… since your mama don’t want you walking in high heels, I reckon you better leave these over here in their box at the back of my closet, and you can come over in the afternoons and wear them. But they gotta be our secret from everybody, ’cause I don’t want your sisters getting jealous and Mr Freddie B don’t know I got them.’
‘I’m good at keeping secrets,’ said Joy running her forefinger across her lips like she was sealing them up. ‘I like secrets better than butter pecan ice cream.’ Then she shared a couple with me no sooner than she said that. She whispered in my ear so not even the walls would hear that she was in love with Bernie Finkelstein and that she wanted to marry Alan Ladd, the movie star, she thought Bernie looked just like. I swore on the Bible that I wouldn’t tell nobody.
Them secret Papagallo shoes was the first big bond me and Joy had between us, and the fact that nobody knew about ’em but us made Joy’s afterschool visits seem all the more exciting to her when she would slip over and double lock my front door leaving Brenda by herself to watch the cartoons as Tammy didn’t get in from work till six thirty by the time she’d also stopped off to pick Anndora up from the minder’s.
Joy loved to hang over in my place playing with that $2.98 doll I’d got her and tipping around like she was grown in them royal blue high heels, licking a popsicle or sucking a toffee I’d got in for her.
After her first few visits, I went to the dime store and bought some more for her to play with, ’cause I didn’t want her to get bored and that little cheap doll neither walked or talked and wasn’t that much fun. Remembering how I liked jacks when I was her age, I got her some and the woman in the dime store sold me a board game she said was popular with her own daughter called Chinese checkers that had pretty colored marbles. Lots of ’em in six different colors.
But Joy’s favorite turned out to be the ball and jacks. She’d sit cross-legged on my polished parquet floor and want to play game after game with me. I pretended not to notice if she cheated, and as my hand was way bigger than hers for scooping up the jacks, I had a advantage over her anyway. So I figured it was fair enough if’n she needed to cheat to win.
When I’d slip a saucer full of homemade lemon drop cookies over to Brenda, she’d hardly look up from the noisy TV set and didn’t seem to mind that my God-sent child played over with me. Though Tammy’d told the kids not to take food off folks, I told Brenda, like I’d told Joy, I wasn’t just folks, and if we didn’t tell Tammy about the cookies, she wouldn’t have nothing to get mad at no way. Both the girls seemed scared of her, but Joy more than Brenda, and it worried me.
Whereas I did a lot of mooning out the window at other women in the streets with their kids ’fore Joy and me got to be pals, I suddenly had her afterschool visits to look forward to, and like I told Freddie B who noticed how I’d perked up and kept my hair combed, I hadn’t never met no child as well behaved as Joy before. ‘You can be bad in here if you want,’ I’d say ’cause she was almost too good and could get so quiet I’d tell her, ‘Go on and bang some pots and pans if you want.’ She was so like a grown woman sometimes though, telling me how good my cakes and cookies was and how much nicer I kept my place than her mother did theirs as she didn’t bother to collect up Anndora’s toys. And Joy had perfect manners and didn’t never forget her pleases and thank yous neither.
My baby sister Helen was kind of jealous that Joy came into my life, ’cause ’fore Joy, I used to put up with Helen laying in a stupor around my apartment when it suited her. Her and my brother Caesar used to come and drink each other under the table, but I lost tolerance for their street corner shenanigans when I thought Joy was likely to pop by, ’cause I don’t hold with getting drunk in front of kids. And neither Helen nor Caesar was content unless they had a bottle of whiskey or wine at their lips.
Helen tried at first to poison my mind about Joy and claimed that the child was too good to be true, and that she wouldn’t trust no eight year old that was so full of compliments for everybody and didn’t never put a foot wrong. She said she had a second sense that Joy wasn’t all she seemed, but with drink in her, Helen’s got a mean streak and it ain’t wise to listen to what she says. ‘There’s Joy telling you how much she likes the gold tooth you got in the front, and there’s you mouthing bad about the child. Now I’ll tell you straight Miss Helen D’Orleans you’re just jealous ’cause I got me a little girl.’
She’d stick out her tongue at me like she was five years old whenever I said something mean to her and had been doing it since she was a kid, but at twenty-seven it didn’t suit her no more.
‘You don’t know where that woman and them kids don’ come from,’ slurred Helen, ‘nor where they’re going to. ’S’pose it’s hell and back,’ she said, and laughed that drunken laugh of her’n. Ever since she was little Helen knew just what to say to vexate me. She could be like a mosquito buzzing ’round my ear, driving me to distraction, and what she said got my thoughts going.
Not knowing nothing of Joy and her family before they moved to Oakland left me brimming over with questions that little Joy acted like she wasn’t supposed to answer. So I figured her mother’d had warned her not to go spreading their business, though I did find out that her daddy had had nice dark brown wavy hair like Joy’s and a thin mustache and was young when he died unexpected not long before they’d up and moved West from Wilmington, Delaware. But Joy would go quiet and find an excuse to slip home if I asked about her when she was little, so I stopped prying, till curiosity got the better of me during one of her afternoon visits a couple of months after she’d started coming over.
She was setting in the middle of my living room floor on her fivesies in our third straight game of jacks, when I told her to pop over to her place and bring me some of her baby pictures so I could see what she looked like growing up. I figured that wasn’t nosying in with questions, but was just about looking at photos. That’s when she came back with her snag-a-tooth picture and we had that to-do, ’cause she drew in her two front missing teeth with a pencil and then got terrified that I’d tell her mama.
But like I explained to Joy, it was real baby, baby pictures that I was interested in, and when she claimed her mama didn’t have none, I refused to believe it. ‘Can’t you let me have a see, please, please pretty please,’ I begged like a agitating child. ‘I don’t know no mother in the world that don’t keep her hands on a few baby pictures.’ And I didn’t. Every woman I knew that had a child had some pictures to brag on when they was babies.
So the next day Joy come visiting, I asked her again for a see of some pictures while she was playing herself a game of Chinese checkers and I was ironing Freddie B’s shirts.
‘Don’t you got just one?’ I asked. ‘Not just one bitty, bitty one even?’ I longed to know what my God-sent looked like when she was one or two or three even. ‘Who you was as a baby is important to me, Joy. And the less you tell me the more I itch to want to know ’cause pals is supposed to know everything about each other. Your mama hasn’t got just one?’ I said, showing her that a picture the size of my thumbnail would do me fine.
‘Honest Injun,’ Joy answered like I’d taught her to say instead of ‘Swear to God’ which is what she made me say before she’d tell me something that I wasn’t suppose to know, like how much her mother paid for that pair of beige high heels she bought at Hodgeson’s that I really liked.
‘Honest, Baby Palatine, honest, honest, honest, honest!’ she hollered banging her balled up fist on the floor. It was as close as she got to showing spunk, ’cause up to then she was as polite with me as kids are with strangers, though I’d got her to stop calling me Mrs Ross like I was some old fogy. ‘I only have that first grade picture and I already gave you one,’ she said emphatic and pointing to where I’d tucked it in Corinthians in Freddie B’s big black Bible on the sideboard.
