God Don’t Like Ugly (30 page)

“W
ho is this?” I muttered into the telephone. It was just a little after 7
A.M.
on a Saturday morning.

“April.”

“Where is Rhoda?”

“Mr. Otis carried her to the movies, then dinner.”

“Tell her Annette called.”

“OK. You know Jock lives here now.”

“Yeah, I know.”

I hung up the phone and looked at it. Then I dialed Pee Wee’s number. I was horrified when a woman answered. “He’s in the shower,” the bitch told me. I slammed the phone down, then I got under a blanket on my couch with the
Jet
magazine. Not more than five minutes later the phone rang.

“You called?” Pee Wee asked.

“How did you know it was me?” I said nastily, dropping my magazine to the floor.

“You’re the only woman who calls me,” he informed me seriously.

“You had company?” I continued.

“Oh yeah. That was Lena.”

“Lena who?”

“From school. The one you flattened on prom night,” he said, laughing. “She was here to get her hair trimmed, but she showed up early. Daddy let her in, then he left before I could get out of the shower.”

I got silent because I didn’t know what to say.

“You still there?” Pee Wee asked, clearing his throat.

“Uh-huh. Um…I thought that sounded like Lena,” I snarled. We only talked for a few minutes more. Things were fairly normal in Richland, and he didn’t have a lot to tell me.

I didn’t tell Rhoda right away, but I had begun to have more nightmares about Mr. Boatwright, what he had done to me, and what she had done to him.

One night I woke up with my gown soaked with sweat and the insides of my thighs throbbing. Another time I was thinking about him while I was cutting up a chicken and I took the knife and started stabbing the chicken all over. There were times when I showered seven, eight times a day trying to wash away the pain and anger he had caused me. Rhoda was still the only person I could talk to about Mr. Boatwright.

“I’m sorry to be calling you this late,” I told her one night after midnight. “I was having another nightmare about Mr. Boatwright and I needed you to get me through the rest of tonight. Please.”

“I’m here for you. I’ll always be here for you.” Rhoda listened to me babble for a whole hour.

“Before I hang up, I just want you to know, I would do anything in this world for you, Rhoda. All you have to do is ask.” I meant it. If she had asked me to give up Erie and move to Florida to help them run the farm, I would have. “Do you hear me, girl?”

She mumbled something under her breath.

“Huh?” I said.

“I was talkin’ to Jock,” she told me. “He is so fucked up in the head sometimes we have to tie him to the bed so we can get some sleep.”

“Wouldn’t he be better off in one of those army hospitals?” I asked.

“He would. But he is my brother. I promised him I would take care of him until the day I die.” I could hear Jock yelling obscenities. “Annette, I caught Jock and April together in the cornfield the other day.”

My whole body tensed. Suddenly, my Mr. Boatwright nightmares didn’t seem as bad as they seemed before.

“Oh no. She’s just a child! A white child in
Klan
country!” I roared.

“She’s fifteen goin’ on twenty-five and looks it. She wears a 36DD bra and has hips wide enough to balance saucers,” Rhoda told me in a low flat voice.

“How could Jock mess with that little girl?” I asked, out of breath.

“Sex is like dope to some men. You were a lot younger than fifteen when Buttwright jumped you. It must be their
fuckin
’ nature, pardon the expression,” Rhoda said nastily.

“What Jock is doing is slow suicide. You’ve got to stop him before her family finds out,” I wailed.

“I couldn’t have said it better,” Rhoda said gently.

“What are
we
going to do?” I was ready to do whatever it took to help Rhoda straighten out this mess. “You want me to take Jock off your hands for a while?”

“Oh no, that’s out of the question. I wouldn’t dump a burden like that on you.”

“Well what else can you do?” I hollered.

“Don’t worry. I’ll fix it,” Rhoda assured me.

S
even months after Rhoda’s son’s funeral I finally agreed to go out with Levi Hardy. He approached me after Easter Sunday church service.

