by Pearl Cleage
The look was not lost on General, sitting on the edge of the bed. “What’s wrong? Did I get the wrong size?”
Ignoring his question, Brandi rapidly unzipped the next bag, revealing a bright yellow day dress with a full skirt, accompanied by a white cardigan sweater. The next bag held a black cocktail dress with a high neck and a deep V in the back, not quite low enough to show the birthmark, but close enough to excite him. He waited for her to squeal like she had before, but she was quiet. Too quiet. Something wasn’t right. Brandi’s silence grew with every new outfit she uncovered until she turned to him after unzipping the last one with eyes full of questions he probably couldn’t answer, even for himself.
“Well, aren’t you going to try them on for me?” he said, trying to recover the celebratory spirit that had swirled around them when he’d first walked in.
She looked uncomfortable as she reached for the first outfit and held it up in front of her body, careful not to actually touch the fabric to her skin. He had asked the clerk to remove all sales tags so the dress looked like she had just taken it out of the closet, but it wasn’t Brandi’s closet he had recreated. It was Juanita’s. Next to Brandi’s contemporary urban fashions, these clothes, which had looked so right in the store surrounded by padded shoulders from the forties and poodle skirts from the fifties, now looked just plain wrong.
General wondered suddenly what he had been thinking when he bought all this stuff, but he really knew. He had been shopping for Juanita. Brandi wasn’t even in it. The problem was, how was he going to explain all that to a girl who hadn’t even been born last time these clothes were in style?
“Go ahead and put it on,” he said with a big smile, trying to dissipate the strange mood that had settled over them.
Still silent, Brandi slipped the dress over her head and winced as it slid over her hips to end just above her knees. She glanced down at it and then looked at him again with the same confused expression.
“Come on over here, girl, and let me zip it up.”
She backed away a few steps, plucking at the dress like somebody had smeared spaghetti sauce on it. “Look, no offense, baby, but this is some old-time shit you got here.”
General was stung. He looked at her and his eyes narrowed. “I didn’t ask you to critique it. I asked you to try it on. Can you do that?”
“I’m tryin’ it on, baby,” she said, her voice taking on an unpleasant wheedling tone. “But it just ain’t me.”
He knew he had gone too far with the fantasy. Trying to turn Brandi into Juanita was a fool’s errand. And an old fool at that. But maybe he could still rescue the moment. Maybe she would cheer up if he reminded her that they were getting ready to take their relationship to a whole new level. Maybe she just needed to hear how fine she was, all wrapped up in a grown man’s fantasy of a dead woman’s style.
“Come here,” General said.
She went and stood in front of him slowly, the new/old dress hanging from her shoulders like a broken promise.
“Listen, baby,” General said, stroking her arm gently. “Vegas is the big time. You’re going to meet some of my associates. These are high-class people and their women are high-class women. I don’t want you to look like somebody’s country cousin from Atlanta.”
She just stood there.
“Turn around now and let me zip you up so you can see how it looks and don’t worry. You’re going to be the finest woman these niggas ever saw.”
He zipped up the dress while she gazed disapprovingly at her reflection in the mirror.
“Where you get this stuff anyway?” she whined.
General was staring at Brandi with his own critical eye. When Juanita had worn a dress almost exactly like this one, she had looked like pure class. They had gone down to New Orleans for the weekend while Blue was in Canada on his second honeymoon in five years, and everywhere they went, General remembered the envy in other men’s eyes. She was a queen and she looked every inch the part. Brandi, on the other hand, somehow managed to make the outfit look like secondhand news.
“What do you care where I got it?” he snapped at her. “All you got to worry about is how to wear it.”
“It just don’t look like me is all I’m sayin’, baby. That’s all.”
She reached behind her, unzipped the dress awkwardly, and stepped out of it. That annoyed him even more. What had made him think he could make her into anything other than what she was? A small-time stripper with no style and no future.
“Hey!” she said suddenly. “Are these clothes used?”
She was looking at the side seams of the dress with the practiced eye of a veteran mall shopper. Her tone accused him.
“They’re vintage,” he said, sounding defensive to his own ears.
She knew what that meant and she didn’t appreciate it one bit. “You bought some used clothes up in here?”
Without another word, he stood up and began to gather the bags, stuffing the clothes inside roughly. “Fuck this. You ain’t ever got to go to Vegas with me. I ain’t the one who’s never been there.”
Brandi watched him with alarm. She didn’t want to lose him, but what was the deal with these frumpy old clothes? Had they belonged to somebody else he knew? The thought made her feel creepy. Maybe they belonged to that bitch whose name he always called out when he came, she thought. Juanita. Were these her clothes? Was this like one of those old horror movies where the guy kills his wife and then tries to make somebody else look like her by wearing the dead bitch’s clothes?
General was stuffing the clothes back in their bags angrily and Brandi grabbed his arm in desperation.
“Wait, baby!” she said, grabbing his arm, seeing her trip to Vegas disappearing before her eyes. “I just—”
“Shut up,” he said, shaking her off. “You ain’t got nothin’ else to say to me.”
