by Mary Monroe
“This is a real special day for mothers and their children, Christine. Even to the mothers that don’t deserve to be mothers,” she added, giving me a stern look. It didn’t bother me when I got scolded by Miss Odessa. As a matter of fact, I was glad when she did.
I gave her a sheepish grin, shuffled my feet like an idiot, and shrugged. I don’t know why, but one thing I couldn’t do was sass old people. Even when they were mean to me. I figured it had something to do with that incident when I was a little girl and stepped on that old man’s head in our old house and thought I’d killed him. Even though I had found out that that man had died of natural causes, to this day I still felt a twinge of guilt about stepping on him and not telling anybody about it.
“Are your kids coming to spend Mother’s Day with you?” I asked.
A sad look immediately appeared on Miss Odessa’s face. It was the same look that slid across my face when people asked me something I didn’t want to answer. But she answered me, anyway. “I doubt it,” she replied in a hollow voice, shuffling across the floor to one of two shabby easy chairs in her congested living room. She had one of the smallest units in our building, but she had more possessions than anybody I’d ever seen. As petite as I was, I often had to walk sideways to get around in her apartment, and I still sometimes managed to knock over something along the way. “They hardly do anymore. Not since they all grew up and moved into their own places. I had me three husbands, a bunch of kids, and I still ended up alone,” she said, with a dry laugh.
It amazed me how much I actually had in common with this old woman. Miss Odessa was even older than my parents, and from what I’d learned from her in bits and pieces that day, all five of her kids lived in or around Berkeley, but they practically ignored her. Her youngest son had a new wife and a year-old daughter, whom Miss Odessa had never met, and they lived just six blocks away.
I could see the sadness in the old woman’s eyes when she talked about her children. I decided to change the subject for now and avoid it in the future. In the next breath, I started rambling about something I’d seen on television, and before long we were laughing.
As footloose and fancy-free as I was, I was fairly sensitive. It didn’t happen that often, but I got emotional from time to time. I had cried off and on for two days when, a few months before, old Mr. Royster next door died.
I spent the rest of the evening stretched out like a python on one of Miss Odessa’s two living room sofas, watching one rerun after another. She liked beer, and she usually kept a couple of six-packs in her refrigerator. She kept dozing off, so I could have drunk as many of her beers as I wanted to, but I didn’t. I didn’t need a buzz to feel good when I was with her.
It was a school night, and if Miss Odessa had not chased me home around eight o’clock, I would have stayed even longer, watching more television and poring over the magazines that she had stacked up in boxes throughout her apartment. She also had an incomplete set of encyclopedias, which I found fascinating. Through them, I entered a whole new world, and I started to see a lot of things in my old world in a better light, including myself.
CHAPTER 22
Even though Miss Odessa had become a positive influence in my life, I was still running with a wild crowd.
I had not seen Wade Fisher around the neighborhood in over a year. And whenever his name came up, I changed the subject. I’d almost forgotten about him completely until Miss Odessa and I ran into his mother at a fruit stand at the Ashby Street weekend flea market one Saturday afternoon two weeks before the Fourth of July.
“Oh, Wade is already doing so well in Hollywood! He’s got him an agent and an apartment near the big studios. And, he got him a Jewish agent, so I know my baby is in good hands,” Miss Louise squealed, spit dribbling from both sides of her mouth. Somehow she had managed to slide her stout, bell-shaped body into a denim jumpsuit that was two sizes too small and thirty years too young for her.
She opened her matching denim shoulder bag and whipped out a sealskin wallet. My first thought was that she was going to show me how empty it was and then put the bite on me for “a few dollars,” like she usually did when I ran into her. But she surprised me this time. With her eyes bugged out and her tongue licking her bottom lip, she flipped open her wallet to a picture of Wayne in the spot where her driver’s license should have been. It was a good head shot of Wade. He looked every inch a big Hollywood star. But I had a feeling that was not the case.
