“Did you eat anything today at all?”
“I had a hot dog at the movie.”
“Great nutrition there. Why don’t you let me fix you a plate, warm it up, and you can eat when you get out of the shower?”
“Mom!” She spins around. “Would you stop hovering? God! You’re driving me crazy. Why don’t you get a life?”
I’m stung too deeply to be able to hide it. The whole day comes crashing back on me and I have to blink hard to avoid letting any tears fall. Which makes me even more pathetic and victimish and I stand up and go to the kitchen. “Fine.”
“Mom,” she says behind me, but I keep walking. Yank open the greenhouse door, head for the back corner, fling open the lid over the potting soil, and stick my hands into the black earth. It’s cool and smells of possibilities. I stand there, smarting, letting the heat drain through my hands.
She follows me, puts her arms around me from behind, her head on my neck. “I’m sorry,” she says, and I can hear tears in her voice. “That was just evil. I know you’re sad, and I’m sorry and I can’t fix it and I’m just too mad at Dad to be able to deal with him right now, okay?”
“I know.” I stare at the black dirt beneath my hands, smell the rich, damp humusy scent. Annie smells of herbal shampoo and popcorn, and her slim body, her hair on my cheek, eases some deep tension in me.
Quietly, I say, “I miss you.”
“I’m growing up. I’m sorry. It just happens.”
“I’m not sorry you’re growing up, but you are going to be leaving home for school next year and then things will really be different for both of us. Let’s make a deal, all right? I would really like to have one sit-down meal every week with you. I’d like to just have this last bit of time when you’re still a kid in my house, all right?”
She squeezes me. “Okay. And I owe you a dinner, too, for not getting mad at me over the Denver thing.”
“Yes, you do.”
“How about tomorrow night? The Black-Eyed Pea?”
I chuckle. “Where grown-ups go for dinner?”
“Yeah. So you can have something wicked. And I can have some banana pudding.”
“It’s a deal.”
She lets me go and I turn around to face her. She’s so beautiful, my little girl, with her clear skin and clear eyes and soft rose of a mouth. “Sorry I keep hovering,” I say. “I’ll put the chicken in the fridge and you can have some later if you’re hungry.”
“I just might.”
When she goes up to shower, I decide I might as well be productive. No one will be here to complain if I play classical music—loudly—on the living room stereo, if I pull out the couches and tables and cover them with black trash bags torn open along the seam. I carry in a big pile of newspapers, arrange the furniture, set the bowl of chocolate bars in front of the door, and put on some old, ugly clothes for painting. I’ll be a bag lady for the trick-or-treaters.
And paint the wall. To the sound of the Gipsy Kings. I’ll dream of Seville. And maybe even allow a little fantasy of Angel Santiago’s smooth skin.
As I’m putting the newspapers down, the phone rings. Hope sails up through me, light and clear, into my throat, and I’m reaching for it in relief before I remember. He was standing there, holding hands with a woman who is … whatever. Not me. I look at the caller ID and it’s Rick, so I let it ring. When it quits, I check for a message, but he hasn’t left one.
“Time to move on, Trudy, my dear,” I say aloud, and spread the newspapers.
SHANNELLE’S WRITING WALL
All day you wait for the time you can get at the paintings again because that is the high spot— in a way it is what you do the other things for … The painting is like a thread that runs through all the reasons, all the other things that make one’s life.
GEORGIA O’KEEFFE
18
SHANNELLE
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT: frustrated!!!
Hi, Naomi. It’s past eleven and I really should go to bed, but I’m just so mad at my husband that I’m absolutely not going to do it. This is a whiny post, so you can skip it and read it later if you want, but I just need to vent to someone.
