Mama Day Read online

  George, I was frightened. Can you understand that? Things were going so well between us that I dreaded the day when it would be over. Grown women aren’t supposed to believe in Prince Charmings and happily-ever-afters. Real life isn’t about that—so bring on the clouds. And each day that it was exhilarating and wonderful; each time you’d call unexpectedly just to say, I was thinking about you; each little funny card in the mail or moment in a restaurant when you’d reach over for no reason and squeeze my hand—each of those times, George, I’d feel this underlying panic: when will it end? And it was worse when we were in bed. You’d take me in your arms with such a hunger and tenderness, demanding only that I be pleased, that I’d feel a melting away of places in my body I hadn’t realized were frozen voids. Your touch was slowly making new and alive openings within me and I would lie there warm and weak, listening to you sleep, thinking, What will I do when he’s not here? How will I handle all this space he’s creating without him to fill it?

  And you—you would be so cheerful the mornings after you slept over. Running down to the deli to get us fresh rolls and orange juice. Circling some announcement in the paper for a show we could catch that weekend. Never understanding that it was three whole days until the weekend and my seeing you again. Three days was time enough to settle into what my girlfriends were saying: “He sounds too good to be true.” I’d look around that empty apartment and yes, it had to be that—untrue. You were only part of some vision, or at best a temporary visitor in my life. Too good to be true. Too good to last. I found enough courage to ask you that one night, do you remember? No, men don’t remember those things. You thought I was teasing you to prolong the moment when I brought your head up from between my thighs and stroked your lips with my fingers. What will I do when you’re not here? I said. It stung me that you took it so lightly: I’m not going anywhere for the next fifteen minutes, I plan to be coming.

  The more you began to mean to me, the more I was losing control—and I hated it. I wasn’t angry at you for phoning later than you said you would, for ending an evening early because you were genuinely tired—I was angry at myself for allowing it to matter that much. And when I was brooding or sarcastic after you finally called, it never seemed to bother you. You’d laugh it off, and that would make me angrier. It was horrible feeling that I needed you more than I was needed. And so I would push you, making petty demands. If you cared, you’d do X. If you cared, you’d do Y. I was tearing my hair out, and all you had to say was, I’ll call you when you’re in a better mood. Giving in to me so effortlessly made you all the more unreal. He just wants to glide on through this, he doesn’t care. If he cared, he’d … What? Fear is unreasonable, and that’s what I was being. And it seemed as if I couldn’t stop myself from picking up the phone and instead of telling you how I really felt—

  “So you’re not coming over Monday night again?”

  “I don’t come over any Monday night. You know that’s for football.”

  “And I’m supposed to believe that?”

  “I don’t see why you shouldn’t, I’ve never lied to you.”

  “Or I’ve never caught you.”

  “Ophelia, if you want to take the train down to South Ferry, get on the boat, and come over to Staten Island tomorrow, you’re welcome. But on Monday, I watch the games.”

  “And you watch them for six hours on Sundays, too.”

  “That’s right. And I even have my satellite dish so I can follow the Pats when they’re not on network.”

  “So where is that supposed to leave me? If I want us to go somewhere Sunday afternoons or Monday nights, it’s tough shit, right? I take second place to some overgrown clowns running around in—”

  “Is there something you wanted to do Monday?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Then I don’t know what the point is.”

  “Well, then clearly there’s no point in my trying to explain it to you. When someone doesn’t care, they just don’t care. Obviously, there are things in your life that matter more than me.”

  “Of course there are. My health, my work—to start off the list—and the New England Patriots. It’s a short season, you’ll just have to live with it.”

  “And if I don’t want to?”

  “Then you don’t.”

  “You know, George, if you really cared …”

  “I don’t care that much, damn it!”

  After making you hang up on me, for a brief moment I’d be satisfied. Just imagine if I’d been a fool enough to tell this man how I really felt about him—see the way he treats me. He’s insensitive and selfish. No doubt about it, he’d walk right over me if I ever opened up. Yes, for a brief moment I was comfortable feeling that I was insulating myself from all the damage you were capable of. And then it didn’t seem so awful that one day it would be over. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I could handle that version of you. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Here was a relationship I needed to turn into a catastrophe, out of fear of losing a perfect one. And when I was in that state of mind, I found plenty of support:

  What are you so upset about? The truth had to come to light.

  A leopard can’t hide his spots but for so long.

  It’s easier to get run over by a flying saucer than to find a decent man in New York.

  If he’s not married by now, you shoulda figured something was wrong.

  I couldn’t sleep well those nights. Why should I call you when you had hung up on me? Slammed down the phone, as a matter of fact. Maybe I had gone a little too far, but there was no reason for you to act like that.

  “But I do care.”

  “Huh?”

  You had the most disconcerting habit of calling me back and picking up a conversation where we may have left off two hours or even two days before.

  “I said, I do care.”

