“Mmm-hmm,” she said.
“Whatever. Listen, Keith and I talked for a long time last night. I wish that you could have stayed and heard his life story. He’s had a hard time, but his faith in God is so strong. That man is an inspiration to all.”
“Wow. How long will he be here?”
“Only a few months. He’s working on a special project at Oakland Children’s Hospital, something to aid children’s skin in healing when it’s been burned. He’s a mentor too, you know?”
“Chantell, listen to yourself. What did y’all do after I left? Did he put something on you?”
“No, Tia, you so nasty! It’s not a romantic thing. I’m like his godsister or something.”
“Girl, that man is not your family! I seen the way he was looking at you.”
“He is not my type, Tia, and I have a man, remember? I’ve just gotten Eric thinking about our future. I am not about to abandon all of my hard work so the next woman can come along and benefit from it.”
“You know what? Don’t even get me started on you and Eric. I am not going to go there with you, Chantell. But what do you mean Keith Rashaad is not your type? What, he’s a little too nice for you?”
I laughed. “Whatever, that’s not what I mean. Sometimes I can’t stand you.”
She laughed too, with her brutally honest self.
“I like nice guys,” I told her. “Remember my ex-boyfriend Trevor, that attorney?” Mentioning him was a mistake. I knew it as soon as it came out of my mouth.
“Ohh, I remember Trevor!” She laughed. “Every other minute he was reminding us of how prominent he was.”
I burst into laughter too and mocked him: “‘Well, you know, my family has a law firm. And quite frankly, we’ve always been really, very upper-echelon in the greater San Francisco Bay Area!’”
Tia laughed harder.
In my own defense, I said, “Hey, I was young! I know better now. I can’t stand people like that.”
“Chantell, I love you and all, and you’re my girl, but, honeydew, you can act very ugly too.”
“Forget you, Tia!” I laughed, but she was right. I could act awful. It wasn’t that I was trying to be prominent, though: I just didn’t want people knowing my fears, knowing my pain. I didn’t want to be stepped on, and I didn’t want to appear weak.
“Well, my friend Keith Talbit is not like Trevor anyways,” I said as I walked over to the couch and sat down. “Keith is patient, and friendly, and goodhearted.” I put my feet up on the couch.
“Then talk to him, Chantell.”
I rested an arm back behind my head.
“Negative, capt’n. We’re just friends.”
Let’s Do Lunch
I
’d just finished a sales call when I pulled into the parking lot of Eric’s workplace. If we were going to go on this cruise together, we needed to work out the details. I needed to talk with him face-to-face. Yes, we had our differences, and little arguments. And of course because Eric was so fine, there would likely always be women trying to throw themselves at him, just like when guys hit on me. The point was, it had been two years, and Eric and I loved each other. We just needed to hold on to each other and work out our issues. We were destined to be together, I knew that. That’s why we kept ending up in predicaments where we had to be together. God wanted us together and happy.
It was twelve o’clock, and he should have been taking a lunch break soon. I got out of my Jeep and walked into the Safeway, and I thought about what I needed to say.
I found him in the break room in the back. He had on a long white butcher’s coat over his clothes. I could see the collar of his striped button-down Ralph Lauren shirt sticking out of the top. I loved that shirt. My baby looked so fine, and his clothes were really clean. I always wondered how he kept them so neat, cutting up meats the way he did. He looked surprised to see me.
“Chantell, what are you doing here?”
“Hi. No worries. I am here in peace. I came to talk.” I smiled and held up my hands. “I’m sorry for hitting you, Eric. I was just so mad at you. It sounded like you called me Sabrina, and I thought we were going to get married this weekend.”
He looked around, then up at the clock on the wall. “You don’t need to apologize, baby. And we are going to get married, but you have to stop sweating me so hard about it. Let’s let it happen naturally. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said; God had guided Keith Rashaad, and He was going to take care of me too. Then I asked, “But Eric, who is Sabrina?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I think I was having a weird dream or something. Well, babe, you’d better head out. I have to get back to work.”
“Oh, okay, honey. I don’t want to hold you up. Oh Eric, one last thing.”
“What’s up?”
“Well, remember my friend Keith Rashaad Talbit from when I was a little girl?”
“Umm . . . Oh yeah, the little boy with the rashes. Right?”
