Authors: Dorothy Phaire
Although she was only twenty-eight years old, Brenda’s body ached at the end of each day. Sometimes while sitting at a red light on her way home from work she’d let her eyelids drop and flutter for a few moments just to capture a brief semblance of sleep. But, Brenda forgot all about those complaints whenever she felt the warmth and hardness of Jerome’s body against hers. When she lifted up her head to check the time again, she realized she was going to be late for work. Brenda quickly untangled herself from Jerome’s arms and leaped out of the bed. He held out his hand to her to beckon her to come back to bed. “Where you goin’ baby?” he said while squinting his eyes to look up at her.
“It’s time to get up. You know I gotta make
Justin’s bottles, do our lunches, and fix breakfast,” she said firmly, and picked up her robe from the floor and put it back on.
“Ten more minutes, baby,” he pleaded, “Then I’ll get up too and help you. Promise.”
Brenda could see his erection under the covers as he lifted both outstretched arms toward her. She knew exactly where this would lead if she did what he asked. She shook her head, realizing that somebody in the family had to be responsible. “Naw, that’s okay. I’ll be half way done with my choirs by the time you get out the bathroom and stop looking at yourself in the mirror,” she said playfully, while headed towards the bedroom door to leave. Just then the telephone ringing stopped her. Jerome quickly reached for the receiver before she could get to it. Brenda waited to find out who was calling.
“Yeah,” he said in his still groggy voice. After a few moments of silence he placed the receiver back.
“Who was that?” she asked, cautiously.
“Hell if I know. They hung up. Maybe one of your boyfriends,” he said teasingly and threw a pillow at her.
Brenda ducked, picked up the pillow, and threw it back at him. It landed on top of his head. “Yeah, right, Sleeping Beauty. Just don’t get too comfortable. I’ll be back to wake you up in twenty minutes.”
Brenda left their bedroom and closed the door behind her. She walked down the hallway to the nursery to check on the baby before going downstairs to the kitchen. Justin or Baby Buddha as they called him, slept peacefully on his back. Everybody said Justin had the serious look, chunky cheeks and portly belly of a statue of Buddha that you often found sitting on a shelf in one of those Chinatown novelty shops. But, unlike those statues of a bald Buddha, Justin had a head full of soft, dark-brown curls and long eyelashes. He really should have been a girl, she thought, smiling down at him as he slept. After a while, the nickname Baby Buddha stuck. An empty bottle sat on the nightstand where Jerome had left it last night after feeding and rocking their son to sleep. Jerome may have his faults, but nobody could say that he wasn’t a good daddy. She picked up the dirty bottle and bent
over to kiss Justin, detecting the smell of milk and his own unique baby scent. His sweet smell permeated through the entire room as well as wafted through his baby clothes even after they had been washed, folded, and tucked away in the dresser. Brenda loved his baby smell. She watched his eyelids flutter as he slept. She didn’t know what she’d do if anything ever happened to her sweet baby boy or to Jerome for that matter. Her priest had taught the parishioners during Sunday Mass that God gives his believers trials and tribulations in life to overcome, but God won’t give his children more hardships than they could endure. Brenda believed what her priest had said, but she didn’t want to be tested like Job in the Bible. Losing either her son, Justin or her husband, Jerome would be one tribulation that she would never be able to bear.
B
renda left Justin sleeping in his crib and went downstairs to the kitchen to start making Justin’s bottles and to prepare bag lunches for work. She put a huge pan of water on top of the stove to boil. While she waited for the water to boil, she washed out the stack of dirty bottles in the sink with a bristled bottle cleaner. Next, she laid out slices of white bread on the counter top and spread the slices with mayonnaise and mustard, then layered extra pieces of deli ham and American yellow cheese on Jerome’s sandwich, while only giving herself one thin slice of ham and Swiss cheese. When she heard the water boiling, she placed the bottles into the pan of boiling
water to disinfect them. Only three more months left to do this, sighed Brenda. Then Justin would be six months old, and she’d no longer have to sterilize bottles and boil his drinking water for five minutes to kill any germs lurking in the tap water. She couldn’t wait. That would be one less thing she’d have to do in the mornings.
