The Penny Read online

  I’d twisted my thumb tight inside the coils of the phone cord. I yanked hard, couldn’t get it out. The idea of Miss Shaw offering such a thing made her immediately suspect. Why would a person who was practically a celebrity in St. Louis pay me any mind at all? I’d never dreamed Miss Shaw would offer me a job.

  Jean loved bragging about her occasional lucrative baby-sitting engagements. If I had a way to make money, too, maybe my sister would stop lording her superiority over me. If I had a way to make money, maybe I could get away from this place.

  But no way would Daddy let me do this.

  “I might be very interested,” I said with the most grown-up voice I could muster.

  “Would you come next Tuesday? We could try it out.”

  My ear felt like I had shoved it up inside my head. As I untangled my thumb from the phone cord, I saw Daddy eyeing me. I wasn’t at all ready for the “talk with his belt” that he’d warned me about.

  “You got yourself a job?” Daddy had already unbuckled his belt and whipped it from the loops. He held it ready, folded inside one hand like leather reins.

  I tried to nod, but I was frozen with fear.

  But this time he couldn’t have surprised me more. “That’s fine by me. You make your own money, that’s less I have to do to take care of you.”

  “Okay,” I said in a breathless whisper, halfway to Miss Shaw on the line and halfway to the man who was threading his belt through the loops again. “Okay.”

  I hurried to the bedroom to tell Mama and Jean what had happened with Miss Shaw. There they were together on the bed, clammy and laughing, plastered with wet pedal pushers and Mama’s blouses and an assortment of Daddy’s T-shirts. I plopped lengthwise across the mattress beside them and added one of Mama’s skirts to my chest, wanting to be a part of their laughter as the clothes warmed to our skin.

  “You with a job?” Mama ran her hand through curls that had once been the same color as spun honey, but which had now faded to the yellow-grey of dried hay. She examined me pointedly. “What’s your daddy going to think about that?”

  “He said it’s okay. He said he doesn’t want to take care of me anyway.”

  Jean propped her head on her fingers like she was posing for a movie poster and I was the camera. She rolled her eyes.

  I thought, I wish you’d go away to secretarial school this very minute. It wouldn’t make any difference to me.

  After Mama peeled the wet things off and carted the laundry basket downstairs, I watched out the window as she hung clothes in the moonlit yard, her fingers trailing the line as she clipped blouses together by the hems, their arms reaching for the ground. Here I am with a chance to try my luck on something new, I thought as I watched Mama outside, and neither Mama nor Jean thinks it’s anything out of the ordinary. That can be a way of living, I guess. When nobody notices things you think are special, you start wondering if maybe it’s you who isn’t seeing things right.

  But I had found a special penny, Daddy hadn’t been too mean today, I’d gotten singled out for free movie tickets, and I’d gotten a job, all in a matter of hours. I looked out the window at the heavy blue arms on Mama’s wet blouses, dangling outside downstairs in the moonlight. Those arms reaching for the ground reminded me of me. Seemed like I was always reaching like those arms, too, without knowing exactly what I was aiming for.

  Chapter Three

  All my life has been shaped by other people’s hands. Daddy slapping me, Mama never hugging me, Jean pointing a finger of criticism at me. . . . I believe when you look close at a person’s hands, they help you figure out who a person is on the inside. Jean’s slender, unmarred fingers with her nails filed into the shapes of crescent moons, they tell me that if something looks imperfect or frightening, Jean doesn’t like to see it. Mama’s cuticles peeled raw and the empty finger where her wedding ring should have been if Daddy had ever seen fit to buy her one, they tell me that she keeps her unease inside and that she’s long ago turned loose of expecting anything. Daddy’s broad, calloused palms, his swollen knuckles, they tell me he uses the flat of his hand to get what he wants and that he hangs on hard to things he thinks ought to be his.

  And there are my own hands. A miniature version of Daddy’s—stubby fingers shaped more or less like his—but I know in my heart I am not like him. What clues do they tell everybody about me? That these are the hands of a girl who feels something unnamed waiting inside to get out, something bigger than she can hold? A girl who keeps hearing in her head that she might be asked to do something great in the world someday? A girl who has a deep desire to use her hands to help other people, but she can’t see how that would ever happen?

