I Wish I Had a Red Dress (3 page)

THE ADVANTAGE OF FAITH
in moments of crisis and transition is that when the rest of us find ourselves swimming in guilt, fear, confusion and second-guessing, the true believer simply goes with the flow. I’m not quite there yet, which is the advantage of having a friend who is also a minister. When I got back to Idlewild, I went by the church first.

It was already six-thirty, but I could see a light in Sister’s office window. She was working late too, so I pulled into the parking lot and blew the horn. Her face appeared in the window immediately, smiling and waving for me to come inside. I knew she would. Ministers are pretty much obligated to welcome the weary traveler. They never know when the Christ child might show up.

Sister Judith is a minister, not a nun, but she likes to be called
Sister
because it’s a term of religious respect that doesn’t carry with it what she calls “the undeniable scent of the patriarchy” like the word
reverend.
She’s from San Francisco, and they take their feminism seriously out there. I tend to be a little less ideological, especially when it comes to what we call ourselves. I don’t really care. I’m a lot more concerned about what we
do.

It’s like the ongoing debate about whether
African American
is more correct than the more generic
black.
I prefer
Negro
myself, but if you say
Negro
to a bunch of young people, they take it as an insult, which is counterproductive, so I usually stick with
African American,
although I still think it’s unwieldy, but that’s just me.

Same thing with women. The labels don’t matter much to me—womanist, feminist, suffragette, even my committee’s choice of the decidedly old-fashioned
women’s libber.
There are infinite choices that are acceptable to me if they all mean
free
. I myself have tried to lobby for the more mythological and, I think, spiritually powerful term
Amazon,
but I can’t get anybody around here to buy into that one. They claim it sounds too much like
Xena, Warrior Princess.
I don’t care. I still like it.

“I was just thinking about you,” Sister said, hugging me through our two overcoats. Fuel oil is expensive and Sister often economizes by turning the thermostat way down and keeping her coat on when she’s working. But only when she’s alone and never on Sunday morning. Most of our congregation is over sixty-five; old people will forgive you a lot, but not cold feet.

She opened her office door and ushered me quickly inside, where it was warmer by about fifteen degrees, thanks to a small space heater glowing in the corner next to her desk and her usual collection of brightly burning scented candles. Today, the small room had a decidedly tropical aroma.

“Want a cup of tea?” She reached for her thermos to share with me whatever fragrant herbal blend it held today.

“Don’t you keep some unconsecrated wine around for these moments?” I said, collapsing on her office love seat, suddenly exhausted. Don’t let people tell you begging strangers for money doesn’t take it out of you.
It does.

She raised her eyebrows. “Which moments?”

“Moments when nothing goes according to plan,” I said, stretching my feet toward the heater.

“Oh, those,” Sister said, handing me a cup of steaming tea that smelled like cinnamon and apples. “You’ve heard that old joke, right?”

“What old joke?”

“If you want to make God laugh, make plans.”

I looked at her. “That is not only an
old
joke. That is a
minister
joke.”

“Sorry,” she said. “Drink your tea.”

I took a long swallow and we just sat quietly for a minute. Sister’s good at silence and after the day I just had, her peaceful presence was as soothing to me as all the reassuring words in the world. Sister is the best thing that’s happened to Salem Baptist Church in a long time. When old Dr. Ross finally retired five years ago, we got a really awful guy from Chicago for about six months. After we got rid of him, we didn’t even have any prospects. Then, out of the blue, the Baptist Board sent us a letter saying we’re really lucky because they’d just been contacted by an outstanding young minister in California who’s interested in coming to Idlewild. She could be there in a month, and oh, by the way,
did we care that she was a woman?

That was Sister. Within a month, she and her husband, Bill, drove up in a U-Haul truck with the windows open and the radio
blasting Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.” We’ve been friends ever since.