She dropped the sandwiches into the two open lunch bags, along with a piece of fruit in each one and a handful of chocolate chip cookies in Jerome’s bag. Jerome loved his sweets, she thought with a smile. In that regard and in many other ways, he was nothing but a big kid. He’d probably try to trade his apple at lunchtime for a Hostess Twinkie.
Although she didn’t really mind her job as Dr. Hayes’ office assistant, Brenda hated leaving her baby with a day care provider after her three month maternity leave ran out. She wanted to stay home and take care of Justin during his crucial first year. But staying home was a luxury she could not afford, and she had no trusted family member to look after her son while she worked. True, her mother was free during the day, but Irene Kenmore Adams had made it perfectly clear before Brenda even got pregnant that she had already performed her maternal duties by raising her and that was enough. As she told Brenda right from the start, her full-time babysitting days were over for good. With a documented age of 58 years old on her birth certificate and a fabricated age of 48, Brenda knew that her mother was not and never would be the grandmotherly type. In fact, she had told Brenda that she planned to teach Justin to call her Miss Irene whenever he started to talk. Grandma, Granny, Gran, Nana, not even Grandmother Adams suited her mother. According to Brenda’s mother, she considered herself too young and vivacious to be a grandmother and she didn’t want to be out with her grandson one day and have him mistakenly call her Grandma. Brenda recalled her mother’s answer three months ago when out of desperation she had asked her to watch Justin when she went back to work.
“Sweetie, I’m not interested in going back to changing dirty diapers or making
bottles. Honey, you know that’s not my thing,” said Irene. “You’re a grown woman now. My maternal duties are over.”
Brenda hadn’t bothered to point out to her mother that, other than giving birth to her, she had performed very few ‘maternal duties’ as she called it. In fact, it was Bengi, their Philippino live-in nanny who had fed Brenda from the time she was two weeks old, clothed her, combed her hair, and took her to the playground while her mother stayed home and watched soap operas or ran out during the day on appointments. When it was time for Brenda to start kindergarten, it was Bengi, not her mother, who walked her to the bus stop everyday and was there to meet the school bus when it was time to come home in the afternoon. And, it was Bengi who prepared the family meals, cleaned the house, and taught Brenda how to say the rosary beads at night before she went to bed.
Brenda’s mother had been baptized as an Episcopalian, but she did not practice any form of organized religious worship, and her father was simply indifferent to religion. So Brenda grew up under the influence of her nanny’s religion of Catholicism. Guided by Bengi, a devout Catholic, Brenda went to Catechism Classes and to Mass on Sundays, and sometimes even during the week. Thanks to Bengi’s arrangements with her priest, she was baptized as a baby. At seven years old she received the Eucharist during her First Communion. At eleven, she was anointed by the bishop with holy oil when receiving the Confirmation Sacrament. For the most part her mother was indifferent to having Brenda raised as a Catholic. The only admonishment that Brenda recalled hearing her mother tell Bengi, more than once was, “My little girl better not grow up to be a nun or I’ll come find you and skin you alive, Bengi!” Whatever Brenda knew about being a good mother and a good Catholic, Brenda had learned from her nanny. Whatever she knew about what not to do and how not to behave, she had learned from watching her mother.
Brenda no longer bothered to update her mother about Justin’s latest milestone or developments because she didn’t seem the least bit interested in baby babbling. The discussion would usually veer into a negative, one-sided conversation about Jerome instead. In fact, Brenda recalled the day she announced her pregnancy to her parents. Her father was thrilled with her news just as she suspected he would be. But as for her mother, instead of congratulations, her mother’s only reply in a dry voice was, “
Now you’re stuck with him.”
Brenda didn’t want to hear her mother’s attacks of “
that man’s not good enough for you
” and “
I don’t trust him
.” She got enough of that from her girlfriends, Cha-Cha and Veda. The last telephone conversation with her mother was still fresh in her mind, where Irene had told her daughter, “
Darling you know your daddy and I would help you financially with the baby if you would just come to your senses and kick that loser to the curb. We’d even help you get your own apartment
.” Brenda knew the financial help would only materialize if she did exactly what her mother wanted.