  Our flat on Wyoming Street sat uphill from the curb, the roots from the maple tree threatening to buckle the sidewalk. I felt a strange blend of dread and resolve every time I slid my hand up the wrought-iron railing that edged the steps and climbed steeply to the porch. The windows in the front were the prettiest things, rounded at their tops, with red bricks fanning out from the glass like eyelashes. In between the windows stood two doors, the right door leading up to a landing and our five-room apartment, the other leading to the families who lived below.

  Often at night my daddy would stand outside on our front stoop and take stock of the constellations burning overhead, his thick hands, his stiff palms, flexing at his sides. From my bedroom window upstairs, I could see a moving red glow as he drew on his cigarette, the double-barreled flow of smoke as he exhaled through his nose, the glint of moonlight on the metal eyelets of his boots. He seemed small from where I stood then, his eyes as sad and sharp as a rodent’s, and I marveled that someone like my daddy, who loomed so large and dangerous in my life, could appear undersized and exposed.

  He didn’t smoke often in our rooms, but sometimes after supper, he would smoke two, maybe three cigarettes in a row before he came inside to go to bed. More often than not, he swigged from a bottle, too. I would watch him staring into space with a hardened look on his face. Then he would finally give up, poke out his last Lucky Strike on the whitewashed stoop, and pitch it to the step, where he’d scrub it out good with the sole of his workboot.

  He’d come in again and I would hear Mama and Daddy’s careful voices. I never knew what Mama was doing all those times he stood outside, but I always thought she might be doing the same as me, watching him and wondering what was going on in his mind. Things were much more peaceful in the house when he wasn’t in it, and she probably just stood there holding her breath, wishing it would last a little longer.

  One of the most surprising things that had happened to me that year was when Marianne Thompson, my seventh-grade best friend, moved from the apartment below us into a quality-built home in St. Louis Hills. The only reason I could ever have a friend like Marianne with Daddy around was because she lived right downstairs. In St. Louis Hills, the Post-Dispatch advertised, the Thompsons found “country living in the city” in a land “swept by cool breezes.” I knew I was being selfish but I couldn’t help it; right now I wished Marianne wasn’t being swept by cool breezes. I wished she still lived in the flat below.

  After all the talking Marianne and I used to do about Miss Shaw, after all the conspiratorial stories she’d whispered about Miss Shaw skulking around in the graveyard, she would have shared my excitement and trepidation, I knew. I could have tied a secret message to the end of the rope I’d brought home from the lot by the gas station and lowered it to her window. (Once I’d intended to cut it up and make jump ropes, but it seemed more daring to use it for covert activity instead.) I would have waited until I felt the delicious tug from her end, which meant she’d read my note and tied on an answer. But Marianne was gone.

  When girls at school tried to make friends by inviting me to do something, I didn’t want to say, “Daddy won’t let me.” So more often than not, I came up with an even better excuse. “I don’t like sock hops,” I’d say. Or, “I don’t like basketball games.” Or, “You’re crazy if you think I’d go to K
atz Drug for a soda with you.”

  Nobody would ever know how badly I wanted to go do all those things with other girls. I couldn’t let myself get close to anybody because Daddy was always there.

  Once when Marianne Thompson had come upstairs and Daddy was home, I caught him staring at her with an expression that made my stomach pitch. I grabbed my friend’s arm, feeling as if the world had just lurched sideways and become more dangerous. I dragged Marianne downstairs into the yard to see about tree-climbing or making mud cakes. At that moment, I sensed that if I didn’t get her out of there, Daddy might do the same things to her that he did to me and Jean when he snuck into our bedrooms at night.

  Which meant I ought to be grateful she had moved away to St. Louis Hills. No matter, though. I still missed her.

  That morning, I pocketed my penny and went in search of my family. I found Jean filing her fingernails in the breakfast nook. “How come you’re up so early?” she asked me. She held up a hand and examined her cuticles.

  “I’m just excited about my new job. That’s all.”

