All Aunt Hagar's Children

BLINDSIDED

After the white woman Roxanne Stapleton worked for in Silver Spring gave her a ride across the northern border into Washington, Roxanne, without much waiting, was able to catch the D.C. Transit bus heading down 14th Street, N.W. The bus going down 11th Street would have put her closer to her room on 10th, but it was still early Friday evening and the show at the Howard Theater wasn’t until eight-thirty, and the white woman would be far away in another world until Monday. And, too, going down 14th had always been good luck: long ago she had met Cedric on a 14th Street bus. Dark Cedric with green eyes. Cedric of the two and a half years. She had once found a twenty-dollar bill on a 14th Street bus. So because there was time to spare, she took the 14th Street bus.

The bus was half full and Roxanne managed to get the first seat after the side door, her favorite spot. “Now you be sure to have a good weekend, Roxanne,” the white woman she worked for had said, the same thing she had been saying for four years. Her white woman was to tuttut over the telephone on Monday morning and ask, “Did you injure yourself inadvertently over the weekend, Roxanne? Maybe at one of your Negro functions?” The white woman had her ideas about what black people did with their lives, especially on weekends, and just about everything they did in her mind could lead to blindness.

By the time the bus reached Rittenhouse Street, a woman had sat down beside Roxanne and the haze was already over her eyes. Roxanne blinked once, and her eyes started to clear, and then she blinked twice more and all was as before. Between Randolph Street and Park Road the haze returned and refused to go away with more blinking. It was October, the days growing shorter as they rushed toward the end, and she, ever a poor daughter of the universe, attributed the haze to the world’s gradual loss of daylight. And she was exhausted. Oh, but the things the body did when it was tired. Gonna make you a little blind, Roxanne, so you can’t see that stage at the Howard Theater tonight. What will Sam Cooke sound like when you blind, child? The universe told her to smile. But after they crossed Harvard Street and before they could reach Girard Street, with the bus now offering standing room only, she became worried because the haze remained steadfast. She considered herself a woman of some refinement and would not talk to just anyone on a bus, but she was so worried that she turned to the woman beside her and asked, “Miss, you see somethin on my eyes?” Leaning toward the woman, Roxanne opened her eyes as wide as she could.

“Lemme see,” the woman said and took Roxanne’s chin in her hand and pulled it to her. Some people thought nothing of taking large liberties when a small one was all that was needed. “No, they just look like regular eyes to me. You got somethin in your eyes?”

“There’s somethin growin over my eyes, thas all. It’s like cheesecloth.”

“Cheesecloth?” the woman said. She had a southern accent so thick it insulted Roxanne’s ears. She was much older than Roxanne was when she came to Washington with her own accent, so the woman would probably never speak any other way, as Roxanne had succeeded in doing. “Whas cheesecloth?” And she was louder than she needed to be in public.

“I just can’t see the way I usually see, thas what I’m sayin.” Roxanne closed her eyes and used her index fingers to massage her temples. Just relax, she told herself. Her Catholic friend, Agnes Simmons, had prayers to some saint for every ailment. Who was the saint for blind people and had he himself been struck blind?

At Clifton Street, the bus stopped for some time after a man got on and dropped the twenty-five pennies he had for his fare. Not one fell into the fare box. People laughed as the bus driver said to no one in particular that they should outlaw paying with pennies. “I pay your salary with these pennies,” the man said at one point, down on his hands and knees. Each time he found a penny he would stand up and drop it in the box. “You don’t pay my salary with nothin,” said the driver, who refused to move until the man had paid his full fare. “Oh, yes, I do, too. Here. Here’s a little bit of it now,” and he stood and put in a penny. “All right, yall,” a man seated behind the driver said. He had roses in one arm, cradled there like a small child. “I’ll pay his G-D fare and you just get this bus goin.” People applauded. He leaned over the penny man on the floor and put a quarter in the box, the roses still nestled in his arm, and the driver pulled back into traffic. The man with the pennies stayed on the floor and the bus driver said he would have to move behind the white line, as required by the laws and regulations of Washington, D.C. “On that floor is my tip for you,” the man said and stood up.

Roxanne, trying to remember if she had seen any white people on the bus, did not laugh with everyone else. She had kept her eyes closed once the woman next to her had looked into them, but before the intersection at Florida Avenue, she opened them and there was nothing but darkness. Her heart sank and she gave up a tiny yelp. “Lady,” she said to the woman beside her, “I think I’m blind. I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”

“You a blind lady?” Yes, Roxanne decided, the accent was eternal. “How long you been blind, honey?”

“Just now. It just happened. You have to tell the bus driver because I don’t know what I’m goin to do.”

“You blind? You do good to be blind. I wouldn’t go about if I was blind, I can tell you that.”

“Please, just tell the driver. I got here seein and now I can’t see. Tell him that. Please.”

“Oh, you just got blind? Thas what you sayin?”

“Yes, just now. I could see all day, but now I can’t.”

“Dear Jesus sittin on the throne!” The woman stood up. “Driver, we have a poor blind woman here. You hear me!”

The word was taken forward. “We got a blind woman that want off this bus, driver,” people from Roxanne up to the front began saying. “Driver, ain’t you listenin?” the penny man said. “Thas just like D.C. Transit to hold a blind woman up.”

The driver stopped between Swann and S Streets. “What is this commotion?” he said after he stood up and looked back. His view was not good because of the standing people. “Somebody hurt?”

“There a blind woman that wants off,” said the penny man, who was standing midway between the driver and Roxanne. What he said was repeated until it reached Roxanne, who said as loud as her dignity would permit, “No, please. I was just now struck blind. I could see when I got on, and now I can’t. I was just struck blind.”

“She was struck blind on your rickety-ass bus,” a woman across from Roxanne said. “I hope she sue D.C. Transit for everything yall got.”

“You workin for that blind lady now, bigshot,” the penny man said to the driver, who was making his slow way back to Roxanne. “Try bein nasty to your new boss lady and see how long you keep your job. Fire him right now, lady. He made you blind.”

