Can You Keep a Secret? Read online

  Daddy slowed down for a couple of weeks. Then he started up again the following month. One Friday he had not come home from work by six p.m., the time he usually did when he wasn’t fooling around.

  “I guess Clarence is working late again or having a few beers with his buddies,” Mama said to Shirelle as the three of us ate dinner that evening. “Or visiting a sick friend . . .”

  “Oh, there’s just no telling where he’s at,” Shirelle said with a disgusted look on her face. “He could be lying in a ditch somewhere.”

  “Humph! Things like that never happen to men like Clarence,” Mama said, just before she bit into one of the fried chicken legs Shirelle had cooked.

  Eight, nine, and ten o’clock came and went. Daddy still had not come home by eleven so we all finally went to bed. I woke up in the middle of the night when I heard him and Shirelle arguing in their bedroom, which was right next to mine. I couldn’t hear everything, but I heard Daddy holler, “I’ll behave! Give me another chance, baby!”

  I heard what sounded like somebody getting slapped and then things got quiet. After about a minute, I heard bedsprings creaking and a lot of moaning. I assumed that whatever Daddy had done, Shirelle had forgiven him and was going to give him “another chance.”

  Two nights later, Daddy stayed out late again and when he got home, Shirelle fussed at him for a whole hour.

  I was worried about her. She was no longer the fun-loving, happy-go-lucky woman I used to love to be around. She didn’t even fix herself up the way she used to. She slouched around the house in her bathrobe and bare feet with a puppy dog expression on her face and a drink in her hand. And she only left the house to go get more liquor when she ran out.

  A lot of times when Daddy was out and about, Shirelle usually stayed in her room. At night I could hear her crying. I felt so sorry for her. I felt sorry for Daddy, too. He was a mixed-up, tortured soul. I was convinced that something was wrong with him. Why else would he keep cheating on the women who loved him?

  Mama didn’t get involved in the arguments between Daddy and Shirelle. As a matter of fact, she was about as indifferent as she could be. She kept to herself and went on about her business like nothing was wrong. She went to work, spent time with her friends, and did the same things she had always done. She was probably a mixed-up, tortured soul too. Instead of acting like the lady of the house, like she still was in my book, she seemed more like a boarder.

  Chapter 8

  Lola

  ABOUT NINE MONTHS LATER, THINGS TOOK A TURN FOR THE WORSE. That was when Mama was diagnosed with a terminal blood disease. She had to quit teaching and she lost the ability to take care of herself. For the next three months, she was in and out of the hospital. But Daddy and my other mother agreed that we would take care of her at home as much as we could.

  Just like she’d done when Mama had shingles, Shirelle had to help her bathe and dress herself. Assisting my mother eventually became a full-time job for Shirelle. She did it without complaining and with very little assistance from Daddy. I helped as much as I could. When Mama got so sick she had to start wearing diapers, Daddy started coming home late again—with more lipstick on his collar.

  My other mother finally threw in the towel.

  It happened on a Friday evening in October, the day after Daddy’s latest romp. He and I had gone to the supermarket to get items for the cake that Shirelle was going to bake for my upcoming party to celebrate my thirteenth birthday in a few days. When we returned home, Bertha Mays, a woman who lived at the end of the block, strolled out of the kitchen wiping her hands on the crisp plaid apron wrapped around her pear-shaped body. There was a wall-to-wall grin on her moon face. A hairnet covered most of her gray-and-black hair. “Clarence, you won’t have to worry about a thing,” she said with a snort. Then she gave Daddy a hopeless look and slapped her hands onto her hips.

  There was a confused look on Daddy’s face, not to mention mine. He looked at me and we shrugged at the same time. “What the hell is going on?” he asked with his eyebrows raised. “Bertha, where is Shirelle?”

  “Gone,” she replied with a casual sigh as she turned around and started shuffling back toward the kitchen.

  “Oh? Well, where did she go to?” Daddy hollered as he and I followed Bertha. When we reached the kitchen, he glanced anxiously at the back door as if he expected Shirelle to walk in.

