Blanche Passes Go

by Barbara Neely

  When she was a child, it had nearly broken her heart to realize her sister, Rosalie, was their mother’s favorite. But Blanche had loved Rosalie so much, Mama’s bias had almost made sense. She also didn’t mind when her mother preferred Taifa and Malik. There was a way in which she put them before Mama. But she’d expected that, after Rosalie died of cancer, she and her mother would find a way to move closer to each other. It hadn’t happened. Now here was Mama making new curtains, putting out her quilt, and moving her things out to make room for a never-before-seen cousin. It stung Blanche like a wasp. She wiped at her eyes and chided herself for being foolish. Wasn’t it time for her to be getting over all this hurt-child stuff? How would her life be different if her mother loved her just the way she wanted her to? Would it make her a better person? Would she be happier? More fulfilled? As if it mattered. Mama was Mama. No amount of tears, talking, or wishing was going to change her. Take it or leave it, she told herself. Take it or leave it. But she still snatched up her quilt and stuffed it into one of the boxes. Mama had other blankets Sauda could use.

  Blanche washed her hands in the tiny bathroom before she went back to the kitchen. Miz Cora had put a bowl of her biscuits, along with the slab bacon, butter, and jam, on the kitchen table.

  Blanche put the kettle on. “I saw Mr. Broadnax.” She got the cups, sugar, milk, and teabags.

  “Humph!” Miz Cora put a teabag in her cup.

  “He asked about you.” Blanche dabbed a large spoonful of jam on a biscuit half, topped it with a thick piece of bacon, and covered that with the other biscuit half.

  “What he askin’ ’bout me for?”

  “He said you always did know how to take care of yourself.” Blanche took a bite from her biscuit.

  Miz Cora rose from her chair so unexpectedly she startled Blanche.

  “Royal Broadnax ain’t no judge of what I could or couldn’t take care of.”

  “Royal? Is that his first name? No wonder he…”

  “Why you talking to him about me in the first place? What else he say?”

  Blanche thoroughly chewed her food, trying to think how to answer in a way that would lead to information from this woman who would talk you into deafness about almost anything but herself. Blanche had spent a considerable portion of her life trying to get her mother to talk about her own life and about Blanche’s father. “He was a good father and now he’s gone. Ain’t nothin’ else to say,” was her mother’s usual response to Blanche’s questions about her father. “It weren’t nothing special,” or “I was young and foolish, but I had more sense than you, girl,” were her mother’s standard answers when Blanche asked about Miz Cora’s youth. For a while, Blanche had given up on trying to get her mother to talk. She’d figured her father had walked off and left his wife and his children, too. So none of them owed him a thought, and her mother was entitled to keep her life as secret as she wanted to. But she’d changed her mind about that: the older Blanche got, the more she believed it wasn’t just her mother’s and father’s lives that were being kept from her, but part of her own. People who had or raised children didn’t have sole rights to their own life story. Once you had a child, you became community property. Family property.

  “Mr. Broadnax sounded like he knew you real well.” Blanche eyed her mother, who’d sat back down at the table.

  “Did he?” Miz Cora didn’t look at Blanche.

  “Was y’all friends or something?”

  “You sure got a heap of questions today. Best eat that biscuit.” Miz Cora poured the tea.

  Blanche stared at her mother, refusing, with her silence, to accept what she’d been told. Her mother sighed.

  “He was kind of like a friend of the family. Him and your daddy was…They ran around together some.”

  “A friend of the family?”

  “He was kind to me when I needed a kindness. That’s all I meant.”

  “What kind of kindness?”

  “Lent me some money, if you got to know.”

  “For what?”

  “Blanche! You ain’t even ast me how I’m feelin’. My pressure was up when I went to the clinic yesterday.”

  Yeah, right. Blanche had heard this story before—whenever her mother wanted, or, like now, didn’t want something, she’d break out the pressure story. “Did he give you a prescription?” Blanche took another bite of her biscuit.

  Miz Cora gave her daughter an evil look. “He said I don’t need to be gettin’ all upset, havin’ people bring up things I don’t want to talk about without even askin me how I feel, when I’m…”

  Blanche raised her palms in surrender. “Okay, Mama. I got to go anyway.” She finished off her biscuit and put her dishes in the sink, then walked around the table and kissed her still-seated mother on the top of her head. “So long, Mama.”

  “Humph! Now you gon leave. I ain’t even had a chance to ask after my grandbabies!”

  Blanche was out the door. Why should she be more willing to give out information than Mama was? The door was almost closed behind her when she turned around and went back in the house.

  “Forgot something,” she said.

  “Humph! Never did have no memory! When you was ten years old you…”

  Blanche retrieved her grandmother’s quilt from the box and put it back on Sauda’s bed. This was between her and Mama. Nobody else. Blanche’s legs felt wobbly by the time she finally left, as though she’d actually been on a roller-coaster instead of just whipped around by Miz Cora.

  There was a message from Melva on her machine that erased all thoughts of her mother and her Caribbean cousin:

  “I was right about your boy,” Melva’s message said. “You up for potluck at my place? Junior and the kids are going to a game. Come on over about seven. Bring whatever you want. Okay? We can’t do it no sooner, ’cause Patsy got to go over to Durham and can’t get here no earlier. I’m on First Street, ten twenty-five.”

