“We met a year ago,” she snapped. “I was just an enlister then, but I’ve worked my way up through the ranks to director.”
“Now, I have had several conversations with your support counselor”—there was some shuffling of papers—“Nadine. And she has told me that although you’ve promised to return to the program, you have failed to do so. Which in my book makes you a liar.”
“ ’Scuse me, but you have no—”
“Not only a liar, but I assume since you have not returned to the program that you’re a fat liar!”
“Hey, hey, I don’t have to put—”
“A blimp of a liar!”
“What the—”
“A thigh-rubbing, waddling hog of a liar!”
I was stunned mute.
“Now, my success depends on how many women I can keep in this program. Whether you lose your blubber or not is of no concern to me.”
“I—I—”
“Shut up!” Miriam screamed. “Now, I have a ninety-eight percent attendance rate. Anything below that and I don’t get my twenty-five-thousand-dollar bonus at Christmastime, or my trophy, and I have received a trophy every year for the past four years!”
I cowered on my couch as I pressed the phone against my ear.
“Let me tell you one thing, Miss Geneva Holliday, you will not hamper my winning streak, do you hear me! You will show up at the Upper West Side office this afternoon, pay your ten dollars, weigh your fat black ass in, listen to the encouraging stories the other fat women have to share, and then come back the following Saturday and the Saturday after that, until you’ve dropped a dress size or gone bankrupt, whichever comes first!”
My lips flapped helplessly, but no words came out.
“Am I clear, Ms. Holliday?”
“Yes, yes,” I squeaked, finally finding my voice.
“Now if your counselor reports otherwise, you’ll have to deal with me. And you don’t want to deal with me, Ms. Holliday. I have ten years of military experience. Covert military experience. I will come to your place of residence, take you out, and not leave a fingerprint or a drop of your blood on your filthy carpet.”
I looked down at the carpet that hadn’t been cleaned in months.
“So we understand each other?”
“Uh-huh,” I said, nodding my head vigorously up and down.
“Good. Have a nice day.”
I heard a click and then a dial tone.
I thought of calling Crystal, but then realized how absurd I would sound. Shit, I’d just lived through it and it sounded absurd to me. No one would believe this.
Shaken, I pulled myself up and onto my quivering legs and walked into the kitchen.
Pulling open the freezer door, I retrieved a pint of Ben and Jerry’s, walked it over to the microwave, popped the container in for five minutes, stirred the creamy liquid with my finger, and then guzzled it.
Forty-Six
I’m sorry, Ms.Crystal.”
I blinked at the sound of Noah’s voice. “Noah?” I said unbelievingly.
“Curse me out if you have to—I won’t blame you one bit. In fact, I know I probably deserve it.”
I grinned. “Yeah, you know you do,” I said. “What the hell is going on with you?”
“Oh, Miss Thing, if you only knew,” Noah said wistfully.
“Did you break up with Zahn?”
“Oh, no, nothing like that. In fact, he’s coming in on Labor Day.”
“Really? That’s just two days away.”
Noah was quiet for a while. “Is it? I’m so behind. Where did the summer go?”
“I don’t know, Noah—the older you get, the quicker time just seems to fly by.”
“You said it, sweetie.”
“Well, are you going to tell me what drama you’ve been going through, or are we going to dance around it?”
“I will, one day, but not today.”
“Okay, I respect that. Just know that I love you and I’m here for you.”
“I know you are, baby, and I appreciate it. And know that I’m here for you as well.”
“I know you are.”
We basked in the glow of our commitment as friends for a minute.
“So how’s your roommate doing?”
“Chevy? Don’t you know?”
“Nah, she hasn’t returned any of my phone calls. Last time I saw her I was bailing her out of jail.”
“Get the hell out of here!” Noah screamed, and I could hear the kitchen chair being dragged across his expensive kitchen floor tiles as he prepared himself to get comfortable while I dished the dirt. “Do tell!”
“You don’t know about it, and she’s living right there in your house?”
“Girl, pleeeeeezzzze! Ms. Chevy and I pass each other in this house like strangers in the night, like ships on the sea—”
“I get it, Noah, damn.”
“So what happened?”
“She hopped the turnstile.”
“Get the fuck outta here! That is a classless act, something I would never think Ms. Chevy would stoop to.”
“I know, I was shocked too. But you know for yourself that she ain’t working.”
“Well, I figured that out when she started sleeping until noon all week long. But her not working ain’t stopping her from shopping.”
“What you saying?”
“I’m saying she comes in here almost every day loaded down with bags.”
“What?”
“Am I speaking a foreign language?”
“No, not at all. Didn’t you say you thought she had a new man?”
“Shoot, knowing Chevy’s freaky ass, it could be a woman.”
I had to laugh at that. “Stop it, Noah. Chevy is a card-carrying heterosexual.”
“Yeah, okay—you never know what’s going on behind someone ’s groove.”
I had to think about that for a while. What Noah said was true: I was living testimony of that. I never dreamed in a million years that I would be shacking up with a man and giving him money, but here I was doing just that.
“Well, I guess you’re right,” I said meekly.
“So what’s going on with you, Ms. Ting-a-ling?”
