“We got to talking and he suggested that I keep a journal—”
“I was a grad student in psychology,” Tim interrupted. “We’re big on journal writing.”
Dana shook her head with a wry smile.
“Oh, sure,” she commented sarcastically. “Anyway, he suggested that I record my feelings in the journal.”
“I had no idea what I was asking,” Tim interrupted again. “I just thought that she would put her frustrations down in writing and that would help her get through the rest of the term.”
Dana grinned. “And it did.”
“I started writing stories, little pieces and parts of things that had happened to me. Observations mostly. I remembered a roommate I’d had,” Dana rolled her eyes. “Sarah was a little different. She was into spanking her boyfriend with a paddle. And he liked it! One night, the rest of us girls came home early from a bar and …” Dana giggled. “Sarah was dressed from head to toe in black leather.”
Becca chuckled. “You just never know.”
Gloria’s eyes were as big as dinner plates. I was trying to be cool and sophisticated, so mine were only as big as saucers. Jack leaned over and whispered in my ear.
“Maybe we could try that sometime?” he said hopefully.
I pushed him away. Silly man.
“It gave me an idea. I am a mystery fiend and I love Agatha Christie. I started writing about an absentminded dominatrix who sometimes forgets how to untie her clients. She also solves mysteries.”
“I read one of her stories and thought it was great,” Tim offered. “Maisie is dominant and scatterbrained all wrapped up in a leather—”
“Or latex,” Dana interrupted.
Tim smiled and nodded.
“Yes. A leather or latex package. She gives spankings in the morning, discipline training in the evenings, and tracks down mysteries in the hours in between.”
“Latex,” repeated Jack with a huge grin. He turned to me with his eyes wide and winked. “Latex.”
“Quit it,” I said under my breath.
“The story was funny and erotic at the same time. I sent it off to an old buddy of mine who was an editor at a publishing house.”
“The Maisie Beatme mystery series was born,” Dana said proudly.
“Maisie … who?” asked Becca, almost choking on her iced herbal tea.
“Maisie … Beatme?” Jack repeated.
Dana and Tim grinned.
“Cute, isn’t it?” Tim said.
“They are sort of tongue-in-cheek. You can’t take Maisie seriously. Except that the books really caught on and the next thing I knew, I was writing two books a year!”
Jack’s grin was so wide that I thought it would bust out his cheeks. Gloria was turning red.
Tim nodded, wiping his mouth. It had been a long time since I’d seen anyone but Troy put away so much ice cream in so short a period of time. Thank God I had another gallon in the refrigerator.
“Sometimes,” Tim offered, “I help Dana come up with titles for the books. They have to be catchy, but they also have to have a double meaning. Like All Tied Up, Never Let Me Go, Cuffs and Saucers—”
“And my personal favorite, Planes, Chains, and Automobiles,” Dana added with a smile.
“Planes, Chains …” Gloria dissolved into a fit of giggles.
“I know,” Dana commented. “They’re campy as hell, but for some reason, the books work. I’ve written twenty of the darn things. They’ve made us rich! I have a fan club, we have conventions, and, well, in order to make the books authentic …” At this, Dana started turning a little red. Now that was interesting. Modesty in a woman wearing leather, silver buckles, and chains as accessories. Not to mention the fuzzy yellow house slippers.
“I take on the persona of my main character. That helps make the writing more authentic. I dress like her, speak as she would, live as I imagine she would live.”
“Really?” was all I could think of to say.
“We have a home over off River Road just across the county line,” Dana went on to explain. “We also have three small and very curious children. And Tim and I didn’t feel comfortable exploring … er … doing the research at the house. We’re building a studio, but it won’t be ready until March. So Tim got the bright idea of renting a place until it was finished.”
“Jared, that’s our oldest,” Tim continued, “he is about Troy’s age and just like Curious George. We didn’t think it was time yet to explain to him that Mommy dresses up in black latex and ties up Daddy with chains and rope.”
Gloria glanced over at me and said, “How am I going to explain this to Troy?”