Suddenly her desperation felt more like anger. She hadn’t done anything wrong and now he was walking out the door. It wasn’t fair!
“How come I ain’t got nuthin’ to say?” she shouted as he walked out of the room with the bags over his arm. “Because I won’t wear Juanita’s old clothes?”
General dropped the bags he was holding to the floor, closed the small space between them in one swift motion, grabbed her arm, and lifted her off the floor like a rag doll. She was too terrified to scream. His face, only a few inches from her own, was a hard mask of rage. She saw him draw back his hand and closed her eyes against the blow. She hoped he wouldn’t beat her up too bad. She couldn’t work all beat-up.
Then, to her surprise, he released her arm and half dropped her to the floor. She staggered and then steadied herself before she opened her eyes and saw him standing with his back to her, obviously struggling to regain control of his emotions. Brandi remained motionless, hardly breathing.
“How do you know Juanita?” General’s voice was an ominous rumble of pain and confusion.
“You say her name,” Brandi whispered, trembling in her G-string.
He turned to face her, his face a terrible thundercloud, his eyes like lasers boring into her soul. Brandi swallowed hard and said a little prayer. At this moment, the question wasn’t whether or not to lie, but whether or not the truth would save her or seal her fate at General’s hands.
“I say her name when?”
“When we… when you come.”
The frown on General’s face relaxed almost imperceptibly, but it emboldened her just enough for her to continue.
“You been doin’ it the whole time we been seein’ each other, baby.”
The energy seemed to leave his body in a rush and he sat down on the edge of the bed like an old man. Brandi slowly, very slowly, sat beside him. She kept her knees slightly apart so he could smell her sweetness, but it was obvious that sex was the last thing on General’s mind right now. He sat with his head in his big hands as if she wasn’t even there.
“You ain’t got to tell me nuthin’,” she said softly, as if speaking any louder might set
off a response that would endanger her. “I’m just… I’m just not down for no spooky shit, okay?”
He didn’t move. She could see his big shoulders rising and falling with his breathing, but his sudden stillness was beginning to frighten her more than his anger. Shouting matches were familiar territory. Silence was an unknown danger, which is why it frightened her even more.
“You feelin’ okay, baby?”
In response to her question, he spoke so softly at first, she wasn’t sure if it was only a sigh. “I’m sorry.”
She leaned closer. “What you say, baby?”
“I’m so sorry.”
He repeated his apology as he raised his ravaged face. The pain she saw there frightened her, not for herself, but for his ability to bear it.
“What you got to apologize for? Good as you been to me, you can call me any name you want to call me.”
General looked at her sweet face and she could see that he was searching for the words to make her understand. She waited for him to explain what was going on, touching his thigh gently.
“You can tell me, baby,” she said. “You can tell me anything.”
He sat quiet and rigid and she began to stroke his leg slowly with no hint of sexual promise, only comfort.
“Tell me.”
General took a deep breath. “Juanita was the only woman I ever loved. She died ten years ago.”
“I’m so sorry, baby.”
“Before she went, she told me she would…”
Brandi’s hand on his leg never stopped stroking. He took another deep breath.
“She told me she would send me a sign.”
The hair stood up on the back of Brandi’s neck. “What kind of sign?”
He shrugged his massive shoulders. “She didn’t say exactly what. She just said it would be something only I would recognize.”
“And did you?”
He nodded slowly, never taking his eyes from her. “Yes. When I saw you.”
“Me?”
He nodded again. “She had a birthmark just like yours. Same shape. Same place on her body. That first time I saw you at Montre’s, I didn’t know what to think, but there it was.”
“So you think I’m like her reincarnated or something?”
He smiled. “Nothing like that. Just that… seeing you… seeing that mark on you…” His voice trailed off.
“You still love her?” Brandi wasn’t scared anymore, but she was intrigued. She thought this kind of stuff happened only in the movies.
“I’ll always love her.” General whispered.
Suddenly she felt bad for him. The lie that had seemed routine when she told it came back like a bad dream. He thinks he got a signal from his true love, she thought with a pang of guilt, and that mark on my ass isn’t even a real birthmark. This was getting way too complicated. Brandi stood up and looked down at General.
“Want a drink, baby?”
“Yeah.”
He stood up and followed her into the kitchen. She poured them each a shot of scotch.
“I didn’t mean to call you by her name.”
“Forget about it.” She smiled, handing him one glass and taking a small sip from the other as they headed back to the bedroom. She was still naked except for her high heels and the silver thong.
“And for the record,” he said, sitting down again on the side of the bed, “those weren’t her clothes. They’re from that vintage store in Little Five Points.”
“Thanks for sayin’ it,” she said, sitting beside him, “but I knew you had too much class for some shit like that.”
He smiled at her and sipped his scotch. “So now you know my secret. What about you?”
She shrugged. “I ain’t got no secrets, baby. What you see is what you get.”
He didn’t say anything. He just leaned over and hugged her with such tenderness that she felt guilty again. Tenderness was more unfamiliar than silence, so she leaned her bare breasts against his chest and waited for him to make the next move. His massive arms suddenly seemed the safest place on earth for her to be. If there had ever been a time to tell the truth, this was it. There was no room left for the lie. She leaned back and looked into his face. He smiled, his big hands moving down her shoulders, caressing her lightly.
