by Mary Monroe
Muh’Dear didn’t have to go into detail, but I knew what she meant. By Jerome being so light-skinned and having all that curly hair on his head, there was a good chance he’d produce kids who looked like him. In my opinion, Black folks had come a long way by the 1980’s, but light skin and straight or curly hair still carried a lot of weight. I tried not to let that bother me, especially since I considered myself beyond things that shallow. Rhoda Nelson, who was as dark as I was and the most beautiful Black woman Richland had ever seen, had influenced my perceptions to the point where I would never covet light skin and straight hair again.
Yet and still, I was glad to be seen with a man who looked like Jerome. However, I would have considered him gorgeous no matter what shade he was. Despite what I thought of myself, he thought I was beautiful, too. And he was proud of me. I realized that when he took me to a barbecue at his mother’s house six months after our first date. It was the Memorial Day weekend.
Ordinarily, I would have spent the day with Muh’Dear and Daddy King, like I did every other holiday. But gatherings at my mother’s house always included Scary Mary, who worked at being a busybody in three shifts and Pee Wee—if he was between girlfriends. The last thing I needed was to have Scary Mary clown me about Jerome in front of Pee Wee. I had eagerly accepted Jerome’s invitation to his mother’s barbecue.
Almost every woman at the gathering at Jerome’s mother’s house was just as big as I was, if not bigger. When too many of us walked through the living room at the same time, the pictures on the wall shook and everybody thought that was funny. I did, too. It was like these women celebrated being large and I considered that a good thing. It made me feel better about myself. I held my own head just a little bit higher that day.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that I was the only dark-skinned woman present and I was the only one wearing my hair in braids. I had always hated my short, brittle hair. The best thing I could do for it was to hide it. I didn’t like wigs, so having my hairdresser add extensions to my hair and braid it seemed like the next best thing. Besides, braids made me look younger. And at my age, every year I could conceal counted. Looking younger made me feel like I had just that much more time left to work with.
Jerome’s two older brothers, both even lighter than Jerome, had wives who were one shade away from being white. Jerome’s younger sister Nadine and his mother Marlene were both about the same shade as Jerome. It didn’t take me long to start feeling uncomfortable. Jerome’s sister Nadine had been in a lot of my classes at Richland High, but we’d never really associated with one another back then. However, today she was the only one of the females present who really seemed to enjoy my presence.
“I hope you have a good time, Annette. My brother is crazy about you and he couldn’t wait to bring you over to meet the family,” Nadine told me. She laughed and shook her head. Looking at her up close for the first time, I realized she wasn’t as pretty as I thought. For one thing, one of her eyes twitched and the eyeball inadvertently rolled to the side every few seconds. That crawling eye was bad enough, but there was a purple birthmark as big as a quarter on the side of her mouth. Her lips were so thin, there was more lipstick on her teeth than there was on her lips. Her reddish-brown hair was thinner than mine. In fact, I saw several bald spots that she had tried to hide with a black headband. In her case, having light skin was a blessing. She had been popular in school because of that alone. “Some of the family members are pretty remote.” Nadine sighed, rolling both eyes, but each one in a different direction.
I smiled. “That’s okay. I’m pretty remote myself,” I said. I liked Nadine and I planned to cultivate a friendship with her. It would be nice to have a close female friend. It was time for me to step out of the darkness of solitude that I’d been in since my Rhoda days.
I was horrified when somebody produced a camera and took a group Polaroid picture of all the women, with me in the middle. As soon as the picture finished developing, I wished that I had stayed out of it. With all those high-yellow women surrounding me, I looked like a fly in a bowl of buttermilk.
It was hotter than usual for late May that afternoon. The sun had melted a candy bar that one of Jerome’s nephews had left on the picnic table in the backyard of the sprawling gray house on Pike Street.
Other than a few obligatory comments about the bright yellow sundress I had on, the other women said very little to me. I stood away from the crowd listening to the women complain about the sun and how they avoided it to keep from getting tans they didn’t want.
