The Steep and Thorny Way(25)
I stepped back, fear prickling across my skin.
“It’s Joe Adder, isn’t it?” asked Mama. “Naked.”
My face flushed. “It’s just . . .”
Mama cocked an eyebrow and swung the sketch pad by the tips of her fingers. Flour snowed off her hands and speckled the empty white sky above Joe’s head.
“It’s just an imaginary young man,” I said. “I made him up.”
“He looks an awful lot like the way I remember Joe looking. Aside from the lack of clothing.”
I put my hands on my hips. “Why were you snooping around in my room?”
“Were you with Joe just now?” Mama straightened her neck.
“I . . .” I couldn’t look her in the face. My ears pulsed with a loudening beat.
“Why would you want to spend time with him?” she asked, her voice strained with hurt. “I don’t understand why you’re doing this, Hanalee.”
“It’s not . . .” I pulled at my collar. “You don’t understand.”
“You’re no longer allowed to leave this house on your own.”
“What?” I burst out laughing. “Oh, if you only knew how ridiculous you’re being.”
“Do you hear me?” she asked. “You’ve upset both your father and me by letting that boy whisper his lies into your ear and do God knows what else to you.”
“Joe hasn’t touched me.”
“I want you to go sit in a hot bath.”
I gasped. “Why?”
“Because I believe he has touched you, and I’ve always read that hot baths can impede a pregnancy.”
“I’m not carrying Joe Adder’s baby! That’s the most absurd claim that anyone could—”
“Go!” She pointed to the hallway. “Draw yourself a bath.”
“There’s no reason—”
“You’re staying inside this house from now on. No more journeying outside on your own. No more wandering in the woods. I’ll lock you in your room if I have to.”
“Mama—”
“I won’t keep worrying about you. This will keep you safe.”
“I’m not going to get—”
“Go!”
RELUCTANTLY, I FOLLOWED MAMA’S ORDERS AND plunked myself down in a scalding-hot bath in our little indoor bathroom, which was tiled in blue and white diamonds. My hair needed a washing, anyway. I leaned my head back in the water, my face sweating in the steam, and I soaked each curl from the roots to the spiraling tips. Then I scrubbed my scalp clean with Canthrox shampoo and dunked my head again.
Beneath the ripples in the water, my body seemed to waver back and forth like a reflection in a curved mirror I once saw at a church carnival. My breasts, my stomach, my navel, the dark triangle of hair between my thighs—all of me—shimmied back and forth, growing and shrinking; all the parts of me that no boy in my community would ever be allowed to see, unless his skin miraculously transformed into a shade of brown or black, or mine turned white. Unless we sinned and enjoyed each other outside the bonds of holy matrimony.
To think Mama believed that I would touch Joe Adder.
Or that Joe Adder would touch me . . .
To chase such thoughts away, I closed my eyes and nudged my mind back to the days when Daddy would take me out to the very pond in which I’d caught Joe bathing. The line between our property and that of the Paulissens blurred around the water, but our families never quarreled, and what was theirs was ours, and vice versa. Daddy would roll up the legs of his pants after hard work in the fields on a hot summer day, and we’d wade in far enough to cool our shins in water that reflected the greens and browns of the trees. My toes sank into the sludge below my feet, and I’d sometimes see crawdads resting on the banks, or the shadows of minnows darting around my legs. Daddy would tell me a story he once learned from a Creole fellow about a man who convinced a wizard to turn a prince into a fish as a punishment for loving his daughter. We’d sing “Wade in the Water,” and Daddy’s voice would rise up, deep and rich, into the boughs hanging over our heads. Sometimes he even sang so low, he sounded like the frogs croaking on springtime nights, and I’d laugh at the sound of it but would also feel filled up and get teary-eyed.
I rested the back of my head on the curved ridge of the bathtub and let myself stay in the pond for a while. Mama clanked her spoon against a bowl in the nearby kitchen, and the washroom walls darkened with shadows. But, for a moment, I stood within that swimming hole, next to my daddy, with the water lapping at my knees and my voice joining his on the wind.
MAMA HAD LAID OUT MY WASHED AND PRESSED BLUE cotton dress—the same dress I’d first worn into the woods to hunt down Joe—with wide pockets and a low waistline. After donning the clean clothing, I sat on the edge of my bed and brushed out the tangles in my hair, which soaked a damp spot across my back, but the curls were too wet to pin into my fake bob just yet. I didn’t know how other brown-skinned girls with tight curls like mine combed and dried their hair, but I always begged my mother to allow me to buy one of the straightening combs I’d seen in the pharmacy. “Don’t try to hide your pretty curls, Hanalee,” she’d say every time I asked, even though she didn’t know what to do with my hair, either. Daddy had never paid enough attention to his mother’s and sister’s grooming habits to pass along any beauty tips from them. He just said their curls were even tighter.