  “You should tell me that more often.”

  “Maybe you aren’t listening.”

  I don’t think I was. Because I kept picking fights about your football games. It was the only thing that seemed to tick you off—that and being called a son-of-a-bitch. I had a pretty dirty mouth and it often amused you. Southerners can’t swear, you’d say with a laugh, you make bastard sound like it should be a woodwind instrument. November and December gave me plenty of opportunities to complain; important games were played during the holidays. And it’s not as if I cared about Thanksgiving or Christmas, I hadn’t grown up celebrating either of those. I was eighteen years old and going to school in Atlanta before I even saw a live Christmas tree. And all of the forced gaiety and noise about the holiday I found unsettling. But Selma was having a huge Thanksgiving dinner party and I wanted to show you off, but you were going out of town for a game. And no, I didn’t want to come along. Outside Detroit—where it was probably a million degrees below zero? Besides, I was determined that you were going with me to that dinner.

  “I am serious about this, George. Dead serious.”

  “I’m going to the game.”

  “Then don’t call me when you get back.”

  “I’ve heard that one before.”

  “No, I really mean it—don’t call me.”

  “You mean that—over a stupid party?”

  “Yes, I really mean it.”

  “Okay, Ophelia. I won’t call you.”

  “You mean that?”

  “Yes, I really mean it. You mean it, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  So why didn’t he call? This was the end, the absolute end. That dinner party was a total disaster. Selma had gotten drunk and put too much wine in the stuffing, so it looked like her turkey was having diarrhea. And after another half bottle of Johnny Walker, she got onto one of her favorite subjects—black men dating white women. Later that night I caught a twenty-second news clip about the game, saw a red-headed blur in the crowd, and swore it was Shawn. The bitch. Some women have no pride—they’ll go to any lengths to run after a man who doesn’t want them. Not me. What did Grandma used to
say? She was short on money but long on pride.

  My pride had to stretch a long way. November left, December came—no call. I was utterly depressed when I wrote home, and even more depressed when I got my Candle Walk package the next week. What in the hell was I doing in this city? It was cold and unfriendly. I took out the sweet orange rock Grandma had sent me and Mama Day’s eternal lavender water. Seven years away from that place and December twenty-second still didn’t feel right without my seeing a lighted candle. The same old news from home, but if those letters had ever stopped coming, I don’t know what I’d do. I got to the line “The last thing you need is a no-good man,” and started to cry. They were so right. Your phone rang twelve times—twelve.

  “You know I didn’t mean it.”

  “I didn’t know, Ophelia. But I was hoping.”

  I woke up one morning, sometime in early November, and realized I wanted to be with you for the rest of my life. Whether I could or not was seriously open to question, but the desire was certainly there. From a child I had to accept that some things you may want aren’t meant for you—or worse, not even good for you. I had wanted to know my parents, I had wanted to be able to take part in sports. But none of that was to happen because of reasons beyond my control, and being carefully trained not to let that upset me, I made the best of it. The life I had, I had, and what I could do, that was that. So the revelation about you that day wasn’t earth shattering—I had my usual shave and shower, fixed a bowl of oatmeal, and went on to work—it was simply another item in a long list of things I had wanted. But was it possible, could we live around each other? The rest of your life seems like a long time when you’re only thirty-one. We had to look at each other and see if we could accept what was there—because that’s exactly what we were getting.

  That was when I decided not to go out and buy the video cassette recorder. I had been toying with the idea because the relationship was fairly new and most women are so insecure in the beginning. They think it proves something if they call on the spur of the moment—Could you come over?—and you do. It only means that you came over, and if the weather’s bad, you’re wet. But I enjoyed pampering them—a little time and silly little attentions, and they would purr. Add some sort of personal gift to that now and then, and they’d walk on water for you. They were happy, and I was happy because I couldn’t tolerate pouting. When a woman was screaming about the big things, I found out she just wanted something small. That “you don’t care” crap could be nipped in the bud by randomly checking off days in your appointment calendar to have your secretary mail out a Hallmark card. That way you’re “thinking” about her—whether you are or not.

  Unfortunately, you and I were in the middle of the football season. A VCR could have solved that. But if it was going to be possible to spend the rest of my life with you, I might as well find out if you could accept me totally—and that meant football. It wasn’t a pastime, it was a passion. I didn’t talk, I didn’t cuddle, I didn’t want your hand on my crotch when the games were on—and television was a poor second best to a live stadium. I was always fascinated with the mechanics of the game, the mixture of science, raw strength, and a touch of human unpredictability. It challenged me more than other sports, with its infinite possibility of moves. Baseball and basketball were a linear display of skill and strength: if you thought fast and were strong and flexible, you could endure. But football took that extra ounce from a man: when your physical frame is being beaten and slammed, you can simply become too tired to think, to move. And sometimes your guts can even give out. So you keep going because you keep going. It produces a high that’s possible only when a man has glimpsed the substance of immortality.

