God Still Don't Like Ugly (18 page)

CHAPTER 35

When I was able to move again, I grabbed a wad of napkins and almost knocked three other patrons down trying to get back to my booth so fast. I sat down so hard, a sharp pain rolled through my stomach.

“I’m almost finished,” P. told me, coughing and gobbling up another slice of the pizza, spilling soda on the table.

“Take . . . take your time,” I said nervously, using the napkins I had just picked up to wipe off the table instead of the sweat sliding down the sides of my face. I beckoned for the waiter and ordered another pizza and a half-carafe of white wine.

“What’s wrong, Annette?” P. asked, giving me a puzzled look. “Did you want that last slice of pizza?”

“Uh . . . no. You go on and eat it. I’ll eat some of the next one. I . . .

I just thought about something that made me nervous,” I replied, looking toward the door.

“You look so funny now,” P. stated, looking at me with her eyes blinking rapidly. “You sick?”

“I’m fine. Just be still!” I snapped.

The waiter delivered another pizza and the wine. I ignored the pizza, but I poured myself a glass of wine so fast, I spilled most of it on the table. I couldn’t get some in me fast enough. I didn’t stop drink-140

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ing until it was all gone. P. gobbled up as much of the second pizza as she could by herself, eating so fast she almost gagged.

“You can slow down. I don’t want any more pizza,” I told her, belching so hard my chest felt like it was going to explode.

Chewing frantically, a frown appeared on P.’s face and she pushed the pizza away.

“I don’t feel so good now,” she complained, rubbing her stomach.

I didn’t feel so good myself and I felt even worse knowing that I had allowed P. to overindulge herself.

“We’ll sit here for a little while,” I offered. “Then we’ll both feel better.”

Now that I was tipsy from drinking the whole container of wine by myself, I was afraid to drive. I was also afraid to go back out into the mall. The last thing I wanted to do was face Rhoda Nelson again.

Especially this close to Christmas and my wedding.

There was a back door out of the pizza parlor. It was for the use of employees only and there was a big sign above the door that said just that. But I wasn’t going to let it stop us from leaving that way. I slid into my coat, snatched up my package from the lingerie store, and turned to P. “Quick—follow me and run like hell!” A stunned teenage employee walking toward us just looked and shook his head as P. and I rushed toward the back door, flung it open, and fled. P. seemed to be enjoying our unplanned escapade and ran along with me, giggling until we reached my car.

“How come you didn’t want to pay?” P. asked, trying to catch her breath as she fastened her seat belt.

“What?” I hollered, tossing my package into the backseat.

P. sniffed, rubbed her nose, and looked over at me as I secured my seat belt around my heaving chest. My heart was beating so hard, I thought I was going to have a heart attack.

“You didn’t pay for the pizza and stuff,” P. said with a devilish look on her face.

“Oh, shoot!” I smacked the steering wheel and gritted my teeth.

“Well, we’ll just have to pay double the next time we go there for pizza,” I offered, speaking more to myself than to the confused child on the seat next to me. I didn’t know when I’d go back to that mall again. But knowing that I might run into Rhoda there, I knew it wouldn’t be anytime soon.

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I knew I couldn’t drive until the buzz had worked its way through my head. So P. and I tumbled out of my car and walked across the parking lot and spent the next two hours in a hardware store across the street from the mall.

“Now, we can’t leave until I find something to give to my boyfriend for Christmas,” I told P., praying more for Rhoda not to come into this store than I was for the employees at the pizza parlor not to track me down.

Jean wasn’t home when I attempted to drop P. off, so I took her home with me and I was glad that I did. She kept me so busy wrapping Christmas presents that I didn’t have time to think much about Rhoda.

About an hour later, Jean called and told me to send P. home.

“I don’t want to go home. I want to spend the night with you,” P. insisted, almost in tears.

“No, you have to go home now,” I said sternly. “It’s Christmastime and you should be spending more time with your own family.”

With a profound scowl, P. put on her coat with so much reluctance that she put it on inside out.

As I was walking P. to her house, I advised her not to tell her mother that I’d allowed her to eat so much at the mall pizza parlor and that we had left without paying for our orders.

