Should Have Known Better

by Octavia, Grace

  “What, Dawn? What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. There was something. Something with Phil Landon.”

  “Phil Landon? From the car dealership? The jungle fever skirt chaser?”

  “Skirt chaser?”

  “Yeah,” Sharika said. “You never heard about him? Oh, I forgot you’re not from here. Both he and his daddy have chased every black tail in Georgia.” She laughed. “We have like four caramel-colored families in Augusta that can trace their roots back to the Landons. And you know what that means. The only problem with those guys is they love black women, but they won’t marry one to save their lives.”

  “What? But he was so nice,” I said. “And Sasha said he was her—”

  “Friend?”

  We sat and listened to each other’s thoughts. Sharika was sure she could get more information on Landon. He’d dated and dumped some girl she’d gone to high school with. His wife showed up at the house one afternoon, threatening to take her to court, saying she had receipts. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I couldn’t make sense of it. If Sasha was having an affair with Landon, why would she come after Reginald? And if Landon had dumped Sasha like Sharika was implying, why would she take us to his office? Why would he agree to a deal?

  “I’m going to put my ear to the street,” Sharika said, like we were in some old blaxploitation movie. “See what I can find out.”

  “Thank you,” I said, feeling a little bit of soft rain over my fury.

  “Well, if you ask me, that’s what friends are for.”

  “Thank you for being my friend.”

  My mother had chucked a spoonful of lima beans and ham chunks into two bowls on the kitchen table. There was no salt, no pepper, just beans and ham clumped together.

  I moved the food around. Ate a little. Picked the pork from the bone and used it to suffer through the beans.

  I couldn’t stop seeing Landon’s wife standing there alone in the nail salon. How Sasha responded to her. How Sasha responded to me when I asked if she was actually sleeping with that woman’s husband. She smiled. She grinned.

  If she was capable of acting like that, behaving that way toward a woman she didn’t know and then toward someone she’d slept across the room from for two years, what else was she capable of? What else had she done?

  “Mr. Morgan gave me information about a doctor,” my mother said, talking about the lawyer. “I can call if you want.”

  “I don’t need a doctor, Mama. I told you and I told him, I don’t need to see a psychologist or psychiatrist or whatever.”

  “Now, I know our people don’t commonly go to these doctors, but Mr. Morgan said it’ll be good for you, and considering everything that’s going on—”

  “Everything that’s going on? What exactly is going on, Mama?” I asked. “You and Mr. Morgan seem to want me to see this doctor about what’s going on, so what’s going on? You tell me, because I don’t know. Maybe you know. Maybe he knows.”

  “I don’t kn—”

  “And there it is. You don’t know. And neither does he, so how can you tell me to get help for something neither of you understand? Not one of you! I don’t have my children. My husband is . . . Who’s supposed to fix that? How can they?” I hollered. “They can’t. No one can fix this but me.”

  “I still think that maybe you could at least try it. Who knows. With prayer and a little help, you might be able to—”

  “Mama, please stop it!” I rattled. “What is it with you? What? Do you believe those test results? Do you believe I’m using drugs?”

  “There were three tests,” she answered. “They all said the same thing.”

  “But what do I say?”

  “I don’t know what you say. You show up at my house. You scream. You run off. Drink up that old liquor,” she said. “I don’t know what you say.”

  “I’m your daughter! The least you could do is believe me when I tell you I didn’t use drugs.”

  “Then how did they get into your system?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about that. I just don’t get it,” I said. “But until I do, I need you to back off. And trust me.”

  “It’s not just about me trusting you. For this weekend—” she said uneasily, bringing up a topic I’d forced into silence.

  “Forget about it,” I cut her off, pushing the bowl away from me. “I’m not going to see my kids in that house. Not with her.”

  “Well, then, how else will you see them? The judge gave Reginald temporary custody and he ordered supervised visits until they can clear your drug test and psychological evaluation.”

