stick out her tongue at me like she was five years old whenever I said something mean to her and had been doing it since she was a kid, but at twenty-seven it didn’t suit her no more.
‘You don’t know where that woman and them kids don’ come from,’ slurred Helen, ‘nor where they’re going to. ’S’pose it’s hell and back,’ she said, and laughed that drunken laugh of her’n. Ever since she was little Helen knew just what to say to vexate me. She could be like a mosquito buzzing ’round my ear, driving me to distraction, and what she said got my thoughts going.
Not knowing nothing of Joy and her family before they moved to Oakland left me brimming over with questions that little Joy acted like she wasn’t supposed to answer. So I figured her mother’d had warned her not to go spreading their business, though I did find out that her daddy had had nice dark brown wavy hair like Joy’s and a thin mustache and was young when he died unexpected not long before they’d up and moved West from Wilmington, Delaware. But Joy would go quiet and find an excuse to slip home if I asked about her when she was little, so I stopped prying, till curiosity got the better of me during one of her afternoon visits a couple of months after she’d started coming over.
She was setting in the middle of my living room floor on her fivesies in our third straight game of jacks, when I told her to pop over to her place and bring me some of her baby pictures so I could see what she looked like growing up. I figured that wasn’t nosying in with questions, but was just about looking at photos. That’s when she came back with her snag-a-tooth picture and we had that to-do, ’cause she drew in her two front missing teeth with a pencil and then got terrified that I’d tell her mama.
But like I explained to Joy, it was real baby, baby pictures that I was interested in, and when she claimed her mama didn’t have none, I refused to believe it. ‘Can’t you let me have a see, please, please pretty please,’ I begged like a agitating child. ‘I don’t know no mother in the world that don’t keep her hands on a few baby pictures.’ And I didn’t. Every woman I knew that had a child had some pictures to brag on when they was babies.
So the next day Joy come visiting, I asked her again for a see of some pictures while she was playing herself a game of Chinese checkers and I was ironing Freddie B’s shirts.
‘Don’t you got just one?’ I asked. ‘Not just one bitty, bitty one even?’ I longed to know what my God-sent looked like when she was one or two or three even. ‘Who you was as a baby is important to me, Joy. And the less you tell me the more I itch to want to know ’cause pals is supposed to know everything about each other. Your mama hasn’t got just one?’ I said, showing her that a picture the size of my thumbnail would do me fine.
‘Honest Injun,’ Joy answered like I’d taught her to say instead of ‘Swear to God’ which is what she made me say before she’d tell me something that I wasn’t suppose to know, like how much her mother paid for that pair of beige high heels she bought at Hodgeson’s that I really liked.
‘Honest, Baby Palatine, honest, honest, honest, honest!’ she hollered banging her balled up fist on the floor. It was as close as she got to showing spunk, ’cause up to then she was as polite with me as kids are with strangers, though I’d got her to stop calling me Mrs Ross like I was some old fogy. ‘I only have that first grade picture and I already gave you one,’ she said emphatic and pointing to where I’d tucked it in Corinthians in Freddie B’s big black Bible on the sideboard.
‘It ain’t like you was born during the war when didn’t nobody have the time to think about taking no pictures. I bet it’s that you don’t want me to see ’em.’ Then I took to teasing her. ‘What’s the matter, you was a ugly baby and you’re scared I’ll make fun of you?’
The minute I said that her eyes watered up like she was going to cry, and she rushed to put all the marbles and the Chinese checkers board in their box and put them back careful in the broom cupboard where I kept all her play things.
I was annoyed with myself for upsetting Joy and did my best to make it up by saying, ‘I was just joshing. Any fool can see that …’ Then I stepped away from the ironing board to do a shuffle and swing Freddie B’s work shirt in front of me while I broke out singing, ‘You Must have been a Beautiful Baby’ that I’d heard many a time on the radio. But as toneless as my deep voice is, it’s no wonder that it didn’t make her smile. I wasn’t good with kids in them days. Not like Freddie, ’cause I was too quick to talk to them like they was grown and say things in too harsh a way. Hadn’t nobody taught me better, and funny enough, it was Joy, little as she was, who used to tell me that it was best not to say exactly what was on your mind, ’cause people like to hear compliments and not what you was really thinking. Not but eight and she already knew grown folks’ tricks that I didn’t know. That’s what living in the city can do for kids.
Though she had beat me at jacks for the third time that afternoon before she started playing Chinese checkers, I said, ‘Come on Joy, let’s have another game of jacks. I don’t care about no ol’ baby pictures.’
But they stayed on my mind, so later that evening when her mother had give her and Brenda and Anndora their supper and let ’em go downstairs to play out in our parking lot, I settled down with Tammy for a cup of coffee and asked if she had any old family albums I could see. By then, I’d got up a regular habit of popping over to her place to keep her company after the kids’ supper, ’cause she didn’t know nobody else in the neighborhood and hadn’t made no friends at work.
‘Both my husband and I were orphans,’ she said, ‘so we had no families. I’m sure I told you that we’d met in the orphanage in upstate New York when we were sixteen.’
True enough she’d mentioned it when I asked her for references for renting the apartment, but at the time I didn’t take no notice, ’cause when she said she had three kids I didn’t figure we would end up taking her no way, ’cause the last thing I wanted was somebody’s brood of bad-assed, nappy-headed children to have to scrub up behind. She had also said at the time that her husband didn’t leave her nothing and got hisself killed when a crate fell on him in the shipyard warehouse where they was both working for which her and them kids didn’t get but $5500 compensation from the company.
But setting there cosy in Tammy’s place with a steaming cup of milky coffee in my hand, when I asked to see family photos, she walked straight over to a bureau and unlocked the top drawer and brought out a whole stack of pictures which she seemed quite happy at first to show off. And I got so excited I didn’t know where to put my face.
I don’t know how many umpteen baby pictures of Brenda and Anndora I skimmed over, though I ooohed and aaaahed loud at every single one thinking I’d best be polite. But nice as they were, I was really only wanting to see the ones of Joy, ’cause them other two children didn’t mean so much to me like she did, ’cause Brenda was often broody and Anndora was so spoiled that it was impossible to like her, cute though she was.
When me and Tammy had sifted through nearly the whole pile, about thirty-five pictures in all, and I hadn’t seen one of Joy, I lost patience and asked Tammy in a backhanded way why Joy got missed out. ‘How come you got so many beautiful pictures of your eldest and your youngest?’
‘Sherman. That was my late husband … Sherman.’ Her expression clouded over and she sounded scornful when she seeped out his name that second time, like he didn’t bear her no happy memories. ‘He liked to think of himself as an amateur photographer and loved to use the children as his subjects. He could even do his own developing,’ she added brightening up a bit. ‘I would definitely have encouraged him to start up a photography business but with his depressions, I wasn’t sure that he’d be able to deal with the public.’
I could see her bite her tongue for letting go of that much in front of me. It was easy to tell that Tammy didn’t like to talk about him, and whereas I first thought it was ’cause she was still mourning, I began to wonder. His body hadn’t long been in the ground ’fore she picked up and decided to give herself and them girls a fresh start by moving West on the advice, so she claimed, of a girl in her typing pool in Wilmington, who had an aunt in