by Aya De León
If the girl hadn’t said anything, she might have stood there for ages.
Still numb, she wandered into the cab, her body smearing rainwater across the vinyl of the backseat.
“Where to, miss?” the driver asked.
Blinking, she came back to herself a bit. “La Guardia,” she said.
She sat back in the cab and got an alert on her phone. The clinic was trending online.
She looked and there it was, Drew’s article. “Sex Work Is Work: Manhattan Strippers Fight to Unionize.”
The article was incredible. Everything she could have hoped for. It was funny, compelling, an underdog story. She was quoted correctly, and he picked all the right snippets of what she said. Under any other circumstances, she’d be celebrating. It was a PR dream. #GoStripperUnion was trending on Twitter, and according to Serena, they were getting a ton of online donations.
When she arrived at La Guardia, she went directly to the airline with which she had all her frequent flyer miles.
“Can I help you?” the petite woman in the navy-and-pink uniform asked.
Tyesha blinked at the woman. Everything felt surreal, almost hazy. “I need,” Tyesha began. “I need the next flight to Chicago.”
Book 4
Chapter 17
For the first couple of months after her aunt died, Tyesha was totally bereft. Every night, she cried as she lay in her twin bed.
But then her mother began to admonish her: “Girl, you can’t be up here crying every day. Your aunt Lu is in a better place. She’s with the Lord. That’s not a reason for crying, but for rejoicing, like the pastor said at the funeral. We cry for ourselves. So stop being selfish, get up and get ready for school.”
That day, she was sitting in English class after the last bell rang, and an older girl she knew from church asked if she wanted to come smoke some weed with them in her cousin’s car. Friends had asked before but Tyesha had always said no.
This particular day, Tyesha said yes. She would love to.
The weed was like magic. It got her mind off her aunt. It got her laughing for the first time in months. The cousin was cute. He was a year older and had a broken-down pickup truck he drove to school.
They started hanging out consistently. One day, she stayed late with the cousin and they started kissing. It was much more vague and surreal than the time with Kyle. After they fooled around a few times, they had sex. Tyesha was almost sixteen by then. It didn’t hurt, but maybe that was just because she was high. She lay back against the upholstery of the truck’s long seat. She felt the cousin pumping inside her. She felt her calf pressing against the steering wheel. It felt good, but also sort of blurry.
The next day, she told her friend, who scoffed at her.
“My cousin?” she said. “You fucking with my cousin? Girl, you can do so much better. Come on.”
For Tyesha, the marijuana soon became secondary to the excitement of boys. In particular, she liked older boys.
Her friend took her to some parties and gave her specific instructions.
“Don’t drink anything or smoke with these boys,” she said. “They’ll get you messed up. And if you wanna fuck somebody, don’t do it tonight. Just give him your number and do it later. Then he’ll have to take you to a movie or buy you a meal first. And don’t ever fall for one of these guys. You’ll just end up getting your feelings hurt. Enjoy them for the sex and see what you can get them to buy for you.”
Soon, Tyesha learned to turn meals and movies into clothes and shoes, and getting her hair and nails done. Some of the young drug dealers were interested, but she didn’t want to be like her sister, Jenisse. So she just stuck with boys who had a little cash, like football and basketball players.
And this was how she discovered college athletes. They had money like drug dealers, but they were on the right side of the law.
She had just turned sixteen, when her friend took her to a party at one university. Their basketball team had just won, and the students were jubilant.
The party took place in the apartment of one of the ballplayers. It had a huge living room that had been turned into a dance floor. It was the first time since her middle school dance that Tyesha had been somewhere with a live DJ. He was playing one of the top rap songs of the era, “I Need a Hella Grown Man.”
One of the team’s point guards didn’t so much ask her to dance as he took her hand and led her to the dance floor, assuming that she would want to.
