by Mary Monroe
No matter what I did, if it impacted Bertha, Libby and Marshall would get involved. It would be just like them not to let me move back into her house. My life had become such a mess. There were times when I wished I could go to sleep and wake up and find out that the last ten years had been a bad dream. I would have given anything in the world to have Daddy, Mama, and even Shirelle back in my life. But I was not dreaming. I was determined to find a way to be happy again whether I gave up marriage and stayed on with Bertha (another twenty or twenty-five more years!) or not.
I could still hear Dr. Brown talking to Bertha, but I had no idea what he was saying. It was only when she addressed me that I put the thoughts running through my head on hold.
“Lola, you can go on home. I’ll be fine,” she insisted, sounding much stronger.
Dr. Brown gave me a guarded look. “I’d like to keep her overnight. She can go home tomorrow morning between ten A.M. and noon.”
I dialed Maurice’s number as soon as I got home. “Baby, we need to take a break for a while. My stepmother needs more time to get used to you,” I told him when he answered. I braced myself and held my breath. The inside of my mouth tasted like I had been sucking on a cotton ball. I had to swallow hard to keep from gagging.
Maurice took his time responding. He grunted and began to speak in a hard, detached voice. And that didn’t surprise me. But I was surprised that he was still speaking to me at all after the way Bertha had talked to him in the hospital. “I’ve been expecting you to say something like that.”
“She’s getting old and she really depends on me to take care of her. She’s afraid that the more time I spend with you, the less time I’ll have for her.”
“Lola, that woman has two grown-ass children. They both live just a couple of miles from her. Shouldn’t the bulk of the responsibility of taking care of her be on their shoulders? This woman is only your stepmother.”
Maurice’s last comment was a sad song that I’d been singing to myself since the day Bertha latched onto me. It didn’t matter to me that she was only my stepmother and that her children lived nearby. The emotional tug-of-war, which I couldn’t seem to get rid of, had won another round. “I have to hang up now. Can we talk more about this some other time?”
“I guess we’ll have to.” He paused for a few seconds. Then he began to speak in a voice that sounded even harder and more detached than a few moments ago. “You’ve made your decision. Good-bye, Lola.”
“Good-bye, Maurice.” I had a feeling this was our last “good-bye.”
I was right. I never heard from him again.
Three weeks after Maurice had dumped me, Joan took it upon herself to “cheer” me up by playing matchmaker. “Reed’s friend Paul Sibley just broke up with his wife. If I invite him over for dinner, will you come?” she asked during a brief telephone conversation.
“I don’t think so. I never have much luck with blind dates,” I told her with a dry laugh. “And Bertha would probably scare him off too.”
“Not Paul. Nothing scares him. He’s the only one of Reed’s friends I know who can really stand his ground. His ex mother-in-law was a real bitch, but it never bothered him.”
“Hmmm. What does he look like?” I wanted to know.
“Now, you know I wouldn’t set you up with an owl!” Joan laughed. “He’s tall, dark, and handsome—picture a young Denzel Washington.”
I gasped. “A man like that doesn’t have a new woman yet?”
“Relax. He’s only been back on the market for a couple of weeks. So if you’re interested, you’d better move fast. The other bitches are in heat.”
I laughed. “Well, why not? I need something to take my mind off Maurice.” I sniffed and swallowed hard. “I’d love to meet a man that Bertha couldn’t scare. How soon can I meet him?”
“He works on weekends, so is this coming Monday soon enough?”
“Sounds good to me. What kind of work does he do?” I was more than a little excited by now. Most of Reed’s friends were in the medical profession. His closest friend was also a dentist and another one was an eye doctor. “Is he a doctor too?”
“Something like that.” When Joan paused, I got suspicious.
“Uh-oh. What does that mean?”
“He’s the assistant coroner. . . .”
“Oh.” My heart skipped a beat. “So his ‘patients’ are dead people. . . .”
“I guess you could say that.”
I let out a dry laugh. “I think I’ll pass.” I recalled the image of Mama laid to rest in a yellow dress. A guest at the funeral had told me that it looked like me lying in that coffin. Then there was that eerie picture that Joan had taken of me lying on her bed with my eyes closed while wearing a yellow blouse. I looked like a dead girl. The last thing I wanted in my life now was a lover who was so closely associated with death.
I didn’t sleep much that night. And when I did, I had a dream that was so chilling it woke me up. In the dream, I lay dead in a coffin dressed in a yellow shroud.
I stayed busy so I wouldn’t think about Maurice too much or the “premonition” of me being dead—which I kept telling myself was ridiculous! I waxed the floors twice as often as I used to and I ran more errands for neighbors.
Last Saturday, a month after my last conversation with Maurice, Joan and I spent almost three hours doing volunteer work for the senior citizens at the Happy Meadows nursing home. This was the second time in the same week. I washed and braided two old ladies’ hair; Joan trimmed one old man’s toenails; we played Chinese checkers with two other residents; we read the newspaper to two more. Afterward, we both felt real good about ourselves and couldn’t wait to return and do something else. The director stopped us on our way out and told us not to come back because a few staff members had complained about us taking work away from them and were threatening to go to the union. Getting “fired” was bad enough, but to add insult to injury, they had a security guard escort us out of the building! We were just as stunned as we were disappointed.
