Gen imagined her stubbing the cigarette into the ceramic ashtray she’d found in the curio store in Springboro—a scantily clad woman lounging poolside, probably from the 1930s. Fenton agreed to make the purchase to spare Gen the embarrassment, and she’d presented it to Carolyn for her thirty-eighth birthday.
“I’ve regretted it every day,” Carolyn continued.
“The badly part or the ending it part?”
“All of it.”
Gen stood up, ready to bring the conversation to a close. She could almost taste the burn of the Campari she’d need to calm down. An emergency call from Fenton would have almost been easier to handle. At least she would have known what to do.
“I can’t talk about this tonight,” she said.
“Hell, any time would be fine with me. I’m grateful you didn’t hang up or curse me out.”
“When did I ever curse you out?”
Carolyn sighed. “Not once, Gennie.”
“You don’t get to call me that anymore. I have to go.”
“When can we talk again?”
Gen ran a hand through her hair. Should she end it now or end it later? Or should she not end it at all?
“This weekend,” she said after a long pause, and then laid out her stipulations before dropping the receiver into its cradle.
Gen poured Campari and soda water over ice and sank back down onto the gossip bench. The bitter scent hit her nostrils as she lifted the glass. On the message pad she kept there, she scratched out a list of questions with a hand that quivered at first, then became surer as the spicy liqueur did its work:
Why now?
How long would the visit be?
Where would C stay?
Does this mean sex?
Why would I do this?
Ripping off that sheet, Gen started a second list—why she should never let the visit happen.
I’m still not over it.
I’m still hurt.
I don’t trust C.
I can’t draw attention to my private life.
And then she penned a third list, noting why she should agree to the visit, despite all the minuses.
We had 6 years together.
I still think about C.
I’m lonely, damn it.
After underscoring the last line twice, she freshened her drink and brought it to bed.
✥ ✥ ✥
Gen carried the anticipation of Carolyn’s next call with her from class to class, to meetings with students, to the grocery store, to the bank, to coffee with Ruby, and back home. She found herself savoring its arrival like a tart from the Barrington Tea Shoppe—one not to be shared, not even with Fenton. He was so distracted these days anyway, his worries tumbling out of him whenever they spoke, that he might trivialize her news.
Just the thought of talking to Carolyn again made Gen’s skin warm and tingly, her toes curl in her pumps. All because the very evening Carolyn had called, the evening Gen had compiled her pros and cons lists, she had decided she would take Carolyn back in a heartbeat.
She didn’t want to be so easy or predictable. She should make Carolyn work to get her back. But when it came right down to it, Gen had to force herself not to pick up the receiver herself and call earlier than their scheduled appointment.
On Saturday she dusted the gossip bench, straightened the message pad and pen. She changed her clothes twice, even though Carolyn couldn’t see what she was wearing through the long-distance line.
The phone rang twenty minutes early—not like Carolyn, who was more often late. When she heard Juliet’s clear voice on the other end, Gen’s disappointment pinched like a tight belt.
“I wonder if you have any time this weekend to meet for coffee or a drink?” Juliet asked after some small talk. “This damn tenure packet has me wanting to slit my throat.”
Gen smiled, the memory of being overwhelmed by her own application fresh in her mind. Still, the clock read six minutes to two, and she needed to keep the line open.
“Can I call you back later? I’m expecting another call.”
“Oh, sure. And if this weekend’s bad for you, it can wait.”
Guilty at her own abruptness, Gen tacked on a lie that slipped out as easily as if it were true. “My sister’s calling soon. About our father’s health.” Her sister had written to Gen with a brief mention that their father was retiring, and he had suffered a heart attack a few years back; but there’d been no mention of his health in the letter.
“How horrible! Well, I won’t keep you another minute. I’ll be wishing the best for your family.”
Gen got a tumbler of water and repositioned herself at the bench, crossing and uncrossing her legs, trying to find a posture that was natural. The action made her feel ridiculous. All the evenings and weekends she and Carolyn had talked when they were a couple, Gen had never considered how she sat. They spoke so often and so long that a few times Gen had to pay her phone bill in installments.
