I Wish I Had a Red Dress (9 page)

I THOUGHT IT WOULD
be a good idea for Tee and Nikki to stay the night at my house in case Junior was still feeling crazy. Nik said she’d bunk with her mother until things settled down a little, but Tomika immediately took me up on my invitation.

I told her to put Mavis to bed while I made us some chamomile tea. When I came back in the living room, she was already curled up on one end of the sofa. I handed her a cup. She took a long swallow and sighed.

I joined her on the couch and we tucked one of the world-famous Circus afghans around our feet and sat for a long, quiet moment.

“Were you scared?” I said finally, really wanting to know.

Tee considered the question. “I was too mad to be scared. Either The Circus is our place or it ain’t, right?”

I nodded. “You know how I felt out there?”

“How?”

I held my cup with both hands and the warmth was as comforting as a pair of slippers that have been sitting beside the fireplace. “
Helpless
. I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t done what you did.”

“You’d have thought of something.” She smiled with a lot more confidence in my abilities than I felt at that particular moment.

“Maybe,” I said, “but I didn’t have to. You handled it. I owe you one.”

She grinned. “One what?”

I grinned back. “One absolutely unexpected moment of creative
sister strength
when you truly need it.”

She laughed softly. “That sounds pretty valuable, Miz J. Maybe I should get it in writing.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t forget.”

We clicked our mugs to seal the deal and then just sipped our tea in silence for a minute or two. It was one of those good silences where you feel like everything is already clear, so there’s no reason to muck it up with a lot of chatter. I refilled our cups and Tomika chuckled softly.

“What?”

She pointed at the bag of videos she’d picked up on our way out. “They been fussin’ at me about these videos all day and we never even got to ’em.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“What is it about Denzel?”

She laughed softly. “Well, a couple of months ago, I went to
this revival in Big Rapids with my cousin Jan. The preacher came all the way from Chicago and he kept sayin’ that to be a good Christian, all you gotta remember to ask yourself is
What would Jesus do?
That made sense to me. It’s like our free woman thing, plus it’s easy to remember. Once you read the Ten Commandments, what he would or wouldn’t do is pretty clear, so I started thinkin’ about what if we had somethin’ like that about
guys.”

“What guys?”

She leaned forward, eager to make me understand. “The guys we . . . you know . . .”

Boyfriends? Babydaddies?

“Lovers?”

“Right!”

“A lot of them are truly sorry, but since they all we see, we ’bout to forget what a good man even look like, much less how one ‘spose to act.”

She’s right about that. Most of these girls have never had a relationship with a man who didn’t abuse them.

“That’s when Denzel popped into my mind, right there in the middle of the revival.”

“Why?”

“Because he put out a lot of movies where he act like a man is ‘
spose
to act. He take care of his family. He look out for his friends. He always got a job and he ain’t never hit no woman or abused no kid.”

She sipped her tea, her braids falling on either side of her face like a veil. “I was still with Jimmy back then.”

Jimmy was her ex live-in, a pretty boy with a bad attitude and no visible means of support.

“That’s why I was sittin’ up there in the first place, prayin’ over his ass, because of course, he was actin’ a fool, shovin’ me around, tellin’ Mavis he was gonna whip her, takin’ money out of my purse when I’m sleep. So I thought to myself, if Denzel was your man,
what would he do?
Just thinkin’ about it, about how different it would be, made me start cryin’ so hard my cousin thought I was gettin’ saved.”

“Maybe you were,” I said.

“I don’t know about that, but I know I went home and told Jimmy he was going to have to make other living arrangements.”

“Is that when he moved out?”

“That’s when I
put
him out.” She set her cup down. Chamomile tea was the last thing on her mind. “Miz J, you only need to see one do
right
to see all the others are
wrong
. I found me one in the movies and I’ma watch him as hard as I can. I’m tired of wastin’ my time lookin’ at niggas who don’t know how to treat a woman no better than they know how to be a man.” She took a deep breath. “Maybe this way I’ll recognize him when
my
Denzel show up.”

