I always kept the door to my room locked when I was in it, and even when I wasn’t in it. I didn’t want my mama to sneak up on me while I was playing around on the computer Daddy gave me for my birthday this year.
“Maybe this computer’ll keep you occupied enough so we won’t have to worry about you all the time,” Daddy had told me, his gray mustache looking like a fuzzy worm wiggling up over his lip. He looked like a schoolteacher sitting at the desk in my room, showing me how to use my new Dell computer.
“I won’t get in no more trouble, Daddy,” I chirped. My mind was spinning in so many different directions, I couldn’t even remember the last stupid thing I’d done to upset my mama and daddy. I smiled at Daddy before I asked him what else I was getting for my birthday. Like he did most of the time when I got on his nerves, he just waved his hand in the air and rolled his eyes back in his head. Then he trotted out of my room back to the den to do whatever it was he did in there. I didn’t care. I had me a Dell computer!
It seemed like every time I turned my Dell on, naked people popped up on my monitor, whether I wanted them to or not. I couldn’t figure out how all of those people out there found out about me to be sending me so much stuff! There were titties, butts, and peckers all over my screen!
And I liked it.
I had been looking at naked people and playing around in chat rooms for a week that day when Mama came knocking at my door. She was beating on it like the police.
“Helen, open this door!” For an old woman, my mama had a young voice, and she knew how to use it. I hit a button on my keyboard to make the pictures on my screen shrink to a little bitty space down at the bottom before I ran and opened my door. I cracked it just enough for Mama to see my face.
“Yes, Mommy?”
Before some more words even got out of Mama’s mouth, she let out a deep breath and looked at me like she was seeing me for the first time. I could tell she was tired. Her eyes were puffy and red, her arm was up against the wall outside my room to help prop her up. She was a wreck.
“Helen, would you please not lock the door to your room? There is no reason for you to lock your door.” Mama’s voice did not match her face. She was sixty-six and looked and acted it. Ever since she retired from her job at a bank last year, she stopped dressing up and making up her face. Lines and wrinkles had taken over, making it look like she had on a mask made out of brown crepe paper. But she used to be a pretty woman. I knew that because of all the old pictures she had laying around of her when she was real young. She used to have thick black hair that touched her shoulders, big light brown eyes that slanted up, and because my daddy used to be a dentist, she still had perfect white teeth. I got my mama’s looks. Not the way she was now, but the way she looked when she was young. Back then, hella men whistled at her. Uh-huh. Now I was the one the men whistled at. Every time I walked down a street. People would be surprised if I told them how many construction workers rubbed on my butt when I stopped to talk to them on the days that Mama let me go walking by myself.
And I liked that, too. I had been thinking about that just before Mama came banging on my door.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“Rockelle Harper wants you to come to her house in an hour to babysit. She said to bring your sleeping clothes on account of she’ll be out for the night. That old man she nurses has gotten sicker, and he will need her more. I hope you don’t mind helping her with those children.” Mama rubbed her nose and stared at me. She had a face that looked more like a mask. Her expression was always the same. It was hard to tell when she was mad, sad, or glad. The only way I ever knew how she was feeling was when she told me. “I’m so glad Rockelle has so much trust in you.” Mama patted her jaw and parted her lips like she wanted to smile, but I knew she couldn’t anymore.
I grinned and shifted most of my weight to one side. “Me, too,” I said, holding on to my grin.
“It’s done wonders for your disposition.” Mama stood back and put her hands on her hips. “And that fool Reverend Mays said that there wasn’t no hope for you…”
I nodded because our preacher was a fool and always had been. The only hope he had was trying to pinch my titties in the church basement. I had refused to go back to that church when Daddy and Mama tried to make me. They gave up real quick when I told them why I didn’t want to go back. We even started going to a different church, but I didn’t want to go to that one, either. I told them that if God was everywhere, all the time, like Reverend Mays said He was, then I could talk to God without even leaving my room.
“Uh-huh.” I stood up straight and opened my door all the way. “Tell Miss Rocky I’ll be right on over.” Girls like me had a hard time hiding our excitement, but I tried. I started grinning and blinking. There was nothing I liked better than going to Miss Rocky’s house. That’s where I had the most fun. When she didn’t ask me to babysit, and I had no other reason to be there, I’d watch her house from my bedroom window.
After her husband, Joe, left her to run away with another woman, Miss Rocky started having all kinds of strange folks in and out of her house. Every now and then, a man named Clyde with a cute face for a man came by Miss Rocky’s house when I was there. He would look at me with a long eye until Miss Rocky would shoo me out of the room.
Clyde never stayed that long at Miss Rocky’s house and sometimes when he left, Miss Rocky would be so fidgety she would have to drink a beer or something else. A Mexican woman and two other Black ladies came and went at Miss Rocky’s house all the time, too. They would drink and grin and whisper in one room while I looked after the kids in another part of the house. Right after the ladies left, Miss Rocky would start cussing. Then she would tell me that they were greedy heifers because they always slurped up all her alcohol.
