Boaz Brown (5 page)

“I knew I was fine
 
before
 
I lost the weight.”

I continued, “Matter of fact, we almost got ourselves killed
 
goin’ up in that club with you to confront that woman he was seeing—like we had guns or something in our purses. Know good and well if that woman had said ‘boo’ we would have both jumped back!”

“Okay, okay, okay,” Peaches gave in. “You’re right. I was hardheaded.
 
But not anymore.
 
Through that experience, I learned to seek out and take heed of wise counsel.”
 

Peaches caught her breath and got back to
 
Deniessa. “So now you’re the one with the issue. What did Jamal say when you told him to hit the road?” Peaches jerked her thumb to one side.

“I didn’t exactly tell him to hit the road, Peaches.”
 
Deniessa
 
wagged her head. “I told him I loved him and I cared about him, but we just couldn’t live together indefinitely. He said, ‘So is this about the M-word again?’ And I told him, yes. Then we went around and around about how old-fashioned marriage is. The whole time I was thinking to myself,
 
If
 
I’d been a bit more old-fashioned to begin with, we probably wouldn’t be in this mess now. I didn’t even respond to his comments, because I was
 
so
 
close to kicking myself for letting him get so much free milk for so long. Besides, I didn’t want to say a whole bunch of things that I might regret later.” Deniessa gave
 
a hopeless grin. “And that’s what happened.”

I sensed her despair, knowing that what she did was right yet unpopular.
 
Knowing that she’d ultimately done the best thing but immediately inconvenienced herself.
 

I didn’t know exactly where
 
Deniessa
 
stood on all the hot dating issues, but I’d cut off sex altogether when I put my foot down on the kind of mess that I would no longer accept in my life. The vow to become celibate seemed overwhelming at first. After years of sexual activity, celibacy felt as if I were giving up womanhood itself.

“I think I can relate to at least part of what you’re going through,” I shared with her. “Peaches, you remember when we first started talking about celibacy? That was what—two or three years ago?”

Peaches nodded. I faced
 
Deniessa. “Girl, I thought I was going to fall out on the floor at the thought of celibacy. I had that booty-call phonebook right in my nightstand. I mean, I had some top performers on standby, okay?”

“Well, I wasn’t getting any to begin with, so it wasn’t a problem for me.” Peaches pursed her lips. We laughed at Peaches as she continued with her testimony. “After I had Eric, I closed up the shop. Twenty hours of labor will do that for
 
ya, you know?”

“Ooh, please, not the twenty hours again,” I begged her.

“I cannot wait until you give birth.” She eyed me. “I am going to record every single hour of it.”

The finale for the evening was dinner, which we made together in the kitchen. We prepared spaghetti, corn, garlic bread, and Peaches’ marvelous Caesar salad. I tried to see what she had going into that salad, but she brought the ingredients in a brown paper bag and refused to let us in on her secret recipe.

“Get back.” She threatened with the tongs.

“I’ve got my eye on you,”
 
Deniessa
 
told her.

“You’re about to have these
 
tongs
 
on you.” Peaches waved them around and turned her back to us again, hunching her shoulders over her corner of counter space.

I don’t know why we tried to eat while we were talking. It was a miracle that none of us choked on anything, as much as we laughed about life and work as black women in turn-of-the-century America.
 
Deniessa
 
told us how she almost got into it with a woman at
 
Walmart.

“So I was in the express line and the sister in front of me has, I know, a good forty items in her basket. This white lady behind me said something about counting items and reading signs, but the sister in front of me thought
 
I’d
 
said it,”
 
Deniessa
 
clarified.

“Next thing I knew, she was like, ‘You got something to say, you need to say it in my face.’ I just kind of smiled and told her that I didn’t have anything to say. The white woman behind me who
 
really
 
said it was as quiet as a mouse. I don’t think she meant for her comment to be heard. If I had told that sister in front of me that it was the white woman behind me who’d said it, it would have been all over in that store.”

“I bet she’ll think about that the next time she’s
 
standin’ behind a black woman in the express line,” I smirked, climbing onto my racial soapbox. “White folks could stay out of a whole lot of trouble if they would just keep their opinions to themselves. They always got somethin’ to say, but when somebody checks them on it, they get scared.”

