This book is dedicated to my friend,
Mary Blayney,
who knows the real story,
and that this isn’t it.
Part One – The Early Daze
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Part Two – The Hazy Phase
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Part Three – Braving the Maze
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
A Biography of Mary Kay McComas
IF YOU KNEW AT age ten what you knew at age forty-two, how much of your life would you change? A ponderous question. One she’d asked herself so often lately it had become even more important than the question of why she was alive at all. You know, what is the purpose of life?
Livy removed the thin cotton open-in-back hospital gown she wore over her slip and skirt and tossed it onto the treatment table. She could hear the doctor talking, presumably to the nurse, on the other side of the door, but she couldn’t make out what he was saying. It didn’t matter. They were finished with her. She’d come back in a year for a look-see, but it was over. They’d done all they could for her.
She buttoned up her blouse, taking her time, wondering if the pain had been worth it. Oh, not just the physical pain. Comparatively speaking, it was nothing. But the years of emotional pain she’d suffered… and the pain she was causing him now. Were they worth it?
If you believe that you are totally a product of your environment, and you’re not unhappy with the way things turned out, then you wouldn’t want to fiddle with your past, she decided. You’d want to experience it all again, the good and the bad, or your life wouldn’t turn out the same. You’d want to know the same people, live the same experiences, cry the same tears, make the same mistakes. Wouldn’t you? You couldn’t even switch the sequence of events—such as marry your second husband first—because then you wouldn’t know or appreciate how good you had it the second time around. Or would you?
Maybe she was still too young to answer such weighty questions. She felt as if she was just starting to get smart at forty-two. Real wisdom might take a little longer.
A pity really. Wisdom should come with gray hair, she thought, looking at her blurred reflection in the paper-towel dispenser above the sink. Beneath the concoction her hairdresser applied to her scalp every six weeks, she was salt-and-pepper gray. Prematurely, of course. After all, she had young children at home. And she couldn’t run around looking like their grandmother, could she?
She used the mirror in her compact to apply a little extra blush to her right cheek. Lipstick covered the paleness the pain created—and if she smiled, maybe the Telfa dressing over her left cheek would be less noticeable. Or not. At this point, it made very little difference. In six weeks it would be gone forever. And what was six weeks to forever? Or to forty-two years, for that matter?
She studied her face in the little round mirror. It wasn’t all that different.
Brian hated different, hated change. If it were up to him, time would have stopped in 1960. They’d still be ten years old and riding their bikes all over Tolford. She returned the compact to her purse and slipped her feet into low-heeled shoes. No. He’d have stopped time in 1967 so he could rediscover low-interest, no-obligation, disease-free sex. No, no, no. He’d stop it in ’68. He was a basketball star that year, and Cathy Dixon was on his mind like a… a brain tumor.
She gave a soft laugh. Change was inevitable. He should know that by now. It was scary. And it never came easily—especially when it was a change for the better.
Why did it seem so much easier to cling to old ways, to neglect things, to let them run down and decay than to work and build and create something new and good?
Not for the first time she wondered if perhaps that wasn’t man’s fatal flaw, part of the curse for the original sin—his reluctance to make changes because he got burned so badly the first time he tried to change things, back in Eden. Maintaining the status quo wasn’t as risky, and it was easier.
Wasn’t it easier to ridicule new ideas than to embrace them? Wasn’t it easier to hate than to love? Scorn than to praise? Ostracize than accept? And yet, in truth, it takes a lot more energy to hate someone for the color of his skin than it does to admire him for his character and talents. A lot more effort to fight a war than to live in peace. A lot more emotion to kill than to make love.
It was a curse all right.
There was a time when she thought she could change all that. Not single-handedly, of course. That is, not unless she was forced to act alone because of the inertia of her fellow human beings.
She shook her head in disbelief as she gathered up her purse and smoothed her hair into place with one hand. Had she really been so young and supercilious?
What a big, bad place the world had seemed in those days—and so ripe for revamping.
A new bandwagon came along every five minutes, and you could pick one or jump on them all. Black civil rights. The Vietnam war. Women’s liberation. Ecology. Government graft and corruption. Endangered species. Abortion. Communist aggression. Inflation. It was a wonder she didn’t break anything hopping on and off those wagons.
Of course, Brian would have been there to catch her if she’d slipped. He’d always been there. Traveling through life with her, refusing to ride on a bandwagon but walking a parallel path of his own, viewing the world from a different perspective—from a quiet, down-to-earth angle that was simple and basic.
He’d always been there, like a safe base in a game of Tag-You’re-It. He was the keeper of her faith, the guardian of her innocence. His hands painted the splendor of the earth for her. She saw her own beauty through Brian’s eyes…
Brian reached for his overcoat, shook out the wrinkles and folded it, then hung it over his arm. He did the same to her coat and filled the air around him with the scent of lilacs. Always lilacs.
He took in the familiar fragrance, long and deep, his nose buried in the soft wool. It was true red, her favorite color. Her smell. Her color. He wondered if those things would change now. He wondered if she would change.
He couldn’t help it; he was scared. That deep-down, sick-at-your-stomach scared you get just before your whole life comes crashing in around you. He’d been that scared before, but not recently. Not for a long time, until now.
