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"Dandelion Summer"
Epiphany Jones
“Ode to Weeds . . .”A title like that isn’t what a teacher wants after she drags a bunch of high school kids to the Dallas Arboretum and then tells them to write about it. She wants you to get all poetic about roses and daffodils and stuff. Guess I had to learn that the hard way.
You write about weeds and you’ll get used as a bad example, while she slings your paper around in the air and says stuff like, “Y’all think this is some kind of joke? You know what I had to go through to get that field trip approved? Huh? I try to do something extra. Try to help the ones who might want something in life, and this is what I get? It’s supposed to be free-verse poetry about a public attraction in Dallas, not some gibberish you scribbled down and ripped out of a spiral notebook. Every one of you go home and do the assignment again!” She gave me a dirty look, and I sank down in my chair, sweat dampening my clothes. The rest of the kids were gonna know I was the one that set her off, and then I’d have more than just getting jumped in the bathroom to worry about. As soon as she let us go, I needed to beat it out of there and get down the street before anybody could catch me.
The teacher went on talking about how she never should’ve bothered to take losers like us off campus. All we ever did was cause her grief and get in trouble, anyway.She did have a point, sort of. This school did stink. I’d been here just a few weeks, and I’d already figured out that much. Most of the kids here were on their way to jail or the welfare line, or, if they were lucky and good at sports, maybe college someplace for a little while. But the teacher could’ve seen my point, too. There was a reason I wrote about the weeds in the parking lot instead of the flowers in the gardens. But to her, I was just one more face in a toffee shade of brown, transferred in for the last couple months of the year. She didn’t want to know my story. If she would’ve actually read the poem, she would’ve seen why I thought weeds deserved an ode.
I was one. I always had been.That teacher’d probably never been a weed in her life.
She didn’t know how it was to be someplace you’re not wanted. Weeds don’t care, is the good thing. They don’t need a fancy garden, or somebody petting on them, covering them when it’s cold, sprinkling them with drops of Miracle-Gro, or loving all over them. You give a weed a little crack in a sidewalk, and it’ll put down roots, and suck up water, and do its thing no matter what else happens. Weeds don’t need much from anybody. They can look after themselves.
When you’re a weed, you can either die or you can push your way through the concrete and try to survive.
The second bell rang, and I was halfway to the door before that teacher hollered my name. I started to act like I didn’t hear her, but someone side-slammed me, and I smashed against the doorframe, and my stuff flew everywhere. A couple girls drop-kicked it on their way out, laughing and cussing and calling me things you’re not supposed to say in school, but everybody does. DeRon Lee passed by in the hall with a couple of his homeboys. He laughed and shoulder-butted somebody out of the way so he could grab my backpack. “Now, how you gon’ do new girl that way?” he asked the others, and flashed me a big, toothy grin. “Don’t you know she my lab partner in science? We gon’ get us a A-plus-plus.”
I couldn’t help it: I laughed. It’d probably be the only A-plus-plus DeRon ever got.
From across the hall, DeRon’s sorta girlfriend gave me a look that would’ve been against the law, if looks could kill. She started across the hall, but the English teacher came out and told DeRon to move on. Then the teacher got ahold of me and pulled me back in the classroom so she could vent on me, saying things like, “I don’t know what you learned at whatever podunk school you came from, but in this room, I run things. You think you’re gonna make a joke out of my class? Huh? Come in here with your little attitude . . .”
I zoned out and thought about Mrs. Lora at my last school—the school in the nice, friendly little town where people didn’t cuss me out just because they didn’t like the way I looked, or knock my stuff across the hall, or get in the bathroom stall next to mine and tell me I oughta go somewhere and die, or make fun of my English paper in front of the whole class. Mrs. Lora was the kind of teacher who loved every kid the same, even the weeds. She showed me how she felt, one time when we were walking home together. She stopped to look at a little purple flower growing from the road stripe in the middle of the street. “Well, isn’t that something, Epie?” she said. “Look how it’s blooming right there with the cars driving by. Just goes to prove that life doesn’t have to be perfect for something beautiful to grow.” Then she hugged me around the shoulders and pulled me close to her big, sweaty body.
I liked Mrs. Lora. She rented a room to Mama and me in her tall white house three blocks down from the school. Those two years at Mrs. Lora’s were the best in my whole life, but like everything with Mama, it had to end.