“You can keep all of that a secret, can’t you?” I asked, leading the girl down the street by her hand.

P. was taking too long to respond.

“P., did you hear me?”

“I heard you,” she replied weakly. “I can keep a secret.”

I stood outside on the sidewalk in front of Jean’s house until P.

made it inside, dragging her feet and looking back at me with a hopeless look on her face. It had started to snow again so my vision was obscured. For a moment, I just stood there blinking at the big, green-shingled house that Jean occupied. Jean and P. had painted pictures of elves and fairies on the wall of their front porch. The place reminded me of a big, sad dollhouse. A light came on upstairs and P.’s face appeared in a window. She stayed there until I left.

Alone in my house again, I was still so occupied with other things—

cleaning up the mess in the kitchen, watching television, and hand washing a few pairs of my panties—that I didn’t think much about 142

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Rhoda. But when I went to bed, Rhoda was all I could think about. It had been close to around this same time of the year when I’d last seen or talked to her.

I had thought about her often over the years. Naturally, I did it more around this time of the year. I knew that her family had moved away, and as far as I knew, she never came to Richland to visit anybody so I couldn’t come up with a reason for her to be back in Richland now. Hours later, I was still tossing and turning, almost falling out of my bed thinking about Rhoda. I kept telling myself that I had mis-taken some other woman for her. There were a couple of other petite, young Black women in town who resembled Rhoda from a distance . . .

When I got up the next morning, I had convinced myself that I had not seen Rhoda.

But I was wrong.

CHAPTER 36

Two days after my visit to the mall, Jerome and I went to the Red Rose nightclub to hear a jazz band from Cleveland that somebody had told him about. Jeffrey Rose, the nightclub owner’s nephew, sang with the band and the club was anxious to give the boy some ex-posure. I should have known that there were other reasons for Jerome to want to go out and spend money when he didn’t have to. I found that out before we even left my house.

“I won a raffle down at the office. Buy one drink, get one free. And all the free buffalo wings you can eat,” Jerome confessed with a grin so extreme it almost divided his face. “If we eat enough, you won’t even have to cook dinner tonight.”

Another snowstorm had hit Richland earlier that day. Snow was still coming down like curtains. Most people had the good sense to stay home that night. Even though Jerome had snow tires on his car, the car skidded so much on the icy streets that I was a nervous wreck by the time we got to the Red Rose. And I didn’t try to hide it.

“I’d feel better if we had walked over here,” I complained, gripping Jerome’s arm as we stumbled, slipped, and slid across the parking lot.

“Not in all this shit,” he snapped, snow covering his bare head like a white cap.

I had a scarf on my head and a muffler around my neck. But snowflakes the size of quarters all but covered my face. My cheeks and 144

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eyes burned from the cold wind that was howling at us like a wolf.

Being so fair-skinned, Jerome’s normally yellow-toned face now looked bright orange. His nose was almost blue.

“Old Mr. Boatwright used to walk over here from our house in the snow, at night, two and three times a week. And he didn’t have but one leg,” I said with my teeth clicking and my hands feeling numb even though I had on thick gloves. I was more disgusted with myself than I was with Jerome. I couldn’t believe that I had let him woo me out into this miserable weather just because he had won a raffle to get some free drinks.

“Well, I am not old Mr. Boatwright,” Jerome growled, snatching open the heavy metal door leading into the tiny bar with its postage-stamp-size tables. “And that’s probably why he’s residing at the cemetery now.” Jerome’s teeth were clicking just as hard as mine.

We were the only two patrons in the dimly lit Red Rose for the first hour after the band started playing. And it was a wretched band at that. The sax player was trying to play and smoke at the same time, the guy on the keyboard played off-key, and Mr. Rose’s poor young nephew couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. I felt sorry and amused at the same time.

Jerome was in heaven. So far he had only had to buy one drink.

One of the band members covered our next two rounds. And the waitress couldn’t bring more buffalo wings to our table fast enough for Jerome.

