Gumbo

by E. Lynn Harris

  “You're a Southerner, aren't you?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I'm from—”

  “Wait. Let me guess.” She placed her index finger behind her ear as if trying to pick up the radio waves of my accent. “Mississippi!” Her answer wasn't presented as a question so I was more than happy to let her be right. Why not? If I could be Malik, I could be from Mississippi. It was a sister state.

  “Good ear.”

  “Never question a woman's skills,” she said with a self-assured glow. “Southerners are so respectful and well behaved. Everyone knows their place. Lovely.”

  My mood suddenly turned and I began to feel uncomfortable. I felt defensive, but I forced a smile. My life had been built on staying in my place, not rocking the boat. But I wasn't in the South. I was in New York, in Harlem, in a house with Carmen, trying to change the subject, trying to change.

  “Thanks for the hookup,” I said. “I really needed a place and you don't have to worry about the rent.”

  “I'm not worried about that. I bet you're a hard little worker bee. We like that,” she said. She put her hand lightly on my leg and I flinched. She smiled. “I think it'll work out wonderfully.”

  Carmen again held up her empty glass and I picked up the champagne bottle and refilled it. The last drop went to her.

  “Move in when you like. The key is on the hook near the door,” she said, standing. “Be a dear and let yourself out. It's time for my nap.”

  She walked out of the room and started up the stairs. I sat there for a while longer, almost like I was waiting for permission to get up, be dismissed, waiting for direction from Carmen England.

  My Girl Mona

  BY CRYSTAL WILKINSON

  He's short and bald, round like a black snowman but handsome. He's my head doctor, the third psychiatrist I've seen this year. The doctor leans back in his soft green leather chair and brings the tips of his fingers together like he's wise. He's not the smiley type. He nods and that's my cue to start talking.

  Mona is forty-three and still got the kind of body that makes brothers act a fool, I say.

  I look at Doctor like, You know what I'm saying? Doctor clears his throat.

  We was sitting in that little diner off US-150 catching up like we do once a month, I tell him. I was sipping my 7-Up trying not to think about how much better Mona looks than me. More kids, more husbands, but she still looks like she did in junior high. Dark skin, perky titties, a waist that curves in tight then fans out into hourglass hips for miles.

  The doctor says I'm having panic attacks, I tell Mona, and I go through the rigmarole of symptoms: heart flutters, dizzy spells, the sweats, an odd feeling of otherworldliness. When I say otherworldliness, Mona looks at me like she's being held hostage, but I keep talking. She takes a toke off her third cigarette, which takes away from her good looks. I've heard brothers say that about her, you know, wrinkling up their noses like smoking a cancer stick sends Mona from fine to ugly that quick.

  You know what I mean? I say to Doctor not as a real question but just to be saying it. He just nods like he knows.

  The waitress, who is so skinny her collarbones show through her tight-knit blouse, freshens Mona's coffee with a trembling hand like the pot is full of rocks. She looks at Mona with an eyebrow raised. Mona with all her flash is a fish out of water in Stanford now.

  Mona's always been a part of my life, I say to Doctor. I still see us as little girls sometimes even now when we get together. Doesn't seem that long ago when we played down by the old creamery or recited our memorized verses in unison in front of God and everybody in the church, but it's been almost thirty years now. I was the everyday girl—not bony, not fat, not dark, not light—the girl who carried her opinions in her neck. Right here, I say to him and press my fingers into the center of my throat, a big old knot.

  You were in training for panic attacks even then, Doctor says.

  Doctor, she was something, I say. Mona was the one who could draw every eye across a room.

  Back when everybody was trying to have that perfect Angela Davis fro, Mona opted for the Farrah Fawcett look even before it caught on. She had long hair for a dark sister—down past her shoulders. Mona was always trying to shellac her skin with lightener, but I loved her walnut-hull brown. She was the first black girl in Stanford to be prom queen. Mona was always first. The first to get her period, the first to sprout butt and tits, the first to “do it.” If Doctor had been a light-skinned brother or a white man, he would have turned red.

