Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing Part 9

When we were kids Tam would tease you until you almost wanted to hit her, except she'd hit you back. All this poor girl could do was look at me with those big eyes like: please don't let that five-foot-ten woman with the dreads get near me with no scissors.

I told her to put on a sweats.h.i.+rt and come trail around and give me a hand putting out the flowers.

The place looked gorgeous, if I do say so myself. It's an old farmhouse, built by a black caretaker on land given to him in the eighteen hundreds by the family he worked for. He built the front section, I understand, from local stone that he dug out of his own fields. In later years, his children and grandchildren added rooms, but then, I guess, the gene pool ran shallow, because they messed over the building and then messed up their finances so bad that we got the property for next to nothing. The one thing I'd expect that living out here would have taught them is the advantage of inheritance. White people out here hold on to their land, and they hold on to their money, which is why they have no debt and why everybody else in America is fighting over what's left.

I told her that this land has been under black owners.h.i.+p for more than a hundred and fifty years. And I explained to her about the original owner and showed her the gravestone that he carved every day for fifteen years before he died out of a piece of quartz shaped like a cross he found in the creek. Fifteen years, a little at a time. He finished the carving and died a month later. It's a wonderful story. If the family didn't have the sense to keep the place up, well, too bad. I have no qualms about making use of the history they threw away. Whether it made any effect on the bridesmaid, I couldn't say.

Since everybody knew the kids didn't have any money, and the bride's family didn't have a pot to p.i.s.s in, I tried to keep the presentation humble. Tamara hooked up this "whole village" theme. Tam being Tam, she did it tongue-in-cheek. But, ironic or not, Tamara understands the spirit of a thing like this, or what the spirit ought to be, and then she can translate that into something tangible. Tamara must have made fifty phone calls to get everybody in the bride's and groom's families to donate Bryant's and Crystal's favorite dishes. Then she made up cards with kinte cloth around the edges and that person's name, like Aunt Clara's Uncanny Corn Pudding or Uncle Sonny's Hot Sauce, with a big circle with a diagonal line through it like the NO SMOKING signs, except for where they put the picture of a cigarette were the words CANDY a.s.s, which is what Sonny always says: "If you're a candy a.s.s, don't eat this stuff."

Now, she did all of this, mind you, even though she personally thought that half the food was "uninspired" (her word) and that only two dishes were "truly extraordinary"-the yellow mustard hot sauce and the black-eyed peas and rice with smoked turkey b.u.t.ts. So she filled in with her own creations, which are fantastic. I tried to get her to make this thing I read about where you bake a ham on a bed of fresh-cut gra.s.s, but she launched into a diatribe against Martha Stewart and the taste police and Ralph Lauren ads, so I let well enough alone.

She baked a gorgeous wedding cake with lemon custard in the middle and b.u.t.ter-cream icing and tiny broomsticks and candied pansies and mint leaves cascading down one side, which was about as far into haute cuisine, she said, as she was willing to go. It was plenty. That thing was exquisite. Tamara brought it down from New York in three cardboard boxes in the back of her little red Karmann Ghia and a.s.sembled it at the house. I mean, she outdid herself for this wedding.

I ordered twenty flats of purple and yellow pansies for the inside and outside of the house and, because it was Valentine's Day, red and white roses for the formal arrangements. The house is mostly muted beige and cream and yellow, so the color just popped.

Then there was the wedding party. I wanted little Empire-waistline dresses in red velvet with puffy taffeta sleeves for the bridesmaids. A cla.s.sic look, young, but with style. But, no. Girlfriend had to have one of those black-and-white weddings. She thought it was da bomb, as the kids say. Well, you have to have a very good eye to pull those things off. And money.

And I'm sorry, but it was too late for white.

She wore it, though. Blue-white to hurt your eyes and s.h.i.+ny and tight. I always say: A place for everything and everything in its place-and that cheesy white satin dress was not the place for that big old pregnant belly and b.u.t.t. G.o.d knows baby got back and front to begin with, which is why Audrey started calling her T&A.

