Young Wives

But he was equipment crazy. He spent all the profits on a backhoe, a bucket loader, and a bulldozer. He had T-shirts made up that said, JACKSON CONSTRUCTION AND EXCAVATION, IF WE AIN’T BUILDIN’ WE’RE DOZIN’. Well, he was probably dozing right now—on the sofa. Because he had mismanaged everything.

At first they’d both thought Clinton’s touch had been golden. Both she and Clinton had been sure he would create their fortune. In the darkness, Jada shook her head. Maybe he’d gotten a little cocky, a little arrogant even. He felt like he was different than most of the other men back at their church. “They’re employees,” he used to say. “I’m an employer.” He didn’t go as far as turning Republican, but he did buy a set of golf clubs. And she had had total faith in him.

It was funny. When she’d seen Clinton working on a building site or directing his men, she’d gotten off on it. He was DDG—drop-dead gorgeous. He seemed so “take charge,” so full of authority. Now he was just full of it.

Blind faith, as it turned out. They didn’t know they were merely riding the fiscal tide of the times. When corporate downsizing began, all of Clinton’s business dried up and blew away, just the way so many white executives’ jobs and minds had. He couldn’t make payments on the equipment, couldn’t make salaries, had to let people go. The trickle-down effect took a little longer, but Clinton’s mind and pride were eventually blown, too. For almost four years he tried to hang on, giving detailed estimate after detailed estimate on houses that were never built, extensions that were never added.

Finally, all his pride, her faith, and their money were gone, but their mortgage payments still had to be paid. Jada begged Clinton to get a job, and when he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, she—who hadn’t worked since their first child was born—got the only job she could—as a teller for minimum wage. Even for that she had needed the help of her friend Michelle to get the position. There were a lot of job-hungry wives in Westchester. The money Jada had earned just barely covered groceries, but at least from that day on they were paying cash for their Cap’n Crunch instead of Mastercarding it.

Clinton, though, hadn’t been relieved. In fact, he’d been made even more miserable by her working. He moped and loafed and slept and ate and griped. He said he didn’t like her out of the home, that the job paid too little and was beneath her. She agreed, but knew they were in no position to negotiate. Somehow, Clinton just never accepted that. He lived a bitter, private life, waiting for “the climate to turn.” He’d gained at least forty pounds. He yelled at the kids and seemed to blame her for everything.

If it had been impossible to cope at home, Jada had found it surprisingly easy to persevere at work. The bank was a relief: what they expected of her was so much more doable than her task at home. To her own surprise, she’d been promoted almost immediately to head teller—a black woman with three other black women and a white girl reporting to her! She’d never supervised anyone but her children. Then, when she’d been made a loan officer, and later head of the whole loan department, she’d been as astonished as any of them. Mr. Feeney, the branch manager, had liked her—they got on real well and up to his retirement, she’d been his assistant branch manager. When he’d retired, well, she’d hadn’t been surprised at anything except her reluctance to tell Clinton the good news.

Only one woman, Mr. Feeney’s old secretary, Anne, seemed to resent her. Now she was branch manager, with two dozen people, including Anne and Michelle, reporting to her! She coped with Anne and depended on Michelle. Thank God it hadn’t changed their friendship: Michelle wasn’t the least bit jealous. Michelle liked being a loan officer and didn’t want to put in any hours after three o’clock. Not, of course, that Jada wanted to—she just had to. The bank was paying her about half what they had paid Mr. Feeney, but they still wanted blood. Two months ago they’d sent some management consultants through to see if there was some way they could “reduce overhead through more efficient paperwork flow-through and staff utilization.” What it really meant was finding a way to fire a couple more people, though Jada’s branch had larger deposits and transactions than any other branch of its size in the county.

Of course, everyone had been shaken up. They all needed their paychecks—except for maybe Michelle—as bad as Jada did. Sometimes Jada had to shake her head at the way men managed things. They gave lip service to the idea that human resources (never “people”) would perform better if their morale was high, but then the sons-of-bitches were always doing things that lowered morale.

