Can You Keep a Secret?

by Mary Monroe

  “Love? Pffft! Love is just another four letter word. My daddy loved my mother and she loved him. But that didn’t stop him from screwing that cow he left Mama for. And, Mama said she had a boyfriend herself before she even found out about Daddy and his girlfriend. Don’t you talk to me about no goddamn love, Lola Poole. Shit!” That was another thing about Joan; she liked to cuss.

  From that day on, I began to look at my parents in a different way. I didn’t ask Daddy if he was “screwing” Miss Shirelle and I certainly didn’t ask Mama if what Joan had told me she’d overheard in the beauty shop was true. I didn’t have to.

  The week before Christmas, I came home from school one day and Daddy had moved his girlfriend into our house!

  Chapter 3

  Joan

  EVERYBODY I KNEW WAS YIP-YAPPING ABOUT LOLA’S DADDY MOVING his girlfriend into their house. Ooh wee! I always thought that some of my female relatives were off the chain! I had never heard about any woman doing something as crazy as moving into her married lover’s house while the wife was still living under the same roof! Shivers went up my spine when I thought about what my mother would do to my stepfather if she found out he was even thinking about cheating on her. Actually doing it could have been fatal for him.

  No matter where I went in my neighborhood, somebody was discussing what was going on with Lola’s family. Yesterday, two ladies behind me in line at the corner market were discussing it. This evening it was the main topic at our dinner table. I was probably the only one who even noticed that the oxtail stew had stayed on the stove too long.

  “I don’t know what old man Poole’s got between his legs for his wife to let him move that woman in with them,” Elmo said. My mild-mannered stepfather was tall and lanky and he had small black eyes, a sharp nose, and tobacco-stained buckteeth. Despite the way he looked, Mama was madly in love with him and everybody else adored him too. Even though Elmo was in his fifties, Mama often treated him like one of her seven children. He liked to stir up a good pot of gossip as much as the rest of us. “I wouldn’t have the nerve to bring another woman around my wife, let alone move her into the same house.”

  Mama gazed at Elmo with a smile on her face for a few seconds. Then she reacted to his last comment the way I expected. She didn’t put a mean look on her face or raise her voice. She didn’t have to. “Elmo, you ain’t crazy. If you ever bring another woman around me, or if I ever catch you with one, I’m going to teach you a lesson you won’t never forget,” Mama warned. “If you don’t believe me, you just try it.”

  “Aw, Pearline, you know my mama didn’t raise no fool.” Elmo chuckled, placing his hand on top of Mama’s. He knew Mama’s history with her men and how she had roughed up a few for doing her wrong. Had I been a man looking for love, I would avoid women like my mother.

  Mama was nice to everybody until they crossed her and that rarely happened. Everybody knew that she was one woman not to mess with. She was a severe, fairly full-figured woman with tight brown eyes, a strong jawline, and short curly black-and-gray hair that she kept neatly styled. She worked as a guard for a local women’s detention facility with some very violent inmates. She even carried a gun and a can of mace on her job at all times. “If you see me fighting with a tiger, help the tiger,” Mama often joked. She was the third of eight children in a rowdy family from the projects in Barstow, California. Her first husband, my father and the father of my six siblings, lived in Sacramento. Daddy was a bitter man because he had only one eye. He had lost his other one during a fight with Mama when she caught him in bed with another woman. I was four at the time.

  Mama had left work early that day and picked me up from preschool because I had been coughing all morning and the teacher didn’t want me to infect the other kids. I was with her when she walked into her bedroom and busted Daddy so I witnessed the whole thing. The woman leaped off the bed and wrapped herself in a sheet. Then she snatched her purse off the dresser and shot out of our house like a bat out of hell. She jumped into the station wagon she had had the nerve to park in our driveway. Daddy was in his undershirt, shorts and socks, but by the time Mama got through clawing him with fingernails so long and curled they looked like Fritos, he was completely naked. With me running along behind her, she chased him with an empty beer bottle from one room to another. She fell when she tripped over one of my building blocks. That gave him enough time to make it back to the bedroom and lock the door.