The driver reached Roxanne. “Lady, why ain’t you tell me you was blind when you got on? I coulda put you by me and it woulda made things easier.”

Roxanne thought she remembered his face, the bill of the hat cocked a bit more up than it should be, and a face too womanish to suit her. “Is your fellow a handsome colored man, Roxanne?” her white woman had once asked. “Thas just it,” Roxanne said to the driver. “I wasn’t blind when I got on.” And the driver was also short. Cedric and Ray and Casey and all the rest had been tall men of long shadows. Her new man, Melvin, was a good foot taller than she was. “Can’t you understand? I was just now struck blind.” But was this driver really short, or had that been the one yesterday? Last week? How can a blind woman trust her memory?

“Right now? Right here? On my bus?”

“Yes. I could see when I paid my fare.” She sighed because at last her words and his words made it all real, for herself, for the entire bus: Roxanne Stapleton was blind. “I could see,” she said, and the words were only a few degrees above a whisper, which was how she liked to speak in public. People said she got loud when she drank, but she didn’t believe them. I ain’t just like every colored person from every corner of the world. “I just can’t see now.” Would the show at Howard Theater ever come back? Was Sam Cooke the kind of man to wait for a blind woman?

“You wanna go to the hospital?” the driver said.

“I don’t know. There’s no pain. I do know I wanna get home now.”

“Where you live?”

“Seventeen-oh-eight 10th Street.”

“I know where that is,” the penny man said. He had followed the driver through the standing crowd. “Round the corner from the fire station on R Street. Right?”

“Yes,” Roxanne said. Please, Lord, give me help from anybody but this jackass.

“You mind takin her home?” the driver said.

The man leaned over and looked out a window, up and down 14th Street. When he rose up again, pennies in his pockets jangled. “This way before my stop,” the man said, “but I could see her home.”

“You want this man to see you home, lady?”

She would have preferred anyone but the absurd man with his pennies, but in the end Roxanne nodded her head. “I’d appreciate it.”

The driver led her to the front and wrote down her name and address and her friend Agnes’s telephone number because Roxanne used her money for clothes rather than a telephone. “I’m sorry bout all this,” the driver said and placed in her hand a slip of paper with the names of the D.C. Transit people she should contact. Then he opened the door and people started saying, “Good luck to you, lady. Good luck to you, blind lady.” The man went down the steps first, his pennies jangling with each movement, and then he reached up and took her hand and guided her down. The door of the bus closed and it went on, and the sound of it leaving was the saddest sound she had heard in a long time.

At the corner of S and 14th Streets she asked the man where they were. She was surprised when he told her because she had thought they were still on the other side of Florida Avenue. She knew the area well, the liquor store at the corner, the office of her notorious landlord, Roscoe L. Jones, behind her at the corner of Swann, and across 14th on S was a little restaurant Melvin had taken her to on their first date. But maybe this wasn’t the place. Maybe this was Southeast and everyone was out to get her.

“If you get a good night’s sleep, your sight might come back,” the man said, placing her right hand around his left upper arm. “Whas your name again, lady?”

She told him.

“I’m Lowell and I’ll see you home safe.” He did not sound like a man so down in the world that he had only pennies for money.

“I really appreciate this, Lowell.” Two weeks ago a woman on New Jersey Avenue returning home from work had been robbed and hit twice in the head with a gun, the worst crime many had heard about in some time. Roxanne was realizing that Washington was getting less and less safe for people like her. The good and the decent. Men with little in their pockets had done the city in. “I’ve told Mr. Shepherd we just cannot chance coming into the city after dark, Roxanne,” her white woman in Silver Spring had said once. “It is not a city for the good and the decent anymore the way it was when Mr. Truman and General Eisenhower were here. There are new elements there.”

Lowell said, “No big deal. I knowed a blind woman when I was a boy in Anacostia. She raised five children by herself after her husband died walkin to work. That lady could fill your cup up to the top and not spill a drop while she was doin it.”

They turned and went up 10th and within a few steps they could smell what was left of the storefront church that had burned down just the Sunday before. “I hope nobody was hurt,” Lowell said, looking through the skeletal thing all the way into the back. It was a frightening mess, and the man was tempted to tell her that she was lucky she could not see it. The church’s reverend was to knock at Roxanne’s door within the week, having heard about what had happened to her. She would talk to him only at the door, would not allow him in, thinking that he was looking for a donation to help rebuild the church. He would see that in her face. “I only came,” Reverend Saunders said, putting a basket of fruit in her hands, “because God would not allow me to do otherwise.”

At her building, a lime-green two-story brick structure, she wanted to know if there was a light on in the basement, and when he said there was, she asked that he go down and knock at the door. Mary Benoit and her two children lived there. Mary wasn’t a drinker, a partyer, but she and Roxanne, ever a woman in search of a good time, were friendly enough. She wanted now to be with people she knew, hear voices she recognized. Mary’s nine-year-old daughter, Adele, came out. “Hi you, Miss Roxanne?”

“I’m blind, honey. It just happened.”

“Blind? Oh, no, Miss Roxanne. You want me to help you?”

“Your mother home yet?” Lowell had placed Roxanne’s hand on the railing before knocking, and now he took that hand and put it in the girl’s hand.

“My mama not home yet,” Adele said, “but Taylor, he home.” The girl began rubbing the hand Lowell had given her, rubbing it in both of hers, the way she had seen people in the movies do with someone’s cold hands.

“I best get on,” Lowell said. “Less you need me for somethin else.”

“Oh, no,” Roxanne said. “You been so good to me. Lemme give you a little somethin for all your trouble. I know you went out your way.” She began to open her pocketbook, but he put his hand over hers. “I don’t need your money, lady. Just try to get better, thas all.” He stepped away.

