She Had It Coming

by Mary Monroe

  “And Europe,” she said with emphasis. I rolled my eyes and prepared myself to listen to her give me a detailed account of all her mixed blood. People of color must have thought that it was a rite of passage to claim to be of mixed blood. I was beginning to think that I was the only full-blooded black person in America.

  “Europe? I never would have guessed that,” I said, the sarcasm dripping from my mouth like wax from a burning candle.

  “Well, it’s true. I can trace our roots back six generations. My grandfather was from Ireland. How do you know you don’t have some insanity or hereditary diseases in your background?”

  “I don’t know any of that,” I said meekly, watching Paul out of the corner of my eye. As soon as he handed me my wineglass I took a big gulp. The way he kept fidgeting and glancing at his watch I couldn’t tell which one of us was more uncomfortable.

  “Excuse me, Loretta. My grandbabies just arrived,” Miss Thelma said, leaving abruptly. She pranced across the floor so fast her cape fluttered, and then rose up so high it momentarily hid the back of her head.

  Paul immediately gave me another apologetic look. “Mama’s a real piece of work,” he said. “I hope she didn’t say anything to offend you.”

  “With my background, it takes a lot to offend me,” I told him. “By the way, I didn’t know you had an Irish relative on your family tree,” I said, tilting my chin.

  “Oh? Well, did she also tell you that Grandpa Colin, a man who often paid his debts by serving up his retarded teenage daughter for the night, drank himself to death? And that he seduced my grandmother when she was just twelve, as his wife lay in bed dying of cancer? Did she tell you that once his family found out he’d been fucking his black housekeeper and her daughter, they disowned him? Did she tell you that he ended up living and dying in a ghetto in Pontiac, Michigan, in the basement of the house that his housekeeper lived in? Did she tell you all of that?”

  “She didn’t have to.” I sighed. “I’ve met a few people like your mother.”

  “My peoples, my peoples,” Paul said, shaking his head and rolling his eyes. “Don’t let them get to you, baby. Just remember, I couldn’t choose my family, but I could choose the woman I wanted to help me create a family of my own. I don’t like to brag, but I think I did quite well for myself.”

  “I think you did, too,” I said, wiping sweat off Paul’s forehead with my napkin.

  Paul looked toward the bar where most of the family members were still holding court. After giving them a disgusted look, he returned his attention to me. “Just remember, you’re marrying me, not them. When you are ready to get out of this . . . this snake pit, just let me know and we’ll escape to our room and lock the door.”

  “I’m fine,” I assured Paul, holding up my hand. “I can handle myself. Now let me mingle some more. The last thing I want your family to think is that I’m a snob.” I chuckled, walking toward the garishly dressed mob. From the look on Paul’s face you would have thought that I was leaping into a lion’s den.

  Once Miss Thelma took it upon herself to inform the rest of the family that I had no family and had grown up in a lower middle-class neighborhood with foster parents, I became dog meat in their eyes, too. For the rest of that night, I was treated like a bastard at a family reunion.

  The fact that I had a good job didn’t faze them one bit. “You could get a much better job with a college education,” one pie-faced female relative said, looking at me with a frown on her face. I was the most conservatively dressed person in the room, but the way I got stared at by the male relatives, you would have thought that I was naked. The way the females looked me up and down, you would have thought that I was dressed like a streetwalker. One thing was for sure, this was one night that I would remember for a long time. It reminded me of a Freak Night party I’d attended in high school.

  About two hours into this “night to remember,” the mumbled comments about my glamorous and fun-filled job included one that described it as “a glorified waitress.” As painful as the gathering was, I was glad I’d attended. After the way Paul’s family had reacted to me, he decided he didn’t want a big wedding, either. As a matter of fact, now he was the one who wanted to just trot down to city hall, despite the tantrum his mother threw. But Valerie was still opposed to that. “I’d feel better if you got married in Paw Paw’s,” she joked. But Paul and I took her joke seriously. Getting married in a popular bar with just a few close friends sounded like a good compromise. Most of Paul’s family members didn’t go to what they called “low-end” bars like Paw Paw’s, so we didn’t have to worry about them coming.

