“They aren’t really black if they live where you live.”
No, I had wanted to say, they’re just middle class enough to live here and just happened to be able to scrape up enough money for a down payment so they don’t have to live on top of other people in an apartment complex.
“Child, you could still be living in your own room right here in this house, you wouldn’t have a mortgage, and that city library you said you liked working at the most is just around the corner.”
That particular city library in Naptown was the first to turn me down for a full-time job after graduation, but I purposely screwed up the interview. I didn’t want to be working a stone’s throw from my mama! I might have picked up those stones and thrown them at her! It did, however, offer me part-time work at minimum wage; I accepted…and I endured three dreary years with Mama and Reesie’s three little monsters I collectively called “the Qwans”: J-Qwan, Ray-Qwan, and Qwanasia. If it weren’t for Daddy, I would have gone out of my mind.
“Mama, they didn’t want me for the position I deserved four years ago.”
“Well, there are plenty of other libraries around here, and maybe they have some openings now—”
“Look,” I had interrupted, “I’m blooming where God planted me, okay?” Mention “God” to Mama, and she at least takes a breath. “Staying and working the stacks in Indian-no-place at minimum wage was a waste of my time, Mama, and—”
“Excuse me?” she had interrupted. “Living with me and your daddy was a waste of time?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“It sounded like you said it to me.”
My mama only hears what she wants to hear. “I said that the job was a waste of my time. It was a waste of my degree and all that money you and Daddy paid for me to go to college. Look, Mama, I’m tired. I’ll talk to you later.” Then I had waited for her to get the final word.
And this time, Mama didn’t speak right away. That gave me time to walk down my hallway, clutching a cordless phone I paid way too much for, wearing an outfit I bought with my own money at regular price at a store Mama would never shop in, into my library. Yes, I have a library. What else do you do with a three-bedroom ranch (advertised as a “handyman special”) when you only need one bedroom? I know it’s redundant and stereotypical for a librarian to have her own library. But I’d much rather buy books and shelves than beds no one will ever sleep in. If Mama and Daddy threaten to visit someday, I may have to buy a sleeper sofa or something. I’ll probably end up just sleeping on that sofa since I’m leaving the other bedroom “fallow.” It’s my storage room now.
But I don’t want to think about that. Not the buying of the sofa—the visit from Mama and all her criticisms. She’ll look at my house as her house and spend the entire visit “fixing” everything I’ve done wrong.
“You make sure to be in church on Sunday,” Mama had said eventually. “Maybe you’ll meet somebody.”
Just once, I’d like to go to church only to meet Jesus. “Good night, Mama.”
“And go to a black church this time, Dee-Dee, okay?”
Click.
Oops. I had hung up on my mama. I had only been thinking about hanging up on her, and my finger had hit the button before I could stop it. The phone had rung a second later. “Sorry about that, Mama. My finger slipped and I—”
“Are you coming up for a visit or not? At least come up for New Year’s.”
I had taken a deep breath and closed my eyes. “No, Mama. As I’ve told you before, I have—”
“Your own life now. I know, I know.” Silence.
“And I only have one day of vacation left this year.” More silence. “I promise to come home for Thanksgiving.”
“Thanksgiving? That’s in…eleven months!”
“Bye, Mama.”
Click.
I had waited a few minutes, and the phone didn’t ring. After that, I had started shuffling cards and…here I am.
I really shouldn’t be playing solitaire at all. I should be making cookies for Santa, which only I would eat in the morning. I should be wrapping gifts (mainly for myself) or listening to carols or even looking out the window for the snow showers they’re predicting. Roanoke might have a white Christmas for the first time in anyone’s memory. But aren’t all Christmases white anyway? You have a white Jesus, white shepherds, white angels, and white stars. It’s a Caucasian Christmas. At the library, we’ve been listening to a country station that plays only Christmas music from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day. Our library isn’t completely quiet, because Kim “Prim” Cambridge, the library director says, “We have to compete with the mall, and they’re playing that music, too.”
Kim is…odd.
So, I’ve been subjected to eight hours of “Jingle Bell Rock,” “Silent Night,” “White Christmas,” and “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” Oh, and “The Christmas Song” sung by some white guy with a twangy voice. Where are Nat King and Natalie Cole? Or just Nat? Mmm. I could get used to Nat’s creamy-butter voice in my life. I doubt I’ll hear him on that station, though I did hear a little Luther Vandross one day. It surprised me so much when he belted out “O Holy Night” that I did a little chair dance right there at the reference desk.
Francine, the other Grade Four Clerk, had then had the nerve to ask if I needed some lotion for my behind. “You look all itchy and twitchy,” she had said.
White folks just don’t know a good chair dance when they see one.
I was listening to that station earlier tonight, but I’m all Christmased out. Those reindeer keep hitting grandma—because grandma is drunk—and the little drummer boy (all seventeen different versions, three every half hour) is giving me a headache with all that rum-pum-pum-pumming. I’m no Scrooge, but when you start hating “The First Noel”—the first Christmas song I learned to sing when I was five years old—you don’t have any Christmas spirit left.
I look at the gifts under my Charlie Brown Christmas tree, a remnant of a tree I actually bought at a Christmas tree lot. “Topped it off a real big one,” the man had told me, and I had talked him down to three dollars.
You know you’re horrible at celebrating Christmas when you talk a man down to three dollars for the top of a “real big one” and your tree fits in the front passenger seat of your Hyundai.
And, you know you’re lonely when there are only four gifts under that tree. Two are from anonymous coworkers (one from a gift exchange with the circulation staff, one from a gift exchange with the reference staff), and both are books: The Da Vinci Code and The Handmaid’s Tale. Neither book is my cup of tea, but they’ll look nice in my library. The third gift is a sweater I bought for myself at Lane Bryant. I had tried on several sweaters ranging from sizes ten to eighteen, and though my heart had said, “Give yourself a size ten, girl,” and my mind had said, “You’ll look just fine in a fourteen,” my body ordered me to wrap up the size eighteen. It actually fits me better, though I’m embarrassed that it fits me better. It will give me an excuse to get out after Christmas to exchange it…for a sixteen…or a fourteen, who knows? I may take a couple walks around the block tomorrow.
And the last gift really isn’t a gift at all. They’re books I get to review for the Mid-Atlantic Book Review, an on-line book club I’ve belonged to since I arrived in Roanoke. “We’re MAB, and we’re Mad about Books!” is our slogan. I didn’t make the slogan, and, for the most part, I’m “Mad at Books.” The trifling stuff they publish these days…At least these books will keep me busy for a week or so.
Until