  “That sister called me to come over here right after you and Lola left the house and told me she needed my help. Me, being the woman I am, I dropped what I was doing and got over here as fast as I could. As soon as I made it in the door, Shirelle told me to make myself comfortable. Next thing I knew, she ran upstairs and came back down with two suitcases,” Bertha told us. She gently removed the grocery bags from Daddy’s hands. “I’ll put this stuff away.”

  “She had to tell you something about where she was going and why. I can’t see her up and leaving with suitcases without saying nothing,” Daddy said.

  “She didn’t say where she was going,” Bertha replied as she set the grocery bags down on the counter. “All she told me was that she’d been planning to take off for weeks. A few minutes after she came down with her suitcases, one of her brothers pulled up outside in a car with a loud muffler and honked his horn. Shirelle ran out of this house so fast it made my head spin.”

  I didn’t know what to think about Bertha. For one thing, she was not that attractive. She was a dumpy woman with a rust-colored complexion, a meatball nose, and beady black eyes. She seemed nice enough, but she had two children I couldn’t stand. Twenty-three-year-old Libby and her twin brother Marshall resembled their mother in every way. They were both snobs and bullies and a few other unpleasant things. No matter how nice and friendly I was when I was around Libby, she looked at me like I was next to nothing. The looks I got from Marshall made me even more uncomfortable. No matter what outfit he saw me in, the way he looked at me with his eyes glistening and his tongue sliding across his bottom lip, he made me feel naked.

  Bertha’s husband had divorced her five years ago. He’d left her a nice big house and from what Mama had told me, a substantial amount of money.

  “Clarence, I told Shirelle that I’d look after your sweet wife from now on,” Bertha chirped with a firm nod. “Mildred and I have been close friends for years so I know she’d do the same for me.”

  “That’s mighty generous of you, but what about your job at the school?” Daddy asked, blinking his eyes fast and wringing his hands.

  “Pffft!” Bertha waved her hand and shook her head. “I used to love teaching, but the kids in elementary school got too obnoxious and dangerous for me. I took my early retirement last week so I can come over here every day and do all I can for Mildred. You won’t have to worry about paying me. I’m glad I can help out. And I’m more than willing to help you out with little Lola, too,” she added, winking at me.

  “I can’t believe Shirelle took off without telling me!” Daddy yelled.

  “Well, she did,” Bertha assured him. “But like I just said, you don’t have to worry about a thing. I got everything under control.”

  “Yeah . . . uh, I guess we’ll make do until she brings her tail back here,” Daddy said, his voice cracking. I had never seen such a stunned and confused look on his face before today. He looked down at me and bit his bottom lip. “Lola, you mind Bertha, you hear?”

  “Uh-huh,” I muttered.

  Bertha came back to our house Saturday morning around eight. She made the cake for my birthday party which was supposed to take place that afternoon. But because Daddy was so upset about Shirelle leaving, he made me cancel my party. I didn’t mind. I was as upset as he was, so the last thing I wanted to do was entertain a bunch of my friends. I did tell them all that they could come by and drop off my birthday presents though.

  Shirelle didn’t call and we didn’t know where she had moved to. The next time I tried to get in touch with her niece, Mariel, which was a week after Shirelle had left; her grandmother told me
in a very impatient tone of voice that Mariel couldn’t come to the telephone. When I called her again a few days later, the number had been changed and unlisted. That saddened me a lot because Mariel had become very important to me. She was the one I leaned on when Joan was being punished for doing something stupid and couldn’t leave the house, talk on the telephone, or spend time with me. It was obvious to me that Shirelle had wanted to make a clean break from Daddy and me and that had included the end of my relationship with Mariel. For some reason, Daddy thought Shirelle would return sooner or later, but I knew she was gone for good.