  I had already moved a lot of my belongings into Paul’s apartment. The Friday night before the ceremony, we moved everything else. He lived on the tenth floor in a swank building near downtown L.A. With the huge windows, trendy furniture, and plush green carpets, my new home was like a palace compared to every other place I’d lived in, including Valerie’s house. “You can always come back if you ever need to,” Valerie assured me, wiping tears from her eyes. She’d waited until she and I were alone in her living room.

  “Oh, I don’t think I’ll have to,” I told her, beaming like a lamp.

  Valerie closed Paw Paw’s to the public that Saturday. And Paul and I got married on the dance floor. The only guests in attendance were Valerie; Moanin’ Lisa and her escort, a cab driver she’d met the day before; a few of my co-workers; and a few of Paul’s friends and co-workers. I wore a simple off-white silk dress cut just below my knees. Paul looked like a prince in his black tux.

  When the power went out on the block, twice in the same hour, we moved the reception to Valerie’s house. Things were going fine until one of Paul’s co-workers wandered through the kitchen and out onto the back porch to get some fresh air. I didn’t know about it until I heard Valerie screaming, “Don’t go in my backyard!” The stunned guest came running back into the living room with Valerie behind him, both of them looking like they’d seen the devil. “I . . . I don’t want people trampling around in my backyard,” she stuttered.

  “I wish somebody would tell me what the big deal is about that damn backyard,” Moanin’ Lisa slurred. “All this time I’ve been living here, we can’t have barbeques back there, or anything else.” Moanin’ Lisa took a long drink from a tall glass of wine and looked from me to Valerie. “Is there some kind of treasure buried out there or what? One of these days I’m going to find out! My cousin Sonny works for the city digging ditches. He’d be glad to lend me a shovel!”

  One of the strangest looks I’d ever seen on another person’s face crossed Valerie’s. Right there in front of my new husband and our wedding guests, she told Moanin’ Lisa she had thirty days to move out.

  CHAPTER 39

  With my employee discount, Paul and I were able to enjoy a two-week cruise to the Mexican Riviera. I enjoyed it, but I was glad when it was over. I got a glimpse of reality, and it was not a pretty picture.

  On the third day into our honeymoon, after Paul had had a few drinks, he showed me a side of himself that I didn’t like. While we were enjoying a fun-filled dinner at a long table filled to capacity with strangers, he made fun of the fact that I had only a high school education. When I reminded him that I’d also attended a state-funded training program, he took that and ran with it. “That? You think that’s something to be proud of? Programs like that are as cheesy as Job Corps!” he roared. He was the only one at the table who snickered. The people, who were close enough to hear him, looked mildly horrified. And if that outburst wasn’t enough to make him look like a bumbling idiot, he also made unkind remarks about the fact that I had grown up in foster care. I was outraged, hurt, and embarrassed. Especially after all that shit he had said at his mother’s party, apologizing about him not being able to choose his family and how glad he was that he was able to choose me to be his wife.

  I was the darkest person at the table, but the way my blood rose, had I been white I would have turned as red as a rose. Despite the effe
cts of the two glasses of wine I’d drunk, I suddenly felt stone-cold sober. I laid down my silverware and turned to my husband, rotating my neck in the true ghetto princess style. Either I overdid it or I didn’t do it enough because my neck felt like it was going to break in two. Paul was stunned, but he knew me well enough to know that I was not the kind of sister who took anybody’s shit lying down. I’d proven that to him the way I had graciously checked his obnoxious mother.

