had been after Meridian since she was twelve years old. She would visit the funeral home on Saturday afternoons, as everybody did to see who was new in the viewing room. Daxter would entice her into the small back office where he kept a long sofa and two soft chairs. At first she thought Daxter generous: He gave her candy for a swift, exploratory feel. When she became older—fifteen or so—he would take out his wallet crammed with money, and leave it on the sofa between them while he felt her breasts and tried to pull her onto his lap. The only part she liked was when he sucked her nipples, and she liked to hear his breathing, like his throat was closing, when she let one chubby hand touch the bottom of her panties. She could sit, holding his head against her breasts—where he busily and noisily sucked—and feel the hot throbbing of his passion almost enter her. But his obesity, in the end, was distasteful to her. She had heard that fat men had short, stunted penises. She imagined Daxter’s penis to look like an English walnut.

  When Daxter was not around she allowed herself to be chased around the embalming table by his young assistant, an almost handsome man, but dissipated and with a face that—as the saying went—begged for pussy. He thought of nothing else. His tool of seduction (his description) was his voice, which he used to describe the act of intercourse. Holding her with her back tight against him so that his penis was like a hard, live bedpost against her hips, he would whisper in her ear: “Think of how it would feel,” he would urge, grabbing one, then both, of her nipples, “to have this big, black, long, ummm ...” and he would press the bedpost against her— “inside you. Slippin’ in and slippin’ out.”

  She hated him but was fascinated; she was also far from immune to the voice. The Assistant would manipulate her breasts and cram her between his legs and rub her so against him that her panties became flooded with the residue of her resistance. The Assistant was very clever and so never actually forced her beyond a certain point, but each time he left her with one of his little homilies: “Experience is the best, the only, teacher,” and “Just looking at water will never teach you to swim.”

  One day The Assistant, who knew (he said) how much she wanted to, was ready to, be fucked—if not by him then by the Voice, the Bedpost—arranged for her to watch him while he seduced another schoolgirl (the same girl, in fact, who did baby-sitting for his wife). He did it in the small shed where the wicker baskets were stored. She watched because she was curious, wanted to learn without doing, if possible, and because she had nothing better to do on a hot Wednesday afternoon.

  The Assistant began by standing with his bedpost against the back of the girl. She was about sixteen, and wore loafers and a red cardigan sweater turned backward with a neat little white collar. Her small brown hands kept checking the collar to be sure it had not become unfastened by the stripping quality of The Assistant’s words. His hands were elsewhere. Already under the cardigan, kneading the nipples—then into her pants as her skirt fell to the floor. Then he hoisted her up onto the table and began to fuck her
standing up. Then up on the table. The girl was bucking up and down as fast as she could, as if she feared to break a rhythm she had learned by heart. The Voice fucked more slowly, expertly, like a machine, and the Voice never stopped talking. At the end he watched her as if from a distance, his voice a monotone, his face greedy, obscene and ugly. When the girl tried to bury her face in his chest and force his arms around her, he pushed her away.

  The Assistant said later that the girl was his now whenever he wanted her, because he had discovered a secret few men knew: how to make a woman come by using nothing but his penis and his beautiful voice. These were his gifts, The Assistant said, more skillful than the suppleness of wrist required to extract cold blood from a cadaver’s vein. And what had she thought of his performance? She was willing to continue their meetings on one condition, she told him. What is that? he eagerly asked, sucking a lemon for his throat. If you hold me in your arms, she said casually, you must promise not to talk.

  Of course she had given up Daxter and The Assistant when she became involved with Eddie—well, not just at first. She was guilty of having tried to use them to discover him, what he wanted from her; and yet their pawing over her and her refusal to do anything more than tease them had seemingly separated her from her young husband forever. For as much as she wanted to, she—her body, that is—never had any intention of giving in. She was suspicious of pleasure. She might approach it, might gaze on it with longing, but retreat was inevitable. Besides, Eddie did not seriously expect more than “interest” from her. She perceived there might be something more; but for him, it was enough that his pleasure should please her. Understanding this, they never discussed anything beyond her attitude.

  The Happy Mother

  SHE HAD BEEN IN HARD LABOR for a day and a half. Then, when she brought the baby home, it had suffered through a month of colic, gasping and screaming and robbing her of sleep. She was so exhausted it was futile to attempt to think straight, or even to think at all. It took everything she had to tend to the child, and she had to do it, her body prompted not by her own desires, but by her son’s cries. So this, she mumbled, lurching toward his crib in the middle of the night, is what slavery is like. Rebelling, she began to dream each night, just before her baby sent out his cries, of ways to murder him.

  She sat in the rocker Eddie had bought and stroked her son’s back, her fingers eager to scratch him out of her life. She realized he was even more helpless than herself, and yet she would diaper him roughly, yanking his fat brown legs in the air, because he looked like his father and because everyone who came to visit assumed she loved him, and because he did not feel like anything to her but a ball and chain.

  The thought of murdering her own child eventually frightened her. To suppress it she conceived, quite consciously, methods of killing herself. She found it pleasantly distracting to imagine herself stiff and oblivious, her head stuck in an oven. Or coolly out of it, a hole through the roof of her mouth. It seemed to her that the peace of the dead was truly blessed, and each day she planned a new way of approaching it. Because of her growing reliance on suicide, the thought of it, she was able to function very well. She was told by everyone that she was an exemplary young mother, so mature, so calm. This pleased her because it was so amusing. She delighted in the praise. As her face grew warmer and warmer she began to giggle—to be praised some more for her good humor.

