by Mary Monroe
I was baffled. “That Pee Wee was a blabbermouth when I met him, he’s a blabbermouth now!” I hissed.
“Pee Wee ain’t told nobody nothin’. But y’all wasn’t foolin’ nobody in this town but yourselves. And I don’t know why you havin’ such a hissy fit. Pee Wee is a fine young man. You outdone yourself. You caught a real prize. He’s a much bigger fish than that Jerome.”
“We didn’t think you would like us being together. I mean, Pee Wee was always more like a family member.”
Muh’Dear nodded and shook her finger in my face. “He still is and I hope he always will be.”
I gasped. “You told Pee Wee about the baby?”
Muh’Dear clicked her teeth and shook her head. “I ain’t told that boy nothin’. But like I said, I ain’t blind no more.”
“Well, I hope you don’t tell him. That’s my responsibility.” I paused and looked around the kitchen again. Some of Muh’Dear’s employees had some mighty big ears. Pee Wee hearing about my pregnancy from one of those busybodies was one thing I would not allow to happen. “Uh, we’ll talk more about this when you get home. Call me. Where are my chicken wings and waffles?” I had my food wrapped to go.
There was a message from Rhoda waiting for me when I got back to work. I called her immediately.
“Otis just told me that Pee Wee and that Mitchell woman broke up,” Rhoda said breathlessly. “She went back to her husband and they are plannin’ to move to Cincinnati.” Rhoda sighed. “Poor Pee Wee was such a fool for that woman. I bet if she ever leaves her husband again, she could have Pee Wee back in a split second if she wanted him…and if he’s still available.”
“So?”
“So you need to hook him back up before he latch onto somebody else. How would you feel if the Mitchell woman changes her mind tomorrow and decides she wants to stay with Pee Wee after all? Let me tell you somethin’, sister-girl, the older you get, the shorter that line of men waitin’ on you gets.”
“Men never lined up for me in the first place so I don’t have anything to worry about,” I said dryly. The men that I had turned tricks with had been the closest I ever got to having men standing in line to get to me.
“You know what I mean.” I could hear Rhoda blowing her nose on her end. “Sorry. This cold is really gettin’ on my nerves. My honey wouldn’t even sleep in the bed with me last night. Lyin’ there by myself, I thought about you and I wondered how you could sleep alone day after day, week after week, year after year. I mean, Pee Wee is as buffed and fine and raw—finally—as my husband is. So I know he can work that body—”
“Please let me worry about my own sex life. Besides, there are other single men besides Pee Wee.”
Rhoda was quiet for an uncomfortably long time. “Jerome bowls on the same night as Otis and me. Uh, he and I talked for a few times and he knows you’re my best friend. He was at the bowlin’ alley last night and he asked how you were doin’.” Rhoda paused and gasped. “Is he the one you hope to snuggle up with again?”
“I’d rather donate my body to science,” I said emphatically. “Rhoda, I don’t have to encourage Pee Wee to be with me. If and when he’s ready to come back to me, he’ll do so on his own.”
I was right. Like he was following a script, Pee Wee returned to my bed and me the very next day.
To this day, I don’t know why I didn’t tell Pee Wee that I was pregnant with his baby then. I guess it was because we had always had such an odd relationship. He seemed to enjoy seeing other women when he felt like it. The last thing I wanted was for him to feel that I had trapped him with a baby.
As crazy as it sounded, even to me, I decided that I would just keep sleeping with Pee Wee for as long as I could. If and when he ever decided to see only me, I’d tell him about the baby.
Maybe.
CHAPTER 68
B
eing obese hides a lot of things, including pregnancy, on large women like me. Even when I was naked and flopping around with Pee Wee in my bed, he couldn’t tell I was pregnant. He knew how sensitive I was about my weight. Even if he did notice that my belly was rounder than normal, he didn’t mention it.
It was the same with other people I knew. I felt confident that other than Muh’Dear and Rhoda, nobody else knew I was pregnant. Like the folks who worked at the Buttercup, the people I saw at church (when I went), and Scary Mary. Carlene, Scary Mary’s most useless prostitute, bragged about having a supernatural ability that allowed her to know when somebody she knew was pregnant.