  Without being too obvious about what I was doing, I opened the refrigerator and took quick stock of the supplies inside. Good. We were short on things. I slammed the icebox hard enough to rattle bottles. “Where’s Mama?”

  “She’s sewing me a new skirt for secretarial school.”

  “Where’s Daddy?”

  “Patching cement down the street.”

  Daddy used to have a night job—he worked as a truck mechanic for International Harvester. When he was gone in the evenings, sometimes Marianne came up to play cards. Now that he’d gotten laid off, Prozma Realty called him for odd jobs—hanging sinks, patching sidewalks, fixing screens. This made it much harder to predict when the coast would be clear.

  I found Mama with her head bent over the presser foot of her Singer, feeding fabric to the needle with splayed hands. “I’ll run errands if you want. I think Daddy said yesterday he wanted Royal Crown Cola and peanuts from the store.”

  “Oh, you want to go for him? Why don’t you get us a Redi-Mix, too?” When she glanced up at me with her large, dark eyes and smiled, I could tell my mother must’ve once been pretty. Now she seemed as brittle as a dead twig, ready to snap in two. “Maybe I’ll get in the mood to bake a cake.”

  I stood still for one extra obvious moment, waiting for Mama’s permission to dig into the flour tin above the stove. That’s where she kept the spending money. I kept thinking maybe she’d stop sewing and look at me. But those stitches needed to be perfect, I guess, because she never raised her eyes from them. “Take only what you need, Jenny. And bring me back my change.”

  I dragged a chair across the kitchen to get to the flour tin and glanced at Jean. I didn’t want her watching me do this. Yes, I was taking only what I needed. But I needed more than what Mama knew. I could have easily walked to the confectionery and gotten the groceries, but I needed streetcar fare, too. Which meant I would shop the A&P, which the ad in the Post-Dispatch told me would make me a woman of unequalled leisure and economy. I needed to share the story of the penny with someone who, unlike Jean, would try to understand the mystery of it. For me, the good thing about shopping A&P was that the streetcar would take me past Aurelia Crockett’s house.

  We kept to our own neighborhoods the way compatriots keep to their countries. The Italians lived on The Hill, the coloreds stayed to the east of Jefferson and Market and close to Tandy Park and along Labadie Street, and we kept to Wellston and Forest Park and Richmond Heights. Mixing people from two St. Louis neighborhoods, no matter what color, was like stirring water and oil. We were most loyal to the people who lived in our quarter. Daddy would have slapped me silly if he knew I sometimes headed down to the Ville.

  I had made a promise to myself that I’d never talk to anybody at school again. It turned out being too much trouble, talking. I’d just get started making friends with other girls and they’d start asking questions I didn’t want to answer, like whether my parents would bring refreshments to open house, or if I could meet after classes for a hamburger at Famous, or if I’d ever stayed awake all night (which meant they wanted to be invited to my house) for a sleepover.

  So I told Cindy Walker and Rosalyn Keys they must be crazy thinking I’d be interested in doing anything with them, in a voice so rough that it sounded like I was chewing on my own words. As long as Rosalyn and Cindy were only acquaintances, I could keep them. But I couldn’t let any friendship flourish with girls who expected to be invited to my house. Although Daddy had never threatened to hurt any of my friends, I had seen him hit Mama plenty of times. I had seen the way he looked at Marianne. I sure didn’t want to chance Daddy doing something to anybody else.

  So I told them not to ask to come over to my apartment because they couldn’t.

  The next thing I knew, after I told them they couldn’t sleep over, there were notes stuck in my locker, folded in thick triangles like the flags I’d seen being handed over to dead soldiers’ mothers, notes that said things like, “YOU STINK, YOU’RE STUPID.” And other things I hated because Daddy shouted them through the house at me, words that made me feel like I was worth nothing, words like rocks falling that made me want to duck my head.

  Aurelia Crockett came to Harris School at the same time that the school district brought in the portable classrooms. Every morning two dented, creaky Blue Bird buses pulled into the drive, and the colored people, both children and teachers, lugged their satchels and coats out of the buses and into the prefabricated buildings, which had been trucked in and set in place with hoists, for class. They had their teachers, we had ours. Our breaks and lunch came earlier than the portable-classroom kids’ did. The only time we’d get to see them was when they’d start a broomball game in the field outside Mrs. Coleman’s class and we’d watch them racing around the bases and shouting at each other out the window.