At two, the phone didn’t ring, and it didn’t ring at 2:10 or 2:15. Gen got up and walked the perimeter of the kitchen once, then a few more times to steady and calm herself. She checked the wall calendar where she’d printed “CAROLYN 2 PM” in Saturday’s block. Had she said two-thirty or three, but written two by mistake?
At 2:17, she wondered if Carolyn had gotten stuck on another call, the way she almost had with Juliet.
At 2:19, she considered that her clock might be running fast.
At 2:22, she downed her water in a long gulp.
At 2:25, she walked to the front door, thinking about throwing on her coat and leaving. If she did ever call, Carolyn would hear the phone ring and ring. At 2:29 Gen decided taking the phone off the hook was better because Carolyn would get a busy signal that said I’m far too busy to talk to you.
But she hesitated, and the wall clock read 2:31 when the phone finally rang. Gen let it squawk several times.
“Oh, thank God I haven’t missed you,” Carolyn said. “I am so, so sorry, Gen. I ran out to get cigarettes but there was an accident in town and all this traffic, and I just got back.”
She held her thought: You needed cigarettes more than you needed to keep an appointment? “It’s fine. I didn’t notice.”
“Phew! I had an image of you fuming over there.”
“I was writing and lost track of time.” She lowered herself onto the bench. “So.”
“So. Here we are.”
The pro and con sheets lay in a neat pile on the bench. Gen lifted the top sheet, the one that ended with I’m lonely, damn it and spotted I don’t trust C on the list underneath it.
“Have you given any thought to what I asked? About coming to see you?”
Gen pushed the lists away, embarrassed how often and how much she’d considered Carolyn’s request.
“I have.”
“And?”
“And I’m not clear about why you want to. All of a sudden.”
Carolyn lit a match. “I understand,” she said. “I was a beast, springing the information on you the way I did. You deserved better.”
“A better breakup?” Gen laughed at the audacity.
“Better treatment.”
“I deserved someone who wasn’t going to leave me.”
“Things weren’t perfect between us—”
“We had our difficulties, I know, but my parents did, too, when I was young, and my father didn’t just up and move to another state.” She didn’t know she still felt these things, or more accurately, that she intended to say them. She had thought this call would go down smooth, like a fine brandy—a heartfelt apology, then a warm reconciliation. She didn’t know, either, that the analogy to her parents, a couple together since the nineteen-teens, would glide out so easily.
“What do your parents have to do with us?”
“I thought we were in it for the long haul. Like them.”
“But they’re married—”
“It doesn’t matter.” Her throat scratched, but she went on. “You had
someone else.”
Carolyn took in a deep, audible breath. “I don’t know how you know, but I won’t lie to you. There was someone. It was brief and unfortunate. I actually knew her before you and I met. She always dazzled me, and it just sort of happened. It was a huge mistake. One I’ll regret for a very long time.”
And there it was—the infidelity Gen had wondered about. She had hoped she was wrong, that Carolyn would hasten to deny it.
“Patricia Ormond.” Gen didn’t mean to speak the name out loud, but it escaped on its own. The year before, when she arrived at Carolyn’s for Thanksgiving break, an unfamiliar Chevy with Maryland plates had occupied the carport. When Carolyn helped Gen carry in her weekend case, she had whispered in a rush, “Don’t be mad, but my friend Pat from grad school came to town unexpectedly with her fiancé. She doesn’t know about us.”
That stung like a slap. “We’ve never had to hide here,” Gen pointed out.
Carolyn colored and added mischievously, “We’ll still have plenty of time together, late at night.” Despite Gen’s annoyance and disappointment, they had an enjoyable holiday with Patricia and her fiancé. Gen thought she remembered his name as Ken or Kirk, something crisp and monosyllabic. She hadn’t given Patricia another thought until Carolyn announced the move to Towson.