  “Look, baby, I didn’t choose to be a member of a dysfunctional family. I didn’t choose the woman who gave me life. But I am thankful that she didn’t abort me, dump me in a trash can at birth, or sell me to pay off her debts, like somebody else you know.” I paused so I could savor the look of agony on Paul’s face. But I wasn’t through with him yet. I exhaled and took a drink from my water glass. “And another thing, despite all that shit I had going against me, I had a good life, anyway. I didn’t choose to grow up in foster care. And I can’t help it if I was not able to attend college. But I did finish high school, and that’s something a lot of people can’t say where I come from. There are a lot of people in this country who had to struggle just to get from one day to the next. Unfortunately, I was one of those people. But I think I am doing all right now.” As soon as I paused again, Paul spoke again.

  “Are you through?” he asked in a meek voice, looking around.

  “No! Hell no, I’m not through!” My lips snapped brutally over every single word that shot out of my mouth. “I’ve got a few more things to say. You’ve brought this subject up before, and so has your family. If it’s going to be a problem, we need to deal with it now.”

  From the way Paul squirmed in his seat, I could tell that he was embarrassed. Especially after the distinguished-looking, white-haired gentleman seated on my right patted me on the shoulder. Then in a clipped British accent, he told me how much people like him admired an “underdog overcomes life of despair” story like mine. Our other dinner companions tried to ignore us, but out of the corner of my eye I saw some of them sneaking peeks at us and whispering.

  “There is nothing to deal with, Dolores. I don’t care where or what you came from. I love you regardless,” Paul said with a sheepish look on his face.

  “Then let’s lay this to rest now. I don’t want you to keep bringing this subject up. That’s in the past, and I can’t change it,” I said harshly, and with the nastiest look on my face that I could produce. I snatched up my fork and speared a wedge of potato on my plate, and chewed it to smithereens without taking my eyes off Paul’s face.

  “This case is closed,” he mumbled, barely moving his lips. After he’d finished his drink and dinner, he slunk back to our stateroom. I went to the bar where I enjoyed a few highballs with the British gentleman who had sat next to me at the dinner table and his wife, a frail little woman with diamonds everywhere but on her toes who kept telling me she wished she could be as feisty as I was.

  I didn’t consider myself a feisty woman, but I was no wimp when it came time for me to speak up for myself. And I was ready to do it again that night, if I had to. But Paul was as meek as a lamb when I returned to our room. He met me at the door with a glass of champagne. After we went dancing in the ship’s disco, he escorted me back to our room, carried me over the threshold, and gave me a foot massage. He didn’t say anything else stupid about me that night, or at any other time during the cruise. This was the sensitive and gentle man who I had fallen in love with. But something told me that the subject was still on his mind and that it would eventually come up again.

  Now that the honeymoon was over, I was anxious to settle into married life. But there was a dark cloud looming over my head. It had probably been there all along, but love had obscured my vision. It had prevented me from seeing certain things, until now. I was still blindly in love with Paul, and I was determined to make my marriage work. But the more I got to know him, the more I could see what he was really like. Despite the foolishness he often subjected me to, he was still a wonderful man. The problem was, I was beginning to think that he thought he was too wonderful for a woman like me.

  It didn’t take long for me to realize that married life with Paul was not going to be a cakewalk. I didn’t involve myself with horoscopes much, but he was a true Gemini. The man was as two-sided as a coin. Dating somebody like Paul was one thing; living with him was another thing.

  He complained profusely about my housekeeping skills. He screamed every time I left hair on the bathroom sink. When it was my natural hair that was bad, but when it was the hair from one of my wigs, he flew into a rage. With the exception of breast implants, which his last girlfriend had, Paul was one man who did not tolerate anything fake. He’d had a horrible relationship with another girlfriend. “Every time I wanted to sleep with her, she had to remove her padded hips, her padded bra, her contacts, her fake nails, her hairpiece, and her removable bridgework and drop it all into a chair by the bed. The more time I spent with her, the more pieces she added to herself. There’d be more of her on the chair than in the bed. After a while I didn’t know whether to get in the bed or on the chair.”

  Paul enjoyed regaling me with amusing tales about his former lovers. But he made it clear that he had high expectations for me because I was the one who was going to be with him until the very end. “I am a clean man, Dolores, and I deserve a clean woman.” He didn’t have to remind me too often, but when he did, he did it with a flourish. The one time that I forgot to flush the toilet after I’d used it, he preached a sermon about the importance of good hygiene and showed me six difference Scriptures, in a Bible that I didn’t know he had until that night, where he had marked references to cleanliness.

