Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [97]
Ramona put the robe on and tied the belt around her waist. She lifted the shawl collar up around her chin and breathed in the gentle puffs of lavender and mint rising from the robe like a morning fog. She looked at herself in the mirror in that soft, rich robe. People were always telling her how pretty she was, and some days, right after she’d gotten her hair done and had on a good blouse and her thin gold-tone hoop earrings, she could see that she was pretty. But she’d never felt it. Couldn’t even dream up what pretty would feel like. Except standing in this tight bedroom looking at herself in the mirror in this sweet-smelling robe, the collar pulled up Loretta Young style, she began to sense how pretty must feel, how pretty Shern must have felt every time she put on that robe.
She tilted her chin and gently pushed her hands into the slit pockets and swayed back and forth in the robe. She could almost hear what Shern must have heard from her mother, hard and soft words about how to live. Courage and dignity wrapped up in her words like spiced apples tucked inside a strip of dough. She imagined that as Shern sat there holding the china cup, she must have felt a rising in her chest that went way beyond just feelings of physical beauty. A line of strength and determination rising up in her like a flag being raised the likes of which had allowed Shern to pack up her sisters and break away from Mae’s.
Damn, she thought, Shern had gotten out, accomplished in a single month what Ramona hadn’t accomplished in a decade. Now Ramona was sorry she’d called the police. She wanted to shout instead, “You go on, Shern. You take God with you, girl, and you just go on. You got out, Shern. You got out.”
She wrapped herself tighter in the robe, tried to nestle her head under the collar, took in the air under the robe that was green like the robe, and soft and sweet. She could feel that stirring in her chest again, a stem of something green like a sapling trying to grow around a rock to get some sun. This time the sapling was stronger than usual, more persistent, but there was the granite, the rock, with mean, jagged edges. The rock was taking over her chest again like it always did when she tried to think about it. She gasped, felt like she was choking. She would just have to choke; she had to let herself remember, swathed in the green of the robe as she was. And then it came. She didn’t even have to force the remembrance. The granite exploded into tiny bits of sand; then the remembrance just poured out in front of her and moved along on the gray, cloudy air.
Even the air in the park was green that day. Blades of grass and tree leaves and shrubbery and stems trumpeted their deepest shades of green because these were the last days of summer and the air swept it all up and dripped color on Ramona and she got a smile in her stomach as she and Mae got closer to the park.
Ramona was five and on her way home from her first day of afternoon kindergarten. She held tightly to Mae’s hand as they jaywalked to get across the street to the park. “My teacher says only cross on the green,” Ramona blurted as Mae half dragged her across the street before the cars rushed down. “She said a car could hit you and then you would be dead.”
“Tell your teacher to kiss my ass,” Mae said absentmindedly, and then laughed. “No, don’t tell her I said that, lil darling. She’s right, we should be crossing on the green, we should be crossing at the corner too. But I got things on my mind. Now you asked me to bring you to the park, okay. We’re at the park. Good and empty this time of day, too. Glad I picked you up early so we got this spot in the park all to ourselves. I’m gonna sit right here on this bench and do some heavy