“Talk about soft,” Lydia said. “How many years you got on you, Uncle Warren? ’Cause ain’t nothing softer than an old man. Now, me? I like me a young, hard man with a young, hard back. And that’s why I got me a real strong bed at home.”
Lydia stroked Dante’s shoulder and he gave her a long, deep kiss. He said he couldn’t wait for the honeymoon, but he might have to buy a new bed. ’Cause the way he was feeling, he was gone break that box spring tonight.
When Uncle Warren headed outside to smoke his cigar, his wife followed. The two did not return.
* * *
When Lydia’s mother had attended Routledge College in the 1960s, it had been against the rules for a female student to be married. A male could have a wife back home, along with children, and he was applauded for wanting to make something of himself, to push his family forward. But a young woman was admonished that her place was in the home. She needed to be there for her husband, to tend to his needs. Mama had scoffed at such male chauvinist nonsense. Women worked harder than men, she said. Most women could do anything they set their minds to, and for the rare woman who couldn’t, that fact was for her to find out. It wasn’t for a bunch of male administrators at the college to decide.
Yet the week after Lydia married Dante, she didn’t want to go back to campus. It wasn’t right for her, walking on the yard, headed to one building and then the next. Attending sorority meetings and deciding who would make it onto the new Beta line. Sitting in the refectory, eating the food that other hands had prepared for her while Dante was at home eating a hamburger and fries that probably had sat under a heat lamp because Lydia wasn’t there to cook.
She felt guilty for not being with Dante and guilty for not caring one bit about how Niecy was getting pushed around by the Betas, though she was already a member. Niecy was her friend, but Lydia wasn’t concerned about her fight to include more girls with high grade point averages on the new line, how Niecy had gone to Dr. Oludara to complain about how the Betas were too color-struck. Dr. Oludara was the oldest sorority sister on campus, and she didn’t believe in excluding young women from membership based upon the length of their hair, their weight, or their skin shade. But the problem was, Dr. Oludara hadn’t paid her sorority dues since the seventies. Her word didn’t carry much weight with Beta.
“I think I’m going to write a letter to the national chapter,” Niecy said. “I’m tired of this shit.”
Lydia flipped through a sociology textbook. She was behind in her lessons, but she couldn’t concentrate. The letters skipped around.
“What do you think about that, soror?”
“About what, Niecy?”
“My writing nationals about the Beta line.”
“That sounds good.”
“Will you sign the letter, Lydia?”
“Yeah. I mean, sure. But Beta has been color-struck for years. That’s why I didn’t want to join this shit in the first place. I only did it for you.”
“I know, soror. But this is important. We have to make a stand.”
“Okay, you do your thing. But you gotta type the letter.”
Lydia hardened herself to Niecy’s concerns. She couldn’t worry about children’s games acted out on campus. Routledge wasn’t the real world. It was a giant playground, but Lydia was a woman now. She had higher matters to attend to, like making sure to remind Dante to pay the rent and the electric and water bills. Calling up an insurance company and making an appointment for an insurance man to come by the apartment, so she and Dante could have burial policies. They were young and had years ahead of them, but every married couple needed those policies. Paperwork was proof of lifelong commitment.
Her suspicions that marriage was not child’s play were confirmed that weekend, when she went to Atlanta to see Dante. When she returned from the Laundromat and folded his clothes. Other than cooking, doing laundry was her favorite chore. Lydia made Dante clean the bathroom and wash dishes, but she actually liked folding clothes. It had been the only time that she’d had peace with her mother growing up. She and Mama used to sit in the basement together, saying nothing, only moving their hands, while the washing machine and dryer rumbled softly beside them.
Lydia’s contentment was broken when she opened the top drawer of the dresser—Dante’s drawer—and saw the cluster of cellophane packets. They were filled with what looked like cloudy diamonds.
