Forever Friends (12 page)

“I met him at school. He's a teacher.” She opened and closed her hands as they rested in her lap. “I'm thinking of leaving Wallace and Hope.” She pulled at the front of her pants. “I think they'd be better off without me. I think I don't know how to be a wife and a mother. I think I've made a mistake.”

Lana thought about the letter she had written and kept in her purse, the letter so unlike the one Jessie had written to Wallace and left on the kitchen table.

She had penned it three days earlier. She had even filled her suitcase, Roger having promised to take her in. She had written instructions about Hope's schedule and care, what time she took a nap, which doll was her favorite, and how to stop her from crying.

Wallace hadn't noticed the empty place in the closet, the extra room in the dresser drawers, the clean shelf in the medicine cabinet. Or, she thought, if he has noticed he hasn't objected. And she considered this even more reason to leave. She was only waiting for the right time.

Yesterday was no good because Hope was still sick and the repairman was coming and somebody needed to be there to let him in the house. Today was no better since laundry needed to be done. Tomorrow might not work since there was nobody to watch the baby, so she wasn't sure when it was that she would break up her home, that everything would change.

There was a pause between Lana and Nadine as the missing middle-aged woman opened the door and came back into the Laundromat. Her face was tight and red, her hair loose and falling in her eyes. She walked over to Nadine and held out a rumpled piece of Mexican currency. Nadine seemed to recognize it, but she only shook her head.

“Cambio,” the woman said with a heavy accent. “Necesito cambio.”

Nadine pointed to the sign written in Spanish that said only U.S. dollars were accepted, but the woman kept pushing the bill in front of the employee and saying, “Cambio.” She was becoming frantic, her voice loud and strained. “Cambio,” she said again, her hair flying around her.

“Okay, okay,” Nadine responded. She got up from her seat, taking the Mexican bill with her, and went to the cash drawer behind the counter. Everyone in the Laundromat knew it was against the rules for the workers to exchange Mexican money, but they all looked away without concern. Nadine returned to the woman and gave her more than a handful of quarters. The woman took the money and held onto Nadine's hand in a display of gratitude.

“Gracias,” she kept saying over and over. “Thank you.” Then she moved away from the two women and placed the coins in the stopped dryers to pay for another cycle for her laundry.

Nadine jumped on the washer, taking her seat again. She pulled out a man's shirt from the basket. She pressed her hand down the center of it and folded it in a small ordered square.

“She comes in here every three weeks, never has U.S. money.” She turned toward the woman who needed change. “I guess she's using up all of her savings she brought with her when she came.”

Lana studied the woman. She wasn't that old, maybe midthirties. She had three dryers going and another load of laundry still waiting to be done. She rubbed the remaining quarters between her fingers with a faraway look in her eyes, uncontained sadness.

Nadine finished folding the clothes and began sorting them by size. She jumped down and was standing near Lana, beneath her young friend. “When I tried to kill myself, I don't think I really wanted to die.”

She placed the large pieces of clothing in one pile and the smaller ones in another. Lana didn't speak.

“I mean, I did want to die because I was so—Jesus—” she stopped. “So lost.” She fingered the lace on a child's blouse. “But I also wanted to live because I figured that the worst punishment I could get was in staying alive.”

Nadine pulled out the small blouse and held it up. It was pink with white polka dots and a thin piece of white lace around the neckline and cuffs.

She went on. “I knew that dying was the easy thing, the least difficult thing, and part of me craved that.” She folded the little shirt, placing it on top of the pile, and looked up at Lana. “I mean, there was a part of me that just wanted to be done with everything, just be finished. And as weird as it seems, that may have been the healthiest part of me at the
time.” She talked as if she was only beginning to understand things for herself.

“I know it sounds weird, I'm sure, to think that the portion of my mind that everybody thought was the sickest was really the fragment designed to save me.” She stopped folding and considered what she was saying.

“But you see, it seems to me that the part of me that wanted to live, the elements of my psyche or spirit or whatever it was that wanted me alive, saw my life only as a punishment, like it was some exercise of torture for a prisoner of war who was going to die anyway. It wasn't the inclination to stay alive that should have been trusted; that tendency was tainted by guilt and the need to punish. It was the inclination to die that saved me, the tendency to release myself from all the entanglements of Brittany's death, the desperation to be delivered and the idea that I deserved it. That was the part to be honored.”

