Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore (9780385538398) Read online

  I stumbled out to my car and popped the trunk. There I kept a small leather bag with all my toiletries. I brought this into the house, found a guest toilet far from Marcia’s bedroom, and did my morning cleanup.

  At least I didn’t have to shave.

  Before leaving I peeked in on Marcia. With her defenses of nostalgia and gin she was able to appear somewhat in charge of her diminishing domain. But sleep took away her armor, leaving an old woman bereft of everything she’d lived for.

  I thought about the word bereft and remembered Jude Lyon. When Theon had told me that Jude was dangerous there was actual fear in his tone.

  I left a note on the kitchen table with my red phone number on it. Then I walked out into the weak sunshine of early morning, put the toiletry bag back into the trunk, and made it to the driver’s seat. There I closed the car door but had to stay still for a few moments in deference to my body’s memory of the alcohol.

  My head ached and there was a buzzing in my ear.

  I considered letting the seat back and napping for a while before driving off.

  A few more minutes passed.

  Then there came a tapping on the window.

  I turned and saw a uniformed policeman. He’d rapped on my glass with his nightstick. In the side-view mirror I could see at least two other cops approaching.

  I was that fifteen-year-old girl again, praying for a Theon Pinkney to help me escape.

  The cop motioned for me to roll down the window.

  An instantaneous chemical reaction purged me of the hangover.

  I opened the car door.

  “I said to put down the window.” The cop raised his voice enough for the tones to shift while he was speaking.

  “To do that I’d have to turn the ignition,” I said, back in full control of my tongue.

  “Get out,” he commanded.

  I smiled, swiveled, and stood.

  “Lift your hands at your side,” another policeman said.

  I’d had a hundred directors telling me what to do with my body parts. These were just two more.

  The first cop was white—they all were white—and male. He, the first one, went into the car while the second director turned me around, pushed my arms down behind my back, and put handcuffs on my wrists. I let my body go limp in order to minimize the bruising from the adrenaline-filled police.

  I was turned around, not gently.

  “You broke into this home,” a gray-headed policeman told me. He wore reflective sunglasses and had almost indiscernible gray stubble on his chin. His breath was both minty and sour.

  “No. I was visiting my mother-in-law,” I said. “Now I’m going home.”

  “Yeah, sure,” the cop said. “We got the call from a neighbor that a black woman was breaking into her neighbor’s home, taking things from the house and putting them in her trunk.”

  My big blue bag was in the trunk with my father’s gun inside. I had a carry permit in my wallet, but if the constabulary was not inclined to believe me then they didn’t have to believe my documents either.

  If my hair was long and white and my eyes the color of the ocean they would have recognized me immediately, maybe asked for an autograph. I wrote these words in my little journal not long after that encounter. Of course, now I realize that if I were a white woman driving a pale blue Jaguar the cops would have never put cuffs on me; they would have never been called to the scene or, if called, they might not have come.

  “Whose car is this?” the gray cop asked.

  “Mine.”

  “Where’s your license?”

  “Free my hands and I’ll get it for you.”

  “You’re under arrest,” he said, and was preparing to say more.

  “What’s the problem here?” a strong female voice inquired.

  I was surprised to realize that tone had come from Marcia Pinkney.

  She was wearing a brown housecoat and turquoise slippers. Her left hand clutched the housecoat at her breast and her right hand was held out to reiterate the question in case the officers were deaf—or dumb.

  “Ma’am,” Gray Cop said. “Is this your house?”

  “Of course. Why do you have my daughter-in-law in chains?”

  “Um,” he said. “Daughter-in-law?”

  “Answer my question, young man.”

  “We got a call from across the street that a black woman had broken into this house.”

  “And you were going to arrest her without even knocking on the door?”

  “We had to secure her first. Um. Are you okay, ma’am?”

  “Of course I am. Don’t you see me?”

  “Because we have her in custody. You don’t have to be afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid of my daughter-in-law, Mrs. Theon Pinkney. She’s the one who should be afraid. Four big men grabbing her and putting her in chains. What’s wrong with you?”

  The police stood there, slightly confused. I could see that they felt justified, even righteous, for grabbing me in Marcia’s driveway. There was no question in their minds that I was a criminal and that they were on the side of the Law.

  Marcia glanced at me then. We’d spent hours together but it was as if she hadn’t really gotten a good look at me until seeing the tableau in her driveway.

  “Take those chains from my daughter-in-law’s arms,” she said, sounding just a little like her son.

  The gray cop hesitated. He didn’t like being ordered around by a civilian. He was the one in charge. Maybe he considered arresting us both, but he knew that the witness across the street, the one who called about me, was probably still watching and that a patrol cop was subject to the same justice that he carried around on his shoulders like Superman’s cape.

  “Let her go,” he muttered.

  “But, Joe,” the cop who tapped on my window said.

  “Let her fuckin’ go.”

  The first cop turned me around and took off the cuffs. I resisted rubbing my wrists—I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction.

  “I know there’s something wrong here,” Gray Cop said to Marcia. “And I will be back.”

