I’m also feeling really guilty because we are still struggling with money so much. I know I’m smart enough to get a job in an office somewhere, and I’m good at organizing things. It seems crazy to be chasing this idea of writing books when I could get real work at $9 an hour and build a nice, ordinary life. Tony is always coming home and telling me about jobs at State Hospital, where he works, and it’s so stable and so reliable, he’d really like me to do it. It’s hard to stick with my five-year plan, to believe I can really do this. It’s getting kind of close now—I only have a year left, Naomi, and then I told him I would go to work.
Am I crazy? Give me some words of wisdom if you have any. I’m feeling pretty depressed.
Shannelle
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT: oh, sure, work for the state
hey, sweetie—so happy about dentist & teeth troubles getting fixed. did you fill out the form for the writer’s retreat? the deadline is next week. you must do this!
so sorry to hear of all the things in your weigh (weighing you down). first of all, recognize that all writers and painters and creative people have times when they are not as productive as they’d like to be. don’t beat yourself up for not getting as much done as you’d like. it’ll come.
oh, and yeah, i think you should go be a secretary and dress up for work every day and do things you’ll hate from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. c’mon, shannelle, you know better. there’s nothing wrong with being a secretary or wanting stability or anything else, but you are a writer, and you know it. if you give this up, what are you going to say to yourself when you’re 80? do you really want to be one of those people who tells me at parties, “i used to want to write, but i just got too busy. maybe i could tell you my idea and you could write it for me and we’ll split the money.”
you are a talented writer with a lot to say, and you ****must not give up****!!! the world needs your stories. you need to write them. the universe NEEDS you to write them, because if you don’t do your work, it might not ever get done. there is no other writer in the world like you. no one else can tell the stories you will, in the way you’ll tell them.
i can’t give you any guarantees about it, though, you know that. if you want stability and health insurance, this is not the road to follow. it’s unpredictable and you have to learn to be a juggling artist and most of us don’t have big retirement plans. but babe, it’s worth it. it’s so worth it. it’s worth it to get up every morning and be doing what you really want to be doing. it’s worth it to write. it’s worth it to publish. it’s worth all the struggles.
homework for the day: write a letter from a reader to you. tell yourself all the things you most want to hear about your work. date it two years in the future, sign it, and put it up on your writing board, where you can see it all the time.
FILL OUT THAT FORM FOR THE WRITER’S RETREAT AND SEND IT IN!
i’m always here, listening. you can count on me always. i promise.
love,
naomi
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Homework
I sent in the retreat form yesterday. Cross your fingers. I’m not thinking right now about how I’d work it out. Cross that bridge if/when it comes to that.
Wrote the letter, too. Felt silly at first, then it was fun. And afterward, I ended up writing three pages on the book, I was so inspired! Thank you thank you thank you!
Love,
Shannelle, who has gone three whole days with no family crises
Christmas
YEMAYA
The goddess of the sea and the moon. She is the mother archetype and the provider of wealth. As the one who gives life and sustains the Earth, she is extremely generous and giving. She is the nurturing energy that soothes anyone. But like the ocean, when she is angry, she can be implacable. Therefore, she represents the mother who gives love, but does not give her power away. Yemaya is also the owner of the collective subconscious and ancient wisdom, since she holds the secrets that are hidden in the sea. She is often invoked in fertility rituals for women and in any ritual concerning women’s issues.
—www.goddess.com.au
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
MATTHEW 5:4
27
ROBERTA
December 7, 20—
Pearl Harbor Day
Dear Harriet,
So sorry to hear about Mary’s cancer. You tell her from me that she’s on my prayer list. The Lord can work miracles, as we all have seen. And don’t you worry at all about being able to come for Christmas. You’re needed there, and I understand. There’ll be a pack of folks here anyway, you know it.
