house in Montgomery. I bet Scary Mary is tryin’ to recruit her old as she is. These wild kids runnin’ all over the place are her grandkids. Their mother, my cousin Donna, she ran off with some woman’s husband. Aunt Lola got out of the whorin’ business and settled down.”
To be in mourning, Rhoda was talking a lot. Talking was one thing most of the grieving people I’d been around didn’t want to do.
“Did she get religion like Uncle Johnny did a long time ago, too?” I asked.
“No. She robbed one of her tricks and he stuck a pair of red-hot marcel curlers up her coochie. She never sits down for too long. She can’t! She sleeps on her stomach like a seal. Scary Mary wouldn’t get much mileage out of her.”
“Ouch!” I felt a tingling in my crotch.
“Ouch is right.” Rhoda shuddered.
Like a lot of the people in the house, including me, Rhoda kept a plate of rich food in her hand and was eating like this was the Last Supper. This was out of character for her. In all the years we’d been friends, Rhoda had always been weight-conscious. I was convinced that Rhoda was behaving the way she was to avoid an issue deeper than her grandmother’s death, but I couldn’t imagine what. She was so frisky and animated I was convinced that she had been secretly sipping one of those mixed drinks. She was acting like it, and smelling like it.
I got up to go to the kitchen where all the food had been laid out to refill my plate and had to pass the parlor to get there. Mr. Nelson, Mr. Antonosanti, and Judge Lawson, each of them dressed in a dark suit and tie, were in the parlor, with Mr. Boatwright standing among them. He looked so out of place in his dingy dungarees, plaid suspenders, and house shoes with the backs removed. I stopped outside the door, curious to hear what an oaf like Mr. Boatwright would have to say to men like these particular three. They were discussing women and minorities in politics.
“I envision a woman in the White House before a Black man or an Oriental,” Mr. Antonosanti said.
“Oh I hope not!” Mr. Boatwright laughed. “A woman president would mean the end of the world, sure enough. She’ll get in one of them PMS moods and every month she’ll push a button and nuke a foreign country.”
I gasped and shook my head. I leaned over just enough to see the expressions on the men’s faces over Mr. Boatwright’s stupid ramblings. They looked at him like he was less than nothing. I truly felt sorry for him. He wanted to so badly, but he could never fit in with men like Rhoda’s daddy, Judge Lawson, and Mr. Antonosanti.
I got more food and returned to the living room, to discover more people had arrived. I was kind of glad when Mr. Boatwright, still babbling nonsense, returned to the living room a few moments later, tagging behind Mr. Antonosanti.
Rhoda’s father’s older sister Moline was a washed-out, sixty-something white woman with blond hair and the same green eyes as Rhoda. She looked a lot like Lola but was heavier by at least fifty pounds.
Moline cornered me and started talking in a low nasal voice. The alcohol on her breath was so strong, I had to cough. “I’m just so impressed with the way my little colored brother turned out. This fine home, this fine family, all these fine friends and neighbors, the world sure enough has changed. Laurette wouldn’t come. She’s my oldest girl. My old shoe wouldn’t come neither. I been tryin’ to divorce him for twenty-five years, but he keeps hidin’ the divorce papers. Him and Laurette ain’t as modern as the rest of us. You’ll never catch them two in no Black household. They’re superstitious. They look down on y’all, Jews, Spanish-speakin’ peoples, Asians, and,” she paused, then whispered, “fags and bull dykes.” She paused again to suck in her breath, then she looked me up and down and shook her head. “Johnny tells me you and Rhoda is best friends. Is that a fact?”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Rhoda’s such a smart girl, she could do anything she want. Thing is, she ain’t interested in college or climbin’ no corporate ladder. She just wants to be a happy married woman, like me. What about you?”
“I’d like to have a secretarial career,” I said proudly, but in a low voice. I noticed Mr. Boatwright tilt his