“I seen you at the Blue Note the other night.” He grinned, his eyes all over me. He had on a plain gray suit that was too big. The legs of his pants were dragging the ground, and the sleeves on his jacket almost covered his hands. I was feeling good and looking good. I had on a cream-colored two-piece suit that made me look ten pounds lighter, with matching shoes and hat. Being large didn’t bother me half as much as it had when I was a schoolgirl and the only girlfriend I had was a size four. Leaving Richland and the limited life I had accepted for so many years was one of the best decisions I ever made. Viola and half of the Black women I came in contact with since moving to Erie were just as big as I, if not bigger. They were popular and happy, and now, so was I. I had tried several diets, including a liquid diet, a rice diet, a grapefruit diet, and a few others, but none had worked. “Girl, God didn’t mean for every woman to be a size four. If he did, you wouldn’t have so much trouble stickin’ to them diets. Pass me the potato salad,” Viola told me one day over a barbecued chicken dinner at her house. It wasn’t that I couldn’t stick to a diet. I did follow them, and still didn’t lose weight. Once on a liquid-protein diet, one so extreme I experienced fainting and dizziness, I lost eighteen pounds in three weeks. As soon as I went off the diet and started eating my beloved fried chicken again, I gained the eighteen pounds back plus five more. I told Viola, “You’re right. If God meant for me to be a big woman, no diet in the world is going to work for me.” I gave up dieting and continued to eat like I always had.

That particular Easter, Viola and most of the congregation were going home to eat ham with all the fixings. She had invited me to her house, but I’d declined. I was still uncomfortable socializing with people and their complete families. Viola’s holiday dinners included her four children, her three grandchildren, her parents, and a few other assorted relatives. With each passing year, having only Muh’Dear and Aunt Berneice concerned me tremendously. Knowing that once they passed on I would have absolutely no blood family left saddened me to a point where I fantasized about finding a man and deliberately getting pregnant. I didn’t want to grow old alone and end up hopeless, helpless, and dependent on strangers, like Mr. Boatwright. Odd as it seemed, even to me, more than once I regretted aborting Mr. Boatwright’s baby. As close as Viola and I had become, I could not tell her about the sexual abuse I had endured. The main reason was whenever rape entered our conversation, unless the victim was a female infant, an invalid, or a nun, she usually said something like,
“She
probably brought it on herself.” We had a few things in common, but in many ways Viola and I were as different as night and day. We liked the same movies and TV programs, but the only things she read, other than her Bible and the daily newspaper, were Black publications like
Jet
and
Ebony
. I read everything from the classics to the current best-sellers to the
Enquirer
. Viola, wearing a voluminous, floor-length cotton dress with so many flowers she looked like a parade float, was standing next to me listening and looking at Levi like he was talking to her.

“Viola and I go to the Blue Note all the time,” I told him. We were standing outside in front of the church along with about a hundred other members of the congregation all dressed for the occasion. Typically, most of the women had on loud outfits similiar to Viola’s and garish hats that included feathers and more flowers. The men were dressed more conservatively in dark, neutral suits.

It was a warm, sunny day, but foul fumes coming from the nearby factories made it hard to breathe. There was a lot of coughing going on, and people were wiping smoke from their eyes. Kids of all ages were running amok. Viola’s plump stepfather, Reverend Jackson, was still roaming throughout the crowd shaking hands and hugging babies. Viola had ordered her husband, Willie, to go get the car, which was parked a block away. Viola hated walking more than a few yards at a time and did it only when she had to. When we went shopping, she had to sit down to rest, catch her breath, and fan every few minutes. I thought about Mr. Boatwright almost every day of my life anyway and how some of his habits had annoyed me. Viola’s problem with walking was so much like his, I thought about him even more.

“I been meanin’ to ask you, you wanna slide through the Blue Note one evenin’ for a beer and listen to the band?” Levi continued.

