Red Light Wives (12 page)

I
don't why, but I had a strange feeling about that Lula. There was something about her that gave me the creeps. I
knew
she was going to be trouble. Not just to Clyde, but the rest of us, too. She gave me odd looks when I tried to get more information from her about herself.

Nowadays, I wanted to know as much as I could about the people I had to deal with. I didn't trust too many people anymore, and if I was smart, I never would again. I had trusted Joe Harper, and he'd made a fool out of me.

Mama—like she would know—had tried to warn me about Joe when I first brought him home. I was seventeen; Joe was twenty-eight.

“Rocky, that man is goin' to make a fool out of you,” she told me so many years ago. “You need to finish school, get a job, and find you a real man.”

“Like you did?” I shot back, rolling my eyes at Mama as she stumbled around the tacky living room in the tacky apartment we lived in in the projects.

“No, I want you to do better than I did. I didn't have no choice. When I got pregnant with you, my daddy made Booker marry me. I knew it was goin' to be rough and I wasn't goin' to be happy. When your brothers came, I knew I was stuck with Booker and livin' in this flophouse for life. But your daddy is a good man, and I love him.”

I hated living in the projects. I deserved so much more. I couldn't stand to look at my daddy in his filthy janitor's work clothes and Mama with her greasy aprons and limp hair. Her hands seemed to be covered with flour or grease all the time—even when she wasn't cooking up one of her pecan pies or frying a slimy-ass catfish. And I was way too embarrassed to invite my friends to our apartment. I didn't want them to see how much damage poverty could do.

Daddy had divorced Mama before I was born. Her own mama and the rest of her family lived in a pigsty in Fresno, so she couldn't get any help from them. She had no choice but to go on welfare.

When things didn't go the way Daddy thought they would, he moved back in with Mama when I was two. And Mama being the fool she was, let him get her pregnant two more times. When we moved from our first apartment into one that Section Eight covered, you would have thought that we had all died and gone to Heaven the way Mama carried on. I couldn't understand how a woman could be so happy with so little.

“We are truly blessed,” Mama insisted, while at the same time the people in our neighborhood were killing and robbing one another on a regular basis.

I refused to babysit for my younger brothers when Mama had to leave the house. But I still ended up doing other things that I didn't want to do. Like going to buy groceries with food stamps! I thought I would die that time when Gail Hawthorne, the biggest snob I knew, walked into a Safeway supermarket and caught me paying for some generic items with food stamps. Her daddy was a lawyer and she was the one girl in my school with whom I went out of my way to try and be friends. I was willing to do whatever it took to make myself look like I had some class. Reading a lot of books and watching educational programs on television helped me a lot. My looks and intelligence were the only things I had to fall back on. I looked at that as my ticket to a better life. I had even forced myself to speak better than the ignorant people who lived in my depressing neighborhood.

“Rocky Nicholson, is that you?” Gail asked, her big brown eyes blinking at the food stamps in my hand. “What you doin' with Monopoly money?” Standing there in her designer jeans, so new and expensive the crease was still in the legs, Gail narrowed her eyes and gave me a look that made my skin crawl.

“Oh, hi. Uh, these are food stamps,” I said lamely, balling those damn things up in my sweaty hand. I could not have been more disgusted if I'd been clutching a cow's tongue. There was a grocery store closer to our apartment, but I'd walked eight blocks to the Safeway located in Gail's neighborhood.

“Food stamps!” Gail made the words sound like profanity. “What you doin' with food stamps?” An amused look appeared on her face.

“I was, uh, doing a favor for this old lady who lives next door to us. She's all crippled up with arthritis and can't do her own grocery shopping,” I lied.

“Yeeow! I wouldn't be caught buyin' stuff with food stamps—for nobody!” Gail exclaimed, giving me a smug look. “Well, if you got a lot of stuff to carry home, I'll help you. That way I'll know where you live.”

I almost swallowed my tongue trying to get the words out so fast. “That's all right! Uh, my mama's real sick and I can't have no company.” I almost peed on myself. I hurried out of that store as fast as I could, hoping that Gail had believed my lie about the arthritic old woman. She must have, because eventually we started hanging out together, but just at school and her house. There was no way in hell I was going to let a lawyer's daughter see the way I really lived.

