A Natural Woman

by Lori Johnson

  Intellectually, she fully accepted the attraction for what she thought it was, a physical response to a good-looking man who possessed a special knack for making her feel and look wonderful. However, emotionally, she couldn’t stop herself from wanting, craving, and needing so much more.

  On first glance, she’d thought him asleep. But as she’d drawn nearer, she’d realized she’d actually stumbled upon him deep in thought. When his eyes finally flickered open, they seemed to take her in fully and completely without veering off course to look past her, through her, or zone in or any particular feature of her anatomy.

  When she smiled, he sat up and removed his cap. “How are you?” she said.

  “Very good,” he said, returning her smile. He stood, pocketed both the book and the headgear, then waved his hand over his chair. “And at the moment, all yours.”

  “That you are,” she said on climbing into his chair. “So, where’s Yazz?”

  He whipped out a cloak and draped it around her. “What? Don’t tell me you’re actually trying to miss him?”

  Aliesha laughed. “Yazz and I have arrived at what I would call a proper understanding.”

  “Good, I’m glad to hear it. Underneath it all, Yazz is a pretty decent guy. He’s always trying to get me involved with some morally uplifting activity at his church or community center. Just this past weekend, he had me helping him give free haircuts and shaves to some of the guys down at the homeless shelter.”

  She nodded. “It’s nice to know his actions speak better of him than do his words.”

  Dante laughed. “Yeah, I figured that would score us at least a few brownie points in your eyes.”

  “Am I that bad?” Aliesha asked. “I’d hate to think I make you feel like I’m grading you.”

  “Hey, I don’t take it personally. I’m sure it’s nothing more than the matronly schoolmarm in you who can’t help but stay hard at work, 24/7.”

  “The matronly schoolmarm?!” Aliesha said. “Thanks a lot. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think I was talking to Yazz.”

  “See, there you go getting all sensitive on me again,” Dante said. “I’ve got nothing but mad respect for schoolteachers, be they matronly, hot-to-trot, or something in-between.”

  She turned and issued him a look that prompted them both into a round of laughter. She noted their more relaxed give-and-take and hoped it would last.

  He picked out her hair and while working his way from back to front he said, “I’m sorry if I came off as somewhat defensive about the whole book thing the last time you were here. That’s been sort of an ongoing sore point for me.”

  “Why is that?” she asked, realizing he finally felt like talking about it.

  Speaking slowly and hesitantly, he said, “I guess growing up, there was always this sort of division between me and my cousin Reuben, not one necessarily of our making, mind you, but one nonetheless. He had the rep for bringing home good grades, the smart one who always had his nose in a book. Me, I was the big, quiet kid who hung out in the gym and on the ball field and who nobody expected much from as far as academics were concerned. Back in the day, people were constantly trying to shove us into these neat, little, confining boxes, ignoring the fact that they didn’t always fit.”

  Unsure if she truly grasped the gist of the tale he’d shared, she asked, “Should I take that to mean he wanted to be the jock and you wanted to be the scholar?”

  Dante paused, tossed aside the hair pick, and snatched up the clippers. “To tell you the truth, Miz Professor, all I ever wanted was the same chance, the same type of encouragement and attention he got. Who knows where I might be today had that happened.”

  Sensing her inquiry had scraped against a sensitive nerve, she waited until their eyes connected in the wall-mounted mirror at his station before she said, “Is where you are today so bad?”

  “No, I suppose I could have done worse,” he said. “And don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming my Big Mama or my uncle Mack. Neither one of them made it past the ninth grade. They were only taking their cues from everybody else around them.”

  Dante turned off the clippers and moved in front of her. She stared into the deep pools of his dark brown eyes and saw sadness where she’d expected to see anger. Before he could lean forward and switch back on the clippers, she reached out with her words as gently as she knew how. “There’s nothing wrong with being athletically gifted. You could very well have taken that path to college and then gone on to to do other things. It’s not unheard of.”

