Searching for Tina Turner

by Jacqueline E. Luckett

  As clear as the view through the windows of this metal- and granite-filled kitchen, she tries to see the lesson in divorce, wants it to open out like the landscape before her: garden, trees, streets, sky, sun, clouds, stratosphere, heaven. Everything happens for a reason. She knows what Randall doesn’t: she has to be free to fulfill her destiny. How could he explain that to Camille?

  f f f

  Beyond the windows, the day is brilliant. It feels like black inside Lena’s head. Like midnight and death. Perhaps ninety minutes focused on her body; a release of her mind to its inner energy is what she needs. Stretch, downward facing dog, sun position, hands over heart, warrior pose; meditation for a restless mind that cannot stop. But the lethargy, the heavy weight of gloom, sends her one sluggish step at a time up the stairs.

  Randall offers no option. Randall is not the option. Every single part of her body feels dead: her head lolls, her shoulders slump, her hands hang, her body sinks deeper into the bed until she feels that she is on the floor. Already, her body aches for the old days, the joy, the joking, sitting together without the need for words, body heat, the pride in her family and what she worked so hard to build: the promise of happily ever after.

  She reaches for the telephone. It takes an eternity to lift it from nightstand to ear. She pushes eleven numbers. If she can hold on through the sales staff, the canned music, the minutes until her call is transferred to Bobbie’s office, then she can cry.

  “What’s up?” The keys of Bobbie’s computer keyboard click in the background.

  “I got divorce papers.” Lena explains Randall’s proposal. She knows she’s done the right thing. It is the anger at being spineless that hurts the most; the realization that, having given her all to marriage and family, the person she loves more than herself could let go as quickly as he did his ill-fated assistant. “Maybe I should call Randall—”

  “Stop! Don’t let him bully you into something you haven’t thoroughly investigated. Run the numbers. Get a lawyer.”

  “A woman. Black.”

  “Divorce isn’t about gender, color, or emotion. It’s business.”

  “A black woman might understand how another black woman feels.”

  “Pain doesn’t know color. Divorce is no more difficult emotionally for a black woman than it is for a white one. The difference is the shock on the lawyers’ faces when they’ve spoken to you on the phone and heard your very white-sounding voice and then see what they didn’t expect walk through their door. When they see your black face drive up in your gaudy Mercedes-Benz; when you list your assets—more than their own—and they want some explanation of why you’ve got it and they don’t.”

  “So, how do I decide?”

  “Pick the best, the sharpest. The most experienced lawyer will do what it takes to win.” Bobbie’s sigh is long. “There’s a big difference between cynicism and racism. Understanding how much of either one you will take is how you decide who you’ll work with and who you won’t.” The tap, tap of Bobbie’s pencil or fingernail against the phone makes Lena feel like a poor student about to give a wrong answer to the teacher’s question.

  “I failed.”

  “You stood up for yourself. Did you think if you threw down the gauntlet Randall would sweep you off your feet, make passionate love to you, and promise to value you for what you do for him and your family? Please.”

  “This is the most thoughtless, thought-full decision I’ve ever made.” Lena pulls the covers over her head to shut out the radiant sun and what was a wonderful view of the neighborhood trees and their speckled shadows, San Francisco, and two bridges before she opened that envelope. “I should have spoken up sooner.”

  “I can’t hear you. Where are you, Lena?”

  “I’m in hell. At least he could have given us more thought—it’s only been six days. It’s like I’m no good… something that needs to be gotten rid of quickly. Like the garbage or… a big black spider.”

  “Can you finish what you started?”

  “I can’t breathe.” Tina started over at forty-five. Now she has to start over, too. “What will I do? I feel like something is stuck in my throat. I can’t breathe.” Under the weight of the covers Lena feels like a ten-year-old hiding from the bogeyman, waiting for her big sister to rescue her with a flashlight.