Mama came across Russ at a flea market. She knew him from way back when she was in high school. Pretty soon, that old flame was burning just like in the country songs Mrs. Lora liked. Mama quit her job at the processing plant and moved to Dallas to be with Russ. I stayed back with Mrs. Lora for a while, dreaming that maybe I’d get to live with her all the way through high school. She told me I was welcome to. She liked having me help with her house and the apartments she rented. For the first time ever, it felt like somebody really wanted me around. But before I was even through my freshman year, Mrs. Lora went from teaching in that little white school to the hospital to a big funeral I never got to see. I was in Dallas with Mama and Russ, trying to find another crack in the sidewalk.It was harder than I thought it would be. A big-city school is different from the backwater places Mama and me had been before. The neighborhoods off Blue Sky Hill were mostly run-down and rough. The kids ran in packs, and if you got yourself on the wrong side of them, you could end up in a world of hurt. I didn’t even have to do anything for that to happen. When you’re half Italian and half black, and you talk like you grew up in some hick town, you’re just some weird chick nobody wants to know.
By the time that English teacher finished chewing on me, the halls were full of kids and noise, and I pretty much knew what my trip to the front door was gonna be like. Once the teachers went back in their rooms, you were fair game for anyone in the hallway. But it never crossed my mind that it wasn’t the kids I needed to worry about; it was the mamas. I ran into one of them right inside the school door, and she about yanked my arm out of the socket.
“You all high-tone, Miss Creamy Caramel,” she said. “You think you better’n us, cuz yo’ mama’s a wop? You prance ’round here, think you gon’ get my daughter’s boyfriend? You all smilin’ at DeRon and stuff. Yeah, she seen you doin’ that ever since you been here. You think you gon’ take DeRon from Lesha? Huh?”I froze up right there in the doorway, which was dumb, because I should’ve told her to move her big, fat self out of my path. I wasn’t the one looking at her daughter’s boyfriend, either. DeRon Lee had been into me since the minute I showed up in this school—something new, I guess. The nicer he was to me, the more the other girls got on my case. Now it looked like I’d have their mamas to deal with, too.
“You jus’ like yo’ old lady.” She pointed a finger right up in my face. “Yeah, I know yo’ mama. She all runnin’ around here like she own the place, ’cause she live here back in the day. Well, she a shame befo’ God. Go gettin’ herself wit’ other women’s men. That’s how she ended up with you. She tell you that? She got a lotta nerve, movin’ back to this neighborhood after she took my cousin’s man. Yeah, yo’ daddy was my cousin’s sorry boyfriend. Yo’ mama tell you that, either?” She stuck her chin out and got up in my face with her nasty cigarette-smellin’ breath.
“My daddy died before I was born. In the army.” It was rolling around in my head that what she was saying couldn’t be true. Mama never wanted to talk about my daddy, but a long time ago I’d heard her tell the registration lady in some school office that he was sent to Somalia before they could get married, which was why she had Salerno for her last name and I had Jones, his name, for mine. This lady and her sleazy daughter probably couldn’t even spell Somalia, much less figure out where it was or know anything about my daddy. She was just some high-school-dropout, low-rent loser, up here trying to help her daughter nail down DeRon Lee, because he was so good at basketball everybody figured he’d end up in the NBA—if he didn’t land in jail first.
She laughed, her long red fingernails fanning the air like the claws on one of the lions at the zoo. “Girl, you jus’ as ign’rant as you look. Yo’ daddy ain’t in no army. He washed dishes at a restaurant until he got hisself killed in some car wreck. He didn’t die before you was born, neither. He jus’ didn’t want no wop child fo’ a daughter. Yo’ mama’s people didn’t want you, neither. They too busy up there on Greenville Avenue, servin’ up that fine Italian food at Tuscany Restaurant.”
She must’ve seen my eyes getting wider and wider, because she threw her head back and laughed. “Girl, what kinda lies yo’ mama been feedin’ you? Yo’ mama’s family jus’ a couple miles up the road, but I bet you ain’t gettin’ no birthday cards, is ya? Them high-class woppas, they don’ want no daughter gettin’ with some dishwasher boy and makin’ some little Oreo moolie. Why you think they kicked yo’ mama out when she had you?”
The lady turned around and walked off, and I stood there feeling like a house of glass was cracking all around me. People bumped into me, knocking me back and forth as they squeezed by, and I barely even noticed. After a minute, somebody laughed and yanked my backpack off my shoulder and threw it back into the hall. Pencils and papers spilled and scattered around, and the school counselor came out to see what was the matter.“Epiphany?” She waved and snapped her fingers by my face. “You all right? Epiphany?”
Epiphany. That long mouthful of a name bounced off and floated into the air, like another trail of smoke. It didn’t feel like it belonged to me anymore. Mama’d told me that was the name my soldier daddy picked for me. When he saw the ultrasound pictures from half a world away, he knew I was gonna be something special. Now Epiphany didn’t mean anything. She didn’t exist and neither did the soldier daddy.
