The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor Read Free Book Online Page B

it.”
    “I’m not gonna have my child screaming his head off all night just to please you. He’s still a baby, he doesn’t like sleeping alone, and that’s it!” she said through clenched teeth.
    “Five years old ain’t no baby,” Miss Eva said. And then she added mildly, “You sure it’s Basil who don’t want to sleep alone?”
    The gentle pity in the faded blue eyes robbed Mattie of the angry accusations she wanted to fling at the old woman for making her feel ashamed. Shame for what? For loving her son, wanting to protect him from his invisible phantoms that lay crouching in the dark? No, those pitying eyes had slid into her unconscious like a blue laser and exposed secrets that Mattie had buried from her own self. They had crept between her sheets and knew that her body had hungered at moments, had felt the need for a filling and caressing of inner spaces. But in those restless moments she had turned toward her manchild and let the soft, sleeping flesh and the thought of all that he was and would be draw those yearnings onto the edge of her lips and the tips of her fingers. And she could not sleep until she released those congested feelings by stroking his moist forehead and planting a kiss there. A mother’s kiss for a sleeping child. And this oldwoman’s freakish blue eyes had turned it into something to make her ashamed.
    She wanted to get up from the table and spit into those eyes, beat them sightless—those that had befriended her, kept her baby from sharp objects and steep stairs while she worked, wept with her over the death of her parents—she wanted them crushed under her fists for daring to make her ashamed of loving her son.
    “I don’t have to take this,” Mattie stammered defensively. “Just because we stay in your house don’t give you a right to tell me how to raise my child. I’m a boarder here, or at least I would be if you’d let me pay you. Just tell me how much I owe you, and I’ll pay up and be out before the week’s over.”
    “I ain’t decided yet.”
    “You been saying that for five years!” Mattie was frustrated.
    “And you been movin’ every time I mention anything about that little spoiled nigger of yours. You still saving my rent money in the bank, ain’t you?”
    “Of course.” Mattie had religiously put aside money every month, and her account had grown quite large.
    “Good, you’ll be using it soon enough for new clothes for my funeral. That is, if you plan on coming?”
    Mattie looked at Miss Eva’s stooped back and the wrinkled yellow neck with grizzled wisps of hair lying on it, and small needles of repentance began to stab at her heart. She would be gone soon, and Mattie didn’t want to imagine facing the loss of another mother.
    “You’re a crafty old woman. You always try to win an argument by talkin’ about some funeral. You’re too ornery to die, and you know it.”
    Miss Eva chuckled. “Some folks do say that. To tell you the truth, I had planned on stayin’ till I’m a hundred.”
    Please do, Mattie thought sadly, and then said aloud, “No, I couldn’t bear you that long—maybe till ninety-nine and a half.”
    They smiled at each other and silently agreed to put the argument to rest.
    The children came running into the kitchen, scrubbed and penitent. “Let me check those ears,” Mattie said to Ciel and Basil.
    She was about to send him back upstairs to wash his when he put his arms around her neck and said, “Mama, I forgot to kiss you hello this morning.” Basil knew he would win his reprieve this way. Miss Eva knew it, too, but she said nothing as she slung the oatmeal into their bowls and slowly shook her head.
    Mattie was aware of only the joy that these unsolicited acts of tenderness gave her. She watched him eating his oatmeal, intent on each mouthful that he swallowed because it was keeping her son alive. It was moving through his blood and creating skin cells and hair cells and new muscles that would eventually uncurl and