The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men (8 page)

“Fine,” I said again. I spotted my Tumi suitcase coming around on the baggage belt.

We arrived at the house that I grew up in an hour later. The sight of the five-bedroom pale-yellow colonial sitting in the middle of our little cul-de-sac filled me with relief, a familiar touchstone on an overcast day.

A dull rainbow of not-quite-dead leaves had fallen from the neighbors’ trees onto our lawn, and that made the house look even more normal from the outside. In no way did it announce itself as the home of rap legend Rick T.

The inside of the house, however, told the true story. If the framed posters of black leaders from Malcolm X to Angela Davis, and wood and soap-stone African statues scattered throughout the house didn’t clue visitors in, the semi-permanent smell of dark and brooding incense let them know that a
conscious
black family lived here. However, having learned the art of political discourse at Smith, our home decor had begun to ring false to me.

“I just wonder if home decoration is a completely truthful vessel for political intentions. Isn’t that the job of actions?” I’d asked my mother on my last visit, before leaving for China.

My mother had laughed at me. “Yeah, I came home speaking big after I went away to college, too. That will go away after a couple of years in the real world.”

I had swollen up with irritation and accused my mother of being “dismissive” back then, but when I entered our home for what would turn out to be the last time, I felt nothing but guilt. The smug shutters fell off my eyes and I could now see in the decorations how hard Mom had worked to make our home worthy of a great rap star.

I left my suitcase at the bottom of the stairs and headed toward my parents’ bedroom, asking Brenda, “What does Dad want me to bring?”

But I stopped when I saw that the door to my parents’ bedroom was closed. As far back as I could remember, my mother had demanded an open house. No closed doors unless somebody was inside the room, sleeping or doing homework. That had been her policy. And as a teenager, I had often been annoyed when I closed my bedroom door before leaving for school, only to find it wide open when I returned home.

But now the door to my parents’ bedroom stood closed. And though no ticking sound emanated from the other side of the door, I somehow knew there was a bomb inside that room.

“Don’t,” something whispered inside of me, unsettled.

But I did, dismissing the subconscious warning and turning the round,
scratched-up brass knob anyway, like a girl in a horror film; then I found something truly horrible inside.

First of all, there was my mother’s gold wedding band, defiant in its simplicity, refusing to speak to Rick T’s later success.

Second of all, there was what the ring lay on top of. A piece of white paper, which had probably come from the printer downstairs.

I approached the note the same way that I would have approached a dead body. Fearful, but needing to see it for myself. In many ways, this note was my mother’s dead body, which, in the back of my heart, I now knew was lying in the hospital’s morgue.

I picked up the ring, then picked up the note.

My mother liked to talk. Later, at the funeral, both Janine and I would recall how often she would give hour-long answers to simple questions like, “Where did you get that refrigerator magnet from?” or “What’s a hernia?” The reason we were both so great at research, we told fellow funeral-goers, was because we had learned early to look things up ourselves rather than risk a lengthy answer from our mother.

But on paper she had always been economical with her words. In the early days, when she was still writing all of Rick T’s lyrics, the unknowing critics had praised him (and therefore my mother) for the spare yet effective way she managed to paint a picture of the projects where she (not Rick T) had grown up, with poetry beating like a diamond in her heart.

Thursday and Janine—

I know you will find this, because your father doesn’t come into this room anymore. You are my daughters. Do better. Don’t be pathetic. Don’t ever be pathetic like me. I love you from the top of your heads to the bottom of your toes.

And that was it. No signature. Of course it didn’t need one. She knew we would know who wrote this note. I sat there—for a few seconds, for a
couple of hours, I would never be sure. All I knew was that an uncertain portion of time later, someone said, “Thursday.”

And when I looked up, my father was standing in the doorway. My father, tall and attractive not in the true sense, but in the showbiz sense. He had a face that people could look at for a long time because he reminded them of somebody they knew. Somebody they liked. A cousin, a brother, a friend, a father.

