Dominion (18 page)

She continued to rub in the skin lotion, watching it disappear into the maple syrup brown. Her skin was soft, and she could have been mistaken for a college girl if not for the thin dark lines time had carved in her face.

Suddenly the bathroom door flung open and she barely escaped getting hit.

“What’s this, elephant stampede on the Serengeti? How many times I got to tell you not to charge in like that?”

“Sorry, Mama,” Jonah said. “Frettin’ about your lines again?”

“I’m not frettin’, boy. You want frettin’, I’ll give you frettin’. Now get yourself gone, you hear me? Just like your father, chargin’ in on a defenseless woman! I swear.”

She swatted him on the rear, good naturedly. She saw his smile as he left.

Clarence came back in, this time to get shoe polish. He looked at her gazing in the mirror. “You’re just maturing. I don’t want you to look like some high school cheerleader anyway”

“Thanks a lot! You made my day.”

He smiled at her vanity, then took another look in the mirror to satisfy his own. The doorbell rang.

Jake, Janet, and Carly all stood at the front door. Geneva welcomed them in and everyone exchanged hugs.

“How are you, Carly?” Geneva asked.

“Oh, I don’t feel that great, to be honest. But I’ve been growing a lot in my faith. I guess that’s what matters most, huh?”

Jake put his arm around her, drawing her near. Carly looks tired, Clarence thought. He knew her battle with HIV had moved into the early stages of AIDS, with some sort of cancer starting, her immune system unable to fight it. Something about how she looked reminded him of his cousin Mack, who’d died of AIDS a year ago. Carly was only nineteen, her son, Finney, a year and a half.

Geneva helped Carly get Finney settled in Keisha’s old crib, set up in their bedroom. Carly’s life had changed dramatically in the last two years, outside much for the worse and inside much for the better. Through Jake and Janet, Clarence and Geneva had come to know and love her.

“Olive Garden or Red Robin’s? I’m still going back and forth,” Geneva said.

“Both sound good to me,” Janet said. “They’re just a stone’s throw apart, so we don’t have to decide till we get there.”

In January Clarence and Geneva had gone with Jake and Janet to the Old Spaghetti Factory. They’d had such a great time, they’d gone out together at least once a month since, trying different places and establishing some favorite haunts. They rarely went to fancy restaurants, preferring to dine less expensively but more frequently.

“Mind if we stop by Barnes and Noble’s just before dinner?” Clarence asked. “It’s right by the restaurants. The coffee’s on me.”

Clarence drove to the bookstore and bought a round of mochas at Starbuck’s Coffee, attached to the store. All four loved to read and enjoyed hanging around bookstores together—especially a store that encouraged you to drink coffee, browse, and sit back on couches and comfy chairs.

The girls hung out in fiction, domestics, and food while Clarence and Jake went to sports, military, and humor. While Jake was looking at Vietnam books, Clarence said, “Be back in a minute.”

He headed around the corner toward the African American section. It was one of the largest and best he’d seen, with hundreds of titles. He looked at a few of the huge picture books, showing closeups ranging from Frederick Douglas, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B DuBois to Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe. He found himself touching the picture of Ashe in childlike admiration. His eye caught a book called
The Rage of a Privileged Class: Why Are Middle-class Blacks Angry?
He picked it up and started reading.

Four pages later he felt someone close to him and whirled around.

“Hey, Clabern. What’s wrong?” Jake saw the scowl on Clarence’s face.

“Nothing’s wrong. I was comin’ back in a minute, just like I said.”

“No problem. I finished up, so I was just wandering. What are you looking at?”

“Nothing.” Clarence turned and shoved the book back on the shelf, his body shielding it from Jake’s eyes. “Just checking out some racial stuff so I can get ready to debate Harley over the holidays.”

“I’d like to meet your brother. I keep envisioning a Black Muslim version of you.”

“We’re nothing alike,” Clarence heard the edge in his own voice. If Geneva were there she’d say, “You’re a lot alike.” He cringed every time she said that.

“Better find the girls and get to dinner.” Clarence walked away briskly. Jake wondered if he’d done something to offend him. He had no idea what.

“Would you buy this for me, baby?” Geneva handed Clarence another one of those creative health-food books. He went up to the counter, choosing the college-aged black girl rather than the fortyish white woman who’d corrected him over the phone about the “African American” section.

“Did you find what you needed, sir?”

Clarence looked at the young black girl with surprise. The voice. It was the woman he’d talked to on the phone an hour and a half ago.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“No. I…I just recognized your voice. I’m the one who called and asked about a black literature section. You told me you had an
African American
section.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know…”

“Yeah. Me neither.”

It embarrassed Clarence to realize he’d made the same assumption about her she’d made about him. While the clerk processed his Visa, he thought of when he first called a real estate agent looking for a home in Gresham. He explained he was wanting to move out of Portland and asked if east Gresham had good neighborhoods. “Oh, sure,” the man had said, “there’s no blacks or Mexicans or anything.” He’d hung up on him, but he was still angry at himself for not paying the man a visit, showing him the face behind the voice, and maybe putting the fear of God into him while he was at it.

The four walked out of the bookstore. Though Clarence tried to hide it, the other three knew something was wrong. They walked across the street to Red Robin’s, attempting to make the best of it, Geneva and Janet walking close to each other and a little ways ahead of the men.

Geneva thought Janet and Jake made a cute couple and kept thinking of them as married. Actually, they’d been divorced five years earlier but had started a dating relationship in the last two years.

“When’s he going to ask you to marry him again?” Geneva asked as they walked through the parking lot.

“Maybe when he’s sure it’ll turn out differently this time,” Janet said.

