I Wish I Had a Red Dress (10 page)

NIKKI’S MOTHER DOESN’T WANT
her to file a formal complaint. She’s convinced that would make Junior even madder and we should just “leave well enough alone.” I spent all afternoon trying to convince her otherwise, but I should have saved my breath. Jasmine had never been bothered by Nik’s relationship with Junior. A Sunday afternoon skirmish where no bones were broken seemed a minor inconvenience.

Finally, she got tired of listening to me. “Listen, Joyce, I know you tryin’ to help, but Nik been with Junior since they was both kids. She know to handle him.”

“Has he abused her before?”

“
Abused
her? He ain’t abused her. They might have a little tussle every now and then like everybody else, but he ain’t never
ripped her up
or nothin’ like that.”

These distinctions are important. It’s like the Eskimos having so many different words for snow. People always name carefully what they have to come up against to survive. An avalanche and flurries are both snow, but one will kill you and the other one won’t.

I hung up the phone and considered my options. If Nikki didn’t file a complaint, the most we could hope for was that the sheriff would go by the house and
talk
to Junior, which people had been doing since he started kindergarten with no visible positive effect. Without Nik’s cooperation, there was nothing else we could do but hope things died down of their own accord.

Tee had to leave early to take Mavis to the doctor to see about a cold that kept hanging on, so I was busy answering calls from everybody wanting an update on the news. Even Sister checked in to be sure I didn’t need her to come over and chase out the evil spirits or the infidels, whoever was acting the biggest fool at the time of her arrival.

It was after five when Deena stuck her head in the door. She was already in her coat and boots.

“Sheila runnin’ late, but everybody else been picked up and I gotta go, so I’ma drop off Daryl and Duane on my way. Anything else you need me to do?”

She had been assuming more and more responsibility for our day-care program. She was a natural teacher with infinite patience and a good sense of humor. Once her twins were in school full-time, I was going to encourage her to go for a degree in elementary education. She had gathered all four kids at the back door, stuffed into their jackets, ready to go.

“Go on,” I said. “Tell Sheila to call me, will you?”

Deena shook her head. “She ain’t gonna do that. She too embarrassed about what happened yesterday.”

“Tell her it’s not her fault. She can’t control Junior.”

“I tole her. She still embarrassed.”

“Okay,” I said. “Maybe I’ll go by there later.”

“Better take Tee wit you if you do!” She was only half joking. Deena had been proud of Tee yesterday. Having survived an abusive father and several rough boyfriends, she admired a woman who didn’t back down. “See you in the mornin’!”

I stepped out into the hallway and waved at the kids who stood in a row waving back as if they were awaiting the arrival of a train that was running late. Deena shooed them out, strapped them into their car seats and headed off. I was alone for the first time today. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes for a minute. My brain couldn’t decide whether to focus on Junior or his mother or Jasmine or Nik or Tee or . . .

I opened my eyes and decided I had done enough for one day. I walked into the community room and looked out the big picture window. The sun sets early up here this time of year and the gray sky over the lake was promising more snow. There’s a stark beauty to these woods in winter that the summer people never see, and I pulled up a chair and sat there for a minute to admire it. I think Alice Walker was right about recognizing God in a field of purple flowers. I feel the same way about sunsets.

I took a long, slow breath.

Breathing in, I know that I am breathing in. . . .

Breathing out, I know that I am breathing out. . . .

I felt the tensions of the last couple of days begin to leave my body immediately.
Why haven’t I been meditating?
I knew why. It always makes me feel so much better that I immediately stop doing it.
Well,
my warped reasoning goes at that moment,
why should I waste twenty minutes a day to encourage clarity, sanity
and peace in my life? Surely that time is better spent running around in circles like a chicken with my head cut off!

Breathing in, I know that I am breathing in. . . .

A flock of ducks winged in over the lake, swooped down low for a quick look and headed away again, their honking audible and urgent. These are the moments when missing Mitch becomes a sharp pain instead of a dull ache. The moments when the impulse to turn to him, knowing that he’s seeing and feeling exactly what I’m seeing and feeling, is so strong it’s actually made me weak at the knees a time or two. Good thing I’m already sitting down.

