One House Over

by Mary Monroe

  “Well, now,” he croaked. “Look like you and Joyce done hit it off real good.”

  I gave him the most irritated look I could conjure up. “We did. She seems like a real nice lady and I hope I get to know her better.”

  “Why?”

  I did a double-take. “That’s a mighty odd question. Especially coming from you.”

  “I’m just trying to figure out what you seen in her that the other men don’t see.”

  I folded my arms and said in the strongest voice my mouth could manage, “I seen a real sweet woman and I like her. She was nothing like I expected.”

  “Is that right? Hmmm. I do declare, I’m sure enough surprised.” Buddy cocked his head and squinted. “After all me and Sadie Mae told you about that gal, I don’t know what you was expecting.”

  “Well, it don’t matter. I still like Joyce. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to finish my work, so I can go home and get ready for my date with her.”

  Buddy raised his arms and shook his patchy gray-haired, peanut-shaped head. “All right then. I was just trying to help.”

  “Do me a favor and don’t ‘help’ me no more.”

  “Say what?”

  “If you got anything else you want to tell me about Joyce, keep it to yourself. I’d really appreciate that.”

  “Oh. Okay then.” Buddy bit his bottom lip and cleared his throat. “I’ll tell Sadie the same thing if you want me to.”

  “Tell her exactly what I told you.”

  “Uh-huh. Um . . . I guess I should get back to work in case Mac come back. If he do, I hope he in a good mood, so he’ll let me take off early today. I need to get home, so I can rinse out my good shirt and iron it dry. I got a date with a lady this evening myself.”

  “That’s good, Buddy. I hope you’ll have a good time.” I ended the conversation with a smile and a pat on Buddy’s shoulder and he returned to his cash register. That was the last time he or Sadie ever said anything to me about Joyce.

  * * *

  I didn’t own no watch. I looked up at the wall clock every few minutes to keep track of the time. When I got off at five, I’d have just enough time to go to the flophouse where I rented a room and get ready.

  Chapter 4

  Joyce

  IT WAS HARD FOR ME TO BELIEVE THAT A HANDSOME MAN LIKE ODELL could fix his juicy lips to call me beautiful. I was not blind, so I knew what I looked like. No matter how much I spruced myself up, I was only average-looking at best. One of the drawers in my bedroom chifforobe contained a big supply of nut-brown face powder, rouge, black eyebrow pencils, straightening combs, marcel curlers, and every hair pomade ever made. Even with all those props, I had never felt beautiful until now.

  Odell liked me enough to invite me to have supper with him, but I still didn’t think our date was going to lead to anything serious. If sex was all he wanted, that was fine with me.

  I prayed that Daddy hadn’t put him up to asking me out. In a way, he had, by telling Odell I hadn’t been on a date since last year! I couldn’t imagine what Odell must have thought when he heard that. There was just no telling what else Daddy had told him about me. I could just hear him blabbing about how I sat around the house every night with my head in a magazine or a book. But it was true. When I didn’t feel like reading and went out somewhere by myself, I got jealous when I saw other women with their boyfriends or husbands.

  Odell seemed like the kind of man who liked to see people happy, so he probably thought it would please Daddy if he took me out. I didn’t want to think that was the case, but I couldn’t help myself. After giving it a little more thought, I decided I didn’t really care what his real reason was. I was just happy that I was going out with him.

  After I had checked my make-up and hair for the third or fourth time, I sat on my bed and stared at the wall. I didn’t like to spend too much time feeling sorry for myself, so I was relieved when Mama interrupted my thoughts when she knocked on my door ten minutes after I’d locked myself in.

  “You all right in there?” she yelled.

  “Yes, ma’am.” I sounded so tired I probably should have been getting some rest instead of getting ready to go on a date.

  “Odell just got here.”

  “Oh. He’s right on time,” I mumbled, and glanced at the clock on my nightstand. I didn’t know what else he was, but at least he was punctual—which was more than I could say about any other colored person, including myself. I’d arrived at my own high school graduation so late, they had already passed out the diplomas by the time I got there.

  I didn’t want to keep Odell waiting because I was scared Daddy or Mama might say something that would scare him off. I laughed at the thought of that happening. I didn’t know what I was thinking! First of all, he worked eight hours a day five days a week with them. There was just no telling how many stupid things they’d probably already said to him about me. But he still wanted to take me out, so maybe he didn’t care what they’d told him. Or maybe he was after my money. Just thinking about him being a fortune hunter made my chest tighten. If that was what he was after, he would be disappointed. Other than my paycheck, I didn’t have any of my own yet. I would inherit the store and everything else Mama and Daddy left behind when they died, but they could live another five or ten years for all I knew. I figured that a man after money wouldn’t want to wait around that long to get it. Besides, the other men I’d been involved with had known that I’d inherit a small fortune someday but they hadn’t asked me to marry them. Anyway, a man like Odell could get any woman he wanted. Other than trying to please my parents, I couldn’t think of any other reason why he’d want to spend time with a clumsy ox like me unless he really did like me; or, unless he was crazy.

