Bebe Moore Campbell (3 page)

Frances was sitting in front of a sewing machine that was pushed up against the wall of the small area in the back that served as both my office and the alterations room. She held up a pair of pale green pants and a navy blue pinstripe jacket.

“Ooooh,” I said. “What are they?”

“Prada and”—she fingered the label of the navy suit—“Gambelorino?”

The name on the label was important. There was a time when I cared about flesh beneath my fingertips, kneading it until sighs of gratitude floated up. Healing occupied space in my mind then. Now designers were my bread and butter, and my fingers were for counting money. I shrugged, then reached over and examined the suit: felt the fabric, checked the seams and the topstitching. “This is very expensive. That’s what we’ll tell the clients.”

Frances nodded, her nimble fingers tugging at the thread as she deftly repaired a small tear in the buttonhole of the green suit jacket.

“Where’s the stain?”

She pointed to a crusty pinkish circle the size of a dime over the left breast pocket. “It was red. Looked like lipstick or blood. I put some remover on it. Don’t worry, I’ll get it out. Topanga Canyon wants four hundred apiece,” Frances said.

I rolled my eyes, and Frances laughed.

“How should we size them?” I asked.

“A very small six. Petite. You should call Downtown Girl. These would fit her. She’s another scrawny one.”

I gave her a sideward glance and rolled my eyes again. I was only slightly bigger than Topanga Canyon and Downtown Girl. Frances had never met a Big Mac she didn’t like. Everything about her was large: her size, her smile, her spirit. She patted her long weave and grinned.

“That’s all right. I could take all y’all scrawny women’s men,” she said with a laugh. “Did Adriana tell you that she met somebody nice? She’s going to the movies with him tonight.”

“No wonder she seemed so happy.”

Our eyes met. Adriana’s romances always started out on an upbeat note. Her stop-and-start love life was of great concern to Frances and me. Adriana had never been a winner in love lotto.

“If my fat ass can get a man,” Frances said, “ I know she can, pretty as that girl is.”

Getting wasn’t Adriana’s problem.
Keeping
was the operative word. There was an elephant stampeding through her life that chased men away. Frances and I liked to pretend it wasn’t there.

The phone rang. Frances answered, then handed it to me. Her eyes issued a warning.

“Be nice,” she said.

Be nice, I repeated to myself, a question mark in my mind. That admonition fit two situations, two sets of hot words and no apologies, two men.

Love in the past tense is always tricky.

“Hello.”

I knew it was Clyde by the way he cleared his throat. That was my ex-husband’s way of steadying himself: He cleared his throat and then barreled in. For my part, I took deep relaxation breaths and kept my fists clenched. “I don’t want to argue with you. I was calling to see how Trina is doing.”

“Well, Clyde, that’s your lot in life. You make women want to argue. You have to admit I’m not the only one.”

“I could say the same thing about you.”

It was true enough to make us both laugh.

“I guess we’re just difficult people,” Clyde said.

“I’m not difficult; I’m misunderstood,” I said. Clyde cracked up once again. “Trina is fine.”

Trina is here, Clyde, I’ll get her for you.
That’s what I should have said, knowing that for Clyde and me civility is a rainbow that fades almost as soon as it appears. But I’d never learned to break away quickly from the man I’d promised to live with forever; that, of course, was my problem, not his.

Frances rose quietly and closed the door.

“Did she get the birthday check?” His volume went up; it always did when he spoke of money he was spending. He wanted anyone in earshot to know that he was capable of paying.

“Yes, Clyde. That check is already spent.” I could feel a surge of familiar anger. Clyde wrote checks and left me to do the heavy lifting.

“That quick? She couldn’t have gotten it more than two days ago. Damn.”

“Like father, like daughter,” I said.