“Well, at least the sun lightens my hair. Dark hair looks so brittle,” Marlene, Jerome’s mother, said, looking at my spider-like braids wrapped around my head. Marlene wore way too much makeup for a woman her age. Other than wrinkles and a few black freckles dotting her sharp nose, I didn’t know what she was trying to hide. Even though her slack jaw twitched when she talked and her teeth were so big she couldn’t close her mouth all the way, everybody thought she was beautiful anyway. She had a raspy voice so when she talked it sounded like she had a slight case of laryngitis. “Men love light-colored hair.” She sniffed, cleared her throat, and tilted her head, patting her own bleached-blond curls. She fanned her face with her hand a lot, too. She was around Muh’Dear’s age so I assumed that she was going through menopause, too. I convinced myself that it was the real reason she was so forward with me. Nevertheless, I didn’t like the woman, but I would tolerate her because of Jerome. I smiled as she kept talking, looking down her nose at me out of the corner of her eye. “Annette, where are you from? The Islands? The island women look so regal and undiluted. Except those shiny-faced ones who wrap up their heads in those loud-colored scarves. Now, they look downright fierce.”
“I was born in Florida,” I said tersely.
“I never would have guessed that.” Marlene lifted her eyebrows, shook her head, and gave me a hot look. “Your folks, too?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Hmmm. I know your mama and I would have sworn that she was Creole or Cajun. Maybe even Indian.” Marlene shook her head again and fanned her face so hard she groaned. “You and she look so different from one another. She must have weak genes…”
“She’s Black as far as I know,” I said firmly. “If she’s mixed, she never thought it was important enough to mention. I took after my daddy. He has really strong genes, I guess.”
“Oh. You’re going to have some interesting-looking children.” Marlene sighed, looked at Jerome, then back to me with a look of concern and pity. “Well, get up and get you some of that potato salad, child. I can see you love to eat as much as the rest of us. Tee hee.”
A few minutes later, two of Jerome’s male cousins arrived. To my surprise, both of them had dark-skinned girlfriends. One of the couples had a newborn baby that everybody started making a fuss over right away. The baby looked like a lemon with a face. The other couple had a dark baby—just as cute as the light one—that everybody but me ignored.
As much as I loved Jerome, I wondered if I would be able to tolerate his color-struck family. I wondered what I would do the first time one of them made a negative comment about my color. Once when I had tried to be friends with a light-skinned girl at school, she flat-out told me I could never spend the night at her house. She claimed that her mother was afraid of dark skin touching her sheets and her daddy was convinced that dark-skinned people stank up everything they touched. That same girl was known for telling lies so I didn’t know whether or not to believe her. When I saw that girl one day at the shoe store with her mother, I ignored her. But Jerome’s family had proven to me that they had a problem with dark skin. I knew what I was getting myself into, but having Jerome all to myself was worth it.
By the end of the afternoon, the backyard was so crowded I couldn’t keep up with Jerome. Seeing the lighter-skinned people segregated from the crowd, off to themselves, saddened me and reminded me of the old South. I couldn’t wait to leave.
I used the ruse that I had to go
do laundry so I’d have something clean for work the next day. Nobody protested when I excused myself. Since Jerome wanted to stay to wait for his favorite uncle to arrive, I had to go home alone.
On the bus.
CHAPTER 30
I
lied to Pee Wee and told him that I’d had a wonderful time at the barbecue. He had seen me from his front room window exit the bus at the corner and had come over immediately, the soles of his well-worn house-shoes flapping. He hadn’t even taken the time to button the thin shirt he had on. I had just kicked off my shoes and folded myself onto the couch when he barged in, wild-eyed and frantic.
“I’m glad you had a good time,” he said with a smirk, standing in my living room with his back to the door and his hands on his hips. “I…I guess me and you won’t be gettin’ together no time soon, huh?” Pee Wee whined, patting the top of his head with his hand.
I just looked at him and blinked.
He sniffed and continued, seeming uncomfortable. “That first night I seen him slobberin’ all over you on your front porch, I knew it was the end of…you know. That thing we do…”
“Oh, Pee Wee.” I sighed and shook my head, unable to face Pee Wee. “That ‘thing we do’ was going to get old, sooner or later.” I looked over at him, disappointed to see him pouting.