  He responded in kind. “Yeah, see, but that’s just the thing—sports was never really in my blood, at least not like it is for some guys. I had to work hard to stay competitive. But the more I played and practiced, the less time I had to devote to anything academic. I was in my junior year when I went up for a pass, got hit, came down wrong, and shattered my leg in six different places.”

  He turned the clippers back on and glided them over her head. “After that, I didn’t even have the heart to try anymore. About all I could do was sit on the sidelines and watch while all of the world, including my cousin Reuben, passed me by.”

  She winced. “I can see where an event like that might cause some additional strife and tension, particularly in a relationship that’s already marked by jealousy.”

  “You got that right. I went through a real hateful and destructive period. It’s a wonder I didn’t land in jail or kill somebody. I guess it’s like my Big Mama always says—it was only by the Grace of God that I didn’t.”

  “But there obviously came a turning point,” Aliesha said. “What was it?”

  A pained expression gripped Dante’s face. He traded the clippers for a small pair of scissors. “My uncle Mack’s stroke. It knocked him off his feet, both literally and financially. When it got to point where he started talking about selling some, if not all, of the little piece of land his daddy had passed down to him, I knew I didn’t have but two choices—either man up or let everybody down. So I got myself together. Got a job on a roofing crew with the father of one of my old teammates, started doing what I could as far as seeing after both the old man and my Big Mama’s personal needs, and during the course of it, discovered I had something of a talent for cutting hair.”

  A phone call cut into Dante’s spiel. He stepped away from her to speak with the caller in private. At the call’s end he resumed his work on her hair in silence.

  She fought back her urge to drill him with additional questions and instead used the quiet time to reflect on the peek inside his world he’d granted her. The quiet but volatile mix of bitterness and disappointment she’d heard raging beneath his words reminded her of that expressed by her father on those rare occasions when he’d slip and say, “It wasn’t that I lacked ambition, like your mama’s people want to believe. Painting houses all my days isn’t what I originally set out to do. But sometimes things happen. You get off track and then you find out, there ain’t no easy way of getting back on.”

  Aliesha waited until Dante had finished cutting her hair and they’d moved to the now-familiar darkness of the utility room before she attempted to tug on one of the loose threads from their previous conversation. While seated on the bench in front of the shampoo bowl after her wash, waiting for him to finish wiping the area down, she’d started thinking about the cabinets full of books Yazz had told her about. “So what do you like to read?” she asked, carefully and cautiously extending her words through the silence and hoping he’d view them as a bridge.

  Dante’s bright smile acknowledged her inquiry and on completing his clean-up tasks, he motioned for her to follow him. He led her to the row of cabinets hanging over the washer and dryer. After he eased open the doors, one by one, she reached up, ran her fingers across some of the spines, and took in some of subjects and the titles: The Autobiography of Malcolm X with Alex Haley, Miles: The Autobiography with Quincy Troupe, bios on Tupac, Biggie, Michael Jordan, and Muhammad Ali, none of which really surprised her. But the ones she spott
ed on Arthur Ashe, Barbara Jordan, Winnie Mandela, Thurgood Marshall, and Nina Simone all gave her a moment of pause. “You’ve quite an impressive collection,” she said.

  “It’s a habit I picked up as a kid, thanks to my Big Mama. Back in the day, she use to clean up at the library and just about every week she was bringing me and Reuben books they’d discarded. I’ve been hooked on biographies and autobiographies ever since. Besides providing me with an escape of sorts, a way of stepping out of my world and into someone else’s, I’ve always been intrigued by the things people do to change their lives.”

  Beneath his obvious pleasure, she picked up on a note or two of melancholy. But rather then pry, she said, “Wally doesn’t mind you taking up so much cabinet space?”

  “Nah, Wallace is cool. There was a big storm a couple years ago that flooded the basement apartment I was subletting at the time and forced me to move in here temporarily and sleep on a cot. The books that didn’t get ruined came with me. I’d fully intended to take them with me when I moved out, but by then Wally and Gerald had started using them as backup in the disputes that are always going on around here. You know, somebody says one thing about Hank Aaron or Ali’s record and somebody else wants to challenge it. Sometimes when I know a customer’s interested in a particular person or topic, I’ll see if I can’t find a book to give him to thumb through while he’s waiting, and if he’s regular, I’ll even let him borrow or take one home for keeps.”