I’m doing just fine, thank you. The weather is making the old arthritis kick up, as always, and there are days I don’t want to get out of my warm bed at all, so I don’t. Jade gets ticked with me, but I tell her I’m an old woman and have earned the right to stay in bed and sleep if I feels like it. I read my study guides and Bible and sleep a lot and after a day or two, I’m ready to go again.
What that granddaughter of mine does not understand is that the reason that got me out of bed is gone, and at least when I’m sleeping I can forget it for a while. She says it’s depression, but I just told her to go get busy, because natural grief ain’t the same as modern DE-Pression (ha!).
I’m getting sleepy again and am going to slip off and take a nap whiles she’s still at work so she won’t nag me (ha-ha!).
Love,
Your sister,
Berta
Scads of research shows [women athletes are] less likely to develop breast cancer or tolerate domestic abuse; they enjoy better grades, a better self-image, and lower levels of depression. Girls report that competition leaves them better prepared for life and the rough-and-tumble workplace.
JOHNETTE HOWARD
28
JADE
It starts to snow like crazy one early December afternoon. I’m sitting in my tiny office at DSS with a seventeen-year-old mother who already has three children and one on the way. The first three have been removed from her care. She’s making the pitch that she’s ready to have them back.
I have a headache at the base of my skull from the falling barometric pressure. Likely some of it comes from all the caffeine I’ve been gulping on the sly. There’s a small ache in my upper right arm from a muscle I pulled yesterday—threw a punch and missed, which didn’t do my case for getting in the ring any good. Rueben laughed at me.
It may sound like I’m heartless, thinking all those things while this young girl is pitching her story to me, but let me tell you, she’s so skinny her stomach sticks out like a basketball. Her hair hasn’t been washed in about six weeks. It’s gummy and sticky, hanging like snakes on her shoulders.
And still she’s trying to play me. Tossing her snake hair over her shoulder, blinking those big blue eyes at me. Once, she was probably pretty, but a crack whore loses her sheen in no time.
I see so many girls like this now. More and more. And if it’s not crack, it’s booze or weed, and it’s always about one more man. One more. The one that’s for real this time. The one who might stay. The one who will love his babies.
One more boy. A boy like my cousin Malik, always playing, always braggin’, always talking about their bitches. To get them, the girls give away their hearts, their bodies, their kindness, even their children, until they’re all used up. Hollowed-out shells of themselves, ancient at thirty, living in public housing for the rest of their lives because they don’t know anything else. And they have babies. Boys who grow up to call women bitch and girls who start giving themselves away at twelve and thirteen.
In the early days, when I still had some idealism left in me, I tried to do something about the girls. I taught birth-control classes. Parenting classes. Gave assessment tests to find out skills and interests, so they could get jobs or maybe even into col
lege. Some of those girls were so damned smart, it would break your heart, but there’s no place for them to rule in their world. In the ghettos and barrios of America, a girl can’t even rule in the crime world, as her brother could.
Only thing she’s got is her body. Makes me sick.
Anyway, I made so little progress with those girls, it felt like draining the ocean with an eyedropper. I moved on to the babies. Least there you get a chance, once in a while, to break the cycle. And so, no, I don’t have much sympathy for this lost girl in front of me. I’m wondering, instead, how to save her baby so he or she won’t be sitting in my office fifteen years from now.
The snow catches my attention. Big, mesmerizing flakes like I haven’t seen in ten years. I missed snow in California. These float down and cover up the ugly parking lot.
When the phone rings, I’m hoping it’s going to be a way to distract myself. “This is Jade Kingman.”
“Hi, Jade.” I know the satin-smooth voice immediately. “This is Eileen Robideaux.” The mother of the second set of Dante’s children. “Am I disturbing you?”
“Give me one minute, Eileen.” I cover the mouthpiece. “Bonnie, I can’t help you until you’re clean. Capisce?”
“I am, Ms. Kingman! I swear!”
“Willing to take a drug test?”
Her eyes slither away. With a defeated slump, she gets up and shuffles out. As she exits, she mutters, “Cunt,” without any pretense of hiding it from me.
