The second time she asked, they sat on the couch in Randall’s home office working on a speech he was about to give at the annual board of directors’ meeting. He read it through, noting changes, words, phrases, commas, and periods that gave him time to breathe or the audience to ponder. Lena suggested memorizing the first paragraph to make immediate contact with the audience and gain acceptance and interest right away.
“I went to the bank today,” she said.
Whether he heard her or not, she couldn’t tell. He recited the first paragraph, experimented with his delivery—serious, with humor, smiling, not smiling, hands, no hands. “When I gave my father his first cell phone last year, he was astonished at the power of such a small device. ‘Dad,’ I said, ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet.’ As I stand before you, on the cusp of a new century, ready to introduce the future of telecommunications, I speak those same words to you as I did to my father: ladies and gentlemen, you ain’t seen nothing yet!”
As soon as he finished, her thumbs lifted in approval, Lena started again. “I talked to the manager about my photography business. It’s been two years, and I’m ready.” She smiled at the end of her sentence, hoping her declaration was light enough to encourage Randall’s agreement.
“You’re happy aren’t you? The kids are happy. I’m happy.” He took her hand and didn’t wait for her reply. “I know I promised, and I mean to keep that promise.” Randall stood and paced the length of his office, delivering his words in the same way he had practiced his speech: her expertise, her willingness to polish his speeches, not to mention her first-rate entertaining had become critical to his success.
“Bottom line, the next couple of years are key. I know we can make this work.” He knelt in front of her, his eyes willing her to agree. “C’mon, Lena, it hasn’t been that bad, has it? You help me, and I’ll help you. I’m not breaking my promise, just asking for an extension.”
Hadn’t she known it would come to this moment all along? Lena swore she could handle all of that, take a few classes, develop a signature style, and check out galleries. How many extensions would it take to get to her dream? She reminded Randall that she had multitasked her way through kids and work and entertaining and managing the household for years. It would work, she reasoned, until she heard him say his goal was to be CEO. The sensation, like vertigo, went from head past stomach to knees easier than she thought it would. Like falling into a cushy ball of fluff. Surrender. Without fight, without words, just the certainty that the loyalty Randall valued would cost her her soul.
“Okay! I get it. There’s a delivery truck in my driveway. I won’t wait for him.” The gloved driver jumps out of the van, opens its double doors, and shoves three boxes onto a handcart. Lena points to the front porch and a white envelope taped to the wrought iron railing. The driver tips his baseball cap and heads in that direction.
“See? The universe has just sent you a message. Make things happen. And why don’t you call Cheryl. Your old buddy always could knock sense into you.”
“I haven’t talked to Cheryl since Daddy’s funeral. Too much time has passed to cry on her shoulder. Especially about Randall.”
“Promise me you’ll call her. If you don’t, I will.”
f f f
“Where do you think you’re off to?” Lena opens the trunk and sets the grocery bags on the ground.
“I’m late for Dr. Miller,” Kendrick says. Teenage girls suck their teeth, boys newly out of their teens, or at least this one, Lena thinks, smirk. Is this what I’ve taught you? she wants to ask. Is this the way you’ll look at your girlfriend, your wife, when things get tough? She walks to his car and lifts her hand to rub his cheek like she did when he was three, and they were full and round, but Kendrick bobs out of her reach.
“It’s only two thirty. Your appointment isn’t for an hour and a half.” It takes no more than a glance for Lena to double-check her calculations on the dashboard clock. “I’ll take you.”
“I can drive myself.” Kendrick throws up his hands, looking, Lena thinks, just like Randall. “I’m almost twenty-one, I don’t need my mother to drive me around like I’m a kid in grammar school. Anyway, Dad says it’s okay.”
Six months ago, Kendrick’s phone calls and emails became sporadic, unlike his first year at Northwestern, when he called with weekly updates. Lena and Randall assumed that the demands of his second year and his academic scholarship kept him busy. He was sulky and distant and had been that way at Thanksgiving. They blamed his moodiness on fatigue. A phone call from his roommate, upset with Kendrick’s erratic behavior, set Lena in motion. Kendrick confessed that he dabbled, he called it, with uppers, downers, and sometimes cocaine to help with a bad case of the blues and the pressure of everybody’s expectations. Randall gave him no options: no more money and treatment—at home or in a rehab center—within seventy-two hours.
