Say You're Sorry

by Sarah Shankman

  “For being the only black woman crazy enough to move up there within shouting distance of the Arctic Circle, to open a 24-hour washateria and tanning salon complete with blues, chicory coffee, and beignets.” That’s what Sharleen had said.

  Followed by Charles’s offering that Dorothy was so weird she ought to audition for one of those reality shows while she was in the Lower 48.

  Whereupon Sharleen had shot him a dirty look.

  Because no matter what she said, Charles was not allowed to express an opinion about any woman, not one word about the entire gender, not since Sharleen had seen Representative Todd Aiken on TV opining that rape rarely leads to pregnancy because, “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut the whole thing down.” With that, Sharleen had shouted “Legitimate my ass!” and reached over the sofa and slapped Charles upside the head.

  As far as Charles could tell, it was now the opinion of Sharleen and all her girlfriends, that most men these days were stupid and evil—and while he wasn’t denying that there was a lot of that going around, he wouldn’t say most—while on the other hand every woman in the whole United States had been dubbed a saint. He wasn’t talking about any football team either. And black women, they were Saints with Attitude.

  He said as much to Sharleen this morning when she and her momma both started in yelling at him.

  Didn’t pick up the dry cleaning or the laundry from Mr. Lee. You’d think he could do some little something to help out around here.

  Well, he did plenty. Lots of the shopping, all the heavy cleaning, most of the cooking, but he didn’t have time right now, working a four-to-midnight, then turning around and picking up an eight-to-four. Trying to put aside a little bit so they could go someplace cool for a couple of weeks in August. Sharleen didn’t make beans at that bookstore where she worked days, and she went to school at night.

  “You want to see attitude? I’ll show you attitude!” With that Sharleen had picked up a handful of books, hard cover, and started chunking them at his head.

  Wasn’t that something? Popped him in the ear with a copy of Are Men Necessary?, and he bled all over his Regional Transit Authority uniform shirt. Then Sharleen and Dorothy both stared at his bloody collar like he was Jack the Ripper instead of the victim of a book-throwing crazy woman.

  After that they’d been neither time nor appetite for breakfast, and he was the last man in, his supervisor yelling at him, he’d drawn one of the buses with the on-again off-again air conditioning. Plus his least favorite route.

  Elysian Fields starting out at the lake, that part wasn’t bad. But hang a right on Royal, straight through the Quarter jammed with tourists clogging up the streets, don’t know where they’re going, don’t have the right change, horse carriages with old uncle drivers dressed up like fools yelling “Cornstalk Fence Hotel,” it was enough to make a man pay a brother driver to run over his foot, file for his disability.

  Today, even the good part had gone bad. Out in Gentilly between Mirabeau and Brutus, three kids got on with a boom box screaming dirty rap.

  Charles said, “You turn that thing off before I rap you upside your heads.”

  Then an old black lady hobbled up, smelling pretty ripe, talking to herself, not a penny in her purse. Could be his grandma.

  “Come on, darlin’,” he said, “you ride anyway.”

  “Who you calling darlin’, you mother-raper?”

  That was it. Enough. Bottom of his shift, Charles was heading for that bookstore, grab up Sharleen, slap those women silly been feeding her all this women-this, women-that bull, especially the one she’s always talking about, that Lily.

  Charles was a peaceful man, but the time had come to knock some heads.

  *

  Lily’s friend Bernard walked away for two minutes to buy a Times-Picayune at the liquor store. A good-looking man in a blue-and-white seersucker suit, carrying a briefcase, joined Lily at the bus stop. He nodded Morning, then stared down at her black sandals with the grosgrain ribbon ties and said, “You have the most beautiful ankles I’ve ever seen.”

  “Buzz off,” Lily said.

  *

  Between Pleasure and Humanity a fat lady got on the bus. She weighed 300 pounds easy, maybe 350, was carrying another 25 of groceries in wet bags.

  Of course, one broke, and there’s Doritos and Cheez-its and guacamole and chocolate chip cookies going every which way on Charles’s bus. One of the rap kids grabbed up a bag of chips with green onion and sour cream, ripped it open, and dug in.

  The fat lady put all her weight behind a pretty good backhand, knocked him forward three seats.

  “I’ve had me just about enough of you young hellions,” she hollered. “Don’t have a lick of home training.”

  Charles didn’t even slow down. He was thinking about the look on Sharleen’s face when Dorothy was talking about young white boys growing on trees up there in Alaska.

  “I like ’em,” Dorothy had said. “Not set in their ways. Not housebroke either, but who cares, I can train ’em. And one starts getting the least bit sassy, I just toss him out, go get me a fresh one.”

  Sharleen had looked like that was the best idea she’d heard all week. Like she didn’t know a relationship took work, had highs and lows, good times and bad. Like life.

  “Before my friend Lily cut and ran from her rotten two-timing husband she chopped his two-hundred-dollar shirts into little bitty pieces and threw them out the window like Carnival confetti,” was what she said.

  That Lily again.

  When Bernard came back with his paper and Lily started talking loud, the man in the seersucker suit hailed a passing cab.

  What Lily said was, “I enjoy being pretty and have as much vanity as the next woman. But couldn’t a man just for once get past the how-do-you-do before he starts in commenting on whatever part of my anatomy grabs his squinty little attention?”

  “As opposed to your brilliant mind?” said Bernard. “Well, I’m here to tell you it’s your understanding of the future perfect tense that I’ve always been in love with. And your opinions on the balance of trade. I swear, Lily, if you weren’t a woman, I’d marry you myself.”