Till My Baby Comes Home
Lydia was fifteen, going on sixteen, when Mama had talked to her about what it meant to be a woman. How Mama had been in college, headed to graduate school and planning to become an English professor, before she found out she was pregnant by Lydia’s father. Mama had set aside her dreams to become a wife and a mother, and she hadn’t regretted her choice, not for one second. But she told Lydia that she wanted her to understand that once a woman had a child for a man, he could come and go in a woman’s life, exactly how he pleased. He could decide if he wanted to get married or stay single. He could pay child support, or make a woman track him down every month or take him to court to buy formula for her baby or groceries once his child had teeth to chew proper food. And even if a man did pay child support, that wouldn’t be enough to cover the bills for a house he wasn’t staying in. Even if he did want to get married and live with a woman, her child would be a red wagon to pull behind her, not the man’s. A mother couldn’t ever be free of her child.
And while Mama loved all her daughters dearly—God knows she did—she wished somebody had told her what a woman’s life truly was before she and Daddy had gone down to the Chicasetta courthouse and married. That when the women in her family had talked about the evils of men, they hadn’t been so specific, naming this man or that man. Pointing at random, troublemaking men in the community as exceptions and not the rule. They should have told her every man has got some serious faults.
“But Daddy is nice to you, isn’t he?” Lydia asked.
“Oh, yes, baby, your daddy is a real good man! I don’t want you thinking I’m trying to bad-mouth him. I love that man strong. But as nice as your daddy is, Lydia, I want you to know that I got lucky. I’m saying, if he wasn’t nice, it wouldn’t have mattered, because I had you. And having a child with a man ties you to him for life, even if you’re not married. Even if he doesn’t even want you.”
That day would have been the time for Lydia to tell her mother, no, she didn’t understand. To sit in the car with Mama and talk it out, but that morning, Lydia was pregnant. It was early September, and they were sitting in the car in the parking lot of an abortion clinic outside the City. When Lydia had returned from the south in August, she hadn’t known that she was pregnant by Tony Crawford. She hadn’t noticed anything at first, until her mother asked her, how long had it been since she’d seen a period? Had she been feeling sick? And were her breasts hurting?
Her mother made the appointment for the abortion without even asking. It was for eight in the morning. Aunt Diane would take her sisters to school, because Lydia and her mother left the house at six forty-five. If she missed that appointment, she’d have to wait six more weeks to get a new appointment. By then, she’d be in her second trimester, and an abortion would be a complicated affair. Perhaps a hospital stay and general anesthesia. If that happened, Daddy would have to be told that his daughter was pregnant, instead of given the lie that his wife and oldest child were going on a shopping trip for school clothes because Lydia had hit a growth spurt.
At the clinic, she was given a pregnancy test that confirmed what Mama already knew, and after the abortion, Lydia was occupied with the memory of what had happened. That her mother had not asked her, did she want to keep her baby? Though Lydia definitely hadn’t wanted to bear Tony Crawford’s baby, she thought her mother should have asked. Instead, when her name had been called in the lobby, Mama told her, it was time now. She asked Lydia if she wanted her to be in the room with her, and her daughter said yes. Then Lydia had lain on the table and a nice but businesslike white doctor had pricked a needle in
side her while Mama had held her hand. There was a sucking noise, and the slight cramps that the doctor told her to expect were more than that. The pain nearly overwhelmed her, and she wanted to piss herself. But in a few minutes, it was done, and Lydia only bled normally, not the clots that would have been cause for alarm. The relief would come days later, but before that, there were the familiar feelings of self-hatred and shame. She wasn’t a good girl anymore; she was tainted. And because Lydia was busy nursing both of those emotions as if they were twin babies she’d birthed, she forgot to ask Mama about what else went on in a marriage. What else should she know?
Five years later, Lydia went down to the Fulton County courthouse and married the man she loved. By then it was too late. Nothing her mother could say would push Lydia from her path, even after Lydia found those cellophane packets in Dante’s drawer.
She wanted to let go of her panic, and then anger. She’d grown up with drugs. Not in her parents’ house, naturally, but there had been drugs in her high school. Everybody drank beer. There was weed, too, which was harmless, a plant that didn’t do much, unless you were drinking while you smoked. A few bold kids stole Valium from their parents’ medicine cabinets, but those were very rare treats.
