Both of the children seemed so protective of Michelle. Frankie had made his mother promise over and over again that she would be more careful about “assidents.” Jenna, who might have suspected this had been more than a slip into a door, just stroked her mother’s forehead.
Angie put a hand up to her belly. She wanted that—and she would have it, too. She thought about how pleasant it would be to hold a warm, loving bundle up to her cheek or to her breast. They could watch her favorite Disney movies—The Parent Trap, Pollyanna—and then some of the PBS specials. It would be a while before they could lie on sleeping bags in the living room and share pizza, but it was something to look forward to.
A sizzling noise brought her back to the present. Her cup had runneth over. Angie replaced her mug with an empty cup, as spilling coffee hissed on the warming plate. Then she opened the refrigerator, but found there was no milk left. Kids definitely had a downside. God, she’d have to drink it black, and she hated black coffee. But she had to have something to kick-start her. She took a sip of the bitter black liquid, made a face that no one saw, and then opened a cabinet to see if there was something to eat. A box of Pop Tarts was right in front of her. She’d never had those in the house before. Jada or Michelle must have bought them—maybe for the kids. It was probably six hundred calories of empty carbohydrates, but Angie pulled one of those puppies out and had it in the toaster before she could count anywhere near that high.
Tomorrow she had to go to the OB-GYN and she’d have the client from hell come to the clinic, but today it was Pop Tarts. Pookie, the cocker spaniel, woke up and sniffed, then approached her—or the Pop Tart. She broke off a corner and gave it to the dog. So there was a trade-off to having no milk with these guests: instead she had tempting bad food at her disposal. Angela took a bite of her breakfast and a throb started just from the pressure of the food touching her tooth.
Angie wondered why every mother didn’t weigh a thousand pounds, but if this tooth kept up, she wouldn’t be one of the heavy ones. Then she picked up her legal papers, the two books she had been referencing, and her notes, putting them into her briefcase while she waited for the coffee to cool a little. In the meantime she went to the door to get the mail, which came very early at the apartment complex. Nothing much: two grocery circulars addressed to “Occupant,” an electric bill, and her bank statement, but behind that lurked an envelope postmarked Boston. She dumped the other stuff on the card table and opened the last one with a shaky hand. She could see by the printed return address that it was from the law firm Reid was using to handle the divorce.
Inside was a request for her to make an appointment to meet with them and sign divorce papers. No surprise. But what was a surprise was that a court date was set for only two weeks away. Enclosed was a small handwritten note.
Figured that faster was better. I’m sure you feel the same. And hope that you can get here because the court date was difficult to get. I don’t think there are any details that I’ve overlooked, but I would so appreciate your full cooperation so both of us can get on with our lives.
As ever,
Reid
Get on with their lives? Get on with their lives? Angie had to read the note over a second time and then a third, sipping from the bitter cup and chewing on the sugary pastry. She wanted her child, and she wanted it free of Reid, so the faster he moved, the better off she was. But he didn’t know that. She couldn’t believe that he could be so cold or so obvious, this pathetically obvious.
But the most curious thing was his closing. As ever, Reid. Was he “as ever”? Had he always been so insensitive, so obtuse? When he was marrying her, was he “as ever” as this? She shook her head, trying to clear it. Jenna must have gotten out of the shower while she’d been staring at the note, because now she was gently kicking—if there was such a thing—her younger brother awake. What to do? Angela wasn’t really used to children, though she knew she’d better get used to them in the next six months. “Hey, hey,” Angela said in an authoritative voice, and to her astonishment, Jenna stopped. Maybe I could he a good parent, Angie thought. Maybe I’m a natural.
Just then Jada came out of her tiny bedroom looking frighteningly natural. She headed toward the coffeemaker, picked up the cup on the warming plate, and then almost screamed at the heat in the handle. Coffee flew everywhere.
