If her father had failed at anything, it was to prepare his wife for a life without him in it. He had bought mortgage insurance, so the house was hers outright. And he had life insurance, so she would not now, in her fifties have to find work. But he hadn’t imagined—nor had any of them, really—that the beautiful wife he kept like a princess would not know how to cope with his mere absence.
When Sam was thirteen, she accidentally stumbled across a cardboard box in her mother’s closet. Thinking that perhaps she had discovered her parents’ secret stash of porn (because didn’t most parents have one?) she’d opened it, keeping an ear out for someone who might discover her snooping.
But inside, she had only discovered paintings. Miniatures in bright colors, depicting scenes of men and women dancing exuberantly, heads thrown back and arms spread wide, in ramshackle juke joints, vibrant nightclubs, and parlors.
At first, Sam couldn’t understand why her mother would buy the dozens of small oil paintings and not display them. Then she noticed the artist’s marking at the bottom—her mother’s initials. Or at least what her initials had been before she was married. The discovery for a moment delighted Sam, and then saddened her. She had never seen her mother with paints, canvases, or anything of an artist. She had never heard her mother so much as express an interest in art. And yet … here it was, the evidence of what had to have been a passion of hers, once upon a time.
Sam never told anyone what she found. Not even her sister. But she took one of the small paintings and hid it in her room. It was of a woman, or a girl, really, in a yellow dress, dancing alone in the middle of a room. She is surrounded by people, watching her with wonder, and with envy. Sam still had the painting and sometimes took it out to look at it but had never displayed it for obvious reasons. She imagined the girl in the yellow dress was Maxine, before she allowed marriage and motherhood to suffocate every other part of herself.
“Why is Leah always late?” Sam complained to her mother now, as Maxine walked the casserole out to the dining table.
“She has to make sure Kieran is settled with the baby. You know how men are. They panic when they’re about to be left alone with an infant.”
Sam rolled her eyes at how easily the excuse for Leah’s flakiness rolled off her mother’s tongue.
“Well, I’m hungry now. I’m going to start eating without her,” she threatened.
“The chicken needs another few minutes,” her mother said. “She should be here by the time it’s done.”
Together they sat at the kitchen table, and Sam eyed the cake sitting in the center of it.
“I found that recipe in the grocery store,” her mother said, following her gaze. “Some Spanish thing. Tres Leches. You ever heard of that?”
Sam nodded. “Delicious.”
“It’s the kind of thing your father would have liked. Because it’s so rich. It’s probably the kind of thing that killed him,” her mother said putting a hand to her jaw. “I always liked baking for him.”
“You didn’t kill Dad with your cooking,” Sam said wearily.
“I indulged him,” her mother returned.
“And he indulged you.”
“Yes, but not with things that could kill me.”
“Mom. Diabetes runs in his family.”
“Diabetes doesn’t run in families. Poor eating habits do.”
“Okay,” Sam said.
She stood and went to get something to drink from the refrigerator.
What she really wanted was to eat. She had been ravenous since she left Colt’s place, having worked off their light meal with all the fooling around they did just before she got ready to come here.
She took a bottled water from the fridge and cracked the seal, taking a long swallow. The silence lengthened, and Sam watched the back of her mother’s head. She had grown less conscientious about her greys. Now, they laced through her dark brown permed hair, making it appear dry.
Once a young woman who painted colorful miniatures, her mother was now a much older woman, unable to envision a life without her man. How long did a transformation like that take? Ten years, twenty? Or, perhaps even more scary, what if it took only one, or two years to lose yourself?
“I’m here!”
The sound of Leah’s voice, coming from the front hall seemed to energize the room. Sam watched her mother’s shoulders straighten, and she stood, turning to Sam with a smile.
“I knew she wouldn’t be too late,” she said.
The words were spoken as though to herself, rather than to Sam, and she turned to head out to the front room, leaving Sam standing in the kitchen by herself.
They wouldn’t have missed her, Sam thought as she eased her Altima back down her mother’s driveway, keeping an eye on her passenger-side mirror as she did.
Leah had parked her ridiculously huge Cadillac Escalade a little close for comfort to Sam’s vehicle. Between the two of them, it was Leah who had the most to lose if there was a scratch, so one would have thought she would be more careful. But ‘careful’ and Leah didn’t really go together in a sentence.
Her mother and Leah were still in the living room when she took her leave, sitting on the sofa with legs folded beneath them, gossiping like girlfriends. Sam had lost track of the conversation about an hour earlier, but tried to hang in there, not wanting to be transparent about the fact that she had been plotting her escape since shortly after the Tres Leches and coffee were served. If Sam had been the one who was late, or hadn’t shown up at all, there would have been some reflexive grumbling and complaints, but they ultimately wouldn’t have missed her.
The entire time she was there, her mind wandered to work, and Jason’s comments on the juvenile asylee paper; and to Colt, and that morning, and the night before.
Mostly, her mind stayed on Colt.
She should have been clamoring to tell her mother and sister about the new development in their relationship. But something was holding her back, and she wasn’t even sure she knew what it was. Her mother at least, would be thrilled. Leah, maybe not as much.
