Chardonnay: A Novel

CHARDONNAY

A Novel

JACQUILYNN
MARTINE

1

I’m Not Me

March 2006

Joplin,
Missouri

Lincoln University

As fear panics my face I open my eyes to the bright
iridescent lights above me. The sounds of beeping machines and silence engulf
my conscience and I wince at the pain inside my body. My mouth forms an O,
however no words pass through. I lean up to try and pull the IV out my arm but
as if they knew my great escape plans, a nurse rushed in and gently pushed me
back. She tells me everything is going to be okay and that my family would be
on their way for me in the morning. I fight, beg, and plead for her to release
me yet there is no appeal and five other nurses come to the nurse’s aide and
restraints are placed on my wrist and ankles
. For
hours I cry and wonder why I am here and after my cries were not heard my body
grew tired; I drifted off to sleep.
I fly off into a deep sleep and hear
the torment but unsure from where.
 
I see
shadows lurking over me dancing to the devils drum as they taunt my soul. They
beg for my soul while they do things I can’t understand. As much as I fight it
seems the battle is not mine to win.

I run away from the danger. Fast.
Breathing hard as I come upon a wheat field.
As I stand in the stark shadows of a
wheat stalk, hiding, crying, floating with time on each electric impulse, I am
now of my mind’s imaginable euphoria.

The
winds of my breath slightly ease away each cuticle from the stem of a dandelion
nestled in my small palm. My eyes look on in wonderment as its seed floats from
me, lifting its self-up and far away into life’s being. Even as a child I knew
my existence was meant for more. The rustling of hard footfalls startle me into
the fear I just thought I’d let go with that seed of life rushing from me. And
that’s when I saw him. I look up to see eyes, eyes that have never seen me
before. Their slanted slits drew curiosity. The hand of these eyes reached out
for me and that one gesture alone changed my life forever. As this little boy
helped me back through the dusk settling into night, I found myself looking
back searching for that dandelion seed long gone from this place I wanted to
leave as well. I couldn’t help but want the strange boy leading the way to let
me go and be free to fly away just as it had done. But he stopped and turned to
face me. Even then his features stirred an emotion in me I couldn’t understand
to be called love later on. And there in the silent wilderness and the darkness
swallowing our short statures whole, he says to me,

“What’s
your name?”

“Why
you gotta know?” I responded back.

Even
as a child he was perfect, his eyebrows frowning and a sheer awkwardness
panicking his puppyish face.

“It’s
‘why do you have to know’.”

“Whatever.”
I say with the swirl of my hand. At seven-years-old I didn’t know what ghetto
was and what it meant to most people. As a matter fact, I didn’t grow up in the
ghetto. But just from his drawn reaction I knew I wasn’t like most children, he
knew that as well. He gently smiled and said, “I’ll never let you go, okay.
Just follow me and I’ll lead the way.”

I
nodded my head and took his words literally from the time we were children to
now, as adults putting the frames to our picture perfect lives. And without
notice I can still remember those very first words he spoke to me as flashes
throw me into a harbored trap...

...Him perspiring,
throbbing, thrusting, while on top of me. Whispering candy coated words of him
wanting my flesh and his to be entangled raw. He never listens to
my plead
to wear a rubber since he knows the dick he’s
already pushing in me is a good sampler of a lust I can’t distrust. The slight
tingle of his fleshy tongue slowly drifts down the mid-drift of my stomach
pumping slow, yet hard in and out of my radiated womb.
 
I gasped for
leveled stamina. I had never been this hypnotized. The room twirled around and
I cried moans of pain. I wished that he would stop making his territory
permanent, but I wished that he would go deeper.

He hit my soul, making me cry harder. He kissed my tears away.
This durance was inescapable. My legs hung in the balance of me moving from a
girl to an official woman. “Ah, I’m coming!” he belts out. My tears slow their
flow, in shock from what he just said. I could never make it to the Atlantic
and English Channel now. Our natural scents fill the air, intertwining into one
scent, making me feel closer to him. He moved from me. His cum is sticky and
warm, pouring out of me and trickling down my behind to the crease were my
meaty thighs meet and down my shaking legs. I didn’t move, scared to step into
the future. He go gets a towel, comes back, and cleans me. He turns on the
shower, gesturing his head for me to come his way. Once I get up and move to
the bathroom door, he picks me up and carries me to the tub. We engage again in
this wet sin and I never blink twice because I love this man.

I awake gasping for air and come face to face with the doctor and
nurse. They check my vitals and the doctor takes a light to my eyes, asking me
to look above his head. Once he is done he signs some paper work and hands it
to the nurse as he trots out the room. She gives a meek smile and tells me I
will be released today. However I am confused as to why I am here in the first
place. I hear a commotion outside my hospital room and a few moments later my
parents walk in. My mother walked over to me and touched my head.

“Chardonnay, sweetie, are you okay?” she stated.

I blink my eyes and ask, “Why am I here? How did I get here?”

She looks
over at my father and he gives an apologetic smile.

“Honey that does not matter.
What matters is that you
get well.” He calmly says.

I nod my head and listen on to my mother tell my father that I
need to get back to school and that they need to gather my things.

My father appears surprised at my cooperation and we prepare to go
home.

*
 
*
 
*
 
*

May 2006

When I was
born, my eyes were a blue and my hair was the color of spun gold. My hair was a
rare gold blond hair, even for a Creole child. My mother told me my eyes
changed like a chameleon every day. One morning she woke up and they were just
plain
gold.
As radiant as the color of my hair
.
That was the morning they named me. For three months I had been a child
without a name...can you believe that? Needless to say that’s how stubborn my
mother could be.

