God Still Don't Like Ugly (35 page)

Rhoda nodded again. “I think so. I haven’t felt anything since.”

“Can’t you get implants or something?”

Her shoulders sagged as she shrugged and groaned. “I tried that.

As soon as I healed from the surgery, I had implants inserted. They were fine for about a year. One mornin’ I woke up . . . and one had ruptured during the night. Once all the saline solution had dripped into my system, my body had a really negative reaction and I almost died.” Rhoda looked at me with the most unbearably sad eyes I had ever seen. The whites of her eyes looked yellow and cloudy and were streaked with blood. Their sparkling, light-green color that I had admired for so many years had darkened by at least two shades. These were things I had not noticed until now. “From that I went to those removable things. After they kept slidin’ in and out of my bra when I least expected it, I gave up on them, too.”

I had to sit down on Rhoda’s bed, massaging my own bosom. “Well, I am sure Otis still loves you, anyway.”

Rhoda joined me on the bed, clutching the new blouse against her chest. Her knee touched mine. “Now you know why I can’t leave him.

What man would want me now?”

“But Otis loves you—”

Giving me a sharp look, Rhoda hollered, “What do
you
know about love? You with your
two
titties—”

“There’s a lot more to me than titties! And there’s a lot more to you than that, too. Looking good is not all there is to life, Rhoda. Because whether you like it or not, it doesn’t last. And there’s nothing you or anybody else can do about it. The best plastic surgeon in the world can only do so much to make somebody look better.” I laughed. “If I thought otherwise, I’d have spent every one of my paychecks on everything from my face on down to my flat feet.”

Rhoda didn’t laugh. Instead, she gave me a thoughtful look and shrugged. “I never had to worry about the way I looked until . . .”

“Well, I’ve looked the same way all my life, but I made the best of it.

Sure, I was surprised when men found me attractive. I was surprised when you told me I was beautiful. All I ever tried to do was be the best person I could be and people cared about me for that.”

282

Mar y Monroe

Rhoda smiled and squeezed my hand. “I’ve always cared about you, Annette. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—you are the best friend I’ve ever had.”

“You could be a lot worse off, girl. You are a wonderful mother, a good wife. You have more than a lot of other women will ever have.”

“Except two healthy titties.”

“You stop that!” I hollered, waving my finger in Rhoda’s face. “Be thankful for all the years you did have a nice body. How would you feel if you had to live in this wigwam of blubber for all these years the way I had to? Huh? If I could, I’d slice off these two big balloons on my chest and let you drag them around for a while.”

Rhoda laughed and gave me a mournful look. “Annette, I never wanted you to find out about this. I wanted to keep this a secret for the rest of my life.”

“Girl, with all the gruesome secrets we already share, what’s one more?” I stood up. “Go on and put on that new blouse so we can drink those milkshakes.” I grabbed Rhoda by her arm and pulled her up from the bed.

“I don’t ever want to discuss this again,” she said firmly, sliding her arms into the sleeves of the new blouse.

“We won’t,” I said.

And we never did.

CHAPTER 69

Amonth after that tense conversation with Rhoda in her bedroom, I was invited to Florida again. My other half-siblings, Amos and Sondra, were in Florida for Amos’s wedding to a German woman named Helga that he had brought home with him.

It was a bad time for me to be traveling, but I agreed to go anyway regardless of how bad I felt. Some days my morning sickness lasted until noon. My food cravings were so extreme, one night when I
had
to have some Mexican food, I got out of bed and drove around for two hours trying to find a restaurant that was still open. I had to settle for a bag of Doritos that I purchased at a gas station.

By now I was anxious to meet my other siblings so I was not going to let my pregnancy interfere with my plans. And, my half-brother had insisted on me being there to see him get married.

“Amos said to tell you that this will be a once-in-a-lifetime thing for him. If this marriage don’t work out, he’ll never do it again. So you’d better get yourself down here if you want to see your brother get married, girl,” Lillimae advised me when she called. I was stunned beyond belief when the same invitation to Florida was extended to Muh’Dear and even more stunned when she accepted.

“I done waited too long to be a grandma. I ain’t about to let you get on a plane and go off to a savage jungle like Florida by yourself, Annette,” Muh’Dear told me on our way to the airport.