  Mail still came to our house for her and instead of giving it back to the mailman, Daddy put it in the kitchen drawer where we stored other odds and ends. He had also refused to get rid of the few clothes she’d left behind, and a treadmill in the garage that she’d rarely used. The longer Shirelle stayed away, the more dependent we became on Bertha. By the end of the third week, she had moved so much of her stuff into our house, people predicted Daddy would get jiggy with her next.

  And they were right. Two weeks before Thanksgiving, I saw Daddy and Bertha practically going at it in the kitchen one evening when they thought I was in my room. He had her pinned against the wall and one of her thick legs was wrapped around his thigh. How a heavy-set woman like her managed to lift one of her legs up that high was something I could not figure out—especially since she was always complaining about arthritis in her knees, pinched nerves in her legs, and gout in her feet. She had her arms wrapped around Daddy’s waist and he held her head in place as they kissed. They were both wheezing and grunting like hogs. I decided not to tell Mama or anybody else what I’d seen. Since the rumors and gossip about Daddy and Bertha had already begun to circulate, it was just a matter of time before everybody knew what was going on in our house anyway.

  Two days before Christmas, I went into Mama’s bedroom to check on her. “Shut the door and come over here,” she ordered. I was surprised to see her sitting up in bed and even more surprised that she had spoken in such a strong voice. For the past couple of weeks, it had been difficult for her to talk in her normal voice. Bertha had put a note pad and a pen on the nightstand for her to communicate when she was too weak to talk.

  “You look and sound so much better, Mama,” I said as I slowly made my way over to the bed. Her eyes looked brighter than they had since she got sick. Her smooth, copper-colored skin had a glow to it that I had never seen before. But the smell of sickness was all over the room. Despite the fact that Bertha changed Mama’s bedding every day and bathed her, the stench of urine and vomit filled the room.

  “I just wanted you to come close enough so I could get a hug and tell you to be a good girl,” Mama rasped, now speaking in a very weak voice again. “Find yourself a good man and raise your kids the way I raised you.”

  “I will, Mama. I’ll be glad when you can get up out of this bed and be happy and healthy again.”

  “I will be real soon, honey,” Mama assured me as I leaned over the bed to hug her. She was too weak to hug me back. I held her for about two minutes and then she let out a hissing noise and went limp.

  It took a few seconds for me to realize she had died in my arms.

  We didn’t celebrate Christmas that year. It was the day before Mama’s funeral. A couple of hours before the service, Daddy went to the funeral home and took a Polaroid picture of Mama in her coffin, which was something a lot of people I knew did. I could never figure out why. Who would want their dead body to be photographed in a coffin? Mama had never liked to take pictures when she was alive. If she had been able, she would not have allowed it. For one thing, she had lost most of her hair so she wore a wig and her favorite yellow dress. She looked much better dead than she had looked the last few months of her life. She even looked younger. I was not the only one who noticed, but it looked like me lying in that coffin.

  “I didn’t realize how much you and your mother looked alike,” a woman from the neighborhood said when she saw the picture. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear that was you fixing to be buried.”

  Daddy put that picture in a photo album we’d had for years and I forgot all about it.

  Chapter 9

  Joan

  I’D ONLY ATTENDED A FEW FUNERALS AND NOBODY HATED THEM AS much as I did. All that crying and looking at the body of the guest of honor lying in a coffin was too much for me. Mama’s parents died three months apart when I was five. Daddy’s parents died two years later in the same month! I had worn the same black blouse and black skirt to all four funerals. Now here I was again in another dreary black outfit—this time it was a pantsuit—for Lola’s mother’s funeral.

  I had no idea so many people had loved Lola’s mother. Second Baptist Church with its dark green carpets and huge colored murals on every wall of Jesus in various poses, was packed with people boo-hooing up a storm. I was glad that it was a closed casket funeral, which was a first for me. I had seen Mildred a couple of weeks before she died and she’d looked so pitiful then I could barely stand to look at her without feeling nauseous. There was a large framed picture of her on top of her casket. That was the way I wanted to remember her.