The Red Rose was popular for a lot of reasons. The owner was so generous he allowed his regular customers to run up long tabs before he collected, if he collected at all. I knew this because Mr. Boatwright had died owing the club a fortune that Muh’Dear had settled herself, calling it her last act of “Christian duty” in Mr. Boatwright’s honor.

The club offered food to go and I often stopped by myself to pick up fried chicken dinners for Jerome and me. It was a cozy little place and after I got more relaxed, I was almost glad that I had come. That feeling didn’t last long.

I was facing the door but I didn’t see her come in. It was like she had come out of nowhere.

Rhoda!

This time I
knew
it was her. Standing alone on the dance floor in front of the bandstand, she had on a long, dark skirt, boots, and the same leather coat that she had had with her at the mall. Her long hair GOD STILL DON’T LIKE UGLY

145

was in a ponytail. While I sat there in slack-jawed amazement, the band started playing a tune I’d never heard before, called “Crack The Whip.” Rhoda started gyrating like a stripper and my mouth dropped open so wide, my chin ached. Every member in the band egged her on as she removed a leather belt from her waist and started waving it in the air, cracking it like a whip. In all the years that I had hung around with her, I had never seen Rhoda get so loose in public—or anywhere else, for that matter.

“Now there’s a sister that’s feeling the holiday spirit. You need to loosen up more,” Jerome told me, beckoning for the waitress, snapping his fingers and bobbing his head to the music. He was enjoying every minute of Rhoda’s outrageous performance. I could feel sweat oozing out all over my body. I snatched a napkin off of the table and started to wipe and fan my face.

I had managed to shut my mouth but I was still horrified.

“I’m as loose as I’m going to get,” I declared, my heart beating against my chest so hard I thought the buttons on my cotton blouse were going to pop off. I moved to a chair on the opposite side of the table so I could face the wall—not to keep from looking at Rhoda, but to keep her from looking at me.

The band finally stopped playing but they hooted, hollered, clapped, and whistled like they had no shame whatsoever. I turned to see Rhoda walking away from the dance floor, clutching a huge bag filled with fried chicken so potent it teased my nostrils all the way across the room. I watched her until she glided toward the door and disappeared.

A couple of minutes after Rhoda’s departure, a few more patrons entered and the band stopped sending us drinks. Now, Jerome was just as ready to leave as I was.

By the time we left the club there was so much snow coming down we could barely see two feet in front of us. Jerome led me to his car with his arm around my shoulder, cussing all the way. I didn’t even bother to remind him that it had been his idea for us to come out into this raging blizzard in the first place.

Jerome drove me back to my house and left without coming in for his usual “nightcap,” which included a few minutes in my bed. But that was only after I feigned cramps and a headache.

Once I got inside, I couldn’t sit still long enough to enjoy anything on television. Seeing Rhoda a second time in the same week was a 146

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heavy load to carry and I needed to talk to somebody about it. But my options were limited. I couldn’t call Pee Wee for obvious reasons. I couldn’t talk to Muh’Dear about Rhoda and every time I called up Scary Mary, all she really wanted to talk about was herself. I called up Jean.

Not to talk about Rhoda, because Jean didn’t know the history of this subject, but I figured that a neutral conversation with an uninvolved party would be the next best thing.

“Annette, is it my imagination or is there something bothering you?” Jean asked. I could hear P. singing along with the television in the background.

“What do you mean?” I managed.

“You’ve asked me if I was going to apply for that supervisor’s position four times in the last ten minutes. And each time I told you I wasn’t.

You nervous about the wedding?”

“Yeah. That’s it. I am nervous about my wedding,” I said quickly.

“Well, don’t be.” Jean sighed. “I just wish I was in your shoes.”

I spent the next hour talking to Jean about our jobs at the telephone company, her desire to marry her boyfriend, and other mundane things that I would forget as soon as I got off the telephone.

I went about my business the next few days. I had enough going on in my life that I was soon able to put Rhoda on a back burner.

One of the reasons I tolerated Richland was because it was a small town. It was a lot more intimate than Miami and even Erie, Pennsylvania, the town I’d tried to hide out in a few years ago. But even if Richland had been twice its size, it would still not be big enough for Rhoda and me to occupy at the same time. Not after the way our friendship had ended.