by Unknown
There’s a table and two chairs in my kitchen. My faithful record player takes up a small amount of space on top of an entertainment center that a neighbor gave me just before she was evicted. My black and white television barely works and requires pliers to change the channels. The only thing of value in my apartment is my vinyl record collection.
I check my clock and see that it’s just past midnight.
It’s on nights like this that I find myself straining to hear them: the midnight cries from women who once slept in nearby beds, all longing for something to rest their heads on that wasn’t soaked in urine.
The silence that fills the air around me now is still taking me some time to get used to.
I know I’m supposed to be happy.
My court-appointed attorney told me so.
He tried to convince me that I could find happiness in the arrangement he had made with the court—five years in what they called a women’s diversion program since I was considered a first offender. The diversion program relocated me somewhere in the country with nothing but red Georgia clay to look at, a small house with ten beds shared by twenty women to live in, and daily meetings that were supposed to rehabilitate me and get me ready to go back out into the land of the living again.
The land of the living. Back then, I wondered how I was supposed to live after what happened that night. Still, it was either the diversion program or being locked in a prison cell for up to ten years, so of course I took the country, the shared beds, and the meetings with counselors who said the same things over and over again.
But that wasn’t really what I was supposed to find happiness in; that part was supposed to come after I had completed the diversion program and the word “felon” was removed from my legal record. In short, I could go through life without a conviction following my every move. That fact was the only thing that gave me a measure of sanity, knowing that one day I wouldn’t have a yellow folder with my full name—Mýa Denise Day—on the front of it.
Not many who lived a life like mine got that chance.
I guess it can also be said that not many have experienced everyday things as I did afterward—things such as smelling the reddest of roses as I walk down a sidewalk, getting a job, or sleeping in a bed upon which no one else has cried.
So, yes, I’m supposed to be happy, but as I sit alone, feeling like the walls are caving in on me, I long for one thing—my mama and her jar of Vaseline. Dorothy Rena Day was the queen of Vaseline. She believed it was the be-all to every ailment.
Including broken hearts and shattered dreams.
The first boy I liked was a white boy. His name was Brian Andrews. He had straight brown hair that he kept combed back, and his eyes were so blue, you thought you were swimming in an ocean when he looked at you. Anyway, when I was in sixth grade, on picture day, I walked over to him with a small bundle of flowers in my hair and my favorite hot pink floral dress on, and I asked him one question. “Could you like someone like me?” In response to my heartful question, he picked up a handful of awful, smelly mud and threw it at me. The mud slid down my dress and fell on my black shoes, the ones with the bows on them.
When I got home, I bathed and then Mama covered my entire body in Vaseline, convinced it would heal my heart because she knew it wasn’t the mud, but why he threw the mud that had cut me to the core.
Brian Andrews, the boy that I just knew would give me my first kiss, had screamed loud enough for all to hear that he could never like a dumb, dark-skinned girl with nappy hair.
That was integration for you.
I will never forget the day I stood in front of the mirror, staring at myself and wishing I was someone else when Mama came in with her jar of Vaseline.
“That isn’t going to make my skin lighter, Mama,” I’d snapped at her.
“You’re right. It isn’t going to make your skin lighter, Mýa, but it will make it shine as beautiful as the person you are on the inside.”
When I went to say something sarcastic back to her, she grabbed at her chest.
I was sixteen years old when I realized Vaseline couldn’t heal my mama’s forty-two-year-old heart.
Chapter Five
Monday morning. The sun hasn’t quite opened its eyes as I walk into Jack’s Pancake House around five, an hour earlier than my shift requires; Jack gives us our employee meals for free if we eat them off the clock. The place is a family-owned restaurant with crisp white walls that get a fresh coat of paint each year, bright red vinyl booths, and chrome tables that are topped with fresh yellow and white daisies every morning.
Jack Tanner is a tall man with a full head of thick, curly gray hair. He often jokes that most of the men in his family lose all their hair by the age of thirty. Jack is happy that at sixty, he still has his.
I love hearing Jack speak, especially when he’s excited about something. That’s when I can see the dimple in his right cheek. I have never met anyone with a bigger, more forgiving heart than Jack’s. His wife of forty-two years, Mary, often says that Jack’s skin is whiter than Alaskan snow, but he doesn’t know it.
I agree. Jack could use some sun.
If it weren’t for Jack, I would never have gotten the associate’s degree with my name on it that now hangs in his office, nor would I have been able to pay for it. Jack and Mary are also the only people who know about my past.
“Twenty-seven is still young, Mýa. You can’t wait tables forever. I won’t let you. You can do more,” Jack yells over the sizzle of bacon being tossed on the grill as I grab my first cup of coffee.
“I don’t think I could ever leave you, Jack.”
“You can, and you will. You’re like this bacon that smells and looks good, but eventually, people do something with it—they eat it. Why? Because bacon is made for more than smelling and looking good. It has a purpose. You need to find your purpose.”
