by Tracy Brown
“Amen!” Misa chimed in, joining them at their table. “Plus a loving sister like me to share it all with. Who could ask for anything more?”
Camille sucked her teeth and smiled. “Finished with your card game?” She looked over and saw that Frankie and Gillian were headed over to Nobles’s table.
Misa frowned. “Yeah. Baron was my partner and he kept reneging. Frankie and Gillian beat us like we stole something.”
The ladies laughed, while Camille noticed Toya shoot a look in her direction that said, Told you so. She ignored it and watched as Frankie and a few other guys went to refill their plates. Gillian stood talking to her father and sipping on a Corona.
Dominique was checking out sexy Baron. He stood next to his sister with his hands in his pockets as he talked to his family.
“That man is gorgeous!” she proclaimed.
Misa nodded vigorously in agreement. “Yes, he is! And I bet he’s hung like a horse, too!”
Camille gasped and took Misa’s drink away from her. “No more for you!”
Misa frowned and looked at Camille like she was crazy. “What are you, the tipsy police?” She snatched her drink back from her sister. “You can’t tell me when to drink and when not to.” Misa was feeling buzzed, but wasn’t about to let Camille treat her like a little kid.
Camille shook her head disapprovingly. “You should go and check on your son,” she suggested.
Misa blew her off. “He’s fine, warden! Shit, I thought this was a barbecue. He’s having fun, Camille. And so was I until I came and sat over here.”
“Yeah, Camille, lighten up,” Toya urged, snapping her fingers and dancing to the Biggie hits the deejay was playing. “Seems like everyone is having fun but you.”
Camille rolled her eyes and scanned the yard for her husband. She saw him standing with his crew downing shots of Patrón. She shook her head. “He’s gonna be drunk if he keeps that up,” she said out loud without realizing it.
Misa threw her hands up. “Let him! Hell, you should get drunk, too. That way you guys can have wild, kinky sex tonight. With your uptight ass!” Everyone laughed, except for Camille. Misa pulled out a deck of cards from the pocket of her shorts. “Let’s play some cards, y’all.”
The ladies played two rounds of spades before calling it quits. Camille and Misa were no match for Toya and Dominique. As kids, while Misa and Camille had been braiding each other’s hair and playing with dolls, Toya and Dominique had been playing cee-lo and poker with Brooklyn thugs. The sisters had been defeated badly, and Camille was sick of hearing Toya teasing them constantly that they were “in the hooooooooooole!” She had had enough for one day.
“I’m gonna get going,” Toya said. “Got a date tonight with pussy-eating Jameson.” She downed the rest of her iced tea and set her cup back on the table.
As Toya rose to leave, Dominique joined her. “I have to go, too. Octavia has a test on Tuesday and I need her to get some studying done.” She scanned the yard for her daughter and spotted her talking to one of Frankie’s younger crew members. Dominique shuddered, more determined than ever to get the scantily clad Octavia home before this fool sunk his claws into her.
“Thanks for coming, ladies. I hope you enjoyed yourselves.” Camille walked them to their cars and hugged them before they made their exit. She returned to the yard and saw Misa heading toward her with their mom in tow.
“Mama’s tired,” Misa explained. “She’s gonna stay at my house tonight, so we’re gonna bounce.”
Lily smiled at both of her daughters, proud of the young ladies she’d raised to be such wonderful women. “Camille, I think this is the best barbecue I’ve ever been to. You outdid yourself.” She kissed her daughter and squeezed her tightly before she and Misa headed home for the night.
Once her mother, sister, and nephew were gone, Camille looked around for her husband. At first she couldn’t find him, and she began to wonder what the hell he was up to. But then she spotted him staggering up the stairs leading to the house with Gillian and Baron supporting his drunken steps. She started toward them but was stopped en route by Nobles’s wife, Mayra.
“Camille, I have got to get your recipe for that macaroni salad. It was delicious! I thought you had this all catered, but Frankie was bragging to everybody about how you did all this by yourself. I’m amazed!”
