by Mary Monroe
Rhoda’s handsome Jamaican husband, Otis, was from a well-to-do family. He was my husband’s closest friend, and I’d known Otis almost as long as I’d known Rhoda and Pee Wee. But I’d always been careful of what I said to and around him. I had never gotten over the fact that he’d been the first and only male to come between me and Rhoda back when we were in high school, when I first realized how important Rhoda was to me. I used to be very possessive of her time, but over the years I had learned to compromise. I saw Rhoda when it was convenient for her. Even if it meant I had to sit in my car on the street for hours at a time.
“Uh, I just got here,” I lied. “I was so tired, but I didn’t mean to go to sleep. I just…just closed my eyes for a few minutes.” I yawned, then forced myself to smile. I had slept with my head against the steering wheel. Now my forehead was so numb it felt like I had lost the top part of my head. “I guess I was more exhausted than I thought.”
Rhoda had parked her SUV on the street in front of her house. She and Jade had shopping bags from some of the most expensive stores in Cleveland.
“Why didn’t you wait for us inside? Otis is home,” Rhoda said, a quick glance over her shoulder toward her house. She waved at her husband, who was now peeping out the living room window with both hands shading his eyes. She set one of her shopping bags on the ground and grabbed me by my wrist, practically pulling me out of my car. My feet felt heavy, like my body didn’t want them to move. I felt like I was rooted to the spot I stood in, like an old tree.
“I didn’t want to bother Otis and his company. I didn’t mind waiting outside,” I mumbled, with a wave of my hand. Rhoda and Jade looked at each other, then at me. “I…I…got a phone…phone call,” I stuttered. The voice coming out of my mouth sounded nothing like my own. I was beginning to feel like a visitor in my own body.
I didn’t feel like myself because I was still confused, and I was truly frightened now. I was mad, too. Mad as hell. I wasn’t the bravest person in the world, and I had only had to defend myself on a few occasions in my lifetime. But I was prepared to do whatever I had to do to protect myself.
I couldn’t think straight. There was an eerie sound buzzing in my ears and a storm of a headache pounding at my brain. I thought I was going crazy. I thought, at that time, that Rhoda was my best and only ally. “The same bitch who sent me that blacksnake and the note called me at my house.”
“How do you know it was the same person?” Jade asked, her eyes wide with anticipation.
She had two shopping bags in each hand and a shoe box under one arm. Her yellow backpack was dangling off her shoulder like a vine. And she had on a different shade of lipstick from the one she’d had on earlier, which told me that she’d had her makeup done, too. Rhoda had done the same thing. She even had on a pair of long, curly false eyelashes. It was no wonder they had been gone for so long!
As in awe as I was of beautiful women, I was glad that I was so low maintenance. After a five-minute shower, it took me ten minutes to do my makeup and hair, and then wiggle myself into one of my many muumuus. I didn’t own a single belt. There was no point, because I had no waistline. And the one pair of jeans that I’d had the nerve to buy ended up as the top part of a backyard tent that Jade and some of her friends made. I had a few suits that I wore to work and a few other fancy outfits that I wore to weddings and funerals, but floor-length dusters and muumuus suited me just fine most of the time. Rhoda and Jade took at least two hours to put themselves together each time before they left their house. Even just to go to the corner store! It frustrated me to no end to have to endure all that pussyfooting around, when I really needed to talk to Rhoda ASAP. But like I said, she was really the only person I could talk to about everything. Therefore, I had no choice but to wait for her to come home. She gave me her undivided attention as I spoke.
“Oh, it was the same person, all right. She told me so,” I said, giving the hood of my car a quick slap that was so sharp and hard it made the palm of my hand throb.
“Why, that bold bitch!” Rhoda roared, stomping her foot.
I let out a triumphant sniff, glad to see Rhoda so fired up. I knew that whatever it was I had to deal with, Rhoda would be with me all the way.