“Every time I dream about fish, I find out somebody is pregnant.” Carlene had made this claim so many times in my presence that I had no doubt in my mind that if she thought I was pregnant, she would bring it up. There were three other women that we all knew were pregnant. Carlene discussed them at great length every chance she got. She talked about the fact that one of the pregnant women was involved with three different men and didn’t know which one was the father of her child. Another one of the three women was in her late forties, morbidly obese, and alcoholic. “With all that against her, she’ll give birth to a Cyclops for sure,” Carlene predicted. “The fish I dreamed about this time didn’t have but one eye.” The third woman, who was neither promiscuous nor experiencing a midlife snafu, was discussed just as much as the other two, though not as often but just as harshly. “She’s so quiet and sneaky about her baby, she must be hidin’ somethin’,” Carlene reported. I was convinced that my secret was safe. Except from Rhoda.
Rhoda was the first to notice when I started showing. “Since you’re already big, you probably won’t get stretch marks,” she told me.
“Well, thanks a lot,” I said.
She chuckled. “Now, you know I didn’t mean anything by that. There’s nothin’ wrong with you bein’ a big woman. I would never make fun of you. You know me better than that, anyway. Besides, nobody’s body is perfect,” Rhoda said with a faraway look on her face.
I had been ashamed of my body most of my life, but I didn’t think that Rhoda was ashamed of hers. She certainly had no reason to be. That’s why I was surprised when we went shopping she never let me join her in dressing rooms when she tried on clothes. This particular day, she decided to bring home a new blouse without trying it on in the boutique at the mall where she had purchased it.
While I was in Rhoda’s kitchen, making milkshakes with Jade, Rhoda went into her bedroom to try on the new blouse. She was taking longer than she should have, so I went to find out why. I had been to Rhoda’s house several times since our reunion. I was still not used to seeing such a showcase. The off-white carpets on every floor were so plush and thick, it felt like walking on air. White carpets. People talked about Rhoda having white carpets on her floor like it was the height of arrogance. The thing that baffled them the most was trying to figure out how she kept white carpets clean. What they didn’t know was that as soon as you entered Rhoda’s front door, you were required to remove your shoes. A huge chandelier bathed her living room with golden light at night, and every piece of furniture in her living room was some shade of white.
Above a fireplace in Rhoda’s sitting room was a huge oil painting of her, her husband, and both of her children. On the mantel and on the walls were additional pictures of her family. Oddly, there were no pictures of Rhoda’s deceased son and her deceased brother. But I knew that Rhoda carried snapshots of them both in her wallet, the same way I had carried around a snapshot of my daddy for so many years.
I paused briefly in Rhoda’s den, the room she used for her childcare purposes. This floor had linoleum and cheaper furniture, as well as the usual childproof items. We hadn’t discussed it yet, but I knew that when my child came, I would leave him or her with Rhoda once I returned to work.
Rhoda’s bedroom door was closed. As soon as I started to open it, she screamed, “Don’t come in here!” But it was too late. “I don’t want you to see me like this,” she sobbed as I entered the room.
“Rhoda, you know it’s—” I stopped in the middle of m
y sentence. I was horrified by what I saw, but I managed to remain calm. Rhoda was naked from the waist up. Gone were the two healthy, firm breasts she had always been so proud of. All she had now were two cruel scars. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Taking quick, tiny steps, I marched across the floor and stopped in front of Rhoda. I stared at her disfigurement in slack-jawed amazement. “I had no idea!” I shrieked.
With her head hanging low, she wrapped her arms around her chest. “It happened right after I had Jade,” Rhoda said in a distant, almost unrecognizable voice.
“What the hell happened?” I asked, my arms waving, my eyes on her flat chest.
