Life Sentences (20 page)

CASSANDRA GOT LOST THREE TIMES
en route to Fatima's house. The street names were vaguely familiar, but any landmarks that might have helped orient her in this northwest suburb were long gone. Following the signs to what she was promised would be the town center, she found herself at a mall. She thought she remembered the mall from a years-ago trip, but it had been newer then, glossier, with high-end stores such as Saks. Now it looked a little seedy and neglected, and Saks must have been a mirage.
Talk about “no there there,”
Cassandra thought, reprogramming her GPS.

Finally, she found her way to Fatima's neighborhood, one of those developments with basically a single street name, Rosewood, and
multiple suffixes: Court, Path, Lane, Circle. The houses were tightly packed around the cul-de-sacs, the front yards sacrificed to make room for huge driveways that fed into three-car garages. It was nice enough, Cassandra supposed, solidly middle-class. Yet, like the mall, it had the feel of a place that had once been a little nicer, and there was an abundance of
FOR SALE
signs. She sensed she was in a part of town where people had overextended themselves. Fatima's house, in particular, looked stressed. While generally neat and well maintained, there were signs of larger things that required an expert's care—a slight sag in the garage roof, pitting in the stucco exterior. Yet there was a large Lincoln Town Car in the driveway, shiny from a recent wash.

“Cassandra,” Fatima said on a sigh, resigned yet not surprised. “How did you find me?”

“It wasn't that hard,” she said. No reason to endanger Teena's job. And it wouldn't hurt to let Fatima think Cassandra might know far more about her than her address and credit history. Although those two details, along with her matriculation at Spelman, were all that Cassandra had. That and her memories of the girl she had known.

Where did that girl go?
she wondered, taking a seat in Fatima's neat yet gloriously tacky living room, which was dominated by a credenza of glass, mirror, and metal. It held exactly one book—a white leather-bound Bible—and a series of objects that seemed to have no connection to one another. A porcelain doll, a vase in a vaguely Oriental style, a statue of two deer, a basketball trophy, a ceramic basket of pink flowers, and an enormous family photo with almost thirty people crowded in the frame, all wearing T-shirts that proclaimed
HOLLINS FAMILY REUNION
. The last made her happy for Fatima, the idea that she was part of such a large and loving family. Fatima had been an only child, raised by a single mother. For all her brashness, there had always been a hint of loneliness, too.

But while the woman facing Cassandra still bore a physical resemblance to the girl—albeit much, much, much bigger—the essence of Fa
tima wasn't there. This was a fearful woman, reticent and nervous. None of these words had applied to the young Fatima. Nor did Cassandra recognize the almost deferential tone in which Fatima began to speak.

“So you're a writer.”

“Yes, I mentioned it to you at church the other day.”

“I don't read much. There's not really time. And Gaston—he's my husband, you saw him there—he didn't really approve of what I did read. Romances and the like. He said they were frivolous and not exactly Christian.” She lowered her voice as if they might be overheard, although the house gave every appearance of being empty. “I still sneak a Zane every now and then. Do you know her?”

“I know
of
her,” Cassandra said. “She's very successful.”

“She's from Maryland,” Fatima said, suddenly skeptical, and Cassandra realized that Fatima believed the writing world to be not unlike her megachurch, a huge congregation of people brought together by a single common interest and geography. If Cassandra didn't know Zane, could she really be a writer?

“Well, she's very private, isn't she? The thing I want to talk about is—”

“Callie. I know, you told me at church. I got nothing to tell you, though. I don't keep up with her.”

“But you certainly remember the girl we knew back then. You knew her better than most, in fact. She wasn't part of our crowd, but she was from your old neighborhood, right?”

“We went to School Eighty-eight together.” That was a Baltimoreism, using the number instead of the name. “That part of Edmondson Avenue was rough, even then. My mama was glad to get me out of there.”

“Rough?”

Fatima shrugged. “Rough for the times. Mean kids, lots of fighting. Not the kind of rough you see now, with kids taking guns to school and the like. But harsh enough.”

“And you moved in across the street from the Barrs, Tisha and Reg.” Childish, but Cassandra enjoyed saying his name when she could.

“Yeah.” Fatima managed to get a lot of emotion—doubt? fear?—into that one syllable.

“What was Callie like?”

“You saw. Quiet. All she wanted to do—all she ever wanted to do—was stay out of trouble.”

