by Pearl Cleage
As soon as I shed my robe and slipped into the sparkling water, I wondered what had taken me so long. There are obvious health benefits to doing a series of energetic laps that push your body to its limits and allow your lungs to show you what they’ve got, but there are equally important psychological benefits to just lying back under the stars and watching the steam come off the warm water and disappear into the cool late February air.
The night was clear, and even in the city, there were an impressive number of stars on display. It only took a couple of hours to drive from Atlanta to Birmingham, so by now Zora would have arrived at her destination. I hoped she was somewhere where she could see these same stars. Somewhere she could take a deep breath and stop running from herself so fast.
But that was unlikely. The mood she was in when she left, and the road-trip energy flowing from the guys who had come to get her, pointed more toward hard drinking, fast driving, and a series of bad decisions. I kicked my feet gently and sent up a little prayer for Zora’s well-being. Next week, we’ll hang out, she kept saying, and I intended to hold her to it. That would be the time to tell her about the duplex after I’d had a chance to think about it. It was, after all, my problem, not hers. What kind of grandmother dumps her troubles on a grandbaby who’s having a hard enough time just keeping her own head above water?
That thought made me feel guilty. I was supposed to be here to help her, not join her in some kind of self-destructive pity party. The mermaid’s expression suddenly seemed vaguely accusatory. I swam to the edge of the pool, hoisted myself out, grabbed my robe, and headed inside. Only one person could talk me back before I went too far down this road. I went upstairs, rummaged around in my purse until I found my cellphone, and punched in Howard’s number on speed dial.
“Your ears must have been burning!” he crowed on the other side of the world. “I just spoke your name this very minute. Where are you?”
“I’m at Zora’s place in Atlanta. Where are you?”
“I’m cooking dinner for six at my place. Let me speak to Lil’ Bit.”
“She’s gone to a wedding in Birmingham.”
“Alabama?” The idea horrified him.
“No, England,” I said. “Of course, Alabama. It’s just one state over, remember?”
“Alabama isn’t just a state, sweetie, it’s a state of mind,” he said. “Tell me you’re not spending Friday night all by your lonesome.”
The way he said it made me sound pathetic and not at all like my formerly fabulous self. “Just me and the mermaid,” I said.
“What mermaid? Oh, there’s the bell. Somebody get that! I can’t leave the pasta!”
I could hear the sound of one of Howard’s famous dinner parties in full swing. Loud music, lots of laughter, and what I knew would be a great big delicious meal.
“I’m making my world-renowned pumpkin ravioli,” he said. “Of course, I thought of you!”
“I miss you.”
“I miss you, too, sweetie. You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said, realizing this was not a moment when he could indulge me in some good old-fashioned whining about how hard my life was these days, but unable to resist giving him a thumbnail sketch. “The house is a wreck, Zora’s a mess, and I have no idea what I’m supposed to do about either one.”
“I thought you said the house was fabulous.”
“Not this house. The one I own.”
“The duplex?”
“That’s the one.” A loud burst of laughter made me feel so lonesome I actually teared up. “Listen, this can wait. I was just missing you and wanted to hear your voice.”
“I miss you, too, sweetie. These gatherings just aren’t the same without you. When are you coming home?”
“You tell me,” I said.
“I’m working on it,” he said. “Those fools don’t stand a chance. Between now and next week, I’m going to have so many folks demanding your triumphant return, Miss Thing won’t know what hit her.”
I was confused. “Who?”
“Didn’t you get my message? That little Cuban chippie who’s sleeping with François has floated the idea that she should close the season in a splashy new production of—are you ready for this?—Medea!”
I felt like he had kicked me in the stomach. All the air left my body.
“You there?”
“She’s not a chippie.”
“Stop being so noble. This is Howard, sweetie.”
“I’m…I just…I can’t believe it. I’ve only been gone a few days.”
“Time waits for no diva,” Howard said. “She saw an opportunity and she’s trying to work it.”
“What did François say?”
Howard made a rude noise and I could hear the faint ding of his oven timer. “Monsieur LeGutless said he’d let the board decide.”
“That’s reassuring,” I said.
“They’ll never agree to it. The American piece is one thing, but your fans would never stand for it. Trust me.”
“I do.” At this point I didn’t have much choice.
“You’d better! Gotta go, sweetie! If this ravioli is not al dente, my rep will be ruined. I love you!”
“I love you more. Ciao!”
“Ciao!”
So there it was. A perfect storm of bad luck. I was glad that Abbie would only be gone a few days. The way things were going, maybe a visionary advisor was exactly what I needed.
TWENTY
For the next two days, I thought and swam, and swam and thought, but by Sunday, I was as confused as I had been when I left Greer Woodruff’s office on Friday. Zora hadn’t checked in at all. I didn’t want to crowd her by calling, which left me plenty of neutral space to imagine her floundering around in all manner of unpleasant circumstances. Dinner at Abbie’s was a welcome distraction. She had offered to come get me, but I told her I’d be fine walking the few blocks over and she said she’d see me at seven.