By the time the deal went down, her three attendants dropped to one. To make a long story short, they were trifling. There's no excuse. The one attendant left was the pitiful girl who had brought us the original bad hair day-although she looked fine once we finished with her, thank the Lord-in a black off-the-shoulder dress. Despite Nicki's work, the pointed tips of the bodice stuck off her chest like some kind of crazy plumes. The shoes were so big, she wobbled. Somebody gave her the idea to wear some off-white stockings that went way beyond bad to comical. Child was so busy trying to do sultry, she ended up making herself look like a crow.

I tried to tell them that an evening wedding is not the same thing as a nightclub act. But the bride was marrying the most promising young black man she'd ever met, so, hey, she knew everything there was to know about everything. Put the B in bad taste, but how could she tell? I gave them like a Currier and Ives backdrop and they come on stage doing Heckle and Jeckle. Hurt your feelings if you think about it like that for too long.

So I didn't. I just sat up in the front in a red peplum jacket and-just to go along with the program-a black full-length straight skirt with a side slash, not to mention a long-line bra for control under the jacket, a long-line girdle for the skirt, and control-top panty hose underneath everything to try to control whatever was left. Dear G.o.d. My midsection was so bound up I could feel the gas pockets forming down in my gut before the service even began.

But they were happy. And I refused to be anything but. Bride's gown too white and too tight? The maid's dress too black and too big? Music out of a boom box while the groom's own mother could play piano like an angel? Hey, no problem. Therapist used to say I didn't have any boundaries with my kids, so guess what? I let them plan this whole mess by themselves. Don't come back to me ten years from now saying I made them do this or that, and they got the wrong start in their married life, and it's all my fault. I let them tack it up-some of it-to their hearts' content.

And they loved it. Or, as we used to say, they loveded it. All the kids, mine, too-my son, Hiram Junior, standing next to Bryant as his best man, and my daughter and her boyfriend, the so-called Afrocentric intellectual-I swear they acted like we were at the Penn relays instead of a solemn event. They put their hands up in the air and did those doggie hoots like the audience on the old a.r.s.enio Hall show.

"They gonna make this thing into a f.u.c.kin' farce," Audrey said through her teeth. "It'th da bomb!"

I just put my head down and said a prayer.

When I looked up Arneatha was standing in front of the fireplace completely unperturbed. Arneatha can fall over her own shadow, she's so clumsy, but let her stand still somewhere and she exudes calm. I've seen her do it in a cla.s.sroom: The peacefulness spreads right through the children. Bryant and Junior were so handsome in the tuxes Hiram got them, and Bryant looked so much like Audrey's father, I couldn't help remarking on it.

"Don't even say it."

Arneatha indicated with a finger that the bridesmaid should step back and give the bride room to squeeze in next to Bryant. The ring bearer started to have a fit because he couldn't see, so Junior scooped him up and held him in one arm for the rest of the service. When the wedding party was still and the guests were finally silent, Arneatha let out that beautiful voice. It is a voice that is rich and smooth, not overpowering, but intense. It's a gift and, when she wants to, Arneatha knows how to use it.

"Dearly beloved," she began, "we are gathered together here in the sight of G.o.d and the ancestors and in the presence of these witnesses to join this man and this woman in holy matrimony."

At the point in the ceremony where you can read something, the bridesmaid and Junior stepped forward. The ring bearer, who was spoiled rotten, wouldn't get down, so Junior s.h.i.+fted him to his left arm and read holding his papers in the right: "'There is no sweeter name than that of my friend, my love, my soul's companion.'"

Then the girl read: "For the Bible says: 'Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard over the land.'"

Tamara leaned forward and whispered into my ear, "'The voice of the turtle?'"

"And the Bible also says," he continued, "'A faithful friend is the medicine of life.'"

