Come to a Good End
BY SHANTEKA SIGERS
I admit my features got a touch of suffering, something around my eyes, and suffering is what folks most remember my mother for but I don’t look like her. I got freckles and red hair like a bonfire in the fall and I guess maybe these people wear me out just like they wore her out, and like I said, you can see it in my eyes. But my sister Priscilla Jean actually looks like her. Same round arch of a hairline. Cheekbones sitting up off the sides of her face. She got the turned-up top lip and that one shy little tooth tucked in on the side. Tall. Just like our mother. Most of the time though, Black folks miss the resemblance because mama was a redbone and Priscilla Jean is dark-skinned.
One time I’d said how stupid people are about that and she’d said, “Well, Tallulah, sentiment trumps genetics.” My answer was to drop a pan of meatballs so the sauce splashed across her expensive shoes. She always got to see both sides. It’s annoying. Pick you a side, get on it, and dig in.
Somebody ringing my doorbell and I know whoever it is, they about to get on my nerves.
I open the door to the fifty-something white man who is dating my thirty-something sister. He walked over here from my father’s house, eight doors down. I think something is wrong with her and I think this man on my porch is part of the wrong.
“Tallulah? I’m Nigel. It’s Nigel?”
This man is packed into a pair of inky blue jeans and a white t-shirt with a fancy little pocket. I keep trying to puzzle out how he decided that a spiky bird’s nest of hair would be a reasonable topping for a man. His lips seesaw up and down, one side smile and one side grimace and his eyebrows squirm like they got a whole different puppeteer. He’s out here looking hopeful and terrified, like somebody sent him to make friends with the school bully.
“I know who you are,” I say.
But I don’t know why my sister sent this fool down here after I spent a whole day avoiding him. Plus, I’m already heated because when I went over to the house that afternoon, she come pulling me in the bathroom and telling me to change out of my cutoffs.
“Tallulah, this is not a hayride. This is a…”
“…a what? A wake? A funeral? He ain’t dead. He is in hospice. Who gets a hospice party? And? He a asshole. This is a tea party for a asshole. What’s the dress code for that, Peeeee Jaaay?”
I smeared her initials, her new Call me PJ all up in her face. Then I shoved my way out and I admit I gave her a good elbow on the way past.
“She send you?” I got my hair clamp held out like it’s a switchblade.
“Ah, oh, what? No! No! … I was having a smoke. You know, just stepped out from all the…you know…down there and I thought I would uh, come down to talk? See if you need help with anything?”
I’m confused by his sputtering. I’m confused by his offer to carry ham. Ham fetching don’t match them ankles and them shined up loafers.
“No, I got everything.”
“Ah, yes, I see, well…I see…but anyhow, maybe next time I can run here with you, perhaps?” This white man got no home training. He see I’m in a hurry. I got on my white church sweater and my good dark blue skirt and I’m trying to put my hair up. Priscilla Jean didn’t ask me to, but I know that’s what she wants. And I need to get back down there so I don’t have to get no sad little sighs about how long I left her at the party she wanted to throw.
“Don’t need no help.”
He runs his eyes all around my door frame and then says, “You pretty much, well, raised PJ after your mother died? Well, before then too, she says her big sister always had her back.”
I section my hair and start on a cornrow, right here in the doorway. When I’m done, I’m closing this door.
“You know, when she talked about her big sister, I imagined this powerful, imposing sort. Even in her photos you seem bigger. But you’re … not.”
Men like to marvel at me because I’m short. Daddy says I’m wearing the same body I was wearing when I was ten, even though I’m 40. He calls himself warning people about me, That bird-boned Tallulah is more hawk than sparrow. He says being short and all this nappy red hair make me mean. His proof: I sweat on my nose. He just mad he can’t twist me up like he do everybody else.
“Now,” says Nigel, “All I can imagine is PJ in the principal’s office and this wee doll bursting through the doorway full of righteous fire.”
This Nigel’s t-shirt has a V-neck. There’s chest hair coming out of there and it is more than a little gray. I got the end of my braid yanked over my shoulder like I’m making him a noose.
“Ah! Oh, um … PJ also said that you took her to church every Sunday?” he says.
I stare him dead in the face while I get this bun on top of my head for Priscilla Jean.
“She’s not very religious now, so it seems a little uh, odd.” This Nigel leans in close like he can have a secret with me. “Her new religion is, of course, therapy. Hence this … uh, healing.”