  Mama kicked the door until it fell off the hinges. That’s when she really lit into Daddy with that beer bottle, breaking it on his face, severely injuring his right eye. He told the doctor at the hospital that he had been drunk and had fallen onto some broken glass. But we all knew he’d told that lie because he was too afraid of Mama to sic the cops on her.

  While Daddy was still in the hospital recovering, Mama and all of us kids stuffed his belongings into moving boxes and garbage bags. My brothers stacked everything on our front porch.

  A couple of weeks later, Mama served Daddy with divorce papers. He sent some of his friends to get his stuff. I had always been his favorite child and I still adored him. I missed him a lot but like the rest of my family, I was on my mother’s side because my father was the one who had broken up our family.

  We didn’t hear from him again until a year later when he sent Mama the announcement of his upcoming marriage to the same woman she had caught him with in her bed. He even called our answering machine and left a long rambling message bragging about it. That really upset Mama. She called him back and taunted him by saying that she had cheated on him first. I think she just made that up to get Daddy’s goat. None of us ever saw any evidence that she’d cheated.

  Chapter 4

  Joan

  LATER THAT SAME YEAR, MAMA MARRIED A JAMAICAN MAN NAMED Cyril MacIntosh. She had met him on the Caribbean cruise that she had booked to help her get over Daddy. As soon as Cyril got his green card and a job driving cabs in San Jose, he got downright arrogant. He started coming and going as he pleased and throwing his weight around like he was king of the world. That was his first mistake. His second mistake was alcohol. When he was under the influence, he got hostile and tried to boss Mama and me and my siblings around. I stopped counting his mistakes when he stopped helping Mama pay the bills because I knew then that his days were numbered. All of that caused a lot of tension in our house. The family wondered when and how severely Mama was going to maim her second husband. We didn’t have to wait too long to find out.

  Cyril eventually cooked his own goose until it was burned to a crisp. He came home drunk again one night a month after he’d received his green card. During dinner in front of me and the rest of the family, he told Mama that the only reason he’d married her was so he could get that priceless green card. He also informed her that he preferred Asian women and had already started a relationship with one. Mama surprised us all because she didn’t chastise Cyril herself. In addition to a bunch of uncles and male cousins that didn’t take anybody’s mess, Mama had four ferocious brothers. She calmly got up from the table and went into the living room and called up her three-hundred-pound baby brother, Leon. He showed up at the house twenty minutes later. The Jamaican didn’t have a chance. My uncle worked as a bouncer in one of the roughest nightclubs in town and had cracked quite a few skulls so cracking another one didn’t even faze him. Uncle Leon gave Cyril the beating of his life. He left the house that night walking with a limp and bleeding from his head to his toes. He never even returned to get his belongings and we never heard from him again.

  Mama wasted no time divorcing Cyril. Then she married Elmo Witherspoon, my current stepfather. He had been a mechanic for more than thirty years and he made good money. He was also a nice quiet man and he treated us all better than my own father had. Most important of all, Elmo knew his place and so far, he had not stepped out of line once. He did everything my mother told him to do. He had even cooked the oxtails we were enjoying now as we discussed Lola’s family and Shirelle.

  �
�Mildred Poole must have lost her mind,” my cousin Too Sweet stated, chewing and talking at the same time. “There is no way in the world I’d let my husband get away with something like that.”

  “If you ever get a husband,” my obnoxious thirteen-year-old brother James threw in, making me and the rest of my siblings snicker. “You’re the only woman over forty I know that ain’t never been married,” he added with a smirk.

  “Boy, behave yourself,” Mama scolded, shaking a fork in my brother’s face. “And how many times I done told you not to be using ignorant words like ‘ain’t’ in front of me? I don’t want nary one of my kids sounding uneducated.” Mama glanced around the table with a look on her face that was threatening enough to make us all stop snickering at the same time. Turning to my cousin in the seat next to her she added, “We took Too Sweet in on account of she didn’t have no place else to go and she needs to be loved, not picked on.”

