by Mary Monroe
“Excuse me?”
“Aunt Viola’s gone. My poor boobie. She had another seizure and died Tuesday evening around five. Now if you don’t mind, I got business to tend to.” Noble hung up before I could get more information about Viola. But it was just as well. When I got back outside, where I’d left the two puzzled Mexicans standing on the front lawn, I noticed a FOR SALE sign on a stick in the middle of the yard. As soon as I looked toward Glodine’s house, she came out onto her front porch in a housecoat, with bare feet and a coffee cup in her hand. She shaded her eyes and stared at me. I ran over to her and started talking from the sidewalk.
“Noble told me Viola died,” I yelled with a sniff. I rubbed my nose and shaded my eyes to look at Glodine because the sun was in my face. That didn’t irritate me as much as Noble’s most recent actions. I had so much anger in me that I didn’t have much room for any grief. But I was devastated to hear that Viola had died. “He’s selling her house already! And he’s already moved every single thing out of the house that she owned!”
“Girl, that ain’t the half of it. That greedy buffoon was too cheap to give her a proper funeral. He went on-line and found the cheapest cremation deal he could find.” Glodine paused and slapped her hands onto her hips.
It felt like every word that came out of Glodine’s mouth pierced my heart. And my poor heart had been broken in two, thanks to my conversation with Viola’s nasty nephew.
“If I had known she was that close to death, I would have spent more time with her the last time I saw her,” I muttered.
“With all of them other busybody kinfolks she had, I don’t know how that nigger got away with taking such advantage of that sweet woman all these years. It’s mighty funny how fast she left this world after he got that new car and got her to change her will so he gets everything now. And another thing, him cremating her so fast was mighty suspicious. I seen a case like this on Murder, She Wrote. He must have had something to hide. I bet he poisoned her and had her cremated so they couldn’t do no autopsy and find out the truth. If you ask me, I think the DA ought to look into that. Seems like it’s a fad to be a criminal these days.” Glodine paused again. She glanced at me out of the corners of her fishlike eyes, then she looked past me at the two Mexicans still standing in Viola’s front yard. She looked back at me and snickered. “Speaking of criminals, I’m glad you done moved on from Floyd. I see you got you a new boyfriend already. Mexicans make good boyfriends.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “I heard that when it comes to women, they’ll lick everything from the rooter to the pooter. They eat a whole lot of beans and hot peppers, now. I advise you to go to Costco and stock up on some enema bags, some extra strength Beano, and some of them charcoal pills for your amigo. Gas can be real annoying, and it’ll ruin the most romantic moment at the worst time.” Glodine didn’t take her eyes off my face as she let out a loud burp.
“I don’t have a new boyfriend,” I insisted. “Floyd and I are still together,” I said firmly, turning to leave.
“Together? Girl, that boy ain’t never going to see the light of day no more, just like I told everybody for years. He come from bad stock. I’m just sorry I wasn’t able to turn him around.”
I didn’t respond to Glodine’s comments, and I didn’t bother to turn back around and waste a dirty look on her. It wouldn’t have done any good, anyway. People as callous as Glodine had hearts of stone and skin as thick as an armadillo. There was nothing I could have said to her that would have made her feel any remorse for me, or Floyd.
I drove the confused Mexicans back to the same corner where I’d collected them, and I paid them anyway.
CHAPTER 28
My first apartment was about the size of a large closet, but it was cozy and in a safe and quiet neighborhood. It had thick carpets on the floor, so I didn’t mind sleeping in a sleeping bag for the first few nights. I looked forward to shopping for a bed and other items and to learning my new job. I was trying to divert as much of my attention as possible—anything to keep my mind off Floyd.
Floyd’s new home was Carson Prison, a brutal, maximum-security facility about two hours north of L.A. Just last month three convicts and two guards died during a violent dispute between some Hispanic and black gang members, against members of a white Nazi-based group that hated all minorities. This was the “bright side” that everybody kept telling me to look on.