The day Kendrick came home, Lena, Randall, and Camille unanimously decided to surprise him at the luggage rounder instead of circling the airport until he showed up at the Arrivals exit doors. When he appeared at the foot of the escalator, Randall flinched as if someone had delivered a one-two punch to his head. The couple next to them stared, not with a stranger’s usual admiration of Kendrick’s confidence, but repelled by his appearance. Nothing about Kendrick was the same. His pants sagged lower than usual, more from weight loss than trend, a dingy T-shirt hung from his almost skeletal shoulders, his matted hair was on the verge of accidental dreadlocks. The crinkle in the corners of his eyes that always made Lena think he was up to devilment, even when he wasn’t, was gone.
At home, Randall set rules for Kendrick and left them for Lena to enforce. He cut Kendrick’s driving privileges and imposed a ten o’clock curfew and mandatory visits to a therapist.
Arms crossed against his chest, Kendrick frowns as if Lena is wrong. Lena wonders how much Kendrick values her right now.
“I love you, son, and I know these restrictions are tough, but you knew the rules when you opted for home treatment. Only a few weeks to go.”
“Why are you being such a—” Kendrick catches himself and rolls his eyes. “I don’t know what to tell you except, Dad says it’s okay.”
“Your father said nothing to me, and you’re not driving anywhere until he does.” Lena takes two bags full of groceries into her arms. “Come help me.”
“It’s been four months.” Kendrick guns his engine. “I’m ready to go back to school and no curfew. I miss my friends. I want my privacy back. Dad said it, and I’m outta here.”
“I can’t apologize for something I haven’t done, Kendrick. There’s a reason why you abused drugs. I want to make sure that you take your time and get all the help you need so that it never happens again.”
“Jesus Christ!” His words snap from his lips. “Are you ever going to forget, or do I have to spend the rest of my life making up for it? I’m not an addict, Mom. I just made a mistake.”
“Yes, you did, Kendrick.” Lena’s words sail into the air as Kendrick puts the car in reverse and races down the driveway. “But you don’t have to take it out on me.”
Lena tosses her car keys and oversized handbag onto the kitchen counter and trips, not for the first time, over Kendrick’s size 12 Nikes. If it’s true that feet never stop growing, Lena thinks, her son’s shoes will be two sizes bigger in no time. Adrenaline helps her to unload the rest of the groceries, to shove butter, vegetables, and the fifteen-pound roast into the refrigerator and hurry to the front door. It helps her lift the boxes, one by one, into the living room as carefully as if they are full of Steuben crystal and to strip away the clear tape of each box in one long piece.
She checks the invoice against the thirty-eight CDs and resists the urge to run to the computer, type each song into a spreadsheet, and alphabetize them. Instead, CD in hand, she scours the front of the complex stereo system for the simplest buttons: power, load, play. Randall has, they have, the best, most convoluted music equipment his money can buy. He once told Lena
that even if they couldn’t afford the amplifiers, concert-quality sound of the six-foot speakers with super-sensitive tweeters, woofers, and other components she doesn’t understand, that he would have bought them anyway. After their children, music is their strongest common denominator.
The volume knob is obvious, and one exaggerated twist fills the room with music. Tina’s voice bellows from the speakers, and the infectious melody cloaks Lena. For now, it is the beat she needs—steady, strong, funky. So, Kendrick can drive; can do whatever he wants without the need of his mother’s consent. He values his father. His father values him. Who values her?
Tina knows it, sings it, summarizes it as clearly as the pain, the ache that works its way to Lena’s heart: And I don’t understand what’s your plan that you can’t be good to me.
Tina’s question is Lena’s: “Who will be good to me?” Her question is for Randall, for Camille, for Kendrick.