Rhoda took a deep breath before she started. “One mornin’ while I was takin’ a shower, I felt a lump in my left breast. I didn’t think it was anything serious so I ignored it. I checked the lump every day for a few weeks, hopin’ it would go away. One day I looked in my medical book and I read about calcium deposits and things like that. I told myself that’s all it was. I didn’t feel my breast again for six months, but by then it was too late.” At this point, Rhoda lowered her voice to a whisper. “Not only was that same lump still there, there…there was another one in my other breast.”
“Can…cancer?” I could hardly get the word out. With all the women I had known, I had never known one with breast cancer. Accidents were one thing. They could have been avoided. So could crimes. But an assault from nature had to be the ultimate crisis.
Rhoda nodded. “Otis made me go to the doctor. But like I said, it was too late. They had to remove both…both of…my breasts.”
I hugged my enigmatic friend. “I am so sorry, Rhoda. I had no idea. Well, did they get all of the, uh, cancer?” The evil word burned my lips like a flame. I had always felt sorry for people who had lost a body part. The fact that Mr. Boatwright had come to us with only one leg had played a huge role in my devotion to him. The pity that I had felt for him had made it that much easier for him to lead me to his bed, like a lamb being led to slaughter.
Rhoda nodded again. “I think so. I haven’t felt anything since.”
“Can’t you get implants or something?”
Her shoulders sagged as she shrugged and groaned. “I tried that. As soon as I healed from the surgery, I had implants inserted. They were fine for about a year. One mornin’ I woke up…and one had ruptured during the night. Once all the saline solution had dripped into my system, my body had a really negative reaction and I almost died.” Rhoda looked at me with the most unbearably sad eyes I had ever seen. The whites of her eyes looked yellow and cloudy and were streaked with blood. Their sparkling, light-green color that I had admired for so many years had darkened by at least two shades. These were things I had not noticed until now. “From that I went to those removable things. After they kept slidin’ in and out of my bra when I least expected it, I gave up on them, too.”
I had to sit down on Rhoda’s bed, massaging my own bosom. “Well, I am sure Otis still loves you, anyway.”
Rhoda joined me on the bed, clutching the new blouse against her chest. Her knee touched mine. “Now you know why I can’t leave him. What man would want me now?”
“But Otis loves you—”
Giving me a sharp look, Rhoda hollered, “What do you know about love? You with your two titties—”
“There’s a lot more to me than titties! And there’s a lot more to you than that, too. Looking good is not all there is to life, Rhoda. Because whether you like it or not, it doesn’t last. And there’s nothing you or anybody else can do about it. The best plastic surgeon in the world can only do so much to make somebody look better.” I laughed. “If I thought otherwise, I’d have spent every one of my paychecks on everything from my face on down to my flat feet.”
Rhoda didn’t laugh. Instead, she gave me a thoughtful look and shrugged. “I never had to worry about the way I looked until…”
“Well, I’ve looked the same way all my life, but I made the best of it. Sure, I was surprised when men found me attractive. I was surprised when you told me I was beautiful. All I ever tried to do was be the best person I could be and people cared about me for that.”
Rhoda smiled and squeezed my hand. “I’ve always cared about you, Annette. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—you are the best friend I’ve ever had.”
“You could be a lot worse off, girl. You are a wonderful mother, a good wife. You have more than a lot of other women will ever have.”
“Except two healthy titties.”
“You stop that!” I hollered, waving my finger in Rhoda’s face. “Be thankful for all the years you did have a nice body. How would you feel if you had to live in this wigwam of blubber for all these years the way I had to? Huh? If I could, I’d slice off these two big balloons on my chest and let you drag them around for a while.”
Rhoda laughed and gave me a mournful look. “Annette, I never wanted you to find out about this. I wanted to keep this a secret for the rest of my life.”
“Girl, with all the gruesome secrets we already share, what’s one more?” I stood up. “Go on and put on that new blouse so we can drink those milkshakes.” I grabbed Rhoda by her arm and pulled her up from the bed.
“I don’t ever want to discuss this again,” she said firmly, sliding her arms into the sleeves of the new blouse.
“We won’t,” I said.
