Dance on saturday, p.4
Dance on Saturday, page 4
The anticipation, a mingling of fear and thrill, stayed with her every waking hour, like an itch all over her body. Sometimes she barely felt it; other times she could focus on nothing else and had to open a melon book or redo a day of planning. Come Friday she waited on the porch with a knot in her stomach. As the car pulled up she saw Warmell deep in conversation with Deja. He was laughing. He parked at the curb, got out, and stepped around to open the passenger side. In a perfect world, she thought, they could grow fruit to replace car parts like the lock knob that jerked six times before the door finally opened.
Deja looked rested compared to her last visit. Her shirt read AKRON VALLEY BASKETBALL CAMP ’99 (absolutely charming) and might have fit fifteen years ago, the hem clinging to the skin above her navel. Warmell hefted three suitcases from the trunk and Teetee sprang down the steps to embrace her. For a moment she lost herself in the girl, her plumpness, the indisputable presence of her, the strength that rippled like waves from her shoulders and into Teetee’s loving palms.
To the unknowing eye, the cabin was a shed half-caved in by winter snows. Inside was a living room, bedroom, kitchenette, and bathroom, windows built into the low ceiling to allow for natural light. The furniture came from a beige vinyl set. On the walls hung collage-style paintings of river baptisms, Yoruba masks, and woolen tapestries depicting orishas, among other afrocentrisms. Overall, a calmly autumnal spot where Teetee often escaped to read poetry or journal. Deja thanked her to see white bath linens on the bed, impeccably laundered. As she unpacked, Teetee admired the efficiency with which she’d folded her clothes. Old clothes—good for gardening.
“Home sweet wreck,” Warmell said. He lingered in the bedroom doorway, a timid smile under his mustache. Moments later Teetee realized he’d attempted a joke. He remained standing there for half a minute, wearing a look like the orchestra was playing him offstage, then left the cabin in a stiff-legged shuffle.
Teetee spoke to Deja in her brightest voice. “You can eat anything in the fridge. Giant Eagle grocery’s in Edgewood Town Center. About a twenty minute walk. It’s good exercise. But Warmell wouldn’t mind driving.” She gestured to the living room TV. “Oh, and we have videos, if you like movies. But who doesn’t like movies?” She laughed for no reason.
Deja set about hanging jeans in the closet. “So you know, I’m a Christian. Baptist Christian. That’s all I’m ever going to be.”
“Wonderful!” Teetee said with a chill down her spine.
The look Deja gave her was of someone trying to avoid looking too harsh. “In case you do stuff like . . . you know . . . multiple wives or . . . anything with kids . . .”
“Oh, sweetie. We’re not a cult. We’re Presbyterian. We worship God.”
“And God is in the Fruit?”
Teetee chose to ignore the cynical undertone in her voice. “I don’t know who else could make us immortal.”
With an exhausted grunt, Deja sat back on the queen-sized bed elevated with white comforters. She removed her sandals to rub her blistered toes. She asked, “When do we start planting?”
“Let’s start tonight!”
Soft as a moth’s wing, “Thank you.”
In the house kitchen, Teetee showed Deja five packets of cantaloupe seed on the windowsill. Never touching them herself, she instructed her to pour soil in the biodegradable mini-pots. Count out sixteen seeds. Plant one in each. Happily, she watched Deja water them. In two or three months they would grow huge and yellow and sweet.
Later, at the kitchen table, they went over shade levels and fertilizer. The steely determination with which Deja listened reminded Teetee how badly she wanted this. Losing track of time, she was surprised to read five-fifteen on the clock.
“Dinner should be ready in an hour,” she said. “You want some?”
Deja brightened. “Mama gotta eat!”
She ended up taking her plate of microwaved turkey to the cabin, her excuse that she needed to call her kids. Disappointed, Teetee sat in bed with Warmell until lights out, he doing the crossword, she journaling. All night the house creaked and cried around them. Pipes gurgled incessantly.
In the morning she dusted off a boombox and looked through her cassette rack. Grabbed the first three Mariah Carey LPs for maximum positive energy.
