God Help the Child: A novel by Toni Morrison Page A

called the pride and wealth of nations. She started to whisper or moan but his lips were pressing hers. She wrapped her legs around his rocking hips as though to slow them or help them or keep them there. Bride woke up moist and humming. Yet when she touched the place where her breasts used to be the humming changed to sobs. That’s when she understood that thebody changes began not simply after he left, but because he left.
    Stay still, she thought; her brain was wobbly but she would straighten it, go about as if everything was normal. No one must know and no one must see. Her conversation and activity must be routine, like an after-bath washing of hair. Limping to the kitchen sink she poured water from the standing pitcher into a bowl, soaped then rinsed her hair. As she looked around for a dry towel Evelyn came in.
    “Ooh, Bride,” she said, smiling. “You got too much hair for a dish towel. Come on, let’s sit outside and we can dry it in sunlight and fresh air.”
    “Okay, sure,” said Bride. Acting normal was important, she thought. It might even restore the body changes—or halt them. She followed Evelyn to a rusty iron bench sitting in the yard bathed in bright platinum light. Next to it was a side table where a tin of marijuana and a bottle of unlabeled liquor sat. Toweling Bride’s hair, Evelyn chatted away in typical beauty-parlor mode. How happy living here under stars with a perfect man made her, how much she had learned traveling, housekeeping without modern amenities, which she called trash-ready junk since none of it lasted, and how Rain had improved their lives.
    When Bride asked her when and where Rain came from, Evelyn sat down and poured some of the liquor into a cup.
    “It took a while to get the whole story,” she said. Bride listened intently. Anything. Anything to stop thinkingfirst about how her body was changing and second how to make sure no one noticed. When Evelyn handed her the T-shirt as she stepped out of the tub, Evelyn didn’t notice or say a word. Bride had spectacular breasts when rescued from the Jaguar; she had them in Whiskey Clinic. Now they were gone, like a botched mastectomy that left nipples intact. Nothing hurt; her organs worked as usual except for a strangely delayed menstrual period. So what kind of illness was she suffering? One that was both visible and invisible. Him, she thought. His curse.
    “Want some?” Evelyn pointed to the tin box.
    “Yeah, okay.” She watched Evelyn’s expertise and took the result with gratitude. She coughed with the first toke, but none thereafter.
    They were silently smoking for a while until Bride said, “Tell me what you meant by finding her in the rain.”
    “We did. Steve and I were driving home from some protest, I forget what, and saw this little girl, sopping wet on a brick doorstep. We had an old Volkswagen back then and he slowed down, then put on the brakes. Both of us thought she was lost or her door key was. He parked, got out and went to see what was the matter. First he asked her name.”
    “What did she say?”
    “Nothing. Not a word. Drenched as she was, she turned her head away when Steve squatted down in front of her, but wow! when he touched her on her shoulder she jumped up and ran splashing off in wet tennis shoes. So he justgot back in the car so we could continue our drive home. But then rain started really coming down—so hard we had trouble seeing through the windshield. So we called it quits and parked near a diner. Bruno’s, it was called. Anyway, rather than wait in the car we went inside, more for shelter than for the coffee we ordered.”
    “So you lost her?”
    “Then, yes.” Evelyn, having exhausted the joint, replenished her cup and sipped from it.
    “Did she come back?”
    “No, but when the rain let up and we left the diner, I spotted her hunched up next to a Dumpster in the alley behind the building.”
    “Jesus,” said Bride, shuddering as though it were she herself in that