Men, she thought, gayness notwithstanding. “It’s normal to cry when someone you love dies,” she reminded him. “Old folks say the dead need our tears to get where they got to go.”
Donnie sighed a shuddery after-tears sigh. “Ray-Ray would have liked that. He believed in the hereafter and stuff like that. God! I miss him.” He rubbed his eyes. “We had a fight the last time I saw him.”
“When was that?”
“Four days before he died. We’d been staying at my place most nights until our place was ready, but that night…” Donnie sighed and closed his eyes for a moment before he went on. “That night…It was a real fight. I said things…we both said things that…Ray-Ray walked out. And that was that.” His eyes glistened. “I never saw him again.” Donnie quickly wiped at his eyes.
Blessed Ancestors! Blanche thought, Could this story get much sadder? She hoped Donnie would say more about the fight, but he didn’t. Asking him to go into detail seemed a little like poking a finger in his wound.
“How long were y’all together?” she asked instead.
“I’ve been in love with him for years.” Donnie’s eyes and expression went someplace else.
Blanche was aware of a kind of translation going on in her brain, changing Ray-Ray—the overmuscled, confident jock—into a gay man somebody had been in love with for years. She chided herself for assuming Ray-Ray was straight because he had muscles and didn’t swish.
Donnie’s voice drew itself up to its full weight: “I’m the first black lover Ray-Ray ever had.” He sounded every bit like a grand-prize winner.
Blanche was surprised. But why? There was no reason gay men should escape the pink pussy jones, just because there was no pussy involved. Being gay didn’t relieve you of your white-is-better slave heritage. But that wasn’t what she wanted to talk about.
“Did Ray-Ray ever talk about the Brindles, those people his mama works for?” she asked.
Donnie took a couple of slow sips of beer. Blanche watched him. Thinking or playing for time? She wondered.
“No. He never did.” He stared at her face but not in her eyes—just the way Taifa did when she was lying.
“I asked because I heard that he and Marc Brindle were old friends, and I wondered if Marc knew, or if…”
“I don’t know him.”
Blanche watched him closely. If he and Ray-Ray had been as tight as Donnie said, and Ray-Ray and Marc had been close from childhood, how likely was it that Donnie hadn’t at least heard of Marc? Or the Brindle family?
“I don’t know anything about who Ray-Ray knows…knew, or what he was into. I didn’t want to know and I still don’t. We’d both…We’d both been around. Ray-Ray said he wanted a fresh start, to have a new life with no…so did I.”
Maybe, Blanche thought. He and Ray-Ray may have wanted to start fresh, but the way Donnie reacted when she asked him about Marc made her sure that Donnie knew enough about Ray-Ray’s old life to know what Blanche herself now realized: that Ray-Ray and Marc had been lovers. She gave Donnie an examining look. His jealousy certainly didn’t show. She hoped her feelings about Aminata were equally invisible. She finished her drink.
“Well, I’m real sorry about Ray-Ray. I hadn’t known him long, but I liked him. The way he…”
Donnie ran his hands over his face. “Half the time I can’t believe it’s true.” He leaned toward her. “There’s something I want to ask you. A favor. Ray-Ray had a picture of us together, taken at a friend’s party,” he said. “Do you think you could get it for me? It would mean a lot to me. And some letters I wrote him when…” He worked to keep his face from crumbling. “I looked through the things he left at my place and they weren’t there. I guess they’re at his mother’s or wherever else he was storing stuff until we could…I guess his mom would know. Maybe you could ask her?”
“I’ll see what I can find out,” Blanche said. “He didn’t give you anything special to hold, did he?” she asked.
Donnie poured more beer into his glass. “All I have are his weights and some clothes.”
Blanche took her gas bill from her handbag and pushed it and a pen toward Donnie. “Here, give me your number. I’ll at least try to get you some remembrance from the funeral. Inez’ll be back in a week. I’ll call you.”
