The Ugly Side of Me

by Nikita Lynnette Nichols

  “Malcolm, I’m stuck,” I said seriously. “Will you help me up?”

  “Hold up. I’ll be back,” Malcolm said and went into my bedroom.

  “What do you mean, ‘hold up’? What are you doing? Come on, Malcolm. This water is ice cold on my butt.”

  Suddenly there was a flash of bright light in my face. The fool had taken a picture of my desperate situation with his cellular phone.

  “Oh, my God!” I said. My heart was beating overtime. “No you didn’t, Malcolm! I know you didn’t do what you just did.”

  He was still laughing. “I had to. This is a Kodak moment.”

  I was pissed on top of pissed. “This ain’t funny!”

  I was so hot and bothered that I didn’t want Malcolm to touch me. I was determined to get out of the toilet on my own. He stood laughing while he watched me work up a sweat as I squirmed.

  Malcolm stopped laughing when he saw tears streaming down my cheeks. My shoulders jerked, and I had to suppress terrible words that wanted to escape my throat. Malcolm didn’t question why my shoulders shook vigorously. I guess he thought I was crying uncontrollably. That was when he came and wrapped his arms under my arms and instructed me to wrap my arms around his neck. His feet were spread two feet apart when he took a deep breath and hauled me up from the toilet. Cold water ran down the backs of my legs. I didn’t say anything to Malcolm. I pushed him away from me and started the water in the shower.

  “Come on. Don’t be like that,” he said to me.

  “Leave me alone,” I said with much attitude. I raised my T-shirt over my head and took it off, stepped in the shower, and snatched the shower curtain closed. Malcolm left the bathroom and shut the door behind him. Minutes later I heard the door open again. Malcolm pulled the shower curtain back and stepped in behind me.

  He leaned close to me and whispered in my ear, “I’m sorry.”

  I still didn’t say anything to him. We stood under the cascading water, with Malcolm’s arms wrapped around me, for ten minutes before he took the sponge from my hand and gently washed my body thoroughly.

  If my shower walls could talk, I would never show my face in public again.

  Chapter 26

  I rolled over and looked at my alarm clock. “Oh, my God,” I said. I had mistakenly slept until noon on Sunday. I had had every intention of going to church. Morning service at World Deliverance Christian Center began promptly at ten o’clock. I imagined that Bishop Art Clark was probably opening the doors of the church.

  It was the first Sunday in July, and the saints had probably taken Holy Communion already. “I know it was the blood. I know it was the blood. I know it was the blood for me,” I could imagine the church folks singing.

  Lord knows that I needed to take Communion, but it wouldn’t make much sense for me to get dressed and to drive thirty minutes to church. As soon as I arrived at the church, the benediction would probably be over. It would be a waste of gas.

  I looked at the right side of the bed and saw that Malcolm was gone. I threw the covers off my body and sat up. I must’ve done it too quickly, ’cause I got dizzy for just a second. The whole bedroom had shifted. I sat on the bed for about ten seconds, then stood and went into the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash my face. Afterward, I left the bathroom and glanced in the den and didn’t see Malcolm. I walked to the living room window and parted the mini-blinds and saw that his Navigator was gone from my driveway. I knew for a fact that Malcolm didn’t have to work, so I wondered where he had gone.

  In the kitchen I saw fried bacon and scrambled eggs on a plate wrapped in clear plastic wrap on top of the stove. On the counter, next to the stove, was a note with my name written on it.

  Hey, sleepyhead,

  I’ll be at Brainerd Park, shooting hoops with Ivan and the boys, till around two o’clock. Hit me on my cell if you need me.

  Mal

  I laid the note back on the counter and unwrapped the plate. Immediately, I got sick to my stomach from the smell. I knew I wouldn’t make it to the bathroom, so I opted for the garbage can in the kitchen. Everything that I had eaten the day before came up with a fury. I literally puked my guts out. I went to the stove and picked up the plate and brought it to my nose. I didn’t know if it was the bacon or the eggs, but the smell made my stomach turn. I had just bought the Canadian bacon two days ago and wondered if it had soured already.

