God Don't Play (11 page)

CHAPTER 23

W
hat Jade had said about people laughing at me didn’t really faze me that much. A lot of people had said a lot of stupid shit about me, and to me. Some had even been brazen enough to say it to my face. I had been used to it for a long time. However, mean and nasty comments still hurt, but I got over it all a lot easier and sooner than I had when I was younger.

I had a lot more going for me than some of the people who took it upon themselves to criticize me. My job as a supervisor at a respectable company was one of the many things that I had going for me. Despite the negativity that I had to deal with, I still felt blessed.

There was only one other enclosed office at Mizelle’s. Our bookkeeper shared that cramped little fishbowl with a wall of files and Mr. Mizelle, my boss, when he visited. And that wasn’t very often. It was a privilege for me to have an office all to myself when the other employees had to work in tacky little back-to-back cubicles. The four cubicles along the wall had windows, and those cubicles were almost as coveted as my office.

My promotion had included a cash bonus of three thousand dollars that I had used to buy myself some new office furniture. The company had a budget that covered furniture, office supplies, and a few other miscellaneous items, but the company didn’t want to pay for what I wanted. I got myself a large red oak desk with a matching file cabinet. I even purchased some ethnic artwork for my walls. I loved plants but I didn’t have much luck with them. I had to replace the plants in my house on a regular basis because I couldn’t keep them healthy and looking good. I did the same thing at the office. A large, framed grinning portrait of me, Pee Wee, and Charlotte was the only photograph that I had on top of my desk, even though we took pictures all the time.

I removed the latest issue of
Ebony
magazine from the top drawer on the side of my desk. After I glanced at the table of contents and didn’t see anything I was anxious to read about, I dropped it back in the drawer. As much as I liked to read, women’s magazines especially, I hadn’t done much reading in the last couple of weeks. It angered me to know that the person who had chosen to harass me had caused me to make so many changes in my routine.

I rolled my chair around just far enough so that I could look out the window behind my desk. There was not much of a view: just the side of another dreary gray building and a few naked trees. Fallen leaves covered the ground like a thin brown blanket with jagged edges. I leaned forward toward the window so I could see the corner of the Chinese restaurant where Jade and I often ate lunch. Despite the fact that there was nothing that interesting to see, I sat and stared out my office window.

I sat there wondering if I would ever find out the identity of the woman who had targeted me. But then I had to ask myself: what good would it do me to find that out? My instincts now told me that it probably wasn’t Gloria Watson. She had not done anything out of the ordinary that I was aware of. But I didn’t want to rule her out. I let out a sigh that was so strong it fogged up part of the window, forming a large, steamy
O
.

I lost track of the time so I don’t know how long I sat in the swivel chair behind my desk, as stiff and mute as a statue. When I finally stood up, my legs almost folded. My head was spinning and I couldn’t understand why I was so dizzy. I decided that I was going through some kind of an aftershock and my body and mind had to readjust. That little note, the blacksnake, and the telephone calls had done a lot of damage to me. And I knew that it would all stay on my mind for a long time to come.

Just before noon I decided to leave the building. I walked briskly past the cubicles near my office, flipping a folder in my hand. I looked busy and in a hurry and that’s the way I wanted to look. I didn’t even want to talk to anybody unless I had to. My workers were pretty independent and reliable. I knew that they did what they had to do without me breathing down their necks.

With my purse swinging off my arm like a pendulum, and my legs aching like I’d been kicked, I trotted the one block down the street from our office to McDonald’s. I was so preoccupied, I crossed the busy street without looking both ways for traffic, and an eighteen-wheeler missed mowing me down by just a few inches.

That incident was responsible for my stomach feeling something other than hunger pains. I decided to not pick up the three Big Macs that I had planned to eat for lunch because I had to stand in the order line for so long that by the time I got up to the counter to give my order I had lost my appetite. I was annoyed because I had wasted twenty minutes of my lunch hour.

“I don’t want to order anything. I keep forgetting that I’m on a diet,” I told the young girl behind the counter with a sheepish grin on my face, my chin tucked in.

“I don’t blame you,” the girl hollered, with a frown on her face as her heavily made-up eyes roamed all over me as I turned to walk away. Her reaction made me feel twice as big as I really was. I waddled to the restroom, sucking in a stomach that wasn’t going anywhere.