She reached for the laundry bag and opened it. “I mean, I don't think trying to commit suicide was the clearest decision of health, but I do think that the motives behind it were more healthy than the motives behind staying alive were.”

Lana wasn't sure how to respond.

Nadine continued. “I guess what I'm trying to say is that sometimes we make choices that on the outside everybody thinks they know what they mean, that they're self-destructive or sinful or hurtful.” She faced the younger woman. “But the truth is, they're just choices to keep people, maybe even our
selves, from seeing the real problem, the real reason we're self-destructive in the first place.” She turned away and arranged the clothes in the laundry bag, smoothing them down as she put them in article by article.

“My choices to attempt suicide and to do drugs seemed like sorrow to everybody who knew me. Everybody just assumed they were choices of grief. ‘Childless mother buckles under her bereavement.'” She said the last sentence like it was a newspaper headline, bold and heavy. “But nobody had a clue of how poisoned I was. Everyone, including me, underestimated the guilt.” She pushed the clothes down into the bag. She hesitated.

“I just know that there's always more in a person's life than what you see; situations are always messier than what you think. It's like walking into a house. It may be all neat in the front room, a wide open space dusted and swept, and you may think it's a clean place.” She tugged at the sides of the bag. “But until you've walked into all the rooms, you don't have a clue as to what you're dealing with. And there's something else,” she added as she yanked the cord at the top of the laundry bag, pulling it taut. “Everybody's got a little dirt somewhere. You may feel like you're the only one with trouble, the only one trying to hide a mess, but the truth is, we all got a few stains. Trust me, there ain't nobody spotless.” She tied the two ends of the laundry bag cord, making a giant bow. Just at that moment the washer in front of her stopped. Lana watched as Nadine opened
the lid and placed the contents into the basket that she had dropped at her feet.

The old man, who had been sitting by the window, had left his place and moved over to the dryer. He was pulling out his clothes when he lifted his chin at Lana as a sign that he was finished. She jumped down from her perch, and she and Nadine walked over toward that side of the Laundromat, where the dryers stood side by side against the wall.

“Don't they smell good?” the man asked as he held up a towel to Lana's face.

She was surprised at his request, but she dropped her face into the towel, smelling it.

“My wife used to put fabric softener in the wash, but now it's already included in the detergent,” he said as he began pulling his clothes out of the dryer. “She'd have liked that,” he said. “The most important thing to her was not how the laundry looked but how it smelled. That's how you tell clothes are clean,” he added.

Lana lifted her eyebrows at Nadine, who was busy checking the loads that the other employee had placed in the dryers. Two appliances were being emptied out. The woman who had needed change quickly threw her clothes in the first one available and dropped her coins in the slot and turned the dryer on. She returned to where she had been waiting. She was ironing men's shirts near the back, where customers could press and starch their clothes free of charge.

“There, it's all yours.” And the old man took his armful of
clean laundry, dropped it in his basket, and headed out the door. He was humming some church song.

Lana threw her clothes in and started the dryer. She would need to call the office and tell them she would be late. She searched around for a phone and saw one near the vending machines. She turned to go in that direction, and when she glanced out the window, noticing the diner across the street, she saw Roger coming out with a young woman. A student, Lana thought, and was surprised not to feel anything at what she saw.

She watched them as he held open the door, his eyes following the slender line of her body, the easy way she let him, and Lana was not angry. She simply observed, unattached, uninvolved.

He reached his arm around her; and the young, unknown woman sidled into the man. She opened for him like a flower. Lana turned away when they walked behind the diner, to his car parked on the side street. She went over, picked up the phone, and dialed her place of employment.

“Hey, Claudia,” she said to the other secretary in the front office of the bank where they worked. “The baby's sick again.” She swallowed, unsure of why she felt so calm. “I'm going to have to take her to the doctor.”

Then there was a brief exchange, including an apology, and she hung up the phone. Nadine had moved around her and was standing behind the counter. She had heard the conversation but asked nothing. She bent down and got some change out of her wallet and selected two candy bars from
the vending machine, offering one to Lana. She didn't say anything to the young wife and mother.