Camille smiled, grateful for the compliment, but kept an eye on Frankie as he disappeared into the house with Gillian and Baron. “Thanks, Mayra,” she said, turning her attention back to the lovely older woman. “I’m not the most domestic person in the world, but I know my way around a kitchen. Events like this are the only times I really get to show off my skills.”
Mayra chatted on and on about how good the food was, and Camille only half listened. When she saw Baron come back out of the house alone, she couldn’t take it anymore. “Excuse me, Mayra,” Camille said, having to cut her off in midsentence. “I’ll be right back.”
Camille crossed the yard and climbed the stairs to her house. Once inside, she found scores of people milling around and watching television. Frankie and Gillian were nowhere in sight. She climbed the stairs leading to the bedrooms and vowed that she would kill them both if anything inappropriate was going on. As she neared her bedroom, she could feel her heart pounding. Looking in, she found no one. When she continued down the hall, she could hear low voices coming from the guest bedroom, and she tiptoed closer and stood outside the door undetected. She peeked inside and saw Frankie sprawled across the queen-size bed, lying on his stomach, and Gillian sitting beside him, rubbing his back.
Frankie’s speech was slurred as he spoke. “I’m fucked up, Gigi. Word.”
Gillian chuckled. “I told you not to try to keep up with Baron. My brother drinks like a fish, and you should know that by now.”
“I could hang with Ba—With Baron.” Frankie hiccupped. “Fuck that.”
Gillian shook her head. “Apparently not.” She sighed. “Get some sleep. That’s what you need. Close your eyes and relax.”
Frankie took her advice and shut his eyes as Gillian stroked his back. “I . . . love you . . . Gigi. Word.” Frankie hiccupped again, causing Gillian to giggle.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love you, too. Now go to sleep.”
Outside the door, Camille fumed. She stood there feeling a mixture of jealousy and anger, and then at last she stepped into the room and cleared her throat.
Upon seeing Frankie’s wife, Gillian didn’t seem fazed. “Hey, Camille. Looks like our boy has had too much to drink.”
Camille didn’t return Gillian’s smile, nor did she appreciate her referring to Frankie as “our boy.” She stared at Gillian and spoke flatly. “I’ll take care of my husband from here. Thank you.”
Gillian caught the tone in Camille’s voice and smirked slightly. Camille was so clearly insecure, and Gillian thought it was pathetic.
She stood up, picked up her purse from the nightstand, and walked toward the door. “Great barbecue,” she said. “Tell Frankie to call me tomorrow.”
Camille stood with her hands clenched together. “I’ll do that.”
Gillian walked out and Camille stared at her sleeping husband with contempt. She had heard what he said to Gillian, but told herself not to overreact. Surely, Frankie meant that he loved Gillian the way a man loves his best friend. Not the way that he loved his wife. She walked over and sat down beside Frankie. He stirred from his sleep, still inebriated, and burped. Camille patted him on his back comfortingly, and Frankie smiled. “Love you, Gigi.” He fell back asleep within moments. Meanwhile, Camille sat there and continued stroking his back, with her emotions knotted like a ball in her chest.
Ice Queen
Toya stretched out on the massage table and stuck her face inside the donut hole at the front. She could not wait for Max to get started on her full-body massage. It had been a whole two weeks since her last one and she was fiending. Especially after the unexpected (and unwanted) phone call she’d gotten the other
day. She needed Max more than ever right now!
Toya’s time on the massage table was her chance to relax, think things through, and clear her mind of all the negativity she dealt with each week. As a professional, single, career-minded black woman, she had her share of bad days. Still, she wouldn’t have traded her life for that of any other woman. Toya knew she was a bad bitch, and often referred to herself that way. Camille had asked her the other day why she used the word “bitch” so often and pronounced it with so much venom. “ ’Cuz you have to let a bitch know that you mean what you’re saying, bitch!” They’d laughed about it, but in actuality, Toya really didn’t care who disapproved. She didn’t take anybody’s bullshit. She didn’t hesitate to speak her mind. She was confident, a bit conceited, and convinced that there was no badder bitch on the planet than Latoya Blake.