 
Like most Black little
girls, I thought of my eyes and locks as . . . pretty. The prettiest a
black
girl
could get. My gold hair wouldn’t stop growing and I strayed from any
red coats and hoods in fear of being called
Little
Red Riding Hood
or Goldilocks. One day, at the age of six, I got a reality
check about myself. I was coming from ballet practice with my mother. We
stopped by a local McDonald’s and two women were in line behind us. I couldn’t
stay still and my patience was sheer to none. One of the women caught me
staring at her. She was startled by me and
winced
her
eyes at me. She bent down and said,

“You are the prettiest black little girl I’ve ever seen.”

My cocoa skinned mother snapped her neck around at the woman while
I smiled at her. I was used to being called pretty. It was nothing new to me.
But to my mother it was insulting. Her hair was jet black and her eyes were the
color of the Earth’s richest soil.

I viewed
her as pretty, but she opened my eyes that day. Said not everyone thought of
her that way. She pulled me to the front of her and we walked out of McDonald’s
that day without my happy meal. And this child was not happy. When we got to
the car she swung me around and pressed her hands on my shoulders.

“You listen to me. And you listen to me good. Don’t you ever let
anyone tell you that you’re the prettiest anything especially of your own
race.
She doesn’t know shit about you or where you get those
gold ass locks of hair and glowing hazel eyes from.”

I whined back saying, “But I thought—”

“You thought wrong.” She said cutting me off.

I cried in her face. She didn’t console me or tell me why she was
in frantic mode. It wouldn’t be until years later I would get what my mother
meant. It wouldn’t be until years later I would get tired of people telling me
I had the
pretty hair.
You see, that woman was a
white
woman. She
debased my culture, and even though she told me I was beautiful, she told me I
was ugly all in the same sentence. Told me my beauty was close to what was
emphasized in the magazines that only showed blue eyes, eyes I was born with,
and blond hair, hair that I was two shades of color away from. In that light,
it helped to hang around girls of indifferent yet diverse back grounds. Zasmyth’s
family was right out of Jamaica. None of her ancestors were slaves, and she had
a hint of the accent. Katura was an African queen from Ethiopia, or she carried
herself that way. Her skin was dark as night and as smooth as a baby’s bottom.
Fianna was . . . at first glance white. But if you asked her she would tell you
she was African. And she was.
From Berber, Africa.
She
was like my fish in the pond, and was down with the pound. Konstance, my
cousin, was the All-American girl. Did the latest dances before anyone, owned
the latest gadget before anyone, and was the sweetest one out of any of us. It
may have been because of her baby face and the fact that she was the youngest
at the age of nineteen. Life hadn’t hit her in the face yet.

Being a college girl didn’t prepare me for automatic success. I
was ranked top of my class, with all the qualities of a poignant adolescent,
seemingly to the outside world, that culturally mistaken my skin for the next
of impossible kin. To some that was supposed to make me special...looking
white, being light skinned, or high yellow. And I hadn’t grown mentally into my
nearly perfect measurements of 38, 28,
42
that could
make a Coke bottle go flat. But unlike most easily absorbed young women, I was
not
 
a
sponge. I was a
brick. No one could change my view on me even with what was brought upon me in
the past months of my life.

My fiancé, Myron Kent, is a newly Magna Cum Laude
graduate
from Howard University with a pending NFL contract in his hands. He’s a six
foot even Adonis and has everything a girl . . . or groupie could want. Our
history goes back to ancient times. As sapient as I was about his ways, I held
on for more destructive blows to my muscular organ. A heart disease I was
causing and fighting silently, to discourage his blood vessels inside of me to
never supply my heart again. Or I could say it was my need to feel as if I had
control of my own life. Either way, I did the most destructive thing I could to
gain power back of my life. I did everything I could so far to rebel from what
people projected on me. I joined a sorority, kept my grades up to where anyone
would hire me (even Donald Trump), and died my hair a different color it seemed
every month. I was a normal girl, but to society I was obscure. When I woke up
this morning I fought with myself about how I would break the news to him. News
of a pent up tension I couldn’t hold anymore.

“Chardonnay, get the phone!” hollered Zasmyth from the dorm
bedroom. She was my college dorm roommate as well. “I’m not here.” I said
rushing out the shower with a towel around me, and tripping over Jimmy Choo’s
shoes I took off the night before, leaving them for death traps in the morning.

“Well, mi not lying for you an-t-more.”
She said
throwing me our cordless phone. It nearly slipped through my hands, contrasting
from its slick texture.

My fiancé
was in town and looking for an opportunity to tell me how much he missed me,
but I needed to tell him about my sudden change of heart. I looked at the
caller I.D. and saw the name Mychale Kent. He was at his parent’s home.

“You know you’ll have to tell him anyway, right?” said Zasmyth
dryly as I walked towards my bed. She was one of my closest best friends from
my childhood. She was damn near like a sister to me and told me the truth and
the whole truth. Zasmyth was tall, approximately five foot eight inches, with
thick, shoulder length fire truck red hair that had caramel highlights. Her
complexion was light brown and her attitude was a nonsense razor sharp wave
that would hit anyone who wanted to crash it. Zasmyth was tough. She had to be.
Her mother worked hard to get her and her sister Zourtni out the hood after
they came here from Jamaica. She grew up on 26th street and Prospect.
The Dirty South of Kansas City, Missouri’s metro area.
Her
mother sent her to Pembroke Hill elementary and we’ve been close ever since. So
her frame of mind was feed when in need. Be it her stomach or some chick’s
face. But with one glance of her beauty and grace, you would guess she was a
proper, home trained young woman. She had class like that.

“I’m not sure if I’m strong enough.”

“What do you mean? If your unhappy, your unhappy.” she said not
understanding my frame of mind. She was all for me dumping Myron.