I Wish I Had a Red Dress (11 page)

My confusion must have been evident. I had forgotten he came here to hand me a letter. What had I done with it?

“About the house,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure there was something written down between us since I’m never going back to the Motel 6 and evicting me could get ugly.”

“We do things a little more informally up here than they do in the city,” I said, holding out my hand. “A handshake will do fine.”

“Done!” He shook my hand and we made his residency at the Smitherman place official. I wondered how long his fingers
were, but I felt like it would be inappropriate to measure, palm to palm, like you do when you’re a kid and all measures of who’s the biggest are acceptable. In this case, the answer was truly obvious. His hand dwarfed my own.

“Sure you don’t want me to go with you when you take her home?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

He smiled. “Once a cop, always a cop, I guess.”

I smiled back. “Thanks for coming by.”

“May I consider this conversation
to be continued?
”

“Absolutely.”

“Good,” he said, opening the door and stepping out into the cold. “I’ll look forward to it.”

“Me too.”

I watched him get into that big black car and glide off into the evening and realized
I already was
.

A HALF HOUR LATER
Sheila and I had finished our tea and she had given me a pretty good sense of what was going on at the Lattimore house.

“They really mad about what happened.”

“Who?”

She shrugged. “My brothers, my mama. All of ’em.”

“They should be mad—at
Junior.
”

“He say it was between him and Nik, and Tee didn’t have no business to get in it at all.”

“Is that what you think?”

She pulled the shapeless sweater tighter around her thin shoulders. “He was drunk,” she said, like that explained everything.

“But what do you
think?
”

I wondered what plan of action the Lattimore brothers were capable of concocting, sitting around with the curtains drawn in the middle of the day, the TV light flickering on their handsome faces like the frames of an old-time silent movie.

“Junior mean, Miz J. He always been like that. Just mean as a snake, even as a kid, but he family, you know? He always gonna be my big brother and blood is blood, right?”

Right
. “Did Junior hit you?”

She shook her head.

“Then who?”

“My mama.”

“Why?” Was the whole family insane?

Sheila shrugged. “I told you they all mad about what happened.”

“Mad at you?”

“Just mad.”

“You know we’ve got plenty of sleeping bags if you and the kids want to camp out here for tonight.”

“Nah. That’d just make ’em even madder.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know what else to suggest.

We looked at each other and then she tried to smile in a way I guess she thought was reassuring and stood up.

“I guess I better start back.”

I stood up too. “I’ll drive you.”

She hesitated.

“Sheila,” I said, as gently as I could. “I’m not going to let you walk home in the dark in a foot of snow.”

“Okay.” She glanced out the window. She didn’t hardly want to walk back those long, cold, solitary miles if she didn’t have to. “I guess it’ll be okay.”

“I won’t come in.”

“Can you let me off at the corner?”

I wanted to say
no way,
but she was already so freaked out, I agreed.

“All right,” I said. “But you call me if you need me to come and pick you and the kids up later.”

“I will,” she said, stuffing her feet into a pair of barter closet boots that were a couple of sizes too big, but fleece-lined and dry. With the big red socks they almost fit and Sheila smiled for the first time tonight.

When we got close, I let her off at the corner like I promised I would and that’s when I realized Nate was following me. I thought I had seen his car after we left The Circus, but I figured it was just a coincidence. This is a very small town and the path to almost anywhere takes you across the path to almost everywhere else, but after a couple of turns down the decidedly nonmajor roads that lead to the Lattimore house, I saw him again.

If the trees hadn’t been so bare, I might have missed him. He is an ex-cop, after all. He knows how to follow you without being seen if he wants to. But I grew up here. I know shortcuts he has yet to discover and two quick turns put me back on the main road right behind him. I pulled up close at the first stop sign and tapped the horn. His startled eyes in the rearview mirror were all the proof I needed.

When he turned in at the gas station like he’d been headed there all the time, I did too.

“Hello, again,” I said, remembering that old Marvelettes song about the hunter getting captured by the game. “Were you following me?”

His smile was sheepish and surprised. “Will it do me any good to deny it?”

“Not a bit.”

“Then I’ll come clean. Yes, I was following you.”

“Why?”

“I had some concerns about your safety.”

He had some concerns?
“Would those be the same concerns you mentioned to me earlier?”

“Those would be the ones,” he said. “Were you really going to get gas? I can pump it for you while we talk.”