“I wasn’t complainin’,” he snapped, poking his bottom lip out like a disgruntled child, shifting his weight from one foot to the other until one of his loose house-shoes slid right off his foot.
“I do love Jerome and he loves me. Besides, I thought you and Mona Lisa McCoy had a thing going,” I said, waving Pee Wee to the love seat facing me, which he ignored. With a frustrated look on his face, he shook his head, then started pacing back and forth.
“Me and Mona Lisa had a thing goin’,” he admitted. “But, you know I always come back to you when things is slow. Shit.” He returned his house-shoe to his foot and stood still, folding and unfolding his arms. Then he squatted down and rolled the cuffs on his jeans a few inches above his ankles and started shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
I rotated my neck and gasped. “That’s just it. You only come to me when there is nobody else to go to. I come first with Jerome,” I snapped, not sure if what I was saying was true.
Pee Wee threw his hands up in frustration and suddenly remembered an appointment he had to go to, but I knew he was lying. He didn’t like where the conversation was going and neither did I. It was just as well he was leaving; I needed to be alone anyway. I had a lot of thinking to do about Jerome and where our relationship was going, now that it was serious. I hoped that Jerome was worth my sacrificing Pee Wee.
Jerome rarely mentioned Pee Wee to me, but I knew that he was not too fond of him either. Pee Wee had been Jerome’s barber until Jerome found out about Pee Wee spending so much time with me. Now Jerome went to the other Black barber in Richland to get his hair cut, even though I had assured him that Pee Wee was nothing more to me than a close friend. I changed the subject whenever Pee Wee’s name came up during a conversation with Jerome.
I was the only Black switchboard operator at Richland’s telephone company, but that didn’t bother me. It was a comfortable position and the pay was adequate. I joined the credit union and purchased my first car, a two-year-old Cougar. Unlike my old job at the Buttercup, where I had worn a conservative blue uniform and comfortable shoes, I got to dress up in nice suits, dresses, and heels as a switchboard operator.
Richland High School, where Jerome worked as a guidance counselor, was only three blocks away from the telephone company. I was able to meet Jerome for lunch several times a week. It pleased me when he came into the building to my workstation to pick me up. I wanted the women I worked with to see what a good-looking man I had. Especially after one of my female co-workers had tried to fix me up with the frog-eyed brother that delivered our office supplies.
Jerome knew every cheap restaurant in town and he had a fistful of coupons for every single one. I didn’t mind, because when I ate lunch alone, it was usually at Antonosanti’s, a block from my work. Once when I told Jerome that I had spent twelve dollars on lunch at Antonosanti’s, it brought tears to his eyes.
The Monday after attending another gathering at Jerome’s mother’s house, Jerome met me for lunch in the telephone company parking lot. Sitting in his car, we shared watercress sandwiches and some of the drab potato salad left over from the barbecue. He had also brought along a Thermos full of ice water that he shared with me.
Cramps forced me to leave work early that day. There was a message on my answering machine from Daddy. All he had said was, “Call me.”
I called Daddy back immediately and it was the same brief conversation we always had. He gave me an update on his declining health and bragged about a deer he had shot and put in his freezer. For the first time in months, he asked when I was coming to see him.
“I’m at a new job and I can’t take a vacation for a year,” I told him.
“Well, what if I come see you?” he bleated, unable to hide his disappointment.
“Uh…that would be nice, Daddy. But Muh’Dear is still mad at you, you know.”
“For what?” he cried plaintively.
“Daddy, you ran out on us,” I reminded.
“I ain’t the first man to run out on no woman—”
“You’re the first man to run out on us,” I reminded. “Anyway, I think Muh’Dear’s beginning to come around, though. She doesn’t cuss as much as she used to whenever your name came up.” I sniffed and held my breath.
“Well, I hope she don’t take too much longer now. Ain’t none of us gettin’ no younger.”
