Bianca really wanted to talk to her mother and tell her everything, but she couldn’t. Instead, after she got the lump out of her throat, all Bianca could manage to say was, “Ma, I’m sor—”
But before Bianca could even get the words out, Ella had put her hand up to silence her. “I don’t want to fucking hear it. You are a fucking disgrace to me. You silly little dumbass girl, fucking your life up!” she said with such disdain, as if Bianca were the hugest disappointment in the world. Ella took a look over her as if she were trash. She then shook her head and walked away.
Her mother’s words cut her like a sharp knife. The pain of the cut hurt her feelings so badly that all she could do was tiptoe down the hall to her room, thinking about what she could’ve done differently so that she wouldn’t be in this situation, which only brought tears to her eyes. She began to read her Bible, but that didn’t stop them from coming, and she cried herself to sleep.
“Wake the fuck up!” She was startled awake by her mother’s stern voice. “I said get the fuck up, girl.”
Still half asleep, Bianca jackknifed up in the bed.
“It’s shit everywhere down in that got-damn basement. I mean everywhere. Get your fast ass up and go down there and make yo’ hot ass useful and clean that shit up, now! Right the fuck now!”
Bianca took a deep breath, pulled herself together, and headed to the basement to deal with the backed-up raw sewage that was due to the years of bad plumbing in the house. She tied a pair of tights around her face so that the smell wouldn’t be so pungent as she began to clean it.
The night came and went, and she still felt like she hadn’t put a dent into the swamp that filled the basement floors. It took two days to get the water up, and a whole other day just to shovel the shit up. Then it took another two more days of bleaching and sanitizing the entire basement, from top to bottom, walls and all. Bianca’s poor body was so sore and her bones hurt so bad from all the hard labor that she was forced to do with no help that she secretly hoped that she would miscarry, but that didn’t happen.
Finally, the hour came when everything was done, and it was clean and smelling like new money mixed with Fabuloso. She hoped that the Grade-A job she had done on getting the basement back intact would make her mother proud. With all her might, she raced up the stairs, hoping that when her mother saw how spic and span it was, it would take some of the tension off of the uncomfortable situation.
Before she could get to the top of the stairs, she heard laughter coming from the kitchen. By the time she walked through the basement door, she could hear her mother, her grandmother, and her Uncle Peanut’s wife, Jackie.
“Welcome to McDonald’s! May I take your order, please?” Grandma Williams mimicked Bianca’s voice to the other ladies sitting around the kitchen table. “Yup, that’s gon’ be what Ms. High Yella Bianca gon’ be saying.” Holding her corpulent rolls round her middle, she fell into laughter, and the other ladies followed suit.
Though those were the words Bianca swore she’d never have to say a day in her life, at this moment, her fate wasn’t looking good. Now that she had turned up pregnant at fourteen years old, the people she knew, including family, had already put the words in her mouth and had her marked for failure. They’d written her off as a typical teen mother who wouldn’t amount to anything. They’d just given her a death sentence as far as making anything of her life.
“Fries with that?” another added to the cruel joke. It was Uncle Peanut’s wife’s voice, using a falsetto to imitate Bianca.
“Combo meal, or just the sandwich?” The ladies continued with their mean, sinister remarks. It was as though they were taking great pleasure in knowing that she was going to suffer and feel the full ball of scorn that they had gone through as young mothers.
Bianca shook her head in disbelief. She couldn’t believe how they really had her dropping fries at McDonald’s for the rest of her life. Even though she’d been an honor roll student and had even skipped third grade because she was so far advanced, with a baby in her belly now, no one saw her graduating high school, let alone going to college. Let them tell it, her life was over. Her life as she knew it was over—that much she knew—but something inside of her made a strong resolve. She wasn’t going to let this baby’s birth destroy her dreams.
It truly pained Bianca for the dreams of being the smartest and most successful one in the family to be ripped away. They hadn’t necessarily been her dreams, though. They had been more like her mother’s. Bianca’s mother talked about the girl so much that people who didn’t know any better would think Bianca was her only child, even though she had an older daughter, Bella. Her mother was living her own aborted dreams through her. Over the years, no matter how much Bianca’s mother would praise her youngest daughter, there had always been that one person in the background
