Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas Read Free Page B

lonely pregnancies and wishing for two and a half children each who would gurgle happily behind that picket fence while we drove our men to work in our friendly-looking station wagons.
    I had loved one man and dramatized my losing him with all the exaggerated wailing of a wronged seventeen-year-old. I had wanted others in a ferocious desperation, believing that marriage would give me a world free from danger, disease and want.
    In the record store, I lived fantasy lives through the maudlin melodies of the forties and fifties.
    “You'd be so nice to come home to.”
    Whoever you were.
    “I'm walking by the river
'cause I'm meeting someone there tonight.”
    Anyone—that is, anyone taller than I and who wanted to get married. To me. Billy Eckstine sang,
    “Our little dream castle with everything gone
Is lonely and silent, the shades are all drawn
My heart is heavy as I gaze upon
A cottage for sale.”
    That was my house and it was vacant. If Mr. Right would come along right now, soon we could move in and truly begin to live.
    Louise Cox and her mother were practicing Christian Scientists. I accepted an invitation to visit their church. The interior's severity, the mass of quiet, well-dressed whites and the lack of emotion unsettled me. I took particular notice of the few Blacks in the congregation. They appeared as soberly affluent and emotionally reserved as their fellow white parishioners. I had known churches to be temples where one made “a joyful noise unto the Lord” and quite a lot of it.
    In the First Church of Christ, Scientist, the congregation wordlessly praised the Almighty. No stamping of feet or clapping of hands accompanied the worship. For the whole service, time seemed suspended and reality was just beyond the simple and expensive heavy doors.
    •  •  •
    “Did you like it?”
    We sat in Louise's kitchen, eating her mother's homemade-from-scratch biscuits.
    “I don't know. I didn't understand it.”
    After a year of relentless observation, I trusted her to think me unexposed, rather than ignorant.
    Her mother gave me a copy of Mary Baker Eddy's
Science. and Health
. I began to wrestle with new concepts.
    The tough texture of poverty in my life had been more real than sand wedged between my teeth, yet Mary Baker Eddy encouraged me to think myself prosperous. Every evening I went home to a fourteen-room house where my son and seventy-five-year-old Poppa Ford awaited my arrival. Mother usually was out dining with friends, drinking with acquaintances or gambling with strangers. Had she been there, her presence would not have greatly diminished my loneliness. My brother, who had been my ally, my first friend, had left home and closed himself to me. We had found safety in numbers when we were young, but adulthood had severed the bonds and we drifted apart over deep and dangerous seas, unanchored.
    In Mother's house, after dinner, I would read my son to sleep and return to the kitchen. Most often, the old man dreamt over an outsized cup of heavily sugared coffee. I would watch his aged ivory face, wrinkled under ghostly memories, then go to my room where solitude gaped whale-jawed wide to swallow me entire.
    Science and Health
told me I was never alone. “There is no place God is not.” But I couldn't make the affirmation real for me.
    •  •  •
    The sailor wandered around the store. He was reading the bulletins and scanning the posters. His dark hair and oval, sensual face reminded me of Italian Renaissance paintings. It was strange to see a white military man in the Black area in broad daylight. I decided that he had gotten lost. He walked to the counter.
    “Good morning.”
    “Have you got ‘Cheers’?”
    Maybe he wasn't lost, just found himself in our neighborhood and decided to buy some records. “Cheers”? I thought of all the white singers—Jo Stafford, Helen O'Connell, Margaret Whiting, Dinah Shore, Frank Sinatra, Bob Crosby, Bing Crosby and Bob Eberle. Tex Beneke. None had