God Don’t Like Ugly

by Mary Monroe

  “I been prayin’ for this boy here to slow down and get married so he’ll have somebody to take care of him,” Clara whined, looking directly at me. I threw up my hand and laughed nervously. Levi cleared his throat to get his mother’s attention. She glanced at him briefly, gave him a threatening look, then returned her full attention to me. “How old is you?” she asked me with a gleam in her eyes.

  “I’m twenty-four,” I told her. Levi’s house was too small for all the furniture he had crammed into it. The living-room couch was so close to the love seat facing it you didn’t have to lean too far to touch it. None of the furniture matched. The lamps on the black end tables were blue, the couch and love seat were plaid, and there was a whatnot stand in a corner filled with tiny plastic animals and clay Oriental people with slits for eyes and exaggerated grins. A big box of a television had a cracked yellow vase full of plastic red roses on top of it. The bottom half of the living-room walls had been painted dark brown, and the top half was pink.

  “How come you ain’t married yet?” Clara asked seriously. She pressed her legs close together and cupped her hands on her lap. “I heard you had a solider boy.”

  “Well that didn’t work out,” I said, shifting in my seat.

  “Oh? What did he do to you?” she asked in a low voice with her eyebrows raised. Then she turned her head and leaned her ear in my direction.

  “Oh, he didn’t do anything. We just decided to go our separate ways.”

  “Was he in the church?”

  “No, Ma’am.”

  “Well you didn’t need him noway. Levi got reborn when he was a young’n and been sanctified ever since.” Clara paused and turned to Levi sitting next to her on the couch. “Ain’t you?” She rubbed his arm, then patted it.

  “Yes, Ma’am,” he said meekly.

  Clara sucked in her breath and continued. “Now.” She paused and looked from my thick legs slowly up to my face. “I got a feelin’ you love to cook.”

  “I do,” I replied with a sigh.

  “Well…God’ll send you a husband long as you believe. Levi, go set the table and let’s eat that ham before it ’vaporates,” Clara said firmly, fanning her face with a folded newspaper.

  Levi and I only stayed at the crowded Blue Note for about an hour. I was impressed when he walked me to my door, shook my hand, and waited until I had gotten inside and turned on the lights in my apartment. I waved to him from my living-room window.

  Levi became another bizarre episode in my life. He loved to eat as much as I did and had gained weight since I first met him but I still outweighed him by at least fifty pounds. In the beginning we ate in a lot of restaurants, and some of our most serious conversations revolved around food. “You seen them great big old beef ribs they serve at the Murphy Eat-A-Rama?” he asked one day on our way back to my apartment from a day at a carnival. “Oh yes. The meat’s falling off the bone,” I said, smacking my lips. He made me laugh without trying, usually at times when he thought he was being serious. Levi didn’t read anything at all unless he had to, and he was not the most intelligent man I’d ever dated. One night he called and asked if there was anything I wanted him to bring me. I requested a large pepperoni pizza with mushrooms on one side. He wanted to know “which side.” In addition to our visits to restaurants, it wasn’t long before I was cooking meals fit for a king two to three times a week. Since I wasn’t that crazy about bars, the Blue Note was the only one we ever went to every other week or so.

  We attended a lot of movies, church functions, and parties at Viola’s house. “That Levi would make you a good husband,” she whispered to me at a birthday party for her husband. “He got a good job, he looks clean, he don’t cuss, he’s good to his mama, and he don’t smoke. What more could a woman want?”

  “I don’t…love him,” I confessed. Levi was standing in a corner talking to Viola’s docile husband Willie, who had a bibbed apron on over his party attire. Most of Viola’s guests had left, and the few that remained were on the other side of her living room.

  “Love ain’t nothin’ but a four-letter word, girl. You think I married Willie ’cause I loved him? I married him ’cause he had everything I needed. And in all the years we been married I ain’t had to whup him but five times.”

  “But don’t you feel anything for him?” I asked, surprised.