The report had come back two weeks ago and—thank the Lord—the branch had been given what television movie critics might have called a big thumbs up. But Jada had been left with frightened, resentful employees. To combat that she instituted a weekly meeting to get and implement the staff’s suggestions for improvements. The problem was, there were very few real ways to improve, while everybody wanted to use the meeting to showboat. Well, at least the men did. They all had to repeat old ideas over and over as if they were new and their own. The women had to talk every single damn thing to death.

This evening’s meeting had been so stupid, a waste of time. Why was it that a person alone could make a decision in ten minutes, but an organization of ten people could take two hours to come to no decisions at all?

Jada sighed as she turned the Volvo into the driveway. She could see the unweeded dahlia bed by the streetlight. Her mother, a great gardener, would be ashamed. At the very last minute she saw Kevon’s bike lying on the blacktop near the garage door. She swerved and braked. God-double-damn it! Goddamn, Goddamn, Goddamn! So much for not taking the Lord’s name in vain. Jada stormed out of the car into the cold, jerked the bike up, and leaned it against the side of the garage. She opened the door (Why hadn’t Clinton fixed the automatic door opener? The man was useless as handles on a glove!) and then put the bike away, pulled the car into the garage, got out, closed the garage door, and stamped across the lawn.

It was bedlam inside. Clinton was lying on the great room sofa. He gave her a look that said “I do help around the house,” when all he’d managed to do in the last week was put a towel in the hamper once. Now he was talking on the phone while Shavonne was eating cookies and watching TV. Both were forbidden to her preteen daughter before homework and a chapter of reading. Meanwhile Kevon, Jada realized with a shock, wasn’t anywhere to be found. At least the baby was sleeping, unless Clinton had left her lying in the driveway, too.

“Where’s your brother?” she asked Shavonne.

“I don’t know,” Shavonne murmured, without taking her eyes off the screen. “Are we going to eat soon?”

“You haven’t had dinner yet?” Jada shot a murderous look at Clinton and went to the refrigerator. She took out the milk, grabbed a box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, took out the last can of tuna, and decided to add the leftover string beans. There were plenty of’em—why did she bother with green vegetables at all?

In nineteen minutes the table was cleared and set, the television off, Shavonne washed, Kevon was found in his room, and the casserole was being dished out to the four of them. Life took on order and she could see even Clinton was marginally grateful. That sense of order, and the children, were the only reasons he hung around. But his lapses were getting worse and worse. She would have to talk to him.

Jada looked across the table at her husband. He averted his eyes. His skin gleamed and his hair, in a new cut, was in a handsome fade. For a month this new crisis had been hanging over her head. She should talk to him tonight. Confront him. But she was so tired. I’m the real casualty in this family, Jada thought. She knew that, despite her incredible fatigue tonight, she still had to put Shavonne and Kevon to bed, check in on Sherrilee, as well as confront her husband and demand his decision, a decision he didn’t want to make and she didn’t want to hear.

Jada began to spoon what was left of the casserole into a plastic refrigerator bowl. The limp, twice-cooked green beans—certainly a misnomer, because they were no longer anything even close to green—lay there before her. They looked worse than dead—used up and wasted.

Somehow the sight of them made her inexpressibly sad.

5

In which two people achieve orgasm and boots are made for walking

When Frank Russo walked into the master bedroom a little before eleven that night, Michelle, her hair down, lay across their bed in her satin nightgown, her breasts bursting out of the white foam of lace at the straps, reading. She looked up from the page as Frank caught sight of her. He grinned, then tried to play nonchalant. As if. She smiled to herself, then waited. She knew the scent of her perfume, the one she wore on nights like this and that he still bought her every Christmas, was wafting toward him. She didn’t say a word—she only smiled and glanced at the fabric of his trousers, right below his belt buckle. She wondered, not for the first time, if she’d trained him like one of those Russian dogs that salivated when a bell rang. Would her perfume give him an erection anytime he smelled it?

Frank sat down on the bed beside her, his eyes taking her in. “What you been up to?” he asked, his voice husky and intimate. “Painting the garage?”

