Читать книгу The Company We Keep - Mary Monroe - Страница 15

By herself? As manless as a nun? Teri was so sick and tired of everybody constantly reminding her that she was still by herself. What in the hell was wrong with a woman being by herself? What did she have to do to convince people that she was doing just fine by herself? The fact that she never complained about being alone should have told them something.

“Grandma, you don’t need to worry about me. I can take care of myself.” Teri occupied a seat next to her grandmother at the table in the TV/dining room. She recalled how she had badgered Nicole the night before and now she knew why Nicole had been so irritated. She felt the same way now.

“Your mama used to say the same thing and look what happened to her. I don’t want you to end up dead. I want you to settle down and get married so me and Grandpa Isaac won’t spend eternity worrying about you, too.”

“Getting married won’t save me. It didn’t save my mother,” Teri reminded. “Let’s change the subject.” Teri leaned to the side and kissed her grandmother’s puffy cheek.

A few minutes later, Grandpa Stewart left his seat in front of the television set. He shuffled over to the table where Teri had just finished eating her black-eyed peas.

“Girl, you need to eat like you got some sense,” he complained. “Let me dip you out some of these peas. Black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day mean money.”

Teri didn’t protest as her grandfather piled more peas onto her plate. “And don’t you worry none about gas. Sop up some turkey gravy with a piece of that corn bread before you go home. It works better than charcoal pills when it comes to dealing with gas,” he told her, burping like a baby, excusing himself between burps.

“Uh-uh. I take back what I just said about peas meaning money,” Grandpa Stewart said, shaking his head as he reached for his own plate, which he promptly filled with peas. “Corn means money. Peas mean good luck,” he said with a grin. “That and a little gas if you overdo it,” he added with a chuckle. He sniffed and dropped another spoonful of peas onto Teri’s plate. She thought she would scream if she heard another reference to gas.

“I’m not that hungry,” Teri said again, rolling her eyes at her grandfather.

“You always did eat like a little bird,” Grandma Stewart gently complained, then chewed on a deep-fried turkey leg.

“It’s her nerves if you ask me,” Grandpa Stewart suggested, both of his cheeks full. He was a good match for his wife. She looked like a chipmunk. He looked like he had the mumps. Juice from the peas glazed his bottom lip like lip gloss. He sat down hard in the chair on the other side of Teri, groaning like a man in pain.

Teri rolled her eyes up to heaven. A few minutes later she followed her grandmother into the living room with Grandpa Stewart close behind, holding onto his plate and grumbling all the way.

“Isaac, Teri’s just trying to hold on to her girlish figure like all the rest of these youngsters,” Grandma Stewart said, giving Teri an affectionate pat on the butt. “Baby, I need to show you something.” Teri gave her grandmother a puzzled look as she followed her out of the room.

“Trying to keep a girlish figure my foot. Her nerves are what keep her from eating right. And prayer is the only thing that can help that,” Grandpa Stewart said in a gentle voice. He had stopped in the middle of the living room floor. As soon as Teri and her grandmother disappeared, he plopped down into a chair and that was where he planned to stay until his bedtime.

“Amen to that,” said Old Man Carson, who occupied the seat directly across from Grandpa Stewart.

“Well, I’m praying that there’s some corn bread left.” Grandpa Stewart turned to see Teri’s young cousin Rudy running into the living room with an empty plate. Normally, eating in the living room was off limits. And that was a rule that Grandma Stewart enforced with vigor. But today was an exception. There were more than two dozen guests in the house and it was a holiday.

“Girl, did you find a job yet?” Grandpa Stewart asked Cynthia, Teri’s nineteen-year-old cousin, as she eased down onto a hassock near the doorway, crossing her long, freshly waxed legs. She was hoping that somebody would notice how good her legs looked and pay her a compliment. Nobody did.