She had, however, been shaken to the core by the phone call she’d received the other night. She shrugged away the thought of it, shuddering just a little at the memory of his disgusting voice in her ear. Finally, Max came in to start her massage. She closed her eyes, as he pointed out that she was feeling tense in the shoulders again. She hadn’t always been so tough. Like any typical little girl, she had enjoyed her dolls and dressing up in her mother’s clothes. She grew up with four brothers and she was the only girl. That was what made her strong. Toya was ridiculed and teased so often that it seemed like they took turns making her cry. But then she realized that her crying only gave her brothers more satisfaction. So she developed a thick skin and began to hone her verbal skills by tearing her brothers apart with her words. When they called her ugly, she called them faggots. When they made fun of her hairstyles, she made fun of their cheap sneakers. Times were hard back then, and this was their entertainment. With five kids to raise, a no-good, alcoholic husband, and the mean streets of Brooklyn waiting to eat her family alive, Toya’s mother held things together as best she could. Mrs. Blake was college educated, as were all the elders in her family. But she’d fallen for a smooth talker, gotten married, and had a whole bunch of his babies. Her teaching job didn’t pay much and her husband, Nathaniel, never kept a job. The tough economic conditions of the eighties only magnified the misery in their household even more.
For entertainment Toya talked shit, while her brothers played pranks on her. One time they told her to turn the light on in the bathroom. When she pulled the string, a dead mouse was hanging from it. They laughed as she screamed and cried, and she was distraught for a long time. But that night she lay in bed, plotting her revenge. The next morning she put dead roaches in all of their cereal bowls, and waited until her eldest brother—the one who had urged her the strongest to turn on the bathroom light—had shoved a whole spoonful into his mouth before she spoke up. He spit it out all over the kitchen table, the floor, and his brothers. Toya got her ass beat for that one. But she learned to hold her own and eventually became so adept at giving her brothers a taste of their own medicine that she earned their respect. This only emboldened her, giving her the cockiness she needed to pick fights at school and in their neighborhood. Soon she became known as the loudmouth chick that all the guys respected and all the other chicks were afraid of.
As she grew older, Toya’s relationship with her brother Derrick grew stronger than her relationships with her three other brothers. She and Derrick were the closest in age and had the most in common personality-wise. Her eldest brother became a police officer, and the two brothers in the middle were successful in the corporate world. Derrick had been a hustler from the start. He got caught up in the lifestyle and was gone. Toya was well aware of what her brother was into, and she didn’t judge him. She had her own flaws, after all. Eventually, Derrick got bagged in a buy-and-bust. Toya was the one member of their family who stood by Derrick when he was sent away for three years at the age of twenty-one. Toya mailed him packages and even made the trek upstate for a visit or two. She encouraged her brother to come home and get his life together, and she promised to help him. Derrick assured her that when he came home he was going to turn his life around.
And he kept his word. When he had been released from prison five years prior, he married his daughter’s mother and settled into a quiet life as Mr. Mom, working the early shift at the hospital as an orderly so that he could be home in time to greet their daughter as she returned home from school. To Toya, it was remarkable that Derrick had changed his life so drastically. He had gone from a block hugger to a homebody, and she admired him for it. And that meant that if he could do it, there was no excuse for the countless losers who hid behind felony convictions as an excuse for why they couldn’t change their ways. Particularly Dominique’s man, Jamel.
Toya thought about Dominique’s relationship with “the convict” as she lay on the table enjoying the feeling of Max’s fingers working magic on her lower body. She felt that Dominique was suffering from chronic low self-esteem. Why else, she reasoned, would a single woman pulling down a six-figure salary and working in a high-profile career in the music industry ever settle for a lame who never had a real job in his life? She wondered why Dominique couldn’t see what a stupid mistake she was making by spending time and money on a man like Jamel. In Toya’s eyes, he was a fucking loser.
