Virginia K. Nalencz

Counting by Fours

     It was February,1963, in the Bronx. We were living in the projects then, in Highbridge where we could see the river and be reminded that there was a way out, when Yusef Powers discovered us singing at the Sweethearts' Soirée at Jordan L. Mott High School. We called ourselves the Del-Motts; the name was my idea, a bow in the direction of our school. That night we wore the short green outfits: black sheath dresses green-gilded with hundreds of shiny disks sewn on by Mama, disks the size of quarters that sparkled when we did our dips and turns. Our hair was pomaded up into glistening French twists. We were a vision in the desert, a mirage that glowed above the horizon where a thirsty traveler knew there was a well of pure water. The house band accompanied us--tenth graders on drums and the coolest of the seniors on guitar, plus Miss O'Connor the music teacher on piano--but we were really an a capella group then, four girls who sounded like birds calling to one another in a forest.

     Twenty minutes before the dance, we were more like crows scrapping over a length of telephone wire. "You better draw those lips again, Lila honey," said Donita. "No 'Fire and Ice' by Revlon gonna make you look like Little Miss Pretty Mouth. Those big lips gonna be right out there, front and center." Donita swung her hips and took over the speckled mirror in the girls' bathroom.

     Lila leaned right in with her mascara wand. She looked Donita in the eye, via the mirror. "I suppose your lips are more refined on account of your granddaddy being a white man. " Marie handed the hairspray can over to me, her eyes on the four eyes in the mirror.

     "Why, sure, my granddaddy is a white man, and what of it?" Donita reached into her bag and drew out an eyelash curler. She squeezed her eyelashes between the metal rods without so much as a blink. " I suppose my great-great-granddaddy could have owned your great-great-granddaddy." Donita liked to get in these little digs. They didn't mean much. She snapped her purse shut, confident of victory. But I knew Lila.

     "Maybe," Lila purred, "May-be. And maybe my four- times-great granddaddy ate your four-times- great-granddaddy."

     We marched out the door together and onto the stage, our teeth showing like piano keys. Later on, when they'd ask in interviews whether we'd always been like sisters we'd trot out that keyboard smile. "Oh yes, just like sisters," we'd say.

     In four months we were going to graduate from high school. Lila's and Marie's and Donita's mamas and daddies and brothers and aunties would all be saying how proud they were: the Del-Motts would be the first in their families to graduate, unless you went reaching out toward cousins and such.

     My Mama was different: she treated the prospect of my graduation as a matter of course. She'd had to leave school early herself. "I was a good student," she told me, more times than I can count, "but I could sew like I was born with thread spinning out of my fingers, like ole' Rumplestiltskin spinning straw into gold." Back in Georgia, her folks needed that gold she could spin, so she said good-bye to her schoolbooks with tears in her eyes, at the end of the sixth grade, and went to work as a seamstress. She kept after me though, taught me to recite the presidents of the United States, in order, up to Dwight D. Eisenhower when I was five years old. It all paid off with a high school average good enough to get me into Hunter College of the City of New York, which had free tuition and the best education a woman could find, according to Mama.

     That winter we sat together in the evening, Mama and me, at the table under the lamp, reading the college catalog. The lampshade had a silk fringe, and beyond the feathery shadows the room was dark, so we leaned in close to read about what I was going to study. "Organic Chemistry," I intoned like a preacher. "Preparation, properties and reactions of aliphatic and aromatic organic compounds. Laboratory including a variety of syntheses parallel to the lectures."

     "That's what you need to be a doctor," Mama said. She'd been dreaming of medicine for me ever since I'd skipped third grade.

     "You going to be a nurse?" the ladies at church would ask me.

     "Doctor," Mama would correct them, and their noses would twitch the way a rabbit's does when he sniffs a hound nearby.

     "Where's the money coming from? You don't become no doctor out of the projects." That's what the church ladies were thinking, and so was I, but I never asked.