“Oh, nothing. Nothing at all,” I lied. “Just working my ass off.”
“And what about that fine man of yours?”
“Ha, ha,” I laughed nervously at the mention of Kendrick. “Oh, he’s still fine,” I said.
“Umpf, I know he is,” Noah said in a lustful voice. “You better keep a tight rein on that buck, or I’ll whisk him right from beneath your nose!” Noah teased.
“You do and I’ll kick your ass!” I said back with a laugh.
“You’ll try, at least!”
We taunted each other for a few more minutes.
“We have to get together before Labor Day,” I said.
“Well, that just leaves today and tomorrow,” Noah said.
“Well, let’s get together on Sunday, then,” I said.
“Good for me.”
“I’ll let Geneva know. Will you tell Chevy?”
“Well, I’ll slip a note under her door.”
“Better yet, stick it into one of the million pairs of shoes she owns—you know she tries them all on every night before she goes to sleep. It’s like a bedtime prayer for her.”
“Miss Crystal, you need help, girl!”
Forty-Seven
Kendrick played possum until Crystal donned her sweats and left the house for a run. She would have opted to use her treadmill had it not been for the mountain of clothes he had thrown across it.
His eyes rolled to the clock. It was just after ten, and the city was already bustling and loud.
His head was pounding, but that did not stop his progress. He pulled himself up into a sitting position and scratched at his balls.
He supposed it had been a few days since he’d last showered, but he couldn’t remember just how many. The days and nights seemed to stream into each other. Even as he sat there scr
atching, he couldn’t remember what day of the week it was.
Climbing out of bed, he stumbled to the bathroom and took a long piss. Most of which ended up on the toilet seat and the white tiled floor below.
After he turned on the faucet for the tub, he pushed the stopper down into the drain and went off to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, and peered inside.
There was a loaf of whole wheat bread, a half-empty bottle of low-fat milk, a bowl of sliced watermelon, and a container of leftover egg foo yong.
He removed the egg foo yong, watermelon, and wheat bread and placed all of the items on the table. He then began greedily stuffing the food down his throat with his bare hands.
After he felt that his stomach was full, he left the scraps on the table, walked past the open refrigerator door, and moved into the living room, where he plopped himself down onto the couch, snatched the remote control up from the table, and turned the television on.
He’d been missing the goings-on in the world, so he flicked through the channels until he stumbled onto CNN. But soon his eyelids began to droop and he dropped off to sleep.
When he awoke due to an overly loud Nissan commercial, he jumped up from the couch, frantically looking around for the source of the noise. Finding it, he grabbed the remote and pressed the off button.
Standing there in the early-afternoon light of the living room, he tried to decipher a strange sound filling the apartment.
“Sounds like running water,” he mumbled to the walls before turning into the kitchen and looking down into the bone-dry kitchen sink.
Heading off to the bathroom, he walked across the now sopping wet bedroom carpet to find that the tub was overflowing. “Shit,” he muttered under his breath, but failed to turn the faucet off. Instead, he grabbed the bath towels and tossed them down onto the floor, which was covered in three inches of water.
When the towels sank helplessly to the bottom, he tossed the bath mat, washcloths, and face towels down and watched as they succumbed to the same fate.
“Fuck it,” he said as he moved to the basin, where he haphazardly brushed his teeth and washed his face.
With no thought to the rest of his body or the scraggly beard that covered his face, he moved back into the bedroom and dressed himself in a pair of green chinos, a black T-shirt, and a pair of black Nike sneakers and started toward the door. Realizing he didn’t have a dime on him, he backtracked to the bedroom and saw that Crystal had left a fifty-dollar bill on the dresser, which he greedily snatched up before helping himself to her jewelry chest, from which he lifted a pair of diamond and ruby earrings, a solid gold bangle, and a string of freshwater pearls.
Forty-Eight
I eased myself back into the chair and looked into Abimbola’s expectant face.
“How do you feel?”
I thought about it for a minute. Besides the way my stomach bulged over the rim of my pants, I felt okay. I mean I felt full, in a strange sort of way. “Okay, I guess.”
“Good!” he exclaimed, slapping his hands together. “Very, very good!”
In fact, I felt sleepy. Yes, what I wanted to do was sleep. My eyes drooped.
“I see you have niggeritis, huh?” Abimbola leaned forward and peered at me. “But you cannot lie down at this time,” he said, his face turning to stone. “This whole run must be a simulation of what you will be doing on Labor Day.” He abruptly stood up. “You must remain in a seated position for the next”—he stopped to consider the gold Rolex on his arm—“six hours, at least.”
“Six hours?” I whined. I needed to lie down in the worst way.
“Yes, six hours—no less!”
I rolled my eyes at him and rubbed my stomach.
“No, no, you must not interfere with the packages,” he said in an alarmed voice as he slapped my hand away.
“What else can’t I do?” I said sarcastically.
“Look, come into the living room. You can sit in the recliner there. It’s just like being in first class.”
I perked up. “Will I be flying first class?” I asked.
“No,” Abimbola said sternly.
I settled myself comfortably into the recliner and dropped right off to sleep.
I woke to some confusion—the loud voice of Abimbola and Cassius’s screeching.