  I was worried that Malcolm was feeling ill as well if he had eaten the bacon. I dumped the food on the plate in the garbage, got the remaining uncooked bacon from the refrigerator, and dumped it also. Then I removed the bag from the trash can and tied it shut. I went back to the bathroom and brushed my teeth again and rinsed my mouth with Scope. I heard the telephone ring, and I went into my bedroom, sat on the bed, and picked up the receiver.

  “Hey, girl,” I answered when I saw the name TREVOR BAKER on the caller ID.

  “Hey, whatcha doing?” Anastasia asked me.

  I exhaled. “Not too much of nothin’. I just got up.”

  “Really? Did you and Malcolm have a late night?”

  I thought about the events that had taken place in my bathroom early that morning. “Girl, you don’t even wanna know,” I said.

  “Please spare me the nasty details.”

  “No, it wasn’t nothin’ like that. Malcolm left the toilet seat up, and I fell in the toilet bowl. It was pure drama after that. I cussed, screamed, and hollered. And the fool had the gall to take a picture when he saw that I was stuck down in the toilet.”

  Anastasia laughed out loud. “Girl, what? You better hope you don’t end up on Instagram for the world to see.”

  “I was so doggone mad, I wanted to kill him.”

  “That’s why you’re supposed to look before you squat. I know I have to.”

  “That’s because you share your bathroom with a man. I live alone, so my toilet seat is always down, Stacy.”

  “And for a week you have to share your bathroom with a man,” she reminded me. “Why weren’t you at church today? Bishop Art Clark preached for about fifteen minutes and, girl, we were out of there. It’s the Fourth of July weekend. I guess the bishop had a barbecue to get to.”

  “I was gonna come to church this mornin’, but I forgot to set my alarm clock.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Anastasia moaned. “Are you sure that’s all there is to it, or was it a young tenderoni occupying your time?”

  “No, seriously,” I said. “I was really goin’ to church, but I overslept.”

  “I’m dyin’ to know what happened when Trevor and I dropped you off yesterday. How did it go with Malcolm?”

  “It went all right. I asked if he was screwing Sharonda, and he said that he wasn’t.”

  “Did you really expect him to admit it to you, Rhapsody?”

  “No, not really, but what can I do, Stacy? I don’t have any proof that he is.”

  “Is he there?”

  “No. He went to play basketball with his boys. I’m gonna put a rump roast in the oven, and I guess I’ll make macaroni and cheese for dinner today. Did you cook?”

  “Trevor got up this morning and said he had a taste for beef stew, so I cooked my meat before we went to church. I just gotta add the veggies and make the corn bread.”

  “Ooh, I love your beef stew, Stacy. Save me a bowl, okay?”

  “Okay. Listen, I want you to make a frappé tomorrow for the barbecue.”

  “Why can’t you make your famous homemade vanilla ice cream?”

  “Because I don’t feel like it. I got enough stuff to do. Making the frappé is the least you can do for having me fighting and going to jail with you.”

  She had me cornered. “Okay, you’re right. I’ll make the frappé.”

  “Well, let me get in the kitchen and season the ribs while Chantal is taking a nap.”

  “Is she drinking the formula yet?”

  “Yep. That hungry hippo couldn’t hold out for too long.”

  I chuckled. “Stacy, you are too crazy. I’ll t
alk to you later.”

  After talking with Anastasia, I heated my oven to four hundred degrees and seasoned my rump roast. I cut eight white potatoes into small chunks, sprinkled them with seasoned salt and lemon pepper, and placed them, along with the roast, inside a plastic bag and sealed it tight. I put the roast in the oven to let it cook for an hour and forty-five minutes. On the back of the note Malcolm had left me, I wrote, “Ginger ale and rainbow sherbet,” and then placed it under one of the magnets on the refrigerator to remind me to stop at the mini-mart on the way to Anastasia’s house tomorrow.

  With my Sunday dinner in the oven, I showered and put on a fresh nightgown. I lay across the futon in my den, turned on the television, and flipped to the Lifetime channel. The movie Who Will Love My Children? starring Ann-Margret, had just come on.

