“Oh, Sheil, I can’t believe it.”
“Believe it. Diahann Carroll is dead.”
Angela was very nervous cutting her friend’s hair, but Sheila was a patient instructor. She too looked gorgeous when they were done, her darker skin a contrast to Angela’s honey coloring. “We have got to go to the store,” they shrieked, almost in unison as they looked at themselves in the mirror. They did a fast, sloppy job of sweeping up their old hair, tossed it in the trash and headed over to Melrose. Two African queens out for an afternoon’s shopping. Who would stand in their way?
They came back just moments before dark, exhausted and laden with bags of new clothing they could not possibly afford. “So much for next month’s rent.” Angela laughed, shoving her hip into the door. Her earlobes ached a little from her new gold posts. Sheila was wearing new black-and-white-striped hoop earrings. They dropped their bags inside the door and collapsed on the ugly gold sofa. They both started laughing for no discernible reason, their legs entangled, their heads at opposite ends of the sofa. “You look good, Sheil,” said Angela.
“So do you, girl.”
Silence fell between them. A police car’s siren wailed in the distance. They stared at each other for a long moment. Angela was the first to speak. “You really do look beautiful.”
Sheila shifted her feet a little, rubbing them against Angela’s thighs. Angela didn’t move away. Sheila crawled around awkwardly and brought her legs in line with Angela’s so that they were head to head. Their faces were very close. Sheila touched an earring experimentally. “Do those hurt?”
“No. Not if you don’t mess with them.” Angela’s breath was coming a little faster, and she was utterly confused. She knew only that she didn’t want to stop, just like back under the bleachers with Bobby, whatever this was. Sheila’s hand slid to the side of Angela’s face and she shifted around, straddling her now. Angela moved her hips a little and spread her legs. Sheila smiled. “So this is all right?”
“Yeah.” Angela paused. “Well . . . what? Is what all right?”
Sheila smiled easily. “This.” She leaned in. They kissed, mouths open. Angela’s mind jumped from sensation to sensation. She opened her mouth a little wider, concentrating on the feel of Sheila’s tongue, her hands moving lightly across her breasts. She had a sudden odd flash of those blondes in the tub, but then she opened her eyes and it was Sheila, only her Sheila. It was all right. Sheila had saved her after all. And now here she was, saving her again. Once they got each other’s clothes off, they both laughed for a minute. Angela was uncertain exactly how to proceed. But it didn’t take long to figure it out.
They lay together on the slightly lumpy orange carpet afterward, staring at each other. The strangest thing was not feeling strange. Angela had never even heard of two women together like that. She was sure it wasn’t allowed back home. But something that had been knotted in her all her life, just below her breastbone, had been untied. And now it was done. She was loose. A loose woman, what her mother always used to fear so. She took a deep breath. Sheila spoke first. “You OK?”
Angela stretched, slid her hand across to touch Sheila’s cheek. “Yeah, I’m fine.” She pushed up on one elbow. “I’ve never done anything like that before, though.”
Sheila laughed. “You’re awfully good at it.”
“Well—I had a good teacher.” Angela paused, drew a small circle on Sheila’s stomach with her finger. “Have you done that . . . done what we did with other girls?”
“Once or twice. I’m not no dyke, though. I just do it for kicks . . . if I really like someone.”
Angela frowned. “What’s a dyke?”
Sheila stretched. “A dyke is a big, mannish woman who hates men and only sleeps with other big mannish women. Not like us. We just do it for fun.” She looked at Angela intently. “Wanna do it again?”
Angela laughed. “Sure. Let’s go to your bed this time, though.” She crawled over and kissed Sheila deeply. She had never felt less self-conscious in her life. “Let’s go,” she said again, standing up and extending her hand. They went into the bedroom with their arms around each other, like girlfriends on the playground.
The next morning, Angela woke up in Sheila’s bed. She felt wide open. Her eyes. Her heart. Her ears. Everything was wide open. She could hear every sound in Los Angeles.
She had an audition that afternoon before work. Sheila helped her get made-up, picked out her outfit—a Kelly green mini and high black boots—and gave her a big kiss as she sashayed out the door. “Go get famous.”