284

Mar y Monroe

“I can take care of myself. Don’t you know that by now? I don’t need you watching every move I make, Muh’Dear.”

Muh’Dear shook her head sadly. “If I had been doin’ just that when that evil, slimy snake Boatwright slithered into our lives, you wouldn’t have suffered nary a day of your life at his hands.” Muh’Dear blinked hard, but it was too late for her to hold back her tears.

“But you didn’t and now you can’t. Let’s put that mess behind us, too.” I grabbed Muh’Dear’s wrist and squeezed. “I’m a strong woman.

Just like you. I got through that mess with Mr. Boatwright intact. I’m going to get through this pregnancy the same way.”

I was so overwhelmed when I met Amos and Sondra, my brother and my sister, that I couldn’t stop hugging them for the first five minutes. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Muh’Dear looking at the emotional meeting in Lillimae’s living room with a blank expression on her face. Knowing that these were the children that my father had had by the white woman he had left her for, had to be painful for Muh’Dear. But she handled it well. She even hugged them both a little herself.

I had seen pictures of my other siblings, but they didn’t look the same in person. Amos looked like Daddy did when he was a young man and he was almost as dark. Like Lillimae, Sondra also looked like me but she was a lot darker than Lillimae.

Right after I’d first met Lillimae, we’d bonded immediately. Things didn’t move that fast with Sondra and Amos. Even though they both seemed happy to meet me, they were somewhat reserved and aloof where I was concerned. When I tried to converse with Amos, he often gave quick, one-word responses and he didn’t ask me a whole lot of questions about myself like I had hoped and expected. “Amos is shy,”

Lillimae explained when she got me alone. “He don’t even like to talk to me that much. But him and Sondra both still tryin’ to get used to the idea of havin’ another sister.”

Now, Sondra liked to talk, but when she did it usually wasn’t with me. I overlooked all of that and I accepted her and Amos uncondi-tionally. I was interested in everything either one of them had to say whether it was directed at me or not.

Muh’Dear was not impressed with the house Daddy lived in and couldn’t believe anybody would want to get married in it. Right after the brief ceremony in the living room, she took me aside and started whispering, “This place reminds me of some of them hovels we used GOD STILL DON’T LIKE UGLY

285

to live in before Frank acted a fool and took off with these half-breed kids’ mama.”

“Muh’Dear, please be nice. We came down here to have a good time,” I whispered back.

Daddy was nearby and the way he screwed up his face, for a moment I thought that he’d overheard Muh’Dear’s rude remark. But he sucked on his teeth and shook his finger at Sondra. “Gal, what did you just say?” he asked gruffly.

Sondra repeated a comment that she had just made. “I said, if I ever take a notion to move back to Florida, I’m thinkin’ about passin’.”

Everybody in the room looked at Sondra. I could hear a few snickers. I wasn’t the only one present to gasp. Daddy said what I was thinking.

“Sondra, gal, with all that nappy-ass hair on your head, your
brown
skin, and your big ass, if you even think you can pass for white, you ain’t foolin’ nobody but yourself!” Daddy had had too much to drink.

“Look at your sister Annette. She black as hell and she happy. Ain’t you, baby?” He smiled, giving me an insightful look.

Muh’Dear cleared her throat and draped her arm around my shoulder.

“I am happy,” I admitted. And I was.

Lillimae and her husband Freddie Lee had reconciled. He had moved back into Lillimae’s house. I didn’t know why I was so surprised that he was so good-looking. Especially when I had almost married a man just as handsome myself. As a matter of fact, Freddie Lee resembled Jerome. He had the same light skin and curly hair, but he had a dimple in his left cheek that made him look even cuter.

Lillimae’s two preteen sons, Wally and Ernest, seemed bored and took off running out the back door as soon as they had stuffed their mouths with wedding cake.

What was touching about the ceremony was, after the preacher had pronounced Amos and Helga man and wife, they also jumped over a broom, like the slaves used to do when they were married. Of course, Muh’Dear had to whisper in my ear about that. “I done seen everything now. A half-white man and his all-white woman, doin’ one of the blackest things in the world.” Muh’Dear covered her mouth when I gave her an exasperated look.