She found Deja already outside, waiting by the plot in her sweats. The empty place no longer padded, her cotton tank top sagged from the tip of her remaining breast. Teetee wore overalls, a straw hat, leather gloves, and sneakers. The sunshine got her singing an O’Jays song.
“Ooh, look at you all sing songy,” said Deja.
Teetee smiled shyly. “Let me know if it’s annoying.”
“I love it,” Deja said.
Teetee knelt in the fruit garden and sank her fingernails into the warm soil. Images twisted up her fingers, from cuticle to knuckle to cortex to memory. She saw Murray planting seeds and Sister D watering grapes. She wished she could bottle her euphoria, let Deja drink it. Together they uprooted weeds, killed them, cut their rubbery stems at the root.
In dreams she sailed the river, walked through the hills, descended the valleys, scaled the mountains to reach the middle of the beginning, an equator in time before they had words for time. Nothing but bone and gristle, she padded on bloody feet down a tree branch, the width of which called to mind something yet to be invented. What was it? Ah yeah, a road.
Cast in darkness by the branch overhead, she trusted her keen hearing and balance to protect her in the shadows. (To think she’d been so tall and strong!) Her companion’s footsteps sounded behind, light as rain on thatch. Two children, vine-belted, the last to remain after everyone else had fallen in exhaustion, to wait in their dozens on the roots below. She made herself ignore the high-pitched voices buzzing about her ears. Accolades could come after the prize was won.
A hitch jabbed her left side. She breathed like she had pebbles in her lungs. When her groping fingers collided at last with the trunk, she spun around to catch breath. Her heart clanked and clattered in her chest. Through slanting bars of sunlight her companion approached with a limping gait. Like her, the other had brown skin, limbs like bramble, and a bald pate. Both were nude save for the belt, a stone knife sheathed against their hips, and across their shoulders a sling woven from their own shorn hair. Both had a gash instead of a worm between their legs. She-who-would-be-Teetee braced her legs akimbo to anchor herself. Her belly and heart thirsted to see the yellow treasure glowing on the branch high above. She lifted a jagged rock from her sling and carefully unspooled the ivy rope tied around it, a nerve-wracking process. Too much force in the swing could send her off the branch. Her companion knelt and hugged her around the waist for added weight. She-who-would-be-Teetee gripped the rope in both hands, gave three big swings that had her shoulders screaming, then let fly into the dark. Twice, the rope wrapped around the branch before it impaled the bark. She unleashed a triumphant yell that her companion echoed. Their cry exploded through the trees, in defiance of every predator who sought their soft throats. A cry against death and hunger. She could taste the fruit on her dry slab of tongue. They knotted the rope in their belts, put feet on the trunk, and climbed.
Wind sang with an alto voice. It kissed her cheeks and turned her sweat to ice. Below, the world was green and purple and brown, a bowl of spilled soup. Her arms ached as gravity pulled at her shoulders, the pain and nearness of death steeling her resolve as she climbed to the mushroom-grown underside. Around her rose the monarchs of the wood, world-trees teeming with life, in whose leaves sounded the movement of a hundred creatures. She saw cocoons stuck to the trunks and imagined the burrowers inside, long-nosed scoundrels dreaming their furry dreams until the white-mooned night they would burst forth as winged nectar-gatherers and snowflake earthward. In exchange for tunnels—shelter when winter came—the children guarded those cocoons. This pact had lasted as long as she’d been in the forest, and she’d been there forever, climbing, reaching as she did now to squeeze the corrugated underbelly of one mushroom and with her pointed toenails puncture another. She walked horizontally up the fungi, careful to balance as she swayed from the rope and slime oozed between her toes. She alighted on the branch, offered both hands to her companion. For a time they lay on their backs, breathing.
Following a brief rest they stole forward, their tread noiseless in a carpet of moss. Needles of pain stabbed her right shin. The branch was narrow enough for three girls to walk abreast. To keep steady, she tightened an arm around her companion (who she realized without knowing why was Murray). Suspended from a vine thicker than her waist, the treasure was twice as tall and wide as they, rotund, oval, gilding the bark with its shine. Knives in hand, they stabbed up into the porous skin and peeled it back; they plunged their hands in the stringy meat to begin filling their slings.