Right before his own father had died, Rick T had driven us to visit our paternal grandparents for the first time. Their house had only been a few neighborhoods over, and I had been surprised to find out that they lived so nearby. My grandmother opened the door, dressed in what my mother called a church suit, even though it was Wednesday.

“Oh Ricky, I’m glad you’re here,” she said.

He started to hug her, but she shooed him away. “No, no, get upstairs to your father. He wants to see you bad.”

My father took the stairs three at a time, running to meet a man he hadn’t spoken to in almost fifteen years, of whom I’d never even seen a picture.

“Mom, I have to go to the bathroom,” my ten-year-old sister tended to address all of her needs and wants to my mother back then, even the ones with which she had nothing to do.

“It’s right down this hallway, through the kitchen,” my grandmother told Janine.

“I remember where it is. I’ll show you,” my mother said, also to Janine.

For the rest of the short visit, the two women would continue to talk through Janine and me, never addressing each other directly, not even to say good-bye when my father came storming down the stairs fifteen minutes after we arrived and said with a face made of angry stone, “Let’s go. Let’s go now.”

While we were alone in the living room together, waiting for my mom and Janine to come back, my grandmother smiled at me and said, “You are
the pretty girl twin of your father. Down to the eyes. The only thing that’s not his on you are these adorable dimples.” She squeezed my cheeks, even though I was twelve, too old for cheek pinching.

I preened, happy to be compared to my father and resenting my dimples, which I had inherited from my mother’s mother, a salty old woman who refused to move from the projects and would spend most of our visits saying things like, “Ain’t you smart? I bet them white people be falling all over you the way you talk. You probably think you one of them. Well, you gonna find out when you get older. You ain’t that special.” And then just a few minutes later, “I don’t know why your mama don’t bring you round here to visit more often.”

“Where’d you get these dimples?” my pleasant and pretty grandmother asked me, her preacher’s wife eyes taking me in like I was a delight just for existing.

“I don’t know,” I answered, not wanting to bring my other grandmother into the conversation, or even my own mother, who I could already tell she disliked. She did not, I discerned over the short amount of time we spent together, think my project-born mother was good enough for my suburb-raised father. She would later not even attend my mother’s funeral. And by denying my dimples, I had implicitly agreed with her. I would think about this small betrayal often in the guilty years following my mother’s death. But back then, like all children of the famous, I idolized the parent who spent the least amount of time with me, and took the one I saw every day for granted.

That is, I took her for granted until that night, when I read her suicide note, and looked up from it to find my father standing in the doorway.

He had been one of the first artists to make it big off the rap game, but in the year 2000, the year my mother died, he was in his early forties and it was beginning to show—not on his face, but in the fashion choices he made to hide the signs of his advancing age. Back in the nineties, during the height of his career, he had worn a beard, but then gray hairs had started
popping up, springy steel harbingers of the trajectory of his career. And now he shaved every day, wearing a variety of baseball caps to cover his head and its receding hairline.

I had teased him about this, the last time I saw him before I left for China. He had laughed with me, all good-natured, and told me that he was planning to get some track pants, too, to cover up his gut. “I’m going to wear them like those old men playing chess in the park.”

I had laughed, Janine had laughed, my mother had laughed. We had all laughed together, my mother especially, pretending that we were what we appeared to be: a happy family.

And now my father stood in the doorway in his baseball cap and track pants, worn with a baggy “ENYCE” T-shirt that, yes, masked his gut.

I put it together in those moments. My mother hadn’t been in a car accident, swerving to avoid an animal or another car, as originally believed. She had barged through that divider and driven herself over the cliff.
Thelma and Louise
style. When I had stepped onto the plane, my mother had still been alive, undergoing hours of surgery to save the failing organs that had been beaten to death when her car had crashed into the divider and then rolled down the steep hill beyond it. But when I stepped off the plane, my mother was dead, having refused to go along with the lifesaving procedures, her life spirit tugging and tugging against the surgeons’ efforts until they let her go and called her time of death.

