The two have been friends since the first day of classes at Barry College, where they both took their MSW degrees. Except for the years when she went north to do her psych Ph.D. at Cornell, she has had lunch with Sheryl Waits on average once a week and is thoroughly integrated, so to speak, into the Waits family circle. Sheryl is a psychiatric social worker and runs a unit in a community mental health center in Liberty City, an impoverished black district of Miami, where she is considered both a saint and a tough-ass bitch, often by the same people on different days.
They go to a moderately expensive restaurant in a waterfront hotel, with a nice view of Biscayne Bay. It is rather overpriced, they both agree, but they are worth it. They are scrupulous about taking turns picking up the tab; what they never do is to minutely divide up the bill, arguing about who had what and how much to tip. While they wait for their meal, they exchange news, which given their lives means that 80 percent of the news will be Sheryl’s, always announced with the phrase “dysfunction in the intact black family,” a torrent of amusing folderol about the husband, Leon, a patrol lieutenant in the Miami PD, the most useless husband ever invented, and the three children, defective, insubordinate, no ‘count, doomed to failure and the streets. None of this is true. Sheryl is creating a mythos, propitiating the gods to continue what Lorna knows she believes is the most colossal good fortune. In return, Lorna tells some anecdotes about her patient load, including the Dideroff woman and her saints?no names, of course. Sheryl seems particularly interested in this one, but Sheryl is a church lady, a Catholic, strangely enough, and thus pretty much in the same bin, in Lorna’s mind, as Dideroff. The remainder of their conversation is devoted, as it usually is, to Lorna and men.
“Anybody on the horizon?” Sheryl asks.
“Not as such.”
“Ticktock.”
“Oh, stop! I’m only thirty-four.”
“Uh-huh. And as far as I know, you ain’t never yet been out with anybody really gave a damn about you. All of them’re these skinny little whiteboy intellectuals want you to be they momma, while they play around on you. You need to get your life sorted out, girl.”
“I’mfine, Sheryl. Being between men is not a felony in this state. And, you know, I’m wondering why every lunch we have ends up with an elaborate critique of my sex life. I mean it’s getting a little old, don’t you think?”
“I’ll tell you what else is gettingold, darlin. You ringing on my phone at twoA.M. in the morning, oh, wah, Sheryl, he done itagain, boo hoo hoo!”
“All right, I’ll never call you except during business hours,” snaps Lorna.
“Oh, for God’s sake! That’s what friends are for, you nut! All I mean is it just breaks my heart. I want you to behappy! Regular. Walking in green fields full of flowers with a nice guy.”
“Like in a toilet paper commercial.”
“Exactly. And every fourth commercial the couple is black, except you can tell the dude is, like, a little queer? Seriously, hon, you got to change your way of living.”
“And if that ain’t enough, I’m gonna change the way I strut my stuff.”
“Oh, right, be a smart-ass about it. But the songs don’t lie, honey. Uh-uh. They don’t lie.”
“You’re bound and determined to reshape my life into domestic bliss, aren’t you? Guided by the eternal wisdom of old popular song lyrics?”
“And my highly honed social worker skills. Let me ask you something: you ever thought about a cop?”
“When I got my stereo ripped off, sure.”
“Moron. I mean to date one.”
“You’re still confusing me with you, dear,” Lorna says uncomfortably. “It’s not my kind of thing.”
“Because…?”
“Because. Let me think. Look, you know I love Leon, but I need…how can I say this without sounding like an arrogant shithead…?”
“Oh, go on, go on! If I was going to dump you for being an arrogant shithead, I would’ve done it years ago.”
“Thank you. I want someone I can talk to. I don’t respond well to ‘how about those Marlins’ as a conversational gambit. I want someone who reads books.”
“Leon reads books.”
“I meanbooks. Come on, Sher, I don’t want to get into a fight. You’re happy, God bless you, but I need something different. Let it go.”
“Got to be an intellectual, huh?”
“I think so.”
“Just like Daddy.”
Lorna mimes looking around, as if searching for a public notice. “Excuse me, I thought this was a psychotherapy-free area. Waiter!”
Sheryl ignores this and studies her friend appraisingly. “Mm, I just had an interesting thought.”
“What? And I don’t like that look on your face.”
“My thought was you ought to meet Jimmy Paz.”
“And why is that? He’s an intellectual?”
“He reads books is what I hear. Leon says most people in the department think he’s the smartest guy who ever worked there.”
“And he’s probably got three semesters at Miami-Dade Junior College too.”
“Now youare being an arrogant shithead.”
Sheryl is now giving her the stare she usually reserves for one of her children gone seriously over the line or a junkie trying to hustle her. Lorna feels herself blushing again. “All right. That was low.”
“I forgive you, or I will forgive you if you show up at our place the Saturday from next. We’re throwing a retirement party for Amos Greely. You’ve met him.”
“The mentor.”
“Uh-huh. Anyway, Paz will be there. We’ll have white folks too. We ain’t prejudice or nothin.”
“He’s a Cuban, right?” There is some eye-rolling action here.
“An Afro-Cuban.”
“Sonot another male chauvinist piggie?”
Sheryl laughs long and loud, drawing looks from some of the neighboring tables.
“Darlin, they’reall male chauvinist piggies, and your skinny whiteboy intellectuals are the worst kind because they’ll never admit it. And Paz cooks too.”
“He cooks?”
“Yeah, he’s a chef in his off hours. His mom owns Guantanamera.”
“Very impressive,” says Lorna, who is actually impressed. She has eaten at that restaurant, widely considered to be the finest Cuban place in Miami, the best of a tough league. “Let’s see, reads books, cooks for his mother, unmarried at what…? Thirty-five?”
“About there.”
“Gay.”
Another laugh from Sheryl, even louder than before. She has to dab at her eyes with her napkin. “Oh, no, sugar. You don’t have to worry about that. Not Jimmy Paz. The book on him is he likes smart girls. Smart white girls. I am going to get cast out of the sisterhood for setting this up, but I’ll have to learn to live with it.”
“Lucky me,” say Lorna sourly.
“No, this is right,” says Sheryl. She looks up, cups her hand to her ear. “What’s that you say? No lie? Made inheaven? Well, lawsy me!”
“I’m calling 911,” says Lorna.
“You may laugh, but I got a good feeling about this. And let me slip a little professional note into your file, honeybunch. Us Catholics talk to the saints all the time. And sometimes they talk back. You need to find out some more about Emmylou’s religious background before you toss her among the lunatics.”
Lorna finesses this uncomfortable moment by signaling for the waiter, and then she makes much out of checking the time and fretting about an appointment she has at one-thirty. That Sheryl is sincerely religious she regards as an amusing flaw, like the fat. On the other hand, Sheryl’s point is a good one and supported by theDSM. She will find out about that the next time she sees Emmylou. As they leave the restaurant, she is already planning her questions. She will have to get through the consult first, but that should not pose a problem. Mickey Lopez thinkseveryone is crazy, which means she will only have to roll Howie Kasdan, which she knows she can do and will take grim pleasure in doing.