  “I guess I do,” Viola said, shrugging her huge shoulders. She beckoned Willie, and he darted across the room to where we were on the couch holding our plates and drinks. “Willie, I thought I told you to put more chips in them bowls and more ice in that bucket.”

  “Oh, I forgot. I’ll do it right away!” Willie said quickly, nodding and backing toward the kitchen.

  As soon as he was out of hearing distance I whispered to Viola, “What about…” I didn’t even have to finish my sentence.

  “Sex? I let him pester me once a week, and he know better than to complain,” she said with a firm nod.

  “Is it…enjoyable?” I asked shyly. Unless there was money involved, I didn’t see any point in having sex if it didn’t feel good.

  “It is for him. I just lay there thinkin’ about what I’m gwine to can next, plums or pears.”

  Muh’Dear had enrolled in a community college and was studying business administration. Judge Lawson was paying her tuition. I had been dating Levi for two months before I told her about him. “I been tellin’ Scary Mary my girl don’t get involved with the first man come along. I’m glad you took your time findin’ somebody. Now you remember that mess that boy got you into when you was a young’n—make this one use somethin’. Either that or you go get on some pills or somethin’. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” I mumbled.

  Levi didn’t ask me to have sex with him the first time we did it. He just climbed on top of me on my couch one night after we’d been dating for almost a month. It was quick and pleasant, but I didn’t experience the satisfaction I had with Pee Wee. Levi and I never got fully undressed. When he spent the night with me he had on pajamas and I wore a gown and underwear. He just opened his fly and I lifted my gown high enough for us to connect. I never removed my panties. I just slid one leg over to the side. Like Viola’s husband he was docile, but without my encouragement. He often insisted on washing my dishes and running errands for me. After a while we developed a routine you could set a clock by. He’d come over without calling every Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday evening to eat one of the lavish dinners I’d prepared. He liked whatever I cooked, but his favorite meal was collard greens, corn bread, fried chicken, and potato salad. That’s what I cooked every Saturday. A few times he’d come over just long enough to gobble up a couple of plates of food, then run. “I got to carry my mama somewhere,” or “I got a union meetin’ to go to,” he often told me. Like with Viola, I didn’t have too much in common with Levi. We shared our love for good food, movies, and the church. “Girl, it sounds like that man is usin’ you,” Rhoda teased when I told her about all the dinners and sex I was into with Levi. I didn’t want to think that I was being used. Levi’s mother lived with him and cooked whatever he wanted her to. He didn’t have to depend on me for a decent meal, and I was sure there were other women who would sleep with him, too.

  “Oh I don’t think so. He brings a lot of food to my place for me to cook that he buys with his money, and he’s always offering to do things for me,” I told her. He was fun, he never disagreed with me, and, most of all, I was no longer lonely. The closest friend I had in Erie was Viola, but she spent a lot of time with her other friends, family, and her husband, so she didn’t have as much time to spend with me as I wanted her to. Levi took up where she left off.

  Viola went to visit relatives in Louisiana the week of the Fourth of July. Cynthia Costello showed up at work after the holiday wearing dark glasses to hide a black eye, and there was a Band-Aid on her nose. None of the other women or I said anything to her all morning about her injuries. Two months before she had come to work on crutches because her husba
nd had broken her leg in two places. She had just gotten rid of the crutches. Before that it was a cast on her arm. She chatted along with the rest of us about sales, something that was on TV the night before, and recipes. I felt so sorry for her I wanted to hug her.

  “What are you doing for lunch today, Cynthia?” I asked a few minutes before noon.

  “I brought my lunch,” she mumbled, clearing her throat. It was only when she smiled that I noticed a deep cut on her bottom lip, too. Cynthia brought the same things for lunch every day, either a Spam, liverwurst, or peanut butter with jelly sandwich. I spared no expense when it came to eating out. With my paycheck and five thousand dollars left over from Mr. Boatwright’s money, I could afford to. Though Viola and I bought our lunch at McDonald’s a lot, we ate like kings at least three times a week at the nice restaurants close to the factory. The nicest most expensive one was Giovanni’s, an Italian restaurant that reminded me of Antonosanti’s in Richland.