“I’m still looking,” Cynthia said, rolling her heavily made-up eyes. A job was the furthest thing away from this girl’s mind. She wasn’t a man, and as far as she was concerned, work was for men. A woman’s “job” was to keep her man happy. She was one of the few relatives that Teri had little or no use for. Especially after Teri refused to hook her up with some of the musicians she worked with or to make arrangements for her to shake her shapely ass in somebody’s music video. Instead, Teri—with her jealous old-maid self—had offered her a receptionist position as a backup to Nicole. Cynthia had looked at Teri as if she were crazy.

“Well, you better look harder. Don’t you want to be like your cousin Teri?” Grandpa Stewart asked, frowning at the way his granddaughter displayed her naked legs. Had young people become so loose that they had no shame left whatsoever? That had to be the case.

“Not if I can help it,” Cynthia said with a snort, shaking her head.

“In the meantime, pull your skirt down and cover your shame, girl,” the old man ordered.

Teri and her grandmother talked about trivial things as Grandma Stewart searched for some documents in the dresser drawers in her bedroom, spilling contents to the floor like a burglar.

Every few minutes, Grandma Stewart brought up the fact that Teri was “still single” and that that wasn’t normal for a woman her age. But each time Teri’s marital status came up, she steered the conversation in another direction.

“Sister Hawthorne is looking mighty healthy these days,” Teri commented.

“Healthy? Baw! She’d better look healthy with her pig-ear-eating, three hundred pound self. Brother Hamilton asked her to marry him last month and she jumped at the chance. Can you imagine that? I don’t know what this world is coming to. But with her being a widow going on two years and him just losing his wife, and them living next door to each other, it was bound to happen sooner or later. Now if she can get a man, even one that looks like a baboon and smells like a nanny goat like Brother Hamilton, a girl like you ought to be able to get somebody like Obama or Denzel.”

Teri looked around the room and sighed. She wondered what her grandparents and Nicole were going to complain about once she did get a man.

“There’s a sale at Kelsye’s furniture store.” Teri pitched her words like a baseball.

“That reminds me. I saw the Kelsye’s older boy the other day. The one that spent twenty years in the military. He’s going to make somebody a good husband. You want his phone number? I’ll ring up his mama before you go home today.”

“Nanny, listen to me. I am happy being alone. How many times do I have to say it? What do I have to do or say to make you and Grandpa stop worrying about me being by myself?”

Grandma Stewart gave Teri a stern look and let out wind from both ends before she spoke, excusing herself first, though. “Get married, I guess,” she said, fanning the fumes she’d just released. The old woman gave Teri a hopeful nod. “Grab the Kelsye’s son before somebody else snatches him up.”

Teri was too exasperated for words, but she knew that if she didn’t continue to defend herself, her grandmother would wear her out.

“I don’t need you or anyone else to help me find a man. I can do that on my own,” she insisted.

“Then why don’t you?”

“Why don’t I what?”

“You work with men every day. What’s wrong with one of them?”

Teri gave her grandmother a thoughtful look. “There is nothing wrong with the men I work with. I used to date one of the guys in our personnel office,” Teri confessed. “But things didn’t work out.”

“And why didn’t things work out? It don’t take much to keep a man happy, if you know how. And I am not talking about all that bedroom foolishness. The first time I was with Isaac in the flesh, you would have thought he was tearing down a house the way he rode me. The whole time I was laying there under him, all I could think about was how I was going to wash all his sweat and jism off my sheets.”

Teri stared at her grandmother in slack-jawed agony. “Do I really need to hear this?” She had to look away to keep from laughing at the thought of her stuffy grandparents having sex.

“Once you put that physical part in the proper perspective, the rest is easy. You feed your man what he wants to eat, make him think he’s some kind of king—and all that means is telling his dumb ass a lot of barefaced lies, and keep his house and kids clean. That’s all it takes. That’s why divorce is a stranger to most of my generation.”

“The guy I dated from work wanted a mama…” Teri admitted with a pensive look on her face. She recalled how heartbroken she had been when Derrick Hardy told her that the only reason he’d asked her out was because she reminded him of his mother. That same day, she had stopped at the mall and purchased a more youthful wardrobe on her way home from work. Derrick no longer worked for Eclectic, and she made sure that every piece of clothing she purchased came from the most youth-oriented boutiques—for women in her age group, of course—that she could find.