For a moment Michelle opened her mouth to protest. Then she closed it again. She wouldn’t laugh. Instead she shook her head slowly, letting her hair cascade over her shoulders, lowering her eyes demurely back to her book. “Uh-uh,” she said, her voice slow. “But I did change the oil in the Lexus,” she drawled.

“Good girl,” he said, and casually began to unbuckle his belt. “While you’re at it, my truck could use a tune-up.” It was only then that she allowed herself to laugh and put the book down. Then she took Frank’s hand and held it to her soft, wide-open mouth. She licked his palm.

Frank couldn’t play cool any longer and groaned, then stripped off his shirt and undershirt, and lastly pulled off his jeans and boxers in a single movement. Michelle tried to keep his hand against her mouth the whole time, promising him everything with her eyes, but once in bed he pulled up the blanket as soon as he could and turned his back to her, curving his body into his sleep position. “God, I’m bushed,” he said, and lay there quietly, ready for sleep.

“Frank!” Michelle wailed, and then he had to laugh and turn to her, his arms open, his flesh hard.

Making love with Frank, after all this time together, was still great. Maybe, Michelle thought, it was because they knew each other so well but could still surprise each other. Their lovemaking ranged from very sweet to wildly athletic humping. From tiny, subtle movements, just the right word, the right tone of voice, to something wild that felt like sex with a stranger. Yet what Michelle loved was that it was always, in the end, safe with Frank.

There was the night he had come home with a Gap box. He wouldn’t let her touch it until the children were asleep. “Later,” he said raising his dark brows. From his leer she’d been afraid it might be a sex toy or a porno tape, but when she opened the box it was just a blue dress. She’d looked at him blankly. “Now,” he’d said, “go get me a tie.”

“Why?” she’d asked.

“Because we’re going to play Oval Office,” he told her. “I’m Mr. President and you’re Monica.” She’d laughed and laughed, until he convinced her to become his Secretary of the Interior.

Tonight, though, Frank was playing no more games. He was his most tender self. Without preliminaries, he rolled over and onto her, holding his weight off of her by placing his elbows on either side of her chest. Then he lifted her two hands with his and, holding her wrists, placed their hands on her hair. “Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?” he asked in a whisper.

She shook her head, though their hands held her hair so she couldn’t move it very much. “Tell me,” she whispered.

“Only if I can be inside you while I do,” he whispered back.

“You drive a hard bargain,” she told him, and shifted her weight to one hip. He still held her hands, but now with only one of his own. With the other he pulled up her nightgown, the satin bunching deliciously around their thighs. She was already wet as he pressed his flesh into her.

“You’re like silk,” he whispered. “All over. All over,” he repeated. “I look at you sometimes and I’m amazed. You’re so beautiful. And every place I touch you is so soft.” He was inside her—still and hard—but he moved his hips just once so she would remember where she ended and he began. He looked into her eyes. “Is that enough?” he asked.

She shook her head no.

“You want more?” he whispered. “More?”

She nodded.

“You’re greedy,” he told her, moving his eyes from hers. She watched him look at her. “Your mouth,” he murmured. “Men would kill just to touch your mouth, just once, with the tip of their fìnger.”

She smiled. A little shiver ran through her. “What do you want to touch it with?” she whispered.

“With my palm,” he said, covering her mouth, but only for a moment. “With my tongue,” he added, and he licked the very corner of her lips. “With my teeth,” he whispered, and pulled her bottom lip into his own mouth, biting her gently but firmly. He knew the line just between ultimate pleasure and the slightest bit of pain and judged it perfectly. Frank changed the balance of his hips then and pushed deeper inside her. He kissed her at the same time, his tongue aping the intrusive, wet slide of his penis.

“Your mouth is so beautiful,” he said, and it was almost a groan, “but it’s not the most beautiful part of you. Not even close.” And then he let go of her hands so she could pull him tightly to her. And she did.

Later, when Michelle lay in the dark, her nightgown a ruin, her body loved and relinquished, she savored her happiness. She reached her hand out to Frank’s back, so dark, so broad. He wasn’t big, but he was beautifully, compactly built. She rested her hand on his shoulder. He was already gone, spent, but she didn’t feel alone. Their union was a lasting one, and the thousand times that he’d entered her, the thousand times she’d given herself to her husband, had built up a kind of bank balance, a kind of bonus of connection between them, even when they weren’t joined as one flesh. Lying beside his sleeping form, she didn’t feel alone.

