Part 3 (1/2)
By the time she steps into the bathroom, Randall is already soaking in the tub. Two gla.s.ses of wine, his nearly empty, sit on the marble-tiled ledge. He slurps his wine and, eyes closed, rests his head against the tiled wall behind him. ”Ahhhh. I needed this. Thanks, hon.”
Lena kneels beside the tub so that her face looks directly at his and drags her hand through the scented water, forcing steam and the odor of musk to drift in the air between them. ”I can't help but wonder, Randall, how keeping you on track makes your secretary and your a.s.sistant more worthy of your thoughtfulness than your wife.”
”It's no big deal, Lena. You don't like cheap stuff anyway. I'll take you to San Francisco next week. You can pick up something then.”
”That's not the point, Randall.”
”The point is I'm home, not with them, and I'm tired.”
Her boots come off slowly, as do her cashmere sweater and tight jeans. She tosses them next to the four pairs left on the floor from earlier this evening before she settled on the French ones, to show off her hips. Randall did not notice her hips or the jeans at the airport, just as at this minute, eyes closed in a trance of concentration, he doesn't notice her nakedness.
The water sloshes against the sides of the long tub when Lena stirs it with her foot. When she steps in, Randall opens his eyes and leans forward. He cups her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and ma.s.sages them in that way that always makes her moan. Lena pulls away before she does, before she starts something even her momentary meditation has left her still too upset to finish.
”I'm already feeling the jet lag.” Randall scoops hot water over his chest and head and repeats this motion two more times. Wrinkled eyebrows keep the rivulets from his eyes. ”I'm ready to sleep in my own bed.” He swallows the rest of his wine with one quick swig, steps out of the tub, and dries himself roughly before going off to bed.
The rasp of Randall's snores matches the sawing sounds of the final minutes of a movie on TV. Sleep is the only time that anyone would label Randall peaceful. If she is awake, when he lies motionless in the middle of the night like this, Lena often pokes his shoulder, his neck, his thigh in antic.i.p.ation of the slightest movement: proof he is still alive and well. Half-open eyes tell Lena he is somewhere between dream and arousal.
Randall tugs her close, tickles her with his tongue in a new place, and she gasps from the sensation. They blend together in their familiar way. She surrenders to his touch, the bristle of his mustache, a hint of musk oil. There is no urgency to his movement, yet he comes swiftly, leaving Lena wanting more.
Chapter 6.
Lulu and John Henry's dream house looks the same as the day they bought it in 1965. The house is painted a pale color somewhere between beige and rust; a lamp that switches on at 4:30 p.m. and off at 7:30 a.m. every spring, summer, winter, and fall. Year round Christmas lights, more fragments than bulbs, loop under the eaves and around the three-sided bay window that dominates the front of the house.
Whenever Bobbie and Lena complained of how embarra.s.sed they were by the lights and the hideous, old-fas.h.i.+oned paint, John Henry told them he didn't have a problem with change as long as it stayed away from him. The biggest change he'd made in his life, he told his daughters every time, was coming to California, and, since he wasn't a risk taker, he saw no need to push his luck.
”Lulu? You in the backyard?” Lena ducks around the low branches of the California oak where she and Bobbie always wanted John Henry to build a tree house. The limbs of s...o...b..ll hydrangeas straggle over the path; low pink azaleas, in ironic harmony with the painted red cement, ramble below. Two garbage cans filled with dead leaves sit in the middle of the path. This Wednesday, like every Wednesday of the eighteen months since John Henry pa.s.sed, Lena feels like she has become her father. She lugs the trash to the curb where neighbors' cans jaggedly line the street up one side and down the other like whole notes in a measure of music.
Once done, she heads for the backyard. The yard that used to be John Henry's pride and joy is unkempt in a way that shocks this daughter of parents once so fastidious: overgrown hedges, scraggly lawn, brown spots on camellia leaves, wiry rose bushes; an apple tree branch hangs doggedly parallel to its trunk.
Lulu's posture is effortlessly straight-backed. She holds a tarnished bra.s.s nozzle attached to a green-striped garden hose in her left hand and listens intently to someone's conversation on the other end of the cell phone squeezed between her right ear and shoulder. The bluish rinse that Lulu tints her thin, curly afro with glistens in the sun. Not one hair on her head is out of place, no wrinkles in her blouse, not a drop of water on her pants. Lena can't help but smile at how beautiful her mother still is, how the color of her clothes warms her skin.
