“Who?” Paulette asks.
The women are curious again. This is so much fun. Pretending.
“The invisible man with no name who’ll most likely take my husband’s place one day.” Now just about all of the women are sitting in the window seat, apparently waiting to see just what it’s going to take to accomplish this.
Spencer still doesn’t sound like himself but I tell him that I’m heading for Fresno today and will be back late tomorrow afternoon or early evening. That I would like to make him and his girlfriend a gourmet dinner on Saturday since they fly out early Sunday. This seems to excite him. The boy loves to eat and I love cooking for people who appreciate it. Except of course my husband, who would be fortunate to get a few morsels of Snuffy’s dog food mixed in with the gravy I would so gladly pour over his mashed potatoes. I pity the fool. Spencer tells me his wrist is the worst pain he’s ever felt, but he’s handling it like a man. I tell him not to try so hard, because he’ll have plenty of opportunities to prove his manliness. This shouldn’t be one of them.
I do not call Leon or Arthurine. Since he’s on vacation, he can take her to Bible study. And I’m not going to any party on Saturday. I don’t care what the occasion is. Plus, it doesn’t really matter. They’re all the same anyway. All of our middle-aged friends have the same kind of parties: the music is either jazz or old R&B and is turned down so low you can barely hear it until more than two people get drunk and demand that the hosts “Turn it up!” because they’re about ready to “cut up” on the living room but most likely the garage floor. This can happen quickly, much later, or not at all. If it’s the latter, we just stand around or sit on the couch and comment on their new piece of artwork—even those of us who have little or no knowledge of art—and then we’ll engage in one of the many long drawn-out philosophical and political discussions and you hope for a topic you feel so strongly about that you have to stop yourself from raising your voice. But who is it you’re trying to convince and what difference will it make? So you just eat your sushi until it’s time for the gumbo that the hostess swears is the best we’ll ever have tasted and you just pray it tastes like gumbo and you can find the shrimp and spot a crab claw as we sip on Napa Valley’s finest and go home without breaking a glass, breaking up, or breaking down.
Against my better judgment, I pull up to the drive-up window of Burger King and order a Whopper with small fries and no drink. I always have a bottle of water in the car. I eat a few fries then realize I’m almost out of gas. Before I hit the freeway I stop to fill up. I toss my sunglasses in the glove compartment. When I try to close it, it won’t shut. To make room, I try moving around the thick wad of napkins I’ve accumulated from other drive-up windows, a small bottle of hand sanitizer, reading glasses that have recently become a necessity, and a few other things. This time I push it harder but it pops back open and a thick piece of folded paper falls on the floor. When I reach down to pick it up, my arm hits the glove compartment and it snaps shut.
When the pump stops I get out and am just about to toss this paper when I decide to open it to make sure it’s trash-worthy. Of course it’s that list of promises I made to myself that I haven’t looked at since the day I read it in the doctor’s office. I peek at the first point: “Stop swearing.” Shame shame shame. I haven’t even come close to reducing my usage, let alone stopping altogether. And why was it so important? I believe it was because it made me feel uneducated when I have a vocabulary. Then why haven’t I? Forgot. Lazy.
I finish the last of the burger and every single French fry. Put the nozzle back into the pump and get in the car. The smell of fries and ketchup is overwhelming. I grab the bag and twist the top as if I’m trying to break its neck. I get back out of the car and shove the bag into the trash bin. This is where it should be, and I know it. I am ashamed of myself because I have not kept a single one of these promises. Haven’t even tried. What was the fucking point…I mean, what was the point in even writing it all down if I wasn’t going to give it a try? Just to remind myself in my head how much I wish I could do? Change? Isn’t this what drug addicts and alcoholics and overeaters do? Promise they’ll quit tomorrow but tomorrow never comes? When will tomorrow become today? It’s the same shit—I mean thing—when I get right down to it. No angel is coming down here to intervene, to stop me from suffering from what feels like inertia. No angel will help me see my life any clearer than it is right now. No angel will give me the courage to lift my foot and step outside of this emotionally draining circle. Unless of course that angel has just been extremely patient, hoping that sooner or later I’d befriend her and finally let her come out of hiding.
