Life Sentences (12 page)

She had told her teacher as much. “But this is dialect, Tisha. It's how people spoke once upon a time, in the South. Joel Chandler Harris wanted to preserve these oral traditions, lest these stories be lost to the ages.” Cassandra, always the suck-up, had chimed in, “It's not just a story. It's
history,
Tisha.”

Not mine,
she wanted to say.

She found her way to the Jack in the Box, now a Burger King, and ordered a milk shake and some onion rings. Chicken salad with pistachios. She hated that kind of food. So why had she suggested the restaurant? Because—admit it—she wanted to impress Cassandra. Cassandra! Who had been a borderline geek in school, with that enormous mop of frowsy hair, her skinny, clumsy body. Time was Cassandra had sought Tisha's approval. It was a veritable chain of command: Tisha looked to Donna, Fatima and Cassandra looked to Tisha, and sad little Callie followed at Fatima's heels, asking for nothing but the right to stand on the sidelines. “You playing kicksies?” she would say on the playground. “You playing foursquare?” But she wouldn't play unless Donna or Tisha urged her to join. Fatima's invitation wasn't good enough, much less Cassandra's. Not that Cassandra ever thought to invite Callie, and now she had apparently forgotten how the girl tried to attach herself to them. Because if she did, that would be a chapter, maybe multiple chapters, maybe a book in itself.

Now how had Tisha gotten lost in this suburb where she had lived for seventeen years? Okay, so this wasn't her part of town, but she had gone wildly off track somehow. The trick to driving in Columbia, Tisha
always believed, was not to think about it. She had gone right when she should have gone left or straight, turned into Faulkner Ridge, but then, she had Faulkner on the brain.

Tisha met Br'er Rabbit again in college, when she signed up for Sterling Stuckey's seminar on what was then called black folklore. She was skeptical at first and confused that the assigned book of stories was credited to William Faulkner. Why was William Faulkner writing about Br'er Rabbit? But her professor had explained that this was William
J.
Faulkner, a former slave, telling the same stories as Harris, but in simple, direct language that granted the tales dignity and power. The professor had then drawn the parallels between Br'er Rabbit and the trickster rabbit of West African folklore, then linked this to the concept of Pan-Africanization, in which old ethnic divisions melted in the face of slavery. He returned Br'er Rabbit to Tisha, allowed her to see how plucky that little rabbit was, how smart. A trickster by necessity, because how else could a rabbit survive in this savage world?

A few weeks later in the semester, when they were reading a biography of Jelly Roll Morton, a white girl from Oklahoma said apropos of Morton's love of fine clothes, “I always did wonder why black people all have fancy cars, even when they don't have much money.” There was a deep, almost frightening silence, a silence miles beyond awkward. Stuckey had gently led the class into a discussion of stereotypes and generalizations. But the girl had remained serene and unperturbed in her ignorance, believing herself validated. “Right,” she said when the professor finished. “It's very childish, buying fancy things when you can't put food on the table.”

Cassandra was never stupid that way, never quite that smug or insular. She had been a better sport about her stepmother than the woman's family had been, for sure. Annie Waters had been all but disowned by her family when she married Cedric Fallows. The gossip about
that
had been way, way above Tisha's young head, coded and obscure, but she had figured it out eventually. Everyone had, except Cassandra. Which
was funny, because no one really cared except Cassandra. Until she wrote a book, and now millions of people had entered the time of King's death through this—
Sorry, Cassandra,
Tisha thought, pulling on her milk shake so angrily it grunted—
trivial
story. That had been the most infuriating part of the memoir, watching Cassandra blithely co-opt those three days to tell the story of her own personal tragedy. She hadn't known, couldn't know what had gone on in the living rooms and kitchens of black folks' homes that horrible weekend, the fear and grief and terror of it all. As Donna said, she meant no harm.

But Tisha knew that people who meant no harm were often the most dangerous people of all, the real tar babies from which one might never disentangle. Reg and Donna were crazy, thinking that Cassandra could be managed in any way, that they could let her a little way in and then dissuade her from dragging them into the process of picking the bones of Callie Jenkins's life. That poor sad woman, always on the sidelines, waiting to be invited. Whatever she had done—and everyone assumed she had killed her baby—leave her in peace now, Cassandra. Leave her be.

Reg and Donna could wrangle with Cassandra if they chose. Tisha—well, Tisha was going to lay low.

I WAS A TELEVISION JUNKIE
as a child. Officially, I was allowed to watch television only an hour a day, but that was my father's rule and my mother seldom enforced it. When he moved out, television would become a passive way for us to be together, and the restrictions fell away. But while we still lived under one roof, my father cursed, reviled, and damned television. Which, of course, made it irresistible.