A screech slit the world open. High above, leaves crackled and she looked in time to see a winged nightmare expurgate from their black recess. Suspended on two veiny membranes that each ended with a single claw, it came storming down on them. Its nose looked bashed-in and two daggers hung from its black-furred jaw. Its ears were taller than the girls were tall. For a moment she could see the winged rodent in its entirety, before a colossal falling leaf obscured her vision. She jumped forward and rolled to avoid its crushing impact.
In a fighting crouch, legs braced and arms tensed, she readied for swift and powerful motion. Three strides away the mammoth leaf landed heavily, silently, on the spot where she’d stood. A stench like mud flooded her nostrils. The twisting shadow of the thing entangled her. Armed with her knife, her deadly companion, she had a moment to yell her challenge before winged death struck. A rush of wind, a reek of fur. She stabbed up. Foul blood blinded her.
Fallen on her shoulder, she lifted an arm to wipe her eyes, heard her friend’s shrill voice shoot up to the heavens. The wood beneath her vanished and she was falling. She tried to scream but the wind snatched it from her throat like a ravenous fox. Then the rope squeezed her waist to the circumference of a dandelion and she vomited.
Girdled with pain, she hung limp, the forest floor rotating below. She could see her legs kicking pitifully. Craning her neck to look up, she glimpsed She-who-would-be-Murray anchored by her weight to the branch. She-who-would-be-Murray held the leaf above her head as the sharp-winged abomination assaulted her impromptu shield with air and claw and bone. She-who-would-be-Teetee gripped the rope and began the inexorable climb.
They returned to earth with crimson pouring in rills down their legs. There had been no time to heal before other predators made themselves known and forced the girls into a hasty descent. Missing a pinky finger on her right hand, She-who-would-be-Teetee used what strength she had to carry her friend, who had been ripped open down the middle, the wound stanched with blackened leaves. Half her face was a mask of peeled flesh and gaping teeth. The exultant songs of the children changed to horrified gasps. Burrowers came forward to touch She-who-would-be-Teetee’s cheeks with blunt and dirty fingers, their compound eyes wet with concern. They stretched their question-mark proboscides to caress her wounds and told her to lie down in a language that sounded like termites scuttling through a log. Heedless of them, she swallowed a bite of golden meat, felt the rush of vigor as her wounds closed from the inside. Laying her friend on the moss, she chewed the sour stuff and spit the juice into her mouth. Her companion couldn’t swallow, but She-who-would-be-Teetee kept spitting down her throat. At last light returned to her eye, the bleeding stopped, her flesh knit together. Relieved, She-who-would-be-Teetee held the girl’s hand and smiled for her, so joy would be her first sight when sight returned.
Once she knew her comrade would live, she passed meat to the others, who fed gluttonously, juice dribbling down their chins and hairless chests until they were indistinguishable, a sexless race of pulp-smeared beasts. Then she lifted an ovular seed as long as her arm from the sling. What if they planted it and saw what happened? She asked help from the burrowers, who dipped their proboscides in elation.
“Teetee!” she heard a child’s voice say.
Wakefulness hit her like a slap to the face. She saw Deja in the garden, crouched like a Klondike pioneer digging gold from a river. Mariah sang from the tape player: Sent from up above, so much love in my life. I can’t get enough of your touch—feels so right. Teetee found herself in the wicker chair.
“Goodness, child, what?” she snapped.
Deja looked worried. “It looked like you wasn’t breathing.”
Teetee tried to regain her wits through the fog in her brain. Dream and memory shared the same corner bus station. She saw blood on her lap. She made a fist with her right hand and felt the pinky move. However, when she looked, she saw only a scabbed empty place.
“Oh. How long was I asleep?” She noticed with satisfaction the green stains on Deja’s gloves.
“An hour.”