Through the living room, the hallway, up the stairs and down again. Head and hips shake to the beat. The handmade sofas, the wall-sized art, the spindly Venetian vases—they say Randall has been good to her. Fingers snap and feet dance. Let the tears stream.
The day after Randall gave her the yellow diamond, Lena put her camera into the armoire; a memento of who she was and her value. She stops in front of a black-and-white picture taken with her 35mm the year before she married: Lulu and John Henry on their thirty-sixth anniversary. The award-winning photo was published by the Oakland Tribune for all her world to see. Years later, it was supposed to be submitted along with her business plan. The contrast is high and sharp; the focus on their eyes. They look straight into the camera, and the lens captures their love for each other and the photographer.
Chapter 8
Randall flips through the rows of CDs hidden behind the doors of a built-in cabinet that also houses the stereo. He once told Lena that he wanted to own all of the most important jazz albums of the twentieth century. The first time he mentioned his goal, he and Lena had been sharing their stories. Like Lena wanted to study photography, Randall wanted to major in music even though he played no instrument. He chose to major in business—his father didn’t care, Randall said—so that, unlike his father, his future family would be well cared for. Between the faux-painted cabinet, the shelves of his study, and his vinyl collection carefully stored in the temperature-controlled crawlspace under the house, he has, like every other part of his life, overachieved this goal. He loads six CDs into the player and waits for the first track to start. His head jerks with each click of the volume dial, like a bird attentive to its young; his hands adjust for the perfect balance of bass and treble.
On the opposite end of the rectangular living room, Lena drags her forefinger across the mantel and moves last year’s family portrait one inch to the left. Randall passes two oversized chairs and the fireplace on his way to Lena’s side of the room. Tonight, Lena feels like a trophy wife on display in the burnt yellow pants and top Randall insisted she put on. She wears it to please him; it is not her style. He fiddles with the sabuk around her waist—a cummerbund he calls it—and rubs his thumbs on the small of her back in a circular motion. She relaxes into Randall’s mini-massage, her head falling against his chest, and wills him to recall his promise to make one more counseling session.
Three and a half days, the numbers going up instead of down, mark the time Randall has been home, and they have not spoken of serious matters. Lena wishes this respite signified the desire to move on. No spontaneous touches, no suggestive double-talk, no teasing as foreplay to time alone. Randall has occupied himself less with thinking or work and more with sweating: hours of racquetball, hoops with Kendrick beating him only once out of the five times they played, hiking the hills around their home with and without Camille, jumping rope, and shadowboxing. He has spent quiet time in the living room listening to music and sorting through his CDs. The coffee table becomes the focus of her attention: a dead leaf pinched from the bouquet of peonies, hydrangeas, and, her favorite, rubrum lilies; books poked into a perfect pile.
“Are you happy?” Lena asked Randall if he was happy before their first counseling session ended. His deep breathing had more than physical purpose: thought gathering, a careful delivery of words. Different from the breaths taken the first time he’d said “I love you.” During the session, his finger thumped against the wing chair’s arm and he said that she should be “fucking ecstatic, judging by what you have and the life you live.”
“Every day at TIDA, the white boys measure my words and my work for potential mistakes. Work is not about happy. Work is about beating the odds and kicking ass.” He closes his eyes like she’s seen him do a thousand times—a trick learned in a year’s worth of biofeedback sessions. “I’d be happy if we could table this.”
“Not work. Like Tina says—whether times are happy or sad.”
“That was Al Green. Tina Turner was singing, Lena, not espousing a philosophy.” Randall’s heavy voice is sarcastically chipper. “With the money Tina Turner makes, she’s found happiness, trust me.”
The singsong doorbell chimes, and Lena rushes to the dining room for one last survey of the table. She swaps two place cards, corrects the alignment of a spoon and fork to exactly two inches from the table’s edge, and motions to the housekeeper in the kitchen to turn the oven off.
Randall steps into the entryway and spins on the doorbell’s last note—his silk shirt flutters from his broad shoulders to its loose hem. He raises his thumbs: all systems go. “Look around, Lena. What do you have to be sad about?”
f f f
From her end of the table, Lena feels like a minor character in her hundredth performance of play: a vital prop, without dialogue and unnoticed. She is unable to figure out if she has grown away from her friends or too much into herself.