Now, Carolyn’s “I’m sorry” confirmed Gen’s suspicion.
“So, what? She ended it, and now you’re alone again and you want to come back?” Gen couldn’t keep the bitter edge out of her tone. “And then when you’re dazzled by someone else, you’ll do it all again.”
“I understand that you can’t trust me right now,” Carolyn said in a measured voice. “I get it. But we had almost six years together in which I was completely faithful. I swear it, Gen. I had lots of opportunities in Richmond, women I met when you weren’t in town, but I never, ever did anything about them. I didn’t want to! I don’t know what happened with Patty—with her. It was like being caught in a riptide.”
An image flashed into Gen’s mind of Carolyn bobbing in a swirling current of water off Rehoboth Beach.
“And I want you to know that she didn’t end it. I did.”
“Did she lose her dazzle?”
“I’m sorry I used that word,” Carolyn said. “I think the whole thing was more about me, anyway. That probably sounds ridiculous.” She struck a second match, then a third and fourth in quick succession. Gen pictured the matches going out one by one as Carolyn struggled to steady her hand.
“It’s too hard to explain on the phone,” Carolyn said, defeat heavy in her voice. “There are things—I thought if I could see you, maybe that would help, but I’ve made such a mess of everything, I understand if you don’t want to.”
Gen smoothed her lists, which she had folded and refolded into squares without even realizing what she’d done. She’d been so sure she would take Carolyn back, but now her resolve wavered.
“There’s too much going on right now,” she said. “I’ll make a decision after the Southern.”
Chapter Eleven
Gen
The NAACP meeting took place in the assembly hall of Grace AME Church. The modest red-brick building hovered at the edge of a clump of businesses and shotgun houses in the Negro neighborhood of Slocum Point. Some white folks called it Colored Town. The church’s elderly pastor no longer served as the chapter president, but he still volunteered his space, a long, skinny room that had assumed a shabby air since Gen was last there six years back. The walls wore a thin film of gray dust, and some of the venetian blinds were missing slats. But as Gen waited in a long entry line with mostly Negroes and a handful of white people, she noted the cracked linoleum floor that sparkled as if someone had scrubbed it to a high gloss that very day.
With pen poised to check off the attendees, Mae Johnson, the chapter secretary, greeted Gen warmly. “You’ll have to remind me of your name,” she added. Mae’s tightly waved hair was the same hairstyle Gen remembered, but the strands of white were new.
“I’m probably not on there. I’ve been remiss with my dues.” She reached into her wallet for a dollar bill, which she handed to Mae.
“It’s two dollars now,” Mae said.
Gen muttered an apology. She had stopped paying her dues while she was working on tenure, when Virginia ordered the NAACP to file its membership lists with the state—a technique used by Southern states to intimidate the organization and its members. Gen drew out another dollar and apologized again for not keeping up.
When she heard Gen’s name, Mae’s face tensed, assuming an I remember you look, and the air between them cooled. Two years back, as part of a wave of integration efforts, the NAACP chapter had backed an effort by Mae’s daughter, a straight-A student, to gain admission to Baines, the closest four-year college. When Frank Johnson, Mae’s husband and the chapter president, wrote to Gen to ask for an amicus letter on his daughter’s behalf, Gen had disposed of his note without replying. Her action had shamed her and nagged at her conscience, but she had not wanted to risk an association with a legal case like theirs in the middle of her push for tenure. To Mae and Frank, though, her silence surely looked like garden-variety bigotry.
The Johnson girl lost her case when the college administration successfully argued that her enrollment would require a rewriting of the school charter, which stated that Baines was founded for Christian white women.
Now, Gen was desperate to ease the tension. “Mrs. Johnson, I never got to tell you how sorry I was about the outcome for your daughter at Baines. She was more than qualified.”
Mae nodded stiffly.
“I hope she landed somewhere she can use her talents.”
