by Mary Monroe
“Why did you write to Mr. Blake in the first place? He looked like a bulldog in his picture.”
“Because he sounded so sweet and generous in his profile. When I received that first letter from him, with that three-hundred-dollar check made out to me, he sounded even sweeter.”
“Every single one of them sounded sweet and generous in their profiles and letters. You were the one who said we should only write to men who lived so far away that we would never have to worry about them sneaking up on us!”
“None of the men did! It was only that one woman!”
“It’s only that one woman, so far. Do you have a telephone number for Mr. Blake? If you do, call him up and see if it’s his wife. And if it is, can you come up with a story to tell him so he can call off that pit bull wife of his?”
“I don’t have his telephone number, but I do believe he’s the one. Some of the stuff he told me in his first letters didn’t jibe with some of the stuff he told me later. First he said that he was a retired army captain collecting a fat pension check every month from Uncle Sam. A few weeks later, he told me he was a retired navy man.”
“Army, navy, so what? What difference does it make what those old men are really doing to get the money they send to us? We need to be worried about the woman who came to my house! Bertha will have a cow if she ever finds out what we’ve been up to, using her address and all. And her kids—oh, God, Bertha’s kids! They will shit bricks and do God knows what to me!”
For a stepmother, Bertha was a nice enough woman. Lola never said anything bad about her except that she whined a lot and kept her on a real short leash. She liked her stepmother and they got along well. But I could totally understand her being scared of her stepmother’s children. Libby and her twin brother, Marshall, were twelve years older than Lola. They were the stepsiblings from hell: “mean,” “self-centered,” and “greedy” were just a few ways to describe those two. There was just no telling what they would do to Lola if they found out what we’d done.
“You’re right,” I agreed. “Those two miserable jackasses would make your life even more of a living hell. I feel sorry for you if they ever find out.”
“You feel sorry for me? You’re the one who dragged me into this lonely hearts club mess! What do you think your mother and your stepfather would say if they found out about our scheme—that you came up with?”
“They wouldn’t be happy about it. But goddamn, somebody’s wife coming to beat me up? I never expected something like that to jump off!”
“Neither did I. If I had, I wouldn’t have let you use my address. Now I’m afraid that the wife of one of the geezers I’m writing to might come here looking for me while I’m at school! We need to figure out a way to get out of this mess before anybody finds out about it.”
It had been my idea for us to write pen pal letters to a bunch of lonely, love-struck old men. I’ll address this issue in more detail later, but I’d like to reveal my side of the basics of this bizarre story now. Anyway, joining a lonely hearts club was originally supposed to be something to do to keep us from getting bored, and a way to kill time between boyfriends. Especially since we had already participated in a previous pen pal project last year in Mr. Maynard’s social studies class.
Writing to teenagers in foreign countries had fizzled out real quick. They had badgered us to send them expensive gifts and forward letters from them to American celebrities, like Will Smith, Denzel Washington, and Madonna. A girl in Uganda had the nerve to ask me to send her a plane ticket so she could come and stay with me for two weeks.
Lola got tired of her pen pals asking her for gifts and favors, so she stopped writing to them after only six weeks. I continued to write to a few—only dudes, though. They were much more interesting than girls—and never asked me to send them gifts or to hook them up with celebrities. I enjoyed corresponding with boys all over the world. Learning about their cultures was good practice for me because one of the things that I thought I wanted to be when I grew up was a journalist for a cool publication like National Geographic.
I had sent my male pen pals some real cute pictures of myself, so they had all fallen in love with me. Writing “love letters” to dudes I had never met, and probably never would, had been a lot of fun, until today.
Chapter 3
Joan
I HAD WRITTEN TO THOSE YOUNG BOYS FOR ABOUT SIX MONTHS UNTIL I got bored. I decided that older people would be much more interesting pen pals for me and Lola to write to, this year.
We joined Aunt Martha’s Friendship Association, which was a fancy way of describing one of those lonely hearts clubs where desperate people hooked up by mail. It was featured in a cheesy confession magazine that came in the mail every month addressed to my unmarried, plain, heavyset, middle-aged cousin. Her name was Flossie, but everybody called her “Too Sweet.” We shared the same bedroom, and in addition to her being a nuisance, she was a slob. She left her magazines all over the place, so I didn’t have to look far to find what I needed. As far as I knew, Too Sweet had no interest in corresponding with strangers. For one thing, she was too cheap to spend money on stamps. When I had my teenage pen pals, she told me one time that she thought it was stupid for me to write letters to strangers telling them my business.
Too Sweet had been reading her magazines for as long as I could remember. Every month, in addition to several lurid confession stories with outrageous titles and provocative illustrations, the last four or five pages in back of the magazines were devoted to mature people looking for love. Their names, profiles, and pictures of them in color were featured in the section called “Let’s Become Friends.” And, boy, did they sound desperate! Some bragged about how “fine” they were and what great personalities they had. Most of the people on the list were women. But there were a lot of men looking for “new friends” too. A few were honest enough to admit that they were not “exactly easy on the eyes” or were “a little on the heavy side,” but that they made up for those flaws in other ways.
