Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore (9780385538398) (13 page)

Marcia Pinkney started and stared. She shivered and almost forgot to take a swig of her sweet oblivion.

“I hated you because you were a black girl,” she said, as if it were a revelation—even to her.

“I know that.”

“You do?”

“Yeah.”

“How could you know when I only just realized it right now?”

“Theon told me that when he hooked up wit' Moana you went to her and begged that she let Theon go. He said
you offered her money and anything else she wanted. But when he finally did leave her and got together with me you didn't even try.”

I could see that Marcia wanted to deny my slurred indictment, that she wanted to say that it was a different time and situation. But she couldn't put the lie into words.

“I'm so sorry,” she said, and then she began to weep.

I got a little teary too. Not the racking anguish I felt on the mountainside. This was more like a gentle mist than a raging storm. But still it moved me enough to get up and go over to Marcia. I knelt down next to her ceramic chair and embraced her. She was stiff at first but then let go and cried on my shoulder.

After a few minutes of these soft tears she patted my arm and I went back to my chair. We divvied up the last of the delicious drink and stared out over the empty, filthy pool into the polluted sky, through which we could see the bare outline of the San Bernardino Mountains.

The sun was going down but it was comfortable enough outside.

A trio of hummingbirds came by to inspect the scent of the now empty pitcher. Marcia snored gently as I watched the delicate birds inspect this wonderful but inaccessible plastic flower.

One of them did a circuit around my head. Maybe she smelled the sugar on my lips. I thought that it would be nice to be kissed by a hummingbird.

Soon they all flitted away to a bush of yellow flowers on the far side of the pool.

Not long after that the sun began to set. I was sad and peaceful sitting there.

“Oh dear,” Marcia said after a while.

“What, Mrs. Pinkney?”

“I can't seem to stand up.”

“Is something wrong?”

“I think it's the gin,” she said, and then chuckled.

I giggled along with her.

“Let me help you,” I said.

I tried to get up but failed on the first attempt. Taking a deep breath I tried once more, stood up, and stayed in that posture. I found that I could maintain that stance as long as I held on to the edge of the aluminum table.

“Your sheets are in the wind too,” Marcia said.

I wondered if the words actually meant what she was saying. It didn't matter—the old racist and I understood each other quite well.

“I should put you to bed,” I said.

I helped Marcia Pinkney to her feet and walked with her to the many-windowed master bedroom. I helped her off with the white dress and laid her down, pulling the blankets up to her chin.

I thought she had fallen back asleep but then she grabbed my hand.

“Don't go when you're still tipsy, dear,” she said.

“Don't you worry,” I said. “I'll sit out on the couch and watch TV until I'm sober enough to drive.”

In the living room I contemplated watching the old console television but gave up the notion. Just the idea of the jangled sounds and shifting images made me queasy. I sat on an ugly maroon couch that was built to seat two. On a green stone table next to it was a framed photograph of Theon when he was maybe thirteen. He was smiling with his mouth but not his eyes. I saw in the child the future man.

This vision brought a sigh from deep in my lungs.

I cradled the picture and sat back on the unsightly but comfortable couch.

It was so strange to be out in Pomona sharing confidences with Theon's mother. One of the reasons he married me was that he knew that she and I could never be friends. Theon didn't trust his mother. He believed that she could have saved him from his father's savage beatings but that she did not because she didn't love him enough. This distinction was very important to him: His mother did love him but not enough to save him.

Smiling at the thought of my dead husband's delicate psyche I closed my eyes. When I opened them again the sky had lightened. The sun was not yet up but dawn was coming.

I stumbled out to my car and popped the trunk. There I kept a small leather bag with all my toiletries. I brought this into the house, found a guest toilet far from Marcia's bedroom, and did my morning cleanup.

At least I didn't have to shave.

Before leaving I peeked in on Marcia. With her defenses of nostalgia and gin she was able to appear somewhat in
charge of her diminishing domain. But sleep took away her armor, leaving an old woman bereft of everything she'd lived for.

I thought about the word
bereft
and remembered Jude Lyon. When Theon had told me that Jude was dangerous there was actual fear in his tone.

I left a note on the kitchen table with my red phone number on it. Then I walked out into the weak sunshine of early morning, put the toiletry bag back into the trunk, and made it to the driver's seat. There I closed the car door but had to stay still for a few moments in deference to my body's memory of the alcohol.

My head ached and there was a buzzing in my ear.

I considered letting the seat back and napping for a while before driving off.

A few more minutes passed.

Then there came a tapping on the window.

I turned and saw a uniformed policeman. He'd rapped on my glass with his nightstick. In the side-view mirror I could see at least two other cops approaching.

I was that fifteen-year-old girl again, praying for a Theon Pinkney to help me escape.

The cop motioned for me to roll down the window.

An instantaneous chemical reaction purged me of the hangover.

I opened the car door.

“I said to put down the window.” The cop raised his voice enough for the tones to shift while he was speaking.

“To do that I'd have to turn the ignition,” I said, back in full control of my tongue.

“Get out,” he commanded.

I smiled, swiveled, and stood.

“Lift your hands at your side,” another policeman said.

I'd had a hundred directors telling me what to do with my body parts. These were just two more.

The first cop was white—they all were white—and male. He, the first one, went into the car while the second director turned me around, pushed my arms down behind my back, and put handcuffs on my wrists. I let my body go limp in order to minimize the bruising from the adrenaline-filled police.