Then the bridesmaid started to sing "You Are So Beautiful to Me." Her voice was husky and smallish, but right on pitch and from her throat, not all up in her nose like most of the children sing today. Audrey nodded her head. It was just right.

When she finished Arneatha went into her signature wedding prayer: "Father G.o.d, we ask your blessings on these two people. They are so very young. We ask that you teach them how to care for and care about each other, knowing that in a marriage n.o.body gets his or her way all the time, knowing that in many cases, Lord G.o.d, you will ask that they rise to the occasion when they swear they cannot, and share when they feel they do not have enough, and give what they never got themselves."

I commenced to crying right on cue. Like a big baby. I'd been keeping up a good front, but I was exhausted, and Lord knows that like Audrey, I wished he'd held off a few years. And sitting there I had another thought: That of all the people in the room, Arneatha herself was the one who should've had the babies. It wasn't too late yet, but it almost was. We were becoming grandmas already.

Why else was I crying? I don't know.

"Dear G.o.d, help them build a life for themselves and their children. We don't fall in love, we receive love from G.o.d and we use it in our lives. We know what's in everyone's mind at this wedding, Lord. You've already blessed them with fertility. Teach them how to make love work in the home they will now build together."

I probably wouldn't have boo-hooed like that had it not been for the cancer. And, as these things go, I had it easy-I contracted one of the good cancers. The girls teased me that I had the rich white women's cancer with the 96 percent cure rate. But something like that rocks your world. It just does. And then there's the other 4 percent.

What I did, the minute I was diagnosed, was I decided to fight this monkey. To my mind, that means not giving in. I like life rich. Like the kids say: phat, large. I made up my mind to that a long time ago. I am going to eat my beef and my pork. Sorry. Pigs' feet is what kept our people alive. I mean it. That's why G.o.d gave Adam dominion over the animals. And I am going to put cream in my coffee. I will not let this cancer dictate my every move. I will not live in constant fear. I swear, I think that makes it grow more.

I didn't go to the cancer support groups the hospital sponsored because of the same reasons. I do not want to sit up in a room with a bunch of baldheaded white women talking about how scared we are that the cancer's going to come back. Arneatha told me I was missing an opportunity for spiritual growth, and I told her that I loved her dearly, but that I was growing just about as fast as I could take. I told her, I said: "I got you; what I need the group for?"

So, as Arneatha was saying that marriage is an honorable estate, she looked at me and it felt like the look she gave me in the hospital when I asked if she believed in heaven. "All I know," she said, "is that life is short, and that this is no dress rehearsal."

Jesus have mercy.

This is the real thing, I kept thinking, and it's already half over. Half a lifetime ago, I was standing up there myself. I wasn't but nineteen when I got married to a grown man-Hiram was thirty-one-and I knew precisely what I was doing. I'd worked at his bar for eight months. He'd been watching me, but kept his distance. So one day I pulled him aside and told him that I knew his political ambitions. I told him that I knew exactly the kind of wife he needed, and that I could be that wife. I told him that not many women could think as big as I knew he was thinking, and very few could live up to the vision. But I had imagination-and I knew how to stick. Then I stood there waiting for an answer. Thinking that I couldn't possibly be serious, I guess, he told me that he had a thing for blondes. What about that? Could I be a blonde for him? He said it kind of offhand. I was awfully young.

Now, I was not some poor, pathetic child slinking around the world dying to be a wife. I was on a mission-we all were, our set, our little pride, as one of our teachers at Girls' High called us, us four lionesses lying out on our rock in the sun, watching the water hole, just seeing what was going to turn up for us. That makes it sound like we were going to gobble up whoever came along, but too bad how it sounds. If you're a black woman with ambition-or man, for that matter-you better be aggressive and expect that somebody's not going to like you. Because we are supposed to be sub. Subservient. Subsistent. Substandard. Subliterate. Subordinate. Subdued. America doesn't want us off welfare. They want us on welfare, right where they can keep an eye on us.