“Wow! Ooh, man. Trying to get me disability?” Jada cried, shaking her hand out. Angie apologized while Michelle, who’d joined them all now in the one room, both mopped up the spill and wrapped some wet paper towels around Jada’s hand. “Most accidents happen in the home,” she reminded them.
“I had some mean dreams about home last night,” Jada said. “Really mean. Clinton did not enjoy himself.”
Angie handed Jada the papers from Boston. “I’m having some mean daydreams right now,” Angie said. “I wonder if there’s a scientist somewhere who knows the opposite formula for Viagra?”
Jada looked at the note, still waving her injured hand, and raised her brows. “Nice idea,” she said. “You want to introduce it into the entire water system of Boston, or keep it neighborhood specific?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” Angie paused, “but I think something has to be done.”
“Oh yeah! I can get behind that,” Jada said. Then she began walking back to her room. “I have to get dressed now, though. I’ll help with the female terrorism after I get myself a really high-paying job behind a deep fat fryer in some fast-food chain.” As she turned to go into her room, she inquired over her shoulder, “Should I wear a power suit to apply for such jobs?”
“A power jogging suit maybe,” Michelle called out as she shepherded Frankie into the bathroom.
It was chaos, but it was kind of fun to have all these people here. It was a little like dorm life. The teasing and the sharing.
“And save a job for me at the drive-through,” Michelle added as she closed the bathroom door. Angela laughed out loud—something rare for her before ten A.M. She knew that Jada was going to go out job hunting and that Michelle had planned the same thing once her face healed up a little.
Jada pulled herself together quickly, and came out wearing something less than a power suit but more than a jogging suit. “I gotta do my face,” she called out.
Michelle had the kids ready for school after a certain amount of squabbling about the whereabouts of some book and the mini-trauma of not being able to find Jenna’s new pink socks. At last, though, they were ready to go. It didn’t matter to Angie, since her car was sitting outside waiting for her. It was just interesting to watch the spectacle of modern morning motherhood.
“We’re ready,” Michelle announced. Angie handed her the car keys.
“Open the door. I’ll be right out,” she told her. Only then did she quickly gather up her own stuff. In the daylight, Michelle’s face was shocking, the bruise on her neck an ugly purple. Angie thought of Reid. He’d never hit her, but he’d never loved her, not that those things should ever be combined.
She could be a good mother to his child, Angie thought. And she could enjoy it. If it was a girl, she’d teach her to be strong. If it was a boy, she’d teach him to be a better man than his father was.
In fact, all men should be taught to behave better than most of them had been. And it was up to women to teach them. She didn’t think she was as frightened as she’d once been, but she was angry. Really angry. All these men: Clinton, Reid, and now Frank. All of them so heedless, so selfish, so careless. “We should all get together and do something,” Angie suggested out loud. Jada had came out of her bedroom, her face a perfectly done mask
“About the coffeemaker?” she asked.
“No. About this idiot, my future former husband. About your idiot.” Then Angie lowered her voice so the children just outside talking to their mother wouldn’t hear. “And about Michelle’s idiot.”
Jada nodded. “Listen, if you’ve got an idea I’m willing to help out,” she said. “In my dream last night, I remember there
was a trash compactor and somehow Clinton’s head fell in it. But in real life, you never see the trash get what they deserve. Still, if you want me to go and paint slogans on Lisa and Reid’s garage door, I’ll do it. Or if you want me to call the managing partner and rat them out? Or maybe the bar association?” She paused and laughed once, bitterly. “Oh, I forgot. They’re lawyers, and there are no standards of personal behavior they can break. Anyway, if you have ideas, I’m willing to try. Remember I said that.”
Angie nodded, then looked at her watch. She had to go. The morning had been very different from her usual ones, but not necessarily bad. She ran out and got into her car, waited while the kids said good-bye to Michelle, then listened to them bicker until she dropped them off. She watched them go into the school, then she headed for the clinic, thinking about all the wronged women she would see there and wondering, in a practical way, if there wasn’t something that she, Jada, and Michelle couldn’t do to change their own status quo.
