“Alright.” I pointed to the red and white sign hanging from the ceiling that indicated the kids’ section. “Let’s start with underwear. Y’all got bras?” I hadn’t noticed either of them wearing one although Erica was well past being ready.
Instead of following me, Erica walked over to the food counter. I had eaten there once. Hot dogs. Nacho chips with cheese. India walked in the opposite direction toward a miniature horse carousel. She started vocalizing, a cross between a grunt and a cry. It was loud and startling. She slapped the metal horse’s flank.
“You want to ride it?”
I knew India could hear, but I wasn’t sure how much she comprehended.
“Girl, that thang too small for you,” Erica said, wandering back over to us.
“Climb on.” I put a quarter in the machine and India swung her leg over the horse. The lights came on, and out of the speakers came a staticky tinkle of music like an ice cream truck. The horse rose. India made a clicking noise in the back of her throat that was so loud people stopped and gaped. Some of the passersby steered clear of us and the girls’ body odor. I tried not to make eye contact with the strangers. When the ride finished, I put another quarter in and watched as India threw her head back. I added another quarter. And another, until I ran out. The more she squealed, the more people stared. I went to the customer service counter and asked for a dollar’s worth of quarters. Erica laughed at her sister’s delight, while I hoped no one said anything to me.
“Eeeee! Yee eeeeee!!”
* * *
? ? ?
AFTER WE FINISHED shopping, I took them back to my house. Although the policy didn’t speak on it, I knew it would be frowned upon if Mrs. Seager found out. I promised myself that I wasn’t going to do this ever again. I parked Mama’s car behind my Colt in the driveway and took the girls into the house through the side door.
As they walked through the kitchen, staring, I became painfully aware of every hiccup of mechanical noise. The buzzing fan of the window unit. The hum of the refrigerator. They didn’t say anything, but I watched them hungrily taking it all in. Mama kept all her curtains open. She hated darkness more than anything, so our one-story house was always full of daytime light. The girls looked around, their voices hushed, as if we had sneaked into a stranger’s house.
“This look like white folks’ house,” Erica declared when we were in my room. “You live here with your husband?”
“I don’t have a husband. I didn’t tell you that?”
She shook her head. I realized I hadn’t shared much about myself with them, though I knew so much about their family and background. Everything was lopsided. Volunteering their personal information was part of the bargain of public assistance. Tell us everything about yourself and, in return, we’ll hand you a sliver of a slice of American pie. In the meantime, we won’t tell you anything, not even what we’re going to do for you. Suddenly I didn’t feel so bad about bringing them home with me.
“I live here with my parents. I’m an only child.” I reached under my bed and took out a photo album. “Y’all sit here and take a look at this while I go draw the bathwater.”
I brought in one of the dining room chairs so they could both sit at my desk. It was the same desk where I’d studied for my high school exams, and when I looked back at the two of them sitting there poring through that album, something surged within me. I cannot explain it other than to say I was filled with determination. I would get them back in school. I would get them that apartment. I would do everything I could to help them.
I sat on the side of the tub. No doubt, I was overstepping my boundaries on this case. I decided I wouldn’t tell anyone, not even Alicia. I didn’t want to lose my job, and Mrs. Seager would lose her mind if she found out what I was doing. When the water was ready, I brought out fresh towels from the hallway closet and hung them on the back of the door. I found the shampoo and hair grease under the bathroom sink. It was going to be a serious undertaking getting their hair untangled. The best I could do was try to comb it out. Maybe I would cornrow it. We could sit outside on the porch, and I would braid until it was too dark to see, parting their hair with a rattail comb or with the tip of my pinky nail.
“If y’all want to, you can get in the tub at the same time,” I said as I cut tags off underwear and clothes. “I think you can both fit.”
India jumped up first. Ever since the horse ride at Kmart, she had been warming up to me. At one point she had even grabbed my hand and held it.
It turned out that the hair was too matted to detangle. As much as I hated to do it, I had to cut the tangles out. Erica convinced India that it had to be done, but the younger sister started to cry when she saw her hair falling onto the bathroom floor. In the end, I picked it out into an Afro. I took India’s hand and put it on her head so she could feel the curly softness. “I didn’t cut that much,” I said.
“Our grandmama going to go crazy when she see our hair.”
I wanted to cuss myself. She was right. Her grandmama was going to kill me. Cutting their hair without asking permission had been tomfoolery. And not everybody was into Afros. My daddy sure wasn’t. My hands shook as I put the scissors back in the drawer. All I can say is that their hair seemed a serious thing to me that evening. Life or death. If I could clean them up, I could clean their lives up, too.
In my room, India settled on the floor in front of me and I divided her hair into sections. Parting the hair, line after line, this shared geography of scalp like an ancestral road map, bound us Black girls. I scraped my nail along the pale of her scalp. The hair hung in tight coils. I ran my fingertips along the bumps at her nape.
“Does it itch back here?” I asked. She nodded, and I thought of a medicated shampoo I could buy that might clear up the fungus.
“What’s that?’ Erica sat on my bed and pointed to the floor beside her.
“Records. You ever played a record before?”
Erica shook her head. She and her sister were aliens and I was their guide on Earth. Here to teach our food, our music, our movie stars. I flipped through my records and picked out a new one by Gladys Knight & the Pips. The first song I played was “Neither One of Us.” The music changed the mood, and Erica talked to me about her mother. Her speech was slow, but there was an intelligence to the girl.
“We used to have a radio. My mama liked to listen to music on it.”
“You remember your mama?”
“We used to live in a different house. A real house. Things ain’t the same after she dead. Even Daddy ain’t the same.”
She said the word dead so matter-of-factly. These girls were dulled by the world.
“Speaking of your daddy, he doesn’t seem to like me too much.”
“Why you say that?” Erica propped her chin up on her palm. She was stretched long across my bed in her new clothes. A yellow butterfly spread its wings across the back of her shirt. As soon as she’d seen it in the store, she’d clutched it to her as if she would not allow me to say no.
“He just . . . I don’t know.”
“Daddy ain’t got a mean bone in his body. He just don’t like government people.”