Far as women are concerned, a lotta men want you to be sub, too. Not Hiram. Hiram expects you to be on equal footing, which is hard sometimes because he is larger than life. It's why people vote for him. Hiram walks into the room and people turn to see who it is. He disturbs the air.

So, there are women, inevitably. I didn't quite figure that in at nineteen, but then, you don't at that age. It hasn't been so bad, really. Nothing I could ever really point to specifically. No disrespect.

He has very strong principles across the board, and where it counts. It wasn't enough for him to own a bar; he wanted to move the drug dealers off his corner so neighborhood people could come in for a beer without being afraid. We had a couple of little light-bright old schoolteachers on the block, lived together in a perfect little house with green shutters-I swear they were lesbians-and he made us make a pitcher of iced tea for them so they could stop in after school on Fridays and have a gla.s.s with us. That sort of thing. He brought in a local DJ so people could dance outside the bar on Sat.u.r.day nights and sold soda and water ice and roast beef sandwiches from a sidewalk table. You have never seen a bar like Hiram created. It was like the family barbecue that most of us wished we had.

So when he said the blonde thing, I decided not to take offense. I didn't go off about how here's another brother wants white women and all that. What I did, I took it as a challenge. Everything with him is a challenge, a compet.i.tion. I said-to myself, that is-OK, Negro, you want blond? I'll see you your blond, and I'll raise you.

I went home and bought some Dusky Sahara-something-or-other and dyed my hair. Then I had my girlfriend, Audrey's cousin, give me a new cut and curl. I told her I wanted it bone straight, with just a bang at the bottom for movement so the highlights could catch the light, but short, sophisticated. And I'll tell you a funny thing-see, people think fas.h.i.+on and hair and all is frivolous, but how are we introduced to one another if not through our eyes?-when I picked up the mirror that night, it was as if the woman looking back was exactly who I was meant to be all along, as if that little girl with that rhiney red hair and freckles was the ugly duckling, and, now, I had become the swan. Blond swan. I swear. I decided who I was going to be for Hiram Prettyman, and I can look anybody in the face and tell them: I have lived up to it, too.

When Arneatha got to the part in the service about married people present renewing their commitment, I reached over and squeezed Hiram's hand. Twenty-one years. I remember thinking at that moment maybe that's when marriages, like people, came of age.

Arneatha told Bryant to kiss his bride, and, honest to G.o.d, he just went for it. Tamara leaned forward over my shoulder and said to me, "Remember you asked what he saw in her?"

And I have to say, until that moment I never could picture it. You don't, with your own children. Or at least I don't see them as, you know, s.e.xual persons. Tam would. But then, she's the one went down on some little Negro at a house party-and we were only sixteen-so I figured, consider the source.

Audrey saw it, too, which is why she always called the child T&A. Audrey does have a nasty mouth on her sometimes, and that's no more than the truth. In fact, when we had our big falling out fifteen years ago over Bryant-that time she said she was coming to get him to take him to the zoo, but she didn't, and he fell asleep right there by the front door, in his own chair, dressed up in the little blue blazer Hiram bought him-we got into the fight of our lives, and Audrey said some things to me that to this day I will not repeat. But G.o.d knows she has paid for it. For every drink she poured down her throat, she has paid a terrible price.

I can't forget, but I surely can forgive, and it's as if I had saved a place for her in my heart all along. Bryant will take longer, though. He gives her her due respect, but he is very, very cool. I can understand that.

Tamara slipped out to get the food and the toast going. I swear, she should've been a caterer. Caterers make good money. College professors do, too, but I have always thought that she was trying to prove something. She said as much herself-that the only thing her Jamaican parents wanted was money and middle-cla.s.s respectability, even though they couldn't stand respectable, middle-cla.s.s Americans. So, her compromise was to teach college, drive a thirty-year-old sports car, and stay single.

