Every Woman's Dream (9 page)

Chapter 15

Joan

O
NE THING
I
DIDN'T LIKE ABOUT THE WOMEN IN MY FAMILY WAS
that they all gained a huge amount of weight when they got pregnant. Losing my shape was one of my biggest fears. But since I was probably going to blow up like a blimp, anyway, I promptly ordered a whole loaf of garlic bread for myself.

Reed and I decided not to tell anyone else, not even his parents, about my condition until we were absolutely sure. He volunteered to make an appointment for me with one of his doctor friends for the following week.

Lola sounded happy when I called her up later that night and told her what Reed and I had discussed. She wished me well, but after a few minutes, her tone changed. Her well wishes now sounded like complaints. “I don't know what I'm going to do now. I'm going to miss hanging out with you,” she whined.

“Nothing will change between us when Reed and I get married,” I insisted.

“The hell it won't. No married man is going to let his wife keep running around with her single friends. Him being a dentist, you'll be meeting all kinds of upper-class folks. And once you have your baby, you'll be carpooling, and planning PTA events, and having lunch with soccer moms. Next thing I know, you'll be joining the country club and going to tea parties. . . .”

“Lola, please don't spoil things.”

“I'm not spoiling things! You're the one who got pregnant!”

“I didn't plan this,” I shot back. “I thought you were happy for me.”

“I am. And I'm sorry for . . . Oh, Lord! I just thought of something!
What about those old men?
”

“What about them?”

“Are you going to keep writing letters to them?”

“Of course I am. I don't see why I should stop right away. Besides, some of the letters are a hoot. Last week my old dude in Tulsa sent me a picture of his dick! I never laughed so hard in my life!” Joan guffawed. “Thank God he included a couple of hundred dollars with it.”

“But with the kind of money Reed must be making, you won't be needing money from your pen pals.”

“What if he's stingy and puts me on a strict budget? That's one thing. Another thing is, for all I know, he and I might get married and not even stay together. My sister Elaine and her husband didn't stay married a year.”

“Well, I'm happy if you're happy. I just didn't think things would change so drastically, all of a sudden. With a husband and a baby, you're going to be so busy you might not have time to keep writing to your pen pals, or time for me. . . .”

“I will make time for you! Until I know how things are going to go with Reed, I'm going to keep writing to my pen pals. What about you?”

“I guess I'll keep writing to them too,” Lola said dryly. “Why not?”

I could tell that she was more than a little concerned about the future of our relationship. She suddenly wanted to end the call and asked me to call her the next morning so we could have our usual Saturday-morning chat.

Even with Too Sweet snoring, I went to sleep as soon as I laid my head on my pillow and I slept like a baby.

 

I got up early the next morning. As usual, there was a ruckus going on downstairs, so it was hard to sleep in, anyway. I planned to call Lola after I had polished my nails. Before my polish had even dried, she called me. The moment I heard her frantic voice, I knew something was wrong. I was not prepared for what she told me.

When she told me that she had just gotten rid of the wife of one of my pen pals who had come to her house a few minutes ago
to kick my ass,
I knew it was time for us to get off our gravy train. I was afraid, and from the panic in Lola's voice, I could tell that she was too.

I was just about to bolt and head over to Lola's house so we could send “breakup” letters to all of our pen pals when Mama accosted me in the hallway outside my bedroom. “Don't you leave this house, gal, until you finish that laundry you started last night,” she barked, hands on her hips.

“Yes, ma'am,” I mumbled as I scrambled downstairs to the laundry room. I plucked clothes out of the dryer and folded everything as fast as I could. Then I did a few more chores that Mama had been badgering me about. It was over an hour and a half before I was able to head over to Lola's house.

When I arrived, stomping up the front porch steps like a clumsy mule, Bertha snatched opened the door. She never attempted to hide her annoyance with me. She parted her chapped, liver-colored lips just enough to give me a blunt greeting. “Hello, Joan. You over here again?”

“Lola told me to come over,” I said defensively as I eased over the threshold, almost stepping on Bertha's flat bare feet. She stepped out of my path and waved me toward the staircase.

I rushed up to Lola's room, entered, and locked the door. She stood in front of her dresser with a pen in one hand and a sheet of paper in the other. “It's about time you got here,” she said sharply.

“Mama made me do all kinds of shit first and I had to go pick up the stamps so we can mail the letters today,” I explained, my voice dropping almost to a whisper. “I got here as fast as I could.” I had run up the stairs, so I was huffing and puffing and even had to cough a couple of times to catch my breath.

Lola gave me a concerned look as I approached her. “Joan, are you feeling all right? You look terrible,” she said.

