ma’am.”
And then just to make sure everything was clear she said, “But not ’til I’m dead. Paint fumes make me cough.”
I wanted to laugh but didn’t know if I could. So I looked over at her.
She was grinning so I laughed, and part of why I was laughing was that Rose always knew what to do and I wanted to be like that for my baby, with plenty of room to take any of my child’s mistakes and just hide them away inside myself so she can keep starting over until she gets it right. Which was a strange thing because until I thought that thought to myself I didn’t know I thought my baby was a girl.
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”
Things beneath the Grate
But that did make me start thinking about the house in a new way because I started thinking about the baby living in it for a long time instead of just thinking about me living in it for a bit. Even though my baby was still little I felt enough of her inside me that I started thinking more about what it would be like for her to be in my arms, about where she might sleep, about the locks on the doors and about the heat of summer and the cold of winter. People in Memphis are better at hot than they are at cold so once I started thinking about this my main worry about Rose’s house was the heater, which Rose said was gonna be a problem that winter since it sometimes didn’t come on the winter before. I don’t like to be cold and I sure didn’t want to be cold and pregnant. Who knows what cold does to an unborn baby? I thought. And I thought when my baby finally was born I just wanted not to worry about locks and heat and cold. I wanted not to worry about food.
Once I started thinking about it, though, it didn’t take long before I realized the problem might not be as big as I thought at first. I decided not worry about a problem that was not a problem yet. The ducts and vents and all were there. And these days machines like heaters work much better than in the old days.
But while I stood there mulling the house in general I stared down into the grate over the dark duct that snaked up to the middle of the house. My toes were on the edge and I looked down past my belly where my baby was growing and for the first time in a long time I thought about some of the things that used to scare me and thrill me and make me feel safer when I was a girl and for a minute or so I let it all just be one thought and suddenly I was both happy and sad that I was not a little girl anymore. And I wanted to cry, which was happening more and more often.
I kept looking down trying to work the thoughts all the way to the end. It was a kind of tunnel down there, with its own wind, where the house breathed. When I was a kid I stared and stared down through our grate, even though the adults stepping over me told me to get on up off that floor, girl. But there was a whole history of dropped things down there—candy wrappers, Band-Aids, bits of cereal, dust. But what I always saw as a kid about the things beneath the grate was that they were so different down there matted in the dark tunnel. They were the kinds of things you would poke at with a stick like a bug or dead thing you didn’t want to touch, even something you would touch while it was new and fresh. Which makes sense since even a person who you might have hugged a thousand times can be like that when they are down in a coffin and it’s all of a sudden hard to touch them. It’s not just because you don’t want to smudge the makeup they spent so much time putting on so that it’s not so sad to look at dead people. And it’s not just that you worry over not knowing whether their skin will feel room temperature or colder than that and you’ll think it’s gross and feel bad because that was the thought you had the very last time you touched them. It’s because they used to be there and now they aren’t and even if you’re grateful to the dead body for being who you loved so long, you can’t get to what changed. Everything is there in the box that was there before your friend or mama died. The only thing missing is your friend or mama. You wouldn’t hug a person who didn’t want to be touched or read even a good friend’s diary without permission, and it’s sort of like that. With a dead person, there’s no one left to give permission. Something is hard about that touch.
I couldn’t spend too much time thinking about that sort of thing, though. I never used to think this way. Maybe that is what a baby will do to you, make you think hard over the meaning of the smallest thing, since a baby is the smallest thing for a while. I was growing up. The way I knew I was growing up was that when I stared down through Rose’s grate I also wondered why it was different down there instead of just feeling that it was different. I was getting better and better at wondering why instead of just feeling. Then I realized I’d been standing there a long time fretting over something that may be nothing and thinking about these other things, and I saw what I was doing and I stepped back. Every now and then everything seemed so strange to me, even little things like the duct and the heater, and I could only guess that part of the reason was having a baby growing inside me.
So even though I tried to make myself not think about problems that weren’t problems yet, like the heater, I still mentioned it to Jimmy. He said don’t worry. By the time winter got cold he’d have enough money to take care of a heater and anything else that came up. He was the kind who could have gone to college except that something, some invisible choke collar, kept him at his butcher job living right where he was born. I never knew much about what happened to his parents and his half-sister and he was living proof that if you stay in the same place long enough you’re bound to get ahead somehow because he owned his house free and clear. But it was never enough for Jimmy. There was always something more than a roof, a job, a car, and even a computer to work on and search for things and do calculations and all. Jimmy was a big thinker, not a big actor. And that was Jimmy’s problem. If he could have ever gotten his thinking and his acting in the same room he could have been running the meat counter instead of working for someone who ran it.
But when Jimmy talked about money he was handsome. It’s good to see a man really want something. It’s not that I don’t agree with the priests about money and heaven. But it’s not having money that keeps the heater from working. It’s not having money that makes us glad even to have squash and okra. It’s not having money that makes a lot of things hard. But I didn’t ask about where he planned to get the money for the heater. I didn’t like what Jimmy was up to.
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