“Would you like another drink, ma’am?”
I could hardly lift my head to see who was talking to me. And when I did, my eyes burned when I blinked. It took me a moment to realize where I was and even then I was not sure. Looking around, rubbing my head, it all came back to me. I was in hell. I’d been sitting in the same bar for hours, reliving my life.
“Ma’am, are you all right?” The waitress was about what you’d expect. She had long, stiff orange hair with black roots, pasty complexion, too much dime-store makeup, bad teeth, and a dingy white uniform with a button missing.
“Uh, just some coffee please. Black.” I let out a long, painful sigh, raking my shaking fingers through my hair. “Are there any more bars in this neighborhood?” I asked hoarsely, the inside of my throat feeling like it had been scraped with a dull knife. I couldn’t take a chance and visit a bar where I might run into someone I knew. And from the looks I received in this place, I didn’t want to become too familiar with this crowd. I recognized some of the same brooding faces I’d seen on my first visit.
“I’m not sure, ma’am. I only work here. I live in Oakland.” Despite her grim appearance, she had a pleasant voice. Just the mention of Oakland made my head throb.
“Then how far am I from Market Street?”
The waitress gave me an impatient look and shrugged. “Like I said, I live in Oakland.”
“Just some coffee please,” I managed again.
Four cups later of what was supposed to be coffee, I felt sober enough to rise. But my legs felt like Jell-O. If I hadn’t held on to the table, I would have landed on my face. All eyes were on me as I staggered to the restroom with the red door, a door that wouldn’t shut all the way. I ignored the single unflushed toilet and peed in a trash can. There was no toilet paper. I splashed water on my hands anyway, dried them on the tail of my dress, and stumbled out. I clutched my purse with both hands as I eased toward the exit. A bearded man with a ponytail winked at me on my way out.
I don’t know why I was surprised to find the Lexus intact. It had been broken into two times in the last year, both times on the street in front of my own house in broad daylight.
“Who would think that those thugs would even know how to get to Steiner from the ghetto,” Mom had scoffed.
I didn’t comment when the perpetrator, the son of the judge next door, was caught trying to sell the CD player he’d ripped out of my dashboard.
I ignored the faces peeking out of the window from inside the bar, watching as I staggered and stumbled across the parking lot. By the time I reached my car, the same bearded goon who’d winked at me coming out of the restroom, exited the bar and stood blocking the door, watching until I fell into my seat and strapped on my seat belt.
Everything seemed normal when I got home. Almost every light in the house was on. Mom had left two messages. Heather had called from Europe and left a message that she’d changed her mind about the car. She decided to use the money to return to Europe, and backpack through France and Italy next Christmas with some new friends she’d made in Dublin. Robert had left a message saying he would be home in a couple of days.
My buzz had been downgraded to a light headache, but my mind was still a ball of confusion and fear.
A long hot bath, with a highball in my hand, made it easier for me to continue revisiting my past.
I’d never told any of my friends about my teenage pregnancy. In my fourth month, when I could no longer hide it, I was sent to Sacramento to stay with Dad’s older sister, Rita, a bitter, divorced woman who reminded me on an hourly basis of the shame I’d brought on the family. “If you are lucky enough to find a decent White man who’ll marry you, I advise you to kiss the ground he walks on,” Aunt Rita, her pale, sharp-featured face close to mine, told me. Her finger poked my protruding belly. “It’ll take you the rest of your born days to live down this curse.”
Aunt Rita rarely mentioned the fact that my deceased sister had associated with Charles Manson. But I heard about my disgrace with a Black boy every day that I lived with my aunt.
I spent as much time as I could holed up in the miserable bedroom my aunt had prepared for me. And it was a dark, musty, congested little space. I was so depressed that I was in labor for six hours and didn’t even know it. By the time my aunt got me to the hospital, I was delirious.
I chose not to hold or even look at my child. I returned to Oakland a week after giving birth, assuming Clyde and his grandmother had turned my child over to their relatives in Mississippi and that my shame would never be mentioned again.
For the next few years, I maintained a low profile and stayed close to home and out of trouble. That seemed to appease my parents. But they were disappointed when I flunked out of college and started wandering from one boring job to another. It was three years after Clyde before I was with another man.
Robert O’Rourke was the thirty-year-old nephew of one of the partners at Dad’s law firm. Conservative, aggressive, ambitious was the best way to describe his personality. I overlooked his plain features and receding hairline and went out with him anyway because my parents adored him. And even though I didn’t love him, I married him, hoping it would make up for the disgrace I’d brought to my family.
The sex was about what I’d expected: dull and perfunctory. Each of my two pregnancies—Josh first, and Heather two years later—constantly reminded me of the first one and the child I would never see. I couldn’t stand to look at children who appeared to be biracial. And not a day went by that I didn’t wonder what had happened to mine.
Keeping busy was more than an option, it was the distraction I needed to make my marriage work. Robert was a very successful architect so we traveled extensively. We lived in Dublin near his parents for a while before we returned to the States and settled in San Francisco, two blocks from my parents on the same street.
By the time Heather and Josh entered school my life had become routine. Carpools, PTA meetings, women’s clubs, parties. The sordid shenanigans of my youth had become a blur.
With a maid to oversee the house and kids, Robert and I spent a lot of time socializing. But it wasn’t long before that came to a standstill, at least for me. Robert spent most of his time entertaining his business associates and when he was around, he spent most of that time pointing out my faults. Like my out-of-control spending and my fading looks. I spent more time at the gym and the beauty parlor than I did with Robert. But my twenty-pound weight loss and face-lift didn’t make much of a difference to him. Despite my improvements, I saw even less of Robert.
A divorce was out of the question and having an affair was not an option. I had too much to lose. Besides, it had devastated the marriage of my best friend, Joan Richmond.
“So, Joan’s run off with some greasy Mexican,” Robert informed me during one of his rare appearances at dinner.
“She won’t be the first and she won’t be the last,” I scoffed. I was the one who had encouraged Joan to flee, and I was glad I did. She called me from Long Beach sounding happier than ever. However, I didn’t have the courage to take my own advice.
“Well, the way she’s consorted with those people, that’s about all she deserves now.”
Robert’s vision didn’t include much diversity. He socialized with minority business associates, but he generally disliked Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and anything in between. And he viewed them all as lazy, useless criminals who had no right to the privileges we took for granted.
With the exception of my Jamaican maid, Robert made sure I had no relationships with people of color, and he wanted to keep it that way.
There was no way in hell I could let him know about Clyde and Keisha.