“What has he done so far?” I asked in a casual voice. My question made Miss Louise uncomfortable, because her mouth dropped open, and she gave me a look that made me uncomfortable, too. “Uh, I go to the movies a lot and I watch a lot of television, but I haven’t seen Wade in anything yet,” I said, with a forced smile.
“My boy’s done a lot of stuff,” Miss Louise snapped, like she was saying it more for her benefit than for mine. She patted her wig and sucked in a loud breath. “But you know how them Hollywood bigwigs do black folks. Black actors can’t get too far in them movies, because the producers and directors usually edit them out of whatever they put ’em in when they run over budget or some other stupid reason.” Miss Louise let out a sigh that made her screw up her face in such a pained way that I thought she was going to cry.
Miss Odessa fished a pair of horn-rimmed glasses out of her big straw purse and held them up to her eyes. Then she looked at the picture with so much awe on her face, you would have thought she was admiring something holy. “Well, the boy is certainly handsome enough to be in the movies,” she said, swooning.
“Oh yes. The boy goes to parties where all the biggest stars go. And, you ought to see all of them pretty girls chasing him all over that Hollywood. Them white girls especially. He all but has to beat them off with a stick. I don’t know what it is about my boy that drives the girls so crazy, but his daddy had the same problem. Irresistible is what he is,” Miss Louise said, with a proud sigh, looking directly at me.
“He’s my son and I love him to death, but the boy is a ladies’ man. The girl he’s with now is white, but she’s a nice girl, and I think I can deal with her in the family if I have to. She rich. You want to see her picture?” Miss Louise asked, already flipping open her wallet to another compartment. This time she plucked a picture out of the change compartment. Miss Odessa leaned so far forward to look at this picture, it looked like she’d suddenly developed a hump on her back.
“Oh, my God, what a beautiful girl,” Miss Odessa said, looking at the picture like it was something good to eat.
I glanced at the picture so fast, all I saw was a blond blur and two rows of sparkling white teeth. “Tell Wade I said hi and best of luck,” I mumbled, backing away. I didn’t want to hear any more about Wade’s glamorous new life, and I certainly did not want to look too long at a picture of his pretty new girlfriend. I wasn’t looking where I was going. I stumbled and accidentally backed into a stand across from the fruit vendor, where a boy was selling old comic books and lemonade.
“What can I get for you today, baby sister?” the boy asked. This boy was also from the neighborhood, but he and I ran in completely different circles. I didn’t even know his name, but I knew that he was always involved in some kind of moneymaking venture. One week I saw him running up and down the street selling newspapers, even going up to cars waiting on red lights to change. The next month, he was on the street selling something different each week: newspapers, bean pies, roses, and fish sandwiches. When he got tired of doing that, he sold lemonade on the sidewalk in front of his mama’s house. I even used to see him rummaging through Dumpsters, fishing out aluminum cans and empty pop bottles.
“Is that lemonade fresh?” I asked. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that Miss Odessa was still talking to Wade’s mama. Given the way Miss Louise was waving her arms and wiping sweat off her face with the back of her hand, I assumed she was still bragging about Wade. Then I saw Miss Odessa pull a wad of bills out of her purse. Miss Louise’s hand looked like a lobster’s claw as she re
ached out and snatched the money. She did it so fast that I would not have witnessed it if I had blinked. That’s when I looked away and focused my attention on the boy and his lemonade in front of me.
“I made it myself out of lemons from my own tree,” he said proudly. Before I could even tell him that I didn’t have any money, he filled a large Styrofoam cup and handed it to me, tossing in a wedge of lemon.
“Uh, I spent all my money getting my fortune told,” I explained, pointing to a booth down the same aisle, occupied by a gypsy psychic. She had told me that I’d meet a tall man who would one day be very important to me. I didn’t pay too much attention to her prediction, because every psychic I’d ever been to had told me, and most of the other girls I knew, the same thing. “I’ll have to pay you later,” I said. I drank until the cup was empty.
