Marsha Hunt - Joy

Tammy’s husband or not, I hadn’t never set eyes on Jesse and though I didn’t want to be mean and think on him as no stranger since him and Tammy’d been married over two years, I wasn’t ready to think on him as family neither, and definitely didn’t want him telling me the details about Joy.

So when he said, ‘I can only tell you what I know myself which is not a hell of a lot,’ I wanted to stop him, ’cause he didn’t know Joy good enough to have real feeling for her. Though Richmond ain’t far from New York City, she didn’t bother to visit him and her mama but three times in as many years. What I was wanting to say didn’t come out though, ’cause another lump was welling up in my throat so I couldn’t speak, and while I pretended to listen to Jesse mouth on, what I was actually thinking about was that he was the only man I knew of that Tammy let into her life or her bed after John Dagwood up and left her in the middle of the first year when her and the kids lived opposite me and Freddie B in Oakland. She never said as much, but a blind man could of seen that she pined and nursed her broken heart like somebody normal would nurse a coronary thrombosis. I thought it was selfish and a waste with them children needing them a nice stepdaddy … somebody decent to help her give them the extras that they had to do without unless they got ’em off me and Freddie.

All these thirty years, I haven’t breathed a word to nobody about the reason Dagwood disappeared or what I’d said to him to make him leave. As it was me, who didn’t have no choice but to send him packing, I felt positive all along that he wasn’t never coming back. But had I told Tammy as much she would of known that I had something to do with him leaving, and much as she was wishing him back, I was praying for him to stay away. And praying is stronger than wishing.

Like my mama warned me and Helen, ‘A pretty nigger will run you into the ground and you won’t never know what he’s up to nor who he’s up to it with.’ That was John Dagwood. Wasn’t no question that he was a real looker and wasn’t only me and Tammy that had thought it neither. Even Freddie B had to own up that he was nice looking after Freddie’d seen John Dagwood in that emergency ward the time Anndora’d cut her hand. And I had me a girlfriend back then, Tondalayah Hayes her name was, who acted like she couldn’t believe what a heavenly vision loomed before her eyes the first time she spotted Dagwood. And considering her line of work, Toni, as I nicknamed her for short, wasn’t one for falling over backwards over no man. But I recall that’s exactly what she almost did trying to sneak a peek at him from my bathroom window in Oakland after I’d told her that Tammy had taken up with somebody that even Freddie B, not one for noticing things, had said was nice looking.

While Jesse’s voice was still chatting in my ear, I was remembering that conversation I’d had with Toni that took place two weeks after Anndora’s Sunday visit to the emergency ward. Tondalayah had come for a Friday afternoon visit and I told her if she stood in my bathtub she could just about see Dagwood. So Tondalayah was bent over, peering out of the two inches I had opened for her to be able to see him out my bathroom window while he was shirtless down in the parking lot, busy scrubbing down the white walls of his tyres of that little two seater convertible he had that I hadn’t never heard of. She said ‘Nice looking, shit! That’s the understatement of the year! That nigger’s a black prince.’

‘Doggone it, Toni,’ I whispered standing behind her. ‘Keep your voice down, girl.’

‘Oh, you’re so nervous about everything, Palatine. You give yourself the jim-jam-jimmies. The man can’t hear me, and so what if he can? I haven’t said anything bad.’ As Tondalayah stepped out of the bathtub, I could see that she’d left black scuff marks from the rubber soles of her ankle boots, so I reached behind the tub to get a rag and the Dutch cleanser. It wasn’t likely that she’d think to do it herself, ’cause she claimed she had better things on her mind, miles away from housework. What with her being a stripper, I could excuse her for it.

‘He’s got black pearls for eyes and white pearls for teeth.’ She laughed high notes and threw her head back like she was about to go into one of them belly dances I used to see her do when we first met while I was cleaning a strip joint where she worked for a spell down Bakersfield way. Though some of them Sisters at my church used to turn their nose up at her when I’d drag her to First Tabernacle from time to time, me and Toni was real good friends.

‘And who said he was dark?’ She was still rampaging on about John Dagwood. ‘Black as that Turkish coffee they serve me down at the Souk’s Cafe,’ she said and sipped at her beer glass full of red wine. What I liked about her was she could hold her liquor and knew when to stop. Not like my baby sister.

‘He looks hard and supple in all the right places too,’ she said moving over to check her fake chignon bun in the mirror. ‘Body like a welterweight … Shit, Palatine, tell your husband when you see him that Miss Tondalayah Hayes said John Dagwood ain’t just nice looking. No-sirreee-Bob. That nigger is fine as a motherfucking Georgia pine, and I better not get a chance to run my fingers through that good hair, ’cause I could get dangerous.’

‘Aw shut up, Toni, he ain’t even got no hair to speak of.’ He kept it close cut so that you could practically see his scalp and it showed that his head had a perfect shape. ‘And long as them red fingernails of yours is, you’d probably draw blood if you run your fingers ’cross his head anyway.’

‘Dan-ang-ger-ooze,’ laughed Toni and popped her fingers with each syllable, before she let out a squeal and shook like somebody had walked over her grave, and got ready to stand in the bathtub again so she could take another look out the window.

‘You don’t know when to stop, do you?’ I said and closed it shut in case the sound of her voice carried and John Dagwood and everybody else in the neighborhood could hear her.

Tondalayah was so loud she reminded me of country folk which is one of the things I liked the most about her. Good looking as she was, she was down home. No airs. And the other thing I liked was that she was the most generous person I’d ever met in my life. Way more than Freddie B even, ’cause whereas he would give the shirt off his back to kin, Toni would give what she had to any ol’ body that needed it. And not just her money neither. Like the first time she come up from Bakersfield to spend the night in my apartment and my baby sister Helen was setting on the toilet so drunk that she thought she was setting on a chair. So when Toni went in there to have a pee and couldn’t get Helen to move, she run a lukewarm bath and took the trouble to get my baby sister in it. With my help, of course, but the idea was Toni’s and so was the underwear and navy blue pedal pushers that she loaned Helen to put on when we finally got her out the tub. Her and Helen was both five foot three inches and narrow hipped though Helen done put on a bunch of weight since then. Tondalayah had Helen looking like somebody else by the time she got the blue eye shadow and pale orange lipstick on her. And I couldn’t believe Helen was quiet as a lamb while it was going on till Toni went to put a comb through Helen’s hair.

‘I don’t want you combing on my hair,’ Helen told her, trying to pull away.

‘You better shut the hell up, before I beat you to death with this comb,’ said Toni which made me laugh, and made my baby sister take a swing at Toni who didn’t pay Helen no mind and kept combing ’cause no sooner Helen tried to take that swipe she passed out ’sleep.