On school days, I rushed home practically shaking with anticipation. I started with
One Life to Live,
killing time until
Dark Shadows
came on, but the soap opera quickly eclipsed the supernatural in my imagination. Soap operas were the dirtiest thing going in the late 1960s, filled with illicit sex and unplanned pregnancies that trapped people into loveless marriages. I watched in a stupor until the news came on, then hurriedly did my homework, as my father expected it to be complete when he arrived home.

My favorite was
Bewitched,
a nighttime show and therefore not so easily hidden from my father. I claimed it as part of my allocated ration, but the show enraged him on principle. He seemed incensed that Darrin, whether played by Dick York or Dick Sargent, had snared Samantha, the beautiful witch. My father shared Samantha's mother's opinion that Darrin was unworthy—not because he was a mortal, but because he refused to let Samantha use her powers to enrich them. Even
though my father's beloved myths repeatedly demonstrated the dangers inherent in loving gods and goddesses, my father would not have shied away from pursuing an immortal. In fact, in less than forty-eight hours from this evening that I am describing, Annie would rise, Aphrodite-like, from a sea of writhing bodies, and he would almost die for her.

But this was a Thursday. I turned on the television, thinking about how there's no in-between with witches, they were either ugly or gorgeous. I hoped to be gorgeous, but it didn't look promising. My mother said I was the prettiest girl in the world, but my father was conspicuously silent on the subject of my looks. He had stopped caring for my hair the summer between third and fourth grade, and it was now an unmanageable mass, as my mother had prophesied, and not at all flattering to my odd little face. Still, it was convenient to have hair to hide behind, in school and at home, where I could sense something was terribly wrong. Or about to be.

“We interrupt this program for a special bulletin”—remember those words? We don't seem to hear them as often now, since CNN came along, rushing information to us within seconds of it happening. Today, bulletins pass by on a
crawl,
humble and deferential, trying not to obscure the programming. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot in Memphis at 6
P.M.
central time, an hour before I settled myself at the television, and I was just learning about it. He was thirty-nine years old. Ancient to a girl who would turn ten in two days, but the same age as my father and five years older than my mother.

I called out to my mother, who was in the kitchen. She didn't believe me at first: How can a little girl be the bearer of this news? Finally comprehending, she cried out—but no, that scream was later, I am conflating things. My mother will scream two months later, in the early-morning hours of June 5, when Robert F. Kennedy is shot. I will hear her scream and go to her bed, wonder at her wild grief over a man that we don't really know. It will be several minutes before I think to ask, “Where's Daddy?” My mother will cry harder. So much happens in two months.

Within hours of the news of King's death, Washington, DC, and Detroit were engulfed by riots, but Baltimore was deceptively quiet. “A city so behind the times that it can't riot in a timely fashion,” my father liked to say.

“But if people here had rioted right away, you never would have gone out Saturday,” I pointed out to him years later. “And you wouldn't have met Annie. You met Annie because King was killed.”

“Don't be sloppy, Cassandra. Yes, you can say that I met Annie in circumstances that were a direct consequence of King's death. But it's fallacious to say I wouldn't have met her otherwise. After all, she worked over at that bakery in Westview Mall, not even three miles from here.”

“But would you have fallen in love with her in a less charged encounter?” I persisted. “Would it have been love at first sight if you had met, say, buying pizza rolls at Silber's? Or riding the bus downtown?”

“Oh, yes,” my father always said. “Annie Waters was my destiny.” Then, at the look on my face: “Don't ask a question if you don't want to know the answer.”

THE MOMENT TEENA SPOTTED
the shopper in the voluminous cape, she wanted to scream “Mine!” like a hotdogging outfielder. It wasn't just that the woman was clearly someone who spent freely. She had money and taste and a relatively decent figure for her age—slender, not too hippy, although a little on the short side for true high fashion. She had the good sense not to dress younger than her age, which Teena put in the early to mid-forties. That meant she would avoid the trendiest clothes. But she would appreciate the best pieces in some of the new spring collections, be keen to find an item or two that allowed her to keep pace with fashion without being a slave to it.

“I'm Teena,” she told the woman, ignoring the glare from the other
sales associate, Lavonne, who, by rights, should have snagged the customer. “Let me know if you need anything.”

