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Patsy’s rage had soared unbounded, encompassing not only her powerlessness but the accumulated resentments she had for her mother—the pain of her mother’s loyalty and affection for Jesus.
For Patsy, sex is a reenactment of fantasy, a rebellion against the fear of impending doom that has shaped her. She cannot help but echo those cries, boisterous and uninhibited, bursting full as a hand mercifully reaches from the air, raw with the smell of sex, and relieves her.
Schoolboys were the worst, since they gossiped about Patsy’s freakiness, waiting for her after school or church so she would prove what their friends had already told them. She welcomed the attention, and the associated label, since it was better, safer, than the truth.
Tru’s face closes as though she has already figured out that promises are merely sweet lies.
“So, do you love him?” Patsy asks. The question sounds insubstantial in the fragile light and silence. Cicely takes a while to answer. Slowly she lifts her head, and when her eyes meet Patsy’s they have inside them something abstract. Patsy breaks away from her gaze, too tired to figure it out, wishing to take the question back.
A liquid wave of disappointment fills her chest.
Where you are never alone long enough to feel the spell overtake you, the darkness following you like an unmoving shadow.
Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all . . . Underneath the poem is the name Emily Dickinson. She commits the name and poem to memory.
Outside, leaves tremble on tree limbs as though fighting to keep a season that has already moved on.
She wants to undress her, massage her rigid body until it loosens, arouse that wild passion they once had, tell her that it’s okay now to be free.
A liquid trail of disgust floods her chest. The unfairness of her life is the shock she has received upon discovering that a woman can break her heart more than any man—a woman to whom she gave everything and expected nothing in return. It’s the nothing that gets her—the fact that she was content with the nothing. Knowing that she is fully capable of feeling such visceral disgust for herself fills her with purpose, a drive to get on with it, gather the scattered pieces inside herself, and get her life back.
Maybe that’s how it is—maybe life favors certain people and relegates the rest to living in their shadows.
She feels herself being pulled into view, examined for the first time with interest. Her fear dissolves, and from it emerges a faint confidence imbued inside her like tea from a tea bag.
But she hasn’t recognized herself for years, buried under this weight, which she wears like armor—seventy-five pounds of extra flesh, her hulk-like shadows spanning the width of walls and sidewalks. All she does for comfort these days is eat. She cannot remember the taste of food after she swallows. The fat softens her, swallows her up inside its folds to make her nonthreatening, invisible—yet visible in a way that makes it difficult for people to walk right through her on the street, or sit on top of her on the subway.
“Dey got a black man running fah president now, too. Don’t mean it g’wan be easier fah black people if him win. In dis life, what you see is what yuh get,” Roy says. “Yuh see dat?” He points to where the sun rises like a newly cracked egg yolk. “Dat’s a certainty. As long as you’re alive, yuh know yuh can depend on seeing it every day. Yuh can’t place hopes on no one else, because everyone g’wan disappoint you. It’s life. Get dat right, or else yuh g’wan end up mad an’ angry fah di rest of yuh life. Yuh not g’wan have everyt’ing handed to you like dat. Yuh neva g’wan have a mansion or a nice
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