  “Would you like to have lunch with me at Giovanni’s? The food’s great—my treat,” I said to Cynthia.

  First, she gave me an incredulous look, then a broad smile appeared on her face.

  “I haven’t eaten in a restaurant in five years,” she managed to say.

  “You can order anything on the menu,” I told her, then I gave her a big hug.

  Along with lunch, Cynthia drank five glasses of Chianti. She was a functional alcoholic and nobody could tell when she was drunk unless she told them. I felt good the rest of that day because I’d brought a little joy into somebody else’s tortured life. Nobody knew better than I how far a little kindness went.

  CHAPTER 51

  Three years after I’d started dating Levi he stopped spending the night with me. We talked on the phone a few times a week and he came over without fail every Saturday night to eat and have sex, but he left right afterward. One Friday he called me at work and told me he was not going to be able to come over this particular Saturday. “Somethin’ came up,” was all he told me.

  I cooked the collard greens and fried a chicken anyway when Saturday evening rolled around, then curled up on my couch to watch The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. During all the time I’d been dating Levi I had only seen his mother Clara five or six times. But I did talk to her on the phone often enough. She called almost every time Levi came over to tell him to pick up this or that from the store on the way home. One reason I avoided going around her too much was I didn’t like the way she always brought up the subject of marriage. Levi had never given me any indication that he wanted me to be his wife, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be anyway. However, if he had asked, I probably would have taken him and run. I’d marry him not because I loved him, but because I believed he would probably be my only chance. At twenty-eight, no other man had ever proposed marriage to me, but most of the ones I had dated ended up marrying somebody else.

  This particular Saturday, since I was so used to Clara calling the apartment every Saturday, I decided to call her to see how she was doing. A strange woman answered the phone. “She still at the weddin’ reception,” the woman told me. I thanked her and hung up.

  It was still early, so I called up Rhoda. There was something in her voice that concerned me when she answered. She sounded almost as stiff and detached as she did when she called to tell me her son was dying.

  “Are you OK?” I asked. My concern instantly turned to fear. I sat up on my couch, slid what was left of my dinner off to the side of the couch, and leaned my elbow on the arm of the couch.

  “I’m fine. How are things with you and Levi?”

  “Oh about the same.” I laughed. “This is the first Saturday he hasn’t come over since we started dating. I need to wash my hair anyway.” I yawned, glancing at my recently manicured nails. “How are things workin’ out with your brother?” I asked.

  Rhoda took her time responding. First she sucked in her breath. “Jock got April pregnant,” she told me in a slow and tired voice.

  “That young white girl?” I gasped. I jumped up from my seat so fast I knocked the plate to the floor. “Oh no,” I moaned, squeezing the phone.

  “She’s three months along.”

  For a few seconds I was stunned speechless. Somehow I managed to get out, “What are you going to do now? Her folks will have a fit!”

  “She says that if Jock doesn’t take her away, Ohio or somewhere, she’s goin’ to tell her daddy that he raped her.”

  “Oh no, Rhoda! You can’t let her do that! Can’t you give her some whiskey and sit her in a bathtub of hot water like you did me or to some doctor and get her an abortion?”

  “It’s worse than you can imagine. She wants this baby, girl. Half of the girl’s family belong to the…Ku Klux Klan. The child would be my niece or nephew. I’d go crazy worryin’ about how that child was bein’ treated livin’ with all those redneck, peckerwood bastards. That is, if they don’t beat it out of her before it’s born.” Rhoda let out an angry breath. “Lord, what a mess!”

  “What are you going to do, Rhoda?” My heart started beating so fast and hard I had to breathe through my mouth.

  “Whatever I have to do,” she growled.