Chapter 16
I
take the long route and decide not to call Lovey ahead of time since she might not remember. And there’s no telling where Joy is or what she might be doing. Even if she happens to be home, who knows what state she’ll be in. By the time I get there, the kids shouldn’t be home from school for at least another hour or so and since I’m almost positive there won’t be a lot of options when it comes to dinner, I’ll see what’s there and then go to the grocery store.
When I’m about an hour outside of Fresno I decide to turn my cell on. Of course I’ve got three thousand messages from Mr. Costa Rica himself. I don’t want to hear any of them so I just press the automatic callback. He answers on the first ring. “Hello, Leon.”
“Marilyn, where’ve you been? We’ve been worried sick about you. You’re giving Mom and me a heart attack. Where are you? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, Leon. Just fine. I’m on my way to Fresno.”
“You mean you’re not coming home first?”
“Apparently not if I’m on my way.”
“Why didn’t you come home last night?”
“Because I didn’t want to.”
“Well, where’d you stay?”
“That’s really none of your business.”
“Yes, it is.”
“I stayed in a place that gave me enough room to think.”
“We’ve got plenty of rooms in this house where you can think without being disturbed, Marilyn.”
“I needed to get out of the house, away from you, Leon.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way.”
“I am, too, but it’s the truth.”
“Well, I’ve got some bad news.”
“What now? I just hope it’s not one of the kids?”
“No, the kids are fine. Mom’s fine. It’s Snuffy.”
“What about him?”
“He’s gone.”
“You mean he got out? How?”
“No, he’s passed on.”
“Well, it’s about time,” I say, before realizing this isn’t exactly what I want him to say to Arthurine. “What I meant was, I’ve been wondering how much longer he was going to be able to hold on. It was his time, I suppose.”
“Mother’s a mess.”
“I know. She really loved that dog.”
“It would’ve been nice if you’d been here with her.”
“Leon, don’t even go there, okay?”
“What?”
“My being there would not have stopped Snuffy from dying and there would’ve been nothing I could do to comfort Arthurine that you couldn’t do. So stop with the guilt trip. Look, I just wanted you to know what my plans were.”
“Well, I’m glad you finally called. Mother is trying to decide whether or not to have a little service for Snuffy.”
“You can’t be serious, Leon?”
“She’s had that dog for sixteen years, it seems fitting to give him a proper farewell. People do it all the time. There’s a cemetery just for pets so it can’t be that outlandish.”
“Is she going to have him cremated or stuffed?” I ask, unable to help myself.
“You really can be crass when you want to be, Marilyn, you know that?”
“Sometimes the situation dictates it, Leon. But this seems a bit silly. Who’s supposed to come to Snuffy’s funeral besides me, you, and Arthurine?”
“Prezelle has already said he’d come.”
“And who else?”
“That’s plenty. He’s a dog. He didn’t exactly have a slew of friends.”
“Leon, I’m going to hang up now, okay?”
“Hold on a second! Spencer said they’d be here in a few hours.”
“I already know that, and I’m making dinner for him and Brianna on Saturday.”
“How can you be in two places at once?”
“I’m not planning on being in two places at once.”
“Then let me ask you something, Marilyn, and I don’t mean any harm by it.”
“I’m listening.”
“Do you remember the original reason you went to see your doctor?”
“Of course I do. To get my hormone levels checked.”
“Yes, but this was because you admitted that you’d been forgetting a lot of things and having wild mood swings and just being bitchy all the time for no particular reason.”
“And your point?”
“Did she ever actually give you anything for it or not?”
“No, she didn’t, Leon. I was pregnant, remember?”
“Yes, but you’re not pregnant now and you’re acting the same way you were before.”
“I think I’ve got a few good reasons for sounding the way I sound and acting the way I act, and I doubt if it has anything to do with my hormonal balance or imbalance.”
“Well, you seem to have forgotten all about Frank and Joyce’s party and I just told you about it yesterday.”
“I didn’t forget.”
“Then tell me how are you supposed to make dinner when the party’s at the same time?”