Mae took in a stoic breath. “Bennett’s a good school, but she’s all the way off in Greensboro. I don’t see her but a few times a semester.”
“Let’s hope Baines will be more forward-thinking someday.”
“Someday won’t be time enough for my girls.” Mae glanced past Gen to the next woman in line.
Guilt rushed through her, and Gen fished in her purse for an extra three dollars—what would normally pay for a week’s gas. Mae took the bills without looking at her and stuffed them into the metal cash box with a respectful “much obliged.”
After the uncomfortable moment with Mae, Gen felt too embarrassed to speak to Frank Johnson directly, but she caught his eye and smiled. A compact, light-skinned man, Frank, like his wife, looked older and more drawn with the passage of time. Gen didn’t remember him wearing wire-framed glasses, which gave him a scholarly air. She and Frank had enjoyed several lively conversations about integration in the past, and just before she stopped attending meetings, they’d graduated to a first-name basis. This evening, he nodded at her in courteous recognition but then turned his back and continued talking to the group of men that circled him.
The lengthy agenda included everything from updates about school integration efforts to routine reports from the Church Work Committee and the Women’s Committee, which reminded Gen of a history department meeting. When Frank opened the floor to new business, a young man at the other side of the hall spoke up, and the meeting heated up.
“Mr. Johnson, no disrespect, but the sit-in at Darnell’s lunch counter me and Theo proposed didn’t make the agenda. You told us last time it would.”
Frank pressed his lips together. “We can talk about it now if you want, Marcus, Theo.”
The pastor cut in before the young men could respond. “No need for that, Frank. I can tell you right now that a sit-in is not a strategy this board wants to pursue.”
“Why’s that, Reverend?”
“We can’t invite violence against our members,” the pastor continued. “We can’t support our folks going to jail. You see what just happened to Dr. King.”
“We’re not talking violence. But sometimes you got to take risks to get results. Dr. King knows it. Y’all know it.”
“You might not be talking violence, but you could get your head bashed in just the same.”<
br />
Marcus shook his head, and a hush descended over the room. After a pause, Frank interrupted the silence. “Marcus, we appreciate you and your desire to shake things up. We wish change would come more quickly, too. On the matter of the lunch counters, however, the strategy that the national association advocates seems like the safest strategy.”
The younger people in the hall groaned audibly.
“Now just wait, y’all. Boycotts have been successful. We’ve passed out fliers in the neighborhood asking folks to boycott Darnell’s and Woolworth’s and volunteer to picket if they can.”
“Yeah, my mama got hers,” Marcus said. “But seriously, Mr. Johnson? You talk a good game about change, but how you gonna get change if you don’t demand it?”
“Not with all deliberate speed, that’s for sure,” the young man next to him quipped. Gen recognized the phrase immediately as the Supreme Court’s vague directive when the Brown decision ordered the states to integrate their schools.
“Change ain’t coming to us on a silver platter,” Marcus continued. “And you wonder why young folks like us are heading over to SNCC.”
With that, Marcus said something to the other young men, and they rose and left en masse. The chapter had not experienced rifts in strategy when Gen attended meetings before. There had been peaceful agreement on all the major issues. She wondered if the younger members like Marcus were students or recent graduates from the Negro school, Lincoln Junior College. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, founded the previous spring, advocated lunch counter sit-ins and other direct actions.
A wave of grumbling traveled up and down the rows of chairs. Frank maintained order with a gavel. “Don’t you mind those young folks, Mr. Johnson,” a woman called out. “Some young folks be the death of us all. You just keep doing what you’re doing.”
“Mrs. Combs, those young men are our future. There’s room for everyone in the movement.”
The name Combs sounded familiar to Gen. She thought that had been the name of the man caught with Mark Patton.
The final bit of business was the presidential election.
“I’ve asked some of our white members to act as escorts if they can. They did a wonderful job in the first weeks of school, transporting our children safely, and they have contributed mightily to helping register folks to vote.” Frank gestured to several white men sitting at the side of the hall.
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