“Adele, baby, would you see me to my place?” Her room was on the first floor, a few feet beyond the front door, a large room with a sink and an icebox and a stove, along with a bed and dresser and everything else she needed to make a good life. She had been there six years. Adele unlocked the door and Roxanne switched on the light just inside the door and stepped inside. The room smelled the same—Spic and Span mingling with the perfume she had put on that morning before going out to clean her white woman’s house and cook her food. Suddenly, taking small steps into the room, both hands out before her, she could see herself the day she picked up the box of Spic and Span at the Safeway on 7th Street, had taken it from a shelf two up from the bottom and looked at the price to compare it with the larger size one shelf up. No, she had told herself, the small size will do for now; the price had been in blue numbers on a tiny white sticker. She could also see herself the Sunday she got the perfume at Peoples Drug at 7th and M. She had gone in with Melvin; he bought prophylactics in a red box, and she wandered over to the perfume kiosk. “Pick one, and I’ll buy it for you,” he had said and kissed her shoulder from behind. But, no, had that been Melvin, or Cedric of a long time ago, Cedric of two and a half years?

Roxanne sat on the bed. Adele helped her take off her sweater.

“Miss Roxanne, you really blind?”

“Why would I lie bout somethin like that, girl?” There was an edge in her voice, and Adele, not used to it, closed down. “Why would a body lie bout bein less than what they was?” Roxanne had a daughter, way back in Louisiana, nine ugly miles outside of Baton Rouge. But she had not raised the daughter, and she had not seen her in two years, the last time Roxanne had visited Antibes Nouveau. Had left that place, without planning to, for good at twenty-six years of age in the middle of the night with two men friends as the daughter, then three years, slept at the home of Roxanne’s parents. Sipping rum and Coke, Roxanne and the two men had only planned to visit four juke joints before morning. I be back fore breakfast, she had said to her parents when she left the girl at nine o’clock that night. But she did not see Louisiana or the daughter again for a year. Long before they hit the second juke joint, one of the men, the driver, had suggested that they drive all the way to Washington, where folks partied seven days a week. Of the three, only Roxanne knew geography and distance, but the rum said she did not know what she thought she did. On the third day, more than halfway to Washington, somewhat sober and committed now to nothing else but salvaging a bad idea, the man spoke not about parties but about his third cousin who knew how to get well-paying jobs in the federal government. After finding a pathetic government job in Washington, Roxanne telegraphed her parents eight days later, after they had already begun rehearsing how to tell their granddaughter her mother was dead. Will send for Carolyn soon. Give me a few months to save for her ticket. She was hungover when she telegraphed, and she would be hungover the times over the years when she started her visits home from Union Station. But every year as she set out for Antibes Nouveau, Washington was ever in her heart and mind a new city, still a place with men who did not yet know about “the Jewel of Louisiana,” still a place where she needed to be.

There was a picture of her daughter in a gold-looking metal frame on the tiny table beside the bed in her room; the girl was five years old in the picture, but that had been six years ago. Roxanne turned now to Adele and said, trying to put a little warmth in her voice, “Baby girl, would you mind hangin up my sweater?” The room had no closet, just a long wooden rack that Roxanne hung all her clothes on. Her daughter had never seen Washington. “I don’t think I can reach up there, Miss Roxanne, less I get on the chair.” “Well, just hang it on the back of the chair.” During the visit to Antibes Nouveau two years before, her daughter had first avoided her, and then, on the eve of her return to Washington, the child had begged her not to go.

With Roxanne still on the bed, Adele remained near the chair, which was unlike her when around Roxanne. When grown-ups talked mean, the child liked to stay to herself.

“Adele?”

“Ma’am?” Next to the chair was a tiny table, a twin to the one at the bed, and on it was a record player. The records were on the one shelf below that.

“You lookin at me?”

“Yes, ma’am, but I whatn’t starin hard or nothin.” She was not a child of lies.

“Come over here. I’m still the same Miss Roxanne.” She opened her arms, and the girl put her head into the woman’s lap. Roxanne felt herself wanting to cry; maybe this wasn’t just something to mess up her weekend. Maybe this was always and always. “You go on back downstairs and tell your mama to come up when she get here.”

“I can stay if you want me to. I’ll stay with you.”

“No.” Roxanne told her to take the lock off the door and pull it shut. Behind her room were stairs that went down to the basement and she could hear Adele going down. Long ago she had heard of a man in a foreign country, a man the doctors had made into a woman. If they could do that, then they could restore her sight. Those doctors had had a long way to go, for the man had never been a woman. They might not have to go as far with her, for she had known sight all her life.

She stood and put her arms out. This how blind people act, she thought. This how all them poor blind people act. At the mirror over the sink, she blinked and blinked, hoping. She put her face close to the mirror, so close that the breath came out of her and bounced against the glass and returned to warm her nose. “You look like a million dollars to a man that been poor all his life,” a boyfriend had said not long after she arrived in Washington. Pulling her head back, she reached up and touched the mirror. She was beautiful, and the whole world had always told her so. That boyfriend was dead now. And being that he was dead, and being that she was blind, how true were the words? Fine, fine Roxanne, the best thing ever to come out of Louisiana. “You could be one of those colored models they say your people have,” her white woman had said. What would happen to her beautiful face now? She tapped the mirror and then touched all the features of her face. What would happen? She had not learned very many big things about herself while living in Washington, but one big thing she had learned was that if she was not first beautiful in her own eyes, then she was beautiful in no one’s eyes.

Agnes Simmons got off the D.C. Transit bus at R and 11th Streets, N.W., and stopped at Cohen’s grocery store on the corner. She knew she needed something, but she couldn’t remember what. Bread, yes. Eggs? Was it eggs? She bought bread and told herself she would just have to come back if she had no eggs. Her friend Roxanne was not a lender. I work hard for what I got, Agnes… She walked to 10th on the southern side of R to see if Tenth Street Baptist Church had changed the signboard in their yard. For nearly three years of living above Roxanne, she had enjoyed the little sayings they put there, though lately they had been rather tame. A year ago they had had the best yet: I COMPLAINED BECAUSE I HAD NO SHOES UNTIL I MET A MAN WHO HAD NO FEET. That had touched the Catholic soul in her, something she still thought about as she closed her eyes and opened her mouth and accepted the host. This is my flesh… She was twenty-eight and had never been married and had not had a steady boyfriend in four years, but she was not in pain. This is my flesh… No one had told her she was beautiful in a very long time, since before the last boyfriend who had wanted only one thing. Beware of boys who want only one thing, her Catholic mother had warned as they shopped for Agnes’s first brassiere.

