The Blackbirds (9 page)

In the midst of their exhilaration and afternoon calm, as birds both in the sky and in the alleyways sang, at a moment when there were no high-speed chases, no sirens, and no ghetto birds hovering overhead, the world stopped rotating. Ericka's mother, Mrs. Stockwell, arrived.

Indigo was coming back down the stairs, her mother walking in front of her, when she saw Mrs. Stockwell's Lexus ease by the gate, blocking a lane, in search of street parking.

Indigo hurried over to the jumper and told Ericka, “Get ready to rumble. Your egg donor has arrived. I'm surprised she accepted the invite.”

Ericka stopped jumping and darkness descended on her sun-filled heart.

“Why in the hell did you invite her? You know I don't want to be around her.”

“Try and make amends. You haven't seen her but once since you had cancer.”

“You
know
what she said. We are way past that ‘amends' bullshit and you know that.”

“She's your mother, Ericka.”

“I didn't get to choose from whose birth canal I would arrive. I would've chosen Oprah.”

“Get out of the jumper and greet your mother.”

As far back as Ericka could remember, her Oklahoma-born mother had always worn long Mildred Pierce–style dresses, only lately she had worn the dresses fitted, hugging her curves. She was trying to be sexy.
She was in need of attention. Women had midlife crises, felt their youth fading, same as men. A woman changed her style of dressing and wore a new perfume when she had had a second awakening, or was desperately clinging to that which was fading, that which time and gravity either eroded or devalued. She wore three-inch heels and kept a designer purse on her shoulder. In the mild breeze gently touching the arid afternoon, as waves murmured against the beaches eight miles away, the Queen arrived in the light of the sun.

She was a very attractive, religious, and self-righteous redbone. The color-struck world in which she lived always colored her red or yellow, never brown, and hardly referred to her as being black. She usually wore her salt-and-light-brown hair pulled back into a bun so tight she looked Asian, but she had dyed her hair, had colored it light brown with blonde highlights, so it had a much younger woman's flavor, and today Mrs. Stockwell had worn it down, let her vanity flow across her soft shoulders. Her face was relaxed, her features less extreme, her eyebrows perfectly done. She'd taken on the look of a Hollywood starlet past her prime but still trying to be in the game. Ericka's mother had lost forty pounds since Ericka saw her last, looked fifteen years younger, once again an hourglass of a woman with big breasts, slim waist, and wide hips.

Mrs. Stockwell held a Bible in her right hand, a birthday card in the other. Ericka saw her mother pause and shoot a familiar look of disgust toward her and the other Blackbirds in bikinis. Ericka's mother focused on her, yielded a stare so harsh that in order not to start a knock-down drag-out fight on Indigo's birthday, Ericka went back to her apartment, nostrils flaring, and put on jeans and a blue
EAT.SLEEP.READ.
tee. When Ericka came back to the pool area, she found her mother sitting underneath palm trees, next to the folding table where the Blackbirds had left their cell phones. She was ending a conversation and putting one of the phones down. It was Destiny's.

Livid, Ericka asked, “What the hell are you doing talking on my friend's phone?”

“It kept vibrating, and that was irritating, so I answered in case there was an emergency of some sort.”

“You don't just answer someone's freakin' phone. Why would you do that?”

“
Because it kept ringing
. It was the wrong number. I was being considerate.”

Ericka looked at the caller ID. Saw the name
HAKEE
M MITCHELL
.

Ericka said, “So damn nosey. I've caught you on my phone creeping my messages.”

“Did you not hear me say the blasted phone kept ringing and irritated me?”

“Answering someone's phone is like wearing their underwear. Don't ever do that again. You pick up their phones and put your germs and bad energy all over their lives.”

She wiped down each phone, and when it buzzed, she looked at Kwanzaa's phone, read her older messages.

Buenos tardes
, Marcus.

Buenos tardes
, Kwanzaa.

Yes, Marcus? Is there a reason you keep calling and texting?

I love you.

Love you, too.

Do you miss me?

Yes, I miss you.

Marcus Brixton had just sent her another text, wanting Kwanzaa to come see him tonight, wanting to have a late dinner, drink wine, and reconcile. He said he missed her and begged for forgiveness. Ericka deleted the text that Kwanzaa hadn't read yet, but left the older ones alone.

She made a mental note to sneak into Kwanzaa's phone and block Marcus's number.

Indigo's phone had many texts, people from all over the globe sending birthday greetings.

She read the exchange Indigo had just had with Olamilekan and her heart dropped.

Mrs. Stockwell said, “You're just as inquisitive regarding someone's intimate affairs.”

