She was supposed to be part of this community now. The despised, the pathetic, but Lydia rejected this connection. She was different from these people. One day, she was going to stop using drugs. Even when the police arrested her coming out of a crack house, she didn’t feel a kinship. She called the only phone number she was allowed to use, that of Zulu Harris. As she waited in the holding cell surrounded by sullen female strangers, she dreaded his arrival. But when Mr. Harris paid her bail and retrieved her, he only said, try to be more careful. And it was probably best that they didn’t share the episode with her daddy.
Mr. Harris was an old friend of Lydia’s father, from way back. In his mid-forties, bald, and with a hint of a paunch, but so handsome. He called Lydia his niece and told the waitresses at his restaurant that she could eat for free. The waitresses had started out with attitudes, but eventually she’d won them over. Now they shouted Lydia’s name when she walked in. They tried to give her pie.
On Friday evenings, there was her father. He’d knock on the door of the apartment where he’d installed her. He’d put a sack of groceries on the small table in the space next to the kitchenette. There wasn’t much time that elapsed before he would begin asking, what had he done? What hadn’t he done? And what could he do for Lydia now?
“It’s not your fault, Daddy. It’s mine.”
Weeks passed, and she became weary of his routine, especially the part where she’d ask him, when could she come back home? Then his tender nature would congeal. She couldn’t come home. Let’s not talk about this, he’d tell her, and they’d sit quietly on the corduroy couch.
For a gift, Daddy brought her the sewing machine her granny had given her. He’d sneaked it out of the house while Mama was out. An antique, a Singer 66, purchased by her great-grandmother Pearl; before that, Dear Pearl had sewn on her hands. Her father made Lydia swear on her Bible that she wouldn’t sell it. He’d brought one along.
Lydia laughed. “Daddy, are you serious? You’re an atheist.”
“That’s not true.”
“Yes, it is! You don’t have to pretend with me. Mama’s nowhere around.”
He sat down on the couch with a low grunt. Mr. Harris and he had found it at a thrift shop out in the country, where the rich white folks lived. At the same estate sale where he’d bought the armoire, there had been an antique coffee table and dining room suite, china plates, flatware, and a four-poster bed, all of which her father had acquired for nearly a song. The apartment was cozy, not thrown together. Lydia wondered, how long had her father been planning to exile her from the family?
“Fine, darling. I’m an atheist. You caught me. But you aren’t, so put your hand on this book.” He picked up the Bible from the coffee table, and she sat beside him, putting her hand on the cover.
“I swear that I will not sell the sewing machine,” she said. “In Jesus’s name, Amen.”
“Very good! Let’s go get something to eat down at Zulu’s place. Belle thinks I have patients, but I have Fridays off now. You don’t think less of me for lying, do you, Lydia?”
“No, of course not.”
She asked if he could bring her some fabric. She wanted to keep her skills up. He brought her back some pin-striped linen, making her put her hand on the Bible again.
It was a lady named Irma Bradley who noticed her dress in Mr. Harris’s restaurant. That dress was too fancy for this neighborhood.
“Where you get that?” she asked.
“I made this myself, Mrs. Bradley.”
“Shonuff?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
When Mrs. Bradley wore a dress that Lydia made, she told the other, older ladies that Lydia’s prices were more than reasonable. If someone brought a pattern, that was nice, but if not, tell Lydia where to find the dress. She’d take the bus down to the store, carry the dress into the dressing room, and turn it inside out. She could make her own pattern out of brown paper. That girl had a gift.
It was passed down from her great-grandmother, Lydia told Mrs. Bradley. The lady hadn’t learned to read, but she’d had a photographic memory. Though Dear Pearl been a white man’s daughter, she was still Negro, and the stores in town hadn’t let her try on clothes. But those white folks hadn’t bothered her; she could see a dress in the store window and make an exact copy.
“Them white folks,” Mrs. Bradley said. “That’s why I left Mississippi. But I wish I could go back for good. I still got people there.”