Ugly Ways (25 page)

But Mudear did that regularly with her girls, said something so true, so insightful that it would fairly take their breath away in its indisputability. Even when it cut to the quick.

Where Betty's hair was thick and coarse, Annie Ruth's was just the opposite. Mudear called it "little t'in 't'in hair," then she laughed. It was baby fine and thin. Annie Ruth had done just about everything imaginable to her hair to thicken it up: henna rinses, falls, conditioners that claimed to leave a coating on each strand of hair, teasing, setting it with beer, body-building haircuts. Betty, who always loved to play in folks' hair even as a child and did all the Lovejoy women's hair from the time she was ten or so, started experimenting with her baby sister's hair when they were girls and she had never stopped. Lately, she and Annie Ruth had settled on a fluffy brown mass of short curls—some hers, some fake—that framed her face and complemented its oval shape. With her hair styled in curls, she looked younger than her already fake age, like a moppet. But in her harried condition before her plane trip back to Mulberry, Annie Ruth had forgotten her small hairpiece and had to make do with just her own thin hair. She knew that Betty could have picked up a hairpiece for her from one of her shops, but Annie Ruth felt Betty had enough to do without worrying about her hair.

Emily's hair style changed nearly every week. She had what Mudear called fast-growing hair. "Like dead folks," she said. Emily's hair and fingernails did seem to grow overnight. The manicurist at Lovejoy's i told her, "Miss Lady, I've seen lots of hands in my time, but I ain't never seen nails grow as fast as yours."

Every Saturday morning when she drove the two hours down to Mulberry for her standing eight-fifteen hair and nail appointment, she had no idea what she was going to look like when she drove back by noon. She liked that. It made her feel like the mutant she was. She changed to accommodate the men she dated, to appease her coworkers, to fit into her family.

Even more than her sisters, Emily was the family chameleon, changing with what was expected of her. She tried so hard to be whatever was asked of her that she routinely lost track of what she felt was the real Emily. Betty felt this was why her sister acted so crazy sometimes, it was what people expected of her. And her older sister had to routinely tell her, "Okay, Em-Em, come on now, come on back now."

But Emily had no intention of "coming back." She liked it out there on the edge of the ravine, the chasm between sanity and insanity. Even as she signed the checks for her regular appointments with her psychiatrist, she knew that she would allow herself to be helped to normalcy only so much. She felt at home down by the river at night smoking a joint and thinking about life and Mudear and how she was going to get this man, whoever he happened to be at the time, to marry her.

What I got to "come on back" to reality for? she'd ask herself. Even the edge of insanity felt safe to her compared to the chaos and loneliness she saw in her own life. Her reality was a steady government job, a garden apartment, a hair and manicure appointment every Saturday morning, and twenty extra pounds on her ass that she had to get rid of.

Actually, what she was seeking was a little peace, a little connection, and even though everything in her life—her upbringing, her family experiences, her own marriages, her sisters' lives, her mother—told her that in the arms of a man was the last place she would find it, she couldn't stop searching. Even her sisters said that Emily was looking for a man harder than anyone they knew.

"Girl, Emily looking for a man with a flashlight," Annie Ruth would say, even in front of Emily, with a sad chuckle.

Emily didn't take any chances. She never put a hat on her bed because she knew that meant a man would never sleep there. On New Year's Day, she made sure that the first person to walk in the house was a man for good luck. She always threw kisses at every red bird she saw so she would be assured of seeing her lover that day.

During the Gulf War she had even sent dozens of letters with her picture inside addressed to "An Officer and a Gentleman" to the front hoping to find a man in what she herself called a weakened state of war. She packed up care boxes with sunglasses, Girl Scout cookies, disposable razors, soap, suede work gloves, writing paper, and extra stamps and sent them off to Saudi Arabia with her hopes packed up in there, too. Her sisters were surprised when she got back a number of responses from the front. Most with photographs of healthy-looking young soldiers, black and white, so happy to have someone back home care about them as they faced death on the sandy battlefield. But after the conflict died down and the "boys" returned home, she never heard from any of them again.