“I feel fine,” I said with a dismissive wave. “I'm just a little bit woozy and tired.”

“Well, you'd better get used to that.” Lola glanced at my stomach, then at my face, which was beginning to feel hot. I didn't know if it was because of my condition or the real reason I had come to visit. “I still can't believe you hadn't told me about the mess you got yourself in sooner than you did,” she complained. “Pregnant at seventeen!”

“You didn't tell Bertha about it yet, did you?”

“No, I didn't tell her yet.”

“She sure was looking at me like she knew something.”

“That's nothing new. She always thinks you're up to no good,” Lola pointed out. “Do you want some tea or milk or something? Bobby left some weed the last time he was here. I could roll you a blunt.”

“You mean a
joint
? Lola, what makes you think I want to smoke some dope, especially in my condition?”

There was a scared look on her face. “I figured you'd be a little nervous after what I told you about that woman coming to beat you up. I thought you might want something to calm your nerves.”

“I'm fine,” I insisted. “And if I did need something to calm my nerves, it wouldn't be some weed. I didn't even know you smoked that shit.”

“I don't and I never will. But like I said, Bobby left some here. He's fooling around with Cathy Harbor now, so I probably won't hear from him again, and I don't know what else to do with a bag of weed.”

“I'd like to stay on Elaine's good side, so I'll take it home and give it to her. Now let's get this letter writing shit over with. I can't stay long. Reed's coming back today so we can continue discussing our plans,” I said as I plopped down onto the neatly made bed. I opened my backpack and dumped out the stamps and several pens. She had already placed the stationery and envelopes on her nightstand. She produced the list that had the names and addresses of her pen pals, and I removed mine from the front pocket of my backpack. Despite her ugly off-white furniture, the old-fashioned venetian blinds covering the windows, and the baby-shit-colored walls, I enjoyed spending time in Lola's room because it was a lot more private than mine.

I was going to wait until I got home to write the final letter to Lee, that love-struck woman in Miami. I had changed my mind about telling her that lie about me having to take my mother to Mexico to live with my uncle Alex. Now I thought it would be better to tell her a stronger lie: I had just accepted a job with the Peace Corps and would be moving to Brazil and would write to her again once I got settled. With a story like that, I was convinced that she would not attempt to find the “man” she'd fallen in love with. I still didn't want Lola to know that I had posed as Leroy Puckett and conned a female.

“I have a few things to do myself today, but I'm not doing anything until I get all my letters written,” she told me. I noticed her hands were shaking as she grabbed an envelope and began to address it. “I'm never doing anything like this again,” she snapped, giving me a menacing look.

“I'm not either,” I responded in a meek voice.

After we had composed all of the letters, we trotted to the mailbox at the corner. Since we had so many to mail, we decided that it might not be such a good idea to put them all in the same box at the same time. We dropped off only a couple at the first location. Then we roamed around to ten more boxes, with at least two or three blocks between each one. At one point, I got dizzy, so we stopped and sat on a bench at a bus stop for a few minutes. I couldn't believe that I had already begun to feel like shit so early in my pregnancy. After I felt better, we left the bus stop and resumed our mission. I was so relieved when we dropped the last batch into a mailbox in front of the main library.

We were exhausted by the time we made it back to Lola's house. She was just as surprised as I was to see Bertha standing in the doorway with a frantic look on her face and the telephone in her hand. “Lola, I was just about to call the police and have them come here so I could give them one of your blouses,” she wailed.

“Why would you give the cops one of my blouses?” Lola asked as she brushed past Bertha, with me close behind.

“For the dogs to sniff and help find your body, that's why. I didn't know if a sex maniac had grabbed you and Joan off the street or what. You didn't tell me where you were going when you left, so I didn't know what to think.”

“Um, you were in the bathroom and we didn't want to disturb you. We went to get something to eat and w-we, um, lost track of time,” Lola stammered.

“There's a kitchen full of food in this house,” Bertha pointed out.

“It was my fault. I wanted a Big Mac, so we had to go to McDonald's,” I explained. I could tell a storm was brewing and I'd been in too many storms already. “I guess I'd better get on back home before Mama has the police out looking for me.” I excused myself and rushed back out the door before Bertha could do or say anything other than suck on her gums and give me an annoyed look.