  “I don’t need to be supervised with my own children,” I said. “I’m a good mother. I’m a damn good mother and Reginald knows that. He’s just listening to Sasha and letting her fill his head with all of these lies.”

  My mother looked off and I could see in her face that she thought I was tumbling through excuses.

  “Here we go again,” I said. “First you think I’m crazy and need a therapist, then you think I’m using drugs, and now you don’t believe me when I say Sasha is the person behind all of this. God, Mama, who do you think I am?”

  “I don’t know who you are. I really don’t,” she said. “You left this house in a rush and you never turned back. You acted like me and your daddy was monsters.”

  “One monster’s just as scary as two,” I said.

  “He wasn’t that bad.”

  “Wasn’t that bad? Were you there? Do you remember?”

  “He was hard on me, but he wasn’t ever really hard on you. I protected you. I protected you as much as I could.”

  “Well, it wasn’t enough.”

  “You’re OK now. You turned out fine,” she said, getting up from the table and carrying the nearly full bowls with her. She flung them into the sink and there was a crash of glass. “I did what I was supposed to do. I put a roof over your head. Got you in school. Took you to church. Fed you. Gave you an extra blanket at night. I couldn’t do none of that without your father and you know that.” She stepped toward the sink and looked out the window into the dark night. “I wasn’t nothing but a baby when I came to Atlanta. No education. No skills. Had to get on my knees and scrub floors. You know what that’s like?” She looked at me over her shoulder and then looked back outside. “No, you don’t know what that’s like. Because you ain’t never had to do it. I made sure of that. I made sure you had a daddy who’d stay. A home in a nice neighborhood. That you were smart. That you’d never be like me.”

  I began to cry and took my eyes off of my mother. I couldn’t look at her. She’d had her hands holding on to the sink like she was about to fall down. She was weeping and shaking with her back to me.

  “I made sure you went to college. Fought like hell to get you out of this house. Begged your father to pay for it. I begged! Begged! On my knees! Raw. On this floor. Right here.” She stomped on the floor. “And I knew, I just knew that it’d come back to me. That you’d go out in the world and be something and come home and show your mama. Show her that even if everything wasn’t right, she did something right. But you left me. You found that man and you left me.”

  “I couldn’t come back here,” I said. “I promised myself I’d go anywhere, but I couldn’t come back here. That’s the only thing I wanted. That was all I thought of when I left. That I couldn’t come back.”

  My mother turned around to me.

  “When I met Reginald, that was his promise,” I said. “He was going to take me away. Take me away from here.”

  The day we met, Reginald said my dress reminded him of a flower bed. I was just nineteen, as skinny as a stick man and still stuffing my bra. I didn’t know how to take his compliment. Flowers were pretty. They were all over my dress and even springing up on the sleeves of my sweater. But did I want to look like a flower bed? A whole flower bed?

  I was standing in front of my old dorm, an ancient sweat box with tiny bedrooms and prison-like windows.

&nbs
p; He was wearing a huge sand-colored hat with sweat permeating the brim. Standing in a bed of flowers near the steps.

  “You like flowers?” I asked, hoping he’d say yes at least and maybe I wouldn’t feel so bad about looking like a whole flower bed. I was on my way to class, and while Spelman is an all-girls school, I had a few guys from Morehouse in my classes and I didn’t want them snickering at my fashion choice when I walked in the door.

  Reginald looked up from the flower bed and smiled. He was young. A little older than me. Had nice teeth and dark brown skin.

  “I wouldn’t have told you if it was all that bad. Now would I?” he said. He plucked a purple flower from the soil and handed it to me.

  I kept our first date a secret. I’d just pledged my sorority and I was learning fast that there were rules to being a sorority woman. More rules than there were to being a Spelman woman—and that was certainly enough. I had to watch whom I dated and where we went. Watch what I wore and what we said. I had to watch everything. And if I wasn’t watching, they were.