I put on a black skirt, a black sweater, and some of my favorite silver jewelry. When I looked in the mirror before I headed out, I wasn’t unhappy with what I saw. It’s taken me a few years, but I think I’ve finally made peace with what I look like now, at this fifty-eight-year-old moment. A little thicker in the waist, a little broader in the beam, but so what? Next to the Botox brigade, the thing I find most disturbing is women my age dieting and exercising away any hint of roundness. Even their necks get skinny so that their heads are perched up there at the end of the stalk like perfectly made-up Halloween jack-o’-lanterns. Abbie didn’t look like that. She looked like a real woman with a real life. And so did I.
It was already dark when I stepped outside and stood there for a minute listening to the wind rustling through that magnificent magnolia. A man and a woman passed the house, her arm looped through the crook of his with an easy familiarity, and I could hear them talking and laughing as they walked. François and I used to walk everywhere we went, but I don’t ever remember taking his arm. Or maybe he never offered it.
Abbie opened the door before I had a chance to ring the bell.
“Come in, come in!” she said, pulling me inside with a quick hug. “Hang your coat or toss it and come on back to the kitchen. I’m making paella and I don’t want to miss a step or we’ll have to send out for pizza!”
I laughed as she headed down the hallway, her bright red skirt swirling around her ankles. Her tie-dyed shirt was tied at the waist in a style I remembered from the old days. There was a fire crackling in the fireplace, the smell of seafood and saffron in the air, and from the living room speakers, the sound of Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter. I hung up my coat and followed my nose to the kitchen where Abbie was standing at the stove, peeking into her pots with a critical eye.
I was surprised at how much food she was preparing. Why had I thought this was going to be just the two of us? I had a brief pang of disappointment, wanting to ask Abbie’s advice about things a little too personal to share with strangers.
“Don’t worry,” she
said. “It looks like I’m cooking for the army, but it’s just us, plus Aretha and Peachy.”
Her ability to read my mind so specifically was uncanny and a little disconcerting. “Did he like the picture?”
She grinned at me. “He loved it. Hung the thing right inside the front door. Now when you walk in, my smilin’ face is the first thing you see.”
“I guess that’s the end of your anonymity.”
“You can’t be anonymous on Tybee Island. The whole place isn’t ten miles long. Everybody knows everybody.”
“Kind of like West End.”
“Kind of,” she said, adding another bright pinch of saffron to one of the big pots and replacing the lid quickly. “Except West End doesn’t have an ocean.”
Satisfied that things were under control on the stove, Abbie headed to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of champagne.
“Grab us a couple of glasses, will you?” she said, pointing to the cabinet over the sink. “We’ll toast something.”
She poured us each a glass and stuck the bottle back in the fridge.
“What shall we toast?” I said.
She grinned and held up her glass. “To the return of the Amazon Queen.”
I almost spilled all that perfectly chilled champagne down the front of my favorite sweater. Abbie laughed, clinked her glass against mine, and took a sip. I recovered my equilibrium enough to take a sip, too.
“I can’t believe you remember that after all these years!”
“How could I forget it?” she said, putting down her glass and moving toward the cutting board where she had already arranged her salad fixings. I’m a good cook, but a very disorganized one. By the time I get it all on the table, the kitchen is usually an absolute disaster. Abbie cooked like Howard with distinct staging areas for each task. They’re the kind of cooks who start the process by running a nice hot pan of soapy dishwater. In Amsterdam, I’m the kind of cook who starts the process by smoking a joint. In Atlanta, a glass of champagne will have to suffice.
“That’s the first piece I ever saw you do.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. You were doing that other piece with François at the theater every night, but in the afternoon, you were showing up all over Paris, making these pronouncements from the back of that beautiful black horse.”
“Did I have my titties out?”
“Just one, for the herstorical authenticity.”
I groaned.
“Don’t groan. It was great. You rode up to a café where I was sitting outside having a Pernod, dismounted, and read a communiqué from the Amazon Queen, who, according to what you read that first day, had just returned after a long absence and she was not at all pleased with our progress.”
“Can you blame her?”
I really wasn’t surprised that Abbie remembered the piece. All false modesty aside, it was a classic. The way it developed was completely spontaneous. One day I was coming back from the theater and I saw a small poster taped to a light pole that said GOD IS COMING BACK AND, BOY, IS SHE PISSED. It made me smile. I figured it was probably true. Gender aside, any god or goddess worth the name would have to be a little bit disappointed in how we turned out. We humans, I mean. The dolphins and the mountain goats seem to be doing just fine.
That’s where the piece started, with an image of a big angry female force coming to set things right. It ended with Halima finding somebody who let us use their beautiful horse, and me riding around Paris with a tit or two hanging out and a sword strapped to my back, declaiming my opinions through the persona of a fictional Amazonian warrior woman. She would show up at various points around the city, state the queen’s opinions, pass out handbills reiterating the same, and then gallop off into the sunset.
It was an immediate sensation, of course, and probably made my reputation as much as anything.
