“Sing it on. Sing it on,” Cassandra said. “I remember the first time I heard Rhonda sing that.”
“At that talent show, right?” Anita said.
“Right,” Cassandra said. “People started standin up and shit and cheerin and everything. I felt sorry for the other people who had to come on after her, cause nobody wanted to hear em. This one girl came on and she was tryin to play the guitar and people started callin for Rhonda, and this girl just gave up and left.”
“I paid my money and didn’t get a good seat,” Melanie said. She had turned the radio volume down, but she continued trying to get a clear station. “Yall better get all the lookin you can at Rhonda now, cause when she gets famous, you won’t be able to get within a hundred feet of her. She won’t even remember your name.”
“You don’t know what you talkin about, girl,” Cassandra said. “Rhonda’s gonna stay the same. I know her. You don’t even know her all that well.”
“They all change, and Rhonda’s gonna change the most. Move out to Georgetown or Chevy Chase, if she still livin round here, and be with all them white people.”
“Oh, fuck you, Melanie!” Cassandra said.
“Fuck you back, Cassandra. I gotta right to say what I think.”
“Not in my car, and not when you don’t know what you talkin about. And if you don’t like it, you can get out and walk your sorry ass back home.”
Melanie became quiet.
“Sing another song, Melanie,” Anita said. “Sing ‘My Guy’ again.”
“No, thas all right,” Melanie pouted, turning off the radio and folding her arms.
“She sound like a gotdamn cat anyway,” Cassandra said.
The birds in their trees continued to make a racket as they turned off 11th onto P Street. Just before 9th, they passed a group moving boxes and furniture into an apartment building across from Shiloh Baptist.
At the light at 9th, Gladys, looking back, asked if Cassandra could back up. “I think thas Joyce and Pearl,” she said. Cassandra backed up until she was in front of the pickup with a used couch in it. “Hey! Hey!” Gladys shouted to a man with a load of boxes. “That Joyce Moses in there?” The man nodded, and Cassandra parked the Hudson behind the truck.
Upstairs, in the front apartment on the second floor, they found Joyce Moses and her friend Pearl Guthrie, heads in kerchiefs, standing in the middle of a nearly empty living room lit by one naked light bulb. Practically everyone at Cardozo knew them — two pregnant girls who had dropped out of school to pool their church mice resources in an effort to make the best head start for themselves and their babies.
“Where the damn party?” Gladys asked.
“Wherever it is, you ain’t invited,” Pearl said, and the two embraced. Cassandra embraced Joyce, took Joyce’s blouse in two fingers, shook it and wanted to know why she wasn’t showing at two months “like all the other cows.” Melanie, after her hellos, went snooping in all the rooms of the apartment. Anita knew only Pearl and held back, standing in the doorway.
The movers were Joyce’s father and Pearl’s father and their relatives and friends. They were finishing up with the couch. Pearl, still with one arm around Gladys, pointed to the place where she and Joyce wanted the couch, and the men set it in place. The room still looked empty. “We gonna make the rounds of Goodwill and Salvation Army tomorrow,” Pearl said, seeing that Gladys noticed how empty the room was.
“If everything where yall want it,” Joyce’s father said, “I’d best be gettin back.” He took his daughter in his arms and he kissed her forehead.
“Tell Mama I’ll try to call her tomorrow,” Joyce said. “Tell her I hope she feelin better soon.”
“She’ll be feelin better tomorrow just before you call. You got my word on that,” her father said.
Pearl’s father gave her some money and embraced her. Then, as if embarrassed with others about, he withdrew and simply held her elbow. Though the room was full of people, there were no sounds except the movement of feet and the noise from outside. The other men had already gone downstairs, and Joyce’s father and Pearl’s father soon followed them. Joyce and Pearl went to the curtainless window to watch them go away. For three or four minutes, as if they had completely forgotten that they had visitors, they stood watching at the window. Then Pearl began to cry and Joyce, once more, told her that it would be all right. “Hush,” she said. “Hush now.”
“Where the hell was them sorry men a theirs?” Cassandra wanted to know when the four were back in the car. “Where the hell was Rufus?”
“I know he was at football practice the other day, cause Dwayne told me he was,” Melanie said. “And nobody in the world know where Kelvin at.”
“I feel like shootin both a them,” Gladys said.
“I’m all for that,” Cassandra said, honking at the slow driver in front of her, “cept for that damn it-take-two-to-tango rule.”
The sun had set by the time they reached 8th and H streets Northeast, and after they had crossed East Capitol Street, Cassandra pulled over to ask directions to Anacostia of a young man.
“Oh, he was sooo cute,” Melanie said, when they were on their way again. “But he not as cute as Dwayne.”
“Thas all you ever think about is some dick,” Cassandra said. Anita and Gladys laughed.
“I’ll have you know me and Dwayne are engaged,” Melanie said.
“Anita knows how to sing. She got a good voice,” Gladys said, wanting something to take the image of her friends standing at the window out of her mind.
“I don’t sing all that well,” Anita said. “I just sing in the choir.”
“Oh, oh. Better cut out all that cussin, ladies,” Cassandra said. “We got one of them choir girls in the car. Where your Bible, honey?”
“I just sing in the choir,” Anita said again. “Nobody sings like Rhonda.”
“You got that right, sugar,” Cassandra said. “And for your information, Melanie, Rhonda went down to sign some contracts today and she already offered me a job with her. Any kind of job I want. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”
“She gonna quit school?” Anita said.
“You kiddin? Her father wouldn’t let her do that in a million years, singin contract or no contract.”
Despite the heavy traffic of people going home from work, they found Gladys’s father without much trouble. He lived in a small house on Maple View Place, down the road from St. Elizabeths and not far from Curtis Brothers furniture store. Melanie wanted to stop at the store to see the giant chair they had in the parking lot, but Cassandra told her to get a good look as they drove by because that was as close as Melanie was going to get.
Gladys was out of the car as soon as they stopped and refused anyone’s help with the boxes. She put the small box of pictures under her arm as she carried the larger boxes to the front porch. The woman her father lived with opened the door and helped her take in the boxes, then the woman closed the door. The other girls got out of the car. Melanie, seeing three young men harmonizing up the street, sauntered up to them, and Cassandra and Anita sat on the hood of the car, with Cassandra smoking a Chesterfield and Anita thinking that this was the first time in her life she was seeing Anacostia.
“My grandfather used to say people in Anacostia still lived with chickens and cows,” Anita said after a while.
“Shows you how much you know: They don’t allow em to do that anymore,” Cassandra said. She flicked the cigarette butt into Gladys’s father’s yard. “Even if they did, it wouldn’t tell you much — Anacostia people the best people I ever met in the whole world, chickens or no chickens.” She counted how many cigarettes she had in the pack and decided to hold off on the next smoke. “My mama and daddy came from Anacostia, then they had to go cross the fuckin river to live and get killed in some car crash.” She changed her mind and lit up another Chesterfield, blew out the match, and flicked it into the yard.