Memphis: A Novel(21)

What kind of God would allow her sister to stay with a man like this?

Later that night, Miriam calmly explained to August that Jax was her husband. That he had never done this before. That he would get better. They all would. The doctor had said Joan wouldn’t remember her rape. Maybe she wouldn’t even remember Derek. This visit. They would all recover from this. Jax hadn’t been himself. The stress of it all. The shock. The shame. “Men, you know?”

August heard and knew none of it. Knew only that God was an angry one. So were all the men she knew. August was sick with it. The whole mess.

Later that night, in the lonely quiet of the dark house, after everyone else had gone to bed, August couldn’t stop hearing Joan’s screams. Echoing through the parking lot, projected out the open driver’s-side door of the Coupe de Ville.

That Joan. August needed for that white doctor to be right—maybe she wouldn’t remember this. Any of it. Maybe she wouldn’t even remember being left in the car.

The sound of Joan’s screams rang in August’s memory. She took the bottle of whiskey down from the kitchen shelf and drank until she couldn’t hear anything but her promise to herself—that girl ever asks you for anything, anything at all, you give it.





CHAPTER 10


Joan


1995


After dinner our first night in our Memphis house, Mama brought me and Mya to the quilting room. The back part of the house was split into two wings—east and west, with a long hallway connecting the two. It met in the middle with the bathroom Mama had cleaned me up in earlier that day. The dark hallway looked vaguely familiar. I threw my head to the left and made a promise to myself that I would never go farther than that connecting bathroom. I would never go to Derek’s wing of the house.

Mama led us right down the hallway, where there were two rooms—the quilting room on the left and the bedroom my mother would sleep in on the right. When Mama opened the door, I saw large quilts, big enough to cover our two twin beds twice over, hanging from the walls of the blue-wallpapered room. The room was lined with them. Farther inside, I saw a small anteroom in a corner with a curtain that half-concealed a massive bronze Singer machine, complete with foot pedals.

Mya ran to the bed underneath a grand marigold-yellow quilt fitted with a blue diamond as its center eye. This left me with the bed closest to the bay window, the bed underneath the emerald-green quilt in the Tree of Life pattern. It was our family tree, branching out in beautiful leaves with names sewn into them; I saw “Hazel,” “Della,” “Myron,” and names I didn’t know, like “Sarah” and “Clyde” and “Arletha.”

My mama held my hand and used our grip to motion at the Tree of Life quilt. “You see your middle name, Joan? You were named after your great-grandmother Della, who made this quilt.”

Mya had climbed up on her twin bed and jumped on it, testing its bounciness. “I like it here!” she exclaimed between jumps.

“Your Grandmommy Hazel made some of these, too,” Mama said. “That yellow one, over My. She refused to buy a sewing machine. She made them, all of these, by hand. She’d say, ‘What slave woman had a sewing machine?’ and she’d go back to stitching.” She got a hitch in her voice whenever she spoke of her mother.

“Thank.” Mya jumped. “You.” Jump. “Ancestors.” Another jump. “For picking cotton.” Jump. “So we don’t have to!”

“My, I’m about to make you go pick a switch if you don’t get down from that bed.”

We both knew this threat was a joke. Mama never hit us. Even when it was warranted—like when we broke her set of jade elephants playing with them like army men—her big eyes would get so wet and sad that Mya and I would apologize right away. Maybe she knew we overheard all those fights with Daddy. Maybe she knew there was only so much little girls could handle.

A quilt of mesmerizing geometric pale-blue squares hung above a chestnut chest. Mama nodded toward it. “She made that one for you, Joan. Started it when I called and told her I was pregnant. My—I swear. You best stop jumping on that bed!”

Later that night, tucked underneath piles of quilts and blankets, Mya and I heard the muted voices of Mama and Auntie August. It came in waves, their laughter. Then pauses of long silence. A shout. A bottle banging on a countertop. More laughter. Someone softly sobbing.

Even though the room had two beds, Mya had left hers to snuggle up to me in mine, something she did whenever she was scared but didn’t want to say. Wolf was too large to fit on the twin with Mya and me already sharing it—though, Lord knows, the dog had tried. She had lain down on top of us, an eighty-pound weighted blanket of fur, and begun licking Mya’s face.

“Wolf, stop,” Mya said, pushing Wolf’s massive head away from hers.

“Wolf, down,” I commanded.

Wolf whimpered in response but obeyed. She curled herself into a ball and slept on the floor as close as she could get to the bed.

“Your forehead is so big,” Mya said. She tapped her forefinger on my forehead like sending out a line of Morse code. “It’s like a fivehead.”

I pinched her as hard as I could. “Shut up and go to sleep.”

“It’s just like Daddy’s forehead.”

I kicked her, not too hard, underneath the covers. “Go to sleep,” I shushed her.