Rabbit

by Patricia Williams

  “You think white people have a laundry that says ‘Cracker Wash and Dry’?” I asked Jerome, staring at the sign. He laughed and told me that some guy named Hood had bought the place. “Girl, that’s why it’s called Hood,” he said. “Not because it’s in the hood.”

  Hubert Hood was a middle-aged man with a potbelly and rectangular reading glasses that sat on the end of his nose. I met him when he came out of his office at the back of the store one afternoon and found me beating the shit out of Duck’s cousin Reggie with a giant jug of Clorox bleach.

  I’d been in the laundry minding my own business, when Reggie walked in and started hollering at his girlfriend, Tanisha, who was using the washer next to mine.

  “Bitch! Who told you to leave the muthafucking house?” he yelled. Then he grabbed Tanisha by the throat, shoved her up against a dryer, and started punching her in the face.

  I never liked Reggie anyway, and I definitely wasn’t going stand there and let him whoop Tanisha’s ass, so I grabbed the bottle of Clorox off the counter and slammed it into the side of his head. Reggie ignored me and kept swinging on his girl, so I twisted the cap off the bleach and dashed it in his face. Reggie fell to the floor, hollering about his eyeballs being on fire. That’s when Hood came running out of his office with a pistol in his hand.

  “Whoa!” he yelled. “What the hell’s going on out here?” Hood grabbed Reggie by the collar, dragged him over to the sink, and shoved his head under running water. He turned to me: “Girl, you trying to blind this boy?”

  “Hell, yeah!” I said. “He was beating on my friend.”

  Hood looked from me, to Tanisha, then to Reggie, who was soaking wet, with his Jheri curl plastered to the side of his face.

  “Well,” said Hood. “I can’t argue with that.”

  The next time I had to do laundry, I brought my kids. They sat in plastic lawn chairs Hood had set up against the wall. Ashley kept herself busy reading a book her teacher had given her about a bunch of talking bears, while Nikia chewed on the head of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.

  Hood came out of his office and nodded hello. Then he noticed my kids. I could see him giving them the once over. Nikia had a fresh haircut and was wearing a pair of snow-white Jordans, creased Levis, and a crisp navy-blue Polo. Ashley was dressed exactly the same, except her Polo was red and her hair was braided into four neat plaits, each one finished off with a red clip in the shape of a bow. “Those your kids?” Hood asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “How old are they?”

  “My girl’s five and my son’s coming up on four.”

  “Nice looking. Quiet, too.”

  “Say hello to Mr. Hood,” I told the kids.

  “Hello, Mr. Hood,” they said together.

  “Real mannerly,” he muttered to himself, walking back into his office. “I like that.”

  After that, whenever Hood would see me—which was pretty much every day, since I was selling crack right in front of his laundromat—he’d ask, “How your kids doing?”

  He came outside one chilly afternoon while I was leaning up against my car hustling and the kids were in the backseat. Ashley was doing a worksheet on top of her winter jacket, which she’d folded up on top of her book bag to make a desk in her lap. Nikia was pretending to feed his G.I. Joe french fries from his McDonald’s Happy Meal.

  “How long you gonna keep these kids waiting in the car?” Hood asked.

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Maybe two, three more hours.”

  “Why don’t you send them inside?” Hood suggested. “It’s cold. And I don’t like the way all these knuckleheads out here acting the fool when the sun goes down. It’s not safe.” I took the kids into the laundry and told them to sit on the lawn chairs. But Hood motioned for me to bring them inside his office. “I got a TV in there,” he said.

  When I went to check on them a little while later, Ashley was curled up in an armchair in the corner of Hood’s tiny office, reading her storybook out loud, while Hood sat at his small metal desk with Nikia, teaching my boy to count the coins Hood used to make change for his customers.

  Hood became my kids’ regular after-school activity. They’d be with him for hours, doing their homework or watching TV, while I hustled. Sometimes he’d stay open later than usual, until nine or ten o’clock at night, just to wait on me.