The majority of the men and almost half of the women came right out and said they were people of means and didn’t have a problem being generous. That grabbed my attention right away, of course. With that in mind, our original notion—we’d only be writing to a bunch of older dudes for the heck of it—took on a whole new meaning. Once it dawned on me that we could kill two birds with one stone, I decided we could say things in our letters that would make our pen pals send us gifts. But even if they turned out to be stingy and didn’t want to be nice to us, I still thought that communicating with them would be something fun to do. Who wouldn’t want to correspond with people who were all but telling the world that they were willing to practically pay for some attention? Those were the ones we focused on, and the older the better. There were only a few people under the age of fifty. But as far as I was concerned, they were “too young” for what I had in mind. I was acquainted with a lot of people in their fifties, so I knew that their brains were still somewhat fresh and sharp so they’d be too much trouble to get over on.
And we only selected the lonely hearts who lived out of state. Some were as far away as Canada, the Caribbean, Europe, and several Latin American countries. The reason I used Lola’s address was because I couldn’t take a chance on one of my meddlesome family members opening my mail. I’d already had one bad experience in that area and didn’t want to have another one. One of my former teenage pen pals, a gorgeous redhead named Pierre, lived in France. He liked to write sexually explicit letters. I looked forward to reading about the things he would do to my body if we ever met. One day one of my nosy sisters opened one of my letters from Pierre “by accident” and read it. She ratted me out. My whole family was horrified when they found out what I’d been up to. At that point, they all still thought I was a virgin and decided that even “sex by mail” was not acceptable for the “baby of the family.”
Mama told me I could no longer write to Pierre or any other pen pals. I had always been rebellious, so I continued
to write to Pierre. The only difference was I had him send his letters to me in care of my “cousin Lola” at her address.
Lola didn’t have to worry about some busybody opening any mail that came addressed to her. Her biological parents were deceased and her stepsiblings had their own homes, so she and her stepmother lived in the big house on Evelyn Circle alone. Bertha was way too lazy to get off her fat ass and go out to their curbside mailbox to get the mail every day. Lola picked it up when she got home from school during the week and on weekends so we didn’t have to worry about Bertha intercepting any of my correspondence. There was no way I could have let my new pen pals send letters to my address, so that was the reason I had used Lola’s again.
Lola’s loud voice interrupted my thoughts. “What if that lady comes back one day and Bertha answers the door and blows the whistle on you?” she asked. “What in the world would we do then? What would you do if I was forced to tell that lady the truth and where you live? I was lucky enough to get rid of her this morning without too much trouble, but she didn’t look like the kind of woman who would give up on anything too easily. You know how black women are when it comes to men and money.”
“Tell me about it. I hope that lady doesn’t come back and cause a ruckus in front of Bertha. She’s already got one foot in the grave. Something like that would probably make her have a fatal heart attack!”
“Or what if that woman is driving around right now, looking for you, and runs into you on the street when you leave the house? She might even come back to my street and knock on one of my neighbor’s door and ask a bunch of questions about the people at this address. The first thing they’ll tell her is that nobody named Joan lives here, but that I have a best friend with the same name! You know how Mr. Fernandez next door likes to run his mouth.”
“Let’s pray that Mr. Fernandez is not home if and when she returns to the neighborhood. In the meantime, that old battle-axe can cruise around this town all she wants looking for me. She’s never seen me, so she wouldn’t know me from the Queen of Sheba. We didn’t send pictures of ourselves to anybody, remember?”
“Oh, yeah. I forgot.”
Most of the men had requested friendships with women in their twenties and thirties. We had sent each one a recent photograph of my twenty-seven-year-old divorced sister, Elaine. My sister—bitch that she was—got on my last nerve, but I couldn’t deny her beauty. Before she moved back in with us last year, she had lived in L.A. and worked as a swimsuit model for four months. With her big brown eyes, high cheekbones, curly brown hair, and butterscotch-colored skin, she practically had to beat the men off with a stick. Using Elaine’s picture without her permission or knowledge was real deceitful, but we didn’t let that stop us. That was not the only deceitful thing going on, though. I had another scheme in the works that Lola didn’t know about. One of the lonely people I’d been writing to and receiving money orders and checks from was a childless, sixty-five-year-old woman in Miami named Lee Lawson. With a name that could also belong to a man in the return address on the envelopes, Lola had no reason to suspect that I was corresponding with a woman.