The church’s signboard that night had nothing but the names of the church and the pastor and the times of services. Eat…

She knocked at Roxanne’s door and Roxanne said to come in.

“Where the hell you been, Agnes? I been waitin and waitin for you. Where the hell you been?”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“I been struck blind, thas what’s wrong.” Roxanne was in the easy chair in front of the large front window.

Agnes laughed. “Oh, just give me another one, because that one won’t do it.” She had been educated in Washington’s Catholic schools and worked now across from the gas company in a shop on 11th Street that sold buttons and sewing supplies and cloth and all else that a woman needed to help make a good home. Becoming the manager after five years of service. Once, looking out the store’s window, Agnes had seen passing two former teachers, nuns, from Holy Redeemer, and had gone out to them. But as she watched their sturdy backs, the ironed perfection of their long, black habits that seemed not to swish one bit from side to side like women’s dresses, she had said nothing. Agnes’s mother had always prayed that she would become a nun, but her mother was dead now, and so there was no one to want such a life for her anymore. Her father had converted to marry her mother. His good Catholic wife had suffered up to her last moment of life, and the kneeling convert had raised his bowed head at her funeral mass and never lowered it again. “Agnes,” he told her whenever she asked if he had been to mass, “you can be Catholic for both of us now.”

“I should slap your damn face!” Roxanne shouted.

“Why? What did I do, Roxanne?” Agnes came in and set down her grocery bag and purse next to the door, something she always did so as not to forget things on her way out.

“‘What did I do, Roxanne? What did I do?’” Roxanne stood up and nearly fell, and when she took a step, she bumped into the small table beside the chair. “‘What did I do, Roxanne?’ You make me so sick! I tell you I went blind and all you can do is laugh.”

Agnes went to her. “But I thought you were kidding, Roxanne. You know how you kid sometimes.” Agnes touched her arm.

“Well, I’m not kiddin now, you dumb bitch.” Roxanne pulled away. “I don’t know why I bother with you. Why do I waste my damn time with someone like you?”

“I’m sorry, Roxanne. I really am. Here, why don’t you sit down. Please tell me what happened? Dear Jesus.” Agnes made the sign of the cross.

“‘Dear Jesus. Dear Jesus.’ For Chrissakes!” Roxanne sat again and misjudged where she was and so sat on the arm and tumbled onto the seat. “Get me a little vodka from the icebox, and mix some orange juice in it.” Why had she lost her sight and Agnes hadn’t? What did Agnes do with her sight all day anyway? Sell a few buttons here, a few needles there. Not even anough makeup on her face to cover a roach’s back.

Agnes brought the glass with three-quarters vodka and one-fourth orange juice, the way Roxanne liked it. “Here it is.” She waited until Roxanne had a firm grip on the glass and then released it. Roxanne drank nearly half of it in one gulp. They were both facing the large window onto 10th Street, and Agnes looked down to see two boys on the sidewalk counting money and Roxanne heard first a car honking its horn all the way up to R Street, followed by a pickup chugging along. Two cars with well-tuned engines came after the pickup. Roxanne was listening for Melvin’s car. Three more cars went almost silently past her window. It was like Melvin to be late when he knew she needed him. Agnes remembered that soon everyone would have to turn their clocks back one hour. Fall back, spring forward, that was the rule from the nuns arrayed in their black. “Black is not my color, Mama.” “Black’s everyone’s color, Agnes.”

There were playful taps at the door and Roxanne called out, “Melvin? Melvin? That you?” Melvin Foster came in and started singing a medley of Sam Cooke songs. “If he can’t make it,” Melvin said, “I’m gonna go up on that stage and replace him.” He was in a dark blue suit and a bright gray tie, Agnes saw, and he was wearing black Swiss Ballys, the kind with the graceful stitching at the toes. She had seen such in the window of Rich’s on F Street, as she strolled about on her lunch hour.

“Oh, Melvin,” Roxanne said, “where you been, honey?”

“I’m real early,” he said, “so don’t give me none a your stuff.”

“She’s blind, Melvin.”

“She’s blind, she’s blind as a bat,” Melvin sang. When neither woman responded, he stopped, took off his hat, and put it on a peg on the wooden rack. He was nothing if not a man who took the awful silence of women seriously. “Temporary, temporary,” he said after Roxanne had explained as he sat on the arm of the easy chair, his arm around Roxanne as she drank a second vodka. “Fuckin temporary, baby.” Agnes was now only a few feet beyond the door. He remembered how religious Agnes was and he looked at her and said, “Just temporary.”

In the end, Melvin said they had best get to Freedmen’s Hospital, and Agnes asked if she should accompany them.

“Of course, you should,” Roxanne said. “What kinda stupid-ass question is that?”

“Let her alone, Roxanne. She ain’t responsible for this,” Melvin said.

It snowed that night in October, two inches, and people said that was one for the record books.

Through the months of the fall and the winter, Roxanne saw a series of ophthalmologists, neurosurgeons, and psychiatrists from Freedmen’s to D.C. General, and none could tell her where her sight had gone. “It may well be, Miss Stapleton,” a psychiatrist in a darkened, borrowed office at D.C. General said to Roxanne late one morning as Agnes sat in a chair beside the door, “that you could awaken tomorrow and your eyesight will be back.” This woman, who had been imported from Georgetown University, was herself losing her sight, though none of her patients—many of whom were prisoners from the D.C. Jail next to the hospital—had been informed. She saw Roxanne alone that morning for some forty-five minutes and then brought in Agnes, who had been accompanying her friend to many of the doctors’ visits. And when Agnes was not able to come, Melvin had been there. So many of the friends Roxanne lived to party with had drifted away. They might catch her blindness, and blind people couldn’t dance very well, and they certainly weren’t known as partyers. “Or it could be,” the psychiatrist continued, “that when you are sixty or seventy or eighty, you will awaken and be able to see again.” A social worker at Howard University had thought a psychiatrist going blind would know the proper things to say to a woman who was already there. “But then, too, you might die without ever seeing again.” Some of the jail’s prisoners, who knew what no one had told them, called her the Bat, and others called her the Mole behind her back. It was like God to do that shit to a colored woman, the prisoners said—make her a doctor with one hand and make her blind with the other.

