Should Have Known Better

by Octavia, Grace

  “Are you sure everything is OK?” I asked again.

  Her smile quickly dissipated.

  I pushed the door again, this time with much more force, and it swung back so hard, it should’ve slammed against the wall inside of the bathroom, but it stopped short.

  “Ouch,” a male’s voice cried.

  With equal surprise and concern, I stepped into the bathroom to see who was behind the door.

  “Mr. Lawrence?” I looked from him to Mrs. Harris and back. His shirt was completely unbuttoned. “You two?”

  “No, no, not that, honey,” Mrs. Harris tried to reassure me with her smile.

  “Not that? What do you mean, Maggie?” Mr. Lawrence asked.

  “I mean, it’s not what she’s thinking,” she answered.

  “The hell it’s not,” Mr. Lawrence said. “It’s everything she’s thinking!”

  “Chuck!” Mrs. Harris looked down and suddenly desired to rebutton her shirt.

  “Look, I don’t really care what it is,” I said sternly, “as long as it doesn’t happen in the library. You two are too old for this.”

  “I know,” Mrs. Harris agreed shamefully. Her shoulders sank and she went and stood beside Mr. Lawrence as if they were teenagers.

  “I mean, do I need to take away your bathroom privileges like I do some of the kids from the school?” I asked.

  “No,” they answered together.

  “Good,” I said, and it was all I could offer in such an off situation. There were no parents to call. They were the grandparents.

  I rushed home, ready to tell my husband all about the senior bathroom tryst. Reginald was raised in Augusta and Mrs. Harris had been his third-grade teacher. He’d never believe she was canoodling in the bathroom with Mr. Lawrence. But my rush was put to rest when I turned onto our street. I could see through the rosebushes on the corner that his rusty green work truck wasn’t parked in the driveway, and I hardly needed to stop to read the note on the front door to find him. He’d taken the twins to the park.

  The other thing the doctor with the gray beard in the white coat couldn’t tell me about my son’s autism was why his twin sister hadn’t gotten it and if she ever would. He told me to keep a diary and bring her back in six months. Seven years later and my daughter, Cheyenne, was still OK. But really we’d all been affected by autism.

  “Here you are,” I said, finding Reginald sitting on the end of a bench of a long row of babysitting, BlackBerry-holding dads.

  Reginald was a big man. He came from big Southern people, and had muscular, broad shoulders and the kind of lacquered black skin that made him stand out—even in a room full of black people.

  “Oh, hey,” he said dryly before clicking his phone closed, and I could tell in just those two words that it had been a bad day.

  I looked out over the muddle of bright playground equipment. Kids were everywhere, screaming and pulling. I saw my daughter’s red shirt at the top of a jungle gym. It was a three-walled clubhouse where she and her girlfriends, too old to continue to enjoy the sand and slides and too young to sneak off to the bathrooms, kept court.

  “Where’s R. J.?” I asked.

  “Sandbox,” Reginald said, pointing his phone in the direction of a sea of babies and toddlers and preschoolers scooping sand into pails. In the middle of the tide was a ten-year-old in a dark blue hoodie. His head hung low.

  “He had a bad day?” I asked to confirm.

  Reginald got up without speaking and walked me halfway to the sandbox.

  “The school called me to get him early,” he told me. “I had to cancel two jobs.”

  “Oh, babe, I’m sorry,” I said, feeling a little pinch in my gut.

  “I really need you to get off early so you can get them from school,” he said. “It’s killing me. Especially now that it’s about to be summer. More light equals more hours and more grass to cut.”

  “What am I supposed to do?” I said this with a straight face as I waved at the mother of one of Cheyenne’s friends. “I can’t ask Sharika to close the library by herself. She already opens alone so I can get the kids to school.”

  “Just do something,” Reginald commanded. He came in closer so the woman couldn’t hear him. “And stop making it seem like I’m the bad guy. I’m just trying to get us ahead a little. I’m starting to feel like I can’t do anything big because I’m so busy dealing with all of this stuff.” He gestured to the sandbox.

  “Stuff? You mean our kids?”