“No, thanks,” I said, not sure exactly how I felt about this, but pretty sure it was in the general neighborhood of uncomfortable. “I told you I’d be fine.”

He was still smiling. “Like I said before, I thought you might need some backup.”

I was
definitely
uncomfortable, but I just looked at him. We weren’t even really friends yet (were we?) and I was already correcting him like he had agreed to the ground rules. Well, too bad. Here we go again.

“That’s lovely,” I said, “but you can’t trick me into it. I’m a smart woman. If I need to be protected from something, you can tell me. Then we can discuss whether or not I agree, how I’ve handled the situation in the past and whether or not I’m open to that kind of help from you. Then I will decide to accept or decline your offer of assistance.”

He was looking at me like I was crazy, but these kinds of discussions are always so fraught with misunderstanding, it’s important to be clear, and when you’re clear, you always run the risk of sounding doctrinaire and inflexible. I tried to soften it a little. “But I appreciate the impetus.”

“The impetus?”

I nodded. “The fact that you wanted to help.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

I hate that question. It’s like when the guy at the liquor store
counter looks at your driver’s license photo, squints and says, “This you?” because he doesn’t recognize you without your glasses/bangs/dreadlocks/crow’s-feet. What are you going to say?
Nah, man. That ain’t me. I was just kidding around.

“Of course, I’m serious,” I said. “I don’t like to have anybody making decisions about me but me.”

“Even for your own protection?”

“
Especially
for my own protection.” If that doesn’t confuse him, nothing will. I tried to keep my face neutral and waited.

“Then I apologize,” he said after a minute when I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. “And I stand corrected.”

“Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?”

He shook his head in a way that could only be described as rueful. “No. I can’t truthfully say that I do.”

Good,
I thought. Admitting confusion is always an important first step, especially for those self-confident brothers who seem to have a deep faith in their own infallibility coded into their DNA.

“Well, I’d like to stay and explain it to you,” I said, “but I’ve gotta go.” I smiled at him as I climbed back into my car. “To be continued, remember?”

“Right,” he said, looking more confused than ever. “Good deal.”

To be continued
was right. Something told me that me and big Nate had a whole lot of talking to do before we finally saw eye to eye, but I’m up for the challenge. If I can make him understand the basics, maybe we can actually be friends.

THE GOOD THING ABOUT
having the house to myself is that everything stays exactly where I put it. The bad thing is that tonight that includes the breakfast dishes. I filled the dishpan with hot soapy water while I sliced up some fresh vegetables and put on a pot of brown rice. Bill says I eat so much rice and drink so much tea I must have been Chinese in one of my most recent past lives. That’s highly possible, but I have no memory of past lives, ancient or otherwise. If I could pick, I’d probably choose this one all over again, even though being black and female in a place that doesn’t bring a whole lot of love to either group is probably not the most luxe life I could come up with.

On the other hand, I’ve been well loved and truly blessed with friends and family and even a social house cat or two, and here I am tonight standing at the sink in my own cozy little
house, smelling my dinner on the stove and wondering how to fit a great big beautiful stranger into what I think is already a pretty full life.

Sister would tell me to relax and go with the flow, which is, of course, exactly what I should do, but I can’t help trying to define a place for him in my mind as educator, optimist, neighbor, friend, before that little voice in there that hasn’t been allowed out for so long defines things for me in terms that would let him know beyond a shadow of a doubt that being a separatist is the last thing on my mind.

MAVIS WAS FEELING FINE
again, so Tee came in early. By the time I got there, she had settled Mavis in the community room with a new coloring book and Tee herself was scribbling furiously on a legal pad. Her desk was already covered with crumpled yellow sheets she had rejected.

“Good morning,” I said. “What’re you working on so hard?”

“I had another idea,” she said without looking up. “I think it’s better than the first one.”

I was still in awe of the perfection of her anti-Super Bowl inspiration and her Denzel theory. I couldn’t wait.
Three’s the charm
.

“What is it?” I said, hanging my coat in the closet.

“Hold on a second,” she said. “Get your tea, and I’ll be ready to brief you.”

“To brief me?” She sounded like a presidential press secretary. The surprise in my voice made her look up, grinning.

“I been watchin’
The West Wing
, okay?”

I laughed. “You keep having big ideas, that’s where you’re going to end up.”

She shook her head. “Not me. I’d be slappin’ people regular if they leaked my stuff after I told ’em not to.”