Angela smiled. “You know it.”
She walked into that audition room like the queen she was. Everyone turned to look at her. She laid her headshot down on the desk and took her seat with the others. After a long while, they called her name. She entered a small room where three white men sat at a table across from her. She said her name, read a few lines from the script they gave her. “Do you mind nudity?” they asked. “No, I like it,” she replied, laughing. They looked startled but then laughed too. “We’ll get back to you, Miss Edwards,” they said. She left. That night at work, she made more in tips than she’d ever made, didn’t bump into one single person with her tail. Everybody was talking about her and Sheila’s hair, how terrific they looked. The next day, there was a call on her service. She had a callback for a part in Big Doll House, to be directed by Jack Hill. It was her first callback. She felt so good that day she didn’t even care later that she didn’t get the part. Things were changing. The work had begun. When she told Sheila about the callback, she said triumphantly, “The queens will not be denied!” Sheila laughed and took Angela’s hand, throwing it up in the air like a prizefighter’s. “No they won’t. They certainly will not.”
4
WHEN ANGELA BROKE UP WITH BOBBY WARE, not long before she left for Los Angeles, people thought she’d gone right out of her mind. They’d been keeping company for nearly five years, and making love for about four and a half of them (though folks didn’t know that). Neither of them knew much about the other’s body when they started, but they were open and eager. Angela felt as if a great secret had been kept from her. All her mother’s talk about being a lady. If ladies didn’t get to know what this was like, then she plain didn’t want to be one. On nights she wasn’t with Bobby, she slid her own hands between her legs, thinking about all kinds of things, different people, figuring out different ways to conjure that feeling, sighing and moaning into her pillow. She could see why people didn’t talk about it too much: the power of it seemed dangerous. It didn’t feel wrong exactly—just risky. But she didn’t want to stop.
Louann was the only person Angela told. That was how it began to end. She brought it up one day as they walked home from secretarial school. Louann was going on and on about her boyfriend, Mitchell: “. . . he said he just wanted to slide one hand up under my bra for one minute, and I said, Oh no, mister, that’s as far as we’re gonna go and—”
“Lou, don’t you want to?” Angela spoke without thinking.
“Don’t I want to what?”
“Let him. Do it. You know.”
“I do not.” Louann hugged her books closer to her chest as though someone was going for her breasts right then and there.
“Never?” said Angela.
Louann smiled a little bit and lowered her books. “Well, sometimes.” She rolled her eyes. “Sometimes it’s nice. But you know . . . you just can’t. He ain’t never gonna buy the cow if he gets the milk for free.”
“Louann, sometimes you worse than my mama.” Angela skipped a few feet ahead and turned toward her friend, overtaken by a wild impishness. “I’ve done it. Been doing it. I like it too.”
Louann stopped dead. “You what?”
“You heard me.”
Louann clutched her books back to her chest. Her eyes widened. “Angie. Wow. I knew you was always kind of fast, but—”
“But what? Now we ain’t friends?”
“No. That ain’t it. But now you gon
na have to marry him. Or something. How you gonna do the nasty with him like that and then just go on? What all would folks say?”
And in that moment, Angela saw. She’d lived in Greenwood all her life, but she’d let herself be blind. She remembered the firm, possessive way Bobby took her elbow when they went out, the confident way he looked at her when she came over to have dinner with his folks, the way he opened doors for her with a flourish. All things that had seemed nice when they’d just been having their own little secret. But now she had to think about what folks would say. He cared about that too. He would never let her go now that they’d been lovers for so long. And she knew. Knew like she knew her own name, that she could no more marry him than fly to the moon, no matter what he’d been thinking. She would have to stop. There was no way to do what he would want of her now. She felt a deep and sudden twisting in her stomach. And one word and one word only in her head: no. She and her friend stared at each other, shocked by what they knew.
She saw Bobby the next night. They had just made love, having grown adept at avoiding the bumpy parts of the car and finding the right parts of each other. They were snuggled together in the back seat under a stadium blanket, the windows cracked to let out the steam, the air snapping in bright and cold. Angela could hear her breath in her lungs and Bobby’s heart beneath hers. The opening riff of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” buzzed in her head as she looked out the window at the stars. She was having trouble breathing.