     For the Sweethearts' Soirée on Valentine's Day the gym was dolled up with streamers and paper doilies with candy-heart mottoes like "Thrill Me," and "OooBaby" and some ruder ones added by the boys who were taking Mr. Thomas' woodshop class for the second time. The Del-Motts were getting ready to do our last number, "Party Lights," when I saw the man in the silver suit. This man walked up to the edge of the stage. He gave off a shine when he walked, and he claimed the stage with his hand, resting it onstage, showing off his fat diamond ring. "Mr. Silver, he is in no hurry," Donita drawled, as if she didn't care whether or not he heard.

     "Party lights, I see the party lights, red and blue and green," we chanted, and the drums kicked in. Marie sang lead, jingling through the story of the girl who was left outside, looking at the lights. Her mama won't let her go to the party, and something about the jangle from the tambourine says: this girl is a loner by her very nature. The song always touched me; what I yearned for myself, more than anything, was to belong, but I feared I was that girl, a loner at heart. Marie's voice made every brother and sister in the room rise up and dance. We had power when we sang, zapping through us like an electric shock. I almost forgot about Mr. Silver when I let the beat carry me in the song.

     We hustled to get off the stage before the applause died down. Looking backward like it was some square-dude choo-choo finale, we all strained over our shoulders for a last glimpse of the silver man. He was on the short side, but lean, with small features, not too broad a nose, and wavy, shining hair. His light suit made his skin look darker than it was. "He don't look like no chaperone," I whispered to Lila.

     "Doesn't look," she hissed. "Don't say 'don't.'" I felt my face burn in the dark; I despised making mistakes in my grammar, especially in front of Lila. We pushed our way through the crowd of kids, the stage crew, who were hanging around, sneaking cigarettes.

     "Yeah, so OK, he's not a chaperone," said Marie. The girl cast so much oil on troubled waters, she must've had a hundred-gallon jug hidden away somewhere. But I was grateful to Marie; she let me go on with dignity in the face of Miss Lila's superiority. "Then I ask you most correctly, who might that gorgeous gentleman be?" Marie grinned at me, acknowledging our complicity.

     "I think we gonna be finding out real soon," said Donita. She spun her index finger around in circles that ended with a red arrowpoint to stage left.

     "Yusef Powers," he said, bowing to each of us in turn. We gaped like he was Bugs Bunny, hopping backstage. "Power-Band Recordings, Inc.," he added. I felt my heart turn into one of those space rockets; it shot off, looking for the end of the sky.

     Everyone in the projects knew the name Power-Band. Having Yusef Powers hear you sing was like getting picked to play forward for the Knicks, like having your horse come in on a twenty-to-one shot at the Long Island Raceway. Power-Band had signed the best groups from the street corners of the five boroughs: Jerome and the Valentines from Bedford Park, the DeWitts from Clinton High School, and, most important for us, the top girl group, scooped up from a brownstone stoop at 116th Street, the Sequins. Those girls had harmonies we all craved, and even more they had gowns that clung to their bodies like they were carved on by the wind, and hair and nails that spoke of hours of careless care, and the Queen-of-the-Nile manners that outfoxed the foxes.

     "Might I join you ladies for a moment at a table?"

     There were a couple of rickety card tables and chairs in the rear of the gym, hidden behind the backs of the boys who wanted to take in the stage with their eyes but not take a girl in their arms for a dance, oh no, not Percy Deland, nor James Thompson, Jr., nor their so-tough club-brothers. In the eleventh grade Donita had herself some nervous weeks, thinking she might be presenting JT Jr. with a little JT III. Either she got lucky or she bounced hard enough jumping Double Dutch, and by Valentine's Day he wouldn't even ask her to dance.

     Yusef Powers pulled out four chairs in turn and brought us cups of punch. "That's a sweet sound you girls have--you sisters by any chance?"

     "Lord, no," said Marie, giggling so that her green disks shook in the dim light; the lighting fixtures in the gym were covered with gel caps for the dance, and some thirteen-year-old had guessed wrong that red would be romantic.