Lana started to explain, but instead she just took one of the chocolate bars, opened the wrapper, and headed back to the dryers. She jumped up and sat on the last washer, her legs dangling over the side.

Nadine came up behind her. She sat on the same machine, facing the front. “What are you going to do?” she finally asked.

Lana shrugged her shoulders. She watched as her clothes spun and twisted, bumping from end to end, side to side, falling and tumbling over themselves, changing before her eyes.

She thought of them as her indescribable feelings, the unspoiled love for her daughter, whom she knew she would never forgive herself for leaving, the tenderness she felt for Wallace, and the shame of the carelessness with which she had treated their marriage. Over and over, side to side, the love and the unworthiness and the longing and the disappointment bumped and collided and fell.

A piece of chocolate spilled onto her shirt. When she reached down to wipe it off, it smeared, causing a small blemish just on the left side of her chest. She dabbed at it a bit and then turned to Nadine. “You got anything for this?”

The other woman jumped from her seat and moved around until she was standing right in front of Lana. She lifted up her friend's shirt a bit from the bottom to study the
chocolate spill. “I've got just the thing for the stain on the outside.” She stared at the younger woman. “But if there's more than that, you'll need to talk to somebody else. I just clean the clothes.”

And Nadine turned and disappeared into the office, leaving Lana alone with her choices and the pieces of her heart.

I
t tastes a little like cinnamon.” Louise took the first sip of Kenyan tea that Jessie had brought back and was serving to the women.

“Yes, there's cinnamon in it,” Jessie responded as she walked into the den with a tray of English biscuits.

“What's it called again?” Beatrice asked as she smelled the top of her cup.

“Masala,” Jessie answered. “It has cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, cloves, and black pepper.”

“Black pepper?” Margaret asked. “I've never heard of putting black pepper in tea.” She took one of the cookies and sampled it.

“That's what's interesting,” Jessie responded as she sat down next to Louise, the tray placed in the center of the coffee table, the stack of photographs next to her feet. “I remember my grandmother putting pepper in tea. She used both black and red, claimed it had healing properties.” She picked up her cup and took a sip. “It's an African custom.”

Charlotte tasted the liquid. It was sweet and thick, almost medicinal. It coated her tongue.

“Here, put some milk in it.” Jessie reached over the table and gave Beatrice the cream pitcher.

Beatrice poured a little milk into her tea and took a swallow. She lifted her eyebrows as she brought the cup down to the saucer sitting in her lap. “So rich,” she reported. “Like that tea you get at the buffet at the Indian restaurant.”

Jessie nodded. “Yes, there are some of the same spices in both teas. I think it's the cloves that are the most noticeable.”

All the women took another sip, analyzing the tastes.

“So, tell us all about it.” Louise sat back in the sofa. “Was it everything you hoped?”

“More.” Jessie answered, picking up the first group of photographs. “It was like,” she stopped to think, “it was like some dream or the final leg of a pilgrimage.” She laid the photographs in her lap and took another sip. “It was a little like going home.”

The other women listened without comment. Beatrice remembered the postcard she had received and her thoughts about Tennessee.

“Except it wasn't exactly like that because I've never thought of myself as African. And it was real obvious that we were different from the people there. But,” she opened the envelope and pulled out the pictures. She looked at the first one, a shot of the village market. “There was just this sense of familiarity in the place, like part of me knew it.”

“Déjà vu!” Beatrice replied. “Lots of people get it when they go somewhere. It's an ordinary phenomenon.”

Louise turned toward her friend. “I don't think this is what Jessie is talking about. It's Africa, Beatrice. Africa?” She said the last word as a question, trying to push her friend along to understanding.

“Oh,” Beatrice responded, staring down into her cup of tea. She crossed her eyebrows in confusion.

“No, Lou, it was sort of like déjà vu, only deeper somehow.”

“I think I'd feel that way about Ireland.” Margaret wiped the crumbs off her mouth with a napkin. “My mother's mother was Irish.” As she named her, she thought of her grandmother, the distant memories that had never seemed to fade.