Even though I was allowed to visit Floyd for the first time a month after he’d started his sentence, I came up with every excuse in the world not to. Besides, I didn’t have a car, and riding on buses for too long made me sick to my stomach. There was no other way for me to get there. My new job was a lot more demanding than I thought it would be, so I volunteered to do a lot of overtime. Working ten hours a day, six days a week didn’t leave me much time to visit Floyd in prison, anyway. I had even started making new friends.
The first time that the single woman in the apartment directly across from mine invited me to go out for drinks with her, I jumped at the chance. And it was a good thing I did. Mona Lisa Freeman’s favorite bar was Paw Paw’s. It was the same bar that Valerie’s family still owned. It was a quaint and cute little place wedged between an African bookstore and a Greek deli. Black vinyl booths lined the walls, and tables with red tablecloths surrounded a small dance floor that faced a bandstand. On every wall were glossy autographed pictures of celebrities—famous and not so famous, dead, black, white, unemployed, and everything in between.
Up until now I had been to Paw Paw’s only a few times and not as a patron. I’d stopped by with Valerie a few times after school, hoping to catch a glimpse of a celebrity. When I didn’t see a single star after five visits, I stopped going, and hadn’t been back since.
I had no idea what was happening in Valerie’s family these days, and I had not had the time to try to find out. But when I walked into Paw Paw’s that evening with Mona Lisa and saw Valerie for the first time since the night of our graduation, I almost cried. She was tending what appeared to be a very busy bar. But as soon as she saw me, she stopped talking to a customer in midsentence and ran to me, still holding the bottle of gin in her hand that she’d been pouring from.
“Girl, you are so slim,” she squealed, wrapping her arms around me. “Tell me what diet you’re on.” Valerie had picked up a lot of weight, but it looked good on her. She set the gin bottle on the table and slid into the booth by the door where Mona Lisa and I had seated ourselves.
“It’s not a diet I’d recommend,” I told her. I gave her a brief update about what had been going on in my life. After she bombarded me with hugs, tears, and comments of sympathy, she shared her own tale of woe, dabbing her eyes and nose with a paper towel the whole time.
“I am so glad to be back in California. Tennessee is a nice place to visit, but I’m a California girl to the bone and I couldn’t be comfortable anywhere else in this country but here. I can’t get over how good you look, girl.” Valerie looked me over as though she were inspecting a cow. “Are you dating someone?” she asked in a tentative voice.
I gave her a dry smile and shook my head. “So you’re back here to stay?” I asked. Valerie’s eyes searched mine before she answered.
“As far as I know, I’m here to stay. And in the same house I grew up in,” she said, clearing her throat and glancing away. Then she looked at me and blinked. The way she screwed up her face a second later, I couldn’t tell if it was a sigh she let out or a groan. “My poor mama’s days of suffering are over. We buried her last week. Paw Paw’s been gone for six months. I couldn’t talk Binkie or Liz into moving back into the house, and I didn’t want to be bothered with another dog. The girl who’s renting Binkie’s room is turning out to be the roommate from hell, but I don’t know how I’m going to get rid of her,” Valerie told me in one long breath. She stopped talking. Then she sniffed and blew her nose so hard that she let out a muffled fart, which I graciously pretended not to hear or smell.
I didn’t even need to introduc
e Valerie to my new friend, because Mona Lisa Freeman was a regular. She was an attractive but frighteningly thin and insecure woman in her late twenties who worked as a claims adjuster for an insurance company in Long Beach. When the oldie but goodie tune “Little Red Corvette” by Prince came on, she leaped up from the table, bobbing her head and snapping her fingers. Like a puppy, she trotted out on the dance floor to dance by herself because none of the two dozen men in the bar asked her to dance. And of the six she’d asked, each one had turned her down.
Valerie shook her head and leaned across the table and started talking in a low voice. “I hope you don’t get too close to that one. She’ll keep you in the doldrums. She was named after the Mona Lisa, the only work of art that her ghetto-fabulous mother can identify. That’s a beautiful name, and the sister is a beautiful girl, but she bitches and moans so much about any and everything, everybody around here calls her the Moanin’ Lisa.”
