God Still Don't Like Ugly (5 page)

People know what you are when they look at you and they treat you as such. You don’t give out no surprises.”

“I’ve had my share of abuse because of the way I look, too,” I said thoughtfully.

“But if you could change the way you look, knowin’ what you know now, would you?”

I smiled. “I don’t think so. Every person I’ve ever known has experienced some pain about one thing or another.”

Lillimae nodded and shrugged. We remained silent for a moment, but the crickets and other night creatures sounded like they had a symphony going on outside. The small window above the kitchen sink was open by a few inches. A moth that couldn’t make up its mind repeatedly flew in and out. I heard an old car rattle past the house before it backfired. The loud bang made us both jump.

Lillimae shut the window and returned to her seat with a groan.

She had braided her hair and pinned it up on her head. Traces of face cream made her look even whiter under the glow of the weak lightbulb in the kitchen.

“Annette, I know you missed your daddy when you was growin’ up, 32

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but it sounds like you still managed to enjoy life. Didn’t your mama ever have any men friends livin’ in the house with y’all before she married your stepdaddy?”

It took me a moment to respond. “Just one,” I said stiffly, my eyes on the floor.

“Well, I hope he took up the slack that Daddy left behind.” Lillimae sniffed. “Was that man in the Church?”

“Uh-huh.” I cleared my throat and rubbed both my eyes. “But he wasn’t the kind of man I wanted to replace Daddy.”

“Regardless, a man was there to keep y’all company. My mother-in-law always tellin’ me that a piece of a man is better than no man at all.

She can’t wait for me to take that half-ass son of hers back so he can stop crampin’ her style. Every time I turn over in that big bed by myself, I know what she means. Bein’ alone ought to be a sin. If that man was willin’ to stay in the house with your mama, especially you bein’

by another man, that was a double blessin’. Wasn’t it?”

It took me a moment to respond. “Something like that,” I said vaguely. Yawning and stretching my arms, I rose and headed out of the kitchen.

I didn’t sleep much that night and when I did, Mr. Boatwright’s face dominated my dreams.

It was like he was still raping me.

CHAPTER 9

Iwas glad Daddy got up early the next morning to go fishing. It was a ritual that he had started before I was born. I was surprised that he didn’t want to spend as much time with me as possible. But in a way, I was glad to have the space I needed to sort out my feelings. As happy as I was to be in the same house with him, I was still uncomfortable.

Surprisingly, I felt particularly at ease alone with Lillimae. Her looking so much like me helped.

Lillimae and I ate a huge breakfast of grits and bacon before we re-treated to the front porch glider. Still in our bathrobes, we sat fanning our faces with old magazines as we watched one noisy, beat-up old car after another crawl down the street.

The sun had already started its assault. The people in the houses on both sides of us had come out on their porches trying to cool off.

The same old man I had seen watering his lawn when I’d arrived was watering that same lawn again.

I was glad that my half-sister was the type who liked to talk. She seemed to enjoy telling me about how proud she was of Daddy and how he had raised her and her two siblings alone.

“We didn’t give Daddy half the trouble a lot of kids give their folks.

Oh, our baby sister Sondra was a little on the wild side durin’ her teen years. She got pregnant when she was fourteen, but she couldn’t stop 34

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dancin’ up in the clubs long enough to carry the baby to full term.

She settled down after her miscarriage long enough to finish school and join the army. Our brother Amos, he fooled around with some of them drug dealers and gangs, but he came to his senses after somebody shot at him on the street one night. I was glad when he joined the army, too.”

“Do you miss not having a relationship with your mama’s family?” I asked.

A weak smile crossed Lillimae’s face. She sniffed and nodded.

“Somebody pointed out my mama’s mama to me one day when I was eleven. She was workin’ the cotton-candy stand at a carnival. I went up to her and introduced myself.”

“What did she say?”

“She didn’t have to say anything for me to know where I stood with her. She hawked a wad of spit as big as a walnut in my face. Me, her first granddaughter. I heard she treats the other two daughters my mama had with her white husband like queens.”

Just then, a noisy, dusty blue Chevy, dented in the front, a red door on the driver’s side, crawled around the corner and stopped in front of Lillimae’s house. A young white woman, glancing around nervously, kept the motor running as she rolled down her window.

