Searching for Tina Turner - By Jacqueline E. Luckett Page 0,8
driveway and races up the stairs and into bed. The phone beside the bed calls out to her: pick me up, call Candace and offer an explanation, call Randall, beg for more time. Apologize? Instead, she reads. In the bed, across the bed, on the toilet, then back to bed, Lena reads about Tina’s ups and downs for the rest of the afternoon.
What comes through Tina’s autobiography is the realization that she already had everything she needed for success inside. Tina thought about leaving for years, but she also thought—or so Lena interprets—that when you love someone you stay with them. Through good times and bad. Lena blesses herself with a small sign of the cross for the differences in their circumstances and because Randall has never treated her that way—but the emotions, the doubt and fear of the future, are similar.
Maybe, she thinks, she should make a plan. Maybe she should get a yellow legal pad and a red pen and label two columns + / – like Randall does when he thinks through a decision. Like the night they decided, together, to buy this house. Like he did the night before his vote on the TIDA merger, Lena, his sounding board, next to him on the couch. What would she put in her columns? What does love have to do with anything? she reminds herself—he is far from perfect, but so is she. There is the mole on his left shoulder, his generosity, his love for Kendrick and Camille, how he doubles back to leave money by a sleeping homeless person’s side, the way he huffs when he exercises and talks nonsense in his sleep and used to reach for her and take her in his arms in the midst of a dream, how he cherishes Lulu as if she were his own mother. If these qualities all fall on the + side, why isn’t she happy? Or, was Candace right—are they the same?
Lena shakes away the thought of any resemblance to Candace and imagines what her +/– list would look like.
++Camille and Kendrick; – Camille and Kendrick’s attitudes
+ Tina left at forty-five; – she is fifty-four
+ Tina had marketable talent; – her photography is pretty good
+ Tina fell out of love with Ike
+/− She loves Randall
Chapter 3
The bedroom windows rattle lightly with the ba-boom, ba-boom of the surround-sound speakers. The system Randall had installed two floors beneath this one can be turned to a volume loud enough to make the walls of this fifty-year-old home shudder. She has no idea how long Kendrick has allowed the music to pound or why it needs to be so loud. On her left, the red planner beckons from the nightstand. The enrollment slip extends beyond its rounded edges. When she registered for the six o’clock class two months ago, she hoped that Randall’s attitude would mellow, and he would be happy that his wife wants to follow a dream that complements their life. Lena checks her watch: one hour to pull herself together and get to campus. A smile breaks across her face: one hour of lecture and two of lab. Oh!—the bitter smells of developer and fix.
Dressed in the same sweatshirt and cotton pants that Candace criticized her for earlier, Lena gets out of bed and strolls to an armoire in the corner of the bedroom. Inside there are freshly pressed linens, her boxed wedding dress and Randall’s old tuxedo, Camille’s cotillion gown, and Kendrick’s first communion suit. Her old Pentax 35mm with manual controls, not the palm-sized digital she has used over the last couple of years to capture her family’s history, sits at the back of the top shelf.
“Mother?” Camille pokes her head into the doorway. “What’s for dinner?”
Tonight Lena’s excuse is valid. “Call Hunan City, Camille, and have them deliver. My photography class starts tonight.”
“Starless, Mother.” Camille’s tone is matter of fact and insistent— use the name I’ve chosen, it says, not the one you gave me. No matter how hard Lena tries to accommodate Camille’s recent capriciousness, her younger child’s desire to change her given name is not easy to accept.
“Mom, Starless.”
Most days, Camille is cranky. Cranky and reclusive. How can she criticize her child for the very behavior she is guilty of? The discontent that started last fall continues. Lena longs for the two of them to be close again. Either way, come September, she’ll shed tears when she walks past the door of Camille’s disused room or when the clock’s hands sweep close