I uncover the phone. “Okay, Eileen. Sorry about that. How are you?” And it isn’t until that very second that my gut knots up. I haven’t heard from Dante in weeks. “Is Dante okay?”
“Oh, girl, you know Dante. Always lands on his feet.” But there’s a depth to her pause that doesn’t give me any comfort. “I am calling about him, though.”
“All right.”
“Look, Jade, we had our differences, I won’t lie about that, but I didn’t think you ought to be in the dark out there in Colorado, maybe sending him money or whatever.”
“I’m—” I halt in my lie. “Yes, I am. What’s he done?”
“He got married.” For the first time, I hear the soul-deep fury in her voice.
“What?”
“Yeah, that’s what I said. It was Portia who told me, and you don’t even want to talk to her today, sister, because I mean she’d shoot a nigger if she had a way—he’s been playing her six ways to Sunday, even asked her to marry him. She showed me the letter a couple of weeks ago.”
There’s an odd fluttery sensation in my chest. Not quite nausea. I press two ice-cold fingers to the place between my eyebrows.
“Jade?”
“I’m here.” My voice sounds hollow. I shake the hair off my face. “Who did he marry?”
“Some white woman he met during the trial, just before he went up, a lawyer. Can you believe it?”
The man could charm the panties off the Virgin Mary, so yeah, I can believe it. But I can’t even get that much out. “Thanks for telling me, Eileen. I’m going to go now.”
“Jade, you know I didn’t tell you to hurt you.”
“I know. Thanks.” I hang up the phone, walk over to my door, and close it. There’s a ripping feeling in my chest. It feels like it’s taking my breath, maybe all my ribs with it. It spreads upward to the base of my neck.
Married.
A thin little voice winds through my head—But I’m his wife! That’s how it was, a comfort to me, that he actually married me even when he didn’t marry the mothers of his children. He’d been allergic to marriage until he met me. He said that a thousand times. I took it to mean that I meant more to him than any other woman. That no matter what, I would be his beloved, forever and ever. That what we had was unique. That he would never be able to love anybody else, any more than I would.
I stand there trying to breathe, look at the thick, crazy-beautiful snow falling. I know I’m never going to see this kind of snow without remembering this pain.
Dante, lost to me.
Married. I remember what Eileen said, that it was a white lawyer he met during the trial. I search my memory frantically for who it might be. The main lawyer had been a man, but he’d had a woman assistant, with cropped, shiny dark hair I had admired. She was tiny. Tiny in height, in the shoulders, and had no butt at all. I noticed because her skirts looked so straight. She wore red lipstick and had professionally manicured nails.
I suppose it goes with the territory.
And you might ask yourself what a woman like that would be doing with an imprisoned thief with four children from two different women and an ex-wife. Don’t. All of us, all his women, are in that category. Not just good-looking, but especially good to look at in some way. Eileen is one of those cat-eyed, light-skinned island women. Portia’s a regal, long-necked African queen with a bustline that captures the attention of any man in sight.
Standing there, I realize that it has not been real, my divorce. I signed the papers. Cut him off financially. Sort of. Moved a thousand miles away. I hadn’t even been taking his phone calls.
I’d been telling myself I was over him.
But I have never believed it. Not until this very minute. It hurts so bad, I want to kick something or scream or throw a trash can through the plate-glass window, just to hear it shatter.
Instead, I pick up the phone and dial my supervisor’s extension. “Shirley,” I say when she answers, “I’ve got to leave early. Taking a couple of personal hours.”
There must be something in my voice. “Anything I can do, Jade?”
“Not unless you know any contract killers for ex-husbands.”
“Hold on, I have one in my Rolodex.”
I chuckle bitterly. She’s divorced, too. “See you tomorrow.”