“Well.” I bowed my head for a moment and glanced at my feet, frowning at the grass stains and dust on my new beige pumps. Since my passion-filled night with Pee Wee, I had been with several other men I’d met while out with Viola in bars, restaurants, and parties. One Monday morning when I got to work, Viola started teasing me before we’d even had our first cup of coffee. “Willie told me he seen you and that truck driver we met at the Blue Note a couple of weeks ago comin’ outta Percy’s holdin’ hands. I know he the reason I couldn’t reach you at home all weekend.” I told Viola how I’d spent the weekend in Pittsburgh with Ernest Stamps. I liked Ernest, and we got along real good. Every time he returned from one of his cross-country hauls, I would be waiting for him with a home-cooked meal ready. After a few weeks, the relationship fizzled out, and I moved on to a security guard who worked at Erie High School. None of my relationships ever went too far, and I didn’t think one with Levi would either. I had lost everything I had to lose, so there was no reason not to accept his latest invitation. “Uh…when did you want to go?” I glanced at Viola; she smiled and nodded.

“What’s good for you is good for me. I’m pretty flexible.” He laughed, dancing an exaggerated jig. “I’d like to go tonight if you ain’t got nothin’ to do.”

“I don’t have any plans for tonight,” I lied. I had planned to pick up a dinner-to-go, call Rhoda and talk to her for a while, then watch TV. “We can go tonight if you want to,” I told him. We agreed that he would pick me up around seven and we’d go to the Blue Note for a few drinks.

Two years earlier, Levi had moved into a three-bedroom house on Lutz Street, a few blocks from me. He had invited his elderly mother, Clara, to leave the South and move in with him. Before going to the Blue Note, we went to his house to eat the Easter dinner his mother had prepared. Clara was a few years older and heavier than my mother, but she looked a little like her, with the same light brown skin and features. She wore horn-rimmed glasses that she looked over the top of when she talked. Like Muh’Dear she was totally devoted to the Lord.

“I been prayin’ for this boy here to slow down and get married so he’ll have somebody to take care of him,” Clara whined, looking directly at me. I threw up my hand and laughed nervously. Levi cleared his throat to get his mother’s attention. She glanced at him briefly, gave him a threatening look, then returned her full attention to me. “How old is you?” she asked me with a gleam in her eyes.

“I’m twenty-four,” I told her. Levi’s house was too small for all the furniture he had crammed into it. The living-room couch was so close to the love seat facing it you didn’t have to lean too far to touch it. None of the furniture matched. The lamps on the black end tables were blue, the couch and love seat were plaid, and there was a whatnot stand in a corner filled with tiny plastic animals and clay Oriental people with slits for eyes and exaggerated grins. A big box of a television had a cracked yellow vase full of plastic red roses on top of it. The bottom half of the living-room walls had been painted dark brown, and the top half was pink.

“How come you ain’t married yet?” Clara asked seriously. She pressed her legs close together and cupped her hands on her lap. “I heard you had a solider boy.”

“Well that didn’t work out,” I said, shifting in my seat.

“Oh? What did he do to you?” she asked in a low voice with her eyebrows raised. Then she turned her head and leaned her ear in my direction.

“Oh, he didn’t do anything. We just decided to go our separate ways.”

“Was he in the church?”

“No, Ma’am.”

“Well you didn’t need him noway. Levi got reborn when he was a young’n and been sanctified ever since.” Clara paused and turned to Levi sitting next to her on the couch. “Ain’t you?” She rubbed his arm, then patted it.

“Yes, Ma’am,” he said meekly.

Clara sucked in her breath and continued. “Now.” She paused and looked from my thick legs slowly up to my face. “I got a feelin’ you love to cook.”

“I do,” I replied with a sigh.

“Well…God’ll send you a husband long as you believe. Levi, go set the table and let’s eat that ham before it ’vaporates,” Clara said firmly, fanning her face with a folded newspaper.

Levi and I only stayed at the crowded Blue Note for about an hour. I was impressed when he walked me to my door, shook my hand, and waited until I had gotten inside and turned on the lights in my apartment. I waved to him from my living-room window.

Levi became another bizarre episode in my life. He loved to eat as much as I did and had gained weight since I first met him but I still outweighed him by at least fifty pounds. In the beginning we ate in a lot of restaurants, and some of our most serious conversations revolved around food. “You seen them great big old beef ribs they serve at the Murphy Eat-A-Rama?” he asked one day on our way back to my apartment from a day at a carnival. “Oh yes. The meat’s falling off the bone,” I said, smacking my lips. He made me laugh without trying, usually at times when he thought he was being serious. Levi didn’t read anything at all unless he had to, and he was not the most intelligent man I’d ever dated. One night he called and asked if there was anything I wanted him to bring me. I requested a large pepperoni pizza with mushrooms on one side. He wanted to know “which side.” In addition to our visits to restaurants, it wasn’t long before I was cooking meals fit for a king two to three times a week. Since I wasn’t that crazy about bars, the Blue Note was the only one we ever went to every other week or so.