Phone still in place, Lulu holds two conversations at the same time. ”Tell me your husband husband didn't see you looking like that? At least you could've put on lipstick.” Lulu never goes without her trademark lipstick. Today, her fuchsia lips match the budding azaleas, her cardigan, and her loose ankle-length pants. ”He back yet?” didn't see you looking like that? At least you could've put on lipstick.” Lulu never goes without her trademark lipstick. Today, her fuchsia lips match the budding azaleas, her cardigan, and her loose ankle-length pants. ”He back yet?”
Lulu is a pet.i.te woman; her frame frail and shrinking with each pa.s.sing year. Lena bends, touching her lips to Lulu's cheek, and sniffs. Floral perfume is Lulu's trademark, too; its fragrance comfortable and rea.s.suring; her forgetfulness is not. Three times over the last month, Lena has had to remind Lulu of details she should know-Randall is out of town, Kendrick is home and not away at college, Camille is about to graduate from high school, Bobbie lives in New York.
”Randall came home yesterday. Remember?”
”That son-in-law of mine is always off somewhere-China, Paris, New York-making big-time deals.” Lulu shouts into the phone in the way octogenarians often do, forgetting the sophistication of cell phone technology. The hose falls to the ground and snakes beneath her folding chair. ”He's the executive vice president at TIDA, you know. The only black that high up. I'm surprised Lena didn't go with him and stay in one of those nine-hundred-dollar-a-night hotels he loves.”
Lulu is Randall's biggest fan, and, on some level, Lena is both proud and bored with Lulu's exaggerations. Lulu winks, covers the handset, and mouths words that Lena cannot decipher because, despite this habit her mother has had for all of Lena's life-in church, behind John Henry's back, in rooms full of noisy relatives-Lena is not good at lip-reading. Lulu tells whomever is on the other end of the line she has to go and clamps the phone shut.
”You need a gardener, Lulu. What if I can't come over every Wednesday?”
”I'm not helpless.” Lulu's knuckles are knotted with arthritis. She flexes her fingers and lays her hands on Lena's. ”How's my baby girl doin' on this glorious day?”
Lulu presses her hands to Lena's temples. No need, Lena believes, to bother Lulu. John Henry and Lulu's marriage was different, maybe exceptional. They grew up in a Mississippi town with only a postal route number and no name. The day John Henry came home from World War II, he asked for Lulu's hand in marriage. The two of them worked hard, raised their girls, and spoiled them as rotten as they could on their government salaries.
John Henry took care of everything. He doted on his wife. He drove Lulu to work, to church, the grocery store, and shopping and brought his check home every Friday. In return, Lulu took care of him, served his dinner every evening at six sharp-a saucer of finely chopped onions beside his plate no matter what she cooked. She ironed his clothes and let him play poker with his buddies once a month.
”Did you ever feel like you were... losing yourself?” Once Lena believed her attachment to a powerful mate completed her. Power s.h.i.+fted their relations.h.i.+p, hers and Randall's, bifurcated their growth, like a tree, into independent directions ignoring the trunk that made it one; forgetting to meet at a glorious crown, joined and whole. Now she knows she cannot tell when her husband of twenty-three years lost his respect for her. But that loss has weakened her.
”Honey, that losing yourself thing is strictly for your generation. I knew where I was all of the time.” Lulu chuckles. Picking up the nozzle, she takes a bottle of aspirin from her pocket. The cap is one of those now old-fas.h.i.+oned, no-childproof tops.
”I need to make some changes. And Randall is a little... impatient.”
”I hope you're not thinking about that photography business again.” The day Lena completed her acceptance paperwork for UCLA, John Henry, checkbook in hand, and Lulu stood beside her prepared to pay her tuition on one condition: no photography. They weren't about to waste their hard-earned money on frivolity: college was about getting a good job, a nine-to-five-with-an-hour-for-lunch job, a government job, a GS 12 or 15 job with a pension, vacation, and benefits.
”I always always took care of my family first.” Lulu jiggles pills straight from the bottle into her mouth, then sips from the nozzle. ”Women have to put up with a man's moodiness until it runs its course.” took care of my family first.” Lulu jiggles pills straight from the bottle into her mouth, then sips from the nozzle. ”Women have to put up with a man's moodiness until it runs its course.”