“I feel that way when I look at pictures of the Southwest, not the low desert so much as the high one.” Charlotte sat up in her seat. “New Mexico, mostly.”

Jessie faced her pastor. “Are your people from there?” she asked.

“I don't know. I don't think so,” she answered as she began tracing back her family's roots in her mind. “When I see a picture or read a story from there, there's just something about the way I feel, down deep, like in my bones, that somehow makes me think that's where I began.” She bit into a cookie.

“Could be a past life thing,” Beatrice said as she reached across the table for more milk. She thought about her recent readings of people who had realized their past lives, noting that they kept finding themselves repeating things as if their spirits were trying to get something right.

She thought about her husband's brother and sister-in-law, the secret now out between them. She wondered if this unannounced woman, a new daughter, was some karmic connection to the dead daughter, wondered if all of it was somehow related to a past life experience for one of them.

“You know, I never believed that stuff until this trip. I only thought a person carried around the genes of their parents, maybe the grandparents, but when I walked along those streets or when we drove out into the plains, I felt like I had a hundred family members or more watching from inside me.” She passed the group of photographs to Louise. “It was strange.”

“Were the native people nice to you and James?” Louise
examined the pictures and then passed them on to Margaret, who was sitting beside her.

“Some of them were. Some weren't.” Jessie picked up another stack and began flipping through them. “The connection wasn't so much with the people as it was with the land.” She gave that stack to Charlotte, who was sitting across from her.

“Well, what all did you do?” Margaret asked.

“Everything we planned.”

The women passed along the photographs, making comments about the sights, the beauty of the area, and the serene looks on the faces of their friend and her husband.

“We shopped, of course.” She got up and brought in a cloth bag with souvenirs in it. She began handing out gifts. “Mostly wood carvings, some soapstone figures, a few textile pieces.”

She handed Charlotte a statue, a large brown-and gold-faced woman connected to a base with five rings of bright colors painted around the bottom of the sculpture.

Charlotte held it and ran her fingers across it. The stone was smooth and heavy, the colors deep and vibrant. She faced Jessie, her expression a question mark.

“I bought it because she reminded me of you.”

The other women studied the object in their pastor's hands.

“Big headed?” Beatrice asked as a joke.

Charlotte smiled.

“No,” Jessie answered. “Strong with large eyes.”

The minister studied the gift.

“You see more than you let on.”

Charlotte kept her face down as she remembered her recent discussion with Peggy DuVaughn. The woman had not mentioned anything about Lamont or the people at church, but Charlotte had been able to tell that she had felt the animosity toward her grandson. Charlotte had wanted to apologize for the church members' behavior, but she hadn't known how. So they had muddled on in conversation without purpose or comfort.

“What's this?” Beatrice asked.

“It's a scarf,” Jessie answered as she walked behind her friend and tied the piece of brightly colored fabric around her head. Beatrice sat up, able to see herself in the window behind the sofa. She turned her head from side to side, admiring herself. “I look like a queen!” she responded.

“Exactly,” said Jessie.

Margaret pulled out tiny black elephants from a small paper bag. There were twelve of them, some larger than the others. She placed them on the table in front of her.

“It's a calendar,” Jessie said to Margaret. She knelt down in front of her and placed the elephants in a straight line. “You keep them turned to the front until the month passes, then you turn them this way, one elephant for every month.” And she began facing the elephants toward the wall. “I figured you have the deepest appreciation of time of all of us.”

Margaret smiled and continued spinning the elephants so that they were all facing forward.

Louise was the last one to unwrap her gift. It was a small basket made from long, thick blades of yellow grass. A small woven lid rested on top.

“It's a replica of the ones the African women carry on their heads.” Jessie took her seat. “You've always amazed me with what you keep balanced in here and in here.” She pointed to her chest and her head.

Louise turned the basket over in her hands. The strands of yellow and green grass were perfectly woven inside each other, a melding of strength and beauty. “Thank you,” she said.

There was a moment of silence as the women admired the gifts Jessie had brought them, each of them satisfied that she had handpicked the pieces, each of them enjoying the thought that their personalities had been considered and honored in their friend's purchases.

