by Aya De León
“What you want?” Jenisse asked when she came to the door. She was dressed in a camel-colored dress with nude pumps and dark lipstick. “And what the hell happened to you? You got a homeless makeover?”
“You were right,” Tyesha said. “I can’t believe Mama did that to you. That’s one of the most fucked-up things a mother could do to a daughter.”
Suddenly, Jenisse’s face puckered, and she looked like she might cry. Tyesha went to hug her, but Jenisse waved her away and took a deep breath.
“I need a cigarette,” Jenisse said, and walked Tyesha through the house to the back porch. The older sister sat down on a wicker loveseat and motioned for Tyesha to sit across from her on a matching chair. The railed wooden deck stretched the length of the house and led out to a grassy yard. On the rail beside Jenisse was an ashtray, matches, and a pack of cigarettes. She pulled one out and lit it.
She took a deep drag into her lungs and spoke. “Yeah, that shit was fucked up,” she said, exhaling smoke. “I’m just sorry I took it out on you. Every time I saw you, I thought about what she did.”
“Well, it’s good to know why you were such a bitch to me all these years,” Tyesha said. “Now that the truth is out, do you think maybe you could stop?”
Jenisse laughed. “I’ll think about it,” she said, and took another drag. “Being a bitch is one of the few things I’m good at.”
“You’re good at advocating for your kids,” Tyesha said. “You think Zeus will pay for Amaru’s school now that the paternity test came back positive?”
“He better,” Jenisse said. “But in the meantime, I’m glad they’re staying with you in New York. I was never the mama they deserved.”
“They love you,” Tyesha said.
“That’s just cause I’m they mama,” Jenisse said. “But I know I didn’t really wanna raise babies; I was just trying to keep Zeus. But look at you. You stayed out the trap. You got a good job. No kids. You got that rapper chasin’ you.”
“Not anymore,” Tyesha said.
“So fix that,” Jenisse said tapping ash into the ashtray. “Deza told me how it is wit y’all. A million chicks wanna fuck with that nigga and you like, he ain’t good enough.”
“He was gonna do an album with Car Willis,” Tyesha said.
That stopped her sister. “He doing an album with Car Willis?”
“No, but he was gonna,” Tyesha said.
“Girl,” Jenisse said. “People who ain’t from Chicago don’t know how it was. He canceled the album?”
Tyesha nodded.
“Then get over it,” Jenisse said. “Wait, is he a good fuck?”
Tyesha laughed. “Yeah.”
“Then call his ass. Fuck him. Enjoy it.”
“If I could do it like that, I would,” Tyesha said. “But I like him too much.”
“So?” Jenisse asked. “Let him know you want him to put a ring on it.”
“It’s not that simple,” Tyesha said. “He doesn’t exactly see me as the wifey type. I used to be an escort. That’s actually how we met.”
Jenisse grinned and stubbed out her cigarette. “An escort? I thought you were the big college girl.”
Tyesha sucked her teeth. “How do you think I paid for college?”
“I was, too,” Jenisse said. “That’s how I met Zeus. I was always afraid he didn’t wife up with me because I had been a ho.”
Tyesha shrugged. “He’s as wifed up with you as he’ll ever be with anybody.”
Jenisse sighed. “Here’s the big mistake I made. We talked about getting married at one point, but he had this big prenup. I refused to sign it because I thought it meant he thought of me as a ho, that he didn’t trust me. But I learned my lesson. A nigga like him needs me to prove I’m loyal and not after the money. If you love your rapper, put him on a marriage track. Let him know you want him to put a ring on it. After a year, if he don’t propose, drop his ass. Thug Woofer will probably want a prenup, and you’ll think that it means he doesn’t trust you. It means he wanna trust you. He needs to know you ain’t after his money to believe you really want him. Besides, with all you got going, the prenup might end up protecting you. You should write a book about the stripper strike, going from being a ho to running that clinic. You might end up being the one with the money in twenty years. Wait and see.”
