by Mary Monroe
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Now. How you feelin’?” She placed her hand on my forehead and frowned.
“I’m fine,” I told her.
“I need to know who done it so I can talk to his mama.” She removed her coat and draped it over her arm.
“I told you I didn’t know.”
“How many was there?” she asked impatiently.
“I don’t remember,” I said mechanically, refusing to let her see my eyes.
“Do you mean to tell me you done fornicated so much you done lost count?”
“No. I think there were three. Or five.” I sounded like I was reading cue cards.
“Next thing you’ll be tellin’ me is you was drunk or on dope.”
“I was drunk.” My face was on fire. I had let my own mother down in the worst way. I could easily clear myself, but telling her the truth was unthinkable.
“Uh-huh. Brother Boatwright told me he smelled alcohol all over you when he found you all passed out. I got a call in to the Reverend Upshaw and Reverend Snipes.” Muh’Dear sighed. She sounded so tired and looked worse than she sounded. She had become an old woman right before my eyes.
“For what?”
“For you, girl. If I don’t get you some spiritual counselin’ now, you liable to wind up pregnant again…or on that slab in Brother Nelson’s house.” She sighed and turned to leave.
“I guess you heard about Granny Goose dying last night?” I asked. She stopped in her tracks and whirled back around to face me, walking fast back toward my bed.
“Granny Goose died? Last night? Well how is Rhoda and her family holdin’ up?” Muh’Dear wanted to know.
I shrugged. “I didn’t go to the house yet.”
“What? How long have you knowed?”
“Rhoda called me right after you left for work this mornin’.”
“Well if you was well enough to make that big mess in the kitchen I seen, you was well enough to go pay your respects.”
“She too busy layin’ in there gobblin’ up chicken wings and readin’ pornographic books,” Mr. Boatwright yelled from the hallway. I’d been reading Peyton Place for most of the day. Within seconds he was in my room. His housecoat belt was tied securely and he was buttoned all the way up to his neck.
“Shame on you, Annette. I thought Rhoda was your best friend,” Muh’Dear gasped, waving a finger in my face. “I bet she right frantic. I can’t believe you ain’t over there to hug her.”
“Can I go over there now?” I asked, looking at Mr. Boatwright from the corner of my eye. He glared at me.
“I guess so. I’ll be over there as soon as I bake ’em a cake,” Muh’Dear said.
“There’s a whole chicken in the freezer we can donate, too,” Mr. Boatwright offered. “My bum leg wasn’t in such misery, I’d go with y’all. I leave the house bad as I’m feelin’ now, I might be the next one to wind up on that slab in the undertaker’s house.”
CHAPTER 30
The Nelsons’ flag had been lowered to half-mast, and there were several unfamiliar cars parked up and down the street. Mr. Boatwright ended up going with us, walking with me holding him by one arm and Muh’Dear holding him by the other. I don’t think he was as helpless as he claimed to be, he just liked being in control when he was upset. I was convinced that he had changed his mind about going to the Nelsons’ house with us was because Muh’Dear kept going on and on about how handsome Jock must look in his army uniform.
“What took you so long?” Rhoda asked, looking directly at me when she opened the door.
“I was resting,” I said.
“From that flu bug that put her in the hospital,” Muh’Dear said quickly.
As soon as we got inside, Mr. Boatwright started jerking his head from left to right, looking all over the place with an expression on his face that reminded me of a deer caught in the headlights of a speeding car. I heard him mumble to Muh’Dear, “Is that rum I smell?”
The mob in the living room was mostly people from various churches and the neighborhood. Florence greeted me but kept her distance because she knew Rhoda didn’t like seeing her with me. Three white boys under ten were running throughout the house punching one another.
Rhoda introduced us to her white relatives from Alabama, then led me to a corner, where she whispered something about each one.
I squinted to look across the room resting my eyes on Uncle Johnny standing in the middle of the floor with a drink in his hand and swaying like he was about to fall. “Uncle Johnny’s drunk. Your daddy’s not afraid he’ll get loose in here?” I asked.
“Oh, Uncle Johnny can handle his liquor,” Rhoda said seriously. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Mr. Boatwright hugging Rhoda’s mother and crying like a baby about how Granny Goose was going to be missed. Every time the door opened his head snapped around toward it. I knew he was looking for Jock to appear.