  “You know I don’t mean it like that. I just need you to have my back. That’s all I’m saying. We can’t get what I want us to have if you don’t support it. Is that so bad? Is it so bad that I want more for my family?”

  “I never said it was bad,” I said. “You’re just starting to sound a little different.”

  Reginald wasn’t a particularly argumentative husband, not like some I knew, but we’d had this argument before. The truth was that Reginald never wanted me to work in the first place. His mother had never worked. His grandmothers had never worked. When we first got married, I was OK with it. Not working? Most of my friends were buried in work and dying to find a man who wanted to take care of them. I stayed home and took care of his parents and tried to make their house—which we’d moved into when we’d gotten married—our own. But then I got bored. Going to graduate school was something I started online when I was pregnant and on bed rest. I picked what I thought was the easiest major, and when I graduated I convinced Reginald to agree to me working so we would have health insurance as he built his lawn care business. Unfortunately, getting that job at the library meant that Reginald had to pick up the twins from school every day. They were ten, but R. J. wasn’t allowed on the bus because of his meltdowns.

  “His teacher said he wouldn’t speak all day,” Reginald said. “She realized at lunch that a red marker was missing from her desk. Another kid said R. J. had taken it. He admitted that he had it, but wouldn’t give it back.”

  “Did you get it back from him?”

  “I’ve been on calls all afternoon, Dawn. Come on; don’t do that.”

  “I wasn’t doing anything. I’ll get it.”

  We stood there and watched Reginald Jr. push his hands into the cool sand and leave them buried there for a time. Kids half his size ran in tight circles around his space in the sandbox.

  “When we got in the car,” Reginald went on, “he just kept saying, ‘park—255—’ ”

  “Means Drive. 255 Means Drive,” I added, walking toward R. J. “His favorite place. The park.”

  “Hey, Mama’s honey bunny.” I inched in slowly on R. J.’s right side.

  He didn’t respond. He kept his wide, brown eyes buttoned to the sand between his legs, but I could see my reflection in the corner of his eye. I squatted beside him. This kind of detachment was typical when he’d had a new experience or was being confronted with a series of things he’d rather not face. He could see me, but he was pretending he couldn’t.

  “How was school?” I asked, dusting a few stray grains of sand from the red sweatpants he was wearing.

  R. J. looked up from the sand and over at the benches where Reginald had been sitting. While he was Reginald’s “Jr.,” he followed his sister in looking like me. All three of us had my father’s bushy eyebrows that would turn into a unibrow with a month of no grooming, my mother’s brown eyes, and teeth that were perfect without the aid of braces. He had his father’s size though. Had always been the biggest kid in his class. The doctors warned us that as he grew, the more difficult it would be for us to control his meltdowns.

  “Bad day, huh?”

  R. J. pushed his hands farther down into the sand.

  “Well, you know what Mama says about bad days.” I paused to give him a chance to respond, but he didn’t. “Don’t focus on what happened, focus on what you will do next.” I slid my hand into the sand beside R. J.’s and clutched it.

  He looked at me as if he’d seen me someplace before.

  “So what a
re we going to focus on now?” I asked.

  R. J. looked from me to his left hand that was still buried in the sand.

  “What, precious? You want Mama to hold your other hand.”

  I slid my hand into the other sandy grave and tried to clutch his hand, only it was balled up. I tried to force it open, but R. J. quickly released his grasp and slid into my hand what felt like a stick. I pulled my hand out of the sand.

  “A red marker?” I held it up.

  “Trouble,” R. J. said affirmatively. “I’m going to get in trouble.” He nodded and looked at his father, who’d come up behind me.

  “Oh, sweetie. It’s not trouble. You just have to give it back and apologize. Can you do that?”

  R. J. nodded again.

  “You can’t take things that don’t belong to you. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes, Mama,” he said.

  “Now, let’s get your sister.”

  Whenever a day came, and there were many of those days, when we had to manage the negative outcomes of R. J.’s autism, it was nearly certain that we’d have to handle Cheyenne’s attitude. In my brief stint writing diaries about her, I wrote of a baby who was always trying to climb away from me—and that was before she could really climb. The doctors later concluded that she’d likely never develop autism, but I knew something else was brewing. The more I pulled her to me, the more she pushed away. And soon, I just let her go. She taught herself how to walk.