It was such a perfect response to such a terrible problem that I just sat there. In the absence of flesh-and-blood examples of the real thing, Denzel had become the designated man, a good brother, whose behavior could be observed and codified.
What would Denzel do?
Easy to remember; easy to understand. I wondered if we’d have to get his permission to put it on a button, a poster, a billboard over Times Square!

“Mama!” Mavis was rubbing her eyes sleepily in the doorway. “I woke up!”

“Come here, baby,” Tomika said to her daughter, who staggered
over sleepily, fell into the safe haven of her mother’s arms and went immediately back to sleep. Tomika adjusted the afghan.

“You know what?” I said, excited by the possibilities for the application of Denzel theory. “I think you just had another big idea.”

She shook her head and grinned at me. “I hope this one don’t make me hafta
really
shoot Junior Lattimore.”

“No way,” I said. “I don’t believe in guns.”

She looked exactly like she would have if I had said
I don’t believe in gravity
. “You know soon’s he find out what happened, he gonna hafta try and beat my ass or somethin’,” she said matter-of-factly. “He can’t be no punk.”

I had been thinking the same thing myself. “Maybe he won’t find out.”

“Nik gonna tell him.”

That hadn’t occurred to me. One of the others maybe, accidentally, but not Nikki. “Why?”

She shrugged and Mavis mewed softly like a newborn kitten. Tee rubbed her back in slow circles. “First time he make her mad once she stop bein’ scared, she gonna throw it in his face.”

“But they broke up.”

“Yeah, well, all I’m sayin’ is, I know he’s gonna act a fool and I’ma be ready when he does.”

“What do you mean?”

She kissed the top of her daughter’s head and looked at me. “I don’t know yet.”

Mavis nestled closer to her mother’s breast and smiled in her sleep: peaceful. What kind of woman would she grow up to be if
we could make sure she always felt that loved, that protected, that safe? I don’t know, but I damn sure intended to find out.

“The truth is, Miz J”—Tomika’s voice trembled just a little— “I was sorta hopin’ you’d help me figure that out.”

I reached over and took her hand. “All right,” I said. “I will.”

I HAD JUST STARTED
pumping my gas when Anita Lattimore pulled up to the pump in a bright purple Impala. The car had definitely seen better days, but as each of her sons came of age, they continued to adorn and personalize it until they saved or stole enough to buy vehicles of their own. At that point, the family car returned to their mother’s primary custody, but the distinguishing decorative touches remained; red crushed velvet seating, now liberally pocked with dope-seed holes and cigarette burns; faux gold rims, minus two of the original set; a vanity plate reading born bad; and, of course, the flat purple perpetually peeling paint job.

Seated next to her in the front seat was a woman probably ten years younger, but already showing the ravages of too many bad drugs, too much mean sex and a steady diet of barbecue potato
chips, fried pork rinds and Pepsi-Cola. The passenger was talking animatedly on a tiny cell phone, but Anita leaned across her, opened the door, stuffed some money into her hand and pushed her out into the cold afternoon to pump the gas.

The woman, dressed in a red miniskirt and a short fake fur jacket did not appreciate the division of labor. “Why I always gotta pump the damn gas?” she said, shivering and trying in vain to pull her skirt down over a little more of her thighs.

“One, because you ain’t got no damn car. Two, because you ain’t got no damn money,” Anita snarled through the open door. “And three, because you can always walk your broke ass home if you don’t like it.”

Anita slammed the door, leaving her friend outside, and lit a cigarette. The woman, having no other options, sighed deeply and set about her task while resuming her phone conversation at the same decibel level she’d used speaking to Anita.

“You there? Yeah, girl, I already told the muthafucka all that shit. He a lyin’ ass if he say I didn’t. When he first stepped to me last time they came through, I said we do head and hand jobs only. No fuckin’. I ain’t ’bout no AIDS and Nita ain’t either.”