  “There’ll be no need for that, young man,” Marcia said, looking up into the reflection in the policeman’s shades. “Because what’s wrong here is the same thing that’s wrong with you. Just look in a mirror and you will see that like I see it now.”

  I went to the passenger’s seat and popped the trunk again. I went to my big blue bag and pulled out my wallet.

  “Do you still want to see my license?” I asked the senior cop.

  “Let’s get outta here,” he said to his men.

  They turned and walked to their cars, gave me a parting warning look, and drove out of the little cul-de-sac, so many angry crows humiliated at being chased by a little girl with a stick.

  “Is it always like this?” Marcia asked me after the cops were gone.

  “I haven’t been out of my comfort zone for a long time, Marcia. Usually I’m in a place where everybody knows me and everybody treats me with respect. They might not mean it; they might not like me, but at least they smile and pretend.”

  Across the circle a white woman came out on the porch of her ranch-style home. She was tall and thin, wearing a burgundy robe decorated with a pattern that I couldn’t make out from the distance.

  “I don’t understand what you mean,” Marcia said.

  “What just happened here is how people really feel,” I said. “Your neighbor over there saw a black woman fooling around in the front yard and then go into your house.…”

  “Old Nancy Bierny should mind her own business,” Marcia said with venom.

  “You would’a done the same thing, Marcia. If you saw a black woman goin’ in and outta Nancy’s at six in the morning, you would’a called the cops and said that someone was acting suspiciously in front of a neighbor’s house. You would have been scared and the woman you saw would have been presumed guilty. That’s the way it is in the straight world where the good folks live. That’s par
t of the reason Theon left. He didn’t want to be associated with the world you and your husband lived in—the world where he got beaten and you went to hide in another part of the house.”

  Marcia put a hand on my wrist.

  “Please stop,” she said. “I can’t stand to think about it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Sorry. I left my number on the kitchen counter. If you want to come see Theon’s body the night before, you just call. I got that cell phone on me all the time now.”

  Marcia pulled her hand away from my wrist and put it over her mouth. Maybe she didn’t trust herself to speak.

  I know if I were her that I wouldn’t have known what to say.

  There’s a little shop on Robertson just north of Venice Boulevard. I’d not been inside before but whenever I drove past I thought that the kind of clothes they sold would be perfect for my mother. It was called Phyllis Designs.

  I was thinking about that shop while at LeRoy’s Chicken and Waffle House eating more calorie-rich food. I ate, wrote these words in my little journal, and reread a few chapters of Kindred by Octavia Butler. In between phrases I paused, thinking of the little dress shop.

  Hours passed as I sat at the low wall of the outside patio, drinking coffee refills and turning from one project to the next. The waiter made me pay at one point. I suppose he thought I was some kind of thief who would try to get away without paying for the meal.

  But that didn’t bother me. I was thinking about Marcia and the gray cop, my father’s gun and a new wardrobe for a new life.

  “Can I help you?” asked a tall white woman in an orange one-piece dress.

  The dress was designed for a woman younger than her fifty-something years but she probably looked better in it than she would in more age-appropriate garb.

  She had brown hair and like-colored eyes and her teeth were too perfect to be her own. She was thin, almost skinny, and did yoga or Pilates daily, I was sure.

  She wore little makeup and didn’t give off the aura of sexuality. She strove to be attractive but kept the gate to her garden locked.

  I had these thoughts because the woman was checking me out with the same intensity. She saw my fake breasts and tight body under the fat woman’s yellow-and-blue dress. She saw my age and the disproportionate concentration of experience in my eyes. She saw also that my blue bag was a real Thimera, a ten-thousand-dollar accessory that could be purchased only at a single outlet on Rodeo Drive.

  “I’ve always loved this shop when I drove by,” I said. “So today I decided to come in.”

  The shop woman couldn’t keep the hint of a sneer from her lips.

  “Most of my clothes are for older women,” she said. “A young girl like you has less to hide and more to be proud of.”

  “You’re Phyllis?”

  The excitement in my tone diminished the sourness on the designer’s lips.

  I understood Phyllis in that instant. She came from that very neighborhood, probably went to the high school across the street. She was a smart child and well-heeled. Phyllis didn’t want to be just another housewife and was a generation or so too early to have been allowed into the world of high finance. So she decided to be an artist: a clothes designer. But try as she might the world of runways and fashion models was also beyond her. And so her husband … or maybe he divorced her for a younger partner, and so probably her parents bought her this shop. It was a hit among women of a certain age, women who wanted to show off but still had a little something to hide.

  Phyllis’s designs were craftier than the clothes made for New York and Parisian models. A thirty-three-year-old mother of two with fifteen extra pounds and less than perfect skin could don one of this shop’s offerings and go to a church or temple fund-raiser with confidence and even hints of beauty.

  “It’s just a small shop,” Phyllis said, trying to figure out if she wanted me to leave or to sit and have coffee.

  “My husband died a few days ago,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you,” I said, casting my eyes around the small, clothes-crowded shop. “It was sudden and very sad, doubly so because we had grown apart and now we’ll never be able to resolve those differences.”