He glanced at the doorway, then stood, holding both coats to him. He walked to the window.
The doctor’s office was part of New York University Medical Center in lower Manhattan. It was painted rental-unit tan. The furniture was covered in fecal-brown and puke-green vinyl. The nurses wore perky pink-and-white uniforms. They clashed with the decor. And the window had no view—only the outer wall of the next building, some melting snow on the ledge, some pigeon poop.
He shook his head and closed his eyes. He hated New York. He always had. Even when he lived there. Of course, that had been years and years ago. How old had he been?
That was when she first got married, so he must have been about twenty-four. They were the same age, give or take three months, two weeks and two days. He was still living there when she got divorced; that made it four years he’d spent in New York. Certainly long enough to decide whether you liked a place or not. And he didn’t.
He much preferred old Tolford, the town they had grown up in. Tolford, Tennessee. Located just south of the Mason Dixon, east of Nowhere, west of Nothing. The city-limit signs weren’t exactly back to back, but you could see them both from the middle of Main Street. There were bigger dots on the map, but none better in his opinion. Good old Tolford.
When he opened his eyes, they were directed at the doorway again. Empty. He glanced at the other patients waiting to see the doctor. A dermatologist-slash-plastic surgeon who believed in the practice of innovative procedures.
The fear squirmed in his belly again. Was any other medical specialty reputed to have fewer scruples than plastic surgery? Or a higher incidence of quackery? Plastic surgery—it sounded like a game for children. Plastic surgeon—made by Tyco? Accessories not included?
He sighed. He knew he wasn’t being fair. She had her reasons for being there. Livy was ever ready with her reasons for doing things. He couldn’t say he fully understood them all. He tried. But he didn’t always succeed.
His gaze slipped to the oversized coffee table inconveniently placed in the center of the tiny waiting room. It was heaped high with magazines and newspapers. Sports Illustrated, USA Today, People, U.S. News & World Report. On top was the outdated Time he’d tried to read earlier. A short article he couldn’t finish. Something about a place called Botswana. It was one of those relatively new countries that kept popping up to remind him how long it had been since he’d studied geography in school.
Not a very stable place, the earth. There were new countries everywhere, it seemed to him. Several more in Africa, a few in Europe. Czechoslovakia was two separate countries now, and Germany was back to being a single state. Even the dreaded “Russia” of his youth, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was in fragments. Or so he’d heard. He didn’t really bother to keep up with such things, though it did amuse him sometimes to think that whole countries could come and go, and still you could find a prize in a box of Cracker Jacks.
Some things never changed, and he liked that.
Being able to count on things was important. He’d spent most of his forty-odd years seeking solid, basic truths in his life and had managed to cling to a mere handful. He must have come to the conclusion early on that there was little truth or stability going on around him, because the world as a whole didn’t affect him much.
Not the way it affected some people. Not like it affected her.
He was, by self-admission, an introverted man. Pensive. Introspective.
Maybe self-absorbed was closer to the truth.
He felt guilty sometimes, believing himself to be the only person alive at the time who didn’t fall to the ground and weep buckets of tears when he heard President Kennedy had been assassinated. His vague recollection of the funeral was of how long and boring it was. The only impression he had of the first moon walk was the question of why all three channels had to televise it at the same time. And how long that guy’s golf ball would be in orbit. It used to irritate him when people discussed the Vietnam war at parties and when racial equality was hotly debated as if it were a two-sided issue.
He’d taken a lot for granted in his life. His freedom. His innocence. His good fortune to be born in the exact right month, under the best of stars, with his moon rising in the luckiest of houses, so that all he had to deal with when he came of age was yuppiedom and some political turmoil in the Middle East that in no way, shape, or fashion affected his daily life.
He blinked away a small collection of recollections and glanced over his shoulder. The doorway was still empty.
It was a good thing no one could look inside his head. The confusing blur would frighten them. His memory was a nimbus of color and emotion, a thick, sometimes swirling fog dotted with distressingly few solid experiences to cling to. Facts and fragments of historical events had passed through, but they were too heavy and too detached from the moment he was living in, they simply slipped away and were forgotten.
Older but no wiser, he wasn’t surprised that after forty-two years of treading life’s waters he could barely distinguish one moment gone by from the next. Nor did it surprise him that his head was still above the water, even though he’d floundered and gone under so often. Somehow he’d always managed to rise to the surface once more, take a deep breath, look around.
Curious to see what she’d do next, he supposed, turning to look out the window again.
What he knew of the world, what he knew of his life, he knew because of her. If he had convictions and beliefs, if he had hope and empathy, it was because of her. If he’d done one decent thing in his life, taken one risk, given a single ounce of himself to better the world, it was because of her. She was his link to the rest of the world, and it was her oyster. She loved it. She cared about it. She fought for it. She protected it. She was ever faithful to the assumption that somewhere within all its ugliness, there was a beautiful pearl.
Oh, yes. If he had any memory of his life at all, it was of Livy.
GOOD OLD TOLFORD.
Only Main Street had sidewalks in those good old days. The town’s lifeblood flowed through three primary arteries: an electric-fan factory, a rayon textile plant, and agriculture.
