A Natural Woman

by Lori Johnson

  “Oh, Mrs. Perez. I mean Julia. How are you?”

  “Very well, thank you. I’m sorry to call so early. It never crossed my mind that Javiel might have company. I hope I didn’t interrupt anything.”

  Even though Aliesha knew they were all adults well beyond the age of consent and Julia’s voice had been steeped in tease, it didn’t keep her from feeling a twinge of embarrassment. “No, Javiel just stepped into the shower. Shall I have him call you back or would you like to leave a message for him?”

  “Actually, I just came from the bakery and I was hoping to drop off a little something for him. Would you mind terribly if I left it with you?”

  “You mean now?” Aliesha said. She looked down in panic at her exposed legs and skimpy attire. “At this very moment?”

  “Yes,” Julia said. “I just pulled into the drive. Don’t worry, I won’t keep you long.”

  “Okay,” Aliesha said, while Argh! is what she thought. After hanging up, she hurried to the front door and looked out in time to see a casually dressed, sneaker-wearing Julia emerge from her car. She walked up to the front porch while juggling her purse, a small white bag, and a carrier upon which sat two large, white containers of what Aliesha assumed was coffee.

  Aliesha struggled to maintain a pleasant expression as she held open the door and helped Julia with the items.

  Acting as though she didn’t see Aliesha’s semistate of nakedness, Julia said, “Have the two of you eaten yet?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Aliesha said with a pained smile.

  “Well, I’ll just leave these in the kitchen,” Julia said.

  Aliesha followed, frowning and tugging at Javiel’s shirt, which seemed to be growing shorter with every passing second.

  “My, isn’t this impressive,” Julia said. She nodded at the pans, utensils, and dishware Aliesha had yet to remove from atop the stove. “You fixed breakfast.” She walked over and picked up a pan. “And what looks to be crepes, no less. My son must have really poured on the charm last night.”

  “I’m not sure if charm is exactly what I’d call it,” Aliesha said, allowing a bit of irritation to seep into her voice. “And I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you that your son was actually the one who prepared breakfast this morning.”

  Julia laughed. “Yes, you are definitely my kind of girl.”

  “I hope you didn’t come all the way out here this early in the morning just to bring Javiel breakfast,” Aliesha said, no longer caring if she sounded rude or what Julia thought about her one way or the other.

  Julia’s bright smile stayed intact. “Not just breakfast, my dear. Beignets.” She removed one of the pastries from the bag and found a clean saucer upon which to place it. “I attend an early morning yoga class on this side of town. Across the street from my class there’s a fabulous bakery that makes these and other equally fattening and decadent treats. Every once in a while, I drop some off for Javiel before I head for home.”

  “I see,” Aliesha said, accepting the saucer Julia offered her, but only buying so much of the bull that was being ladled out with the sweetest of smiles.

  Julia locked eyes with Aliesha. “I’m sensing you’re a bit upset with me, perhaps about some of the things I shared with you in private the other night. Either that or Javiel has succeeded in painting for you a horribly unflattering portrait of me.”

  Aliesha hesitated, wondering if this was the best time and place to pursue such a conversation. “To be honest, it’s a bit of both,” she said. After offering up a weak smile of her own, she looked down at the beignet, an act of deference she hoped would assure Julia that she had no intentions of going on the attack. “I mean, since you brought it up, Javiel has mentioned a few things that have made me wonder.”

  “Like? And about what?” Julia said prior to inviting herself to a seat at the breakfast table.

  Aliesha looked up and unleashed her concerns in one continuous but steady breath. “Namely, your lack of support for his artistic aspirations, which, from what I understand, has been the case since he was a child. The preference he says you and Mr. Perez show your daughters. And your own intense dislike of his dark-skinned, Puerto Rican grandmother.”