“They fired us! Do you believe that?” Joan hollered as we trotted to the lot across the street where she had parked.
“And to think we were giving up our time to work for free. So much for that,” I said as we climbed into her car.
When she stopped for a red light at the corner, we looked at each other and burst out laughing. “I guess we’ll have to figure out other ways to make up for taking money from those old men,” she said, laughing some more.
But at least we had made some amends for our crime by helping out at the nursing home. Now that that was over, I was going to look for other ways to redeem myself
Each new day, I felt a little better about myself and how much I had grown up since Daddy had died. I was determined to be the kind of woman he and Mama would have wanted me to be.
I often thought about my past and how happy I’d been during my childhood, even when Daddy was having affairs. Because of my age back then, I could not have said or done anything about what he was doing. I still wondered what made him do what he did, and what made Mama put up with it. One thing I knew for sure was that I was not going to be like her. If my future husband cheated on me and flaunted his affairs in my face, I’d leave him in a heartbeat.
Chapter 28
Joan
2012
IT WAS HARD FOR ME TO BELIEVE THAT I WAS NOW THIRTY YEARS OLD. It was even harder for me to believe that I was still with Reed.
Even though I was still a young woman, I felt old. Life was passing me by and I didn’t like it. I was not going to wait too much longer before I did something about it. Years ago I had considered having an affair. But I’d put if off because I hadn’t been able to find the right man in the bars, parties, and other social gatherings I’d attended back then. I’d even flirted with a bank teller at Citibank until he invited me to have lunch with him. When I told him over Whoppers and fries in the Burger King across the street from the bank that I was married to a dentist, all he suddenly wanted to talk
about was his financial problems. He was so brazen, he had the nerve to tell me he hoped I’d be able to help him out from time to time. “Just a few dollars now and then, baby.” I had no desire to be some broke-ass man’s sugar mama back then, or now. I started going to a different branch of Citibank to do our banking, but I kept looking for the right man.
A few days later, a handsome dude in a suit approached me on a busy street downtown. I told him I was married, but he still insisted on giving me his telephone number and told me he wanted to get to know me. When I called his number that night to see when he wanted to get together, a woman answered. Thinking she was his mother or some other female relative, I told her the reason for my call. She cut me off in the middle of a sentence, cussing and threatening to kill me if she ever caught me with her husband. I couldn’t get another word in edgewise, so I abruptly hung up.
After that fiasco with the lonely hearts club, I had no desire to get involved with another woman’s husband. I kept looking and it took a couple more months before I came across another man I liked enough to cheat on Reed with. He was the son of one of my stepfather’s friends. Before we could get together alone, I found out he was addicted to crack cocaine and had just come out of rehab for the second time in the same year. I wasted no time scratching him off my list.
I gave up on finding a lover and my life went on, more miserable than ever.
Despite everything I had, I was too unhappy for words. I was so bored and dissatisfied with Reed I wanted to scream. Our marriage had gradually become so stale, I could barely stand it. We hardly ever went out anymore, and some days we went for hours without speaking to one another. We had so little in common with each other’s relatives and friends, we didn’t have many visitors and we rarely visited anybody together. That was how we managed to hide how bad things were between us. But it was hard to hide too many things from Junior.
“Mama, how come you and Daddy don’t talk no more?” he asked. The three of us occupied the same living-room couch, watching Toy Story on DVD. Other than when I yelled at the characters on the TV screen, Junior was the only one I had spoken to in the last two hours.
Reed sat on one end of the couch; I sat on the other. Junior, who was a little pudgy for a twelve-year-old, sat squeezed between us. He was only half-watching the program and fiddling with some baseball cards at the same time.
Reed and I glanced at each other at the same time. I blinked. He scratched the back of his head. Even though my son had directed his question to me, it was Reed who responded. “Your mommy and I do enough talking when you’re not around,” he said with a weak chuckle.
His answer wasn’t enough for Junior. Not only was my son big for his age, but he was inquisitive for his age too. He turned to me, tugging on the sleeve of my blouse. “You don’t hug and stuff no more, either, like you used to when I was a little boy.”
“Honey, your daddy and I are still very much in love. But as adults get older, they show their feelings in different ways.”
“What ways?” Junior asked, looking so confused I felt sorry for him.
Just before I was about to offer another feeble response, the telephone rang and somebody knocked on the front door at the same time. Reed leaped up to go answer the door and I leaned over to pick up the telephone on the stand at the end of the couch.
Brandon Martin, the airline pilot who lived next door, had come to advise Reed to put his brand-new Lexus in the garage. It was street-cleaning night, which meant no parking on the street between the hours of seven and nine. That got Reed out of the house and I was sure he was relieved. Brandon was rather long-winded, so I knew he’d detain him for at least ten minutes. The telephone call that had saved me from making a fool of myself in front of my son was from Too Sweet. She wanted to remind me to bring the extra bottle of bath salts I had promised to bring to the house on my next visit. To keep her talking, I asked about everybody individually in the house at the time, which was quite a mob. By the time I got to the sixth person, my sister Marguerite’s best friend, Nancy Dixon, Too Sweet could stand no more. “Look, Joan. I don’t have time to sit here all night. Everybody is doing all right. So let me get off this phone.”