There were three churches, one Presbyterian, one Baptist, and the old black Baptist church, of course. (The last, according to his mother, who still lived in Tolford, had recently been taken over by a group of Christian fundamentalists—though they weren’t expected to last long.) And there were six bars. A reasonable ratio, in his estimation.
Tolford boasted two gas stations, two grocery stores, four regular restaurants, and three fast-food establishments that, to him, qualified as competitive economics. There were three public schools, one for each level—no private schools for miles and miles; a bowling alley; a small country club, which was actually a community pool and golf course that didn’t require exclusive membership anymore; and one doctor—Dr. McAbey, a general practitioner whose office and small clinic claimed the four front rooms of the big old house on Walnut Street where he lived with his family.
Broadleaf forests surrounded the town. As did acres of wheat and soybeans. A few fields of cotton and tobacco had remained, but not many. Cool, calm lakes. Excellent river fishing. If you grew up in Tolford, you grew up barefoot and happy. Slow and lazy, Tolford was his sort of place. He missed it. All of it. Though he could clearly recall a time when he’d seen it quite differently…
He felt again the heat of that day and the sting of the tears in his eyes. His face was burning with shame and fear. His hair was damp and curly with sweat. He wanted to run away. It was 1956, and he didn’t want to live in a new house or go to a new school. He hated this new place and everyone in it. And they hated him. They were laughing at him. He wished his mother would come back for him. If he survived his first day of school, he’d never come back. Ever. No one could make him.
And then it happened. In the middle of a heartbeat.
“Next time I tell ya ta stop it, are ya gonna stop it?” he heard her yelling. Donny Moore lay crying at her feet, his nose trickling crimson. “Or do ya want me ta punch ya again?”
Donny covered his face with his hands, discovered the blood, and started crying louder—but he didn’t forget to nod the answer to her question.
In utter astonishment, for he hadn’t even considered hitting Donny himself, Brian slowly turned to face the girl beside him.
Granted, his knowledge of females was limited at the time. He knew they wore dresses and they didn’t get crew cuts, but other than that they were just “girls” in his mind—the other half to his teacher’s “Now boys and girls…”
But SHE, this girl, was magnificent. Long dark hair braided down both sides of her face and huge deep-brown eyes that were just a little too big for her six-year-old face. She had an acre of freckles scattered across her button nose and a big purple blotch on her left cheek. Her expression was still stormy with anger and mayhem as she glared down at Donny.
Then she glanced at him.
“What are you starin’ at?” she asked him, glowering.
“Nothin’,” he said. He lowered his gaze, taking in her red plaid dress with its white Peter Pan collar, the lace-trimmed anklets, the Mary Jane shoes, and prayed that she wouldn’t sock him, too, when he asked, “How come you hit him?”
“He was makin’ fun of you,” she said, puzzled. “Didn’t ya know he was makin’ fun of the way ya talk?”
“Yeah. I knew.”
“Why didn’t you hit him?”
“You’re not th-uppo-th-ed to fight at th-chool,” he answered, lisping his esses. “You’ll get in trouble.” His mother had warned him about it.
“I won’t.” Her smile was smug. “I got permission.”
“Permi-th-ion? To hit kid-th?”
“Well, not all of ’em,” she said, walking away from the scene of the crime as if it hadn’t happened. He fell into step beside her, not caring where she was going. “But my daddy says I can punch anyone who makes fun of me, ’cause they deserve it.”
“That boy wa-th makin’ fun of me,” he pointed out.
“It don’t matter. He still deserved it.” She smiled at him.
For a second, Brian thought his heart had stopped. But, no. He could feel it pounding and growing larger and larger inside his chest. Her big brown eyes twinkled at him, taking away his breath. His mouth went dry.
“Wh-why would anyone make fun of you?” He couldn’t fathom it.
“’Cause of my mark.”
“What mark?” She had a mark? He scanned her up and down once again.
She pointed to her left cheek.
Oh. Sure. He’d noticed the big purple blotch on her cheek, but it wasn’t her most striking feature—not like her fists, certainly. In fact, the mark on her face was the least significant observation he’d made about her.
“Wow. How’d you get it?”
“I came with it. I was born with it,” she said. “But don’t stare at it, okay? I hate it when people stare at me.”
“Okay.” There were other things about her that he preferred to stare at anyway. “What-th your name?”
“Olivia Jane Hubbard. I sit two seats behind you.”
“You do?”
“You can call me Livy, if you want.”
“I’m Brian. Brian Carowack.” His new dad and his mother and baby sister all had a different last name, but his was easier to say.
“I know,” she said, smiling again. “I have a loose tooth. See?” She wiggled it back and forth with her tongue. “You wanna wiggle it?”
Wow! What a girl! His grandma had take-out teeth because she didn’t have any real teeth at all. But he didn’t know anyone in the whole world with loose teeth. And she was going to let him wiggle it and everything.
What if he broke it? What if he wrecked her smile? What if he made her look like his grandma did at night?
“Nah.”
“Do you have any loose ones?”
“No.” He was just an ordinary boy. Nothing special about him.
“How come you didn’t come the first day of school?”
“We wa-th movin’ to our new hou-th.”