“We’d just better stick to the vampire story,” I told her.
“Yes, that’s probably best,” Jack agreed. “You’ll just have to keep him from using all of Opal’s garlic bulbs and tell him not to drive a stake through Dana’s heart.”
We all had a good laugh at the thought of Troy, with a garland of garlic bulbs hanging around his neck, creeping around the coach house after dark in Spiderman sneakers carrying a backpack filled with wooden stakes.
“Tell him I’m a good vampire,” Dana added. “Good vampires eat regular food like everybody else.”
“Vampires?”
The screen door slammed. My daughter, Imani, stood in the open doorway carrying a duffel bag the size of Alaska. Her eyes were wide and she looked as if she wasn’t sure that she was in the right place. I can only imagine what she was thinking as she stood in my kitchen and saw her mother with a group of strangers that included a woman dressed in a black leather miniskirt, bustier, and psychedelic yellow house slippers.
“Imani! Why didn’t you call me from the airport?” I jumped up, almost knocking over my ice cream and several cans of soda. Ice Tray slipped in the open door and was immediately followed by CW, and Bear and Wells, who tolerate the cats when they are outside but don’t tolerate their presence inside. The dogs barked as they flew through the kitchen after the cats, and Troy, hearing all the racket (we knew that he wasn’t asleep), came running down the back stairs to find out what all the excitement was about. So much for a quiet, uneventful homecoming.
It took almost fifteen minutes for things to settle down, for Troy to catch the cats and send them back outside, for Jack to drag Imani’s body bag–sized duffel bag up the stairs, and for Gloria to set out a sandwich and a soft drink for my daughter. Sometime during the melee, introductions were made.
“I’m Troy.” A slightly grubby hand was offered.
Imani smiled and shook it anyway. “Hello, Troy,” she said.
“Do you believe in vampires?” Troy was not letting go of that idea.
“Troy …” Gloria sighed.
Imani glanced at me for a second. “I don’t know if I do or not. Do you?”
“Yes,” Troy whispered, and he would have said more except that his mother was maneuvering him back toward the stairs.
“Say good night, Troy.”
“Mom.…” Troy wailed.
“Hi. I’m Dana Jablonski and this is my husband, Tim,” Dana said, extending her hand. “I rent the apartment over the coach house.”
Imani’s eyes dropped to the leather corset that Dana was wearing.
“Oh, this. I almost forgot that I was wearing it! I use the apartment to do the research for my books.”
“What kind of books do you write?” Imani asked. She loves to read.
“I write the Maisie Beatme mystery series. They are light erotic mysteries,” Dana said. After a pause, she added, “You’ve probably never heard of them—”
“You are kidding me!” my daughter exclaimed, “I love Maisie Beatme! I have every single book you’ve written! My girlfriends and I pass your books around until we’ve all read them! Wait until I tell Toya—”
My daughter reads about Maisie Beatme? My precious child reads books about a riding crop–toting cr
ime solver who traps criminals with the spikes on her high-heeled boots?
Where did I go wrong?
“I have them all in a box in the dorm,” my daughter said. “I want you to autograph each one. Toya will be so jealous!”
“I would be happy to,” Dana said graciously. “And, if you’re interested, my new book comes out next month. I’ll make sure that you get a copy, ‘fresh off the press,’ as they say.”
Imani was ecstatic.
“Thanks! What is it called?”
After titles like Cuffs and Saucers, I didn’t think I was ready.
“Double Buckles, Chains and Trouble,” was the reply.
Nope, I wasn’t ready.
Later when everyone went home and everyone in the house disappeared behind closed doors, I sat on Imani’s bed and helped her get settled. I just wanted to sit there and look at her.
Imani is tiny, about the size of a minute, so she doesn’t take after me, with her father’s reddish-brown skin, black hair, and dark eyes. She keeps her curly hair cut short and now, I noticed, she had pierced her ears again and another set of silver hoops swung back and forth. She is the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen in the world. But then, I am biased.
