I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots by Susan Straight

Author:Susan Straight [Straight, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780385470124
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 1992-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

Leaving

1983

“HEY, BIG MA, WHEN them boys coming back? Didn’t they just go out for some ice?” someone said.

“Mmm-hmm, probly got to showin off that new car. I know they talkin to the guys at the icehouse, cause they use to work there, remember?” Jesse answered.

“Probly buyin some crab. They use to crave some crab when they was little.”

“They wasn’t never little!”

Everyone laughed at Jesse’s joke, the people who were left from the crowd that had been shifting in and out all day. The men and boys who had lined the railing along the piazza were down to five or six, framing the doorway to let in dancing fingers of late-afternoon light around their shadows. Carmen and Jean from downstairs sat in borrowed chairs, but most of the other chairs had gone back to apartments with their owners by now, and Marietta was impatient for the rest to leave.

“Yeah,” she said, “they use to work there, and they don’t get back here soon, I’ma let both of em sleep there. Cool off all this bighead foolish.”

She knew as soon as she said it that their faces would shift just a little, their eyes find other eyes and smile. “Big Ma don’t never relax,” they were thinking. “Uh-uh, she cain’t even sit back and enjoy nothin.” She knew she couldn’t have said anything else. She didn’t know how. All the visitors were here for Nate and Calvin, and she rarely talked to more than one person in an entire day. She was aware of every word she said now, in the little quiet.

Jesse fished through an ice chest for another beer, and she heard water slosh against the cans. The sodas and beer in all the tubs and coolers were floating now, floating the way that voices had bobbed tightly in the small front room. In and out the door they had come all day, knocking up against each other the way they did at funerals, weddings, barbecues, and new-baby days. But all the voices, smells of food and hairdress and beer had been in other rooms up and down the street. She had been to some celebrations with Tiny Momma, but no one ever had reason to gather in her place; no one had been encouraged to sit awhile and talk except Tiny Momma and Miss Alberta, who had moved into the apartment next door the year before. They sat beside her at the kitchen table, shelling shrimp and drawing fingernails up the bellies, arguing with everyone.

“Ain’t none of em a safe way to go,” Tiny Momma said. Miss Alberta nodded her head.

“I can’t believe she refusing to fly,” Mr. Taylor, another neighbor, said. “Don’t you know the newspapers say flying is actually safer than driving on the freeway, Big Ma?” She looked into his wire-rimmed glasses. He was probably only a year younger than she was, and she always felt strange when he called her Big Ma—but his son did, everyone had, for so long now that she forgot her name sometimes.

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