An American Marriage(48)
“Don’t call him trifling,” I said. “Men have reasons.”
She shushed me. “You didn’t come here to talk about my daddy, did you?” And there was a question in her question. Women have that way of asking you more than what they want to know.
“Food smells good,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. “Louisiana women. I swear y’all come out of the womb gripping a skillet.”
I hoped that I would get to the table and see a bowl of crowder peas, pulled from the vines that grew along the fence that separated Davina’s property from the neighbors’. When I was coming up, Mr. Fontenot, the language teacher, had lived there. I ended up enrolled in French class by accident, the only black kid in the room. Me and Mr. Fontenot were close, both being onlies.
He told me about the French Club, how they met after school and practiced the language in preparation for a ten-day trip to Paris. I asked Mr. Fontenot if there were black people in Paris, and he said, “Both local and imported.” He gave me a novel by James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain, that had nothing to do with France, but he assured me that the author was there as we spoke. I turned the book over and studied the sad but intelligent face. James Baldwin was plenty black. “Learn the language,” Mr. Fontenot said, “and I will help sponsor your journey.” But three things happened: I would have been the only black kid going on the trip and nobody thought much of that idea. “Something goes wrong over there and it will be your word against theirs,” Big Roy said. Another thing was the money. Seven hundred fifty dollars would have been my share even with Mr. Fontenot sponsoring me. That’s why no black kids were going. And the last thing was Mr. Fontenot himself.
When he hipped me to Go Tell It on the Mountain, he didn’t say one word about Jimmy being a homosexual. “Jimmy” is how Mr. Fontenot always talked about him, like they went way back. According to Mr. Fontenot, Jimmy started saving his papers for posterity when he was only eleven years old because he knew he was going to be important and that he was going to need “documentation of his trajectory.” He had then given me a little black notebook. “You should keep a journal for future generations,” he said. “When you get out of this town, people are going to want to know how you did it.” It was this journal that ended all my plans, more than the money. Big Roy didn’t like the look of the little book and neither did my mother. Eloe is a small town, claustrophobic and mean sometimes. Didn’t take more than a couple of phone calls for my parents to find out that Mr. Fontenot was “funny like that,” and there was no way they were sending me to Paris under his sponsorship.
“What happened to Mr. Fontenot?”
“He passed away in the early nineties,” Davina said.
“From what?”
“You know what I’m talking about,” she said. “Come on, you need to eat.”
I got up and headed to the oval-shaped table, like the one I grew up eating on. Six people could fit easy. I pulled back the chair and was about to sit down when she asked me if I would like to wash my hands. Shamefaced, I asked her where the bathroom was. Lathering up with soap that smelled like girls, I felt a little prickle of anger along the underside of my jaw, but I splashed water on my chin until it settled. Tilting my head under the faucet, I filled my mouth with the soft water and swallowed it down. It had been a long time since I could look into a real glass mirror, but what I saw I could have done without. My forehead was creased like the fan Olive kept in her purse. But at least I was clean; I was shaved. As soon as I got my money right, I would see a dentist and get fitted for a new bridge. Using a fluffy brown towel dangling from a hook, I dried my face and returned to the table, which Davina piled with a righteous feast.
It was like something out of the Bible. Pork chops swimming in gravy, macaroni and cheese—brown on the top and shiny with butter. Mashed potatoes heaped in a striped blue bowl and next to that a stack of the white rolls Olive used to make. When you tugged them, they came apart in buttery sections. There, snug in a shiny silver bowl, were a few of the crowder peas I had been craving.
“You want to say the blessing?” she said, reaching out for my hand.
I closed my eyes and bowed my head, but I didn’t get past “Dear Lord” when my throat started twitching. It took me two breaths to give up on talking. I clamped my eyes shut and swallowed hard against whatever it was that was trying to rise up and get out of me.
“Dear Lord,” Davina picked up. “Thank you for this food that will nourish our bodies. We thank you for this fellowship. In the name of your son, Jesus Christ, Amen.” She squeezed my hand at the Amen, like the period at the end of the sentence, but I kept squeezing, even when she tried to pull away. I managed to say, “Bless the hands that prepared it,” before I let her go.
As Davina spooned mounds of everything onto my plate, I imagined myself—a man just out of the joint, about to do some serious damage to some pork chops. I felt a little bit like a punch line, more self-conscious than I had ever been in corporate America, right here in my own hometown. Davina set the food down in front of me, and at the last moment I remembered my manners and didn’t touch my fork until she picked up hers.
“Bon appétit,” she said with a little smile.
I said it back and remembered Celestial, who said just that before she ate anything, even her morning cereal.