Instinctively—because it was what she always did after dinner at her mother’s—she called Colt. He was breathless when he answered the phone.
“Working out,” he explained.
“Again?”
“I didn’t work out earlier,” he said. “I went for a run.”
“That’s the same thing to me,” Sam mumbled.
“What’s wrong, lady bug?” Colt asked. “You sound funny. Leah get on your nerves?”
“You know she always does.”
That was untrue. Leah didn’t always get on Sam’s nerves. Leah and her mother together got on her nerves.
“I’m almost done here. Come through.”
“I literally just left you, like, three hours ago.”
“So what?” Colt said. “I didn’t get enough of you. I need some more.”
Jesus.
Sam felt her face, and other parts of her body warming.
No wonder women acted like fools for him. If this was the way he talked, she would be a fool for him soon enough.
Sam listened to him on the other end of the line, grunting. He was probably lifting weights, just as casual as can be—lifting weights, and increasing her heartrate, like it was nothing. Across a telephone line, no less.
“No,” she said. “I have to go home. Get some … stuff done.”
This couldn’t be healthy. No one was supposed to be this important to another person.
“Okay …” More grunting. “So, I’ll come to you just as soon as I’m done.”
Sam hesitated, and opened her mouth to refuse, but nothing came out.
“A’ight, bug? I’ll come to you.”
“Yes,” she said.
Come to me.
~ Eleven ~
Colt and Sam were seventeen, almost eighteen the first time he wondered, earnestly wondered, what she looked like naked. Before, he had noticed some things, the kinds of things that made Sam feminine and cut
e—like the way she looked in a swimsuit, or the smoothness of her knees when she sat down in a skirt that was short enough to rest just above them.
But he had never permitted himself to go all the way there and think about what her entire body might look like, uncovered and without even the tiniest garment. Recognizing her as “feminine and cute” was one thing. But recognizing her as a sexual being was something else entirely.
It happened because of a conversation they had on the phone one night. On the very same day, they had both just gotten their acceptance packages from Georgetown in the mail. Sam was excited, as was Colt, but she worried that going to a university so close to their hometown would be inhibiting.
‘How the heck am I ever going to be able to comfortably ‘ho out if I’m only twenty miles from where my parents live?’
She whispered the words, because Sam didn’t use words like ‘ho’ lightly.
‘You ain’ tryna ‘ho out,’ Colt said. It sounded like a cross between a statement and a question. He waited for her to respond. And when she finally did, she sounded regretful.
‘You’re probably right. But I mean, at some point I’m going to want to have sex, and not have to wonder if my mother’s going to stop by unexpectedly to drop off some laundry or something.’
‘You ain’ tryna ‘ho out,’ was all Colt could manage, once again. He was stuck on that thought, and this time when he spoke it aloud, it sounded like a directive, a rebuke.
After they hung up, he pictured it: Sam, naked and with her legs spread wide; some faceless stranger’s large hands gripping her by the inner thighs. His ashy ass rising and falling as he rut inside her.
That picture, the accompaniment to the thought of Sam ‘ho’ing out’ stuck in Colt’s head, and made him restless. It didn’t even turn him on, the way any sexual image normally might. Instead, it made him feel like he was crawling around inside his own skin, looking for an opening so he could burst out of it.
“You should have seen me. I’m a natural. Jason said it, and even used those words. I’m a natural.” Sam let the last word drag out, like she was savoring the taste and shape of it on her tongue.
As she spoke, she was pulling a yellow blouse off, over her head. It was the precise color of a buttercup in high bloom and had been paired with the cream-colored suit she had shed on the bedroom floor moments earlier.
‘I’m being subversive,’ she’d said to Colt that morning when she got dressed. ‘Jason distinctly told me I should wear a blue suit, but I feel like they’ll listen to me, and remember me better if I don’t look exactly like everyone else.’
‘Nah,’ Colt had told her. ‘They won’t listen to a word. They’ll just sit there thinking how pretty you are.’
‘That’s way sexist,’ Sam told him.
But she’d blushed too, and even let him feel her up a little while he kissed her, just before she had to leave the house in a hurry to make her eight-thirty a.m. pre-meeting with Jason. It was the first time she was going up to the Hill with him, and she was excited because it was for a series of lobbying meetings on that issue paper she’d been agonizing over. If she did well, and if she enjoyed it, it could be the opening of a new door for her, a new career.
“Was he pissed you didn’t wear a blue suit?” Colt asked.
He was reclining on her bed, watching her undress, thinking about how the entire day up till now had been filling time while he waited for Sam to get off work. It was kind of like when they were kids and bored out of their minds, suffering through that empty week after school ended in June, but before camp had begun.
Colt, who had always been an early riser, would sit around from about seven to ten a.m., waiting until it was a reasonable hour to call Sam and tell her to come over, or that he was heading over there. It didn’t feel like the day had properly begun until they were together, in the same place at the same time.
“I think he was a little annoyed when he first saw me,” Sam admitted. “Like he might have been worried that I didn’t know how to follow instructions or something. But we didn’t have a whole lot of time before the first meeting so we had to rush, and then I blew him away in the meeting and he forgot all about it until the end of the day.”