  Hood was like a granddaddy to my kids. And sometimes when they were at school, I’d slip inside the laundromat to spend time with him myself. “Hey Rabbit,” he said when he saw me standing in his office doorway one afternoon. “C’mon in.” He had a stack of bills spread on his desk in front of him, a little calculator, and a notebook. “I’m just taking care of my finances,” he said, picking up a bill. He peered at it over the top of his reading glasses, made a note in his ledger book, then he wrote a check and slipped it inside the envelope.

  “You sure got a lot of bills,” I said after he’d stuffed more envelopes than most folks had utilities.

  “Credit cards,” he explained. He reached into his back pocket, took out his wallet, and pulled out a Visa card. “I got a twenty-thousand-dollar limit on this one. I don’t touch it, though.”

  “What’s it for then?’

  “Emergencies.”

  Hood must have seen the confusion on my face, because he went on to detail exactly how his emergency plan worked: “Say if I need a house repair, or my car breaks down, or my wife takes ill, I got this high-limit card to cover me. You gotta hope for the best but plan for the worst. This credit card is in case the worst happens. It’s my safety net.” I’d never heard anything like this before. When I was growing up, there was never a plan for those days when the food ran out or the electricity got turned off. Life was a string of one emergency after another, with no kind of net to break the fall.

  “How do you get one of those cards?” I asked Hood.

  “You gotta have good credit,” he said. “You can’t get anywhere in this life without good credit.”

  Every night at 6 p.m., I’d get the kids some dinner at Lilly’s Soul Food and the four of us would sit in Hood’s office while he watched the evening news. I don’t know why Hood even bothered, all it did was give him bad nerves. Hood got worked up about everything: the recession, Rodney King, Anita Hill, and Mike Tyson going to jail. “Back in my day,” he said one evening, “we had cats to look up to, like Jackie Robinson and Dr. Martin Luther King. Now it’s like we on a highway to hell.” He added, “At least we have Bill Cosby.”

  As much as Hood worried, nothing raised his blood pressure more than fretting about me and my kids. One night when I was working late and Hood had Ashley and Nikia in his office, I noticed he kept coming to the window and looking out onto the street. It took me a while to realize he was checking up on me. Hood was afraid I was gonna get hit by a stray bullet in a drive by, or that some other dealer was gonna stick me up. He said he wished I would quit hustling and find something safer. But the only idea he ever came up with was winning the lottery. “Imagine you hit the jackpot,” he said. “You win the lotto, you could get off these streets for good.”

  The way Hood worried about me, I probably should have known better than to show up at the laundry with a thick white hospital bandage wrapped around my head. But I wasn’t used to having somebody care the way he did, so I didn’t think it through. When Hood saw me standing at his office door one morning looking like I just came home from war, he clutched his chest like he was having a heart attack: “What the hell happened to you?”

  “Nothing,” I lied. “I’m fine.”

  Hood came around the side of his desk to help me into a chair. He took a seat across from me and held my hands in his. “Who did this to you?” he asked softly. I felt so bad about the way he was looking at me—like I was a little bird that fell out of a nest—I could barely bring myself to tell him the truth. I leaned back, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath.

  The day before, Derrick had come by my apartment with a giant hickey on his neck. It
wasn’t the first time, either. Derrick stayed cheating on me. It was the number one thing we argued about. “Who the hell been sucking on your neck?” I demanded. “What bitch you fucking now?”

  I guess Derrick didn’t have a good comeback, because instead of answering he picked his loaded gun off the kitchen table and smacked me across the face. That’s when the gun went off.

  Derrick said it was an accident. “The gun made a mistake,” he insisted. But he took off before the ambulance arrived, leaving me bleeding on the kitchen floor. I guess he didn’t want to explain to the authorities that his gun had a mind of its own.

  Hood knew Derrick and I fought like cats and dogs. We’d yell at each other in the street and sometimes Derrick would follow me into the laundry. Hood ran him out of the place plenty of times hollering, “You better leave up outta here before I put my foot up your ass.”