Donnie wrote two digits, then crossed them out and began again. “It’s easier to get me at work,” he said. “I have voice mail there. Since Ray-Ray…I can hardly stand to go near my place. Can I have your number, too?” he added.
Blanche tore off a bit of flap and wrote the Brindles’ kitchen number and her home number on it.
Donnie reached across the table and touched Blanche’s wrist. “Blanche, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk; I mean, you don’t know me but you…”
Blanche rose from her seat. She couldn’t take any more stoved-up male emotion this evening.
Donnie offered her a lift. She accepted but told him to let her off near Dudley Square. She wanted to walk the rest of the way. It was a bright, clear evening. The streets were alive with people and the promise of summer soon to come. She let herself feel the cool air on her cheeks and was grateful to be alive, in this body, at this time, no matter what was going on around her.
She was looking forward to a nice cup of tea when she got home. But the minute she saw Shaquita and Pookie talking on the stoop, she knew that she was going to do something that was probably a waste of time—and that tea would likely be replaced by a large gin. She hurried toward them before she could think up a halfway decent reason not to do what she knew she was about to.
“Hey, you two. I’m glad you’re here. I want to talk to you. Come on inside.”
Shaquita blinked at Pookie; he shut his face down so completely, he might have been asleep. He threw himself on the sofa and tugged at his cap. Shaquita sat next to him, stiff and wide-eyed as somebody in shock.
“Look, Miz Blanche,” Pookie said while Blanche was thinking how to begin. “I know what you want to talk to us about. I know I’m going to have to take care of the baby, help Quita get a place.”
Blanche bit down on her irritation at the tone of his voice—like she was a bill collector in a bad mood and he’d just put the check in the mail.
“You don’t have to worry. I been thinkin’ about it; you know what I’m sayin’? I was kinda like shocked when she tole me, but I’ma take care of my woman and my child.”
Woman! Blanche nearly screamed. “With what?” she asked instead.
“Whatchu mean?”
“I mean, how are you going to take care of Shaquita and a baby?”
“It ain’t none of your business how I make my money.”
“Shaquita’s my business.”
Shaquita took his hand. “It’s not Pookie’s fault that the only way he can make decent money is selling drugs.”
“Decent? Decent? It may be the only way he can make money, but there ain’t a thing decent about it, and you both know it!” Blanche turned to Pookie. “And when’s the last time you thought of getting enough education to maybe get a job that don’t get you thrown in jail or murdered?”
Pookie stared at her, his whole body straining toward her as though he was having a hard time holding himself back. “What? You want me to be like one of them downtown suits with they briefcases and tasseled loafers, actin’ like where they be goin’ is the onliest place in the world to get to? You think they ain’t doin’ worse shit than me? Do they boys meet ’em and greet ’em, make ’em feel like somebody? No. Do they got each other’s back? No. They do that dog-eat-dog shit. I ain’t into that. You can ask anybody. Yeah, I carry a gun for protection sometimes, but I ain’t never pulled it on nobody who didn’t mean me serious harm. I’m down with bein’ black, doin’ the right thing for the folks. I help out my moms, my sister, and her kids. I look out for my people. Ask anybody.”
“Yeah? Then how
come you knocked up somebody’s sixteen-year-old child? You call that ‘bein’ black, doin’ the right thing for the folks’?”
Pookie jumped up from the sofa. “You don’t know nothin’ ’bout what I been tryin’ to do. Nothin’!” He jabbed his finger at Blanche. “I ain’t just out there on the corner. I went to get my GED, see? I went to almost every class for weeks.”
“Then what happened?” Blanche asked him.
“I flunked the test,” he said in a near whisper.
Shaquita tugged him down beside her. “I tried to convince him to take it again, but…”
Blanche could feel a throbbing in her right temple. In any sane world, it wouldn’t even be legal for these two to lip-synch the word “baby.”
Shaquita covered her face with both hands. Pookie touched the back of her hand with his. Shaquita uncovered her face and looked at him as though he were a life raft and she were drowning.