Tyesha did. He was tall and long-limbed, with a smooth baby face and a tight fade, a little curly on top. On the dance floor, many of his teammates really just stood there and let their partners do all the work. They looked down at the shaking asses and swiveling torsos of the girls and treated the dance like a show, waving their hands in the air while they did a perfunctory two-step.
But Tyesha’s partner danced. She figured he must have been a good ballplayer, because his moves were well coordinated. His narrow hips moved in counterpoint to his broad shoulders. They circled each other and fed off of each other’s energy. When the dance was done, she smiled and expected him to thank and release her, but he pulled her close for the slower number, and she didn’t complain, enjoying the feel of his body against hers, even with the moisture of the perspiration and the menthol smell of his antiperspirant.
They danced together for the whole party. Only after the last dance did he ask her name. “Well, Tyesha,” he said, “wanna come over to my dorm and keep the party going?”
She did. The sex was better than with any of the high school guys. They had sex twice. In between rounds of intercourse, he went down on her. She had never had a partner do that before, and it was delicious.
They fell asleep in his double bed, under the oversized Dr. J poster. She woke up the next morning before he did. For a half hour, she gazed at the big room he didn’t have to share, the bright tile bathroom, and the shelf full of books. She remembered that she used to like reading. She and her aunt would go to the library every week. Since Aunt Lu’s death, Tyesha hadn’t gone once.
After the ballplayer woke up, he took her to breakfast at his dorm. Tyesha had never seen so much food outside of a supermarket. He paid for her as a guest, and she was invited to eat whatever she wanted. Workers were ready to make her fried eggs, omelets, or waffles. There were ten kinds of bread for toast. Twenty cereals. Donuts. Pastries.
She sat down at his table with a pile of eggs and a waffle smothered in marshmallow sauce with chocolate chips on top.
As she ate, she realized that the ballplayer was sitting with teammates, and several of them were showing off the girls they’d bedded the night before. They openly compared them. Apparently the Asian girl was prettier in the face, but Tyesha had a better body. The light-skinned girl was cutest overall, but she had acne, which kept her from being a perfect ten.
Maybe on a different day, the competition would have stung or felt demeaning, but today she only cared about one thing: college. She was going to college, so she could live someplace like this.
From the time her aunt had died, Tyesha had wanted to feel connected to her. She had prayed at night, talked to her, tried to hear if her aunt was talking back some kind of way. But Tyesha’s own voice seemed to be talking alone into the empty night. For the first time, she felt sure that her aunt Lu was on board for this plan. Tyesha could almost hear her voice. “Yes, baby. College. That’s what I’m talking about.”
As Tyesha headed out of the dorm, she walked by the residence hall office. She was looking for the campus map so she could find the nearest subway stop. She hadn’t expected to find a young black woman sitting at the desk.
“Can I help you?”
“No,” Tyesha said shyly. “I’m not a student. I’m just a guest.”
“That’s okay,” the staffer said. “Do you need something?”
“How do people go here?” Tyesha said. “I mean, is it just good grades to get in or what?”
The girl gave her a stack of pamphlets, including a
minority pre-freshman flyer.
On Monday, Tyesha took them to the guidance counselor at her high school. They started working on a plan to get her into college.
After that, she gave up on high school boys completely. She only dated university boys who could help her reach that one goal.
She joined a bunch of different extracurricular activities, which got her mama to shut up and stop nagging her about where she was and what she was doing.
When her friend came up pregnant, she was careful to get another birth control shot. Although it wouldn’t protect her from chlamydia or gonorrhea. She started using condoms.
Then she started using them for birth control, as well. When one of them broke, she used emergency contraception. She continued to date college boys and leveraged her nights in their dorm rooms into informal tours.
By the time she was admitted to all the schools where she’d applied, she already knew which dorms had the remodeled bathrooms and the good barbecued chicken.