  Julia nodded but didn’t appear surprised. She reached for one of the containers of coffee and popped the lid from the cup. While staring off into space and between sips of the steaming brew she said, “I had a brother, a gifted jazz musician whom I loved dearly but whom I watched waste away at a young age. He was nineteen and I was twelve when I saw him get hooked on dope and resigned to living in a perpetual state of misery. As far as I could tell, he was always broke, running from creditors and begging my parents to bail him out of some sort of financial bind. They always seemed to be at war, my parents and him. It seemed their biggest ongoing fight was his resistance to their demands for him to at least get a teaching certificate. Poor, poor Ernest. The only time he wasn’t sad when was when he was somewhere with the horn in his mouth or a needle in his arm. He was twenty-three and I was sixteen when I found him slumped over in my parents’ bathroom, dead from what I’d like to believe was an accidental overdose.”

  She paused and looked at Aliesha. “I’ve always seen a lot of Ernest in Javiel. So, yes, it’s true. His father and I encouraged him to use his skills in a manner we thought would help him stay self-sufficient. And yes, at times, we may have been overzealous in doing so, which he, I’m sure, views as us having been unnecessarily hard on him.”

  “I didn’t know,” Aliesha said, gazing down at her bare legs and suddenly feeling a mixture of embarrassment and empathy. “Javiel never told me any of that.”

  “No, I don’t suppose he would,” Julia said. “And as far as his dear old abuela, yes, it’s true, I thought her a horrid woman, but trust me, the quantity of melanin in her skin had nothing to do with my ill regard of her. If anything, it was just the opposite.”

  “The opposite?” Aliesha said. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  Julia sighed and said, “The real irony of Javiel accusing his father and me of showing skin tone biases is that his beloved grandmother was guilty of exactly that. The fairer skinned children, like Javiel’s cousin Jesus and my own daughters, she treated like royalty. Most of the brown-skinned ones, like Javiel, received decidedly second-rate treatment. And the poor dark-skinned ones, the ones who looked most like her, mind you, she barely wanted around. The only reason Javiel got better treatment was because his father had been her precious firstborn and only son. But she was constantly advising me to keep Javiel’s hair cut short so the kink wouldn’t show as much or else begging for us to send him to her during the summer months because she thought by keeping him out of the Southern heat, she could keep his skin from permanently darkening. And to think, to this day, he still worships that horrid woman!” Julia said, swinging her hand as if swatting away a fly and knocking over her coffee cup in the process.

  Aliesha rushed to Julia’s aid with a wet dishtowel. “I’m sorry,” she said while wiping up the spilled coffee. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “I’m not angry with you, Aliesha,” Julia said. She motioned for Aliesha to sit. “I’m simply trying to get you to see that Javiel has his own odd way of looking at things. Quite often, there’s a whole lot more beyond his sometimes narrow view of the truth.”

  Still not certain how much credence to assign Julia’s version of the truth, but not wanting to bypass an opportunity to dig further, Aliesha said, “Might that also include his stint in the monastery and the woman who you allege help put him there?”

  Julia stopped wiping the table with the cloth she’d taken from Aliesha and said, “Has he talked to you about Evelyn?”

  “Not really.”

  A glaze formed over Julia’s eyes. “Oh, so you probably don’t know that he very much wanted to marry this girl?”

  Aliesha shook her head.

  “Or how after she dumped him and gave him back his ring is when he decided that living out his days as a monk had a certain
appeal.”

  Aliesha shook her head again.

  “Well, you might want to ask him. And when you do, don’t forget to have him tell you how shortly after he made his decision to enter the monastery, that same girl turned up missing and later was found in the woods . . . dead.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Aliesha tried unsuccessfully to get Julia to stay and fill in some of the ominous holes in the story she’d shared. Julia insisted she’d already said too much. She advised Aliesha to take up the matter with Javiel.

  After Julia’s hurried departure, Aliesha immediately went upstairs and told Javiel of his mother’s visit. But she kept the more disturbing details of their conversation to herself. She still wasn’t sure what to make of the beautiful and charming Julia Malveau Perez. Had she been exaggerating? Outright lying? And if she had been telling the truth, whom exactly was she aiming to protect?