”Maybe Bobbie should get her b.u.t.t out here and benefit from some of this advice.” Her big sister always says Lena tells their mother too much.
”It doesn't apply... and, Bobbie thinks her books are more important than... anything else. Maybe if she listened, she could have a husband, too.” Lulu holds on to the chair to stand fully upright. ”You forget how lucky you are. You're living the life I dreamed for you...”
”What can I help you with today? I won't be able to stay as long as usual, I've got to get ready for Sat.u.r.day. Randall wants friends over for dinner.”
”That's nice, baby girl. That should make Randall happy.” Holding her right elbow with her left hand, Lulu opens then shuts the sliding gla.s.s door to the spa.r.s.ely furnished family room behind them. After John Henry dropped dead of a heart attack on the eve of their fifty-ninth wedding anniversary, Lulu went into a frenzy. She threw away John Henry's yellowed, fake-leather recliner, years of past issues of Life Life and and National Geographic, National Geographic, unopened liquor bottles, except for the now forty-year-old bottle of twenty-year-old blended scotch whiskey Bobbie gave them years ago as an anniversary present, the old TV, the broken hi-fi and the treadmill John Henry used every other day until it broke. unopened liquor bottles, except for the now forty-year-old bottle of twenty-year-old blended scotch whiskey Bobbie gave them years ago as an anniversary present, the old TV, the broken hi-fi and the treadmill John Henry used every other day until it broke.
After Lulu forces the metal latches-top, bottom, and two above the handle-closed to the accompaniment of small grunts, Lena heads for John Henry's tool room, the one room Lulu left untouched, and grabs a can of WD-40. At the sliding door, she sprays each of the four latches and the metal runner tracks. She works the latches and the door back and forth until they roll without effort.
Lulu pushes at Lena's arm. ”You get on home. Get ready for your party. Fix yourself up. You have a good life, Lena-I know I'm repeating, but it's the truth.”
”What if that isn't enough?”
”Then make make it enough. Make it enough to last until death do you part. I hope you're not thinking about doing something foolish. There's no way you could live like you do without Randall.” it enough. Make it enough to last until death do you part. I hope you're not thinking about doing something foolish. There's no way you could live like you do without Randall.”
”You... you sound like a page from a black-mama manual: if you got a man, then you got to be happy.” Mother and daughter stand opposite one another, two sets of hands perched on their own hips just like they did when Lena was a teenager, eager to get from under her mother's old-timey ways.
The locks glide open when Lulu opens the gla.s.s door, and Lena knows she is being ordered to leave, as Lulu's superst.i.tions demand, the same way she came in.
”I'll get somebody-at least to cut the lawn and trim the roses, there are so many.” Lulu sighs with resignation, as if this decision is her punishment for growing old without a man, and heads toward a full white rose bush. She nips three blossoms with her shears. ”This is an Austin tea rose. Your father gave it to me for our fortieth anniversary. It stands for happy love.” She dribbles water from the hose onto a paper towel then wraps it around the th.o.r.n.y stems and hands the bouquet to Lena. When Lulu starts to water the lawn again, it occurs to Lena that Lulu has been watering the same spot since she arrived. She is either methodical or more forgetful than Lena cares to ponder.
”How are you feeling, Lulu?”
”Don't worry about me; I'm fine. Your father would take care of the yard, if he were here. Your father was the man.” Her words are practiced like the rosary she recites every Friday morning. ”Your Uncle Joe was busy all of the time. He was a big shot, like Randall. Worked day and night on his real estate business so his family could have a big house-not as big as yours-and a new Cadillac every year. Inez liked to decorate, but she had to ask your uncle for the money.” Lulu's face is serious, her eyelids close.
”What does this have to do with me?”
”Well, when Inez wanted new wallpaper in her bathroom, she peeled pieces from around the bathtub, the sink, places she knew Joe would notice, and she flushed them, and a few women's items, down the toilet. When the toilet backed up, Joe told Inez to call the plumber and while she was at it, she might as well get somebody to replace the wallpaper as well.” The wind sprays dirt onto Lulu's face. She wipes her eyes with a lacy handkerchief peeking from her pant pocket and aims the water at the wilted juniper bushes beyond.
”I can't believe Uncle Joe was that stupid.”
Lulu ignores the metered patter of Lena's foot intended to get Lulu to make her point. She pauses, her smile the best indication of how much she is enjoying her story and her daughter's undivided attention.