The Company We Keep

by Mary Monroe

  This was a typical late-afternoon dinner gathering, served buffet style so it was every man, woman, and child for himself. It didn’t take long for every single person to have a plate in hand. Old, stout Maybelle Hawthorne, wearing a white floor-length frock that looked like a bathrobe, had a plate in each hand. Both contained generous mounds of food threatening to spill onto the freshly waxed linoleum floors. Some folks stood in groups of three or four, talking as they ate. Others sat or meandered throughout the house.

  The destination for most of the males was the room with the big-screen TV where a previously recorded Lakers game was on, featuring Dwight Davis. There was almost as much emotion displayed in the living room as there had been during Reverend Upshaw’s fiery sermon. This was the “down-home” atmosphere that kept Teri focused and balanced. This was where her character had been formed. This lifestyle had made her the caring, hardworking, no-nonsense person she was today. No matter what happened in her future personal life, this was what she would always measure her sense of values against.

  Grandma Stewart had spent most of the day and half of the night before “cooking up a storm,” as she had declared. In addition to a deep-fried turkey, five Crock-Pots full of collard greens, four platters of corn bread muffins, six mac and cheese casseroles, and enough yams to feed a small army, there were six huge pots of black-eyed peas—more than enough for every person present to have several helpings. Grandma Stewart didn’t care how much everybody ate. And she made it clear that she didn’t want anybody to leave without eating some black-eyed peas.

  “Everybody knows that if you want a New Year to start off right, you got to start it off with some black-eyed peas,” Grandma Stewart announced, spooning peas onto a huge plate for herself. Black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day had been a family and cultural tradition for generations. For a woman who liked to cook and eat rich food, Teri’s grandmother was a petite woman with an attractive but chubby face that resembled a chipmunk. Black moles dotted her warm brown face. Her husband was only slightly larger with a mole-like face, a head that resembled a coconut, and sparse, wiry white whiskers on the sides of his face that looked like they belonged on a cat. Teri had her grandmother’s eyes and her grandfather’s full lips, but she had inherited her five foot seven inch height from her mother’s side. One of her biggest sorrows was that her maternal grandparents had both died before she was born so she’d never know what else they’d passed on to her.

  Teri enjoyed good southern cooking as much as everybody else in the room. And even though she didn’t think of herself as a superstitious woman, she ladled more peas onto her plate than anybody else. There was nothing else on her plate, not even one of the golden corn bread muffins that her grandmother had just removed from the oven with steam still floating above them like miniature clouds.

  “Girl, I know you are not going to bypass that turkey and those greens,” Grandma Stewart commented, frowning at the contents on Teri’s plate.

  “The peas are enough for me right now,” Teri declared, stirring a few drops of hot sauce onto her meal.

  “Well, if all you are going to eat are the peas, you’re going to wind up with enough gas to light up Florida. Are you all right? You look a little peaked. I hope you didn’t stay out too late last night. I woke up and called your house around eleven-thirty last night and you hadn’t come home yet. I hope you are not running around with the wrong crowd, drinking and doing whatnot. You know how we worry about you, with you still out there by yourself as manless as a nun…”

  CHAPTER 10

  By herself? As manless as a nun? Teri was so sick and tired of everybody constantly reminding her that she was still by herself. What in the hell was wrong with a woman being by herself? What did she have to do to convince people that she was doing just fine by herself? The fact that she never complained about being alone should have told them something.

  “Grandma, you don’t need to worry about me. I can take care of myself.” Teri occupied a seat next to her grandmother at the table in the TV/dining room. She recalled how she had badgered Nicole the night before and now she knew why Nicole had been so irritated. She felt the same way now.

  “Your mama used to say the same thing and look what happened to her. I don’t want you to end up dead. I want you to settle down and get married so me and Grandpa Isaac won’t spend eternity worrying about you, too.”