Rick T, stuck in a mire of Janine’s tears and paperwork that needed to be signed after my mother’s body had been processed, sent Brenda to pick me up and keep me at the house until he got there and could tell me the news himself. He had not known about my mother’s letter because, as my mother had said, he did not come in this room anymore.

Janine hadn’t made the trip upstairs with him. And neither had Brenda. However, I could sense that my father’s mistress was still downstairs, face appropriately sorrowful, but her heart hovering. Like a vulture.
Waiting, waiting, and smiling on the inside because my mother was dead, and she would finally have Rick T out in the open and all for herself.

The wedding band dropped out of my hand to the ground, bouncing with a metallic clink before rolling under the bed.

“Is that your mama’s ring?” my father asked.

With a running start, I jumped on my six-foot-tall father and raked my fingernails across his face. “Why did you send your mistress to pick me up? How could you let her come into our home?” I asked him, shrieking every word. “You arrogant, narcissistic, cheating son of a bitch!”

I had never gotten in a fight in my entire life, but Sharita was only five-two and had grown up in Kinloch, which, according to her, was one of the rougher neighborhoods in St. Louis, rife with large, mean black girls who wanted to fight her after issuing accusations like “You think you all that” and “You think you better than me, but you ain’t shit.”

“The secret,” Sharita told me at Smith College’s BRIDGE orientation program for students of color, “is to always go for their head. Doesn’t matter how big they are, they all got soft heads. Don’t be noble. You got to be willing to throw dirt in their eyes if it comes to that.”

My father and I fell sideways, rolling across the floor like my mother’s car had rolled down that hill. Despite my head attack, he managed to push me off of him and get to his feet, confused and disoriented. And my father, the king of “It Wasn’t Me,” lied to me like I had heard him lie to my mother. “Brenda’s not my—”

I didn’t let him finish. I took a glass from the nearby nightstand and threw it at his head with a vicious sideswipe. He screamed, grabbing the side of his head where the glass had shattered against it. Blood streamed through his fingers as Rick T made wounded animal sounds.

“Thursday, stop,” Janine said from the doorway.

When I saw my little sister at the door, standing behind my bleeding father, I did what she said. I came to a panting stop, only to have the house turn against me. It pushed me out of the room, stumbling by my father,
rushing past Janine, and running by Brenda downstairs before it spit me out the front door, where I violently threw up in my mother’s flowering bush.

How the hell was I supposed to live without a mother? My father was all career, sharp flow, and surface charm. He didn’t know a damn thing about love. He had funded the whole venture, but it had been my mother that had made the four of us into a family, and now, for all intents and purposes, it was just Janine and me.

I should have started crying then, with the kitchen-sink melodrama that I had left inside the house and the taste of recently ejected airplane food still in my mouth. However, my eyes remained a desert of anger and recrimination when I looked out onto the cul-de-sac.

But then a car pulled up to the curb and two people who looked like Risa and Sharita climbed out. And as they walked toward me, I began to realize that it really was them.

That’s when the tears finally came. My two best friends blurred in front of me and they caught me in their arms when I fell toward them. They held me; my taller friend, Risa, keeping me steady from above, and my shorter friend, Sharita, propping me up from below.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. “It’s midterms. You can’t be here.”

Risa shrugged. “We told our professors we had to go see about our girl. We were all, like, ‘Fuck your tests, bitches.’”

“We asked nicely to take them later so that we could come see you,” Sharita translated.

Which only made me cry harder.

Brenda drove Rick T to the emergency room. I didn’t know what he told the people who sewed up his stitches so soon after tending to his dead wife. Didn’t care, either. I only saw him once more at the funeral. Then I went back to China to finish out my semester. From then on, I managed to find other places to stay during the holidays and school breaks. And Rick T didn’t invite me to the wedding when he and Brenda got married an appropriate-enough year later.