I’d been Clyde’s first wife. Not exactly a childhood sweetheart but close enough. After me came the trophy blonde, Miss Gone-in-a-Flash-with-the-Cash herself. I had tried to tell the fool that white women don’t leave the way sisters do. None of that “all I want is my peace of mind.” She did a strip club on his bank account, and my child support was shaky for about two years. Then he came all the way back, overcompensated for wife number two by marrying the Sapphire of all Sapphires. Miss Body was a brickhouse: double Ds, big behind, shapely legs. Clyde was totally sprung. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth—at first. But the centerfold had a split personality. Evilene would go off in a New York minute. When she started acting like she was getting ready to put her hands on Trina, I knew her days with Clyde and maybe on this earth were numbered. Now there was Aurelia, an elegant beauty with enough street in her to keep Clyde in line. She treated Trina kindly. For the first time, I felt replaced.

Trina’s here, Clyde. I’ll get her for you.
Why couldn’t I just say that? But if I knew how to quit with Clyde while I was ahead, I’d probably die of boredom. He’d been the outlet for my aggressive tendencies for quite a while.

“Well, I want her to have nice things.”

“The nicest thing you could give her is more time.”

I could hear him bristling on the other end. Clyde always chose offense over defense.

“You still have her in that program?”

“Yes.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Trina’s mind, Keri. She was smoking too much weed and she got paranoid; that’s all that happened. Then you go and put her in a psychiatric hospital like she’s some crazy person.”

“Your daughter has been diagnosed with a mental illness.”

Clyde sputtered and choked. “I don’t believe that shit. Half these doctors don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.”

The weariness in Clyde’s voice dismayed me. I was used to his mouthing off, being opinionated. Our fights were legendary, hard, long, below the belt, and bloody. We thrived on hot words and slammed doors, at least I did. As long as we fought, a part of Clyde still belonged to me.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m okay.” There was a long pause that he didn’t fill in.

“Trina’s here. I’ll get her for you.”

I heard Trina say “Daddy!”—the name a gleeful exclamation, a shriek of delight, in the manner of girls who worship their fathers as much as they love them. I’d never experienced that kind of idolatry. By the time I was two, my father was dead from a motorcycle accident. By three, my memories of him had faded, and by five he was no more to me than a smiling picture under glass. As I grew, my father’s absence became normal, like church on Sunday. It was my mother’s detachment that stung like acid flung against my skin.

Oh, those beautiful mommies, just out of reach, removed and aloof because they lack the maternal gene, because they love their jobs, some no-good man, their reflections in the mirror, or the afterglow from the bottle or the hallucination from the pipe more than they love their children. Daughters can worship their mothers too. When I was a child, my mother was in and out of my life and mostly drunk in both locations. I wanted to be important to her, only that. To matter more than the next drink. It’s amazing what people squander in a lifetime, what they walk away from as though it’s just so much detritus in the street. I remember trying to hold on to my last bit of hope, how it seeped out just before I gave up on my mother. I stored my pain and anger in a place that became molten. And now I had to live with heat that wouldn’t stay contained.

Trina was giggling. Clyde used to make
me
laugh too. When we were newlyweds with brand-new dreams, we laughed all the time. Driving through Atlanta, where we started out, Clyde would point out the site of our first mansion, our second. Stick with me, baby, and you’ll be farting in a Rolls. I don’t need a mansion or a Rolls, I told him. But he did.

Trina caught my eye, gave me a look, and I got up and walked outside, closing the door behind me. Not all the way, though. I left it open a crack and stood right there. Trina’s laughter wafted out. I heard her say she was fine.

I had to give the man some credit. Clyde showed up for the important occasions: the birthdays, the holidays. He called. He had never been late with child support, except after his second divorce. When we were together, he did almost as much child care as I did. In between chasing down dollar bills, Clyde was a real daddy. Trina caressed the word, cooed, and giggled some more after she said it. If anybody said my name that way, I’d never leave her. But then, he hadn’t left Trina. He left me.

My inner mule made me marry Clyde. That was one time God warned me big time. Minutes before the ceremony began, while I was standing outside the church getting ready to march down the aisle and say I do, a pigeon flew over my head, veered dangerously close, and shit right on my veil. Ma Missy was next to me, her bright clairvoyant eyes fevered with insight garnered from one look in her personal crystal ball. Between clenched teeth she whispered, “Babygirl, that’s Jesus talking to you. You need to put your ass right back in that limo and get the hell on away from here.”

She read my glance.