That lousy bitch doctor!” Roxanne complained as Agnes led her out to the D.C. General entrance where Melvin, who had driven them there and was outside smoking, was to pick them up. “That lousy, no-good bitch!”

“There is hope there somewhere,” Agnes said quietly.

“Let me fuckin go!” Roxanne pulled her arm away. “You worse than she is, you silly-ass thing. Take that hope shit and stick it up some priest’s ass!” People stopped and stared at her, but Roxanne did not know.

Agnes stood with her arms at her sides, and when Roxanne heard nothing from her, she swung at the place where she had last heard Agnes speak. “You worse than nothin!” It had been more or less this way between them for some time, though that effort to strike Agnes was at the end of a very long road. Neither woman would know it for some time. Agnes leaned to the left and Roxanne hit nothing, then stumbled and caught herself before she fell.

“Hey! Hey!” Roxanne could hear Melvin coming closer. “What the hell you doin out here, Roxanne? Why you actin up?”

“Oh, Melvin baby, I’m tired of this stuff from her and everybody else.” He took her gently by the arm and led her to the nearest wall.

“I know,” he said. “I can only think I know.” He held her shoulder for several moments, and then he turned and faced Agnes, who had a look he could not fathom. He reached across to Agnes and touched her cheek with his open hand. People watched the two. As far as either Melvin or Agnes could remember, this was the first time they had ever touched in such a way. Agnes closed her eyes and moved into his hand.

This was late April, and up until then spring had not been unkind to Washington. It stayed that way until mid-June when the humidity hit, thick and mean and unforgiving, and ordinary people with ordinary lives had to slog and claw their way into a more horrendous beast of an August where they lived each day thinking September would bring them relief. That was not to be so.

“I sometime think I’m gonna lose my mind,” Roxanne said now, and Melvin returned to her.

“You made of better stuff than that,” Melvin said. Agnes went toward the door; he could not make out anything bad in her walking, not hatred or bitterness or even resentment. There was merely—or so it seemed as he saw her step onto the rubber pad before the electric doors and watch them, first one and then the other, open to her—there was just a passable day out beyond the door that she wanted to enjoy before returning to many hours at the shop.

“I useta think I was, honey,” Roxanne said. “I really useta think so.”

Weeks before this, in March, after the city government people had officially declared her “a blind entity with no feeblemindedness,” the social worker at Howard and some D.C. government people got Roxanne into a program aimed at teaching the handicapped, especially the blind, how to live like everyone else. Someone, for three days, came to the homes of the five blind students then in the program to show them how to maneuver around their “habitable space.” Then Roxanne and the four other blind people began to learn the basics of accounting and how to operate tiny stores that were in various federal government office buildings around the city. The stores sold snacks and cigarettes and newspapers and small packets of Kleenex that could be tucked into a woman’s pocketbook. The instructor, an accountant with a blind husband who ran his own little store at the Justice Department, told her students at the end of the first day that the federal government employed people who would be mostly honest customers but that there were some who did not have the fear of God. “They will give you a dollar and swear to their thieving and useless god it was five dollars,” she said. “But our all-seeing God is a money God and knows money backwards and forwards. He will guide you.”

The store they ultimately gave Roxanne was on the sixth floor of a ten-story building at Thomas Circle, with a large window that faced Vermont Avenue. On the building’s seventh floor was an outpost of the Atomic Energy Commission with people who did nothing but read reports only from scientists based in Nevada and Utah and the southeastern portion of North Dakota. In time, as these people came to know her, they would come into the store and joke with Roxanne that if her doughnuts weren’t fresh enough, they would “atomize” her and her stale doughnuts. On the fifth floor and on her own sixth floor there were outposts of the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Commerce. These were primarily silent people, except for the Negroes who laughed with Roxanne as they complained that the federal government had outlawed soul food. A good part of the rest of the building were D.C. government employees, and though they came and went all day and were as friendly as any of the federal people, few of the federal people knew exactly what their jobs were.

It became not such a bad life, the life of a small store operator, and by the beginning of August Roxanne had assured herself that she could conquer “this blindness thing,” or at least learn to live side by side with it. She had worried that she would become a next to nothing, floating out in the universe alone and penniless. She could see herself becoming like the blind man with his milky gray eyes she used to see sitting on a wooden folding chair on the corner of 9th and F Streets, N.W., his quart-sized mason jar of donated bills and coins on a green handkerchief on the ground in front of him. Blowing on a silver harmonica when he wasn’t mumbling to himself. “Blind man here, blind man here, blind man here just tryin to get by,” he sang to passersby.

On the Monday evening of that second week in August, the accountant instructor took Roxanne to dinner at Scholl’s Cafeteria just down the street from her job on Vermont Avenue and then saw her home. “I’m so proud of you, Roxanne,” the woman said. “You and me both,” Roxanne said before she got out of the car and unfolded her white cane. Once in her room, after she had turned on the fan, she banged on the ceiling with a pole—a device to open high windows—for Agnes to come down to her. The pole had been given to her by Melvin, back when the blindness was such a new thing to them all. Roxanne hit the ceiling five times and waited, but Agnes did not come down. She waited several minutes more and hit the ceiling again. She thought she had heard footsteps above her, but she knew by now that blindness played tricks with the rest of her senses. She got a beer from the icebox and sat in her easy chair in shorts and an old Dr. Ben Casey shirt from Melvin. The oscillating fan blew on her and then blew to the nothing on either side of her.