I admit it was strange at first, having a close friend who was also an ordained minister. I kept waiting for her to be more “ministerial,” whatever that means, but Sister acts just like any other fortyish female except that on Sunday mornings, she stands up in front of everybody and calls the spirits in. Over her desk, she has a quote from the Dalai Lama that says “Kindness is my religion.” I like that. It doesn’t leave you any
weaseling
room. Everybody knows kindness when they see it.

“So I take it things did not go well,” she said, after giving me a chance to catch my breath.

“I withdrew the proposal.”

“Withdrew it?” She looked as disappointed as I felt, but her voice was calm. “What happened?”

“Well, they had a few additional questions for me.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, some basic stuff. What’s a free woman? Are you sure we should be trying to raise them in captivity? How come they have so many
illegitimate
babies? Stuff like that.”

“Well,
shoot!
”

Sister doesn’t curse, so
shoot
is about as good as it gets. She poured me some more tea and I sipped it slowly. On days like this, sometimes the best you can hope for is a sympathetic shoulder to whine on until you have a chance to regroup. Sympathy is practically Sister’s middle name and a little whining can be therapeutic as long as you don’t make a habit out of it.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “Your proposal was great. What do they want?”

“You got me,” I said. “I feel like I’m spending all my time pretending to do something they can understand so they’ll give
me money to do something they don’t even care about. It’s depressing.”

Sister reached across her desk and patted my hand. “Do you think you can raise the money someplace else?”

“That’s what I’ve been thinking about all the way home,” I said. “The truth is, I don’t even have any prospects, but I think it’s time for us to find another way to support what we do. If we never cut loose from the state, we’ll never know.”

“Good for you,” Sister smiled. “You know the Buddhists believe that sometimes when everything is in turmoil, it’s because something wonderful is ready to be born and that thing is distracting you so it can have some privacy during the birthing process.”

“And that’s the best distraction it can come up with?” I said, picturing a creature in the last stages of labor, frantically roaming the halls of the state capital, looking for a quiet corner in which to deliver. “This magical thing couldn’t settle for a nice, distracting double rainbow over Idlewild Lake?”

“You were indoors all day,” Sister said gently. “You would have missed it anyway.”

She was right. I hadn’t seen the sky since this morning.

“You know what really gets me?” I said, draining my mug. “I spent the whole day begging a bunch of men for money to help some women. I thought you feminists had a revolution.
What happened?
”

“Feminism doesn’t mean no men,” Sister said calmly, refusing to take responsibility for the failures of the women’s movement. “It means no
sexist
men.”

“Six of one, half dozen of the other.”

“Come on,” she said, “can you really imagine a world without men?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “It’s a peaceful place full of fat, happy women and no football.”

She hooted at that. Sister’s laugh is one of the best things about her. She had no interest in discreet chuckling or giggling into her hand. Sister laughed
loud
like a little kid at a birthday party, when blowing out all the candles is still cause for major celebration.

“I
like
football,” she said.

“Do you ever watch it without Bill?”

Sister was madly in love with her husband, an English teacher at the high school and a would-be poet. If he had liked watching professional bowling, she’d have been right there, but left to her own devices, she was more inclined toward old Hollywood movies and
CBS Sunday Morning.

“You’re working too hard,” she said. “Close your eyes.”

I did as I was told and heard her unwrapping what sounded like a large paper bag. She took my right hand and folded my fingers around something cool and smooth. “What is it?” I asked.

“Open your eyes.”

I was holding a perfect mango. The thick, waxy outside skin was the color of a rosy tropical sunset.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Sister said proudly, like she’d grown it herself.

I couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d handed me a purple orchid. Mangoes do not grow around here and, unfortunately, if we don’t grow it, there isn’t much demand. Bananas are about as exotic as we get.

“Where did you get a mango?” I said, turning it over in my hand, loving the shape and the weight of it.

“At the market.” She smiled. “I’ve got a dozen.”

She held open the bag excitedly and there they all were, each
one more photogenic than the last. I wondered if Sister’s candles were really scented today or if the mangoes were perfuming this cold air in self-defense.

