Single Mom

by Omar Tyree

  I sat back in my office chair on the seventeenth floor of the building and thought about my career while staring out at the Sears Tower again. I rarely even thought about my work. It was a blind drive, and I never really enjoyed it.

  “Like father like son,” I mumbled to myself. And it was the truth, so what else could I say?

  Girl Talk

  ENISE, I meant to call you last night, but I just got all caught up in the moment,” Camellia was telling me. She was talking fast and excitedly. “Girl, my daughter finally went out and did it,” she said. It was a quarter to eleven, Tuesday morning.

  “Did what?” I asked. I still hadn’t found the time to talk about Camellia’s weight problem. She wouldn’t slow down long enough for us to discuss it. Her feelings about her weight sure didn’t stop her from being active. Or maybe some of her overactivity was about running away from her weight concerns.

  She said, “Monica went out and had sex, despite everything I’ve been telling her.”

  I tried to stay levelheaded about it. I asked, “How do you know? Did she confess?”

  “Yes, she did confess. And if she didn’t, I would have been ready to drag it out of her.”

  “How did you find out? You didn’t catch her in the act, did you?” Now that would have been a story to tell.

  “Oh, Lord, no!” Camellia responded. “I wouldn’t have been able to stomach that. Just knowing that she’s active is heartache enough. Walking in on the act would have been like signing my death certificate.”

  “Well, did you ask if she protected herself?” I was prepared to take the discussion step-by-step, and I was already thinking about Jimmy.

  Camellia said, “That’s besides the point. And you would never guess who she did it with.”

  I started thinking crazy thoughts and had to stop myself. Do I really want to know all of this? Monica’s partner didn’t seem like any of my business, unless Jimmy was involved! I stopped breathing for a second. My mood was no longer even-tempered.

  “Reverend Gray’s son, Reuben,” Camellia filled in.

  I exhaled, but my heart was still racing. “Well, at least she picked a decent boy,” I joked, once I knew that it wasn’t my boy.

  “How would you feel if Jimmy did it with one of the girls in the choir?” Camellia asked me.

  “Which one?” I responded harshly.

  We stopped and burst out laughing. I sounded just like a mother, a tough matchmaker. I felt sorry in advance for the first girl that Jimmy would bring to the house.

  “Girl, this isn’t funny,” Camellia reminded me. “I’m bringing Monica to the meeting tomorrow night, and I hope that Selena shows up. Monica needs to meet her.”

  Poor Selena was nineteen with two kids, but I didn’t see Monica fitting in her shoes. “I can’t see Monica going down that road,” I commented.

  “Well, I couldn’t see Monica losing her virginity at sixteen, but she did it.”

  I looked at my clock again. I had my third client of the day at eleven. A phoner. “We’ll talk about it, but I have to get back to work now,” I said.

  “Okay, we’ll talk,” Camellia agreed.

  “Lunch?”

  “You name the place.”

  “Brenda’s.”

  “One o’clock?”

  “One o’clock it is.”

  “All right, I’ll see you then.”

  I hung up the phone with my good friend and planned to talk to her about everything, including how she felt about men. We hadn’t had a good girl talk in ages. Everything was about our children, parenting, educational programs, single-parent issues, etc. What it all boiled down to was that Camellia wasn’t leaving any time to think about herself. However, I wanted to make sure I eased her into things instead of taking her right there. I didn’t want to scare her away and force her to change the subject on me like she had done so many times in the past. So I met her at Brenda’s Cafe under the downtown Loop at one, and began to talk about my own problems. Otherwise, Camellia would have controlled the entire conversation.

  “You know I had lunch with Walter yesterday. We met over at the Presidential Tower for a half a minute,” I said.

  Camellia looked surprised. It totally threw her off. “Over at the Presidential Tower?” she asked. “What was up with that?”

  “He wanted to apologize for all of the changes he’s taken me through with our son.”

  “Mmm,” Camellia grunted. The mission was accomplished. “So what did you say?”

  “Well, after I started adding things up, he couldn’t take it.”

  Camellia grinned and nodded. “That’s always the truth. I guess they figure that just saying sorry is supposed to make our day and change a rainstorm to bright sunshine. But it doesn’t quite work that way.”

  “So anyway,” I continued, “he went ahead and did his usual thing and left early in a hissy fit.”

  Camellia just stared at me for a moment. “Well ain’t that something. And he just asked you to go to lunch with him out of the blue?”

  “Out of the blue,” I told her. “What, Samuel has never—”

  Camellia cut me off and said, “That man ain’t even thinking about us.”

  I shook my head. In all of the years that we had known each other, and through all of the meetings we had organized for single mothers, Camellia still refused to talk about her high school sweetheart and the father of her two children, Samuel Woodson. It was as if he no longer existed. Nevertheless, the man still lived and breathed in Chicago!

  “So, you’ve never even thought about calling him?”

  Camellia was already shaking her head. She held out her hand and said, “Denise, we’ve been there and done that already. Now I have my own life to live, just like the rest of us single mothers.”

  “Well, I’ve never heard you tell the women who come out to our meetings that they should never hunt down the fathers. In fact, I’ve heard you tell a few people to go out and make those calls,” I reminded her.

