Ugly Ways (16 page)

"God, these girls trying to kill me!" he'd yell to the house. "How many times I got to ask you girls to leave my razor alone!"

Then, he'd stomp back into the bathroom dripping rich red blood down the front of his white undershirt. It had reminded Betty of the old Poppa, but it didn't last. He might mutter a bit to himself, but he never really confronted any of them about it.

Annie Ruth took off her underwear and robe and dropped them in a pile on the floor by the door. She took off her earrings, squiggles of gold shaped like two melted question marks, and laid them on the edge of the sink. She lifted the top off a pink china rose—Emily had sent it to Mudear as a birthday gift—on the shelf above the sink and took out two black hair pins. With them, she secured her copperish curls on top of her head. Turning back to the tub, she saw the apothecary jar full of sprigs of lavender sitting on the back of the tub and dropped a few of them into her steamy water. Reaching for a washcloth and big fluffy lilac towel from the rack by the sink, she caught a glimpse of her behind in the full-length mirror on the back of the door.

She turned around and, looking over her shoulder, she stood in the mirror and got a good long look at herself. Umph, she thought, that butt is ... She had to pause a moment to recall just how old she actually was. That butt is thirty-five years old. She turned to the side and took another look. Not bad, she thought. From the side, she looked down at her stomach.

Looking at her image in the mirror, Annie Ruth tried to imagine her tight, toned, exercised golden-brown body pregnant, really pregnant. Her stomach extended, her hips curved and widened, her breasts full and hanging. It was hard for her to picture. She had never thought of being pregnant. Never been around pregnant women. Now that she thought about it, she may have even avoided her friends and coworkers when they were pregnant, hoping not to be reminded of the teenaged vow she had made with her sisters.

She patted her stomach tenderly and reached over to add cold water to her bath. She had read a story on the air recently about the dangers of hot tubs and saunas to mother and unborn child.

"Don't worry," she said to her stomach. "I'll take care of you." She laughed out loud because it sounded so corny coming from her, but she could feel herself get "full" in the chest like an old woman at a family reunion at the thought of taking care of her child.

She dipped one foot into the water then, eased into the tepid water, and settled in a tub that, as far as she knew, only Mudear's butt had ever touched. She leaned back and tried to imagine how she had felt as a litde girl sitting between a young Mudear's short legs, propped up against her stomach, the back of her head nesded between her mother's breasts. Annie Ruth could almost picture it, but she kept losing the picture.

She rested a hand on her warm wet stomach, she was sure she could see a curve to it now, and thought about Emily.

Annie Ruth routinely lost track of chunks of her life, but she knew she would never forget the time she had come from D.C. to Atlanta to accompany Emily to get her abortion. Each moment of the trip seemed etched so deeply in her memory that there seemed no way to carve it out. She had had to fly down because her sister had waited so long to tell her about her plans that she had no time to make the train trip the way she usually traveled. She could tell from Emily's voice on the phone that if she didn't get there and get there fast, there was no telling what Emily would do.

All her years as a television reporter had come back to haunt her with vivid flashbacks of pictures she had seen of pretty young girls and overweight and overworked middle-aged women lying in pools of their own blood with twisted coat hangers still nearby or bottles of household disinfectant drunk at the last minute in desperation. Even she, while still a freshman at Spelman on her scholarship, when her period was late one time, had considered throwing herself down the flight of steps from the top of the third story of the old brick ivy-covered dormitory the way her roommate had and then rolling over three times on the landing to reach the next flight of stairs to tumble down. But instead, she had gone up to the beautiful historic campus chapel before classes and prayed so hard that her period had miraculously started.

Sitting outside the clean antiseptic-smelling clinic waiting for her sister, she had been unable to meet the pleasant businesslike gazes of any of the women working behind the desks. She swore over and over to herself as she took her sister's arm and led her to the waiting taxi and back to her apartment, "I'll never take my birth control lightly, I'll never take my birth control lightly."