After they’d been seated and had ordered, Clarence was still quiet.

“Geneva,” Jake said, “Janet was telling me how you and Clarence met. I’d like to hear about it.”

“Well, I grew up in Corvallis, one of just a handful of blacks. My parents came from Alabama. Daddy got a job as a custodian at Oregon State. It was his dream for me and my brothers and sisters to go to college there. Three of us did. Anyway, I loved football. I was at our first game when I noticed this big lug of an offensive lineman on the field. I checked his name on the program. I was down there real close to the sidelines and saw him take off his helmet. I memorized his face.”

She squeezed Clarence.

“Tell them how you chased after me,” Clarence said, his first words since the bookstore.

“The program listed him as a junior transfer from Alcorn State in Mississippi. Well, I was a junior too, and I thought, maybe he came out here to Oregon to meet some girls. Figured I might as well be one of the first.”

Janet laughed and grabbed her arm. Jake and Clarence chuckled.

“I started visiting practices and watching from the stands. I even used binoculars. Can you believe that?”

“So when did you finally introduce yourself?” Jake asked.

“I had a girlfriend who worked in registration. She got me a copy of his winter term class schedule. I saw he had an English lit course, so I signed up for the same section.”

“You didn’t,” Jake said.

“I did. And on the first day of class, I made sure he noticed me.”

“That was pretty easy,” Clarence said. “We had the only two Afros in the room. Oregon State was less than one percent black. Here I was, thinking I’d spontaneously bumped into the girl of my dreams, and all the time she was pulling the strings. Course, hard to blame her. I was a pretty studly young man.”

“When did you find out it wasn’t spontaneous?” Jake asked.

“Too late. She already had her hooks in me.”

Clarence looked at Geneva. He always saw her as she was back then. Young and energetic, short but leggy and Bambi-like. Her neck was long, and she had big vulnerable eyes on top of high cheekbones. She took a positive outlook on life, the perfect foil for Clarence’s cynicism.

“You both came from Christian homes, didn’t you?” Jake asked.

“Yeah. We had strong convictions,” Geneva said. “I had to beat off some white girls who kept putting the make on him, you know, hearing the myth about black male sexuality.”

“What do you mean, myth?” Clarence asked, laughing.

“We kept our virginity,” Geneva said, “but it wasn’t easy.”

“Good for you,” Janet said.

“You made the right choice,” Jake added. “Janet and I have talked about how much we wish we’d waited till marriage. I’m afraid it got us off on the wrong foot. And I take responsibility for that.”

“Me too,” Janet said.

“I’m just glad God forgives and we get another chance,” Jake said. He put his arm around Janet and drew her toward him.

“Geneva, can I have your water?” Clarence gestured at her full glass sitting next to his empty.

“Just tell me the three little words every wife wants to hear.”

“Pass the catsup?”

“No. I love you.”

“Well, I do. That’s why I married you.” He grabbed her water.

“He’s a hopeless romantic,” Geneva told Janet. “Hey, I’ve got one for you. Why does it take fifty thousand sperm and only one egg for a new life to begin?”

Jake and Janet both shrugged.

“Because none of the sperm will stop to ask directions.”

They all laughed hard.

“See why I married her?” Clarence asked Jake.

“Yeah, I sure do.”

“Now if I can just survive her health food kick. She’s been feeding me these slimy green drinks made in the blender. Seaweed specials.”

“I just want you to live longer.”

“That stuff makes me not
want
to live longer. I’d rather live shorter and die happy.”

“Geneva,” Janet said, “You have to tell Jake what you told me the other day about your great-grandmother. What you did for her.”

“Well,” Geneva looked at Jake, “when she was ninety-two and I was ten, I taught Great-Grandma to read.”

“No kidding? Wow.”

“I’ll never forget it, the light in her eyes. She was like a little girl. She could read the Bible for the first time. She lived another five years and she read for hours every day. Sometimes she’d sit in her rockin’ chair shakin’ her head, and she’d say, ‘I’s readin’, chile, I’s readin’!’ She never got over it.”

“How come she hadn’t learned earlier?” Jake asked.

“Well, she was the daughter of slaves. They didn’t know how to read. When she started her own family after emancipation, she lived where they didn’t let black kids go to school. The black school was six miles away and there wasn’t any way they could get the children there, so my grandfather grew up not knowing how to read either. Great-Grandma just never had anybody to teach her. It was one of the biggest thrills of my life.”

Geneva teared up, as did Janet. They sat quietly for a minute.

“I noticed some of those books in the African American section at Barnes and Noble,” Jake said. “I really don’t know much about black history and racial issues. I was thinking I should go back and do some reading. And maybe get your perspective on things.”

“Race. You want to hear my food preparation analogy?” Geneva asked. “To whites, race is like a sauce. You can put on as much or as little as you want. To blacks, it’s a marinade. It permeates everything. You can’t take it or leave it. It’s always there, no matter what.”

“Being black in America is like wearing shoes that don’t fit,” Clarence said, his finger unconsciously running over the leathery patch of skin surrounding the scar beneath his right ear. “Some people will toss them off completely and go barefoot; some can adjust better, but their toes are always cramped. My mama used to say to me, ‘Boy—’ Now, if you ever heard a black woman say ‘Boy’ that was my mama! She said, ‘Boy, you’ll always be colored, so get used to it. Won’t do you no good to fret about it. Just do your best and leave the rest to God.’”

Jake and Janet looked tentative, afraid whatever they might say would display ignorance or offend Clarence and Geneva, who were eager to talk, but only if their friends wanted to pursue it. The topic died an unnatural death.