Before I left the restroom, I looked at myself in the full-length mirror on the wall, raking my fingers through my hair. I was horrified at what I saw. I had left home without putting on any makeup and my hair looked like I’d been flying. The buttons on my blouse were buttoned wrong. I had on a flowered blouse and a plaid skirt. I looked like a humongous piñata. I wondered why Jade hadn’t also commented on my attire. Realizing how tacky I looked, I was afraid to go back out in public. But I did. I couldn’t have felt more uncomfortable walking back to work if I’d been naked.

People gave me the usual looks of disgust that they gave other obese people, but my weight was their problem. I had stopped obsessing about it a long time ago. Diets didn’t work for me, my doctor said I was in good health for a woman my size and age, and my handsome husband couldn’t keep his hands off me. I knew that Jade and Rhoda, both being a size four, thought that being slim was the greatest thing in the world. They suffered a lot to remain thin. Three years ago when Rhoda returned from a cruise eight pounds heavier, she fasted on water and juice until she got back to her normal weight, which took three whole weeks. The fast had almost killed her, but to a person as vain as Rhoda, it must have been worth it.

I didn’t envy Jade and Rhoda for their beauty. If anything I felt sorry for them. Especially Rhoda.

In Rhoda’s case, nature had given her a lot. But it had taken much more away from her.

CHAPTER 24

I
was thankful that nature had not chosen to disrupt my good health, so far. I was obese, there was no doubt about that. But that was an affliction that I could have controlled better, had I tried. When I compared my health to Rhoda’s, I decided that I was the lucky one after all.

Unlike Rhoda, I had never really been sick or incapacitated a day of my life. Death had even come knocking on her door; lucky for her she was too sick to open that door and she’d escaped death that time.

Even though she was still an extremely beautiful woman, Rhoda’s deterioration had begun right after she had given birth to Jade. Breast cancer had claimed both of her breasts, but she had learned to live with that disfigurement. She wore clothing that hid it so well, even I didn’t know until she told me. But that was just the beginning.

About ten years ago she suffered a stroke that had almost killed her. Of all the places on her body to be affected, it had to be her beautiful face. To a vain person like Rhoda, that was as good as a death sentence. For several months one side of her face was so contorted that she’d looked like a leering gargoyle. She also had some paralysis and speech problems. After two intense years of physical therapy, she recovered. At least on the outside. Her face resumed its original appearance, but for several years after, her left eye wouldn’t close and tears streamed from it at the most inconvenient times.

“I finally got my husband to fuck me after a two-year dry spell and right in the middle of it, my damn eye up and starts floodin’ like Niagara Falls,” Rhoda complained. Rhoda’s marriage suffered, to say the least. She and Otis would go for weeks at a time not speaking to each other.

But Rhoda’s marital problems had started long before her physical problems, so she couldn’t get any mileage out of that. Time had not healed the wounds in Rhoda’s marriage. In some ways she and Otis lived separate lives. They were more like roommates than husband and wife. It pleased me on the occasions when they showed some affection toward one another, but they were rare.

Before Rhoda’s stroke, right after giving birth to her first child, Rhoda gained a lot of weight and had a hard time losing it. Her husband had found her repulsive, and started to ignore her in the bedroom. But some men found Rhoda’s weight gain attractive.

The man who had found Rhoda most attractive was her husband’s best friend, Bully. For several weeks they had fucked the hell out of each other—once even in the same bed where she slept with Otis. Rhoda had told me all of that out of her own mouth.

After Bully had moved on and married some English woman, Rhoda discovered she was pregnant with his baby. Since Otis had not touched her in months, she knew that if she wanted to save her marriage she had to come up with a plan. She got Otis drunk and dragged him to bed. When he woke up the next morning naked, she was in his arms. Self-inflicted scratches on her thighs had convinced Otis that he had made love to her. She’d even scolded him for being so rough.

A month later when Rhoda told Otis she was pregnant, he was jubilant. By then she had lost most of the weight from the first baby, but he professed that he didn’t care how much she gained this time. She gave birth to her second son and regained her original figure in no time, with the help of an aggressive and expensive personal trainer. Her marriage was wonderful again. But Rhoda’s bliss was short-lived.

