by Mary Monroe
I decided I had no choice but to tell Pee Wee what was going on. And Rhoda felt the same way when I summoned her to the kitchen and told her about the disturbing telephone call that Jade had just taken.
“Annette, you have to tell Pee Wee. And you have to tell him now. You don’t know what kind of person you are dealin’ with,” Rhoda said, shaking her finger in my face as we stood in the kitchen by the window.
I ignored Rhoda and moved to the sink where Jade stood dabbing her eyes with a wet paper towel. “What else did she say, Jade?”
“She, she called you a black, black cow and a…a…b…b…black heifer,” Jade stuttered, almost choking on her words.
“Ha! At least we know she’s not too bright. Everybody knows that a cow and a heifer are the same thing,” Rhoda snarled. “What else, baby?” Rhoda asked, her lips snapping over each word. “Did you hear any background noises? Cars, music, dogs, trains, kids? Anything that might help us figure out at least where this bitch called from?”
“And what good would that do if we don’t even know who she is?” I asked.
“Annette, you really need to sit down and think back over the last few days. Or even the last few weeks. Who have you talked with that you might have said something they took the wrong way? At least we know it’s a woman, so you can eliminate every man we know.”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled. Shaking my head, I moved to the refrigerator where I snatched out a bottle of beer and removed the cap with my teeth. I slammed the refrigerator shut so hard that a pan on the stove twirled all the way around like a spinning top. “There are a few women at work who are mean enough to do something like this. But not to me. I haven’t done anything to anybody at work that would make them want to get back at me,” I said thoughtfully. “At least not that I know of.”
“Auntie, remember when I told you I heard those cows talking about you when I was in the ladies’ room that time?” Jade asked, surprisingly composed now. One thing I could say about Jade was that she was the most resilient human being I knew.
I looked from Jade to Rhoda, shaking my head. “I can think of at least two or three who didn’t like me getting the promotion,” I said. I suddenly felt even more frightened. It was one thing for me to receive ugly mail and phone calls at home. I felt somewhat protected in my house, as long as Pee Wee was with me. But I was wide open at work. Anybody could walk up to me and start shooting!
“Shit!” Rhoda mouthed, casting me a hard look.
“What if it is one of my co-workers?” I asked in a frightened, hoarse whisper.
“Well, when you find out who the bitch is, you file a complaint,” Rhoda said. “There are laws against this kind of shit when it happens at work. You used to work for the phone company. So you got some damn leverage. They liked you so much they didn’t want you to leave. It ought to be easy enough for you to pull some strings and get them to tap your phone, here and at work. If you find out where the calls are comin’ from, you’ll find out who is makin’ them.”
“I’ve already thought about getting my phone tapped and adding caller ID to my service. But I don’t think either one would do any good. I am sure that whoever is doing this to me has already thought about those things too,” I said with a heavy sigh.
“Well, I am dyin’ to find out who this bitch is,” Rhoda hissed.
“I might not live long enough to find out. Especially as crazy as people have gotten in this world. If I’m dealing with a real psycho bitch, filing a complaint wouldn’t even cover as much as a Band-Aid.” I gasped and leaned against the wall.
For a moment, my mind flashed on every recent work-related act of violence that I knew of.
CHAPTER 14
It was a major struggle for me to get through the rest of the evening. I had lost my appetite, even for alcohol, and it was not easy for me to go on about my business like nothing was wrong. I couldn’t say the same for Rhoda and Jade. They were able to put up a good enough front to keep the men from noticing that something was out of order.
It had begun to get dark and the streetlights that lined my street had just come on. After a trip to the bathroom to rid myself of some of the beer that I’d consumed, I went out to my front porch and looked up and down Reed Street, wondering if my new enemy was one of my neighbors.
