Life Sentences (11 page)

“Why did you write about my birthday party, anyway? I mean, even if you had gotten it right, what was the point?”

Whoosh, back to that. Why couldn't Tisha let it go? “Well, it was our first boy-girl party. Remember? And I felt inadequate. When it came to that stuff, I was behind the curve. You and Donna and Fatima, you were ready for boys. I was still playing with toys. I gave you a toy, in fact, for that birthday, a stuffed cat. I could tell you thought you were beyond such things.”

“But—” Tisha seemed to be struggling, either with emotion or the attempt to find the right words. “It was
my
party. What was it doing in your book?”

Cassandra knew Tisha had not asked the question she wanted to ask, the underlying complaint:
Why did you get to write it?

“I'm a writer, it's what I do.”

“But it was
my
life.”

“Lives overlap, intersect. If I wrote only about my life, I wouldn't write about anything.”

“Maybe that would be better,” Tisha muttered.

“Tisha, are you angry that I want to write about Calliope? As you said, she wasn't really our friend.”

“I just don't want to be in there, too. But I will be, won't I? We all will—Donna, Fatima, me. I thought you were done with us, at least.”

Tisha always had been quick.

“I don't know what I'm writing, but there's clearly a story there. She was one of us, once. Not part of our gang, but a classmate. I want to figure out how the path deviates, how we end up in middle age, safe and snug, and she flounders so horribly. Okay, you had a tight family and Donna's folks were practically Baltimore royalty. But Calliope wasn't that different from Fatima, and you say Fatima made something of herself. Callie's story will tell us something larger. About the accidents of fate, the choices and temptations we faced.”

“But I don't want to be a part of it. I just don't. Can't you leave us out of it?”

“You won't be the focus, Tisha, far from it. The real story is what happened to Calliope. Of course, I'll have to talk to your brother—”

“He can't help you, either.”

“He was her lawyer.”

“Gag order,” Tisha said.

“During the case, yes, I read that. But I don't think a gag order can be upheld in perpetuity.”

“He figured where this was going, told me that he can't talk to you. Nor can Calliope, even if you can find her, and Reg himself isn't sure where she is.”

“Can't talk to me,” Cassandra asked, “or
won't
?”

Tisha sighed, checking her watch. “Does it really matter, Cassandra? Maybe we're all just done being supporting players in the Cassandra Fallows show, starring Cassandra Fallows as Cassandra Fallows.”

“That's not fair, Tisha, not fair at all.”

“I've got to go.” She put down a twenty, far more than she owed, even with a generous tip. “I have a teleconference at two.”

“It was nice to see you, Tisha.” Hurt as she was by that crack about the Cassandra show, she wasn't going to be sucked into picking a fight, closing any doors.

“It was good to see you, too, Cassandra. I'd love to talk to you, really talk—when you're not writing a book. I don't care what anyone says—I thought the novel was your best work to date. You should write more fiction. Not that you haven't written plenty already.”

ROUTE 108 STREAMED PAST
the windows of Tisha Barr-Holloway's “mama car,” an eight-year-old Dodge minivan that was fiendishly reliable, denying her any rational reason to trade it in. Even with her youngest approaching driving age, she still had to ferry a lot of kids around because of all the rules these days. Curfews, no more than two kids in a car at any time when there was a young driver behind the wheel. Lord, how the rules had changed since her sixteenth birthday, when she had gone down to Glen Burnie with her father and come back with a license three hours later, and the only real restriction was the fact that their family had only one car.

Tisha actually preferred the new way of doing things, even if it
meant she was chained to the steering wheel for a few more years. Howard County had too many twisty country roads left over from its farming past. Route 108 was one, in fact, and Tisha was driving much too fast, given the light rain that had begun to fall.
I would kill Michael Jr. if I caught him driving like this,
she thought, continuing to drive ten, fifteen miles over the speed limit. She did not, in fact, have to be at home at any particular time, did not have a teleconference at two, but she had needed to get away from Cassandra. Ravenous, she mapped the area in her head, tried to remember where the nearest fast-food place was. A Jack in the Box, she thought, over by Wilde Lake. She'd backtrack and hit the drive-through.

That thing about the novel—why had she said that? She hadn't even read the novel, while she had read the two memoirs more attentively than she cared to admit. Tisha didn't have much use for lying, yet that one had just popped out, bold and unrepentant. She had read
about
the novel, after Reg told her to call Cassandra Fallows, but she hadn't even considered reading it. Yet if she had taken the time, she was certain she would have preferred it to the memoirs.

Tisha hadn't paid attention when
My Father's Daughter
was first published. She had two young children at home; she wasn't reading much of anything in those days. But the book, still in hardcover, had eventually crossed her path and she had noticed the name on its cover. Cassandra Fallows. Had to be the same girl she had known all those years ago, the one who had disappeared abruptly between freshman and sophomore year. Tisha picked it up, thinking only that it would fill in the gaps, tell her why Cassandra hadn't come back to Western High School after ninth grade.