Miss Rocky had a computer, too. One night while I was online in a chat room, a man in Australia sent me an instant message, then an e-mail with a picture of his dick attached! At first, I thought it was a long, fat mushroom. So I laughed out loud, LOL in computer talk. But the real fun was all that other stuff that Miss Rocky tried to hide in her house.
Now, I didn’t like to snoop through other people’s things, but what happened with Miss Rocky wasn’t my fault. While I was going through the closet in her bedroom, I stumbled across a box under a pile of clothes. In it, I found a copy of The Spectator with a picture of her in a skimpy little outfit, with her tongue sticking out like a snake.
The Spectator was this newspaper small enough to fold under your arm like The Enquirer, and just as scandalous. The people in this newspaper liked to get naked or squeeze into some black leather, hide their faces with masks, and show off. Our paperboy didn’t bring this kind of newspaper to our house. I didn’t know where they sold this nasty stinking thing. I knew about it on account of I found a copy in my big brother’s house smashed between some books on a case in his living room.
So, anyway I cracked open The Spectator, and there was Miss Rocky in a nightgown, stretched out on a black rug, looking right into the camera! Honest to God, my eyes almost rolled out of my head. I wondered what nasty so-and-so took this picture. Anyway, her just laying there half naked must not have been enough for her. There were words next to her picture: Let Baby Love cum ROCK your world. You would think that these people running a newspaper, even a nasty newspaper, would at least learn how to spell come. And Baby Love? Uh-huh. She could call herself whatever she wanted to. Miss Rocky’s real name was Rockelle Harper.
Right below Miss Rocky’s picture was a telephone number. Now I knew Miss Rocky’s number by heart, but this was a different one. Then I remembered Miss Rocky had had the phone company come to the house and hook up another phone in her bedroom with a different number two weeks earlier. As soon as the telephone man left, she’d hooked up an answering machine to it and told me not to never answer that particular telephone when she left me in her house to look after her kids.
“Why?” I’d asked her.
“Because I said so, that’s why.” She waved her thick, lemon-colored hand at me, her long curved nails looking like a hawk’s. She was being a real bitch. Well, two could play that game. I decided right then and there to act like I hadn’t heard her tell me never to answer that new telephone.
And it’s a good thing I did answer Miss Rocky’s other telephone, first chance I got. How else would I have found out what I did? Just last night, right after Miss Rocky left her house with that snooty Mexican woman named Ester who wore a red dress and drove a red car, that mysterious telephone started ringing. I just happened to be in Miss Rocky’s bedroom looking for the key to her liquor cabinet. Miss Rocky had turned the ringer off, so I couldn’t really hear the telephone when it rang. But the answering machine made a clicking noise when it came on, so that’s how I knew somebody was calling. Miss Rocky and that Mexican woman pulled off in that red car just in time. I turned up the volume on the answering machine. Come to find out, it was a man, and he had a real nice voice.
I cleared my throat and took a real deep breath. Then I sat down on Miss Rocky’s bed with that blue velvet bedspread she just got. I crossed my legs and cocked my head to the side, making myself real comfortable. I pretended I was in my bedroom.
“Hullo?” I said, so nervous I almost choked on some air.
“Uh, is Baby Love in?” He sounded White.
“You mean Rockelle?”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s her real name. Sometimes we call her Rocky.”
A long time passed. The man was being real quiet, but I could tell he was still there because I could hear him breathing and I could hear music in the background. I cleared my throat to get his attention.
“Is this 555-1986?” he asked, finally.
I looked at the number that was printed on the front of the phone. “Yup,” I told the man.
He coughed first, then he started talking again, but this time he sounded different. Like he was nervous. “I’m responding to the ad in, uh, The Spectator. I liked the photograph they featured.”
I figured that. The telephone number under the picture of Miss Rocky in that nasty piece of a newspaper was the same number on the telephone. “I figured that,” I told the man, trying to sound like a smart-ass, the way Miss Rocky did when I got on her nerves.
“Baby Love, Rocky, whatever. Is that you? That’s a beautiful woman in that photograph.”
“No, but I’m a beautiful woman, too. You ought to see me in my blue dress.”
I couldn’t figure out why this man was laughing. I didn’t think there was anything funny about what I’d just said. “Well,” he was still chuckling a little, “is Rocky available?”
“No, sir. She had to go to work.”
“I see. Well, uh, when do you expect her back?”
“Oh, she comes and goes.” I held the telephone real hard and close to my ear. I looked at the door because I heard a noise. It would be just like that wild child of Miss Rocky’s, Juliet, to have her ear propped up against the door like me when I was being nosy. I felt the smart thing to do was whisper. “She’s got a lot of friends since her husband left her for another woman. That’s why she’s always on the go these days, if you know what I mean…”
The man took a long time to say something else.
“She sounds like a really interesting gal.”
“Oh, she sure is. Especially when she’s naked.” I covered my mouth. I didn’t want this man to hear me giggling.
He gasped and started breathing real hard. “I’m sure you are as hot as she is.” His voice was husky, like he knew something on Miss Rocky. “Are you her roommate?”