“That’s true,”
 
Deniessa
 
agreed, “but sister-girl was wrong for having forty items in the checkout lane. You know,
 
we
 
can be pretty bad about following directions sometimes.”

“Girl”—Peaches raised her hand to tell us a tale of woe about her world in human resources—“I was training one of the H-R representatives last week, and we sat down with a brother who didn’t realize he was making almost fifty cents an hour less than his manager told him he would be making. He had worked
 
six months
 
without ever sitting down with his paycheck and a calculator to make sure he was actually making seven twenty-five per hour. I couldn’t believe it. Girl, that’s the first thing I do when I get my printout. I make sure it’s
 
all
 
there!”

“Maybe he just didn’t know how to figure it out,” I said. “You would be surprised what people know and don’t know.”

“But black folks know our money if we don’t know
 
nothin’ else,” Peaches countered me. “He was just being lazy.”

“I’m with Peaches on this one, ‘cause
 
any other black person wouldn’t have even made it out the door without seeing that,”
 
Deniessa
 
said. “I know I wouldn’t have.”

“Well,” I reiterated, “I just know that some of the things we take as common knowledge aren’t common to everybody else. I sit down with parents every day who don’t know how to average their child’s grades. It all boils down to education in America. The system has done a poor job of teaching people what they really need to know.
 
Especially when it comes to educating
 
our
 
kids.”

“Yeah, but some stuff can’t be taught,”
 
Deniessa
 
said. “Nobody should have to
 
tell
 
you to check your check. If you don’t know how to do it, ask somebody. It’s that simple. Well, let me take that back. We
 
are
 
talking about a black man, aren’t we? You know a brother ain’t
 
tryin’ to ask for help.”

“Oh, no, you didn’t go there on the brothers,” Peaches scolded her. “I won’t hear of it!”

“Anyway!
 
You didn’t start with all this until you had Eric. You know you were the main one dogging brothers out until you had a son. Now, all of a sudden, it’s ‘Don’t talk about the brothers.’ Girl, please, I just call it like I see it.”

“I have to recognize”—Peaches took a bite of her breadstick and used the remainder to conduct her words—“Eric is a husband in training. Somebody’s gonna
 
have to put up with him once he leaves my care. I refuse to make him another sister’s burden.”

“What if he doesn’t marry a sister?”
 
Deniessa
 
joked.

Peaches closed her eyes and swallowed the bread in a hurry. I smiled, waiting for what would surely be some outrageous statement. “I wish Eric
 
would
 
bring home a white woman!
 
It wouldn’t be
 
nothin’ but a whole bunch of ugly.
 
No, ma’am, I’m raising Eric to be a black husband to a black wife and be a black father to some little black kids. I want naps on my grandkids’ heads. I’m talking beady- beads.”

“Okay, I don’t know about the beads. But I do second that
 
black
 
thing,” I agreed.

“Speaking of black things, I’ll let you two know the next time the undergrad chapter I sponsor steps at Paul Quinn’s Greek show. It’ll be fun,”
 
Deniessa
 
said by way of invitation.

“Just let me know,” I said.

Chapter 3

Our first place, an apartment, was on the wrong side of the tracks. Well, come to think of it, we were always on the wrong side. But we used to be on the wrong side of the wrong side a long time ago. It was a two-bedroom, one-bathroom deluxe cheap apartment complete with shag carpeting and lime green psychedelic lava lamps in every bedroom. I shared a room with Jonathan, who always got up at the crack of dawn, fooling around with toys or watching cartoons. Other than that, I enjoyed living at the apartment. It was close to my school, and sometimes Momma would take us to the school playground to play on swings that actually had the seats in them. The playground at our apartment complex was always being vandalized by teenagers, most of whom weren’t even residents.

I was happy to see a moving van parked near our building, but Daddy said it was high time we moved when our last set of upstairs neighbors moved in. “I refuse to live right next door to a clan of Mexicans!” he declared.

At the time, I didn’t know what a Mexican was. From the way Daddy talked, I thought Mexicans were bears or something.

“We
 
gon’ have roaches before you know it.” Momma shook her head. “You mark my words! Jon Smith, we better hightail it out of here!” It was one of the few times they openly agreed on something.