     Lila leaned across the table and put out her hand as if she were inserting it into a long white glove. "Lila Sutton," she said, while Yusef Powers pumped the hand up and down. "So pleased to meet you. My friends and I"--she mentioned our names--"are neighbors in the Abraham Lincoln Apartments." I'd never heard the Lincoln projects called any such thing. We shook hands all around like we were looking to be elected to something.

     "Have you been singing together long?" Yusef Powers asked when the glad-handing stopped.

     Donita opened her eyes real wide, so that the man could dive right into them if he had a notion to do any swimming. "Since forever," she breathed.

     I gripped my punch cup on the table, to feel something cool in my hands.

     "We met in the church choir when we were little children," I said. I felt I had to sing a straight line after Donita's twittering curlicues. "The Reverend made us into a group called the BabySoul Quartet of the Holiness Church. We won a few contests around the city." I was trying so hard to show that I was the intelligent one, I would have told him the principal products of North Dakota if I'd had the chance. Donita started humming her favorite tune for getting on my nerves: "If I Can't Sell It, I'll Keep Sittin' on It."

     "Well now," said Yusef Powers. He was a man who could give the impression of being very polite and at the same time of not listening to a word you said. You felt he was doing you a favor, passing over your foolish effusions without comment. "I'd like to hear you sing down at the studio," he said.

     "I did not raise up my daughter to be an entertainer," Mama said, and the way she spoke the last word she might as well have said "village idiot."

     "What are you saying, Mama? You helped us with our costumes, you let us rehearse..."

     "I did it so's you wouldn't find yourselves some worse trouble," she huffed. Mama was a tiny lady--I was a head taller by the time I was twelve years old--but she could puff herself up like a bullfrog when she wanted to cast a shadow over me. We'd be having ourselves a debate and I'd look over to find she'd grown bigger, no explanation provided. She was standing at the yellow formica table in the kitchen, mixing up some cornbread. Every time her spoon went round through that viscous gold meal in the bowl she seemed to pick up an ounce more of conviction. " And you will not be dropping out of college afore you drop in. That's all to that."

     I had a trick of my own, during debates with Mama, to keep myself from boiling over. It was those presidents she taught me; they were better than counting to ten. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison; I ticked through the list in my mind. If I said them in groups of four, the argument would generally be over before I reached Kennedy.

     I sat down at the other end of the table and buttered the insides of four oblong pans. If it was Saturday, then Mama was baking cornbread for tomorrow's church supper, and it was most definitely Saturday, the day after the Sweethearts' Soirée. "I want to go to college," I said, trying out the sound of it for the hundredth time. The heat came on and banged in the radiators; it bubbled up like my hopes. Mama turned so that her profile was outlined by the feeble winter sunlight coming through the sixth-story window. She had full lips and high cheekbones, from some Cherokee ancestor, marauding or amorous, she said, but I could see her chin trembling. It made me afraid to bear children, seeing how the love of them could shake a person like that. "If you want college, then what are you doing fooling around with Yusef Powers?"

     Monroe, John Quincy Adams--saying that name in full had a particularly calming effect. "It's just an audition. Down at the Hudson Building. Corner of Lexington and 40-something."

     "Go down to the crossroads and meet the devil," Mama remarked to the mixing bowl.

     Jackson. Van Buren. HarrisonTylerPolkTaylor.

     "What do you want, goin' on the chitlin' circuit, different bad hotel every night, what kind of life is that?" When Mama got angry, Georgia came creeping back into her talk. Her voice joined the jumble of voices in my head, the racket from the worst-matched choir in the world. Down in the warm bass pit was Mama's Georgia rumble, shook up with drumbeats from the Del-Mott's greatest hits, the ones I could hear coming from the future in the dreamy moments before I fell asleep each night. And on top was my own voice like a ding-dong bell, alone in the Hunter College bookstore, reading off my shopping list, greedy as a millionaire.

     "Who said anything about the chitlin' circuit? The big acts at Power-Band play at the Copa."

     "Well I see!" Mama slapped the formica in triumph; the pink underside of her hand on its way down filled my vision like a fighting banner. "I see now what you're dreamin.' Diamonds fallin' in your champagne glass, I suppose."

