built.
When you are nineteen you don’t think about forts, if you ever did, which I didn’t except for a couple of times. Once was when I first heard the story of Robinson Crusoe. The other was when I had been sent to stay with an uncle for a while when my mother was sick and I rode with him on his business to pick up valuables that people left on the street for the garbage men. We always started in the rich neighborhoods early in the morning and it was amazing what people will throw out. Mattresses, barbecue grills, humidifiers, stereos, you name it.
So one day we were driving through the neighborhoods and he said, “There it is,” which is what he said whenever we came to a load that would give us in one stop as much as we usually found in a whole day. It was in front of a pretty brick house, big enough for three or four families easy. There was all kinds of things—toys, boxes of clothes, books, a bed, pictures, and all the pieces for a fort including a plastic roof and a little door. It was like Christmas except that I never had a Christmas like that. So we loaded up the truck but we didn’t have room for the fort and I would have cried except that I knew I was only staying there for a little while and could never take it back to Memphis anyway. But when we had loaded everything up and we were pulling away I saw this white woman staring out the window. And then before I even knew why I cried anyway.
All which is to say that when you are pregnant and you start thinking about forts again, you can wonder why you ever stopped thinking about them. I mentioned this to Jimmy but he saw too much room for extra work, though one night he took a break from his searches on the computer to find a site about tree houses. Everything was on that computer. Everything. If I had had the nerve I’d have gotten him to show me pictures of childbirth, but some things just need to be gone through and not thought about so much, I think.
So something catches your eye like three trees lined up and cut into Ys. Then the Y reminds you of the question Why and the trees look half dead like a lot of other stuff. One thought leads to another thought not like train cars, which are connected so that you know why they follow each other, but like ants who, if the first ant walks zigzag, every other ant walks the exact same zigzag, even though they are not connected by anything you can see. Then before you know it somebody who would not be around except you stopped and asked for a glass of water starts to grow inside you and suddenly you’re not thinking about why people like the power company ruin your trees but instead how the trees might look to a kid, other than Ambrosia. And that’s what made me wonder what else I was missing.
But this kind of thing is hard to say. Saying it is not really like the thing you want to say. It’s like a tree’s shadow is like a tree and also is the thing most not like a tree. Everything I’m saying is shadows. But what’s inside—Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy.
Layla’s Gift from God
Not to go on about a thing, but sometimes at night when I was rubbing my hand over my belly I thought of Layla and Ambrosia alone on the other side of Jimmy’s house, and I imagined crazy things. Like Ambrosia as a sponge inside Layla soaking up too much of one part of Layla so that she was robbed of that part and Ambrosia was so stuffed full of it she had no room for anything else. Say she took all the fear. Or the rage. Or something. I couldn’t even think what one thing it might be that Layla was missing that seems all stuffed into little Ambrosia rocking back and forth. Maybe shame. After I thought of Ambrosia sucking up all the shame, say, I saw her being born feetfirst and grabbing onto Layla’s womb and pulling it out with her.
I didn’t know what Layla was like before she lost her womb but I’d never seen anything quite like her. She was not pretty but she had the roundest breasts and the roundest firm bottom I’d ever seen. And she had three dresses all made of thin material and hiding nothing of who she was and she never wore panties. But it wasn’t like she was showing off. It was more like that was the way she was made so it was hard to fault her. I think making love to Layla would be like standing in the shade when it’s hot.
So men who wandered down the tracks just came to her room and she gave of herself. In the time I knew her I counted eighty-seven bums that she made love to. In the beginning I’d hear her scream and I’d think she was being beat. But when I made Jimmy go check, even though he said she was fine, Layla was sore at me for a week. “I was just worried is all,” I told her, and that was soon after I started staying with Jimmy so how could I have known what was what in her life? But that didn’t matter. Even when I explained she wouldn’t say why she was mad that I made Jimmy walk in. It felt like walking in on a doctor’s examination or a priest taking confession I guess.
So I just started listening to her scream while bum after bum found a night’s worth of relief from whatever it was that kept them walking the tracks. It never just sounded like screams. It sounded like she was screaming at someone. But who? Not the bum, I’d say. Who else was there to scream at? God?
And I mean any bum could find that night of relief with Layla. It didn’t matter young or old, smelled bad or not, fat or bony. I’d never seen anything like it as I said. I saw men missing limbs follow her into her house. I saw men I knew were retarded, and they never just walked up to the door like the others but she had to call to them while they stood in the corner of the yard and they always looked bashful when they came out and wouldn’t look at me. And I saw men who except for not shaving and being on the tracks could be insurance salesmen for all you’d know. But there was never more than one at a time. That was just the way it was. And I never knew anyone to fight. If a man was already there the others just walked on like they understood the rules.
I wondered if they knew she didn’t have a womb, and I was pretty sure they didn’t because Layla was never a talker even to people she knew like me and Rose, though for some people it’s true that the people you talk most to are people you don’t know, people at the bus station, for example. I was pretty sure Layla’s bums just went in and did their business and left without a lot of talking. I don’t know where their seed went. There’s a lot I don’t know. But I was born a very curious person. If I had stayed in school I’d have been a scientist.
Sometimes I wish Ambrosia could talk because she heard every one of the bums and what passed between them and her mama.
I’ll say again I can’t fault her and wouldn’t want to. When she was alone down at the other end on her couch, staring out at nothing in particular, she seemed heavy, like even standing up was a chore and she was just too tired to do it. Even when she went to church she just sat there looking down, and when she went up for the bread and wine she never looked at the priest, never crossed herself, just walked back to her pew where she didn’t kneel or close her eyes or do anything but stare at the floor. But when one of her bums came along it was the one time she seemed to know what to do, which was interesting to me because as calm as she was motioning for them to go on inside, I’d throw up I’d be so nervous. For them I thought Layla was like shade on a hot day. That’s as good as I can say it.
The Tooth Fairy’s Castle
A while back Ambrosia lost her first tooth. We were all sitting on the back porch and the train was roaring by interrupting talk about the best ribs we’d had in Memphis. When it passed there was usually a time before we started up again. But this time just before I was about to say something Layla looked down and said, “You lost your tooth.” And sure enough Ambrosia had pulled out her loose tooth and it was sitting by her on the porch. She had just the slightest bit of blood on her lower lip.
I saw that Layla looked like she wanted to cry and I thought I understood. I hadn’t seen her look like this before, but you never know what’s gonna make you cry. Most kids get all excited when they lose a tooth but Ambrosia plucked it