Rhoda’s mother, wearing a long black hostess gown, left and came back into the room a few minutes later carrying a tray of mixed drinks. “Brother Boatwright, would you care to have a drink?” she asked. He was on the couch with Muh’Dear and a woman I didn’t know.
“Don’t mind if I do,” he said quickly, reaching for the tallest glass.
“Don’t worry, this batch is nonalcoholic,” Mrs. Nelson assured him. As usual, her hair and makeup were flawless.
“Oh,” he grunted, looking at the glass like he wanted to shatter it. As soon as Mrs. Nelson walked away, he walked over to Uncle Johnny and they left the room. Minutes later they returned and Mr. Boatwright had a different drink in his hand that I was sure was alcoholic.
“See that thin, blond-haired woman standin’ there talkin’ to Scary Mary? That’s my aunt Lola,” Rhoda said. I looked at the woman, who appeared to be in her fifties. She was pale and tired-looking, but she had nice features. Her face was small and oval-shaped like Rhoda’s. She had big pretty green eyes that had more than enough eye shadow and mascara on them.
Rhoda sniffed. “She might move in with us after she sells her house down South. Lookit the lipstick on her teeth. She used to be a whore in a house in Montgomery. I bet Scary Mary is tryin’ to recruit her old as she is. These wild kids runnin’ all over the place are her grandkids. Their mother, my cousin Donna, she ran off with some woman’s husband. Aunt Lola got out of the whorin’ business and settled down.”
To be in mourning, Rhoda was talking a lot. Talking was one thing most of the grieving people I’d been around didn’t want to do.
“Did she get religion like Uncle Johnny did a long time ago, too?” I asked.
“No. She robbed one of her tricks and he stuck a pair of red-hot marcel curlers up her coochie. She never sits down for too long. She can’t! She sleeps on her stomach like a seal. Scary Mary wouldn’t get much mileage out of her.”
“Ouch!” I felt a tingling in my crotch.
“Ouch is right.” Rhoda shuddered.
Like a lot of the people in the house, including me, Rhoda kept a plate of rich food in her hand and was eating like this was the Last Supper. This was out of character for her. In all the years we’d been friends, Rhoda had always been weight-conscious. I was convinced that Rhoda was behaving the way she was to avoid an issue deeper than her grandmother’s death, but I couldn’t imagine what. She was so frisky and animated I was convinced that she had been secretly sipping one of those mixed drinks. She was acting like it, and smelling like it.
I got up to go to the kitchen where all the food had been laid out to refill my plate and had to pass the parlor to get there. Mr. Nelson, Mr. Antonosanti, and Judge Lawson, each of them dressed in a dark suit and tie, were in the parlor, with Mr. Boatwright standing among them. He looked so out of place in his dingy dungarees, plaid suspenders, and house shoes with the backs removed. I stopped outside the door, curious to hear what an oaf like Mr. Boatwright would have to say to men like these particular three. They were discussing women and minorities in politics.
“I envision a woman in the White H
ouse before a Black man or an Oriental,” Mr. Antonosanti said.
“Oh I hope not!” Mr. Boatwright laughed. “A woman president would mean the end of the world, sure enough. She’ll get in one of them PMS moods and every month she’ll push a button and nuke a foreign country.”
I gasped and shook my head. I leaned over just enough to see the expressions on the men’s faces over Mr. Boatwright’s stupid ramblings. They looked at him like he was less than nothing. I truly felt sorry for him. He wanted to so badly, but he could never fit in with men like Rhoda’s daddy, Judge Lawson, and Mr. Antonosanti.
I got more food and returned to the living room, to discover more people had arrived. I was kind of glad when Mr. Boatwright, still babbling nonsense, returned to the living room a few moments later, tagging behind Mr. Antonosanti.
Rhoda’s father’s older sister Moline was a washed-out, sixty-something white woman with blond hair and the same green eyes as Rhoda. She looked a lot like Lola but was heavier by at least fifty pounds.