  Too Sweet, whose real name was Flossie, was a few years younger than Mama and she had had several boyfriends over the years. But none of them had cared enough about her to marry her. And I couldn’t figure out why. There were several other older, overweight, plain women like her in our neighborhood who were married. Too Sweet was the only child of my real father’s deceased sister, Flora. Mama said that it was her attitude that kept her from getting and keeping a man. According to my uncle Myron, she was a displaced deadweight who had become a permanent thorn in our family’s side. She had already lived with him and several other relatives before she landed on our doorstep four years ago. None of her blood relatives had been willing to take her in when she had to quit her job as a housekeeper in a cheap motel. She had a serious case of diabetes and had not worked in ten years. In addition to a disability check every month, she subscribed to magazines that appealed to other miserable people like her: true detective and romance publications were her favorites. Sharing my bedroom with my pitiful cousin and sleeping in a bed a few feet from hers was no picnic. But I had learned to live with it without complaining too much. There were times when I even thought she was amusing.

  “I could get a husband if I really wanted one,” Too Sweet insisted. “I am real particular when it comes to men. I ain’t about to lick the bottom of no barrel or scrape a bone that some other woman done tossed out.”

  Even Elmo couldn’t keep a straight face after hearing that. He started snickering along with me and the rest of my siblings. All it took for us to get quiet again was another threatening look from Mama.

  Marguerite, my eldest sister, cleared her throat and added her two cents. “I thought we were talking about all that madness going on in the Pooles’ house,” she said. Everybody nodded and mumbled in agreement. “Shirelle has always been a hoity-toity type of woman; a straight up Miss Ann if ever there was one. You can tell just by the way she bats her eyelashes and swishes around town that she thinks her butt has a silver lining. I wonder how this mess is going to affect poor little Lola,” she said in a nasty voice. Marguerite was twenty-two. She had a cute round face like the rest of us and a decent body, but she was very insecure. The first time a man paid her some serious attention, she took him and ran. She was engaged to marry a man who delivered packages for FedEx. Her biggest fear had once been that she’d end up like Too Sweet; old, alone, fat, single, and shuffled around from one relative’s residence to another. Just because she had a man now, Marguerite thought she knew everything about relationships. “Poor little Lola. She might grow up thinking that it’s okay for a husband to cheat on his wife so if her husband cheats, she’ll let him get away with it. If I was her mama, I’d take that child and check into a motel until her daddy comes to his senses and sends Shirelle back where she belongs.”

  “Oh, Lola don’t care,” I offered, waving my hand. Even though I was the youngest member of the family, I often had a lot to say during our discussions. “She told me it was like she had two mothers now.”

  Chapter 5

  Joan

  AFTER I HAD FINISHED EATING DINNER AND HELPED MY SISTERS DO the dishes, I went up to my room and finished my homework. That took only a few minutes since I’d done most of it right after I got home from school. Then I trotted over to Lola’s house.

  The Pooles’ house was not nearly as big as ours. We had five bedrooms, they had three. Their front and back yards were so small, when Lola and I and some of the other neighborhood kids wanted to play ball or something, we usually went to the huge fenced-in yard behind my house or Myers Park in the next block.

  When I knocked on the front door, Shirelle was the one who let me in. She had a fan in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. As usual, she wore a lot of makeup and her hair looked like it had just been done.

  “Hi, Shirelle!” I wasn’t able to hide the excitement in my voice. Being in the presence of a woman that Too Sweet called a “home-wrecking hussy” intrigued me. It took a bold female to rub her affair with a married man in his wife’s face. I liked bold women because I planned to be one myself someday. Not the kind who would steal another woman’s man, though. I wanted to be a woman who lived by my own rules as long as I didn’t hurt too many people. Shirelle had even quit her job at the beauty shop and now here she was greeting visitors in another woman’s house like she was a queen bee and the Pooles’ house was her hive. “Is Lola home?”

