Tampa Girls: Two Characters

From A Novel In Progress
by Colette Bancroft

Cordelia

From where we were slumped down in the porch swing, we could see Cordelia get off the bus down at the corner, about an hour earlier than usual, and we could tell she was mad before she even hit the sidewalk. She came striding down the street like the wrath of God; Cordelia was even taller than Juliet, and that girl could stride. She rounded into the yard and headed straight for the kitchen door, not even glancing at us on the porch. The kitchen door slammed, and we heard Regan say mechanically, just like Miss Pearl would, "Don't slam that door, please." She thought it was us; we heard her say, surprised, "Cordelia! What is it?"

"Damn! I swear I will quit this job," Cordelia said angrily. She was working as a maid over the summer to save money for her second year at Florida A&M. She cleaned for a couple of different families in the mornings; in the afternoons, she worked on an independent study class she was taking, poring over history texts and taking notes in a tiny, perfect hand. She wanted to be a college professor, and I had no doubt she would be.

"Now settle down and don't talk like that," said Regan. "What happened? More cat poop under the sofa?"

We heard a plunk, like a coffee cup being forcefully set down on the table. "Hush," said Cordelia in a lower voice. "This was really bad. I was at the Greens' this morning, and Miz Green's lawyer brother from Atlanta is still there with that damn sprained ankle, lying around the house all day like he'd been hit by a truck instead of falling off his water skis 'cause he was drunk."

"You don't know that," Regan said, in that dicty way she had.

"It'd be damn unlikely he was sober," said Cordelia, and Regan made a little tut-tut, which Cordelia ignored. "So today Miz Green is out at her bridge game, and old Clayton is lounging around in his robe reading the paper, and I'm in the dining room polishing up the good silver for Miz Green's dinner party on Saturday. Clayton comes weaving through, going to the kitchen for some ice for his ten o'clock bourbon, says not a word to me, he never does, acts like I'm a chair or something." Cordelia is getting mad all over again. We can tell by her voice, which we can hear clearly because we have crept over to the edge of the porch right by the kitchen window, in our usual nosy way.

"Then I hear him come back through the door behind me, and he says, 'Sis, why don't you polish this for a while?' I turn around and he's got his robe open, standing there with a water glass of bourbon in one hand and his nasty little pecker in the other, big old smile on his face."

Regan gasped. "Oh my Jesus. What did you do?"

"I wanted to stab him with a fork, but I said, 'Mr. Clayton, I'm a good Christian woman and so is your sister, and I don't think she'd approve.' He snickers and says, 'We don't have to tell her.'" Cordelia's coffee cup smacked the table again in outrage. "Like I'd want to! Like I'd touch that shiftless cracker with a ten-foot pole! Man don't even know my name. Shit!"

This time even Regan didn't complain about her language. "What then?" she said breathlessly.

Cordelia's voice changed; she was still mad, but it sounded like she was grinning. "I got up and walked over to him, got right up close and looked down at it, studied it for a second. He's grinning like a hound. I look him right in the eye and I say, 'Well, sir, that looks kinda like a pecker, but I never saw such a small one.'"

Regan let out a whoop in spite of herself, and Cordelia started to laugh, that good deep laugh she had. I couldn't help it; I snorted, and Juliet clapped her hand over my mouth, but it just came out. I howled, and Juliet started to laugh too, and Regan came flying out that kitchen door like she'd been shot out of a cannon.

"Get away from that window! You nosy little brats!" she hollered.

Cordelia came out behind her and said, "Oh, hush, Regan." She was still laughing. "They're old enough that they probably ought to hear that story. You don't think some redneck's going to be wagging his weenie at them any day now? Hell." She was full of unacceptable language today. We were laughing so hard we could hardly breathe, but Juliet managed to gasp out, "What did he say?" which made us all laugh, even Regan.

"Come on in here," said Cordelia, holding the kitchen door open. We scooted in and sat down. "You want some coffee?" she said to us.

"Cordelia!" Poor Regan was going to die of shock before her sister was done with her.

"Half and half. They're almost fourteen, you know," Cordelia said.

"Well, if Mama asks, I had nothing to do with it," Regan said, getting two cups out of the cupboard.

Juliet and I stared at each other and shivered with delight. Cordelia handed us our coffee, aromatic Cuban coffee paled with milk, and we sipped it reverently.

"So what did he say?" Juliet asked.

Cordelia grinned. "He didn't say anything for a minute. His mouth fell open so far a little bit of spit dripped out of it, down his chin. Then he dropped his precious bourbon. That really made him mad, but by the time he started to yell I was already out the back door. I ran across the alley to where June works, at the Howells', and knocked on the kitchen door and got her to let me in. I waited about fifteen minutes, then I checked from the alley and saw his car was gone. Probably went over to the Chatterbox for a liquid lunch," she said.

"What if he tells his sister?" I asked. "I mean, I guess he wouldn't tell her what really happened, but couldn't he get you in trouble?"