Lillimae gasped. “That’s my uncle’s wife. That’s Roxanne. The one I told you about.” She clutched my arm. Her knee started shaking against mine as she rose from her seat, pulling me up with her.

Lillimae started waving with both hands to the woman in the car.

But the woman shook her head and yelled, “Lillimae, your mama died!” Then she rolled her window back up and drove off, leaving Lillimae and me on the porch staring in slack-jawed amazement until the car turned the corner.

Lillimae and I sat on the front porch in silence for about five minutes after the woman had delivered the news about Lillimae’s mother’s death. Finally, she turned to me and spoke through trembling lips that suddenly looked so dry I thought they’d crack. “What do you want to eat for dinner?” She sniffed and scratched the side of her neck, her eyes blinking hard. I noticed that when Lillimae was upset or angry, her eyes looked darker. Right now they looked as dark as mine.

“I’m not that hungry. Anything you fix is fine with me. Uh . . . I’m sorry about your mama.”

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Instead of speaking again, Lillimae sighed and gently rubbed my thigh. The glider squeaked like it was in pain as we wobbled up to our feet at the same time and shuffled into the living room. I followed Lillimae into the kitchen where she grabbed a dish towel off of the table and started wiping her face.

Standing next to her, reared back on my legs, I asked, “Is there anybody you can call?”

She whirled around to face me. Her eyes were now red with dark shadows already forming beneath them. “For what?”

“About your mama. Don’t you want to know how she died?”

Lillimae shrugged, sucked in her breath, and shook her head. “I’ll find out soon enough,” she told me, narrowing her eyes.

CHAPTER 10

Lillimae and I spent the afternoon in front of the television watching game shows and
The Phil Donahue Show
. Around five, Daddy stumbled in with a bucket full of catfish. Two hours later, over a dinner of fish and more greens, Lillimae turned to Daddy and told him,

“Roxanne came by today.” Lillimae had dabbed on some makeup, but it didn’t help. She couldn’t conceal her pain.

Daddy stopped chewing and looked from Lillimae to me and back to Lillimae with his eyes bulging. “Well, now I know why you lookin’

so much like hell, that I can smell the brimstone.” He snorted. “What did Roxanne want?” Fresh black-and-gray stubble on Daddy’s rough face reminded me of a briar patch. He dragged his fingers through his knotty hair and sniffed. “Musta been somethin’ deep for her to come by here in broad daylight.”

“She came by to tell me that Mama died,” Lillimae muttered, her eyes on the plate of untouched food in front of her.

Daddy leaned back in his wobbly chair. Scratching the side of his face, he muttered to Lillimae, “Well, bless your soul.” Then he let out a loud, deep breath. “Them fish sure was bitin’ today. Them bad boys was all but jumpin’ out the lake into my bucket on they own.”

It was an awkward moment for us all. I forced myself to eat as much as I could. Without a word, Lillimae pushed herself away from the GOD STILL DON’T LIKE UGLY

37

table and waddled back to the living room. Daddy turned to me with his eyes narrowed.

“I bet that piece of news about Lillimae’s mama made your day,” he hissed, his jaw twitching. His words shocked and angered me.

“Well, it didn’t,” I snapped, surprised that Daddy would think I’d celebrate the death of a woman I didn’t know. “My mama raised me better than that,” I added proudly, rising.

I didn’t know what to expect the next day or the rest of my visit but I had already prepared myself to expect the worst. She didn’t say it, but I assumed Lillimae wanted to be left alone. So instead of joining her in the living room, I decided to turn in for the night and try to get some sleep. I couldn’t hear the television but I did hear a brief, muffled conversation between Daddy and Lillimae in the living room.

Then the house got ominously quiet. It was hours before I fell asleep.

I had forgotten how hot Florida could be in the morning. Even with the plastic curtains covering the window in the bedroom that Lillimae had put me in, the sun’s rays woke me up that next morning around seven o’clock. I would have cracked open the window, but through the curtains I could see the outline of a huge grasshopper on it outside, peeping into the bedroom.