“Buddy said they were a mistake,” she said as if the idea of something so lovely ever being called a mistake was a thought hatched in the brain of a fool. The local market was a constant source of irritation to Sister and Bill, who had been spoiled by the abundance and variety in their old West Coast neighborhood, where a rich blend of ethnicities guaranteed an international sampling even if you weren’t looking for it. A sushi taco would not have been out of the realm of possibility.

“They were in with his regular order of apples and sweet corn. He didn’t even know what to charge me, so I got the whole batch for five dollars!”

She reached into the bag, took one out and tossed it gently in her hand. “I offered him one so he could taste it and he told me he thought he had tasted all the new stuff he needed to, but thanks anyway.” She shook her head in disbelief. “He’s in the food business! If he’s not ready for mangoes, what about kiwi and kumquats and Asian pears and escarole and artichokes?”

Like I said, they pay a lot more attention to food variety in San Francisco than we do in Lake County, but she was right about two things: These were beautiful mangoes; and Buddy didn’t have much imagination. He asked me to go to the movies a couple of times after Mitch died, but all he wanted to do was talk about how weird it was that his wife had died and Mitch had died, and now here we were together. Dead spouses didn’t seem like the best foundation for a long-term relationship, so I didn’t pursue it.

Sister pressed a mango into my other hand. “Take another one with you,” she said. “I’m going to get Bill to use the rest to
make us some of his world-famous mango margaritas tomorrow night.”

We eat at each other’s house so often we tease about automatically setting a place for drop-ins. Sometimes we do potluck. Sometimes we do something elaborate like Bill’s special paella or my pasta from scratch, but most of all, it’s a chance for us to catch up and let our hair down.

We’ve all managed to find our life’s work in jobs that require a certain amount of public decorum. As a minister, a social worker and a high school English teacher, we’re expected to assume as part of our public responsibilities, a quiet dignity, an unshakable reserve and a constant seriousness that can sometimes become oppressive. Left unchecked, they can lead to a certain self-righteousness that is counterproductive to the work that we do. Being together, just the three of us, helps us
keep it real.

“I’ve never had a mango margarita,” I said.

Sister looked surprised.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I said. “Where would I get one?”

She shook her head. “You have to get out more.”

“I’ll work on it,” I said. “What should I bring tomorrow?”

“Just yourself,” she said. “Around seven, and wear something
festive.
”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing. I just thought you might want to give all that black a rest and come out with a little color.”

“Black
is
a color,” I said. She was echoing my sentiments exactly, but I wanted to be the one to say it first.

“Wear whatever you want,” she said, giving me a good-bye hug. “And don’t worry.”

I hugged her back. “I won’t.”

I was lying, of course, but she knew it, so I don’t think it
really counts. Sometimes you have to give the correct answer even when you’re not really feeling it yet so you can hear how it’s going to sound when you finally get it together for real.

Before I headed home, I still had to go by The Sewing Circus to make sure Tomika had locked up. Tee’s been working in the office with me for a couple of months and I hope one day she’ll be able to function as a full-fledged office manager. Right now, she’s still getting used to the responsibility. She’s nineteen and this is the first real job she’s ever had.

I laid the mangoes gently on the seat beside me, and as I pulled out of the parking lot, I realized I had been right about that tropical aroma in Sister’s office—it wasn’t the candles. Outside, it was starting to snow again, but in my beat-up old Chevy, there was just the slightest whiff of mango.

WHEN I WALKED INTO
the tiny office we share at The Circus, Tomika was barely visible above the double page spread of last Sunday’s
New York Times.
I try to get them all to read it, but Tomika’s the only one who actually does. It usually takes her all week to get through the whole thing, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She’s spent most of her life getting all her information from television and the tabloids. Her mind is having an orgy of new ideas.