  Since I couldn’t be out on the fields in high school, I would help the coach design plays, and he often listened to my suggestions because he said I had a very rational mind. But there was nothing rational about what happened when I became part of the crowd—and the bigger, the better. Unless you’ve been there, you can’t understand what it’s like. Yet, even being there for someone like you wasn’t enough—you’d only see twenty-two men on a field and seventy-odd thousand screaming people. So why tell you what you couldn’t believe? The crowd became a single living organism—one pulse, one heartbeat, one throat. I’ve seen it bend down and breathe life into disheartened players. I’ve seen it crush men with its hate. And I’m not talking in metaphors—it could create miracles. It did at the Super Bowl in 1976. First quarter and the Steelers were down seven-nothing to the Cowboys after only five minutes of play. That can wreak havoc on a team’s morale and throw a whole game off. But my half of the crowd’s body leaned forward as Terry Bradshaw dropped back at the Cowboys’ forty-eight and missiled the ball, too high and heading out of bounds, on the right side. But there was the wide receiver, Lynn Swann, his dark, lean body defying gravity as he leaped up—caught it—and twisted midair to ram it down in bounds. A thirty-two-yard gain. No, being there wasn’t enough. You’d have to feel the force that suspended almost two hundred pounds of flesh above the ground to believe that we had willed him those wings.

  I had gone to my first big game in 1968, the Jets against the Raiders in the AFC championship, and I had been hooked on live games ever since. I had made every AFC playoff and most of the NFCs even if they were on different coasts. But if there was a conflict, or I couldn’t get a flight to make both, the AFC was my league, just like the Pats were my team—I guess I had a special affinity for underdogs. I took a lot of kidding from Bruce about them. What do you know about football? I’d say. I know a lot about losers, he’d answer, and the New England Patriots are definitely that. But he shut up in ’78 when they took the Eastern division championship on a tie breaker over Miami. He had no choice—I wouldn’t let him get a word in edgewise for weeks. Of course, they didn’t make the final round of playoffs. But I still believed that I would live to see them get to the Super Bowl. Maybe, as Bruce said, that was a bit too much to ask. He and I had a good working relationship: we broke our butts together and knew when it was time to go our separate ways—he in April for the start of the trout season, and me in January for the end of the games.

  That was the way it was, but more important, the way it was going to be. And sure, I could give in to you that first year, get a VCR and maybe only do the Super Bowl on my vacation. But what about the next year and the next? You were obsessed with the idea of my behavior spelling the ending of us, and I was laying the groundwork for the beginning. So why didn’t I just come right out and tell you? Because I had my own insecurities as well. It was frightening, wanting you as much as I did. I couldn’t imagine your being able to equal that intensity, and I didn’t even hope for that. Just some sign that I was beginning to matter, that I was special from the other men you’d known. And if there were no signs of that, why give you carte blanche to hurt me—or worse, despise me for my vulnerability? The more you were beginning to mean to me, the more close-mouthed I became, waiting. And waiting for what? Something more than temper tantrums about whether it was a Monday or Tuesday night I was free to see you—those weren’t about me, they were about you. Even something more than the conditioned responses I knew I would receive by being thoughtful—that was about human nature. I guess I was waiting for some action—words would not suffice—that said, Yes, I’m doing this because he makes the difference.

  You wouldn’t talk to me. I don’t mean when I was being irrational and demanding—I deserved having the phone hung up on me then. But by the time the new year came, it was more than apparent that you were football. And I started trying to read the sports section although it confused the hell out of me. I even tried watching a game one night, but where’s the fun in all of it when you can’t see the ball? They line up, bend down, and all of a sudden they’re in a pile, smelling each other’s behinds. Okay, this was a part of your life I couldn’t share and you seemed to prefer not talking about it. I could handle that, since I was bored by the whole subject anyway. But, George, there were too many other th
ings we didn’t talk about.

  I had told you about where I grew up. I painted the picture of a small rural community and my life with Grandma and Mama Day, so it seemed like any other small southern town and they two old ladies doting over the last grandchild. Of course, some things about Willow Springs you could never believe, but I showed you Candle Walk, we exchanged gifts that night instead of Christmas Eve. You thought it quaint and charming, and it was fun, undressing each other on the floor with all that soft light around us. But I did open up fully to share my feelings about my father running off and my mother dying so young. I talked to you about loneliness—all kinds. About my day-to-day frustrations with the job, the plans I had for my future—going back to college and getting a history degree. Not a marketable skill, but something I’d wanted to do. Coming from a place as rich in legend and history as the South, I’d always been intrigued by the subject. I talked and talked, but getting you to say anything about yourself was like pulling teeth. Oh, you’d hold a conversation—and you could make me laugh with the stories about some of your clients, about your partner’s offbeat relatives and the niece who put chewing gum in the filing cabinet.