“I’m not going to the party, Leon, because I don’t care if Frank the adulterer is turning a hundred and they’re celebrating fifty years of marital bliss, which you and I both know is a big fat lie. Why should I go over there pretending I’m happy for them when I’m not? She should’ve left him years ago. But that’s neither here nor there. I’m not going, Leon. I’m making my son and his girlfriend and any of his friends that want to come over a dinner I hope they’ll remember after they get back to their dorms.”
“Why can’t you make them lunch?”
“You just don’t get it, do you? But I’m going to say this since you’re obviously oblivious. I have not seen our sons since last Christmas, and right now, only one of them is here. I miss them. I miss washing their dirty, stinky clothes. I miss hearing their raggedy cars pull into the driveway. But most of all, I miss cooking for them. So on Saturday, that’s what I’m going to do. If you can’t understand this, Leon, then you can just go to hell.”
I hang up. I drive with fury for at least the next twenty or thirty miles. Which is when I realize I might have to rethink this no-swearing promise because sometimes no other words seem to do. I mean, come on, a funeral for a fucking dog?
The garage door is up but Lovey’s car isn’t in it. In fact it’s full of all kinds of foreign objects that don’t belong in here. For starters: whose treadmill is that? And what about that red mountain bike? The big-screen TV? Is that somebody’s brand-new living room furniture? I think that looks like a car motor, but I hope I’m wrong. I can’t wait to hear this one.
I knock on the door a few times. When no one answers I use my new key. As soon as I walk in, I smell something burning. It’s hair. “Lovey?”
“I’m back here,” she yells from the kitchen.
I speed back there where Mrs. Saundra Norman, one of her oldest customers, is slouched forward in a kitchen chair. She is sound asleep. Lovey is standing behind her waving a hot straightening comb through the air. Continuous circles of white smoke billow up and disappear into the ceiling paint. She spits on the straightening comb to test it but it’s so hot the saliva evaporates before it hits the iron.
“Lovey, what are you doing?”
She starts slicing the air with the iron comb again. I can already see where she originally tested it, because a patch of Mrs. Norman’s silver hair has been singed off about three inches. “I’m fixing her hair. What does it look like? And why did you just come barging in my house like you own it? You don’t live here.”
“Lovey, that straightening comb is way too hot. Please put it down.”
She looks at it for the longest time and then, thank God, apparently agrees. She sets it on an unlit eye on the back of the stove even though the heat-controlled apparatus she’s supposed to be using is plugged in and sitting right next to the stove, with a pair of bumper curlers inside it.
Mrs. Norman’s head lifts to an upright position as she opens her eyes, looking around the room as if she doesn’t know where she is. Her skin is olive black and smooth. Hardly a wrinkle and I know she’s pushing seventy. “How are you, Mrs. Norman?” I say.
“I’m fine and you, sugar?”
“Good. I didn’t see your car out front. Did you drive over here?”
“No, my son brought me. I don’t drive no more.”
“Why not?”
“I forget why. I just can’t.”
“Are you sure you want Lovey doing your hair today?”
“Lovey ain’t done my hair in years, why would I want her to do it today?”
Oh my Lord.
“
You
called me, missy,” Lovey says, leaning down over her shoulder. “And I wasn’t even charging you! I was trying to be nice and doing it as a favor.”
Mrs. Norman turns to see who’s talking. “Lovey?”
“Don’t act like you don’t know who I am, Saundra Lee.”
“I’m sorry, baby. I thought I was dreaming. How much more you have left to straighten before you can put some curls in?”
“If you could stay awake and keep your head up, I coulda been finished ten or fifteen minutes ago.”
“Well, could you at least open a window, it’s hot in here.”
I go over and crack open the back door because I know the windows were accidentally painted stuck.
“Thank you, sweetheart. Aren’t you one of Lovey’s daughters?”
“Yes, I am. I’m Marilyn.”
“My my my. You getting old and fat just like the rest of us, ain’t you, chile?”
“I suppose so,” I say, wishing I could curl up in a knot.
“If you ask me, she look better now than when she was in her twenties, so shut up and mind your own business, Saundra. When my baby was in college, she was so skinny I wouldn’t even waste the film in my camera on her, but after she had that first baby, she started filling out, and that’s when she started looking like a woman. And she don’t look old. We look old. How old are you, Marilyn?”
“Forty-four,” I say.