“This is quite a place you’re running here, Mom,” she said, stuffing jeans into a drawer. “Talk about a melting pot! Gloria and her son, Jack Neal—I like him, Mom. Dana, she practically has a cult following; I can’t believe that you didn’t know that! And Dr. Rebecca Levine, I had to read her in my world religions class.”
“Becca? World religion? I thought she wrote short stories.”
Imani sighed and rolled her eyes.
“Doctor Levine, Mom,” my daughter corrected me. “Becca to you, Dr. Levine to the millions of people who’ve read her books on religion and women. You’ve never heard of her?”
“I guess I lead a sheltered life,” I said frowning. “I spend a fortune at bookstores. How did I miss Dr. Levine and the absentminded dominatrix series?”
Imani laughed.
“They aren’t in the general fiction section, Momma,” my worldly daughter informed me. “You’ll find Dana’s books under ‘Erotica.’ ”
I just looked at her. We had discussed birds and bees, hadn’t we?
She laughed when I asked her.
“Mom, you told me all of that stuff when I was eight, remember? Don’t worry; I know what I need to know to take care of myself—”
I held up my hand to stop her from continuing.
“OK, Mom,” Imani said calmly. “I’ll spare you the gory details.”
“Thank you,” I said, somewhat relieved.
She closed the last drawer and sat down on the bed next to me. “This is an interesting room.”
I followed her gaze as it took in the three nightstands, peg-leg table, and dinosaur-sized armoire, not to mention the four paintings I’d hung on the remaining wall space and a stack of unhung ones leaning against the wall. Poor Imani. Her room looked like an antique furniture shop.
“I wanted to make sure that you had enough drawer space,” I said innocently.
Imani made a face.
“And you’re painting again,” she commented, nodding toward a colorful experiment that hung opposite her bed. I had been in a purple funk mood when I painted it.
“Do you like it?” I asked. I try not to sound too eager, but like most artists, I am desperate for compliments on my work.
Imani bit her lip, but her dimples were showing.
“Um, it’s …” She paused as she searched for a word that wouldn’t hurt my feelings. I smiled to myself. I knew it was awful. “It’s bright … and daring.”
And Gloria said it looked like blueberry yogurt that had gone bad.
“Everything is so … different now,” Imani murmured. She looked around the room. “This place, this town, you.”
“Me! I’m your same old momma,” I said modestly. But I wasn’t. Not even close.
“You’re different, Mom. You look different; you talk different.” She pulled a corkscrew strand of my multicolored hair. “Act different …” She sounded thoughtful.
I looked down at my hands.
“Some things had to change, sweetie,” I said. “I wanted my life back. And if I didn’t do something soon, I wouldn’t have a life at all.”
Imani heard that and looked at me a long time without saying anything. She had an odd expression on her face, a mixture of sadness, wonder, and something else. Anger?
“What is it?” I asked. Suddenly I felt defensive and guilty, like a fugitive. What had I stolen?
“Have you divorced him?” she asked. “Daddy, I mean.”
“It was final on Wednesday.” I had wanted to tell her since she stepped through the back door, but it just didn’t seem right to hug her, kiss her, and say, “Imani, I’m so happy to see you, baby. By the way, I’ve just divorced your father,” before she had a chance to set down her luggage.
“I see,” she answered in a very quiet voice. Her eyes were pensive. “How did he take it? Was he mad?”
I told her as best I could about the hearing and about Ted’s visit to Prestonn. I left out a lot. His comments about not paying her college tuition. His pet names for me. She smiled when I told her about Bear’s and Wells’s reaction to Ted. They had taken an instant liking to her. Even now, Wells had made himself at home in Imani’s lap and was snoring.
“I’m supposed to see him next week,” she said slowly. She sounded as if she was talking to herself. “I don’t know if I should.”