Lavonne wouldn't have meshed with this customer, Teena rationalized. Lavonne was too pushy, too insistent. She did better with the insecure ones. With a shopper like this, you offer help, then back away, making sure to gauge the exact moment when she wants assistance. Teena watched the woman flip through the high-end designers Nordstrom carried here. She had the air of a New Yorker, someone used to more and better offerings. A shopper of Bergdorf Goodman or the designer floors at Saks's flagship. Sometimes, on her day off, Teena bought a ticket on one of those up-and-back bus trips to New York, the ones that charged only $35 and threw in a bagel. While her fellow travelers headed out to matinees and museums, she wandered the best department stores, drinking in the wares. She didn't try things on—professional courtesy, she wouldn't waste another sales associate's time that way—but she examined the clothes and studied the shoppers. The merchandise inspired envy, yet the customers left her grateful for her life in Baltimore. While many seemed nice, there was one type she could never suffer—loud and cawing, incapable of being pleased. Oh, she saw her share of bitches here, especially around prom time, but the Baltimore bitch was a different breed entirely, someone she could handle because she had known the type her entire life, even been one in her youth. She would have called it
confidence
then, or a
strong personality.
Same difference. In her twenties, pretty and ambitious, Teena had been careless with others' feelings. She had even secretly loathed unlucky people, believing they were responsible for their own fates. She had been ruthless about culling losers from her life, lest they prove contagious.

Then she had joined their ranks.

The woman was looking at a dress, a Tory Burch shift in pale green and pink. Teena had been selling the hell out of it—those two shades never went out of fashion in preppy Baltimore—but it wasn't right for this customer.

“It's pretty,” she ventured. “And incredibly popular.” The woman winced. Good sign. “I have a sense it's not to your taste.”

“I tend to be pretty somber,” the woman admitted with a laugh. “Maybe I should change, though. It's such a spring look and I'd like to believe that spring might finally make it here, although I know from experience that Baltimore won't get down to the business of spring until late April.”

“You're from here, then?”

“Originally.” She passed the Tory Burch by but picked the next dress on the rack, a fluffy Alice + Olivia. She was clearly in a romantic mood, drawn to pretty-pretty things quite different from the severe clothes she was wearing today. A woman in the mood for a change. Recent weight loss? But this woman did not move as if her body were new or surprising to her; quite the opposite. This was a woman who was used to being attractive, perhaps even overrated her looks a bit, lost track of how age chipped away at a woman. She had the languid aspect of someone who was dreaming, modeling these clothes for someone's appreciative gaze. Teena saw this quite a bit, across all age ranges. She wondered at it, the human capacity for silliness and love as the decades mounted up. That part of her was as dead as the nerves in her right hand.

“What about this? I think it suits your coloring.” She pulled out a jersey dress that was more rose than pink, and hue made all the difference. A Dolce & Gabbana, it also cost twice as much as anything else the woman had picked but was far more appropriate than the bubble dresses draped over her arm. Her figure was good enough, but someone who had made the decision to let her hair go silver—in contrast to Teena, who had just let her hair color
go,
period—couldn't carry those younger silhouettes. The shopper inspected the price tag, unfazed.

“Would you like a pair of pumps?” Teena asked, shooting a look at the suede boots. Gorgeous, with a high, stacked heel, but ill-suited to these clothes. It would be a shame to lose the sale simply because a pair of winter boots defeated the buyer's imagination. “Size seven?”

“Eight,” the woman said with a knowing smile. She understood that Teena had been careful to underestimate her shoe size. Good for her. Teena had never understood this peculiar vanity. Granted, Teena wore a size six, but still. Your feet were your feet; no diet or exercise on the planet could change them. It was the one size that women should own with pride. Girly girl that she had always been with her love of clothes and makeup, Teena remained baffled by some other aspects of femininity. There had been moments, in the box with Calliope Jenkins, that she believed this was the root of her problem: She didn't understand women, much less mothers. Teena couldn't break Calliope because she wasn't female enough. Ironic, given that she had lobbied for the assignment—and been granted it—on the basis of gender. Calliope Jenkins looked up at men with those sleepy, clouded eyes, and they had trouble seeing a killer. A crazy woman, yes. The men in the squad all agreed they could smell the crazy on Calliope. A troubled woman and a woman who caused trouble—yes. A killer? Logically, she must be, but logic withered in the face of Calliope's calm recitations, the call-and-answer of “I take the Fifth,” “I have nothing to say.”

“I'll make sure you have a pair of light-colored pumps,” Teena promised. And, while she was at it, she would take the liberty of bringing a few other items. There was a Roberto Cavalli that no one had been able to carry, much less afford.

