Man Swappers (5 page)

“What kind of rumors?” Paris asked, shifting in her seat.

“Things that I dare not believe about you girls. I didn’t raise y’all to be no loose girls. So I’m hoping they’re not true...”

My sisters and I looked at each other, already knowing where the conversation was headed. “You hope what isn’t true?” Porsha asked, getting impatient. Our mother, love her dearly, has a way with dragging shit out instead of getting to the point.

“Well...” she paused, trying to find her words. A practice she rehearsed over and over to keep our father from storming up out of the house when she said something he didn’t like. Out of the three of us, my patience level is the shortest. And when it comes to nonsense I am much more vocal about it than they are.

I huffed, glancing down at my watch. “Mom, will you please spill it already? Geesh. Say what you have to say and stop beating around the bush.”

She ignored my irritation, squinting her eyes at me. “Persia, don’t get mouthy with me. Now, like I was saying, I hope these rumors being spread about y’all are nothing but the devil and his lies.”

“MOM!” I yelled, getting up from my seat. “This is ridiculous. Will you, please. Get. To. The Damn. Point.”

“The point is your Aunt Lucky called here, then your Aunt Fanny, to tell me they heard the three of you have been sleeping with each other’s boyfriends.” Lucky and Fanny are two of her gossiping-ass sisters, Lucille and Francine, who enjoy rattling off everyone else’s business, except their own. They are always somewhere meddling. The only aunt who had any sense was my Aunt Penny—my mother’s youngest sister. She packed up and moved to Arizona, far away from all of their asses.

I rolled my eyes up in my head. Paris and Porsha glanced over at me, shaking their heads for me not to get into it with her. “That’s old news.”

“
Old news
?” she repeated in disbelief. “What in the world do you mean, it’s ‘old news’? It’s new news to me. And y’all know how I am about gossip and rumors.”

Yeah, you like dishing it, but can’t stand to be on the receiving end of it.
“Well, what we do isn’t a rumor,” I informed her. “It’s a fact. I thought you were gonna say some mess about one of us being pregnant, or having a disease or something.”

Porsha and Paris snickered.

“Oh, good Lord,” she said, getting up from her seat. “Say this isn’t so.” She looked around at each of us, waiting. “One of you had better open your mouth and tell me right now that your aunts have been calling here with a bunch of hot trash lies ’cause I
know
damn well none of my daughters would be so goddamn trifling to do some ho-ass shit like that.”

My sisters and I blinked, blinked again. It was very rare that we heard our mother use that kind of language. Out of her four sisters, she is the prim, proper, prissy one, despite being born in Newark. Despite being raised in the projects. She was the one who made sure her three daughters went to private schools instead of public schools, and moved us far away from the hood because she wanted better for us. Always a lady; always turning the other cheek—for most things, we knew she was pissed about this. But we also knew that, whether it struck a nerve with her not, we were okay with what we were doing.

“Mom, Persia’s right,” Paris stated. “It’s true.”

Our mother threw her hand up over her mouth, shocked that we were open about it. She stared at us, long and hard. It was almost as if she would have preferred we’d denied it. “Why in the world?”

“Because all three of us...” Porsha tried to explain, pointing at Paris and me, “...have been in relationships with guys who have
either cheated on us, or tried to, so we decided to take matters into our own hands by allowing any man we become involved with to have more than one woman—the three of us.”

“And on top of it,” I added, grinning, “he gets to experience some of the greatest, freakiest sex he’ll ever experience in his lifetime.”

I’ll never forget the look on her face when I told her that shit. It looked like she was on the brink of a heart attack. All the color in her honey- brown complexion drained from her face. She was flabbergasted. She shook her head in disbelief. “So, let me get this right. My three daughters,” she glared at us, “like fucking the same men. Is that what the hell I hear y’all saying to me?” We nodded. “Ohmygod, I can’t believe I’m hearing this shit.” In melodramatic fashion, she clutched her chest, shaking her head. “Oh, so I guess y’all down between each other’s legs licking each other, too, huh? Just doing all kind of sinful shit.”

We frowned. “Ugggh,” we said in unison. “We share our men, Mom. That’s it. We’re not lesbians and we aren’t licking each other.”