It’s Halloween, right? I am really a freak about holidays, because my mother just never did that much. (It’s not her fault—she worked all the time because of my dad’s bad back—she just didn’t have any energy left over. My dad, sad to say, is the loser, not my mom.) Anyway, I made the boys each a costume, and we had a party this afternoon with their friends and some of Tony’s nieces and nephews. I baked a cake with gummy worms crawling out of a dirt graveyard with little tombstones and everything. (It was SO cute! You make the dirt with crushed Oreos.) I cooked a big supper for everybody, and then we went out trick-or-treating, and Tony helped me clean up the kitchen, and then he wanted to have sex (and it’s not like I mind that—LOL!) so I did and then I wanted to get up and come in here and write for a while. I mean, I was dying for it. I saw Angel and Trudy talking outside today, and it gave me so many ideas for the book that I just wanted to come in here and write.
And Tony got mad at me. He’s so jealous of the writing, and I just don’t get it! He keeps saying we have so much, that it’s selfish of me to want more. He says I’m just going to get my heart broken. He says if I loved him, I wouldn’t want to get up and write all night long, but that I’d want to lie there with him.
ARRGGGH! It’s not fair, and usually I give in because he’s right—we do have a great life, and I’m really lucky to have such a steady, loving husband who is so good to his kids and takes care of business. But I just feel like if I give so much to them, it doesn’t hurt anything for me to have something that’s mine. I didn’t do all that stuff for Halloween to earn my time at the computer or anything like that. I love doing it. It makes me happy to make a homey world for my kids and for me. I’m good at it.
But now it’s nearly midnight and if I want to write for an hour or two, what does it hurt? So what if I get my heart broken? It’s my heart and I can do whatever I want with it. Maybe he’s right and people like us don’t do things like publish books, and no matter how hard I try I’ll never make it. I know the odds are against me.
I have to try anyway. I have to give it everything I have so that when I’m eighty and sitting in my backyard, thinking about what I did and why, I can say I did my best.
Thanks for listening. I’m NOT going to bed now. I’m going to write some pages. I have 63 already!! My neighbor loaned me a CD of an eighteenth-century composer after I heard a little bit of it yesterday, and the soundtrack is perfect.
Shannelle, putting on headphones
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT: re: frustrated!!
did you fill out the form for the writer’s retreat? it’s a miracle you write as much as you do, and i think you might be amazed what’d come out of you if you had time on your own. just a little bit. it’s not that much to ask of your family.
keep fighting for your right to do the work. you deserve it.
love,
naomi
Thanksgiving
KUAN YIN
Kuan Yin, Mother of Compassion in ancient Chinese culture, blows gently into your life, and should be welcomed as an eternal source of comfort and peace. Kuan Yin’s values are about co-operation, sharing, balance, harmony and partnership; she is highly sensitive and aware.
Kuan Yin is light and weightless—the qualities that result from highly tuned vales of tolerance and acceptance.
—www.goddess.com.au
WOMEN IN BOXING
January 1975: EVA SHAIN wrote a letter to New York State Athletic Commission Chairman Edwin B. Dooley and asked to be granted permission to judge pro fights. A week later, he wrote back and said that he would give her a hearing. SHAIN entered the hearing room on Jan. 6, 1975, and found out the next day that she had a unanimous vote to be a jud
ge. Her first professional fight that she judged on was on the eve of Thanksgiving in 1975. Two years later, Sept. 29, 1977, she was at ringside in Madison Square Garden judging her first world championship bout with Muhammad Ali vs. Earnie Shavers. SHAIN WAS THE FIRST FEMALE JUDGE TO WORK A WORLD HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE BOUT. It was also the first time a woman judge worked a professional fight at New York’s Madison Square Garden. SHAIN earned a place in the Guinness Book of Sports Records and eventually became the subject of a Trivial Pursuit question. Eva Shain lost her battle with cancer in August of 1999.
19
JADE
Sunday, I go to church with Grandmama. She was going to stay in bed, but I made her get up and put on her clothes, protesting all the way. It does her some good to be there. Her hands are still shaky, and she makes me take her right back home after to avoid the well-meaning press of folks coming to surround her. In the car, she pats my hand. “Thank you, baby. I just can’t tolerate another minute of noise.”