I don’t like him leaning. My arms are up in my hair, so I feel wide open. I talk real loud to move him back. “Leon don’t need no healing. He fine. He live just how he want to. It’s everybody else that’s busted up and potluck meatloaf won’t make that get no better.”
“Well, part of therapy is coming to epiphanies like that. I have the utmost respect for what your sister is trying to do—”
“Where you get that at?”
“What?”
“Respect. For what she doing?”
“Well, PJ is a very— “
“How you gonna have respect for what she doing, when you don’t know what she doing, and she don’t know what she doing?”
For a second he looks pleased, like he just discovered something. Like maybe he’s relieved that he can skip the nonsense talk. Then he says, “You know, you have excellent posture.”
“Well.” I say and snap my hair clamp shut. Reach for the doorknob.
“Yes. Oh! I won’t keep you. Just here to offer some muscle,” and at that he curls his arm revealing a sad little hump draped in loose skin.
I shut the door on his floppy mouth. He talks funny and all those false starts at something to say make me mad.
In the hall there’s a picture of me, mama, Priscilla Jean and Daddy at a cookout. I’m squeezing her so tight the muscles are standing out along my arms, bunching her powder blue sundress around her waist. Priscilla Jean is beaming her happy right at the camera and Daddy is looking at me and mama. We got our heads tilted back, eyes closed and you can’t tell whose red-brown hair was whose. And right after the burst and whine of the flash on that old camera, Daddy had growled to the whole backyard, Who the fuck you think you is? The gotdamn Queen uh Sheeba?
Now I got an organized list of things I hate my father for and right near the top is how it felt when my mother levered my arms apart and took herself away from me, red-faced and scurrying into the side yard.
I don’t have a picture of this: Next day me and Mama pulled in the driveway and daddy was shirtless, in work pants and dress shoes scowling under the hood of his green Charger. And that was the exact moment I saw the first touch of time on Leon. Tone giving way to slight slack. A new tightness to his skull. I could see the assassin creeping in on him, bending his back and slowing his heartbeats and he didn’t know yet.
“Look at him …” I’d said to Mama. “Just look at him over there smoking Pall Malls like the gotdamn Queen uh Sheeba.”
She gave me a look but I saw a crack in her disapproval, an almost laugh. I threw myself into it. Over there eating grits like the gotdamn Queen uh Sheeba. Out there parallel parking like the gotdamn Queen uh Sheeba. Lookadere, the gotdamn Queen uh Sheeba got a hole in his sock. I said it until even Priscilla Jean had had to snicker under her hand. And I kept saying it. Until my mama couldn’t even muster up a pity smile. Until those words were dead and it was my kill.
Every surface in my kitchen has the overflow of my sister’s tea party, mismatched pans and trays and dishes and bowls from people who know my mama and daddy, all warming or cooling. I got plenty of room in my house because my husband died not too long after I got married. Daddy says my mean ways got to him but my mean ways got nothing to do with a cancer than comes up on a man faster than a rainstorm. I scowl at a plump ham but pick it up anyway because I can’t stand Renee Ross but that old so-and-so can cook.
I get another knock and if this is my sister, I swear I am going to lock my doors and let her do this by herself. Me and the ham snatch the door open to Nigel. Mid-cigarette.
“Forgive me, Tallulah,” he says. “I ran into a woman who I think maybe is on her way to your father’s house, but ah…couldn’t quite make it?”
He is alone on the porch.
“No, no,” he says. “Not here. She’s … in your neighbor’s garden?”
I bet he thinks this is what we do out here, go help other bumpkins caught in the briar patch but this is what I hate the most. Everybody is a jack-in-the-box of snot and feelings. I’m tempted to send him to go get Priscilla Jean. She likes this sort of thing.
I don’t have shoes on and I’m not getting any. I slam my door so he understands I’m coming but I don’t want to. Nigel lets out his breath.
“Ah, yes! This way!”
I shove the ham into his arms as my price, and he fumbles the cigarette, which immediately falls to the ground. He steps on it and does a sorry job of kicking it off the porch.
We get a couple houses up the street and he says, “Here, here.”
Some lady is face down in Miss Higgins’ garden. A black suede heel is parked on the stony path leading to the back of the house, like a car waiting for the driver to finish her business and return. The other shoe is wrecked, jammed toe-first in the dirt. A rhinestone studded purse has vomited up balls of receipts, keys and a dusty eyeshadow tray. A pile of black fabrics gasp and heave. Spikes of blonde wig-hair slide up and down her back. Mean little red toenails have cut their way free of her pantyhose. She kicks at the dirt like she’s swimming, destroying Miss Higgins’ tender new plants.
