We had class in the library, and for twelve weeks, we couldn’t wait till Thursday nights. If our phone privileges fell on that night, we ignored them. She gave us notebooks and colored pens and pencils. Sometimes she’d sneak in some chewing gum. We’d chew all through class and then wrap our spent gum in paper and she’d collect it before she left so no one would know. And for two and a half hours, we’d write about anything we wanted to write about. I wrote poems about my daddy’s daddy who was a sharecropper, about my great-great-grandmother who escaped from slavery to live with the Indians in Florida, about growing up near the cane fields, about catching fiddler crabs, about missing Antwan, about the azure waters off Bimini and the funny little man who sold me a straw hat when we were there. I don’t know why, but it made me feel free. It took me out of that environment, and it seemed like whatever we wrote, Lolly somehow made us feel that we were on a par with Shakespeare or Langston Hughes. And sometimes she’d bring poems to read to us—poems by Nikki Giovanni or Gwendolyn Brooks or a guy who had been in prison named Ethridge Knight. When we read our own stuff aloud, Lolly would watch us with her big green eyes, and she’d nod or sometimes close her eyes like she was listening to music, some Grover Cleveland type stuff like my dad used to listen to. We thought she was an angel.
One night someone asked her what happened to her foot.
She laughed, took off her shoe and showed it to us. It wasn’t real! We were shocked. She rolled up her pants leg and showed us that the whole leg all the way up to her thigh wasn’t real.
“This is my Barbie leg,” she said. “I had cancer when I was fourteen years old, and they had to amputate my leg just above the knee.”
“Oh, my goodness,” someone asked. “Do you have those what-do-they-call-em pains where your leg used to be?”
Lolly nodded. “Phantom pains? Yes, sometimes it hurts like hell.”
We understood the idea of phantom pains. Some of us had pieces of our hearts amputated, and we hurt where there shouldn’t have been anything at all.
Lolly had big thick eyebrows, and when she pretended to be serious, her eyebrows would scrunch up and her freckled face would get crinkly and she made you laugh. Once she showed us that leg, some of us stopped feeling so damn sorry for ourselves. After all, we’d lost our freedom but we would gain that back eventually. She’d never have her leg again. And it made us love her all the more. So, we wrote and wrote, hoping that our abundance of words would make her happy and somehow they did seem to.
Then the program was over and she said she’d try to give us another program that summer. Lolly was true to her word. Only this time instead of writing poetry, we were going to put on a drama production.
Friday, May 20
The door to the Blazer opened. A pair of black stiletto heels landed on the pavement. The feet inside the shoes were nicely arched, the ankles slender, legs shapely. The owner of the legs locked and slammed the door. She looked in the rectangular side mirror at her reflection and noticed a smudge of lipstick outside her lip line, rubbed it off with her index finger, whispered, “what the hell” and turned to go inside the French restaurant where the party was being held. The night was warm as melted candle wax, and there were no stars to be seen in the gray-black sky. As she walked across the parking lot, she ran a finger over the cusp of her right ear, counting the earrings—a nervous habit.
Jen didn’t like parties. She usually drank too much, said something wildly inappropriate and wound up going home with someone who was married to someone else. All right, she had only pulled that stunt once, but it had turned into a two-year affair that ended that very day with a phone call from the wife, advising Jen that her attentions would no longer be needed.
“I have forgiven Daniel,” she said, “but I promise you, he won’t be making any more visits to Tallahassee to see you, and if you show up here in Atlanta, I will eviscerate you.” Then she hung up. Eviscerate was a lovely word, Jen thought; equivocate, eliminate, eviscerate. This all confirmed what a psychic in Cedar Key had told her a few weeks ago: “He will dump you like a load of dirt and never look back.”
So, after one failed marriage and an affair that was worse than a failure, here she was at the ripened age of thirty-two without a hell of a lot to show for herself except a ten-year-old Chevy Blazer, a suspended driver’s license and a cat with allergies. But she looked great in her little cobalt blue dress, and after a couple of glasses of whatever cheap wine they were serving at this thing, she wouldn’t care about the rest.
She was walking along the stepping stones toward the veranda of the rambling wooden house turned fancy restaurant when a voice called, “Dr. J.”
She wheeled around. Gary was trotting toward her.
“Doctor?” she asked. “I’m not a doctor yet. I’m still ABD, and when did we get so formal?”
“AB what?”
“All But Dissertation. It means I’ve done all the course work, passed the tests and now I have to write a damn tome to get the piece of paper.”
Gary smiled, and yes, he was disarming, distracting, slightly dismaying. He had been flirting with her relentlessly for the past three months, helping her with the young performers at the Shakespeare Festival, an event which provided the excuse for this “appreciation” party. He was also a student in her theater arts class at the university.
“Sorry . . . Jen. Wow. You look really nice. Great dress.”
“Thanks. I’ve had it forever.” Ex-husband Lyle bought it for her. No need to go into that.
“So, you came by yourself?” Gary asked, awkwardly. He was just an inch or two taller than she with a soccer player’s physique and soft pink lips that she had never really noticed before.
“Yes. And where’s your date?” she asked, gazing at him in the weak light from the restaurant.
“I don’t have one.” He looked around as if for his invisible playmate.
“Then let’s cause a scandal,” she smiled and tucked her hand through his arm. “Maybe I’ll get fired from my oh-so-high paying adjunct position. I’m sure Amanda Hathaway, my nemesis, will be here, and she’s dying for an excuse to make sure I get crossed off the list.”
“Why would you get fired? The semester is over, Professor Johanssen. I’m not your student anymore.”
“Then why are you calling me professor?” She let her body shift close to his. Together they walked up the steps onto the veranda of the 1920’s house that had been converted into the town’s showcase restaurant, Chez Pierre.
Sure enough Amanda Hathaway, the grand dame of the theater department, noticed them and said archly when she “accidentally” ran into Jen in the bathroom, “Isn’t it past your date’s bedtime?”
“I believe it is,” Jen had answered and swung out of the bathroom without a backward glance. Amanda Hathaway had been in several Broadway hits in her younger years. She was now a full professor of theater at the university and she had never accepted the idea of someone like Jen actually having a job there, too, even if it was a crappy part-time position. Jen managed to get excellent evaluations from her students, and she’d done the necessary course work. But Jen was a woman. An attractive woman with plenty of talent. And Amanda Hathaway couldn’t stand her.
**
“How old are you?” Jen asked Gary as she slid on top of his naked body and ran her tongue along the side of his salty neck.
“I’m twenty-one,” he said. Okay, she thought, that’s only eleven years difference. She spread her legs and straddled him, not