Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [48]
Victoria just stood there at first, tasting the salt that lingered on her tongue and watching Ramona clutching at her duster, the overdone yellow tulips seeming to spill out through her fist. She was struck by her beauty again, and she had to look away. “Can I help you do something?” she asked, putting her voice toward the small block of light coming in through the shed window.
“What you gonna help me do and you can’t even walk?” Ramona answered.
Victoria forced herself again to look at Ramona, at the brittle outline of her otherwise soft face. “I just thought I could help you do something,” she said, her voice strong considering the pulsing of the salt settling into her gums. “You’re always so—so busy cleaning and everything, I just thought…” Her voice trailed off as she turned away again toward the light of the window.
Ramona pointed her face at Victoria as if the child had just called her some heinous, filthy name. “What did you just say?”
“I just thought—I just—”
“You don’t want to help me”—Ramona mocked Victoria in a slurred voice—“and please stop looking at me like that, just stop it.”
Victoria’s eyes were smoky with tears.
Ramona could no longer stand the benevolence of that face staring at her, or the storm of feelings in her chest, or how tight the shed was with the overflowing basket of dirty clothes. And now it was as if she could see all the fosters who’d ever lived there prance before her view. Even that big, ugly sixteen-year-old boy who everyone said was half retarded who’d snuck into her bed when she was twelve, and was pawing and biting all over her, and at first she thought she was dreaming, so she just lay there trying to wake herself up until she smelled the Glover’s Mange that Mae had rubbed in his scalp so his hair would grow. And that mixed with the sound of elastic snapping against her skin as he tried to get her pajama bottoms down, and the feel of his mouth against her breasts jolted her, and she realized then she wasn’t dreaming, and she hollered out for her mother, and Mae ran in and saw what almost happened. She told him to pack his paper bag, he was leaving in the morning, and then she sent Ramona for the ironing cord, stripped her, and whipped her like she was trying to make a racehorse run. Told her it was her fault, she had probably been smiling up at the boy, shaking her butt in front of him, pressing up against him when nobody was looking, little heifer, she knew the boy was backwards, hadn’t she caused it to happen? Mae asked her that night as she whipped her and told her it was all her fault.
Ramona could almost feel the skin on her back blister even now standing here in this shed when she thought about how Mae had beat her that night. She looked around the tiny shed for something to distract her from the cloud of feelings rising in her chest. Nothing. Just the overflowing basket of dirty clothes, and the small square of a window, and Victoria’s face, looking up at her now; it was small too, and needy, a niceness about it.
So right then she did the only thing she could do. She slapped Victoria’s face right across her already swollen mouth. She slapped her as if she were every foster child who’d ever crossed the threshold into Mae’s house. She slapped Victoria’s face as if with that slap she could erase every situation that would have a child taken from its real home and placed with Mae. She slapped her so hard her own hand stung and now throbbed. Then she grabbed Victoria to her, almost buried her in the bright yellow tulips of her duster; she pressed the child’s head to her chest and gently pummeled her back. Her feelings were so conflicted, like jagged lightning bolts popping through the clouds in her chest, she didn’t even know what to say. She just held Victoria to her and listened to her cry.
PART THREE
9
Clarise was trying to come back to her right mind as she sat in her room at