“Maybe so,” Tyesha said. “What about you and Zeus? You ever gonna get married?”
“You trying to make me your stepmama?” Jenisse asked.
Tyesha cringed. “I still can’t wrap my head around it.”
“We ain’t never getting married,” Jenisse said. “He put some money away for me. When he dies, I’ll be better off not being associated with his estate. Meanwhile, we know how to make it work. I let him fuck other women from time to time, and he lets me buy what the fuck I want.”
Tyesha laughed. “Now that everything’s out in the open, will you talk to Mama? She wants to make it right with you.”
“I’ll think about it,” Jenisse said. The two of them looked out into the gathering dusk in the yard.
“Mama’s an old church lady now,” Tyesha said. “Forgive her. She’s gonna be your only family here, now that the boys are locked up and Amaru’s going to school, and Deza’s working on her music in New York.”
“Like I told you,” Jenisse said. “I’ll think about it. Now let’s get you cleaned up. You can’t go back to New York City like this.”
Jenisse walked Tyesha back to the house, into the part that they actually used.
* * *
Tyesha arrived back at JFK in an old pair of Jenisse’s jeans and a Chicago T-shirt. But before she went home or to the office, Tyesha went to see Zeus. Outside his room, the hotel corridor was empty. She hoped that meant that Reagan had returned to Chicago or crawled back under his rock.
As a kid, she had fantasized about one day meeting her dad. In the younger years, he was a dashing, powerful man, not unlike Zeus. But he would sweep her away in a montage of father-daughter activities that she saw white kids do on TV like ice-skating and berry picking.
She knocked on the door.
Unfortunately, after a few minutes, Reagan answered.
“Umph,” he grunted. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”
“You got no pleasure coming from me, Reagan,” she said. “Where’s Zeus?”
“Tyesha.” Zeus stepped out of the bedroom dressed in a dark suit. “Good morning.”
“Good morning,” she said, almost shyly. How had she not noticed it before? His big eyes. He had the thick eyebrows she was so careful to pluck. The goatee sort of muted the shape of his lips but they were so like hers. His lighter brown skin mixed with her mama’s dark brown would perfectly blend to her coloring.
He cleared his throat. “I wanna thank you for keeping the girls,” he said. “I shoulda did something sooner. Please let me give you a little something for them.”
Tyesha shook her head. “No, Zeus,” she insisted. “It’s fine. I got a good job and they been helping out around the apartment,” she said. “Actually, I came to talk to you about something else.”
“Go ahead,” he said.
She cut her eyes at Reagan. “Can we speak privately?” she asked. “It’s a family matter.”
“This is family,” Zeus said. “Reagan is like a son to me and is in on everything, as he’s gonna inherit the business one day.”
“Yeah,” Reagan said. “I knew your aunt Lucille, and was part of her program.”
She fixed a hard stare on him. “Please don’t speak her name to me,” she said. “I just came back from visiting the place where she was shot.”
Reagan dropped his eyes.
“Anyway,” she said, “as you know, Jenisse asked me to get DNA samples from the girls, and here are the results. They’re yours,” she said handing him the envelope. “Both of them.”
“You came all the way here to tell me that in person?” Zeus asked.
“No.” Her voice dropped slightly in volume. �
�There was a—well, I couldn’t get a saliva sample from Amaru. She refused to cooperate. So I used the hairbrush, and they tested me by mistake. Apparently, I’m your biological child, as well.”
“Oh, shit,” Reagan murmured.
Zeus’s eyes widened. “I had no idea,” he said.
“I just wanted to come by and explain what it says on the results paper,” Tyesha said. “Doesn’t seem to me that anything needs to change. I mean, I don’t want anything from you. But I’d like to be the one to tell Deza and Amaru . . . in my own time, if you don’t mind. My mama kept the secret all these years, but it’s out now.”