A few seconds later, Reed came back inside, but he didn’t return to the living room. He went to our bedroom, where he stayed for the rest of the night.
I was apprehensive about tucking my son in for the night because I was afraid he’d say something else about me and Reed. But he didn’t and I breathed a sigh of relief. I rushed out of his room as quickly as I could and returned to the living room, where I leafed through a stack of recent family photos of just myself, Reed, and Junior. We all looked so happy. But I didn’t know how much longer I could keep up my part of the act. Had it not been for my precious son, I probably would have lost my mind by now. He was the glue that held the family together. But a young boy could only do so much in such a fragile situation.
An hour after I had made sure Junior was in bed and not playing around on his new computer, I peeked in on Reed. He was snoring like a bull. I got a blanket and some pillows out of the hallway linen closet and made up a bed for myself on the living-room couch.
I wanted to have several more children, but there was no way in the world I was going to have another baby with Reed. Our marriage had been on life support for a long time and I thought about pulling the plug, more and more, with each new day.
So far, Lola was the only person I had confided in.
“I don’t know why you stay in a relationship that makes you so miserable,” she told me during happy hour at Tiny’s Bar, a hole-in-the-wall of a building in the same block where she worked. It was a Thursday evening, a week after the awkward conversation with my son. I had not called her first to let her know I was coming. But when I showed up at her work a few minutes before she clocked out, she was happy to see me, anyway, and eager to go join me for a few drinks and some of the delicious complimentary fried chicken wings “Tiny” served if you bought at least one drink. In less than an hour, we were already on our third drinks.
I had nibbled on only two of the wings in the basket on our table while Lola gobbled them up, left and right, and signaled for the waiter to bring another basket. We still weighed about the same, but a few things on my body had shifted. She was still as firm as ever and rarely worked out. I had not done much to stay in shape during my pregnancy. Now I had to work hard and eat right to look good in my clothes.
Lola kept chewing like a rabbit, but her eyes got big when I responded to her comment. “You’re a fine one to talk! At least I’m in a miserable relationship with a man. You’re in a miserable relationship with your stepmother. You could have married Maurice and be living God knows where in the world by now.”
“I’m dating regularly, so I’ll eventually meet someone I can work on a future with. And you’re also a ‘fine one to talk.’ You told me that you and Reed go for weeks without having sex. Knowing what a ‘hot mama’ you are, that must drive you crazy.” Lola laughed but I didn’t find her comment funny.
“Sometimes we do ‘go for weeks without having sex.’”
“That’s what I just said.”
“That doesn’t mean I go for weeks without having sex, Lola.”
“I’m not sure your masturbation sessions count,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“That’s not what I’m talking about. . . .”
A digital camera couldn’t have captured the look of disbelief on Lola’s face. You had to see it in person to believe. “Lord have mercy,” she mouthed. “Are you going to confess to me that you’re having an affair?” I could tell from the amused look on her face that she didn’t think I was serious. It took only a few seconds for her to realize how serious I was.
I sniffed and smoothed down the sides of the fresh hairdo I had treated myself to at the beauty shop a few hours ago. I took my time responding. “Something like that . . .” I stopped talking and looked in Lola’s eyes and winked.
That made her mouth drop open so
wide I could see bits and pieces of chicken on her tongue. “Woman, don’t you dare go silent on me now. If you are getting it on with another man, you’d better tell me. I know you too well, so I’ll know if you’re lying or not telling me everything.” Lola had no idea that she was about to find out she didn’t know me as well as she thought.
“Yep! This woman is ‘getting it on’ and on, and on some more,” I quipped. It took a few moments for her to react to my words.
Her hand froze in midair with another chicken wing inches in front of her mouth. “Did you just say what I think you said? You’re having an affair?”
I nodded.
“You little devil.” Lola dropped her piece of chicken back into the basket and took a long drink from her wineglass. After a mild belch, she continued. “I should have known something was going on with you. The way you’ve been smiling and glowing these past few weeks. Reed was right! You’re involved with another man. Is it somebody I know?”
“Well, it’s not just a man. . . .”
“There’s more than one?”
I had planned to tell Lola sooner or later the dirty little secret I had been keeping from her, and now seemed like a good time. “I’ve been visiting some dating sites.” I heard Lola suck in some air, but I didn’t give her time to respond. “I should have done it years ago, but I kept putting it off, hoping things would improve between Reed and me. I eventually got so frustrated I changed my mind and jumped on the bandwagon, so to speak. I spent hours on my computer the first night. I didn’t bother with any of the mushy sites like eHarmony and ChristianMingle. They cater to people who are interested in serious relationships or marriage. The sites I’m focusing on are for people who are interested only in casual, no-strings-attached sexual relationships with like-minded people.”