It was cold, and Frank shivered for a moment in his sleep. Michelle got up to close the window he insisted on leaving open. As she silently lowered it, she looked out at their quiet street. Then a limo, moving slowly, drove by. From her perch above, Michelle could see a face, white and drawn behind the glass. She could swear it looked up at her, that their eyes connected. She shivered and locked the window. Reflexively, for the first time in years, she crossed herself. Then she turned back to look at Frank, and almost ran to be beside him again in the haven of their bed.

Frank had spent himself on her and their children, Michelle thought. He had built this house with his own hands and skill and strength for them. He fed them and clothed them. He taught his son how to throw, his daughter to dance. He taught all of them how to feel loved, how to be safe.

I’m so very, very lucky, Michelle thought before she fell into another deep, deep dream.

The next morning when Michelle woke up she found the ground outside covered in a deep frost. For a moment she considered climbing right back into the warm bed beside Frank but Jada, like some dark, heat-seeking missile, would just come up the stairs and drag her out. Michelle dressed with an extra layer, pulled her long tAngie of hair into a ponytail, and tugged on her boots instead of her sneakers. She was down the stairs and almost out of the house in just minutes. Pookie was already waiting there at the door, his brown eyes almost as pleading as Frank’s had been.

“Okay,” she said, though she knew Pookie would slow them down. And Jada wouldn’t like that. Michelle loved Jada, but it had been odd at first to become friends with a black woman. There weren’t many in their neighborhood. And though Michelle prided herself on not being prejudiced, Frank and his family were … well, they certainly had special words and phrases that they used when they spoke about African-Americans. But they weren’t allowed to do it in front of Michelle, or her children.

It was a luxury to have a close friend. She and Jada got along really well, but sometimes small things stood out strongly and marked the boundaries between them. There was something about the way Jada both excused and blamed her husband that was weird to Michelle. And there were the foods Jada served her kids, unhealthy prepackaged American things. Plus, the different television programs she watched, the different reactions to movies that she had. There were a few things like that that they’d both learned to stay away from. Now Michelle clipped the leash to Pookie’s collar and was out the door. She’d learned that if she didn’t make it a quick getaway at 5:40 every morning, she wouldn’t get away at all.

The frost crunched under her boots and sent that little chill down her spine that everybody got when they heard certain noises. It wasn’t really cold, but the frost was a promise of things to come. Michelle loved cleanliness and she liked the freshness of the air in winter. It smelled clean. The dusting of snow, especially when it first fell, was also so clean-looking. Michelle walked down the street, almost reluctant to ruin its perfection with her boot prints and Pookie’s little paw spots. The tar of the street surface showed through starkly, black blots on the white sheet of road, as white and soft as confectioners’ sugar. Theirs were the only steps marring the perfection. That was the good thing about this time of the morning.

Michelle looked up from the frost and saw Jada coming out of her house. She’d be in a grim mood. Jada hated winter. Well, Michelle was prepared to hear her complain and also ready to hear what was going on in the Jackson marriage.

Jada pulled her hood tighter around her face. Gray flaky patches were already forming on the skin under her eyes. She wasn’t made to live in this climate, she thought, though she’d lived in the Northeast all her life. When she’d visit her parents in Barbados, her skin stayed moist. There her hair went into perfect jet ringlets and had bounce. She had what Clinton’s grandma called “good hair”—that meant it wasn’t nappy and didn’t need a perm to straighten it. Jada knew what it really meant was that it was closer to white people’s hair than it was to black people’s. She hated that kind of stuff, so she was disgusted with herself to find she was pleased that Shavonne had inherited her hair. It wasn’t as important that Kevon get it, and when he didn’t—his tight curls were a lot more like Clinton’s—Jada had accepted that. That made her a racist and a sexist, she figured. She’d decided she’d let God worry about Sherrilee’s hair.