  “Getting married won’t save me. It didn’t save my mother,” Teri reminded. “Let’s change the subject.” Teri leaned to the side and kissed her grandmother’s puffy cheek.

  A few minutes later, Grandpa Stewart left his seat in front of the television set. He shuffled over to the table where Teri had just finished eating her black-eyed peas.

  “Girl, you need to eat like you got some sense,” he complained. “Let me dip you out some of these peas. Black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day mean money.”

  Teri didn’t protest as her grandfather piled more peas onto her plate. “And don’t you worry none about gas. Sop up some turkey gravy with a piece of that corn bread before you go home. It works better than charcoal pills when it comes to dealing with gas,” he told her, burping like a baby, excusing himself between burps.

  “Uh-uh. I take back what I just said about peas meaning money,” Grandpa Stewart said, shaking his head as he reached for his own plate, which he promptly filled with peas. “Corn means money. Peas mean good luck,” he said with a grin. “That and a little gas if you overdo it,” he added with a chuckle. He sniffed and dropped another spoonful of peas onto Teri’s plate. She thought she would scream if she heard another reference to gas.

  “I’m not that hungry,” Teri said again, rolling her eyes at her grandfather.

  “You always did eat like a little bird,” Grandma Stewart gently complained, then chewed on a deep-fried turkey leg.

  “It’s her nerves if you ask me,” Grandpa Stewart suggested, both of his cheeks full. He was a good match for his wife. She looked like a chipmunk. He looked like he had the mumps. Juice from the peas glazed his bottom lip like lip gloss. He sat down hard in the chair on the other side of Teri, groaning like a man in pain.

  Teri rolled her eyes up to heaven. A few minutes later she followed her grandmother into the living room with Grandpa Stewart close behind, holding onto his plate and grumbling all the way.

  “Isaac, Teri’s just trying to hold on to her girlish figure like all the rest of these youngsters,” Grandma Stewart said, giving Teri an affectionate pat on the butt. “Baby, I need to show you something.” Teri gave her grandmother a puzzled look as she followed her out of the room.

  “Trying to keep a girlish figure my foot. Her nerves are what keep her from eating right. And prayer is the only thing that can help that,” Grandpa Stewart said in a gentle voice. He had stopped in the middle of the living room floor. As soon as Teri and her grandmother disappeared, he plopped down into a chair and that was where he planned to stay until his bedtime.

  “Amen to that,” said Old Man Carson, who occupied the seat directly across from Grandpa Stewart.

  “Well, I’m praying that there’s some corn bread left.” Grandpa Stewart turned to see Teri’s young cousin Rudy running into the living room with an empty plate. Normally, eating in the living room was off limits. And that was a rule that Grandma Stewart enforced with vigor. But today was an exception. There were more than two dozen guests in the house and it was a holiday.

  “Girl, did you find a job yet?” Grandpa Stewart asked Cynthia, Teri’s nineteen-year-old cousin, as she eased down onto a hassock near the doorway, crossing her long, freshly waxed legs. She was hoping that somebody would notice how good her legs looked and pay her a compliment. Nobody did.

  “I’m still looking,” Cynthia said, rolling her heavily made-up eyes. A job was the furthest thing away from this girl’s mind. She wasn’t a man, and as far as she was concerned, work was for men. A woman’s “job” was to keep her man happy. She was one of the few relatives that Teri had little or no use for. Especi
ally after Teri refused to hook her up with some of the musicians she worked with or to make arrangements for her to shake her shapely ass in somebody’s music video. Instead, Teri—with her jealous old-maid self—had offered her a receptionist position as a backup to Nicole. Cynthia had looked at Teri as if she were crazy.

  “Well, you better look harder. Don’t you want to be like your cousin Teri?” Grandpa Stewart asked, frowning at the way his granddaughter displayed her naked legs. Had young people become so loose that they had no shame left whatsoever? That had to be the case.

  “Not if I can help it,” Cynthia said with a snort, shaking her head.