* * *
I drive blindly home. My grandmother isn’t there. She’s left me no note or anything like that, but why should she? I kick my toe on one of her boxes, and realize that, slowly, she’s filling them up. There are boxes in every room in the house, each with some relative’s name on it.
And it strikes me that things are disappearing off the walls, that the house is looking a little threadbare. I wonder what I should do about it. Talk to her pastor? Is this some expression of grief that’s common? Is it serious?
As I’m taking off my coat, the phone rings. I pick it up dully.
“Hello.”
“Baby, I’m so glad I caught you. Tried to catch you at work, but they said you’d gone home.”
I hang up. He calls right back, and I wonder who gave him the phone card. Probably his new wife. I lie there on the couch and let it ring. And ring.
The third time, I pick it up and bark, “I don’t want to talk to you!”
“Jade.” He says it in that velvet voice. Patient and regretful.
“What?”
“Baby, please don’t hang up. Listen.”
“You have five seconds.”
“I’m just trying to get back to you, baby. You’re the only one for me, you know that.”
“Dante, how stupid do you think I am? You married her, while you were telling Portia you two were gonna get back together and you’re calling me for stamps and money and phone cards and the only one who was seeing you clearly was Eileen, and you’re pissed that she told me.”
“Baby, wait. Eileen told you what? That I married this bitch?”
I make a noise. “Don’t lie, Dante. I’m sick of it. Just try to tell the truth for once in your pathetic life, all right?”
He’s silent.
“Too hard?” I say.
“Baby, look. I married her, a’ight? But you saw her. Skinny old thing, not my type at all. But what better way to get out of jail faster than to let this lawyer who has a thing for me do all the work?”
I close my eyes. On my red eyelids, I see a hundred pictures, falling like snowflakes. Me and Dante, laughing over a meal in a nice restaurant, him all dressed up and the waitress fawning on him and me preening to be with a man so many others
wanted. Portia, showing up on my doorstep one night like a voodoo queen, hair all bound up in a turban, her eyes crazy. Scared the hell out of me, but she just looked at me and said, “Watch your pocketbook, sugar. He’ll take you like he’s taken us, for everything you got, and make you think you’re likin’ it.” Then she pushed past me into my house, and spit in Dante’s face. He didn’t do anything. Just picked up a napkin and wiped his cheeks, raising his face to her. There was something hot and dark in that moment of their staring at each other, something I didn’t want to see, and I looked away.
I see myself, lying in his arms, nestled close into his shoulder, after we’d made love. It feels like everything inside me is in ribbons.
And I see the new one, so polished and attractive and successful, falling under his spell. Getting ready to be the new sacrifice. “How can you use people like that, Dante?”
“Whatever it takes to get back to you, baby.”
“You’re a shallow, pathetic man,” I say. “You used me, and Portia and Eileen, and you’ll use this one until you use her up, then go on to the next. You are,” I say distinctly, “one sorry-ass motherfucker.”
He hangs up.
The profanity rings in the air of my grandmother’s house, as ugly a thing as I’ve ever said. As I sit there, the echo reproaches me. I can’t think of anything to do but go put on my workout clothes. Leave a note for my grandmother. Go to the gym.
There aren’t many people there on a snowy Thursday afternoon. The bitch who hates my guts is one of them, unfortunately. Or fortunately. She hisses like a snake when I pass her on the way to the locker room. I just cut her a dark look that says, Go ahead. Cross me today.
Rueben doesn’t appear to be anywhere around. I’m disappointed, but he’s not the reason I’m here. I change and yank my hair into a scrunchie. There’s a jumpy tension in my legs, my arms as I go back out. I start with the jump rope to warm up. Bitch is on a punching bag, and she makes little comments as she smashes her gloves into it. “Break that nose.” “Crack her pretty-girl jaw.” “Half-breed bitch.” I ignore her, going through my paces. Rueben will kick my ass if I get in a fight, and I’m mad enough today to do it.
The Goddesses of Kitchen Avenue: A Novel Page 18