“I don't recall her ever being in trouble at school.”

“Not at school. At home. Her mama—her mama was strict. Real strict. It was like—” Fatima paused and Cassandra used all her will not to rush in, fill the silence.
Let it go, let it go,
she reminded herself.
If you don't speak, she's more likely to keep talking, building momentum.
“It was like, if she was stricter, if she held Callie in hand, then somehow people couldn't gossip about
her.
She took to calling herself by her own name, back when almost no one did that, you know?”

“Her own name?”

“You know, Myra Tippet. Only she put a
Mrs.
in front of it, even though there was no Mr., which is why she was determined to be proper. ‘Mrs. Myra Tippet does not cotton to coarse behavior, Fatima.' That kind of thing.”

“Oh, third person,” Cassandra said, then hated herself for it.

Fatima smiled. “Same old Cassandra, always with the right answer. Anyway, it didn't matter how much she called herself Mrs., how hard she was on Callie. Everyone knew that Callie didn't have a father, never did. I didn't either, but at least I was legal, you know? Oh sure, I was
barely
legal. My mother was six months gone on her wedding day and my daddy was gone six months after the wedding day. But I had a father's name on my birth certificate, a real one. Callie's daddy? No one ever knew who he was, including Mrs. Myra Tippet, even if she did put Jenkins on the birth certificate.”

“I don't get it. Why would she give Cassandra a different surname?”

“I don't know.” Fatima sucked her lower lip, thinking. “When you lie, you got to make it specific, right? Or maybe there was a Jenkins among her mens, and she hadn't decided yet that she was going to be born-again proper. She was one of those good-time girls who has had her fun, then figures she's going to be so good that no one can doubt her again.”

“Like you?”

“What are you saying?” A flash of the old Fatima here. Challenging, defiant.

“Tisha told me—or was it Donna—that you were”—she searched her memory for the word, which had delighted her. “
Churchified
now, and didn't want to be around people who knew you back in the day.”

“Who said, Tisha or Donna?”

It seemed an odd point on which to fixate. “I'm not sure. Tisha, I think.”

“Well—” Fatima was clearly angry yet trying to hold herself in check. “I'm just trying to have a life. I met a good man, married him. We have three sons. Things haven't always been easy for us—he started a business two years ago, a transportation company. Town cars and limos, the kind of things people don't splurge on in these times, although proms are coming, that should help.”

“When was the last time you saw Callie?”

“We went to community college together. And we worked together for a bit.”

“Where?”

“You don't know that part?”

“No.”

She gave her a long, level look. “You don't want to mess with them,” Fatima said at last.

“Who?”

“It doesn't matter. Trust me. If you don't mess with them, they won't mess with you. And they'll give you a chance, if you need it.
They're not unfair. They'll help you, if you need help. Only you got to let this go.”

“But—”

Fatima leaned forward. There was so much of her now, but there was a firmness to all that flesh, a solidity. Cassandra couldn't help wondering what it felt like inside Fatima's body. She carried herself with the same cocky confidence she had as a girl and there was an almost gleeful exhibitionism about the way she dressed. Caught unawares at home this afternoon, she wore a bright, boatneck tunic covered with green, orange, and yellow flowers, with matching green slacks and yellow flats.

Or had she been caught unawares?
She hadn't seemed particularly surprised to see Cassandra, not the way she had been at church.

“I'll tell you this much. I
don't
know where Callie is. Wouldn't tell you if I did, but I don't. You have my word on that. We haven't seen each other since we were almost twenty and I went down to Atlanta to go to school.”

“To Spelman.”

“Yes, to Spelman. And Callie could have gone, too. Maybe not there, but somewhere, finished her education, done something with her life. But she was a stubborn girl, as everybody found out soon enough. She had her way of doing things, and I had mines. I'm not saying I was smarter or better, but I'm happy where I am. Callie could have been happy, too, if she wanted. Happy enough, at any rate. Leave her alone. Leave everything alone, Cassandra. This isn't like some test at school where you have to show everyone how smart you are. You really smart, you'll walk away. Sometimes, that's the smart play.”

“Who are you scared of, Fatima? Who is it that I have to avoid?”

“You don't know them,” she said firmly. “You don't want to know them.”

“I'm writing a book,” Cassandra said. “I'm going to tell this story.”