     The butter was sinking into my fingertips as I swirled it round and round the pans.

     "You always told me to set my standards high," I crooned.

     She laid down her spoon and bowl and came over behind me to rub my shoulders. "That I did, honey. That I did." For a minute or ten, I couldn't tell, I gave in to the luxury of her kneading hands, fixing me up like a good loaf of bread. Then I felt her hands give up their hopefulness and drop from my shoulders. She walked around to face me. "You know what happens when that Copa club owner asks his wife, can he invite the Del-Motts over to their table, or even to their house for dinner? His wife, she's smart. She doesn't talk about race, she talks about comfort. She says to him, 'Oh, they might not be comfortable if I was to ask them.' And he thinks he has a nice thoughtful wife because he was beginin' to be uncomfortable at the idea too. And you stay on the outside of their world." She stared out the window at a piece of newspaper caught flapping on the fire escape. "Or else you inside his world in all the wrong ways."

     "I can take care of outside and inside. I only want to sing. Long as they let me sing, they can keep their dinners."

     "Honey, it ain't that simple. When you grow older, you see how it all comes 'round to who has dinner with who."

     "Mama, that's gonna happen anyway, whatever I do. Same thing if I'm a doctor or a teacher." Now I felt like the wise one. I had thought about all this.

     "That may be, but if you entertain"--there was that emphasis on the heathen word again-- "you are asking for approval. If you teach or fix broken bones, you are not asking, you are doing, approval or no approval. What's your act come to without applause?" Fillmore. Pierce. Buchanan. Lincoln.

     The elevator was broken so I zoomed down six flights of stairs. The stairwell, the sunless town square of the projects, had flaking gray walls, a message from the city planners to the tenants: this crumbling dark place is good enough for the likes of you. And the graffiti on the walls and the urine stink said: we hate you too, right back. I zipped past the playground where the play was all buying and selling, past the chain-link fence that protected the trash bins from being molested, out to the little patch of dead grass where I stopped so short, I could feel the cartilage in my knees go jiggling in protest. I could feel that cold river damp sneaking up under the cuffs of my dungarees.

     I could see High Bridge arcing over the river, a series of arches like an aqueduct. My history class in senior year had started with the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans, the inventors of the aqueduct. Mrs. Gardiner, my teacher, was smart enough to almost whisper so we'd quiet down and listen to her stories about Pharaoh and the old Egyptian boys and so forth. One day she said that people had all different ideas about how the Roman Empire fell, but it really came down to one thing.

     "Barbarians!" Percy Deland shouted. "Barbarians!" It was the only part of history he ever learned about, barbarians. He loved to take up a whole period, when he could get away with it, talking about "the human wave assault from the East." The Vandals were a real breath of fresh air in Roman times, according to Percy.

     "One thing," Mrs. Gardiner said, in a voice as quiet as a tissue crumpling. "One thing," she said, once there was no sound but the clock ticking down the hall. "The Roman Empire fell because the people forgot how to repair the aqueducts." In the times of upheaval, she told us, they didn't keep up their public works. One generation, that's all it took to forget. The next generation had no idea how to do it. They patched things up as best they could. But the aqueducts began to fall down and the cities were without fresh water, so the people went back to the countryside or squatted in the ruins, next to fallen columns, and that was the end of the Empire.

     We jounced on the subway downtown to the Hudson Building. Donita got a snag in her stocking from the straw seats, but it didn't matter, we looked fine, shivering in our black velvet jackets. "Can I take your coats?" the receptionist at Power-Band asked, and we all mumbled our no's and thank you's and grabbed our pelts like they were our own skins, we were so proud of our black velvet. Besides, didn't that girl at the desk know you can't be a singing group without the matching outfits?

     She led us into a room with acoustic tiles and music stands and wires wriggling all over the floor. Lila was looking as though being in a recording studio was just a bowl of oatmeal on a winter morning, something she wanted all right, but nothing out of the ordinary.