If he could talk like the other kids did, he might have gone on to explain about his stepfather’s new job, the new bedroom he didn’t have to share with his baby sister, Beth, and the fuss his mother had made about his missing the first week of first grade. He might even have told her how confused and lost he felt. But he didn’t talk like the other kids did, and he preferred to keep his responses as short as possible—and with as few s-es and th-s as possible.
“Where’d you live before?” she asked, seeming not to notice the short spray of spit that accompanied his speech.
“In my old hou-th.”
She looked at him. “Did you have lots of friends there?”
“No. But I had a dog. He couldn’t come.” His new dad didn’t like dogs.
“I have a cat named Snow. But that’s only ’cause she’s all white. I was gonna call her Whitey, but my mama liked Snow.”
“My dog was Rocky. He liked to chew on rock-th. He thought they were ball-th. He could eat your cat, I bet.”
“Maybe. Or they might have been friends. Like us.”
Friends? Like us? Were they friends already?
“I have a new bike,” she said.
“Can you ride it?”
“Sure.”
“I might get one from Th-anta Clau-th. If I’m good.”
She looked at him as if she were about to tell him something important, then seemed to change her mind. “We can take turns riding mine.”
“Olivia Hubbard!” It was their teacher’s voice. “You’ve been fighting again?”
It didn’t sound as if Livy had everyone’s permission to fight.
Together they turned to face Miss Dobbs. She was young and pretty like his mother. She wore blue. A loud, happy blue. But her stern expression made his blood rush hot and then cold through his body. His heart hammered with guilt and fear. He’d never been in trouble at school before—never even been to school before. What would his mother say? What would his new dad do?
“Yes, ma’am,” Livy said, her head high.
Holy smokes. Wasn’t she afraid of anything, he wondered, full of awe.
“March,” Miss Dobbs ordered, her finger pointing back to the classroom, her attitude that of a practiced referee.
Livy, too, seemed to know the routine. Without defense she started walking across the playground toward the school.
Something wasn’t right. Brian felt it in his heart and then voiced it in his mind. If it weren’t for him, she wouldn’t be in trouble. Maybe he should be punished, too. Grappling with the knowledge that whatever they did to bad boys at Tolford Primary School, it wouldn’t be half as awful as the deep Dutch he’d be in at home, he took two steps forward.
In that moment, Livy turned her head and smiled at him. Her smile could melt a flagpole.
“See ya later, Brian,” she said.
“Okay,” he said.
He’d owe her one.
If you were born in Tolford, Tennessee—smack-dab in the middle of the American Bible Belt—it wasn’t necessarily better, but it certainly was easier, if you were born white, like Livy. It also helped if your mama, like hers, had family roots there that ran deeper than a shagbark hickory tree and your daddy was one of the two attorneys in town.
If he was the district attorney with political aspirations… well, let’s say certain allowances would be made by certain people if you were his only daughter.
Other children, of course, proved the exception to this unspoken rule of etiquette. Kids were usually more afraid of and more eager to please their own parents than they were someone else’s folks. And they rarely made allowance for your social standing. They either liked you or they didn’t. No matter who you were or what you said or how you looked.
“This is wonderful, Brian,” Miss Dobbs said, her soft, enthusiastic voice as clear and distinct through time as the first fat drops of rain in a summer shower.
She was looking over his shoulder from behind at the work on his desk. There was a sunny afternoon beyond the schoolroom windows, and the class was being quiet and diligent during “art time.”
The assignment: Draw your best friend.
“Boys and girls, may I have your attention for a moment?” she asked, reaching for Brian’s crayon drawing. “We’ve seen lots of friends this afternoon. Bobby’s best friend was his dog, Teddy. And Julia’s best friends were her mother and father. Cathy’s friend was Lisa Marie, and Arthur’s was Larry. Now let’s see if we can recognize who Brian’s best friend is.”
The class looked up.
“Are you finished, Brian? May I show the other children?”
He nodded. Brian wasn’t as big as some of the kids in their class. He was skinny and shy and he didn’t like to talk. Livy knew he hated being singled out in front of the others.
Miss Dobbs held the picture high, turning in a circle so everyone could see it. Livy was eager. She knew who Brian’s best friend was. She saw the black x-es of dark braids along each side of the egg-shaped face and the freckles across the nose and felt great satisfaction. She waited for someone to identify her.
Her classmates looked puzzled. A few of them looked her way, then back at the picture. But they didn’t say anything.
Miss Dobbs turned again. This time Livy saw the red ribbons at the ends of the braids and the brown eyes—complete with eyelashes. Brian was one of the best artists in class. Miss Dobbs always said so. Livy thought he was the very best, and she looked around the room once more. What was the matter with everyone? They all knew who Brian’s best friend was—from the very beginning they’d been best friends. And who else in the class had hair as long and black as hers? And who else had to wear stupid red bows in it?
“Can’t anyone guess who this might be?” Miss Dobbs asked, looking as perplexed as Livy felt. “I think it bears a remarkable resemblance to someone right here in this room.”
When the picture came around a third time, Livy studied it harder. It was her, all right. She was smiling, and two teeth were missing. Miss Dobbs always remarked on what she called Brian’s gift for detail, which meant he didn’t miss anything like fingers or shoelaces or feathers on birds or houses made of brick instead of stone or wood. Brian liked to draw, and he was proud of his work.
