Black Girls Must Die Exhausted: A Novel for Grown Ups

by Jayne Allen

  Chapter 17

  If on any day I would skip going to Crestmire, today would have been it. But, instead, even though I was hours behind, I was still on the familiar road to Glendale. I went to see Granny Tab on Saturdays because I missed her and it gave us a chance to spend time together. I went every Saturday because of guilt. For everything I didn’t do and everything I couldn’t, this was the one thing I could and did do that lifted the weight off of my shoulders. I felt bad that she had to leave her apartment and live at Crestmire so that others could help take care of her, so I visited. I felt bad that I almost never accepted my dad’s invitation to dinner so that Granny Tab could have all of her grandchildren together, so I visited. I felt bad that I couldn’t tell her to just “move in with me” and solve all of her problems, like she did for me when my mom moved to DC, so, I visited. And today would be another day for my absolution.

  Lexi’s bombshell erased all thoughts of Marc as a traitor from my mind, at least for the short term. Her situation gave me an entirely new point of view about my own. At least Marc only broke up with me. Rob had been living a full-on secret life. I had to pretend for Lexi’s sake that I was shocked, but in reality, I wasn’t. This wasn’t even close to the first time that Rob had cheated, or even for Lexi finding out in an embarrassing way. The first time was in high school. Lexi asked me to come meet her at her house one afternoon, in a panic. I had debate club, so couldn’t get there until 6 pm. When I walked in the door, Lexi whisked me upstairs to her room—her family had one of the few two-story homes in the neighborhood.

  “What do you know about STD’s?” Lexi asked me in a whisper after she closed the door.

  “Uh, just what we learned in Sex Ed, Silly, that you don’t want one!” I said. I was still a virgin then, so to say this conversation was a theoretical one for me would have almost been an understatement.

  “I think I have one. I think Rob gave me something,” Lexi hissed.

  “Oh my God, what?” I asked, moving slightly away from Lexi toward the door, because “something” could have been anything, and at that time, I had zero idea or experience with what you could catch and how you could catch it. I was so naïve at that time, I might have even thought that cold sores came from colds. The hurt registered on her face from my obvious retreat. I felt bad, so I reached out my arm to touch hers. “Whatever it is, I’ll still be your friend,” I said.

  Lexi started to cry. “It’s like, little things, crawling…down there…like little spiders.”

  “You have spiders in your…” I stopped and let my eyes indicate the rest of my sentence. We didn’t really have great words for our genitals then. Mine was still mostly unknown to me even. At that age, I wasn’t using it for much.

  “I think it’s called…crabs…that’s what they look like. And it’s itchy.”

  “So, wait, like right now, you have spiders down there? In your underwear? Won’t they come out?” I asked, trying not to show Lexi my rising panic. “Well, did you ask Rob?”

  “No, I’m afraid to ask him. What if it’s from something else? Then he’ll think I’m gross and break up with me.”

  “Lexi,” I said, looking at her seriously, in my most serious 15-year-old best friend kind of way. “Have you been cheating on Rob?”

  “No way! I haven’t been with anybody but him!”

  “Then it’s his fault! You have to ask him!” I said, wanting to shake her, but not really touch her, because of the spiders.

  “I can’t. Tab, you have to help me.”

  And there it was. Classic Lexi, classic Rob. As it turned out, Lexi did have crabs and Rob did give them to her. He had been creeping with one of the cheerleaders at school who had been creeping with most of the football team. It could have been worse. Lexi dragged me with her to the clinic, where they explained everything and told her that her solution and relief was as close as the nearby drugstore. After that she shaved everything and made it a point to show me her completely bare and spider-free vagina when it was all done. She eventually did ask Rob about it, who lied, of course. She eventually she found a bottle of the same drug store stuff that she used in his room. She told me, but she never confronted him with it. She was afraid that he’d be mad at her for “going through his stuff.”