Boy, did it ever. In Cassandra's version, her withdrawal from Western was because of an end-of-school beat-down administered by three East Baltimore crackers with whom Cassandra had been feuding all year. Only Cassandra had to make it some kind of karmic retribution, punishment for a slight she had administered to Tisha more than three years earlier, an incident that Tisha had all but forgotten.

“What
bullshit,
” Tisha had exploded the next time she saw Donna. “Do you remember any of this?”

“I remember the beat-down. I mean, I remember hearing about it, after the fact. But I don't remember that we were anywhere nearby. And if we were, so what? Can you imagine me wading into some fight? I don't
think
so.”

It was funny about Donna, how nothing shook her self-regard. She had made a disastrous first marriage, which was simply never discussed, then married Tisha's baby brother, yet it hadn't made her any less superior. She still considered herself above everything and everybody, Andre Howard's precious baby, the niece of state senator Julius Howard. Marriage to Reg had saved
her,
yet Donna managed to convey that her companionship was an enormous favor she had bestowed on him.

The Howards and the Barrs had grown up only five blocks apart, but they were big blocks. The Howards were serious shit, a family almost as storied as the Mitchells, for whom the downtown courthouse was named. The Howards were never quite the first at anything, but they had always been in the hunt. There had been a time when everyone thought Donna's uncle Julius would be Maryland's first black U.S. senator or governor, whatever he wanted. But those scenarios had assumed he would easily move from city council to city council president to mayor, and things hadn't progressed quite that smoothly. After a failed run for city council president, Julius Howard stalled out in the statehouse. A man of consequence, but not the one-of-a-kind, first-of-a-kind he thought was his due.

Still, the Howards
mattered
in a way that had always irked Tisha. She had befriended Donna when they were in kindergarten, instinctively adopting the old adage about keeping enemies close. Not that two five-year-olds could be enemies. But they would have been rivals, eventually, if they hadn't become friends. And she did adore Donna, just not as blindly as everyone else did, including Reg. Look at Cassandra, thinking Donna was the artist in the group when Tisha was the one that everyone was imitating. Tisha had started drawing those elaborate pictures
of girls preparing for dates when they were in fifth grade, not fourth as Cassandra's book would have it. A small thing, but if Cassandra couldn't get the small things right, why should she be trusted on the big things?

She did have some of the details down: Donna's drawings had looked like dogs, Sweet Polly Purebreds, with those snoutlike noses and eyes on the sides of their head. Donna never did master dimension or perspective. Of course, Cassandra being Cassandra, she had to make a
thing
out of this whole drawing phase, place it against the backdrop of women's liberation. Why were they so fascinated with dating, images of girls caught in midtransformation? Wasn't it funny that it was the
preparation
for the dates that interested them, as opposed to the dates themselves? They loved the idea of dressing, of doing their hair, of applying lipstick. The dates would be anticlimaxes. “Like the girls in
Apartment 3-G,
” Cassandra had written, missing the point that the only variation in that comic strip was hair color. It never occurred to her that Tisha had been compelled to fill in the blanks, make up her own
Apartment 3-G,
where it wasn't about being a blonde, brunette, or redhead but about the texture of hair and how to combat it.

“That's the thing about white people,” Tisha had complained to Donna when she couldn't get her worked up about the way Cassandra had created bookends of two unrelated events. “They never think anything is about race unless it affects them. Then it's
all
about race. Try to tell someone like Cassandra what it was like, looking for someone with a face like yours on the comics page of the Sunpapers or on television, and she'd think you were being so overwrought. But when she gets beat up—by three
white
girls, no less—that's all because she's, I don't know, Harriet Tubman, leading the little Negro girls to freedom.”

Donna had laughed. “More Harriet Beecher Stowe. Although I'll grant that Cassandra's prose is a little smoother.”

God, why couldn't Tisha be like Donna, one of those people who skimmed the surface of life, never getting bogged down in anger or righteousness? “I wouldn't show my face,” some people whispered when
Donna came back to Baltimore after her first marriage collapsed. She had met her husband, who hailed from the Knoxville, Tennessee, version of the Howards, in college, persuaded him to work on her uncle Julius's campaign. The wedding ceremony was a year after Princess Diana's and almost as grand. The bridesmaid's gown had been among the most hideous Tisha had ever worn, and that was saying something.

Seven years later, the marriage was all ash, and no one really knew why, just that it must be something horrible for Donna to walk away without a red cent. Rumors circulated, shifted, inverted.
He beat her, she beat him, they beat each other. They lost all their money in a savings-and-loan scam, same as Old Court, only worse, and she didn't want to be with him if he was poor. He's gay, she's gay. He knows some dirt on her, that's why she's not getting any money, paying him off, if the truth be told.
Yet Donna refused to be cowed and declined to confide in anyone, even Tisha. “It just didn't work out,” she said. “We were too young, we grew apart.”