  Blanche remembered how Melva had looked both when Blanche told her about the snooping job and while Blanche was messing with Luella’s mind. It was a close-attention, seriously interested kind of look that Blanche now recognized as the mark of someone who shared her own healthy interest in other people’s business. Sure, Melva had liked the idea of getting a hit of cash for bringing Patsy and Blanche together, but Blanche was pretty sure Melva would have done the same out of sheer curiosity.

  On the way to Melva’s, Blanche couldn’t help fantasizing about what Patsy might have to say. She knew she was toying with disappointment. It wasn’t likely Patsy had heard of another rape, or had seen Palmer beating up his future mother-in-law, or shooting up in the guest bathroom. If he was that out there with his stuff, she’d have heard about it by now. But if hope were hamburgers, she’d be stuffed.

  Walking into Melva’s house was like stepping into a ripe peach. The sofa, the chairs, the lamps and shades, the walls, and the drapes that covered the entire front wall—even though there was only one small window in it—were a peachy beige, as was the rug. The coffee and end tables were rosy blond. Blanche found herself tiptoeing by the plastic-encased sofa and chairs and realized how much the place reminded her of a funeral parlor. She followed Melva back to the bright kitchen with its peach walls and sparkling white café curtains and woodwork. Blanche set her bowl of Vanessa’s International Negro Spaghetti—the recipe of an old girlfriend—next to the fried chicken wings and the salad of lettuce, tomato, and hard-boiled egg Melva had prepared. When Patsy arrived, she added a large jug of red wine and two big bags of potato chips.

  Blanche hadn’t seen Patsy for years. She looked much the same, except that she was ten pounds heavier and had given up the Jheri Curl she’d had when last they’d met. Now her hair was hard-pressed and done up in shiny loops that looked like they’d give you a paper cut. Blanche knew it wasn’t good to rush a person with a story to tell, so she didn’t object when, after
the how-you-beens and a bite to eat, the first talk was about Maybelle Jenkins’s murderer.

  “I’m surprised they even arrested that white boy.” Patsy blinked at them. “They been trying to find a likely nigger to blame it on since it happened.”

  Melva took another wing from the platter and a couple spoonfuls of spaghetti and salad. “Yeah, but at least times is changed some. When we was coming up, they just picked up somebody black and beat him into saying he did it.”

  “Yeah, well, this mess ain’t over yet,” Patsy said from behind a cloud of blue cigarette smoke that she at least had the decency to try to blow away from the table.

  Even though she’d told herself not to hurry Patsy, Blanche sighed loud enough to make it clear that this was not the conversation she came to hear. Melva gave her a quick look, then poured them all a jot more wine.

  “So tell Blanche what you told me about that Palmer,” Melva said to Patsy.

  Patsy put out her cigarette and sipped some wine. “Well, like Melva told you, I useta work for them Gregorys, back before Miss Elizabeth moved to gay Paree. She was engaged to that Palmer you askin’ about.”

  “Why’d they break up?”

  Patsy swirled the wine in her glass. “Well, the official reason was that they was incompatic, you know, they was just too different.” She sipped more wine. “But there was more to it than that, I think.” Patsy reared back in her chair and picked something from between her side teeth with her little finger. “What I mean is, Miss Too-Cute-to-Be-True Elizabeth was what you might call highly sexed. The girl acted like she discovered the nasty. But I heard her say sex with David Palmer wasn’t all that. She said…Wait a minute, it’ll come to me.” Patsy put on an I’m-thinking look and drank some more wine. Blanche clenched her fists in her lap to keep from trying to shake the words out of Patsy.

  “Oh yeah, I got it! She said he was a emotional retard and needed some lessons in foreplay. More like taking a nap than having sex. Them’s her exact words. Or almost.”

  “When was this?”

  Patsy thought for a minute. “Let me see, now. I stopped working for them about three years ago…two and a half, and Elizabeth had been gone from home—oh, let me see—it’s been about six or seven years now, I guess. Lord! Where does the time go?”

  Blanche was about to ask Patsy how come she remembered so well after so long, but Patsy wasn’t finished:

  “I always remember what Elizabeth said when I see him, ’cause it sure ain’t the vibe I get from him. The Palmer place ain’t far from where I’m working now. He be driving by. Sometimes jogging when I’m walking the dogs. He don’t ever look at me, but I don’t take my eyes off him.”

  “Why?”

  Patsy shrugged. “ ’Cause he the kind of man you got to watch, else who knows what’ll happen? I useta see him when he come to see Elizabeth,” Patsy said. “From jump street I thought there was something, I don’t know, creepy about that man. I just don’t trust him. Something about him made me always want to be with somebody when he was around. I don’t know why, just something about him.” Patsy stopped to light another cigarette. “And since he had that breakdown, I don’t know. He looks weird to me.”

  Blanche was so moved to finally hear some other woman say something she recognized about Palmer that she had to stop and think about what to ask Patsy next.

