by Bobby Love
chapter seven
Our Love Story
* * *
CHERYL
“You’ve been through a lot, Cheryl, but you deserve to be happy. You’re young and you have your whole life ahead of you. Yes, you lost the baby, but life will go on. You’ll go on, Cheryl. You’re only nineteen years old.”
I was talking to myself in the mirror. I was still mourning the loss of the baby I carried for almost five months. My blood pressure had spiked to dangerous levels and the baby died. And I was still heartbroken over my ex-boyfriend Deon. I really thought we were going to be together forever.
But I knew it was time to move forward with my life. I kept going to the library, just like Mommy used to, to take out self-help books so I could figure out how to better myself and reclaim my life.
My friend Deena told me I should start exercising to feel better, so I turned on Richard Simmons every morning and worked out before I ate breakfast. And it was working. I was feeling a little better every day. I tried not to think about the past, and instead I started thinking about the future, about what I wanted. What would make me happy? I told myself I was done thinking about boys and relationships, and instead I was just going to focus on being the best person I could be.
Because I had thought I was going to be a single parent, I’d dropped out of community college, thinking I should focus full-time on getting a job and saving money. Now I wanted to go back to school, but I felt bad asking Daddy for the money. I decided I should start acting like an adult and get a real job and make my own money, like Deena. I couldn’t just sit at home and keep taking care of my brothers.
Once I made up my mind that I was going to find a real job, I hit the streets and started looking. Initially, the only opportunities I could find were retail jobs—first at a clothing store and then at a grocery store. I worked a few weeks at both places, but neither job lasted very long. The clothing store went out of business, and the grocery store manager fired me so he could hire a relative. I kept looking.
One day my godfather’s wife, Mrs. Thompson, caught me in the elevator of our apartment building.
“How are you doing, Cheryl?” she asked. “What are you up to? Are you still in school?”
“I’m hoping to go back to school,” I said. “But I need to get some money saved first, so I’m trying to find a job.”
“Well, I can ask down at the hospital if they’re hiring. They always need people.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Thompson,” I said, smiling, as the elevator reached her floor and she walked out.
“Don’t thank me yet,” she said. “Let’s see what they say.”
The next day Mrs. Thompson knocked on our apartment door. She barely waited for me to open it before she announced, “I got you an interview at the hospital!”
“You did?” I practically shouted.
“Yes I did,” she said, beaming. “You gotta go over there Monday at two p.m. and ask for Ms. Carrington. She’s real strict, but you’ll do fine. She knows me and I put in a good word for you.”
“Oh, thank you, Mrs. Thompson!” I said, wrapping my arms around her in a grateful hug.
She patted me on the back. “You’re welcome, Cheryl. I know you’re going to make me proud.”
The Baptist Medical Center sat right behind the Pink Houses. The name had changed, but it was the hospital I was born in and the hospital my mother died in. It only took me ten minutes to walk there from our apartment, so I was right on time for my interview on Monday afternoon.
I was told to wait in the little waiting room outside Ms. Carrington’s office, so I sat down and tried not to sweat through my extra layers of deodorant. I had on a denim skirt that went below my knees and a pink blouse. I thought I looked responsible and professional.
I only had to wait for about five minutes before Ms. Carrington called me into her office. I sat in the chair across from her desk and found myself sitting up straight and praying I wouldn’t say the wrong thing in front of this woman. Even though she was Black and seemed to be about the same age as my father, there was nothing soft or familiar about Ms. Carrington. Her mostly gray hair was pulled into a severe bun at the back of her head, and she never cracked a smile the whole time I sat in her office.
Ms. Carrington shuffled through some papers and then said, “I hear you want to work here?”
I cleared my throat before answering. “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I heard there was an opening in the kitchen.”
“Yes. We’re hiring a new dietary aide. Have you ever done this type of work before?”
“No,” I said, hoping this wasn’t going to be the end of the interview.
“Well, how do you know you’re going to be able to do the job then, Ms. Williams?”
I tried to think of something to say that could make up for the fact that, one, I had never been a dietary aide, and two, I didn’t even know what a dietary aide did. But I ended up just telling the truth. “Well,” I said, earnestly, “I pick up things really quickly, and I’ll watch and learn what needs to be done.”
Ms. Carrington didn’t look up, but she made some noises that sounded like she approved of what I said. I watched as she wrote some things down on her paper and then she stood up and walked to the door. “Someone will get back with you soon, okay?” she said.
“All right,” I said. It was such a short interview I figured there was no way I was going to get the job.
As I walked back home, I tried not to let my disappointment get the best of me. There are always other jobs, Cheryl, I told myself. That night Mrs. Thompson popped up to our apartment to see how the interview went. I told her what happened and she laughed at my discouraged tone.
“You’re going to get the job, Cheryl. Ms. Carrington is just like that. She thinks she’s still in the military and she doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘smile.’ ”
I had to chuckle at that because that woman did seem so serious. But I wasn’t so confident that I was going to get the job.