  “In the meantime, pull your skirt down and cover your shame, girl,” the old man ordered.

  Teri and her grandmother talked about trivial things as Grandma Stewart searched for some documents in the dresser drawers in her bedroom, spilling contents to the floor like a burglar.

  Every few minutes, Grandma Stewart brought up the fact that Teri was “still single” and that that wasn’t normal for a woman her age. But each time Teri’s marital status came up, she steered the conversation in another direction.

  “Sister Hawthorne is looking mighty healthy these days,” Teri commented.

  “Healthy? Baw! She’d better look healthy with her pig-ear-eating, three hundred pound self. Brother Hamilton asked her to marry him last month and she jumped at the chance. Can you imagine that? I don’t know what this world is coming to. But with her being a widow going on two years and him just losing his wife, and them living next door to each other, it was bound to happen sooner or later. Now if she can get a man, even one that looks like a baboon and smells like a nanny goat like Brother Hamilton, a girl like you ought to be able to get somebody like Obama or Denzel.”

  Teri looked around the room and sighed. She wondered what her grandparents and Nicole were going to complain about once she did get a man.

  “There’s a sale at Kelsye’s furniture store.” Teri pitched her words like a baseball.

  “That reminds me. I saw the Kelsye’s older boy the other day. The one that spent twenty years in the military. He’s going to make somebody a good husband. You want his phone number? I’ll ring up his mama before you go home today.”

  “Nanny, listen to me. I am happy being alone. How many times do I have to say it? What do I have to do or say to make you and Grandpa stop worrying about me being by myself?”

  Grandma Stewart gave Teri a stern look and let out wind from both ends before she spoke, excusing herself first, though. “Get married, I guess,” she said, fanning the fumes she’d just released. The old woman gave Teri a hopeful nod. “Grab the Kelsye’s son before somebody else snatches him up.”

  Teri was too exasperated for words, but she knew that if she didn’t continue to defend herself, her grandmother would wear her out.

  “I don’t need you or anyone else to help me find a man. I can do that on my own,” she insisted.

  “Then why don’t you?”

  “Why don’t I what?”

  “You work with men every day. What’s wrong with one of them?”

  Teri gave her grandmother a thoughtful look. “There is nothing wrong with the men I work with. I used to date one of the guys in our personnel office,” Teri confessed. “But things didn’t work out.”

  “And why didn’t things work out? It don’t take much to keep a man happy, if you know how. And I am not talking about all that bedroom foolishness. The first time I was with Isaac in the flesh, you would have thought he was tearing down a house the way he rode me. The whole time I was laying there under him, all I could think about was how I was going to wash all his sweat and jism off my sheets.”

  Teri stared at her grandmother in slack-jawed agony. “Do I really need to hear this?” She had to look away to keep from laughing at the thought of her stuffy grandparents having sex.

  “Once you put that physical part in the proper perspective, the rest is easy. You feed your man what he wants to eat, make him think he’s some kind of king—and all that means is telling his dumb ass a lot of barefaced lies, and keep his house and kids clean. That’s all it takes. That’s why divorce is a stranger to most of my generation.”

  “The guy I dated from work wanted a mama…” Teri admitted with a pensive look on her face. She recalled how heartbroken she had been when Derrick Hardy told her that the only reason he’d asked her out was because she reminded him of his mother. That same day, she had stopped at the mall and purchased a more youthful wardrobe on her way home from work. Derrick no longer worked for Eclectic, and she made sure that every piece of clothing she purchased came from the most youth-oriented boutiques—for women in her age group, of course—that she could find.

  CHAPTER 11

  Teri ignored the look of disapproval on her grandmother’s face as she smoothed the sides of her short black skirt.

  Like everything else in the Stewart home, the bedroom furniture was old, but well cared for, too. There was the bed that looked more like a wagon that Teri was not looking forward to inheriting.

