1942 Pontiac Torpedo.
Two doors, black body. Convertible. Daddy bought the car with his first check after the war. The ink had barely dried on his check before he was at the Lou Meliska Pontiac dealership staring at the most beautiful muscle car he had ever seen. It was smooth and big bodied, black and shiny as silk, the cloth interior like a pillowy pin-striped dream. The car was used and Lou Meliska sold it to Daddy himself without taking a single penny off in spite of Daddy wearing his uniform, but Daddy didn’t care. It was the first thing he owned that he didn’t have to share.
He glided up next to Mommy, who was walking with her friends from bible study in that car. The engine purred as Daddy idled beside her, watching her hips move this way and that. She clutched her small bible to her chest, her skirt falling to a modest length just below her knees. Her modesty? He liked that. She had white gloves on small fingers. Her feet were sockless, though, dainty kitten heels closing in on naked pale ankles. She was the color of over creamed coffee.
He liked that, too.
He didn’t tell her he bought the car with his pension. She assumed that he was well-off, one of the colored boys that she had heard about but never seen. They didn’t struggle, of course. They were colored, and he wasn’t well off, but between the money he got from his father’s life insurance and the money he got from the government for fighting white wars and the money from the sale of the farm, the family homestead, he could provide for her. But the car? That gave him legs. He stood head and shoulders above the others because of that car. All the other boys returned from war wanted her, but he was the one she went home with.
Daddy was born partially deaf in his right ear. Subsequently he affected a cocked head stance that Mommy mistook for swagger. She thought his brooding was sexy, the way he sometimes stared at her when she spoke and took a long time before answering. It was many years before she figured out he couldn’t hear her.
Before the war he wouldn’t have considered a Pontiac. Mama didn’t like them. One came over the hill after church when he was two and Gladys was four. Her shoe came off—Mama always purchased them a size too big, for breathing room. Gladys’ shoe came off and she let go of Mama’s hand. It happened so quickly. Gladys was there and then she wasn’t and a Pontiac, far too big for the girl driver, was in her place. They didn’t let Mama say goodbye. She had nightmares about Gladys mangled and small and dead under the huge whitewall tires of the Pontiac for years.
Daddy cleaned the torpedo with the meticulous gentleness of a lover. Every Sunday he took his bristled brush and scrubbed the whitewall tires. He washed and waxed the Torpedo while Mommy fluffed pillows and ironed shirts. She began using starch at Mama’s insistence; Mama gazed pityingly at the wrinkled and crooked cuffs on Daddy’s shirts and offered to take the ironing and the washing, too. Mommy resented her for that and held the iron a few seconds too long on Daddy’s favorite collared shirt.
When they divorced Daddy piled everything he owned into the Torpedo, which was just as shiny as the day he pulled up beside Mommy. She resented him for taking the car, which he claimed she loved more than she ever loved him. She didn’t correct him because they both knew he was right.
She squinted at him through hard eyes and pulled a long drag from an unfiltered cigarette into her lungs, then told him she should have tried to grow an engine where her pussy used to be, then maybe he would have been as eager to fuck her as he was to fuck his car. He told her to wash her mouth out with soap so she could get practice cleaning dirty things.
He streaked off in a sonorous cloud of dust. Mommy let the cigarette burn down and then tossed it into the gravel, storming into the house and slamming the door behind her.
She remembered me a few hours later, and retrieved me crying and wet on the darkened porch.
***
2. 1946 Indian Chief.
Candy apple red, low bodied, with custom handlebars. Daddy won this from his younger brother Owen. The terms of the bet were years past and therefore unclear, even to them, but it was a sore spot between the brothers and Daddy loved to rile his brother up with the bike, which emitted a dry, throaty rasp like Sarah Vaughn in an smoky speakeasy.
The handlebars were my domain; Daddy would prop me on the bars and I would tuck my chin and steel my stomach would swoop as the wind stung my cheeks and whistled in my ears. Mommy hated Daddy riding the bike with me, and on this Mama agreed. Uncle Owen was killed on a bike, a Harley. He was doing tricks and never saw the big Buick that pulled out in front of him. His funeral was closed casket but I imagined his big smile still pasted to his face, his eyes unseeing.
The Chief was one of the things that drew Mommy to Daddy. She was only drawn to him because of things, things and distance. The things he had and the distance from what she was. She thought that being with Daddy, with his swagger and good looks and his fast car and his fast bike she would pick up speed.
Her life would pick up speed.
His life did. Daddy worked as an engineer for the air force, based right out of Wright Patt, and he lived a life in constant motion while Mommy and I were left behind. Daddy jetted around the world, places that Mommy pointed to on a map but could not herself see. When Daddy was home he was in his car, except for when he was on the chief. The chief took him places that the Air Force could not. His life was in his hands, even more than it was just being a negro in a white world. He loved the power in his legs when he kick started the bike, the moment between the engine coughing and sputtering to life and deep and abiding silence, the heavy pull of the throttle and he gave her just a little more power knowing exactly what she could handle and when.
The Chief moved when he wanted it to move. It gave and did not take and did not complain when he did not do the wash or help with the girl. It simply was. The Chief knew that he was a man as his own father was a man–he was gone, yes, but he always came home.
Mommy hated that bike. That piece of junk. That disgusting red. A whore’s red her own mother might have said, had her own mother said anything other than “I’m sorry,” denying that she could ever give birth to a negro child willingly.
Still she fought for the bike in the divorce, the same as she fought for the Torpedo. It was a listless fight, the same lithe willingness that she used when selecting the cut of meat she would use for dinner or the pantyhose that would coordinate with the most dresses, or the missionary position she would employ once every two weeks. The most vigor she exhibited in those days was the scrub down after, so hard and fast that her skin bled.
She fought for that bike because it was something to do and it was something he loved and even though she didn’t love him she did love his fight. It would be what she missed the most about him.
***
III. Me.
Two, high yellow. Girl.
“I’m not equipped to take her,” Daddy complained. His uniform was starched and pressed by Mama, who sat quietly behind him, crocheting as though there was nothing at all unusual about the display. I was propped there next to her, watching Mama but listening to Mommy and Daddy fighting.
“Where am I going to put her?” Mommy shot back. “There’s barely enough room for me!” Mommy and Daddy glared at each other but were both careful to look past me, as light as an empty case of luggage but a heavier and more certain burden.
“I’ll help with her,” Mama said soothingly. She patted my knee and I nodded, relaxing into her.
I have no memory of being one of the things, of course. Mama told me, much later, when I was old enough and strong enough to know. I needed to make the world see me. To make the world make room for me. That I would be strong and I had to always be strong. That I was loved was her point.
That I was a thing, the thing not fought for, the thing not remembered, the last thing, the unwanted thing, would be mine.
Slowly We Unfurl Again 