Every day for the rest of the week, Mrs. Thompson would come to assure me that I was going to get the job. And every day I’d stare at the phone, waiting for it to ring. It finally did on Friday afternoon. Ms. Carrington called me herself to tell me that I got the job.
“You start on Monday. Your shift begins at four p.m., but you better get here at three thirty so we can get you your uniform and your physical taken care of.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “And thank you, Ms. Carrington,” I added.
“No need to thank me,” she said. “Just show up on time and do your work.”
Once I got my white coat, plastic gloves, and hairnet, I was taken into the kitchen. The Baptist Medical Center consisted of both a hospital and a nursing home, and the kitchen churned out food for both facilities. Needless to say, it was a huge, bustling operation, and the sounds of clanking pots and pans and people laughing and talking assaulted my ears when I first walked in the room. I saw mostly Black and Latino men and women working. The women were doing food prep and the men did the dishwashing and heavy lifting.
My job as a dietary aide was to assemble the meal trays according to the color-coded system. Yellow meant a diabetic meal, so those trays got the low-sugar foods. Blue meant high blood pressure, so that meant a low-salt meal. Green was for a liquid diet. Sometimes there was a special request for a cold plate with just a salad or a cold sandwich. Once a tray was complete, I would add it to the wagons that would be wheeled up to the patients’ floor, where I would be responsible for distributing the meals to the patients. I had to announce myself to the patients and simply leave the food, but as I got more comfortable with the job, I would sometimes talk to the patients and maybe try to cheer them up.
It didn’t take me very long to learn how to be a good dietary aide. And pretty soon, the faces in the kitchen started to look familiar too. It turned out many of the people who worked there also lived in the Pink Houses. Even though I wasn’t a nurse, I began to feel like I was living the life
I was supposed to be living. I was helping people, I liked the people I worked with—even though most of them were much older than me—and I loved having money in my pocket.
Initially I worked the afternoon shift, from 4:00 to 8:00 p.m. Soon they offered me some eight-hour weekend shifts as well. I was happy to take them. With my new income, I opened my first bank account, and I could contribute to our household needs as well. Even though Daddy continued to give me money to buy the groceries, I used some of my own money too. And I always made sure to give my brothers Don and Scott some money if I didn’t make dinner so they could get something to eat. By the time I turned twenty, I could honestly say I loved the way my life looked.
Since I didn’t start work until 4:00 p.m., during the daytime I could go shoe shopping—my favorite pastime—or hang out with my friend Carla, who was in college and often had free time during the day. I’d get dinner ready or do the grocery shopping, and I’d still have time to watch my favorite story, General Hospital, before walking over to Baptist Medical.
One day when I came in to work, I heard a man singing over by the dishwashers who was so loud I could hear him warbling over the usual riot of noises.
“Who is that?” I asked my friend Janet as I pulled on my gloves and got ready to get to work.
“Oh, that’s a new guy,” Janet said. “His name is Bobby.”
“Well, Bobby sure is loud,” I said, peering through the dish rack to see who this tall, dark drink of water thought he was. All I could see was that he had deep-chocolate-colored skin, which contrasted nicely with his white dishwasher’s uniform. And I noticed he wore his cap sideways so it looked like a little sailboat atop his head. Clearly this man likes attention, I thought, and then I promptly forgot about him.
A couple of weeks later, I was up on the patients’ floor delivering trays when I entered a man’s room to bring him his dinner. He was an older white man, and I was supposed to give him a low-salt meal. I grabbed the tray with the blue sticker and came into the room with my usual smile and greeting.
“Hello, my name is Cheryl and I have your dinner here. Would you like to eat it now or shall I just leave it for you for later?”
The man mumbled something, but I wasn’t clear what he said, so I asked him to repeat himself.
He turned over in his bed and looked at me and bellowed, “I said, you dumb bitch, that I don’t want any of that nasty slop you call food! Get it out of here and you get out of here!”
Just then the loud guy from the kitchen stuck his head in the room.
“Hey, what’s going on in here? I heard all this yelling in the hallway.”
The man in the bed was now sitting up and he was pointing at me. “I told this bitch to get this food out of my face. I don’t want it.”
By this time I was too afraid to go near the man and retrieve the tray.
Bobby wasn’t afraid though. He told me I could leave, which I was grateful for. I scampered out of the room but hovered in the doorway to see what was going to happen.
Bobby grabbed the tray from the man’s table and then said, “You don’t ever talk to that woman again, you hear me? She was just doing her job. If you don’t like the food, you don’t have to eat it. But don’t take it out on the women who are here to serve you.”
And then he stomped out of the room.
“Thank you,” I said. “You didn’t have to do that.”
Bobby shrugged. “Someone needs to teach these guys some manners,” he said.
Later, when I told my friends down in the kitchen what happened and what Bobby had done, they looked impressed.
