by Mary Monroe
“I was wrong, Sammy. I know I was wrong now. I love my mama, but I should have drawn the line when she asked me to leave Detroit and move out here to take care of her.”
“Naw, you should have drawn the line way before that.”
“I know, I know. Listen, you can still get a divorce, Sammy. I’ll be more than happy to sign the papers or do whatever else I have to.”
“There ain’t never been no divorce in my family. That’s the last thing I wanna do,” Sammy said gently. The sincerity in his voice surprised me.
“But you brought it up first, not me,” I reminded.
Sammy mumbled something I couldn’t understand. “What did you say?” I asked, my heart thumping so hard against the inside of my chest, I could hear it.
“When you comin’?” he asked.
“Just as soon as I can. Tomorrow if I can get us a flight.”
“Your mama want to do this thing too?”
“Not really. But I told her she can come with me, or she can stay out here.”
“My mama didn’t want me to marry you, you know. She wanted me to marry one of them sanctified Wheeler girls.”
“That’s your mama’s business. She didn’t have to live with me. And you can let her know that you can still marry one of the Wheeler girls. I won’t stand in your way.”
“Shit. This is a hell of a way for us to get back together. And, by the way, just what you been doin’ out there? California is a tough nut to crack if you ain’t got no college education.”
“Huh? Oh, just workin’ hard like everybody else. I had a few jobs…secretary, waitress. But it’s so expensive to live out here. San Francisco makes Detroit seem like a hick town.” I forced myself to laugh. “I guess they want everybody to help with the upkeep on that Golden Gate Bridge.”
“Ain’t that the one all them folks be jumpin’ off of?”
“Uh-huh. A person can get real depressed out here,” I said, sadly recalling a newspaper report about a man leaping to his death off that famous bridge a week ago.
“Well, at least I ain’t got to worry about you doin’ nothin’ that desperate. Do I?”
“I would never do somethin’ like that,” I said stiffly. “I got too much to live for.” Mama’s face flashed across my mind. I knew that as soon as we got back to Detroit, she would brag all over town about me being a model. So I had to lay the groundwork for that. “Uh, I did some modelin’, too.”
“No shit? You kiddin’.”
“No shit,” I said stiffly, wondering how many other women had told the same lie.
“Well, you sure got what it takes. I doubt if you can do much of that back here.”
“Oh, I’m through with that. I want to find somethin’ more stable. Modelin’ is a short-term career.”
“They hirin’ at Ford Motors,” Sammy announced. “It ain’t as much fun or glamorous as modelin’, but Ford pays a pretty penny, too. I just got on the payroll last month.”
My heart was finally beating the way it was supposed to. My lips had even curled into a smile. “That’s good to know. I’ll put in an application as soon as I get there.”
“Rosalee.” Sammy stopped and I waited a long time before I said anything else.
“Yes, Sammy. I’m listenin’,” I said, using the same seductive voice I used with my tricks.
“You take care of yourself, Rosalee. I-I’ll see you when you get here.”
After Sammy and I hung up, my telephone started ringing off the hook. Clyde left two frantic messages, Ester left two, Lula left three, Mama left three. Rockelle even called and left one. But I ignored them all.
I turned off my answering machine; turned off the phone; took a long, hot bath; and slid into my nightgown. For the first time in weeks, I slept like a baby.
Chapter 32
ROCKELLE HARPER
I knew that my life would really start to unravel after the stunt that dumb-ass Helen pulled. Helen’s parents had even stopped speaking to me, and they rolled their eyes at me every time I saw them. I was lucky they had not tried to file some kind of charges against me. Not yet, at least and I prayed they wouldn’t. I didn’t know much about the law, but I was sure that there was something on the books about contributing to the delinquency of a retarded person.
The kids missed Helen and hated crabby Old Lady Johnson. “How come Helen can’t come back?” my son Michael asked with tears in his eyes.
My precocious daughter, Juliet, answered that question for me. “Because she’s not responsible! She shouldn’t have been leaving us alone!” Juliet exclaimed.