  The summer I turned fourteen, Junior, my husband to this day, was the one boy we could tolerate. He was the kind of boy who was all-boy but could hang out with the girls without grabbing his private place. He wasn't like all them other nappy-heads who played kick ball under the streetlight. The girls would sit on the curb in our halter-tops and hot pants, trading pullout posters from Right On! magazine—swapping Ricky Sylvers for Michael Jackson and listening to the Ohio Players on Mona's eight track. When the game was over, the boys turned their attention to us. We all stayed out until our mamas called us home. Or until the mosquitoes started biting so hard that we all would run home itching, whelps rising up all over our little hot bodies.

  That year it seemed like me and Mona spent every day of our lives wondering what it would be like to be kissed by a boy. We watched our mamas' stories on TV and read the dirty parts of every romance book we could find. We wondered what “doing it” really was, even though neither of us wanted the label that came with the girls who let boys touch. But we already knew there were girls like Jeanette Stokes, who actually went into one of the unlocked cars parked along the streeet and let a boy untie her top so he could see her breasts. And she let one of the boys she really liked finger her in the dark. The ironic thing about it though was that even through all that, Jeanette Stokes was still a virgin when we graduated from high school but Mona wasn't.

  Doctor catches me remembering, staring off into empty space that makes up my yesterdays and then I come on back.

  Through the smoke cloud, Mona strokes her red acrylic nails, extends them out like crawdad claws to pick up her knife and cuts her chicken sandwich, I continue telling Doctor. She clears her throat and fidgets with the collar of her blouse, then smoothes invisible wrinkles from her skirt. I know she can't wait for me to hush, but I keep on talking like my life depends on it.

  Imagine that, I tell her. Hell, I've never had anything like this before. Junior had to take me to the emergency room the first time it happened. I thought I was having a heart attack. I've always been healthy. No, never had anything like this before. Not when cancer took Grandmamma or when they fired me up at the factory. They said it was a permanent layoff. Not even when Junior messed around on me with that white woman.

  That bit of juice gets Mona's attention and I stop talking for just a second before I start back up, timing it just right, making sure it's not long enough for her to jump in.

  Oh, I guess shit happens, I say. Guess I'm getting older. Right at that moment, as always, I'm trying to figure out on my own exactly why Mona's been my girl all these years.

  And why do you think that is? Doctor asks me, leaning forward like he's getting close to an answer.

  Don't know, I say to him, It's a long story.

  So I can see that I am making Mona nervous, I continue telling him. I'm waiting for Mona to chime in with a friend's concern or at least to tell me how sorry she is to hear about my nervous condition but she don't. I'm waiting to hear, What are you going to do? Is there anything I can do? Can they give you something for it? But her mascara-rimmed eyes are meddling with the people eating in the booths around us. Flirting with Mr. Taylor, who's stuffing a hamburger in his mouth, mustard running down his chin. Nodding hello to Callie Sumner, who owns the restaurant. We went to high school with Callie. She saunters by with a large orange tray filled with hamburgers and fries held high above her head, her flabby arms flopping in her own wind.

  I guess we are all getting old. Getting fat. Mon
a's not even listening to me. When she looks back in my direction, I switch subjects and tell her about Junior's teaching job up at the middle school. He is one of the first black teachers in the county.

  Did you know that, Doctor?

  No, I didn't that's interesting.

  I tell her about Daddy's trip to the hospital with appendicitis. I finish by telling her about my daughter, Shauna, getting caught shoplifting in Lexington.

  She's just driving us crazy, I say. We had to go up there and get a hotel for two days to get it all straightened out.

  But all of these are things Mona probably already knows from the newspaper or the grapevine. Nobody's business is sacred in a small town.

  I can see that I've got Doctor's full attention. He's looking at me starry-eyed like a boy listening to a tall tale.

  By the end of that summer all of us girls had at least been kissed, I tell him. Even Candy Patton, the quietest and most religious among us, prayed for seven straight days not to go to hell because she let Peanut rub her ass. It's all right, they're married now.

  I should have said hind end in front of Doctor but I didn't. I was comfortable, like we were old friends.