Like the stolen pills, cocaine was for special occasions. Once in a while, somebody at a party had a packet of powder but kept that confidential, only sharing it with a chosen number, and Lydia was always asked, did she want a line? And she’d smoked primos, too, joints with coke sprinkled inside. She really liked those, how the coke sent you flying, but the weed chilled you out. She and her high school friends had agreed that primos and even straight powder cocaine were completely different from smoking crack rocks.
Crack was ghetto and trashy. You didn’t bring rocks to a party or smoke them when you were kicking it with your friends. It was like a tacky outfit that you hung in the back of your closet, because you never wanted people to see you with it on. And anybody who smoked rocks went downhill rapidly, like the miserable souls who frequented the crack house three blocks away from Lydia’s high school. The neighborhood had once been a nice, middle-class area, and the house had been a showpiece, but something happened at the beginning of Lydia’s sophomore year. The kids at school said the people who had lived in the house had died and their only child, a son, smoked rocks. Within weeks, the house had turned into a residence haunted by addicts struggling up the steps and hanging outside. And it hadn’t mattered how many times somebody called the law. The police would raid the house and the addicts would scatter, but forty-eight hours later, the smoking would begin again.
Lydia thought of what smoking crack would do to her husband. His lips constantly dry from the chemicals. An empty stare to his eyes, and her heart contracted, but that Sunday, when she called him to let him know she had arrived back on campus safely, he sounded his usual self. He only missed her, he said. He had a hard time sleeping without her.
“Do you want to tell me something?” she asked.
“Why don’t you ask me what you want told?” he asked.
Lydia liked her husband’s openness. She hated somebody beating around the blackberry bush, too.
“Dante, we need to talk.”
“Uh-oh. What’d I do?”
“I saw something in your dresser drawer. I was just putting your underwear in the top drawer, like I always do. I promise I wasn’t snooping.”
“Lydia, let’s talk about this on Friday when you get here. Okay, baby?”
“But Dante—”
“Woman, what I say? We’ll talk about on the weekend. Good night, okay?”
On Friday, her classes were over at noon, and she already had her bag packed in the trunk of the car. She stopped in Chicasetta at the Pig Pen and picked up pork chops, several bunches of greens, two plump ham hocks, and a package of frozen lima beans. For dessert, she wanted to make a pound cake, and also bought eggs and butter. There was already rice in the apartment; she made sure to buy five pounds every month.
A good meal would lull him into a compromising moment, but when she opened the door, she noticed changes in the apartment. In the living room, a bright red leather sofa and a coffee table. A white bed frame with a shelf and mirror as the headboard and matching end tables for each side. On one of the end tables, there was a phone; no longer would Dante have to drive to Miss Opal’s house to call her. In the bedroom, the scarred chest of drawers had been replaced with another dresser, also white. Everything gleamed.
At dinner, when Lydia asked Dante where the new furniture had come from, he told her he got it on sale.
“So, Dante, you going to tell me what’s going on?”
“What you mean?”
She lost her temper, shouting. “Dante Alexander Anderson, don’t you play with me! I spent two hours making this goddamned meal!”
“Aw, baby, thank you. It was delicious.” Her raised voice didn’t rattle him. He took a toothpick from the holder—this was another new item on the dining room table. A table that was no longer an unsteady place for playing cards. This one was a sturdy, oak piece of furniture. “I ain’t want to tell you about this, but they cut my hours at the store. So what you saw? I’m selling that part-time, till I can get back on my feet.”
“So you’re saying you’re not smoking crack?”
Dante shifted the toothpick to the corner of his mouth. “Oh, naw, baby. You know I try to keep it light. I mean, weed is one thing, but that other? Naw, I ain’t going out like that.”
“And what about the police kicking down my door?”