Poor child, Blanche thought. Poor children. Pookie looked like a little kid afraid somebody was going to take his lollipop. He probably knew less about the world outside of his neighborhood than Shaquita.
Blanche leaned forward in her chair. She spread her hands as if to show she was unarmed, on their side. “Look, you two are so young, with so much to do to get your own lives together, it just doesn’t make sense for you to have a baby right now. I mean, what’s the hurry?”
Shaquita crossed her arms over her chest. “My grandmother didn’t raise me to have no abortion.”
Blanche almost laughed. The girl sounded as righteous as a jackleg preacher.
“Did your grandmother raise you to have sex without using birth control? Did your grandmother raise you to have sex at all?”
Shaquita lowered her eyes.
“Okay, you two. Let me ask you a couple questions. What kinds of things should a baby be able to do by six months?” She looked from one to the other. They looked at each other. “Well, Shaquita? Pookie?”
No answer.
“Okay, then, about how old should a baby be before you start giving it solid food?”
Pookie and Shaquita looked at their shoes. Blanche was sure most people about to have kids wouldn’t be able to answer her questions either, but she sure as hell thought they should be able to answer them.
“Both of ya’ll know more about how to drive a car than you know about how to take care of a child.”
“We can learn!” Shaquita insisted.
“Yeah, but will you? If you don’t know how to take care of the child before it’s born, when are you going to learn, what with school and…”
Shaquita shot forward in her seat. “School?!”
“Girl, if you think for a minute that Cousin Charlotte is going to let you quit high school and give up college ’cause you’re pregnant, you need to think again.”
Shaquita was holding Pookie’s hand with both of hers.
“How’m I going to take care of the baby and go to college? That doesn’t even make sense.”
“Why you so worried about Pookie’s education when you’re ducking out on your own?” Blanche silently thanked Taifa for telling her how afraid of college Shaquita really was.
“What?”
“You know it’s true, Shaquita. Having this baby is as much about not going to college as it is anything else.”
“It is not!”
Pookie gave Shaquita a questioning look.
“It’s not. It’s not. I swear it.”
“Then why don’t you want to go to college?”
Pookie was watching Shaquita closely. Blanche wondered if Shaquita noticed that Pookie didn’t jump to her defense as she’d done to his.
Blanche turned to Pookie. “So what you planning to be doing while she’s going to college?”
Pookie shrugged. “I’ma take care of my baby and my baby’s mother; that’s all I know.”
The two of them seemed to melt together like overheated chocolate bars. You couldn’t slip a knife blade between ’em, Blanche thought, and that dampness on my face is from spitting in the wind. But that didn’t stop her from pressing on.
“How many couples you know who had babies together are still together?” she asked.
Pookie and Shaquita looked at each other and then away.
“Some of them is,” Pookie said. “Lotta my homies…they kids is all that’s left. If something happens to me…”
Of course. She should have thought of that. Shaquita might be trying to avoid college, but Pookie was trying to avoid death—trying to make sure some part of him remained after the next gang bang or drug war.
“Babies can’t stop bullets, Pookie,” Blanche said. “I don’t know if you had a daddy growing up. I didn’t. And I still sometimes think how unfair it was that he left my mother alone to take care of us. I’ll always wonder how my life mighta been different with him around. And I resent him for it, wherever he is.”
For the first time, she saw real attention in Pookie’s eyes.
“It’s not gonna be like that for us!” Shaquita interrupted with tears in her eyes. “Pookie’s gonna get a job, and we’ll stay together. I know we will!”
And dogs will sprout wings and take up the tango, Blanche thought. But the memory of being sixteen kept her from saying it. At Shaquita’s age, hadn’t she, too, believed bad things happened to other people, that even if she did the wrong thing, it would turn out right? That’s what it meant to be sixteen.