I was turned around, not gently.

“You broke into this home,” a gray-headed policeman told me. He wore reflective sunglasses and had almost indiscernible gray stubble on his chin. His breath was both minty and sour.

“No. I was visiting my mother-in-law,” I said. “Now I'm going home.”

“Yeah, sure,” the cop said. “We got the call from a neighbor that a black woman was breaking into her neighbor's home, taking things from the house and putting them in her trunk.”

My big blue bag was in the trunk with my father's gun inside. I had a carry permit in my wallet, but if the constabulary was not inclined to believe me then they didn't have to believe my documents either.

If my hair was long and white and my eyes the color of the ocean they would have recognized me immediately, maybe asked for an autograph
. I wrote these words in my little
journal not long after that encounter. Of course, now I realize that if I were a white woman driving a pale blue Jaguar the cops would have never put cuffs on me; they would have never been called to the scene or, if called, they might not have come.

“Whose car is this?” the gray cop asked.

“Mine.”

“Where's your license?”

“Free my hands and I'll get it for you.”

“You're under arrest,” he said, and was preparing to say more.

“What's the problem here?” a strong female voice inquired.

I was surprised to realize that tone had come from Marcia Pinkney.

She was wearing a brown housecoat and turquoise slippers. Her left hand clutched the housecoat at her breast and her right hand was held out to reiterate the question in case the officers were deaf—or dumb.

“Ma'am,” Gray Cop said. “Is this your house?”

“Of course. Why do you have my daughter-in-law in chains?”

“Um,” he said. “Daughter-in-law?”

“Answer my question, young man.”

“We got a call from across the street that a black woman had broken into this house.”

“And you were going to arrest her without even knocking on the door?”

“We had to secure her first. Um. Are you okay, ma'am?”

“Of course I am. Don't you see me?”

“Because we have her in custody. You don't have to be afraid.”

“I'm not afraid of my daughter-in-law, Mrs. Theon Pinkney. She's the one who should be afraid. Four big men grabbing her and putting her in chains. What's wrong with you?”

The police stood there, slightly confused. I could see that they felt justified, even righteous, for grabbing me in Marcia's driveway. There was no question in their minds that I was a criminal and that they were on the side of the Law.

Marcia glanced at me then. We'd spent hours together but it was as if she hadn't really gotten a good look at me until seeing the tableau in her driveway.

“Take those chains from my daughter-in-law's arms,” she said, sounding just a little like her son.

The gray cop hesitated. He didn't like being ordered around by a civilian. He was the one in charge. Maybe he considered arresting us both, but he knew that the witness across the street, the one who called about me, was probably still watching and that a patrol cop was subject to the same justice that he carried around on his shoulders like Superman's cape.

“Let her go,” he muttered.

“But, Joe,” the cop who tapped on my window said.

“Let her fuckin' go.”

The first cop turned me around and took off the cuffs. I resisted rubbing my wrists—I didn't want to give them the satisfaction.

“I know there's something wrong here,” Gray Cop said to Marcia. “And I will be back.”

“There'll be no need for that, young man,” Marcia said, looking up into the reflection in the policeman's shades. “Because what's wrong here is the same thing that's wrong with you. Just look in a mirror and you will see that like I see it now.”

I went to the passenger's seat and popped the trunk again. I went to my big blue bag and pulled out my wallet.

“Do you still want to see my license?” I asked the senior cop.

“Let's get outta here,” he said to his men.

They turned and walked to their cars, gave me a parting warning look, and drove out of the little cul-de-sac, so many angry crows humiliated at being chased by a little girl with a stick.

“Is it always like this?” Marcia asked me after the cops were gone.

“I haven't been out of my comfort zone for a long time, Marcia. Usually I'm in a place where everybody knows me and everybody treats me with respect. They might not mean it; they might not like me, but at least they smile and pretend.”

Across the circle a white woman came out on the porch of her ranch-style home. She was tall and thin, wearing a burgundy robe decorated with a pattern that I couldn't make out from the distance.

“I don't understand what you mean,” Marcia said.

“What just happened here is how people really feel,” I said. “Your neighbor over there saw a black woman
fooling around in the front yard and then go into your house.…”

“Old Nancy Bierny should mind her own business,” Marcia said with venom.

“You would'a done the same thing, Marcia. If you saw a black woman goin' in and outta Nancy's at six in the morning, you would'a called the cops and said that someone was acting suspiciously in front of a neighbor's house. You would have been scared and the woman you saw would have been presumed guilty. That's the way it is in the straight world where the good folks live. That's part of the reason Theon left. He didn't want to be associated with the world you and your husband lived in—the world where he got beaten and you went to hide in another part of the house.”

Marcia put a hand on my wrist.

“Please stop,” she said. “I can't stand to think about it.”

“Okay,” I said. “Sorry. I left my number on the kitchen counter. If you want to come see Theon's body the night before, you just call. I got that cell phone on me all the time now.”

Marcia pulled her hand away from my wrist and put it over her mouth. Maybe she didn't trust herself to speak.

I know if I were her that I wouldn't have known what to say.

There's a little shop on Robertson just north of Venice Boulevard. I'd not been inside before but whenever I drove
past I thought that the kind of clothes they sold would be perfect for my mother. It was called Phyllis Designs.