How embarrassing! She probably came across a hundred years old. Yet she wondered: Did she really come up with the idea to plant seeds? She? Little docile Teetee? Her impulse was to call Murray and inform him he’d been born a girl. Unfair as it would be for Deja, she wanted to close her eyes and submerge again. The child plunged her gloved hands into the soil like she could wrestle the earth out of shape, and lifted them out with equal force, weeds encircling her arms like green bracelets. These she cast in a knee-high pile.
“I should work,” said Teetee, and braced her elbows on the armrests to stand. “You go rest.”
“You sure? I can keep going.”
Teetee took a watering can to the spigot and filled it halfway. “Never feel obligated to work. You can’t just mother other people, you have to mother yourself too. And rest is inherently nurturing.” Their gloved hands touched as she passed the can. “Water your babies, then rest.”
Later, as Teetee weeded, Deja reclined in the wicker chair and thumbed at her cellphone, a Newport in her teeth. Then she retreated to the cabin and stayed for three hours.
Deja had trouble sleeping. Nine forty-five at night, Teetee would don her purple bathrobe to check on the fruit one last time before bed. She would see the girl through the cottage window, two fans going like the Wright Flyer’s propellers to push a cumulonimbus of pot smoke from the living room and out the rear window. Kneeling by the glass coffee table, Deja would pack her weed in a gutted-out Swisher, slip her tongue along the edge to roll a slim needle of a blunt. The first time Teetee saw this she bristled at the disrespect. Then she remembered marijuana had medicinal value, or so they said. Deja had finished chemo just last year; if she looked closely, Teetee could see spots where her hair grew back patchy. Only a tyrant would begrudge her that bedtime joint. Thus she resolved to never tell Warmell.
Sometimes on these nightly excursions, her guilty pleasure, voyeuristic and rude yet strangely fulfilling, she heard snatches of phone conversation: “I’m telling you, she lucky I’m in Pittsburgh. Saying I left my babies? Oh my god, that bitch is lucky.—That is some scandalous shit. Tell me more.—Gio, shut up and put your brother on the phone.—Girl, you will not believe the crackheads they got here. This nigga was in the trash can. I was like, the fuck? Nigga, is you Oscar the Grouch or some shit?”
She would watch Deja read from skinny novels with muscular torsos on the covers. Or the girl would curl under the blankets and stare into space, possibly imagining the milk that would pour from her new breast, because Teetee knew by looking at her that she wasn’t finished creating life. The cabin light was always on when Teetee left the garden at precisely ten p.m.
Those first two weeks they did an hour of garden maintenance every day. Watering the rows of newly planted strawberries. Fertilizing the tomatoes, cucumber, and radishes that grew diligently in the vegetable plot. Cutting strawberry stolons to keep them from growing invasive.
One day Teetee discovered Deja had killed four flowers by cutting the wrong stolons—a forgivable rookie mistake. But when she pointed this out, Deja jammed her trowel in the soil five times. “Fuck!” she screamed.
Bemused but sympathetic, Teetee watched her breathe heavy until she had no more air and was wheezing.
“I’m sorry,” Deja huffed. “That was stupid.”
“Please cover the soil back up,” said Teetee, who secretly enjoyed the fragrance of overturned soil, the sight of startled earthworms twitching their umbilical bodies. Deja was like a robin flown into the garden: pretty to see and hear, still willing to peck holes in the leaves because those were the terms by which she understood them.
When the strawberries ripened, Teetee made them into preserves she then bottled in Mason jars. The rest went inside Ziploc bags in the freezer. They look like noses, she thought amusedly. Bags of noses. In the kitchen she would gaze lovingly on the melon sprouts. All were tall with a healthy green color.
Using popsicle sticks, she partitioned an eight-by-five section of garden for cantaloupes. Shame they had no room for a trellis; she adored the sight of melons hanging like rotund trapeze artists from their own vines. Murray delivered a Rubbermaid tub of manure, a concoction he displayed as proudly as his mashed potatoes. He dumped it, along with fertilizer and mulching soil, into a wheelbarrow and stirred with a shovel, careful to pick out any hard bits that might hinder growth. Teetee and Deja took turns tilling the mix into the soil. They wore matching head wraps to keep the sun off their foreheads.