Other than her late periods, she had never been pregnant as far as she knew and she had vowed that she never would get that way. Annie Ruth knew, as surely as she knew Emily could not have gone to term with her pregnancy, that she could never go through an abortion. But she felt she had been strong for Emily. She took her home and warmed up some Campbell's tomato soup with half-and-half and dried basil the way Emily liked it. She held her sister in her arms when she wept and she lied to Emily's husband that she was in town on business when he returned home from the garage. Then, she helped Emily concoct the falling down the outside steps story to tell Ron. She even bandaged up Emily's right ankle to further buttress her fall story.

She didn't let Emily do a thing for the entire weekend that she stayed there with her. She was as strong as she had ever remembered being, but on the train trip back to D.C. she couldn't stop sobbing. She just leaned her head against the cold air-conditioned window of the train and wept all the way up the eastern seaboard.

She and Emily and Betty had all made a vow when Annie Ruth had joined them as women on her periods that they would never get pregnant and have children just to abandon them the way Mudear had done with them.

"Let's just never have any children," Annie Ruth suggested. "Then, we
know
we won't be like Mudear." And it sounded like a good idea to the other two.

"Okay," they agreed, clasping hands and squeezing tight to seal the vow.

"I swear."

"I swear."

"I swear."

Annie Ruth lay back in the tub, closed her eyes, and just inhaled deeply the scent of lavender rising from the water. Mudear would have a fit if she knew I was luxuriating in her personal tub surrounded by her personal herbs, Annie Ruth thought with a satisfied sigh as she sank lower into the water. Through the bedroom door, she could hear Poppa slowly clicking through the channels of Mudear's television. Annie Ruth wondered if Mudear had ever seen her on television. When she had worked in Washington, she had sent a few videotapes home of herself covering big breaking national and international stories. But only because one of the female technicians at the station had gone to the trouble to make copies for her and put them on her desk with mailing cases, labels, and the smiling suggestion, "I know you'll want to send these home to your mama."

The last tape she remembered sending to the Sherwood Forest address had been more than three years before when she interviewed CNN's Bernard Shaw—Mudear's favorite newsman—after his return from the Persian Gulf. Mudear kept one of her televisions tuned to CNN all the time. And so did her daughters.

On her last visit to Mulberry the year before, Annie Ruth had sat stunned as she and her sisters listened to the news conference on CNN at Betty's house. Magic Johnson stood at the microphone as handsome and healthy looking as always and told the world that he had the HIV virus.

Without saying a word, both her sisters swiveled their heads to look her dead in the face. Stating their question was unnecessary.

"No, I never slept with Magic," Annie Ruth said. She wasn't offended. She knew how her sisters worried about her. "Come to think of it, I don't know how we missed each other in L.A. Lord knows I had my share of professional basketball players."

They pondered her observation for a second. Then, all turned back to the wide-screen television set, shaking their heads at Magic's situation.

Even though they didn't discuss it much anymore, the specter of AIDS had a place in all of their minds. They had been or were still screwing around too much not to consider the possibility of contracting the virus. Betty had settled down more or less with Stan even though he hadn't quite stopped dragging the streets for other women. And then there was Cinque.

Emily, usually in and out of quick relationships when she was younger, was not as sexually active as she had been in her twenties, either. Now, she seemed to give off these nervous signals like radio waves to men that told them she would be trouble, she would be complications, she would be complexities, she would be involvement, she would be commitment. She seemed to let men know early on that she was just what they seemed hell-bent on avoiding. And most did. Long ago, Betty and Annie Ruth had given up on introducing her to any men they knew. Those affairs always ended in acrimony and disaster for Emily. And Betty and Annie Ruth usually ended their relationships with the men out of loyalty to their sister.