The day she graduated with a full scholarship to Northwestern, her mama was proud, and she knew her aunt would have been, too. Looking back, Tyesha tried to recall if she’d even wondered about her father at that time. Seeing some of the other kids in her graduating class with a mom and dad cheering for them, would she have wondered about him? Or would she only have stayed focused on the absence of her aunt, the flesh-and-blood loved one who was missing, not the ghost that never was?
* * *
The morning after Tyesha got the results of the DNA test, she landed at O’Hare. Her clothes had dried in the canned air of the plane, and her hair had curled up from the rain, then matted down where she had slept on it. Her head nestled between the window and the seat back for three hours of dreamless sleep in the same position. The flight attendant had to wake her.
Her eyes had fluttered open to see a middle-aged Asian woman smiling and nudging her shoulder.
“We’ve landed in Chicago,” the woman was saying.
Tyesha’s first thought was I’m from Chicago. My mama still lives there. And then she recalled why she had taken the trip. Her mother and Zeus. She had to confront Jenisse.
She wiped her face and stood up. In spite of having no luggage in the overhead compartment or beneath the seat in front of her, she was still the last passenger to leave the plane. She walked down the jetway in a haze of disorientation.
Even through her daze, she could tell that something was wrong with her appearance by the frowning faces around her and the way people gave her a wide berth. In the bathroom, she saw that her hair needed to be dealt with. She rummaged through her purse but couldn’t find a hairbrush. Instead, she found a navy cotton handkerchief wadded up in the bottom of the side compartment. She smoothed it out the best she could and tied it over her hair.
It had been nearly four years since she had been home. She took a cab directly to her sister’s house. Chicago on an early summer morning looked like something out of a half-forgotten dream. But the old neighborhood looked the same. When the cab pulled up to Jenisse’s house, she felt her heart start to beat fast.
Her sister and Zeus lived in a house in Avalon Park. It was mostly black, but more middle-class than South Shore, where their mother still lived. Tyesha paid the driver and banged on her sister’s door. After a few minutes, she began to lean on the doorbell. Finally, she heard a muffled shout from within the house.
“What the fuck?” Jenisse’s voice rang louder. “Zeus, how you gonna come back from New York early and forget your fucking keys again?”
But then Tyesha saw a brown shadow move over the peephole.
“Tyesha?” Jenisse said. “What the hell you doing in Chicago?”
She opened the door.
Tyesha strode in. “You in New York. Me in Chicago. Our family is just full of surprises.”
The living room was done in shades of beige and tan, with a creamy leather sofa set. There were vintage jazz photographs on the walls. Sepia images of Billie Holliday and Thelonious Monk adorned the wall facing Tyesha. Below them was a bar for entertaining and a largely open passage to the next room, through which Tyesha could see the lacquered wood dining room set. All the surfaces were spotless. As Tyesha recalled, the family really lived in the kitchen and family room, which were in the back of the house.
“What went wrong with the girls?” Jenisse asked. “They too much for you? You come begging me to take them home?” She leaned around Tyesha. “Or better yet, they both in the cab? You came to drop those heifers off?”
“What?” Tyesha said. “No, they’re in New York at my apartment. I came to see you.”
“Why on earth—”
“You stole Mama’s man,” Tyesha said. “I always wondered why he was so fucking much older than you. But you took him. With your fast teenage ass, you took your own mama’s man.”
Jenisse began to laugh. She laughed so hard, she fell back on the couch, and her kimono fell open, exposing a length of toned leg and a short expanse of her belly with a sprinkling of silvery stretch marks. Jenisse was liquid with the laughter. She began to almost howl with it, tears falling down her face.
“You think it’s funny?” Tyesha said. “You think it’s so fucking funny that you took her man. That Zeus is my father, not some shadowy guy whose description kept changing.”
“No, I—” Jenisse tried to speak, but the laughter prevented her. When she could get enough breath, she said. “No, I think it’s funny that you think so.” And then she was seized with another fit of laughter in an even higher key.
“This is bullshit,” Tyesha said, and she turned to walk out.
“Wait,” Jenisse rasped, gripping her side.