“Bobby,” she finally said. “What do you wanna be doing in ten years?”
“What?”
“What do you wanna be doing in ten years?” Even though she’d asked him this before, she was hoping he’d surprise her.
He shifted up on one elbow, looking bemused. “You know. Living ’round here. My daddy’s probably gonna retire soon and I’m going off to Howard for college and med school, but then I’m coming right back here. Be married too, I think.” Here he stopped and looked at her, but she didn’t say anything. “I’d like to live right around from my parents so I can help out.”
Angie’s head pounded. She liked Bobby a lot. He always made her laugh. And she loved the feel of his hands on her; that was always good. But now he’d told her. Now she knew. He wanted a life that would kill her. She couldn’t do it. Why hadn’t she seen it sooner? Bobby was looking at her, only love in his eyes. How could she break that good heart? “I can’t, Bobby. I’m not even going to stay here. I’m gonna be an actress. In the movies.”
“What?”
“I’m not staying here. I . . . I’d better go.” She finished straightening her clothes and reached for the door. The truth. She owed him that. Even though she hadn’t been totally sure what the truth was until the words came out of her mouth. She never did forget the look on his face as she climbed out of the car. Like something had hit him from behind. Or what it was like not to take his calls, to avoid him in the street. She carried those memories with her on the bus all the way to Los Angeles, a heavy weight. But they didn’t stop her. She knew she couldn’t stay.
Things that mattered to her were always like that. It was the same when she found herself with Sheila. She had been aware of the way Sheila’s hips moved, the way she used her hands when she was talking, the elegance of her mouth before they were ever lovers, but until they kissed she didn’t know she could want a woman this way. She didn’t know she could feel this kind of satisfied with a woman. But now it was true. There was no hiding from it. She still liked men, she could still look appreciatively at a man or take pleasure in a man’s touch. She thought she still might even be able to love a man. But Sheila was the fact of her. She couldn’t deny it.
Two years had passed since Angela had come to LA. She never went home to visit; she didn’t call often. Every week at first, halting, filled with pauses, then every month. There were no friends to talk to back there. Louann, married and pregnant already, would not even begin to understand. And her brother and sister remained the strangers they had always been. She did talk to her parents, lying with almost every word she spoke. She told them that she auditioned as much as she could on her lunch hour from the fictional dentist’s office. That she lived with two other girls in a nice part of town. That she was dating nice young men and not letting any of them go too far. That she’d heard about this new marijuana, but, no, she didn’t know anyone who’d tried it.
Her parents never suggested visiting and eventually they stopped pressing her to come home. Sometimes this made Angela feel a little sad, but other times she thought they could hear that she was a different person now and they didn’t want to know about it. She didn’t tell them about the movie she was in, the slow hip swivel on the bar.
One cool fall night, when she answered the phone, she didn’t recognize the voice. It sounded like a woman’s, but it was hard to tell. “Naked. Naked up there” was all the voice said.
“Who is this?” Angela said. She almost hung up, but her hand tightened around the receiver at the same moment.
“You know who this is,” the voice went on. “It’s your mother. Though God help me, I never raised you to do anything like that.”
Angela’s hand went from tight to boneless. She nearly dropped the phone.
“Angela, you know you are to answer me when I’m speaking to you. I could not believe what I was seeing.”
“Mama?”
She went on. “I wouldn’t have believed it except I saw it with my own two eyes. Everyone in town is talking. That’s why I went. And there you were, right up on that bar. Naked. Naked!”
“Mama, I—”
“What in the name of all that is holy are you going to say to me? What are you going to say to me about that?”
Angela felt her mouth working, tried to think of what she could say. But nothing would come. “You’ve got nothing to say, have you, miss?” More silence. “Well, I don’t want to speak to you until you do. Until you can somehow explain this to me. And I don’t see how that day is ever going to come.” Then came the slam of the phone in Angela’s ear. Angela sat there, her beautiful face a fist. She could feel all her muscles under her skin, the skin that her mother had seen when she was a baby, the skin that horrifled her now. Her hands rested on her smooth brown thighs, the thighs that frightened her mother. Her breath came hard in her throat. She thought she might vomit.