  Somehow we had willed the girlness out of our bodies, I say. Instead of playing hide-and-go-seek, or hopscotch, or Chinese jump rope, or watching the boys play kick ball, in the shadows against somebody's daddy's Plymouth or Nova, we paired up with the boys and kissed. We turned our heads to the side, puckered and kept our lips shut tight so the boys could keep their germs to themselves.

  I can't help but to start laughing.

  Anything else? Doctor says to me crossing his expensive britches legs and adjusting his self, wide in the chair, where I can see the folds of his crotch and not cracking a smile.

  What do you remember most about this? Tell me everything, Doctor says and reaches over and squeezes my wrist like that's a comfort. And it sure nuff is.

  Me and Mona named ourselves the kissing experts after seeing my brother, Kiki, and his girlfriend, Ina, on the couch, I say. We crouched outside the doorway of the living room, a place my mother never let us go into. The living room that was always ten times cleaner than the rest of the house, where the antiques and the good coffee table and the glass-topped lamp stood. The centerpiece was the white couch, still covered in plastic, that Daddy bought for Mama one year with the income-tax money. That living room was the show-off room only reserved for company, especially out-of-town company. It was the one thing my country mother had that rivaled anything belonging to the relatives who would ease back home from Cincinnati driving their new Cadillacs or Bonnevilles.

  Kiki met Ina up at the Lexington Mall and drove his green Impala up to see her every weekend. When he brought her home to meet us, Mama told me and Mona to stay out from underfoot and let Kiki have his privacy. But me and Mona were looking through a crack in the door to the living room when Kiki and Ina kissed so much, their tongues going in and out of each others' mouths, that they looked hungry, like two starved people feasting on Christmas dinner. Me and Mona looked at each other horrified at first, but we were also looking when Kiki's hand rubbed all over Ina like mad and disappeared under her green paisley culottes. We took notes in our diaries and secured our secrets with the turn of the little gold diary keys we wore around our necks.

  Now we know how it works, Mona says in a whisper, clutching her diary to her chest, her eyes fluttering up toward the ceiling like a prayer had been answered. I nodded, yes, without speaking a word. Stunned. Never knowing my brother, who I deemed Big Nasty for not lifting the seat on the toilet, the one who denied me his barbecue potato chips or candy sticks, the brother who tried to coax me into washing his funky laundry, was capable of making a girl moan and smile the way Ina did.

  Later that day, Kiki walked hand-in-hand with Ina all over Stanford. Ina with her fashion-model looks and in-style clothes and Kiki with his football-player muscles were a sight to see. Everybody saw them walking down Water to Maxwell Street on their way to Carter's Grocery for ice cream, their perfect eight-inch Afros side by side like two black moons.

  While they were gone, me and Mona pilfered Ina's purse and claimed her Satin Dreams lip gloss for our own. We shared it as a token of our sexual orientation. In secret we slathered it on our lips and tried to cut our eyes and walk with our hips rocking the way Ina did. We even talked Kiki into driving us to the Lexington Mall one weekend so we could buy ourselves some wooden high-heeled shoes just like the ones that Ina wore with her hip hugger blue jeans. Up until the time Kiki and Ina broke up, me and Mona would stare at her and follow her around when she was in town, hoping to get hold of some of her twenty-year-old womanly secrets.

  I laugh and Doctor smiles, then catches himself and takes the smile back quick. I guess he thinks he's not being professional. I'm wishing he would just come off this for a minute and just be the black man that a sister girl needs to share her problems with and not the doctor.

  So anyway, I sat to Doctor. I know Mona's been waiting for the conversation to open up one fraction so she can come in full force and fill it to the brim with her, so I ask her how she's doing.

  Well, she says, running her fingers through her hair, then patting it down in the front and pursing her lips together to refresh her lipstick, I'm doing fine. No drama, she says.

  But of course that was just warm-up talk; with Mona there's always drama. Soon Mona is smiling and gesturing wildly across the table. I listen as she sifts through child support and alimony, great sex and the kids like she's prom queen again—fake smiling so wide her unsightly dark gums show. It's an unflattering look and I catch myself relishing in the snickers that Mona doesn't notice coming from two lanky brown girls who are drinking milkshakes across from us. Look at that old lady trying to be hip, is what I'm sure they're saying. Well maybe “hip” is not the word they use these days.