Upstairs, Agnes sat on her bed. She also had one room but, unlike Roxanne, there was a small kitchen attached to hers. After Agnes had heard the first banging, she had immediately stopped walking across the floor, and then, as quiet as an old thief, she had gone lightly to the bed and sat as she listened to the second round of banging. “I want you to write a letter to my parents when I get home tonight,” Roxanne had told her that morning. Now, Agnes looked down at the red fingernail polish she had applied two evenings before. It had taken her more than an hour. She had long ago seen Roxanne paint her own nails in less than ten minutes. Agnes touched the nails, the redness, the smoothness. They were cut short to suit a functional life. “Is this not pride before a fall?” she said of the polish and waited for the pole to hit her floor again. She had tried putting on lipstick that morning, but the face she saw in the mirror with the lipstick was such an alien one that she was forced to wipe it off. The three of them, Agnes, Roxanne, and Melvin, had been sitting on the porch two evenings before, enjoying the sight and sound of children playing along 10th Street. Roxanne had gotten up and made her way upstairs to the building’s only bathroom. Agnes and Melvin could, despite the sounds of the street, hear Roxanne’s hands along the wall behind them as she made her way. No sooner was she on the stairs going to the second floor than Melvin looked at Agnes for a long time without words. She blushed and took her eyes to her lap. “I think I’ll go for a walk. Please tell Roxanne,” Melvin said as he stood. He went down two steps to the sidewalk and turned and looked up at her. Less than fifteen minutes before, Roxanne had said to Agnes, “Go get me another beer.” “I’ll get it,” Melvin had said. “No, I told Agnes, honey.” On the sidewalk, Melvin looked up the two steps at Agnes and said, “Why you scared to even put lipstick on?” He seemed more hurt than anything else. He left without an answer. And as she heard Roxanne making her way back down, Agnes picked up the beer that was still cold even with the crushing heat about them and asked herself who would know if she spit in the can. She had had confession that Saturday and had escaped from the confessional with a penance of only two Our Fathers and two Hail Marys. “Go in peace,” the priest had told her. She put the can back down in the same place.

Agnes now got up from the bed and went into the kitchen, not caring what sounds she made along the floor. A third round of banging began, but she ignored it and prepared her dinner. Across the city, on North Capitol Street, Melvin sat in a booth in Mojo’s and thought how nice it would be to have another beer. He had told Roxanne that he needed to visit a sick relative in Arlington for a few days, but she did not know that all his kin there had died out a long time ago. He took his time with two more beers, and then, a little before midnight, he got in his car and traveled to S Street, N.W., between 10th and 11th. He parked and the time went on and on until it was nearly one thirty in the morning. He had a job to go to in a few hours, but he was lovesick and no job in the universe could matter now. The beer had taken him there, but as he sat in the car and smoked cigarettes, the beer lost its hold and he gradually became just a man thinking about a skinny woman, not altogether attractive with her eyeglasses and her unpainted lips and the habit of crossing herself whenever a dead person’s name was mentioned.

Melvin got out of the car and went around the corner and up 10th Street to where Roxanne and Agnes lived. He took the outside stairs slowly, one at a time, and walked by Roxanne’s door. Agnes opened her door after the third knock and stood with her robe tightly around her nightgown, one hand holding the bunched cloth at the neck. It would be like you, Melvin thought, to have on a nightgown in this weather. She squinted without her eyeglasses. She had a life that burrowed through the world with few surprises, and there was no surprise on her face now. It was as if, every day over years and years, he had said to her, “On such and such a night, I will knock at your door and I want you to answer without giving it any thought.”

“It’s late,” he said as she stood in the space the partly opened door made.

“I know,” she said. They were not whispering and it was nearly two in the morning. Roxanne had stopped banging on the ceiling after about half an hour, and she had not sent anyone to get Agnes.

“You can shut that door in my face and I’ll turn around and leave,” he said.

“Leave? And go back downstairs?” she said. They had never spoken man-and-woman talk like that, but no one listening would have known this.

“I didn’t come from downstairs.”

Once he was inside, she put on her eyeglasses and fixed him a cup of coffee while he sat at the small table at the window, and again she moved about her place without thinking once of the woman below her. The world outside her window looked different to Melvin from one floor up.

“I’ve been thinking of moving from here,” she said after placing the cup and saucer before him and taking the seat across from him.

He said, “I would miss you. It would be like all the pain in the world if I couldn’t see you again.”

The priest who would instruct him in the Catholic faith told him he would have to choose a middle name for himself. “Why?” Melvin would ask. “Because there was no Saint Melvin, and God wants you to have a saint’s name.” Agnes’s father, a Catholic no more, unearthed a small book giving all the saints’ names and why they had been canonized. “Pick one,” his father-in-law-to-be said. “George. Sebastian. John. Pick one…But try to stay away from Xavier. I don’t remember what he did, but that name ain’t done all that right by me.”

For weeks, Agnes and Melvin did no more than talk in the night when the human beings in that building were all away in sleep. And when the talking was done sometime near dawn, he would stand, stretch, drink the last of his coffee, and go off to work. Then, late one night in October, a year after she went blind, Roxanne got up from her bed to go upstairs to the bathroom. Melvin had told her he would be away again that day. Before she had even reached the top of the stairs, she heard a most unfamiliar sound from Agnes’s place—the sound of a woman moaning in pleasure. She knew the sounds Melvin made when he made love, but she did not have to hear him to know he was with Agnes. All that her life was at that moment told her he was in there. And that life, such as it was, flowed out of her and she fell back and had to catch herself before falling down the stairs. She went down four steps and was in such pain that she had to sit. She wanted to cry out, but she prevented that by putting the sleeve of her nightgown in her mouth. I must get back to my place, she thought, even though she knew she lacked the strength. Melvin had always been such a good man, even as she had strayed a few times. What could have happened to him? And to be with such a wretch of a woman. Perhaps, just perhaps, she thought after some time, it was not herself who had been beautiful all those years, but maybe it had always been Agnes.