“Hey, Miz J!” she said before I could even get my coat off. “Listen to this.” She cleared her throat. “ ‘Authorities confirm a healthy female baby was born in a treetop’—a
treetop, okay?
—‘during recent severe flooding in Mo-mo-mo . . . ‘ “ She slowly sounded out the unfamiliar name. “ ‘Mozambique.’ ”

“What?”

“They even got a picture. Look at the
babymama.
How she make out?”

Tee thrust the paper in my direction and there the
babymama
was all right, a tiny, rain-soaked African woman, clutching her newborn in the Associated Press wire photo that would introduce her to the world.

“Jesus!”

“You got that right!” Tee was looking over my shoulder at the woman’s shell-shocked face. The baby was nursing. “This girl just delivered a baby in a thunderstorm up in a tree and they both made it! That’s what’s killin’ me. They made it back to dry land
and
got they picture in the paper! So, how was the trip to Lansing? Should I start lookin’ for another job?”

Tee changed subjects effortlessly without even stopping for breath. Whatever else she could or couldn’t do, the girl could
talk.

“We all survived it,” I said, hedging.

“So it was cool, right?”

“So far, so good.” No point everybody worrying at the same time. “Where’s Mavis?”

Tomika’s four-year-old daughter is a true Sewing Circus baby. She’s been coming here for day care most of her life.

“Nikki took her to McDonald’s with Tiffany and Marquis. I wanted to finish the Week in Review. That means all I got left is Saturday for Arts and Leisure and half of that is gonna be movie ads.”

Tomika even read the Business section. In one of my many fantasies of her future, she is a successful stockbroker managing The Circus portfolio with such skill that we have not only operating expenses but an endowment and a scholarship program. I
haven’t told her about all of this, of course. They don’t dream as big for themselves yet as I do for them. They’ve still got some catching up to do.

I shuffled through the stack of mail she’d laid out neatly on my desk. Mostly bills. Tee was clipping the tree-baby story for her “Say what?” file.

“This kinda stuff really makes you think,” she said, cutting around the picture carefully.

“About what?” I flipped past the water bill and tossed a flyer from the grocery store into the trash can.

She shrugged, still searching the face of the tree
babymama.
“I don’t know. Just the fact of somebody
regular,
just livin’ her life. She got a man. She gettin’ ready to have a baby, and
BAM!
all of a sudden all hell breaks loose and she havin’ the kid in a tree!”

Tee had stumbled upon the exquisitely random chaos that makes the universe the truly challenging place we know it to be, and she didn’t appreciate it. I know the feeling.

“You don’t think things could break down that tough around here ever, do you?”

“We don’t have hurricanes,” I said.

She looked at me and grinned. “You a trip, Miz J. You always look on the bright side, huh?”

They tried calling me a couple of things before they settled on Miz J. Mrs. Mitchell was way too formal. Joyce was way too informal, and Sister Mitchell was a generation or two removed from what they know. Miz J was a shortened version of Miss Joyce, which sort of evolved from so many of them having southern roots. People south of the Mason-Dixon line add Miss to your first name as a sign of affection and respect, so I liked it right off.

“I do my best,” I said.

“Well, then I got one more for you,” she said, flipping through the paper quickly, the cut pages flapping in the wind like torn flags, her eyes scanning for another noteworthy item she wanted to share.

It’d been a very long day, but Tee loves to talk about what she’s reading and I’d have to be a whole lot sleepier than this to tell her I’m too tired to keep up.

“Here it is! Listen to this!” Her voice rose with righteous indignation. “ ‘California study shows a dramatic increase in reported cases of domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday. Experts suspect that increased use of alcohol and heightened emotional reactions to the outcome of the game increase the risk for women during this hotly contested annual event.’ ”

She tossed the paper down with a contemptuous flick of her wrist and I added anchorwoman to my list of Tee’s future career possibilities.

“Isn’t that just typical? These guys get so excited they got to kick somebody’s ass and they ain’t even in the game! They sittin’ at home, watchin’ it and drinkin’ a beer just like everybody else.”