I didn’t know what kind of money Lillimae made working for the post office or how much money Daddy got from his retirement fund. But I knew it had to be enough between them that they could have lived in a much nicer neighborhood. And I was sure that they could afford to put better furniture in the house. Every piece in the house was probably older than I was. The mattress on the bed I was in was so weak, it was practically on the floor. Even without me on it.

It was a struggle for me to pull myself out of the deep valley in the middle. Like the other floors in the house, the linoleum on the bedroom floor had been waxed to a brilliant shine. My bare feet stuck to the floor as I made my way around the bed to retrieve my bathrobe from the back of a chair in front of a closet with a blanket for a door. An ironing board that Lillimae had used the evening before to clean the fish on had been propped up in a corner by a door that had no knob. I had to open and close it with a piece of wire hanging from the hole where a knob should have been. I didn’t know why I was feeling the way I was about people living in such squalor. Before Mr. Boatwright had ruined my life, Muh’Dear and I 38

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had lived in places not even this nice and I had been happy. I smiled and got dressed.

If the sun hadn’t aroused me first, the aroma of the elaborate breakfast Lillimae was preparing would have. The smell of bacon was so strong it made my eyes water. I had all of my appetite back. I was comfortable enough to let myself relax. However, now Lillimae was the one with no appetite. She didn’t even sit at the kitchen table with Daddy and me. Instead, she paced around the kitchen nibbling on a piece of dry toast and swatting flies with a potholder.

The subject of Lillimae’s mother’s death was not mentioned again until we read the newspaper that arrived the next day. It was then that we learned Lillimae’s mother had been involved in a fatal car crash on her way home from work just hours after she had treated Lillimae so rudely.

“The funeral’s Saturday,” Lillimae informed me after a brief telephone conversation she had with somebody she did not identify. “It’s the last time I’ll get to see her so I have to go.”

I didn’t know what Daddy was thinking about that white woman’s death, because other than a few grunts, he kept his comments to himself. Then he went to his room where he remained until I called him out to eat dinner.

I had nothing against white people. My current closest female friend was a white woman. However, the last thing I wanted to do while I was in Florida was attend the funeral of the one who had stolen my daddy. There had been no love lost between that woman and me, but I already loved my half-sister. I had to go to the funeral because Lillimae needed my support.

“You don’t have to go in the church with me, but I’d appreciate you sittin’ in the car waitin’ on me,” Lillimae said, as we cleared the breakfast table after we’d eaten. I had not seen her shed a single tear.

However, her eyes were red and swollen and she had barely eaten since hearing the tragic news.

“I’ll go in that church with you if you want me to,” I said, praying that Lillimae would decline my offer.

Lillimae shook her head so hard, the hairpin she had pinned her hair up with fell to the floor along with a plate she had just washed.

“Goodness gracious, no. I wouldn’t put you through that. You wouldn’t be welcome there. If they figure out who I am,
I
won’t even be welcome there neither. They won’t notice me if I stand in the back GOD STILL DON’T LIKE UGLY

39

with a floppy hat or a veil hidin’ my face, but you’d stand out like a lighthouse and they’d treat you like you stole somethin’. Wait for me in the car.” Lillimae sighed before she excused herself. When she returned from her bedroom, her eyes were more red and swollen than ever.

CHAPTER 11

The obituary for Lillimae’s mother that appeared in the newspaper didn’t even list Lillimae and her siblings among the survivors.

Just the two kids her mother had by the white man she had left Daddy for. The woman who had meant so much to Daddy at one time still must have meant something to him because on the day of the funeral he cried, too. Of course there was no mention of him in the obituary, either, but he wanted to go to the funeral, too. He sent flowers to the church under a fake name. Then he agreed to wait with me in the car parked across the street, a block from the church, while Lillimae paid her respects inside.

The church, a quaint little white clapboard building with a crooked steeple, was located in a mixed neighborhood. Seeing a few Black and Hispanic faces on the street made me feel a little more at ease.

It amazed me how many differences there were between white folks and Black folks. At our funerals there was enough loud weeping and wailing to wake the deceased. Some of the white people I saw standing around outside the church were acting like they were at a carnival admiring a sideshow. Big-bellied, red-faced men were smoking fat cigars and grinning. A washed-out woman was holding a homely, crying baby wearing nothing but a diaper. Young kids were playing tag and throwing rocks at a stray dog.