There was just Epie, a skinny, long-legged, creamy caramel girl standing there getting in everyone’s way. Too skinny, too ugly, too brown, not brown enough, her eyes a strange grayish green that came from the Italian restaurant up the street. Just a couple miles away. When Mama would talk about the past at all, she always told me her parents were dead, but now I remembered that we came to Dallas once when I was little. She’d just split up with some guy, and we needed money to keep from ending up at a homeless shelter. We came to this neighborhood, and she went inside a house, and she left me in the car with some crayons and a coloring book. She came back with cash, and we beat it out of town.
She never told me she was visiting family, but now the truth was clear enough. She didn’t want whoever was in that house to see me.
I got my backpack together and walked out of the building and turned into Epie. The best thing was that Epie didn’t care what that lady thought, or whether some girls would probably try to jump her later for hanging out with DeRon. Instead of heading on home from school, Epie hung around and watched the basketball games, then waited in the alley behind the gym and found DeRon afterward. She rode in his old car, and got her flirt on, and went off to some party with him at the low-rent apartments down the street. It didn’t even bother her when everybody was getting wasted, and some ex-convict named Ray came by and smiled and wanted her to go back in the bedroom and smoke. DeRon just laughed and said, “Go on, Ray. How you be gettin’ all up on my girl like that? She with me, and you know me and my boys can’t be smokin’ that stuff. We got them drug tests alla time. You gone get me in trouble, my man.” DeRon and Ray bumped fists and laughed.
Right after that, DeRon and his friends got restless and headed out. Epie piled in the car and went right along with them. Next thing she knew, they were down the street in the parking lot of the old white church, and the guys were running around wild, throwing rocks at the building and tipping over benches in the memory garden. Then the police showed up, and the fun went bad in a hurry. The whole thing ended with a ride home in a police car and a parent talk on the front porch. The good news was that the preacher at the old church had told the police officer he wasn’t gonna press charges; he just wanted the damages taken care of. The bad news was that Mama was bloodred mad because she’d wasted her whole second-shift lunch hour driving around, thinking there’d been a kidnapping or something. Now she was late getting back to her job as a temp, cleaning classrooms at the university.Epie didn’t feel a thing when the cop left and Mama dragged her into the house, then slammed the door. She figured Mama deserved this. It didn’t even seem like there was any point telling what’d happened that afternoon, or bringing up what that lady at school said about the soldier daddy in Somalia. If someone’ll lie to you once, they’ll lie again.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me, Mrs. Lora used to say.
While Mama yelled, and Russ complained about how much gas he’d used up driving around looking for me, Epie sort of faded off. I started thinking that three more years until I got out of high school was too long to stay here. I wanted to move on to someplace where I didn’t have to worry about getting jumped at school and there wasn’t some lady who knew dirty little secrets about me, and I didn’t have relatives down the street who wouldn’t let me into their houses. Maybe I oughta go on down to Greenville Avenue and walk right into that fancy restaurant, I thought. See the looks on their faces when their long-lost grandbaby shows up.
Russ got tired of the argument and headed for the door, dropping his keys on the table. “You can take my car back to work. I’m gone on my bike.” A minute later, his Harley rumbled from the carport and he was outta there. Russ knew Mama was ready to come all the way unwound and it was gonna get ugly.I looked at the clock and wondered if Mama cared about anything else but her wasted lunch hour. Did she even wonder why, after coming right home after school every day for three weeks, and trying to be good, and trying to stay out of the way so her and Russ wouldn’t mind having me around, I all of a sudden went and partied till after midnight? Mostly, she just seemed mad that now she’d get her pay docked and have to work late. Like usual, she figured I was trying to make her life harder than it already was. She never thought anything I did was good. I wanted to not care. She’s a liar anyway, the Epie voice whispered in my head. She’s been lying to you all your life.
Mama stood in the doorway, her hands shaking as she yanked her dark hair up in a ponytail and grabbed a rubber band from the pile of mail, newspaper ads, and other junk on the end table. Her face was wicked red from her cheeks on down, all the way to where her skin disappeared into the neck of her T-shirt. Her eyelids were droopy and slow. She’d probably calmed herself with a whiskey sour or two when she couldn’t find me. But whatever. Anything she wanted to do was her business.“Stop giving me that dirty look.” She lifted a hand like she was gonna smack me. It wouldn’t have been the first time, but if she tried it again, she was in for a shock. I was tired of taking crap off her. All I ever did was try to make Mama like me, and all she ever did was tell me how much trouble I was and how hard it was to keep a roof over our heads and buy everything we needed. Every once in a while, she’d add that things weren’t supposed to end up like this. This wasn’t the life she’d wanted. “You’re just lucky I’ve got to get to work, or I swear . . .” She let the threat die in a growl.