  She felt as though something perched inside her brain was about to fly away. Eddie went to the restaurant, worked, came home (or did not come home), ate, slept, went off to school in the morning, as before. He loved his son, and was good to the child. He bought him the usual stupid presents, showed him off to his parents, took pictures every six weeks and even learned to change the baby’s diaper—though he denied this expertise when his friends came to visit.

  She wondered sometimes why she still did not love Eddie. It perplexed her. He was still good-looking, still sought after by women (several, by now, had caught him, at least for a time), and he treated her with gentleness and respect. But the longer they lived together the more she became obsessed with the horrible thought that Eddie, like his name, would never be grown up. She thought he would always be a boy. Not that she knew what a man should be; she did not know. She only knew that none of the boys she had dated or been friends with seemed capable of becoming men. She projected first one, then the other, of them into the future. They became older, but still boys. She could imagine them only in positions similar to—if on the surface vastly different from—the one Eddie held at the restaurant. Fetching and carrying and courteously awaiting orders from someone above. She could not imagine one of them becoming, for example, president of the local bank.

  This affected her with a kind of lethargy. She could not become active again. She could not move about her own house purposefully. What was the use?

  She could, however, criticize. And she began to find fault—with everything. Small things, at first. For starters: Why did his pants and shirts have to be starched and ironed after every second wearing? (By this time his mother had stopped doing the laundry for them.) It did not seem a reasonable answer to her that his mother “had always done this,” or that he was “used to clean clothes.” So what? she answered, so was she. But she had learned to wear her clothes longer than two days without changing them. Except for her underwear. And why, she wondered, must he shower for such a long time and fog up the bathroom so that if she came in, even to use the toilet, her hair was ruined by the steam? And did he still play basketball at school? And was there a point to staying fit? What damn good did he expect it to do?

  More seriously: She hated the fact that although he was still in school and she was not, he did not seem to know anything about books—or about the world. She learned more than he knew from watching TV quiz programs.

  He was not interested in “education,” he said, but in finishing school. She despised this answer because she knew the truth of it. She knew also that it was the aim of everyone in the school, from the principal to the first-graders. In fact, “finishing school” was synonymous with “education.” The point was, she did not believe it, now that she was no longer in school. School had been dreary, but only there had she occasionally experienced the quicksilver flash of learning that never came to her now.

  She read Sepia, Tan, True Confessions, Real Romances and Jet. According to these magazines, Woman was a mindless body, a sex creature, something to hang false hair and nails on. Still, they helped her know for sure her marriage was breaking up. She lived with the awareness in her usual fog of unconcern. Yet the break, when it came, was not—as she had feared and sometimes hoped—cataclysmic. In fact, in a way she hardly noticed it. It did not come at once, with a heated argument, fighting, packing or slamming doors. It came in pieces, some larger or smaller than others. It came—on Eddie’s part—with a night away here, three or four days absent there, and with a cooling off, slightly, of his usual affectionate attention to the baby. This was the only sign of calculation she could detect on his part. He assumed, naturally, that the baby would remain with her (this was, after all, how such arrangements had always gone), and he did not intend to see much more of either of them. On her side there was just—a continuation of her lethargy, an unwillingness to put forth effort for anything.

  On the day he left, she had walked past a house, not far from theirs, where—since it was nearly summer—all the doors and windows were open. People, young people, were everywhere. They milled about inside, shouted out of windows to those outside, looked carefree (as childless young people, her own age, always now looked to her) and yet as if sensitive to some outside surveillance beyond her own staring. But she was the only person walking on the street. And she stopped to look only because it was a black family’s house, in a black neighborhood, and there were several young white people. And all of the young people were strangely dressed and looked, really, funny and old-timey in the overalls and clodhoppers they wore. Even the girls (and she noticed especially a white
girl with long brown hair) were dressed in overalls with bibs!

  It was something to think about, the day Eddie moved out for good. She could not, somehow, concentrate on the fact of his leaving. She did not know deeply enough what it might mean. Was he gone for good? Did he actually take all his clothes—even the starched but unironed shirts balled up in the refrigerator? And who was to play with the baby when he woke up? Eddie usually did, if he had a few minutes between work and school.

  Now she sat listlessly, staring at the TV. The house she had passed was on. There was to be a voter registration drive (she wondered what that was) that would begin in the city, at that house, and work its way out to the people in the country. Local blacks, volunteers, were needed. A group of young men made this announcement to a (white) newscaster who looked astonished and held his handkerchief over the mike when he presented it; when he talked into it himself, he removed the handkerchief. Black people were never shown in the news—unless of course they had shot their mothers or raped their bosses’ grandparent—and a black person or persons giving a news conference was unheard of. But this concerned her, gathered her attention, only superficially, for all its surprise. It kept her mind somewhere else while she made her hands play with the baby, whom, even then, she had urges to kill. To strangle that soft, smooth, helpless neck, to push down that kinky head into a tub of water, to lock it in its room to starve. It looked at her with apprehension, looked about mournfully for its daddy. She forced herself to think only of the black faces on TV and about the house not far from her own.

  The next morning as she lay in bed watching the early news, she was again shown pictures of the house—except now the house no longer existed anywhere but on film. During the night—between three and four A.M.—the house was demolished by firebombs. The bombs, exploding, set fire to—not just the house—the whole cluster of houses on that street. Three small children were injured—no, a flash at the bottom of the screen announced them dead; several grownups were injured. One adult, missing, was assumed dead. The others had somehow escaped. It seems they had posted a guard who was alerted by the sound of a pickup truck stopping several yards from the house and then, in a few minutes, racing off.