Floating Staircase(64)

“Not unless you want to buzz someone in here to change these sheets in about three minutes.” Althea waved a brittle hand at me, and I set the cup down beside the photograph of her son. “Stuff goes through me like lightning nowadays.” She blamed the medication she was on for thinning her blood.

Sitting down in the chair, I folded my hands between my legs and leaned closer to her. “What is it you wanted to ask me?”

“Earlier you mentioned ghosts.”

“Yes. I asked if you believed in them.”

“Did I give you an answer?”

“No.”

“Would you like to hear one?”

Feeling that she was toying with me, I couldn’t help but grin. I said, “If it suits you.”

Jangling like a newborn colt, the old woman raised her arms and flattened out her wrinkled bedsheets. She sucked in a shallow breath as her eyes began to tighten with what I believed to be deeper scrutiny of my character. But as she began to speak again, I realized she was going back to her youth, retracing those fading footprints down the path of her own childhood.

“In the summer of my sixth year,” she began, “my mother took odd jobs throughout the county. You see, my father had run off the previous summer with some woman he’d met down at Orville’s drugstore—this was in Louisiana, where I grew up—and my mother wasn’t going to let her only child starve because of him. He left her with nothing but the clothes on our backs and the ramshackle little tar paper hovel over in Cameron. We’d needed a car soon after he’d left, and I remember going with my mother to the used auto dealer off Best Street where, for one hundred and seventy-five dollars, she bought an old Chrysler the color of a house fire and about as reliable as the man my mother cursed the whole drive back to Cameron.

“The jobs my mother took consisted of housekeeping services for a rotation of regulars in the upper-class section of the city—great big gabled mansions with white columns and gardens so rich and thick you could actually get lost in ‘em. She hit each house on her rotation once a week, and since I was too young to be left on my own and because there was no sense in payin’ a babysitter more than my mamma was probably making cleaning those big houses, she dragged me along with her.

“Mostly, I would sit in the living room on some expensive couch, my hands firmly in my lap while I watched the television for hours. My mamma wouldn’t even let me have a drink or a snack or anything like that, for fear I’d spill it on the couch. Other times I would sit and draw pictures at the kitchen table and leave them for the homeowners. You might think these home owners saw us as help and nothing more, and for the most part you’d be right, but it would be a lie to say I didn’t go into some of those homes to find my artwork on their refrigerators, just as if I was their own child.”

Her eyes twinkled with the memory, and I could tell it was a very important one to her.

“My favorite house belonged to the Mayhews, a handsome couple who had three older children away at college. The house was a beautiful bit of architecture—it certainly took my mamma all day to clean—but the best part was the sloping green lawn and surrounding gardens that dipped toward a lush palmetto grove that separated the Mayhews’ backyard from the house directly behind them.

“One afternoon I was out playing in the palmetto grove when I saw a little girl, perhaps just slightly older than me, through the trees in the other yard. She was a skinny, pale-faced little thing with eyes like hen’s eggs and very delicate features. Even at my young age, I recognized an intimate fragility in her. She wore a head scarf of floral design over what appeared to have been a bald scalp. When she waved at me, I giggled and waved back. Then she took off across the yard and into the grove where she hid behind the palmetto stalks. We played hide-and-seek all afternoon until my mamma called me from the back porch that it was time to go home.

“During one of our drives to the Mayhew home one morning, my mamma asked me what I did playing in that grove all day, and I told her about the little girl. I told her about the head scarf, too, and how she looked like she might be bald under there. My mother said the little girl was probably ill and I should be careful not to get her too wound up when we played together. ‘What’s her name?’ my mamma wanted to know, and it occurred to me that I’d never asked her name. In fact, we hardly ever spoke with each other—we’d only hide in the narrow boles of the trees or behind large fans of palmetto leaves, and we would certainly laugh, but we’d never exchanged names.

“So mamma planted a seed. That afternoon, when the little girl came running through the trees to find me hiding beneath a moss-covered log, I said, very prim and proper, ‘Hello. My name is Allie Coulter. What’s your name?’ That’s how my mamma always told me to speak to folks for whom she worked. And even though my mamma didn’t work for this girl’s family, they were neighbors to the Mayhews, so I figured that was good enough.

“The girl did not answer me. Her smile faded, and then she just turned and ran back through the trees. I watched her go, I suppose, or maybe I called out to her—as vivid as this whole memory is for me, I’ve lost many of the details over the years—but she just kept going.

“That night when I told my mamma what happened, she said maybe the little girl was scared of me because I was new to her—which I later came to learn was my mother’s way of saying I was black and the other girl was white and maybe our differences were becoming apparent to one another. But back then I had no concept of that.