I don’t know who this is and then I do. I know who visits Miss Higgins’ house and who still wears stockings and who would be out here snorting and snuffling and carrying on.
Nigel bends over, stuttering at the woman and the beginnings of spinach. “E-eh-pardon me, Miss?”
Diane Joseph’s face pops up out of the dirt and swerves itself at Nigel. Then me. Never a pretty woman. Worse now. One of her fake, too-thick, drugstore eyelashes had gotten loose and skulked up her face, leaving gummy footprints across her bronze eyelids. Her jaw hangs open, showing us a shiny pool of spit contained by a thick slice of plum frosted lip. She’s grinding long bronze acrylics into a fistfull of leaves releasing a plume of basil.
Far as I’m concerned Miss Higgins can come out here and bury her all the way in the ground. I spin, burning my heel on the gritty bricks and spring out to the sidewalk, not running because I don’t run but moving quick because this fool wasted my time. Nigel is far, then close. “Wha-where are you going, Tallulah?”
“My house. Then Daddy’s.”
This Nigel scampers back and forth in an orbit around me, the ham cuddled up in one arm like a fat, shiny dog.
“What about that lady?”
“She don’t need no help.” I say.
“You’re just leaving her?” I can tell he is thinking about using his body to stop me and if he does I will leave a Tallulah-shaped hole in this man.
“You want to help her? Help her. You the one found her.”
“I know you can’t …”
“You don’t know nothing about nothing.” I say. Step. Step. Step. Up on my porch.
“Well TELL me.”
“Look you,” I say barrelling toward my door. “I’m not telling you nothing. You just out here on a field trip to examine the Bamas for a good story to tell your friends.”
I’m so mad I forget to slam the door in his face. Nigel clucks on my welcome mat then here he is, in here behind me, following all the way to the kitchen. “She didn’t deserve a tissue? A kind word? Water?”
Oh, now I’m wet cat mad. I put a jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise and a bright yellow casserole pan in the crook of his other arm.
“I can’t imagine why you ….”
I balance a bowl of chittlins with a precarious lid, a silo of Morton’s salt and a box of Velveeta on him and just start walking.
“Okay, won’t be no saving you from yourself today, I guess. You know what? You want to walk in there and show Priscilla Jean how much you care about one of the women Leon used to cheat on our mother with? You do that.”
There is only the sound of my feet pounding down the hall. The scratchy sides of my stiff shoes scraping against my feet. I snatch my keys up to announce my real departure. Nigel scampers beside me looking like I just batted a rattlesnake out of his hands, hugging his charges for comfort. He is obedient as an old hound and finally there’s no sound for a blessed half block. And then he says, “Well, you certainly got a beautiful day for this … event.”
Mama and Daddy’s house has this peeling coat of green paint giving way to a light-yellow underneath that makes it look like the house is trying to shuck itself. But right now the trees have their bright orange leaves on, shaking shadows, distracting the eye. Nigel takes a deep breath and says, “Mother Nature approves.”
“If Mother Nature knew what kind of man my daddy been, she’d have herself an early freeze and ice the ground shut. You don’t want that kind of thing in you.”
I sure don’t want to, but I start thinking about when Mama died. She didn’t get no kind of beautiful. She went crying and shitting her way into the afterlife. Just screaming for Jesus and her daughters. Priscilla Jean and me were standing right there. Jesus was MIA.
She died the night of the Christmas pageant and the church couldn’t give up their pastor to be at her bedside. Sent the usher in charge of courtesy. Don’t nobody want his cold hands and new Bible. Mama howled until spit ran down her chin. The real pastor walked in, smelling like sweet pie, ten minutes too late.
I kick the side door open even though it don’t stick no more and I hope it hits somebody. Today, almost every woman from the church is crammed in here making plates and buttering things. They make room for me wherever I go because I’m looking for a reason to remind them that they stayed at the pageant watching their mangy children ruin the birth of our Lord while good Sister Sharon was dying.
I wedge Nigel into a prime spot by the counter and unload him. He is giving off a low, anxious chuckle about nothing. Priscilla Jean is standing by the stove talking nonsense, way too loud. “…because everyone has a different process to work through, you know? I took forever to learn that, and it took two priests, a monk and a therapist. Oh. That sounds like one of those jokes where they all walk into a bar.”
My sister used to have jobs where she’d sigh under the repeated stress of having to explain exactly what it was she did. I hated that sigh. But she doesn’t curate or facilitate anymore. Now, she’s an insurance agent. Everybody knows what that is.
