ENTREPRENEUR. YOU WILL BE JUST ANOTHER NIGGER.
“Wow,” I said, running my fingers over the card. The words were written so hard that you could feel the imprint of the words across President Peanut’s front teeth. “Is this good or bad?”
My mother looked at me like I was the one who had gone crazy. “Bunny Chaurisse Witherspoon, whose side are you on? That bitch is trying to destroy our family. You see she addressed the card to James and sent it over here, to this house.” My mother nodded her head with something that looked like satisfaction. “If she’s sending mail over
I swear to God that she smiled for the first time in two weeks. “But Mama —”
“Listen to me. That bitch is just jealous, and she wil not be satisfied until she has destroyed everything I have worked for. This is serious now.”
“Mama, it was serious the whole time.”
“Don’t use that tone of voice with me. I am stil your mother.” I regret not turning my eyes away, because she looked in my face and saw that this wasn’t true in the same way that it had been two weeks ago.
“Mama,” I said, “what Daddy did is against the law.”
“Statutory rape is against the law,” my mother said, and softened her tone at my kicked-dog yelp. “Baby, I am not saying this to be hurtful. I am just saying that I could have cal ed the police on Jamal Dixon. You were what, fourteen? But I knew that wasn’t the best way to handle it. Yes, men do things that are il egal, but cal ing the law is not the way to handle private, family business. It’s entrapment, anyway. And she knows it. You know she forced him to marry her. And now she wants to press charges. Crazy heifer.”
“Mama!” I said, no longer using that careful voice you use when talking to babies and alcoholics. “Gwen might not be the only crazy person in the equation. Daddy was with her for almost twenty years. Dana is their kid. Don’t you think he should, I don’t know, suffer?” It wasn’t the right word, it sounded too biblical, but it was al I could come up with.
“I’m the one that’s suffering, Chaurisse.” She walked across the linoleum of the kitchen and dragged the trash can to the corner of the table. Using her forearms, she raked the potatoes into the trash, soiling the sleeves of her sweatshirt. “You and me, we are the only ones that didn’t do anything wrong. We were just living our lives, thinking we were normal people. We are the only people who deserve a say in this.”
“What do you want to happen?”
She tied off the trash liner with a twist tie and sat down in my father’s chair. “I want our life back like it was.”
“Mama,” I said. “You can’t put the rain back in the sky.”
She drew her hand back as if to slap me. I turned my good shoulder to catch the blow, but it never came. My mother took her hand down and held it in front of her face like a mirror. “No, no, no,” she said talking to her hand like it was a smal child in need of a little discipline. “I am not going to let that whore make a barbarian of me. She is not going to take my dignity. I am a wife. I wil act like a wife.”
“Mama, sit down. Do you want your Tylenol PM?”
My mother paced around the kitchen, stil holding her right hand by the wrist like she didn’t trust it to be free. “No,” she said. “You asked me what I want and I told you.”
“I want to move to Massachusetts,” I said.
My mother looked puzzled and I can’t blame her. The impulse came from out of nowhere, but what I wanted more than anything was to be far away from both my parents. “I want a divorce,” I said.
It was too much for me. I should have been preparing for graduation, looking for a white dress to wear under my robe. I told my mother that I wasn’t going to march for commencement and she said, “It doesn’t matter, as long as you get your paper.” We were in deep water, my mother and me. Mama needed help — probably professional help but at least the help of somebody who knew her better than I did. If there was someone else I could have cal ed, I would have. Women on television have friends they can count on. My mother’s favorite TV show was
25
QUIZ SHOW
MISS BUNNY’S BROOCH sat in my mostly empty jewelry box. It was an old-fashioned case, one of the things my mother bought me when she started wishing for her own lost childhood. A tinny version of Fur Elise plinked out when I lifted the lid. I held the brooch in my hand, proof that my father was somehow living two lives at once. Everyone had been in on this scam, even Grandma Bunny, closed up in her casket.
Is it safe to say that we al went a little crazy in May of 1987? It was like our lives turned into a movie — not the blockbusters you have to go to the theater to see but the ones you catch on television in the middle of the night. Once our lives began to seem made for TV, we al started acting like characters. Who could blame us? There were no real life models for our new reality.
For my part, I acted the role of girl detective. I handled the postcard only by its edges, so I wouldn’t get my fingerprints on it. I tricked my mother into taking a double dose of Tylenol PM, so she wouldn’t stir as I eased her keys from a hook and took the car out in the middle of the day.
Nervously scanning the lanes behind me in the rearview mirror, I made my way to the airport.
Uncle Raleigh was sitting in the blue Lincoln, reading a photography magazine when I tapped on the window. He smiled to see me and I could see how old he had gotten in just a few weeks.
“Chaurisse,” he said, unlocking the door, “come and sit with me.”
I opened the door, and sat on the familiar seat. “Hey, Uncle Raleigh.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” he asked.