As she had watched the TV screen with the reporters and lights and questions, pictures of Magic's favorite haunts on Melrose, his Bel Air mansion, his pool, Annie Ruth had been reminded again of how much she hated L.A.—the conspiracy of lies that told the world there was lovely weather there year-round, all that fucking driving on slabs of concrete that even felt more hostile and forbidding than other cities' expressways, the expensive houses jammed onto every inch of the hills surrounding the city, the fact that she had yet to find one good girlfriend, the universal hunger there for fame or for just being noticed, evidence of the damn film industry everywhere you went, shooting films on the street, in restaurants, in shopping malls and stores, in churches. It wasn't just the shallowness, the hunger for fame and stardom that left Annie Ruth so empty in L.A. It was other things—women at parties trying so hard to be noticed that they seemed to arch their backs in pain.

It was the middle-aged black men in silk shirts and their old white women in spandex and silicone, gold jewelry and diamonds. Both pretending so hard—he that he has a job, she that they are in love. The rows of convertible Jaguars and Mercedeses with their cellular phones parked next to a homeless family's raggedy Ford. The danger from random violence on the street that everyone tried to pretend they didn't understand. Having to go all the way across town to see more than three black people laughing and talking together.

She had had to stop going to parties in the Hollywood Hills because looking down on the smog-choked city below and all the unfortunates who could not afford to breathe unpolluted air made her so melancholy that she would have to find a quiet spot on a deck and weep.

She always hoped to keep all that and the craziness it evoked in her in abeyance during her visits to Mulberry. But she could feel it taking hold of her from three thousand miles away. Just the sight of that "Hollywood" sign on TV up in the hills over the city made her want to spit.

Whenever she complained to her sisters about her new home, they would ask sincerely, "Girl, what you doing out there, then?"

She never could form a concrete sensible answer. Despite her hatred of the place, the people, the "life-style" (she even hated that word), she continued to stay there. Even when news of her on-air nervous breakdown would have made it easier to start anew in another television market, she had taken a couple of days off and returned to her seat between her coanchor and the weatherman as if nothing had happened.

Annie Ruth had forgotten where she was until she shifted in the tub and splashed water on the floor. The warm bathwater had turned cool while she had traveled back to L.A. and it gave her a chill. She didn't even bother to wash herself. She just flipped the stopper, rose, and stepped out of the tub as she reached for the fluffy lilac towel and began drying herself. She caught sight of her chipped nail polish and made a mental note to redo her nails before she went to bed.

The sensation of lounging in Mudear's tub wasn't nearly as satisfying as she had thought it would be, but she did feel a bit more relaxed and not a bit nauseated anymore.

And Annie Ruth got the nerve to be sitting her butt in my own personal bathtub first chance she got. Other daughters woulda kept their mother's bathroom just the way she left it. Woulda even sort of set it up like a shrine or something. You know. Not let anybody use it and got real mad if someone, a visitor or something who didn't know any better, walked in by mistake and sat on the toilet or washed her hands in the sink. But no. Miss Had a Nervous Breakdown on the Air in Los Angeles and Having a Baby for She Don't Know Who, first chance she gets, goes and stretches her pregnant ass out in my personal bathtub with sprigs of my lavender floating around her.

As a matter of fact, it woulda been nice if one of those girls had had the presence of mind to bring a few pieces of that lavender down here to Parkinson Funeral Home and spread 'em here in my casket for me. It would make things so much nicer for me in all eternity. Of course, the lavender would only keep its scent for a few years. But at least for that time I could be enjoying the smell and all.

But then, those girls never did really think about anybody but themselves.

And they got the nerve to say
I'm
selfish. People just think that 'cause I'm short. Even when I was a girl, people just seemed to get so upset when I spoke up or expressed my feelings on anything. Said all I thought about was myself and my wants and opinions. Used to hurt my feelings, too.

But then I realized that most of that was 'cause folks just didn't want to hear nothing from no colored woman about what she thought. Not just men, either, just as often it would be one of my girlfriends or their mothers or a teacher or somebody who would be criticizing me for having the nerve to express myself. Humph. "Girl, go somewhere and sit down." That's what they used to say.