  All the other times, and there were several, Lexi would find out, Rob would lie, Lexi would find out again because Rob was a terrible liar, Lexi would get mad, Rob would apologize and buy Lexi something and then Lexi would forgive him like nothing ever happened. Once, Rob spent all his money at Zales jewelry store buying Lexi the smallest chip of a diamond the World has ever seen. It might have been as small as the period at the end of a sentence in a book. Tiny. In fact, the gold prongs that held up this chip where the smallest I’ve ever seen, but even they were bigger than that diamond. Still, you would have thought that he had bought her the Star of Africa the way she wore it back then.

  So, to think that my Lexi had thrown her Tiffany’s upgrade and kicked Rob out of the house, I had to smile. Maybe, after all these years, she had developed a backbone. Eh, probably not. If I were placing bets, I would have said he’d be back home in a week. Still, that smile lasted all the way into my parking spot at Crestmire.

  I walked in to find my grandmother sitting in the common area with her feet propped up, watching TV next to Ms. Gretchen. I walked over to them with a big smile and pulled up an empty chair.

  “Hi Two! I’m so happy to see you!” Granny Tab said, with her usual enthusiasm.

  “Hey there Honey!” Ms. Gretchen said, getting up to give me a hug. My grandmother didn’t.

  “Two, I would get up to hug you, but the doctor said I have to keep my feet propped up like this for awhile. My ankles were swollen this morning, he wanted them to go down.” My grandmother tried to make it sound like no big deal, but I felt a pang of alarm in my gut. She was here at Crestmire because of congestive heart failure. Any swelling was a bad sign that things were getting worse, not better as we were hoping.

  “Well you look pretty comfortable to me!” I said with the big smile that I forced across my face.

  Granny Tab laughed. “Well, that I am!” I studied her, looking for any other sign of possible frailty. It was what I worried about all the time. Aging could be cruel and I wanted it to spare my grandmother.

  “Tabitha’s got us sitting here like bumps on a log!” Ms. Gretchen huffed. “Normally, I try to get us to walk around a bit. I do my exercise every day,” she said proudly. “But the Doc says we got to sit, so we’re sittin.”

  “You don’t have to sit, Gretchen,” my grandmother said.

  “Yes I do.” After that, Ms. Gretchen gave no further words. Sometimes they reminded me of Lexi and me. Sometimes best friends don’t need that many words.

  “Guess what? I have a date tonight,” I singsonged to my grandmother and Ms. Gretchen.

  “With who? A new beau?” Granny Tab asked?

  “Nope, with Marc,” I said.

  “Oh boy! I knew he’d come back around!” Granny Tab exclaimed. Ms. Gretchen just sat with her lips pursed, saying nothing.

  “Well, we’ll see. I’m going to at least give him a chance to come around. He’s been making a lot of effort to reach out, so I finally said yes.”

  “Oh, so he finally got his answer to ‘what you’re doing,’ I see,” Ms. Gretchen said.

  “Well Ms. Gretchen, he wore me down.” I sheepishly admitted. I thought about telling them about Dr. Todd, but the fact that I cancelled on him to see Marc tonight was not going to help my case. Granny Tab interrupted my thinking.

  “That’s just how your father was with your mother!” Granny Tab said, excitedly. “I’ll never forget when he started talking about this woman he met at school when he called home. From the first time he saw her, he said ‘Mom, I think I just met my wife.’ And he tried everything to get her to go out with him! But your mother, she was a princess if there
ever was one, and your father, well, he was definitely more of a frog back then!” Granny Tab cracked herself up as she spoke. “My poor baby boy, having a white mom, being down there at Howard University, neither one of us really knew what it meant to be ‘black’ so much. But God bless his heart, your dad kept trying to figure it out!” Granny Tab laughed again. “He would report back about everything that he’d learned about black history and culture dating back to the Egyptians! And the professors he had! I was just fascinated. Who knew that being black was so rich and involved? It was a journey for both of us. But when he met your mom…Two, all that mattered was having a big afro like the cool boys had. And so, when he told me that, I was here, well on Fairfax, trying to read up in the magazines on how to make an afro and how to take care of one and trying to tell him, but I didn’t know! His hair was so different from mine.” Granny reached up to touch her thin grey hair. “Evidently, it was also different from what it was supposed to be to make it look like a Jackson 5 afro too!” We all chuckled. “But that’s what he wanted, so he kept trying. That’s what he thought would make your mom like him. If he had some big afro. But his hair just wouldn’t do it!” Granny Tab’s laughter started to become contagious and Ms. Gretchen and I both cracked up at the thought of it.