He came to her three days later, planning to tell her he was taking his life in a different direction and not knowing she had heard Agnes with him. He picked up the chair under the wooden rack and sat across from Roxanne as she sat in the easy chair. He said a great deal but none of it contained the right words, and in the end they heard Agnes moving about upstairs and Roxanne turned to accuse him and he looked away because her eyes were the same as always—not at all milky and full of nothing like those of other blind women. They were as full of life as ever and they told him she saw all as before. They were silent for a time. “You’d best go now,” Roxanne said, “your whore be callin you.” “You got no call.” “I got every call in the world,” and that was the last time for the couple.

The next month Agnes moved away. And a week later a woman, Mercy, came into Roxanne’s store, a woman she had known from all her partying years, a woman she had not seen in a long time. “You still look as good as ever,” the woman said. “Oh, go on away from here,” Roxanne said. They were the best words she had heard since going up that night to the bathroom. “I mean it, girl. I still run across men who go on and on about you. ‘Roxanne this, Roxanne that.’” She invited Roxanne to a party that Saturday night, and Roxanne said as she gave the woman change, “Why not? Why the hell not?” It was so good to talk to the woman Mercy that Roxanne told her to take whatever she wanted, and Mercy took three packs of cigarettes, a package of doughnuts, and two sodas, though she told Roxanne she was taking only one soda and no cigarettes.

She had a sweet old time at the party—her first since Melvin went out of her life. The music, the cigarette smoke, the voices, a woman shrieking with laughter across the room—it was all familiar, and it was all her. Being blind might not be so bad. That Monday a fellow she had met at the party called her job and asked her out to lunch, but she said no. His voice had not grabbed her, and he had held her as they slow-dragged in that way of desperate men—as if he wanted to melt his body into hers. Two days after his call she received a letter from her parents, who asked for the tenth time that year if she wanted them to come up to her. “Don’t fight alone,” they said. “That would be just like you.” Her parents also wrote that Roxanne’s daughter—who had only been told in October, the month before, what had happened to her mother—had been trying to think of what to write. “She needs the time to take it in,” her parents said in a letter of one page. Roxanne had Adele’s brother, Taylor, write a letter to them and get a money order for their train tickets to Washington for an extended Christmas visit. Had it not been for the party, for Mercy telling everyone at the party that the Jewel of Louisiana was back and better than ever, she might have had him write, “My boyfriend abandoned me and I am utterly alone.” “Utterly” was one of the favorite words of an early boyfriend after she first arrived in Washington. “I’m utterly ashamed, baby.” “I’m utterly hungry.” “He was utterly dead.”

When Taylor had finished the letter, he sat in the chair under the wooden rack and studied the stamp on the envelope to make certain all the edges adhered. And after he knew the stamp would stay in place all the way to Antibes Nouveau, he said, “It hurt to be blind, Miss Roxanne?” She had become close to him and his sister and their mother, but the boy was nothing if not a barrel of questions. Maybe that came from having a mother who was a nondrinker. No parties. A life that seemed devoted only to her children. A boy with a mother like that could stop being afraid of asking grown people questions.

“Whatcha think, Taylor?” She was at the sink, putting a wet washcloth to her face.

“I say yes, but Mama said no. It hurt in other ways.”

She touched the washcloth to her throat. The cloth was cool, but she knew that in moments her body would warm it. “Your mama right, Taylor.” She faced the mirror and saw darkness and then turned and could make out the faintest of light in the rest of the room. Would her own daughter be like this boy? Questions, questions, always questions. Blind people, she remembered from the days when she could see, had that jumping thing with their eyes, and she wondered if she would get that, too. One more blow to a beautiful face. Adele had told her only two days ago that her eyes looked like regular eyes. But whatever could that mean? “I suppose blind people hurt in ways you don’t understand now, Taylor.” Maybe it was only people who had been blind for a very long time who got that jumping disease, people who had never learned to teach their eyes to pretend that they could see. She was coming to understand that it was not the questions, but the fear that she would not have the proper answers, answers that would not stand the test of time. If Taylor was this way, how much worse would it be with her own daughter? Who knew what kind of girl she had grown into? “Well, is it like pins in the arm or somethin?” the boy said. “Or gettin shot by a BB gun?”

In the end, she put him off by telling him to put on a record Taylor’s mother had given her on Thanksgiving. It was a 45, and on it a Puerto Rican was singing about the Earth as an apple moving silently through space. “I love his voice,” Mary had said, “and I thought you might, too.” Roxanne had not learned until much later, from someone at work, that the singer was blind.

Mercy took her to three office parties that second week in December. The morning after the third, Roxanne, hungover, could barely pull herself out of bed to get ready for work. Mercy came by her job near the end of the day and laughed that Roxanne would be drummed out of the blind people’s union because she was having more fun than blind people were allowed.

A Saturday party at a house before the Tuesday her people were to arrive was the best in years. She had been introduced early to a man Mercy said was her third cousin “once removed,” but Roxanne tried to discourage him from monopolizing her time. Still, he had a wonderful way about him. The Kearney Street, N.E., event was cut short at about midnight because it began to snow, and while the house where the party was held was nice enough, it would not comfortably keep the fifty or so people throughout a snowbound weekend.

Roxanne and Mercy and her boyfriend and her third cousin returned to 10th Street just before twelve thirty. The cousin had a wreck of a stomach and was living on practically nothing but baby food, so he was the only one who had not been drinking. He had put his hand on Roxanne’s knee during the ride from Kearney Street, but she had not minded that. Indeed, she found it rather pleasant.

The boyfriend parked only two doors from Roxanne’s place, and they got out of the car, giggling and dancing through the snow, which was already coming to an end. Just inside the front door, in the hallway, the cousin began kissing Roxanne and then the boyfriend began kissing Mercy. “Oh, whas this,” Roxanne laughed, “an early Christmas present?” “Thas what it feels like to me,” Mercy said. “Well,” Roxanne said, “the least you could do is find us some mistletoe.”

