by Hannovah
Then someone rang our door bell and, as it chimed out its song, I parted the window blinds to take a peek. If it is Jehovah’s Witnesses, I swear to God I would not be opening this door. I had had enough of religious people for one day. But it was our next door neighbor, Yvette, who had just returned from a ten-day cruise to Costa Rica. She had asked us and her younger brother, Trevor, to keep an eye on her house and to hold her mail while she was gone. Her large eyes were bright with excitement and, as she smiled and waved at me, her shoulder length braids danced about her neck.
“Hey Yvette,” I said, as I opened up. “Come in. Come in. How was the trip?”
“Oh my God, Edna, it was irie. You and Brandon just have to go there sometime. Here, me brought you some things.”
She presented me with a gift bag, and we took a seat in the living room. The gifts were an apron for me and a baseball cap for Brandon, and both had the words Pura vida embroidered on them.
“It’s pure life. That’s what it means,” Yvette explained.
“Thanks. I like them. Thank you.”
My Jamaican neighbor was a few years younger than I, and a widow. She never had kids and, for the most part, she lived alone in her three-bedroom Ranch style home. Her younger brother stayed there whenever he was between girlfriends. But lately, Yvette had been alone and had been purposely getting out more to try and find some romance.
Brandon dragged himself briefly away from his TV to greet Yvette, and then returned to the den to watch his Sunday afternoon basketball game.
Yvette and I took a seat in the living room and got to chatting.
As we spoke, Joanne left her bedroom and stepped across the narrow hallway and into the bathroom, and on her return she noticed me and my guest. To my surprise, she came towards us grinning like if she had just won the lottery. She extended her hand to Yvette. “Hi, my name is Joanne.”
Our neighbor shook it, “Nice to meet you, I’m Yvette. I live next door.”
“I heard you just returned from a cruise,” Joanne said, taking a seat. “How was it?”
As Yvette spoke, Joanne hung on to her every word with a silly grin etched into her face.
A few moments later when Yvette paused in her conversation, Joanne asked sweetly, “Could I get you something to drink?”
“Yeah man. Anything will do.”
Joanne returned with two sodas in hand. She offered one to Yvette, and snapped open the other and took a sip.
Yvette’s eyes shifted nervously between me and Joanne, and her lips trembled. She was an educated woman (a nurse practitioner) of high class. And although she spoke her island twang freely with us, she was able to switch to the Queen’s English in a flash. It was like she was bilingual. I knew that Joanne’s disrespect for me made my neighbor uncomfortable, but she played it off well.
Joanne and Yvette continued comparing notes on Trinidad, Jamaica and Costa Rica, and all the while I was wondering why I did not receive a drink too. Jeez! I felt like I was being punished and discriminated against in my own house. Oh well.
Not long afterwards, Yvette took her bundle of mail that I had secured with a rubber band, and said her goodbyes, and Joanne returned to her room for the duration of the evening.
Joshua Browning finally returned some days later. It was a happy day for me. Whew. And happier still, was a week later when Joanne told us that she had found a job in her paralegal field. And when it rains it truly pours because the Brownings were also closing a deal on a townhouse within a few days. It was one of the first homes that Brandon had taken them to see: a beautiful, refurbished townhouse, in a subdivision just ten minutes away from where we lived in Miami Shores. I knew that my husband was in heaven now. The Brownings appreciated him being happy for them, but they were unaware of the deeper reason for his elation: their pending departure.
“We’ll be staying a few more weeks with you,” Joanne announced to me when they returned from their closing. “Joshua has to remodel the townhouse.”
I looked at Brandon and back to the Brownings. “Remodel?” I asked. “The house is perfect already; like new.”
Joanne tilted her head backward and looked down her double barrel of a nose at me. “Not quite,” she snorted.
“She wants marble on all the countertops instead of laminate,” Joshua explained. “Plus wood floors in the living room. And I have to paint a couple accent walls.”
I was at a loss for words, and I could hear Brandon’s voice in my head telling me that I was as weak as water. The truth is that I felt even weaker than that.