He looked at her more closely. “I can’t believe I never saw it before. You and Deza favor so much.”
Tyesha shrugged. “I just hope you’ll consider sending Amaru to that school. She’s got so much talent. Anyway, I gotta get to work. I’ll see you around.”
As the door clicked behind her, she let out a small shudder. The experience of telling Zeus had been nearly as surreal as finding out he was her biological father. But looking him in the face and telling him was refreshingly real. As she walked back to the elevator, she felt like she could breathe easier.
Chapter 19
The impromptu trip to Chicago hadn’t been her first time leaving and returning to New York since she’d moved there. Yet, unexpectedly, it reminded her of the first time she’d arrived.
Tyesha had always told everyone she’d moved to New York to get away from the craziness of her family, but it wasn’t the whole truth. There was also a basketball player named Tariq. He was six foot three and headed for the NBA.
They had started as a casual hookup after a party in the spring of her freshman year. But then the following fall they had an introduction to African American studies class together. Nearly all the young black women in the class began to dress more provocatively after they saw that Tariq, one of the school’s star players, was sitting in the front row. But Tyesha did the opposite, and dressed down. He had already seen what was under her clothes. No need to have it hanging out like the girls in the cleavage sweaters and short skirts. If he was interested in getting another shot, he would need to step up.
And he did. Three weeks into the class, he showed up at her dorm room, asking if she had the homework info. It was an obvious ploy—the information was on the class website—but she played along. She left him standing at the door, while she went and looked through her notes. Then she gave him the info, nothing more.
The following week in class, she found it hard to pay attention, with Tariq sitting in front of her, his ripped shoulders sticking out of the Chicago Bulls jersey. The professor was giving a lecture on sharecropping: the former slave owners used a credit system to lend the seeds, tools, and other goods to the formerly enslaved. And of course, they owned the land. The formerly enslaved only had their bodies and the work they could perform. The former slave owners set the price—of both the supplies and the cash for the crops—but also did the counting and kept all the records. At the end of the season, the formerly enslaved owed whatever the bosses said they owed, and had produced whatever the bosses said they had produced. And they had no rights the law would uphold. So after every season of arduous labor, where black folks worked as hard as they had under slavery, they were further in debt to the owners. By law, sharecroppers couldn’t leave if they were in debt, but had to stay and work the land until the debt was paid. Which, by virtue of the system’s structure, would be never.
Tyesha was outraged.
One of the students in the classroom shrugged. “That was a long time ago. People need to get over it.”
“Was it?” the teacher asked. “Some of you may have had grandparents or great grandparents who worked under this system. That’s quite a disadvantage if some of you had grandparents accumulating wealth while others had it systematically stolen. Some labor is compensated, other labor is not.”
“Like the NCAA,” Tariq said. “They got us out here hustling for no money with the hope of getting to the NBA. Meanwhile, we’re making a mint for these colleges while we get a substandard education, and if we get injured we get nothing.”
In that moment, Tyesha began to see Tariq in a new light. Maybe he was more than a pretty face and a nice ass. Tyesha still didn’t dress up for class, but she started going to basketball games.
A week later, he dropped by again, explaining that he didn’t really understand Toni Cade Bambara’s introduction to The Black Woman, and could she help him?
Sure, she could.
Later, he would say it was one of the most awkward times in his dating life since middle school. He wasn’t used to having to do anything more than show the least bit of interest, and girls would throw themselves at him. Tyesha was careful to avoid setting up a dynamic where he thought he just needed to drop by and get laid. After a few weeks of studying, he worked his way up to putting an arm around her. She lifted it up and put it back in his lap.
“Tariq, I know we hooked up once,” she said. “And it was nice. But if you’d like to get at me again, you’ll need to take me out on a proper date. No offense if that’s not what you’re into. Plenty of girls around here would be glad to hook up with you whenever you come calling. I’m just not one of them.”
He would like to take her out, he told her. He would like that very much.
