Leaving Cecil Street Read online

  Even Sondra was mildly surprised to see him when she edged the dining-room window up as high as it would go and looked at Shay with her eyebrow raised as if asking, What the hell is he doing here?

  “Moral support,” Shay said in response to Sondra’s eyebrows. “Plus, he’s paying for the bulk of it. You don’t think your mother will mind, do you?”

  “Come on in, hurry up, we’ll talk inside,” Sondra said as she pointed out a soda crate sitting on top of a ten-gallon lidded garbage can and told them to prop the soda crate under the window and use it as a step. Shay went first and then Neet, helped along by Little Freddie from the outside and Shay from within. When Little Freddie had hoisted himself in, Sondra ushered them through the dining room and on into the living room.

  The scent of salt pork hung in the living room, which was a jumble of magazines and black-and-white composition books and unsorted mail and a broken-tooth comb sitting right in the center of the coffee table next to an opened jar of Ultra Sheen hair pomade. Shay grimaced inside. Since she and Sondra weren’t on friendly terms, she was rarely in here. She had expected immaculateness, thought the furniture would be covered with white sheets, maybe the scent of wintergreen alcohol swirling around, a plate of cookies and a pitcher of juice on the table, and if not that, at least the jar of grease should have been covered, the clumps of hair pulled from the broken-tooth comb, the windows opened to chase away the heaviness of the salt pork. At least that.

  She thought then that maybe they should take the disorder as a sign not to go through with it. She looked at Neet, but Neet responded to the hesitation on Shay’s face by saying, “Well, come on, let’s get this over with before I change my mind.” She laughed nervously and then looked down at the floor.

  “Only if you’re positive, sweetness,” Little Freddie said as he put his arm around Neet and kissed the side of her face and Shay thought she saw a moistness around his eyes. She got irritated then, it’s not as if he was in any position to be supporting a baby, he should be the most elated out of all of them that he was about to be relieved of a lifetime responsibility that he couldn’t shoulder.

  “Well, y’all got an envelope for me, right?” Sondra said as she looked from Neet to Little Freddie to Shay.

  “Oh yeah,” Little Freddie said as he reached into his front pants pocket and pulled out a wad of bills and clumsily pushed it into Sondra’s hand. “There’s fifty-five there. You can count it if you want to.”

  “Here’s ten more,” Neet said as she riffled through her purse, “it’s not in ones though, but hell it all spends the same.”

  “Well, actually it doesn’t all spend the same,” Sondra said. “If I go into Sonny’s trying to buy a sandwich or some bobby socks with a bunch often- and twenty-dollar bills, sooner or later he gonna start talking out loud about how am I coming up with all of this money.”

  “Well, it’s not like it’s your money,” Shay said as she laid the remaining five ones in Sondra’s waiting palm. “I mean, your mother’s the one and Sonny or nobody got no right questioning her breaking a big bill.”

  “Well, that may be the case usually, but today I’m the one,” Sondra said, not looking at any of them as she said it. Looking instead at the clock as she cleared her throat. “And we best be getting started ’cause we don’t have all day.”

  “Wait a minute, what you mean you’re the one, where’s your mom?” Shay asked.

  “Okay, this is the situation, she’s not doing the procedure.”

  “Not doing it?” the three blurted out in a chorus.

  “And can we ask why not?” Neet said.

  “She wouldn’t do it. She won’t do people our age, absolutely refuses, gives them the name of someone in New York, says if something happens to a grown-ass woman, well, she’s at least made her own bed, but people our age, generally, she won’t touch. Mnh-mnh, doesn’t want the responsibility if the procedure were to go bad. Unless of course their mother comes to her. She said if she didn’t hear it from your mother, Neet, as far as she was concerned she didn’t hear it. So she wouldn’t do it. So like I said, I’m the one today. I’m totally capable too.”

  “Yeah, but we thought we were paying for your mother.” This from Little Freddie.

  “Well, actually I cut the price way down. But if you willing to pay full price and willing to get Neet’s mom to ask my mom to do the procedure on Neet, I could hold on to this seventy as a deposit and then I could set it up for my mother to do, she could probably be ready for y’all this Saturday morning.”

