Read Online Screening Room by Alan Lightman - Free Book Online

melody in her head, sixty years before her grandson would write it. But the
phasma
was not satisfied. The next morning, sixteen-year-old Anna was walking in the woods when she found a box containing a hundred silver thalers, a gift from the
phasma
that made her ambitious and gracious and that completely changed her life.
    “Which all goes to show,” says Nate, as we creep up to a red light at Poplar and Perkins. “Keep your eyes open. You know what I’m saying?”

You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound Dog

    ( photo credit p3.1 )

Blanche
    On a rainy day in 1960, I got on a bus at the corner of Cherry and Poplar. I was eleven years old, and I was headed downtown. As usual, the white passengers occupied the front seats and the black passengers the rear. There were no empty seats in the front of the bus, so I took a seat in the back, where there were plenty of vacancies. After a few moments, the bus driver pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the bus. He walked back to where I was sitting and gently informed me that I was sitting in the “colored section” of the bus. “But there aren’t any seats up there,” I said, confused. The bus driver stood his ground, waiting patiently for God to make things right. Eventually, one of the white passengers in the front moved over and sat on the lap of another white passenger, creating an empty seat for me.
    When I returned home, I told Blanche. She looked up from her ironing board, her face moist and puffy from working all day, and sighed. “Sometimes, people jez acts crazy.”
Brown v. Board of Education
had done nothing to stop the craziness in Memphis. Blacks and whites not only had separate schools. They had separate toilet facilities, separate drinking fountains, separate lunch counters in the department stores. Blacks and whites were not allowed to visit the Memphis Zoo on the same day. In 1956, at the state’s first grudging gesture toward desegregation at a public high school in Clinton, the demonstrations were so violent that the National Guard had to be called in.
    Blanche had two pleasures in life: smoking Pall Malls and singing in her church choir. She attended a Baptist church on Spottswood. When dressed in her Sunday clothes, she was a bountiful sight, wearing a billowy dress of thick fabric, rings on her fingers, bright red lipstick, blue eye shadow, her hair done up and shining with gel, high heels, and a feathered hat. Blanche had quite a collection of hats because Mother bought her a new hat every year to wear on Easter Sunday. On Saturdays, Blanche would move about our house with a little more vigor than usual, singing black gospels when she thought no one was listening. I grew up on those gospels.
    All of Blanche’s friends went to her church; all of the things she talked about she learned in church. Every month, Blanche spent a weekend at church cooking meals for homeless people. One year, her church was closed for a month to repair water damage, and Blanche walked around in a daze, disoriented, as if a parent had suddenly died. She got absolutely nothing done around the house, and finally Mother told her just to take the month off as a paid vacation.
    Actually, Blanche had one other pleasure. She liked to watch and rewatch movies. Her favorite was Alfred Hitchcock’s
Vertigo
. I remember several occasions over the years when
Vertigo
was shown on television, and Blanche would set up her ironing board by the TV set, screaming every time at the scene where Kim Novak is about to jump from the clock tower.
    Blanche never had any children of her own. For several years, she took care of the three children of a niece who had died at age sixteen of a drug overdose. In the 1950s, Blanche was briefly married to a man named Quentin. She said little about Quentin. “I ain’t met no good men, and I ain’t wasting my time on them no-count men no more.” Blanche also mistrusted doctors and would quietly endure her ailments for weeks without treatment. During