Cordelia smiled again, a sly smile that made her look like a cat. "You're smarter than you look, Paris. But I doubt he'll be around long."

The smile curled itself a little wider. "See, Miz Green thinks he stopped drinking. He swore he had; their daddy drank himself to death. I don't know how she can believe it, even if he is her precious baby brother -- the man smells like bourbon from across the street. But he's been keeping the bottle in his room, and when he empties one he sneaks it out to the trash barrel in the alley himself, so she won't see it."

Cordelia leaned across the table, deep into telling her story. "So, after he was gone, I went and fished four empty Maker's Mark fifths out of the barrel and lined them up next to the kitchen trash can. Miz Green gets back from her bridge game and walks into the kitchen and stops in her tracks like those bottles were rattlesnakes. Wants to know where they came from, so I tell her I was cleaning up Mr. Clayton's room after he went out for lunch, wasn't that nice, maybe his ankle is feeling better. Miz Green asks me if I've ever seen him drinking bourbon, and I say, 'Why, yes ma'am, quite a bit. He said it was for the pain, for his ankle.'

"Miz Green says, 'I'll give him pain,' then she says, 'Thank you, Cordelia, that's all for today,' and she hands me my pay and I get on out of there." Cordelia shrugged. "She's hell on wheels when she's mad, so my guess is Mr. Clayton and his pecker will be on a plane back to Atlanta real soon."

Regan was regaining her composure. "Cordelia, that's enough of that language," she said, trying to ignore that we were giggling like idiots after that last "pecker." Cordelia's story was harrowing, but hearing a grownup use that word in front of us was kind of thrilling. Besides, I felt as if Cordelia had won. I wasn't sure what she'd won, but she'd won. If some redneck ever wagged his weenie at me, I hoped to be as cool as Cordelia.

Elena

I was curious about Sherry's household, just as I was curious about everything else, but I felt a little funny going over there because they lived in Elena Sanchez' old house. Actually it was a rental, like about half the houses in the neighborhood, with military families moving in and out all the time. But I still associated the black-and-white block house with my friend Elena and the terrible thing that had happened to her there two years before, when she and I and Juliet were all in fifth grade together.

Elena was the oldest of six girls, a shy sweet child who did well at her lessons but froze in terror when called on to speak in class. Her father was a master sergeant at the base, a man who brought his stern manner home with him every night. He and Elena's mother were both from Puerto Rico, though he was much older than his wife -- he was above forty, while she was barely into her twenties despite her half-dozen daughters. Both of them were short; he was broad as well, a hammered-down tough guy who filled any room he was in by force of will. She was delicate, with a whispery liquid voice and bones like a bird's; it seemed as if only her pregnancies held her to earth.

Sgt. Sanchez spoke excellent, crisp English, but Mrs. Sanchez spoke next to none, because she almost never went out of the house, and they were the only family on the street without a television. Sgt. Sanchez drove her to the PX to go shopping on Saturday and to St. Brendan's for mass on Sunday, but she went nowhere alone.

We knew her a little bit because we played with Elena, on the rare occasions Elena got to play. She spent a lot of time taking care of her little sisters; Mrs. Sanchez spent a lot of time sleeping and most of the rest of the time sitting at the kitchen table, smoking and reading letters from her mother in Puerto Rico and weeping .

When the Sanchez family had moved in, during the summer just before we began fifth grade, Elena's mother had been hugely pregnant with her seventh child. She gave birth in October to a boy, a boy she had prayed for since she had married Sgt. Sanchez. The baby was catastrophically hydrocephalic -- "Got bad water on the brain," reported Juliet's Aunt Opal, who was a nurse's aide in the maternity ward at the base hospital.

He was baptized Alfredo Victor, for Mrs. Sanchez' father and Sgt. Sanchez, and he died before he was two days old. All the St. Brendan's students went to his funeral mass, attended otherwise only by his family, on a rainy school-day afternoon. Mrs. Sanchez fainted. The baby's tiny white casket, not much bigger than a shoebox, was buried in Sacred Heart Cemetery.

For weeks, Mrs. Sanchez didn't even get out of bed. Sgt. Sanchez yelled at her, but she just turned her face to the wall. Elena and her sisters pitched in, doing the housework as best they could, eating out of tin cans. Elena washed their school uniforms and the little kids' endless diapers in an ancient washing machine and then dragged a kitchen step stool out into the backyard to hang them on the clothesline.

By November, Sgt. Sanchez started taking his uniforms to the base laundry and eating in the mess hall, complaining bitterly to other men in the neighborhood that he should just send his wife back to San Juan for all the good she was to him.

He said as much to my father one Saturday near Christmas when we ran into him at the hardware store. My father was dumbstruck for a moment -- an amazing event in itself, since he was blarney incarnate -- then he said to Sgt. Sanchez in a calm voice that I knew was filled with anger, "Your wife needs a doctor, Victor."

Sgt. Sanchez stepped back and looked at him, surprised for a second, then pissed. "We don't spoil our women like you people do," he said, then spun around on his heel and walked away.