My brothers were just as much of an embarrassment as my parents. Carl, three years younger than me, was a slow learner and was in a special class. The one that all of the other kids made fun of. Sid, who was four years younger than me, was a wannabe thug. He hung out with the roughest kids he could find. I didn't have to worry about him embarrassing me in school because he'd dropped out in the eighth grade. And on top of all that, both of my brothers were fiercely ugly. They had real dark skin, and hair so nappy it looked like they had barbed wire on their heads. I didn't even want them touching me.

“Girl, you need to get up off that high horse you been ridin' all your life. You ain't no better than the rest of us,” Sid snarled. He was mad because I'd covered a chair that he'd just got up from with some newspaper before I'd sit on it.

“Well, I
know
I'm better than your Black ass. I can't wait to get out of school so I can get away from all of this mess,” I yelled, waving my hand around the room. Mama trotted out of our forever smoky kitchen and stood in the living room doorway, looking as tired, old, and greasy as ever. She spent a good deal of her time breaking up fights and arguments between my brothers and me.

“There's a lot of folks got a lot more than what we got, and they ain't half as uppity as you. I don't know who you got your ways from, but it sure wasn't from me or your daddy,” Mama told me, shaking a greasy spoon at me.

“And you expect me to be happy? What's wrong with wanting something better than what we have now?” I shot back. “You and Daddy are so ignorant, you never even tried to go back to school or get better jobs. There is no excuse for anybody to get on welfare and stay on it these days,” I wailed. My voice was shaking so hard it sounded like I was singing.

“If you don't like the way things is here, you can leave now. You ain't got to wait 'til you turn eighteen.”

I knew that Mama didn't mean what she said by the weakness in her voice and the tears in her eyes. But I challenged her anyway.

“You don't think I'll go?” I asked.

“If you wanna go…so,” she muttered, looking away. “I'm too tired to stop you, and I'm tired of tryin' to make you happy.”

“And I plan to. Joe said I could work at his gas station and he'd pay me under the table so I wouldn't have to pay taxes,” I announced.

“Well, you go right ahead, Miss Rocky-
feller
. You got so much class, you want to up and run off to work in a greasy fillin' station that gets robbed once a month, and work under the table. That's real class,” Sid scoffed, folding his arms. His anger made him look even darker and uglier.

I looked at Mama. Sweat was dripping off her face onto her gummy blouse. Her long, flat breasts hung down her chest and stomach like a second pair of arms. She sighed and gave me a look I could only describe as hopeless. “Girl, Joe Harper done already gone through a dozen women that I know about. And accordin' to his own mama, the courts in three states is lookin' for him so they can collect back child support for God knows how many babies he done made.” Mama started walking back to the kitchen with me right behind her, almost stepping on the heels of her ashy bare feet.

“I don't care about none of that. That's Joe's business. He loves me and wants me to work for him, and I plan to. If I'm lucky, he'll eventually marry me,” I snarled, with the fingers on both of my hands crossed.

Mama whirled around and shook her spoon at me again. Sid had followed us to the kitchen and was standing in a corner snickering.

“Rockelle, Joe Harper ain't nothin' but a shady fool that ain't good at nothin' but makin' babies. Is that the kind of man you want?” Mama asked with a snort.

“It was good enough for you!” I hollered, immediately wishing I could take my words back. I'd never seen my mother look as sad and hurt as she looked at that moment. But I didn't want her to know how I felt, thinking that she would see me as being weak. Like her. “Joe takes care of his business.”

“And overchargin' folks for gas is one of 'em,” Sid said, smirking.

I gave Sid an evil look, talking with my teeth clenched. “Well, at least Joe would make some pretty babies. I wouldn't be stuck with a bunch of dog-faced monkeys like—” Mama cut me off by slapping my face.

“You don't look so hot yourself now. That yellow skin can only get you so far,” Mama said in a gentle voice I rarely heard, looking at her hands, turning them over twice. It was as if she couldn't believe how bad they looked. She'd gotten darker over the years, but she was still almost light enough to pass for white. “And just 'cause you and Joe both got light skin, that don't mean your kids'll turn out that way.”