  I need time to think is what Aliesha kept telling herself. Her rationale, though a weak one, allowed her to feel less guilt about her hesitancy to take up the subject with Javiel. Had she been brave enough to confront the truth, she would have confessed that the kernel of fear Julia had been out to sow had not only taken root but, like the leafy Southern vine known as kudzu, had already begun to sprawl in a number of different directions. In the five months they’d been together, why hadn’t Javiel bothered to tell her about Evelyn? Wouldn’t her having come clean about Kenneth the other night presented him with the perfect opportunity to have done likewise about his old flame and their obviously troubled relationship? Was he hiding some horrible secret? Had he anything at all to do with this woman’s death?

  As her anxiety grew, so too did her reasons for not asking Javiel about the matter. If Javiel had a sinister side, surely it would have shown itself by now. Besides, they’d just kissed and made up. She’d even made a point of inviting him to her church on Sunday. Interrogating him about some craziness his mama had dished out behind his back might lead to another round of hurtful words that, like the claws of a feline, neither would be able to fully retract. Perhaps waiting until he’d returned from his weekend outing with the boys would be a better time.

  When they’d spoken by phone on Thursday and again that Friday evening, she’d been careful not to leak her growing concerns. But on retiring to her bed later that Friday night, she’d lain awake longer than usual, worrying about all of the things Julia had told her, along with all of those things Javiel still hadn’t. Fortunately, after an hour or so, the weariness of the day, if not the entire week, came crashing down around her. With the shades momentarily drawn on her conscious concerns, she sank into the dark comfort of sleep and almost immediately began to dream about her mother.

  Strangely enough, during those hours of the day when Aliesha was fully alert and wide awake, her memories of Connie, the woman she’d once called “Mama,” were few. Only when she closed her eyes and drifted into the shadow-encased world of slumber did the sound of her mother’s voice beckon her. Only then could she catch an extended glimpse of her mother’s smile, feel her tight and loving embrace, breathe deeply of her intoxicating scent, and get a sense of the joy she’d contributed to the life of the woman whose stint in the land of the living had been all too brief.

  But on that particular night, it wasn’t long before the soothing, angelic visions of her mother were overrun by a more frightening sequence of images and scenes. Rather than one straight, cohesive narrative, the nightmare played itself out in a frame-by-frame series of near-blinding flashbacks.

  In the first clip, she sees herself as a young child, one tossing and turning in her bed as she fights to block out the sounds of the adult strife she hears in the room at the opposite end of the hall. The woman’s voice sounds muffled, pleading, and can only be detected in intermittent sound bytes while the man’s voice is loud and accusing, and rushes forth in more frequent, rapid-fire intervals, like the repeated bursts from an automatic weapon. The voices spill out onto the second-floor landing and stop in front of Aliesha’s bedroom where they increase in volume and are soon accompanied by slaps, thuds, thumps against the wall, and the unmistakable sound of a woman weeping.

  Aliesha watches as the younger version of herself tosses off the covers, leaps from her bed, pushes open the door, and yells, “Stop it, Uncle Frank! You’re hurting her.”

  Her uncle Frank, his eyes swimming in a murky sea of red and his face swollen like a pus-filled burn, turns and snarls, “Get your little, narrow, black behind back in that bed . . . unless you’re aiming to get a taste of some of this, too!”

  “Leave the child alone, Frank. Leave her be,” her aunt Mildred pleas before making the mistake of grabbing her husband by the arm.

  Frank snatches his arm away and, like a demented, hammer-toting John Henry, swings it back as hard as he can in the direction of Mildred’s head.

  Aliesha hears both screams and the sickening sound a woman’s barely hundred-pound body makes when it tumbles down a flight of stairs.

  The scene fades to black, and in the next clip, the angry face of Aleisha’s father fills the frame. “How come you didn’t tell me this shit had been goin’ on?!” he shouts.

  “Don’t you know your auntie is laying up in the hospital with a concussion, a broken wrist, and a dislocated jaw? And all of those bruises I saw on her shoulders and arms lets me know this is hardly the first time this shit has happened!”

  A pigtailed Aliesha stops sniffing and wiping her eyes long enough to choke out, “I was afraid, Daddy. Uncle Frank told me what goes on in his house stays in his house. And you’re always telling me to mind Uncle Frank. I didn’t want to get in trouble.”