  The three just stood there looking stunned. “I mean, my feelings won’t be hurt. I was only trying to help you, Neet, anyhow, since I didn’t think you wanted your mom to know.”

  “Well, why you bait us, then, acting like your mother was gonna do it, and how do we know that you know what you’re doing?” Shay asked, suddenly hating everything about Sondra, her rounded cheeks, her poppy eyes, her bang that was pushed to one side of her forehead, the way her lips curled when she talked, the way she stood with one of her fat hips jutted way out to the side in a gangster lean.

  Sondra rolled her eyes up in her head at Shay’s questions and let go with an exaggerated sigh. “Number one, I ain’t bait a damned soul, okay, Shay. I didn’t even know for sure that my mother wasn’t going to do it till last night. And number two, I’ve only helped my mother so many times over the years until I could just about do this thing blindfolded. I even went with her a lot of times, at least twice a month over the past couple of years, when the doctor she helps out does the procedure on rich white women at his office in town.”

  “Yeah, but that’s helping, that’s not doing,” Shay said.

  “Look, it’s a simple procedure.” Sondra talked to Neet now, ignoring Shay, who was standing directly in front of her. “We use these rod things to get you dilated, then we insert a hoselike contraption and we turn on a little machine. Now, you gonna feel some cramping, I ain’t gonna lie and say it don’t hurt, it’s gonna hurt, ’bout twelve to sixteen minutes’ worth of pain that’s gonna have you swearing to God and three other white men that you will never ever let no man’s exposed privates get within two feet of you in any direction. But then once everything’s washed on down, I mean, the pain is the least of it considering what you getting in exchange. In fact, you need to take a few Anacins before you even get started, that is, if you gonna go through with it.”

  “I’m going through with it,” Neet said as she let her purse drop to the floor.

  “Well, wait a minute, let’s think about this, Neet,” Shay said. “Miss BB’s not the only one who does this. I’m sure we can find somebody else.”

  “They say you can get one on any corner in New York,” Little Freddie said as he squeezed Neet’s shoulder.

  “Well, we not in New York. We’re here. So let’s get it over with.” Neet took off her granny glasses and laid them on the coffee table next to the Ultra Sheen hair grease. “I mean, I been back and forth with this, Shay, you know that I have. I have to admit it. I was, like, you know, a baby’s not the worse thing that can happen to a person, okay, so I made a mistake, but is it right to cover up one mistake by making two? I mean, my own mother had me at eighteen and despite what people say behind my back she did okay by me. But I just couldn’t close my mind to how I’d be ruining my life, my shot at college, the whole caboodle, okay. You agree with that, right, Shay? If you really think that the best thing for me is to have a baby now, say so.” She paused and swallowed and looked directly at Shay. “Say so, Shay, or stay pumped up for me. Don’t go getting cold feet on me now.”

  “Yeah, Neet, but now it’s not about me.” Shay’s voice was shaking. “Forget everything I said up to now. You got to be absolutely sure because right now it’s about you opening your legs up for a medical procedure to someone our age. Think about that, Neet.”

  Little Freddie cleared his throat. “Um, Neet, I never knew you were hesitant, sweetness. I mean, maybe we should talk about this some more, see how we could
make it work. Why don’t we maybe leave and think about it and talk about it and if we still want to go through with the—the, um, the procedure, we can. But it don’t have to be done today.”

  “It does. It does. Today. I’m ready now, and I might not be ready tomorrow this time.” Neet rubbed her stomach gently, a contrast to the way she blasted her words through the living room. She was wearing an oversize white cotton blouse, one of her church blouses, had thought about the irony of hiding her sin with such a pious-looking church blouse as she’d put it on that morning, and again now. The thought made her dizzy and she sat down along the edge of the couch. “Plus, I feel it growing bigger by the hour—”

  “You ain’t felt life yet, I hope,” Sondra said, cutting Neet off. “If so, you too far along. You can’t be no further along than twelve weeks for the procedure to work, and you don’t usually feel life till fourteen or sixteen weeks.”