In the first sentence of her profile, Lee stated that she was not interested in men in her own age group. She wanted one who was young enough to be the son she never had so she could “mother” him, as well as enjoy his “manly favors.” She bragged about the mansion she owned, the real estate business she ran, and how much money her late husband had left her. Now that she was alone again, she stated, all she was interested in was having a good time with the right person. I couldn’t believe it! A woman that desperate had no business advertising for a young lover in the first place. Couldn’t she find a son/lover in Miami? Didn’t she realize how she was setting herself up to be taken advantage of? I wrote a letter to her five minutes after I finished reading her profile, hoping I’d get to her before somebody else did. Lee looked like a typical woman her age, moon-faced and grandmotherly. The expensive-looking earrings and diamond necklace she wore in her profile picture looked good on her. But the Tina Turner–style wig made her look ridiculous. I sent Lee a picture of a thirty-five-year-old man from my church named Leroy Puckett. I told her that my father had recently left my mother after being married for forty years and she had had a nervous breakdown. I had to work three jobs to help support her. She was so attached to me, her only child, that she couldn’t stand the thought of me leaving her, not even for a woman. Therefore, until my mother got well, all mail to me needed to be addressed to my cousin Joan Proctor. I doubted that Lee would buy such a cock-and-bull story, but the following week I received a three-page letter from her. She told me in the first paragraph that she was so impressed with my letter and good looks, she decided not to write to any of the other men who had responded to her ad. She also said that since I was so good to my own mother, she knew I’d be good to her. In the meantime, she wanted to help me out as much as she could until we could be together. I received a check for a thousand dollars from her the following week so I could buy myself “something nice.”
Maybe it was a good thing that that angry woman came looking for me today because the Lee woman had become real demanding. Last week I received three letters from her on the same day, saying almost the same thing: I had to come to Miami, or return the five thousand dollars she had sent to help me get my car fixed and pay off some bills, so I wouldn’t have to keep working three jobs. I stalled her by claiming some new issues related to my mother had suddenly come up, so I couldn’t come until I resolved them. My plan was to give her enough time to cool off. Then I’d send her a letter telling her that I was going to take my mother to Mexico to live with my uncle Alex. I would explain that I’d be gone for at least three weeks and would write to her again as soon as I could. I actually did have an uncle Alex, my stepfather Elmo’s older brother. And he had moved to Mexico last year. Elmo and some of his friends drove down there a couple of times a month to visit him and do some deep-sea fishing. I planned to accompany them on a future trip and mail a letter from there to Lee so it’d have a Mexico postmark. In the last letter I planned to write to her, I’d tell her that I had to stay down there indefinitely, because I’d been in an accident. I had sustained a broken back and I had no idea how long it would be before I recovered. If she was stupid enough to travel to Mexico to look for me, she’d never find me. The letter I planned to send would have a bogus address. Before I could even write that letter, Lee suggested something I didn’t like and had refused to do with any of my other pen pals: she demanded that I include a phone number in my next letter so she could talk to me.
So far, Lola and I had been able to avoid giving out our phone numbers. We told everybody that first we wanted to get to know them really well. When some of them got too pushy on that subject, we stopped writing to them, and replaced them with new friends. Our lives were complicated enough. The last thing we needed was for some love-struck old person to start pestering us on the phone. The letters were bad enough. One of my pen pals had suffered a stroke a few months ago, so his handwritten letters looked like chicken scratch now and took me twice as long to read as the others.
After what happened today, going to Mexico to send my final letter to Lee was out of the question. I had to send her that letter today.
In the meantime, I was more concerned about the woman who came snooping around today and how we had dragged my innocent sister into our mess.
“Oh, shit! What if that old woman cruises around and sees Elaine swishing down the street?” I wailed.
“‘Oh, shit’ is right. There is just no telling what she might do to her if that happens. She’d probably shoot first and ask questions later. Your poor sister could get beaten up or killed and not even know why!”
“If it comes to that, I’d never be able to forgive myself!”
“Neither would I. You’d better hope it doesn’t come to that,” Lola told me.
Chapter 4
Lola
THE THE THOUGHT THAT JOAN AND I WERE PLAYING A DA
NGEROUS game never crossed my mind, but it should have. She and I knew better! We watched a lot of the true crime TV shows, the daily six o’clock news, and we read the newspapers and tabloids regularly. We knew that there were a lot of stalkers and serial killers running around loose. Like a lot of teenagers, we didn’t think anything bad could happen to us. The truth of the matter was, it was not a stretch for one of our desperate pen pals—or the mate they’d been “cheating” on with me or Joan—to become a stalker or something worse.
“Joan, what have we gotten ourselves into?” I asked, sounding more and more like a scared rabbit as the seconds rolled by. “And your sister!”
“We may have gotten ourselves into a fine mess for sure,” Joan admitted.
“You’re damn right. That lady made it clear that she didn’t come all this way from wherever she came from for nothing. She might run into somebody who knows you! If she comes to your house and sees Elaine, all hell could break loose. That woman had a big purse and there could be weapons in it. I knew this scam was going too good. Why did I ever let you talk me into this shit? What was I thinking? I’ve never done anything this crazy before in my life!”
“Calm down, Lola.”
“Calm down, my ass. We could be in a lot of trouble, so how do you expect me to calm down? If that woman comes back and beats you up, you being pregnant and all, it’ll be all over the newspaper.”
“Let’s not even discuss me being pregnant. That has nothing to do with this new problem we have. And don’t worry, because I’ll figure out something.”
“Well, you’d better figure out something quick. Since that woman is from out of town, she probably won’t hang around here too long. She might decide to try and catch up with Bertha and come back here today or tomorrow.”
