I nodded as though I understood this, but the picture made me feel a sort of roaming sadness in my stomach. I wondered how James decorated his private spaces. He wasn’t a back-to-Africa man, so I knew he wouldn’t look at naked women with nappy hair. Maybe his fantasy women would sprawl on the hoods of limousines. Maybe they’d be inside the cars, resting their breasts on the steering wheel, wearing nothing but chauffeur’s caps with yards of glossy hair tumbling out from underneath. I thought about it.
“You want to look around?”
I nodded again.
“This is my father’s study.” She opened a door and led me into a smal room crammed with books and more il ustrations of black men looking serious. She pointed to a dark-skinned man with a high forehead. “That’s Kwame Nkrumah, who my little brother is named after.”
“Who is he?”
“An African president. My daddy is real y into Africa. Presidents especial y.” She sat in a leather desk chair and swiveled around. “Africa, Africa, Africa.”
“What about your mother? I mean your real mother. Is she like that, too?”
Ronalda’s mouth turned up at the corner and she mashed her lips together before she spoke. “My mother is dead. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, even though Ronalda didn’t sound exactly sad. It was more like she was angry with me for mentioning it.
“Can you show me around some more?” I asked.
She opened another room, the same size as her father’s study, but it was nearly empty. There were bookcases instal ed, but only one shelf held any books. There was a desk, but it wasn’t cluttered with papers. In the corner stood an electric belt exerciser. My mother had one of those, too. You turned it on and it would jiggle the fat off of you.
“This is my stepmother’s office,” Ronalda said. “We can hang out in here.”
“What do you cal her?”
“My stepmother?”
“Yeah.”
“Jocelyn. She never comes down here.”
Ronalda opened one of the desk drawers, revealing eight strawberry wine coolers. “My secret stash. You want one?”
She gave me a bottle; I screwed off the top and handed it back to her. She handed me another. We each drank two coolers as quickly as the effervescence would al ow. The taste was sweet and medicinal at the same time. We opened our third and proceeded with ladylike sips.
“That was good,” Ronalda said.
“Ditto.”
We were both seated on the wooden desk, as there wasn’t even a chair in the office. The smel of our perfumes competed with the smel of the booze and the odor of our bodies. I thril ed at the confinement of it.
Ronalda said, “Can I touch your hair?”
I nodded and she reached out and gently stroked the hair covering my shoulder blades. Her touch was light, as though she worried she would hurt it.
Ronalda’s had started to grow back at last. It was now long enough that it could be straightened and set with brush rol ers. There wasn’t enough to catch in a ponytail, but at least people had stopped cal ing her bald-headed.
“Your hair is so pretty,” she said.
“I look just like my mother,” I told her, so as not to seem conceited.
“Me, too,” she said. “I look like she just spit me out.”
“You have a picture of her?”
Ronalda shook her head. “I didn’t bring anything with me from home. Just a paper sack with a change of clothes and a box of Kotex, but to look in my face, it’s like seeing my mother. Except that I am a nice person.”
I didn’t press her, but I wanted to know more. I’d heard some stories from Marcus. His mother was friends with Ronalda’s stepmother. Ronalda, said the stepmother, had been living like a wild child in Indiana. No adult supervision. None whatsoever.
“What is your mother like?” Ronalda asked me.
I wasn’t sure how to answer. My mother was difficult to describe. Presently, she was at work, taking people’s blood pressure, listening to their hearts. In a couple hours, she would be home, cooking dinner like a regular mother. I almost told Ronalda that my mother was like a superhero with a secret identity, but that wasn’t real y true. My mother’s secret self was almost identical to her real self. You had to real y pay attention to see when she shifted.
“My mother is named Gwen.” I drank some more of the wine cooler. There was a tightness in my forehead and a pleasant vacant feeling below.
“Does she like Marcus?”
“She can’t like what she doesn’t know about.” I laughed.
“My stepmother doesn’t like Jerome. She says he’s too old for me, just because he’s in the service. I’l tel you exactly what she said. ‘Although you may be mature physical y, the mind can take a while to catch up.’ I was looking at her like she had gone stone crazy and then she had the nerve to say that she was a virgin when she married my father. She said it with this little smile on her face.”
I knew the little smile she was talking about. You see it on the faces of girls who were born to be somebody’s wife. That virgin-smile was plenty annoying on the faces of tenth-grade girls, but on grown women it was infuriating. One good thing about having a mother like mine is that she never went and got al superior on me.
“You know her favorite word? Inappropriate. Seems like the only appropriate thing for me to do is to babysit.”
“Does she pay you?”
“Yeah,” Ronalda said. “I get al owance. But sometimes I don’t want her to pay me. I want it to be like I am just someone in the family, but I don’t want to get took advantage of, either. Next week, my stepmother is taking her nieces to see The Wiz. She asked me yesterday if I wanted to come along. I said yes at first, and then she told me that she was going to have to buy an extra ticket and I might end up sitting by myself in the balcony or something. So I told her I didn’t want to go, that I don’t like plays. But real y I have never seen one before.”
She looked so unhappy that I wanted to touch her, but I didn’t know where to put my hand. I ended up stroking my own shoulder. “I would go to see a play with you if you wanted to see one.”
“I don’t want see one,” she said. “I just wanted to be invited somewhere.”
“I go places with my mother,” I said. “But not any place special.”
Ronalda looked at me as though she couldn’t imagine an unspecial mother-daughter outing. It was like I had told her that I had money, but not the kind you could spend.
“Real y,” I said.
Ronalda put her hand in my hair again. “Did you bring a brush?”
I knelt on the tile floor between her knees while Ronalda sat up on the desk pul ing the brush through my hair. Al my life people have wanted to play in my head. On the very first day of first grade, the teacher took me into the lounge and undid my ponytails. Ronalda wanted to know if I was tender-headed. I murmured that I wasn’t, resting my face on her thigh.
“Tel me what you were about to tel me,” she said. The bristles against my scalp felt firm and good. I knew she was probably brushing out my curls, but I didn’t ask her to stop. “Tel me. Tel me about your mother.”
It was as though she had pul ed the truth out of my head. “I’m il egitimate.”
“Join the club,” said Ronalda.
“No,” I said. “It’s worse. I’m a secret.”
“Oh,” Ronalda said. “You’re an outside child?”
“Yeah,” I whispered.
“That’s okay,” she said. “A lot of people are.”
I let go of a breath I hadn’t even known I was holding. This was what it was to have a friend, someone who knew exactly who you were and didn’t blame you for it. I twisted to look at her, but if she knew something important had passed between us, her face didn’t show it.
I asked her, “Was your father married to your stepmother when you were born?”
She shook her head. “No. They got together back when they were both living in Indy. He got her pregnant the night before he left to go to Notre Dame.”