Monroe McKenzie lives at the top of a hill with a sweeping view of New York City. Cars are crammed into her driveway and along her street. I pull up twenty minutes late. The smells of evening dew, dahlias, and daisies calm my nerves. Breathe, I remind myself as I touch the doorbell. It’s one of those old-fashioned bells that chime five times at different octaves. A graying woman dressed in white with a black apron answers the door.
“Welcome to the McKenzie home. Come right in.”
She leads me to the dining/living room combination, where at least fifty women are comfortably seated, some with small plates in their hands and gold-rimmed goblets. On the center table is a short bouquet of flowers, a tier of three types of sandwiches, and platters of cheese, crackers, and smoked salmon. The food looks picked over. Like folks have been here a while. All eyes are on me. I stand clutching my purse. The expensive bone-colored one Preston bought me for Christmas last year. Now I’m wondering if I should seat myself.
Monroe calls out to me, “Felicia Lyons, so glad you could make it.” She moves across the room with the grace of a first lady. Her lemon crepe dress has an eggplant sash, and her hair is long and flowing. “We were just about to get started. Why don’t you grab a plate and join us.”
I smile politely and thank her. I’m not hungry. Intimidated, but not hungry. I move toward the table as I’m told. Erica Prince is standing there pouring a glass of lemonade.
“Erica!” I shriek with pure joy. Ease washes over me. “I didn’t know you were a Dame.”
“Felicia!” she throws her arms around me. “This is my second year. I just read on the agenda that you are trying out for the fund-raiser. I wish I would have known. I could have given you a quick briefing on the playground,” she says with a wink.
“Is it going to be that hard?”
“The Dames are strict,” she whispers out the corner of her cute mouth. Her hair is flat-ironed and curled today. She’s wearing a white pantsuit with a purple shell. Diamond droplets fall from her ears, and she smells like cinnamon. Not the Erica I’m used to seeing chasing after Coltrane and McCoy.
Monroe rings a small bell. All conversation halts. The women who are standing make their way to their seats. I follow Erica. As I pass Monroe, she hands me a gold-stenciled name tag. The room is seated.
Monroe clasps her hands together and beams. “Thanks so much for coming out tonight, ladies. As you know, our annual fund-raiser is two weeks away. I want to thank the committee for their hard work. To date, we’ve sold more than one hundred tickets to women in our community.”
The ladies clap.
“Thanks to Lourdes Maloney for the beautiful design. I’d also like to thank Priscilla Peony and Tasha Montgomery for securing the Green Lawn Tennis Club in Chatham for the event.”
More applause.
“Before we start our meeting, I have five prospective ladies who have joined us to audition their talent. Please stand when I call your name. Cassandra Youngblood, Felicia Lyons, Beatrice Blackwood, Maritza Lovett, and Tina Chang. Dames, please welcome our visitors.”
Hands move in unison; most women smile our way.
“We will start with Tina Chang on cello, and while she sets up her instrument, I want to remind the Dames that I’d like you to stay for a fifteen-minute briefing once the auditions conclude. Ladies, you should have all received a ballot; please remember to grade each performance by using the number system one to three.” Monroe signals for Tina Chang to begin.
She plays the cello as if she’s moving with a classical orchestra. The next performer dances a modern piece that will rival any member of Alvin Ailey. Then the third woman sings opera in Italian and the fourth plays piano while singing half in English and half in French. I can’t compete with them. What in the world was I thinking? A BFA from Marymount Manhattan College and one Super Bowl commercial doesn’t make me equipped. I am not Dame material. My piece on the overburdened stay-at-home mother is not traditional at all, and my feet go cold as I’m waiting for my name to be called. What the hell is wrong with me? I spend at least half of the monologue on real talk, complaining about the woes of motherhood. This crowd won’t get it. My knees knock into each other. I would bite my fingernails if I hadn’t just gotten a manicure.
