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 part 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.