The Love You Save by Goldie Taylor

Author:Goldie Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Published: 2022-11-07T16:29:12+00:00

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I missed our life in St. Ann. I wanted to go home, but right then, I didn’t know exactly where that was. The full summer had gone by and I hadn’t once seen my sister, who was now married and living with her baby in her mother-in-law’s basement. My brother, Donnie, was now staying with a girl named Wilma in a two-room apartment up on Pennsylvania Avenue around the corner from Auntie Gerald’s house. He ping-ponged between Wilma and Beverly, and they frequently came to blows over my brother’s fleeting affections. Unable to hold down a job bussing tables in a restaurant for more than a few months at a time, Donnie lived mostly off a general assistance check and food stamps. He could barely keep up the rent at the flophouse without loans from Mr. Rent Man.

By then, Mama had given up on the idea that he would finish high school and pick up a meaningful trade. When Donnie wasn’t hosting impromptu pot parties or snuggled up with his latest squeeze on his waterbed, he’d come around Auntie Gerald’s house for a hot plate. My mother was largely ambivalent about his comings and goings.

As for me, I was caught up with Jane Austen’s series of novels. A county library desk clerk back in St. Ann, with whom I’d worn out my welcome, had pointed me to the aisle. I started imagining what it was like to be Elizabeth Bennett, the second-oldest sister in Pride and Prejudice. She was pretty and confident and wanted. By the time I finished the novel, I was dead set on finding my mother a good husband. I figured we should try a marriage market.

I remember the day I barged into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub. My mother was slipping on her pantyhose for work when I came up with a big idea.

“Mama, can we go to a ball?”

“What’re you going on about now?”

“That’s where ladies go to find a husband,” I said. “We could get dressed up and go get one for you. Maybe there’s one like Mr. Farrell.”

“You done lost your mind.”

“That’s how they do it in this book I’m reading.”

“And what book is that?”

“Pride and Prejudice.”

“Go outside and play.”

The Austen novels were in the bags Mama brought over to Auntie Gerald’s and I hadn’t been back to turn them in. Now that she was living with L.C., I rarely saw her. When I did, she always seemed to be in a hurry to get somewhere else.

I was writing then. I kept rambling short stories and poems in a stack of spiral-bound notebooks stuffed in a shoebox under Grandma Alice’s bed. Like the English novels I collected and rarely returned on time to the public library, out of shame, I hid them. After all, I had been raised by women who dropped their stillborn babies in a cotton field and men who lied about their ages to go to war for the benefit of a monthly stipend.

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