  Mona doesn't seem like she's from Stanford at all anymore. She has swallowed her small-town twang and is speaking in some generic tone that doesn't even say Lexington. I wonder how she could have moved only fifty-miles north of here and be such an outlander. Her clothes are young—a bright blue blouse with enough opened buttons to show a peek of the black bra underneath, a tight black skirt that I can see only the beginnings of above the table, her legs are crossed and one of her white girlish platform shoes is bobbing up and down into the aisle while she talks.

  Doctor, Mona outgrew me in high school. I just looked up one day and she was a younger version of our mamas and I was still a girl. It wasn't her body so much, which had blossomed in junior high, but something else. She was suddenly able to gold a gaze with a man without giggling or looking away. I first saw her use it on my brother, Kiki, who was twenty-five at the time.

  I stop talking.

  Continue, Doctor says. Interesting, he says like I'm a bug under a microscope. And so I keep on with my story like I have to.

  Mona stayed over one Saturday night our junior year, I continue enjoying Doctor's full attention. We had planned to stay up all night, cornrow each other's hair and try on new makeup, but Mona spent the whole night sitting in my bed, straddle-legged in her baby doll pajamas, trying to hold my brother's attention as he walked by the room. She told me she had to use the bathroom, but soon I heard her in Kiki's room.

  Get out of here girl, I heard Kiki say through the walls.

  But soon their voices were lowered and I could hear the familiar squeaking of the bed and the grunts and snorts that Kiki made when he would sneak girls over. I expected silence from Mona. Thought she'd try to protect me from knowing, but the moaning sounds she made were so loud that I feared that my parents would come to investigate.

  Later, I heard water running in the bathroom, but Mona still brought the smell of sex with her into my bedroom.

  Y'all out of toilet paper, she said, never saying a word about screwing my brother.

  I stared at her and rolled my eyes.

  What? She said.

  What you think? I said.

&
nbsp; Didn't nothing happen, she said. But I knew she was lying.

  After that I think Mona hoped Kiki would prance her around like he had Ina, but when Mona was around, Kiki would sull up and find a reason to rev up his Impala and be gone. I could tell she was hurt by it all, but she never let on. Even as close as me and Mona were, there were a million miles between us.

  Keep going, Doctor says prodding out my lifetime.

  A short time after that, we went to the skating rink in Danville. I watched Mona skate right over to Junior and rub his chest. Under the black lights and the strobe flashing with the music playing a slow song, Junior looked as helpless as I felt when Mona kissed him full on the lips. Junior, who was supposed to be my boyfriend, followed her around for weeks, lingering at my locker, talking to me, but waiting on Mona to come by. It was clear that Mona really didn't want Junior, that he was being used for target practice and looking back, I want to think that she didn't mean me any harm. That she was just testing herself, trying to grab back something lost. Junior tells me to this day that it was nothing.

  I married you didn't I, he says. Leave the past in the past.

  When he messed around on me, I barely gave him a chance to apologize before I took him back.

  Doctor says I should have expressed my feelings.

  Later that night when Junior holds me in his arms I will get tickled about that. If I had expressed my feelings, Junior would still have a skillet mark on his head.

  What you laughing at? Junior will ask me and I will say, Nothing.

  Ever wish you married Mona? I ask him sometimes.

  Woman, he says back, we were teenagers ain't you ever gonna give up on that?

  Then he kisses me and we make love. But even then with him on top of me I am less assured. Feel like I'm a second place trophy.

  I slow down my story to make sure Doctor is still following me.

  So when Mona says, Darling, I have a blessed life, like she's the Gabor sister from Green Acres or some other made-for-TV white woman, my heart pounds out of my chest and sweat pours down my back. My chest is closing in and I'm shaking like a leaf. I am sure that any moment somebody in the restaurant will notice my predicament and holler for Callie to call the life squad. I'm waiting for that shift of time when Mona leaves her own world for just a second and notices that I'm in trouble. But nobody notices. All the eyes in the place are darting towards Mona. I don't say a world and just ride that one out.