  “And not once did I tell them to expect a miracle,” she responded.

  When our food arrived, I immediately thought about the weight problem again. Camellia was having a grilled chicken salad. I had a greasy cheeseburger with everything on it.

  “I didn’t know you thought so much about your weight,” I commented. I tried my best to make it sound like the weather.

  Camellia said, “I don’t.” She had forgotten all about filling me in on the details about her daughter’s escapade with the preacher’s son. That made me realize that it was the best time I’d probably have to get some answers from her. She was usually always focused on talking about something. Suddenly, I had the floor, and my plan was working better than expected.

  I said, “You know, Camellia, I have never pressed you into talking about what went down, because I was there for a little bit of it, but it just seems like you’re running away from a lot of things in your head, while claiming to be helping others. I mean, what about helping you for a change?”

  “Help me to do what, Denise? Find a man?” she snapped. “I mean, I’m happy for you and Brock, but we already know that it’s just not going to happen for all of us.”

  I nodded my head in agreement. “Okay, but does that mean that you just cut off the sensations in that part of your body? I mean,” I leaned over the table to whisper, “don’t you ever feel like you need one, or you want one? Ever?”

  Camellia leaned back and started laughing. “Girl, you crazy!”

  “Answer the question,” I told her. It wasn’t funny to me. I couldn’t imagine not even thinking about sex, no matter how busy you were.

  “Okay, of course I do. Is that what you want to hear?”

  “I want to hear the truth,” I said. I took a wild-ass guess and said, “Do you feel like no man is going to want you because of your kids and your weight?”

  Camellia started eating her salad. Her silence was answer enough.

  “You shouldn’t feel that way,” I told her.

 
She stopped and looked at me. “Denise, I can get a man into bed if I wanted to, but I just think that a relationship should be more than that.”

  “Well, you still have to seek them out to see. I mean, you’re not going to attract anyone by closing yourself off.”

  “Denise, when the Lord feels the time is right, it’ll happen. Okay? In the meantime, I have a sixteen-year-old daughter, who doesn’t need to be there, no matter who it is that’s there waiting for her.”

  That was it. Camellia had rediscovered her train of thought.

  I thought fast and said, “If this were the nineteen forties or fifties, you’d be jumping for joy, saying that Monica was marrying a good man.”

  “But this is the nineties and I’m not jumping for joy.”

  “So whatever happened to getting married right away when you found out you loved someone?”

  “It got old like the convertible Cadillac,” Camellia answered without skipping a beat.

  We fell out laughing.

  I said, “Some people are still in love with those cars. Have you seen any of these California videos lately?”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen those wannabe Mack Daddies a thousand times.”

  “You ever have those dreams where you saw yourself in a big family, and the lady of the house?” I asked her.

  “Yeah, when I was eight. Every little girl has that dream,” she told me with a chuckle. At least I got her away from talking about her daughter again, and I wanted to keep it going in that direction, away from Monica. Not that she didn’t need to be discussed, but like I said, Camellia needed to talk about Camellia.

  “You think that these young girls growing up in the nineties have those dreams?”

  She stopped and thought about it. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe we need to ask some of them. Black History Month is right around the corner. Maybe we could go to a few schools this year and ask the little girls what they think about love.”

  Shit! I snapped to myself. If I knew Camellia, she was ready to brainstorm for the rest of our lunch hour concerning asking little black girls about love.

  I said, “What do you think about love?” I was trying to see if my magic could work again.

  “I think that love has become too easily given, and therefore, it’s too easily taken away. And that’s exactly what I need to tell my daughter. Because that high school sweetheart stuff doesn’t happen anymore.”

  “It doesn’t?” I questioned. “That’s funny, because I hear a high school sweetheart story every day.”

  “And those people are exceptions, that’s why we even talk about them. In the forties and fifties, as you’ve already said, it wouldn’t have been anything special. But now we tend to celebrate the high school sweetheart stories, because we realize that it’s hard to come by nowadays.”

  “We’re still having babies by our high school sweethearts,” I said with a laugh. It was sad but true.

  “Yeah, and these guys are a lot less likely to have jobs, or houses, family support, or any of the strong foundations that we used to have.”

  “So what happened to those strong foundations?” I asked.

  Camellia frowned at me and snapped, “Do I look like I know the answer to that? They stopped going to church. They stopped trying to get ahead. They stopped looking out for each other in the streets. And then they started watching these videos, and listening to this crazy music, and watching these hoochie mamas, and now they all want to go to Hollywood to be pimps and gangsters or play basketball or football to sign these hundred-million-dollar contracts with sneaker deals and everything else. And most of them don’t understand that they can’t all be millionaires, especially when half of them don’t have any valuable skills for employment and many of them can barely read or write. So now they’re walking around feeling sorry for themselves and don’t want to commit to anything that takes any hard work, and then every time their little pee-pees get hard, they expect to be able to stick it somewhere warm and wet, and then jump up, pull up their little pants, and leave, whether there’s a baby coming out or not, and then get attitudes about it as if that’s supposed to be normal behavior!”