I took a step back and tried to make her yelling roll right off. What choice did I have, really? I didn’t have anywhere else to go. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have come home. I would’ve told that police officer I was a runaway or something. It wasn’t like Mama would miss me. I was the worst thing that ever happened to her. If she hadn’t gotten herself pregnant with me, her life would’ve been totally different. Better. She’d be down the road helping to run that fine Italian restaurant.
It hurt to know that—to finally really understand. I didn’t want it to hurt. I wanted to be as cold as ice to her, but there was still some part of me that couldn’t. There was still some of Epiphany in there with Epie.
“Don’t even know if I can get the classrooms finished tonight,” she grumbled, picking up Russ’s keys. “You think this is easy, after cleaning houses all day? I hope you know how much you screwed up, Epiphany. You selfish little . . . And for what? Because you want to go run around like some . . . like some . . . back-alley trash? You get yourself knocked up, Epiphany, and you’re outta here. You’re not staying in my house. You hear me?”
I wanted to say, You know what? I won’t. But I couldn’t say anything. I just stood there with a big ol’ lump gathering in my throat. I wasn’t gonna cry where she could see it, so I closed my mouth tight over the sound and watched her grab her cleaning company smock and head out the door. For half a second, the room felt better without her in it. After that, it just felt empty. I looked around at the matted-down sofa, and the end table somebody’s dog must’ve chewed on before we moved in, and the gold-colored carpet that was probably three times as old as I was, and I thought there had to be more to life than this. There had to be something else out there.
I hated it here. I hated her. I hated me. I hated who I was. I hated what I looked like. I hated the color of my skin, and my stupid, long, kinky hair. All that hate was like a slow burn, eating me up from the inside. Wasn’t there anybody in this world who wanted me?
What if I tomorrow night I got looking superfine, and then took the bus to Greenville? The street would be lousy with people partying at the clubs. Guys would give me looks and stuff, and I’d smile right back. When I made it to that restaurant, I’d walk on in like I belonged there, right past the dudes in their white shirts and black ties, parking high-class cars out front. I’d stroll to the counter and find the people who owned the place and make them tell me what’d happened when I was born. I’d make them tell me all the secrets Mama kept.
Her secrets . . .
I knew where she hid her secrets. She’d crammed two boxes in the back of her closet at every place we’d ever lived. The one time I’d messed with the boxes, she’d caught me with her closet torn apart and yanked me up by the arm so quick I felt my shoulder pop. “Did you open these? Did you?” She pointed at the boxes, her finger shaking.
“I didn’t!” I said, and tried to pull away. The way she was holding me hurt a little in my arm, and a lot inside. “Mama, stop!”
She let go of me finally, shoved the boxes back in the closet, and shut the door hard. “You leave my things alone,” she hissed, and dragged me out of the room. “You stay out of here. Stay out of my room!” She headed back to the sofa to watch a movie with some guy from next door.
I was nine then, old enough to finally get it through my stupid head that I was better off keeping my distance—from Mama and her things. It was easier to stay clear of whatever was in the closet, keep my head down when Mama and me were home together, and try not to be a bother to her. It never even crossed my mind that those boxes in the closet might be hiding secrets about me.
My heart started pumping as I headed down the hall, went into her room, opened the closet door, and looked inside. The boxes were still there, a big one with a picture of a tomato can on the side, and a shoe box, stuffed in the corner behind a pile of dirty laundry and junk. I studied all of it, memorized how it looked, then knelt down and started moving things one at a time, making sure I’d know how to piece it all back together. Even though I told myself I didn’t care what Mama thought anymore, a part of me remembered what it felt like to be yanked up by the arm and thrown through the doorway.
I set each box on the bedroom floor, leaving tiny trails in the dust. My heart hiccuped into my neck. What if even that was enough for Mama to notice? What if she finally decided she was sick of me and kicked me out on the street? But I had to know. If there was something about me in those boxes, I had a right to it, didn’t I?I slid my fingers around the lid on the shoe box, worked it upward. It popped loose, and I set it to the side, my eyes following it to the floor, then tracking back to the box real slow. I was afraid to look, but I wanted to see.