  I’d seen this movie twice before and had cried throughout each viewing. Ann played the role of a woman stricken with a rare type of cancer who had only five months to live. She lived on a farm with her husband of fourteen years and seven children ranging in age from six to seventeen. Ann’s husband had been crippled in the knees for many years and needed her help with planting the crops and plowing the fields. When she received the news of her cancer, Ann knew that she had to find homes for her children and a long-term care facility for her husband, and that she had to sell their land within the next five months.

  By the second commercial break, I was already crying. You would think that since I’d seen the movie more than once, I could sit through it without getting emotional. I got a box of tissue from the linen closet and sat it on the table next to the futon. I peed again, the second time in an hour, and then lay on the futon.

  The first of Ann’s children to be placed in a foster home were her two youngest boys. They were six and seven years old, and she was able to place them with a man and a woman who were seeking to adopt. Ann was grateful she could keep the boys together. The boys didn’t know where they were going with a suitcase in each of their hands. It wasn’t until the caseworker knocked on the door of their new home that Ann said good-bye to her sons.

  “Where’re you goin’, Mama?” the six-year-old asked.

  Ann choked back tears. “Mama has to go away.”

  The seven-year-old placed his hand in hers. “Can we go with you, Mama?”

  Ann knelt down to face them. By that time the foster parents had opened the front door. The caseworker stood behind Ann and placed a hand on her shoulder for support. Ann wiped her tears, which she couldn’t prevent from falling from her eyes. “I wish I could take both of you with me, but I can’t.”

  “Why, Mama?” they asked at the same time.

  Watching Ann cry her heart out, I had to blow my nose and wipe my own tears. There was no easy way to tell your children you had to leave them. A mother’s love was priceless.

  I thought about Lerlean and what she had done for me when I was a child. Yeah, I loved my father, and I was grateful that he had always been in the home, where my brothers and I needed him to be. He had made sure we always had a roof over our heads, clothes on our backs, shoes on our feet, and food on our table. And, of course, he had been there to whup our butts when punishment was due. But it was Lerlean who had met us at the door with milk and cookies every day after school. It was Lerlean who had blown strong air into one of Walter’s nostrils to force the bead he had had no business pushing up there to come shooting out the other nostril. It was Lerlean who had applied the balm to Daniel’s knee when he’d fallen off his bike. It was Lerlean’s bosom I had laid my head against when the li’l boy I had had a crush on told me I was fat.

  I didn’t know what I would do if my mama told me she had a disease that would take her away from me. I knew myself very well, and I couldn’t handle it. That was why from that day on, I prayed that God would allow me to die before Lerlean died, and if He didn’t grant me that wish and forced me to attend my mama’s funeral, I would jump right on top of her casket as they lowered it into the ground and tell them to bury me too, because without Lerlean, there would be no Rhapsody.

  I saw Ann turn and walk away from her boys, her pain evident. Simultaneously, they ran after her, and each boy wrapped himself around her legs and cried out.

  “Don’t leave us, Mama.”

  “Please take us with you, Mama.”

  With every ounce of strength she had, Ann picked her boys up and carried them to the door. She gave the fightin’ and kickin’ six-year-old to the man and the screamin’ and hollerin’ seven-year-old to the woman.

  “No, Mama. Please, Mama.”

  “Mama, Mama. We’re sorry for being bad, Mama.”

  Ann ran toward the caseworker’s car. The tears were so thick in her eyes, she could hardly see where she was going.

  “Mama, Mama,” the boys cried after her.

  “Don’t go, Mama. Please don’t go.”

  The caseworker opened the passenger door and sat the distraught Ann inside the car. The new parents had gotten the boys inside the house. Before the caseworker drove away, Ann looked toward the house and saw her boys in the living room window, beating their fists against the glass, crying out to her. She read their lips and knew what they were saying.

  “Come back, Mama. Please come back.”