Why didn’t someone say something?
“All right,” Miss Dobbs said. “Brian, why don’t you tell us who your best friend is.”
“Livy,” he said.
The other children started to laugh.
“That’s not Livy,” they said. “There’s no purple mark on her face,” they shouted.
Miss Dobbs glanced down at the picture, then at Brian, then at Livy, frowning.
“That’s enough, class,” she said, her voice as stern as she could make it. “Please be silent. We don’t laugh at other people’s mistakes.”
She slid the picture back onto Brian’s desk and started to walk to the front of the classroom. Then she turned around.
“I’m sorry, Brian. Did you say something?”
He glanced about at the class, then stood up beside his desk. It took an act of God, or at least a direct question from Miss Dobbs, to get him to speak out in class because of the way he talked. Even Livy was surprised to see that he had something to say, voluntarily.
“I didn’t,” he said softly.
“You didn’t what, Brian?”
“Make a mi-th-take. I drew Livy. I drew my friend, like you told u-th to.”
“She’s a girl, stupid,” Donny Moore pointed out from across the room. To say that Brian and Donny didn’t get along would be a gross understatement. Donny was the bane of Brian’s existence. Bigger, louder, meaner. “Brian’s got a girlfriend.”
The class started to laugh again.
Brian grew pink cheeked with embarrassment, but it was the anger in his eyes that won out. He turned to Donny and shouted, “Th-ut up!”
“Now boys…” Miss Dobbs said, but not before Donny Moore got out another jab.
“Brian’s got an ugly girlfriend with a dirty face.”
Livy felt hot all over, and she was afraid she might start crying—or get in trouble for punching Donny again. She wanted to hide her face, leave the room, disappear. But something kept her rooted to her desk, watching Brian, his fingers curling into fists at the ends of his skinny arms, his face a glowering mask of rage.
“You’re ugly! Livy is beautiful!” he said, and when the class snickered, his expression faltered with the realization that he’d gotten a little carried away. He started to blush again, but he was disinclined to back down. He glanced at her, then to the floor. “Th-he i-th,” he insisted, looking straight at Donny.
“That is enough. Both of you, be silent,” Miss Dobbs said, leaning over her desk and writing quickly on two sheets of paper. “We don’t talk about our classmates that way. Tonight the two of you can copy these letters a hundred times for me. They spell: No one is ugly. And have your parents sign your papers when you’re finished. Is that understood?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Donny said, making a tee-hee grimace at Brian.
“Brian?” she said, drawing his angry glare from Donny. “Is that understood?”
He nodded.
“Are you gonna be in lots of trouble?” Livy asked him later as they walked slowly home from school. He was always quiet in class, but he usually had something to say on the way home. He hadn’t said a word. She could tell he was still upset.
He shrugged.
“Well, it’s your own fault if you are,” she said, not unkindly. He looked at her. “It wasn’t a very good picture.”
“Why?” He looked hurt.
“You drew me beautiful, and I’m not. You didn’t draw my mark.”
“I forgot.”
“I know,” she said, sympathetically. She sometimes forgot about it, too. “But next time draw it. Then you won’t be in trouble.” They walked on in silence for a few minutes. “And don’t say I’m beautiful to people. Then you won’t be in trouble either.”
“But you are,” he muttered, clearly uncomfortable in saying so but unwilling to give up his right to do so.
“I’m not. I’m strong and I’m smart and Mama says I’m pretty on the inside and that’s where it counts. But my face is ugly.”
“Your mama th-aid your face i-th ugly?”
“No.” As if a mother would. “She says I’m pretty on the inside and that’s where it counts. I say my face is ugly.”
“You’re wrong.” It was a simple enough statement, but to tell Livy she was wrong about anything took a great deal of courage in someone her own size. And she knew it.
She looked sideways at Brian. He was walking along the way he always did, watching his feet, looking up at the trees, or observing the cars that drove by. She couldn’t tell if he was so sure of his remark that he wasn’t expecting an argument, or if he was just so confident in their friendship that he knew she wouldn’t punch him for it.
Or was he simply being loyal? You couldn’t punch a pal for being a pal. Did he really think she was beautiful?
“Did you throw that picture away?”
“No.”
“Can I have it?”
He looked at her, then stopped to take his book bag off his shoulder and unzip it. He handed her the drawing.
Wordlessly, she waited until he was ready to walk on. And she didn’t look at the picture again until she got home. She single-tacked it to her bedroom wall. Studied it. Examined her real face in the mirror. Covered the mark with one hand and glazed the focus of her eyes to see what she’d look like without it.
Not ugly. Pretty maybe.
Brian was right. Without her mark, she wasn’t ugly. She looked nice. Only the mark was ugly. She scrutinized the purple blotch. Dr. McAbey called it a port-wine stain because that’s what it looked like. A stain. A smooth pooling of wine or grape juice. He’d said it was caused by having too many blood vessels or blood vessels that were too big under her skin. He’d shown her pictures of other people and other children who had the same stain over their whole face, or half their face, or down their neck and onto their bodies. He’d said she was lucky hers was relatively small.
But she hadn’t felt lucky. And she didn’t think it was all that small. It was about the size of her fist, an inch below her eye, and it covered most of her left cheek.