 

CASSANDRA SAT ON THE PADDED
stool in the dressing room, wearing nothing but her bra and underwear. The lighting was stupidly harsh. She reminded herself of Tisha's drawings, only aged thirty years. This had gone too far. She had come here to introduce herself, ask for a meeting, but her nerve had failed and now she felt deceitful. For her earlier books, she had relied on her memory and her journals, maybe a few telephone calls to friends and family. How did someone talk to someone new, especially this sad woman whose thin frame couldn't
quite fill her clothes, pretty and well chosen as they were. Where did one begin? “At the beginning,” her father always said when she was in a panic over a paper for school.

Strange though it seemed now, she had sometimes struggled with her English assignments, at least in the public school system; the Gordon School had been far more open to her nontraditional approaches. In ninth grade, still in public school, Cassandra had been given a failing mark on a paper on Faulkner because she had attempted to write it in the voice of Benjy. The teacher knocked off a point for every misspelled word and sentence fragment. “I have a hunch,” her father said, “that your teacher has not, in fact, read
The Sound and the Fury.
” No matter how harsh or kind her teachers' assessments, her father had gone over her papers and evaluated them according to a different standard. He had critiqued her metaphors, drawn red lines through clichés, insisted that she could do better. “Too neat, too proper,” he said. “I didn't raise you to be a mynah bird, mouthing teachers' banalities back to them.”

She made eye contact with her own image in the triple mirror and practiced her lines silently.
Hi, I'm Cassandra Fallows and I'm researching a book about Calliope Jenkins.
Not exactly correct.
Hi, I'm Cassandra Fallows and I'm writing another memoir, but it's also an investigation into the life of Calliope Jenkins.
God, how did journalists do it? She knew how they approached
her,
via publicists and e-mail, sometimes at public events. She found the latter a little gauche. But if that tactic was gauche, then sandbagging someone at her job was lower still. Cassandra had felt flush with success, digging up Teena's address and going to her home, but days had gone by without a reply. Luckily, a neighbor—not the suspicious old man, but a harried young mother unloading groceries—had let the location of Teena's employment slip, along with the fact that no one ever called her Sistina. The nickname, Teena, had set Cassandra up to expect a tackier and younger person, which she realized now was silly. Twenty years had passed. Teena had to be in her forties at least and she looked to be well into her fifties.

She pulled on the rose-colored dress that the unsuspecting Teena had chosen for her. The former detective knew her clothes: The dress, unprepossessing on the hanger, was remarkable on the body and the color made her skin glow. She had eschewed the high heels—she had a horror of putting her feet in shoes that other women had worn—so she raised up on tiptoe, hands on her hips, surveying herself. Where on earth would she wear it?

 

AT THE CASH REGISTER,
even as she paid for the dress and allowed Teena to hand-sell her a lightweight spring coat to complement it, more than doubling the bill, Cassandra still could not figure out how to say her piece. She clung to the fleeting hope that her credit card might prove to be an icebreaker—other clerks, in other stores, and not just bookstores, had made the connection on occasion. But while Teena's glance seemed to snag on it, she didn't say anything, only walked around the counter and handed her the hanging bag, a bit of Nordstrom protocol that had always amused Cassandra.

“I wasn't actually planning to shop today,” she said.

“Sometimes, that's when you find the best things.” Said with a smile, but also finality. The sale had been made; she was done with her. Although Teena was probably one of the ones who followed up with handwritten notes.

“No, I mean—I came here to meet
you.
”

Teena's face froze. No, no, no—Cassandra heard her father's voice, castigating.
That's weak, Cassandra, inaccurate.
Teena's face clouded over. But that wasn't it, either. Her expression changed subtly—a new mask, which established that the previous face had been a mask as well. Teena Murphy probably had masks upon masks upon masks.

“Why would anyone want to meet me?”

“I'm writing about Calliope Jenkins—”

Teena Murphy threw up her hands, almost as if warding off a blow. “I'm afraid I can't help you.”

“Why don't you take my business card?”

Teena accepted the card, dropped it, then had trouble retrieving it from the carpet. Was something wrong with her hand?

“It's not a book
about
Calliope Jenkins. But I knew her, when we were children, and I think it's interesting, the way our paths diverged—”

“What was she like?”

Asked in an anguished rush, the words seeming to escape Teena's throat in spite of herself. The question caught Cassandra off guard. But then—shouldn't that be the central question? What had Calliope Jenkins been like as a child, as an adult? Did the child predict the adult and her life in any way? Cassandra should be prepared to answer this question. It was nothing less than the spine of her book.

She was even less prepared when Teena said, “Buy another five thousand dollars' worth of clothing, and I'll talk to you on my break.”