But then Janet asked, “What room was that?”
I told her and watched her eyes grow wide. “Oh, Cheryl, that man in there is one of those mafia guys.”
“Oh no! Really?” I moaned. It was a known fact that Baptist Medical was the preferred hospital for New York City’s mafia. We would get gunshot victims in the hospital who would be treated, but there would be no records of them ever having been there. I had heard plenty of rumors, but it had never affected my work. Until now. I suddenly felt very guilty about what I had gotten this Bobby character involved in. I was so scared for him that I went home that night and prayed. I sat on my father’s bed with the Bible next to me, saying, “Lord, please let that man Bobby be okay. Please keep him safe, Lord. Don’t let the mafia get him for taking up for me like that.”
That night I didn’t sleep well. And I couldn’t calm down until I got to work the next day and saw Bobby, looking sharp as ever in his crisp white uniform, seeming unbothered. I went right up to him and thanked him again for what he had done. And then I asked if he knew that that guy was mixed up with the mafia.
“I ain’t worried about that guy,” he said to me. “Besides, he’s gone. They discharged him this morning.”
I felt some relief at that. “Thank goodness,” I said aloud, but inside I was thinking, This guy must be really brave or really stupid.
After that I started paying more attention to Bobby. He was always in the center of everything, telling stories and making people laugh. I liked being around when he was telling jokes at the lunch table where we would all sit on break. He seemed much older than me, so I wasn’t thinking of him in a romantic way, just as another co-worker who was fun to be around.
One day as I was coming back from the city from another shoe-shopping expedition, I heard a voice calling me as I exited the subway near the Pink Houses.
“Hey, Cheryl, wait up!”
I turned to find out who was calling me, and it was Bobby Love from work.
I don’t know why, but I checked my outfit to make I sure I was looking cute, because this was the first time Bobby was seeing me outside of my uniform and hairnet.
I was wearing yellow shorts that showed off my legs and a hot-pink shirt. I knew I looked pretty good. And I could tell when Bobby caught up with me that he appreciated what he saw. But he didn’t say anything about how I was looking. He just asked if he could walk with me. I said yes.
“Are you going to work?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” he said. “I think I was on your train.”
“Oh, I was in the city just doing some shopping,” I said, holding up my bag from the shoe store. “Do you live in the city?”
“Yeah, I live up in Harlem,” Bobby said. “I just moved up there not too long ago.”
It was a short walk from the train to the Pink Houses, but it was enough time for Bobby to tell me that he had recently taken a test at work and was being promoted from dishwasher to cook. And that they were sending him to cooking school in the evenings.
“That’s great,” I said. “Do you like to cook?”
“I do,” Bobby said. “My mother was a great cook.”
“Mine was too,” I said wistfully, always amazed that even after all this time, talking about Mommy could still bring a lump to my throat.
“Did your mother pass?” Bobby asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “When I was nine.”
“My mother died too,” Bobby said. He didn’t elaborate. I didn’t ask for details.
And for a little while, we walked in silence.
“Well, this is where I go in,” I said to Bobby.
“Okay,” Bobby said. “I’ll see you at work in a little while.”
“Okay,” I said, smiling. “See you then.”
Something shifted between Bobby and me after that. I noticed him noticing me. And I made excuses to linger even when my shift was over if Bobby was still working. A few weeks after that, Bobby asked me out on a date. Even though we’d been kind of checking each other out, I wasn’t sure Bobby Love was really my type. For starters, he was twelve years older than me, and he seemed really worldly and extroverted. I didn’t know if I could keep up with someone like him. Also, I didn’t want to date somebody I worked with. I turned down the date.
But he asked me again. He wanted to take me to see this hot new movie that everybody was talking about that Prince was in c
alled Purple Rain. I loved Prince, and a movie seemed innocent enough. I said okay.
The night of our date, I tried to find the most mature outfit I could put together. I chose a purple dress that highlighted my cleavage, since I thought that was definitely my best asset. I put on some strappy high-heeled shoes, and I was ready to go. When Bobby picked me up, we took the subway into the city and we talked the whole way there. He was so easy to talk to, I found myself sharing my whole life story. I told him about my plans to be a nurse and my secret fantasies to be an actress.
“My dad and I always used to watch Carol Burnett together,” I told him. “And I’d love to be a comedian like her on TV or on Broadway.”
Bobby smiled but didn’t laugh at me. He told me that he could tell I could do whatever I put my mind to. We were talking so much we almost missed our stop.
The movie was great, but I was looking forward to just having the time to talk to Bobby some more. Going out with him was far more satisfying than going out with the boys my age. Bobby really listened to me and asked me questions and gave me advice on the things I was struggling with. I even told him about my miscarriage and how scared I had been when it happened. He just listened and told me he was sure I’d have healthy kids someday.
By the time we got back to the Pink Houses, Bobby insisted he was going to accompany me all the way up to my apartment. But he didn’t try to get fresh with me.