“Well,” I said hesitatingly. “I think –”
“We can’t,” Brandon interjected with a tinge of sorrow in his tone. “Edna, have you forgotten that your cousin, Cynthia, is coming here for a while. We’ll need the room. This is perfect timing. You guys can stay in your new place while fixing it up. People do it all the time.”
“Oh. I forgot about that,” I said to the ground while thumping my head with my hand. I could not watch the Brownings in their eyes because I would betray the outright lie that Brandon had just uttered.
Young Joshua nodded. “I guess we can do that,” he said, and followed his huffing wife to the bedroom.
Within days, the Brownings moved out, and for the first time in weeks I experienced again what peace and harmony had felt like. I mean, I had no problem with Joshua. True, he had changed a little from when we knew him growing up (now, he did not go to church like he did back then, and I often smelled cigarette smoke on him), but he was a nice person, unlike that cross of a wife that he was saddled with. Why do nice folks end up marrying shitty people?
Joshua invited us to their house warming in late March, and we got there before all the other guests, thanks to my always-on-time husband. Soft calypso music greeted us and I was in awe of the transformation that Joshua had done to the townhouse all by himself. He was great with his hands, and though I did not care much for Joanne anymore, I had to give Jack his jacket; the woman’s remodeling ideas were awesome. And she allowed Joshua to use his steel-pan as a decorative piece. The shiny chrome pan stood on its metal rack against a coffee colored living room wall, under family photos. Although the pan was a musical instrument, it also served as an interesting and exotic ornament.
Our hosts greeted us, and unlike Joshua who was all smiles to have us, Joanne was simply civil, like if we were at a business conference. I played the polite game with her also.
“Fantastic, Josh,” Brandon commented, looking around at the handiwork.
“Heh, heh, heh,” Joshua laughed quietly. “Some people call me a magician. You know, the sales office wanted me to do this to their model unit too. But Jo said no.”
I got envious and said to my husband, “Ray, why don’t we fix up our house something like this?”
Rubbing my shoulder he replied, “In time Eddie. In time.”
Joshua reminded us that he will be resuming studies towards his degree in Automotive Service Management this month, and because he was so good with his hands, I thought that he had made the perfect choice. He would be a driving success, no pun intended.
Joanne waited until we stopped inspecting and commenting on their lovely home, to ask, “Brandon, could you tell me where the immigration office is?”
“It used to be on Biscayne, near Seventy-Ninth Street, but I think they’ve moved. Why?”
Hesitantly, she answered, “My green card.”
Brandon’s head jerked backwards slightly and he exchanged glances with me. We both were now sure that she was not American as she had claimed.
Guests began traipsing in and introducing themselves, but I knew none of them, except for our son, Maxwell, and his girlfriend, Lia. And most of the guests, I found out by and by, were invited by Joanne. Of the seventeen heartbeats that were present, we, that is, Joshua, Brandon, Maxwell, Lia and I, were the only non-blacks. I got the feeling that Joanne really only liked people of color, and as such did not want us to be socializing with her and her friends. Then why was she
married to Joshua? Suddenly, it hit me: the green card. I too had gone through the immigration process also, twenty-odd years ago, but I was genuinely in love with Brandon and wanted to be with him. I had a suspicion about Joanne’s motives for marrying Joshua.
But the little get-together was turning out to be nice and it reminded me of the parties that Yvette threw when her husband was alive. I mean, there was the rousing Reggae and happy Calypso music, and we were served spicy jerked pork, delicious peas-and-rice, curried chicken, and a bread called roti. This was all Joanne, I suspected. Nevertheless, for Joshua’s sake, we socialized and stayed as long as we could.
On the drive home, my husband asked me, “Didn’t Joanne tell us that she was American?” I only chuckled. He continued, “Why’s she now working on her green card?”
“Josh did tell us that she was Trinidadian,” I reminded him. “She’s confused.”
“I feel she does not want to associate with anything non-Caribbean.”