But if you watched her constructing that wedding cake, putting in straws between the layers to hold the thing together, and then piping the b.u.t.ter cream like they blow insulation into a crawl s.p.a.ce under the shed kitchen, you would have seen her whole body come alive. I mean, she twisted and turned and maneuvered. Then she'd put a dab on her finger and come over to me and put her finger to my mouth. The b.u.t.ter and lemon and some drops of raspberry liqueur blended on my tongue like I never could have imagined.

"Tastes like spring, doesn't it?" she asked. "You said you wished we could've had a spring wedding. So, here's the taste of May. And look-"

She opened a mail-order box from out of the fridge and showed me purple and yellow pansies crusted all over with sugar.

"They're crystallized," she said. "They'll match the ones you put out front."

They were so beautiful I didn't know what to say. So she tore one, popped half in her mouth, half in mine, and then went back to cementing the top tier of the cake with b.u.t.ter cream.

Tamara may dog Martha Stewart, but I say, if you don't like what she's doing, go out and do it better. I told Tamara that I think, in the nineties, America's ready for a tall, gorgeous, dark-skinned woman with her own TV show on cooking. Oprah has prepared them. Audrey went for the idea so much that she called cable companies and got information about every public access channel in the Delaware Valley.

Tamara wouldn't take us seriously.

"Oh, I get it," she said. "I'd be like a cross between Martha Stewart and Grace Jones. That'll make 'em take notice."

OK, I told her. We only have but so many schemes to make one another rich and famous, and she already threw away Audrey's idea to do a line of divorce cards back when she was in art school and n.o.body else was doing them. Now even Hallmark publishes divorce cards. But why listen to us? I'm just the high school graduate who does charity b.a.l.l.s and Audrey's the temp nurse. Like what do we know?

FROM What Looks Like Crazy.

on an Ordinary Day.

BY PEARL CLEAGE.

* 1.

I'm sitting at the bar in the airport, minding my own business, trying to get psyched up for my flight, and I made the mistake of listening to one of those TV talk shows. They were interviewing some women with what the host kept calling "full-blown AIDS." As opposed to half-blown AIDS, I guess. There they were, weeping and wailing and wringing their hands, wearing their prissy little Laura Ashley dresses and telling their edited-for-TV life stories.

The audience was eating it up, but it got on my last nerve. The thing is, half these b.i.t.c.hes are lying. More than half. They get diagnosed and all of a sudden they're Mother Teresa. "I can't be positive! It's impossible! I'm practically a virgin!" Bulls.h.i.+t. They got it just like I got it: f.u.c.king men.

That's not male bas.h.i.+ng, either. That's the truth. Most of us got it from the boys. Which is, when you think about it, a pretty good argument for cutting men loose, but if I could work up a strong physical reaction to women, I would already be having s.e.x with them. I'm not knocking it. I'm just saying I can't be a witness. Too many t.i.tties in one place to suit me.

I try to tune out the "almost-a-virgins," but they're going on and on and now one is really sobbing and all of a sudden I get it. They're just going through the purification ritual. This is how it goes: First, you have to confess that you did nasty, disgusting s.e.x stuff with multiple partners who may even have been of your same gender. Or you have to confess that you like to shoot illegal drugs into your veins and sometimes you use other people's works when you want to get high and you came unprepared. Then you have to describe the sin you have confessed in as much detail as you can remember. Names, dates, places, faces. Specific s.e.xual acts. Quant.i.ty and quality of o.r.g.a.s.ms. What kind of dope you shot. What park you bought it in. All the down and dirty. Then, once your listeners have been totally freaked out by what you've told them, they get to decide how much sympathy, attention, help, money, and understanding you're ent.i.tled to based on how disgusted they are.

I'm not buying into that s.h.i.+t. I don't think anything I did was bad enough for me to earn this as the payback, but it gets rough out here sometimes. If you're not a little kid, or a heteros.e.xual movie star's doomed but devoted wife, or a hemophiliac who got it from a tainted transfusion, or a straight white woman who can prove she's a virgin with a dirty dentist, you're not eligible for any no-strings sympathy.

