It’s not my fault. So you can’t blame me. I didn’t do it and have no idea how it happened.
I’m scared. Something bad is happening to me. I feel like I’m melting away. I can’t explain it to you but I do know when it started. It began after he said, “You not the woman I want.”
“Neither am I.”
I don’t know why I said that. It just popped out of my mouth.
Decagon Women’s Correctional Center, right outside Norristown, owned by a private company, is worshipped by the locals for the work it provides: serving visitors, guards, clerical staff, cafeteria workers, health care folks and most of all construction laborers repairing the road and fences and adding wing after wing to house the increasing flood of violent, sinful women committing bloody female crimes. Lucky for the state, crime does pay.
How can she persuade women to improve their looks with products that can’t improve her own? There isn’t enough YOU, GIRL foundation in the world to hide eye scars, a broken nose and facial skin scraped down to pink hypodermis. Assuming much of the damage fades, she will still need plastic surgery, which means weeks and weeks of idleness, hiding behind glasses and floppy hats. I might be asked to take over. Temporarily, of course.
Nothing announced her attack on me. I’ll never forget it, and even if I tried to, the scars, let alone the shame, wouldn’t let me.
Memory is the worst thing about healing.
As we walked down the courthouse steps she held my hand, my hand. She never did that before and it surprised me as much as it pleased me because I always knew she didn’t like touching me. I could tell. Distaste was all over her face when I was little and she had to bathe me. Rinse me, actually, after a halfhearted rub with a soapy washcloth. I used to pray she would slap my face or spank me just to feel her touch.
Oh, yeah, I feel bad sometimes about how I treated Lula Ann when she was little. But you have to understand: I had to protect her. She didn’t know the world. There was no point in being tough or sassy even when you were right. Not in a world where you could be sent to a juvenile lockup for talking back or fighting in school, a world where you’d be the last one hired and the first one fired. She could know any of that or how her black skin would scare people or make them laugh or trick her.
“Come on, baby, you’re not responsible for other folks’ evil.”
In the taxicab on the first day of my parole I felt like a little kid seeing the world for the first time—houses surrounded by grass so green it hurt my eyes. The flowers seemed to be painted because I didn’t remember roses that shade of lavender or sunflowers so blindingly bright. Everything seemed not just remodeled but brand-new. When I rolled down the window to smell the fresh air, the wind caught my hair—whipping it backward and sideways. That’s when I knew I was free.
He was part of the pain—not a savior at all, and now her life was in shambles because of him. The pieces of it that she had stitched together: personal glamour, control in an exciting even creative profession, sexual freedom and most of all a shield that protected her from any overly intense feeling, be it rage, embarrassment or love.
Finally in Mexico they agreed to stop meeting that way […] so they got married and “moved to California to live a real life.”
Bride’s envy watching them was infantile but she couldn’t stop herself. “By ‘real’ you mean poor?” She smiled to hide the sneer.
“What does ‘poor’ mean? No television?” Steve raised his eyebrows.
“It means no money,” said Bride.
“Same thing,” he answered. “No money, no television.”
“Means no washing machine, no fridge, no bathroom, no money!”
“Money get you out of that Jaguar? Money save your ass?”
He suspected most of the real answers concerning slavery, lynching, forced labor, sharecropping, racism, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, prison labor, migration, civil rights and black revolution movements were all about money. Money withheld, money stolen, money as power, as war. Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks’ hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running.
When the police responded to their plea for help in searching for Adam, they immediately searched the Starberns’ house—as though the anxious parents might be at fault. They checked to see if the father had a police record. He didn’t. “We’ll get back to you,” they said. Then they dropped it. Another little black boy gone. So?
Wealth alone explained humanity’s evil, and he was determined to live without deference to it.
Once in a while she dropped the hip, thrillingly successful corporate woman façade of complete control and confessed some flaw or painful memory of childhood. And he, knowing all about how childhood cuts festered and never scabbed over, comforted her while hiding the rage he felt at the idea of anyone hurting her.
Six months into the bliss of edible sex, free-style music, challenging books and the company of an easy undemanding Bride, the fairy-tale castle collapsed into the mud and sand on which its vanity was built. And Booker ran away.
Flat-chested and without underarm or pubic hair, pierced ears and stable weight, she tried and failed to forget what she believed was her crazed transformation back into a scared little black girl.
Complaining about her mother, she told him that Sweetness hated her for her black skin.
“It’s just a color,” Booker had said. “A genetic trait—not a flaw, not a curse, not a blessing nor a sin.”
“But,” she countered,” other people think racial—”
Booker cut her off. “Scientifically there’s no such thing as race, Bride, so racism without race is a choice. Taught, of course, by those who need it, but still a choice. Folks who practice it would be nothing without it.”
His words were rational and, at the time, soothing but had little to do with day-to-day experience—like sitting in a car under the stunned gaze of little white children who couldn’t be more fascinated if they were at a museum of dinosaurs.
You should take heartbreak of whatever kind seriously with the courage to let it blaze and burn like the pulsing star it is unable or unwilling to be soothed into pathetic self-blame because its explosive brilliance rings justifiably loud like the din of a tympani.
“I’m not sure I should, now.” Bride shook her head. She had counted on her looks for so long—how well her beauty worked. She had not known its shallowness or her own cowardice—the vital lesson Sweetness taught and nailed to her spine to curve it.
“I lied! I lied! I lied! She was innocent. I helped convict her but she didn’t do any of that. I wanted to make amends but she beat the crap out of me and I deserved it.”
“You lied? What the hell for?”
“So my mother would hold my hand!”
“What?”
“And look at me with proud eyes, for once.”
“So, did she?”
“Yes. She even liked me.”
They will blow it, she thought. Each will cling to a sad little story of hurt and sorrow—some long-ago trouble and pain life dumped on their pure and innocent selves. And each one will rewrite the story forever, knowing the plot, guessing the theme, inventing its meaning and dismissing its origin. What waste.
Queen’s right, he thought. Except for Adam I don’t know anything about love. Adam had no faults, was innocent, pure, easy to love. Had he lived, grown up to have flaws, human failings like deception, foolishness and ignorance, would he be so easy to adore or be even worthy of adoration? What kind of love is it that requires and only an angel for its commitment?
Having confessed, Lula Ann’s sins she felt newly born. No longer forced to relive, no, outlive the disdain of her mother and the abandonment of her father.
A child. New life. Immune to evil or illness, protected from kidnap, beatings, race, racism, insult, hurt, self-loathing, abandonment. Error-free. All goodness. Minus wrath.
So they believe.