We attended a lot of movies, church functions, and parties at Viola’s house. “That Levi would make you a good husband,” she whispered to me at a birthday party for her husband. “He got a good job, he looks clean, he don’t cuss, he’s good to his mama, and he don’t smoke. What more could a woman want?”

“I don’t…love him,” I confessed. Levi was standing in a corner talking to Viola’s docile husband Willie, who had a bibbed apron on over his party attire. Most of Viola’s guests had left, and the few that remained were on the other side of her living room.

“Love ain’t nothin’ but a four-letter word, girl. You think I married Willie ’cause I loved him? I married him ’cause he had everything I needed. And in all the years we been married I ain’t had to whup him but five times.”

“But don’t you feel anything for him?” I asked, surprised.

“I guess I do,” Viola said, shrugging her huge shoulders. She beckoned Willie, and he darted across the room to where we were on the couch holding our plates and drinks. “Willie, I thought I told you to put more chips in them bowls and more ice in that bucket.”

“Oh, I forgot. I’ll do it right away!” Willie said quickly, nodding and backing toward the kitchen.

As soon as he was out of hearing distance I whispered to Viola, “What about…” I didn’t even have to finish my sentence.

“Sex? I let him pester me once a week, and he know better than to complain,” she said with a firm nod.

“Is it…enjoyable?” I asked shyly. Unless there was money involved, I didn’t see any point in having sex if it didn’t feel good.

“It is for him. I just lay there thinkin’ about what I’m gwine to can next, plums or pears.”

Muh’Dear had enrolled in a community college and was studying business administration. Judge Lawson was paying her tuition. I had been dating Levi for two months before I told her about him. “I been tellin’ Scary Mary my girl don’t get involved with the first man come along. I’m glad you took your time findin’ somebody. Now you remember that mess that boy got you into when you was a young’n—make this one use somethin’. Either that or you go get on some pills or somethin’. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, Ma’am,” I mumbled.

Levi didn’t ask me to have sex with him the first time we did it. He just climbed on top of me on my couch one night after we’d been dating for almost a month. It was quick and pleasant, but I didn’t experience the satisfaction I had with Pee Wee. Levi and I never got fully undressed. When he spent the night with me he had on pajamas and I wore a gown and underwear. He just opened his fly and I lifted my gown high enough for us to connect. I never removed my panties. I just slid one leg over to the side. Like Viola’s husband he was docile, but without my encouragement. He often insisted on washing my dishes and running errands for me. After a while we developed a routine you could set a clock by. He’d come over without calling every Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday evening to eat one of the lavish dinners I’d prepared. He liked whatever I cooked, but his favorite meal was collard greens, corn bread, fried chicken, and potato salad. That’s what I cooked every Saturday. A few times he’d come over just long enough to gobble up a couple of plates of food, then run. “I got to carry my mama somewhere,” or “I got a union meetin’ to go to,” he often told me. Like with Viola, I didn’t have too much in common with Levi. We shared our love for good food, movies, and the church. “Girl, it sounds like that man is usin’ you,” Rhoda teased when I told her about all the dinners and sex I was into with Levi. I didn’t want to think that I was being used. Levi’s mother lived with him and cooked whatever he wanted her to. He didn’t have to depend on me for a decent meal, and I was sure there were other women who would sleep with him, too.

“Oh I don’t think so. He brings a lot of food to my place for me to cook that he buys with his money, and he’s always offering to do things for me,” I told her. He was fun, he never disagreed with me, and, most of all, I was no longer lonely. The closest friend I had in Erie was Viola, but she spent a lot of time with her other friends, family, and her husband, so she didn’t have as much time to spend with me as I wanted her to. Levi took up where she left off.