“Then you're going to have to make some shit up, like you did when we were in school.” The church-lady veneer was gone now, and
the scrapper that Fatima had always been was in full evidence. “I remember your little A-plus stories, all nice and neat, how the teachers fell over you with praise. I thought they were boring, but I guess I don't know from
lit-a-ra-chure.
”

Cassandra had a sudden, vivid memory of Fatima in ninth grade,
dancing
her short-story assignment. In a low-cut leotard and a batik wraparound skirt, which she removed halfway through the performance, she had acted out a tale of gang warfare and betrayal, much of it ripped off from
West Side Story,
which she defended on the grounds that
West Side Story
had stolen from Shakespeare, so why couldn't she? Cassandra had thought that an excellent point, although she hadn't been impressed by Fatima's story, not on the page. As words on paper, the piece had been utterly pedestrian, but as danced and spoken and even sung by Fatima—breasts bouncing obscenely, hands and feet moving to a beat only she could hear—it had been impressive, if only as a feat of utter unself-consciousness. Cassandra remembered someone shouting out from the back of the room, “I just want to say that we couldn't do this kind of thing if they let boys attend our school,” and the approving, defiant applause awarded that sentiment. The teacher had given Fatima a C, saying it was all but plagiarized and not in the proper format.

Later, on the MTA bus they took home each day, an unusually chastened Fatima had asked to see Cassandra's short story, a small, closely observed piece about a religious girl whose hypocrisy leads her to a kind of living hell. Cassandra couldn't remember much about it except for her attempt to write poetically about the sodium-vapor street-lights of the day, the bright melon-colored globes that had been introduced in the mugging-obsessed seventies. In fact, she had probably called them melon-colored globes and used some unfortunate turn of phrase about how they seemed to float in the winter dusk like a recently discovered solar system. Boy, talk about a darling that needed to be killed. But the teacher had liked it—although she did scold Cassandra
for her frequent use of incomplete sentences—and placed a check mark next to it.

“So this is an A paper,” Fatima had said, and Cassandra had heard only admiration. Now it occurred to her that Fatima was left wondering how such a little story, with no shootings or star-crossed young lovers, could earn an A, while her virtuoso performance art had been deemed a C. “Write what you know,” the teacher had urged them, yet hadn't Fatima done that? What if
West Side Story
was as real to her, from her early days in the old neighborhood, as Cassandra's tiny story was to her?

“It was nice seeing you, Fatima,” she said now, meaning it.

“Have a blessed day,” said the stranger who now had control of Fatima's body. She did not get up to see Cassandra out.

THE YEAR WE WERE IN SIXTH GRADE,
Tisha decided to form a girl group. Here was the twelve-year-old mind at work: Diana Ross was tight with the Jackson Five—she was credited with discovering them, although this was public-relations fluff. Still, our thinking went that if Diana Ross had discovered the Jackson Five, then being in a girl group like the Supremes would create some ephemeral bond with the Jackson Five, and they would discover
us.
Tisha, Donna, and Fatima rehearsed during recess, putting together various dance moves to suit the songs they sang. Rocking their arms to denote baby love, flagging down cars as if to stop them in the name of love.

I asked Tisha if I could join the Cliftonettes, named for the street where she and Donna lived.

“There are only three Supremes,” she said quickly.

“I could be the alternate, the understudy,” I suggested. “If someone gets sick.”

“Can you sing?” Donna put in.

“Sure.” Couldn't everyone? In music class, I sang loudly, with lots of feeling.

“Are you
sure
you can sing?” Fatima pressed.

I was named the alternate, a not particularly meaningful role for a group that never performed anywhere but the playground, but it made
me happy. No one said,
But the Supremes are black and you are white.
It was an era of possibility. We were beyond that.

Or so I thought, until the day I cut Jermaine Jackson's photograph out of
16 Magazine
and Scotch-taped it inside my blue binder.

“You can't like Jermaine,” Fatima said.

“Did someone call him?” Those were the rules, as I understood them, in dividing the spoils of a boy group. Paul, John, George, and Ringo; Davy, Micky, Peter, and Mike. In almost every set, there were two good ones, one or two acceptable ones, and one out-and-out loser. Apparently life wasn't that different from the game Mystery Date, which ran the gamut from dream (white jacket, corsage) to dud (scruffy, un-showered). With the Jackson Five, for example, no one wanted Michael, not because we had any inkling of the problematic person he would one day become—he seemed pretty normal at the time, or as normal as any preternaturally talented boy in a pimp hat on national television—but because he was our age and seemed younger. Still, that left four Jacksons, and while I knew it was piggish of me to pick the best one, I was the one with the subscription to
16,
one of my father's guilt-inspired gifts.