  During the next commercial break, I realized snot had dripped onto my nightgown. I blew my nose, wiped my tears, and got up to pee again. I didn’t know why I was peeing so much. I hadn’t drunk anything at all. I checked my roast by poking a fork into it. It wasn’t as tender as I liked it to be, so I let it stay in the oven longer. Then I called my parents’ house, ’cause I needed to hear Lerlean’s voice.

  “Hey, Mama,” I said when she answered.

  “Hey, baby.”

  “Whatcha doing?”

  “Getting ready to go to the flea market with your daddy. You wanna go with us?”

  “Nah. I got cramps,” I lied.

  “You got Midol?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, take two pills and lie down. You’ll be all right. Your first two days of your period have always been the worst for you.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said sadly.

  “What’s the matter?” Lerlean had always been able to read my moods. Even if I was smiling and joking, if something was bothering me, she knew.

  “Ain’t nothin’ wrong, Mama.”

  “Okay, well, your father is outside, blowing that horn like a darn fool. I already told him that I was on my way out. This is why I cuss him out every chance I get, ’cause he don’t listen. I done told him before not to be blowing no horn for me. I said, ‘James, just sit your old senile behind in the car until I get out there.’ But I see he forgot, so now I gotta cuss.”

  “Mama, you know the flea market sells out of the good stuff real fast. You got to get there early. It opens at seven, and it’s almost two.”

  “They don’t ever sell out of the crap your father buys. He goes for the seersucker pants, the satin shirts, and the fat white belts with the big chrome buckle. Don’t nobody buy that outdated crap but your daddy. Whether we get there at seven in the mornin’ or ten at night, that crap will be there.”

  I heard the horn blowing through the telephone line, and my mother lost it and yelled out the front window, “James, if blow that horn one more time, I’ma stab you!”

  “Mama, just go. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “I’m so sick of him. I swear before the Lord, come Tuesday, I’ma call around to see if I can put him in a retirement home somewhere.”

  “Daddy’s too young to be placed in a retirement home.”

  “He ain’t gotta go to a retirement home, but he gotta get out of here.”

  I heard the horn again, and my mother yelled out the window, “You wanna die, James?”

  “Bye, Mama,” I said.

  “I’ll call you when we get back, okay? Don’t forget to take the Midol.”

  “I won’t. Hey, Mama?”

  “What, baby?”

  “I l
ove you.”

  “I love you too, Rhapsody.”

  After speaking with my mother, I lay back down on the futon in my den and continued to watch the movie.

  Ann found foster homes for each of her seven children except the oldest, her seventeen-year-old daughter, who would turn eighteen in a few weeks. Ann and her husband allowed her to move in with her best friend’s family.

  Four months passed, and the FOR SALE sign was still in the front yard. Ann had grown very weak due to the chemotherapy and radiation treatments. Every single strand of her hair was gone, and she’d gone from 120 pounds to 95 pounds. She was sitting on the front porch of her home when a white van drove up the driveway. Next to Ann sat her husband in his wheelchair, with a small brown suitcase on his lap.

  He looked at her and said, “So, I guess this is it.”

  Ann looked at her husband of twenty years with tears in her eyes. “I wish it didn’t have to be this way.”

  Two male nurses exited the van and approached the porch. Though she was very weak, Ann raised herself from her chair and kissed her husband’s forehead. She pressed his head into her bosom and held it there. When a tear dropped from Ann’s chin, he felt it run down the side of his face. She looked at the nurses, nodded her head, and motioned for them to come forward. She stood on the porch and watched the strong men in white uniforms carry her husband away. Ann died a week later.

  I cried my butt off. I went through a whole box of tissues. I blew my nose and peed again. I wondered if I had taken a water pill and didn’t remember doing it. By the end of the movie my roast and potatoes were nice, juicy, and tender. It was now 2:45 p.m. Where in the heck was Malcolm? Just as I picked up the telephone to call him, I heard him come in the front door.

  “Hey, sugar baby bubble gum,” he greeted me in the kitchen.

  He was as high as a kite. Malcolm’s eyes were glossy and bloodshot. He leaned forward to kiss me, but I turned my face away, ’cause I could smell what he’d been doin’.