Moline cornered me and started talking in a low nasal voice. The alcohol on her breath was so strong, I had to cough. “I’m just so impressed with the way my little colored brother turned out. This fine home, this fine family, all these fine friends and neighbors, the world sure enough has changed. Laurette wouldn’t come. She’s my oldest girl. My old shoe wouldn’t come neither. I been tryin’ to divorce him for twenty-five years, but he keeps hidin’ the divorce papers. Him and Laurette ain’t as modern as the rest of us. You’ll never catch them two in no Black household. They’re superstitious. They look down on y’all, Jews, Spanish-speakin’ peoples, Asians, and,” she paused, then whispered, “fags and bull dykes.” She paused again to suck in her breath, then she looked me up and down and shook her head. “Johnny tells me you and Rhoda is best friends. Is that a fact?”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Rhoda’s such a smart girl, she could do anything she want. Thing is, she ain’t interested in college or climbin’ no corporate ladder. She just wants to be a happy married woman, like me. What about you?”
“I’d like to have a secretarial career,” I said proudly, but in a low voice. I noticed Mr. Boatwright tilt his head in my direction.
“Secretaries make good money, especially in the bigger cities,” Moline commented.
“I know,” I agreed.
“See Lola there—she used to be in the sportin’ business. She was a damn good whore. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with a good pesterin’, especially when you gettin’ paid for it. I know this old gal from Mississippi that done it ’til she was sixty-four. Sixty-four, girl. Lola could have done it longer than that. However, a freak accident forced her into early retirement. She works in the gum factory now.”
Rhoda finally rescued me and pulled me to the other side of the room. She introduced me to her seventeen-year-old twin cousins Alice Mae and Mae Alice. They were blond, blue-eyed versions of Rhoda.
“Rhoda tells us you plannin’ to jump on a corporate ladder,” Mae Alice said.
“As soon as I get out of school,” I replied. Rhoda kicked my foot. Mr. Boatwright was just a few feet away.
“Where do you plan to work, Annette?” Rhoda said real loud. “Cleveland? Uh…Cincinnati?”
“Nowhere in Ohio. I’ve been thinking about Pennsylvania,” I said in a low, shaky voice.
Right after I said that, Jock strode in flanked by two of his former gang brothers. He slapped five with Uncle Johnny and embraced the Moline woman and the twins. Lola threw her arms around him and pulled him down next to her on the couch. I guess he was still mad because he rolled his eyes at me.
“Honey chile, you look better than a government check! Don’t he, Annette?” Lola squealed, kissing Jock all over his face.
“Yes, Ma’am,” I managed. I looked at Mr. Boatwright, and, just as I thought, he was staring at me with a cold, angry look on his face.
In less than a minute, Muh’Dear was in front of me whispering. “We better leave. Brother Boatwright’s bum leg is givin’ him trouble, and that use-to-be-whore Lola keeps flirtin’ with him, makin’ him nervous. He want us to he’p him home,” Muh’Dear informed me.
“Can I stay a little longer?” I begged. “Can Pee Wee or Uncle Johnny help you get him home?” Everybody had surrounded Jock as he started talking about signing up to go to Vietnam to “kick butt” legally.
“Now you know thin as Pee Wee is, he ain’t able to hold up Brother Boatwright as good as a big old strong thing like you. And Johnny way too drunk to do hisself any good, let alone a stout man in Brother Boatwright’s condition,” Muh’Dear said firmly.
“Please let me stay,” I begged.
“You ain’t well yourself,” Muh’Dear told me, still whispering. “Besides, you don’t want these nosy folks to start askin’ you questions. You might let somethin’ slip about gettin’ yourself in that mess, and I wouldn’t be able to show my face in church or on the street. Let’s go. You look like you need a dose of castor oil anyway.”
I moved as slow as I could across the room to where Mr. Boatwright was sitting in a La-Z-Boy and helped Muh’Dear pull him up. Lola attempted to help, but Mr. Boatwright pushed her away. The way he was struggling, his leg couldn’t have been bothering him that much.
“Brother Boatwright’s feisty. Just like my third husband was,” Scary Mary slurred from a stool at the bar in the living room. She had not stopped drinking since she walked in the door.
As soon as we got off the Nelsons’ front porch, Mr. Boatwright started saying mean things.