“Okay, don’t listen to me. I got to seventy-five with all my teeth and in my complete right mind being a fool. This is your world, squirrel; I’m just living in it.” She shook her head. “So damn hardheaded.”

It wasn’t that my grandmother didn’t like Clyde; she just realized early on that he was a man intent on moving up so fast he’d leave behind whoever didn’t keep up.

When I peeked into the office, Frances was dabbing more spot remover on the stain. “Don’t want to come out,” she muttered. She put her hand to her face, partially covering a scar on her cheek that she tended to rub when she was troubled. It had become a keloid. That smooth raised skin stood out like a brand.

I returned to the showroom. Trina and Adriana were both helping customers. Adriana rang up hers first and then came over to me.

“So, I understand you have a movie date.”

Adriana nodded.

“Who’s the guy?”

“Some dude in my class.”

“Do you like him?”

Adriana shrugged, her movement full of tough-girl bravado. She didn’t want to care. Then, just as quickly as it had been erected, the wall came down. “It doesn’t matter if I like him or not. You know that.”

She was back to being sad girl again. I wrapped my arm around her shoulder and squeezed her tightly. “Just have a good time,” I said.

Trina was helping several customers. As I watched her, I recalled how she used to work in the shop every day after high school. A bright, clear-eyed young girl, she had made the customers laugh with her wise-cracks and sheer ebullience. She’s still got most of that, I told myself, and what’s missing will return. She’s not so far behind she can’t catch up. She’ll go to college in the fall, go on to graduate school, get a great job, and meet a nice guy, an understanding go-getter. Everything will work out fine.

“Ready to go?” I asked her when her customer went to the cash register.

“Where?”

“I was thinking home. We have to put the flowers in water.”

“Aww.”

I sighed. “Where do you want to go, Trina?”

“To the movies, to the mall, to eat.”

When Trina was in her early teens, she would jump out of a moving car in order to avoid being seen going into a movie with me. That was when she had friends who called, who met her at the mall, who spent the night and filled her bedroom with whispers and laughter and boys’ names. She had been robbed of that casual happiness. I wanted to make up for that void, to fill in the empty spaces until she recovered all she’d lost.

There were moments, right before my world began to tip over again, that I don’t want to forget. Simple, normal minutes, the sun bright, the breeze drying the dampness between my breasts, the clock ticking, nothing special. We took the flowers home, and I put them into water. We drove to the marina and saw a movie, a comedy that made us grab each other as we convulsed, and then had an early dinner at a Thai restaurant before returning home. Trina took her evening pill, and we sat in the hot tub in our backyard and drank lemonade. It grew dark as our legs bumped against each other in the warm water. The stars, at least those that were visible, came out. In LA, it’s easier to see planes than stars. When I’m missing Atlanta, a lot of times I’m thinking about cold winter nights, me scurrying home under a sky filled with stars. But even in LA, I could make out the North Star, with its steady glow. It’s bright like a plane, only it never moves.

The last thing I did before I retired was to count Trina’s pills and subtract the days that had passed from the original number. Counting pills had become a way of life. Even though she’d been well for five months, I took nothing for granted. My old instincts hadn’t yet dulled. The old fears hadn’t completely receded. One more week to go before a refill; there were twenty-one of the pink three-times-a-day pills and seven nighttime white ones. I counted once again, to make sure; then I put the cap back on the bottle and breathed.

During the night Trina climbed in the bed with me, and I pulled her close, wishing she could be a baby again in my arms. No, inside me. We would start over; even my milk would be new. If only I’d known then what I knew now: everything that could turn a gift from God into a tragedy. I knew where the road turned slippery and treacherous and the baby fell out of the car seat. Women would kill for what I know.

Babies should come with instructions taped to the soles of their little feet. A cheery note from God:
Be careful! This child is accident-prone.
Or:
Lucky you! This one goes straight to the top!
How about:
Congratulations! You have just given birth to a natural beauty, who will never know
acne or need braces or diets. Your darling straight-A student will be a
pleasure, an endless source of pride and joy right up to high school
graduation, and then she’ll hit a wall of craziness that may never end.
Take lots of
before
pictures.
After
will be unphotographable.