I laugh as I place a piece of toast on my plate. “So now I’m a piece of bacon?”
“Better! One day, someone is going to come through those doors, look into those big, beautiful brown eyes of yours, and then ask me for your hand in marriage.”
“Just like that, huh?”
“It may not happen exactly that way, but you get my point. I don’t know the future, Mýa, but I can smell love in the air, and it’s going to rain down on your unbelieving head.”
“I think that bacon grease has you talking nonsense, my friend.”
Just as I put a little sugar in my coffee, I hear the restaurant’s front door open. Jack looks my way, and both of us move quickly toward the front to see who it is.
Standing there in front of the counter is a handsome young man with three boxes of lettuce in his hands. He looks like he can’t be a day older than nineteen.
“I guess I’ll have to wait for him to mature a little bit more,” I say to Jack with a chuckle.
“Women date younger men all the time. I keep telling some of the girls here that haven’t found the ‘one’ to give it some time. Their husbands just haven’t been born yet.”
Chapter Six
“Time for you to talk to me, Nina,” I whisper as I pull off my apron after a double shift, place my favorite Nina Simone record on the record player, and begin to shake the pancake flour out of my short hair.
Kicking off my shoes, I snap my fingers to the soft melodies of “Feeling Good” as they float through my apartment. Nina always knows how to talk to me. Sometimes it feels like she wrote her songs just for me.
With a glass of wine in my hand, I stare out my window at the Friday night streets of Atlanta. “I need to be out there with them,” I say with a heavy sigh as I watch a couple of young girls pile into a small car. Their dresses are so tight that I wonder how they can breathe. But who cares about breathing when you’re young and living life, right? Sometimes, I wish I could be that carefree, but I know better. Still, I can hear Jack telling
me to get out of my apartment and go live my life. For the first time, I decide to take his advice.
Nina is still belting it out in the background as I pull out my favorite pair of black heels, a red satin dress that I picked up from the Goodwill and that still has the tags on it, and some gold glitter for my eyes.
Feeling good about finally getting out and loving how my red dress rests on my hips, I glance at myself in the mirror and dab a little of Mama’s favorite on my lips—Vaseline mixed with a hint of ninety-nine cent red lipstick. I turn off the record player and then grab my purse. The cab arrives just as I make it down the stairs.
“Marco’s in Midtown,” I say as I adjust my seat belt.
“It’s the perfect night for a little jazz and some spoken word, isn’t it?” the cab driver asks.
“It is,” I say, looking out the window and admiring the bright city lights that flash by us as we head down the expressway.
“I wish I could go into Marco’s with you. I’d buy a pretty lady like you all the drinks she wanted,” he says, winking at me through his rearview mirror.
I smile.
Twenty minutes later, and after a hundred “pretty lady” comments, I walk into Marco’s and absorb the music and conversations as they seep into my skin. I can’t lie—the vibe of the place has me feeling grown.
Throughout the club, the electric blue concrete floor is sprinkled with gold flecks, creating the elegant illusion of walking on stars. Large cases framed in gold line the walls, each containing a different musical instrument. My eyes linger for a moment on the lyrics from various jazz songs that are engraved into the white and gold wallpaper that surrounds me on all sides.
My heart flutters as I stand in awe, gazing at a large portrait of Billie Holiday that rests in the center of the glass wall behind the mahogany bar.
I feel like her eyes are staring into mine.
Chapter Seven
The hostess is pleasant as she ushers me to a small black table with gold legs off the side of the stage. She hands me a drink menu, goes over the drink specialties, and then provides the name of my waitress—Ms. Maggie Estep.
I laugh as I glance over the drink menu and say, “Maggie Estep can’t be her real name.”
“Every staff member here is named after a musical instrument, a famous singer, or a spoken word artist,” she says as she points to her own name tag—Eartha Kitt.
“You do resemble Ms. Kitt,” I say, placing the drink menu on the table.
“I get that a lot,” she says. She takes my drink order and lets me know that my waitress will be the one to bring it to me.
By the time Ms. Estep places my martini on the table, I’m thoroughly engrossed in the groove of the saxophonist, snapping my fingers to his beat and enjoying the way he made his saxophone do what it was meant to do.
Jack would be proud to see me out, I think as I lean back in my chair and join the swaying heads of the crowd with my own. I can feel my heart thump with each note. Something deep inside me is waking up.
I order another martini and watch as the announcer walks out on the stage and introduces the evening’s spoken word artist. His name is Daniel Jacobs. Light and bright with a black suit, white dress shirt, and white Converse shoes, he stands in front of the mic and waits a second or two as the bass player warms up the audience.
His words drip gently from his lips. My eyes roam the audience and I can see their ears opening and their lungs expanding as they breathe in the melodies that he delivers in such a way that it sounds like a jazz beat sprinkled with a dash of his broken heart.