Lynne, who worries more about pedigree than personality, blathers on about a couple she recently met: the husband’s father was the first black appellate court judge in his state and the wife is a third generation AKA. Charles’s fear of Bali street food. Candace prattles on about her children: X is getting a PhD, Y is pregnant by her doctor husband again, Z is up for partner at his law firm.
Lena takes in the room—gilded mirror over the buffet, the crystal chandelier, the curved arches cut into the Oriental rug’s thick wool pile. What does she have to be sad about?
“How’s your dinner, Charles?” Lena asks Randall’s best friend.
“Perfect, as usual,” Charles volunteers through a mouthful of roast and reaches for another slice.
“And these cut veggies… what are they?” Charles’s bimbette girlfriend asks Randall. As if he knows, Lena thinks. Randall makes suggestions, like executive overviews, and leaves the details to his wife. The young woman, sultry and innocent at the same time, refocuses her attention on Randall before Lena finishes her description of the sharp mandoline and its precision cuts of yellow and red beets, jicama, and carrot tied with softened strands of chive. The bimbette sits on Randall’s left, Charles on his right. Randall chitchats with the two of them and flashes his even-toothed smile. Watching the three of them, Lena wonders if Charles brings these air-headed, busty women to their home more for Randall’s entertainment than his own.
“This is why I adore your parties, Lena.” Lynne nudges her husband, who is almost done before the others have barely started. He shoves food in his mouth and tells them he can’t stop this habit—six sisters and brothers who all ate fast in order to get seconds—even though it’s been forty years since he sat with them at his parents’ table.
Lynne dismisses him with a wave of her hand. “Your food is so creative, like one of those TV shows. Artsy.”
The dark wood is the perfect backdrop for the food arranged in the middle of the round African mahogany table Lena commissioned for the square dining room. The rich wood is striated with tiny rings that testify to its age. Frilly paper caps on the standing rib roast, garnishes of purple cabbage, parsley, and finger-sized fruits; presentati
on and taste are important to her. She cannot brag about well-earned promotions or increased corporate profits or the next big takeover like Randall, but she can outdo most with her food.
Candace, her politically incorrect, six-carat diamond, and her dimpled husband, Byron, sit to Lena’s right and left. Candace catches his eye as her tongue drags creamy potatoes across her fork.
The bimbette joins in. “Oh, everybody’s life seems much more exciting than Charles’s.” She bats her obviously false eyelashes in Randall’s face.
“I make money, baby,” Charles says through his second helping of garlic mashed potatoes. “That’s exciting enough.”
Randall slaps his buddy’s back and winks at Lena: I told you so. The bimbette hasn’t been and probably won’t be around long enough to understand she should keep her mouth shut. Or perhaps, Lena muses, this one gets a “get out of jail free” card, because she is young enough to be the daughter of any one of them or, as her neckline creeps farther down between her full, taut breasts, no man pays attention to what she says.
The housekeeper brings in a silver tray with two dessert choices—a thinly slivered chocolate ganache cake and an orange-scented brioche bread pudding with amaretto cream—paired with Dolce, Randall’s most expensive dessert wine. Every man, save for Byron, whose mouth twitches in anticipation of Candace’s next suggestive move, engages in a segregated conversation with Randall. They natter raucously over sports and bullshit in that way men do: disjointed hyperbolic statements that mean nothing, but their laughter says they’re having fun.
“Why is it…?” Lena straightens so that her voice projects across the table. “That the men talk. The women talk. But we never talk together?”
The beads of the crystal chandelier tinkle from laughter’s vibration, Randall’s being the loudest. “Because we men never have time to get together.” To a person, except for Lena, all heads dip in agreement as if Randall is their leader and it is his right to voice the group’s opinion. Lena is unsure if this is because he is or because they’re in his house, eating his wife’s good food, drinking his expensive wine. “We work hard to support your habits.” All eyes follow Randall’s finger as he thumps it against his chest on the spot where the yellow diamond rests on Lena’s.
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