Sweet St. Louis

Emptiness described the feeling that Sharron Francis had on her day off from work at the St. Louis International Airport. She had far too much time on her hands. And misguided idle time can be a sure invitation to entertaining preconceived notions of naughtiness. Had she visited the man she planned to see downtown at the Hampton Inn, that naughtiness would have been filled to the rim with sweaty twisting, twirling, and running out of breath to hotel sheet music. Nevertheless, she considered it pointless. Pointless and cheap, like the plain white sheets that they did it on. Besides, she knew better. The man was married. And in her right mind, it was wrong. But girrrl did it feeel so right!

RRRIIINNNNGGG! …

… RRRIIINNNNGGG! …

It was probably Mr. Married Man himself, calling from a hotel pay phone, and covering his tracks as usual, just in case his wife would question the phone calls made from his room. But Sharron refused to answer.

For what? she quizzed herself. I can find good sex anywhere.

What she really wanted was reliable companionship. Not a long-distance married man. The fact that he treated her so well and offered her money was not a substitute for the closeness that she wanted. In fact, the money made her feel more like a whore. A paid-for mistress. A sex toy. So she had never taken a dime from him.

… RRRIIINNNNGGG! …

She sat on the sofa and shook her head, disappointed with herself, and disappointed with the fate of her gender, as the phone continued its tempting and desperate rings.

But she fought it off. She fought it off. She fought it … OFF while continuing to shake her head and ponder the relations between men and women.

No matter what we do, it always seems like we’re on the bottom of things whether we’re married or single, she thought to herself. So I guess Celena was right: You use them like they use you.

Thinking of the advice from her best friend and roommate, who also worked at the St. Louis airport, Sharron decided to go ahead and page her as soon as Mr. Married Man would get the message and leave her the hell alone. After all, he didn’t want her to get attached, right? So why should he be?

Find yourself some other mistress to play with, because I have feelings, needs, desires, and everything else that real people have. Real people like your wife and your kids.

When the phone stopped ringing, Sharron paged Celena immediately and took the first call following, praying to be right.

“What’s up now, girl?” Celena’s tempered tone rushed over the line from the pay phone at the airport. “You know when my break is. I’m busy as hell right now. And why you wait so long to answer the damn phone? You decided not to go, didn’t you?”

Sharron smiled, relieved that it was her girl. “Yeah, I decided not to go. I mean, what’s the point?”

“Mmm-hmm, I knew you couldn’t do it,” Celena hummed.

“Do what?”

“Parade around with a married man.”

Sharron smiled even wider, an honest girl caught sneaking her way out through the back door.

“You wasn’t raised that way,” her friend told her. “You was just trying your best to be like me.”

“I wasn’t trying to be like you. It just happened.”

“Yeah, sure it did, after you asked me a million questions about it. ‘Do married men really do it better?’” she teased.

“I did not ask you that,” Sharron responded, appalled by the insinuation.

“Yes you did ask me. Girl, you ask me shit, then you just up and forget about it. Maybe it’s that Memphis air that you grew up in,” Celena suggested. “You think you’re such a damn saint. You screwed this married man, didn’t you?”

“Why you gotta be all loud about it?” Sharron asked her. “Where are you calling me from? People might be listening to you.”

“Girl, they don’t know who the hell I’m talkin’ to, Sharron Francis.”

All Sharron could do was shake her head and grin it off. “You are so foul. You know that, right? And why do you keep comparing everything that I do to Memphis? I am my own person. If you took the time to visit Memphis with me, you would see that.”

Celena snapped, “I got no time for playing horseshoes in Tennessee. Okay?”

They broke out laughing, thinking of the fifteen-minutes-of-fame group Arrested Development and their popular song and references to Sharron’s home state.

Sharron decided to change the subject, right as Celena was announcing her need, and desire, to return to work. There was a young man involved in Sharron’s day who had inadvertently helped her make the final decision not to be naughty with Mr. Married Man.

“Do you know what this guy said to me today?”

“What?” Celena asked. She was all ears and anxious. “Hurry up. I gotta go.”

“Don’t rush me.”

“Well, come on. I gotta go already.”

“If you’re all in a rush, I’ll tell you later then.”

Celena became hesitant and annoyed. “How are you gonna start to tell me something and not finish? God, I hate when people do that! Just tell me what he said already!”

“Please deposit ten cents for the next two minutes!”

“See that? Damn! Hold on, girl.”

Celena slid another quarter into the pay phone.

“You have to get back to work, remember,” Sharron reminded her.

“Sharron, if you don’t tell me what you started, I’m gonna ring your damn neck when I get home! Don’t you know you could mess up my whole day like that?”

Sharron couldn’t believe it. Everything was so urgent to Celena; so right now, right here, right this minute or I’ll die!

“Do you need to know that bad? Dag!” Sharron changed her mind, deciding to keep it to herself. Celena didn’t need to know all of her business. She sure didn’t know all of Celena’s. It was nowhere near being a two-way street. It was more like a free-flowing one-way street on Sharron’s end, but a jam-packed four-lane expressway on Celena’s.