“And we always use condoms,” Paris added like that would make a difference.

“Besides...” I walked over to where my sisters were sitting. I stood behind them, placing one hand on each of their shoulders. “You always told us to never fight over anything, and to share everything.”

She looked at me incredulously. “I taught you girls to share material things, to share your secrets, and your fears,
not
share your goddamn men. I want this nastiness to stop, today. You hear?” Although the question was directed at all three of us, she stared at me, knowing I was the culprit behind it all. And she was right. I was. It took some coaxing—okay, and a little bullying—but not much since we had been known to play pranks with our
boyfriends and friends in high school—to get Paris and Porsha to consider it. But, they are my sisters, and we’re all cut from the same freaky cloth, so I knew once they experienced it, there’d be no turning back.

I kept my eyes locked on hers. “We’re not stopping. You may not like what we’re doing, and that’s fine. But, we’re grown. And you can’t tell us what to do, or who we should be doing it with.”

She slammed her hand down on the table. “What do you mean, you’re not stopping? Paris? Porsha? What do y’all have to say about this?”

“Persia’s right, Mom,” Paris meekly said. “Sorry. But we enjoy it. And we don’t wanna stop.”

“It’s not like we’re hurting anyone,” Porsha added. “What we do in the privacy of our own bedrooms is really no one else’s business.”

“Well, it becomes everyone else’s business when you flaunt your nasty ways in public,” she snapped. “Do you girls have any idea how embarrassing this is? I done cussed your aunts out, and now I gotta go back and apologize to them for being right.”

“Mother, really,” I said, rolling my eyes up in my head. “Why would you really care what anyone said, especially Aunt Lucky and Aunt Fanny? It’s not like they don’t have dirt of their own to worry about. At the end of the day, we’re still your daughters.”

“Yeah, who are sharing and
fucking
each other’s men. And nothing any of you have said has made any damn sense as to why you would want to stoop to some nasty shit like that? I can’t believe y’all out there carrying on like a bunch of hot-ass hoes.”

Paris’s mouth popped open in shock. “Mom, we’re not hoes. We’re uninhibited, and we like experiencing new things.”

“It’s nasty,” Mother said, rapidly shaking her head and turning her lips up in disgust, “and sinful.”

I forced a laugh, knowing there was nothing funny about what
I was going to say to her. “And what do you call a woman who knows her man is cheating on her, but continues baking and cooking and cleaning and sexing him up, knowing that the first chance he gets, he’s going to sneak his ass across town to the next woman? What do you call that?”

She huffed. “Stupid. That’s what it is. And watch your mouth.”

I rolled my eyes. “And what do you call a woman who is crying and begging for her man to stop running out on her every time she catches him cheating on her, but still keeps taking him back? What do you call that same woman who will leave her kids alone in the middle of the night while she goes out looking for her man all over town?”

She looked at me, perplexed. I could tell she was cautiously treading to see where I was going with this. “I don’t know,” she said, getting agitated. “Desperate.”

“No, Mom, it’s
you
,” I said, glaring at her. Contempt dripped from my voice. She had a look of shock on her face when I said that. “You were that woman for as long as I can remember. Do you think we were that naïve to not know that Daddy was out cheating on you? You really thought we never overheard the hushed arguments, or your whispered phone conversations to Aunt Lucky and them? Do you not think we saw you crying over him? Well, we did.”

“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” she snapped defensively. “Your father was a good man, and a good provider.”

“There you go, justifying. Yeah, he was a good father. And, yeah, he was a good provider. But he was also a damn good cheater with a good and stupid and desperate wife who”—I jabbed a finger in the air at her—“flitted around this house pretending everything was alright, playing Suzy-Goddamn-Homemaker while Daddy was out fuc—”

Before I could get the rest of my words out, she lunged toward me and slapped me, causing me to see stars. Porsha’s and Paris’s eyes popped open. “Don’t you ever,” she said through clenched teeth, “talk to me like that, again!”

I could see the hurt and embarrassment in her eyes. I had struck open an unhealed wound. She fought back tears. In that very moment, I knew that in our mother’s anguish she saw the enemy—me, my sisters, and any other woman who shares another woman’s man. For her, we were the home-wreckers, even though we tried explaining to her that we weren’t sharing a man who was already attached to another woman. To her, it made no difference. It was all in the same.