Charlotte put down her statue and picked up the pictures she had been examining and then turned to Jessie. She decided to ask the question. “Did you ever figure out what worried you so much, what caused your premonition?”

Jessie reached for a cookie, took a few bites, and then picked up her tea and drank the last of what she had poured for herself. She stared into the empty cup, trying to find the words to explain what she had asked herself almost daily for the month before they traveled.

She thought of how she felt when she left, burdened and fearful, how she almost canceled the trip, how James had constantly given her reassurances, but how they had not been enough to satisfy her.

“Yes,” she answered Charlotte. “I finally figured it out.” She dusted her lap, dropping small pieces of cookie onto the floor.

“At first, I thought it was going to have something to do with the two of us, that we'd be in a wreck or something.” She eased back in her chair, remembering how frightened she had been on the plane. “And then it became clear that it was something here, something at home.”

Margaret faced away from her friend and placed the elephants in a longer line, turning some toward the wall, pretending months had passed, wondering what Lana had decided.

Jessie answered Charlotte. “When we landed in Nairobi, as soon as we stepped off the plane and the hot, wet wind blew into us, the dust from the patch of land near the airport settling upon my lips and eyelids, I was okay. My spirit settled, my mind was focused, and my heart soared.” She dropped her hands beside her. “I knew when we arrived and I placed my feet upon the brown earth that something old was new, that it was the beginning of something I had wanted for a very long time. That it was a new day, a bright, clean new day.”

Charlotte kept her eyes on Jessie, remembering how Joyce would talk about starting over.

“It's strange, I know, but I had a sense that ultimately whatever was going to happen was going to happen whether I was here or not, that I couldn't control the fates of those I love. And that sometimes the best way to get clear, the best
way to find peace, is to pay attention to your own longings, listen to your own pulse.”

Charlotte turned away.

“I know that Lana and Wallace are having trouble,” Jessie said matter-of-factly. She faced Margaret, who lowered her eyes. “I know that marriage is tenuous at best.”

Beatrice thought of Dick and the secret they now shared together.

“I know that good health is a blessing and not a guarantee.”

Margaret nodded without lifting her head.

“That love, like grief, can never be measured.” She eyed Louise, who slid her fingers around the top of her basket and smiled.

“And that a woman's got to make her own way, figure out her own ideas, find her own measure of mercy.”

Charlotte thought of the members of her church and the cold, empty place in her spirit.

“And then, clear head or premonition, a woman's got to go find things out for herself.”

Jessie glanced around at the women who made her strong.

“But that's not really the truth,” she said. “None of those things were really what had me troubled.”

Charlotte set her eyes on Jessie, waiting for more.

“I didn't want to go to Africa because I was afraid that I would come home and blame you because of what my ancestors suffered.”

The other women were bewildered, unprepared for what Jessie was saying.

“I was afraid that the tiny but indestructible part of me that has bowed down to white folks all of my life, the part that was born in the wombs of their slaves, the part that has seen my parents whipped by them and my children cower to them, I was afraid that tiny cell of bitterness, traced through the bloodline of my people, would divide and multiply inside me, and that nothing that I have with you, nothing that I share with you, not my feelings of love or loyalty or friendship or history, would be enough to keep it from clouding up my memories and filling up my heart.”

She took a breath and went on.

“I was afraid that when I stepped off of the plane, the soles of my feet touching the soil of Africa, and landed on the place where we were born and knew as our home, the place we were stolen from, captured like animals and shipped here, I was afraid it would cause the feelings I had minimized and prayed over and held down for as long as I can remember to rise up, gather in my throat, and suffocate me.”

There was a pause.

“That's why I was afraid.”

The other women did not know how to respond. There was an uncomfortable silence as they struggled with an issue so strong and powerful that it threatened their friendship, an issue they could not dismantle, dissolve, or make disappear. They were suddenly painfully aware of the color of their skin, the thing that separated them.

Margaret turned the elephants around, all facing the front, a year unexpected. Beatrice gently put her cup and
saucer back on the table, having kept it balanced on her knee for most of the conversation. Louise opened the top of the basket and found inside a pale pink stone resting on the bottom, rose quartz, she knew, the heart stone.