Life Sentences Page 13

  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.

  She had told her teacher as much. “But this is dialect, Tisha. It’s how people spoke once upon a time, in the South. Joel Chandler Harris wanted to preserve these oral traditions, lest these stories be lost to the ages.” Cassandra, always the suck-up, had chimed in, “It’s not just a story. It’s history, Tisha.”

  Not mine, she wanted to say.

  She found her way to the Jack in the Box, now a Burger King, and ordered a milk shake and some onion rings. Chicken salad with pistachios. She hated that kind of food. So why had she suggested the restaurant? Because—admit it—she wanted to impress Cassandra. Cassandra! Who had been a borderline geek in school, with that enormous mop of frowsy hair, her skinny, clumsy body. Time was Cassandra had sought Tisha’s approval. It was a veritable chain of command: Tisha looked to Donna, Fatima and Cassandra looked to Tisha, and sad little Callie followed at Fatima’s heels, asking for nothing but the right to stand on the sidelines. “You playing kicksies?” she would say on the playground. “You playing foursquare?” But she wouldn’t play unless Donna or Tisha urged her to join. Fatima’s invitation wasn’t good enough, much less Cassandra’s. Not that Cassandra ever thought to invite Callie, and now she had apparently forgotten how the girl tried to attach herself to them. Because if she did, that would be a chapter, maybe multiple chapters, maybe a book in itself.

  Now how had Tisha gotten lost in this suburb where she had lived for seventeen years? Okay, so this wasn’t her part of town, but she had gone wildly off track somehow. The trick to driving in Columbia, Tisha always believed, was not to think about it. She had gone right when she should have gone left or straight, turned into Faulkner Ridge, but then, she had Faulkner on the brain.

  Tisha met Br’er Rabbit again in college, when she signed up for Sterling Stuckey’s seminar on what was then called black folklore. She was skeptical at first and confused that the assigne
d book of stories was credited to William Faulkner. Why was William Faulkner writing about Br’er Rabbit? But her professor had explained that this was William J. Faulkner, a former slave, telling the same stories as Harris, but in simple, direct language that granted the tales dignity and power. The professor had then drawn the parallels between Br’er Rabbit and the trickster rabbit of West African folklore, then linked this to the concept of Pan-Africanization, in which old ethnic divisions melted in the face of slavery. He returned Br’er Rabbit to Tisha, allowed her to see how plucky that little rabbit was, how smart. A trickster by necessity, because how else could a rabbit survive in this savage world?

  A few weeks later in the semester, when they were reading a biography of Jelly Roll Morton, a white girl from Oklahoma said apropos of Morton’s love of fine clothes, “I always did wonder why black people all have fancy cars, even when they don’t have much money.” There was a deep, almost frightening silence, a silence miles beyond awkward. Stuckey had gently led the class into a discussion of stereotypes and generalizations. But the girl had remained serene and unperturbed in her ignorance, believing herself validated. “Right,” she said when the professor finished. “It’s very childish, buying fancy things when you can’t put food on the table.”

  Cassandra was never stupid that way, never quite that smug or insular. She had been a better sport about her stepmother than the woman’s family had been, for sure. Annie Waters had been all but disowned by her family when she married Cedric Fallows. The gossip about that had been way, way above Tisha’s young head, coded and obscure, but she had figured it out eventually. Everyone had, except Cassandra. Which was funny, because no one really cared except Cassandra. Until she wrote a book, and now millions of people had entered the time of King’s death through this—Sorry, Cassandra, Tisha thought, pulling on her milk shake so angrily it grunted—trivial story. That had been the most infuriating part of the memoir, watching Cassandra blithely co-opt those three days to tell the story of her own personal tragedy. She hadn’t known, couldn’t know what had gone on in the living rooms and kitchens of black folks’ homes that horrible weekend, the fear and grief and terror of it all. As Donna said, she meant no harm.

  But Tisha knew that people who meant no harm were often the most dangerous people of all, the real tar babies from which one might never disentangle. Reg and Donna were crazy, thinking that Cassandra could be managed in any way, that they could let her a little way in and then dissuade her from dragging them into the process of picking the bones of Callie Jenkins’s life. That poor sad woman, always on the sidelines, waiting to be invited. Whatever she had done—and everyone assumed she had killed her baby—leave her in peace now, Cassandra. Leave her be.

  Reg and Donna could wrangle with Cassandra if they chose. Tisha—well, Tisha was going to lay low.

  BEWITCHED

  I WAS A TELEVISION JUNKIE as a child. Officially, I was allowed to watch television only an hour a day, but that was my father’s rule and my mother seldom enforced it. When he moved out, television would become a passive way for us to be together, and the restrictions fell away. But while we still lived under one roof, my father cursed, reviled, and damned television. Which, of course, made it irresistible.

  On school days, I rushed home practically shaking with anticipation. I started with One Life to Live, killing time until Dark Shadows came on, but the soap opera quickly eclipsed the supernatural in my imagination. Soap operas were the dirtiest thing going in the late 1960s, filled with illicit sex and unplanned pregnancies that trapped people into loveless marriages. I watched in a stupor until the news came on, then hurriedly did my homework, as my father expected it to be complete when he arrived home.