“This bitch knows where I live, where I work, and my phone number. I need to stop this and I need to stop it now before…before somebody gets hurt, real bad,” I whimpered. I didn’t have to worry about Pee Wee getting hurt. He had survived Vietnam, so I knew he could take care of himself. My main concern was my daughter. I could get over my tormentor terrorizing me, but there was nothing that I wouldn’t do when it came to protecting my child. I had to put a stop to this foolishness, and I had to put a stop to it now.
Or at least before Pee Wee and Charlotte got dragged into it.
CHAPTER 8
Rhoda glanced toward her house again, clearly getting impatient with me. “Do you want to come inside and talk about it?” she wanted to know.
I nodded. “I tried to call Pee Wee but he had already left. I don’t know if he’s coming straight home and I don’t want to be in the house by myself. Not now,” I said. “I don’t know what this person wants from me. I don’t know what this person is capable of doing, and I don’t want to find out, until I know what kind of maniac I’m dealing with,” I snapped.
“That’s it! That’s it!” Jade said through clenched teeth. “I’m going to go inside and call the cops! We are not going to let this heifer do this to you, Auntie!” Jade yelled, her bottom lip trembling. “Are we, Mama?” Jade lowered her head and gave Rhoda a tentative look.
Rhoda pressed her lips together so hard that it looked like one had disappeared. There was a faraway look in her eyes before she blinked. Then she and Jade stared into one another’s eyes, like each was reading the other’s mind. That was one time that I was glad I didn’t have that ability myself. I didn’t really want to know what was going on in those two heads.
“What?” Rhoda spoke and shook her head like she was just coming out of a trance, and in a way I think she was.
“We’re not going to let this sorry skank keep this up. Are we, Mama?” Jade asked, rotating her neck so hard her hair fluttered.
“No, we won’t,” Rhoda said in a calm, easy manner followed by a quick smile. Rhoda’s smile disappeared when she looked at me and saw the exasperated expression on my face. “Don’t worry.” She tapped my foot with hers and offered another smile. Then her voice got deep, her eyes more intense as she glanced up and down the street.
“If this bitch is crazy enough to step onto my property, I’m crazy enough to straighten out this mess myself.” Even though I weighed more than Jade and Rhoda put together, literally, I felt safer with them than I would have with anybody else I knew.
One thing I could say about Rhoda was she would stop at nothing to handle her business. I had learned that early in our relationship. It had a lot to do with how important she was to me. She took no prisoners and didn’t have to because she had a shoot-to-kill attitude. I didn’t condone that attitude but I did feel that a person had to do what a person had to do, when he or she felt threatened.
When I couldn’t face one of my battles on my own, I always knew that Rhoda would face it with me. I was not proud of the fact that I was so dependent on her, but had she not been such a powerful crutch for me to lean on, I wouldn’t have made it this far. I didn’t know what I expected Rhoda to do about my present situation. But it meant a lot to me just to have her emotional support. And since I didn’t even know who or where my tormentor was, confronting her face-to-face was not an option. At least not yet.
I held up my hand, looking away from Rhoda to Jade. There was no smile on Jade’s face. She looked as grim as I felt. “I don’t think this is a police matter, Jade. I don’t have all the evidence anymore and I can’t even prove that this person called me up and threatened me,” I said, trying to sound strong. The truth of the matter was, I felt as weak as a kitten.
“She threatened you?” Jade and Rhoda yel
led at the same time. Rhoda replaced her smile with a look of horror.
I nodded so hard my neck ached.
“Come on. Let’s get you inside and have a few stiff drinks,” Rhoda said. “I’ve been waitin’ for an excuse to pop open a bottle of the brandy my mother-in-law sent me for my birthday.” She picked up her shopping bags and beckoned me to follow her and Jade, but my feet still felt so heavy that I couldn’t move right away. Rhoda and Jade started to inch toward their house, the sharp heels of their boots click-clacking on the concrete sidewalk.
“Can I spend the night? Or will one of you come spend the night with me?” I begged, dragging my feet, with my flip-flops sliding every which way, as I moved toward Rhoda and Jade.
