‘Is there gonna be some cake and ice cream?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Joy bashful and hardly able to look up from her hands that she was wringing slow just to have something to do with ’em. ‘It’s a birthday party, so I guess …’
‘You better not come back here without some cake for me,’ he said, grinning to show off his big gold tooth before he run down the steps two at a time to get into his new Lincoln. It sat parked in our space in the lot by the side of the building.
I swatted him on his pea head as he passed me and chided, ‘Stop worrying that poor child, ’cause she don’t know what a fool you are. And stop by the barber shop ’fore you bring yourself home, ’cause you’re needing a haircut.’
Just as he got out the door, that’s when a little towhead white boy come up and got ready to put his finger on the bell like he couldn’t see the door flung wide open and me bent over the bottom step with the pail and brush.
‘Don’t ring that,’ I told him. ‘What you wanting?’ I was fed up with neighborhood children laying on the bell every afternoon while I watched the TV and begging money for everything from them same old tasteless brownie cookies year after year to school raffles. And not none of it did I ever need nor want.
Joy’s little voice was practically singing when she piped up loud to say, ‘That’s Bernie and he’s my best friend from class.’ She was all ’a sudden rocking on both feet, she was so happy to see that knock kneeded boy. ‘I’ll be right down Bernie, but I have to get my present and tell my mama I’m leaving.’
She disappeared in the doorway and I gave him the once over like I would an untold number of straw headed boys that would come to that door looking for Joy over the next ten years.
Bernie’s hair was near enough the color of Joy’s organdy dress and though he was freckled and plain as any Tom Sawyer, you could tell by the way she got kinda giggly and giddy that she thought he was the cat’s pajamas. And her not but eight.
That day, I watched her march off proud, swinging Bernie’s arm to and fro as high as it would go. And I heard their small feet in their best party shoes crunching across gravel stones of the building’s parking lot before they climbed into his daddy’s blue De Soto. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that them children made a pretty picture with him in a fresh pressed white long-sleeved shirt and bow tie. She had a white satin ribbon tied in a big bow and streaming down around her fat ponytail and both ponytail and ribbon swung back and forth with her and Bernie.
I got on with my Saturday chores and didn’t think no more about little Joy that afternoon, so it surprised me when evening fell and she was ringing our apartment bell.
‘You come visiting?’ I asked her when I opened the door a crack to see but not be seen. Me and Freddie B was already in our bedclothes though it wasn’t but six thirty, ’cause back in them days our treat on a Saturday night was to tuck up on the living room sofa and watch whatever was on the TV soon as we cleared away our supper dishes.
Joy didn’t answer and looked sheepish when she handed me a wad of something wrapped in a children’s party napkin. I could tell right away from the squidgy feel and sweet smell that it was fresh layered icing cake. ‘What’s this?’ I asked her anyway, ’cause I was embarrassed that she’d brought us something. I wasn’t use to getting no gifts, especially from no children.
‘It’s some cake from the party I’ve been to,’ she told me. She was scared to look me in the eye when she said it.
‘Lord, child, Mister Freddie B didn’t mean for you to bring him back no cake. Not for real. He was just kidding you on!’
‘I saved my piece for him and asked the lady to cut it in half, so there’s a piece for you too. It has jellybeans on it too.’
It wasn’t till Joy was grown that she owned up that she’d snitched that piece of cake, but at the time I thought she’d deprived herself for our sake and receiving it made my eyes tear up. Joy waited like she wanted to come in, standing at my door by herself like a little brown angel on a mission from heaven and what with the strong smell of sugar and vanilla coming off the paper napkin parcel in my hand and the sight of her in that yellow organdy dress in the dingy passage that I was forever sweeping, my mind drifted to Freddie B’s favorite passage from the Bible that says ‘Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares’.
I didn’t ask her in that night ’cause we sure wasn’t really dressed to take in company with me in pincurls readying for our service first thing Sunday, but I went down to the gadget store below us that following Monday and picked her up a little doll baby. It wasn’t but a $2.98 one, but I decided that I would keep it in my place, so’s in case I could coax her over for a visit, there’d be something to give her to play with.
I’d bought her a bat and ball as well but I’d broke it trying it out by the time she finally come to visit me proper, and I even had a twin cherry popsicle on hand in my freezer compartment, which I couldn’t get her to take ’cause she said her mama didn’t like her taking food from folks.
‘But I ain’t folks,’ I said to her. ‘I’m your buddy, and what’s mine is yours.’
It didn’t never matter to me that Joy wasn’t my own flesh and blood. From the beginning, it brightened my spirits to have her to think about, and as Freddie B took to bringing little trinkets home for her like I did without me telling him to, I believed she was the little girl I’d prayed for and used to get him to call her our God-sent child.
It happened that about a month before Joy’d brought me and Freddie that birthday cake, I’d been to buy some new shoes in a flood warehouse sale at Hodgeson’s which was the cheapest place in Oakland to get quality shoes. I ain’t never been one for wasting my husband’s money on clothes, but I’m partial to fancy shoes and have been since my school days in New Orleans when I had to walk a mile shoeless to the schoolhouse everyday, summer and winter. I swore then that when I got grown I’d have more shoes than the law should allow, and even though I usually like to wear a old pair of slip-slides around the house, I always got me at least half dozen nice dress shoes tucked in shoe lasts in the closet. I don’t see it as waste, ’cause I can feel low spirited and put on a pair of pretty shoes that can get me smiling in no time like somebody that’s got something to celebrate.
So, at Hodgeson’s flood sale, when I laid eyes on a real unusual pair of royal blue lace-up high heels, I was determined that I was gonna have them, the only trouble being that they had just that one pair, size 3 1/2. They wasn’t but $5.95 which was even cheap for back then, and they had a beautiful 2 1/2 inch splayed heel and was laced up with leather up the front from about a inch in from the toe. There wasn’t no way I could get my big brogans in ’em, ’cause I been a size 8 since I was sixteen, but I bought them anyway. Luckily, it’s snatch ‘n’ grab at them flood sales, so nobody from the sales department was around to ask me what I was doing buying them 3 1/2 shoes for my big flat feet.
I knew Freddie B wouldn’t of been proud of me spending his hard earned money on high heels too small for me or anybody I knew to wear, but I took a hankering for them that much that I bought them anyhow, and decided on the way home not to show him ’cause he’d of only had to see them come out their paisley box to be asking what I’d bought such weeny shoes for. Not that he complains about spending on clothes if he reckons I’ll wear them. In fact it was me that fussed when he spent all that money on my real expensive red fox stole for our tenth wedding anniversary in ’53.
Anyway, I didn’t let him see them shoes and tucked the box they was in that said ‘P-a-p-a-g-a-l-l-o, Made in Italy’ all the way in the back of our deep clothes closet where he didn’t never look. And some days, when I got fed up staring out the window at folks passing and there wasn’t nothing good on the TV, I’d dig that shoebox out the closet. I felt like Grace Kelly or somebody just knowing the high heels was mine, and it didn’t worry me one bit that I could only get my toes in them.
Anyway, one afternoon, about a week after Joy’d brought me and Freddie B that piece of birthday