  “Oh, shut up, Bernard. It’s too hot to tease. But really, it’s infuriating, men talking about us like we were cows they were thinking about bidding on at a livestock auction. Why, the first thing Clark ever said to me at that party where we met was, ‘My God, you have the tiniest waist. Makes me want to put my hands around it.’ And like a silly little fool, I giggled and let him.”

  Then Lily stared off into space remembering how Clark could and did encircle her with his hands. Strong arms. Long lean muscular legs.

  All of which she missed. Oh, the anguish of long hot summer evenings with no company but Jack Daniel’s. The agony of being a single lady when you knew that most men weren’t worth killing with a stick, and you missed them anyway.

  *

  It was between North Rampart and Burgundy, just before they got to the Royal Street turn, that the odiferous old lady who’d called him a mother-raper came up to the front of the bus and stood swaying in Charles’s face.

  “Ma’am,” he said as patiently as a man could whose air-conditioning had shut off again five minutes earlier, “you’re gonna have to sit down. I can’t let you stand up here while the bus is moving.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” she snapped. Her face looked like a storm brewing out over Lake Pontchartrain.

  “Ma’am,” he tried again, but didn’t get any further as the old lady’s shaky brown hand reached into a bag full of bags and pulled out shiny revolver that she poked into his right ear.

  “Turn this bus around,” she said. “It’s too hot to go shopping, and I want to go back home right now.”

  “Ma’am, I really don’t think you want to be doing this,” said Charles.

  She cocked the revolver with a very loud click. “I cain’t hardly tell you how sick and tired I am of mens telling me what I want to do. So don�
��t be doing that no more, okay?”

  *

  Bernard said to Lily, “Why don’t you just bite the bullet and go see Clark? You know you’re bound to run into him eventually anyway. Call him up and have a drink at the Absinthe. I bet you’d feel one hell of a lot better, you got it over with.”

  “I feel just fine as I am, thank you very kindly.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Okay, except for a little sleepwalking. The doctor said that’s not unusual. Stress. You know. Nothing worse than a case of the mean reds.”

  “Except that they found you out in the middle of St. Roch at four in the morning carrying a quart of milk. Sound asleep as if you were in your own bed.”

  “Just that once.”

  “Honey,” said Bernard. “Fess up. I know he broke your heart. And I know what that feels like. I’ve been there, all alone, night after night, chewing on the good times like you were a starving man. Waking up in a puddle of sweat, terrified of you don’t know what, worse than the boogie man when you were a little kid. Then you remember that you’re all, all alone, he’s gone, and you wish you were dead.”

  He tried to look in Lily’s face to see how she was taking all this, but she had turned away.

  “But you know what? What you’re mourning is what was, not what is. What Clark may have been back in the sweet days ain’t been the reality for a long time now. You see him again, you’ll remember what a jerk he really is. Besides, I hear he’s not nearly as cute. Hear he’s put on beaucoup weight.”

  “Bernard.” Lily turned, her voice as cold as an Abita Springs beer straight out of the cooler. “What I’m afraid of is no boogie man in the night. I’m afraid that if I ever lay eyes on Clark Davidson again, I’ll kill him stone dead.”

  *

  “Turn right here,” the crazy old lady yelled. “Here, boy!”

  Charles turned that wheel hard and did exactly what she said, even if he was headed up the boulevard of Elysian Fields instead of down, and definitely in the wrong lane.

  *

  “Just close your eyes and imagine Clark fat,” said Bernard, who himself was blond and small and elegant with fine bones and lovely breeding that showed in his every corpuscle. “Sweat soaking through the pits of his white linen suit, leaving dark stains. His gut straining against his shirt, buttons gaping. Collar too tight, his fat neck hanging over.”

  “Yuk,” said Lily. But she did what Bernard said. She imagined Clark.

  And then, as had happened so many times before that she’d stopped counting, the figment of her imagination appeared in the flesh. Lots of flesh, all of it hot and sweaty, exactly as Bernard had pictured.

  Yes, right there, right across from them on Elysian Fields stood Clark Davidson, her ex. The man to whom she had given her virginity, given her love, her trust, to whom she’d whispered her deepest longings, her darkest secrets. The man who’d tossed all that away as if it were a bunch of milkweed he’d admired and cut, brought into the house and stuck in a ruby red vase before he’d thought, Oh well, they’re just weeds, after all, and dumped into the trash.

  He was wearing a white linen suit, already darkened with sweat at not yet nine o’clock in the morning.

  Lily waved, and Clark startled, then lit up.

  He looked truly thrilled to see her. Now there was his grin, the one that used to make her heart jump up and down like a puppy.

  He gave her a big wave in return.

  “Hey!” he called. “Hey, Lily!”

  Then he glanced to his left, checking for oncoming traffic, and stepped out onto the melting pavement of Elysian Fields.

  *

  “Lady, look what you did! What you made me do!” Charles screamed at the old woman who’d pulled herself up off the floor after all his swerving and braking and doing the best he could to avoid hitting the big white man in the big white suit who lay surely dead now, his crumpled bleeding body half on the sidewalk, half in the street.

  The old woman had resumed her stance beside him, poking the gun in his ear even as sirens screamed in the distance.

  “Fool should have looked both ways,” she snorted. “Now come on. Giddy-up. It’s hot in here and an old woman like me don’t have no time to waste.”