  Hood hated Derrick. And seeing me that day with my head in bandages and a bullet graze on my skull was too much for him to take. He covered his face with his hands. “Rabbit,” he said, his voice cracking, “you know I care about you and those kids like you’re my own. Every day I pray you find a good man. But God as my witness, you need to quit that piece of shit Derrick or you’re never gonna give nobody else a chance. That’s how it works, Rabbit. You gotta let go of the bad to make way for the good.”

  I told myself Hood didn’t understand my love for Derrick. For weeks, I tried to push his words away. But they kept repeating, like a bad chili dog: You need to leave that piece of shit. Hood’s words popped into my head while I was lying in bed and while I was hustling on the corner. I thought about them while I was giving the kids breakfast and when I was putting them to sleep. I couldn’t shake what Hood had said because deep down I knew he was right.

  I could make a list as long as the Mississippi River of all the ways Derrick had done me wrong: he beat me with a roller skate, he kept getting other girls pregnant, and now, on top of everything else, he’d accidentally on purpose shot me in the head.

  One night Derrick and I had been out driving and had run out of gas. It was storming with thunder and lighting, and we were blocks away from a filling station. Derrick refused to get out of the car; instead he made me go get the gas. An old man, seeing me walking with a five-gallon gas can in the rain, picked me up and gave me a ride. When he saw Derrick sitting in the passenger seat, sucking his thumb, the old man turned to me: “This young nigga made you go get the gas?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “With all this rain coming down?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Girl, that ain’t no kind of man.” Even a complete stranger could see Derrick was a piece of shit.

  I’d always thought it was love that made me stay with Derrick, but I couldn’t name a single thing I loved about him. And I always said we were a family, but we weren’t any more together than the day he showed up at the hospital to meet our newborn baby with another girl by his side.

  Staring up at the ceiling one night, I kept asking myself, Why? Then it hit me. It wasn’t love that kept me hanging on; it was fear. I wanted a Leave It to Beaver–style family, but I was a teenage mama with two kids, no education, and a blown-off nipple. I couldn’t imagine anybody wanting to make a family with somebody like me. I was afraid Derrick was my only chance. But maybe I was wrong.

  I climbed out of bed and knelt on the floor, clasping my hands in front of me. “Dear Heavenly Father,” I whispered. “I know I been asking you to get Derrick to act right and stop beating and cheating on me so we could be a family. Well, Lord, I changed my mind. Fuck that nigga. Take away my love for that lying piece of shit. Don’t change him. Please, God, change my heart.”

  Chapter 21

  Mr. Nice Guy

  I guess it’s just a fact of life that when you get out of a relationship, even a shitty one with a no-good lying piece of shit, you need some time to heal. I’d been with Derrick for seven years. He was the only man I’d ever known. When I stopped messing with him and finally let go of the idea that we’d ever be a happy TV family, it felt like more than a breakup; it was like I’d cut off my arm.

  During the day, I tried to keep busy making money; at night I’d sit in front of the TV and try not to cry. I didn’t want to admit I felt so lonely without him, so when anybody asked how I was doing, I’d just say, “Fuck that nigga, I’m good!”

  “Oh really?” my friend Niecy asked skeptically, when she came over one night and found me laid out on the sofa watching The Golden Girls.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Staying positive, doing me.”

  Niecy was Dre’s baby mama. She’d shown up to my house dressed in hot pants and a black leather vest, looking like the missing member of Xscape, and ready for a night out. She pointed to my outfit: “Honey, just look at you! Rabbit, you a hot-ass mess.”

  I was dressed in a faded red and green extra large nightshirt with a picture of Santa Claus’s happy face and the words ho ho ho on the front. “What are you talking about?” I protested. “These are my relaxing clothes. I’m relaxing.”