  My favorite was Bewitched, a nighttime show and therefore not so easily hidden from my father. I claimed it as part of my allocated ration, but the show enraged him on principle. He seemed incensed that Darrin, whether played by Dick York or Dick Sargent, had snared Samantha, the beautiful witch. My father shared Samantha’s mother’s opinion that Darrin was unworthy—not because he was a mortal, but because he refused to let Samantha use her powers to enrich them. Even though my father’s beloved myths repeatedly demonstrated the dangers inherent in loving gods and goddesses, my father would not have shied away from pursuing an immortal. In fact, in less than forty-eight hours from this evening that I am describing, Annie would rise, Aphrodite-like, from a sea of writhing bodies, and he would almost die for her.

  But this was a Thursday. I turned on the television, thinking about how there’s no in-between with witches, they were either ugly or gorgeous. I hoped to be gorgeous, but it didn’t look promising. My mother said I was the prettiest girl in the world, but my father was conspicuously silent on the subject of my looks. He had stopped caring for my hair the summer between third and fourth grade, and it was now an unmanageable mass, as my mother had prophesied, and not at all flattering to my odd little face. Still, it was convenient to have hair to hide behind, in school and at home, where I could sense something was terribly wrong. Or about to be.

  “We interrupt this program for a special bulletin”—remember those words? We don’t seem to hear them as often now, since CNN came along, rushing information to us within seconds of it happening. Today, bulletins pass by on a crawl, humble and deferential, trying not to obscure the programming. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot in Memphis at 6 P.M. central time, an hour before I settled myself at the television, and I was just learning about it. He was thirty-nine years old. Ancient to a girl who would turn ten in two days, but the same age as my father and five years older than my mother.

  I called out to my mother, who was in the kitchen. She didn’t believe me at first: How can a little girl be the bearer of this news? Finally comprehending, she cried out—but no, that scream was later, I am conflating things. My mother will scream two months later, in the early-morning hours of June 5, when Robert F. Kennedy is shot. I will hear her scream and go to her bed, wonder at her wild grief over a man that we don’t really know. It will be several minutes before I think to ask, “Where’s Daddy?” My mother will cry harder. So much happens in two months.

  Within hours of the news of King’s death, Washington, DC, and Detroit were engulfed by riots, but Baltimore was deceptively quiet. “A city so behind the times that it can’t riot in a timely fashion,” my father liked to say.

  “But if people here had rioted right away, you never would have gone out Saturday,” I pointed out to him years later. “And you wouldn’t have met Annie. You met Annie because King was killed.”

  “Don’t be sloppy, Cassandra. Yes, you can say that I met Annie in circumstances that were a direct consequence of King’s death. But it’s fallacious to say I wouldn’t have met her otherwise. After all, she worked over at that bakery in Westview Mall, not even three miles from here.”

  “But would you have fallen in love with her in a less charged encounter?” I persisted. “Would it have been love at first sight if you had met, say, buying pizza rolls at Silber’s? Or riding the bus downtown?”

  “Oh, yes,” my father always said. “Annie Waters was my destiny.” Then, at the look on my face: “Don’t ask a question if you don’t want to know the answer.”

  COLLECTORS

  March 11–12

  CHAPTER

  15

  THE MOMENT TEENA SPOTTED the shopper in the voluminous cape, she wanted to scream “Mine!” like a hotdogging outfielder. It wasn’t just that the woman was clearly someone who spent freely. She had money and taste and a relatively decent figure for her age—slender, not too hippy, although a little on the short side for true high fashion. She had the good sense not to dress younger than her age, which Teena put in the early to mid-forties. That meant she would avoid the trendiest clothes. But she would appreciate the best pieces in some of the new spring collections, be keen to find an item or two that allowed her to keep pace with fashion without being a slave to it.

  “I’m Teena,” she told the woman, ignori
ng the glare from the other sales associate, Lavonne, who, by rights, should have snagged the customer. “Let me know if you need anything.”

  Lavonne wouldn’t have meshed with this customer, Teena rationalized. Lavonne was too pushy, too insistent. She did better with the insecure ones. With a shopper like this, you offer help, then back away, making sure to gauge the exact moment when she wants assistance. Teena watched the woman flip through the high-end designers Nordstrom carried here. She had the air of a New Yorker, someone used to more and better offerings. A shopper of Bergdorf Goodman or the designer floors at Saks’s flagship. Sometimes, on her day off, Teena bought a ticket on one of those up-and-back bus trips to New York, the ones that charged only $35 and threw in a bagel. While her fellow travelers headed out to matinees and museums, she wandered the best department stores, drinking in the wares. She didn’t try things on—professional courtesy, she wouldn’t waste another sales associate’s time that way—but she examined the clothes and studied the shoppers. The merchandise inspired envy, yet the customers left her grateful for her life in Baltimore. While many seemed nice, there was one type she could never suffer—loud and cawing, incapable of being pleased. Oh, she saw her share of bitches here, especially around prom time, but the Baltimore bitch was a different breed entirely, someone she could handle because she had known the type her entire life, even been one in her youth. She would have called it confidence then, or a strong personality. Same difference. In her twenties, pretty and ambitious, Teena had been careless with others’ feelings. She had even secretly loathed unlucky people, believing they were responsible for their own fates. She had been ruthless about culling losers from her life, lest they prove contagious.