She reached for a bottle of water, and took a swig. She began to cough a bit, titters still shaking her body like tiny aftershocks.
“You wanna tell me the joke?” Tyesha demanded, arms at her sides, clenching and unclenching her fists.
“You got it all backward,” Jenisse said. “Every single bit, college girl. You see the numbers but you can’t do the math.”
Tyesha could tell Jenisse was savoring the moment. Finally, she had something and was teasing Tyesha with it. The sister who dropped out of high school taunting the one with the master’s degree.
“What then?” Tyesha asked. “Tell me how I got it wrong.”
“It’s the opposite of what you think,” Jenisse said. “I had him first. Mama fucked my man.”
And there it was again. The dazed feeling. Like when she looked at the DNA results and couldn’t make sense of it. Mama? Their mama?
“That’s right,” Jenisse said. “So, if there’s a lying, thieving bitch you need to call out, that would be our mama. So put that on your next fucking Mother’s Day card.”
Chapter 18
If the ride from the airport was like a half-forgotten dream, the ride to her old apartment was more like a too-real flashback. She couldn’t get a cab from Jenisse’s house, so she just started walking. After half a mile, her feet began to hurt in the pumps from her previous day at the office. She stopped and waited for a bus. She got on with a cluster of kids headed to school and adults headed to work.
The kids talked loud and joked, their bursts of laughter erupting at intervals. She remembered that feeling. Back in elementary school, when the front and sides of her body were straight lines, she ran with a crew of kids from her neighborhood. Every moment that wasn’t school or church was playing. Kickball, jump rope, tag in warm weather. Snowball fights in winter. Anything could be a toy. If you didn’t have anything, you would laugh, tell jokes, do imitations of teachers and ministers. As long as she was with her friends, it was fun. Everything was funny. She didn’t have a daddy, but that wasn’t anything special. It didn’t steal her joy.
Back then she felt light inside. Now she felt empty, felt nothing. Like her chest was full of air. Or maybe she was a stuffed doll, filled with cotton balls or a fluffy polyester fiberfill.
The blocks of public housing looked exactly the same. She kne
w just where to get off for her old apartment. Just before the playground, with the top of the climbing structure jutting up over the parked cars. Just past the KFC.
As she rode down the familiar street, the revelations made everything seem surreal. Every time I rode up and down this street, Zeus was my father. Every time I walked up to my apartment, I was the daughter of a woman who cheated with her own daughter’s man.
The buzzer was broken, as usual, but a group of kids exited just as she stepped up.
“See?” one of them said. “We missed the bus cause yo slow ass.”
The large metal door slammed behind her, and she proceeded to walk up the dingy staircase. As always at this time of year, it smelled of urine, bleach, and summer funk.
Three floors up, she banged on her mama’s door.
“Just a minute,” she heard the familiar contralto voice.
Her mother opened up with her eyes wide.
Tyesha just couldn’t reconcile Jenisse’s revelation with this aging woman in a headrag, bathrobe, and fuzzy slippers. For a moment, she just gaped at her mother. For the first time, she noticed the smoothness of her mother’s barely lined skin, the classic black beauty in the planes of her face, the thick bust and hips half-smothered under the robe. For the first time, she saw her mother, not as the dowdy Jesus-loving church mother she had turned herself into, but the voluptuous woman she had been before she got saved.
“Tyesha?” she said, startled. “Is everything okay, baby? How come you ain’t in New York? You got Deza and Amaru with you?”
The apartment was exactly the same. The large color television—a flat-screen now—was showing the news. And Mama’s worn chair facing it. Her walker next to it for the days it got really bad, especially in winter.
The coffee table with old copies of Ebony and Essence and a bowl of candies.
The walls covered with photographs. Tyesha’s graduation photos: high school, college, and grad school. And the bible on the table right next to the chair.
Her mother shuffled forward to hug her, but Tyesha leaned easily out of the way, and crossed to pace in front of the couch.