44
The Eleventh Commandment
Frieda crossed Fifth Street and continued up Santa Monica Boulevard. Even though Santa Monica was where she now lived, it had been a while since she’d been to this part of the small city, had stopped on a whim after driving around just to get out of the house. She’d walked along the waterfront for a while, but still wasn’t ready to go back to her empty condo. What she really wanted to do was go home, to the one she shared with Gabriel. But he’d continued to refuse her calls, and the one time she’d dared venture into her old neighborhood it was only to discover that not only had the locks been changed, but the staff had obviously been instructed to not let her in. “Please leave, Mrs. Livingston,” Tito had pleaded when she caught him driving up from a trip to the butcher. “Doctor Livingston made us sign papers that we would not let you in. It could cost us our jobs!”
This embarrassment had made Frieda decide to fight fire with fire. She’d gone home, made some calls, and since she couldn’t get an appointment with Gloria Allred or Judge Toler, her first choices, she’d called the law firm that an attorney from the Cochran Firm had recommended, someone who lived in Los Angeles and was used to fighting battles where child custody and big cash were involved. Getting that ball rolling had not only exhausted her, it had also not brought her the satisfaction that she thought it might. The truth of the matter was that Gabriel was a much better parent than she was, and where her son was concerned, probably a better fit. How could she nurture a child the way Gabriel did when she’d never been nurtured herself? Wanting the answer to that question is what put Frieda on a plane headed to Kansas City four days ago. What had her in a taxi heading to Fifty-ninth and Swope Parkway, where her mother now lived. It was what had her knocking on the door at seven o’clock on a Tuesday night. Her mother was there with two of her grandchildren. They were watching a movie on TV.
“Frieda?” Sharon opened the door after looking through the peephole. “What are you doing here?”
“Hi, Mama.” Frieda entered the house and gave her mother a hug. She looked around, glad to see that the place was clean and the furniture that Frieda had purchased for her the previous Christmas still looked good. “Where is everybody?” Along with a couple cousins who’d practically lived in their house growing up, Frieda had a half brother. He’d grown up with his father and stepmother. They weren’t close. But since he’d gotten married and turned his wife into a baby-making machine and his mother into a grandmother, he’d come around more often. Sharon often babysat. When Gabriel had to work and Frieda had spent last Thanksgiving here with the family, she’d discovered she and her half brother actually had things in common. And Gabe had loved playing with his bad-ass kids.
“Jesse done got him a woman, girl. One with a house and a job.”
“What? My cousin has finally found a sponsor?”
“Having that thirty-year-old leech out of my house? You say sponsor; I say savior.”
“Ha!”
“Yes, and she seems like a nice girl too. Works over there at Research Hospital. Has a daughter, ten years old.”
“Is Jesse working?”
“Is sugar salty? That fool ain’t working on nothing but that pus—” Sharon looked down to see her six-year-old granddaughter looking at her mouth hard enough to count teeth. “He’s still unemployed,” she finished, reaching for the little girl. “Come up here, girl. And stop acting so nosy!” She hugged the child to her, nuzzled the baby’s neck until the girl squirmed with laughter.
“Quit it, Nana!”
They continued playing, and Frieda looked on. She searched her memory, trying to find one involving her that resembled the scene before her. Couldn’t find it. Sharon played with the child a bit longer and then shooed her into the other room. Y’all go into my room and watch the TV in there. I want to catch up with Frieda.”
“Okay, girl. What’s going on with you?”
“What do you mean?” Frieda asked, knowing exactly what Sharon meant.
“You haven’t come home unannounced in five years, ever since you moved to California. You barely even come home at all. We had to beg you to spend last Thanksgiving with us. And where is your son?”
That was a question Frieda didn’t want to answer, a mine field she didn’t plan on stepping into. “He’s spending time with his grandparents,” she lied. “And Gabriel’s doing back-to-back shifts. I started missing my family,” she continued with a shrug, lies turning into truths. “So I jumped on a plane.”
“It must be good to have it like that—just up and travel when you want to.” Sharon looked hard at Frieda. “It’s good to see you, though. You look like you’ve lost a little weight. But I like your hair. You look good.”
“I keep inviting you out to LA. My stylist could do your hair.”