Meanwhile there was Reg, working for Donna's father. He may have been two years younger, but he wasn't silly little Candy anymore, trying to woo Donna with his antic dance. He was handsome, broad shouldered, and, after a rough start at the firm, in the starting blocks on the fast track. People gossiped about that, too, of course. Said Reg was made a partner because he was the boss's son-in-law. But Tisha had always believed it was the other way around: Andre Howard rewarded Reg with his only daughter because he had proven himself as a lawyer. He wasn't going to see his baby done wrong twice. Reg, dependent on his father-in-law for his livelihood, would never shame Donna.

It was strange how rich Reg was now. As Tisha's Michael liked to say, “Doctors and dentists do okay, but the guy who
sues
the doctors and dentists does better.” Not that Reg did malpractice cases, but Tisha understood what her husband meant. She and Michael were comfortable. They didn't sweat the small stuff. A car repair, a big vacation, music lessons—they never had to ask themselves if they could afford it. But college—sweet Jesus, college! Their first house had cost less than the
going rate for four years of tuition. She couldn't imagine those two years in the middle when the kids would both be in school, when they would be expected to put out almost $80,000 a year, but she also couldn't imagine saying no to anything they wanted. Tisha had been told she could attend any college where she got admitted and, by God, her kids were going to have the same deal. But there was no way, even adjusting for inflation, that her parents had paid anywhere near that much for Tisha and Reg, and they had helped Reg with his UB law school costs, too. Her parents had been civil service workers, yet they hadn't seemed to have any problem paying for college. How could that be?

And Reg would be able to do the same for his daughter, born only eight years ago. Hell, Reg had paid a pretty penny just to bring Aubrey into the world, essentially renting some out-of-towner's womb, although the issue of surrogacy was taboo. The sky was the limit for that girl, and God help her if she didn't want to reach for it. Tisha had assumed Donna's conception problems were all age related, but Reg had said something once that suggested Donna had been damaged in some specific way and that it was part of the legacy of whatever awful things happened during that first marriage. “Of course you know all about that,” he assured Tisha, and she said, “Oh, of course.” It had been strange, realizing that Reg knew something about her best friend that she did not. She told herself it was natural, given that they were married. Still, she didn't like it much. She also hated going to their house, that
Architectural Digest
bougie palace in Bolton Hill, with the authentic this and the period that, an exhausting history behind almost every got-damn thing.
Whose history?
she wanted to ask them.
Because when that mantelpiece was made, our people would have been dusting it. Even the Howards.

She remembered the surge of superiority she had felt when she got into Northwestern and Donna, a less dedicated student, had settled for the University of Delaware. Then she remembered how casually Cassandra had topped her achievement at lunch. Princeton. Tisha probably could have gone to Princeton, in terms of grades and scores. But her
imagination wouldn't let her.
Too white,
she had thought when the counselor suggested Ivy League schools.

Only Northwestern was just as white, inside and out, snow piling up to the windowsills until Tisha thought she would go mad. One day, she stood on her desk, peering out at the snow, and a rumor went around that the black girl—she was one of only two in her dorm—was trying to kill herself from sheer loneliness. There they went again, seeing race where all she was seeing was color, the endless white of the drifts, almost thirty inches that winter of 1979.
What was I thinking?
she had asked herself, staring down at the mounting snow. She should have gone to Tulane or Vanderbilt.

But she was generally happy at Northwestern, especially in the classroom of Sterling Stuckey, a teacher who had truly valued her mind. Thinking about Stuckey made her think about Br'er Rabbit, which brought her full circle to Cassandra and her habit of
just not getting it.

It was fourth grade, spring. Tisha longed to believe that it was the week after Dr. King was assassinated, but she knew that was simply too good to be true, that her memory was trying to trick her into making the story better than it was. See, that's where she and Cassandra were different. Tisha
knew
what memory did, how it tried to fool you, how you fooled it. Because not even the Baltimore City school system could be clueless enough to screen
Song of the South
the week after Dr. King was killed.

But something had happened, something disturbing that required herding the children together and putting them in the auditorium for a movie, a huge treat. Only—not in the case of
Song of the South,
especially when it was followed with lesson plans in which they read the Joel Chandler Harris versions of the Uncle Remus stories. Tisha had stared down at her book, embarrassed. The people she knew did not speak that way. Well—her father had a distant relative on the shore, and he wasn't exactly educated. There was Fatima's mother, with her Baltimoreisms such as “There hit go,” which actually indicated the location of
something stationary, something that wasn't
going
anywhere. But even Fatima's mother didn't say “Mawnin” or “Nice wedder!” Tisha had never heard anyone say, for example, that
so-and-so, he lay low,
the way Br'er Fox did while Br'er Rabbit chatted up the tar baby. Her mother was a demon when it came to grammar, especially lay-lie. No one in the Barr family was ever going to get away with saying, “He lay low,” even if it was technically correct. It sounded wrong.