The truth is, people are usually relieved. It always makes them feel better when they know the specifics of your story. You can see their faces brighten up when your path is one they haven't traveled. That's why people keep asking me if I know who I got it from. Like all they'd have to do to ensure their safety is cross this specific guy's name off their list of acceptable s.e.xual partners the same way you do when somebody starts smoking crack: "No future here." But I always tell them the truth: "I have no idea." That's when they frown and give me one last chance to redeem myself. If I don't know who, do I at least know how many?

By that time I can't decide if I'm supposed to be sorry about having had a lot of s.e.x or sorry I got sick from it. And what difference does it make at this point, anyway? It's like lying about how much you loved the rush of the nicotine just because now you have lung cancer.

I'm babbling. I must be higher than I thought. Good. I hate to fly. I used to dread it so much I'd have to be falling-down drunk to get on a plane. For years I started every vacation with a hangover. That's actually how I started drinking vodka, trying to get up the nerve to go to Jamaica for a reggae festival. Worked like a charm, too, and worth a little headache the first day out and the first day back.

I know I drink too much, but I'm trying to cut back. When I first got diagnosed, I stayed drunk for about three months until I realized it was going to be a lot harder to drink myself to death then it might be to wait it out and see what happens. Some people live a long time with HIV. Maybe I'll be one of those, grinning like a maniac on the front of Parade magazine, talking about how I did it.

I never used to read those survivor testimonials, but now I do, for obvious reasons. The first thing they all say they had to do was learn how to calm the f.u.c.k down, which is exactly why I was drinking so much, trying to cool out. The problem was, after a while I couldn't tell if it was the vodka or the HIV making me sick, and I wanted to know the difference.

But I figure a little lightweight backsliding at thirty thousand feet doesn't really count, so by the time we boarded, I had polished off two doubles and was waiting for the flight attendant to smile that first-cla.s.s-only smile and bring me two more. That's why I pay all that extra money to sit up here, so they'll bring me what I want before I have to ring the bell and ask for it.

The man sitting next to me is wearing a beautiful suit that cost him a couple of grand easy and he's spread out calculators, calendars, and legal pads across his tray table like the plane is now his personal office in the air. I think all that s.h.i.+t is for show. I don't believe anybody can really concentrate on business when they're hurtling through the air at six hundred miles an hour. Besides, ain't n.o.body that d.a.m.n busy.

He was surprised as h.e.l.l when I sat down next to him. White men in expensive suits are always a little p.i.s.sed to find themselves seated next to me in first cla.s.s, especially since I started wearing my hair so short. They seem to take it as some kind of personal affront that of all the seats on the airplane, the bald-headed black woman showed up next to them. It used to make me uncomfortable. Now I think of it as helping them take a small step toward higher consciousness. Discomfort is always a necessary part of the process of enlightenment.

For the first time in a long time, I didn't grip and pray during takeoff. It wasn't that I was drunk. I've been a lot drunker on a lot of other airplanes. It's just that at this point, a plane crash might be just what the doctor ordered.

* 2 I always forget how small the terminal is in Grand Rapids. Two or three shops, a newsstand, and a lounge with a big-screen TV, but barely enough vodka to make me another double while I wait for Joyce, who is, of course, a little late. I truly love my big sister, but I swear if she was ever on time for anything, I'd probably have a heart attack at the shock of it.

The bartender seemed surprised when the drink he poured for me emptied his only bottle of Absolut. He set the gla.s.s down in front of me on a c.o.c.ktail napkin printed with a full-color map of Michigan.

"Sorry I don't have lime," he said. "Most people come through here just drink a beer or something."

"It's fine," I said, taking a long swallow to prove it. I knew that if he could think of something else to say, he would, but our brief exchange seemed to have exhausted his conversational skills. He headed back to the TV.

It feels strange to be sitting here writing all this down. The last time I kept a diary was when I first got to Atlanta in 1984. Things were happening so fast I started writing it all down to try and keep up. Just like now. I was nineteen. I had a brand-new cosmetology license, two years salon experience, and an absolute understanding of the fact that it was time for me to get the h.e.l.l out of Detroit.