She bent back over the pad and I examined her hair. Today’s braids were still blond, but gathered on top for an overall waterfall effect. She had pulled them so tightly that her already almond-shaped eyes suddenly had a pronounced slant. It wasn’t unattractive so much as unexpected.

I went to the kitchen and poured myself a cup of peppermint tea, complimented Mavis on her ability to stay within the lines of her new Barney activity book and made a mental note to schedule an appointment with the new kindergarten teacher at the public school. Three of our Circus babies will be starting there in the fall and I want her to know I have high expectations for their continued growth and good nature.

Most of the teachers I’ve worked with have been at the high school level, but now the babies are growing up and I’m meeting a whole new group. What I always do is tell them what I know about the kids, about their family situations, and offer assistance in keeping the mother active and involved. I’ve never had a teacher who was less than grateful. As overworked as most of them are, any help is like an unexpected blessing.

When Deena arrived with the twins and Marquis in tow, I headed back to Tee, who was waiting for me in the office, her eyes shining with excitement.

“Okay,” she said, “here’s the deal.”

I sat down, took a swallow of tea and prepared to listen.

“We need to have a film festival.”

“A film festival?”

She nodded and thrust a clipping at me from last Sunday’s
New York Times
. “They got a million of ’em goin’ in New York all the time. Movies I ain’t never heard of.”

She pointed to an announcement of a series dedicated to the work of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, one of my favorites.

“That’s because you won’t watch anything but American movies,” I couldn’t resist pointing out.

Tee looked annoyed. “That’s not the point, Miz J. The point is, they chargin’ people money to see old movies and they gettin’ it too. Sellin’ out the place.”

She handed me another clipping that included a photograph of an intense-looking group of young people listening to a discussion of the French New Wave.

“And they not just foreign movies either,” she said. “They had one where they only showed Spike Lee movies and he came there himself to talk about what he had in mind when he made ’em.”

The clipping showed Spike fielding questions from a packed house after a showing of
Malcolm X.

“They should have gotten Denzel,” I said, just teasing, but Tee nodded enthusiastically.

“Now you feelin’ me!” She beamed. “That’s exactly what I’m talkin’ about!”

“Getting Denzel?”

“Havin’ a film festival!”

“A Denzel Washington film festival?” I immediately wondered about the possibility of an even stronger anti-Denzel backlash, but Tee was one step ahead of me.

She shook her head and grinned. “They’d never let me get away with that,” she said, “but it don’t hafta be him for the first
one. It’s a lot of movies people like to see, especially if we do it like we do when it’s just a few of us here.”

“How’s that?”

She shrugged, tugging at a few braids to loosen them, rounding out her eyes just a little. “You know, how you always ask us a bunch of trick questions so we end up seeing some stuff we never would have got just talkin’ about it regular.”

“They’re not trick questions,” I said. “They’re to make you think.”

“Whatever,” Tee said. “The point is, if we have a festival, we can make it somethin’ special by gettin’ people who come talk about it afterward.”

Our marathon postmovie discussions are legendary around here. We don’t really schedule them. It’s just that some films raise a lot of questions worthy of exploring. I try to guide things in a way that helps us draw some useful conclusions, but I’m also trying to give them the pleasure that comes with a free exchange of ideas.

After we watched
Set It Off
one night, the conversation touched on the problems of bank robbery as a career option, the challenge of keeping your friends when you are trying to move up in the world, whether or not lesbians can really be in love the same way heterosexuals are in love, the easy availability of guns from people like Black Sam and the constant problem of inflexible bosses like Luther of the self-monikered janitorial service where the women worked between heists.

By spending a minimum of time on questions like whether or not a fine, educated brother-with-bank like Blair Underwood would ever have hit on a girl from the projects who wandered into the bank even if she was fine, and if that was
really
Jada Pinkett Smith’s round brown behind in that nude shot, we were
able to keep the discussion moving and not get bogged down in the gossip zone.

Tee obviously enjoyed these discussions as much as I did, but the idea of expanding them to a more general audience took me by surprise.
Could it work?

“We’ll announce a whole series,” Tee said. “A coupla weekends, maybe tie it to Black History Month if we hurry up, and don’t charge too much, maybe two dollars, just so they get used to the idea of payin’
somethin
’ and almost everybody got two dollars. . . .”

“You want to charge admission?”