“Yes, that’s him. Well, baby, he’s back in town for a little while. You have to meet him! He goes to church every Sunday! The two of you have got to meet—”
“Oh, okay, Chantell, sure. Look I gotta get back to work,” he said, looking at his watch.
“Okay.” I kissed his cheek. “One last thing.”
“Chantell.” He looked at me.
“Promise and I’m leaving. I wanted to talk about the cruise.”
“What about it?”
“Well, I know that we’re going to have a lot of fun. But I, uh, I think we need separate beds, though.”
He rolled his eyes. “Why? I just told you I was going to marry you.”
“I can’t really explain it. I know that I slipped up recently, but my not having sex is kind of like my own little sacrifice that I want to make. It’s a personal thing—”
He looked at me like I was ridiculous.
I said, “When it’s time for us, He’ll make sure we know.”
Eric said nothing.
Then the door opened into the little break room where we sat. “Eric, baby? C’mon, let’s go eat,” said a checker as she walked in, removing her apron and hanging it up on a hook. Then she turned and looked at me and said, “Oh, hi.”
“Hi,” I said. She was a cute girl with long single braids pulled into a ponytail. She wore tight-fitting dark denim jeans and a little white T-shirt.
“I thought you had to get back to work,” I said to Eric, while eyeing the woman.
“Oh yeah. But we’re going to grab a bite to eat first.”
The woman put out her hand to shake mine. “I’m Sabrina.”
You couldn’t have bought me for a nickel! I was so angry and hurt. I looked at Eric, then at her, and said, “I am Chantell, Eric’s fiancée.”
Eric smiled a nervous smile and scratched the back of his neck. “Well, baby,” he said to me. “We’re going to grab a quick bite. We only have thirty minutes, so I’ll talk to you later. Okay?”
I left so that they could go have their little lunch.
A Change in Plans
I
went back to work fuming. If Eric thought we were going on a cruise together, he had another think coming. He’d better be glad I was trying to be a good person, because I could have easily knocked him in his head at his job. I sat up at my desk and pushed back my chair.
If the thought of leaving him hadn’t always made me nauseous, I could have abandoned him long ago. But I hated quitting, I hated losing, and I hated good-byes! I wanted to scream! I put on my jacket and left the office.
Even though Eric always came back to me, I feared that one day some little hoochie momma was going to come along and lure him away from me for good. Maybe I feared too that if I left him, folks who knew us would come up to me and ask how he was, and I would be standing there, vulnerable, looking and feeling stupid and not knowing what to say. I took the elevator down to the first floor and opened the big brass-lined glass doors that led to the sidewalk.
I needed to face the facts. Eric had disrespected me with this Sabrina not once but twice in the last month. I was going to put a stop to all of this foolishness. And I was serious this time. Eric thought he was playing me. But I was going to play him.
There were people walking to and fro all over downtown San Francisco. I joined the crowd and walked down to the corner where a man sold Polish hot dogs and blue cotton candy from a cart. If he was going to shoo me away to go to lunch with another woman, then he was not going on that cruise with me! And he could count on that.
“Hi. How may I help you?”
“Yes, can I have a beef hot dog, a Seven-Up, and a cotton candy?” He handed me my dog, my soda, and a bag of blue cotton candy in clear plastic.
“How much?”
“Eight-fifty, sweetheart.”
I handed him a ten and tried to smile. It was a challenge.
Let’s see how funny and cute Eric was when he got kicked off the boat! Or if he found out that he couldn’t take the cruise. I headed back to the building. Suddenly I remembered that I was the one who had actually reserved the cruise on my credit card. Although we’d both paid our portion of the Citibank bill months ago, maybe there was some way that I could fix it so that he couldn’t board the boat.
I checked the confirmation letter as soon as I got back to my desk. Our ship departed from Pier 27 next Friday afternoon. I knew it was a long shot, but I left a message with the travel agency and asked if I could cancel one of the tickets. I told them that my cruise mate couldn’t go, and asked them to call me at work to discuss how to go about canceling his ticket and refunding my credit card.