She looked again at Brian’s picture. It was just an old crayon drawing, but it was her. And if she could somehow soak up the stain, Brian was right: She was pretty underneath it.
LIVY SWUNG ONE-HANDED around the pole of the stop sign in front of her house as Brian hurried down the road toward her. Every morning she waited for Brian by the stop sign, and they went to school together. And every morning he wanted to feel bad for making her wait so long—but she always said he couldn’t help it.
During the summer she’d explained to him that his mama was a “late person.” That meant she was habitually five to ten minutes late for everything. Consequently, so was Brian. She’d said that it wasn’t a bad thing to be; it was just boring sometimes.
He watched as she caught the wind in her other hand. She didn’t like boring, but she was used to it. Her mama was an “early person,” one who was always at a place ten minutes before she had to be, and then waited. Therefore, Livy waited, too. She didn’t like being bored, but she admitted that sometimes it was a good thing. She said there were lots of things you could do inside your brain when you were bored.
She was full of this type of insightful information.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” she said, smiling, taking one last swing around the pole, fingers spread wide to free the wind.
“She made waffle-th,” he said, explaining his longer-than-usual delay in meeting her.
“Mush again.” She always had oatmeal or grits for breakfast. Alternating days.
They lived only two blocks from each other, but it could have been the whole world that separated them. Everything was different at Livy’s house. Her mother didn’t teach at the high school every day like his did. She stayed home. Livy’s father had a real important job downtown and he wore suits most of the time. His stepfather wore coveralls and drove twenty miles to Idlewild to work at a factory. It was his second new job. He hated it.
They played pretty, wordless music at Livy’s house, country-western or rock ’n’ roll at his. Livy didn’t have to watch her baby sister because she didn’t have one. She was an only child. She lived in a big red brick house with white pillars in front; he lived in a wooden one-story house with a wire fence around it. All the Hubbards had the same last name, so there was no need to explain why your name was different from your mother’s and father’s and sister’s. And Livy’s parents talked to her as if she was a grown-up or something, not like she was a kid.
“Did you finish it?” she asked.
Rather than answer, he slipped a paper out of his second-grade math book and handed it to her. She unfolded the sheet of lined paper, studied it, then handed it back.
“She had golden hair,” she said smartly. “I said it three times so you wouldn’t forget.”
“I thought it wa-th dark. Like your-th.”
Of all her friends, Brian knew she liked him the most. She said it was because he liked to play ball and ride bikes and climb trees, and he never suggested that they dress up in their mother’s old clothes—especially if there were polliwogs to be caught in Mr. Miller’s pond. He was also entirely empathetic with her attitude toward the dresses and hair ribbons her mother insisted upon. And best of all, she said, even when they didn’t like doing the same things, they had fun together doing different things—which was what they did mostly—because Livy liked to do different things.
He also knew that what she found most interesting about him was the one thing she couldn’t do. Draw pictures. What came naturally to him, in lines and color, eluded her completely. Even her stick people looked crippled and diseased. Where his love of detail came in the form of shapes and hues, hers came in words. She read them. She wrote them. She made them up.
And so, when she wanted to make up stories of her own, she did it aloud and Brian would draw the pictures to accompany them. Wonderful pictures with everything in them. Sometimes he’d draw in extra things, to make the story better, though that was usually a matter of opinion.
“Why do you always make the girl’s hair black?” she asked, annoyed.
“Becau-th-th-e acts like you. Th-e-th-ound-th like you. That-th how I th-ee her in my head.”
“You see her in your head?”
“Yeah.”
“When I tell you a story, you see it in your head?”
“Yeah.”
This impressed her for a second or two.
“Well, they’re my stories, so you have to draw them the way I say. The girls always have golden hair, and the handsome man always has dark hair. All stories are like that.”
“Why doe-th th-e alway-th have to die?”
“Because that’s what happens. She saves the handsome man, and then she dies.”
“But why?”
“Because she does.”
She wasn’t always so rigid in her thinking, however. Mostly she was curious. She wanted to know about everything. Bugs and leaves and where the end of the sky was. She was full of questions. And, in general, she admired that same quality in others.
Except when it came to her face.
And people were curious about her face. Lots of adults and some kids. He’d watched adults talk about the mark on her face with her mother. What caused it? Could it be treated? Was it hereditary? They would hold Livy’s face in their hands, turn it from side to side, and talk about the mark as if there were no little girl behind it. Children weren’t so rude. They were cruel. They’d ask if it hurt or if they could touch it. Some would ask if she’d forgotten to wash her face—and laugh.
Frankly, Brian couldn’t see it. Literally. Whole weeks went by when he forgot it was there. He was always surprised and a little confused when other people commented on it. He still wasn’t much of a fighter, unfortunately, but more than once he’d stayed after school with her—punished by association—and he never uttered a word. He didn’t like people who talked about her face either.
They crossed Lambert Street to take the shortcut through the park. It was Wednesday. Any other day they’d be riding their bikes; they’d ride another two blocks along Lambert and cut through the parking lot behind the IGA. It was a shorter shortcut. But on Wednesdays they walked and cut through the rows of overgrown shrubs and between the trees so no one would see them.