Sheila was out shopping. Angela choked on the silence in the apartment. Her hand worked furiously twisting her hair in back. After a while—she couldn’t have said how long—she got up, took off her robe, and walked into the bathroom. She looked down and surveyed her body. Her skin was the color of pennies underwater, stippled here and there with moles in unexpected but oddly inviting places, like one side of her left knee. Her stomach was a little bit rounded, her breasts medium-sized perfect globes. She cupped her hands underneath them, touched the nipples experimentally. This is what her mother hated and feared—the amount of pleasure her body could give someone, even herself. Her mother would never understand the power of being wanted. The way she felt when she was just a little high and making love, like she was in charge of everything. She slid her hands over her stomach again, felt the insides calm down a little. The outside still looked good.
Angela was sitting in the dark when Sheila came home. She had not risen from the sofa for an hour. Her head hurt. She jumped at the sound of the key in the lock. “Sheila?” Her voice shook.
“Yeah, it’s me. What’s going on? Why you sitting here in the dark?”
“I just . . . My mama called. She saw one of the movies.” Her voice was tiny as though her throat were stuffed with cotton.
Sheila sat down next to her. “Not too happy, huh?”
“You could say that.” They sat in silence, legs touching, for a while. Finally Sheila spoke. “I’ve got some good dope,” she said.
“That would be good,” said Angela, wiping at her wet eyes.
“Come on, then. Let me just put my stuff down.” Sheila put her packages into her room, and came out c
lutching a little Baggie. “A cure for what ails you.” She waved it cheerfully. Angela smiled a little.
Sheila always made a big deal out of putting a joint together. First the picking out of the seeds, then the spreading out the leaves, and, finally, with a noisy, small rattling, shaking out the paper to roll the joint. Angela felt like slugging her. She didn’t want to wait for the smooth absence to take her over. She just wanted to be there.
She didn’t have any difficulty holding the smoke in her lungs anymore. In fact, she could no longer clearly remember the fear she’d felt when she was faced with that first joint, how nervous she’d been. Now it was all pleasure. She smoked until she couldn’t remember her mother’s call at all. Well, she did, but it didn’t mean anything. What else was her mother going to say? She was her mother, after all.
Once they were high, they rested on the sofa, their legs entangled for a while, their feet lazily rubbing up and down each other’s calves.
After a long silence, Sheila spoke. “I got invited to a party in the Hills. All kinds a people gonna be there. Let’s go. I don’t want”—she sighed deeply, rubbing her hands through the back of her hair—“I don’t want to just sit here all night . . . let’s get with somebody. Somebody who can do us some good.”
Angela nodded, her eyes still closed. “Yeah,” she murmured. “Let’s go.”
So they moved to the bathroom, together, as though underwater. The air was lined with fur. Felt good against their skin, slow, like they could eat it, like chocolate. Sweet.
They chose their outfits together, tight and shiny and beautiful. They leaned toward the mirror together, smoothing on gleaming reddish brown lipstick. They both put on big hoop earrings, earrings that twinkled, small spots of cheap light against their brown skin. They put in eye drops to get rid of the red and picked their hair out to its fullest glory. They put on false eyelashes. They were so stoned that it took a long time. One of Angela’s lashes got stuck to her cheek as they laughed helplessly, trying to remove it, then making crooked attempts to glue it onto her eyelid. Finally, they were ready. They fired up another joint that they shared in the car, then had to stop for doughnuts on the way, and then they were winding down the road, out to Bel Air, up to the top of a mountain, Sheila’s little orange Bug putting the road away underneath them, gasping a bit at the difficult turns. They laughed a lot at nothing, that kind of obsessive laughing that takes your breath away and makes your eyes water. They didn’t want to because it made their mascara run, but they couldn’t help it. Everything was just so funny. Sheila drove with her hand on Angela’s thigh.
Third Girl from the Left Page 5