’em.’ Then I took to teasing her. ‘What’s the matter, you was a ugly baby and you’re scared I’ll make fun of you?’
The minute I said that her eyes watered up like she was going to cry, and she rushed to put all the marbles and the Chinese checkers board in their box and put them back careful in the broom cupboard where I kept all her play things.
I was annoyed with myself for upsetting Joy and did my best to make it up by saying, ‘I was just joshing. Any fool can see that …’ Then I stepped away from the ironing board to do a shuffle and swing Freddie B’s work shirt in front of me while I broke out singing, ‘You Must have been a Beautiful Baby’ that I’d heard many a time on the radio. But as toneless as my deep voice is, it’s no wonder that it didn’t make her smile. I wasn’t good with kids in them days. Not like Freddie, ’cause I was too quick to talk to them like they was grown and say things in too harsh a way. Hadn’t nobody taught me better, and funny enough, it was Joy, little as she was, who used to tell me that it was best not to say exactly what was on your mind, ’cause people like to hear compliments and not what you was really thinking. Not but eight and she already knew grown folks’ tricks that I didn’t know. That’s what living in the city can do for kids.
Though she had beat me at jacks for the third time that afternoon before she started playing Chinese checkers, I said, ‘Come on Joy, let’s have another game of jacks. I don’t care about no ol’ baby pictures.’
But they stayed on my mind, so later that evening when her mother had give her and Brenda and Anndora their supper and let ’em go downstairs to play out in our parking lot, I settled down with Tammy for a cup of coffee and asked if she had any old family albums I could see. By then, I’d got up a regular habit of popping over to her place to keep her company after the kids’ supper, ’cause she didn’t know nobody else in the neighborhood and hadn’t made no friends at work.
‘Both my husband and I were orphans,’ she said, ‘so we had no families. I’m sure I told you that we’d met in the orphanage in upstate New York when we were sixteen.’
True enough she’d mentioned it when I asked her for references for renting the apartment, but at the time I didn’t take no notice, ’cause when she said she had three kids I didn’t figure we would end up taking her no way, ’cause the last thing I wanted was somebody’s brood of bad-assed, nappy-headed children to have to scrub up behind. She had also said at the time that her husband didn’t leave her nothing and got hisself killed when a crate fell on him in the shipyard warehouse where they was both working for which her and them kids didn’t get but $5500 compensation from the company.
But setting there cosy in Tammy’s place with a steaming cup of milky coffee in my hand, when I asked to see family photos, she walked straight over to a bureau and unlocked the top drawer and brought out a whole stack of pictures which she seemed quite happy at first to show off. And I got so excited I didn’t know where to put my face.
I don’t know how many umpteen baby pictures of Brenda and Anndora I skimmed over, though I ooohed and aaaahed loud at every single one thinking I’d best be polite. But nice as they were, I was really only wanting to see the ones of Joy, ’cause them other two children didn’t mean so much to me like she did, ’cause Brenda was often broody and Anndora was so spoiled that it was impossible to like her, cute though she was.
When me and Tammy had sifted through nearly the whole pile, about thirty-five pictures in all, and I hadn’t seen one of Joy, I lost patience and asked Tammy in a backhanded way why Joy got missed out. ‘How come you got so many beautiful pictures of your eldest and your youngest?’
‘Sherman. That was my late husband … Sherman.’ Her expression clouded over and she sounded scornful when she seeped out his name that second time, like he didn’t bear her no happy memories. ‘He liked to think of himself as an amateur photographer and loved to use the children as his subjects. He could even do his own developing,’ she added brightening up a bit. ‘I would definitely have encouraged him to start up a photography business but with his depressions, I wasn’t sure that he’d be able to deal with the public.’
I could see her bite her tongue for letting go of that much in front of me. It was easy to tell that Tammy didn’t like to talk about him, and whereas I first thought it was ’cause she was still mourning, I began to wonder. His body hadn’t long been in the ground ’fore she picked up and decided to give herself and them girls a fresh start by moving West on the advice, so she claimed, of a girl in her typing pool in Wilmington, who had an aunt in Oakland.
As Tammy handed me a shiny black and white photo, about eight by ten inches of her holding Brenda as a toddler, she said, ‘Sherman was really good, wasn’t he? I think so many of them look professional.’
She was right. The way he used the lights made a soft halo around both mother and child in the picture I was holding and he’d got them to sit semi-profile but still look straight at the camera. It looked like he took ’em in a studio, but Tammy said they was actually setting on the toilet seat with a gray wool blanket tacked on the wall behind them.
It was abvious the picture had been taken after the war, ’cause Tammy had her hair swept up in a smooth fat pompadour roll at the side that was fashionable in them days. And she was wearing a dark box shoulder dress that had big white cloth buttons down the front and a square scooped neckline with heavy white broderie lace trim around it that made me notice for the first time that she had a swan’s neck. There wasn’t a blemish to be seen on her young, wide-eyed face, and if they’d had colored calendar girls back in the forties, Tammy would for sure have been eligible.
Looking at that picture, it was easy to see where Joy and Anndora got their best features from.
Their mother had Anndora’s delicate bone structure and perfectly shaped Kewpie doll lips, Joy’s big slanted almond eyes and pointy nose and Brenda’s only redeeming feature, skin as smooth as a baby’s butt. Although Tammy wasn’t ebony like Brenda and had a unusual skin tone halfway between Anndora’s pale complexion and Joy’s rich dark chestnut color.
In fact, anybody looking at that picture Tammy’d handed me of her and Brenda would have assumed that the sorry looking baby on Tammy’s lap was somebody else’s, except that Brenda did get her mother’s high forehead and widow’s peak. It was two shames though that on Brenda they were so oversized, they didn’t flatter, so whereas Tammy’s high forehead and widow’s peak was a beauty feature with the way she wore her hair swept back, on Brenda the forehead was so broad and her hair was so thin and scraggly like chicken fluff, that Brenda’s widow’s peak looked more like a receding hairline. Which ain’t too helpful on a girl.
Poor Brenda didn’t never grow enough hair to sweep it back off her face so it looked neat nor could she comb it down on her forehead in a bang to make her forehead look smaller, and I would have said that it was cruel of God to birth any girl child so plain that had such a pretty mama. But to his credit, he did make up the difference with them diamond vocal cords he lavished on Brenda. Not that any of us knew it at that time or they showed in that baby picture of her with Tammy that I was meant to be admiring that evening sitting over at Tammy’s.
All that my naked eye and anybody else’s could of seen was a super pretty young girl half smiling and a verging on ugly baby grinning with not but four teeth in her whole mouth.
‘This is sure a pretty picture of you and Brenda,’ I lied a little like Joy had taught me, and handed it back to Tammy. ‘And don’t kid yourself,’ I added to sprinkle some truth on what I’d said, ‘Sherman wasn’t all that clever with the camera. You got God to thank some too, ’cause you was fine as you wanted to be.’ That made her happy, and while it was true of the young Tammy in the photograph, the actual one sitting by me, though good