“Here comes Chewy,” she said in a whisper as she glanced about the nearly deserted park. She handed her school books to Brian. Old Mr. Shirtzer was walking his dog, Fritz, but they posed no threat. Mr. Shirtzer was stone deaf, and he couldn’t see much beyond the end of Fritz’s leash.
Still, they never took chances. They couldn’t. Chewy was black.
Brian couldn’t begin to explain or understand the danger of being black, or of being a small white boy or girl seen alone with an older black boy. All he knew was that it was dangerous. It was a secret. He and Livy had never talked about it after the initial encounter. It just happened, every Wednesday.
They knew Chewy. Charles Winston Lewis was his long name, Livy said—she’d asked him once. He worked at the BP station on Main Street. Brian’s stepfather went to the Shell station, but he’d seen Livy’s mother ask Chewy to change the oil in their car once, and he’d seen her father slap Chewy on the back and laugh with him and tell him to have a fine day on more than one occasion.
In truth, no one had actually told him not to be seen with Chewy. But sometimes you didn’t have to be told. Sometimes you could hear a hateful sound in a grown-up’s voice when he said the word nigger. Sometimes you’d see grown-ups do things that would make your mother cringe and look away. Sometimes you could do bad things without knowing they were bad. But then, too, sometimes you just knew when something wasn’t a good idea.
And so it was on that hot summer afternoon when their path first crossed with Chewy’s on their way home from the library. Livy was delivering another one of her long, elaborate tales, and Brian was concentrating to remember all the details. This new tragedy had a cast of thousands.
“Hey, Chewy,” Livy said, a casual greeting in passing.
“Hey, little Miss Livy, where you been?” He was tall, almost manlike in size. Only his face, still soft and smooth and plump in the cheeks, spoke of his youth. He was sixteen.
“The library,” she said proudly, stopping to talk. “I got a card.”
“That so?”
“Brian’s got one, too. Show him yours, Brian.”
He whipped it from the back pocket of his cotton shorts and held it up for Chewy to see. He wasn’t afraid of him. Chewy’s smile was as big and bright as he was tall and dark, and he had soft, kind eyes. Still, he sensed something in the situation that made him uneasy, and he slipped the card back into his pocket.
“He doesn’t like to read as much as me, but he wanted to get a card anyway,” Livy said. “He goes to the library with me and looks at picture books.”
“Doesn’t like to read, you say? Why not?”
Brian shrugged. He didn’t know why, he just didn’t. He did know that the tension he felt in Chewy’s company intensified when he was being addressed directly.
“What’s that on your neck there?” Chewy asked, not touching him but bending at the waist to get a better look at the four round bluish marks on Brian’s neck.
“Nothin’.”
Chewy’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully, and Brian shifted his light weight from one foot to the other nervously.
“Did you fall again?” Livy asked. “He falls down a lot,” she explained to Chewy. “One time he even gave himself a black eye. Didn’t you, Brian?”
He nodded and looked away. There was a certain understanding in Chewy’s eyes that was impossible to meet directly.
“Can you read, Chewy?” Livy asked, startling Brian. What a terrible thing to ask! Could he read? Chewy was almost grown up. All grown-ups could read. He braced himself and waited for Chewy’s anger.
“I got the gift, Miss Livy,” he said, grinning. “My mama made sure of that. My trouble is finding new things to read.”
“Well, you got a library, too, don’t ya?”
“Sure do. But it’s not as big as yours, and the books are old.”
Through Livy, and through day-to-day living in Tolford, Brian had surmised that things were very different for black people. Different schools, different libraries, special restaurants and drinking fountains. None as nice as the ones the white people were supposed to use. There hadn’t been many colored people in rural Nebraska, where he lived before. There were town kids and farm kids just like in Tolford, but the distinctions between them hadn’t been so great. Not like they were with colored people. Or perhaps he hadn’t taken notice of them. That happened sometimes. He didn’t see a lot of things that were as plain as the nose on his face. He noticed colors and little details, but not big things like how people lived. Either way, he hadn’t been aware of the differences in skin color or lifestyles until he’d moved to Tolford. Nor had he ever been afraid of talking to someone he knew in a public place, as he was at that moment.
“What kinda books do you like?” Livy was asking.
“All kinds. But mostly histories, biographies, and autobiographies.”
“What are… biographies?”
His smile flashed. Big, bright, and amused. “Stories about the lives of real people. Like Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and Booker T. Washington. Good folk mostly.”
“I bet my library has lots of those.” They sounded like grownup books.
“I bet you’re right about that,” he said. He spoke the words kindly enough, but there was a distinct edge to his voice, and he looked away as if there were something in his eyes that they didn’t need to see.
“Want me to get you some with my card?”
His gaze came back to her, hard and piercing, as if he were being snookered, then softened as he considered her offer.
“You’re a good little girl, Miss Livy,” he said. “But you got no idea how much trouble we’d all be in if someone found out.”
See? Brian knew there was trouble in this situation somewhere.
“I won’t be in trouble. My daddy says all colored people should have the same things as me and him. He says separatin’ things is bad. He hopes they let the colored children come to my school. He said he wouldn’t put me in a private school if they paid him,” she said, her young voice high and clear with conviction. “He says the National Guard in Arkansas should find somethin’ better to do than keep little kids from goin’ to school.”
