I'm Your Girl (9 page)
Authors: J. J. Murray
Oh…snap. Ty has a Mr. Tickler, too! I feel a rush of blood to my face. I know, I’m weird, but I’m feeling embarrassed by something that’s happening to a woman in a novel.
I wonder if Ty has the newest model….
Before I can answer—and I really don’t want to answer—Darcy returns with our appetizers, which gives me a wicked thought: good service means that the server is getting some later. Would Darcy be this busy with our order if she weren’t getting busy after work?
“Here are your drinks, hot wings, and spinach dip. I also brought some extra plates for y’all. Are y’all ready to order your main courses?”
I shake my head. “I think this will be enough for me, thank you. Are you guys ordering anything?”
Mike pats his stomach. “No, I had a late lunch so I’m not that hungry. This will be plenty.”
“This is fine,” Pat says. “If I get hungry later, I’ll attack some of the leftovers in the fridge.”
Darcy winces. No big tip for you at this booth, wench. “Great, I’ll bring your check in a few minutes. How should I divide it?”
Pat rolls her eyes. “Just bring one check, please. Whose turn is it to pay anyway?”
Mike pulls out his Visa and hands it to Darcy. “Mine.”
After Darcy leaves, I see Pat staring at me. I know she wants me to answer her question, most likely because she wants yet another of my leftover boyfriends. The girl really likes her leftovers. I dump ’em, and she pumps ’em. She says they taste better the second time you cook with them.
And Pat’s the librarian-looking one? Trifling, just trifling.
I decide to change the subject. “That wench didn’t even ask if we wanted dessert. I guess she needs to hurry up and get ready for her date with home girl later.”
“At least she has a date, and stop trying to change the subject,” Pat says. “So what’s up with you and your love life, Ty? You haven’t been on a date with Charles in God knows how long. I know you’ve been dating that battery-powered Mr. Tickler, and if Mr. Tickler is that good, girl, I may have to invest in one.”
I can’t believe she’s busting out with my business like that! Though I know Mike could care less, I’m embarrassed as hell.
And now I’m embarrassed all over again. In addition to giving librarian-looking people a bad name, Pat is just plain rude. What’s the word? Uncouth. Yep, Pat is uncouth in the booth.
Though I plan to get some from Mr. Tickler tonight if Charles doesn’t come through.
It sounds to me as if Ty has her priorities in order. I’ll bet she has quite a collection of C batteries in her nightstand. She may even have rechargeable batteries warming up in one of those little rechargers right now. I should probably get a recharger, too.
It’s good for the environment, you know.
“I’m just glad you got over Jason,” Mike says. “He was a dawg with a capital D.”
I’m so tired of where this conversation always seems to go. “Why is it we talk about the same damn thing every time we go out?” I ask. “I don’t want to talk about the man I’m with or the men who dogged me out. I don’t want to talk about Charles, and I sure as hell don’t want to talk about Jason. I came out tonight to talk to two of my friends about normal shit, like working, or the last movie you saw, Pat, or the last book you read, Mike. This is depressing.”
Neither Mike nor Pat speaks for a few moments.
“I, uh, I fixed that problem in accounting today,” Pat says.
“’Bout time, too,” Mike says, and in no time, they sit and fuss about working for Wachovia, where Mike is a supervisor and Pat is a systems analyst. I don’t understand a word they’re saying most of the time, because they speak that computer-tech language, but at least they aren’t grilling me anymore.
Darcy gives us exactly two minutes to start on our wings and spinach dip before bouncing up to the table and handing the credit card slip to Mike. “Here you are, sir. Thank you, and y’all have a good night.” Then Darcy bounces away, and I know that isn’t the ass she was born with. It doesn’t fit her white body at all. I’ll bet she got a real good deal on the sale of her singlewide at the trailer park and bought herself a booty. I’m sure her mama’s real proud of her.
Ain’t that the truth! All these no-ass-at-all white girls are trying to get cabooses. They could rid me of mine anytime!
But wait—how are Ty and Dan going to hook up when it’s starting to sound as if Ty doesn’t even like white people? There are far too many opposites in this book. Too much nonsense. This kind of thing would
never
happen, especially in Roanoke, Virginia.
