Searching for Tina Turner (14 page)

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The parking lot outside the camera store overflows with cars and the men and women who rush in and out of them. Lena sits
inside her car watching people watch her rip the cellophane from the digital SLR camera she purchased minutes ago. Drizzle
collects on her windshield, blurs the sharp edges of the megastore’s grayish facade, the sky, and the people in a way she
would like to capture in pictures.

The chunky silver camera hides between layers of molded styrofoam, cardboard, plastic wrapped cables, a laminated quick reference
chart, a 1GB compact flash card, batteries, and quarter-inch-thick instruction booklets in Spanish, English, and Chinese,
all of which Lena tosses back into the limp plastic bag. She slips four batteries into the chamber. The camera emits an electronic,
susurrant whine. Lena rolls down the window and points to the huge electronics store.
Click.
Points to the sky.
Click.
Points to the little girl passing by pointing at her.
Click.
Turns the camera lens around to her own face.
Click.
Camera in hand like a newborn, she sets it back in its cardboard cradle on the passenger seat, turns on the ignition, and
backs out of the lot.

The city of Emeryville used to be an obscure industrial city on the edge of the entrance to the Bay Bridge. In the sixties
and seventies, the mudflats were blank canvases for artists and rebellious hippies from UC Berkeley to build wooden sculptures
and Vietnam protest signs in the slushy marshes alongside the freeway. Now the steel factories are gone, replaced with biotechnology
headquarters, a mall, and a movie complex; only the train tracks remain. Lena drives to an empty lot next to a new condo building
where anise grows wild, and the air smells of licorice.

Out of the car, into the street and the lot beside it. She takes the camera and snaps picture after picture.
Click.
The rusted iron tracks, the rocks and gravel, the feathery weeds between the jagged stones and splintered wooden ties, the
cracked brown beer bottle and discarded keychain beside it.
Click.
The back of an abandoned warehouse, its dock covered in graffiti, discarded grocery carts, the wrought iron gate of the condo
complex.
Click.
She shoots at every angle she can imagine: upward looking down, downward looking up.

She wishes that she had someone to hug and to hug her back, because she is so filled with the thrill of creating, the thrill
of knowing that this old love will be the foundation that roots her to herself, especially if Randall no longer will.

T
his lake in the middle of Oakland is only odd because it is not in the middle of the city. But that’s what Oaklanders say:
Lake Merritt is a lake in the middle of the city. Actually, Lena thinks, it’s kind of cool. Like the canals in Paris. Or Central
Park, if there is a lake in Central Park.

A photographer focuses his camera on a bride and groom in front of a pillar covered with rambling ivy. That is not the picture
she would shoot, Lena reflects, pleased that her old passion fulfills the possibilities of Vernon’s prediction. She would
pose the couple in front of one of the thick, gnarled trees near the western side of the lake to accentuate the opposites:
the couple’s loving intimacy and the bare-trunked tree’s solitude.

With both arms extended above her head, she leans to her left and the bushy-haired man with seventies-style headphones coming
her way. She prays he can’t hear himself sing, knows that James Brown never sounded so bad. Arms to the right and away from
the man who speed-walks in a kelly green Lycra bodysuit. If only her buns were that tight.

Most runners take the path to the right from this exact midpoint of the lake; there is the option of the higher cement sidewalk
or the lower dirt path. A tree-lined grassy knoll between the two paths is filled with twenty or more elderly Chinese men
and women in the midst of ancient Tai Chi moves. Lena begins a brisk trot behind a wizened couple holding hands. The gray-haired
man and woman move solidly up the tamped dirt path and step to the side at the crunch of Lena’s noisy gait. Today the lake
is beautiful, odorless, and clear, with none of the slimy algae that often turns its water brackish.

“I guess this
isn’t
the best time to get on your ass for not keeping in touch,” a loud voice calls from behind.

“You’re late.” Lena waits for the body of the familiar voice to catch up. She has told Cheryl more than once, over the forty
years they have known one another, that she will probably be late for her own funeral. “I guess this
is
the best time to say you haven’t done much to keep in touch your damned self.”