  “How could someone as sweet as you end up pledging a sorority?” Reginald asked on our third date at a dinky hero shop in the West End. He’d gotten a huge sandwich with onions and ketchup gushing out of the sides. I thought it was gross, but he pointed to the sign out front: “Gutbusters!”

  By then, I already knew how much Reginald hated the sorority, and anything to do with it. He found all of us pretentious and shady. Said we were actually the “Negro problem”—a bunch of black folks who thought they were white and measured success by money and names.

  While I didn’t necessarily see these things or have a problem with my Spelman or sorority sisters, he was saying all of the right things to me at the right time. See, I wasn’t exactly Spelman or Alpha pledge material. Who someone was, what her family name meant when we lined up to become women of the school, meant that she could be shot right to the front. The daughter of a dignitary, a family of graduates, contributors, the list went on. They all had their own sections in the sun, clubs and traditions. The next set was the second generations and daughters of faculty or staff members; their parents had a little money or status. Maybe a feature in Ebony magazine. And last were the sisters there on scholarship. The ones who were first generation to the school. Who knew better than to say who their parents were or what they weren’t doing.

  I fit somewhere between the second and third lists of sisters. I was never mysteriously shut out of activities or told “no” to my face like some other girls I knew. My father was a pastor and many people had heard of our church, so my matriculation into the circle wasn’t so difficult. I was kind. I was smart. But I knew not to ever tell anyone that my mother scrubbed floors. And then she started working for one of my Spelman sisters.

  “They’re not so bad,” I told Reginald. “We do community service. We try to make the world better.”

  “If you believe that nonsense, you’ve already sipped the punch,” he joked. “Do I need to save you from the cult of the Alpha sisters?”

  “No,” I laughed. “It’s not a cult.”

  But it was. Or maybe it just felt like one once they all figured out that I was dating Reginald. My big sisters just stopped talking to me. My line sisters, the women I pledged with, said I couldn’t date him. “He didn’t go to college,” someone said. “You can do better. He’s beneath you.”

  This only made me love Reginald more. I snuck out. I lied. I had late-night kisses and tight hugs. We were rebels. We were in love. When I was about to graduate, he asked me to marry him. He said he wanted to take me home and build a life with me. That was everything I wanted. To leave Atlanta.

  I knew I couldn’t have both him and my sisters. I chose him.

  The judge suspended my driver’s license. I couldn’t drive a car on my own for a year, unless I took a driving course.

  My mother had to drive me to Sasha’s house on Saturday to see the children.

  I fought it. I called the lawyer. I called the courthouse. I cried and tried to make threats, but in the end it was clear that for a long while, the only way I could see my children was on Reginald’s terms. And after over a week of being away from two people I hadn’t gone so much as ten hours without in ten years, I had to break.

  My mother prayed through the entire ride. Begged me not to say anything to Sasha. Not to break anything. Said she understood my anger, but that if I wanted the twins back, I had to prove I wasn’t losing my mind.

  “I’ll be fine,” I assured her, but I wasn’t sure about that. Riding in the little car down the wide streets with freshly manicured lawns and white people staring at us from every front step, I felt myself unraveling and I held on to my gut to stop from vomiting.

  On Lover’s Lane, the grass was so green, it looked like it had been spray-painted. Perfectly pruned flowers seemed to sneak up on towering home fronts that somehow were both intimidating and friendly with their matching mahogany French doors and latticed windows. The houses were so big, they looked like offices or community centers. I wondered what kinds of people lived in those houses. What they did. How they’d gotten so wealthy. How they saw my children. How they saw my husband. And how he, a man who claimed for so long to hate these people, saw them.

  My mother pointed to a house tucked so far back behind bushes and rows of tulips you could hardly see it.

  “This is it,” she said, stopping the car in the middle of the street.

  “You sure?” I asked. I looked down at the address that had once been written on my hand.

  “Yes.” She backed up and tried to park the car close to the curb, but we looked around and saw that not one car, not one, was parked in the street.

  “You think we should park here?” she asked.