“They sho nuff was stingy with them drinks!” he roared. “I been waitin’ all my life for a margarita, and when I finally get me a few, they give me ones so weak you could wean a baby on ’em. How they expect a grievin’ man to relax at a time like this with a sip that won’t fill a thimble? Y’all seen how Lola kept flirtin’ with me.” He said it like he was bragging, grinning and sticking his chest out. “I bet—Ouch! Don’t pinch my shoulder, Annette,” he yelled. Just as we made it across the street, Rhoda, Pee Wee, and the twins came running after us.
“Annette, you left your scarf,” Rhoda informed me. I met her in the middle of the street, and she whispered, “Come back if you can tonight.”
CHAPTER 31
Muh’Dear was the type to fall asleep as soon as her head hit a pillow, so I didn’t have to worry about her. But I had to wait a half hour for Mr. Boatwright to start snoring.
By the time I returned to the Nelsons’ house, most of the visitors were gone. I was glad Florence was one of them. I did want to talk to her, but not in front of Rhoda. The only people left were family members. The kids were still chasing one another around the house knocking over plants and chairs, and nobody was saying a word. But the look on Rhoda’s mom’s face told me she was not too happy.
“The young’ns are all in Rhoda’s dollhouse in the backyard,” Mr. Nelson told me as soon as I got inside.
“I’ll get ’em,” Uncle Johnny said, jumping up from his chair.
He was gone for ten minutes before anybody said anything.
“I hope Johnny didn’t go out that back door and fall and break his neck like Mother did,” Moline whined. “Gal—go see,” she ordered me.
I was glad to leave. But as soon as I stood, Lola did, too.
“I want to see this dollhouse everybody done run off to,” she said, stretching her arms. “I done heard so much about it.”
We heard the giggling before we even got to the doll house. Lola and I peered in the window and witnessed all the teenagers, except Rhoda, passing marijuana cigarettes around. Uncle Johnny snatched one from Pee Wee and stuck it in his mouth. That’s when Lola pushed the door open with her foot.
“Johnny Goose! Gimme that thang here!” She rushed up to him and grabbed the cigarette and put it in her mouth and started puffing furiously. I liked Lola. She was friendly and fun to be around, just like Uncle Johnny.
After we all got back to the Nelsons’ living room, Lola wanted me and Rhoda to acc
ompany her to the shopping center, where she and Rhoda could pick up some feminine products to accommodate all the extra females staying at their house. We left in Mr. Nelson’s big fancy Cadillac, a white one he had just purchased a month earlier. Rhoda had not had an accident in weeks with the Ford, but Lola’s driving scared me even more. She was driving through town like a bat out of hell, speeding, weaving in and out of traffic and running red lights.
“Aunt Lola, pull over and let me drive,” Rhoda begged, a desperate look on her face.
“Uh-uh. We’re almost there. I got to go drive lickety-split, so we’ll get there before the drugstore closes,” Lola told her, humped over the steering wheel. It was a miracle we didn’t have a serious accident.
After we left Hardy’s Drugstore loaded down with tampons, Kotex, butt spray, and douche powder, Lola ducked into a nearby bar to have another drink. Rhoda and I went back to the drugstore, where she looked for new makeup and I leafed through movie magazines. The car was parked outside in front of the bar. Rhoda did not purchase any new makeup but she bought me a bag of candy. By the time we left the drugstore again, headed for the car, Lola was good and drunk. She was staggering toward us wearing one shoe, carrying the other in her hand, and with her eyes rolled back in her head.
“Look at Miss Lola!” I hollered. At first, I thought somebody had beaten her. There was blood on her lip and the front of her blouse. We ran to her just in time to keep her from falling to the ground.
“I’m…DRUNK!” Lola slurred. “Rhoda, girl, you got to drive the car. Your daddy’ll bust my brains out all over the place if I was to wreck that big old mobile of his’n.”
“What? My daddy won’t let me drive it. He thinks I’ll ram into another light pole or a tree,” Rhoda wailed, struggling with her aunt to keep her from falling to the ground. “Annette, you have to do it.”
“You know I don’t know how to drive, girl.” I laughed, looking at her incredulously. The thought of driving that big, intimidating car was beyond my imagination.
