Searching for Tina Turner - By Jacqueline E. Luckett Page 0,61

and this is what I know: there’s a little Tina Turner in all of us. Call it pep, audacity, or a look that camouflages the pain. We do what we have to do—be on stage or be who everyone else wants us to be—and finally come to the conclusion that nothing will work, unless we’re true to self.” Lena stops, breathes in and out slowly. “I’m just searching for the Tina in me.”

“Well, don’t wear your hair like Tina’s.” Bobbie’s wit is sharp even at this hour. “I don’t think blond is your color.”

Chapter 20

The months since Lena walked out of that corporate apartment, the door refusing to close behind her, have flown much like summer does for a school-bound youngster—with speed and the inability to distinguish one day from the next. Mediation sessions. Body-numbing depression. Drizzling spring rain. Camille’s graduation celebration; Lena entering through the front door feeling like a stranger in the house she made a home; mother and children like strangers until she gathered them both in her arms. Juicy peaches have given way to bushels of tart green apples at the farmers’ market, where now she looks, but doesn’t buy. Foggy mornings, the threat of drought. September breezes blow warm across Oakland and the Bay Area even as New England leaves redden and the Midwest prepares for winter’s blanket of snow. Awake at six, Lena sports a light jacket this cool morning ready, like everyone else in the Bay Area, for Indian summer—another round of flip-flops, shorts, and weekends of sunshine.

This morning’s exercise around the 3.5-mile perimeter of Lake Merritt is her march of tears: because Kendrick is back in Chicago and rarely responds to her emails or phone calls, because Camille lives with Randall and chooses to have him drop her off at Columbia—a decision made a day after her eighteenth birthday one month ago. When Camille visited two days after graduation—and what turned out to be a civil and joyous celebration—she slumped onto the couch and absentmindedly jangled the extra set of keys Lena gave her. “All my stuff is at home.”

Lena sat, holding herself, and her tongue, in hopes that Camille would recognize her disappointment by her body language. Then Camille came up with what Lena supposed was a peace offering.

“Come to New York for Thanksgiving.”

“Well, Camille,” Lena said, not bothering to argue with her daughter’s decision or fight back the tears at her offhanded dismissal. “That’s not quite the holiday I envisioned, but Bobbie will be excited, and maybe I can get Lulu to come, too.” Only four at the dinner table for Thanksgiving, not the twenty or so—cousins, Lulu, Randall’s father, friends without local family—she always included. No days and days of planning, shopping, cooking. No thrill of turning disconnected items into mouthwatering dishes everyone stuffs themselves with. That thought hurt then. It hurts now past her heart, and if asked her, she could not describe the pain.

After today she will no longer cry.

f f f

Mr. Meyers prefaced each of their sessions with a rolling summary: credit card debt divided 70 percent him, 30 percent her; equal division of savings and stocks; Randall kept his beloved Raiders sky box; Lena the Berkeley Repertory Theater seats; fifty-fifty split of the SF Jazz season tickets.

At the end of the ninth, and final, session and with the help of their lawyers, they reached final agreement. Randall insisted—if Lena wanted Camille and Kendrick to stay with her—that she had to keep the house.

“Or else what?”

Elizabeth warned that Randall would more than likely use the house as a bargaining tool. Lena stopped his momentum with a deliberate bathroom break and collected herself in the cold lavatory. She stood in one of the three stalls and blew her nose, wiped her tears on the coarse toilet paper, then returned to the conference room twenty minutes later as if nothing more than her biological urge had been taken care of. Randall picked up the conversation as if she never left the room.

“I’ve worked hard for what I have,” he said.

“So now it’s all yours, huh?” Lena leaned against her leather-backed chair, looked straight into Randall’s tight, brown eyes, and reminded him: “I worked hard, too. For us. You. Keep. The house.” She gathered her papers and stuffed them into her portfolio. Her hands trembled. The papers shook, and she didn’t hide them. She slipped her purse onto her shoulder, left it to the lawyers to balance the house’s appreciation with Randall’s retirement fund, bonuses, the TIDA stock options,