‘Now don’t upset yourself. Calm down, and let me give you one of them nice chocolate cupcakes I got left over from that batch I baked for you to take to the picnic’ After she nibbled at it, slow and mournful, I gave her twenty-five cents to ride the bus back over to her junior high school. Wasn’t no need of her missing the whole fun day where I was hoping she’d have a chance to make a girlfriend as she didn’t seem to have one in particular like most girls her age.
‘And stop worrying,’ I said as she stepped out the door, after I made her wash her face. ‘I won’t tell.’
But no sooner than she was gone I headed straight down that hall to tell that Artie to get his duds and get out. Cancer or no cancer, I wasn’t in the least bit interested and I didn’t want no part of him if he was talking to them girls on the sly.
That was one of them times that I knew I had to keep the story back from my husband, ’cause he would have asked me questions that I didn’t have no answers to neither then nor now. Him and me didn’t have no secrets from each other till Joy come along. And it didn’t feel right.
As I stood in my living room still in my nightdress that hot March ’Frisco sun was beating on me, and I looked down at Joy’s snag-a-tooth picture that I was still holding in my hand, and then I wiped the glass in its frame to a high shine with the hem of my nightdress. Not that it was so needing it, ’cause I don’t have no dust setting on things in my place. Never did. Never will.
Looking at Joy grinning in that picture made me so sad. She had a smile as big as a Dixie watermelon and could flash them perfect teeth of hers faster than any Marilyn Monroe. And like Freddie B who’d said it from the first he saw her, I believed Joy Bang was born to be a star. With her looks and personality, she could of had her own television show if she’d of had Brenda’s voice. But then, everybody ain’t born to have everything.
I thought about my poor husband laying peaceful in our bedroom and worried about how he would take hearing that something had happened to that girl that he so loved to spoil when she was a kid.
Freddie B would of give Joy the last dollar in his pocket if she’d of asked him for it, and she had in January which is exactly why we didn’t have no savings to stretch over this last spell of his being laid off. Joy needed that $2700 more than we did at the time and I was glad Freddie B was quick to lend it to her with no questions asked, though it would have been nice if she’d been able to pay him back last month like she expected. But we both understood that she was still pinched herself ’cause some back-up singing she was booked for got cancelled.
I didn’t like to say that it didn’t make sense her borrowing from my husband when that bony faced Rex Hightower should have been seeing her over them tight periods. ‘What’s a boyfriend for,’ I used to ask Joy, ‘if he’ll let you run around scrambling for your next meal and he’s rich enough to buy the Golden Gate Bridge.’ With her following him all ’round the globe and singing for free on his recording sessions, then claiming she couldn’t charge her own boyfriend, I wasn’t surprised he treated her any-which-a-way. ‘Act like a dishrag and Rex will treat you like one,’ I told her, but still she jumped everytime he called and that wasn’t often enough from what I knew.
Smart and good looking as Joy was, who knows what she could have made of her life had she given herself half a chance to settle with one of her own kind. But she loved them white ones and I could see it right from when I had my very first talk with her. I remember that Saturday afternoon good. It was my day for cleaning the hallway and stairs of our building on Grange Street. Her and her mama and sisters hadn’t long been living there, and Joy come out on the landing to watch me.
‘Stand back, child,’ I said to her. ‘’Cause you don’t want to get none of this here dust on your dress.’ As soon as I said it I was shamed of myself for sounding gruff. I didn’t mean her no harm, but I didn’t know her mama at all at that point, and I didn’t want Mrs Tamasina Bang out fussing with me about getting her child’s fancy dress dirty.
With the front door open downstairs there was enough light coming in on the landing where Joy was standing for me to see some of the fine detail on her pale yellow organdy dress which had a lacy starched smock with bits of deep yellow satin ribbon tied to it. It was that kind of party dress that all little girls wish they had at one time or another.
Joy was about eight and seemed shy, lolling there by the door of her mama’s apartment, and though I’d bumped into her and her mother and sisters on the street, during their first month on Grange I hadn’t had no time to take a good look at each of the children except to notice how different they was from one another. It was the youngest in her stroller that caught my eye, ’cause with them big green-grey eyes and mass of auburn curls, Anndora was a real heartbreaker. Not that Joy wasn’t cute. It was just that as a toddler Anndora was perfect looking.
Anyway, seeing Joy that Saturday afternoon standing by herself on the landing, while I did the stairs, I was quick to see what a nice looking child she was. I don’t have much time for children that’s too forward, but she didn’t even have to open her mouth for me to sense right off that she had a mild nature.
What was strange was how ’round about that time in my life I had been praying to the good Lord to send me a sweet little girl. True, I’d been praying for one of my own, but beggars can’t be choosers, and I was prepared to get a child however I could. Even if it had to be one borrowed. Not that I knew right off that Joy was the one God sent.
While I peeked up at Joy on our hall landing that Saturday, Freddie B opened our apartment door to come out and saw Joy sparkling in that organdy dress. He whistled at her like them builders he worked with did at grown women passing ’em by and said, ‘Hubba, hubba, ding-ding-dong!’ When she hung her head blushing, I waved at Freddie to cut out making the child feel awkward. But once he gets going with the kids, it ain’t no stopping him. He got a way with them anyhow, always has done which is why I felt bad back in them days that I couldn’t bear him none.
Freddie B, all six foot four inches, looked like a beanpole giant towering next to little Joy.
‘Wisht I had me a camera,’ he said to her.
‘Hi Mr Ross,’ she said in a nice clear voice, as nectar sweet as some of them children I’d seen Art Linklater interviewing on his afternoon kiddie show.
‘Baby Palatine,’ Freddie B called down to me ’cause I was still sweeping, ‘this girl looks good as Dorothy Dandridge, don’t she?’
‘She don’t know nothing ’bout no Dorothy Dandridge, fool,’ I told him.
‘Yes I do,’ Joy said to set me straight. ‘She’s a Negro movie star.’
‘And quick as a whip she is too,’ hooted Freddie B. ‘You tell Baby just where to get off. You ain’t been living in no cardboard box, tell her,’ he laughed and his bottom lip drooped like the piece of snuff he had tucked in it was gonna fall out.
‘Don’t you let no snuff dribble on my clean floor, man,’ I said to him.
But he was too busy monkey-shining for her to take any notice of what I said. Like a big kid he was back then ’fore old age got a hold of him. And me.
‘You want to take a ride with me downtown so I can show you off at Capwell’s Department Store?’ he asked Joy. ‘I bet you’d be the prettiest gal in there shopping today.’
I answered for her. ‘Freddie B you know better than to be offering to take her someplace without offering them sisters of her’n. That’s playing favorites, and what’s her mother gonna say anyway.’ He was always putting his size twelve foot in it. Right from that day forward he would forget and offer Joy what he