Red Light Wives. Mary Monroe

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СКАЧАТЬ Harry. He had a wife who was just as old as he was, and the last thing she wanted to do was fuck.

      “Dude’s wife goes to bed at the same time every night. And once her head hits her pillow, she could sleep through the eye of a hurricane,” Clyde told me. “But that don’t mean you can go out there and act like you ain’t got no class. Be a lady.”

      Unlike Mr. Bob, and the impotent man from Philly, old Prince Harry had as much stamina as a teenager. His body resembled a prune, and his breath smelled like a hog trough. He was so disgusting that I was having second thoughts already about going on any more dates. But another date with Mr. Bob the same night made me change my mind. And if that wasn’t enough to seal my fate, Clyde let me keep the five hundred dollars that Prince Harry had paid me.

      “I seen that sucker naked at the gym, so I know what a trauma it was to do him. You deserve to keep every penny…this time,” Clyde told me with a mysterious gleam in his eyes. “Now give me some sugar.” Clyde hauled off and kissed me so hard I trembled. I knew then that Clyde Brooks was a man who knew how to work a woman’s mind.

      Like with that first date, and with any others I planned to go on, I wanted everything to be over with as soon as possible. I wanted my life to be back to normal, the way it was before Joe left. If I had known that night that my life would never be the same again, I probably would have cut myself off from Clyde right then and there.

      But I didn’t.

      Chapter 5

      LULA HAWKINS

      As mad as I was with Larry, I still had feelings for him. One of my problems was that I loved too hard and I suffered because of that. Because everybody I loved eventually deserted me.

      Mama was the first.

      I don’t remember much about Mama’s family. I hadn’t seen them since I was six. My grandfather was a huge, red-faced, wild-haired, fire-breathing preacher of whom everybody was afraid. When he preached his sermons, the older sisters danced out of their shoes and fainted. The church even shook. Other kids were afraid of him, but I just laughed and hid when he yelled at me for misbehaving. Because as fierce as he was, he was also a gentle and loving man. I would end up being sorry that I had not appreciated him when I had a chance.

      My grandmother was a petite, attractive, but overbearing woman who was always telling Mama how she was going to go to the devil and take me with her if she didn’t “get right.” There were other relatives on my mother’s side, just as judgmental and sanctified as my grandparents, but they all stopped coming around because Mama embarrassed her family by fooling around with married men.

      Mama was only sixteen when she had me, but she had been fooling around with my daddy since she was fifteen, and that’s something her folks reminded me of every day. We lived with her parents and half a dozen other relatives in an old house in Barberton, Mississippi. Barberton was a sleepy little farm town known for its cotton fields, fishing creeks, churches, juke joints, and peanut patches. People had to drive all the way to Biloxi, fifty miles away, when they wanted to experience the “big city” life.

      My grandparents’ house on Pipe Street looked like a wide, sad face at the front from the outside. The windows had shades that were always half drawn, looking like half-closed eyes, and the front door looked like a grim mouth. There was a big peach tree with a crooked trunk in the front yard shading two lawn chairs. That’s where Mama and I could be found most of the time, sipping from glasses of lemonade (half of hers was vodka) as we basked in the sun.

      I could play with the other kids in the neighborhood, but I didn’t do that much because I got tired of defending my mama’s name. Which was Maxine and not “that slut” or “that tramp” like the other kids called her. The thing about all that was my mother was not the only “shameless hussy” (another name the people called her behind her back) in our neighborhood. But most of the other loose women tried to hide what they did. My mother didn’t.

      For Mama, life was all about having a good time, and she did that in three shifts. She would leave me alone with my grandparents for days at a time. Then she’d stagger into the house looking like she’d been mauled by a grizzly bear.

      “Lula Mae, don’t you be lookin’ at me like you crazy, girl. I’m young. I’m goin’ to enjoy myself while I can. Help Mama to bed, baby.”

      When Mama was home, she spent most of her time in the bedroom she shared with me, lounging up under one of Grandma’s goose-down quilts or getting dressed to go back out again. I got used to her shenanigans fast. Some nights I’d even help her put on her makeup then I’d lie awake most of the night waiting for her to come home.

      When my mother’s behavior got to be too much for her family and their constant put-downs got to be too much for her, Mama found us an apartment across town on St. James Street next door to a convenience store.

      “Now we can worry about your whorin’ behind day and night,” my grandmother said, crying hard as Mama ran around our bedroom, snatching our clothes out of drawers. As much as Mama and I irritated my grandparents, they didn’t want us to leave.

      “Y’all ain’t got to worry about me and Lula Mae. I’ll be takin’ care of myself and my child by myself from now,” my mother shot back, adjusting one of the many headbands she wore to hold her unruly dyed brown hair in place. Like my grandmother, my mother was a petite and pretty woman. With her big brown eyes and dazzling smile, she didn’t have to do much to make herself attractive. But that didn’t stop her from wearing the tightest, shortest dresses she could squeeze her sexy body into. It was no wonder men couldn’t keep their eyes and hands off her.

      “Ha!” my mama’s daddy screamed, stumbling into the room on his thick, crippled legs. “You mean that other woman’s husband’ll take care of y’all. This girl,” he pointed at me with the cane that he needed to get around with, “she’ll end up just like you, if you was to take her away from here where we tryin’ to set her a good example.”

      Mama snapped one of our suitcases shut and then folded her arms, looking from her mama to her daddy. “Well, it didn’t do me no good livin’ all these years with y’all. All them preachin’ sessions and Scripture readin’ about somebody in the Bible begattin’ this or that, and chattin’ with a God they couldn’t see just made me want to do the opposite. Lula Mae, go empty your bladder and your bowels, so we can get up out of here. I’ll go crazy if I stay in this house another minute.”

      As I ran to the bathroom down the hall, I heard my grandmother say to Mama, “Lula Mae is gwine to end up just like you. Layin’ up with men for money. Mark my word.”

      It would be more than twenty-five years before my grandmother’s prediction came true. But a lot of other things happened along the way that drove me to that point. Things that I had tried to do to make sure that I didn’t end up laying with men for money like my mother.

      My daddy, George Maddox, was married to a woman named Etta. Etta was not a bad-looking woman. She had a nice body for a woman her age, smooth high-brown skin, bright hazel eyes, and thick black hair she always wore in a braid wrapped around her head. She read her Bible every day and had a few good qualities, but people overlooked all that because most of the time, she was mean and hostile to people she didn’t care for. Like me.

      Etta Maddox knew all about my mama and me. But she left us alone as long as we stayed out of her way. I don’t know what she would have done if she had known that every time she went to visit her relatives in Philadelphia, Daddy brought me and Mama to the big white house she guarded like a palace.

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