  “I’m twelve,” Neet said with determination.

  “Well, as long as you understand that I ain’t pressuring you to do a damned thing.”

  Sondra ended her words as a question and Neet nodded. “No pressure, Sondra, I understand. Now can we just get it over with?”

  “All right, well, first we got to get you prepped. Shay, if your attitude will allow it, I could use some assistance.”

  Little Freddie started to follow Sondra to the stairs and Neet grabbed his arm, said, “Baby, I’d feel better if you waited down here. Really, just knowing that you’re this close means so much to me, but if you’re up there it’s gonna kill what we got special between us, please, wait down here.”

  Shay would have felt a twinge of jealousy if she’d been hearing right then. She thought herself the most special person in Neet’s life. But Shay wasn’t hearing right then, as she just stood there counting in her head, trying to add up the weeks from the first time Neet had said she and Little Freddie had done it. She’d just told her Saturday morning when she’d cried, out on the banister. She’d told Shay she’d snuck away from church during the monthly revival. Was that March or April? Shay was asking herself now. But she couldn’t remember, couldn’t even think straight enough to count off the weeks if she could remember. Everything seemed suddenly accelerated, time, life, as if she could feel the motion of the earth moving fast and straight instead of in circles and already they were upstairs in Miss BB’s back room.

  The wallpaper was a sandy-colored tuxedo stripe and the furniture was faded to a tan that blended in with the beige-toned rug, even the bedclothes were colorless though at least they appeared clean, stainless at least, as Neet’s straddled legs made a tent of the top sheet so that the only color it seemed was a blue poly–filled length of wrap that hung along the sides of the bed. Sondra waddled in and out of the room, setting some additional things up on a card table next to the bed, and Shay relaxed some because Sondra did appear to know what she was doing, as if she had a system, as if she’d been totally truthful when she’d said that she had done this hundreds of times.

  She wrung a washcloth out in warm water and handed it to Neet and told her to pat herself down and then re-cover herself with the sheet. She turned her head while Neet did this; Shay did too and guessed that someone had told Sondra the way her aunt Maggie had told her that it was bad luck to see another girl’s privates. Shay almost laughed right now when she thought about how her aunt used to say that. Shay, she used to say, ain’t no way I could be a nurse like your mother and have to look at a grown woman’s naked ass. Shit, my luck is hard enough as it is. I already can’t hold on to a dollar, next thing I wouldn’t be able to hold on to a damn man. Shay let out a giggle at the thought even as she understood that the thought about her aunt was merely a defense mechanism against the extreme nervousness wrapping around her chest for what they were about to do.

  Sondra pulled on a pair of plastic gloves. “Good thing you not that far along, my mom turns people away if they’re more than three months, some even try to lie and say that they’re only eight weeks, but my mom can tell once her hand gets up there, she stops cold, tells them to take their money back, they shouldn’t have waited so long to get some help. But thank God you’re early.”

  She slid her hand under the sheet and Neet grimaced. “Just try to stay calm and take deep breaths, I know this isn’t an exactly comfortable feeling, but this little contraption makes it so much simpler the way it just suctions everything out. I don’t know what they did back in the day. I think they used some kind of twigs. My mom says if a woman want to get rid of a baby, she gonna find a way to do it, so she said by doing what she does she’s actually saving them from a dirty coat hanger or knitting needle. You be surprised the extreme measures some people forced to take. Especially poor little colored women who don’t have a thousand dollars to pay a legit doctor to do them after hours in his office someplace. But this little contraption here gonna do the job just fine. One of the doctors who was sweet on my mom gave it to her after she helped him out with a procedure.”

  “Oh God, I know it’s gonna hurt,” Neet said in whispered moans. “But I’m with you, Sondra. Go ahead, do your thing, I’ma hang in there with you.”