And we never did.
CHAPTER 69
A
month after that tense conversation with Rhoda in her bedroom, I was invited to Florida again. My other half-siblings, Amos and Sondra, were in Florida for Amos’s wedding to a German woman named Helga that he had brought home with him.
It was a bad time for me to be traveling, but I agreed to go anyway regardless of how bad I felt. Some days my morning sickness lasted until noon. My food cravings were so extreme, one night when I had to have some Mexican food, I got out of bed and drove around for two hours trying to find a restaurant that was still open. I had to settle for a bag of Doritos that I purchased at a gas station.
By now I was anxious to meet my other siblings so I was not going to let my pregnancy interfere with my plans. And, my half-brother had insisted on me being there to see him get married.
“Amos said to tell you that this will be a once-in-a-lifetime thing for him. If this marriage don’t work out, he’ll never do it again. So you’d better get yourself down here if you want to see your brother get married, girl,” Lillimae advised me when she called. I was stunned beyond belief when the same invitation to Florida was extended to Muh’Dear and even more stunned when she accepted.
“I done waited too long to be a grandma. I ain’t about to let you get on a plane and go off to a savage jungle like Florida by yourself, Annette,” Muh’Dear told me on our way to the airport.
“I can take care of myself. Don’t you know that by now? I don’t need you watching every move I make, Muh’Dear.”
Muh’Dear shook her head sadly. “If I had been doin’ just that when that evil, slimy snake Boatwright slithered into our lives, you wouldn’t have suffered nary a day of your life at his hands.” Muh’Dear blinked hard, but it was too late for her to hold back her tears.
“But you didn’t and now you can’t. Let’s put that mess behind us, too.” I grabbed Muh’Dear’s wrist and squeezed. “I’m a strong woman. Just like you. I got through that mess with Mr. Boatwright intact. I’m going to get through this pregnancy the same way.”
I was so overwhelmed when I met Amos and Sondra, my brother and my sister, that I couldn’t stop hugging them for the first five minutes. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Muh’Dear looking at the emotional meeting in Lillimae’s living room with a blank expression on her face. Knowing that these were the children that my father had had by the white woman he had left her for, had to be painful for Muh’Dear. But she handled it well. She even hugged them both a little herself.
I had seen pictures of my other siblings, but they didn’t look the same in person. Amos looked like Daddy did when h
e was a young man and he was almost as dark. Like Lillimae, Sondra also looked like me but she was a lot darker than Lillimae.
Right after I’d first met Lillimae, we’d bonded immediately. Things didn’t move that fast with Sondra and Amos. Even though they both seemed happy to meet me, they were somewhat reserved and aloof where I was concerned. When I tried to converse with Amos, he often gave quick, one-word responses and he didn’t ask me a whole lot of questions about myself like I had hoped and expected. “Amos is shy,” Lillimae explained when she got me alone. “He don’t even like to talk to me that much. But him and Sondra both still tryin’ to get used to the idea of havin’ another sister.”
Now, Sondra liked to talk, but when she did it usually wasn’t with me. I overlooked all of that and I accepted her and Amos unconditionally. I was interested in everything either one of them had to say whether it was directed at me or not.
Muh’Dear was not impressed with the house Daddy lived in and couldn’t believe anybody would want to get married in it. Right after the brief ceremony in the living room, she took me aside and started whispering, “This place reminds me of some of them hovels we used to live in before Frank acted a fool and took off with these half-breed kids’ mama.”
“Muh’Dear, please be nice. We came down here to have a good time,” I whispered back.
Daddy was nearby and the way he screwed up his face, for a moment I thought that he’d overheard Muh’Dear’s rude remark. But he sucked on his teeth and shook his finger at Sondra. “Gal, what did you just say?” he asked gruffly.
Sondra repeated a comment that she had just made. “I said, if I ever take a notion to move back to Florida, I’m thinkin’ about passin’.”
Everybody in the room looked at Sondra. I could hear a few snickers. I wasn’t the only one present to gasp. Daddy said what I was thinking.