He is intoxicating.
His rhythm is clean and crisp.
He’s got me feeling each lyric that moves through the air. I can feel the depth of his pain penetrating down to my gut, causing my insides to mourn because the pain is too familiar. Too raw. All these years, and I can still feel the pain stabbing me.
As I sip on my martini, I realize why I feel like a magnetic force is drawing me to the words in his piece. Pain recognizes pain.
His piece is called “Guess I Always Knew”.
I remember the first day I saw you,
sitting there like a tall drink of refreshing Kool-Aid.
You know the kind, the kind only a mama could make,
the kind where the strawberry flavor made my bones shake.
I remember your smile, girl,
teeth glistening like a baby’s new white diaper cloth.
A white silk dress hugged your beautiful chocolate neckline.
Your eyes sucked up the sun, dried up the waters, and washed away the loneliness from my heart.
I remember thinking I was going to make you mine for a lifetime.
It took one day to love you and one day to lose you.
I never told you.
Never told you that I wanted children. Can’t say why now.
It seems I never told you a lot of things.
Funny now, now that I want to share my dreams.
I have to admit, girl.
I have to admit that hate boils down in my heart for you.
For him, the man you put your touch upon.
You know—the touch that should have only belonged to me.
It hurt, girl.
No, it burned, girl.
It burned like the fire that was aching in my bones.
The day I put that ring on your finger, you should have only wanted me.
I know I was good enough—tall, solid shoulders filled with endless love.
What more did you want, girl? What little did I give? Too bad you can’t answer me now.
Now that you’re gone.
Can a man scream?
When I think of you, I hear the screams inside my head.
Seeing you and him in our bed.
Mama could see the real you. She always could.
The side of you hidden underneath the surface.
She saw it in your eyes.
I married you anyway. Walked down the aisle and said, “I do.”
I think you whispered something that day.
It wasn’t, “I love you.”
Guess I always knew.
As Mr. Light-and-Bright walks off the stage, he glances my way, and in the brief moment that our eyes meet across the short distance that separates us, I can feel something tugging at my heart.
Chapter Eight
“Morning, Jack!” I shout over the roar of the pancake mixer as I straighten out my apron and make sure my name tag is in place.
“What’s up with you?”
From the first day I started working here, Jack has been like a father to me, always knowing when my face is hiding my inner thoughts.
“Nothing,” I say quickly. “I just have some things on my mind.”
He stops the machine and gives me the once-over.
“Stop analyzing me. I’m good.”
“This pancake mix is good; you aren’t. Come into my office.” I try giving him a reassuring smile, but he isn’t buying it. “Come.”
Jack’s office is like walking into an antique store. Every piece has a connection to his roots. On a table in the corner sits a beautiful statue of a slave breaking his chains that was carved by his grandfather. Jack once told me that every time he looks at the statue, it reminds him of his responsibility to help others. Jack’s grandfather was responsible for helping many slaves find their freedom. Every time I look at the statue, it gives me hope. I hope that one day, I, too, will be free. Every day, I feel like the chains of the past have me in shackles.
Jack keeps his eyes on me as he takes a seat behind his cluttered desk. I plop down into a chair that’s older than both of us.
“When are you going to get rid of this thing?” I ask jokingly. “I can feel the springs, you know.”
Jack laughs. “Never.
That chair has been in the family for generations.”
“So have the springs.”
He grins and claps his hands. “Stop stalling. Tell me what’s up.”
“I went out last night.” I watch his eyes widen. “Before you go there, I was alone.”
“Oh. At least you got out. That’s a start.”
“True,” I say as I sit up and cross my legs. “I went to Marco’s.”
“Really? Good for you. I love that place, and so does Mary.”
“I didn’t know you were into spoken word.”
“I’m not. I love jazz, and Mary loves all the mushy stuff they talk about on stage. I call it a win-win.”
“It’s spoken word, not mushy stuff.”
He throws his hands up in the air. “Tomato, tomahto. Who cares? As long as my Mary is happy.”
“Of course she’s happy; she has a man like you that’s still trying to woo her.”
“That’s what I keep telling her.”
I love the relationship Jack and Mary have. They understand each other and they know how to have fun together.
“You’re stalling again,” Jack says.
“Okay,” I say with a long sigh. “Last night, this spoken word artist performed a piece that reminded me of something I feel like I will never have.”
“A man?”
“Sort of. The piece was about being hurt, and it’s not that I want to be hurt, but the love the artist once had for this woman…”
“You want that, right?”
“I do. When the artist finished the piece, I could feel that longing tugging at my heart.”
“I get it, but love doesn’t come when you don’t believe in it.”
I fold my arms. “I believe in love.”
“How can you believe in love when you don’t believe in yourself?”
“I believe in myself.”
Jack pretends to spit on the floor. “Lies, and you know it.”