  “Good. Girl, you gonna do just fine ’cause you got the right attitude. Mama says attitude is ninety percent of getting through it. Okay, now if you want to help yourself some, just feel free to bite down on that teething ring sitting in the dish. It’s soaking in a little scotch whiskey to help take the edge off of the pain, that’s what Mom does. I got to admit it, my mom’s pretty good at this. If you don’t cry out too loud, when I’m through I’ll tell you who-all my mom helped. Some may not surprise you, but some gonna make you howl.”

  She spread Neet’s legs in a clinical way and again Shay was struck by her appearance of expertise. Shay had moved to the head of the bed so that she could focus on Neet’s face rather than the tent her outstretched legs made with the sheet. Sondra continued to chatter on and Shay was surprised that even her incessant chatter seemed a programmed part of the procedure, it was at least distracting and, as such, calming too.

  “Yeah, girl, like I said, you gonna be easy to do ’cause you got your head in the right place about this whole thing. I just need to get up in there and start you dilating.”

  Shay watched Neet’s face begin to disassemble and she scrunched her own eyes tightly because she hated to witness the look of torture taking over Neet’s face. But then it was as if her ears replaced her eyes and magnified with the sounds in the room what she was trying not to see: Neet’s quickening breath, the whoosh of the machine, the air being suctioned out through the tube, the further parting of Neet’s legs, Sondra’s perspiration sliding down her bang, Shay thought that she could even hear that. There was a second of focused, pointed silence then that opened up and made room for Neet’s screams that bounced off the walls and ricocheted through the house. Little Freddie ran to the top of the stairs and stood on the other side of the door trying to ask if Neet was okay, if everything was okay, but his voice couldn’t override Neet’s screams and he still honored her wish and didn’t go in, to keep it special between them, she had said.

  Neet’s cries were shaping themselves into words as she hollered out for Sondra to stop. “I can’t take it, Lord Jesus, we got to stop,” she yelled.

  “Shh, shh,” Sondra whispered. “I wish I had a penny for how many times I’ve heard those words. Countless times, Neet. By so many women, so many, sneaking in through our back door on Saturday mornings before it’s even light outside to have themselves fixed.”

  “Oh Jesus, please, Sondra, you don’t understand, I really can’t stand it, stop, just stop.” Neet pounded the bed as she hollered out.

  “Shh, shh, shh. It’s bad, I know, but I can’t stop now, Neet. I’m in there now. Please keep still, you messing me up. Please. You know how thin these walls are. If Miss Johnetta next door tells my mother she heard hollering over here this morning—”

  “Fuck Miss Johnetta. Fuck the walls,” Neet continued to cry out.

&n
bsp; “Please, Neet, come on, bite down on the teething ring, please,” and then in a sterner voice she said to Shay, “God, Shay, hand her the ring, please, you just standing there like a fucking zombie, the boyfriend would have been more help than you.”

  Shay jumped at Sondra’s words and reached in the dish and was surprised by how rattled she’d become, that her hands were actually shaking, and she knocked the dish over, whiskey and all, but at least she clung to the teething ring that she edged toward Neet’s lips.

  “If my mom knew what I was doing right now, Lord, you just don’t know,” Sondra rambled on. “I’ll tell you soon as I’m done who our age she turned away. You not passing out on me, Neet, are you?” Sondra asked.