  She smiled. “From what I understand, on occasion you even read to some of the kids. Now that,” she said with her voice full of tease, “I’d love to see.”

  “Yeah, I guess in the eyes of some, that would make me look kinda soft, huh?”

  His embarrassment surprised her. She turned toward him. “Nothing wrong with a man being soft every now and then. Matter of fact, I’m kind of partial to certain amount of softness in a man myself.”

  What she’d handed him was an opening, one big enough for him to step through if he were so inclined. Before she’d turned to face him, they’d been standing shoulder to shoulder and barely an inch apart. As she stood staring at him and waiting for his response, she could feel the heat radiating from his body and she knew he could feel hers.

  But rather than seize the opportunity or even acknowledge it, Dante rubbed the stubble on his cheek and while still staring straight ahead, said, “You know, I think I’ve got a couple things here you’d probably like.” He reached up and brought down two texts.

  “Nice try,” she said on scanning the pictures on the book covers—Mary McLeod Bethune on one and Marva Collins on the other. “It just so happens this particular schoolmarm has already read both of those.” She reached in front of him and on removing from the shelves a book about Harriet Tubman and another on Sister Thea Bowman she said, “But here are a couple I’d love to borrow, if you don’t mind.”

  He’d finished with her hair, she’d paid him, and they were standing outside of the shop. While his candor had taken her by surprise, she’d appreciated the fuller view of him it had granted her. She felt like they’d moved into a different space, even though his refusal to acknowledge her shameless flirtation with the barest hint of a smile she viewed as further proof of his lack of interest in anything beyond friendship.

  While standing next to him on the cracked sidewalk in front of the barbershop, she knew the time had come for them to say their “see ya laters,” though, like usual, she wasn’t ready for the conversation to end. Hoping to extend the length of her visit, she slipped into her schoolmarm voice and said, “So you became the book-loving barber and your cousin, the dedicated attorney. At least you both ended up working in fields you enjoyed and that have potential benefits for both society and our community. Where did your cousin end up practicing law?”

  Dante stared at the traffic beyond the parking lot. “He didn’t.”

  “But I could have sworn you said something about him being pre-law.”

  “I did and he was. He even got admitted to Ole Miss, he just never finished.”

  “Because of your uncle’s health issues?”

  Dante shook his head. “No, not that. I can’t really say why, for sure. It wasn’t something he ever talked about. After he dropped out of law school, he sorta just disappeared and we didn’t hear from him for years. When he finally resurfaced, we found he’d changed fields and was working in a university library.”

  “That book-loving gene you two share must be a pretty strong one.”

  “It would seem that way, wouldn’t it?” He sounded amused, but strangely enough, the smile she saw on his face looked absent of any joy. “After his death we discovered he had a will. In it, he’d made a point of leaving me, of all things, his books. But you know, when I went to clean out his place, the only books I found amongst all of his things were multiple, dog-eared copies of this one—” Dante slapped a hand against the book in his smock before jamming his fists into his pockets “—a perplexing tale about a man who turns into a roach.”

  “You’re still angry with him, aren’t you?” Aliesha said softly.

  He looked at her briefly before turning away again. “To be frank, Miz Professor, yeah, I am. Now even more than ever.”

  Why? Because he became a librarian instead of a lawyer?”

  “No, because he took what could have been my shot, my opportunity, and just pissed it away.” Dante pulled the paperback from his pocket and dropped his gaze to the cover. “He hated being a librarian. From what I can tell, he’d even grown to hate books, except for this one. At some point, he even took to hating his own damn fool self—enough, in fact, to walk out into the river one night . . . as if for a split second he thought he was the disciple in the boat, you know, the one Christ told to come to him? If not, perhaps, the Savior himself.”

  “Your cousin took his own life?”