She’s coming through all these people toward me, that long neck holding that face above their heads. Her hair is relaxed and trapped into a tight fist on the back of her head. Her eyebrows haven’t grown back in from her time in the city so she still looks like she expects everyone to polish her silver.
Pricilla Jean left this house behind, this family, this town, and I guess most of the letters of her name, for a city that beat her up just as good. Maybe more. From what I can tell, she got brittle and haunted and can’t make a decision she can stay happy with. She still calls it the greatest city in the world. Yet here she is, looking crazy and out of place in the kitchen she grew up in.
Roberta Mae Robinson is looking over at me, not blinking, and I can feel it bubbling up and I want to stop her from saying what I know she is about to say but nothing comes fast enough.
“Lula, you look just like your mother,” she says and the rest of the women in the kitchen bob their heads but watch me to be sure I don’t take offense. I’ve got a good something to say back to Roberta Mae Robinson but I can’t hurl it across the room without making my sister collateral damage. So instead, I slap Nigel hard on his arm like I’m dismissing a mule. He scuttles out the side door a beat before Priscilla Jean arrives at the counter and she looks around like she’s trying to find lost keys.
“He went out there,” I say.
“Yah,” she says, considering whether to follow. Then she goes, “Daddy’s nurse says he’s having a really good day today.”
There’s a whole set of people we just gave to Daddy. Daddy’s Cleaning Service (Miriam and Christine) cost two thousand last year. Call Daddy’s yard folks (Greg and sometimes Pokey) they didn’t blow the leaves off the back porch. Daddy’s lawyer (Sam Santana) wants you to sign that.
What did my sister just say? A good day. I don’t want quality of day updates on Leon. I want: dead/not dead/needs something done. That’s it. But Priscilla Jean can’t help it, she just frets in triplicate, for herself, for Daddy, for Nigel. I keep both hands on the ham, concentrating on adjusting knobs of pineapple like I’m guiding in a satellite.
“I’m so sorry about earlier,” she says.
Priscilla Jean stands there in a dark blue dress, the most festive thing she could muster. I remember when she had wide hopeful eyes and I had made her mine, dragging her around the house by one chubby arm, scrubbing her head on the carpet. I don’t want her to be sorry but I slam the silverware drawer and say, “I gotta make sure nobody is setting nothing down on Mama’s tables without no coaster.”
I forgot Mama’s tables are gone. Last week, Priscilla Jean had surveyed the overstuffed furniture, fake marble and walnut veneer. Then one of those storage container things came to swallow Mama’s furniture piece by piece. I left and didn’t come back for two days.
Priscilla Jean had redid everything in squares and rectangles of furniture, stingy on the padding like a waiting room. She had peppered the room, tables, shelves and windowsills, with family photos in identical black frames. Old yearbooks and laminated newspaper clippings of articles about Leon’s military service. Seven flower arrangements with one kind of white flower, two kinds of leaves and not a single sprig of baby’s breath.
Daddy hadn’t opened the curtains for years and I had forgot what the sun can do. Daddy’s people, packed tight from living room to dining room, looked lit from inside. Like they are all already ghosts, their lifetimes already laid out to each other with no mystery ahead. Priscilla Jean had made them a soundtrack, a playlist called Daddy that I did not want a copy of. Al Green. Heatwave. The Temptations.
And Leon in the corner, cranked upright, presiding over all from his hospital bed. He looked good. Priscilla Jean had got the barber to make a house call. She had insisted we get him in his nice suit coat and shirt with emerald and gold cufflinks. She had draped a heavy blue quilt that Mama had pieced together for him decades ago, with leftover suit fabrics, dark plaids and stripes. Even propped up and laid out, the outline of his legs told you he was tall. His nurse, quiet and observant, sits beside him guarding what’s left of his life, his medicines and machinery.
Some men leave. Leon came home but he always kept a little something out there for himself. Like, he would take up with a widow and play secret daddy to her kids. Then there they go, looking all smug faced at us in the Piggly Wiggly with shiny pieces of our daddy in their pockets. I remember Priscilla Jean doing a limp imitation of Mama, chin high and above it all. But I would go eye-to-eye, toe-to-toe, every time, curdling full-grown women. There was this vicious little smile that would crawl across my face. They had a fresh wounding coming, I could smell the blood and confusion, and they didn’t know it yet.