  By the time I lassoed her away from her friends and into the car, she was promising to hate me forever and swore a life of eternal silence before telling her brother to stop looking at her “with his stupid bug eyes.”

  It was getting dark outside. Reginald had driven ahead of us in his truck. I looked at the twins in the rearview mirror.

  “Stop being mean, Cheyenne,” I said, deciding to crush the prospects of a fight by making R. J. recall everything they’d done in school that day. Cheyenne rolled her eyes at the travesty of discussion and seemed to push her back so hard into the seat that it was clear that she wanted to disappear.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” Reginald started coolly after dinner. “I listened to the messages on the machine when I got in. Sasha called.”

  The house was just getting quiet. The twins were in their bedrooms. I was washing the dishes. Reginald sat at the kitchen table looking over receipts.

  “Sasha? You mean from Spelman Sasha?”

  The old faucet spat out a rush of overheated water and it nearly burned my hands.

  “Yeah. The one with the, you know, television voice, like, ‘Hey, Dawnie, this is Sasha Bellamy—’ ” He’d contorted his voice into a nasal know-it-all inflection, the one he preferred to use when he was making fun of certain people of a certain class. “‘I’m in Augusta. I wanted to stop by your place tomorrow. I have some free time. Maybe I can stay for the weekend. Spend some time with you and the kids. Can’t wait to see you, soror. Give me a call. Awesome!’ ” He flashed a cheerleader’s smile and then pretended to vomit.

  I slapped him with the dish towel.

  “ ‘Awesome!’ ” he repeated robotically.

  “She said she’s coming here?” I asked, tossing the towel onto the counter. “She wants to come to our house?”

  “It’s all on the machine. Listen to it. I left it on there.”

  “She’s coming here tomorrow?” I looked around the kitchen. Down at my chipped fingernails. “But this place is a mess. Why didn’t you tell me about the message earlier when we got in?”

  “I’m telling you now. I figured that since she’s your friend, she’d follow up by calling you on your cell phone,” he said smugly.

  I rushed over to my purse hanging on one of the chairs and pulled out my cell phone. I clicked it on.

  “You know I can’t keep this thing on at work,” I said. I had a text. It was Sasha saying everything she’d left on the machine. She planned to be at my house at noon. She’d come to town for the same conference.

  “What’s the big deal anyway, Dawn? Isn’t she your special sorority sister—your soror?” Reginald joked sarcastically.

  “I can’t believe this.” I tried to ignore his crack. “I wonder why she’s coming here.”

  I walked over to a little magnetic mirror on the refrigerator. My edges were gray. I had so many split ends my hair wouldn’t hold a curl.

  Reginald, even in his sarcasm, was right about Sasha being my special friend. She’d been the only best friend I’d ever had. She’d been my roommate at Spelman. We pledged Alpha together. We shared secrets in the dark, whispered dreams into each other’s ears. And so far, she was making good on all of hers. Sasha Bellamy had gone from being a flamboyant country girl from North Carolina to Ms. CNN, queen of the black liberal female voice. America saw her every night on television. But I hadn’t seen her in person in nine years. We kind of lost touch when I left Atlanta.

  “I’m so unprepared. Maybe I should just call her and tell her not to come. We could meet for lunch.”

  “Great idea. That’s the direction I was going in,” Reginald said quickly.

  “Oh, wouldn’t you love that?” I snapped. “You probably waited so late to tell me so I’d have no choice but to cancel.”

  Reginald hated CNN. He called it fake news for rich liberals. And he especially hated Sasha’s show, which was taped at the national headquarters in downtown Atlanta. He called it “The Wannabe Watch.” Needless to say, he wasn’t exactly fond of Sasha. But Sasha also wasn’t fond of him. They’d met when I started dating Reginald my sophomore year of college. Reginald thought she was bourgeoisie and stuck up and Sasha thought Reginald, who wasn’t a student in any of the schools in the Atlanta University Center and worked at Spelman cutting the grass and cleaning up flower beds, was a bum preying on college girls.