     "How do you do, ladies?" The man behind the glass leaning into the microphone was Yusef Powers in his everyday incarnation, not a big god like Zeus in his silver glow at nighttime but one of the working gods like Hephaestus, busy in his forge making weapons. My bones were all a-tremble. I peeped around at Lila and Marie and Donita and they fixed right on me because I was the pitch, no need for any pipe or piano. We were going to start out sharp and sassy with "Please Mr. Postman." The musicians filed in and plugged in their amps.

     "You pay no mind to those cats." Yusef Powers' voice filled the room again, and this time he sounded more like Zeus, up on top of Mt. Olympus getting ready to hurl some thunderbolts. "We'll let the band get settled, " Zeus ordered, "and in the mean time, why don't you start us off with something spiritual?"

     "Oh glory," Donita muttered.

     "Yeah, fine," I said. "We'll do 'Glory Hallelu'." If anything could be called a raucous spiritual, it was "Glory Hallelu," and it showed off our four-part harmonies. I hummed a sweet pure G and the others in their own heads grouped their voices around it, tighter than the fingers of a hand coming together to pick up something it wants so bad. I tapped my foot four times, took a breath, and we slid right into "Glory, glory." When Lila, the lowest alto, came in with "And there were angels singing," I could feel the three of them throw their shoulders back and decide to ride this chariot the way we always did.

     I made my voice big for the solo verse that tells of the babe born on the cold night, and then I sank back into the cushion of the surrounding voices when we quieted down for the plaintive transition: But he seemed like such a tiny baby to be sent to save us all. That little bit of song was neither verse nor chorus properly, just a moment to think and breathe. It was then that the word "sister" stole into my mind. It wasn't Sister This nor Sister That nor Sister Flute passing out in church when the testifying took her consciousness away. I thought, "my sister," of each of them, of Lila and Donita and Marie and I wished the word were cleaner so that I could say it the way a man can say "my brother." I wanted a solemn baritone rumbling, to show I was serious, not the silly contralto who is supposed to be fighting with the soprano over the tenor.

     Glory, glory, we sang in exaltation, Marie and Donita and Lila and me, all concentrating on the meld of our voices and at the same time not concentrating at all, only swinging into the rhythm of the song. Sing out loud and sing out clear: the one part of the song we sang in unison made us smile, reminding us of how much we were together in this "Glory," even when the ending broke us into our four parts that fit together like a hand closing around the uuu: Hallelu.

     The "Amen!" from the control room and the amens from the musicians wrapped us in a furry quilt. I imagined High Bridge in a warm country by a blue sea, with water sluicing through troughs atop the arches. The truth was that I loved learning about olden times and atomic numbers and cell division, and I knew I could forget it quicker than the Romans forgot their construction techniques. Music was different. Music went coursing through me just like the water over that old aqueduct.

     When she saw how much I wanted to sing, Mama had to let me go. Maybe it broke her heart; she never told me so. She read the Bible some, and then one night she invited all the Del-Motts and their folks over for a fried chicken dinner and gave us her blessing. "She is not my child now," Mama told Lila and Donita and Marie. "She is your child and you are hers. You are all for one another now."

     Yusef Powers signed us to a contract and, first thing, he wanted to change our name from the Del-Motts to one he thought was more commercial. We said No and he said Your choice, and maybe that's why we never made it all the way to the top. We had a few records in the Top Forty-- the highest went to Number Thirteen--and we played in supper clubs and, finally, in Vegas.

     "Je ne regrette rien," I began saying, later on, when people asked about my life. I'd known the expression from 'way back, from Lila's collection of Piaf and Aznavour records, but I didn't feel I could use it until after I'd spent some time in Paris. I was married to a Frenchman for a while too; that was a period in my life when I never quoted Edith Piaf at all.

     It was Marie who ended up with Yusef Powers. Mama went back to Georgia to live with her sister, and I sent her a picture of them, taken at the Copa after our opening night. They are looking into one another's eyes, Marie all decked out in satin and jewels, holding high her glass of champagne. I kept on learning the presidents, and many's the time I've said them to myself, over and over again.

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