That was funny to Dante. This wasn’t some big deal. It was only a side hustle, and nothing more. Tim was fronting him, to help Dante out, and it was easy money. Tim was the one who had to be careful.
“I’m just trying to take care of you, woman,” he said. “Like a husband should. I’m head of this household. I got responsibilities now.”
“No, we are the joint heads of this household. I don’t play all that male chauvinist mess.”
He removed the toothpick. “Wait a minute. The Bible says the man is the head, and I’m—”
“The Bible don’t say nothing about you selling crack, though. So you can hush up with that bullshit.”
Dante laughed, and asked, could he have another pork chop? Hers were better than his mama’s, but don’t tell Miss Opal. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings.
She wanted to keep talking, to let her husband know, the matter of selling drugs was serious, but that evening, there would be no further discussion, because Tim knocked at the apartment door. He’d brought a couple of his other boys, too. When Lydia offered them dinner plates, Tim pulled out a roll of cash from his pocket. He declared he didn’t want no regular dinner. He felt like some pizza, and Lydia placed the leftovers in the refrigerator instead. Then Tim demanded, who was gone make a run to the liquor store? Don’t bring back that clear liquor, though. That shit fucked him up. Unlike his boys, he had brought a date to the set, a brown-skinned young woman with not enough flesh on her curvy frame. Tim gave the girl abrupt orders: Pour him a drink. Come sit on his lap while he played his hand of bid whist.
At midnight, Lydia tried to give cues to let these men know they needed to leave. They’d been there since eight p.m. Lydia asked, what time was it? though she knew: she wore a watch. She sighed loudly when Tim began to make a homemade pipe from materials that Dante found at his request. The pipe was for Tim’s date. Her full lips were painted a glossy wine, and she bit at the color as she watched Tim poke an extra hole in the side of an empty soda can. He took a cheap pen and pulled the insides out until it was a shell, placing it into the can’s side. He molded foil on the can’s top, poked smaller holes into the foil, and carefully placed a crack rock on top. When Tim lit the rock, the date sucked at the smoke, making satisfied noises. Then she went to the couch and sat. She didn’t seem to mind that she was by herself. Somebody pulled out some weed, and Tim had a packet of powdered coke and used some to make a joint. When the primo came Lydia’s way, s
he reached for it, but she slid a glance at the girl, staring blankly on the couch. Without taking a hit, Lydia passed the primo to the left.
After playing a couple more hands of bid whist, Tim put his cards down on the table. He called to his date, come get some more, and he set her up again and he laughed as she sucked greedily at the smoke. Then he announced that he had to take a piss. He pulled his date from the couch, and she walked meekly behind Tim into the bathroom. No one said anything, until Dante asked, Lydia, you want to play the hand? Let me teach you how to play. She sat in Tim’s chair, and when the cards were dealt, she proceeded to run a Boston. She patted the table, crowing, and the other two guys at the table said, man, you said she couldn’t play. And Dante smiled: his wife had been keeping secrets.
As the game continued, no one commented about the sounds coming from the bathroom, as Tim could be heard ordering his date to turn around, take this shit, take it, and get down on your knees. It was a long time before the bathroom door opened. The date came out, her hair a mess. Tim followed, zipping up his fly. He tapped Lydia’s shoulder and said, I’ll play this hand, if you don’t mind.
She looked at the couch where the date sat, continually biting her now-bare lips, eyes staring blankly. Lydia wanted to say something to that girl, like, I’ve been there. Don’t let this asshole make you feel small. But if she said that, if Lydia aligned herself with a girl who had fucked a dude in a bathroom in a stranger’s apartment, then Tim and his two friends would turn on her, and then they’d turn on Dante. They’d wonder why he’d chosen Lydia for his wife. Why Lydia would defend somebody Tim had treated like a whore. And if that’s who Lydia would defend, they’d think she was a whore, too. And maybe Lydia was a whore. She’d slept with so many boys and young men, and her husband didn’t know. She couldn’t let Dante know that she was the same as that girl sitting on his red leather couch.
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois Page 46