When I was growing up in Idlewild, my tiny hometown four hours north of the big city, the motor city had always seemed as close to paradise as I could probably stand. Two years of really being there showed me how truly wrong I could be.

I had heard that if you were young and black and had any sense, Atlanta was the place to be, and that was the d.a.m.n truth. Those Negroes were living so good, they could hardly stand themselves. They had big dreams and big cars and good jobs and money in the bank. They had just elected another one of their own to the mayor's office, they were selling plenty of wolf tickets downtown, and they partied hard and continuously.

My first week in town, I hooked up with a sister who was going to work for the new mayor, and she invited me to a c.o.c.ktail reception at one of the big downtown hotels. When we got there, I felt like I had walked into one of those ads in Ebony where the fine brother in the designer tux says to the beautiful sister in the gorgeous gown: "I a.s.sume you drink Martel." Folks were standing around laughing and talking and pretending they had been doing this s.h.i.+t for years.

My friend was steadily working the crowd, and by the end of the evening, I had been introduced to everybody who was anybody among the new power people. My first impression was that they were the best-dressed, best-coifed, h.o.r.n.i.e.s.t crowd I had ever seen. I knew my salon was going to make a fortune, and it did. I'd still be making good money if I hadn't tried to do the right thing.

When I got the bad news, I sat down and wrote to all the men I'd had s.e.x with in the last ten years. It's kind of depressing to make a list like that. Makes you remember how many times you had s.e.x when you should have just said good night and gone home. Sometimes, at first, when I was really p.i.s.sed off at the injustice of it all and some self-righteous anger seemed more appealing than another round of whining, I used to try and figure out who gave it to me in the first place, but I knew that line of thinking was bulls.h.i.+t. The question wasn't who gave it to me. The question was what was I going to do about it. Still, when I think about all the men I slept with that I didn't even really care about, it drives me crazy to think I could be paying with my life for some d.a.m.n s.e.x that didn't even make the Earth move.

When I called Joyce and told her what I was going to do, she told me I was crazy and to let sleeping dogs lie, but I felt like it was only fair. I didn't even know how long I had been carrying it and I sure didn't know who I got it from. Atlanta is always full of men with money to spend on you if you know how to have a good time, and I used to be a good-time somebody when I put my mind to it.

So I sat down and tried to figure out how to tell these guys what was up without freaking them out. "Hey, Bobby, long time no see! Have you been tested for HIV yet?" "Hey, Jerome, what's up, baby? Listen, it might be a good time for you to get tested for HIV." I don't remember what all I finally said, except to tell them I was really sorry and that if they wanted to talk, to call me anytime.

To tell the truth, I was a little nervous. I'd heard a few stories about people going off on their ex-lovers when they found out, but n.o.body contacted me for a couple of weeks, so I figured they were all going to deal with it in their own way. Then one Sat.u.r.day, the salon was full of people, and in walks this woman I've never seen before. She walked right past the receptionist and up to me like we were old friends, except her face didn't look too friendly.

"Are you Ava Johnson?" she said.

"Yes," I said. "What can I do for you?"

"You can tell me what you think you're doing sending my husband some s.h.i.+t like this through the mail." She reached into her purse, took out one of my letters, and waved it in my face, her voice suddenly rising to just short of a shriek.

As noisy as the salon always was on Sat.u.r.day afternoon, it got so quiet so fast, all I could hear was the Anita Baker CD we'd been playing all morning. I tried to stay calm and ask her if she wanted to go into my office so we could talk. She didn't even let me finish.

"I don't want to go anywhere with you, you nasty heifer!"

I knew she was upset, but she was pus.h.i.+ng it. I wondered if he'd given her the letter to read or if she'd discovered it on what was probably a routine wifely search through his pockets.

"All right then," I said. "What do you want?"