I nodded.
That was the first of our many visits to the Brownings in their exquisite townhouse and while they did reciprocate, their visits were few and hurried. It was only when Joshua came by without Joanne that he would spend any substantial time with us, and then Joanne would be phoning him every fifteen minutes to keep tabs. I was a bit concerned, but I knew better than to meddle.
One day, weeks later, Brandon voiced his curiosity to Joshua about Joanne’s shunning us.
“Ray, I’m glad you asked,” Joshua replied. “I’ve been meaning to bring that up.”
We perked up like eager beavers.
“Joanne says she doesn’t like to come here anymore because she’s very uncomfortable. She finds that your talks and jokes have too much sexual connotations.”
I snapped mentally. Uncomfortable? Uncomfortable my ass! She was so uncomfortable that she wanted to spend extra weeks with me and Sexual Connotator, Brandon, in order to have her house renovated?
“Hmmm. I’m sorry about that,” Brandon said. His face was a picture of confusion, but he was such a gentleman – such a sweetheart. “I had no idea. Please explain to her that I meant no harm.”
I don’t know how I knew, but I knew deep down that Joanne had lied to Joshua.
After our adopted son left, Brandon turned to me with fire in his eyes. “That girl is dangerous!” he snarled. “Evil. Because she’s a Christian, I never said anything out of the way to her.”
“Oh, I am convinced she’s a dirty liar.”
“Ha. You don’t know the whole thing.”
I looked at him like, what do you mean?
“Well lemme tell you,” he barked. “Many a day when she took a shower and went into her room, she would leave her bedroom door wide open and just sit on the edge of her bed with a towel wrapped around her, doing nothing. Just sitting there staring out the open door.”
“Trying to tempt you?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I was uneasy just passing by her room to go to my own office. And now she’s saying that I make her uncomfortable. Could you believe this bitch?”
I was so shocked at this revelation that words failed me.
CHAPTER FOUR
I had been ticket-free since January. Thank God.
I was about to have the Summer Term off, and my last official day at South was today, Graduation day, the first Friday of May. Yesterday, I encoded my grades and wrote recommendations for a few of my students, and early this morning, Brandon accompanied me to school to help me clear out my office. After fourteen years, I had several boxes of junk to discard, plus a few boxes of textbooks, supplies, awards and gifts that were worth keeping. We returned home and stowed my valuables in our garage-turned-storage room, where they would remain until I acquired an office at North Campus.
Now at three-thirty in the afternoon, I was back at our South Campus stadium, queued up on the sideline along with other faculty and administrators, waiting to proceed to our official seats for our annual graduation ceremony. It was hot out here, and these thick black robes that were mandatory for the occasion, were just adding to the discomfort. Every other person was fanning away with the program booklet. Over the years, I learned to wear shorts and tank-top under my gown, unlike most administrators and faculty who wore professional work attire under theirs. They planned on hanging around long afterwards and would ultimately remove their robes; I never hung around for much of the informal part.
The music finally began, thank goodness, and the campus presidents and deans marched onto the front of the platform and stood under a huge banner of the school’s name and symbol. Soon afterwards, we, faculty, paraded in front of the parents and invited guests before taking our positions to the back of the administrators. As we marched past our leaders, we traded smiles and nods with those we were familiar with, and I received the most radiant smile from Dean Joseph who backed it up with a positive wink.
I guess that sun is better than rain for an outdoor function, but Jesus Christ, this spring day was roasting hot. Why did DSU’s graduation have to be outside? I knew for a fact that several colleges and universities had given up that tradition and taken the ceremony indoors, to cool air-conditioned auditoriums. Ah well, it is what it is. I and many others fanned non-stop, but we tolerated the discomfort because if there was one good thing to be said about DSU, it was that their graduation ceremony never went past an hour.