Mike signs the slip. “She doesn’t deserve a tip at all, but I’ll give her fifteen instead of my normal twenty percent. Everybody has off nights. Are you all ready to go?”
When we get outside, the rain is coming down in heavy sheets. Mike and Pat share an umbrella to his Maxima, while I pop my umbrella and start for my baby, my brand-new BMW 525i, a car I may actually get to own outright in about ten years once the lease runs out. As I’m passing under the Hooters sign, I hear some thumping bass sounding like some old school rap from when I was little—and it’s coming from the old Subaru parked next to me? How dare that little car sit next to mine! I park my car in the boondocks to keep hoopdies like that away from my baby. There will be no scratches, dents, or scars on my baby!
I look through the front windshield, you know, just to be nosy, and see…Dan? He hasn’t left yet? What’s up with him? Is he having car trouble? No, exhaust smoke fills the air just fine. Is he—I hope he isn’t waiting for me. Just because I nodded to him does not mean—
He’s waving. Do I wave back at the man who was feeling up my legs with his eyes? You’re asking a lot, Mr. Dan. First nodding, and now waving. I know you’ve had a rough night, and though I don’t know exactly how you feel—no man ever dumped me for another man—I feel you, Mr. Dan. I squeeze out a wincing smile but don’t wave, get in my car, start it up, and pull out of the Hooters parking lot. I check the rearview mirror to see if he follows—you can never tell with white men these days—then head for home, humming along to that old school beat.
I close
Wishful Thinking.
The concept is different, but it’s too far-fetched. Ty seems as if she has her life together—a strong sister with a job and a plan. Dan, though, has too much baggage and droolage. Is “droolage” a word? I know I’d probably trash this one, even though I usually give interracial romances the benefit of the doubt, since there are so few of them. I might pick this one up again one day when I’m bored out of my skull.
Good thing I stocked up on C batteries. The checkout girl at Wal-Mart didn’t even blink as she scanned the Duracell megapack, the ones parents buy for all the electronic Christmas toys. Little did she know…
Or, what if she
did
know?
I’ve embarrassed myself again.
Three times in one night, two from a book, and one from a memory.
I must be crazy.
Jack
T
here’s hardly anyone in the main downtown library today. No wonder I found a parking spot so close to the building.
It’s the day after the day after Christmas. No one’s reading today. The batteries are still good.
True.
I stop at the circulation desk, where a tan woman—check that—a light-skinned
black
woman is reading a trade paperback. I slide the books onto the counter, and she looks up briefly before scanning the bar codes on the books and looking at a computer screen.
“These books are very late, sir.”
“I just found them today in my son’s room.” I look at her name tag: Diane. “He was, um, hiding them from me.”
She squints at the screen. “The fine on these will be…sixteen-fifty.”
“Ouch,” I say, and I dig into my wallet for a twenty.
“For ten dollars more, you could buy all three,” she says, reaching over and taking the twenty.
“I could? Here.”
Diane finally looks at me, blinking her brown eyes once. “Oh, no. I meant you could buy these at a
store
for ten more than your fine.” She gives me my change, her fingers lightly brushing my palm.
“Thank you,” I say, as my palm tingles. “Um, where is your, um, African American section?”
She looks up, again briefly, before looking at the books on the counter. “The nonfiction section is—”
“I need fiction.”
She blinks once, and was that a sigh?
It was a sigh
.
“In the fiction section, sir,” she says softly.
Oh, yeah. How stupid of me.
You said it.
“Right.”
I walk away toward the fiction section, feeling foolish. Where will
my
book be?
In the fiction section.
I messed up. I hope I didn’t hurt Diane’s feelings.
I’m sure you did
.
I’ll bet she gets stupid questions like that a lot.
And she’s just hung a “Stupid” sign on you
.
She has to have a lot of patience to deal with stupid people like me all day.
I’m sure you made her day
.
I look back. Her eyes are buried in that trade paperback again. Here I am, a writer of African American fiction, and I ask a stupid question like that.
Then I realize…that librarian…Diane…touched me. Her fingers grazed my palm, when she was giving back my change.
Don’t read anything into it
.
She’s the first person to touch me since the funeral.