The yellow blouse had come off now, and Colt watched as she reached behind her to unfasten the bra underneath. He watched her so hard, Sam stopped what she was doing and smiled at him.
“What?”
“I can’t get used to it,” he said.
“Used to what?”
“The fact that I get to see you naked.”
Sam managed to blush and seem exasperated at the same time. It was her signature look, and cute as hell.
“By now you’d think you’d be used to it,” she said, her chin dipping, a reference to how often they had sex.
They had sex a lot.
“I don’t think I ever will be.”
Sam lifted her eyes again. She let her bra drop. Then she peeled off her sheer pantyhose, removed the panties and stood naked at the center of the Persian rug that covered most of the carpeting in the center of her bedroom floor.
She just stood there; and let him look at her.
He could see the blush now. Pink, under brown. Underneath all this boldness, she was still Sam. The only woman he would bet his life he knew just about everything about.
Her nakedness was the final frontier he never tired of exploring.
Her breasts were more than a handful, but not too big. They had a ski-slope curve, and small nipples, the size of quarters, brown with the slightest hint of blushed rose, pointing slightly upward. Her upper abdomen was smooth and flat, her stomach had a gentle softness. Hips, wide; thighs solid and not meeting in the middle even when her feet were together. Her legs shapely, her ass pert and her feet the prettiest Colt had ever seen.
When they were in bed together, he sometimes kissed her feet. The insoles, the toes, the ankles. She was ticklish, but she let him do it, never seeming to know whether she should giggle or moan. Colt had never done that before with any other woman. Of all the things he had done—and there had been plenty—that wasn’t one of them. The kissing of feet, that was just for Sam.
Taking her in from his position on the bed, Colt appreciated every detail. Nakedness wasn’t always about sex. Sometimes it was just about knowing a person. He just wanted to have this—to know the rest of her. The last piece.
Finally, Sam’s eyes grew weary. “Had enough yet?”
Colt shook his head. “Nah. But I know how to control my appetite.”
Sam laughed. “Right.”
She was talking about the night before. When he’d shown up at her door after she expressly told him, earlier that afternoon, that she needed to be well-rested for her first lobbying meetings. He showed up anyway, bringing her dinner from her favorite Mexican restaurant, and insisting that he was only there to eat with her, and then leave.
They ate, and then she said she had to work, and he told her it was no problem; she didn’t need to entertain him. He would just chill and watch television while she did what she had to do. But after an hour, he got bored with the show, and told himself he would just go upstairs to check in on Sam before heading home. Because it wasn’t like they had to have sex every time they saw each other (even though, lately they had).
Upstairs, she was sitting in the center of her bed—this very bed—a pen between her teeth, laptop balanced on her crossed legs, and a notebook next to her on the covers. She was wearing her reading glasses and looked up when he entered. Without speaking, Colt crossed the room, took the laptop off her lap, shoved aside the notebook, and pressed her backward. Only once she was on her back did he take the pen from between her teeth.
‘Colt,’ she said.
And then after that, there was no talking for a very long time.
“So now you want to be a lobbyist?” he asked her.
Sam was pulling a long tank over her head, no underwear beneath it. “I think I might,” she said, her eyes bright with excit
ement. “It was almost fun. It didn’t even feel like work.”
“Cool.”
“But I’m not naïve,” she went on. “I know it’s not going to be like that all the time. I’m sure sometimes it’ll suck, and I won’t feel like going to work at all.”
“But that’s true of right now anyway, right? Sometimes it sucks and sometimes you don’t feel like going to work now.”
Sam paused and looked at him. “That’s true,”
“At least this would be something new.”
She nodded.
“So, go for it.” Colt shrugged.
“I probably won’t be able to avoid the blue suit forever,” Sam said. “Jason told me that if I was meeting with a Member …”
“Member …?”
“Of Congress, Colt. If I was meeting with a Member of Congress.”
“Okay, if you were meeting with a Member then what? You’d have to be in a blue suit?”
“Yeah, it’s protocol.”
Colt rolled his eyes.
“It’s just the way it is,” Sam said. “And I can’t get in there and break all the rules. Not if I’m new. Today was just … I mean, I can’t make a habit of doing that. Not if I want Jason to take me seriously.”
“Okay.”
Colt found the minutiae of Sam’s work boring and didn’t imagine that would change much if she became a lobbyist. He just liked watching her face become animated when she talked about it. But he didn’t feel guilty about being bored since he was fairly certain she found his work boring too. Since he’d been in the NBA, she had only twice come to watch him play, and only when he was playing against Washington, in DC.
All of his offers to fly her and some girlfriends out, put them up in a suite and get them into a box in other arenas, had gone refused. He wasn’t insulted exactly, but there was part of him that wished she was even a little excited about the luxuries that being in the NBA afforded him. He sometimes wished she would ask him for something. Something big, that he could give to her in a grandiose, public gesture. He wanted to impress her.
The Makeover_A Modern Love Story Page 11
