Sometimes he spoke or nodded when he saw me, but he kept his distance, even when people began to like me and almost everyone said hello. Though he certainly did not remember, we had seen each other before, years back, when we were kids. Granny was visiting from St. Louis and she, my mother, and I had come to Paris to the Home Market where Betty liked to shop for meat. It was a very nice store for a small town, like somewhere you would find in a bigger place. They gave out samples of cheeses, sausages, and new sorts of snacks. I loved Chicken in a Biscuit.
While Betty waited for the butcher, Granny and I pushed the cart. As we turned one corner, we encountered an enraged woman yelling at her little boy, whose fair hair—almost clear enough to see through—was slicked back with oil and combed so neatly that he looked like a mannequin in a store. His skin was very white, the sort that burned and never tanned. As his mother’s anger, unexplainable to us, terrifying to me, built up, the boy looked like all he wanted was to fade away, to back into the shelves among the cans and disappear. Even then I knew she saw something in him she despised.
When the mother slapped the boy hard, as if she could just slap him away, my grandmother blanched, staring at the woman’s face. I thought Granny was going to call the police or go over herself to try to help. We saw the red streaks from his mother’s fingers come up on the boy’s white cheeks. Granny stopped the cart and eyed the woman as the boy ran down the aisle, tears running down his face. Back in the car, my grandmother kept bringing up what she had seen. “That woman,” she said, “that woman looked at that boy with hate. With hate. She looked at her own child with hate in her eyes. I have never seen anything like it.”
I knew somehow that the woman was ashamed of her son; he was small and delicate. I just knew. In the car on the way back to Madison as Granny began to settle down, I watched Betty carefully, looking for signs that I might be in trouble too. I felt like I was in terrible trouble too. Like that boy.
“Aren’t you glad,” Granny asked, “that you are surrounded by people who love you?” For reasons I did not understand, this made me feel terrible; bad feelings flooded through me that day in that backseat.
Freddy was that boy in the grocery store. It was that pure white skin that made me remember. He had grown up to be good-looking—a cute guy, as they say in high school—but because of his back, which was often painful, he had not gone out for football. When he and his older brother, Earl, both started working at the IGA, Freddy was quickly fired. Because of his injury, he couldn’t lift the heavy boxes. Every day, his brother gave him the twenty-five cents for lunch in the cafeteria.
In mixed chorus, Freddy was a tenor, like me. Sometimes we shared the same piece of music and he laughed at my jokes. We became friends. He never mentioned his mother, Wanda, who was known for her spotless house and her ire. How that woman could flame up, swearing, grabbing at those boys, seizing a collar or an arm wherever they were, even after they were older. Wanda would scream at those boys; the neighbors talked about it. Every night it went on. In the summer, people heard her while they worked in their gardens.
One afternoon after school, near the end of freshman year, Freddy rode his bicycle past my house where I was sitting on the step. Maybe because it was one of the first warm days, because it was spring, and we felt unburdened, just a little freer, he stopped to talk and I took him inside. Betty had fried chicken and it was cooling on a rack on the kitchen table for supper. I offered him a piece, and before I realized, he had eaten the whole chicken. For the rest of that year, he came over after school every day, always eating supper with us and never leaving until it was time for me to go to bed, something he never seemed to do. He roamed the streets till late, even when it was cold.
If a day went by without him visiting, I was lost. I needed him and wanted to touch him. So many times I had to stop my hands from forgetting what was acceptable. They knew what they wanted; I knew what they could not have. Even regular boys slapped each other on the back, roughhoused, and reached out occasionally to pat each other’s shoulders. Yet if I came too near, Freddy moved away; he had a kind of radar, a sixth sense for when to take off, flee. If I sat on the bed in my room, he sat on the floor. If I came up behind him, reached out to tap him to get his attention, he moved. When my father cupped Freddy’s head with his hands one day to steer him toward the table, Freddy looked shocked, and for a moment I thought he might hit my father, who was so surprised. He looked at me as if to say, “What can we do?”
I loved Freddy. He loved me. There was this feeling when we were together; it was so strong that, reaching out, I almost expected to feel something in the air between us.