But she thinks you’re stupid
.
And she thinks I’m stupid.
Diane
W
hat a fool!
The library isn’t segregated, except when it comes to nonfiction, yet there he was assuming that we had a special African American fiction section. White folks think in little boxes sometimes.
Wait. The last bookstore I went into had African American fiction in its own section. Segregation
isn’t
over. Maybe he doesn’t come to the library that often. I mean, those books were six months overdue. And he’s just finding them? What kind of parent is that? Either he’s absentminded and unobservant or that child is good at hiding things. I look closely at the books I will have to reshelve later. They’re picture books, meaning he has a child age four at the most. What four-year-old can hide books from his or her parents?
And why does a white man want to read African American fiction? He should be reading nonfiction so he’ll know the real deal. I know that the fiction books I review aren’t truly about the real black experience, and that they’re just for entertainment, but I doubt anyone would want to read the real deal about being black in America.
Especially white men. Oh, excuse me,
Caucasian
men. He’s a member of the world’s youngest
named
race, “Caucasian” having been coined by some German named Blumenbach in 1807. And how do I know this nugget of information? Another white man came into the reference section to ask, that’s how. And this Blumenbach was a piece of work, let me tell you. He is supposedly the father of physical anthropology, and he based his findings on studies of his own collection of sixty human heads. Sixty…human…heads…in his
personal
collection.
I will never understand white people.
And the man over there wandering in the fiction section is definitely white—and ashy. White people, as a rule, are the ashiest people on the planet, the reason Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion (for dry skin, of course) and Oil of Olay were invented, the reason SPF-48 exists, the reason alligators are not as self-conscious around vacationers and retirees in Florida. As George Bernard Shaw once said, “A really
white
man would be a horrible sight.”
And that shaggy man is a horrible sight, indeed. If we had a children’s reading today, they’d all run away from him. Skinny, unshaved, scraggly blond hair, light blue eyes, and more wrinkles on his clothes than straight lines.
Pitiful.
But what is he doing returning a few books on a Thursday morning? Maybe he’s on his holiday break. I’ll bet he gets the whole week off from his cushy job. Well, it can’t be that cushy. He was wearing only a simple wedding band. I’ll bet his no-ironing wife has quite a rock on her finger.
I pick up
Thicker Than Blood
. Grandpa Joe-Joe, please help me forget about that skinny, ashy, unobservant white man.
2: Grandpa Joe-Joe’s Jungle
“I told you to be careful,” I say. “Just find yourself a stick.”
Chloe looks around in the tall grass in front of Grandpa Joe-Joe’s two-story farmhouse for a stick to scrape off a wedge of shit from her sandal.
Nasty. From Mr. Shaggy White Man to crap on a sandal. I just can’t win today.
“Does your grandfather have a dog?”
“No. The septic is probably backed up again.”
Nastier.
Chloe finds a stick and begins scraping. “Yuck.”
I shrug. “Grandpa Joe-Joe won’t notice.”
And it’s true. He doesn’t notice much of anything anymore. If it’s raining, I have to tell him to come inside. If it’s snowing, I have to tell him to put on a coat. If he’s stank—and he’s right stank most days—I have to tell him to take a bath.
Grandpa Joe-Joe might have some Caucasian in him. Mr. Shaggy White Man had some serious funk on him.
I look behind me. “Damn. He took down his mailbox again, and I’m not about to go looking for it today, as hot as it is.”
Chloe tosses the stick away. “He takes down his mailbox?”
“Yeah. He thinks if he doesn’t have a mailbox he won’t have to pay any taxes.”
If only
that
would work.
Chloe only blinks.
“Really. I pay his taxes anyway, ever since he got back from the VA hospital.”
She steps up beside me. “Has he been sick?”
“He has post-traumatic stress disorder,” I say, and I can’t help but laugh.
“That’s not funny.” She swats at a swarm of gnats in front of her face. “That’s a serious disorder.”
“I know it is. It’s just that Grandpa Joe-Joe was never in any war. He got in just after Korea and got out just before Vietnam.”
“Oh.”
“He’s got everybody fooled, huh?” I continue through the grass. “Follow directly behind me if you want to.”
She takes my hand, and it is soft. “Where’s the sidewalk?”