During those stressful telephone conversations, Brenda never got a word in, so she learned not to even try to interject a comment. She held the phone to her ear and listened in silence as her mother continued her rant. “Sweetheart, I know you better than you know yourself. Ever since you were a little girl you always wanted to fix things. But baby girl, Jerome Antonio Johnson, is something that nobody, not even God Almighty himself, can fix.”
Brenda would hear cosmetic jar tops being unscrewed and the clanking sound of bottles being placed on her mother’s glass top vanity table. She could picture her mother pausing in mid-sentence just long enough to pluck a few stray hairs from her well-shaped, waxed eyebrows. “Honey, you deserve a man who’ll treat you like a queen. Not like some third string fiddler in the back of the orchestra. You listen to your Mama, darlin’—that good-for-nothing man will never be satisfied with one woman, not even a good woman like you.”
“Uhm um, yes Mama.” Brenda had grunted, only half listening. But inattentiveness never deterred Brenda’s mother from speaking her mind.
“Now, you take me for instance. I wouldn’t have anything to do with any man unless he treated me like a queen on a pedestal. Your father has always been faithful and good to me. Though to be honest, I may not have always deserved it,” she chuckled to herself before continuing, “ …but that’s what you call real love and not someone who’s just using you. Darling, you know I don’t mean to make you feel worse than you probably already do being married to the wrong man, but baby, I’d be negligent as a mother if I didn’t help you see the obvious and share my
forty-nine
years of life’s wisdom from surviving hardships.”
Now that was a joke, thought Brenda. Her mother had never worked hard or had to survive anything in her life. After about ten minutes of this long-winded conversation, it would become too much for Brenda to listen to. She would say a brisk good-bye and hang up the phone. Brenda didn’t want to think about her mother anymore. She reached under the cupboards and pulled out a large iron skillet. She pressed several slices of bacon close together into the pan. Once the grease from the bacon started to sizzle in the hot pan, she cracked open two eggs next to the bacon. Jerome liked his eggs cooked in the same pan with the bacon drippings. He said it was a waste of good bacon flavoring to use a different pan for cooking eggs. He told her that Mama Etta always saved the fat from her bacon drippings and the grease from frying chicken in a Crisco can. Brenda had to ignore all the healthy, low-fat cooking tips she had learned by watching the Food
Network channel on television. Jerome wanted her to cook the old fashion way, like his grandmother cooked.
Jerome lumbered out of bed, stood up and stretched before getting down on the floor and doing 50 push-ups, just to get the blood flowing. He could smell the bacon cooking and the rich aroma of coffee brewing downstairs. He leaped up from the floor and headed for the bathroom to take a quick shower. He turned on the radio to his favorite rap and R & B station that Brenda never bothered to listen to. Standing in the shower with the hot water massaging his hairless chest and the music pumping, it felt good to have a job to go to in the morning and a good woman to come home to at night. Jerome realized how lucky he was to come right off the streets from being unemployed into a fulltime driver position with good benefits. That was rare. Again, he had his Uncle Ike to thank for it. Uncle Ike had been working at UDS for twenty years and had become a supervisor eight years ago. He had tried to get his nephew on at UDS last year but Jerome had been rejected.
While Jerome had easily passed the physical, the drug test was another matter. When the company’s nurse asked him if he was drug-free he recalled what his uncle had once told him, always be honest with your doctor and your lawyer. The woman doing the drug testing looked like a nurse. That was close enough. So Jerome told the nurse that he had used drugs once around Christmas time. The holidays were always rough for him, especially when you don’t have any money he explained. He assumed that he would pass a drug test because he knew it took 72 hours for drugs to dissipate out of your system. Jerome had not taken drugs for thirty days at the time of the test. What he didn’t realize was that drug-free at UDS meant clean for one year. He did not get the job that time because of this technicality. But that was the past and Jerome didn’t want to dwell on the past. Six months ago Uncle Ike had seen to it that he got another chance at UDS and this time he passed the screening. With Uncle Ike’s connections, he got hired. This time he vowed it would be different. This time it was for keeps. Brenda was a forgiving woman but even he realized she was tired of his relapses and his lies.