And I hadn’t been too responsible myself for leaving my babies with a person like Helen in the first place. I was lucky that nothing worse had come out of this mess.
Two days ago, I ran into Helen’s brother, David, at the corner drugstore. I didn’t know Helen’s older brother and his wife that well, but I did know that they often advised Helen’s parents where Helen was concerned. As soon as I saw David, my heart started beating like a drum. With his narrow face, droopy features, and expensive suit, he looked like the vengeful type. What made that even more frightening was the fact that he worked at City Hall.
But he surprised me by being pleasant. It didn’t take long for me to realize that he didn’t know the truth about what had happened.
“Helen gets into too much trouble for Mama and Daddy to cope with now at their ages, so she’s moved in with me. It wasn’t so bad years ago for them to deal with her, when some asshole got her pregnant. I have my own problems to deal with, and even if I didn’t, I’m no spring chicken myself.” An unbearably sad look slid across David’s face. “Mama was already in her thirties when she had me. She was almost fifty when she had Helen. That’s a dangerous age for a woman to have a baby. I thank God that retardation was Helen’s only affliction.”
I gasped. “I didn’t know about Helen’s pregnancy. Who did it?”
David frowned and shrugged his rounded shoulders, already looking like a much older man. “It could have been just about anybody, Rocky. The girl was loose as a goose, and she’s always been so attractive. That’s a hell of a biological snafu common with girls in her mental state. Men have a hard time not noticing her.” David paused and shook his head. His features seemed to droop even more, right before my eyes, making me feel worse than I already felt about my role in Helen’s downfall. “That girl would have dropped her drawers for Satan. If Mama hadn’t had her fixed, she’d probably have half a dozen babies by now.” A painful look appeared on David’s face as he raked his fingers through his thin hair.
“Being a parent is not that easy,” David said, giving me a grave look. “It’s got to be one of the hardest jobs in the world. That Helen. She is so hardheaded. She talks to Mama, Daddy, and me any old way she wants to. But the girl can’t help herself.”
“Tell me about it,” I said strongly, trying not to think about how hard my job was raising three kids alone, especially Juliet.
David sucked in his breath and shifted his weight. It was then that I noticed the contents in his shopping basket: Ex-Lax, a heating pad, a huge bottle of brandy, some Geritol, black hair dye, and some Rogaine. He cleared his throat to either get my attention back or to distract me. I was glad I had not picked up what I’d come for: a jumbo pack of condoms to get me through the weekend.
David grinned and announced, “I just got transferred to Sacramento, and I’ll be taking Helen there to live with us. Annabel—you remember my wife?—is expecting in a few months. It’ll be good to have Helen there to help with the baby.” The sad look returned to his face. “Here I am forty, and about to be a daddy for the first time. Annabel and I will probably have to deal with the same type of shit with our child that my mama and daddy had with Helen. It won’t be easy chasing after a toddler, then a few years later, a teenager.”
I shook my head. “But you’ll have Helen there to help you. She is so good with kids.” I let out a huge sigh. “I sure do miss her.”
“And I’m sure she misses you and the kids,
too.” David stood straight, but his shoulders still sagged. “Listen, Rockelle, I never got to know you that well, but I know my sister spent as much time at your home as she did her own. I appreciate all the time you spent entertaining her. As limited as she is, the girl’s all right by me. She can’t help herself. It’s up to the folks that care about her to look out for her. Help keep her out of trouble.”
I nodded, and laughed, but only slightly.
“It was nice seeing you, David.” I patted his arm and rushed to get my condoms.
Twice as many tricks started calling me on my private line requesting my services. Or maybe it just seemed that way now that Helen had stopped intercepting my calls. Old Lady Johnson, my new babysitter, was a greedy old crow. She charged me by the hour, so every minute I was away from the kids counted.
Then, out of the blue, Rosalee mysteriously disappeared. Clyde had called her number, and a recorded message said that it had been disconnected. At first, we didn’t know what to think. Rosalee’s absence could have meant anything from her running off to be kept by a sugar daddy, to her sleeping with the fish at the bottom of the San Francisco Bay.