After lunch of some ham and beans, which she picks at, she puts on her slacks, and a kerchief over her head, rolls up her sleeves. She’s working on some boxes she had me carry up out of the basement. Pictures, baby clothes, old books. Everything you can think of. I sit with her for a while before my appointment with Rueben, just looking through all of the stuff. “You think your mama would want this?” Roberta asks, holding up a fifties-style apron. “Or should it go to Goodwill?”
“Goodwill. Why in the world would you store something like that, Grandmama?”
She grunts, bending over the box again. “Waste not, want not.”
There are hundreds of photographs. She instructs me to sort them according to the family involved. Those of her and Grandpa and either of their families or when the children were younger go into one box. Individual shots of particular children and their spouses and kids go into another. I’m doing okay until I come across one of me and Mama and my daddy. My real daddy.
“Lord, they’re young,” I say.
“Mmm-hmmm. We all were, child.”
Mama is about twenty-two, slim and beautiful and mocha-skinned, her good hair falling in loose curls to her shoulders. Next to her, my daddy is as tall and slim as a pine. His shoulders are still hangerlike over his skinny chest. He’s handsome, with long blond hair and wire-frame glasses. He’s got one arm around my mama, and me on his hip. I’m still a baby, fat and laughing, with a bunch of barrettes in my braided hair.
He lives in Seattle now. I saw him last year for about two hours, when he came to Sacramento for a conference. We had dinner, he and I alone since Dante begged off. He’s still skinny and still wears a form of the wire-frame glasses, but the hair is going fast. He’s quite well-to-do, a fact that showed in a million casual details. His expensive shoes, worn with jeans. The cut of his shirt. The painful cleanliness of his hands.
I toss the picture in the box for my mother. I must have made some sound, because Grandmama says, “Why you still mad at him all these years later, girl? People can’t be forgiven?”
“I’m not mad at him. I just don’t care.”
“Is that right?”
I shrug, look at the clock. “I’ve gotta get to the gym.”
“You got enough to be mad about without putting your daddy in the mix, Jade Kingman.” Her grief-worn face turns toward me. God, she’s aged a decade in the past week. “Life is long. You might as well learn now to put down whatever doesn’t do you any good.”
“I’m not mad at him, Grandmama,” I say, leaning over to kiss her head. “Just seems to me that there aren’t a whole lot of good men in the world.”
“You’ll find one, baby. I promise.”
“I’m not looking.”
“Mmm-hmmm,” she says, like she knows everything.
There’s no answer to that sound. “Why don’t you take a little nap, and we’ll do some more of this when I get back?”
The way she sighs tells me everything. “Maybe I just will. Help me up.”
I haul her to her feet. “You know, I’m not sure why you’re tackling this big project right now. Why don’t you give yourself a little time?”
She looks at the boxes. “No, I got to get it done.”
And for a minute, I’m scared. Scared that she’s going to go too fast, wanting to follow my grandpa to the grave. “All right,” I say gently. “But at least get some rest right now. I’ll take you out to supper later, how’s that? Country Kitchen?” She likes the country-style food there, and a young blond waitress named Shelly.
“We’ll see.” She pats my arm. “You go on, now. No sense wasting your youth on an old woman.”
* * *
The gym is crowded. I’m pleased to see a few other women there. A teenager who is with what looks to be her older brother, a tough, wiry-looking blonde who lifts her chin in greeting, and a Spanish or maybe Indian girl with a tattoo on her arm who only watches me cross the gym with flat, cold eyes. I meet her gaze straight: You don’t scare me.
She punches her gloves together. Sneers. “Pretty girl.”
I raise a brow. I seriously doubt we’d be in the same weight class, though it’s hard to judge. She has one of those low, square torsos. Sweats too baggy to make out if she has the sturdy legs that often go with it, but I’m betting she does.
“Jade.” Rueben is in the same dark corner he was in before. I cross over to him, ignoring the woman, though when I pull off my sweatshirt, I hope she’s seeing the hard muscles in my shoulders and arms.