“Do you think it’s true?” I said, deciding I could do the rest of the mail on Monday.

“I know it is,” she said. “Somebody always comin’ over in a hurry at halftime ’cause the men at they house lookin’ around for somethin’ to hit.”

She shook her head, setting in motion the tiny, blond braids that hung down to the middle of her back. Tomika liked more hair than she could grow, so she bought what she needed and wove it in. The colors she chose had little to do with what nature had given her, so I learned to think of her extensions like ribbons. The color wasn’t there to blend in. It was there to
celebrate.

Before she started working here, she was known primarily for her elaborately structured hairstyles, her equally elaborate fingernails, and her lack of tolerance for any form of fantasy, subterfuge, or pretension. She saw a movie once where a major character was described as being “brutally honest” and from that point on that is how she was thought of and conducted herself. It can be exhausting, but I’m convinced she’s on a lifelong path to seek the truth and what kind of mentor would I be to discourage such a quest.

“When Sonny was still livin’ at home, Patrice went to watch the game with him at his mama house one time.”

Tomika rolled her eyes and I understood why. Patrice O’Neal was one of our regulars and Sonny Lattimore was her man and the father of her son, Sylvester, Jr., known as
Lil’ Sonny
. Handsome and heartless, the five Lattimore brothers—Junior, Sonny, T. J., Maleek, and Jarvis—were as mean as they were good-looking. Tall and slender without being skinny, they looked like Chuck Berry in his prime. They had high cheekbones and deep, dark eyes that turned to flat pools of poison if you crossed them. The oldest four had fathered half a dozen children by as many women. Jarvis, the youngest, was only fifteen, and still childless as far as anyone knew.

“I’m sure it was an unforgettable afternoon,” I said.

“Awful!” Tomika gave a sympathetic shudder at the memory of her friend’s ordeal. “They started arguin’ right after the first down. They were drunk before the halftime show. By the end of the third quarter, one of ’em was threatenin’ to go out to the car and get his gun, and just before the two-minute warnin’, another one pushed Sheila into the refrigerator ’cause she was too slow bringin’ him a beer.”

Sheila was their only sister. They regarded her as their personal
servant, and their mother, usually drunk and always hostile, did nothing to disabuse them of that notion. The youngest of Sheila’s two sons was widely rumored to be her oldest brother’s child, but she always denied it. Even when you didn’t ask her.

“It don’t make no sense.” Tomika was indignant. “Don’t no women even care about the Super Bowl. They only watchin’ it ’cause they tryin’ to get next to some guy who watchin’ it, or they already did that, and now he think part of the deal is you gotta be bringin’ beer and slingin’ nachos while him and his boys watch it.”

I remember trying to figure out a football game Mitch was watching on TV one Saturday afternoon years ago and suddenly realizing that the whole thing was still as confusing to me as the first contest my father tried to explain when I was about ten years old. I figured that was enough effort to understand a game I didn’t even want to play, excused myself and never looked back. Life is short and football is not required.

“We ought to have an anti-Super Bowl party,” Tomika said. “Let them have the day to themselves, period. Then, if they want to beat on somebody, at least it’ll be a fair fight.”

I looked at her. “That’s a great idea.”

“What?”

“What you just said. An anti-Super Bowl party.”

She looked confused. “For real?”

“We could do it right here.”

A look of confusion flickered across her face. “But we’re not open on Sunday.”

Having a great idea is one thing. Making it real is something else altogether. The social worker in me lives for these moments.

“We can be open anytime we want,” I reminded her. “We voted on it, remember?” I’m big on participatory democracy. We vote on everything around here.

Tee was still a little skeptical, but I had piqued her interest. “I guess we could do
somethin
’
,
” she said slowly. “Otherwise, I’ma have to hear everybody complainin’ all week about how they hated watchin’ it and which one of these fools hit somebody.”

“We can get whatever we need tomorrow,” I said.

“And I’ll call everybody.”