  “Yeah, his and from the looks of things Big Mama’s, too. She hasn’t been the same since.”

  On noticing the mist rising in Dante’s eyes, Aliesha longed to touch his face, pull him into her arms, and tell him it was going to be all right. But they weren’t those kind of friends . . . not yet, anyway. She settled for taking one of his hands and giving it a squeeze. “I’m sorry. In recent years, I’ve lost a number of people near and dear to my heart, so I do have some idea of how you must feel. If you trust and believe, in time, it’ll get better. Some of the hurt may even go away.”

  When she went to let go of his hand, his fingers caught and folded around hers. She looked into his handsome face and watched as the jagged lines faded and the mist cleared. “I’m not so sure I believe that. But I appreciate you saying it, just the same.”

  She nodded. Her eyes conducted a brief survey of his chest before drifting upward again to his neck and around his ears, searching for evidence of the iPod that was generally there. “What? No music today?” she finally asked.

  His face marked by a look of surprise, he searched his pockets, but the only thing he turned up was the book. “Well,” he said. “I guess I owe you a song then, huh?”

  She grinned. “Yeah, I guess you do.”

  A phone call, one from Laylah, had interrupted the conversation he’d been having with Aliesha. Rather than inquire about his or his Big Mama’s well-being or even ask if he might possibly have been busy, the first thing out of Laylah’s mouth had been a bitter, “So, what happened to you last night?”

  “I’m in the middle of something right now,” is what he’d told her. “I’ll call you back later.”

  But being blown off that easily wasn’t something Laylah could very well allow. “The least you could have done is let me know you weren’t coming. I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately, Dante. You never used to behave this way.”

  Rather than answer, he’d sighed and listened as, predictably, Laylah’s voice lost its sharp edge and slipped into a dull whine. “Baby, come on now, I understand you’re probably still in shock and mourning over Reuben’s death. We all are. But still, we should be t
rying to comfort one another and—”

  “You’re right, we should,” he said, no longer bothering to disguise his impatience. “But I can’t talk now. I’ll call you later.” Knowing she’d deny him the proper good-bye he so rightfully deserved and understanding the lengths to which she’d go to keep him from offering up one either, he’d simply hung up without giving her a chance to utter another word.

  He hadn’t lied when he’d told Aliesha he didn’t have a girlfriend. He’d stopped thinking of Laylah as such years ago. Indeed, they had a relationship, an understanding and one that in recent years had grown primarily sexual in nature, and almost obscenely, if not grotesquely, one-sided.

  He was her man, but she wasn’t his woman. Typically, when she called, he went to her and gave her what she wanted, no questions asked and without so much as a moment’s worth of hesitation. But it never worked the other way around, mainly because Laylah didn’t belong to anyone—never had and probably never would—not to him, not Reuben, not even Stewart, her husband of the past seven years.

  But lately, Dante had begun to pull back even as Laylah persisted in assuring him that their day would soon come. “Be patient,” she scolded. “Grant me just a little more time, why don’t you?” as if he hadn’t already granted her the bulk, if not the prime, of his thirty-plus years.

  It was true, he’d deliberately ignored her request to meet her at the Hilton in Harvestville. And the reason? The one he could barely admit to himself—he’d begun to look forward in earnest to Aliesha’s visits and he hadn’t wanted this latest one tainted by any remnant of Laylah’s bittersweet presence.

  When Aliesha had strolled into the shop that day, Dante had been daydreaming about the possibility, however minute and improbable, of aligning his life with hers. But as always, the golf-ball-sized doubts broke through the blue-tinged skies of his fantasy and began covering the ground beneath his feet with a frightening amount of hail. In the familiar and accompanying thunder, he’d heard the mocking voice of his cousin Reuben. A barber and a professor? Yeah, right, that’s a likely pair. About as likely as a barber and an attorney, don’t you think? Face it, boy, you peaked in high school and all of your best years are behind you. It happens sometimes. Get over it and move on. Dante wondered if Aliesha owned the wherewithal required to help him separate the truth from the lies.