Clyde shared a tragic story with us for the first time about one of his earlier wives, a beautiful young woman from the Philippines. He still carried a picture of her in his wallet. “Maribel didn’t come back from a date one night. A week later they found her headless body floatin’ in the bay,” he stammered. “Some maniac from Fresno was the culprit. The next girl he tried to do, she got away. But she had his wallet. Cops found Maribel’s purse and panties in that freak’s house.”
“Clyde, you know Rosalee’s too streetwise and tough to let her guard down long enough for a trick to hurt her. Besides, her telephone has been cut off. I bet she skipped out on her own,” I assured him.
Rosalee’s landlady confirmed my theory. She told Clyde that Rosalee had checked out of the apartment two months late with her rent, leaving nothing behind but some tacky old wicker chairs and a few pieces of clothing. Neglecting her rent told me that Rosalee had been planning her getaway for a long time.
“That long-legged heifer,” he said, growling. Clyde was furious, but the worst was yet to come.
Lula went to the senior citizens’ place where Rosalee had dumped her fussy old mother to see what she could find out. The nosy old White woman who was always up in Rosalee’s mama’s business told Lula that Rosalee had packed up her mother and they’d both climbed in a cab, suitcases and all. Hearing that upset Clyde even more. We all knew that if Rosalee took off with her mother, she wasn’t coming back. Come to find out, Rosalee hadn’t paid her mother’s rent for two months.
Rosalee’s mother had gone behind Rosalee’s back and talked Clyde into cosigning for a ten thousand dollar loan. Then she told Rosalee she had won the money playing the slot machines in Reno. The old woman had used the money to buy herself a three thousand dollar brass bed and used the rest to finance a trip to Vegas. Rosalee had a lot of regular tricks who had been dating her exclusively. Her running out on those tricks and her mother’s secret loan had cost Clyde a fortune. He was fit to be tied. He got so mad, he had a panic attack. He had to take some pills and get drunk.
“That ungrateful bitch! I can’t afford to be played like this. Wherever that heifer hidin’ at, she better be hid good,” Clyde roared, his voice booming throughout his living room. He hurled a glass against the wall and waved that gun of his in the air.
It gave me a lot of pleasure to tell Clyde that I thought he never should have allowed Rosalee into our lives. I didn’t like his response.
“Rockelle, you worry about you and let me worry about everything else. I’m still the head nigger in charge,” he told me, giving me a look that made me tremble. I decided to watch my step. I wanted to stay on Clyde’s good side until it was time for me to defect, too.
Clyde was a peculiar man, but it was impossible to hate him. Every time I tried to do just that, he’d show up at my house unannounced cradling his daughter in his arms. He’d been doing that a lot lately, trying to get over Rosalee. I figured it would be a feather in my cap to accommodate him when I could.
Last Friday night just as I was about to take the kids to Mrs. Johnson’s house so that I could get to my date at the Mark Hopkins hotel, I glanced out my front window. I spotted Clyde, grinning and stumbling up on my front porch. He was carrying Keisha in his arms, like she was still a baby. She and I were about the same age and she was almost as tall as Clyde. Keisha liked to walk with her canes, but Clyde liked carrying her more. They saw me peeping out my window, so I didn’t have time to close my curtains and pretend I wasn’t home.
I opened the door with a fake smile and a lie. “I am so glad to see you two,” I squealed, holding my screen door open with my foot as Clyde struggled to get in. Keisha weighed quite a bit, too. Not as much as me, but she was still a big woman. I guess it didn’t bother her that Clyde still treated her like a child, because she seemed to enjoy his extreme devotion.
“Hi, Rocky!” Keisha greeted, flashing her crooked but beautiful smile and swinging her legs. I envied her deep, husky voice.
It had been weeks since I’d seen Keisha. Since that time, her appearance was different but not for the better. The eye on the injured side of her face had changed its location and shape. It was now noticeably lower and smaller. It looked like Keisha had a hard time keeping that pitiful eye open. When she blinked, her lid barely moved. It just broke my heart to see such a lovely young woman in her condition. I was so grateful that all three of my kids were okay. The problems I had with Juliet were nothing compared to what Clyde had to deal with. But Clyde didn’t seem to mind taking care of his daughter at all. I often wondered just how much more of a fool he’d be without her.