43
In which Jada scans UPCs and gives customer satisfaction
The ridiculous thing was how hard it was to do a lousy, low-paying job. When Jada had taken her first job as a lowly teller, she had suspected that the Mr. Marcuses of the world did work that was both more interesting and better paying, but definitely more difficult. Wrong. She’d had a management job, and despite the paperwork, it was a piece of cake compared to the back-breaking repetition and boredom of low-end work.
She had already tried for a counter job in a dry cleaner’s and as a sales assistant at Payless, but had been turned down flat. Was it because she was black, and white girls in Westchester didn’t want black fingers touching their clothes? The black doesn’t rub off, she’d wanted to say. If it did, some of us would be white.
She figured it was best to go where she was expected to go—she had only to mention her experience as a teller to get a job as a check-out cashier at Price Chopper. Not that she didn’t have to pay her dues. She wasn’t scheduled for the top shift yet. She was on probation for a month first. But Mr. Stanton had eyed her and said, “I like your looks. A lot of your people shop here.”
Jada wasn’t sure who “her people” were—certainly not this big black woman whose baby was crying (though she seemed absolutely deaf to that) while Jada scanned in a big bag of chocolate kisses, an overpriced box of cereal with more sugar content than the chocolate, and a huge bag of onions. Weird, what people bought.
Jada found standing for the whole shift, scanning in item after item and managing not to fall over or fall asleep, really difficult. She’d already learned that busy times were better than slow ones, because when it was slow, she still had to stand there, staring at the headlines of the weekly tabloids, though she wasn’t allowed to read them or anything else. Not that she cared what Jennifer Aniston’s diet secret was, or Pam Anderson’s. That was the hardest thing—just standing there and waiting.
It gave her time to think, which was not necessarily a good thing. What did she have to think about but how utterly meaningless her life was now? The court could do whatever it wanted with her, but it couldn’t get blood from a stone. She was earning less than six dollars an hour, and she’d give it all to her children, but if Clinton wanted to keep the house for himself and Tonya, both of them would have to start working at a check-out counter, too.
For a moment Jada’s stomach tightened. She compulsively went over her month’s expenses against her month’s projected income. She had insurance on the house, on the car, and the mortgage to pay. She had enough savings to last a little while, but then what? The phone and electric had to be kept up. The children had to be kept sheltered. And all of it in a house that she wouldn’t even be allowed into.
She told herself she had to help with the costs to keep something stable for the children. Imperfect as it was, unfinished as it was, that was the house they had grown up in, and it had been a source of comfort. Well, she hoped it had. Perhaps she and Clinton had made a mistake and should have been in an area with more African-Americans, just for the sake of the children, but they were getting a good education. They had friends.
An old woman wheeled up her cart. Jada tried to look alert. She watched as the woman took out a box of crackers, one tomato, jellied fruit candy, and two boxes of pudding. As Jada started to scan the stuff in, the woman pulled out coupons, a couple of them almost as ancient as she was. One was for a brand of gelatin rather than pudding, and the coupon for the crackers had expired months ago. It had been cut from the newspaper sometime in the last decade and had become furry with age and folds. How long had the old lady been carrying it?
Jada gave her the discounts anyway, although at the end of the day she’d probably get it deducted from her own pay. She wondered where the woman lived, and why she hobbled off all alone. She said a little prayer for the old woman as she bagged the next client’s groceries. Then she said a prayer for herself, begging the Lord that she didn’t wind up as lonely and fragile as the old woman looked and to forgive her for not believing in Him.
Before Jada was half done with her shift, her legs ached all up her calves and to the back of her thighs, right into her hips. She wasn’t used to standing for hours. Though she’d taken the job in desperation, it felt instead like failure. Not that she wished herself back at the bank, now that she’d been fired—the bank had robbed her of time with the kids, it had drained her mental energy, and it had exhausted her in a way she didn’t like to admit. But this job was exhausting, too. Jada didn’t mind working—she even liked it—but she had to figure out something more sensible, more well-paying, something that would give her more time to see her children, or better still, to get them back.