She also had her opinions about Camille’s man, Frankie B. So what if he was making some money? He was a criminal, and he was using Camille as his trophy wife, Toya reasoned. Camille was blindly allowing her husband to spend tons of time with a gorgeous female “friend,” all because she was living in a mansion and getting pricey gifts. How pathetic! Toya had her own money and success, not that of a man who could snatch it from her grasp at any moment. The lifestyle was attractive, but only if it was your shit and not somebody else’s.
Toya dated several men, but each of them served a different purpose. In addition to Alex, there was Larry, who Toya knew the longest and was most familiar with. They had been drinking buddies on Friday and Saturday nights for years. He had a long, picture-perfect penis and stamina like a man half his age. But he also had a live-in girlfriend and a son at home. He and Toya were friends with benefits, and neither of them ever tried to complicate that arrangement by involving feelings in the equation. Larry would come through with a bottle of Hennessy on a Saturday night, and it would be on and popping.
Last, there was Jameson Bartlett, an executive at Google who lived on the same block as Toya. His house was the big, sprawling one on the corner with the lawn that wrapped around from front to back and with four levels of luxury amenities. The house had been left to him and his older sister by their grandparents. His sister and her four-year-old daughter lived in the upstairs apartment. To Toya, he was nothing to stare at. In fact, they’d only struck up a conversation because he worked her nerves while riding the Long Island Rail Road to Midtown Manhattan one morning. The train had been crowded, and Jameson had sat next to Toya, squeezing his long six-four frame into the seat. Toya had given him a look of pure disgust as she was forced to put her Louis bag on her lap. Jameson had laughed, amused by how clearly her emotions were conveyed in her facial expressions. He loved black women and their bullshit. She hadn’t said a word, but there was no doubt in his mind that she was cursing him out in her head.
Jameson had apologized to Toya for inconveniencing her, and she had nodded. He struck up light conversation and that was when he impressed her. He was well spoken, using proper English and big words. And he seemed to have amassed a considerable amount of success, considering the fact that he was only in his midthirties. Toya sized him up during their discussion, and couldn’t believe her eyes. True, it was Friday. Many companies allowed “casual Fridays.” Still, Toya couldn’t get past his pants, which were too short for his long-legged frame. Or his beady black sweater with SEAN JOHN screaming across the front of it. All of it was accentuated by his jacked-up haircut. She didn’t even dare to look at his shoes to see what he was working with. She could already tell that he was not the kind of guy she could ever be seen in public with. Her brother Derrick
and her friends would have laughed her off the planet, especially with her high-maintenance ways. But his credentials impressed her. Before she knew it, she was accepting his invitation for dinner, except that she invited him to her house instead of going to some fancy, high-profile restaurant. She shuddered now at the very thought.
For their first date, Toya had him over on a Saturday night and she cooked a seafood feast. After dinner, she let Jameson feast on her, and she had never had her pussy eaten so well. He was a pro, no question about it. She couldn’t help the noises that escaped her lips as he licked and sucked her with perfection. She was sold. From that point on, every now and then, when the streetlights came on and the neighbors had gone to bed, she would invite Jameson over and command him to take her to ecstasy. She treated him like a slave, and he loved it.
Toya smiled and sighed as she thought about how wonderful her life was. She took no bullshit, she lived life on her own terms, and she was sitting pretty. Who could ask for anything more? Now if only she could get her hopelessly romantic friends to see things her way.
She drifted into bliss as Max massaged her stress away. She thought about her phone conversation with Dominique the night before. Dominique had been complaining that Toya was too condescending, too demeaning with her criticisms of her friends and their life choices. Toya knew that she often came across as mean or unapproachable. And she really didn’t intend to be that way. Still, she couldn’t help feeling that she had things all figured out and that everyone else should follow her program. She had explained to Dominique that she wasn’t trying to hurt her feelings when she pointed out that she was a “dumb bitch” for the hundredth time. She was only trying to get her friend to see that she was too good to be putting up with the likes of Jamel. But Toya had done something she rarely did—she apologized. She told Dominique that she would try to tone down her criticism of her love life. “From now on, I won’t say shit about the convict. Not a single word.” She knew it was bullshit. But it had made Dominique feel better, so the white lie was worth it.