  Mama pounded on the door again. “If you don’t get your tail out here and go out with this man, I’ll go.” She laughed. “I told Odell you’d probably be late for your own funeral. You sure took your time coming out of my womb.”

  I laughed too. “Mama, you behave yourself now. Tell Odell, I’ll be ready in a minute. I just need to put on a little more make-up.” I wanted to look extra nice, more for myself than Odell. I felt better when I looked good.

  “Let me in!” Mama hollered, and pounded some more at the same time. I opened the door, and she clomped in with her hands on her hips. “I don’t know why you lock this door in the first place when ain’t nobody up in here but us. We don’t even lock the doors to the house.”

  “I like my privacy, Mama.”

  “Privacy? What do you need privacy for? All you do in this room is read and sleep.”

  The last time I’d left my door unlocked, Mama had barged in while I was stretched out in my bed trying to pleasure myself with my finger, with no success. I had pulled the covers up over me in the nick of time. I didn’t even want to think about what she would have said or done if she had caught me touching myself. As far as she was concerned, sex was only acceptable when it was between two married people. She made that clear every time the subject came up in my presence. “Unmarried folks and sex don’t mix, and it’s a deadly sin.” That was what she’d said when Sadie told us about an unmarried woman who had come to the store to buy some salve to treat scabs on her private parts—which Mama called the appropriate punishment for fooling around. Regardless of what she or anybody else thought about sex outside of marriage, I wanted to get as much as I could. But pleasuring a woman was a man’s job. My feeble attempt at self-gratification had not turned out the way I thought it would, so I never tried it again. I prayed that Odell would at least end my long dry spell. I’d glanced at his crotch right after Daddy had introduced us. It looked like he had the necessary equipment to get the job done right.

  Mama looked around my room, frowning. I was a neat person, so everything was in place. Well, almost everything. There were a few magazines and the latest Sears and Roebuck catalog on the floor next to some chicken bones on a plate. She shook her head when she saw a stack of Gothic romance novels on my dresser that I had recentl
y ordered from a mail-order company in New Jersey. “Lord have mercy. I can’t for the life of me figure out why you spend so much money on reading material.”

  “So I can learn more about life,” I muttered.

  “Learn more about life? If you ain’t figured life out by now, you never will. Besides, everything you need to know is in the Bible. If you read it more often, you wouldn’t need to be wasting money on all them books. Did you wash up real good? We don’t want Odell to think you ain’t clean.”

  “Mama, I took a bath right after I got home this evening. Don’t you remember how you fussed up a storm about me using up all the hot water?”

  “You wash under your arms? A long, tall, strapping gal like you can get right musty in the armpits if you sweat.”

  “I’m old enough to know how to take a bath.” I rolled my neck and eyes at the same time as I plopped back down on my bed.

  Mama stood in front of me with her arms folded, looking me up and down. “Well, just to be on the safe side and make sure you don’t get too ripe, you can rub some of my rose sachet up under your arms too.” Odell must have really made a big impression on her because she never let me use any of her sachet. “Put a dab of baking soda behind your ears and on the back of your neck. That’ll keep you from sweating too much.”

  When I shuffled into the living room a minute later, the first thing Odell said to me was, “You look even more beautiful than you did this afternoon.”

  Either he was crazy after all, or my ears were playing tricks on me.

  Chapter 5

  Odell

  DURING THE RIDE TO THE RESTAURANT, I LEARNED A LOT ABOUT Joyce. She chatted away like a myna bird. It didn’t take long for me to realize that she was not shy like she had seemed when I met her. She even seemed more confident and relaxed now.

  I could already tell that she was a fairly intelligent woman because she spoke like one. Since she read books, listened to the radio every day, and worked in a school with folks that had even gone to college, she didn’t use as much bad grammar as me, and most of the other folks I knew.

  Since she seemed to enjoy conversating so much, I wasn’t going to say too much about myself until I had to. And I’d be particular about what information I shared. I only told people what I wanted them to know and never anything that would make me look even slightly bad, lazy, or trifling in any way. When people asked if I had kids, I always said no. But the truth of the matter was, I didn’t know for sure. I’d started having sex when I was thirteen, so it was possible that I had a few kids out there somewhere. One girl accused me of getting her pregnant when I was fourteen and she was thirteen. She moved to Detroit to live with her grandma while she was still pregnant, and I never heard from her again. The only other time was ten years ago when a woman I’d slept with just once claimed she was pregnant by me. She died in a car wreck a week later. I thought about them two a lot, especially in the last few years. The older I got, the more I wanted to know what it was like to be a daddy.

  Right after me and Joyce slid into one of the back booths at Mosella’s we started discussing politics, the church, and our jobs. I read the newspapers a few times a week and listened to the radio often enough, so I could hold my own when it came to certain subjects. “Do you think President Roosevelt is doing a good job?” It was one of the first questions she asked.

  I hunched my shoulders. “He could be, but it don’t mean nothing to us colored folks. Everybody ought to know by now that whatever goes on in the White House is set up to help white folks. Just like the Jim Crow laws. We ended up in America by default, so it’ll never really be our home.”

