“At least he claims you. I wonder sometimes what would happen to me if my mother passed away. I wonder if my father would take me in.”
She stopped brushing. The floor was cold under me, but I could feel the warmth of Ronalda’s thigh through her jeans. I wanted another of the sweet wine coolers, but I couldn’t ask for it because I had somehow forgotten how to speak.
“Don’t cry,” Ronalda said. “I have a secret, too. My mother’s not real y dead. I just tel people that. She’s alive, she’s just negligent.” She pronounced the word careful y, as though she were reading it from a legal document. “The principal at my school cal ed child services on her. She left me by myself for two weeks. While she was gone is when I broke my leg, trying to wear heels, and there was no one to come and pick me up at the school. The principal put two and two together and the next thing I knew, my daddy drove al the way to Indy and carried me back to Atlanta with him. He drove al night and it was snowing bad, bad, bad.”
“Where was your mama gone to?”
“I don’t know. She even took the hot comb. I asked her when she was coming back and she said, ‘Tomorrow,’ but I knew she was lying when she started putting my little brother’s stuff in a bag, too.
“She loved that little boy like nothing in the world. Before he was born, she used to drink, drink, drink! She even drank Crown Royal when she was pregnant with me. I’m lucky I didn’t get born cross-eyed, retarded, or something. But after Corey, it was like she fel stupid in love with him. She cut out the drinking, stopped slapping people around. She even made hot cocoa a couple of times on Sundays. Before Corey, I thought that my mama just didn’t like kids, but when Corey was born and I saw the way she carried on about him, I saw that it wasn’t that she didn’t like kids, she just didn’t like me.”
“She likes you,” I said. “She’s your mother. Everybody’s mother likes them.”
“I think maybe she loves me,” Ronalda said. “I mean, she kept food in the fridge and a roof over my head. But she never liked me. Now, my little brother, she could just eat him up. That’s why she took him with her when she left.”
“It’s not like that,” I told her. “You get equal love.”
“Do you have a brother?” Ronalda asked.
I said no.
“If you have a brother, it’s the worst thing. If your mama has a boy to care for, she wil show you the kind of love she is capable of. And once you see that, you wil never get over it. You wil be lonely for the rest of your life.”
I had no response for her. I didn’t know how my mother would react to a boy in our lives, but I knew that my father always wanted a son. James was at our apartment when Laverne went into labor with Chaurisse, six weeks early. Raleigh came to the house, and James stood up from my mother’s table, leaving his pound cake half-eaten. My mother tel s me that she fel on her knees beside my bassinette and prayed that Laverne not give birth to a boy. “A healthy daughter is what I asked the Lord to give. That wouldn’t put too much pul on his heart.”
“My father has another kid, but a girl,” I said. “With his wife.”
“Count your blessings,” Ronalda said. “And hope they don’t have any more kids. You don’t want to go through what I been through.”
I tried to tel myself that she was right, that I was lucky. But second best is second best, no matter the reason why.
To Ronalda I said, “Let’s have another cooler.”
She opened the drawer and we took the last two, putting us at four each, which was about a cooler and a half too many. This we knew even as we let the warm sudsy drink foam into our mouths. We stumbled out of her stepmother’s study into the rec-room part of the basement. Ronalda looked through her father’s records and decided to play Richard Pryor just to hear him cuss.
“How do you feel?” Ronalda stretched herself on the carpet in front of the imitation fireplace.
“Sick.”
“It’s a secret, al right?” she said. “Everything about my mother is a secret.”
“Same for mine.”
7
I DARE YOU
MY MOTHER WORKED very hard for a living. This was no one’s fault. Even women who were wives had to do their part to keep the family fed. When I was smal , she took a few classes to learn travel-agenting — thinking she could work from the apartment, using our telephone — but sometime in the midseventies she got sensible and took night courses at Atlanta Junior Col ege to become a licensed practical nurse. For the most part, Mother was fortunate in her scheduling — seven to three — but sometimes she was assigned eleven to seven, and on holidays she pul ed doubles. When she came home those mornings while I was eating my breakfast, she soaked her feet in a pan of saltwater and rubbed the red bites on her neck where the stethoscope pinched her.
Hers was a good job with benefits that included more than health, eye, and dental. Mother had daily access to doctors. As she assisted them by performing the tasks that were beneath them, she asked them about their daughters. What lessons did they take, where did they buy their clothes, and where did they plan to go to col ege? Every now and then, she would chat with the doctors’ wives, mining for personal information, like where they stood on issues like contraception and sex ed in schools (testing out her theory that rich people put their girls on the Pil at twelve). On her break, she took careful notes on a smal pad she kept in her locker. For six weeks in the early 1980s she got to work alongside a woman resident who was even engaged to another doctor. She owed everything, this lady said, to Mount Holyoke, a col ege in Massachusetts. My mother pressed down hard on the notepad and underscored the name of the state. In parenthesis she wrote: Kennedy, etc. A doctor married to a doctor! Mother cal ed it the “the trifecta,” even though it was only two things.
Such information was worth the sometimes-odd hours. When Marcus and I first started going together, she worked eight to four in a pediatrician’s office and then looked after private patients from seven thirty to midnight. It was just a temporary arrangement for November since Christmas was right around the bend. At six fifteen when she was heading out, fresh and pretty in white, I promised her that I would spend the evening doing SAT dril s on the new Commodore computer that she had bought with her “own money.” I didn’t like it when she used this phrase, sounding like a child, bragging about what she had done with her babysitting pay. She meant that this gift had come from her, without any contribution from my father. She’d paid for it with the labor of swol en legs and stiff fingers. I didn’t use the computer, but I did appreciate the gift, the thought of it. I didn’t have anything against the machine or the SATs; it was just that the only opportunity I had to see Marcus was when my mother was at work, late at night, between the hours of seven thirty and midnight.
On one particular night, Marcus and I were going to go to Acres Mil to see a movie with a bunch of his friends. I took extra time with my hair and makeup because I knew that Marcus wanted to show me off. I loved being displayed on his arm, held up for everyone to see.
I looked out of my bedroom window, expecting to see Marcus’s two-door Jetta, but instead I found the good Lincoln, the newer one that was real y navy blue if you looked at it close-up. With much agitation, I tiptoed into the living room and through the picture window saw James let himself out of the passenger side. Raleigh was driving. I can remember very few times in my life that I have been alone in the house with my father. If my mother wasn’t home, he always brought Raleigh with him, like I was someone else’s daughter and there was a need to make it clear that everything was aboveboard.