  “Breakdown? That don’t sound like a rich-Southern-white-boy kind of a thing. What was that about?”

  “About him losin it! His stuff got so raggedy his daddy had to slap the poop outa him at some party. Then put him in the mental hospital. Yeah, girl. They had to hog-tie that boy and drag his sorry ass off. I heard Elizabeth talkin’ about it. Right after that, Elizabeth left and ain’t come back since either.”

  “Damn! Run the girl clean out the country!” Melva said. She leaned over and slapped palms with Patsy. They both burst out laughing.

  Blanche was too stunned by what Patsy had just told her to laugh. She was sure that those three events—the rape, the breakdown, and the breakup—had all happened around the same time. In Palmer’s mind they were probably related. To her mind, it wasn’t the because that mattered. She had no way of knowing whether Palmer had raped her before or after he was jilted by Elizabeth Gregory and she didn’t care. She didn’t know whether he’d broken down before or after he’d raped her and she didn’t need to know. No breakdown or breakup was reason to rape her. There could be no reason for raping her. None. All that mattered to her was the act. Knowing how he might have justified it to himself only made her hate his weak, sneaky ass even more.

  Patsy stood and stretched. “Oh! Miss Elizabeth say she think David Palmer’s daddy wanted his son to marry her as much as David Palmer did hisself. I gotta pee.”

  Blanche looked up at Patsy with serious thankfulness in her eyes—not for having shown her Palmer’s twisted path to raping her, but for letting Blanche know there were at least two other women in the world who understood that there was something basically wrong with David Palmer.

  Blanche turned to Melva. “You did good, honey.” She handed her two twenties. When Patsy came back from the bathroom, Blanche told her, “I appreciate this, Patsy, I really do. Here’s a little something for your trouble.” She was about to give Patsy Archibald’s twenties, then remembered their true purpose.

  “Did Elizabeth ever say anything about his sisters?”

  “Lord! Did she ever! She couldn’t stand either one of them cows. Said the oldest one, the one that moved to Florida, would do anything for money. But Elizabeth Gregory and her friends talked about the younger one like a dog.”

  “What they got against her?”

  “She a Doofus! She do everything they do. One of them change her hair color, Karen Palmer changes hers. Same with clothes. She try to find out what her friends is wearing so she can get something as near to it as possible, if not the same damn dress! Now, is that pitiful, or what?”

  Blanche and Melva shook their heads in wonder over a woman with money enough to develop her own style and too lame to do it.

  Patsy leaned forward over the table. “Oh, you ain’t heard the best part yet. They call her Tester Cunt!”

  “What!?” Blanche and Melva shouted in unison.

  “Oh yeah, some of them so-called high-tones got mouths like cesspools.”

  “But what the hell is a Tester Cunt?” Blanche asked.

  Patsy lit another cigarette. “I didn’t get it either, at first. It’s, you know, like they have at the perfume counter in the Bon-Ton. The bottle that’s open so you can try the perfume or hand lotion. That’s what that Palmer girl does, tries on all her friends’ men! But she engaged now, I hear. Some fool with no brains and too much money, they say.”

  Blanche handed Patsy the twenties.

  Patsy quickly counted the money, then grinned. “Girl! I wish I’da known you was gonna be askin’, I’da taken me some notes!” Patsy high-fived Melva, and all three women laughed.

  Melva picked up the jug. “Y’all want another taste?”

  Blanche and Patsy held out their glasses.

  “Y’all remember the time we went down Greensboro to that New Year’s Eve party?” She looked from Patsy to Blanche.

  “You mean the one where that woman poured a pitcher of ice water over her man’s head to cool him off from dancing with you?” Blanche asked her.

  Melva nodded. “Yeah, and y’all went off with that crazy Ardell and left me with that…”

  “No such a lie!” Patsy shrieked. “You wanted to stay with that wild boy—what was his name, Blanche?”

  “Richard? Or Richie? Something like that. Melva, you was so hot for that boy we could hear you sizzle, girl!”

  “Oooh! Y’all oughta be ’shamed of yourselves, lyin’ on me like that! Ask Ardell. She’ll tell you! He was the one after me. I swear! All I did was…”

  And they were off
on a trail of memories of the days when they were faster than they were wise.

  EIGHTEEN

  BALANCE, LUNCH HOURS, AND CANAPéS

  Six-thirty the next morning, Blanche put that old saying about what’s good for the goose is good for the gander into practice and called Archibald, who acknowledged her early-morning call was payback for his.

  “I saw this snake thingy on a man’s key chain the other day. You know what I’m talking about?” Blanche asked after they’d said their good mornings and had shown a passing interest in each other’s health and welfare. “It looks like a half-coiled-up snake. It’s got a number on it.”

  “Does this have something to do with, er, uh…”

  “I don’t know yet,” she told him.

  “It’s the membership key to SOF. Not a real key, more symbolic of…”

  “S-O-Who?”

  “The Sons of Farleigh. A men’s club.”

  “A club for men like you? Rich men?”

  “Well, yes, if you want to put it that way.”

  Blanche rolled her eyes at the ring of self-congratulation in Archibald’s voice, like heavy coins clinking together.