I collect paper plates off Priscilla Jean’s furniture then I spot Nigel on the stairs being coo-coo, ducking and bobbing and carrying on. He’s got a camera with a lens as big as a bullhorn. He lunges up four stairs, hooking his elbows on the bannister to steady himself. That thing points across the room at Leon while he whispers quietly with a man he has known since elementary school. Priscilla Jean had told me to stop snarling at people taking selfies, but I’m about to shut her crazy old boyfriend and his camera down. That thing is too big, too close. I hate it and him. I punch the soggy, empty plates into a ball and head over there.
Then this idiot points that cannon at me.
I drop to the floor, lower than Priscilla Jean’s coffee table and crab crawl across the doggone living room I lived in for most of my life. I worked my way through the thick ankles of deaconesses, the stringy calves of daddy’s numbers man, past the flip flops and pale feet of a white man Leon had been in the service with.
I surface and jump up four stairs to yank this fool down to me and he nearly falls so I give him a shove the other way. I’ve got him sprawled on his back going up the stairs and that couldn’t have gone more perfect.
“Don’t. You. Dare.”
“Tallulah?”
“What is wrong with you? Put that thing away.” I say like he’d pulled out his penis.
“I, uh, I really think I should capture this? This moment? For PJ? I’m a photojournalist. It might help her be … okay?”
I throw the ball of paper plates down on the stairs and it begins to bloom, opening like a time lapse of a flower. I stick my finger dead in his face and I’m about to give him all four verses of the riot act but then Priscilla Jean is here.
“Listen, Lula, I wanted to tell … ”
Her look of disapproval gets me leashed again and I let Nigel sit up. I say, “Priscilla Jean, tell this—”
“Lula, I let Daddy have a cigarette last night. I turned off all those things and I got him into his wheelchair, and I took him outside and I let him have an unfiltered Marlboro Red. That seemed like the worst thing, so that’s what I got him. And it made him happy to be bad with me. I just wanted to confess. I thought you should know.”
I’m about to let her know that I don’t give two figs what she did with that raggedy man but the look on her face tells me that she needs to hand that over to somebody. I don’t have to care, I just have to take it from her. So I take it.
“It’s fine, Priscilla Jean.”
That seems to satisfy her. I wanted to go but I had nowhere to go so I stayed on the stairs, marooned above this swaying ocean of Daddy’s people.
Stevie Wonder.
Teddy Pendegrass.
Earth, Wind and Fire.
Under the protection of my sister, Nigel slowly lifts that giant camera. Roberta Mae Robinson curls in over herself when Phillip Bailey’s high note hits her midsection. Cheryl Coates, an egg-shaped woman Leon used to play pool with, raises daddy’s arm and spins gently under it. Even Leon’s nurse tapped her feet gently.
I think about Mama. Clawing at the bedcovers. Chewing at her lips. How she was begging for her husband to be there to see her home but he was gone and he was gone on purpose. My eyelids sting and it has been so long since I cried I almost don’t know what’s coming.
Priscilla Jean gives Nigel a little pat of approval and I slide away down the stairs, thinking I would go home but I don’t. Occasional brave people feel like they should say something to me, to tell me what good daughters we are. What a good daughter I am. Some of them say how sorry they are about my father but then stumble because it is too early to say that. Maybe it is too late.
I come to understand that my feet are taking me to my father. Cheryl stands about my height but six times my size. Not half as angry but she’s never been afraid of me. She is my father’s friend but she was my mother’s friend, too. Tell your mama I asked about her. Tell Sharon you saw me. Tell Sharon I’m coming round to see her. Cheryl throws back her head full of gleaming finger waves, mouthing Chaka Khan and holding on to Leon. Her fingers, swollen around tarnished rings and tipped in chipped orange-red polish are steady as she transfers Leon’s hand to mine with the grace of royalty.
I turn my back on Daddy’s people and perch next to him on his bed. Daddy’s nurse steps away. When I am this close I’m cleaning him, lifting him, feeding him but this time I am swaying his giant hand to the music. Leon his eyes are closed and I lean into him, greedy for his scent. A hint of wood. His spicy soap. A cooling peppermint salve. The fabric softener mama always used.
His eyes open, dark brown aged into the deep shadowy blue. A little wild at first like he was falling, dying then caught himself. Then he is sharp and present and aware that it is my hand under his. And that man, that man, that man, he smiles at me. Like I am his long lost.
I lean close and I spit right in his face. My best bullet, spattered across his cheek. But I am still holding his hand. I have not missed a beat.
Across the room, on the stairs above the heads of the guests, Nigel’s lens slowly moves away from his face. His mouth is a shocked little cavern. I grin at him. Big grin. I just gave him something, now he got to take it.