I lived in a very quiet, respectable, racially diverse neighborhood. Directly across the street from my house was a large beige house with five bedrooms and a garage wide enough to accommodate three vehicles. It was the newest building on the block. It had been built five years ago by the friendly Pakistani man who managed the Second National Bank, where Pee Wee and I maintained our joint checking and savings accounts. Before the Pakistani man and his family moved across the street from me, the spot where he had built his dream home had been vacant for several years. A lot of folks didn’t like to talk about the house that had once stood in the same spot. It had been another large house, occupied by a happy family: Rhoda’s family. Not her and Otis and Jade, but Rhoda and her parents and other family members. Shortly after they moved out, a wiring situation created a problem that caused a fire, and the house, which had contained the mortuary that Rhoda’s daddy had owned, burned to the ground. Whenever Rhoda paid me a visit, she refused to even look at the location where she’d once lived.
For some reason the streetlights that lined Reed Street looked a little brighter than usual and resembled a strange necklace. Every single residence had a large, well-kept front lawn. Other than the Cherry Hill neighborhood across town, this was one of the nicest parts of town to live in. Cherry Hill is where Rhoda, Muh’Dear and Daddy, and Scary Mary—a feisty old madam who was Muh’Dear’s best friend—lived. It was clean, almost crime-free, and I felt safe and welcome. Well, I had felt safe and welcome until I received that cute pink envelope with the nasty message inside.
I glanced at my watch, surprised to see that it was almost nine. But it was still warm. As a matter of fact it was warmer than usual, so on my way back in from the front porch I flipped on the air conditioner.
I had turned on the back porch light, but with the light from the bright, silvery moon and the army of fireflies with their yellow taillights flashing, we didn’t even need the porch light. There were just as many mosquitoes buzzing around as there were fireflies, and the only purpose that those suckers served was to sting us. As much as we all scratched and complained about the mosquitoes, you would have thought that we would have already called it a night. But everybody seemed to be having such a good time. Everybody but me.
I had sat on the hard bench so long, my butt was numb and my muumuu had begun to feel like it was glued to my body. And as annoying as the mosquitoes were, they were a distraction for a while. I was looking for anything and everything that I could focus on, so that I wouldn’t have to think about that telephone call that Jade had answered for me. Because when I did think about the call, I thought about the nasty note and the blacksnake.
Fatigue soon got the best of me. I couldn’t stop yawning and rubbing my eyes. As much as I enjoyed the company of Rhoda and her family, now I regretted that I had invited them over. I tried not to think about that telephone call, but it stayed in the front of my crowded mind, even more so than the note and the blacksnake.
Had I still been in school, it would have been easier for me to compile a reasonable list of suspects. But things had changed a lot for me over the years. It was hard for me to come up with more than a handful of people, women in particular, who might have a reason to hold a grudge against me.
I recalled a run-in that I’d had with a hostile clerk in a nearby grocery store who had shortchanged me, a hairdresser who had lost her job after I’d complained about a botched perm, and a waitress I’d refused to tip in a restaurant; I could go on and on. I didn’t think that I had done anything to anybody that was a good enough reason for them to approach me in such a hostile manner. But apparently they thought I had, and that was what I had to focus on: what I had done, and who I had done it to.
Rhoda and Jade seemed to be enjoying themselves just as much as Pee Wee, Otis, and Charlotte were. They were still running around in our backyard throwing a Frisbee and that damn football from one to the other like it was the Fourth of July. But I knew Rhoda and Jade better than I knew myself. They were just as disturbed as I was about what was happening to me. They were just better at hiding things than I was. Especially Rhoda.
“Auntie, don’t you want to have some fun?” Jade yelled as she leaped in the air trying to wrest the Frisbee out of Pee Wee’s hand. “It’s good exercise.” She paused and gave me a curious look as I just sat looking at her like I had suddenly become mute. “Auntie, didn’t you hear me? Don’t you want to get up off that hard seat and have some fun?” Jade yelled again. “You are already sweating and huffing and puffing like a pig anyway, and you haven’t even done anything but sit in the same spot, off and on, ever since we got here.”
