Daddy came back one night while Mama was gone. He was drunk. Althea was babysitting us. She was the big Negro woman who lived with her ancient husband at the far end of the building across the street from us. We liked Althea. Every once in awhile, for no reason we could ever figure out, she’d pull one of her gigantic brown boobs from behind her buttoned shirt and wave it at us like it was some kind of fat snake in her hand. Then, seeing our shocked faces, she’d laugh and laugh like she was dying, it was so funny, and call us po’ white chilluns who hadn’t never seen a grown woman’s teat.
Althea’s eyes grew wide and scared-looking, hearing this drunken man banging on the locked front door and yelling, “Open this fucking door!” She even made a move toward the phone to call the police. But when Karen and I started yelling back, “Daddy! Daddy!” she seemed to settle down and finally let me open the door for him. Daddy fell in and stumbled around the living room a little. Althea watched him for awhile, and then asked Daddy if he wanted her to go home. She wasn’t sure, she said, but she thought Mrs. Campbell wouldn’t be back until midnight. Daddy waved a hand at her and said, no, stay, he wouldn’t be long. Then he pulled both Karen and me to him and gave us both a big bear hug. “Grrrrrr!” he said. His whole body smelled bad of beer and cigarettes, and one side of his shirt was hanging out from his pants. “C’mon upstairs,” he said, “we’re gonna do something fun!”
Daddy gathered us in his arms, and we staggered together up the stairs. Daddy looked around when we got to the top, and the look on his face turned sour. “Where the fuck is your mom?” he said. I hated it when he looked and talked that way; it usually meant someone—me—was going to get smacked. I didn’t say anything, but stupid Karen blurted out that Mama was with her new boyfriend, Ken. As soon as she said it, I wanted to smack her myself.
“Ken!” said Daddy. His mouth smiled at Karen, but his eyes got dark. “Well,” he said. “You know what that makes your mom?”
“What?” we said to him.
“That makes her Ken’s whore!” he said, and the word ‘whore’ came out of his mouth as if he were vomiting it up from somewhere deep inside.
“Whore!” Karen said back to him.
Daddy looked at me. “Right?” he growled. “Right?”
“Right,” I said, though I didn’t want to tell him I didn’t know what whore meant. It sounded like something bad though.
Daddy grabbed hold of us again and we stumbled into Mama’s bedroom, and right away, Daddy went for the closet and threw open the door. Mama’s clothes were in there, all hung up. Daddy grabbed a huge bunch of hangers from the wood bar and jerked the clothes from them; they flew all over the room. Then he picked up an armful from the floor and went to the window and pushed it open, and dumped the whole mess out. The clothes just sort of disappeared into the dark. “Wheeeeeee!” said Daddy.
“Wow!” Karen and I said to each other. We ran to the window; even in the dark, we could see clothes all over the lawn below us, a big ragged patchwork quilt.
Then Daddy told Karen and me to grab an armload of Mama’s clothes, and to throw them out, too.
Downstairs, Althea called up the stairway. “’Scuse me!” she said. “I don’t think y’all are supposed to be doing that! ’Scuse me!”
We just kept throwing out clothes. Pretty soon, there wasn’t anything left in the closet. Then Daddy took Mama’s jewelry box and threw that out, too. It crashed into the lawn with a tinkling, metallic sound.
“Whore!” said Daddy.
“Whore!” we chorused.