I wondered if she would censor her conversation a little, or at least lower her voice, if I had been a young person who presumably had not been exposed to the full vile possibilities of her mother tongue, or an older one who might hope that one of the privileges of age would include the right to pretend people don’t really talk like that except in the cable movies they avoid as assiduously as they do the playgrounds where the young men congregate to play basketball and see who can talk the loudest or the nastiest, or both.

Probably not. I don’t think she was even conscious of me being there. Between pumping gas, rolling her eyes at Anita
through the windshield and making it clear that whoever they were discussing on the phone had been fully apprised of the rules of whatever exchange had occurred, she was fully engaged in her own moment.

“Damn right,” she said, watching the meter carefully so she wouldn’t go over the amount of the crumpled bills Anita had shoved into her hand. “Plus that shit take too long. Niggas wanna be up in the pussy for two, three hours!”

Two or three hours?
What kind of men were these?

The woman cackled at the response I couldn’t hear and replaced the pump. Five dollars on the nose. Her laugh had a raspy, desperate quality that held no hint of real amusement. “You got that right! I
know
it’s good,
but time is money!
”

As she headed inside to pay, I saw Anita looking at me through the window with an expression of pure malice. I wondered what part of what happened yesterday had reached her ears via Junior’s lying lips. I waved to her, knowing I wouldn’t have to wait long to find out.

She rolled down her window in a series of jerky, indignant motions and spit the words in my direction. “You ain’t gotta be wavin’ at me like ain’t nothin’ gone down between us,” she said. “My boy tole me everythin’ and I tole him he oughta get a lawyer and file charges against that lil’ bitch and all the rest of y’all, too, for lettin’ her do it.”

I assumed she meant Tee, but it could have been Nikki, for whom Anita had a special dislike since she was Junior’s longtime girlfriend. Some mothers have a difficult time sharing their sons.

“He was wrong,” I said. “He put his hands on one of our members.”

“One of your
members?
” Anita snorted with contempt.
“Nikki Solomon been fuckin’ my boy since before she got her period. Now all of a sudden she need y’all to run him off her?”

My first impulse was to argue the facts with her, then clarify the legal implications, then point out her role in all this as his mother who should have raised him better, but that was exactly what she wanted me to do so she could get out of the car and we could stand toe-to-toe, trading insults, charges and countercharges until we got tired or somebody called the sheriff to come break up the brawl. But there was no satisfaction for me in that kind of standoff and no protection for Nikki or Tee. I wasn’t required to spend a nanosecond engaged in this dispute, especially since her backup was headed our way, still shouting into her cell phone and, I’m sure, armed with an arsenal of curses she had hardly begun to showcase and which I truly didn’t need to carry around in my head for the rest of the day.

I said nothing, swiped my credit card at the pump and waited for my receipt.

Anita narrowed her angry eyes. “Oh, you ain’t got nothin’ to say now, right? You just all about business and shit.” She laughed, a barking, phlegmy, smoker’s laugh as mirthless as her girlfriend’s cackle. “Aw-iight. Take your tight ass on, then. Save that shit for when the sheriff come.”

“The sheriff’s already talked to me,” I said, opening my car door and unable to resist a small parting shot. “I hear he’s looking for you. Didn’t he call your job yet?”

She looked surprised, and her friend stopped talking long enough to wait for the response. Their overtime at the motel where they were working included a lot of activity that didn’t bear scrutiny.

“What he wanna talk to me for?” Anita said, immediately wary.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe you should ask him when he calls.”

Before they could decide whether or not I was bluffing, I pulled out. In the rearview mirror, I could see them pull out behind me and turn toward town. At the very least, I figured that would give Anita food for thought before she got too self-righteous about her sorry son. I’d had enough of Junior Lattimore already and the day was just getting started good.