  “I’m just saying, no sense having people in the house who are going to cause a bunch of chaos,” Reginald said.

  “ ‘Cause a bunch of chaos’? You don’t even really know her.”

  “She’s a tramp.”

  “Don’t say that. That’s a bunch of old gossip.”

  “So, you’re saying she didn’t sleep with half of the frat boys at Morehouse?”

  “She was in relationships with some of those guys. Plus, that was a million years ago.”

  “OK. I’m sorry. You’re right. She was a tramp,” he said. “Things could be different with her now, because we all know tramps change,” he laughed.

  “We’ve all grown up and changed,” I said. “And you know she has some issues with men.”

  “Her issues weren’t with men. They were with herself. Sasha can hardly take her eyes off of herself long enough to keep a man.”

  I looked in the refrigerator. There was nothing but leftovers. Not even an apple. I’d need to go grocery shopping. I closed the door and looked back into the mirror. The thin hairs between my eyebrows were connecting.

  “And if we’ve all grown up, then what’s the problem?” Reginald asked. “Why are you even thinking about what you need to do around here? You have two kids. She should understand.” He looked up from his little stack of crumpled papers and at me like I was Cheyenne complaining about not being able to go to the mall with her friends. “Do you really care what that woman says about”—he looked around the room—“anything?”

  I didn’t respond.

  He leaned back in the chair, pushing it onto its back legs, and exhaled exaggeratedly.

  “Yeah, you’ve all grown up!” he said. “I’ll never understand your people.”

  I walked out of the kitchen quietly. There was nothing to say. Reginald was ready to pounce into one of his favorite topics and he would’ve loved for me to get aggravated and call Sasha to tell her not to come. That, of course, was something that had occurred to me, but then I was more afraid of how that snub would look than my bummy, aged house and battered hair.

  Five little bottles stared at me from the bottom of my bathroom sink. Hair sheen. Hair grease. Hair dye. Hair
glue. Hair remover. I removed the last bottle and dabbed a little pink glob onto the hair between my eyebrows. There was no way I could dye my hair and still have enough time to clean the house, get the twins washed and in the bed, and somehow lose thirty pounds. I looked down at my hips. It was the years, not the babies, that had them spreading the way they had. For years, I’d tried to blame the twins, but once they’d started walking and talking and I’d passed the weight I was on the scale the morning I’d gone into labor, I knew it was me. And I was OK with that. I was even OK with my husband having more toiletries than me. I’d never been a particularly gorgeous woman and the sheer work it took to keep the charade going was exhausting. Nails and hair appointments. The gym and the clothes. Did this match that and was it riding up too high on my thighs? I had no time for it. I had a family to run and a husband to keep happy. Reginald never seemed to care how I looked; in fact, he was annoyed when I spent too much time on myself.

  “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you when I heard the message,” Reginald said, standing in the doorway of the bathroom. I was leaning over the sink, wiping the hair remover from my forehead. “I just hate to see how these people always get to you. I mean, if anything, you should be proud of what you have. Yeah, Sasha is on television every night, but does she have a husband? Does she have a family?”

  I just looked at him.

  “Exactly. Money doesn’t equal happiness. That’s why I hate those fake-ass Atlanta people who support that status bullshit. I—”

  “I know,” I said, stopping him. “I just need to get myself together—”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Reginald perked up suddenly. “I can get the kids to bed. Give you some time.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, I’ll get R. J. He needs to read his—”

  “Dawn, I have it,” Reginald said. He pointed to the open door beneath the sink. “As you were.”

  After responding to Sasha’s text saying I was happy to hear from her and giving her my address, I dyed my hair and sat in the living room under the dryer watching a prerecorded edition of her show. She was smiling at some handsome Indian doctor, talking about free health care and black women who suffered from fibroids. She held a pen that looked heavy and expensive in her hand and nodded as the doctor spoke. She looked so beautiful and smart and all I could think about was all of the years that had gone by and how much things had changed since we’d pledged Alpha together and sworn to never lose touch.