Red Light Wives. Mary Monroe

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СКАЧАТЬ her and one of her friends on the street. I overheard Etta talking about me like a dog. “Look at George’s little jungle bunny…only thing missin’ is a spear.”

      I liked going to my daddy’s house when Etta was gone. I rooted through her things like a thief. That’s how I got back at her for talking trash about me and Mama. My revenge included me snapping her necklaces in two, tying her belts and scarves into knots, ripping holes in her gaudy underwear, and peeing in her cold-crème containers.

      The apartment that Daddy moved Mama and me into was furnished and in one of the best parts of town. For the first time, I had a room to myself. Daddy bought me my own television set and more toys than I knew what to do with. He also bought us new clothes, a stereo, and a nice little car for us to get around in. Mama had him wrapped around her little finger, but she didn’t let that stop her from adding more men to her collection. The old man who owned the store next door to our apartment was always giving us something free. And, as far as I knew, all Mama had to do for him was smile and flirt.

      Our landlord, a blind albino man named Mr. Green, couldn’t even see how pretty Mama was. But that didn’t stop him from coming around grinning like a Cheshire cat, scaring me like a ghost with his white hair, white skin, and haunting eyes. Some months when Daddy gave Mama the money to pay our rent, Mama would spend most of it and give Mr. Green the change, and it didn’t even bother Mr. Green. He would still grin every time he heard her voice. I never could figure out why Mama’s mercenary habits didn’t rub off on me until after that fiasco with Larry Holmes.

      That first year away from my grandparents’ house was all good. But one day I came home from school and there was an ambulance in front of our house. I found out later that Mama was already dead when I’d left for school that morning. During the night, she had had a brain aneurysm. My grandparents, my daddy, and our landlord’s wife, the woman who had found my mama dead, were all in the apartment weeping and wailing when I got home. Before that day, the worst thing that had happened to me was the car wreck that had damaged my grandfather’s legs. Mama’s death was ten times worse.

      I don’t know how I got through Mama’s funeral. There must have been a thousand things going through my head. I sat there on that hard pew, my body as stiff as a tree, listening to Reverend Newton go on and on about what a “wonderful daughter and mother” my mother had been. As much as I had loved and was going to miss my mama, the main thing on my mind was: what was going to happen to me? I didn’t have to worry about that too long, because right after the funeral, my daddy packed up all my stuff and took me to his house.

      It was a big house with four bedrooms and a lot of corners and closets for me to hide in when I wanted to get away from my stepmother. I had a bedroom to myself, but it was more like a well-furnished prison. Every time I misbehaved, I got locked in my room.

      While Daddy was at work, his wife treated me the way I’d always heard that stepmothers treated their stepchildren. She gave me all kinds of chores to do, and when I didn’t do them the way she thought I should have, she slapped, pinched, bit, and even kicked me. The one time that I did tell Daddy, she attacked me for doing that as soon as he left the house.

      Back then, Daddy and his wife didn’t have any kids together, but Etta had a daughter from her first marriage. Verna was ten years older than me, and in some ways she treated me more like a daughter than Etta.

      Even though Verna was her real daughter, Etta was often mean to her, too. It took me a while to figure out why. Verna was a lesbian, but that was not the word I heard. Both Daddy and Etta always referred to Verna as being “confused.”

      “Confused hell! I ain’t confused. I know what I am. I just like to eat me some pussy,” Verna said to her mother, with me standing right there in the living room listening. It was my ninth birthday. The way Etta’s eyes bulged out, with her mouth open, I thought she was having a stroke. But all she did was shake her head and stomp out of the room, dropping pieces of my birthday cake all over the floor. “Lula Mae, the sooner you learn about life, the better off you’ll be. I ain’t never goin’ to hide nothin’ from you, girl. You done already seen more than a child your age should anyway,” Verna told me, a serious look on her face. Even though I was still a child, sassy and disruptive most of the time, Verna treated me with respect and affection.

      She was a gentle person. But with her big moon face, beady black eyes, shaved head and barrel-shaped body, she looked like a truck driver. As a matter of fact, Verna was a truck driver. Daddy co-owned a trucking company with another man and Verna worked for them. Most of her jobs only took her across town to help somebody haul something to the junkyard, every now and then, she had to drive out of the state or to some other city in Mississippi to haul fruit or live chickens. I hated the days when Verna had to go out of town overnight.

      Daddy was old, almost as old as my mama’s daddy. So, like most other older people, he slept a lot and was out of touch with a lot of things. Verna was the only person in my life at the time with whom I felt comfortable. When she was gone, I felt like I was all alone in a world that was so big and unfair, I never knew if I was coming or going. Attention seemed to be the one thing of which I could never get enough.

      As old as Daddy was, he still had enough juice in him to get my stepmother pregnant with twin boys.

      I was fourteen when Etta gave birth to Logan and Ernest. She wasn’t so young herself, so when her health started to fail, she took me out of school so that I could stay home and help her with the twins.

      “Lula Mae needs a education,” my daddy said weakly. “I want her to be able to fend for herself.”

      “Like her mama did? Either Lula stay home and help me with them babies, or you hire me a full-time nurse,” Etta told Daddy, from the bed she rarely left anymore.

      “I can always go back to school, Daddy,” I said, peeping around the door to the bedroom he shared with Etta.

      With a surprised look on her long, evil face, Etta lifted her head off her pillow and glared at me. “You so triflin’ you don’t care nothin’ about no school nohow,” she insisted with a smirk. “I got a lot of things for you to do around this house,” she declared, laying her head back down on her pillows so hard the bed’s headboard shook.

      I hated school, and as far as I was concerned, I’d learned as much as I could anyway. As bad as it was being in the house with Etta and her two squawking brats, it was better than being in the school I attended. Barberton had a lot of small-minded people with big ugly attitudes, and I suffered because of that. Etta was on the school board so she knew every one of my teachers and had managed to poison most of them against me. I was glad to be away from mean old Miss Windland. That heifer used to make me stand in a corner just for having a “stupid look” on my face or for being disruptive. I got violent when kids said something nasty about my mother, so I had to get “disruptive” a lot. And Miss Windland never failed to remind me that when she’d taught my mother, my mother had been just like me.

      Every time a teacher punished me and sent me home with a note, Etta made me snap a switch off a tree for her to whup me. But there was more to it than that. When she whupped me, it was for a lot of reasons. The worst one was, I was a constant reminder of my daddy’s infidelity and weakness for younger women. She couldn’t take it out on him, so she took it out on me. Even though I knew I would suffer, I was glad when the rumors started flying around the neighborhood about Daddy’s relationship with yet another sweet young thing over in Meridian. I was even happier when Verna told me that it was more than a rumor. She’d seen Daddy with his new piece.

      “I love my mama, but she can be a bitch,” Verna said, right after she’d told me about Daddy’s newest mistress. I was perched on a pillow in the passenger seat of the eighteen-wheeler she was driving to deliver some live chickens СКАЧАТЬ