“You’re Christine Martinez, right?”
“You know my name?” I gasped.
He nodded. “Martinez is Spanish or something, right?”
I nodded. “My folks are from Guatemala. How do you know my name?”
“I asked around.”
I gave him a surprised look. “I don’t know you, do I?” I had had sex with so many boys, I couldn’t remember a lot of the names or faces. There was a possibility that I’d already been with this boy! If that was the case, I had to change my ways because I didn’t like the way I felt about myself at that moment.
“No, we’ve never met,” he said, shaking his head. “I know some of the kids you hang with, so I didn’t think I was your type,” he said, with a chuckle. “Hey, maybe I’ll see you around somewhere. Movies maybe?”
He was not bad looking. He had a round, cinnamon-colored face with shiny black eyes. His lips were rather generous, and he was a little too thin for my taste. He was tall, at least six two. His lanky arms looked like they could wrap around me twice. “What’s your name, anyway?” I asked, turning to leave. “I know your mama is Miss Rosetta Thurman because she goes to the same laundromat that we go to.”
“Jesse Ray.” He paused and stuck out his chest. “My family and my friends call me J.R.,” he said proudly.
“J.R.,” I repeated. “I like that. It’s easy to remember,” I told him. “Well, I hope I see you again.”
“You will,” he replied, with a wink and a mysterious smile.
Something told me that I would see Jesse Ray again. Because he looked at me like no man had looked at me before, like he was already sizing me up and planning our future.
CHAPTER 23
I had enjoyed meeting and chatting with Jesse Ray Thurman, but I didn’t give him another thought after I left the flea market that day. I spent the rest of that Saturday afternoon with Miss Odessa. I had to laugh when I thought about how I’d gone from hanging out with some of the coolest kids in town to hanging out with a woman old enough to be my grandmother.
Unlike a lot of old people I knew, Miss Odessa wasn’t nosy and meddlesome. She’d asked me only a few questions about my folks, like where they worked and what they did in their spare time. The basic information was all she seemed interested in. And, each time I attempted to tell her what my folks were really like, she changed the subject. I guess in her own way, she already knew by the way I’d latched on to her.
I spent so much time at Miss Odessa’s apartment that when some of my street friends came looking for me, they came straight to her door. Jesse Ray Thurman was the last boy on the planet that I expected to pay me an uninvited visit.
I felt so comfortable and at home at Miss Odessa’s that I answered her door when he knocked a few days after I’d seen him at the flea market.
“Hi, Christine. Your mama told me you were at your godmother’s apartment,” he said, grinning from ear to ear.
“How did you know where I lived?” I asked, my mouth hanging open after I stopped talking.
“I asked around,” he admitted, cocking his head to one side. He was so much taller than me that I had to look up at him. When he looked down on me, his eyelids slid halfway down his eyes, like shades, giving him that “hooded eye” look that made some men seem so mysterious.
“Uh … that’s right. My, uh, godmother,” I said, with pride I didn’t know I had. I was surprised that somebody as out of touch as my mother would refer to Miss Odessa as my godmother. From that day on, that was what I considered Miss Odessa to be. It had a better ring to it than “friend” did when I told my friends who Miss Odessa was.
The sight of Jesse Ray standing there in that dimly lit apartment hallway had really taken me by surprise. I stood there, reared back on my heels, with my head tilted back, squinting my eyes so that I could see him better. He was better looking than I’d thought. I didn’t know how to deal with a boy that I didn’t know who was going around asking questions about me.
“I guess you came for the money I owe you for the lemonade.” I grinned, patting the pockets on my jeans, my head still tilted back. My neck had already started to ache, but I didn’t care.
“Oh, you can forget about that. I already did. I, uh, thought you might want to go see a movie.” I didn’t know any shy boys, but the way that Jesse Ray was blinking his eyes and shifting his weight from one foot to the other, he was acting like one.