  “What’s your name?” the conflicted storeowner asked.

  “Sandy. Sandy Peel, but my married name was Pinkney.”

  “You speak so well,” the older white woman said to the young black chick. “You must be well educated.”

  “No. When I was a little girl my father read to me and then, when I got older, he’d have me read to him for an hour every night. I think I must have combined the love for my father and reading and so, even though I dropped out before high school, I’ve always read hard books.”

  “Why’d you drop out?” my new potential best friend asked.

  “After my father was murdered it was the only thing I could do.”

  “Murdered? Oh my God.”

  “In a way,” I said, “what’s happened with Theon, my husband, was the same as with my father. I cut my hair and threw away all my old clothes and my old life. And I’m here today to get new clothes to go along with my new life.”

  “What’s that?” Phyllis asked. “What is your new life?”

  “I really don’t know, Phyllis. A lot of that has to do with you, I guess. I want to be something different.”

  “What are you now?” Phyllis Amber Schulman asked.

  “I think,” I said, “I think I’m a little lost.”

  “Why don’t we sit and have some tea?”

  “My husband and I lived a kind of wild lifestyle,” I was saying to the clothes designer.

  Phyllis had hung a Closed sign in the window of her shop, pulled the shade, and locked the door.

  “Drugs?” she asked.

  “Everything,” I said. “I can’t really go into details but we were way out there.”

  “And now that he’s gone you see that there was something wrong with your life?”

  “No,” I said after a few moments honestly considering her question.

  “Really?” Her question contained no value judgment. She seemed truly interested in who I was.

  “I loved my friends and their lives before Theon died and I still do now that he’s gone,” I said. “It’s just that I can see now that I have to move on. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I used to have this boyfriend named Gary,” she said. “He was a surfer and I was his girl, at least when we were in the same place. We did a lot of drinking and cocaine. I did things with him in the bed that I would never admit to.

  “Gary loved me harder than either of my children, my husband, or my parents ever did. But …”

  “What?” I put down my teacup and took this stranger’s hand in mine.

  “One day I woke up in this shack in Maui. Gary was unconscious from all the coke we snorted, and there were flies buzzing around the sink. I knew right then that Gary would never change and that I had to leave him or go down with him.

  “I called my parents and they bought me a ticket. I didn’t even leave Gary a note.”

  “Did you ever see him again?”

  “When our friend Mike died,” Phyllis said, nodding, “eight years later. We bumped into each other at the service. We just said hi and asked how each other was doing. We were both married with kids. He owned a surfboard shop. Still does.”

  “Did you feel like you made a mistake leaving him?” I asked. I really wanted to know.

  Phyllis shook her head and looked at me with sad eyes. “No. We would have partied our way into early graves. But you know, I’ve never had anything in my life that felt as good as it did when I was with him. I sit in here sometimes talking to women just like me and I find myself wanting to hurry them out so I can call Gary up and beg him to come back. The only problem is that there’s no place to come back to.”

  I squeezed her hand.

  “So you see, Sandy, I know what you’re talking about.”

  I left with seven dresses, four
skirts, two pant suits and two pairs of pants, nine blouses, various kinds of nonthong underpants, bras, hose, three pairs of low-heeled shoes, two hats, and a crazy wristwatch with a wide red band and garnet stones for the hours. The colors we chose were burgundy, dark gold, navy blue, lime, white, and tan. There were a few flower prints, and some pinstripes, but on the whole the colors were solid and uninteresting. They fit me well enough but the sizes were appropriate to my form. Phyllis held on to the BBW blue-and-yellow dress and the tattered tennis shoes to throw away. I left the store wearing a navy skirt and a shimmery (but far from vinyl) gold blouse. I wore no hose because it was a hot day, and my shoes were blue with hemp-corded wedge heels.

  I hadn’t felt sexier nor less attractive in years.

  Phyllis saw me to the door and said good-bye. I nodded at her and she grabbed me in a passionate hug.

  “I’m so happy that you came here to me,” she said after reluctantly letting go.

  “Really? Why?”

  “Most of the time people come in here to hide something or to make themselves look better than they feel and to feel better than they look. They want to spend some money or talk about their husbands and boyfriends, their kids. I guess I kind of hate them. Here I am trying to make something, to create something, and you’re the first customer I’ve ever had who wants to use my clothes the way I feel about them.”

  There were tears in her eyes. I allowed her to hug me again and then she kissed my cheek.

  Phyllis made me feel normal. Her story about the debauched surfer and life outside the life she was supposed to live was really very close to my experience. She was a hint, an omen that there was a place for me somewhere else.

  I had the big blue bag-holster open and on my lap as I pulled into the driveway of my huge, soulless home. There were no dangers, however, no men lying in wait.

  I went straight to the kitchen table and began writing about my afternoon. Phyllis was very much on my mind. She was like a spider who had chosen her permanent corner and from there wove her webs. The crevice she lived in was somewhere in the Garden of Eden but she didn’t realize that. Her talent was subtle but exquisite and the world would never know. I was a self-educated thinker but people in my world rarely realized it. And those who did resented me or wanted to fuck me in the rectum.