Gather Together in My Name - Maya Angelou [7]
“Come over to the bed.” He patiently pulled me away from the chair.
We both sat on the bed and I could hardly see him, although he was a breath away. He held my face in his large dark hands.
“I know you're scared. That's natural. You're young. But we're going to have a party. Just think of it like that. We're having a love party.”
My previous brushes with sex had been just that. Brushes. One violent. The other indifferent, and now I found myself in the hands and arms of a tender man.
He stroked and talked. He kissed me until my ears rang, and he made me laugh. He interrupted his passion to make some small joke, and the second I responded he resumed lovemaking.
I lay crying in his arms, after.
“You happy?” The gold in his mouth glinted like a little star.
I was so happy that the next day I went to a jewelers and bought him an onyx ring with a diamond chip. I charged it to my stepfather's account.
CHAPTER 7
Love was what I had been waiting for. I had done grownup things out of childish ignorance or juvenile bravado, but now I began to mature. I became pleased with my body because it gave me such pleasure. I shopped for myself carefully for the first time. Searching painstakingly for just the right clothes instead of buying the first thing off the rack. Unfortunately my taste was as new as my interest. Once when Curly was to take me out to dinner, I bought a smart yellow crepe dress with black roses, black baby-doll shoes, whose straps sank a full inch into my ankles, and an unflattering wide coolie hat with veil. I pinned a small cluster of yellow rose buds on my bosom and was ready for the fray.
He only asked me to remove the corsage.
Curly had said at the beginning of our affair that he had a girl who worked in a San Diego shipyard and her job would be up soon. Then they'd go back to New Orleans and get married. I hastily stored the information in that inaccessible region of the mind where one puts the memory of pain and other unpleasantries. For the while it needn't bother me, and it didn't.
He was getting out of the Navy and only had a couple of months before all his papers would be cleared. Southern upbringing and the terror of war made him seem much older than his thirty-one years.
We took my son for long walks through parks; when people complimented us on our child, he played the proud papa and accepted. At playland on the beach we rode the Ferris wheel and loop-the-loop and gooed ourselves with salt-water taffy. Late afternoons we took the baby back to the sitter and then went to his hotel and one more, or two more, or three more love parties. I never wanted it to end. I bought things for him. A watch (he already had one), a sports coat (too small), another ring, and paid for them myself. I couldn't hear his protestations. I wasn't buying things. I was buying time.
One day after work he took me to the sitter's. He sat and held the baby. His silence should have told me something. Maybe it did, but again I didn't want to know. We left in a quiet mood. He only said, “I want me a boy like that. Just like that.”
Since we weren't heading for the hotel, I asked where we were going.
“I'm taking you to your house.”
“Why?”
No answer.
He found a parking space a half-block away. The streetlights were just coming on and a soft fog dimmed the world. He reached in the back seat and took out two large boxes. He handed them to me and said, “Give me a kiss.”
I tried to laugh, to pretend that the kiss was payment for the gifts, but the laugh lied. He kissed me lightly and looked at me long.
“Reet. My girlfriend is here and I'll be checking out of the hotel tonight.”
I didn't cry because I couldn't think.
“You're going to make some man a wonderful wife. I mean it. These things are for you and the baby. I hate to say good-bye, but I gotta.”
He probably said more, but all I remember is walking from the car to my front door. Trying for my life's sake to control the angry lurchings of my stomach.