Searching for Tina Turner - By Jacqueline E. Luckett Page 0,70
begun to do when she can’t think of anything to say. The word anomalous pops into her mind. Another Auntie Big Talker word; she’d used it last week when she called to wish Lena well on her trip. While Lena prides herself on her vocabulary skills, she is not sure if what she is feeling is anomalous or just plain normal. The south of France is beautiful, but traveling with anyone other than Randall is something she has never done.
Lena sniffs again. This trip is all about opening up, like a short story she once read where the main character avoided her unhappy present by imagining herself drinking coffee elsewhere. When the character finds a friend, she has a hard time opening up and doesn’t realize until the end that in fact she wants to do just that. Lena wishes to be drinking coffee elsewhere. Open up and let me in; not by the hair of my chinny, chin chin.
f f f
Adults, teenagers, and even a couple of preteens shout into cell phones. Lena checks her purse to make sure she has remembered to bring her own just as it rings. “Camille?”
“Hey, Mom. Just calling to wish you a good trip. You flying over New York?”
“I’m in Nice.” A mass forms quickly in her throat, and Lena speaks slowly to keep her emotions in check. “How’s the move going?”
“Dad’s pacing outside my door, and Auntie stopped by. She dropped off the stuff you sent… you knew just what I needed…”
In the months after graduation, Lena repeatedly explained how much she wanted to help Camille move into the dorm. It was a mother’s right to usher her child into a new life, just as she had ushered her into life at birth. Their discussions always ended the same way: both of them yelling—the anger of the pending divorce wearing thin on their nerves—leaving nothing resolved.
“Dad is a bit out of it, Mom. He’s not doing as well as you are. I don’t suppose you want to talk to him, do you?” Camille pauses, and Lena wonders what her daughter wants her to say, wonders if Camille needs to be reminded that her father is no longer her mother’s responsibility. “He doesn’t know all the little things to get. He even said that the move would be more… organized, if you… The bedspread you sent was cool… and the cookies were good. I… I… wish you were here. I’m sorry.”
“You and your dad will be fine. I love you, baby girl.” Because of their problems and Lena’s desire to forget, she deliberately chose the day Camille was to move into the dorm as the day of her departure. In the letter sent along with the down comforter, sachets for her drawers, razors, boxes of tampons, earplugs, flashlight, boxes of tissue, paper towels, homemade chocolate chip cookies, and a bone-china dipping pot, Lena wrote that she looked forward to the day they could talk freely again, when they could get past the anger that gnawed at both of them and let their openness lead to a new and better relationship. She wrote that as Camille and her father searched the aisles of the local bedding store, while they lugged and unloaded her belongings into the dorm room, she would be flying over New York, looking through the clouds for the rounded dome and tight square rectangles of Columbia’s campus.
Camille and Randall worked slower than she thought. “I’m with you, baby.” Lena mutes her sniffs with a tissue so that Camille cannot hear while she tells Lena about her dorm, her roommate, and her class schedule.
“You’ll come at Thanksgiving?”
She nods as though Camille can see her confirmation through the phone. “I might even let Bobbie cook.”
“Spare us,” Camille jokes. “Auntie is better at selling cookbooks than she is cooking. Have a safe trip, and bring me back something really French. I love you, Mommy.”
f f f
“See? Everything’s going to be okay.” Cheryl hands Lena another tissue while the man next to them pretends not to notice. “Be happy… we’re in France!”
The knot in Lena’s stomach loosens. Truthfully, Lena admits to herself, it unwinds a lot. “Now, if only I could get you to stop thinking about that damn almost was-band of yours.” Cheryl’s made-up word rhymes with husband.
Like Tina, Lena must learn not to dwell in the past.
The bay is lit by thousands of glimmering lights. There is movement everywhere. The ebb and flow of the Mediterranean slaps noisily against the gravelly shore. Nice