“Naw, girl.” Sharon picked up a Jet magazine and started flipping through the pages. “Too many earthquakes.”
“You must be getting soft in your old age,” Frieda said into the quiet room.
Sharon looked up from the magazine. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t remember you ever playing with us like that.”
“Like what?”
“The way you were playing with Yancy.”
“Hell, working two jobs, trying to hang on to whichever boyfriend-of-the-month that was in the house . . . didn’t have time.”
Well, you’re nothing if not honest, is what Frieda thought. “I guess not,” is what she said. “I wish you had.” Her voice was soft, reflective, as she continued. “It would have made me feel like you loved me more. Sometimes . . . I didn’t feel that.”
“Love? You didn’t feel loved? Did you feel those clothes on your back, shoes on your feet, and food in your stomach? Did you feel those Christmas presents that I couldn’t afford, or that money I gave you so you could do field trips and amusement park outings?”
“I’m sorry, Mama. I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful. I just never had a moment like that with you, that’s all, one like I just saw with you and Yancy.”
“I did the best I could with y’all,” Sharon said, after a moment. “Taking care of both you and your aunt’s kids after she got on crack. It wasn’t easy. But I did the best I could.”
In a purely reflexive moment, Frieda stood, walked over to the couch where her mother sat. “I appreciate what you did for me, Mama.” Then she placed her head on her mother’s shoulder and slowly, eventually, felt her mother’s arms around her—holding her, hugging her—feeling that which the young child, the teenaged child, never had.
When she left her mother’s house two days later, it was with some reading material for the plane. “It’s really good,” Sharon had said, when handing Iyanla Vanzant’s Peace from Broken Pieces to Frieda. “Jesse’s girlfriend belongs to a book club there at Research. She read it and suggested it to me. It’s helped me a lot. I think you’ll like it too.”
Frieda began reading the prologue on Friday at 10:45 p.m., while waiting to board her plane. She pretty much read nonstop, reading the last page at around five o’clock on Sunday morning. On Monday, she’d looked up the organization mentioned on the book’s sleeve and two days later had had her first telephone conference with a life coach from Inner Visions Institute. Two days ago, on Friday, she’d called her attorney, told her to hold up on whatever she was doing pertaining to the divorce and the custody battle and to wait to hear from her. Just two sessions in and it had become clear: for Frieda to be good for anybody else, to really and truly love anybody else, including her son, she had to first learn how to really and truly love herself.
What had transpired in the last two weeks is what Frieda thought of as she walked past a couple shops and then saw a large box of books in front of a third shop. She was just about to walk past it as well when something caught her eye. She entered the store, a seeming hodgepodge of books, trinkets, statues, and the like. “What kind of store is this?” she asked the surfer-looking young man behind the counter.
“New age,” he answered casually.
“What does that mean?”
“Different religious and spiritual aids,” he answered, coming around the counter to join her over by the case of statues where she stood. “Here you have Judaism,” he said, pointing to the Star of David, “and over here is Hindu.” They walked to the next shelf. “Here are the Christian symbols—”
“Yeah, I’ve seen the cross before,” Frieda interrupted. “What are these?”
“Those are Tibetan singing bowls.” The worker demonstrated how it worked.
“Hmm. Well, I don’t think there’s anything in here for me.” She headed toward the door and was almost out of the shop when she saw a plaque on the side wall. The words “know yourself ” seemed to jump out at her. She walked over and read the words out loud:
You should know yourself
And uphold yourself
And let unconditional love
Be the only kind that you show yourself.
Reading these words felt good, so much so that she read them again. They sounded like words her counselor would say as she encouraged Frieda to search inside for the love she wanted. “It’s in there,” her counselor had told her. “I promise you that.” Perhaps it was. Because something inside her shifted, as though the words actually created a hole and then slipped into her heart.
“How much is this?” she asked the cashier. He told her. She bought it, and left downtown Santa Monica feeling something that she hadn’t felt since the investigators met her on the street outside Clark’s house, maybe even before then, maybe in her entire life. Frieda Moore Livingston felt that no matter what happened, no matter how all of the drama she was dealing with turned out, she was going to survive. Frieda thought—no, knew—that she was going to be okay.