Life Sentences Read online

  “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.

  GIRL GROUPS

  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 t
hat 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.

  NATURAL SELECTION

  March 28–29

  CHAPTER

  28

  TEENA’S RIGHT HAND WAS THROBBING when she woke up, a sign that the weather was changing. It had been a warmer-than-usual March, but the winter months could never be mild enough for Teena. Worse, she had rolled on her right hand in her sleep, possibly to keep it warm beneath her body, but that had only helped to freeze it into a semi-claw position. She had to get ready for work virtually one handed, which made blow-drying her hair a bitch. Still, she managed, and her right hand was more or less back in service by the time she got in the car.

  The mall was dead. Teena didn’t need to read the newspaper to know what was going on with the economy. She saw it every day at work. The managers had kept repeating, like a hopeful mantra, that business would pick up before Easter. Old-fashioned Baltimore clung to the tradition of new outfits and hats on Easter, even its own version of a promenade, although that had the bad habit of turning into a near riot. Easter had come and gone, and things were about as dead as Teena had ever seen. Forget the housing market, the stock market—if you wanted to know how nervous consumers were, drop by Nordstrom’s high-end departments.

  Bored, she fed Fatima’s name into the computer system again. She had taken it almost personally when Cassandra had reported back to her that the interview was a bust, that Fatima not only wouldn’t help her find Callie Jenkins but had dropped all these hints about how dangerous it was for Cassandra to look, how she would regret it. Teena didn’t buy that for a second. She could recognize a head game, someone trying to dress up ignorance as purpose and intent. She wasn’t sure how the computer, having given her Fatima’s address already, could do anything new for her, but she didn’t have anything else to do and—

  Fatima Hollins’s Nordstrom card had been paid off, in full. In arrears a week ago, it would have been at a zero balance now, except that someone had come in and charged six hundred dollars’ worth of clothes two days after the account was paid off, which happened to be two days before Cassandra visited the woman’s house. Fatima had been on this floor, too, not down in the Rack, although over in the plus-size department.

  Teena’s first impulse was to call Cassandra. But what did she really know? Slow down, she told herself. It was an interesting juxtaposition of facts, nothing more at this point. Cassandra goes to visit Fatima and she suddenly has the scratch to pay off her bill, and then some. But her credit showed an ongoing history of boom and bust. Like a lot of people, she got in a little over her head, then she caught up. Nordstrom, almost all department stores, would go bankrupt if people didn’t over-spend here and there.

  No, it wasn’t Cassandra whom Teena needed to call. She fed another name into the system, one she hadn’t really thought about for years. Yes, there was the account, although it was all but dormant, last used for a few purchases around Christmas. This one probably shopped at more exclusive stores now. But Teena remembered Gloria Bustamante when she was wearing the Montgomery Ward version of dress-for-success suits, with lumpy shoulder pads that looked like little hens hiding in the folds of her jacket. Gloria was older than Teena, but she had been a late starter, green as they come when they first faced off. Teena remembered feeling sorry for her at the time, regarding her as a glorified paperweight, an object placed on Callie to hold her down, keep her still. When Gloria had quit Howard & Howard, Teena had assumed it was because she was opting for a less combative form of law. Yet she had built up quite a good criminal defense practice, which suggested she had more on the ball than Teena had suspected. What might Gloria Bustamante know?

  “WHAT IF THIS WERE REAL?” Reg asked Cassandra.

  Perhaps because they spoke so little—a consequence of spending almost all their time in bed, not wanting to waste the hours they had—the words seemed overly portentous. Cassandra assessed them, considered all the possible meanings, then decided to keep things lighthearted.

  “I thought I was real,” she said, taking Reg’s hand and smacking it on her hip. “Doesn’t this feel pretty solid?”

  He kept his hand there. “This is different for me. And not just because you’re older than the other women I’ve been with.”

  “Thanks,” Cassandra said dryly. “Good to know.”

  “I mean—look, I’ve always had…diversions in my life. I assumed you understood that when we started.”

  “I understood. Does Donna?” Not quite so lighthearted now.

  “I don’t think Donna cares,” he said. She turned her face to him, amazed, and he backtracked. “I’m not saying she knows, on a conscious level, but she suspects. Yet I’ve been considerate. I haven’t shamed her. She can live with that.”

  Cassandra didn’t want to argue with him, not about this topic. But—those words again—she was her father’s daughter, and she couldn’t let a piece of illogic go by, even if it was in her best interest. “I was in Baltimore all of a month when I heard you described as a pussy hound. Could Donna really be that sheltered?”

  “I don’t know. How much
did you know about your father?”

  “Not much. But I was a child. I’m not asking about your daughter but your wife.”

  “I read your book—”

  “You did?” She couldn’t help it; this was almost as thrilling as the words she believed she had heard, was still trying to decipher. What if this were real? Of course the very use of the subjunctive indicated it wasn’t real; still—

  “Well, I listened to it on audio. They should have had you read it. You have a much nicer voice than the woman they used. Anyway, I don’t think your mother knew, not really, and your father was all but rubbing her face in what he did.”

  “Not at first. But did you get to the section where he starts using her nickname, the one he always despised? It’s clear there that she was beginning to suspect his infidelities.”

  “Clear to you, writing after the fact. Did you ever ask your mother what she knew, when?”

  She was irritated now, much as she didn’t want to be. Who was Reg to question the authority with which she had written about her life, her family?

  “We never spoke…on point about these things. It would have been too painful for her. But I showed my mother what I wrote, and she never contradicted it. Nor did my father.”

  “Maybe she just preferred your version. Most people would, don’t you think? Would prefer not looking like a fool. Maybe you gave your mother a dignity she didn’t feel she had in real life.”

  Cassandra struggled to a sitting position. “Are we having a fight?”

  “What?”

  “I feel as if we’re quarreling, and I don’t know why.”

  “Sorry.” He put an arm around her, kissed her forehead. She felt like she was seventeen, but the kind of seventeen no one ever gets to be. Comfortable in her skin, flush with knowledge. Leda again, in Zeus’s beak, but holding on, his equal. “I should know better than to challenge a Baltimore girl on her own mother. My fault.”