  “If his afro didn’t work, Granny Tab, what happened to his hair?” I asked.

  “Oh, Two, it was awful. He had tried to let it grow long, and it wound up looking something like a poodle, I guess. He used hair spray, which was my recommendation, I always used Aqua Net when I wanted my hair to have volume. So, that’s what he used. In retrospect, it was a terrible suggestion!” Granny Tab just erupted in laughter then, cracking herself up to the point of almost doubling over. I imagined my dad using Granny Tab’s Aqua Net to try to move the needle on his appearance of “blackness.” He was already pretty light-skinned, so I guess if visible blackness was a measure of popularity at Howard, he would have failed miserably. Based on what I experienced the times my parents took me back to the University campus for the Homecoming celebration, Howard was a rainbow of black—a representation of the entire diaspora. I always remembered my experience as a lesson on blackness. That it meant not a color, but a culture. So, I guessed that if my dad was having trouble, it had to be hair volume to blame, and probably also his general lack of cool, which he still hadn’t quite managed to fix.

  “So, how did he get my mom to like him? Something must have worked, because here I am!” I said half teasing.

  “And here you are, Two! That’s true. Well, your dad had always been a good student. I required that, no matter what else was going on. So he got a great internship at a bank in New York City the summer after his and your mom’s junior year. Well, coming up on senior year, all the girls started thinking differently, looking less for just afros and paying more attention to what they heard about the guys with bright futures ahead of them.”

  “You mean the ones who were gonna make some money!” Ms. Gretchen said.

  “I reckon so. Two, your father was one of those guys with maybe bad hair, but a brilliant brain underneath!” Granny Tab said proudly. “Once word got out that he was going to be a banker, all the girls started showing up, and your mom was one of them! Of course, she won out, but that was because she was who he wanted in the first place,” Granny Tab said, smiling.

  “Which would be the point that I would make. A man is gonna want who he wants in the first place. Unless he’s an egomaniac or plain crazy.” Ms. Gretchen said. “And a woman wants who she wants too. I met my first husband, Richard, in college.” Ms. Gretchen started telling her story by leaning forward towards Granny Tab and me. “In me and your Grandmother’s time, college wasn’t just a given for women. Women were sent to what they called ‘finishing schools’ where they were taught so-called ‘domestic arts’—how to be a good wife kind of nonsense, because that was going to be all they were ever gonna be. No need to spend money educating a woman who was gonna sit in the house all day—that was common thinking back then.” I heard Ms. Gretchen, but I couldn’t imagine it, so all I could do was shake my head and let her continue. “I was thinking about another kind of job in college—I knew I was going to be a teacher.” Ms. Gretchen said teacher with so much pride, you’d think the word was “President.” “Back then, going to college was a privilege to us, especially if you didn’t come from a wealthy family, so we dressed up for school. On the day I met Richard, I was wearing my pencil skirt, and my cropped cashmere sweater with the butterfly collar. Let me tell you I had the teeny-tinest waist back then, and I loved to show it! Oh, and of course I had my red lipstick on—bright red like a fire hydrant. We’d sit in the student union and smoke cigarettes—now, I quit years ago, but back then, that’s what we did. And I was sitting there between classes, and I saw him and he saw me—and there we were, looking at each other like we were hypnotized! And he came over with his tall and handsome self, finally, and I tried to play it all cool, smoking on my cigarette.” Ms. Gretchen made a gesture to imitate the way she must have been holding her cigarette pulling her hand up and down with the other hand on her hip. I could almost see the girl that she used to be back in those days. “Richard came over to me and I said, maybe you and I should skip the next class and you buy me a Coca Cola.” Ms. Gretchen’s words dripped with sass. “Well, do you know old Richard, well, he was young handsome Richard then, he said, ‘well, I can’t miss class, but I’d very much like to take you to dinner.’ And that was it, he passed my test. He was good in school and good looking too! I let that boy take me to dinner, and then the rest was history.” Ms. Gretchen said with satisfaction.