I sigh, shaking that night out of my head as I reach into my bag and pull out my BlackBerry Torch, then scroll down to turn the ringer back on. I have thirteen emails, three text messages, and two missed calls.

Against my better judgment, I return my mother’s call, first. “Hey, Mom,” I say the minute she answers, pulling out the latest issue of
Vogue
from my desk drawer. I start flipping through the pages.

“Hey,” she says, sounding out of breath. “I tried calling you girls earlier, but didn’t get any answer.” I smirk, knowing she called Paris first—since she’s her favorite, then Porsha. And, when she couldn’t get a hold of either of them, she called me.

“We were out,” I tell her, purposefully leaving out that we were out having breakfast. I sit back in my chair, knowing she already knows, anyway. “Is everything okay?”

“Of course it is.”

“Ohhhhkay, so why are you calling
me?
”

She lets out a loud, frustrated sigh in my ear. “Persia, I don’t know why you must always be so goddamn—excuse my French, snotty.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I say sarcastically. “What were you calling for?”

She huffs. “To see if you and your sisters were RSVPing for Pasha’s wedding.”

Pasha is my mother’s first cousin, and technically my second cousin. Pasha’s grandmother is my mother’s aunt, and my great-aunt. She’s considered a success story in our family. Having lost both of her parents to murder, she’s the owner of one of the hottest hair salons in the Tri-State area. And, quiet as it’s kept, engaged to one of the biggest dope slingers in the game. He’s been home from prison for close to two years and word has it, he’s still up to his same old shit. I guess bad habits don’t die easy. The Feds are hot on his ass, but somehow he keeps slipping through their fingers. You’d think after doing four years in prison, he’d learned his lesson. Oh, well. Not my business, nor my headache.

“I don’t know,” I tell her.

“You know your Aunt Harriett would love to see you and your sisters. She always says you girls don’t even call her.”

Mmmph
, I think, rolling my eyes.
That’s because her ass is always trying to get us to sit in church, or starts spewing scriptures.
“The invitation didn’t say anything about us being able to bring a date, so maybe not.”

“It’s nothing personal,” she calmly states. “With the baby and that gigantic house they recently bought down there by the shore, they’ve had to downsize the guest list...”

Yeah, from one-hundred-and-seventy to a hundred guests,
I think. Word has it that she and her fiancé, Jasper, purchased an eighty-seven-hundred square foot mini-mansion on three acres of sprawling property. It’s where the entire wedding celebration will be. I pull the white and red embossed invitation from out of my top desk drawer, then stare at it:

I
N THE CELEBRATION OF LOVE...
M
RS.
H
ARRIET
A
LLEN
R
EQUESTS THE HONOR OF YOUR PRESENCE AT THE MARRIAGE OF
HER GRANDDAUGHTER
Pasha Alona Allen
TO
Jasper Edwin Tyler
O
N
S
ATURDAY, THE
T
WENTY
-S
EVENTH OF
A
UGUST
T
WO THOUSAND AND ELEVEN
A
T FIVE O
’
CLOCK IN THE EVENING

She sighs. “...It seems like everyone else’s daughters are getting married, except for my own.” She sounds disappointed. I toss the invitation back into my drawer, rolling my eyes up in my head, again.

“
She’s marrying a damn convict and drug-dealer, for crying out loud!
” I snap in my head. I keep my thoughts to myself. Decide to fuck with her instead. “Well, don’t worry, Mom. We’re waiting for that right man to come along to sweep us off our feet, a man who will honor and obey us, handle our ravenous sexual appetites, and submit to our freaky whims.”

“Ugh! For the love of God,” she says, disgust dripping from her tone. “I know the three of you aren’t entertaining no nasty shit like that?”

“Why not, Mother? It’s no secret we sleep with the same men. And we’re raw-dogging it and sharing each other’s spit every chance we get.””

She lets out a disgusted grunt. “Persia, who in the hell are you talking to like that? Have you forgotten who the fuck I am to you? I want to know if you girls have even considered what would happen if the three of you end up pregnant by the same
man, and you have the audacity to want to make smart-ass comments.”