Jade’s long ponytail flopped up and down like the tail on a Palomino. With all the sweating I’d done, my short, severe hair looked and felt like a thorny skullcap. It seemed like the older I got, the worse my hair got. It was shorter, thinner, and more brittle than ever. Jade had informed me, in no uncertain terms, that if I ever stopped letting my beautician dye my hair and pluck the stubborn hairs from my chin on a regular basis, I would eventually look like one of the Smith Brothers, the bearded men illustrated on the cough drop box. Not only was Jade’s comment a little extreme, it was funny and I had laughed about it. If I had let the things that Jade said about my appearance bother me, I would have covered my entire head and face with a ski mask and the rest of my body with a blanket every time I left my house.
After the ugly comment that the note writer had made about my hair, I knew that I couldn’t go on without covering what was left of my hair with a wig. I had worn braids for a few years, but I’d removed them after a comment made by a meddlesome Black co-worker.
“Girl, if you want to get anywhere in this company, you better stop comin’ up in here lookin’ too Black. Them braids gots to go if you ever want to get a management position in the corporate world. Remember how many of us moved up the corporate ladder once we got rid of them Afros and Jheri Curl dos?”
I didn’t like what my co-worker had said, but I’d taken her advice. Lo and behold, a month after I traded in my braids for a sleek perm, I was promoted. The woman who had thought that she would get the position, even though she’d often come to work with a greasy hairnet hugging her head, stopped speaking to me the same day. My breath caught in my throat just thinking about this particular woman. She had slashed the tires on her ex’s car when he left her. If she could do that, she could do anything!
“Auntie, are you listening to me?” Jade yelled, startling me back to the present moment.
“Huh?” I replied, jerking my head around to face her. My face felt like something was crawling all over it. With my hand throbbing like I had arthritis, which I probably did have, I slid it up and down the side of my face. There was warm sweat on my face, not spiders like it felt like.
I sat on top of the wobbly picnic table with a can of beer in my hand with gnats, ants, and flies keeping me company. I offered a weak smile and shook my head at Jade.
“I’d rather just sit here and watch,” I told her. My body felt like a huge boulder, rocking this way and that. It was hard for me to shift my body from one position to another and not fall from my seat. Running around like a teenage athlete was out of the question. Especially with what I had on my mind.
CHAPTER 15
That telephone call had really disturbed me. Even more so because poor Jade had experienced my tormentor’s wrath. I had ignored the telephone in the kitchen when it rang again about an hour later, glad that the others had ignored it, too. After the ringing had stopped, I shuffled into the kitchen and checked the answering machine. The caller had not left a message. I turned off the ringer and the answering machine before I returned to my spot at the table in my backyard.
“Oh, let old lazybones stay right where she’s at,” Pee Wee teased. He paused and shook his finger at me. “I’ll exercise her sure enough, later on tonight,” he threatened, immediately covering his mouth.
“Watch that smutty mouth you got, mon,” Otis teased, his Jamaican accent more pronounced than usual. “There is young peoples in de midst.”
“Like I don’t know what’s going on,” Jade scoffed, rolling her eyes and slapping Pee Wee’s butt with the palm of her hand.
Pee Wee ignored Jade’s gesture, not because he knew I was looking, but because he knew that I trusted him. I trusted him with all my heart. I knew that as long as he was married to me he would never do anything inappropriate with Jade or any other female. Pee Wee was the only man on earth I could say that about. Daddy didn’t like me feeling that way, but with his own track record he didn’t have a leg to stand on.
“I’m tired!” Charlotte yelled, out of breath. She darted across the yard and fell to the ground, fanning and wiping sweat from her face. “Mama, can I have some beer, too?”
“What’s wrong with you, girl?” I asked harshly, giving my daughter one of my meanest looks.
“My throat is dry,” Charlotte whined. She screwed up her face, and then coughed and pounded on her chest all at the same time.
“Have you lost your mind? You are a child, and children do not drink beer,” I managed, glaring at my daughter like she had asked me for the Hope Diamond.