“What is it?”
“Well,” she said, “since we’re confessing and shit, I have to tell you something, too.”
“All right. Tell me.”
“That ain’t no birthmark on me. I had a nigga’s name tattooed on my behind because he liked to do it doggy style, and when we broke up, I had it lasered off, but it left a scar.”
General didn’t say anything for a minute and she was afraid that telling him the truth had been a bad idea. Her mother always said the stupidest thing a woman could do was tell a man the truth. “They can’t handle it,” she’d say, sucking her sunken cheeks hollow trying to get the goodie out of whatever she was smoking. “They think they can until they hear it, then they lose their whole minds.” Brandi hoped General wouldn’t lose his whole mind, or his interest in her. He was a good, steady john and he definitely had connections. He was old enough to appreciate her, young enough to satisfy her, and there was something about him that she was starting to really like.
Maybe it was how he always treated her like a lady, or maybe she just admired a man who could love a woman as strong as he loved his Juanita. Brandi wished somebody would love her that hard. Maybe General was the one. She hoped her mother was wrong.
“What was his name?” General said after what seemed to Brandi like a two-hour pause to digest her confession.
“His name?” Brandi’s mind went blank. It had been so long ago and there had been so many since then. She felt a sudden flush of embarrassment. She had cared enough to tattoo his name on her skin and now she couldn’t even remember who it was. “I don’t know. Ain’t that a bitch? I don’t even know.”
She tried to laugh, but it came out more like a gurgle. That’s when she realized General didn’t look mad or sad anymore. He was sitting there grinning at her like a Cheshire cat. She grinned back, more relieved than she would have admitted. That’s when he started to laugh. Not just a little chuckle to show he wasn’t pissed. He was laughing so loud her neighbors could probably hear it.
His delight, although mysterious, was contagious and Brandi’s own laugh bubbled out of her like clear water in a mountain stream. There they sat, the great big man with the bald head and the broken heart and the pretty little woman whose tight butt and bouncing breasts paid her rent each and every month, laughing so hard they finally had to just sit there and breathe deeply to get control of themselves. He took her hand and she squeezed his thick fingers, lifted them to her lips, and nibbled his knuckles gently. He watched her.
“Well, all Juanita said was she’d send me a sign,” he said. “She didn’t say anything about whether it had to be a real birthmark or not.”
She looked up at him. “So you ain’t mad?”
He shook his head and smiled slowly. “A sign is a sign, right?”
She nodded. “You got that right, baby. A sign is a sign.”
He reached for her and she moved into his arms in one smooth motion, pushing him down on the bed and straddling his hips, rocking herself against him, feeling his response and her own. He closed his eyes. Her braided extensions brushing against his belly felt more like horsehair than human tresses, but it didn’t matter. She was a gift from his beloved, the living proof that what they’d had on earth was still present in the universe; that Juanita was somewhere, out there, watching him, waiting for him, wanting him as much as he still wanted her.
“Say her name!” Brandi panted.
He hesitated for just a heartbeat, but Brandi would not be denied.
“Say her name!”
General heard himself groan and then he couldn’t hold it back anymore. It was a cry, a prayer, a penitent’s confession, and a believer’s testimony. “Juanita!”
Then it was over.
52
Baby Brother was pissed. It had been a week. He’d been calling Zora on Davy’s cellphone, the same number he’d given Kwame, but neither one had called back. Or maybe they had called back and Davy hadn’t heard the ring over Rush Limbaugh’s latest harangue. The topic of the week was the war in Iraq and how what every red-blooded American needed to do was get behind the president, no matter what fool thing he decided to do next.
After a day of having to listen to all that crap, Baby Brother wanted to tell the people who were calling to argue that they ought to spend a week or two in Fallujah before they made any final decisions. By the time a woman who proudly identified herself as a white Southerner without having been asked stated that she thought they should empty out the jails by sending all the prisoners to work off their sentences as frontline soldiers, he wanted to scream. The caller credited her husband with the bright idea and urged the station’s listeners to write their congressmen.
“You see what I’m talkin’ about?” Davy said as they finished their last delivery and climbed back in the truck for the ride home. “That’s how they think.”
“Yeah, so?” said Baby Brother. “A lot of niggas think that way, too.”
“Yeah, but they just talkin’ shit. These crackers ain’t kiddin’.”
Davy indicated a left at Lawton Street and Baby Brother realized they were going to pass right by Zora’s bright blue front door. Maybe he could catch her at home and just drop in long enough to see if she was still mad at him for having had a little too much to drink the other night. He’d paid for it by peeing all over himself, but she had no way of knowing that. Maybe he’d tell her. Maybe she’d laugh and feel a little sorry for a soldier, a long way from home. Sympathy sex was some of the best sex around and he was overdue. That guy he’d met at the club had given him two hundred bucks and a blow job, but that was business. For pleasure, Baby Brother needed a woman.
“Hey, man,” he said to Davy as they turned toward the corner. “Pull over for a minute.”