“Of course you should,” I told her because it was the right thing to say. “He is your father.” And I can’t change that even though he is a mean, violent, shape-shifting sonofabitch. Despite his treatment of me (or because of it?) Ted had never been violent or mean to Imani. He was gentle, indulgent, patient, and just plain nice. To my knowledge, he never even spanked her when she was small. As far as I knew, Ted was an exemplary father.
My daughter looked at me with another unreadable expression; then she yawned.
“Mom, if you’re OK with it.”
I stood up.
“I’m OK with it and you need to go to bed. How long since you slept?”
She stretched. “Since six A.M. yesterday,” she replied. Her eyelids were drooping.
“To bed, kid,” I said, patting the pillow. “Come on, Wells.” I reached for the snoring pug.
“No, let him stay.” Imani cuddled the imperious smushed-face tyrant. “He’s cute.”
Pugs are a lot of things, but cute is not one of them.
“If you don’t mind the snoring.”
“I don’t mind.”
As if to say, “I told you so,” Wells opened one eye, blinked it a couple of times, and turned over.
I closed the bedroom door.
Chapter Fifteen
“Momma, it looks as if you’ve been renovating more than this house. You’re renovating yourself.”
Imani’s words echoed in my mind. They were true, but I hadn’t thought about it in terms of renovation. That sounded too much like a construction project. But she was right. I had been renovated, inside and out. To “renovate” is to restore to a better state, to life and vigor. Yes, that’s what I had been doing all right. And I was making discoveries about myself—and about the yellow house—that I could never have imagined. Both of us were turning out to be more valuable than anyone thought.
What Troy had described as looking like “cat puke” with a salmon cake–colored sky would turn out to be a nearly priceless historical treasure. A week later, Dr. Innis and a colleague and art restoration expert, Dr. Kuenning, arrived at lunchtime to examine my north dining room wall. They were still there at six o’clock when I got home from work. Dr. Innis’s eyes were shining with excitement behind her horn-rimmed eyeglasses. She could barely contain herself. Dr. Kuenning was more subdued, although at one point I
thought he might wet his pants. In those few hours, with a little help from Rodney, who was repairing the plasterwork on my other walls, they managed to clear away some of the old paste, wallpaper, and dirt from a section of the mural so that its true beauty and message could come through. Imani, Gloria, Troy, and Becca were already admiring their handiwork when I came in.
“I guess you won’t want me to do any plasterwork on this wall, Opal,” Rodney teased, giving me a smile of satisfaction as he wiped his hands on his coveralls.
“Not a chance, Rodney,” I told him.
Dr. Innis told me what she and Dr. Kuenning had discovered.
“Ten years ago, we found correspondence from a Methodist minister describing a Duncanson painting of an escape by fugitives landing their boat on the Ohio side of the river, with slave catchers in pursuit on the Kentucky banks. But the correspondence trail went cold and we presumed the picture had been lost.”
Dr. Kuenning chuckled. “The entire affair was taking on the aura of a myth, like looking for Atlantis or the Seven Lost Cities of Gold. We had so little to go on. The only thing we knew about the painting was its title, Over the River, and it was circa 1847.”
“Now, of course, I know what happened,” Dr. Innis said, smiling as she waved her hand over the mural. “The letters left out the most important clue. Over the River isn’t a portable piece that you can track down at a flea market or in your great-aunt’s basement. It’s a mural and was part of a permanent structure.”
“But if it was commissioned by an abolitionist minister, what was it doing on the walls of this house?” I asked. “I thought that I was the first person outside of the Xavier family to own the house.”
Dr. Kuenning agreed.
“You are. Apparently Lorene Xavier was the driving force behind the commission. But the contact for the mural was made through the clergyman who had befriended Robert Duncanson earlier. We may never be sure what really happened.”
“Piecing together a historical record is like a putting a jigsaw puzzle together with only half of the pieces. You may get part of the picture, but you’ll never get all of it,” Dr. Innis added.
Dr. Kuenning gently brushed away a fleck of paste. The colors emerging from the wall were muted and rich. Amazing. And I had thought it was mildew.
The Shade of My Own Tree Page 19