We Are Not Like Them(64)

“Dad went ahead to the cemetery to make sure everything’s straight. The limos will be here to drive us over in twenty.” Shaun looks me up and down. “Um, so you better start getting ready? Those sweats aren’t going to cut it. You can guess where Mom is.” He nods to the kitchen.

“Cleaning?” I already know the answer. Momma’s cleaning habits are legendary. Growing up, Shaun and I had a weekend chore list a mile long. In my eighteen years living beneath her roof, the woman never went to bed with a dirty dish in the sink, and now I can’t either. I tried once. I left an ice cream bowl because I’m a grown-ass woman who can leave a dirty bowl in the sink. The freedom! But I was so agitated an hour later, I got up and washed it at one in the morning.

I was eight when Momma first explained to me that white people often think Black people are dirty. I remember it vividly because it was the night of my very first sleepover (aside from those with Jen, who practically lived with us by that point)—Abigail from ballet was coming over. I had one of those intense little-girl crushes on her, with her long auburn pigtails and her dance bag with her name splashed across it in sparkly cursive crystals. To prepare, Momma and I spent the entire day cleaning. She was on her hands and knees, furiously attacking the linoleum under the kitchen cabinets, when she offered up that explanation. This didn’t make one bit of sense to me, since our house always smelled like ammonia and lemon. I’d learned to vacuum before I could even really walk on my own. Not too long afterward, I was allowed to sleep over at Jen’s house for the first and only time. I thought of what Momma had said as I took in the ring of grime around the tub, the crumbs trapped in the couch cushions.

“Germs are good for you,” Lou said when she caught my jaw just about hanging on the floor. “Look at Jenny. Girl’s never sick.”

When it was time to take a bath, I couldn’t find a washcloth. I asked Jen for one, and she told me they didn’t use them. Momma had always made it clear that a washcloth was essential to keeping your private parts “spick-and-span.”

It all left me confused as to who was clean and who was dirty and how these things were determined.

Here’s Momma now in her best black dress, a tattered apron tied around her waist, her head stuck deep in a cabinet, furiously scrubbing.

“Ma?”

When she emerges from the far reaches of the cabinet, one of the curlers in her hair gets caught on the door. “Baby girl!” She drops the wet sponge and takes me up in a hug. “I didn’t know you were here!”

“I just got here. Sorry I’m late.”

“Oh, baby, you’re right on time. Right on time. Here, hand me that roll of paper towels.” She picks up the sponge without missing a beat, and for the first time I think about my mother’s obsessive cleaning like my running, a way for her to feel a measure of control, or at least the alluring illusion of it.

“How are you, Momma?” I haven’t seen her cry yet either.

“Oh, you know, I’m fine. I’m fine. I just want to get this nasty kitchen cleaned out. We may try to finally sell this place. Your father went ahead to the cemetery. I wanted him to buy some flowers. Heaven knows where he’s going to get flowers around here, but he’ll figure it out. That man is resourceful if nothing else.”

“Okay, well, do you need help with anything?”

“No, no, you go get ready.” Momma waves me away with a wet paper towel.

I leave her to her scrubbing and slip into the same black dress I wore for Justin’s funeral. I’ve worn too many sad black dresses lately. I put on the pearls last, fastening the delicate strand around my neck, turning and turning it until the center pearl, the one that is slightly bigger than the others, sits exactly where it should, right above the hollow in my collarbone. I’m ready, and yet not ready at all.

In the back of a boxy Cadillac coupe from the seventies, thighs sticking to the cracked leather seat, my fingers return to the pearls. I stop when Momma looks at me, worried she’ll scold me for fidgeting.

“They look nice on you,” she says, and goes back to looking out the window, twisting her own wedding ring around her bony finger. If we had that type of relationship, I would reach for her hand now.

Finally, after snaking through a string of rural roads, we pull up to a small field. Crooked wrought iron gates frame a small sign announcing the “colored” cemetery, dating back to the 1800s. Daddy is standing in the middle of the clearing beside a minister from the local church. We don’t know him personally. His people are from Perote for generations back, and they knew Gigi and her parents. My dad and the minister are backlit by the setting sun, standing tall, proud, and solemn with clasped hands. It reminds me of a Gordon Parks photograph. I want to run to Daddy like I did when I was a little girl, have him lift me into the air and spin me around. This was before cleaning thousands of toilets left him stooped with permanent back pain. Instead, he receives me with a tight hug.

We all stand around the casket. A bunch of flowers lie on top of it—wildflowers. My father must have picked them himself, probably right here in this field, and arranged them carefully over the shiny mahogany. His shoes are covered in flecks of red clay. My heart threatens to burst, picturing him bending over with his bad back to pull flower after flower from the dirt.

I’ve been trying to avoid looking at the coffin, same as I did at Justin’s funeral. But there it is, not five feet away. It’s closed, though I know my grandmother is in there, dressed to the nines just like she would have wanted: her favorite hat, a floral dress, her best white silk gloves. Picturing Gigi trapped in there sends pinpricks along my spine. But it’s the hole, the giant hole in the ground, that makes my knees buckle. Shaun links his arm with mine. “I got you, sis. I got you.”