 

Lola and I held our breath for the next couple of weeks. Most of the old men, and the Lee woman in Miami, didn't respond to our Dear John letters. But a few, ironically the ones who had sent the least amount of money, continued to send letters, but no more money. They begged us to reconsider our decisions to “move to Canada” with our new boyfriends. It was so pathetic and I felt so bad about the misery I had caused some innocent old people. But we did what we had to do. To make sure no more letters addressed to me came to Lola's address, I filled out a change-of-address form. My “new address” was actually an empty warehouse several miles across town, next to a vacant lot. Lola didn't want to fill out the same form because she thought that if we both did it, and one or more of those old men filed a complaint, it would look mighty suspicious to the postal authorities. So a few more letters addressed to her trickled in.

By the end of October, all of Lola's pen pals had stopped writing to her. And that woman who wanted to beat me up never returned. Now I was totally convinced that she was the wife of Mr. Blake in Reno because he never wrote to me again and I hadn't even sent him a Dear John letter. I promised Lola, and myself, that I'd do my best to walk the straight and narrow for the rest of my life.

I was about to become a wife and mother and it was time for me to grow up and behave more responsibly. I just hoped that would be enough to keep me from losing my way again.

Chapter 16

Joan

I
WAS NOT READY TO BE A MOTHER, BUT
I
WAS READY TO ACCEPT THE
consequences of my actions. Had it not been for the support of my family, Lola, and Reed, I don't know what I would have done.

Reed and I decided not to wait for me to graduate in June, but I was going to put off getting married as long as I could because I wanted to enjoy my freedom just a little longer. After all, I planned to spend the next forty or fifty years with him, so there were lots of things I wouldn't be able to do when I got married. But remaining footloose and fancy-free was not so easy.

From the day I told Reed that I was having his baby, he became a frequent visitor. When he was not sitting in our living room drinking scotch with Elmo or in the kitchen with Mama eating pig ears or whatever was on the table that particular day, he was on the telephone, asking me all kinds of dumb questions. His favorite one was “Are you eating right and taking the pills the doctor gave you?” He also wanted to know if I was still seeing other men and he needed to know my whereabouts at all times. Almost every time I saw or spoke to him on the phone, he wanted to know if I really loved him. He began to show up at my school unannounced to have lunch with me or to give me a ride home. No matter what the reason was for him to be keeping such close tabs on me, the attention made me feel special. I was flattered to know that I had a man who loved me so much he wanted me all to himself.

I decided to go ahead and marry him before my graduation to keep him from spending so much money on my greedy relatives. To them, he had become the goose that laid golden eggs. Every time he called, different ones started whooping and hollering and asking what time he was coming over and what he was bringing. Reed often showed up with expensive liquor for Elmo and flowers and candy for Mama and Too Sweet, and a variety of miscellaneous goodies for everybody else. One evening he treated everybody who happened to be in the house when he arrived—nine of us—to dinner in a very expensive restaurant. Three days after that, while I was having dinner with Lola, Reed came to the house and took seven more of my relatives to another expensive restaurant. I knew that it was just a matter of time before they started hitting him up for “loans,” the way Libby and Marshall did with Bertha.

 

We decided to exchange vows on the second Saturday in February, 2000, at three in the afternoon. The ceremony was scheduled to take place in my mother's living room. The night before, I had spotted what I thought was a roach crawling up the wall and I went ballistic. For one thing, we had never had a problem with roaches or any other creature. “Girl, you imagining things. That was probably just a baby gnat you seen,” Too Sweet insisted. I had made such a fuss, my stepfather rushed to the hardware store and returned with enough odorless roach paste to coat every wall in the house. He applied it only to areas where nobody would see it. That made me feel better, but our house still couldn't compete with the upscale twenty-five-floor building I'd be moving into with Reed. It was located in one of the most exclusive, gated neighborhoods in town, within walking distance of the country club. His condo was on the eighth floor. His immediate neighbors included a pilot for a major airline and a stockbroker. Most of my family had been to Reed's place a few times; and every chance one of them got, they told me that I was “moving on up” and that I'd “hit the mother lode.” Mama was brazen enough to tell me—in front of Reed—that no matter what he did to me after we got married, I'd be a “straight-up fool” if I didn't stay with him until one of us died. That last comment had given me an ominous feeling and I'd immediately pushed it out of my mind. As far as I was concerned, two healthy young people like Reed and me didn't have to worry about dying anytime soon.

We invited forty-five people to the wedding and informed each one that they could bring one guest. Since we knew so many folks who were
never
on time for anything, we didn't tell them that the ceremony was scheduled to start at three
P.M.
We told them that it would start at one
P.M.
I had told Lola the actual time and I was glad when she arrived at exactly three
P.M.
with Perry Washington, a frat boy she had just started dating a week ago. Almost every other guest showed up an hour late, anyway, descending like locusts in groups of four and five. A few stragglers, Bertha included, didn't show up until after the reception had started. Libby, Marshall, and their spouses were the last to arrive—two hours late. Only two dozen people bothered to bring wedding gifts.