  When Camellia finished with all of that, we looked at each other and laughed.

  I said, “I guess you do know the answer then.”

  Camellia caught her breath and sipped her glass of water. “Well, we all know the answer as to why. The hard thing, though, is figuring out what we can do to change things for the better.

  “I mean, we all know the numbers,” she said. “More than half of the children being raised in the black community today are born to single-parent households. And that’s just plain treacherous!”

  All I could do was finish my food. Camellia had a lot more on her mind than I could have imagined. I felt that asking about her weight was petty after that. Her weight didn’t mean a damn thing! This woman’s mind was powerful, and if brothers were unattracted to that, then to hell with them!

  After a while, though, I did come up with another question. “What kind of man do you think Levonne is going to be?” My sons had always been able to have at least a limited presence with their fathers. Levonne, however, wasn’t that fortunate.

  Camellia sighed. “You know, the whole sickle cell thing made me a bit overprotective with him. He’s just now starting to assert himself more and come out of his shell, and Brock made a good suggestion about him being involved in sports. I think I might have to take him up on that. I never allowed him to play many sports because I was always so afraid of him getting hurt or something. But I’m going to have to get over that.”

  I said, “You know, this whole sports thing for boys is just really overrated. Walter even started talking about running track because his father talked to him about it.”

  “So, are you going to let him go out?”

  “If he can keep his grades up. Yeah.”

  Camellia smiled at me. I knew exactly what she was thinking before she opened her mouth.

  “They are two different boys,” I told her. “Jimmy would fall apart if I took basketball from him. I mean, he gets his entire personality through his ability to play that game. And if he stopped playing, I don’t know what would happen. I mean, yeah, it’s sad, but it’s the truth.”

  “So, with that attitude, you’re actually adding to the cycle,” Camellia argued.

  I disagreed. “Not necessarily. Look at it this way,” I said. “Let’s say Jimmy gets a scholarship to college to play basketball. We can’t assume what type of changes he’ll go through. He’s going through changes right now. Believe it or not, his father is starting to ask him about his grades, and Jimmy is actually paying attention. He’s doing the best in his schoolwork right now that he’s ever done. And I was really concerned about how he would do at this school because the pace is a little faster than most schools in Chicago, and Jimmy wasn’t doing too well there.”

  Camellia smiled. She said, “I thought sports was overrated. It doesn’t sound like it to me.”

  I smiled back. I guess I had gotten so tired of sports talk with my basketball phenom of a son that I was turned off by the entire fanatic atmosphere of it all. Nevertheless, I realized that sports were a vital part of my son’s life and a source of motivation for young black boys whether we liked it or not.

  I said, “On second thought, maybe you should let Levonne go out for a team. You just make sure you tell him that academics comes first.”

  Camellia grimaced. “Who do you think you’re talking to, an amateur over here? No grades means no play. And I don’t care how good he is. But my son is not good at anything yet, so I don’t have to even worry about that. He’ll just be playing for the fun of it.”

  I nodded and grinned. “Right up until he scores that first touchdown. And after that, you’ll have five and six girls calling your house a night: ‘Can I speak to Levonne?’”

  We laughed. Then Camellia asked me how many phone calls Jimmy received from girls.

  “You know what, I don’t
think he’s giving his number out, because I have yet to answer a phone call from a girl. Isn’t that weird? I’m going to have to ask him about that. But you know what? I bet his father knows. And that shit eats me up! I do all the work for all these years, and he’ll still go and tell his father things that he won’t tell me.”

  “Boys will be boys,” Camellia said with a smile.

  I just wondered who was going to be a man for her boy. I had to admit, I was getting a much-needed hand from both of my sons’ fathers, and from Brock. Despite all that I could do, and had done for my sons as a mother, there was just no substitute for the attention of a man.

  Before heading to another SMO meeting at the library that night, I stopped by my mother’s to see if I could talk Nikita into going again. I felt like I just couldn’t afford to give up on her. However, when I got there, my mother told me that Nikita had a new job. I was skeptical to say the least. She hadn’t said anything to me about it, but she had never told me much anyway.

  “So she has you here watching Cheron again?” I asked my mother rhetorically.

  “I don’t mind. Cheron is good company.”

  My niece smiled up at me and said, “Hi.” She was sitting in between my mother’s legs, getting her hair greased and combed. She was very calm, too. I hated getting my hair greased and combed when I was young, and I’m talking about a lot older than three.

  “Well, hi to you,” I told her.

  My mother would often read to my niece and even do her hair when she was in an active mood. I guess it was one of those nights.

  I said, “Well, you fly to Florida next week, Mom. Are you looking forward to it?”

  “I wanted to ask you about that,” she said. “Are you going to be able to watch Cheron while I’m away?”

  I felt offended. I don’t know why. I didn’t mind watching my niece, but my mother made it sound as if Cheron was her responsibility.

  “I’ll have to work that out with Nikita, since she has this new job and all,” I answered sarcastically. I couldn’t believe my mother was falling for it. Nikita was one lie after the other. Not just the men were acting up in the nineties, some of the women were losing their marbles, too. My little sister was living proof of that.