Keisha was wearing a beige sweat suit and a black baseball cap. Her long blond hair was in braids, the style she seemed to wear most of the time.
“I ain’t seen you and the kids for a long time, so I made Daddy bring me over here,” Keisha said, grinning. Decked out in an outfit identical to Keisha’s, Clyde beamed like a searchlight.
“Well, I’m glad he did,” I said, closing the door behind them, glancing at my watch. “Where are you two on your way to?”
“Just over here,” Clyde replied, looking me up and down as he gently placed Keisha on my couch. “Granny’s havin’ prayer meetin’ at her house tonight and Keisha didn’t want to deal with that.”
Keisha was not that popular with my kids. Her distorted face frightened my boys, so they usually stayed in their room when she visited. Juliet didn’t care one way or the other about Keisha and practically ignored her. I ended up entertaining Clyde and Keisha by myself.
It turned out to be a pleasant evening after all, even though I’d missed my date. About an hour into the visit, Clyde pulled me into the kitchen and started whispering.
“I’m goin’ to need you to help Ester and Lula take up the slack that Rosalee left ’til I find us a new girl. Her regular tricks threatening to do business with somebody else’s girls—I can’t have that,” Clyde said nervously. “Now…now I need to know if I can count on you.”
I nodded. “You know you can. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t helped me out.”
“Things gonna get real busy now.”
I nodded again. “Good. I need the money.” I felt bad about what I was thinking in the back of my mind. As soon as I stashed away another few thousand, I was going to leave Clyde, too. I hoped that by then he had him another wife.
I hugged Clyde and kissed him. “Let’s have a drink.”
Clyde was depending on me to help Lula and Ester take up the slack until he replaced Rosalee. I couldn’t believe it. In a way I was flattered. Up ’til now, I’d always been the lowest one on the totem pole. Despite what Clyde had told me in the beginning about my weight not being a problem, a lot of upscale White men, like most of our tricks, wanted to roll around on a bed with a slim woman like Rosalee. But when women like Rosalee were not availa
ble, and those same men wanted a Black woman, they settled for me. And believe me, when I was with a White trick, I didn’t boast about being biracial because when a White trick requested a Black woman, that’s what they wanted.
It was ironic for my popularity to rise to such a high level just when I’d started to seriously think about quitting the business. Before Rosalee’s mysterious disappearance, I had planned to “retire” within a couple of months. Now I didn’t know when I’d be able to do so. But it had to be soon. I was losing my grip on reality.
From day one, even before Clyde sent me on that first date, I’d promised myself that I would only stay in the business long enough to get myself in financial shape. Well, now I was in better financial shape than a lot of people. My rent was paid up three months ahead, all three of my kids and I had more new clothes then we needed, my credit cards were in good shape, we had plenty to eat, I had a new Camry for which I’d paid cash, and I took the kids to Disneyland on a regular basis—at two thousand dollars a turn. Greed and loyalty to Clyde were my only justifications now.
I’d recently taken the civil service test, so there was a possibility that I would get hired on at the post office. In between tricks, I’d practiced my typing and learned new software, so I’d also applied at a few offices for secretarial work. I was a high-maintenance woman, and I could continue to be one if I managed my money right.
I was pleased with myself because I had a plan. A real plan. After I stashed away a few more dollars into that safe-deposit box I maintained at Wells Fargo Bank and got a regular job, I’d move into a cheaper place.
Besides, it had become uncomfortable living next door to Helen’s parents. I didn’t see them that often, but even once a week was one time too many. The last time I saw Old Lady Daniels and her husband outside of that tomblike house they lived in, they were standing on their front porch looking at me with such evil eyes it hurt me just to look at them. It gave real meaning to the phrase “if looks could kill.” I’m lucky that I’m not telling my story from beyond the grave.