  “Girl, please,” Niecy said, rolling her eyes. “It’s July and you dressed like it’s Christmas at the crack house. Stop playing and get your ass up. Chile, you need to get out of the house and have some fun.” They were having a lip-syncing contest at Harlem Nights, Niecy said. We were going and she wasn’t taking no for an answer. She dragged me to my bedroom, pulled an outfit from my closet—a cream-colored version of the exact same outfit she had on—plugged in my flat iron, pressed my weave, gelled my edges, and sprayed my hair with firm hold Spritz. Then she stood back and gave me the once-over. “Yeah, girl, you gonna find you a new man tonight!”

  The club was packed when we got there. At the front of the room, a contestant was killing it onstage, lip-syncing Diana Ross and Lionel Richie’s “Endless Love,” in a half-man, half-woman costume. Every few bars, he’d pivot so we’d see either the long-haired Diana in a bedazzled gown or a white-suited Lionel with a ’fro.

  Someone in the crowd yelled, “Saaaaang, bitch!” as Niecy and I made our way to a table near the stage where some of her friends were already sitting. I took a seat beside a big-boned brother with a friendly smile and low fade. He had on a blue button-down shirt, looking just like Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

  “I’m Michael,” he said, leaning over and shaking my hand. “And you are?”

  “Rabbit.”

  “Rabbit?” he repeated, looking confused. “That’s the name your mama gave you?”

  “No. My mama named me Patricia, but nobody calls me that.”

  He leaned back in his chair and looked at me through squinted eyes.

  “Well, you don’t look like a Rabbit to me,” he said. “You’re too pretty to be named after an animal.” I could feel my face getting hot. This was way better than sitting at home watching The Golden Girls. Michael asked if he could call me Pat and I nodded yes, thinking to myself, As long as you keep sweet-talking me, you can call me whatever the hell you want.

  Onstage, a three-hundred-pound Mariah Carey was adjusting her half shirt, lip syncing, “You got me feeling e-mo-tion . . .” When Michael turned his eyes to the show, I gave him the once-over. He definitely wasn’t my type. I liked the roughneck Jodeci look, and Michael was so clean-cut, he looked more like the fifth member of Boys II Men. Still, there was something about the way he smiled at me and called me pretty that got me interested. “You live around here?” I asked, leaning forward. I could feel my one good boob pressing against his forearm.

  “I been in the military,” he said. “I just got back from Desert Storm.” He took out a pen and drew me a map on the back of a napkin, pointing to a gulf. “That’s where I was deployed, in Kuwait.” I knew about the war from watching the evening news with Hood on the little TV in his office. But I’d never met anybody who’d been there.

  “What’s it like over there?” I asked.

  “Hotter than hell,” Michael said, over the music. “But at nighttime, when
it’s quiet, the desert is real pretty. There’s nothing but sand all around, and when you look up you can see every single star in the sky.” Michael was leaning in so close I could feel his breath on my neck and smell his soapy scent. He wasn’t the kind of guy I went for. But I couldn’t help but picture him in his army fatigues standing in the middle of a war zone admiring the stars in the sky.

  Maybe I should have told Michael I had kids before I invited him over. But I was so excited when he called me a few days after we met at the club that I just blurted out: “You want to come over and watch TV?” Half an hour later, he was knocking at my door.

  The first thing he did when he came inside was ask me why I had so many pairs of sneakers, which he noticed lined up against the wall. “They’re not all mine,” I said, explaining that some of them belonged to my nieces Cece and Little Cee, who still stayed with me from time to time. “And the little-kid Nikes belong to my kids,” I added. “My son is five and my daughter is almost seven. She’s real smart, her teacher just put her in accelerated reading.”

  He stared at me hard as we sat down in the living room. “How old are you, anyway?” I told him I was twenty and could see him doing the math in his head. But all he said was “Okay.”

  “You have any kids?” I asked.

  “Nah.”

  “Why not? You look like the family type.”

  “I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “I guess I always wanted to wait, settle down, and do it right. You know,” he nodded toward the TV, “like that.” On the screen, Aunt Viv and Uncle Phil were sipping tea in the living room of their Bel-Air mansion, while The Fresh Prince made fun of Carlton’s dancing.

  “Oh, you mean you wanna be rich before you have kids?”

  “No, I just meant married and settled down.”