Of the three girls, Emily was the most scarred by her quest to find happiness with a man. But she also had insight about relationships that seemed to evade her sisters.

The year before at Thanksgiving when all three of them had been together in Mulberry the last time, Emily had seemed especially down.

"Em-Em, what's the matter?" Betty asked as she pulled the giblets from the twenty-pound turkey and turned off the water that was running over the thirty pounds of chitterlings in the sink.

Emily shared her news.

"James Patrick got a man? James Patrick got a
man?
" Betty was dumbfounded.

"Not only does he have a man ... he married him."

"James Patrick got
married?
" Betty couldn't believe it.

"Not only did he get married. But the man left his wife to marry James."

"Left his
wife?
"

"Left his wife of thirteen years to marry James Patrick."

"Left his wife of
thirteen years?
"

"Left his wife to marry James in a church ceremony."

"Shit, did he wear white?"

Emily just silently handed over the Polaroid.

"Damn," Annie Ruth said. "He look good, too."

"You know," Emily said finally, taking the photograph back and dropping it in her purse, "maybe we can leam something from gay men."

"Like...?" Betty wanted to know.

"Well, I haven't completely figured that out yet, but knowing James has made me see it's more than one man just wanting another man. You know, I've been working with James for five or six years and I've been watching him."

"Hell, that shows what a sad state black women have come to in this world that now we got to watch gay men to get pointers in getting men," Betty said shaking her head.

"Well, like Mudear say, 'Keep living, daughter,'" Annie Ruth reminded her.

"Anyway, I would see him at work every day and he would have
men
coming 'round all the time to see him and ask after him."

"That just goes to show you how few straight men there are out there for us to have," Betty said.

"Yeah, that, too. But it's something else."

"Like what?" they both wanted to know.

"Well, I think it's the way he lives his life that attracts men rather than how he has sex. I mean if it all had to do with how good you are at sucking dick, then none of us would have any problem. James Patrick has a real joy in his life, in the way he lives it, in knowing who he is and what he is and not just accepting it. But reveling in it. I mean, how many women do you know who live their lives like that?

"God, James Patrick can make his lunch break into an event, an intriguing interlude. He'll run to the bank at lunchtime and come back smiling. And I'll say, 'James, what you smiling about?' And he'll say, 'Oh, I just met this guy.' And I'll say, 'In the last fifteen
minutes?'
And he'll lay the whole thing out for me.

"'Well, I was in a real hurry, you know, 'cause I only had a few minutes, so I cut through the MARTA train station at the corner to save time and I passed this guy in this real nice-looking suit, and after I passed him, I turned around to look at him and he was turned around looking at me and I said, "Don't I know you?" and he said, "Don't I know
you?
" So, he walked to the bank with me and we had a nice conversation.'

"Then, James Patrick just looked at me and smiled. Annie Ruth, Betty, he was just glowing!"

"Oh, Emily, you talking crazy. You know as well as I do that in this world we live in it's close to suicide to just strike up a conversation with some strange man on the street. In the first place, most of them don't want a pleasant exchange, they just want to say something mean and degrading to a black woman. And second, you don't know what kind of psycho you might pick up, to say nothing of what else you might pick up in the process. Hell, that's what got James Patrick and his friends dying all over the place now," Betty said.

"Well, Betty, you know gay men ain't the only ones dying from AIDS, we black women right behind 'em. But you are right about the ugliness that black men always greet black women with," Annie Ruth said.

"Now, I don't know who James fucking, other than his 'husband' now, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm just talking about a pleasant unplanned encounter in the middle of the day. Seeing a good-looking good-smelling man and smiling at him and having him smile at you..."

"Come on back, Em-Em," Betty said chuckling. "Now, you know as well as I do that that ain't even the way black men and women deal with each other. I mean when's the last time you had one of those spontaneous sweet meetings in the street?"