  “The choice has been made—move on, sister.”

  f f f

  In the bathroom, Lena stares at the cabinet shelves lined with amber vials of leftover prescriptions for the insomnia that comes from menopause and the aches that come with aging. She snatches seven amber vials from the mirrored cabinet and folds them carefully into the bottom of her pajama top. With her free hand, she rearranges what is left behind—aspirin, a box of cotton swabs, alcohol, peroxide, dry-eye solution, tea tree oil, and a box of estrogen patches—around the shelves, then walks back into the bedroom. What would Randall say if she did it? What would he do if she swallowed these pills? One by one, she empties the vials onto the bedspread; pills tumble, bead-like, left and right into piles. They should have held on to simple things, said I love you. Let’s try.

  Her pajamas are wet, her pillow is soaked, her glass filled with Drambuie. She sips and holds the liquid in her mouth. Would he be sorry that he didn’t try to understand how much she loves him, how much she needs to be herself? Does he understand that she will never be able to get back what has been broken? She swallows hard and waits for the liquor to go down her throat and dissolve in her stomach juices. Stupid Randall. Stupid Lena.

  Lena rolls the caplets between her fingers, watches them crumble with the heat of her hand. She gulps more Drambuie, lets it take its last slow ride down her throat. Sleep used to be sweet. If only she could sleep. Forever. If she had taped that Tina Turner interview she would watch it now. Lena reaches for her book and settles for Tina’s image on the cover.

  There is hope in Tina’s eyes and the knowledge that life goes on, and it is good. Tina looks into the camera, looks straight into Lena’s soul. The book falls open, the words are underlined: I knew that change had to come from the inside out—that I had to understand myself, and accept myself before anything else could be accomplished.

  Tina reinvented herself.

  Tina survived.

  Chapter 15

  Lena swerves into the underground parking lot of the new apartment building on the western side of Lake Merritt. She has watched its skeleton rise above the lake from the hill her house sits on and passed it more than once on her walks. Its multistory reflection on the water makes the structure look taller and whiter than it is. Signs posted on the building’s windows boast great views of San Francisco and the hills, a gym, a swimming pool, and enticing leases.

  The marbled entryway is high-ceilinged and full of tall palm trees. The lobby resembles a five-star hotel—luxurious, comfortable, and welcoming. The advantage, Lena thinks, as she strolls toward the reception desk, of being married for twenty-three years is the knowledge the spouses have: they know one another. What Lena knows about Randall is this: whenever he cuts a deal he makes sure he is on the winning end. Years of watching him barter with humble vendors, cut business deals over dinner, and recap his victories have shown Lena what her soon to be ex-husband is capable of when he wants something. She assumes that if Randall wants her to keep the house, he—no they—must be worth more than he has let on.

  Today everything is different. She knows it is better to be less controlled by Randall, to be out of the place that no longer feels like home. Even though, physically, Camille and Kendrick are around, the house has lost its soul.

  “I’d like to see a three-bedroom apartment.” Lena stands before the guard at the desk, impressive in his black uniform, as he dials the leasing office.

  A gawky agent steps into the lobby from behind a door with a sign that reads: STAFF ONLY. The young man begins with a tour of the lobby, the workout room, and a small library area for the use of all the tenants.

  Lena waves off his canned spiel and presses her
hand to his arm—the same calming gesture she would have made to Kendrick or Camille. “All I want to see are the available units. I can’t take a sales pitch today. Sorry.”

  They head for the two banks of elevators and tour several vacant units until she sees the apartment she wants: one with a view of the lake and the hills so that she can see where she lived from where she will live.

  The apartment will do fine for her and Camille, and hopefully Kendrick, until Lena decides on a permanent place to call home. She will miss her house: scrub jays trilling at five in the morning, rock doves cooing, rain pelting against the tiled roof; chirping crickets and dancing butterflies; the full moon through the bedroom window—luminous and mysterious; the crunch of autumn leaves, winter wind singing through the trees; the secret compartment behind the fuse box where a four-year-old Kendrick stored his rubber dinosaurs; a six-burner gas stove, blueberry pancakes on Sunday mornings.