  “Well, you divorced Richard, Gretchen,” my grandmother said.

  “Yes, Tabitha, I did. But not until I got good and ready to,” Ms. Gretchen said with indignation. “We had some wonderful years together, Richard and I, but at a certain point, you know you’ve gotta call it over when ‘till death do us part’ starts to sound like a plan, rather than a promise. We weren’t gonna make it together. Some people just weren’t meant to fit. And some people, some women do just fine on their own. My life has been fabulous after my weight loss.”

  “What are you talking about Gretchen, as long as I’ve know you, you’ve always been as thin as a rail!” Granny Tab said.

  “I meant my husbands.” Ms. Gretchen said, cutting her eyes back to the television.

  Chapter 18

  My head swirled all the way home as I raced back, behind schedule, to get ready to see Marc. I over-stayed at Crestmire. Hearing old stories from Granny Tab and Ms. Gretchen was a welcome distraction from Lexi’s news and my mounting nervousness and expectations around seeing Marc again. We hadn’t even spoken after the breakup. And the day I had just experienced brought up so many questions for me about love. First, my dad had pursued my mom to the ends of the earth, only to leave her unexplainably for another woman once they were married with a child? It didn’t make sense. And then, there was Lexi, who had been and done everything for Rob to support and encourage him, just like he said at her birthday. Well, he was out cheating on her with some random woman he shopped with. And it wasn’t lost on me that Laila was being a “random woman” in someone else’s family equation. And here I was, trying to hold onto Marc, because of the slim chance he’d have a baby with me before either one of us really wanted to. Maybe Ms. Gretchen had the right idea, to just cut the dead weight and move on. What I really wished for the most was the newsroom script for my own life.

  I would have liked much more clarity about everything before Marc picked me up. But my questions took more that the time available to contemplate. In honor of Ms. Gretchen’s pencil skirt, I wore a form-fitting black halter-neck pencil dress that showed off the tone of my shoulders. Being on television kept me honest about going to the gym and watching my diet. On nights like this, I appreciated cashing in on the extra benefits.

  Marc was exactly on time and sent me a text to let me know that he was downstairs. I
was happier than I expected to be to see his shiny Porsche four-door idling in front of my building. Under the city lights it almost looked like a superhero’s car, capable of anything. Seeing me walk toward him in my stilettos, he pushed open his door to meet me, presumably to walk me to my side. A gust of air greeted me from the inside of the car. He smelled like cologne, not just any cologne, but the one I once told him was my favorite. I smiled softly as he lightly touched the small of my back to guide me into a hug.

  “Hi,” I said, in my throatiest voice. I still didn’t know if I wanted the prize tonight, but I definitely wanted to win the game.

  “You look great,” he said, finally pulling back after lingering a bit in our embrace. It had been weeks since we’d seen each other—since he had broken up with me.

  “Thank you, so do you,” I said, and then I gasped. Marc had ushered me around to the passenger side of the car and opening the door, I saw a bouquet of gorgeous yellow roses sitting on the seat. “Marc! These are for me?”

  He smiled sheepishly. “Yeah, a little corny, but yellow is supposed to mean I’m sorry. And, I miss you,” he said as he brought his body so close to mine that I could feel the heat of his breath, that smelled minty with maybe the slightest hint of cognac underneath. I started to feel enraptured which triggered a feeling of panic in me. Too soon, my mind warned, causing me to step back from him a bit and use my momentum to reposition the flowers and sit in the car.

  “They’re beautiful. I appreciate it Marc, really. Thank you.” I looked him in his eyes as directly as I could, mustering all available resolve to not stand back up and suggest that we skip dinner entirely.

  “Shall we go?” Marc said, taking a deep breath and putting his free hand in his pocket. I nodded. Marc closed the door, took the driver’s seat and set us off to our dinner destination.