She scanned the aisles hoping for customers, anything to distract her thoughts. But it was the lull before five. She tried to keep busy by straightening up her counter, lining up the customer divider sticks just so. But her thoughts wandered. The visits with the children were breaking her heart. Sitting outside the school in the Volvo, waiting for them and being joined by Ms. Patel, the assigned social worker, was humiliating, but seeing the kids’ confusion, disappointment, and pain was worse. Shavonne was deeply angry. On the last visit, she hadn’t spoken at all for the first forty minutes they were together, and had kept her arms folded over her chest—exactly the way Jada’s mother did. All of Jada’s questions and comments had been met with stony silence.
Meanwhile, Kevon clung to her and told her long, disconnected strings of information that worried her even more. “You know what?” he’d ask, and she’d answer, “What?” He didn’t have anything ready to say, so he’d blink a minute, thinking, and then repeat, “You know what?” To keep talking, he’d either repeat verbatim what he’d seen on TV the night before, or he’d tell her about a fight between Clinton and Tonya. “And Daddy said he didn’t want no more take-out, and Tonya, she said she wasn’t spendin’ her day cookin’. So we had peanut butter,” he’d say. Or “You know what? You know what? She doesn’t know the name of any of the Jedi Knights. She said she did, but she didn’t.”
Or he’d ask Jada heartbreaking questions: “Do you know where my pajamas are? The ones that have the fish on them, with the little boats?” Or “How come you don’t make my bed now? I don’t like it all wrinkled. I can’t sleep with all them wrinkles in the pillows and the sheets.”
Jada would hold Sherrilee and rock her while Kevon held onto the back of her shirt and went on and on. Meanwhile, Shavonne wouldn’t meet Jada’s eye. Only Ms. Patel, who sat quietly, her face averted and shadowed by some personal sadness or the sadness of what she saw every day, reflected pain back to Jada.
But if the visits were painful, driving up to the house and dropping the children off was worse. Sherrilee began screaming even before they turned onto Elm Street. Kevon’s monologue became almost manic. That was when Jada was temporarily grateful for Ms. Patel, who gently but firmly pried the screaming baby from Jada’s arms and took Kevon by the hand and marched him up the walk. It was only then that Sh
avonne looked her mother in the eye. “Come back home,” she’d said the day before. “Come back home.”
And even though she swore she was never going to do it, never going to bad mouth Clinton to his own children, Jada had said, “Your daddy won’t let me. I can’t, Shavonne, because your daddy won’t let me.”
After Shavonne had gone into the house and Ms. Patel had left, Jada had sobbed, alone in the empty Volvo. What she’d said hadn’t helped her daughter. And the visits were so disturbing, Kevon’s comments so upsetting, that she wondered about everything that was going on in her house.
A customer approached, a man with a full shopping cart. Distraction! But as Jada scanned in the groceries, she kept thinking. All three of them, poor Mich, frightened Angela, and Jada herself, had been bested, had been beaten—in Michelle’s case, literally—by men and institutions that were supposed to protect them. Jada hadn’t really believed such bad things could happen to white women, women with education and some money. One of the things she’d learned from this was how bad it was to be a woman—a woman of any color—at the mercy of any color man.
What had gone so wrong? Jada had always been strong, unafraid of hard work and she’d followed the rules. But none of it had done her any good, nor had it helped Michelle or Angie. They were good girls, too, and look how they were living! The apartment was in chaos with all three women and Michelle’s two kids in it, not to mention the damned dog. They were like desperadoes in a hideout, but they didn’t even have the satisfaction of having committed some exciting, violent, successful crime.
Jada scanned in a wrapped head of lettuce and shook her own head. She could see what the others should do: Mich should divorce Frank and make a deal with the DA. Angela ought to figure out a way to punish that so-called “friend” of hers up there in Boston and get even with her husband instead of just slinking away. And she …
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