  Her father pulls her into his arms. “I’m sorry, baby. You don’t ever have to be afraid. Hear me? You can always come to me, Aliesha. I’m always gonna be here to protect you, Miz Babygirl. Even after I’m dead and buried six feet under, I’m always gonna be here to protect you. Don’t you ever doubt it. You don’t ever have to be afraid.”

  The scene fades as a nodding and tearful Aliesha mouths the words, “Yes, sir,” before snuggling deeper into her father’s strong, tight embrace.

  In the final clip, a number of men can be seen seated around a large dining room table. A sparkling chandelier dances and sways over their heads. A pajama-clad Aliesha stands beneath the arch of the room’s curved entrance. She recognizes the men as her uncles—the blood brothers and brothers-in-law of her Aunt Mildred and her own deceased mother, Connie. Her father, William, isn’t seated with the group, but his presence is evident in the heavy footsteps creaking against the second story’s worn floorboards and echoing above the seated men’s heads.

  Josiah, Aliesha’s favorite uncle and the youngest of the men present, says, “So, what we gonna do?”

  “Whatcha mean, we? We ain’t gone do a damn thing. It ain’t our place,” Aliesha’s uncle Bruce growls. Her uncle Bruce is an uncle by marriage and one of Aliesha’s least favorite relatives. He owns a butcher shop and often smells as rank as the meat he handles. He is also a big man, who likes to brag on how he has to use the scales at his shop to weigh himself. But more than anything, Aliesha hates the way the yellowish tint of his rubbery skin reminds her of boiled squash, cooked with chopped onions, the one vegetable dish that never fails to make her gag.

  Her uncle Bruce removes the cigar jutting from the corner of his mouth before he finishes speaking his piece. “This here is between Frank and Mildred. And she said she didn’t want to press no charges.”

  “Maybe we ought to see if we can’t get them to agree to go see Pastor Lawrence for some counseling,” Aliesha’s uncle Alfred says. Alfred is a respected elder at the church they all attend. His role has long been to lead the family in prayer at weddings, christenings, funerals, and whenever they gather for the holidays. “After all,” Alfred continues, “Frank didn’t start all this drinking and carrying on until he lost his job.”

  Howard, the eldest brother, nods and says, “You’re right. And that’s probably best. But prior
to that, I think we ought to sit them both down and give them a real good talking to.”

  Aliesha looks up as the footsteps above her uncles’ heads suddenly fall silent and the chandelier stops shimmying.

  Josiah, who’s been twitching and squirming in his seat, finally says, “That’s it, huh? That’s the best y’all can come up with?”

  “Why?” Scottie, another uncle by way of marriage, pipes up. “You got something better in mind?”

  Aliesha cocks her head and listens as her father makes his way down the stairs.

  “Yeah, I do,” a red-faced Josiah sputters. “I say we find him, drag him back here, and whup his ass. Some low-life piece of shit damn near kills one of the women in our family and all y’all niggas wanna do is sit around and talk? To hell with that.”

  William enters the room. Swinging from each of his closed fists are fat, fully stuffed, dark green plastic bags. He calmly walks over to the dining room table and tosses the bags onto the center of it. “Aliesha,” he says. “Go and get me another bag.”

  Not wanting to miss anything, Aliesha hurries to do what she’s been told.

  “Man, what the hell you call yourself doing?” she hears her uncle Scottie ask.

  “What the hell it look like?” her father says. “I’m packing up all of Frank’s shit. Y’all can sit here and analyze the situation until the wee hours of the morning if you want to. But after all is said and done, brother man can’t stay here no more.”

  “See, there you go!” Josiah shouts. Aliesha reenters the room just in time to see her favorite uncle jump up with a big boyish grin and slap his hands against the table. “That’s what I’m talking about!”

  “Who the hell are y’all to try and run a man out his own house?” Uncle Bruce says with his boiled squash and chopped onion face all twisted up every which-a-way.

  “Settle down,” Uncle Howard says. “I think we’re all capable of discussing this civilly and without any of us getting all bent out of shape.”

  William takes the bag Aliesha hands him and laughs. “Yeah, you right. ’Cause the only somebody who’s really bent out of shape behind any of this is poor Mildred. But I don’t guess she counts for all that much, huh?”