  In this kitchen, three times smaller than the one she has now, she thinks of how she will manage Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas, too, if she is lucky, and in a few weeks a cake for Camille’s graduation. Lena will do whatever she must to make Camille’s celebration normal. Let Randall do it. There’s more to raising a child than signing checks. Let him hire a caterer, handle the details of the graduation party. Ha! Let him make sure Camille roams among family and old friends, collects envelopes of money and gift certificates, and pretends, if only for one day, that nothing in her life has changed. Let Lena be a guest in what was her own home.

  “Ma’am?” The agent is tentative, but Lena does not need to be sold. “Excuse me, but this is the last apartment I have to show you.”

  “Where do I sign?” With no thought to where the money will come from, Lena decides a six-month lease makes the most sense, requires the least obligation for such a tenuous situation. The last time she rented an apartment she was twenty-five and three years away from buying the stucco house—a half-mile from Lulu and John Henry—that she lived in until her marriage.

  While the gleeful agent completes the paperwork, Lena returns to the place she will call home. The apartment is simple: the ceiling meets white walls in sharp angles without the crown molding in every room of her house, a gas fireplace, wall-to-wall carpeting. This new place fourteen floors above street level is lovely but sterile.

  “Hello, hello,” she calls out, waiting for her echo to repeat her words like children do in empty rooms. When she moved into her first apartment, there were friends there to help. It was a party: a celebration of independence, a joyful adjustment to living without parents, sister, or roommates. The process begins again. Same but different. The period of adjustment. The vocabulary change from we to I. She walks from the open kitchen to the bedrooms and the small balcony. Who will greet her but these walls when she comes home? Who will she ask about their day? Who will say goodnight?

  Twenty-three years of hard work: for her children, her husband, her marriage. Twenty-three years of sowing the seeds for a good life. Lena crosses her heart and whispers, “Dear God, I know my life will never be the same again. Please bless me and let new seeds sow themselves here.”

  f f f

  “This is the easiest commission I’ve ever made.” The agent is excited when she returns. Lena imagines that he has spent part of that time computing, if the calculator next to her paperwork is any indication, his commission.

  Up to the time she rented that first apartment years ago, the biggest check she had written was for her car. That check for five hundred dollars was small compared to the one for the security deposit and first and last month’s rent she will write today. Her hand trembled when she signed that lease and handed over her check. Her hand trembles now; this time, she understands, for a different reason. The checkbook inside her Louis Vuitton is the one for their joint equity cash fund. The one she supposes she can still draw funds from. It has not dawned on her until this moment, in front of this nervous young man, that, like a husband from the movies, Randall may have cut off her access to their joint accounts or, worse yet, taken all of their money. She has no idea of how this divorce thing works. But she knows that she better find out soon. If he has a lawyer, then he has one up on her. Up his.

  If Randall has dared to pull out all of their money, she will make a few phone calls, the first to Candace, to assure that the whole world knows. If the balances have not been touched—what an odd salute to her trustworthiness—Lena cannot help but think how funny, for all his formality, that Randall still leaves managing the household funds to her.

  If her change, like Tina’s change, means taking the best from who she was to form who she wants to be, then Lena must accept and move on. She signs the new lease, effortlessly writes a check, and reminds herself to transfer funds to a separate bank account in her name.

  “You really know what you want.” The agent grabs Lena’s hand and pumps enthusiastically, and she hopes, from the look of his frayed cuffs, that his commission will be spent on a new shirt. Let Randall worry about the cable bill, the PGE, the crack in the living room’s bay window, the ashes in the fireplace, weeds in the patio cement, the cedar armoire, Kendrick’s baptismal gown, Camille’s first Easter dress, his great-grandmother’s Bible.

  She will move into this apartment and live here until the divorce is over and done done done.

  f f f

  In the car, Lena dials Bobbie’s home number and listens to the latest greeting on her sister’s voicemail: “You know what the deal is, and you know what to do. So, unless this is an emergency, leave a quick one.”