Lena rubs her hand over her friend’s gray-streaked hair. “You cut all your hair off.” Cheryl has been obsessed with her hair
since their college days. She went to the beauty salon two, sometimes three, times a week, despite persistent complaints that
she was short on cash. If Cheryl made special arrangements with their handsome hairdresser, Lena never asked what they were,
Cheryl’s hair—long, short, or in-between—always looked good.

“And you should do the same; it’s liberating.” Cheryl tugs at Lena’s stubby ponytail. “Us mature women don’t need all this
hair anymore. Short hair sets us free.”

“Leave it to you to fight for a fashion trend.” Cheryl is the medicine Lena needs. She would have called her old friend sooner
or later. Bobbie’s pushing made it sooner. Lena makes the sign of the cross over her heart when they pass the Church of the
Virgin Mary on the opposite side of the street.

“You don’t work and let yourself get all Suzy Homemaker conservative. Stop. Let me look at you.”

When she was in her twenties, Lena jogged the lake regularly. Her legs were her best asset then, and short shorts showed off
her trim thighs and molded calves. Lena pulls her pants up to her knees and flashes a quick grin, proving to Cheryl and a
chubby-cheeked man that they still are. “Looks are the least of my problems.” Lena continues along the path and motions for
Cheryl to follow.

“Let me guess. Mr. Spencer.”

“Something like that.” Lena picks up her pace as a light drizzle begins to fall; joggers speed past them. She pauses for Cheryl
to catch up. Back in the day, Cheryl ran faster than Lena, socially and athletically. “I want to take pictures again.”

“Photography is competitive. I’m not even sure how many black photographers are making money.” Cheryl speaks with the knowledge
and authority of fifteen years of representing emerging artists working in all kinds of mediums: acrylic, oil, organic and
recycled material, metal, and indigenous stone.

“Art can’t be subject to racial boundaries.” Lena snaps. She knows the
business
world is underhandedly racist—Randall’s battles, his struggle to get to the top, prove that.

Cheryl pokes a finger into Lena’s taut bicep. “It’s who, not what, you know that can keep some blacks from garnering the kind
of success that makes them the big bucks.” Cheryl lists the downside of photography: expensive equipment, darkroom time, or
the latest digital software. Finding galleries. Rejection, rejection, rejection. “What do you want to work for anyway? You’ve
got Randall.”

“Randall may not always be around,” Lena whispers.

“I knew it the minute you called.” Cheryl’s face reminds Lena of a person who has tasted something awful and wants desperately
to spit it out. “I could hear it in your voice.”

Lena points to a six-foot, multicolored sign and the giant heads of yellow and orange fantasy creatures visible through the
trees. “Our parents took us to Fairyland when we were little.”

“You didn’t call to reminisce.” Cheryl stops to retie her shoelaces and wipe sweat from her forehead with the terrycloth band
on her wrist. “Talk.”

It was Cheryl who listened when boyfriends dumped Lena, Cheryl who cried with her when Lena discovered she was pregnant with
Kendrick. Cheryl took her to the hospital when she suffered false labor pains, comforted her after John Henry’s first stroke,
listened when she had no one else to talk to about Camille’s temper tantrums. Cheryl knows most of the good and bad of Lena’s
life.

“Randall and I have separated.”

Cheryl yanks at Lena’s warm-up and embraces her friend. “You’re going to be all right, you know that, don’t you?”

Lena shakes her head no. “Oh, Cheryl, I’m so sorry for reconnecting like this. When I have a problem. I know I haven’t been
much of a friend. It’s just that Randall…”

Cheryl and Randall tolerated each other for Lena’s sake. Their common loyalty ended five years ago the evening Cheryl ran
upstairs after dinner to say goodnight to Kendrick and Camille and returned to the kitchen in time to hear Randall: “I need
more wine. This is the last time we entertain Cheryl. It takes three or four glasses just to put up with her loud clothes
and louder mouth.” Cheryl snatched her red cape and silver-studded handbag and told Randall, in a voice more earsplitting
than the one he had complained about, that she wouldn’t dignify his comment with a response, loud or otherwise.

“Good friends pick up where they left off without explanation. What do you need me to do?”

“We haven’t talked or decided anything. I’m worried about Kendrick and Camille.”