  I met Aurelia the day I found the note in my locker from Rosalyn that said, “YOU EAT SLOP.” If my resolve had been slipping about not talking, that note set me to certainty again. I was sitting on the steps as everyone stampeded past, waiting for those girls to leave the schoolyard so I wouldn’t have to walk past them, the cold cement soaking up through my skirt. When I blew on the grass I’d threaded between my thumbs, the sound bleated like a duck call.

  “You aren’t doing it right, you blow as hard as all that.”

  My head jerked—I hadn’t known anyone was anywhere around. My first thought when I saw her was this: it would have been easier for a red-tailed jackrabbit or a flying squirrel to start up a conversation with me than it would be for this individual who twisted her loafer sideways and waited for my answer.

  My second thought was this: I didn’t have to protect her from befriending me. Here was somebody I didn’t have to worry about. Oh, Daddy would beat me if he found out I talked to a Negro girl, that was for sure. But this girl would never ask to spend the night with me. Someone like her would never expect to be invited to my house on Wyoming Street.

  “Girl, you looking for a true B-flat, you’ve got to stretch the grass tighter.”

  In her hair were a dozen or more plaits that stuck out at every angle of her head like limbs on scrub brush. Each one narrowed to a plastic barrette in almost as many colors as she had braids. Once, Daddy had taken me hunting and I’d seen the whites of a deer’s eyes. Its haunted, fluid eyes had stared into mine right before Daddy shot it. Her eyes were the same, aqueous and deep. I could see myself reflected when she focused on me.

  From this low angle I also noticed her bosom, more voluminous even than Jean’s. I thought, If anybody gets to BE flat, it’s not going to be this one.

  A boy appeared at her side, maybe a head taller than her. He made a fist. “What’s wrong, Aurelia? She too good to talk to you?”

  I turned away, blew the grass strand between my fingers as hard as I could. It sounded just as bad the second time.

  “You think you’re too good to talk to my cousin?”

&nbs
p; This boy had another think coming if he thought anything he could do would make me show fear. I had become an expert at hiding how I really felt. I’d grown up around Daddy. I shrugged to the boy’s face; I was too busy wondering just how his cousin could hear a B-flat like that. Maybe they listened to music in the portables all day, for all I knew about what went on in there.

  “What’s that mean?” the boy asked. “Shrugging like that?”

  I shrugged again.

  “You ever hear of the Admiral, the entertainment boat? My daddy’s a trumpet man in the band,” she said. “Sweet music for dancing because that’s what the people like. He can run a scale about ten times in one breath. I’d say he can play pretty good.”

  She dropped her satchel and, as if her fingers could show me what she would someday mean to me, she cupped her hands around mine. When she did, I saw that the insides of her palms were lighter than the rest of her, brown-pink and warm. Her breath told me she’d been chewing Beemans gum.

  I’d once found a lifeless cardinal lying in the street and I’d carried it home in my palm, hoping I could bring it back to life and rescue it. When I dripped water from the kitchen faucet over its head and it didn’t revive, I gave a funeral and sang and buried it. The feeling Aurelia gave me, reaching out to me in genuine friendship, was the same feeling I’d had as I troweled rich soil over the redbird’s carcass. I felt I’d been entrusted with something precious.

  She focused on the grass between my fingers again. “Hold it tighter. Like this.”

  The boy hurried her—I guess I made him edgy—when the buses drove up. “You miss the bus, Aurelia, they’ll skin you.”

  “Wait!” I called as she hopped over me and the last three steps, too. “You live in the Ville? Could I come see you sometime?”

  She turned and nodded, swinging her satchel.

  I blew again on my thumbs and the grass made a new, beautiful sound.

  Even now, even after everything that has happened, I sometimes get scared calling Aurelia my friend. Because, used to be, every time I found a friend, I ended up having to give her away. I ended up having to give my friends away to protect them from Daddy.