“Sometimes that seems like another lifetime,” I said. “Were we ever really that young?”
“We’re still that young,” she said, smiling and chopping up some more tomatoes to add to her salad.
She was as optimistic as ever, but I was old enough to know better. I took another sip of my champagne.
“I’m sorry Zora couldn’t join us. Is she still working with that veterans’ program?”
I nodded. “They’re freaking out about the coverage she’s still getting in that gossip rag.”
“Dig It!?”
“That’s the one.”
“She can’t help what they print,” Abbie said. “They’ve got to fill up fifty pages a day. They might say anything.”
“Have you ever been in there?”
“No, thank the goddess. I’m not exactly of interest to their prime audience.”
“Who is their prime audience?”
Abbie shrugged and leaned back against the corner. Her knife still in her hand, she picked up her champagne and took a swallow. “Young people, bored people, unhappy people with no adventures of their own.”
“That’s not a very impressive demographic.”
“It actually is if you think about it,” she said slowly. “Most folks fit into one or more of those groups. Other people’s lives, real or imagined, are more exciting to them than their own. So they pick up Dig It! on their way to work, or on their way to the grocery store, and instead of having to figure out what they’re going to do to justify their presence on the planet today, all they have to do is see who’s hot and who’s not. Who’s loving who and who’s mad about it. It’s like a continuing soap opera, except these are real people’s lives.”
“They’re obsessed with Zora. The night I got here, she met me at Paschal’s and the next day, there we were having drinks in Dig It!”
“The waiter?”
“That’s what Zora thinks. Whoever it was, her boss seemed to think the piece compromised her position as a serious activist and gave her assignment to someone else on the staff whose profile presumably isn’t so high.”
“That poor child has had a year of this,” Abbie said, tearing lettuce and tossing it in the big wooden bowl. “I can’t believe they’re still hounding her. How’s she holding up?”
I shook my head. “Not so good.” To my great embarrassment, my voice broke a little.
Abbie stopped her salad making and looked at me.
“How are you holding up?”
I tried to laugh, but it came off a little shaky. “I been better.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “Zora’s smart and resourceful. She knows it can’t last. Pretty soon, they’ll find somebody else to torment. That’s not why she didn’t come tonight, is it?”
“No,” I said. “She’s gone to a wedding in Birmingham.”
“Well, that’s a good thing. She’ll be out of town, celebrating with a bunch of people who never heard of Dig It!”
“Here’s hoping,” I said.
Abbie peeked in another pot and looked at her watch. “These Negroes better come on. I am not above starting without them. Are you starving?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Good, then let’s take our champagne in the other room. Otherwise, I’ll keep adding stuff until I’ve ruined a perfectly good meal.”
She led the way down the hall to the living room where the fire had burned down to a pleasant glow and Ella Fitzgerald had given way to Nat King Cole. Abbie adjusted the volume for conversation and took one of the rocking chairs. I sank down into the pillows at one end of the cozy couch.
“Did you get a chance to check on your house?”
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t remind me!”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
I felt like a little background was in order.
“My mother bought the place when we moved here from Montgomery when I was twelve. She left it to me as a hedge against being a broke old woman forced to make a living doing cough medicine commercials.”
Abbie laughed softly. “Now that’s a good mother. Plan ahead.”
“Well, she did, but my ma
nagement company went out of business and the new one doesn’t really have much interest in what they call run-down rentals in undesirable neighborhoods.”
“How bad is it?”
“Pretty bad. There are no windows, no tenants, the yard is full of trash. Plus, an indignant squatter read me the riot act for letting the place get so run-down.”
“That’s awful,” she said. “What are you going to do?”
I snuggled a little deeper into the cushions. “I have no idea.”
Abbie nodded sympathetically. “What do you want to do?”
I loved her for making the distinction. One of the continuing challenges of my life is closing that gap between what I want and what I might actually do.
“Well, I’d like to hold on to it if I can.”
“For sentimental reasons?”
“There’s that,” I said, “but I always liked the idea of owning a piece of property. It seemed like such a grown-up, responsible thing to do, even if I didn’t live there. The rent has been paying all of Zora’s college expenses, and even though I laughed at my mother talking about that cough medicine commercial, it always felt good to know if worst came to worst, I had a place to call my own.”
“You know the funny thing is I remember a cough syrup commercial that they used to show a long time ago and I always loved the woman in it talking about her grandchildren and how this medicine was so good for them.”
I laughed and shook my head. “That’s because she was probably a great actress trying to get her rent money together!”
Abbie laughed, too, but I could tell she knew I was worried. “Can’t you get another management company?”
“Not the way this place looks. I haven’t even been inside, but if the outside is any indication, it’s a wreck, too. That’s probably why what they offered me was so low.”
“How much?”
“Fifteen thousand.”
“Fifty thousand?”
“Fifteen,” I corrected her, wishing it had been fifty. I’d be on my way to the bank right now.
Abbie put down her champagne. “Where on M. L. King is it?”
“It’s the big white house on the hill a few blocks from the cemetery.”