Breathing out, I smile. . . .

And I did. I was still smiling when Nate pulled up and rang the front doorbell a few minutes later.

“GOOD AFTERNOON,” HE SAID
when I opened the door, stomping the snow off his big brown boots and stepping inside. In an environment scaled to kids and largely frequented by women, his huge, undeniably male presence seemed even more so.

“I’ve been trying to call, but either your phone is on the fritz or you’ve had a hell of a busy day.”

“Option two,” I said, surprised to see him. “But I think it’s winding down. Come on in.”

“Good,” he said. “I just wanted to bring you this letter of intent.”

He handed me a white business envelope with ms. joyce mitchell neatly typed on the outside.

“Letter of intent to do what?”

That didn’t sound right when it came out, but before he could answer, the phone rang in my office.

“Make yourself comfortable,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

“Take your time.” He slipped off his coat and looked around. The chocolate babydolls regarded him from their high chairs with the unflappable sweetness that is their trademark and he looked at them with benign
bigness
like Gulliver first encountering the tiny people of Lilliput.

I hurried back to my office and dropped the envelope on my desk. “Hello?”

It was Johnny Tyler from the sheriff’s department asking if Nikki had decided to come down and swear out a complaint or not.

“Not today,” I said.

On the other end of the phone, Johnny reminded me gently that time is of the essence in harassment cases.

“If the perpetrator has an opportunity to feel his own power, the victim may be putting herself at increased risk by waiting.”

I decided it wasn’t necessary to mention that I was the one who told him that. Sometimes your ego will tell you it’s important to get the credit for assisting in somebody else’s growth and development, but it’s not. What’s important is that Johnny now had a new piece of information he could use.

“How about I call you in the morning,” I said. “And we’ll try to come down then?”

“Around nine-thirty?”

The last thing Nikki had said to me was
forget it,
so I was not optimistic about us showing up anywhere by nine-thirty.

“We’ll be there soon as we can get there,” I said.
That was true
. Tomorrow morning. Next weekend. Next month. Like the Jamaicans say:
soon come.

When I walked back into the community room, Nate was standing in front of the original framed copy of the “Ten Things Every Free Woman Should Know.”

“Can you do all these things?” he said, unconsciously echoing Ezra Busbee.

“Almost all,” I said. “I’m still a little shaky on self-defense.”

He nodded, still looking at the list thoughtfully. “Did you ever try to come up with a list like this for men?”

“No,” I said, realizing the top of my head didn’t even reach his shoulder. “Did you?”

He smiled. “No, but somebody ought to. Pretty much the only advice I remember being given as a youngblood was, and I quote, ‘Don’t be a punk; don’t be a pimp; and don’t take no shit off no white boys.’ ”

“What about women?”

“You don’t want to know,” he said, shaking his big smooth head. I wondered how often he shaved it. “But what I was thinking was that it might make The Circus more appealing to those guys at the state legislature if you had a program for the guys too.”

At Sister’s, I had told the tale of my latest foray into the world of public funding. I liked that he had clearly been listening, even though I didn’t particularly like where I thought he was going.

“What kind of program?”

“You know,” he said. “The same kind of thing. ‘Ten Things Every Free Man Should Know.’ ”

I was disappointed. He clearly hadn’t understood a word I’d said the other night. The problem wasn’t that some people might think we didn’t want to be around men. The problem was if men didn’t collectively change their evil ways, we wouldn’t have much reason to. Suddenly, I felt overwhelmed by the necessity
to explain; to always
explain
. He was a smart man. Why didn’t he know?

“That’s not my job,” I said. “I work with young
women
.”

He turned away from the “Ten Things” and looked down at me. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Are you a separatist?”

“A
separatist?
” I was a little confused. There are some sixties radicals who live up here who might still consider themselves black separatists, but there were so few white people around here on a day-to-day basis, the whole question seemed sort of rhetorical to me. “What kind of separatist?”