A few times when I called Daddy’s number, my half-sister Lillimae answered the telephone. We didn’t have much to say to one another but like Daddy, she wanted me to come for a visit. I didn’t know how much longer I could hold them off, but I knew that Muh’Dear was still as adamant as ever about me not seeing my daddy.
Three more years passed by and Muh’Dear’s feelings toward Daddy remained the same. My calls and letters to and from Daddy got less frequent, but I wanted to see him more than ever now and I planned to.
Whether Muh’Dear liked it or not.
CHAPTER 31
J
erome asked me to marry him on my thirty-fifth birthday, just when I was about ready to give up on ever landing a husband. And he did it in front of Muh’Dear and Daddy King. It was over dinner in the ornate dining room in the red brick house that Muh’Dear shared with Daddy King on Cherry Street, three blocks from the town square.
Before I could reply, Muh’Dear said jokingly, “And she better accept your proposal, if she know what’s good for her.” Muh’Dear waved her butter knife at me and added, “Girl, with a fancy man like Jerome, it’d be pie-in-the-sky every day.”
Wearing a blue cashmere sweater that I had given him for his birthday and black slacks, Jerome dipped his head and gave me a guarded look. “Well?” he asked, one eyebrow raised.
I had just stuffed my mouth full of lemon pound cake. I had to finish chewing and swallowing first. I was lucky that I could eat whatever I wanted and not worry about gaining weight. But since I was already a size twenty-four, that wasn’t saying much. I had the nerve to have on a green see-through blouse and a black skirt with a split on one side, revealing my massive thigh. Jerome insisted I wear “sexy” outfits when we went out together, even if it was just to have dinner at my mother’s house. One thing I had to say about the man was, he gave me the confidence I needed to feel better about the way I looked. Just the day before, I had worn a pair of short shorts for the first time in my life when Jerome took me to a pool party. Since it was August, and the temperature was in the low nineties, I didn’t have to wear a coat or a sweater to Muh’Dear’s house. But a chill went through me and my heart started beating so hard I had to shift in my seat.
“I guess so,” I replied, wondering why I was feeling so uncertain about marrying Jerome. I knew he loved me
and I thought I loved him. But something was missing from our relationship and I didn’t know what it was. And that scared me. The last thing I wanted to do was make another mistake, marrying the wrong man.
Jerome tilted his head and gasped, his eyes stretched wide open. “You guess?” With a dry laugh, he grabbed his cloth napkin and used it to snap the side of my head. Then he used that same napkin to wipe crumbs off my lips before he kissed me. “I guess I’ll keep you anyway.”
“Annette, it don’t sound like you too happy about landin’ a man like Jerome,” Daddy King teased. “If I was you, I’d be so happy I’d be dancin’ up and down the street naked.”
My stepfather looked tired and he was really beginning to show his age. I was so sorry that I had wasted the first few months of him in our lives, treating him like shit. Now, whenever he called, I dropped whatever I was doing to go to him. The Friday before, while Muh’Dear was on a shopping expedition with Scary Mary in Cleveland, Daddy King crawled to the telephone and called me at work to tell me that he had fallen down the steps in his house and couldn’t get up. I ran out of my workstation like a bat out of hell to go to him. I stayed with him until Muh’Dear returned.
I reached across the table and touched my stepfather’s liver-spotted hand and squeezed it. “Oh, Daddy King, you stop that. Me naked in public would really draw a lot of attention,” I laughed. I took a deep breath and said seriously, “I am happy. I really am.” I leaned to my side where Jerome was seated and kissed him on the mouth. His kisses were just as lame as his lovemaking. It was like kissing a fish. As a matter of fact, when he spent the night with me, he slept on his back with his mouth open and really did look like a fish when he was asleep. When he woke up in the mornings, he had the breath to match. I didn’t like what I was thinking about the man I loved. I guess it was because I’d always thought of relationships between lovers as being full of passion and excitement. I had to keep reminding myself that Jerome had a lot of other admirable qualities. And, if it had taken me thirty-five years to find Jerome, how many more years would it take for me to find a man I liked better?