  When I took a bath and didn’t clean the bathtub to his satisfaction, he slapped on a face mask and some rubber gloves and did it himself. He also wore a mask and rubber gloves when he picked up my dirty clothes off the floor with a stick. Him doing strange shit like that didn’t bother me, but it did when he tried to get me to wear a mask and gloves when I cleaned house. That was one battle he didn’t have a chance of winning. “Last time I checked, I didn’t have a father,” I reminded him. He let me alone after that.

  By this time, I knew what was expected of me. I had to vacuum the carpets every day, whether they needed it or not. He got so sick of me leaving dirty dishes in the sink for too long that he took over that chore, which was fine with me. He looked cute in an apron. I didn’t have much luck getting him to take over doing the laundry, though.

  Paul wined and dined me on a regular basis in some of the best restaurants in Southern California. He admitted that by taking me out to eat a lot, it was one way to keep me from stinking up our kitchen with turnip greens and neck bones. It got to a point where I cooked my favorite soul food dishes only when he was out of town. He was fine with that as long as I had fumigated our place before he got back home. Paul’s remarks didn’t bother me any more than the remarks I made about his family bothered him. We both had a sense of humor about the two subjects. I was glad that I had a man who was not afraid to speak his mind.

  And not a day went by that he didn’t tell me I was beautiful and how proud he was to call me his wife. But that didn’t stop him from continuing to point out my flaws. Another one was my choice of friends. Moanin’ Lisa had moved into an apartment two blocks from us, so she came over on a regular basis. Paul made it clear that her visits wouldn’t have bothered him had she not complained and whined so much. I couldn’t do anything about that, so I stopped answering the door when she came. But that bothered Paul, too!

  “If you don’t want to be bothered with that woman, you need to tell her. Why can’t you be as honest with everybody else as you are with me?” he said, as I tiptoed back into the living room after refusing to answer Moanin’ Lisa’s knock on the door.

  “I . . . it’s not that simple, Paul,” I mumbled, reaching for my water mug on the glass-top coffee table. “Sometimes it is better to . . . uh . . . lie.” I had my head down because I didn’t want Paul t
o see my eyes. But when I looked up at him, he was staring at me in a way that made my stomach hurt.

  “Have you ever lied to me?” he asked point blank, narrowing his eyes in a way that made my stomach hurt even more. “And don’t lie to me now, because I will know,” he warned.

  “I’ve never lied to you, Paul.” It was amazing how I could lie with such a straight face and be so convincing.

  “I know you haven’t, baby. And your honesty is one of the many things I love about you.”

  CHAPTER 40

  “I’ve never had a reason to lie to you, Paul,” I said quickly, shaking my head so hard everything in it rattled. “When we have to start lying to each other, that’s when we’ll know our marriage is in trouble.” I cleared my throat. “Uh, by the way, I’ll be going to visit my friend in Monterey tomorrow morning,” I reminded.

  “What friend?”

  “Baby, don’t you remember? The one I visit every month. I told you all about her right after we got together.”

  Paul shook his head and slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Oh yeah! That friend. The nut case.”

  “That’s a pretty mean way to describe somebody, Paul,” I complained. “She’s just having some mental setbacks.”

  “I’m sorry, baby. That was insensitive of me, and I should know better. My mama raised me better. Uh, I’ll tell you what—if I can get out of that card game with Perry and Logan tomorrow, I’ll go with you. The last thing I want is for you to think I don’t care about your sick friend.”

  “No, I don’t want you to do that. My friend’s condition has gotten worse over the years, and I’m one of the few people she’ll allow to visit.”

  A puzzled look slid across Paul’s face. “Well, I don’t have to visit this friend, per se. I’m sure that I can find something to do to keep myself busy while you visit with her. One of my former college buddies lives near Monterey.”