There was a plain white paper on the top, folded in half. I lifted it out, opened it, read it—the rental agreement for some trailer house we lived in before Mrs. Lora’s.I set down the paper and took out an envelope that was underneath it. My birth certificate was inside, and a few other things—vaccination records and stuff. My father’s name was on there, Jaylon Jones. It wasn’t J. Lon Jones, like I’d always thought. It was Jaylon, all one word. I tried to picture him in my mind, but I couldn’t anymore. The hero soldier daddy, who was tall like me and looked a little like Will Smith, had walked right out the door with the nasty lady at school. Jaylon was just some lines on paper. A man I’d had all wrong, just like the name.
A man who didn’t want me.
I pushed everything back into the envelope, set it aside, and dug down deeper. There was a Valentine’s card—one of the sappy kind you pick out when you’re just falling in love with somebody. There was no way to tell whether it was from Mama or to her. The envelope was yellowed, but the flap had never been stuck down and torn open, and in the spot where it should’ve been signed, it just said, Me. Why’d she saved it all these years?
I dug deeper, jumping every time the house settled or creaked, even though I knew that once Russ headed off on his bike, he usually hooked up with some friends and partied for hours.There were more papers in the box—some medical stuff, the payment book for the car that’d been gone forever, a few of my old report cards and some school papers where teachers wrote notes and said I was smart, a Mother’s Day card I’d probably made in day care or Head Start someplace. There was a little gold handprint inside a paper heart on the front of it. It was hard to picture my mama putting that card away in a safe place, like it mattered. Maybe it’d ended up in here by accident. Underneath it was a sheet of school pictures from back in middle school. Only one was cut out. It was probably still on the wall in Mrs. Lora’s classroom.
Underneath the school pictures were a few from the Christmas pageant at Mrs. Lora’s church, where I got to wear an angel suit, because I was tall. The pastor, Brother Ben, gave me the pictures when he took them off the bulletin board at the end of the year. I liked Brother Ben’s church. People were nice there. I got saved and everything.
I lifted a stack of bills, and under those was a little handmade book with a blue paper cover. I knew what it was without even pulling it out—the Someday Book from Mrs. Lora’s seventh-grade class. She gave us ten sheets of blue paper that were blank, except for three words: Someday I will . . . We had to fill in the rest and draw pictures. She told us to think hard, to dream big, to put down the things we most wanted to do. To make ten promises to ourselves, and when we were done, she’d bind them into a book. We were supposed to keep the book where we could look at it again and again. When you look at a promise over and over, it becomes part of who you are, she said.
Guess I’d lost track of my promises at some point, just like I’d lost track of the book. Now I couldn’t even remember what those promises were.
Underneath the blue paper promises was another book, an old one with a yellow satin cover that was stained brown around the edges. A baby book. The cloth felt dry and fragile under my fingers as I wiggled it from under the pile. It slid free, and something blue fell out, dropping into the side of the box. A plastic envelope—the kind that comes from Wal-Mart with photos in it. I picked it up, set it on the floor, then straightened the papers in the box so that they were flat again.Boots clomped up the porch steps, and I jerked my hands away from the box, listening. The sound of keys rattling sent an air ball into my throat. Russ was back. For some reason, he hadn’t stayed out partying, after all.
Panic zipped through me. If Mama found out I’d been in here, I was dead. Shoving the photo envelope, the baby book, and the loose papers back in the shoe box, I hoisted the big box back into the closet, my hands sweating while I tried to wrestle stray shoes out from underneath, so it would sit flat. The locks on the front door were clicking now.“Come on, c’mon, c’mon,” I whispered, trying to lift the big box and push the junk from underneath. Finally, it plunked into place, and I capped the shoe box, set it on top, then piled the clothes and shoes into the closet. The front door fell open and thumped against the end table, and I slid the closet closed just as Russ was dropping his keys and cell phone on top of the newspapers.
He started up the hall, and I checked the floor by the bed. Air caught in my throat. The Someday Book was still there. I kicked it under the bed, making sure nothing was showing before I moved toward the hall.
“What’re you doin’ up?” Russ grumbled, swaying a little when he looked down the hallway. “You got someone here with you?” His eyes narrowed toward my bedroom.
I yawned and stretched like I’d just woken up. “I heard a mouse.” It wasn’t until after I said it that I wished I hadn’t. Russ might look under the bed for the mouse. “I couldn’t find it, though.”
On the way down the hall toward me, he slid off his Harley jacket, yawning as I backed away from their bedroom so he could get in the door. “Go to bed, already. That mouse ain’t gonna hurt anything.”
“’Kay,” I said, watching the bed skirt shiver in the breeze as he passed by, the corner of a blue paper showing for just a second before the cloth fell into place and hid it again.