Jada reached for her Blistex stick. In the Caribbean, her full lips never cracked and chapped. She stuck her hand into the pocket of her parka, pulled out a tube of Vaseline and smeared it on her face and hands before putting her gloves on. It was the only way to keep her face from peeling off in little dry flakes all winter. She’d look shiny, but what the hell, nobody saw her but Michelle and Pookie, and the one or two nutjobs who ran past them in shorts, tearing their middle-aged tendons and ruining their knees.

She was exhausted and probably looked it. She glanced at Michelle, who was approaching; she seemed wide awake, her face already glowing in the cold. Her long but perfect nose was merely a little pink at the tip. Otherwise, she looked gorgeous.

Jada liked to walk with Michelle because, among other things, Michelle had legs even longer than hers. They paced each other well. But that little dog slowed her down and Jada hated standing still in the cold. There, in the early morning darkness, Jada couldn’t help but get agitated at waiting for the dog. Start and stop, start and stop. Michelle needed that dog about as much as Jada needed more stretch marks.

“Make that dog move or I’ll have to strangle him and use him as a muff,” Jada threatened. Sometimes, though she felt very close to Michelle, in a lot of ways Jada believed there was an unbridgeable distance between them. Maybe it was because of the black/white thing, maybe because of Mich’s marriage, which was so happy. Jada knew how Michelle loved Frank, and Jada believed he loved Michelle in return. Most important, he loved his kids and brought home money each and every week.

So Jada kept her mouth shut and hoped that Michelle and Frank Russo would be the only damn couple in Westchester County to manage to stay together happily in this decade or the next. Jada loved Michelle and she wanted her happy. After all, if they both bitched all the time, what would happen to their friendship? Not only that, but she needed Michelle as a walking partner. Let’s face it, she thought. A black woman walking alone in the dark mornings in this light neighborhood would be a daily invitation for the cruiser to stop by.

“Come on, Pookie, honey,” Michelle said.

Jada just didn’t get the way white people treated their pets, as if they were children. And, in Jada’s opinion, Michelle certainly treated her kids as if they were pets. She let her kids get away with murder—they didn’t tidy up after themselves or remember to say “please” or “thank you.” Then there was that physical, personal boundary issue. In Michelle’s house, Jada would never even think to take down a glass from the cabinet or open the refrigerator. But Michelle would do it in her house without permission. Jada had never criticized Michelle for any of it. It was small stuff compared to the warmth of their friendship. And maybe there were just as many things that Michelle held back from Jada.

Now, though, Jada allowed herself to eye the undisciplined dog. Then she looked at Mich’s face. “Here,” she said, holding out her Blistex. “I swear you are the only white girl with lips fuller than mine. Sure we aren’t distantly related? Because I’d hate to kill my own cousin’s dog.”

Michelle laughed, took the Blistex and the hint, and called out to the dog. “Don’t be so down on him,” Michelle said, for what had to be the thousandth time.

“Well, he does have two advantages over men,” Jada sniffed. “He doesn’t brag about who he slept with and he never calls her ‘bitch.’”

Michelle laughed. Pookie stopped sniffing and started walking. Jada set a fast pace. Michelle smeared Blistex all over her wide mouth and handed it back to Jada. “Between the two of us this stick won’t last out the winter,” Michelle said.

“Hell, it won’t last out the walk if you use that much,” Jada retorted.

They walked for a moment in silence. “Do you think I’m getting fat?” Michelle asked, as she did almost every morning.

“Yeah. And I’m getting white,” Jada retorted. Michelle giggled. Then her face took on her serious look, the look that meant that soon the quiz would start, and Jada just wanted to put it off as long as possible.

It was early enough that the streetlights were still on, but as the two women passed under one it blinked off. “So where do things stand, Jada?” Michelle asked, predictable as an actuarial table.

“I don’t know. We never had time to talk.” Nevertheless, Jada raged about the condition of her kids and home the previous night as she and Michelle speed-walked past the quiet houses.

“You have to draw a line in the sand,” Michelle said. “You have to …” But Michelle caught herself.

Sometimes Jada thought her friend was afraid to give advice. “I don’t think I can stand it. I’m going to have to take an ax to his head, even though he is the father of my children.”