“You should have never started to tell me then,” her friend pouted.

Sharron thought quickly of a believable lie, just to get off the phone with her.

“I was walking down Kingshighway to catch the bus, and this guy rides up next to me and asks, ‘Are you Naomi Campbell’s cousin? You got the same high cheekbones and long legs.’”

Celena waited for more. That can’t be it! Then she complained. “Is that it? Girl, you made me waste my damn quarter! You don’t look nothing like Naomi Campbell. What, you’re both chocolate brown and tall? I think she’s five nine anyway. You’re only five six and a half. Call me when you got something better than that. Okay? God!

“Maybe I do need to visit Memphis,” she continued. “Because the things that impress you are so … so average. I can’t believe you.”

“Well, bye,” Sharron said, faking offense.

“Well, bye to you, too!”

When they hung up, Sharron thought of the real line that was expressed to her on Kingshighway that afternoon, and wondered how Celena would have responded to that one.

“A piece of me for a piece of you,” she repeated to herself with a grin.

She couldn’t help but chuckle out loud, tickled by it, like a feather stroking the romantic side of her mind. Was it because she was from Memphis? Or was it simply a good line? One thing was for sure, it made her reconsider her date with Mr. Married Man. Was she really getting a piece of him, or just a piece, period? What exactly did “a piece of yourself” mean anyway? Was it all physical? Or could it also be mental, spiritual, and emotional?

It was a perfect line. And he probably had no idea how perfect it was. “A piece of me for a piece of you.” Or maybe he needed to make a major adjustment and change it to “All of me for all of you.” Because she needed more than just a piece. Humans all needed more. Then again, maybe humans had somehow gotten greedy, and pieces of one another were all that we could realistically get, because we were all connected to other important parts: extended family, business associates, and longtime friends. Nevertheless, all of those thoughts running through Sharron’s mind made her wonder about the man. By the way:

“He wasn’t no ugly fish out the water, either. Maybe I would like a piece,” she told herself.

As for Celena, the girl thought she was the living definition of “hip” just because she was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, while Sharron was born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee. Celena acted as if St. Louis was Chicago, New York, and L.A. all rolled up into one. But who could blame her with all of the attention that she created for herself. Maybe it was because she was the middle sister of the three Myers girls. And not having the distinctive recognition of being the oldest or the baby, Celena made do as a rough-and-tumble tomboy and a real dynamo when it came to enjoying herself, especially while with men. Any man!

Yet she was still a tomboy to Sharron. Celena even worked as an airline caterer instead of at the gift shop, a food stand, or as a luggage monitor like most of the other women who worked at St. Louis International. And although she made more money as a caterer, you could hardly tell with the way that she spent it. You would think that the word “sale” had been erased, or had never been part of her vocabulary. So she was always broke; broke and borrowing to pay off steadily increasing credit card bills.

Sharron, through the hands of fate, had been forced to live as an only child, losing an older brother to crib death and a younger sister to a stillborn birth. At age nineteen, Sharron lost her mother to breast cancer. Yet, she never seemed glum about it, or at least not on the outside. She just learned to take life as it was given to her, while adding whatever she could along the way to make it better. Like the addition of Celena as her friend, a friend whom Sharron had met just six years ago when she had first moved to St. Louis, a wide-eyed teen, attending college away from home, “to grow up and experience the world,” her mother had told her, less than two years before dying. “And never let my health stop you.”

But her mother’s health and death did stop her. It stopped Sharron from having faith in her own future. It stopped her from focusing on school. And it often stopped her from finishing what she started, school included. Sharron would go cold turkey and just quit, tired of it all. Tired of struggling for or against something as uncontrollable as life, and as uncontrollable as love.

She loved Celena Myers though. Loved her like a sister. A sister who had helped her to reach for a new day and for new adventures to liven each day. And as misguided as she could be in her attempts to make life hold more substance than work, food, sleep, and sex, Celena was the truth. She was real, as real as they were opposites as friends, like so many other sister friends of the world. They were opposite but complementary. For as much as Sharron needed Celena for adventure, hope, and energy, Celena needed Sharron for stability, morality, and warmth. They were soul sisters like Ant and Tone were soul brothers, all just finding their way, however they could, to make it in life.

RRRIIINNNNGGG! …

… RRRIIINNNNGGG! …

As tempting as he still was, Mr. Married Man that is, the truth was that there was much more out there. There was always something, or some one who would be more fulfilling than naughty candy that eventually rotted you.

Convinced of it, Sharron simply walked away from the phone and returned to her room. She kicked off her shoes, plopped down on her perfect orthopedic bed, and picked up on page 132 of Lolita Files’s Scenes from a Sistah, where she had left off the night before. She realized that there were real meals out there. Pieces of something else to hold on to. And pieces of something else to love.