“Jade drunk some beer!” Charlotte pointed out, stomping her foot.
Charlotte and Jade both had friends their own ages, but they had a special friendship that was slightly disturbing. At least it was to me.
As strict as Rhoda and Otis were with Jade, she still got away with more than a lot of kids her age. I knew that they allowed her to drink a little wine every now and then, falling back on the excuse that some of the most prominent families in town allowed their children to drink wine occasionally.
Rhoda’s father had an older half brother, named Johnny, who had returned to his home in Alabama several years ago. This half brother, who happened to be White, was as shady as he could be. Despite his morals, he had been a fun person to be around. And one thing that I could say about Rhoda’s uncle Johnny was, even though he was a notorious womanizer, he had never said or done anything inappropriate to me like Mr. Boatwright had done.
Rhoda often visited her uncle down South, usually with Jade in tow. From what I had managed to piece together from stories Jade had shared with me, that same old White man was just as crazy about Jade as he was Rhoda.
All of the kids in our neighborhood had called him Uncle Johnny, even me. This Uncle Johnny had spoiled Rhoda rotten when she was a child. Pee Wee had told me that the same old man had even taught her how to shoot a gun.
In addition to expensive toys and clothes, Uncle Johnny used to give Rhoda big bottles of wine, way before she reached legal age. It had been nonalcoholic wine, but to me, wine was wine.
I felt the same way about beer and as long as I could help it, my daughter was not going to drink beer until she was of legal age. I had enough to deal with. I didn’t need to have to deal with a miserable situation like an alcoholic child, too.
“Mama, can I please have a little sip?” Charlotte pleaded.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Pee Wee about to react. He slapped his hands onto his hips and started moving toward Charlotte with a stern look on his face. But I got to her first.
“Jade’s a lot older than you. How many times do I have to remind you of that?” I ignored the sneer that I got from Jade and for once, I was glad she was not my child.
CHAPTER 16
I didn’t like breaking up a party, especially one that I had initiated. But I needed some space so I could
rearrange my thoughts. And besides, as much as they tried to hide it, Jade and Charlotte had worn themselves out with all that running and jumping around. Pee Wee, Otis, and Rhoda seemed to be dragging, too.
I feigned a headache. In a way, I did have one. My head felt like it was about to explode because it was crowded with so many thoughts. To make it look good, I slapped an ice pack on my forehead and did some serious moaning and groaning. But it wasn’t even necessary for me to go to that extreme.
“We should be leavin’ anyway,” Rhoda told me in a tired voice, walking along with me as I hauled the leftovers to the kitchen. “Bully doesn’t like to be alone too much, even in a house as cozy and nicely decorated as mine. Lord knows what that runaway wife of his will say to him. That’s when and if she calls my house tonight. You know how tacky British woman can be. They don’t understand men like we do, especially if their man is a brother.”
I noticed the dreamy-eyed look Rhoda got on her face every time she mentioned Bully. He must possess some very good dick, because for a houseguest he held a very high position on Rhoda’s priority list. She had told me herself that she enjoyed cooking special meals for Bully. Even when she prepared hot dogs or hamburgers for dinner, she thawed out a steak for Bully. Jade had spilled the rest of the beans on him. To me, he sounded like the houseguest from hell. He left his dirty clothes and toenail clippings all over the house, and he ate and drank like a hog. When it came to meat, he only ate steak and lamb. And he had to have bread from a Scandinavian bakery way across town. And as much as he liked to drink, Budweiser beer and Wild Turkey weren’t good enough for him. He had to have some kind of Guinness brew or Remy Martin cognac. He was so lazy that when Rhoda wanted to make up his bed, she had to do it with him in it. That Bully. He took hour-long baths and chatted for hours at a time on the telephone, racking up hundreds of dollars worth of calls (that Rhoda and Otis had to pay) to people in Jamaica and London. He even had the nerve to complain when his meals were late.