They started dating, and by the middle of the semester, they were in love. She spent every night in his single room, which was much larger than the double she shared with a pre-med white girl who was never there except to sleep.
She sat in the front row at all his games and didn’t even worry about female competition because he had picked her over all the sexy girls throwing themselves at him. “I’m done with groupies,” he had explained to her, more like vowed, when he wanted to lock it down and make their relationship exclusive.
She had never felt like this before. Every love song. Every romantic movie. He called her “my girl,” talked about being all “wifed up” with her. The sex was bliss. He wanted to be with her every night. He never said “I love you,” but he texted her lines of love songs. Even years later, there were slow jams she couldn’t hear without thinking of him. In love. For the first time.
And it wasn’t just about the love that was between them, it was also being the one chosen by a baller like him. It was special to be chosen by somebody, but all the more delicious to be chosen by a man that so many young women wanted. She teased him about it, but he scoffed. Those girls don’t have a damn thing that I want.
She loved going to the games, so it was with resignation that she had to pass on an away game in November. She had to study—her grades had been slipping with all the late-night sex. Therefore, it was with enthusiasm, not suspicion, that Tyesha looked on the team’s Facebook page to see photos of one of their away games in November. And it was only because she knew every inch of his tawny brown skin, including the scar on his forearm, that she could identify the arm slung over the hips of the grinning light-skinned girl as belonging to her man. He was cropped out of the picture, but that telltale forearm scar was connected to the fingers that held an ample handful of the girl’s hip. He palmed the roundness of it like a basketball. The wrist bone’s connected to the arm bone.
She felt sick to her stomach. And stupid. What had her friend told her? Her friend that couldn’t keep from getting pregnant had warned her never ever to let herself fall for one of these boys. Her friend hadn’t even been in love with the baby daddy. But she had let herself fall for Tariq. She felt so smug thinking he only wanted her. But if he was fucking around with girls at away games, was he fucking with other girls on campus, too? Were some of them laughing behind her back? How could she have been such a fool? She didn’t cry. Didn’t tell anyone. Just felt a cold, hard spot in her chest, like a block of ice.
The next several days were a string of texts she didn’t respond to, calls she didn’t pick up, and eventually visits she ducked, joining the pre-med roommate in the science library. She
finished studying for the exam that kept her from joining him at the away game and got an A.
Finally, in class on the following Tuesday, she walked in as if nothing had happened. But this time, she was dressed for a nightclub, in spite of the freezing winter weather. On the way into the room, she took off her coat, as if unveiling a priceless piece of art. Then she sat across the room and completely ignored him.
He cornered her after class was over. “What the fuck, Tyesha?” he asked in a hiss.
“I saw those photos of you with your hand on that girl’s ass,” she said. “Funny thing, you said you weren’t coming back because you were tired.”
“I asked you to come with me,” he said. “It was our toughest game yet. The pressure was crazy. If you’d of come, nothing woulda happened.”
Her carefully plucked eyebrows rose. “So it’s my fault you couldn’t keep your dick in your pants?” she said. “To hell with you, Tariq. You go fuck whoever you want, because I’m through with you.”
“Forget you then!” he said, as she strutted away, winter coat over her arm, so he could watch her walk away, hips switching in the ass-hugging skirt and the badass stiletto boots.
But later that night, he appeared at her door, drunk and apologetic. He said he loved her. Something he’d never said before, only hinted at. He needed her. She was the best thing that ever happened to him.
They had sex, but the next day, she found herself calling to check on him. Dropping by practice to see if he was getting too cozy with the cheerleaders. She had him back, supposedly had his love now, but it didn’t feel the same.
“I can’t focus on my classes,” she told her mentor. “All I can think about is what he’s doing.”
“I’ve seen it so many times,” her mentor said. She was a middle-aged black woman with a salt-and-pepper Afro. “Girls get caught up in these athletes and don’t focus on their own education.”