CHAPTER SEVEN LETTERS
CHAPTER
SEVEN
Letters
In her first few days at home, Cora made lists of all the offices she could ask about a job.
Then she spent the next two months knocking on doors and being turned down.
Frustrated and fed up, she stopped by Loretta’s to ask if she’d put in a good word at her factory, but Loretta had been fired as well.
‘It’s all those soldiers they’ve got coming back,’ she said. ‘They don’t need us any more.’
Loretta had started selling homemade orange jam and lemon curd at the roadside to make ends meet, thanking her lucky stars for her trees.
After months of almost nobody being interested in so much as an interview, Cora shifted her sights.
She wasn’t much of a cleaner, not like Momma, but that was one thing a colored woman could almost always find work as.
Except she couldn’t. None of the hotels were hiring and she didn’t even know how to begin to look for a private cleaning job.
So, Cora took her frustration out on her home with a spring-clean the likes of which the place had never seen.
She scrubbed sinks and windows, washed kitchen cupboards and drawers, pounded sofa cushions and laundered the covers.
No corner was safe as the weeks passed and she found new hidden crevices to clean.
Under the dresser in Roscoe’s half of the room, she found an old sock, a matchbook, and four crumpled, unfinished letters all addressed to someone named Megan.
Cora smoothed them out to read the few lines on each.
They ranged from casual, How are you and your family?
, to apologetic, I’m sorry I haven’t written sooner, to accusatory, I thought I would have heard something from you by now, to almost wistful: Today I saw a bicycle and it made me think of you.
Cora’s breath caught in her throat. She had never even heard of this woman.
But if Roscoe had someone else, why had he come home to her, forcing their pretend marriage to become real?
All this time she’d thought that his venom had been directed at America.
Holding these letters, it seemed possible that some of it might be directed at her.
Maybe he felt as trapped by her as she felt by him.
With a start she remembered how Roscoe had said he’d danced with white girls, his eyes blazing hot, looking angry and defiant.
‘Impossible,’ she told herself, but her hands shook a little as she crumpled the letters again and tossed them back under the dresser.
That night she made cornbread and collard greens, his favorite, and asked Momma to go visiting with Aunt Teen.
Cora and Roscoe needed to air out the truth, and if neither one of them wanted this marriage, they could stop dancing around each other and call it quits.
Cora fussed over dinner, keeping it warm as he was first half an hour, then an hour, then three hours late.
When he finally did come home smelling of beer and slurring his words, the cornbread was stone-dry and the collards turned to mush.
‘Just where have you been?’ She hadn’t planned to sound like an old fishwife.
‘Leave me alone.’ He pushed past her into the kitchen and lifted the lid on the greens. He dipped up some food and ate from the stirring spoon.
‘Look at you,’ she said, accusation clear in her tone. ‘Coming in here, drunk as a skunk.’ Ever since starting his job picking oranges, he’d taken a turn for the worse. He hated every minute of that job, and he muted his bitter disappointment with too much alcohol and a surly temper.
He shoveled another spoonful into his mouth. Collard greens dribbled down his chin and onto his shirt. He wiped it with the back of his hand.
‘I’ve been waiting here with dinner for three whole hours. If you want something to eat, you sit in a chair and eat off a plate.’
‘Woman,’ he roared, rounding on her, pointing the stirring spoon at her chest, ‘I am the man in this house, and you’re gonna respect me.’
She was so shocked she didn’t know what to say. He’d never raised his voice to her.
‘It’s only so much a man can take on disrespect, and I won’t take no more.
You hear me?’ He closed the distance to her and grabbed her arm, leaning his face close to hers.
‘You are going to respect me.’ Heart thudding, she winced from his breath that caught in her nose and from the cloud of anger that swirled around him.
There was a danger to him that she had never seen before.
‘Okay, Roscoe,’ she said soothing, trying to make him calm with a quiet response.
‘’Cause you’re my wife. A wife’s got to respect her man.’
She laid a tentative hand on his shoulder. ‘Do you want to lie down, Roscoe?’ All she could think to do was get him to go to bed and sleep it off. ‘You look like you had a hard day.’
He slumped at her words. ‘They don’t know how to respect a man.’
‘I know,’ she said, wondering what had happened to set him off. She slipped her arm around his waist and fit her shoulder under his armpit.
‘I’m not a boy. I’m a man. I fought for my country.’ She led him down the hall. ‘I earned my respect.’
Her heart softened as her temper flared at whatever he’d had to endure that made him need to say that out loud. ‘You did.’ She sat him on Benny’s bed and took off his shoes. ‘You earned your respect.’ She laid him back on the bed, saying, ‘You rest now. You earned a rest too.’
She pulled a cover over him and slipped out of the room, shaken. This drunk, snarling man was a far cry from the sweet, caring friend who’d married her just in case she’d need the support. She didn’t know this hostile Roscoe, and she didn’t want to stay married to him.
She resolved to speak with him in the morning, but when she woke, Roscoe had disappeared again.
Straight away, she threw on some clothes and went looking for him, hoping to find him before he’d had a chance to drink too much.
She circled the neighborhood for hours but finally gave up in frustration.
When she got home, she found Momma at the kitchen table, staring at a letter. Cora came closer and recognized her brother’s block lettering spelling out her name and Momma’s.
Her heart raced as she reached for it. Her momma turned her face away.
Cora yanked the pages out of the open envelope and read what her momma had already learned. Benny was fine. He was back in Florida.
She felt relief wash over her and relaxed into a chair to read the rest, but every new sentence brought shock and confusion.
He’d passed for white throughout the whole war.
He wasn’t coming home. He lived instead over at Levittown as a white man.
He wouldn’t go back to living as a Negro, but he wanted to see them.
Beside her, Momma’s pursed lips trembled.
Cora gripped the paper so hard it crumpled in her hand. She wanted to gather her brother up in her arms, but also, she wanted to shake him for what he’d done.
Momma got up and walked to her bedroom, shutting the door behind her.
She smoothed the letter on the table and read it again, tracing her fingertips over the lines, searching for signs of the brother she knew.
The Benny who’d shared a room with her until he’d gone to war, who’d brought her Cokes and candy bars from all the places he snuck into that she couldn’t follow.
He’d asked to meet with them somewhere out of the way where they wouldn’t be disturbed. He meant somewhere they wouldn’t be seen.
Cora knocked on her momma’s door and pushed it aside to find her curled up on her bed. ‘I’m gonna meet him,’ Cora said. Momma didn’t respond. ‘You’ll come, won’t you?’
Momma propped herself to sitting, tears streaking her cheeks. Her eyes were so hollow, someone seeing her might have thought the letter was from the army with the news they’d been dreading instead of from her son, alive and well.
‘They got me sneaking around to see my own son.’
‘Momma—’
‘That’s my son, Cora. My boy.’ She sucked her teeth, sounding just like Aunt Teen on a bad day.
Cora sat next to her and took her hand. ‘He’s not trying to get away from us, Momma. You know that. He’s just trying to get ahead.’
‘I know that,’ she said, slumping against Cora’s side. ‘But his world won’t mix with ours, no way, no how. We’ve lost him, just as surely as if he’d never come home.’