Things fell apart again when the little boy died shortly after his birth. Rhoda was devastated. She then seduced Otis several times a day until she got pregnant with Jade. When the cancer claimed Rhoda’s breasts she fell into a bottomless pit of depression. Otis didn’t neglect her this time, but she neglected him, and that drove her husband into the arms of another woman.

They had worked through their problems and managed to stay together for the sake of Jade and her older brother, Julian. Jade was almost grown now and Julian was on his own. The marriage that Rhoda and Otis had now was more like a relationship of convenience, a sham and a shame. I didn’t know what Otis did on his own, but Rhoda was as busy as a bee.

Even though Rhoda avoided the subject, I had a feeling that she and Bully had resumed their affair, right up under Otis’s nose.

Since Bully had come to town, Rhoda paid even more attention to Jade. But something told me that that was just a smoke screen. Even if it was, Jade was still the center of Rhoda’s universe. As far as Rhoda was concerned, Jade could do no wrong. But I knew things about Jade that I didn’t want to know. Things that I had promised myself I would keep from Rhoda for as long as I could.

Rhoda often bragged about how Jade would continue to be a virgin until she got married. Well, unless Jade knew how to perform a miracle, being a virgin on her wedding night would be impossible. I didn’t have the heart to tell Rhoda that Jade spent more time on her back than a quadriplegic does. Like so many other young girls hot between their legs, Jade regarded sex as a pastime. Like hanging out at the mall with her friends or getting one of her weekly egg facials.

“Auntie, I love tall boys to death. They make the best lovers,” Jade had swooned to me a couple of years ago in my living room during one of her frequent visits.

“Girl, you’d better leave those tall boys alone if that’s all they are good for. Sex is at the root of a lot of society’s problems. It’s even a crime in some situations,” I said, recalling the many rapes I had endured at the hands of Mr. Boatwright.

“Oh, not getting sex ought to be a crime,” Jade laughed.

I dismissed Jade and her comments, and forgot all about that conversation until I received a frantic call from her, begging me to come give her a ride home from the Rolly Stark clinic where she’d just had an abortion. She was fifteen at the time.

“Auntie, you have to come get me! Paulie got scared and left me here at the clinic by myself!” Jade had sobbed.

“And what did you go to the clinic for?” I asked, glad I was home alone so I wouldn’t have to explain anything to Pee Wee about Jade, once I found out what she needed to explain to me.

“Uh…I…I found out last week that I was a little pregnant. Remember that party you dropped me off at a couple of months ago at Lolly Hawk’s house? Well, something happened to me that night, but I didn’t expect to get pregnant! Shoot—I just wanted to have some fun! Honest to God. Me and Paulie don’t want really want a baby right now,” Jade told me. She broke down and cried for two minutes straight before I could speak again.

“Does your mother know about this?” I asked in as calm a voice as I could manage. This was the most stunning piece of information that Jade had ever shared with me. I couldn’t believe my ears as she told me the whole story.

The baby’s father, a boy who still walked around with a snotty nose and who hung out in the neighborhood on his bike, had become nervous in the waiting room. He had left in such a hurry that he’d left behind one of his shoes. This was a boyfriend that Jade had kept a secret from everybody, including me. The boy didn’t even have a driver’s license or a car, so he and Jade had planned for him to escort her in a cab to
my house
where she could recooperate from her abortion. This had been planned without my knowledge or consent. Now I was sorry that I had given Jade a key to my house.

The whole situation stressed me out from the beginning to the end. But the thing that seemed to bother Jade the most was the fact that she had been brought to my house in a cab. Like buses, dollar stores, and food stamps, cabs were on a long list of things that Jade didn’t tolerate.

With my support, she got through that traumatic experience intact. But as soon as she was up and about, she slid into a series of affairs with several other boys, some in college. That was all done behind her mother’s back, but in my face. It made me feel like I was more than just a conspirator. I felt somewhat responsible for what Jade did, because I didn’t do much to prevent her from doing it. The few times I did try to interfere, Jade wasted no time reminding me, “You are not my mother! You can’t tell me what to do!”

I loved Jade with all my heart, but I was glad she wasn’t my daughter. I predicted that one day she would break Rhoda’s heart clean in two.

I didn’t like Jade dragging me into her sordid lifestyle. One of my fears was that if and when Rhoda found out that I had been cloaking for her daughter, she would read me the riot act. And she had every right to. But since I’d given Jade a job, she had been behaving herself quite well and I was proud of her again.