He shrugged his big shoulders and the brown sweater he was wearing rippled right with him. He was without a doubt the best built
past-forty
-year-old man I’d ever seen.

“You know, women over
here.
Men over
there.
”

“A gender separatist?”

He nodded. “I guess that’s what you would call it.”

He looked so serious and the question was so unexpected, I almost laughed out loud. He must have taken a few women’s studies courses when he went to graduate school. No way he was going to pick up an idea like “gender separatist” on the streets of downtown Detroit.

“No,” I said gently. “I think it’s fine for men and women to be together.”

He looked genuinely relieved.

“But,” I added quickly, “I don’t think anybody’s teaching them how to do it right. If two people are going to build a real family, each one has to bring a whole person to the bargain.”

I tried to look him in the eye without tilting my head backward like a first-time tourist at the Eiffel Tower. It wasn’t possible.
I considered stepping up on a nearby kiddie chair just to even things up, but I figured that would only emphasize the physical differences between us even more.

“That’s what we do at The Circus,” I said. “Try to help the young women who come here figure out how to be whole human beings. Once they figure that out, all the other stuff is more likely to fall into line.”

It must have made sense to him so far because he rewarded me with a smile and one more question. “Can’t we work on it together?”

I wasn’t sure if he meant our respective genders or the two of us, so I tried to forge an answer that would fit both possibilities.

“Eventually we can, sure,” I said, “but at first, there’s so much baggage on both sides, it usually helps to let the girls talk to each other alone until they get the basics down.”

“How long does that take?”

Now it was my turn to smile. “As long as it takes.”

“You’re a patient woman.”

“You ever hear the story about the kid with the starfish?”

He shook his big head again. “No.”

“Sit down,” I said, offering him a chair and taking one myself. “Okay. There was a big storm at the beach, and when the weather cleared, the ocean had washed up hundreds, maybe thousands, of starfish, who were surely now doomed in the heat of the noonday sunshine. A father took his young son out to see the strange spectacle, and as soon as he explained to the boy what was happening, the kid immediately picked up the nearest starfish and carried it down to the ocean. Then he came back and got another one and did the same thing.”

Nate was watching me like the kids do at storytime usually
do, but he wasn’t fooling anybody. He was a lot of things, but a kid was nowhere among them.

“ ‘Hold on, son,’ said the father. ‘There’s too many. What you’re doing won’t make any difference.’ The kid looked down the beach at all those living creatures and then back up at his father. ‘But, Daddy,’ said the kid, picking up another starfish. . . .”

When I said the story’s punch line, Nate said it right with me.

“ ‘It’ll make a difference to this one!’ ”

He laughed and I laughed with him. “I thought you said you’d never heard it!”

“I never heard you tell it,” he said, charming as hell.

“So now that I’ve told it,” I said, “the question is, do you believe it?”

“Yeah,” he said slowly. “Yeah, I do. That’s why I’m here.”

I nodded, glad I hadn’t misread him. “Me too.”

We were sitting there grinning at each other the way you always do when you bump up against a creature of like mind when you least expect it, when I heard the back door open and turned to see Sheila Lattimore standing there, shivering. She was wearing a thin coat, no hat and no gloves. She looked cold and miserable.

“I’m late,” she said, like that explained her belated and bedraggled entrance.

I went over quickly and pulled her inside. Her hands felt like ice. She wasn’t wearing boots either, and snow was packed around her shoes.

“Did your car break down?”

“N-n-o,” she said through chattering teeth. “I w-w-walked over here.”

“From your house?” That was a good four or five miles. “Why?”

But I knew why. The only thing that would make her walk all the way over here in this kind of weather was Junior. “I had to pick up the b-b-boys,” she said, her eyes searching for them.

“Deena said she’d drop them off at your house. Didn’t she call you?”

“She might have.” I could hardly hear her voice. “They wouldn’ta tole me no way.” Her face looked swollen, and the bruise on her cheek was new.

“What happened to your face?”

Her hand flew to the spot like she might still be able to cover it. “I f-f-fell. Comin’ over here. There was ice on the road.”