By the time Monroe pronounces my name, I have decided to bow out, give up, I am not embarrassing myself. Why do I want this, anyway? Maybe Preston is right. These women are just rich and snobby. I don’t really belong. This whole thing is out of my league.
The damn voice taunts. About time you came to your senses. You ain’t built for this. Run, heifer, run.
I push back my shoulders, and as I’m heading toward the center of the room with my mind on the front door, I’m flooded by this interview I saw on the show Life After featuring Bern Nadette Stanis, the woman who played Thelma on Good Times. She talked about this beauty contest that she had entered in Central Park, but at the last minute lost her nerve. Bern Nadette told her mother that she wasn’t going to do it. Her mother had spent her entire paycheck on getting her ready and forced her to carry through with the contest. At the contest, Bern Nadette met the producer for Good Times and landed the role of Thelma, which changed her life forever. I remember her saying, “Don’t ever let fear get in the way because you never know what’s going to open a door.”
My feet stop moving. When I look out, I’m standing in the center of the room. At least a hundred sets of eyes are on me. I run my finger behind my ear for luck, run my tongue across my teeth, stand in the middle of Monroe’s living room, and perform my panties off.
* * *
I’m the last act, and after thunderous applause Monroe stands, commanding the floor.
“Ladies, thank you so much for giving us your time and talents this evening. It was truly an incredible showing.”
More applause. Standing ovation from the Dames.
“Have a wonderful night, we will be in touch. Penelope, would you mind showing them out?”
Penelope, vice president of the Dames, stands and walks us to the door. I shake her hand and smile. Outside I congratulate the other talent and wish them luck. My phone starts vibrating. I know it’s Preston checking up on me and I fumble through the small clutch for my phone.
It’s Shayla. I let it go to voice mail. By the time I’ve buckled myself into my car, she calls three more times. Then a text message signal dings.
I’m in front of your house. Wait here for you or meet somewhere else?
This chick isn’t going away. I text back.
Meet me at Tanky’s.
I don’t give an address. Since she knows so much, let her figure it out. My foot is on the gas, and as the neighborhood changes from affluent to affordable, I lose the good Dames feeling.
* * *
My package of cigarettes is in hand as I pull open the door. Shayla is posted up at the bar on the backside curve of the U. The Heineken sign flashes above her. Her eyelids are painted in a dramatic cat eye, with the top liner curving toward her hairline. With that tight ponytail pulling on her skin, she looks what we used to call “chinky.”
“Hey, Faye.” She waves me over like we are meeting for a girls’ night out.
I sit. “What’s up?”
“Nothing much.”
Our eyes touch. My fingers tap the box on the bar top. I remove a cigarette and put it between my lips. Once it’s lit, I pass it to Shayla and then light another for myself. We smoke.
“Jack and ginger, doll?” the same bartender as before asks me and I nod.
“Let me find out you hanging at the local bar,” Shayla pipes. “Rum and Diet Coke for me.”
I look at her.
“Got to watch this hourglass figure, girlfriend.”
I snicker. She has not changed.
“So Faye, girl, what’s good? Look at you. Married to a Columbia dude with three kids. You doing it, hon, living that life.”
“How do you know he went to Columbia?”
She gives me her chile, please, look. “I told you, I’m wicked.”
The jukebox is spinning “Peter Piper” by Run-D.M.C. We both move our shoulders. The beat and lyrics take over, my head snakes, and fingers snap in the air. We are back in Shayla’s bedroom as teenagers wearing our neon T-shirts, K-Swiss sneakers, and asymmetric bobs, looking through Black Beat magazines, drinking twenty-five-cent Hugs, and eating Doritos.
“This was my shit.” Shayla is out of her seat, swinging her hips. Two men at the pool table stop long enough to grit on us. I turn my head and pop my chest. We move through the entire song lost in our faraway worlds, when life was filled with adolescence. The biggest problems Shayla and I had to worry over then was how to convince the grown-ups to let us go to the Sixteenth Street basement party on Friday nights. Simple and easy. We dance until we are both hot and out of breath. A Jill Scott ballad comes on next.