“See there. She don’t look a day over forty-three.”
“Lovey?” Mrs. Norman asks.
“What is it now?”
“Don’t make the curls too tight.” She closes her eyes again, and as I stand there watching the two of them very closely, Lovey clicks those bumper curlers the way she always did and Mrs. Norman snores the way she always has.
“Lovey, where’s Joy?”
“I think she’s at work.”
“She got a job?”
“I think so.”
“Do you know whose stuff that is in the garage?”
“What stuff?”
“There’s all kinds of things in there I’ve never seen before and it looks like they belong to somebody else.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“There’s a treadmill, a bike, and some furniture, to name a few of them.”
“Beats me,” she says, and pops Mrs. Norman on the head with a hairbrush to signal she’s finished. Mrs. Norman jumps up so quickly she almost loses her balance.
“Thank you. How much do I owe you?”
“Ten dollars,” Lovey says.
Mrs. Norman digs inside her big brown purse until she finds what appears to be a handful of crinkled-up bills. “Here,” she says, pressing them into Lovey’s outstretched palm.
“I don’t want all of that,” Lovey says, searching through them until she finds a ten. I watch because I don’t know what she can and can’t do anymore. This is a relief.
“Do you know if Joy drove your car, Lovey?”
“That car is gone.”
“What do you mean by gone?”
“Somebody stole it or bought it or something, but it’s not coming back. That much I do know.”
“That simple bitch,” I say under my breath.
“Takes one to know one,” Mrs. Norman says, and heads out the front door where she stands until her son arrives fifteen minutes later.
I say good-bye to her but Lovey doesn’t. She lies down on the couch and closes her eyes so fast, I’m not sure if she’s already asleep. I’m sitting in the chair across from her. “Lovey?”
“What is it now, girl?” She doesn’t even open her eyes.
“Do you remember that we go to the doctor tomorrow?”
“Is it tomorrow already?”
“No, but it will be after you wake up. Now you can’t eat anything after eight o’clock because the doctor wants you to have blood tests done and he wants to see how your cholesterol levels are. You’re going to have a physical so we can find out what might be making you forget things.”
“That’s just fine and dandy,” she says. “Wake me up when it’s time to go.”
I sit here and watch her sink into those old cushions that seem to adjust to accept her big body. I wonder if she’s scared at all. She doesn’t act like it. But neither do I and I know I’m afraid of what this all might mean.
A few minutes later the kids come charging through the front door. They’re clean but the clothes they’re wearing could’ve stood a little steam from an iron.
“You back again?” Tiecey says.
“Yeah, what you want?” LL says.
“Come here,” I say, motioning with my finger to both of them. They saunter over and stand in front of me. They are too cute to sound so ugly. “Do you think this is the way you should greet someone when you walk into this house?”
“I just said you back again?”
“And I just said…”
“LL, I know what you just said. How about: ‘Hi’ or ‘Hello, Aunt Marilyn’?”
“Hi or hello, Aunt Marilyn,” she says.
“Hi or hello, Aunt Marilyn,” LL says.
I give. “Are you guys hungry?”
“Yeah,” Tiecey says. “LL always hungry.”
“You guys want to go to the grocery store with me?”
“Yeah. Can we pick out something we like?” she asks.
“Only if you can say ‘yes’ instead of ‘yeah.’ Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
“Yes,” LL repeats.
“How long has Grandma Lovey been taking her nap?” Tiecey asks.
“She just fell asleep a few minutes ago.”
“Good,” LL says.
“What’s so good about it?”
“Because she always asks us to do stuff we don’t wanna do.”
“Like what?”
“Clean up.”
“What’s wrong with helping out?”
“Don’t nobody help us,” Tiecey says.
“You can’t tell me your mother doesn’t do anything around this house?”
“Her don’t,” she says.
“She doesn’t,” I say.
“She doesn’t,” Tiecey says. “Can we go right now?”
“Do you two have homework?”
“Yes. Spelling. But I already know how to spell all the words and even the ones for extra credit. I did my math on the bus.”
“I got to practice my letters,” LL says.
“Okay, but does Lovey stay here by herself a lot?”
“All day,” Tiecey says.
“Do you guys know whose stuff that is in the garage?”