“Well,” Rhoda began, giving me some of the same looks of pity that I received from my mother. “My husband’s friend from London is still here and he’s straight-up nosy. If you don’t mind him askin’ you all of your business, you’re welcome.” Rhoda leaned toward me and rubbed the side of my arm. “You remember Ian Bullard?”
I nodded. “The one we call Bully,” I said, wiggling my nose because the man in question was also Rhoda’s former lover and had fathered one of her children. It had been years since Rhoda and I had discussed her indiscretion and I wanted to leave it that way. But this was one time when I didn’t care who I had to deal with to get what I needed. And right now, I needed to be with Rhoda. “I just don’t want to be alone tonight,” I whined, blinking like an owl.
“And you won’t have to be alone,” Rhoda assured me.
Being that I was such a big ox and Rhoda was so dainty and petite, it seemed like I should have been the motherly one in our relationship. Rhoda couldn’t even get her arms all the way around me whenever she wanted to give me a hug. Instead of hugs, she usually just rubbed the side of my arm, like she was doing now. She opened her mouth to speak again but Jade cut her off.
“Spend the night with us, Auntie. Nobody will bother you in our house. Will they, Mama?” Jade asked. “And I can tell Uncle Bully that you have the cramps, or you’re going through menopause or some other female thing, so he’ll leave you alone.”
There was a smug look on Jade’s face. One of the few things that I didn’t like about this child that I loved so much was the fact that she never let me forget what I was: an obese, middle-aged Black woman who had nothing that anybody would be jealous of. Well, I had something at least one person was jealous of. So much that she took the time to type up a note and send it to me through the mail, call me up and talk crazy, and send me a blacksnake!
“Whoever it is that’s giving you a hard time won’t bother you while you are in our house. Huh, Mama?” Jade asked, anger flashing in her eyes. She shifted her weight to one slim leg and pressed her lips close together.
I didn’t like for Jade to be caught up in this mess that somebody had dragged me into, but she and Rhoda were like a package deal. A lot of the things that I shared with Rhoda, she shared with Jade. I had never had such a close relationship with my mother, which had a lot to do with me getting raped for ten years by one of her best male friends. But I did have a close relationship with my own daughter, even though she was only nine years old. As soon as she had learned how to talk and walk, I’d made it perfectly clear to her that she could come to me with any problem, no matter what or who it was.
“No, they damn sure won’t bother you as long as you’re in my house,” Rhoda sniffed. She lifted her chin and let out a loud breath. Then she spoke so calmly you would have thought she was ordering a pizza. “Jade, sugar, I want you to run into the house and put your bags away. Give yourself that egg facial you wanted to rush home for. Then I want you to go down to the basement and get one of your daddy’s guns. Load it up, and bring it to me.”
CHAPTER 9
Pee Wee, whose real name was Jerry Davis, Rhoda, and I had been friends since junior high school. We had gone through most of the usual things that kids had to go through during the sixties. But Rhoda and I had experienced some things that set us apart from a lot of the kids we knew when we were growing up.
Rhoda had grown up in a privileged environment, and she had enjoyed being the beautiful and pampered only daughter of a charismatic funeral director. She had lived in the lap of luxury in a big house with an extended family that adored her. If all of that wasn’t enough, she was at that time, and to this day, the most beautiful woman in Richland, Ohio.
I had not been as fortunate as Rhoda. I had not even come close.
My father had deserted my mother for another woman when I was three, and had left us in a shack in Florida to fend for ourselves. But being a typical Black woman, my mother did what she had to do so we could survive.
We left Florida and moved to Richland, a small, blue-collar city near Cleveland. My mother did domestic work and that kept us from living on the streets. But when she took in an elderly boarder named Mr. Boatwright, our lives changed for the better, and for the worse. Mr. Boatwright had lost a leg, so he received a nice disability check every month. In addition to paying his rent on time every month, he helped us pay our bills.
And since he didn’t have to work a regular job, he was eager to babysit me, keep our house clean, hop around town to shop for groceries, and cook while my mother went to babysit, clean, and cook for lazy, rich White women.