We sounded like one of those Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney movies where one looks at the other one about forty minutes into the movie and says, “Why don’t we do our own show?” And the other one says, “We can hold auditions right here in the backyard!” And before you know it, they’ve run up some costumes, hired a band, and scheduled an opening night.

“Don’t forget to tell Sheila,” I said.

Tee snorted. “They ain’t gonna let that girl out. Who gonna bring ’em a beer if she over here hangin’ out wit us?”

She was probably right about that, but maybe we could sneak her out for a minute or two just to take a break.

“I gotta go, Miz J.” Tee took her coat from the hook behind the door and slipped her arms in. It was almost Mavis’s bedtime and Tee was big on bedtime stories ever since I told her that was how my mother taught me how to read. Tee wants to give that gift to Mavis. “But can I ask you something?”

“Sure.” I handed her the scarf that had slipped from her sleeve to the floor.

She zipped her coat slowly and pulled on a pair of fur-lined red leather gloves, an extravagant gift from an out-of-town boyfriend who hid up here long enough to father Mavis and celebrate
her first birthday, but not long enough to outwait the rival who shot him dead his first day back in the big city. The gloves were almost five years old now, but other than Mavis, they were all Tee had to remember him by, so they weren’t going anywhere.

“It didn’t go so good today in Lansing, did it?”

“It wasn’t so bad,” I said, sounding a little too cheery even to myself. “We’ll figure it out.”

She frowned at me and tossed her braids off her face impatiently. “How
we
gonna figure it out if
we
don’t tell
me
what really went down?”

She had a point there. There was no reason not to tell her the truth. Withholding information isn’t exactly like lying, but it’s close enough.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it. “I didn’t want to worry you.”

She snorted at that. “You the worrier, not me! What happened?”

“They didn’t respect me or you or any of the work we’re doing here,” I said slowly, wanting to be clear, but not get hung up on the details. “So I withdrew our proposal.”

Her eyes opened wide with surprise. She knew how hard I’d been working on it. “For real?”

I nodded.

She thought about that for a minute. “Because you didn’t want them even considerin’ us after what they said?”

“Exactly.”

“It was that foul?”

“Pretty foul.”

“So did you go off or did you just walk away?”

I smiled a little at the memory. “I went off a little and then I walked away.”

“Did you cuss?”

I shook my head. “I was too righteous to cuss.”

She grinned at me. “You know you can be righteous when you want to!”

I laughed, relieved she understood and didn’t panic.

“I saw this comin’,” she said.

“Saw what coming?”

“I knew they were gonna piss you off and I knew you were gonna tell ’em where to put they money and walk out.”

“You’re a psychic now?” I said.

She just shrugged. “No, but the way you were talkin’ when you went to that grant class and those guys marked up your proposal with that red pen . . .”

I was surprised she remembered that, but she was absolutely right. That red pen had not endeared them to me. The last time somebody marked up something I had written in red ink was in high school and I didn’t appreciate it then either. “How was I talking?”

“Like somebody whose last nerve was bein’ worked on one time too many.”

“So why didn’t you warn me?”

“What was I gonna say? Miz J,
don’t go down there askin’ those white folks for no money!
” She shrugged again. “You had to try. We need the money, right?”

“Yeah, we do,” I said. “I just hope I did the right thing.”

She looked at me like she was surprised to have to remind me of something I should already know. “What do you always say when we’re not sure about somethin’?”

I answered like a confident third grader about to win the spelling bee. “What would a free woman do?”

She grinned her approval. “So did you ask yourself that question?”

“Yes,” I said, proud I had remembered one of the lessons I’m always so busy teaching. “I did.”

“That’s when you went off and walked out?”

I nodded.

“Well, then,” Tee said, like the matter was settled. “It’s all good!”

I laughed out loud because she was absolutely right. I had asked the required question, given myself an honest answer, and acted on it with finality and just the right amount of Amazonian indignation. What happens next is just that: what happens next. But Tee was right, for now, it’s all good!