I borrowed Lillimae’s car after the reception so I could be alone 286

Mar y Monroe

for a little while. I didn’t want Muh’Dear, or anybody else, to know where I was going. I drove straight to Hanley, the rural Miami district where I had been born.

I couldn’t see the road for the tears in my eyes as I eased the car down the hill to see the shack we’d been living in when Daddy left. It was gone. A tree, leaning so far to the left it looked like it was about to break in two, now occupied the spot where our old house had stood.

Waist-high weeds covered the backyard where I used to play. There was nothing left to indicate that I had ever been to this place before.

A squirrel was peeping from behind a tree and ran when I tried to lure him out in the open. I had had a squirrel for a pet when I was a child, but this one wanted nothing to do with me. After a few more minutes, I returned to the car and sped back up the hill. Looking in the rearview mirror, I saw a blanket of dust rising up so high, it completely blocked my view. That dust was symbolic. It blocked out a past that I needed to forget. But I couldn’t. My past had shaped my future and was the reason I had risen so high myself.

Too emotional to return to Lillimae’s house right away, I headed in the opposite direction. Before long I found myself in another rural part of Miami. Atwater was where Rhoda had lived with her husband and children. I parked the car on the road and looked to the clearing where Rhoda’s former house still stood. An elderly white man was on the front porch in a rocking chair. I didn’t want to see any more than this, particularly the inside of the house or the back porch. The back porch was where I’d watched Rhoda nurse her child, even after he was dead.

Inside of this house was the bathroom where Rhoda had electrocuted the white girl who had threatened her family. I don’t know why I had to see the two places that had played such major roles in my life, but I’m glad I did. Even though sadness overwhelmed me, I felt calmer than I’d felt in years.

My bittersweet visit to Miami ended with a hog butchering and us having a picnic in Lillimae’s backyard the day after my brother’s wedding. Daddy seemed happy just to have all of his children
and
Muh’Dear together with him for the first time.

It was the best year of my life.

CHAPTER 70

Daddy was as excited about my pregnancy as Muh’Dear was. He and Lillimae hopped on a plane during the middle of my last month, planning to be present for the birth.

I was surprised and pleased when Sondra and Amos started calling me once a week from Germany. Apparently it was a lot easier for them to talk to me from a distance than it was to my face. I learned during lengthy telephone conversations with them that Amos and his German wife were planning to buy a house in Munich and that Sondra had met the man of her dreams. She airmailed me her wedding pictures. I was shocked to see that her groom was a pitch-black, flat-faced lawyer from Uganda. “Ain’t no tellin’ what our kids are goin’ to look like,” she confessed. It pleased me to hear that she had put her obsession about living as a white woman behind her.

The last week of my pregnancy was the hardest. I was as clumsy as an ox. Lillimae took care of the house as well as she took care of Daddy and me. I never felt so loved in my life.

With Daddy snoozing noisily on my living room couch and me piled on the love seat facing him one evening, Lillimae waddled around the room in a flowered muumuu, dusting and straightening up furniture.

“Annette, I am so pleased everything worked out the way it did. If I hadn’t met you, I probably wouldn’t have gotten back with Freddie 288

Mar y Monroe

Lee. And poor Daddy.” She paused and looked over at Daddy with his head back and his mouth stretched open. “He’s so happy. Everything is complete now.” Lillimae sighed, fanned her face with a dust rag, and looked at me.

“It sure is,” I mumbled, crossing my swollen ankles.

I still felt that something important was not where it was supposed to be in my life even though that something lived right next door to me. As close as Pee Wee and I were, there was something keeping a wedge between us. Me.

My daughter was born one night in the middle of that December.

My labor had started earlier in the afternoon, right in the middle of Jade’s birthday party in the dining room at Antonosanti’s.

“It’s a sign. Us havin’ daughters on the same day,” Rhoda decided.

She had come to the hospital later than evening. Muh’Dear, Daddy and Lillimae, and Scary Mary all grinning like they’d won a jackpot, were in the room with me when Rhoda arrived. It was truly one of the happiest moments of my life. The people I loved most in the world were all with me at the same time. Pee Wee was the only one missing.