Chewy smiled and thought this over; then his dark gaze moved slowly to Brian’s face.
“Your daddy doesn’t say that, does he?” he asked.
“No, th-ir. But he-th not my real daddy,” he was quick to add, knowing a shame he’d done nothing to deserve.
“No matter,” he said, looking kindly at Brian. “I’d get it worse than both of you put together if we got caught sharin’ library books.”
“Then we won’t get caught.” This from Livy, who was always getting caught at school for something or other—and yet she sounded so sure of herself, both Chewy and Brian believed her. Instantly.
Six months later the swapping of books in the bushes with Chewy had become a routine. On Tuesday they went to the library and borrowed, along with their own selections, the book Chewy requested the week before. Every Wednesday morning they cut through the park, Livy holding the new volume in her left hand, Brian carrying her school books. Chewy walked toward them with last week’s reading in his left hand, and when they passed—sometimes saying howdy, sometimes not—he slipped it into Livy’s right hand, snagged the other from her left, and kept on walking without missing a step.
And they’d walk on to school.
Later they’d find the title of the next biography or history he wanted to read neatly printed on paper and folded squarely into the pocket in the back of the book. On occasion he’d squish two long red licorice sticks inside the cover to surprise them.
Livy suspected that if grown-ups ever looked forward to Saturdays, it was because of a deep-seated fondness developed during childhood. Saturdays were her favorite days, even in the summertime, when almost every day was like Saturday. There was something very special about a Saturday. No school. No church. No dresses. And if you could get up and out of the house before your parents were thinking straight, no chores.
Most Saturdays, she and Brian were free souls. They could cram a Saturday chock-full of nothing special and have a wonderful time doing it. They could travel a million miles on their bikes, set traps for the ferocious beasts in the woods down by the park. Many, many Saturdays they spent time scouting for wood. Good wood. Plywood and two-by-fours that no one wanted, or wanted but wouldn’t miss if they disappeared.
It was a Saturday idea. Building a place in the woods beside the river, beyond the park, where they could stay all day Saturday and not go home until it was dark, even if it rained. They had everything they needed there. Water. A tin can with crackers in it. A small jar of peanut butter from her mother’s pantry shelf. They’d taken a three-legged stool with only two legs from Mr. Gemph’s trash and propped it up with rocks, and they’d salvaged a wooden crate from behind the IGA that you could either sit on or draw on.
The problem was rain.
Livy didn’t care if she got wet when it rained, but her mama did, and Brian’s mama was almost as bad. More than one Saturday afternoon had had to be called on account of rain, and a dry place had become a necessity.
They’d laughed about its being like the Three Little Pigs when their first shelter, a huge refrigerator box from the trash bin behind Danworthy’s Appliance Store, had not only blown deeper into the woods during a rainstorm but had disintegrated into a mushy pile of wet cardboard as well. Bricks, of course, were out of the question, so a wooden shelter had become the answer to their problem. They had three walls so far, but no roof yet. They were still looking for a just-right piece of something solid and flat for it.
“Don’t you think lilacs are the best smell in the whole world?” Livy asked, her nose buried in an armful of lavender blossoms swiped from the bush beside Miss Bledsoe’s garage. Miss Bledsoe was a never-been-married lady who lived next door to Brian. She had the neatest yard on the block, the most flowers, and the biggest, most prolific lilac bush in town. “When I grow up, everything will smell like lilacs.”
She started laying the branches of blooms on the dirt floor of their shelter like a carpet.
“Even your food?” he asked, studying the cluster of petals she’d given him, trying to draw them in pencil.
“Maybe,” she said thoughtfully. It hadn’t occurred to her before, but it wasn’t a bad idea. “Like chicken sometimes. It could smell like chicken when it has bones, but if it’s boiled in a pot it could smell like lilacs. And sauerkraut could, too.”
“And garbage can-th could th-mell like them.”
“Okay,” she said, almost out of branches. “And some people’s breath. Have you ever smelled Mr. Watson’s breath?”
He shook his head. Mr. Watson was the principal at their school. Brian tried never to get that close to him. He looked up in time to see Livy fall back into their partial shelter and wallow in the lilacs. Breathing deeply. Grabbing a cluster, rubbing them on her arms and then laying the bruised and fragrant blooms across her nose.
“I think lilacs are the best smell in the whole wide world,” she said, crossing her ankles and using her arms like a pillow under her head. “This is a story about a beautiful, golden-haired princess who wears lilac-colored dresses, and everything she touches smells like lilacs…”
That was most Saturdays.
Sometimes, on Saturdays, Brian’s mother had to go to the high school to work. And for six weeks the previous summer she’d taught summer school. Those were bad times. Bad Saturdays. Jo-Jo came to watch out for Brian and his sister, Beth, and she fussed a lot.
It wasn’t that Jo-Jo wasn’t nice to them: she was. It was the lack of freedom they objected to. Jo-Jo—whose real name was Josephine Butler until baby Beth started talking and began calling her Jo-Jo—worried about them. She wanted to know where they were and what they were doing, and she almost always brought her two sons, Samson and Darnel, with her.