"Son of a bitch," my father said clearly. Then his voice softened. "That poor girl."

He looked at me with sad eyes. "Be careful who you marry, babe," he said gently. At age eleven, I was so flabbergasted by that idea I just stood there while he walked away down the bolts and screws aisle, and I had to scramble to catch up.

Mrs. Sanchez got out of bed eventually, but she was still almost paralyzed by the baby's death. Even before that, Elena said, her mother had always been sad. She loved her daughters, but she missed her family in San Juan, she had no one to talk to. She prayed, Elena said. She prayed all the time.

In May, not long before the end of the school year, Elena told us one morning on the way to school that her father had been transferred to a base in California. Juliet knew the place; her father had been stationed there when she was seven. "My friend Glory is still there. We're pen pals," Juliet said. "She's real sweet. I'll give you her address and phone number."

Elena's face got very still. "I don't know if we're going," she mumbled.

"What do you mean?" Juliet said. Until her father had retired, her family had moved all over the world, and she had loved it. "Of course you're going. California's sure not a combat zone."

"Mami says she won't leave."

"How come?" I asked.

She took a deep shaky breath. "It's the baby. My little brother. She won't leave him."

Juliet and I looked at each other; we didn't know what to say. The deaths of babies, the grief of mothers were still mercifully beyond us.

Elena gazed away from us. "She asked my father to have him...." Her voice broke, then she went on, "To have him dug up and buried in San Juan, where my grandparents live. He told her she was crazy, he wasn't going to dig up any dead baby, but he might just send her back to San Juan." She shuddered and moaned, "Oh, God." Then she caught herself. "I'm sorry," she murmured, more to God than to us. Then she walked away from us into the crowd in the school parking lot.

We made sure to walk home with her that day. Juliet wanted her to come over to get Glory's address, but Elena said she had to check on her littlest sisters -- Luz and Floracita weren't in school yet. Unspoken was Elena's fear that her mother had slept all day and left the girls to fend for themselves. So she and the other three sisters peeled off at the black-and- white house, and we went on down the block toward mine, three doors away.

We were almost there when we heard the screaming. A chorus of it tore at the humid air; years later, the first time I heard a coyote pack's unearthly wailing in the Arizona desert, I would think of Elena and her sisters.

We dropped our books and began to run back without a word. Elena's second sister, little round Carmen, came shooting down the sidewalk toward us, screaming, "Mami! Mami!" Juliet grabbed her, sat her down in the scabby grass in the front yard, said "Stay there, baby," and we ran onto the carport.

Maria and Dolores were clutching each other and wailing. Elena stood silent before the door to the little utility room at the back of the carport, her face gray as ashes, her eyes black. We wrapped our arms around her and pulled her away from the door, turning her face from it even as we looked in ourselves.

Mrs. Sanchez hung from a rafter, an extension cord wrapped several times around her tiny neck. Her pretty face was a lurid purple, her tongue so huge I couldn't figure out what it was; I thought at first some animal had attached itself to her, some kind of monstrous leech. Her hands hung at her sides, her feet free of the earth, and she turned very slowly. The kitchen step stool, spattered with urine, was tipped over under her. She wore a pink gingham housedress, and a small piece of paper was pinned over her right breast.

Even in the instant I stood looking -- it felt, still feels like a century -- I could see the note was in Spanish. When I realized I couldn't read it, I felt my heart break.

In our neighborhood, there were almost no adults home in the after- school hours. But the screaming had waked up Rudy's father, who was on the night shift. It was a mercy it was him; cops learn how to handle the end of the world. He came running with a pistol in his hand, rushed into the utility room and exclaimed "Madre de Christo!" Suddenly gentle, he closed the door and drew us away.

The rest of it is hard to remember. Rudy's father sent us home, called an ambulance and the police, called Sgt. Sanchez, read the note and later that night told my father what it said. I overheard him talking to my mother in the kitchen, saying in a voice full of sorrow, "I should have done something," and I got out of bed. He didn't want to tell me, but he did.

The note just said, "I will stay here with my son."

Sgt. Sanchez packed up the girls that night -- little Luz and Floracita were all right, Mrs. Sanchez had locked them in their bedroom -- and sent them ahead to California the next day. The last we saw of Elena was a glimpse of her climbing into the car with her sisters, a wing of dark hair falling across her face, as we set out for school. We never heard from her again.

Her father sent Mrs. Sanchez back to San Juan to be buried, leaving little Alfredo all alone. There was no mass said for her at St. Brendan's, but her brief obituary in the Tribune said that Alta Gracia Muñoz Sanchez had been 24 when she died. That meant she had been barely 14 when Elena was born -- a year older than we were now.

[ Copyright © 1999 by Colette Bancroft. All rights reserved. ]

Colette Bancroft, a writer known at various times in her career to date as The Goddess of the Classroom, The Empress of Haute Cuisine and The Spitball Queen, conducts Colette's List for TW3. She is an editor on the Metro Desk at the St. Petersburg Times. Tampa Girls is her first novel.