Red Light Wives. Mary Monroe

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СКАЧАТЬ up marriage all the time? Shit. All my married friends that ain’t already divorced, they miserable as hell.” He grunted, whirling around to face me. With his voice humming with rage, he went on. “I couldn’t love you no more, if we was married, than I do now. So let’s leave things the way they are. Besides, it’s more fun this way, ain’t it?”

      I nodded, even though I didn’t agree.

      Larry sighed and looked around the room. Then he sniffed and looked back at me with his eyebrows raised. The smile that usually brought me to my knees popped up on his face. “A cup of coffee sure would be nice,” he hinted in a soft voice, tickling my chin and kissing my forehead again.

      I sniffed and trotted to the kitchen. Like an obedient servant, I returned a few minutes later and handed Larry a cup of coffee. It was black and strong, the way he liked his women. I didn’t feel so strong anymore. I plopped down on the bed next to him, lying on my side, looking like an overturned cement truck. My swollen belly was hanging off the side of the bed. Larry reached over and rubbed my stomach.

      “Put on some clothes, woman,” he ordered. “I can’t have you catchin’ pneumonia while you carryin’ my baby.”

      I snatched my robe off the foot of the bed and wrapped it around me as I walked Larry to the door. He kissed me long and hard before he left. I cracked my front door open just far enough for me to watch him until he reached his car parked in front of my building. Without looking back, he jumped into his dusty blue Thunderbird and shot off down the street.

      I stood in my doorway a few more minutes, with the cool air teasing my face, wondering why I was feeling so apprehensive. I had used all of my paid sick leave, so I was missing a day’s work without pay. Normally, when I played hooky from work, Larry would slip away from his job two or three times that day to spend a little time with me. The thrill of doing something so sneaky kept me from getting bored. But I was also being careless and jeopardizing my job. One day as Larry and I waltzed out of a trendy café on the boardwalk, holding hands like newlyweds, we bumped into Gloria Fisher, one of my meddlesome coworkers on her lunch hour. She greeted me with a loud, snide remark. “Lula, you better go home and get in the bed before you get even sicker!” That little incident caused me to be more discreet. Larry and I decided to spend our time in my apartment making love, eating snacks, watching music videos, and drinking.

      I cursed Larry’s cousins from D.C. These creeps had begun to pay him surprise visits once or twice a month, and it had gotten on my last nerve. Since Larry had refused to let me meet them, they had begun to sound like phantoms. I didn’t know their names, what they looked like, or how many of these mysterious demons I was dealing with. I didn’t even know if they were male or female. I made up my mind right then and there in my doorway, with my bathrobe open and my naked body getting colder by the minute, that when I saw Larry again, I’d insist on meeting these greedy intruders. I had too much time invested in Larry to let somebody I didn’t even know throw a monkey wrench into my life.

      After I left Jupiter’s, the only department store at the only mini mall we had, I entered the parking lot with two shopping bags full of items for the nursery I’d fixed up in my apartment. Three cars over, two Black women in their mid-twenties crawled out of a dark brown van that reminded me of those coffee-colored UPS trucks. And that reminded me of Larry, because he worked for UPS. Every time I thought about my man, I smiled.

      I was smiling when the two women started strutting toward me as I struggled to load my packages into the backseat of my Toyota. They were both nut-brown, with the same big, shiny black eyes, but the scowls on their faces were so severe, I couldn’t tell if they were pretty or not.

      “Yeah, that’s her! That’s that whorin’ Black bitch!” one of the women hollered, pointing in my direction as I closed my back car door with my foot. Naturally, I thought she was talking about somebody else so I proceeded to open my driver’s door. “I’m talkin’ to you, slut!” the woman added. Like an angry soldier, she marched toward me, the heels of her clogs click-clacking against the hot concrete.

      My head whirled around so hard and fast my neck made a popping noise. “What—are you talkin’ to me?” I asked, wide-eyed and annoyed, pointing at my chest with my finger. My pregnancy was responsible for all kinds of unattractive surprises and I noticed for the first time that my fingers looked like bloated Vienna sausages. A sharp pain that started at the base of my neck shot all the way down to the bottom of my back. I felt dizzy as I leaned back on my legs, breathing through my mouth.

      “Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you, tramp,” the woman yelled with a husky voice. Her companion, as pregnant as I was, and looking like she wanted to cuss out the world, handed her friend her purse and waddled in my direction. Her huge belly rode high on her body. She’s carrying a girl, I thought. Baby girls rode high in the belly, baby boys rode low. The old folks I knew had been telling me that for years. I was carrying a boy, but I was going by what my sonogram had revealed, not what old Reverend Dixon’s grandmother had told me at church a few weeks ago.

      “So, bitch, we finally meet!” the pregnant woman yelled, standing in front of me with her thick, ashy brown hands on her hips. An ugly red rash covered half of her face and both of her hands. She looked like a spotted piñata. People going in and coming out of the store slowed down to watch. I recognized a couple from my neighborhood, and a nosy woman from the church I used to attend. The woman addressing me didn’t seem to care about the attention she was attracting. “You done fucked up, you skanky whore!”

      It was the middle of April. In Barberton, Mississippi, our sleepy, dusty little town near the Delta, that meant the weather was warm enough for females to be prancing around in shorts. And wearing shorts was something most of the women I knew didn’t think twice about doing, no matter how ridiculous they looked. The woman standing in front of me couldn’t have looked any worse if she’d tried. Neither could her companion. Each had on cheap, ugly, well-worn shoes and flowered shorts, revealing hairy brown legs that looked like logs. The one who was not pregnant had the nerve to have on a silver ankle bracelet. It was wrapped so tight around her stout ankle it looked like a tattoo. The pregnant one had on a sleeveless, faded plaid maternity top that would have slid off her body if she hadn’t had so many safety pins holding it together. There was a white scarf—no, a diaper—wrapped around her head. A diaper! And it didn’t even cover all of her frayed cornrows. Both of these sisters were screaming for a makeover.

      Even with all of the confusion going on, I was still smiling. I held up my hand and took a few steps back. On top of everything else, I could feel sweat forming in my crotch. It rolled down my thighs, making me feel like I was peeing on myself. “Look, ladies, I don’t know either one of you sisters, and y’all don’t know me, so I advise both of y’all to get the hell out of my face,” I said. My smile finally disappeared. A small, excited crowd, with amused and anxious looks on their faces had gathered a few cars over.

      “You just a low-down, sleazy Black bitch!” the pregnant woman’s companion screeched at me. “Goin’ around fuckin’ other folk’s man.” Each time she opened her mouth to speak, a huge silver stud clamped in the center of her tongue bobbed up and down.

      “I…what did you say?” Larry Holmes was the only man I had been with lately. “Are you talkin’ about Larry…Holmes?” Instead of answering me, Mrs. Holmes sucker-punched me in my stomach. I stumbled, then fell to my knees. My head slapped the side of my car. I didn’t see stars, but I blacked out for a split second. Before I stood back up and opened my eyes, I saw colors that I didn’t know existed.

      One of the few things that my busy daddy had taken the time to teach me was not to take anybody’s mess. “Lula Mae, if you goin’ to go down anyway, go down fightin’.” Daddy had told me that more times than I could count.

      Something told me that СКАЧАТЬ