  I couldn’t tell from the deadpan expression on Joyce’s face what she was thinking. “Well, I’m sorry to hear you feel that way, Odell. I was born in America, so it’s the only home I know.”

  “You got a point there and I’m sorry I said what I said. Me and you is just as American as Roosevelt. Did you vote for him?”

  “No. When I tried to register, the white folks I had to deal with treated me so mean and evil, I gave up and came back home.”

  “I ain’t surprised. Some of my friends got threatened when they tried to register, so I didn’t even try.”

  “Do you think colored people will ever be treated like human beings in this country?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, but probably not in our lifetime. In the meantime, all we got is one another. I think that as long as we work together and look out for other colored folks, and don’t piss off the wrong white folks, we’ll make more progress.” I paused and cocked my head to the side and gave Joyce a serious look. I didn’t want the night to end, because I was enjoying her company. She made me feel so comfortable and gave me so much hope; I had to make her my woman. “You have the most beautiful eyes.”

  She did a double-take and blinked real hard, which told me she was not used to getting compliments. “You think so?”

  “Sure enough. They remind me of marbles. I can’t thank you enough for allowing me to spend time with you. You made my day.”

  “You made mine, too.” Her voice was so low I could barely hear her. I couldn’t tell if the look in her eyes was sadness or desperation. Probably a little of both. Well, I was going to fix all that—if she’d let me get far enough into her dreary life. She dropped her head and stared at the top of the table.

  “You shy, ain’t you?” I accused.

  She looked up and shook her head. “Who, me? Uh-uh. I don’t think so.” Her voice cracked over each word. “I’m just a little nervous.”

  “You don’t have to be shy or nervous with me. I want you to let loose and enjoy yourself.”

  Mosella’s service was always as slow as molasses, even when there was no crowd. It could take up to a whole hour to get served, another fifteen to twenty minutes to get the check, and a half hour more for the server to bring you your change. People complained all the time, but nothing ever changed. This restaurant was still the most popular colored-owned place to eat. For the first time, I was glad that the service was so slow. It would give me more time to conversate with Joyce. If I was going to get my future off the ground, I needed to get busy and start picking her brain. I hoped she’d give me enough information so I’d know where to go next with my plan to make her fall in love with me. I wasn’t about to turn my back on all the benefits I could enjoy by being her man.

  I was impressed when she told me she had finished high school and completed a six-month education training program, whatever the hell that was. She seemed proud of the fact that she had decided in her junior year of high school she didn’t want to keep working in her parents’ store after graduation, like she had been doing since she was thirteen.

  “I don’t mind working at all. I love my folks to death, but working in the store with them breathing down my neck was not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I tried a few other jobs after I finished high school, but when they offered me a position as a teacher’s aide at the same elementary school I went to, I jumped on it and I love what I do.”

  “What is a teacher’s aide’s job?” I asked.

  “I help Miss Kirksey, the fourth-grade teacher I’ve been working with since I started, plan the daily activities. I’m more patient than she is, so I give the kids the individual attention they need. And, you know how rowdy kids in elementary school can be. I help keep the troublemakers under control.”

  “It sounds like a good job, but it must be a lot of hard work, too. That can be a heavy burden.”

  “It is, but I love kids so much I think of it as more of a blessing than a burden. And they pay me a decent salary.”

  “I wish I could have stayed in school long enough to graduate.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “My mama brung in half of the household money, so when she died, I had to drop out of school in eighth grade and get a job so I could help Daddy pay the bills.”

  “Do you have any brothers and sisters?”

  “Both older and long gone. They took off w
hile I was still in my teens. My sister, Maybelline, live in Birmingham with her husband and their retarded adult son. They got their hands full taking care of him and struggling with low-paying jobs just to get by, so she never helped out. My brother, Donnie, live in Birmingham too. He shine shoes in a hotel lobby. Him and his wife got six kids, so he sure can’t do nothing to help Daddy. My siblings never got along with Daddy to begin with, so once they left home, they never looked back. Maybelline send him a Christmas card with a letter included every year. But she ain’t been back to visit but four or five times since she left home, oh, twelve or thirteen years ago. Donnie ain’t been back but twice and he left home a year before Maybelline did.”

  “What happened to your mama?”

  “Tuberculosis killed her when I was ten. Daddy married my stepmother Ellamae a year later. That woman is a bitch on wheels. Two days after I turned sixteen, I threw some clothes in a bag and left that house running. I already had a job picking cotton, but I struggled for a long time before things got better. I go visit my daddy at least once or twice a week just to make sure Ellamae ain’t mistreating him. She’s another reason my brother and sister don’t come around no more.”

  “Where does your daddy and his wife live?” Joyce was real interested in what I was telling her, but it was painful for me to relive my past, so I hoped we’d move onto a different subject soon.

  “Out on Route One down in the boondocks near the cane and cotton fields. In the same miserable shack I grew up in.” I cleared my throat to keep from groaning.

  “Is he happy?”

  I hunched my shoulders. “Well, he ain’t dead, and after all he’s been through, he should be happy he still alive. So, to answer your question: He’s happy. He wasn’t the best daddy in the world when I was growing up, but I love him to death, and I’m going to do all I can to make his last years better on him.”