“Just shut up and enjoy it,” the cousin said and placed his open mouth violently over hers so that his expelling breath went rushing into her body. His tongue pushed in and down her throat. His mouth was at an angle to hers, as boys have been taught to do, but in its violence, the mouth covered one of her nostrils, and the free nostril was the only way she could breathe, but that one had a very hard time of it. She felt as if she were drowning. She struggled, for breath and for freedom from the prison of his body. Then he put his hand between her legs, and that seemed to pull her back from drowning. Finally she pulled her face away and managed an insignificant scream. “Stop! Stop!” She thought, I done seen this before. I done been in this play before.

“Oh, Roxanne,” Mercy said, “just lay back and enjoy it. It’s Christmas, for God’s sake. It’s Christmastime.”

Roxanne began punching the cousin’s back. The accumulation of hits must have said something to him, because he pulled back and said to her, “You blind bitch! You should be happy a man like me would even give somethin like you the time a day.” He tapped her jaw with his open hand, the one that had been between her legs. She hit the back of his head, and again he placed his mouth over hers. I have no memory of singin this song. Dancin this dance… His hand returned to that place between her legs.

Roxanne heard two yips, and then a little voice called her name. “Agnes,” Roxanne said, “is that you out there? Please, Agnes, is that you? Agnes?” Adele asked, “Miss Roxanne, you all right?” Roxanne could see herself through the child’s eyes—a blind woman being assaulted in a hall. By a man she had been weak in the knees for only an hour earlier. Was the desperation plain as well? In a hall with two drunks doing what no child should see. I done danced this dance and sung this song before…This is what happens to blind people in the end. “You betta leave Miss Roxanne alone,” Adele said. There was no other sound in the hall but the tiny voice of the child. The third cousin pulled back. In the dim light of the hall, Adele was standing in her nightgown holding the puppy her mother had given her children early for Christmas. “Call Mr. Young for me, baby,” Roxanne said. “Call him. Call your mama.”

The cousin stepped back. He turned to Mercy and her boyfriend, who had not stopped kissing, and said, “Les blow this scene, yall.” Once they were gone, Roxanne turned to the wall and began crying. She could still see what Adele was seeing. She had never felt more vulnerable, and never so small. The child put down the puppy and stayed where she was and the dog went to the woman. “If,” Adele’s mother had explained to Roxanne a week before, “it was a doll or a bicycle, I could hold it back from em till Christmas. But it’s a puppy. It’s life, and I can’t keep that from em.” The puppy sniffed at Roxanne’s heels, and then Adele came to her. “I was goin to the bathroom,” the girl said. “Number two. I tried to make him stay downstairs, but he jus a baby and won’t listen.” Adele picked up the puppy. Roxanne turned around and reached for the child and the puppy licked her hand. “You want me to stay with you, Miss Roxanne? We all be missin Miss Agnes.”

At about six that morning, she got out of bed and stood there and felt the precious life that was the sleeping Adele. The puppy scrambled from its bed of blankets and came to her heels and sniffed. “We will have to do somethin for you, or you’ll piss and shit up my house,” she said to him. She went to the window. I shoulda wrote you and told you what to expect when you get here. A daughter deserves that… During the night the snow had returned briefly. It amounted to next to nothing, but after Roxanne raised the window a bit, she could smell that far, far more was on the way. She wondered what someone looking in the window would see—would they see a blind woman who was trying to get on with the rest of her life? She began humming the song by the blind Puerto Rican, about the Earth as an apple moving quietly through the universe. In her mind the world was moving through heavy snow. She boiled water and waited for the snow to come into their lives. When the coffee was ready, she took the cup with both hands and blew into it and sipped. Too much sugar, but the cream was just right. She sat in the easy chair. I am your mother. That is first, she should have had Taylor write. Before there was anything else in the world for you, I was your mother…

The snow came, and she felt it begin to cover and silence the world. She took another sip of the coffee, and as she did the snow grew heavier. Did her daughter like pancakes? She closed her eyes. Adele turned in her sleep. In the beginning, before there was any breath in your body, you had your mother…The puppy came up to her feet and turned around and around until it found a comfortable place beside her. She reached down and patted its back. I am blind and that is all there is to it. Eyes closed, she listened to the snow falling, each flake supplying a note in a long and wondrous song, and in moments, as the song played on, she was sitting on the giant apple that was the Earth and that was taking her through the snowy universe. They were moving away from the sun because she had all the heat she needed, so there was no reason to go that way. She leaned against the stem of the apple that was the Earth. As she and the apple neared Mars, she turned to the right and saw the puppy, but it was all grown up and was a dog that she had known back home when she was a girl no bigger than Adele, no bigger than her daughter in the picture on the table beside the bed. She pointed to Mars because she knew the dog, being as smart as he was, would appreciate the sight, and as she took her hand down, she saw Adele beside her on the left on the apple that was the Earth moving through the universe.

“You cold?” Roxanne asked the girl.

“No, ma’am,” the child said. “The snow is warm, Miss Roxanne.”

The woman and the girl and the dog looked at Mars, and after a long time, they were past it, and the girl sighed that Mars was now gone and Roxanne told her that they would see it again. The three were some ways from Jupiter when Roxanne began to worry that she would not remember the proper order of the planets. Could she be true to memory? She knew for sure that Jupiter was next, but was Uranus or Saturn after that? She knew all that once upon a time, could stand in front of that classroom nine ugly miles from the capital of Louisiana and recite their order and how far they were from the sun. What did she know now? On the apple, still traveling silently through the universe, she crossed her legs at the ankles and wiggled the toes of the foot on top. Then, as Jupiter showed itself hundreds and hundreds of thousands of miles away, she pulled the girl and the dog closer to her and the stem of the apple grew a covering as soft as that on her easy chair. It would be Uranus next if that was what she wanted it to be. She would put rings around it and give it a million moons, each a different color. Could she be true to memory? Maybe memory was what you made of it. She looked and the dog nodded Yes, ma’am, memory was what you made of it. Yes, then, rings around Uranus and Neptune. And she would put all the best singers and all the best dancing bands on Pluto, which was still a hundred million miles away, and on the outside of that planet, in blue and orange neon letters that even those blind from birth could read, she would put a sign that said Pluto was open all the time to all of God’s children. Yes, open even to the least of them.