  “She’s upstairs in her room,” Shirelle told me in a stiff voice. She was already walking back toward the living room couch, strutting and looking like a peacock in a low-cut, short, tight, multicolored dress. “Go on up there, but don’t you stay too long. She’s got homework and chores to finish before she goes to bed.”

  I held my breath because I was tempted to remind Miss Ann that she wasn’t Lola’s mama. One thing I didn’t do to a grown person’s face was sass them. I did enough of that behind their backs. I could not wait to tell my family how uppity Shirelle was acting already. That woman had some kind of nerve. Even so, I still admired her boldness.

  “Joan, did you wipe your feet?” Lola’s mother yelled. I glanced in her direction. She, Shirelle, and Lola’s daddy were all sitting on the same couch with him in the middle looking as smug as a pampered puppy.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I replied, moving toward the staircase as fast as I could. I didn’t want to give them time to start asking me about what was going on in my house the way they usually did when I visited. There was too much to tell, but none of it was as juicy as what was going on in this house. I still couldn’t understand how Lola’s mother had allowed her daddy’s girlfriend to move into her house!

  I was glad Lola was in her room so we could talk in private. Another reason was because her room was a lot more comfortable to me than the other rooms in her gloomy house. She had pink frilly curtains at her windows and a cute twin bed with a bright pink comforter and a matching ruffled skirt. A Winnie-the-Pooh the size of a six-month-old baby lay on his back with his head against one of the pillows on the bed.

  One of the few advantages Lola had over me was that she didn’t have to share her room or her toys with siblings or other relatives. All of her dolls, even the ones she’d had for years, still looked brand new.

  “Lola, has Shirelle started bossing you around yet?” was my first question. “She seems like the bossy type.”

  “Not really,” she told me with a shrug. “She’s a real good cook and she doesn’t mind helping us clean the house.”

  “I guess she don’t,” I said with a smirk. “I wouldn’t mind doing a little cooking and cleaning if some man moved me into his house and started taking care of me.”

  “What . . . ever.” Lola rolled her eyes and dismissed my comment with a wave of her hand.

  I sat down next to her on the bed. I didn’t complain about her lumpy mattress the way I usually did when I visited. Unlike my family, her folks didn’t believe in spending a lot of money on certain things. They had not bought new furniture since Lola and I were in kindergarten. And, they were the only people I knew who didn’t even have cable TV or an ans
wering machine! I knew for a fact that Lola and her mother frequently bought clothes from thrift shops, Goodwill, and the Salvation Army. But one thing I knew for sure was that a high-maintenance woman like Shirelle was not going to be shopping in a secondhand store. She wore more designer clothes than any other woman I knew. Her former co-workers told Mama that half a dozen creditors used to call the beauty shop for Shirelle and harass her about her overdue credit card bills. She didn’t have to worry about that now. According to the latest beauty shop gossip, Lola’s daddy had paid them all off and added Shirelle as an authorized user on some of his accounts. If that woman didn’t have it going on, I didn’t know who did.

  “Shirelle took me to Macy’s yesterday to get a few new clothes,” Lola told me with glee. “Mama even went with us.”

  “I’m not surprised. I’m just surprised that your mama hasn’t taken you to better stores before now anyway. She and your daddy make decent money and I notice the sharp clothes and spiffy hats he wears. Not to mention that shiny black hog he drives. He’s the only person I know who owns a Cadillac. No wonder he hooked a big fish like Shirelle.”

  Lola gave me a dry look. “I wish you and everybody else would stop talking about Shirelle. You should be tired of that subject by now.”

  “Not really,” I admitted. “I’ve never known anybody else who had a mama, a daddy, and the daddy’s girlfriend living in the same house. I can’t get used to seeing all three of them sitting in the living room watching TV together,” I said, looking toward the door. “Which lady does the nasty with your daddy the most? I’d really like to know.” I ignored the exasperated look on Lola’s face. I was too curious to care.

  “Miss Shirelle sleeps in the spare bedroom,” Lola snapped. She snatched the TV Guide off her nightstand and started flipping the pages.

  “That’s not what I asked you. I meant—”