“They don't mind if I read their messages. We're friends, but we are like sisters.”

“You have befriended Destiny Jones. Of all the people in the world.”

“Is there an issue? Or did the church stop preaching about the art of forgiveness?”

“She's still just as fast now as she was when she ended up in jail for attempted murder.”

“You might want to tuck your tail, Satan. Your evil is showing.”

“That is her past. That is who she is. I am only stating the facts.”

“I'm sure if they put up a stripper's pole, you'd have flashbacks. Just because the things you did when you were young weren't recorded and shared, don't act like you didn't do them.”

Ericka gathered all the phones and put them near the other Blackbirds.

When she came back, her mother said, “This is ugly music.”

“It's Nigerian.”

“It's still ugly.”

“Mrs. Stockwell, if you don't like the music, go home and play old-timey gospel.”

“If it gets any louder, the police will come, and you know how they respond to black people at pool parties. I am too old to be thrown on the ground in front of the world.”

“This is Indigo's celebration. We told all the neighbors we were going to be loud for a couple of hours this afternoon, the same way they came by and let us know they were going to blow the roof off the block last weekend. Besides, can you hear how noisy the area is already?”

“And this is where you choose to live.”

“I live where I know you will never come visit, at least not after the sun goes down.”

“Well, I'm glad you put on something appropriate. That's how you dress day to day?”

“I changed to get that embarrassing expression of disgust off your face.”

“That thing you had on is not what I would call a proper bikini. This is not a beach in some foreign country that has no values. It was barely a patch over your business and was barely supporting your breasts.”

“Well my burka is still at the dry cleaners.”

“I come in here, in the middle of the day, in this area filled with pedophiles and thieves—”

“Knock it off, and please give that cantankerous personality back to Donald Trump.”

“—and you're outside all but naked.
You know how men are
. No man will ever respect a woman who parades around showing everything God gave her. Why are you outside naked?”

Ericka spoke in a harsh whisper. “It's a pool party, not a Pentecostal revival meeting.”

“People in L.A. don't have pool parties to get in the water. The pool is for show.”

“I had on a goddamn bikini outside of my damn apartment at our damn pool.”

Her mother smiled. “Don't disrespect me, Ericka. And don't disrespect God.”

“Disrespect? Let's not even go there, with the damage you've done to my life.”

“I've done nothing but my best to protect you.”

“Is that your spin on banishing me, on extraditing me to Oklahoma like I was a fugitive?”

“I sent you away to learn ballet, tap, jazz, and to be in an engineering program.”

“Stop. Don't go there, Mrs. Stockwell. Enough with the lies.”

“You are an underachiever and you have sold yourself short. You
were born with certain advantages over your friends. You are as beautiful as a biracial woman.”

“Wow. A bigoted, backhanded compliment that actually sounded like a sweet melody drenched in agave as it left your twisted lips. The earth must be about to fall into the sun.”

“I did not create the rules of the society in which we live. You need to play the role of a biracial woman in this country, because no one in the world respects black women.”

“I'm not biracial.
You are
. Your estranged husband, Mr. Stockwell, might be. I'm not.”

“You don't have nappy hair. You can pass the paper bag test.”

“Well, guess who's coming to dinner? You're bringing the ignorance from the '60s back.”

“You're educated, working beneath your dual degrees as an urban schoolteacher, something no sane person would do. You could at least have become a teacher at the performing arts school downtown, if you have to be a teacher. You could be so much more. I wanted you to be everything I never could be. You are over thirty and living in an apartment building in South Central, in a zoned business district, near where they have warnings about gangs promising to kill one hundred people in one hundred days. You're acting like you're a tragic mulatto in a race film and expecting some rich man to come and rescue you like you're a half-bred Cinderella.”

“The way Mr. Stockwell rescued you, right?”

“I raised you to be smart, an achiever, to be more than you've become.”

“
I'm not you
, and that is all that matters to me.”

“I sacrificed all I had, and did it in vain.”

“I am so tired of your attitude, Mrs. Stockwell. I'm so tired of you complaining about everything all the goddamn time. You don't like my life, well guess what? I'm just like you. We both pick bad men so we're both lonely bitches.”

“Don't talk to me like that.”

“I talk to you the way you talked to me when no one could hear how evil you were.”

“You talk to me the way my mother used to talk to me.”

“And you treat me the same evil way she treated you.”

“My mother used to slap me across my mouth, or beat me with a two-by-four, hit me with a shoe, beat me with an extension cord for taking that tone or talking back.”