“This
is
the sidewalk. Grandpa Joe-Joe doesn’t believe in trimming anything. He likes everything a little wild.” I part a thick shock of grass, and she steps through. Very nice calves. “See those bushes blocking all the first-floor windows?”
She shades her eyes and looks up at the farmhouse. “Yeah.”
“They were planted by Great-Grandpa Bert in nineteen forty-eight.”
What, no Great-Grandpa
Bert-
Bert? If you’re going to be throwing funky names at your readers, at least be consistently funky.
“Really?”
“Yeah. I think they’re holding up this side of the house now, and whenever Grandpa Joe-Joe locks himself out of the house, which is almost every other day, he just climbs the bush to the second floor.”
Chloe squeezes my hand, and I stop. “What’s that?” She points to the right at a hulking piece of rust.
“That’s a DeSoto, Grandpa Joe-Joe’s first car. I spent many a summer evening racing that car as a kid.”
“It…ran once?”
I smile. “No. It wasn’t running even then.” I slide my hand out of hers, put it around her shoulders, and point to the back of the farmhouse. “If you look real carefully at the kudzu over there in the backyard, you’ll see all of Grandpa Joe-Joe’s cars and trucks peeking out.”
“I don’t see…oh. Oh.”
“Yeah, there are a lot of them, and when the kudzu’s down in the winter, all kinds of folks stop by to ask Grandpa Joe-Joe for parts. He doesn’t sell any of the parts, though, but he lets them look, mainly so he can mess with them.”
She leans back into my arm, even slides her arm around my waist. Where has this girl been all my life? “How does he mess with them?”
“Oh, say a man asks, ‘How much for that bumper on the Ford?’ Grandpa Joe-Joe will circle the man a couple times, then say, ‘How much you got?’ The man will ask, ‘How much do you want for the bumper?’ and Grandpa Joe-Joe will ask again, ‘How much you got?’ This will go on and on till the man says something like, ‘I got a hundred dollars.’” I stop and slide my hand down to Chloe’s little waist. Nice and soft. Nice little shelf down there, too.
Come on! Not all women readers have “shelves.” Since when has having a big behind translated into sex appeal?
I
haven’t felt it, and very few men have ever gotten close enough to my “shelf” to feel it. The things men want in a woman that women don’t want
on
them.
And speaking of shelves, I don’t see Mr. Shaggy White Man. I feel a chill. I mean, it’s just Kim Prim and I here today until two, when Francine gets here, and Kim believes that every patron is harmless. “They’re only here to be enlightened,” she says.
Oh, there he is, and though I feel a little better just knowing where he is, I still feel a chill. I look at the front door and see it rocking back and forth. When is maintenance going to fix that thing? The tiniest bit of wind makes those doors move.
I look down at the page. Now, where was I? Oh, yeah.
“Then, um, Grandpa Joe-Joe will say something like, ‘A hundred dollars? That all you got? Damn, you’re poorer than me. How’s that make you feel, boy?’” I turn Chloe to me, my chin nearly resting on the top of those zigzag cornrows. “He’s always messing with folks, and he’ll probably mess with you, too.”
She looks up at me. “How crazy is he?”
“Pretty crazy.” And Chloe is crazy pretty. I hope Grandpa Joe-Joe doesn’t run her off like…No, I don’t want to think about that day.
“Oh, please do,” I whisper. I look up slowly, darting my eyes side to side. No one heard me. I have to stop thinking out loud while I’m reading.
“Come on” I say, taking her hand, but Chloe doesn’t move. “What’s wrong?”
She points at a long black gopher snake sliding through the grass in front of us.
“Oh, that’s just a gopher snake. Nothing to it. Only eats mice.” I look all around us. “It’s the coiled and brown ones you should really watch out for.”
She jumps up to me. “I don’t like snakes.”
“Better not use Grandpa Joe-Joe’s bathroom, then. I had a gopher snake pop out between my legs once while I was, um, doing my business.”
Nasti
est.
That can’t really happen, can it? If so, I am never moving to the country. Never. I can barely make myself go in the staff bathroom upstairs.
“They can…do that?”
“Sure. They get into the plumbing all the time, looking for mice, I guess. Lots of mice out here.”