  Like at most funerals for black folks, several people including my mother and my stepfather, went up to the pulpit and said all kinds of nice things about Mildred. “She was the salt of the earth,” somebody else said. “She changed my life,” another one said. Clifford Bates, one of her former students, stood up and sang five songs that he had written himself. His long performance was agonizing to sit through because the boy couldn’t sing worth a damn. People were clearing their throats and glancing at their watches the whole time that boy stood up there braying like a wounded donkey.

  Dennis Rosenberg the handsome young Jewish physician who had cared for Mildred and was also one of her former students, was the only one who said something that really made me feel a little bit better about being where I was. “Let’s honor Mildred’s life, not her passing. She’s in a much better place now,” he said in his gravelly voice. I could tell that he was struggling to hold back his tears. His last sentence got to me and I started howling again.

  Since Lola and I were best friends, her daddy allowed me to sit in the front pew with them. Bertha, who looked like a pilgrim in a drab black frock with a white collar, had also sat her big ass on the front pew with the immediate family. A lot of Mildred’s former students, some of them grown with kids of their own, attended. So did most of the teachers and the principal she had worked with.

  I kept my arm around Lola’s shoulders the whole time. She had cried so much her eyes were red and swollen. But at least she wasn’t wailing like a banshee the way almost everybody else was.

  “It’s almost over,” I whispered to Lola as I patted her shoulder. She turned to look at me, and somehow she managed to smile.

  “Thanks for coming and thanks for sitting with us,” she whispered back.

  As soon as Reverend Tiggs closed the service, everybody stopped crying and started glancing toward the dining area in the back of the church. I was sure that they were wondering how soon they’d be able to get up and go back there to get a plate of food. I knew people who attended funerals mainly to eat.

  The weeks following the funeral were just as gloomy. I did as much as I could to help Lola get through the trauma of losing her real mother. But no matter how much I tried to cheer her up, there were times when she was so depressed, I avoided her. When she got depressed, she depressed me. She didn’t have to tell me but I had a feeling she wasn’t just depressed about losing her mother. She was depressed about life in general and had been for a while. One of the main reasons was because she was lonely. She often complained about not having more relatives; ones she could visit and have a real relationship with. The ones she did have were just as odd as they could be, so she was never going to have a relationship with them. Once she had even talked about going to the Philippines when she grew up to try and locate the three children her oddball uncle had fat
hered with his Filipino wife just so she would have some blood relatives to associate with. I felt so sorry for my girl.

  “I don’t have anybody but my daddy now. I can’t wait to grow up and get married so I can have a bunch of kids to keep me company,” she told me. It had been three months since her mother’s funeral and she was still depressed about it.

  “You’ve got a long way to go before you get to that point,” I told her. “You haven’t even had your first boyfriend.”

  Lola gave me a strange look. “Joan, you know how to talk to boys and you know I’m kind of shy around them. I’m thirteen now and it’s time for me to start acting like a teenager.”

  “True. What’s your point?”

  “I hope you’ll hook me up with some cool dudes one of these days so I can fool around with boys like some of the other girls we know.”

  “I’ll do that and more.” I grinned.

  I didn’t want to confess to Lola, but I had already started “fooling around” with boys. I had not had intercourse with one yet, but I’d done a few other things. The boys I got involved with were two to four years older than me. All I had to do to keep them happy was jack them off with my hand.

  I knew a few girls who were into giving oral sex to boys, but I wasn’t ready for that. I had a feeling that at the rate I was going, I’d be ready for it soon enough. In the meantime, I was real particular about what went into my mouth. One time a boy stuck his tongue in my mouth and I almost gagged. I didn’t want to think about what would happen when, and if, I decided to let one stick his pecker in my mouth. It was bad enough that what I was doing with boys wasn’t doing much for me.

  By now, both of my two oldest sisters were married to men who had good jobs and good personalities. They lived like kings in big houses in nice neighborhoods and drove fancy vehicles. My only other sister Elaine was anxious to get married too and she had made it clear that she was also going to marry a man who had a lot to offer. I wanted a dude who would be nice and generous to me too.