“No, no one
called
him,” Fatima spluttered. “But you can't—because—well, you can't, you just can't.”

“You can have Jackie,” I said, feeling myself generous. Jackie was the second-best one, in my estimation. I had earmarked him for Tisha, the capo of our little mafia.
The Godfather
was still a few years away, but we instinctively understood tribute.

“You can't have
any
of them,” Fatima said, and Donna nodded. Tisha was taking it all in, careful not to commit herself.

It was our last spring together, although I had not yet grasped the reality of our impending separation. I would head southwest, to Rock Glen Junior High, and my friends would go north, to Lemmel. This was not determined by lines on a map; Baltimore had open enrollment. Students could go wherever they wished. But there were lines in our
heads and, more crucial, lines in our parents' heads. The black families sent their children in one direction, the whites in the other. Something was happening, something for which we had no words. Finally, Tisha spoke in her emphatic yet careful way.

“We're too old to be cutting boys' photos out of magazines,” she said. “It's time for real boyfriends, not make-believe ones.”

My mind reeled at this. Real boys? I wasn't ready for real boys. That's why I was reading
16,
with its endless safe, sexless boys and the occasional disturbing presence of Jim Morrison. The relationship between my father and Annie—they were living together, although pretending not to, if only because that would be a disadvantage in the divorce proceedings that were dragging on, almost two years since his departure—was so overtly passionate that I chose to ignore the very fact of passion.

Still, if my father could love Annie, why couldn't I love Jermaine? Were my friends saying that my father's relationship was illegitimate in a way that not even my mother dared suggest? That was the bomb that Tisha was trying to defuse. She would have been successful if a boy sitting nearby, an overgrown hoodlum with greasy hair that hung in his eyes, hadn't begun to laugh.

“Hey, Cassandra can't help it. She's a nigger lover just like her father.”

Here's the strange thing, the part that our contemporary, PC-trained minds can't quite absorb: This statement was far less inflammatory in 1970 than it would be today. If a teacher had heard the remark, she would have reprimanded Curtis Bunch, perhaps sent him to the office or kept him after school. But she would have done the same if he had cursed, and he would have been punished far more severely for fighting or bringing a Zippo lighter to school. Curtis Bunch was a budding arsonist, a famously awful boy, alleged to be fond of suffocating cats in the old insulated milk boxes that still stood on porches and front steps in Dickeyville.

Back then, a boy might have fought a boy over this word, but only if
it had been used against him. A passing reference to someone else's father, his shameful behavior—well, it was hard to say who should be angry, what should be defended. Annie was not yet my stepmother. My father loved her, but did that make him—what Curtis Bunch said?

Tisha, Fatima, and Donna stared balefully at Curtis Bunch, yet let his remark pass. I wanted to defend my father. Only—I could not defend my father without disavowing my friends. There was a world of things wrong with my father loving Annie—the embarrassment he had caused my mother, the financial havoc he had wreaked on all of us, the squirm-inducing fact that the affair was driven by sex, no matter how often my father spoke of love. But Annie's race was not one of the problems. Right? Right?

“My father's not—” I began, but I could not repeat those words. “At least my father's not like yours.” I knew nothing about Curtis Bunch's father but figured he must be pretty awful.

“No, my old man lives at my house, with my mother, not with some nigger,” Curtis said.

“He doesn't…I'm not—” I began, then saw my friends' faces, closing to me. The bell rang, and we went outside for recess, where we behaved as if nothing had happened. The Cliftonettes did not rehearse that day. Instead, we played foursquare, one of the few games at which I excelled, but I was off that day, ejected almost immediately, even as Tisha and Fatima managed to hold their turns for much of the game. (Donna, so graceful in other things, was not athletic and preferred watching from the sidelines.) Later, it seemed to me that the other girls had ganged up on me, sent the ball toward me with spin and malice, making sure I lost my turn.

Our friendship appeared unchanged, on the surface. I was invited to the big party at Donna's house to celebrate the end of sixth grade. Of course, everyone was invited, but I felt wanted, included, in a way that others weren't. It would be three years before my friends would literally turn their backs on me, finally delivering the punishment I deserved.