More Than Human

‘All righty, all righty, come in for a drink then, who wants to stand out there all night.’ She pawed her hat off and her hair swung raggedly over her face. The man caught her roughly and pulled her close and bit her face. She howled. ‘You’re crazy, you old crazy you.’ Then she saw them, all three of them peering out. ‘Dear old Jesus be to God,’ she said, ‘she’s got the place filled with niggers.’

‘They’re going home,’ said Janie resolutely. ‘I’ll take ‘em home right now.’

‘Honest to God, Pete,’ she said to the man, ‘this is the God’s honest first time this ever happened. You got to believe that, Pete. What kind of a place you must think I run here, I hate to think how it looks to you. Well get them the hell out!’ she screamed at Janie. ‘Honest to God, Pete, so help me, never before – ‘

Janie walked down the hall to the elevators. She looked at Bonnie and at Beanie. Their eyes were round. Janie’s mouth was as dry as a carpet and she was so embarrassed her legs cramped. She put the twins into an elevator and pressed the bottom button. She did not say good-bye, though she felt nothing else.

She walked slowly back to the apartment and went in and closed the door. Her mother got up from the man’s lap and clattered across the room. Her teeth shone and her chin was wet. She raised claws – not a hand, not a fist, but red, pointed claws.

Something happened inside Janie like the grinding of teeth, but deeper inside her than that. She was walking and she did not stop. She put her hands behind her and tilted her chin up so she could meet her mother’s eyes.

Wima’s voice ceased, snatched away. She loomed over the five-year-old, her claws out and forward, hanging, curving over, a blood-tipped wave about to break.

Janie walked past her and into her room, and quietly closed the door.

Wima’s arms drew back, strangely, as if they must follow the exact trajectory of their going. She repossessed them and the dissolving balance of her body and finally her voice. Behind her the man’s teeth clattered swiftly against a glass.

Wima turned and crossed the room to him, using the furniture like a series of canes and crutches. ‘Oh God,’ she murmured, ‘but she gives me the creeps…’

He said, ‘You got lots going on around here.’

Janie lay in bed as stiff and smooth and contained as a round toothpick. Nothing would get in, nothing could get out; somewhere she had found this surface that went all the way through, and as long as she had it, nothing was going to happen.

But if anything happens, came a whisper, you’ll break.

But if I don’t break, nothing will happen, she answered.

But if anything…

The dark hours came and grew black and the black hours laboured by.

Her door crashed open and the light blazed. ‘He’s gone and baby, I’ve got business with you. Get out here!’ Wima’s bathrobe swirled against the doorpost as she turned and went away.

Janie pushed back the covers and thumped her feet down. Without understanding quite why, she began to get dressed. She got her good plaid dress and the shoes with two buckles, and the knit pants and the slip with the lace rabbits. There were little rabbits on her socks too, and on the sweater, the buttons were rabbits’ fuzzy nubbin tails.

Wima was on the couch, pounding and pounding with her fist. ‘You wrecked my cel,’ she said, and drank from a square-stemmed glass, ‘ebration, so you ought to know what I’m celebrating. You don’t know it but I’ve had a big trouble and I didn’t know how to hannel it, and now it’s all done for me. And I’ll tell you all about it right now, little baby Miss Big Ears. Big Mouth. Smarty. Because your father, I can hannel him any time, but what was I going to do with your big mouth going day and night? That was my trouble, what was I going to do about your big mouth when he got back. Well it’s all fixed, he won’t be back, the Heinies fixed it up for me.’ She waved a yellow sheet. ‘Smart girls know that’s a telegram, and the telegram says, says here, ‘Regret to inform you that your husband.’ They shot your father, that’s what they regret to say, and now this is the way it’s going to be from now on between you and me. Whatever I want to do I do, an’ whatever you want to nose into, nose away. Now isn’t that fair?’

She turned to be answered but there was no answer. Janie was gone.

Wima knew before she started that there wasn’t any use looking, but something made her run to the hall closet and look in the top shelf. There wasn’t anything up there but Christmas tree ornaments and they hadn’t been touched in three years.

She stood in the middle of the living room, not knowing which way to go. She whispered, ‘Janie?’

She put her hands on the sides of her face and lifted her hair away from it. She turned around and around, and asked, ‘What’s the matter with me?’