roughly touching and rubbing. Those hands are rough, like the steel wool Bertha scrubs the pots with, and Rita believes that her skin will shred beneath them. She can’t imagine a more painful feeling, and then she doesn’t have to because he’s inside her, pushing into the place where only her index finger had ever been.
Rita, before she was Luscious, her mind bending and her body coming apart on the inside and Manny not allowing her to scream or breathe, and when he’s done he don’t even look at her—he just looks down at the bloodstains on his pants and tucks back in the paper money sticking out of his pockets, but he leaves the nickels that have fallen onto the bed.
Manny Evans finds the bathroom just fine now and returns to Erasmus, his Pall Malls, and liquor, and proceeds to win three more domino games.
* * *
Rita buds in the spring along with the knurly limbs of elms and oaks. Her belly pushes out in mid-April, coinciding with the tulip and daffodil blooms, and all the beauty of the season rests in the glow of her skin, but her eyes are as cold as the long-gone winter.
“Who?” her parents ask, even though their minds have wandered over the young men who have spent time with Rita on the porch, the ones who called out to her from open car windows, music blasting, Rita’s name lost in the lyrics and strain. They assume Jake’s son Marshall or the Tompkins boy, Pierce.
“Coca-Cola man,” Rita says, rubbing her stomach and looking off at nothing. Erasmus can’t stop smoking, and Bertha keeps moving her hands up and down her arms.
“The Coca-Cola man?” they say together, and exchange glances before looking back at her.
“Hmmm,” Rita sounds, and looks down at her swollen bare feet. “Mama, where the pail at?” she asks as if the conversation is over.
Bertha remembers her own pregnancy and her feet, swelled up and burning at the bottoms, but she can’t go for the pail because Erasmus is reaching for another cigarette—even though the one he lit a moment ago is still burning in the ashtray.
“White man, then?” Erasmus asks, and holds his breath.
Rita’s eyes roam around the kitchen and then look up at her father. “No. Colored man,” she says, and her eyes move to the ceiling and then down to the floor and then to the window that looks out into the yard.
“Girl, have you taken leave of your senses?” Erasmus laughs before lighting his cigarette and inhaling. His laughter is reeling, and it makes the hair on Bertha’s neck stand.
“Why you say that, Erasmus?” Bertha asks, moving closer to Rita.
Erasmus’s laughter rocks him, and his cigarette falls from his mouth.
“What’s so funny? Why you laughing so?” Bertha’s head swings between her husband and her child. “Man, you crazy or something?” she asks, rubbing at the hairs on her neck and taking another step that puts her right next to Rita.
Erasmus composes himself and bends down to retrieve his cigarette from the floor. Both women see the thin sheath of hair on the top of his head, and Rita thinks that in a few years he will be bald like Manny. She shivers.
“This here is 1942,” Erasmus says, wiping the tears from the corners of his eyes and sticking the cigarette back between his lips. “And I ain’t never seen no colored man driving no goddamn Coca-Cola truck!” Laughter consumes him again, and the house seems to shake with it.
It’s too late to sit her in a tub of mustard water. Rita is too far gone for that, so they send her over to Fenton, over to Mamie Ray’s place.
* * *
Mamie Ray, black, short, and stout, with a tangled mass of orange hair that spread out around her head like a feathered hat imparting her with a buffoon-type peculiarity. She had a dead right foot that was larger than her left and hands too small for her body, or even a five-year-old, for that matter.
When Rita stepped off the bus, Mamie Ray, body lopsided from years of dragging around her dead foot, was standing on the curb, waiting.
“You Rita?” Mamie asked as she grabbed the girl’s elbow with her tiny hands. She hadn’t really had to ask that question; Bertha had described her child to a tee, and all Mamie needed to look for were the eyes. “Ain’t seen another pair like ’em, ever,” Bertha had said to Mamie on the phone.
“Yessum,” Rita replied, her eyes struggling with the woman’s orange hair and twisted body.
“How far along you think you is?” Mamie asked, looking down at Rita’s stomach.
“Don’t know.” Rita took a step backward.
“Well, you know when you ’llowed him on top of you. What month it was?”
“I ain’t allow nothing,” Rita mumbled. “Cold month, I suppose,” she added, and chanced a glance at the oversized foot.
Mamie bit her lip and scratched at her head. “After Thanksgiving but before Christmas and New Year’s?”
“I dunno,” Rita said, and her eyes moved to the tiny hands.
“Uh-huh,” Mamie sounded, and then, “You look strong; you can carry that suitcase.” She wobbled away.
The women who came to see Mamie Ray came fruitful, bellies still flush, hips spreading though, and breasts heavy and sensitive to the touch. They came dry mouthed, light-headed, always spitting puke, and always scared.
Rita thought most of them were ignorant—not ignorant about how it had happened, but how it had happened to them.
Some came wearing the cheap pieces of jewelry their lovers had given them, tacky tokens of affection that bent and turned colors, the mock gold fading and flaking away over time. Just like the men, just like their love.
Rita was too far gone for an abortion; she would stay through delivery and then return home, no one the wiser.
The other women, the ones who wore shame on their faces like masks, they would be gone, if things went well, within twenty-four hours.
Millie Blythe arrived just as June slipped into its last day. She was much younger than Rita, pale skinned with thin reddish-brown hair and large empty eyes. Feeble looking and thin, and Mamie took one look at her and was about to turn her away when her mother shoved roughly through the doorway and into the house.
“She look sickly,” Mamie said after taking another glance at Millie.
“She fine. Always look that way,” the mother said, and then hastily slapped Millie’s hands away from her mouth. “I done told you ’bout that,” she snarled.
Mamie peered at the mother and then down at Millie’s fingers. The child had chewed her nails clear down to the cuticle. “How far along is she?” she asked, her eyes moving to Millie’s vacant ones.
“Just about a month.”
“How old is she?” Mamie squinted at the girl. Millie’s body didn’t have a curve to it.
“She old enough,” the mother spat, and then shot Millie a look of disgust.
“Fourteen?”