“You let me and Joe worry about that,” I snapped, rubbing the spot on my face where she'd slapped me. I couldn't wait to call up Joe to beg him to come get me. I only had two months to go before graduation, but I couldn't stand one more night in the same house with my family. I attempted to leave the room. Mama grabbed my arm and spun me back around. Except for when I was a toddler, I'd never been this close to her body. It was only then that I noticed just how many wrinkles she had on her face and how deep they were.

“Rockelle, I done the best I could with you and your brothers. It wasn't much, but it was the best I could do. I don't like the way you behave toward us, never did. Even when you was a little bitty girl, you had a real nasty attitude. I thought that you would mellow out as you got older. I see now I was wrong. But I am your mother, and I do love you. No matter how bad you treat me, that ain't goin' to change.”

I pulled away and started walking toward the congested bedroom I shared with my brothers. We had only two bedrooms. Mama shared the smaller one with Daddy. I glimpsed him sitting on the side of his unmade bed. It was the middle of the day and he was still in his pajamas. He and I rarely interacted. We could go for days without speaking. I had never forgiven him for leaving Mama in the first place. He flashed the gold tooth in the front of his mouth that I hated so much. Daddy avoided confrontations by spending most of his time in the bedroom watching the hot television set that he'd purchased from some thug on the street.

The room I shared with my brothers was divided by a thin sheet hanging from a rope. No matter how much I sprayed that foul-smelling room with Glade, I couldn't get rid of the lingering, unholy stench of my brothers' frequent farts and filthy tennis shoes. I kept the window above my sorry bed open at all times, but it didn't do much good.

“I bet one thing,” I said over my shoulder as I plopped down hard on the lumpy rollaway, tossing a soiled jockstrap off my bed to the floor, “when I have a daughter, she won't have to live the way I do.”

Mama had followed me. She stood in the doorway, wiping off sweat that always seemed to be on her face. She looked at me with eyes so weary, I wondered how she was able to keep them open.

“When and if you do ever have a daughter, I hope you have one just like you, Rocky. Then you'll know the kind of pain you caused me.”

That was the last thing Mama said to me that day. The next day I moved in with Joe Harper. That weekend I started working the cash register part-time at the service station he managed. Things were looking up for me.

 

My arrangement with Joe came with a high price. Sure, I had to fuck him that same night I moved in with him. And it was hard to think of Joe as being romantic with his buckteeth. But even though I was a virgin and didn't know shit about sex, I enjoyed it. I just wanted to be with somebody who had more ambition than my parents. All I had ever wanted was a better life and I didn't care how I got it.

As soon as I graduated, I started working full-time for Joe. When I got pregnant with Juliet, I gained fifty pounds in less than three months. But I was still happier than I'd been living with my crude family. However, my happiness was weak, and it got weaker by the day. Joe had a lot of friends, and he liked to spend time with them, usually without me “breathing down his neck.” There were times when he came home with another woman's perfume on his body, but I let that slide. It was enough to have him come home to me.

“You need to learn how to cook better if you want me to come home for dinner more often,” Joe told me as he tossed a scorched pork chop into the trash. “And another thing,
big mama
, you need to pay Jenny Craig a few visits.” The look on his face made me feel as big as a moose.

As insensitive as Joe was, he had some good qualities. He was generous with his money. “As long as you pay the bills, I don't care what you spend my money on,” he told me. He doled out thousands of dollars at a time.

To keep my mind off Joe and his outside activities, I shopped with a vengeance. I bought unnecessary knickknacks for the house and clothes I didn't need. And I spent tons of money every month at Marcus Books, the premiere Black-owned bookstore in the Bay Area. Even when I went in just to browse, the sister who ran the place, Blanche Richardson, always had a shipment of new books that I couldn't leave the store without. The characters created by E. Lynn Harris, Carl Weber, Eric Jerome Dickey, and all the other African-American authors had become my new best friends. I always enjoyed reading. When I'd lived with my family, it had been the only way I could truly escape. Now I had to do the same thing with Joe.