“Dr. Rayburn, I need a picture with you,” student after student requested when the ritual was concluded. And as always, I indulged them. Truth be told, that was the best part of the occasion for me. Some students and parents wanted the traditional, boring, stand-up-straight-and-smile photographs while others insisted that we acted like clowns. I stuck my tongue out for those. For the goof-around videos, some students attacked me with plastic tomahawks, the university’s motif, and I died in a few of them. That was always fun.
It was almost six o’clock when we were through with the shots, and the goodbye hugs and kisses. Then the aroma of delicious foods began to tease our nostrils as our gifted chefs served everyone under a gigantic blue tent on the other side of the arena. That was my cue to leave. As I waved adios to a few of my colleagues, I noticed that most had already removed their robes and had begun mingling in the food area.
I searched for Dean Byam, and found her near the platform in her lovely purple pants suit, her black robe draping one arm as she chatted with another dean. Standing a few feet away, I fanned with the program booklet and waited patiently for her to conclude her conversation. Then, when she was done talking, she spotted me, and without saying a word, she extended her arms wide open in pleasant invitation. I entered and we embraced.
“I’ll miss you,” she said.
“I’ll miss you too.” On our release, I took her free hand and felt compelled to say, “A thousand thanks again.”
“I signed your release papers yesterday,” she said. “I’m glad that DSU still has you. And if there’s anything that I can do to assist you, just call.” She patted my shoulder affectionately.
“Likewise,” I said, turning and walking away to the parking lot.
“Hey Edna,” a deep baritone said from my rear as I made a few strides. It was the tall and handsome Dr. Jamus Joseph. Through the long-sleeves of his white shirt, I noticed his bulging biceps when he folded his arms over his flat stomach. He was fit. “You’re heading in the wrong direction,” he said, his pretty emerald greens zeroing in on me.
I smiled. “Hey Dean Joseph. How are you?”
“Fine, now. How about losing the robe and joining us under the tent.”
“I really can’t take it off.” Damn! I knew it was a mistake to say it as soon as the words fell out of my mouth.
His jaw dropped in excitement, and his eyes x-rayed me from top to bottom, lingering over a couple choice areas. Coming closer, he asked happily, “Not wearing anything below?”
“Oh yes, I am. Definitely.” For some strange reason, I suddenly felt naked, so I hugged myself.
Grinning, he asked, “A thong?”
I could not believe my ears. You are so out of line, I thought. I wanted to put him in his place, but since he was going to be my new boss, I didn’t want to appear insolent and standoffish; that attitude might work against me.
“Shorts and top,” I replied, touching my chin and bowing my head to feign embarrassment.
“Keep the robe. Let’s go eat,” he said. Then, inching close to my ear, he whispered, “Maybe I’ll help you lose it later.” As he stepped back, he winked at me.
You have some nerve. “Sorry, but I really can’t stay. I do have to run.”
“I’ll escort you to your car, then.”
“Thanks but no need. I really have to go. I’m late.” I quickly pulled my robe to mid calves and literally ran. In my PUMPS. I clumsily yet carefully jogged the hundred yards to my car without stopping. I had never run in pumps before, and it was quite a challenge, and all the while I was thinking, this horny dean better not cause me to break my ankle. I was burning up and panting like a race-dog when I got to my car. “Wooo-wee,” I exhaled through short breaths while fanning with my program. “Note to self. Never do that again.”
Leaning on the wagon, I slipped off my heels and was about to strip off the hot-and-sticky black robe when I happened to look up. Dean Joseph was still in the same spot with his arms folded, observing me, and he appeared very curious.
I guess I’ll have to keep this darn furnace on a little longer. There was no way that I was going to let ‘horny’ see me in shorts and tank-top. He was already beginning to freak me out. Hopping into the Volvo, I threw my shoes and booklet onto the passenger side, and drove off.
What have I gotten myself into? I didn’t appreciate the bold-facedness of Dr. Jamus Joseph. But really, the more I thought about his lustful attitude, the more I realized that it was no biggy. I knew that in time, I would eventually melt him down to nothing. Back home, in the islands, I had heated up more volatile compounds than him, and lived to brag about it; he should be like butter in a pan.