“With who?” I asked.
He shrugged. “With me. Your mama let you go out on dates yet?”
“Not really,” I admitted. Neither of my parents had ever discussed my social life with me. “I’m just fifteen.”
“Oops!” Jesse Ray looked like he was going to faint. “I’m sorry. I just thought … I thought you were at least sixteen!”
I shook my head.
“Listen, I’ll catch up with you some other time.” He laughed, backing away, with his hands up in the air, like I’d just pulled a gun on him. “I just thought … Well, I’ve seen you out with some of the kids from the university, so I thought you were older. And, you do look at least sixteen. I don’t want your daddy cracking me upside my head.” He laughed some more, wiping sweat off his face. He didn’t seem shy now, just nervous.
“You still want me to forget about paying for the lemonade?” I asked, following him down the hall, toward the exit.
“Don’t worry about that,” he said, walking away even faster.
“Who was that at the door? Was it one of my kids?” Miss Odessa asked as soon as I returned to her living room. The biggest problem with having such an old person for a best friend was the fact that she had health problems on top of health problems. Today her arthritis was bothering her so bad, it was a struggle for her to get up once she’d sat down. She was wobbling like a spinning top now, trying to get up from her sofa. I padded across the floor and grabbed her by the arm to keep her from falling. “I asked who that was at my door,” she said, flopping back down on her seat so hard, she took me with her.
“Nobody,” I replied, with a shrug. “Just some boy knocking on the wrong door.”
CHAPTER 24
I didn’t go home after I left Miss Odessa’s house that day. Instead, I ended up at the house of a tall, lanky girl, with a cute round face, named Tina. I had recently met Tina through Maria. A month after I met Tina, Maria’s family moved to San Jose so now I spent most of my time with Tina. Unlike some of the other girls I knew, who would steal your clothes and your man, I trusted Tina because she was always honest and up front with me. She was probably the only real friend I had now that Maria was gone. I had promised that I’d help her braid her hair that night. Like with most of the kids that I roamed the streets with, I didn’t even know Tina’s last name. And, it didn’t really matter, because most of my so-called friends never stayed around too long, anyway. Either they moved away like Maria, got themselves caught up in some criminal situation that cost them their lives, ended up missing under suspicious circumstances, or got locked up. Three of my late friends, two girls and a boy in the same family, had all died in the same year. The girls had been murdered, and the boy had committed suicide when he found out he had AIDS. The fact that I was stil
l alive and walking around free was as much a mystery to me as it was to other people.
Tina said she liked hanging out with me because I was smart. But she’d only started saying that after I started sharing information with her that I’d sopped up from the magazines and encyclopedias in Miss Odessa’s apartment. Other kids started to look at me with admiration when I used some of the big words I’d learned.
I was doing something constructive and positive for another person, besides fucking or getting high, and that made me feel good about myself. It saddened me to know that some kids, some even older than me, didn’t know that there were black folks from Guatemala. Tina was one of those kids. She didn’t even believe me when I told her that that was where my parents had come from until I dragged her to our apartment one night and had Mama say something in Spanish. I didn’t know much Spanish, but I knew enough to know that Mama had used a few cuss words when she chased me and Tina out of her kitchen while she was trying to fry a fish.
Tina and I didn’t speak again until we were a block away from my building, and even then, we were still running. “Girl, your daddy didn’t speak when I spoke to him, and your mama spewed some gibberish and looked like she wanted to bust my brains out with that frying pan. No wonder you like to hang out so much,” Tina told me, looking behind her. “I hope you don’t take none of your other homies to your home,” Tina said in a serious tone of voice. “With your folks being so strange, you won’t keep no friends too long.”
After I finished braiding Tina’s hair in her tiny bedroom, we shared a joint and a can of beer. And, before I left the run-down house on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive that she shared with her alcoholic mother, she told me something that shocked me.