“Something like that,” I said, sounding husky myself.
Uh-oh, this was getting good. It sounded like I was about to get all kinds of good stuff on Miss Rocky. What I would do with it, I didn’t know. Maybe if she knew that I knew all of her business, she would treat me more like a friend than a babysitter. Shoot. I really liked Miss Rocky. And other than babysitting for her, I tried to do other things I thought might impress her, too. Now, she liked to read her some books. I thought that if I started reading books like her, she’d see that we had that in common and she would mellow out some.
Well, reading a bunch of books didn’t do much good for me. One time I wrestled with this granddaddy of a book that Miss Rocky had read called Clan of the Cave Bear and all it did for me was make my head hurt. I couldn’t tell what that book was about because I couldn’t get past page five. It couldn’t have been harder for me to read if it had been in Chinese. Anyway, I never was that good when it came to reading.
I started wrapping the telephone cord around my fingers. Then I slid into the red velvet chair that Miss Rocky kept next to her bed. One thing I could say about the woman was she sure knew what to spend her money on. As soon as my butt hit that fancy chair, I snatched up a cute little bottle of perfume with a foreign-looking name I couldn’t read, and I sprayed my face, my crotch, my neck, and my wrists.
“Do you…uh, date?”
“Yep! I date all the time,” I said, sniffing my wrists.
“What’s your name? Uh, or do I already know you?”
Now that was a strange question for him to be asking me. I held the telephone away from my face and looked at it before I put it back against my ear.
“Uh-uh. You don’t know me,” I said, wondering what made this man think we’d met when he was talking to me for the first time just now.
“I see. Well, tell me more about yourself. If Rockelle is already too busy these days, maybe you and I could work something out. Would you be interested?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m Arthur.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, do you want to tell me your name?”
“Helen.”
“I like that. And what do you look like?”
“Uh, not too bad. I know how to fix myself up real good.”
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
“Hmmm. You sound younger.”
“I got a California ID to prove I’m nineteen.”
“But you have…dated.” He said the word dated in a whisper.
“Didn’t I tell you yeah!” I snapped at him because he was trying my patience, the same way Miss Rocky’s kids did when they got cranky.
He laughed. “You sound like a real spitfire.”
“I am,” I told him, clueless because I didn’t know what a spitfire was. Him being a man and laughing when he called me that word, it had to be something good. “My dates tell me all the time that I am a real spitfire…”
My neck was beginning to hurt from me sitting with my head cocked to the side. I turned my ear toward the door so that Miss Rocky’s kids wouldn’t come in and catch me. It would be just like that little grown-ass Juliet, Miss Rocky’s oldest kid. It seemed like no matter what Miss Rocky did for that child, it was never enough. That girl went out of her way to upset her mama.
“So, Helen. Are you available tonight?”
“Uh-uh.”
“I guess you already have another date lined up for tonight, huh?”
“Something like that.”
“What about tomorrow night?”
“What about it?”
“Could we get together tomorrow? We can meet somewhere in public. If we hit it off, we can go from there.”
I rolled my eyes and shook my head. “Can’t I just call you back when I want to go on a date with you?”
“I suppose so.” He said that real slow. “You sound like a really nice girl. But for tonight, I guess I could call another number. I might get lucky after all.”
“Well, you might and you might not.”
The man gave me a telephone number and told me the best time to call him. I wrote the number on the back of a Juicy Fruit chewing gum wrapper and slid it down inside my brassiere. Then I hung up.
I was out of breath and so warm, I had to sit there and fan my face for a while before I felt like myself again. I couldn’t understand how a married woman could survive being around the same man all the time. Just talking to a man over the telephone for a few minutes had just about wore me out. It had been a really long time since I’d been with a boyfriend. I couldn’t remember all I was supposed to do and say.
I deserved a few of Miss Rocky’s beers after all I’d just been through. My face was itching and my throat was dry. And I found out I was wet between my legs when on my way to the kitchen to get them beers. I went to the bathroom to pee.
Looking in the mirror over the bathroom sink, I saw what everybody else saw when they looked at me: a pretty girl any man would want to date. When I wore my long, shiny black hair down, people told me that I looked like a younger Janet Jackson. And that was another pretty woman Miss Rocky liked to talk about like a dog. Just yesterday when I was watching Janet’s new video on BET, Miss Rocky waltzed by the television and said, “Janet Jackson is nothing but a glorified cheerleader!”
I never argued with Miss Rocky. She was the last person I wanted mad at me. Where else could I kick back so deep and not have anybody bother me? Where else could I drink beers, snoop, and maybe even meet my future husband over the telephone?
Miss Rocky was my girl. I didn’t care how bad she talked about her other friends, or Janet Jackson. I didn’t even care about how she tried to hide things from me.
People like me are a lot smarter than some people think. I got away with doing some things because people thought I didn’t know what I was doing. And, maybe I didn’t know what I was doing. But I did it anyway because it felt good.
See, just by looking at me, or by talking to me over the telephone, a lot of people didn’t even know I was retarded.