  “I’ve told you about that message, Bobbie. What if Lulu calls, what kind of message is she supposed to leave?” Lena is tired of being ombudsman between the two women she loves most in the world. She sighs and tries not to let out all the sadness her stomach is having a hard time keeping down. “I’m glad you’re out. You need to do that more often anyway.” Lena pauses long enough to compose herself but not long enough for the machine to turn off automatically. “I signed a lease for an apartment. I feel like shit—but good shit. If you have any suggestions for telling our mother, let me know or, better yet, I don’t suppose you’d do that for me? Would you?” She can hear Bobbie’s voice in her head as clearly as if she had picked up the phone: no way.

  f f f

  Cell phone pressed to her ear, Lena peers through a crack in the curtains. Her mother sits at the table, a cup in front of her and a book in her hand. The television set is on, but Lena can’t hear it, and she guesses the volume is probably muted. Sometimes, Lulu keeps the TV on for the company the images, not the sound, offer. “I’m outside the back door, Lulu. Open up.”

  Lulu flips back the flowery curtain from the kitchen door window before opening it. Her hair is covered with a blue slumber bonnet, her cheeks and lips are bare, her housedress is faded and worn at the elbows. The kitchen sink is full of dishes and pots. At the sink, Lena runs water into the rubberized dishpan. She searches under the cabinet for dishwashing soap hidden between assorted half-full bottles of cleansers and squeezes the blue liquid over the dishes.

  The running hot water steams up the window above the sink while she washes the dishes and rinses them one by one. Lulu picks up a dishtowel and dries the plates and bowls and places them on the counter instead of onto their shelves because she likes them air-dry not just towel-dry. “Randall served me with divorce papers, and I’ve decided to move out.” Lena says matter-of-factly, surprised at how even her voice is.

  “Oh, my God, look what you’ve gone and done. I told you not to bother Randall with your problems.” The soft scent of her dusky perfume floats between mother and daughter. Lulu backs into the kitchen table and lowers herself into her chair. “You never listen, do you, Lena?”

  “Oh, Lulu… I feel bad enough as it is.” Lena scans the kitchen. It is messier than normal: five soda cans and three empty gallon water containers sit, along with newspapers, beside the refrigerator. She pulls a folded grocery bag from underneath the sink, snaps it open, th
en drops the cans, papers, and containers into the bag.

  “You better keep yourself in that house. Don’t let him take it away from you.”

  What, she thinks, is the point of telling Lulu about Randall’s manipulative offer? “I’ll feel better in neutral territory.”

  “I hope you put some money away.” Lulu purses her lips and sips from a cup she has had since Lena and Bobbie were little girls.

  “I’ll sell my car if I have to.” Lena pulls the broom and the dustpan from the tall cabinet beside the stove and begins to sweep the floor in hurried, choppy strokes. “I’m sure he has to pay me alimony or something…”

  “Even I kept a secret stash, baby girl.”

  Whenever Lena joked that Lulu encouraged her to hide a little something on the side, Randall chortled and told Lena that if she was, he hoped it was a lot of something because, with her expensive tastes, there was no way a little would ever do.

  “These things don’t happen in my family.” The volume rises suddenly on the TV as if Lulu senses her daughter’s breakup can be masked by the sound.

  Standing on the other side of the kitchen, Lena thinks of at least two of her aunts and a cousin who should let it happen to them. Divorce or separation, that is. She sweeps the dust and dirt into the dustpan and empties it into the trash. Lulu points at a corner underneath the cabinet, and Lena sweeps there as well.

  “I’m sure Randall still wants you, Lena. He’s a good man. He just works too much.” Lulu fumbles with the slumber cap and pushes the lacy edges behind her ears. “What can you do without him? How will you take care of yourself?”

  “I don’t know why I’m here. I didn’t want you to have a heart attack if I told you over the phone.” Lena shoves the broom and dustpan back into the little closet and reminds herself to buy Lulu one of those handheld vacuums for spot-dusting and spills. Lulu believes in forever and so did Lena until almost twenty-four hours ago. Tina believed in herself, and Lena has to hold on, too, or she will wilt like one of Lulu’s short-blooming azaleas. She steps past Lulu to the back door and pulls it wide open, letting a chilly breeze into the overheated house.