My family spared no expense when it came to food and alcohol. My cousin Clifford was the deejay and his wife, Vivian, and her two sisters had prepared most of the food. The honey stung fried chicken wings and the potato salad were both so delicious, Reverend Bailey insisted on fixing a huge plate to take home. I even saw a couple of bold females slip food into their purses. Such behavior was so typical at our events, acknowledging it was never even considered.

Reed's side of the guest list had almost nothing in common with mine. His crew stood off in bunches of two and three discussing politics, the economy, and world events. My crew stood around discussing Tyler Perry movies, how much they hated their jobs, and who was making love to someone other than their mate. Even as happy as I was, I couldn't wait for the day to end!

“Joan, you look so good in that green silk dress. I'm glad the designers are making maternity outfits look more stylish these days,” Libby chirped as she gave me a clumsy one-armed hug. A weary look crossed her face when she looked over my shoulder and saw the numerous bottles of alcohol on the table in the middle of the room. She was pregnant with her first child, too. She was eight months along, I was seven, so neither one of us could drink any alcohol. “Girl, I'd give anything in the world if I could have me a few Cadillac margaritas,” she muttered.

“I feel you,” I told her with a wink.

Marshall came up to me next with his arms outstretched. Hugging him was like hugging a barrel. “Joan, I can't believe you're getting married! I remember when you was a little girl how you and Lola used to throw rocks at me.” I wanted to throw a rock at him now, but Marshall was a guest and this was a very special day for me, so I remained cordial. I even kissed him on his bloated cheek. “I wasn't sure if we were supposed to bring something, but if you run out of food, I can run out and pick up a sweet potato pie,” he said. At the same time, his eyes were roaming from one woman to another, even though his wife was on his arm. He and my cousin Arthur played cards now and then. That was the only “social” connection I had to this fool. If Mama had not run all around the neighborhood bragging about me marrying “a successful young dentist” and telling everybody about the reception, I would have insisted on going to a restaurant with just a few relatives and close friends.

Reed was all over the place. One reason he was trying so hard to get in good with my family was because my uncle Grady had told Reed he was not happy about him getting his baby sister's baby girl pregnant, and that if Reed ever mistreated me, he was going to suffer. Other than Uncle Grady's ominous threat, nobody else in my family had said one mean word to or about Reed.

His parents lived in Monterey. His daddy was recovering from knee surgery and his mother had to stay home to look after him, but Elmo had taped the wedding for them. Reed's favorite cousin, Laura, a mannish-looking woman in her thirties, had driven over from her home in Berkeley with her dull husband. It was obvious that they were not party people. They didn't drink or eat anything and stayed only an hour.

The first chance I got to speak privately to Lola, I steered her into a corner away from as many people as possible. “You look good in pink,” I told her. “You should wear it more often.”

“I will,” she said with a raised eyebrow. Then she gave me a misty-eyed look. “Joan, I am so happy for you. You must be the happiest girl in the world.”

“I'd be even happier if I could have a few drinks,” I pouted.

“Well, you can forget about that until you have that baby.” Lola wagged her finger in my face before she took a sip of her rum and Coke.

I scanned the room and saw Bertha in a corner with Perry. Her lips were moving about a mile a minute. The way she had his path blocked and from the tight expression on his face, he looked more like a hostage than a wedding guest. “Perry seems like a nice dude. I hope Bertha Butt doesn't run him off, like all your other boyfriends,” I snickered.

Lola gazed at them, but she was not amused. She let out a heavy sigh and a groan at the same time. “I hope she doesn't either,” she said with the most hopeless look I'd ever seen on her face. “Bertha told me before I left the house that if a girl like you could land a dentist, there's no telling what kind of man I could get.”

“A girl like me? What am I, a one-eyed Cyclops?”

We both laughed.

“She thinks you're a little too fast,” Lola told me.

“She thinks I'm a ‘little too fast.' Now, that's funny. For the record, she didn't waste any time latching onto your father when your mother died.” We laughed again. “And now she realizes you will get married someday?” I added in a serious tone of voice with my head cocked to the side and my hand on my hip.

“There was never any doubt about that. The only thing is, she still thinks that when I get married, she's going to live with me and my husband.”

“What do you say to that? I've told you more than once that I'm sure your father didn't mean for you to take your commitment to such an extreme.”

“I know what he meant,” Lola snapped. “I will look after her, but I will have a life of my own.”