Shayla takes her seat. “Philly girl on the box, woot-woot.”
“Girl, if they played Eve I would lose my mind, up in here, up in here.” We both laugh. I swipe my fingers for the sweat that’s gathered on my brows.
“How’s Gran?”
“Same as always. Calls me just about every morning to give me the update.”
Shayla dishes what she knows about our old friends in the neighborhood. The girl had always been dramatic and animated, and I watch like she is a television program. The cigarettes dwindle from my pack, and the ice cubes have melted several times over.
“Why are you doing this to me, Shay?”
She sucks her teeth and looks me dead in my face. “Girl, you always did take shit too personal. It’s not always about you. This time it’s actually about me. Damn, can I have a chance at the good life?”
I want to slap her. “What the hell does that mean?”
She puffs on her cigarette hard. The smoke leaves through her mouth in a big breezy poof.
“My mother died.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that,” I say, meaning it. Even though her mother was mean as piss.
“Ralphie is upstate doing twenty-five years to life.”
Ralphie is her older brother who always tried to freak me in the closet when we played hide-and-go-seek.
“You’ve got your Leave It to Beaver life.” She holds up four fingers and makes the quote signal. “I’ve got Brave. Brave’s got the streets. I need to get him out. It’s hard out here. You don’t even know.”
Shayla motions for another drink. I’ve reached my limit and chew on the last cube.
“Wanna hear something crazy?”
I turn my face toward her and catch her eyes.
“After all this time, you‘re the only person I can turn to for help. Ain’t that some shit? After what like ten years, you’re still the only one, Faye.”
Well, that was me—reliable Faye. But growing up she was sure-enough-Shayla. She always had my back. After the thing with my parents, I stayed at Shayla’s house for a week because I couldn’t bear to enter Gran’s house. I wore her clothes, ate her food, slept in her bed. And that wasn’t the only time. There were others, many others, when Shayla had to come to my rescue. Fight some girl for me because I was too chicken. Hell, Shayla showed me how to use a tampon, and when I couldn’t figure it out she told me to take my panties down and shoved the thing inside of me. She was closer to me than Crystal’s crazy ass was, and she never asked for anything.
Preston often said that when pity starts to flow from me, I can never find the plug. I could blame it on the booze, but something happened when Shayla’s shoulders dipped defeated, and she looked up at me with her distressed eyes. I saw past the makeup, the cunning shell, and the constant attitude. I glimpsed her soul. She was the same girl I loved. Who I would have given a spare lung to if it meant keeping her alive back when we lived on Sydenham Street. We were two sides of the same coin.
Shayla and I had shared the same dream, to get out. She used her beauty and wit to climb the underworld society. No doubt Brave was the biggest, baddest dude on the block.
“Don’t make me beg.” She tugged on my arm. Her eye makeup had smeared.
I flag for the tab. The room has a hum to it. The jukebox is silent as it waits for someone to play their song.
“Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“I’ll help you.”
“You will?” her squeal is loud, and the two men playing pool look our way again.
“Yes, but under two conditions.”
“Anything for you.”
“You better make sure your man does whatever he needs to do. If I lose my house, I will whoop your ass.”
Her face breaks into a wide grin. “Oh, Faye.”
“And two, don’t you ever let the summer of ’89 cross your lips again, or I will whoop your ass.”
She knocks the top of the bar twice with her knuckles.
“You can just meet me at the bail bond’s office. I’ll text you the address.”
“All I have to do is sign a paper backing Brave up?”
“That’s all. And he’ll go to court. Trust me. The bail bonds don’t play. If he doesn’t show they’ll have the bounty hunters after him so fast your head will spin. You won’t lose your house, Faye.”
I’ve gone stone crazy. My husband would blow a gasket if he knew.
“Columbia will never find out.” Shayla does that thing again. “I promise.”
One thing I do remember about Shayla is that her promises were next to golden. Unless something happened that she couldn’t control.