I’m shy, suddenly, with Rueben. He’s not unfriendly, just matter-of-fact as he puts me through some tests and paces, asks me to show him my jabs and punches. I can see they’re not great, and ask him to let me do it again. “I’m a little tense.”
He steadies the bag and nods. I take a breath, try to forget about the rest of the room, find my center, that middle place where the power comes from, and swing. The sound of glove to bag is loud enough the guy next to us turns to look. “Good,” Rueben says. “Again.”
I think of my father. Hard hook. Bam. Another, and a combination. Bam, bam.
A ripple goes through my shoulders, slides down my spine. My hips loosen, and all of a sudden it’s not about anything but this. Just the thrill of hitting so hard, the way it makes my body feel. The energy wells like a ball of blue-white electricity. I can almost see it rolling from my hips, through my torso, into my arms. I swing my left cross.
Bam!
Rueben stumbles as the force of it hits the bag and knocks him sideways. As I gather the energy for another one, he holds up his hand, a quirky little smile on his mouth. “Damn,” he says, raising his eyebrows.
I drop my arms. Lick some sweat off my upper lip. Wait.
“Shee, sister,” says the guy next to us. “I’d hate to be your old man.” He means it as a compliment. I acknowledge it with a glance.
Rueben still has said nothing. He’s got the bag against his body, and his eyes are narrowed. The angle of his arm shows one bicep as big as my thigh. “Where’d you learn to hit like that?”
“I told you, I started with kickboxing and just liked how it felt, so I started some training in Sacramento.” A loose piece of hair falls in my eye and I toss it out. Tell the truth. “I didn’t know I could hit like that until somebody attacked me one night. He grabbed me and I hit him and I knocked him out.”
“Is that who you’re mad at?”
“I’m mad at a lot of people. But I’m not thinking of them when I swing a punch. It makes me hold back.”
He likes this answer. “What are you thinking?”
I shrug. Around us is the sound of someone jumping rope, the staccato slap of the speed bag, a coach hoarsely haranguing a boxer sparring. “Nothing. Just feeling it.” I’m almost holding my breath, I want him to train me so badly.
“All right.” He lets the bag go and gestures for me to follow him. We go down a narrow hallway. He fills the passage almost completely. I try not to notice his body, but it’s been so long since I had sex that for one sec
ond, my evil imagination gives me a clear image of that long back and fine ass completely naked. I squeeze my eyes shut to block it. Inappropriate.
We turn into a small office, with lots of sunlight streaming in from the south. There are a couple of green metal desks, pictures of boxers on the walls. He opens a cabinet and takes out a key attached to a ring with a number on it—14. “This is your locker key. Women’s locker room is to the left as you come in. It’s small, but there’s showers and lockers. Enough.”
I nod, clutch the key in my palm.
He sprawls in an old-style office chair, his long legs out in front of him, his big hands crossed on his rock-hard belly. I do not allow the vision of nakedness to rise.
So to speak.
He’s dead serious when he says, “You got some talent, Jade. Haven’t seen a woman hit that hard, not ever. You can train and you can get in the ring, but I need to be sure you know what you’re doing.”
“I—”
He stops me with an upheld hand. “Let me finish. You’re a beautiful woman, which isn’t a come-on. It’s a fact. You could get that nose broken, those cheekbones smashed.” He cocks a thumb toward the gym. “Chantall, the woman in there baiting you, would consider it her duty, and she’s not alone.”
Not sure where this is going, I nod.
“At some point, you’re gonna feel the choice in you: pretty or strong. I want you to know they’re both cool with me. I’ll train you and I can make a boxer out of you, but you’re gonna have to work your ass off, and you’re gonna hate me some days.”
“That’s okay! I—”
That hand again. This time, it comes with a smile that is both sexy and kind. “Baby, I know it all, okay? Just want you to know there’s no shame, ever, in deciding this isn’t what you really want. Capisce?”
The Goddesses of Kitchen Avenue: A Novel Page 12