I could see Eric now. He’d be standing in line like people did on nighttime TV waiting to board the Love Boat. He’d look silly in a big straw hat, sunglasses, and a yellow rubber-duck inner tube around his stomach. He’d walk up with his boarding pass in hand, cocky as usual, and his flip-flops would flap as he walked up. And the lady who welcomed everyone would tell him that his boarding pass was no good, just like his old cheating behind. Now, I knew it probably wouldn’t happen that way, but hey, he was always cheating on me, and I was getting pretty sick and tired of it.
I sat at my desk and did the paperwork for an additional $20K that I’d closed yesterday when one of my accounts, Perfect Auto Service, agreed to do a flyer campaign promoting their new quick oil changes. We decided to do the “drop” of the flyers in the Saturday edition in three weeks. I made all of the arrangements. Then I picked up a newspaper and looked through some of the day’s headlines as I waited to hear from the travel agency.
There was a big storm coming in; the forecasters were calling it “El Niño’s Sister.” And a San Francisco man was found shot on South Van Ness Street. Migration to California was on the rise. And someone was trying to revise the Ebonics measure.
Revising the Ebonics measure—now, that was not going to happen, I thought. Living in Oakland, I was pretty familiar with that measure. I remembered it well. It proposed teaching children to speak and write using the dialect from which they spoke. It called for teachers to make the children aware of the differences in dialects, and it allowed them to expand upon standard English using their own individual dialect. I remembered being fascinated by it. The Oakland school district was one of the lowest-performing in the country, and it was a majority black district.
The measure seemed to be well-thought-out. It asserted, for example, that if a child said, “I’m goin’ to the store,” the Oakland public school educators were to reinforce the child by telling him, “Although you’re saying ‘goin’,’ understand that in standard English grammar, ‘going’ is always pronounced with a ‘g’ on the end.” It sounded simple enough, but the problem was that the Oakland school board never explained it clearly. Then either the media or some individual started saying things like, “The nerve of that Oakland school board for trying to teach kids slang! How stupid! I’d never send my kids there. I don’t want my kid being taught broken English.”
Then the newspapers picked it up and had a field day, and the lie swept across the country. And everyone was making fun of that “stupid school board out in California” that advocated teaching kids how to speak street talk. There were skits on late-night TV making fun of Ebonics. The Oakland school board cracked under the pressure, and the next thing you know, the Ebonics measure was swept under the rug. That ship had sunk. Good luck trying to raise that sucker from the dead.
I was deep in reading at my desk, so it startled me when my phone rang.
“Hello, it’s Chantell Meyers.”
“Hi, Chantell, it’s Betty Marks from World Travel returning your phone call.”
I’d almost forgotten about my little ploy to keep Eric standing on the docks while I drank margaritas with men who looked like that boxer, Oscar De La Hoya.
“Yes, um,” I said, “can I cancel a ticket?”
“Is it your ticket?”
“No, my boyfriend can’t make it. Because, see, he’s got the flu.”
“Is the ticket in his name?”
“Yes, but I charged it on—”
“Yes, well, have him read the back of the boarding pass that was mailed out. Our policy says that the person the ticket is issued to must call us, then write a letter fourteen days in advance and he or she can get a full refund minus a hundred-dollar service fee. If it’s between seven and fourteen days, then you’re entitled to a full refund minus two hundred dollars.”
“I see. Well, can I change our reservation and get my own room?”
“What is your reservation number?”
“It’s, uhh, A-230-9456-MN.”
I heard her typing through the phone line.
“No ma’am. There is no way. Your cruise filled up months ago.”
I guessed we would be there together after all. “Okay. Well, thank you. We’ll be there.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. He’s eating soup and drinking lots of liquids. I bet he’ll feel better by then anyway. Thanks for your time.”
“Sure. Bye-bye.”
That is exactly what I was talking about. It seemed God wanted us together.
Dreaming of Zarina
T
he day had been nightmarish, but at least I’d already hit my revenue goal for the next few months. I got home around 6:30 and set my computer bag on the floor by the door. Every time I thought of Eric and Sabrina, I’d get angry. I was tired of his mistreatment of me. He thought because he was handsome he could do anything that he wanted to and I’d just let him. He also knew that relationships were difficult for me, and that I liked the idea of being in a long-term relationship. But, contrary to his belief, I did have a breaking point. And I was almost to it too! I told myself that he had better let all of those other girls go, and marry me soon, or I was out of there, and I really meant it.