  “Where else?”

  We looked around again as if we’d find some sign or person telling us it was OK to leave my mother’s little Toyota on the street.

  “But it’s such a long walk to the house,” my mother pointed out. “A mile!”

  “That’s not a mile, Mama,” I said, but I wasn’t sure. It was a long way.

  We looked at the house. The car was still idling.

  “Maybe you could call them,” she said.

  “I’m not calling them. I’m not pulling into that driveway. Let’s just park,” I insisted, reaching over to the ignition.

  “Is that Reginald?” She nodded to the house and I looked to see Reginald skipping down the driveway, waving his hands. He was wearing khaki shorts and loafers. A thin white T-shirt.

  “Pull into the driveway,” he said, holding his hands around his mouth like a megaphone.

  “See, he said to—” my mother tried, but I snatched the keys from the ignition.

  “No!”

  I got out of the car without my purse or my thoughts. Seeing Reginald for the first time since he’d left me in our bed, I was past any edge. I wanted to fight. I was beyond asking why or being pleasant for the judge. This man walked out on me.

  “Where are they?” I asked, but it was more like a command.

  “You should park in the driveway,” he said after a weak wave to my mother, who was standing by my side.

  “What driveway?” I asked sternly. “You don’t own a driveway here, so you can’t say where I can park.”

  “Oh, Jesus, are you going to be like this? Don’t come inside if you’re going to act like this.”

  “WHERE ARE MY CHILDREN?”

  My mother grabbed my arm.

  “Calm down, Dawn,” she begged.

  “Yes, listen to your mother,” Reginald agreed. “That’ll be best. I never knew you’d act like this.”

  “Act? I’m acting the way you made me act,” I said. “Just take me to my children.”

  We trudged up the driveway and through a little path of bushes to the front door. I was behind Reginald. My mother was behind me. I could hear her praying.

  Reginald opened one side of a set of French doors and R. J. and Cheyenne were standing in front of a winding
marble staircase I’d only seen on television. The newel posts were taller than the twins.

  I ran to them and sank to my knees like they were still two feet tall. I gathered them into my arms and rocked and rocked, kissing their cheeks and asking if they were OK.

  “Let me see you,” I said to R. J., pushing him back and looking at his face.

  I did the same to Cheyenne.

  They smiled at me pleasantly, but the look in their eyes was more distant.

  Then I realized that their arms were to their sides and not around my neck. Cheyenne had one hand in her pocket. She was wearing jeans I hadn’t bought her. I hadn’t bought any of the things they were wearing.

  “I’ve missed you guys,” I said. “Missed you a lot. Didn’t you miss me?”

  “All right, everyone, let’s go into the sunroom to get some lunch,” Reginald said loudly, trying to usher us with swinging arms.

  “No!” I argued. I looked back at the twins. “Didn’t you miss me? Didn’t you miss your mama?”

  “Dawn, just come and eat.” My mother put her hand on my shoulder. “They’re probably just hungry.”

  R. J. looked down at his feet.

  I sat there on the floor before them for a minute, but then I got up.

  I felt so defeated. I wasn’t expecting a whole lot. But hugs. Kisses. I miss you—those weren’t expectations. Those were just standard. These were my children. They had to miss me. They had to want to touch me.

  Reginald explained that Sasha had gone shopping. Elka, the cook, had made lunch. A year later in therapy, I’d describe his voice, his body language, even his scent as pedestrian. He was flat. Detached. Like a tour guide showing us around a funeral home or a host who didn’t exactly want to have the party.

  He was saying something as we walked. Pointing to things.

  My mother smiled and held on to her purse.

  And just when I was about to lose myself and scream that this was all my nightmare, R. J. came walking up beside me and took my hand.

  I looked down at him and he smiled. A tear rolled from my eye. I squeezed his hand and looked forward at Cheyenne following so closely behind her father’s footsteps, he nearly tripped. She looked nervous. Very far from me.