Nate walked up beside me holding his overcoat and draped it around Sheila’s shoulders.

“This is Nate Anderson,” I said. “He’s a friend.”

She nodded, totally dwarfed by that great big coat. She looked like the tree
babymama
, lost and amazed.

“You the new vice principal at the school?” He nodded and she pulled his coat around her a little tighter, her eyes round and childlike. The coat reached almost to her ankles. “My brother said you was real big.”

“Who’s your brother?”

“Jarvis Lattimore.”

A flicker crossed Nate’s face, but he just nodded. “Yes. He’s in my first-period tutorial.”

Sheila looked pleased, but I could see her teeth chattering.

“Look,” I said, “why don’t you go in the barter closet and see if you can find some dry socks and a sweater. I’ll make us some tea.”

More than a few times we’ve been a temporary shelter for some woman with an angry man at home and a backseat full of scared kids. Sometimes they stay a couple of days. One time Patrice stayed a week, just before Sonny went into the service. So we keep a “barter” closet full of clothes and even some shoes, where you take what you need and give what you can. Everything seems to even out in the end.

Sheila turned to Nate. “I’ll bring your coat right back to you,” she whispered.

“Take your time,” he said, following me into the kitchen, where I filled the kettle and turned it up high.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We had some unexpected excitement around here yesterday and I think this is part of the aftermath.”

“What happened?”

I tried to think of the most efficient way to tell him the facts without going into too much detail, otherwise we’d be standing here until midnight.

“Her brother Junior came by here yesterday, grabbed his ex-girlfriend by the arm and tried to drag her off.”

“Why?”

“She had just quit him because he objected to her new job.”

“He doesn’t want her to work?”

“He doesn’t want her to be a stripper.”

“Oh.”

The kettle was hissing on its way to a whistle. I took down the pot and dropped in three bags of peppermint tea.

“So what happened?”

“My assistant, Tomika, ran him off with a toy gun before the police got here.”

Nate raised his eyebrows as the kettle whistled readiness. I turned it off and poured the steaming water into the teapot, inhaling the peppermint. That should warm Sheila up a little.

“A
toy
gun?”

I nodded.

“Did he know it was a toy?”

“No.”

Nate kept his voice neutral, but I could hear the concern in it. “Probably better if you don’t tell him.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” I said, grabbing three mugs out of the cupboard and trying to sound confident about the way we were handling things. “Our lips are collectively sealed.”

“No tea for me,” Nate said as I arranged the cups on the tray with a honey bear and a couple of spoons. “She doesn’t need to be worrying about talking in front of a stranger.”

He was probably right about that, but I was sorry we hadn’t had a chance to finish our conversation.

“Are you planning to drive her home?”

“Of course.”

“Do you want me to follow you?”

I was a little confused. “Why?”

“This guy sounds like he might be trouble.” He sounded really concerned. “I thought you might want some backup.”

The thought hadn’t occured to me. If I waited around for backup I’d never get anything done.

“No thanks,” I said, figuring that the presence of a gigantic male stranger might not sit too well with the Lattimore brothers or their mother. What I needed to do was talk to Sheila again about moving out. She wanted desperately to do it, but her family wasn’t about to surrender their slave without a fight. Literally.
So far, Sheila hadn’t had the heart to take them on. Maybe this time she would.

“But thanks for asking,” I said, looking at Nate. “I appreciate it.”

He opened his mouth to say something else, but Sheila padded into the kitchen wearing a pair of huge gray sweats, some red wool socks and a baggy sweater that reached almost to her knees. She was carrying Nate’s coat.

She handed it to him and managed a shy smile. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he said.

I handed the tray to Sheila. “Why don’t you take this, and I’ll be there in a second.”

“Sure,” she said. She turned for a last look at Nate. “Nice to meet you.”

“My pleasure,” he said, and did a little formal bow like a Japanese businessman respecting his own tradition even in a Savile Row suit.

He had parked out back, and I walked him to the door.

“Thanks for coming by,” I said.

“Hey!” he said suddenly. “What about my letter of intent?”