  Neet wished that she could go unconscious right now as she writhed on the towel-covered bed and jammed the teething ring in her mouth and almost took Shay’s hand off when she bit down on the ring. She gritted her teeth into the ring and nodded that she was okay to Shay’s persistent strings of “How you doing, Neet, you holding up?” She tried to concentrate on the yellow-and-blue Mother Goose wallpaper so that she could stop herself from crying out. Except that this wallpaper was tan, tuxedo striped, wasn’t it? Where was the Mother Goose? Was that up in that bedroom in the corner house where she and Little Freddie had done it, when he whispered out her name, gave her back her whole name, Bonita, Bonita, and he was tender and clumsy and warm as he wrapped himself around all of her. But that bedroom barely had paper on the walls. No, she remembered now, as the instrument funneled inside her, reaching for her adolescent cervix, the Mother Goose was on that other wall, Mr. G’s efficiency apartment over top of the candy store where he’d take her, Neet, on Friday nights when she was only eight, when the whole church was in a frenzy and seeing God, and when they got all frenetic like that no one paid any attention to her and even her own mother didn’t miss her when Mr. G took her hand and led her across the street. “We’re going to get candy,” he’d say. “If your mother asks you where we were, we were getting candy.” He’d repeat this to her as they climbed the musty stairwell up to his efficiency apartment. That first time he’d turned on the television that had a hanger as an antenna that didn’t work right because there wasn’t a clear picture and only static for sound that was so loud she could barely hear him as he continued to repeat over and over that if anybody asked, they went for candy. He sat her on his lap and bounced her on it and tickled her under her chin at first and she giggled even as she asked him to please take her back to the church, she wanted to go back to the church, please. “But we’re going to get candy in just a minute, we’ll go downstairs and get you candy.” By then the tickling had turned ugly and she felt herself being torn apart on the inside as he bounced her up and down on his lap. She focused on the Mother Goose wallpaper that was yellow and blue. There was the old woman who lived in the shoe, how mean the old woman looked to Neet as he bounced her on his lap, all those children in that shoe and that woman with her hand on her hips pondering, not knowing what to do with all of her children, she looked like a witch to Neet, staring out from the wallpaper, maybe she was a witch, like maybe her own mother was a witch for not knowing what Mr. G was doing to her own child. Shouldn’t have children and then not know what to do with them. How unclean she’d felt. How chafed and raw inside she was when they’d returned to church. Stiff and sore so that she had to walk wide legged, and her mother didn’t even notice that she was walking strangely. And Mr. G said, “I hope you don’t mind, Alberta, but Neet was getting very restless so I walked her across the street for candy.” Her mother had just smiled up at him and said isn’t that sweet, God will bless you because you’re such a good soul. Neet stared at her mother, begging her to look at her, to see that she was unclean and raw, that he had made her so. Why couldn’t her mother see it? Witch. Witch. She was hollering as the wallpaper went back to its dull tuxedo-striped sandy shade and she realized where she was, not in Mr. G’s efficiency apartment but here in Miss BB’s Saturday house, straddle legged while Sondra took care of things down there and Shay brushed her bang off her forehead. Shay’s hands were sweaty and cold against her forehead, but still they were a comfort against the cramps that were steady and hard just like Sondra had said they’d be. But then she felt a flash of a searing pain, as if an acid-dipped spear was pushing, pushing, separating her insides, ripping. She felt her womb ricocheting from back to front and then crashing in on itself, falling, with a pull, as if her insides were being snatched out of her the way her mother yanked gizzards from a chicken before roasting it. And now she was going to pass out except that she also had to vomit, she didn’t want to pass out in her vomit, knew of a boy on the other block of Cecil Street who’d drunk too much and passed out and then died because he’d choked on his vomit. She started gagging then, as she fought to stay conscious just long enough to spit up, to save her own life, she told herself. Then she felt cold metal against her chin and she realized Shay had the pan there waiting to catch her vomit. God, Shay, she thought. You always been there for me. My girl, my motherfucking girl. She tried to say this, to make Shay laugh the way she’d always laugh when they’d say that to each other, so proud they were to be the other’s girl. She tried to force the words out so that she could see Shay beam, knew how tormented Shay must be watching her right now. But then she heard Sondra say Oh my God, shit. And Shay ask What, what, something’s wrong isn’t it, Sondra, she shouldn’t be bleeding that much should she? Look, it’s gushing out all over the place. Something’s wrong, isn’t it, Sondra, no, no, please God, no. Neet. She’s passing out, Sondra. Something’s wrong. No. No. No. And now it was Shay’s wails bouncing off the sandy-tuxedo-striped walls in the back bedroom of Miss BB’s Saturday-morning house even as Neet tried to tell Shay not to cry, that it was okay, it didn’t hurt anymore and they were still girls and it was okay. But she couldn’t get the words out and anyhow the room was going dark and now she couldn’t even hear.