“I wish you would try. I swear to the God you get on your knees to pray to the same way you used to get on your knees to suck the men you used to sneak over at night.”

“I should slap you across your filthy mouth, then baptize you in that pool.”

“Hit me. Just draw your hand back like you used to. I will drag you through Koreatown, Harvard Heights, Jefferson Park, and through Mid-City, will fight you up and down Olympic Boulevard, Gramercy Place, all the way to the Santa Monica Freeway before I sit down and write a blog and let the world know what kind of wicked mother raised me, you cock-sucking bitch.”

Mrs. Stockwell sucked her teeth. “You will go to hell for talking to me that way.”

“You judge me, and were an expert at giving blow jobs when you were eleven.”

“
I was forced to do things
. There is a
difference.”

“
So was I.
You killed my child,
your
grandchild.”

“Well, I sure as hell wasn't going to raise another child, you ungrateful bitch.”

“There she is.”

“What the hell would I look like, having a child who has a child, and raising both?”

“There is the real Mrs. Stockwell no one has ever seen.”

“I was cursed with you.”

“And you haven't exactly been a blessing in my life.”

“You are my only child, and my only regret is that I had one problem child too many.”

Ericka asked, “Is that supposed to hurt my feelings?”

“You have no feelings.”

“Quite the opposite. If I felt nothing, that would be a blessing.”

Mrs. Stockwell said, “Mr. Stockwell is a whore who has no feelings. He stays married to me so he can tell the women he sleeps with he can't get married.”

“If that is his game, he could have stayed single and put on a two-dollar ring and pretended to have a wife somewhere. He didn't have to get married to be a player.”

“Mr. Stockwell did have to get married if he wanted to lie in my bed.”

“Well, nice to see how that worked out for you. Great strategy, Mrs. Stockwell.”

Mrs. Stockwell whispered, “He has treated me this way from the day we married.”

“That was thirty-some years ago. Get over it. I'm sure he's forgotten about you by now.”

“I was twenty-one when I met him at church.”

“Let me grab my violin.”

“I used to be fun. I was fun to be around. And I was smart. I was sexy. I was beautiful. Men were mesmerized. I could've been a movie star. I was finer than Jayne Kennedy.”

Ericka didn't disagree. By
Cosmopolitan
standards, her mother was much prettier than Ericka would ever be. Back in the day when Mrs. Betty Stockwell was still Caledonia Koepling, when not many knew her middle name and people called her CK or Cee-Cee or Yellow Gal, she had been a young woman who wore short skirts every day, was always in high heels and something that showed how proud she was of her cleavage, and spent Thursday through Sunday nights sipping on Long Island iced teas at the Speakeasy on Sunset, Mingles on Airport Boulevard, or Gammons by LAX. From the moment she was legal and old enough to let a man buy her a drink she was all dolled up in the latest fashion and getting her groove on at the Red Onion on Wilshire, Bit 'N Apple in L.A., Curries in Long Beach, Little J's downtown, or the Golden Tail in El Segundo. Caledonia always participated in some sort of Miss Big Legs, Miss Sexy Booty, Miss Brick House, Bad Mama Jama, or Miss Super Freak contest. The woman had also been on
Soul Train
a few times, always put up front because she could dance, could shake her yellow ass, and was the winner at the aforementioned contests based on
physical attributes almost every time. She was an underground star until she discovered the Lord. She described that point of her life as a weak period, as the period that would go unrecorded, as went part of Jesus' life. For her it was the era when alcohol and sex were used to salve her emotional ills, but only heated uncontrollable desires. She regretted those days the way Janet Jackson regretted performing with Justin Timberlake. Caledonia found God when she had heard a sermon at West Angeles, had looked deep within herself and broke down in tears, and rebuked her Thursday-through-Saturday-night experiences, rebuked everyone who had clapped for her to win a Miss Big Legs, Miss Sexy Booty, Miss Brick House, Bad Mama Jama, or Miss Super Freak contest, rebuked bohemianism, burned sage for months, and declared herself a born-again virgin. She read the Bible cover to cover, was baptized again to wash away all her recently acquired California sins, and rebuked the men who had caused those sins. She stopped using her first name, and began using her middle name. Caledonia Koepling became Betty Koepling. With newfound chastity and conservative skirts that stopped below her knees, she had found herself a husband, all done in that order. On the strength of her figure, calves, and prayers to God, the Good Book in hand as she sat in Bible study on a Wednesday night, she had snatched up a green-eyed, gorgeous man who could pass for the second coming of Smokey Robinson, and become Betty Stockwell.