She looked at Pookie and saw him—not as some swaggering teeny thug who was a threat to everything she was trying to teach Malik, but as somebody’s child. Yes, he had an attitude; yes, he was involved in dangerous shit; but all he was doing was what was expected of him in a country that loved young men like him on the basketball court and in concert and spit hate in their faces everywhere else. Pookie was just trying to be exactly who America told him he was: everybody’s worst nightmare. What she hadn’t thought about before was that Pookie and boys like him might be even more afraid of what they were becoming than the people who labeled them.
Shaquita shifted in her seat. Was there any way to make her see her future in the nervous, screaming, blank-eyed motherettes who regularly wheeled, screamed at, and even smacked their babies on the buses and through the streets? Blanche was suddenly weak with how little she could say that would actually make sense to these two at their age, in their world. She felt suddenly old and stupid.
“Well, at least promise me you’ll think about what I said.” She rose from her chair; all her joints felt stiff. “I’m going to bed.”
Of course, she immediately wished she’d handled the whole thing differently. She should have been nicer to Pookie. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t get past wanting to shake the shit out of both of them.
She closed the door of her room and headed straight for her Ancestor altar. She lit a candle and a stick of incense. Like the old folks she grew up around, she believed that dead ancestors returned through the children born to the family. Mama said Taifa walked, talked, and looked enough like long-dead great-great-aunt Freda to be her twin. Blanche herself had always been told how much she was like her grandmother’s dead sister, Nell. Now she stared at the crouched ebony figure meant to represent her earliest ancestors back to the first mother, including all those lost to slavery. She spoke directly to them, explaining that she didn’t like trying to convince Shaquita to abort, but whatever ancestor was planning to return through this girl’s belly needed to pick a better time in Shaquita’s life. She owned the fact that it was the Ancestors’ and Shaquita’s decision, and it was all out of her hands. She could only do what she thought was right.
By the time she put out the candle, her bed was beckoning to her like a horny lover.
SEVEN
DAY SIX—TUESDAY
Fortunately, she hadn’t expected to be able to loll in bed until she felt like getting up, even if it
was her day off. Taifa and Malik must have been saving up their morning nuttiness until a day she was home. They both slept through their alarms, got up at the same time, and fought about who got the bathroom first, since the rule was that the first one up got the bathroom. Taifa swore the only blouse she could possibly wear needed ironing, and pouted when Blanche told her there was time for her to iron it herself. Malik couldn’t find any socks even though his sock drawer had been full of them two days ago, and told Blanche she was unnatural when she suggested he go sockless. Then he screamed at Taifa and Taifa screamed back. Shaquita vomited in the hallway, they were out of milk, and the handle fell off the tea kettle.
It was mornings like this that made Blanche know there was no way she was going to put in the years of hand-holding she saw other women doing with their grown children. She loved Taifa and Malik. But she was determined to figure out when she could step back from being a mule—on days like these, that’s what she thought mothers should be called. That way, women choosing to have kids would have a better idea of what they were getting into. She didn’t deny the pleasures of the profession. Even mules felt good sometimes. But no matter how much she loved and enjoyed them, no matter how proud they might make her, there was no way to get back the years and days and months of her life that she’d given to them as surely as if they were wrapped gifts with the children’s names on them.
Thinking about motherhood reminded her that she hadn’t called her own mother yesterday. When the house cleared out, she picked up the phone.
“I figured you was gonna call today,” her mother said before Blanche even spoke. “How’s my grandbabies? I dreamt about ’em last night. We was having a picnic out there by…”
Blanche flopped onto a kitchen chair and slumped against the table, weakened by the difference between the idea of a thing and the real thing. Yesterday, when she’d decided to call, she’d been thinking about talking to the warm, loving, wise, advise-giving woman who was the Mama that lived in her head. The Mama who lived in the world, who was on the phone right now, was the Mama who asked questions but didn’t give you time to answer, who asked about the children but not about you, who talked on as though her voice were the only one needed to make this a conversation.
Blanche Cleans Up: A Blanche White Mystery (Blanche White Mystery Series Book 3) Page 15