  Watching her grandmother rooting around in her dresser drawers reminded Teri of how she had searched for the document that she needed to complete her media report before the party last night.

  “Here they go,” the old woman said with a sigh of relief. She beckoned for Teri to join her on the bed. The old bed’s springs squeaked like a herd of mice when they sat on it. “We haven’t signed these yet.”

  “What is all this?” Teri asked, reaching for the beige folder in her grandmother’s gnarled hand.

  “Just some paperwork.” Grandma Stewart held the papers out of Teri’s reach. But Teri took them anyway. She frowned as she read. “This is just to renovate the front of the house and replace the front porch,” Grandma Stewart said, stroking the side of Teri’s head. “And look at all that good hair. A man would love to run his fingers through it.”

  “You can’t sign these papers. We could lose this house!” Teri exclaimed, rising. “We need to get Grandpa in here.”

  “We can talk about all this later. After everybody’s gone. I don’t want the whole world to know my business,” Grandma Stewart told Teri. She motioned for Teri to return to her seat, but Teri refused, shaking her head like a defiant child.

  “Let’s go,” Teri ordered. With the papers still in her hand, she ushered her grandmother out of the room.

  They found Grandpa Stewart back in the dining room standing at the table. Nicole stood next to him with a plate in her hand. Teri was glad to see her. Nicole was always a reliable defensive tool for her to use when she had to deal with her meddle-some grandparents. No matter what her grandparents said, Nicole always took Teri’s side, unless it involved Teri not having a man.

  “Hey, girl,” Nicole said in the light and cheerful voice that made her such a joy to be around in situations like this. Sometimes all Teri needed was Nicole’s presence to get her spark back. “How come you didn’t wake me up for church this morning?”

  “I thought you were busy,” Teri replied with a smirk then a wink. Teri’s grandparents gave each other a puzzled look.

  “Where’s that young’un of yours, Nicole?” Grandpa Stewart asked, clearing his throat as if he were trying to remove a frog.

  “He’s with his daddy,” Nicole answered with a sigh of mild disgust that only Teri detected. She already knew that she was going to have to give Nicole a pep talk after Greg came by to drop Chris off later that evening. Teri had never liked Greg and he despised her. However, whenever she ran into him in public, or if he happened to drop by Nicole’s apartment when she was there, she went out of her way to be cordial. But he treated her no better than he did a dog he didn’t like.

  “Nicole, did you and your husband get back together yet?” Grandma Stewart asked with a hopeful expression on her face. Teri and Nicole looked at each other and cringed.

  “Greg has remarried,” Nicole reminded in a stiff voice. It was obvious to Teri that Greg was the last thing that her girl
wanted to discuss with the Stewarts or anybody else. Nicole cleared her throat, then grabbed a napkin and started to nibble on a turkey wing.

  “Now there you go, eating like a bird, too, girl,” Grandpa Stewart complained. “You and Teri are two peas in a pod. No wonder you’re both still single…”

  “Can I talk to you two in private?” Teri queried, looking from one grandparent to the other. Then she looked at Nicole. “You can stay if you want. You’re family, I guess.”

  Nicole gave Teri a confused look. She didn’t like the serious look on Teri’s face. She decided that whatever Teri wanted to discuss with her grandparents, she didn’t need or want to know. She dealt with the ups and downs of the aged enough in her own family. “I think I’ll join the crowd in the living room, if you don’t mind,” Nicole said. “You and I can chat later.”

  “Later,” Teri said, giving her friend a defeated glance. Then she turned to her puzzled grandfather, waving the documents she had taken from her grandmother in his face. “Whose idea was this?”

  “What is all that?” Grandpa Stewart wanted to know. He looked at the documents as if he were seeing them for the first time. Then he looked at his wife. They both shrugged. “I thought we settled this.”

  “As long as you didn’t sign them, nothing has been settled. Whoever this man is, he’s a straight-up crook. And don’t you dare sign any papers he brings to you,” Teri ordered.