I laughed, and it felt good to do so. It had been a long time since I’d laughed about something, or had something to laugh about. “Well, I won’t be available for her to spend too much time with anyway.” I told Valerie about all the hours I’d been putting in at my new job.
“Make sure you give me your address and phone number before you leave,” she told me, patting my arm. “We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”
“Tell me about it,” I said, looking at her with my chin tilted. “It would have been nice to hear from you every now and then. Just to let me know how you were doing.”
“I didn’t call you while I was gone because I had too many things on my plate already.” She paused and gave me a sharp look. “I hope you can understand that.” I nodded and shrugged. “Well, whatever,” Valerie said, shrugging too. “Anyway, I kind of wanted to put my past behind me. I didn’t want to deal with anything that would remind me of. . . certain things.” At this point she caressed her chin and stared at me for a moment. “Do you understand?”
I nodded again. “I understand. I had a mighty big plate of my own. And it was just as full as yours,” I told her, blinking hard. I used my fingers to wipe away a few tears.
“Look, I’m real sorry about Floyd. But I know you’ll be all right. With your looks, you’ll be back in circulation in no time, if you’re not already.”
“I’m not really that interested in dating right now,” I said. “There are a lot of things I need to sort out first.”
“Uh-huh. And the main one is forgetting about that Floyd, right?”
I nodded. “I guess so.”
“Lo, did he do it?” Valerie asked in a gentle voice, leaning across the table. She covered my hands with hers.
“No, he didn’t do it, Valerie. They got the wrong man.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter now. He’s the one that went down for it, and that’s a damn shame. All that good dick going to waste.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said quickly, horrified that she’d made such a crude statement. “The man’s not dead.”
“That’s not what I meant. I mean, Floyd is a hunk and I know he must have served up some good dick for you to be so crazy about him. The best he can hope for now is to claim him a bitch. My cousin Bryce is doing twenty years in Folsom. He tells me that the only way a prisoner can keep the peace and survive is to become somebody’s bitch, or make somebody his bitch. Either way, Floyd’s ‘peace pipe’ is going to go to waste.”
I was disappointed to see that Valerie still had a tongue sharper than a serpent’s tooth. I didn’t care what she had to say about other people, but I didn’t want to hear any more comments about Floyd. “Floyd is the past, so if you don’t mind, I really don’t want to talk about him anymore.”
“Well, I can understand that. Anyway, you’ll be meeting all kinds of men working for a cruise line. I went on a Caribbean cruise last July and had to beat the men off with a stick. And you don’t have to worry about meeting any thugs like the ones we used to fuck around with. You’ve got too much to offer to waste your time with somebody like Floyd. I hate to say it, but I’m kind of glad he’s finally out of your life.” Valerie looked at me and shook her head before she rose from her seat. “Let me get you a strong drink. You look like you could use one.”
CHAPTER 29
The two thirty-something-year-old secretaries with whom I shared office space loved trying to fix me up with some of their black male friends. Why they were so concerned about my love life was a mystery to me, especially since neither one of them seemed to have much luck with men. Dawn McMurphy, a used-up, dirty blonde with a face that only a dog could love, was involved with a man who came around only to gobble up her food, her pussy, and her life savings. Kathleen Roddy, a Demi Moore look-alike, was dating a married man who had been stringing her along for ten years. To get them off my back, I eventually went out on a few dates. Unfortunately, none of the dates they arranged for me panned out. As a matter of fact, I dodged one bullet after another.
The one man that I had high hopes for was a ship crew member for the cruise line that we worked for. He looked like a young Muhammed Ali. His bronze skin looked so good against his crisp, white uniform, the first time I saw him I swooned. But it didn’t take long for me to change my mind about that sucker. As soon as he got me alone in the car that he had borrowed from his estranged wife, who I didn’t know about until the night of our date, he told me that he liked to wear women’s underwear.