“I know you love them like they were still babies, but Kendrick and Camille are grown. You need to take care of yourself and
get a lawyer, because I know Randall will.”

“I don’t think he’d do that without talking to me first.”

“Ha! Randall didn’t get to where he is today by being timid or indecisive.”

On the dirt path in front of them, leggy, green-wing-tipped geese squawk exclamation points to their conversation. Lena speeds
up a small incline, stomps her feet at the top, and yields the right of way to a gaggle of the ubiquitous geese on the graveled
path. She sidesteps to her left and away from the bird droppings, and Cheryl steps with her. Any day, rows of downy ducklings
will waddle across this same path to the water’s edge. Spring has crept in; bougainvillea buds are fat and primed to burst
in sprays of red. Already several new mothers, waists thick with baby fat, determinedly push their newborns in three-wheeled
strollers to exercise away their pregnancy weight.

“I’ll help any way I can, but you knew that when you called. You could have told me outright about you and Randall. You didn’t
have to make up any excuses.”

“I’m embarrassed.”

“Girl, I knew you when you were still a virgin. Please. Divorce is simply another phase of life.”

“We’re not getting divorced.”

“You sure about that?”

Lena gives the only answer she can: a heavy-shouldered shrug.

Cheryl has had two husbands and no kids. Even though her marriages were short-lived—the first one twenty months, the second
three years—she once told Lena that marital bliss was an ideal state. Lena thought so, too. She kicks stones from the path,
stoops to pick one up, and tosses it at the geese, dispersing them in all directions. Don’t blame us, their squawks seem to
say, it’s not our fault.

“I missed you. We can hang out again, even though…” Cheryl waves her hands around her and stops at the promenade where they
started. “At our age you better think seriously before you step back into the single life.”

“What’s age got to do with it?”

“We’ve passed men, and not one of them has looked at us, said hello, or, God forbid, flirted. We’re in our fifties. We’re
invisible. And while I don’t give a damn about that, you might, if you were single.”

“I’m not the kind of woman that men have ever fallen over themselves for.” She snickers, her broad shoulders relax. Not fat.
Not skinny. Breasts Randall still calls, called, perky, hands without dark spots or lines. “I don’t care. Age is just a number,
right? At least that’s what you used to say when we were forty, and you hit on thirty-year-olds.”

“Still do!” Cheryl grins. “Just like you say art ignores color, I have to
believe
art, and possibly thirty-year-olds, ignore age. That said, do you really want to be single and start over in photography
or anything else at fifty-four? It’s going to take hours and hours, maybe years of hustle.” Cheryl looks Lena straight in
the eye. “Bottom line: is he really all that bad?”

“If I believed he was bad then I would have to question why I’ve been with him all these years. He’s not good or bad; he’s
Randall.” From the arches Lena catches a glimpse of the older couple outlined in the distance, they walk arm in arm now, their
pace steady and assured.

“Find another way to
find
yourself. I assume, unless he’s got someone on the side, that he loves you. So what if he doesn’t say it. He gives it, which
ain’t bad, sweetie. I could use a bit of loving like that myself. Go screw his brains out and tell him to come back home.”

“I wouldn’t do it because of the money.”

“(a) It’s your money, too. And (b) you’d better get a lawyer, because money, my dear friend, is what Randall is all about.
Call me when you’re ready; I’ve got tons of recommendations.”

T
he mail has collected in its metal box for six days. Camille stopped her daily trips to the mailbox after her early acceptance
letter from Columbia arrived. Her agreement letter went back twenty-four hours later. An oversized envelope stands out among
the business-sized ones, the catalogs, the magazines. TIDA’s blue and white logo, the label clearly inscribed in her full
name, Lena Harrison Spencer. After packs of coupons, credit card solicitations, and real estate brochures go straight into
the recycle bin, Lena trudges back to the house.

She clutches the envelope in her hands, turns it over once, then once more for a clue to its contents. In the six days since
she last saw Randall, they have not spoken. Through short, snippy emails, he told her that he would pick up the rest of his
clothes and some furniture as soon as he finds a place. Kendrick has shuttled Randall’s belongings and toiletries back and
forth between home, the corporate condo, and a hotel suite that Randall has taken in San Francisco.