“I told you, you bitch, that we do not service clients from this location!”
“I told you not to call me that!”
“I’ll call you whatever I feel like calling you!” Abimbola screamed back, and then there was the distinctive sound of a palm making contact with a cheek and then a thump as Cassius’s body hit the wall.
“I hate you!” she screamed and came running from the room. I squeezed my eyes shut.
“Now that you’ve already told him where to come, you sell him the shit and get him out of here quick, bitch!”
The bedroom door slammed shut on Cassius’s weeping.
Two minutes later the bedroom door opened again and Abimbola’s voice boomed through the apartment. “I have to make a run. I’ll be back in an hour,” he said and then stormed out the front door.
Cassius screamed something in French that I knew wasn’t “I love you, honey.”
Soon after Abimbola stormed out, Cassius’s cell phone rang.
“Hello? No, you have to come up. I cannot make an exchange in public. Top floor.”
Cassius rushed off to the bedroom. I heard the sound of running water from the master bath and then smelled the scent of Chanel No. 5, Cassius’s signature scent. No doubt, she was straightening herself up after Abimbola’s ass whipping.
In less than a minute a steady knocking came at the door.
“Who?” Cassius asked through the five inches of steel door.
“It’s me.”
I opened my eyes a bit.
Cassius pulled the door back on its hinges and said, “Come in.” And when she stepped aside and I saw who it was, my heart almost stopped in my chest.
Forty-Nine
After my run, I stopped at Starbucks and bought a white chocolate café mocha. I didn’t want to go home, so I sat myself down at one of the outside tables to people watch and think.
My conversation with Geneva flicked through my mind as I sipped the sweet coffee. She was right. Down in the deepest part of my heart, I’d already known the truth. I guess I just needed someone who loved and cared for me to say it out loud.
Not that the truth did anything to assuage the love I’d built over the years for Kendrick. In fact, it made me even more concerned about what it was he was going through and why he felt unable to share his problems with me.
It was to the point now that we hardly spoke, and when I did try to initiate a conversation, the only responses I got from him were grunts.
Maybe he was going through a midlife crisis? I mean, he was forty-two years old. Did it happen that early on? Maybe it did.
Maybe he was depressed. Maybe business wasn’t going well. Lord knew the market had been going up and down like a seesaw.
Whatever it was, it was real bad.
I drained the last bits of the coffee from the cup and tossed it into a trash can as I started my short walk home.
I would try to talk to him one last time. I’d offer my help, and if he felt like I couldn’t help him, then I’d offer to find someone who could.
And after that, I’d offer to help him pack, because as much as I loved him, I loved myself more.
Hello, Mrs. Burgess,” I greeted the sophisticated-looking white-haired woman who was standing outside, cradling her small poodle in her arms. Mrs. Burgess had been a resident in the apartment below me since before the building had gone co-op. And I swear, I’d never seen that dog out of her arms. I wondered if it could walk and mused even further about where and how it relieved itself.
“Ms. Atkins!” she screeched, and I almost jumped out of my skin.
“Yes?” I said, shrinking away from her.
“You have flooded my apartment!”
I just blinked at her. “What?” I said stupidly, believing that the old woman had finally lost her marbles.
“My apartment is under half a foot of water,” she screamed, and then hugged her dog closer to her breast. “Coco could have drowned!”
“Mrs. Burgess, are you sure—”
“Of course I’m sure! I had to call the super. He’s up in your apartment at this very moment.”
I didn’t wait for any more. I dashed to the elevator and jabbed frantically at the button.
“Everything is ruined, everything!” Mrs. Burgess hollered at my back. “I’m going to call my lawyer—you’ll see!”
My apartment door sat wide open on its hinges. As I approached, I could hear voices inside.
“Hello? Hello?” I yelled as I gingerly stepped through the door. My sneakers made a squishing sound on the floor, and I looked down to see that I was standing in water that came nearly up to my ankles. “Shit!”
“Ms. Atkins?” The super’s voice came to me from the living room.
“Yes,” I said as I waded down the hall toward him. Passing the kitchen, I saw that the refrigerator door was wide open as well. I reached my hand in and pushed it shut. “Yeah, it’s me,” I said, my voice filled with dismay. “What happened, Henry, did a pipe break?” I asked when I was standing in front of him.
“No, Ms. Atkins, that’s what I thought when I got the call. I mean, this is an old building, and things like that do happen. Like last winter, when . . .”
I stared at the overweight, long-winded Puerto Rican building attendant. How long was he going to take to get to what my problem was? It could take all day, and I didn’t have that much time or patience. I threw the palm of my hand up into his face. “Did a pipe break?” I said again from between clenched teeth.
Henry studied my palm for a while, and then his face went beet red. “No, Ms. Atkins. You left the faucet on.”
“What!” I screamed and then shoved past him and into the bathroom. Sure enough, the water was slowly draining away.
“You see?” Henry said, using his wrench to point at the tub. “You must have forgotten.”
“I didn’t forget shit!” I bellowed at him. “That no-good, low-down asshole who’s living with me finally decided to get up off his lazy ass and wash it!”
Groove Page 20