Tee looked at me real serious. “Look, Miz J, we need to raise some money, right?”

I nodded.

“And you tole those guys in Lansing to take a hike, right?”

“Right.” Even though I hadn’t figured out how to replace that money, I still wasn’t sorry.

“So where we gonna get it from?” Tee spread her arms as wide as her smile. “From us! Look at this!”

She snatched up the legal pad she’d been working on, and shoved it across the desk in my direction. “We can get a hundred people in here if we set the chairs up close together in the big room, and if we charge everybody two dollars, we can clear a coupla hundred bucks a night.”

Tee was on a roll. This idea had real possibilities. Two hundred dollars wouldn’t be near enough, of course, but every little bit helps. Even better, it would get everybody involved, which was the only way we were going to survive over the long haul. This was, in fact, a best-of-all-possible-worlds idea. It was entertaining, it had real use and educational value
and
it generated income.

I looked at Tee’s careful calculations and then at her, perched expectantly on the corner of the desk. “You’ve done it again,” I said. “I think this can really work.”

Tee glowed. “Of course it can.”

My brain instantly began to organize things. What films should we show? Who should lead the discussion? What about child care? Should we pop popcorn and sell soft drinks? But before I had a chance to start asking questions, Tee hopped off the desk and held up her hand. Her fingernails, as always, were brightly painted in a shade to match her lipstick. She was wearing a pair of tight pants and an equally fitted sweater. No one who saw her buying makeup at the mall, a favorite outing, would guess what kind of creative mind is nestled under all those golden braids. Her protective coloration was so complete that if it had been conscious, I would have called it a disguise. But it wasn’t. It was just Tee,
keepin’ it real.

“So I just thought this last night, okay? I just tole you all I know, and so far, it sounds good, right?”

“It sounds real good,” I said. “I can’t wait.”

“Well, you gonna have to,” she said. “Because I gotta think about it some more before you start askin’ me questions.”

She knew me too well. “What makes you think I was going to start asking questions?”

She rolled her eyes as if to say
puh-leez
. “Weren’t you?”

In response to a direct question, I’m not allowed to lie, so I laughed and confessed.

“Okay, just a few,” I said. “It’s such a great idea and I just wanted to know how—”

“Stop!” she said. “You tryin’ to sneak one in, but I know you, Miz J, and I’m not goin’ for it. You got work to do. So do I. As soon as I figure some more stuff out, I’ll tell you.”

“That’s fair,” I said.

“Good.” She sat down and something flickered across her expression like a small cloud in a perfectly blue sky. “Now I got one more thing to tell you.”

I shifted into neutral. “What’s that?”

“Junior been callin’ me.”

“Here?”

She shook her head. “At home. He don’t say nothin’ and he don’t leave no message and he callin’ from a street phone so no number show up on the caller I.D., but I know it’s him.”

“Can you hear anything in the background?”

“Naw, not really. It ain’t nothin’, I guess. He just call and hang up, call and hang up.”

“How many times does he call?”

She looked at me without any change of expression. “He call a lot.”

My heart sank. “How many times would you say?”

She looked at me and her chin trembled slightly. “Last night, he call for a hour. Every time I pick it up, he just click off, but he did it for a hour.”

“Why did you keep answering?”

Her eyes flashed. “So he’d know I wadn’t scared! It’s my phone at my house. When it ring, I’ma answer it.”

“Do you want to call the sheriff?”

“What’s he gonna do? Nothin’.” She shook her head. “Naw. I don’t need to call nobody. I just wanted you to know so if anything go down, you’ll know who did it.”

That really sent a chill through me. What did she think was going to happen? “I think you should come and bring Mavis and stay with me a couple of nights. You know I’ve got plenty of room.”

“So do I,” she said. “I worked hard to get my place fixed up just the way we like it.”

Tee rented a tiny, barely winterized cottage not far from The Circus. Once her last boyfriend had moved out, Tee began the slow process of transforming the place. She painted the inside, put up a swing set for Mavis and considered planting flowers until she realized gardening is hell on a serious manicure, even with gloves on. She settled for three pink flamingos in the yard instead and a huge metal daisy whose petals rotate with the wind. Tee loved her house and dreamed of buying it. For Junior to run her out was unthinkable, and I had to respect that.

“All right,” I said. “Tell me if he keeps calling, okay?”

“I will,” she said, picking up her legal pad. “Now if you don’t mind, Miz J, I got work to do.”