"I know, that's just what I mean. When did we let it get that way between us, when did we let it get that way? That we so angry and hateful with each other that we can't even speak on the street anymore? What made us let it get that way between black men and women? Isn't that something we ought to be thinking about?"

"What makes you think
we
let it get that way, that our generation let it come to that? My God, look at Poppa and Mudear. We didn't invent this internecine bloodletting," Annie Ruth said.

"Yeah," Emily admitted. "But we sure as hell seem to have perfected it."

"Oh, what you complaining 'bout, Annie Ruth, you always got a bunch of men," Betty had said. "Right now, there's Delbert, the record executive, Edwin, the college professor, Rick, the technician from the TV station, Hank, the musician, Steve, the bum-slash-screenwriter..."

"Yeah, but you know I think most of the men I see want me 'cause they know everybody sees me on TV. I can just imagine most of them sitting in front of the television at ten telling their buddies, 'Had her.' Maybe I'm being unfair, but ain't none of them nothing I want. Don't none of them really please me. You know what I mean?"

"Yeah, I do. I been seeing Stan off and on for more than ten years. And I guess we get along okay. We used to each other. That's the best I can say. And that ain't saying nothing. But you know there ain't much to pick from here in Mulberry ... or anywhere for that matter."

"At least, ya'll got somebody to complain about," Emily said sadly.

"I don't know," Betty said. "At the Christmas party last year, Stan was there laughing and talking and being charming, and two women behind me said, 'Look at him,' meaning Stan. 'He done had every woman in this room.' Then, the other woman said, 'Present company included?' And they both just left the room laughing.

"And it's the truth. I know that. Later on that night, I walked into the back room. Stan was on the phone. Before he saw me standing there, I heard him saying, 'Merry Christmas, baby.'

"And he even got the nerve not to go in for an AIDS test. The biggest fight we ever had was about him using a condom. Says he knows how to take care of himself, he been out there too long to make the wrong decision about a woman. Like he can look at somebody and tell if they HIV positive."

"But Betty, you and Emily know as well as I do that we all just playing a slowed-down game of Russian roulette with our bodies," Annie Ruth said. She had a resigned sound to her voice. "I mean what does safe sex mean to people who have been fucking just who they want for the last fifteen or twenty years? What's a condom gonna do for the past?"

"Maybe it's like Mudear says," offered Emily, who had carried condoms in her purse since high school. "'When you dead you done, so let the good times roll.'"

When the car fell silent, Betty looked in the rearview mirror at Emily.

"Emily," Betty said suddenly, noticing her sister in the backseat rhythmically bouncing her left breast in her right hand. "Do you realize you always clutch your titty when you're thinking or worried? Do you do that out in public, too?"

Emily stopped rocking and looked down at her breast in her hand. She looked up and smiled sheepishly at her sisters.

"Yeah, I guess I do. I catch myself doing it at the most embarrassing places. Standing in line at the post office, waiting for the Xerox machine to warm up..."

"I bet the guys in your office love to see you think!"

Emily bit her lip and shrugged. Then, she glanced down at her breasts again.

"I was talking once to some women at work," Emily said. "One of them, Regina, you remember her, came to work looking like she hadn't gotten a wink of sleep, when I asked her what was wrong, she said, 'Girl, I was up all night talking to my mama. I don't know what I'm gonna do.'

"So naturally, I said, 'I know how mamas can be. What she bothering you about?'

"Regina said, surprised like, '
Mama's
not bothering me about anything. That's why I called
her
to try to help me out of this mess.'

"I guess I looked funny at her because she said, 'Emily, you know my mother makes me as crazy as everybody's mother does. But you know how it is when you need a little comfort, who else can you turn to but your mama. You know.'

"I still didn't have anything to say to that.

"So she said, 'Come on, Emily, who do
you
go to when you need a little tit? When you need to suck on a tit for a while, when you need to cry in somebody's arms?'

"'I called my sisters,' I told her.

"By this time, the other women standing around were looking at me funny, too.

"'You mean, when you really need that mother comfort, that tit, you call your sisters over your mother?' one of the other women in the office said, shocked like.