Mr. Boatwright—“Buttwright,” as Rhoda called him behind his back—was very prominent in our church so he got a lot of pleasure out of giving me my Bible lessons. He liked to take credit for the times that I stood up to testify in church. And he took a lot of his time teaching me how to be nice and polite to people. But all of that had come at a high price: me. A few months after he’d moved in with us, he started doing whatever he wanted to do to me when I was alone with him.
By that time, he had already broken my spirit by constantly criticizing the way I looked. “Girl, can’t nothin’ help you! You fat, you Black, you ugly!”
I heard comments like that from Mr. Boatwright so many times that I began to hear them in my sleep.
I had only known Rhoda for a few months when I got up enough nerve to tell her that Mr. Boatwright had been abusing me since I was seven. Rhoda wasn’t like any of the other girls I knew at the time, but nothing about her shocked me more than her reaction to my situation. She was horrified and developed a level of contempt for Mr. Boatwright that scared me. She vowed that one day she would make him pay for what he did to me. One thing I could say about Rhoda even back then was, she always did what she said she was going to do. Knowing that made it easier for me to keep my legs open long enough for Mr. Boatwright to have his way with me.
The same week of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Rhoda put a pillow over Mr. Boatwright’s face while he slept. She held it there until he was dead. Rhoda and I were seniors in high school at the time.
I didn’t witness, encourage, or participate in Mr. Boatwright’s murder, but I felt that I was just as responsible as Rhoda. And to this day, I still consider myself her accomplice.
Everybody thought that Mr. Boatwright had died of natural causes and since Rhoda had made me promise not to tell what really happened, nobody questioned Mr. Boatwright’s death.
Rhoda and I finished school and went our separate ways. She married Otis O’Toole and moved to Florida. I drifted around like a rootless gypsy in Erie, Pennsylvania, for a while, before I ended up back in Richland.
People were really not that surprised when my parents got back together after a thirty-year separation. But a lot of people were surprised when Pee Wee and I got married and had a child. My looks had not changed that much over the years. Except the older I got, the plainer and bigger I got. Pee Wee went from being a puny, effeminate busybody to a handsome, strapping man who could have married just about any woman he wanted. And that woman turned out to be me. For years some people walked around scratching their heads over that one. And I was one of those people.
Pee Wee and I had a lovely home and a lot of good friends. We had worked ha
rd for everything we had acquired, including our love for each other. I had a good job that I enjoyed and people who cared about me. As far as life was concerned, I had had a good thing going.
Until now.
CHAPTER 10
As soon as I entered Rhoda’s beautifully decorated living room, I felt sick. Or sicker, I should say. My stomach had been in knots and my head pounding like a drum ever since I’d left my house. The way I was feeling, I was in no mood to deal with Rhoda’s husband and their houseguest. For all I knew it could have been one of them who had called me up! I once knew a man, when I’d worked for the telephone company, who could disguise his voice to sound like a woman. So that was not so far-fetched. But I was fairly certain that that was not the case.
I couldn’t believe how paranoid I had become.
“Uncle Bully’s depressed, too. Maybe you and him can cheer each other up, see which one is the most depressed,” Jade said with a gleam in her eye. Jade was so young. She had so much to learn about life.
The man that they affectionately called Bully had been Otis’s best friend since grade school. It was hard for me to believe that this same man had seduced Rhoda and was now drinking and grinning in her husband’s face!
According to Jade and Rhoda, Bully’s British wife had run off with his best friend. It had upset him so much that he had quit his job as a hotel manager in London and hopped on a plane and come running to Ohio so that Rhoda and Otis could console him.
I had never been one to judge people, but this was one situation that made me uncomfortable. Though I had no proof that Bully and Rhoda were fooling around again, it was enough for me to know that they’d already done it, producing a child.
“I’d rather deal with anybody else today,” I told Jade as she escorted me to the kitchen, leading me through a back room so I’d bypass Otis and his company in the living room.