  “Well, is there anything I can do? Do you want me to come down and try and talk some sense into her?”

  “If she won’t listen to me, she won’t listen to you.”

  “Can you send Jock back to Ohio?”

  “She’s already said that if he does leave, she’ll tell her folks my husband raped her! She’ll blackmail me.”

  “Just like when I threatened to leave town, Mr. Boatwright said he would kill my mama, huh?”

  “Uh-huh. Now I really know how you felt.”

  “I’m sorry, Rhoda. I just don’t know what to tell you to do. It sounds like there’s going to be trouble soon no matter what.”

  “There is. I just don’t know what.” Rhoda sighed again and cussed under her breath for a full minute.

  I waited until she paused before I said anything else. “I’ll call you again tomorrow,” I told her. I tried to reach Viola so I could talk to her about what Rhoda had just told me, but her line was busy. Since Levi was the next person closest to me, I called his house again. This time his mother answered.

  “Naw he ain’t here,” Clara told me in a gruff voice. She sounded out of breath. “Who is this anyway?”

  “It’s me, Miss Clara, Annette. Did Levi say when he’d be back?”

  There was a long pause. “Girl, Levi just got married this evenin’. Don’t you—”

  “He what?”

  “You deaf? The boy got married. Didn’t you know he was gettin’ married this evenin’?”

  “Well…I think he told me he was. I guess I forgot,” I managed. I didn’t want to hear anything else. I didn’t want to say anything else. That’s why I hung up right away. I stood in the middle of the floor looking around my living room but seeing nothing but red. Rhoda’s chilling news and the news about Levi was more than I could stand. I was glad I didn’t have any alcohol in the house. I sat in a dazed state for the next two hours, with Rhoda’s words and Clara’s words going through my head over and over again.

  I didn’t go to bed that night. Instead I curled up on my couch and looked at the ceiling until I fell asleep and had one nightmare after another. I was not only being chased by Mr. Boatwright, but by Klansmen as well. Levi’s face was in the background laughing at me. It was no wonder I woke up screaming.

  It was too early for me to get up and get ready for church, but it was not too early for me to call Rhoda back.

  I was going to tell her about Levi, but not until I talked to him and got all the facts. With the mess she had on her hands with Jock, I didn’t think she was in the mood to hear about my love life at the time anyway. “Have you decided what to do?” I asked as soon as Otis called her to the phone.

  “No. Not yet.”

  “I’ll help you in any way I can, Rhoda.”

  “I know you will…I just don’t know what to do,” Rhoda
admitted. “How…how is Levi?” she asked. I knew she wasn’t really interested in hearing about Levi, but I was glad she was the one to change the subject.

  “He got married,” I said flatly.

  “He did what?” she gasped.

  “He got married. That’s what his mother told me when I called his house last night.”

  “Well, when did you break up with him?”

  “I didn’t. He was with me just the other night.”

  “Do you mean to tell me this happened right up under your nose? Who is this other woman?”

  “I don’t know. I guess whenever he wasn’t with me, he was with her. I won’t know anything until I talk to him.”

  “You know somethin’, Annette, I would give anythin’ in the world to have the good old days back in Richland. We didn’t know how good we had it when we were kids—except that thing you were goin’ through with Buttwright.”

  “Yeah. Except for that, we never had it so good. I’ll call you again in a day or so.” I hung up and walked around my apartment, trying not to look at the phone, trying not to think about Levi, trying not to think about the mess Jock had gotten himself into. I had planned to go to church, but there was too much going on in my head. I didn’t eat anything the entire day or leave the house. I didn’t sleep at all that night, and I was glad. I couldn’t stand more nightmares.

  I went to work the next day with dark circles and bags under my eyes. I got there a little earlier than usual, so by the time Viola arrived I was already in the breakroom with a cup of coffee and my newspaper. She nodded at me, got her coffee, and sat at my table across from me. “I feel the same way you look,” she told me.