“Were you scared?”
“Hell yeah. It scared the shit out of me, all right. No one can be constipated at Grandpa Joe-Joe’s house.”
HAAAAA! But it’s still nasty. Did I just laugh out loud? I look around and only see Mr. Shaggy White Man pulling books from the shelves. What’s he got, five books already? I sigh. He’ll be back here in a few minutes, and then I’ll have to do some work.
I lead her to the porch, a small gap in the bushes letting us hit the first step.
“Will the porch hold the both of us?”
“It ought to,” I say, “but if it doesn’t, you’ll just tour Grandpa Joe-Joe’s root cellar first.”
Chloe drops my hand and steps back through the bush to the ground.
“I’m just kidding, Chloe. It’ll hold us. Just don’t—” Damn. “Just don’t leave the sidewalk.” I have to do something about that septic. “You still have that stick?”
Chloe retreats even farther, fussing and cussing, looking for another stick.
“It’s just fertilizer, Chloe. Why do you think the grass is so green and thick around here?” She isn’t hearing me at all. Now both of her sandals have shit on them. “It’s the best land in Franklin County.
Hey, there’s a Franklin County just south of Roanoke. I wonder if…Nah.
If we could just find it under all this grass, that is. I’ve had so many offers to buy this land from other real estate developers, but Grandpa Joe-Joe won’t have it. This is my home, he says
, my…
home. I know I could get at least $5,000 an acre for it, and that would give Grandpa Joe-Joe half a million to play with, but he won’t even listen to me when I start talking numbers. ‘This…is…my…home.’”
That’s right, Grandpa Joe-Joe. You keep your family’s land.
Chloe finds a stick and starts scraping, her face one big frown. Damn.
“Of course, we’d have to move Grandma and Great-Grandpa first, though.”
Chloe freezes. “They’re…buried out here?”
“Somewhere.” I look around. “I used to know where they were, but with all this kudzu—”
She turns to leave. “I’m out of here.”
I would have left at the first sign of human excrement. What took Chloe so long? Oh, that’s right. Chloe is a hoochie-ho with zigzag cornrows and a nice “shelf.”
“Where are you going, Chloe? We’re only staying a few minutes. I just want to check up on him, see how he’s doing, and then we’ll leave. Five minutes, I promise.”
“I’ll wait in the car,” she calls out.
“It’s too hot to wait in the car, Chloe. Come on. It’ll be all right—”
Then I see a skinny, yellow, liver-spotted hand reaching through the grass for Chloe’s ankle. Damn, Grandpa Joe-Joe, not today! I start to run to Chloe, but I’m too late. Her screams send a flock of sparrows up out of the grass into the sky.
What would I do if that happened to me? I’d probably scream, and then I’d stomp the living daylights out of that liver-spotted hand, crap on my sandals or not.
Chloe kicks Grandpa Joe-Joe’s hand away and runs to me, which is a good sign. The last girl ran completely away, all the way to Atlanta, or so I hear. I wish Chloe’s whole body wasn’t shivering, though.
“Is that, is that—”
I put my arms around her. “Yeah. That’s Grandpa Joe-Joe.”
“Where…where—”
I don’t see him, which means he isn’t done messing with us. “He’ll pop up eventually. He’s like a big prairie dog.”
“Why…why—”
“Like I said, he likes to mess with folks.”
And then we see his hunched-over form moving through a patch of thinner grass before he disappears into a thick canopy of kudzu behind the house.
“He
is
crazy,” Chloe says.
And this novel is as ludicrous as
Wishful Thinking
. Oh, I’m sure there are crazy folks in the Southern hills, but no woman—“cute” hoochie or not—is going to go running
to
the man who
brought
her to this place.
I look over to the fiction section. Where’s Mr. Shaggy White Man? Ah, I see a neon-white hand pulling another book from a shelf. Oh, Lord, I hope he’s not leaving books all over the place. That’s what some folks do. They pull a book from the shelf, continue to look, find something better, and then they put the “not-as-good” book down wherever they please. I sometimes see folks do that at the grocery store, and I have to fight the urge to take somebody’s unwanted peanut butter from the bread rack and return it to the condiment aisle.