Another one took me out to dinner, speared items off my plate with his fork without asking, and then requested separate checks when it came time to pay. He sold cars for Honda. As soon as he promised that he’d give me a good deal when I was ready to buy a car, I decided to drag along with him until I’d saved up a substantial down payment. The day I drove my Civic off the lot in the Valley, where he worked, the relationship was over as far as I was concerned. He stopped calling after I ignored his next five voice mail messages. The rest of the rogue’s gallery included a waiter who worked on the ship. He looked a lot like Eddie Murphy—which was the only reason I agreed to go out with him in the first place. I knew something was wrong with him when I came home one night and saw him crouched behind a bush, peeping in the window of the apartment below mine. I didn’t have to worry about getting rid of him. The cops took him off my hands. He had outstanding warrants in three states for everything from fraud to assault and battery.
The more disastrous my love life became, the more I missed Floyd. I couldn’t have him, but I wanted somebody in my life. Despite my exciting new job and my new female friends, I was very lonely. I was still a very young and attractive woman, but I felt like a homely, neglected old maid.
I was not the only young black woman in L.A. looking for love and not finding it. Valerie was in the same boat. I didn’t know what my problem was, but her fierce independence, needy personality, her successful business, and her drop-dead beauty intimidated the men she wanted. I knew that for a fact, because one of her former fly-by-night lovers told me so one night. I’d caught him hiding behind a tree in front of his apartment building so he wouldn’t have to deal with Valerie, who was on his front porch pounding on his door with both fists. I didn’t have the heart to tell her, though. I didn’t think she would reinvent herself just for a man, because I knew I wouldn’t. I figured that sooner or later, we’d both experience the serious, long-term relationships we wanted.
Unlike me, Valerie eventually took a more aggressive approach in trying to secure a relationship, and she took me along for the ride. Once she started visiting me at work and at home, she started badgering me to go out with her to some of the clubs she liked. And of course, I went. There were some nights when I enjoyed myself, and there were some nights when I didn’t.
I was so confused. There were days when I thought I wanted to meet somebody and develop a relationship, and then there were days when I didn’t. Despite my loneliness, it was painful for me to even think about starting up a serious relationship with another man while Floyd was still so much a part of me. But I kn
ew that I’d have to let him go sooner or later. I still had a lot of years ahead of me, and I wanted to share my life with someone.
When I finally decided that I was ready to pay Floyd a visit I didn’t discuss it with Valerie, or anybody else. I knew that they would try to talk me out of it. My emotions were already on edge, so I didn’t need any more turmoil in my life. But because I would be seeing Floyd for the first time in six months, and seeing him in that prison for the first time, my mind was in a tizzy. I did things I probably would not have done otherwise.
Almost a week before my first visit to Floyd, I met a truck driver named Earl Speakes at Paw Paw’s. It was a Sunday night so there weren’t many men to choose from. Other than Earl, who had pulled me out on the dance floor a few minutes after Moanin’ Lisa and I arrived, there was no other man on the premises who I wanted to spend any time with.
“I should have gone to Blockbuster and stayed home and watched movies, or permed my hair,” Moanin’ Lisa complained, running her long, neatly manicured fingers through a rope of jet black hair hanging down her back. She looked at her watch with a frown. “I don’t know about you, but I’m beginning to think that Paw Paw’s has turned into a gay bar.” The few men who had approached the table I shared with Moanin’ Lisa slunk away as soon as she started moaning about everything from her boring job to her slightly bowed legs. I realized then that this sister could bring down Telstar, and the way the men fled, they must have thought the same thing.
This was one of the few nights that I was having a good time. When I asked Valerie about Earl, she wasted no time giving him her seal of approval. “I heard from five different women that he’ll fuck you inside out. If I didn’t have my sights set on his friend Dexter, I’d go for him myself,” was what she actually told me.
After Earl left the bar with me and Moanin’ Lisa, and accompanied us to my apartment, he and I suffered through two hours of her detailed reports about more things that irritated her. It was excruciating.
