"Lorraine, he beats me," I state, barely raising my voice above a whisper as I lower my head in shame.
"What do you mean, he beats you? The man slaps you one time and you think you are Tina Turner!" she harrumphs as she looks at me with disdain.
"It wasn't a little slap!" I snap as I snatch off my Gucci shades and pull my hair up out of my face. My left eye is black and blue, and there is a purple bruise that runs down my caramel-colored skin, hidden by my long hair. I had tried to cover it with makeup, but my experience in the makeup department is limited.
"Child, that ain't nothing. It's your fault anyway!" she says angrily as she pulls my hair from my face.
"How is it my fault?" I nearly scream.
"You don't treat that man right. He gives you everything a woman could ask for, and what does he get in return? Nothing! Every time I turn around, you and that Story girl are off somewhere shopping. I tell you all the time, Rain, cook that man something, keep his house clean. Have some babies for him. But noooo. You would rather hang out than make your man happy, and now that he done hit your ass one time, you talking about a divorce. I would have killed to own my own home at nineteen years old. I never see you in a car older than a year old, and your clothes are made by people whose name even you can hardly pronounce! You must be on that shit," she yells.
"I didn't ask for none of it. Then again, I didn't really have a choice, did I?" I question her.
"With all the things that you have, how could you be unhappy? Do you know how many girls out there would die for just one damn day in your shoes?" she asks.
"Yeah, one day in my shoes and they would probably die!" I answer.
"You talking nonsense!" she replies dismissively. I just stare at her.
Just because he seems to give me the world don't mean shit! Hell, I deserve everything I get from that son of a bitch, and probably more. Of course, she wouldn't see it that way. She has always seen an angel when she looks at him. From the first day I met him, she has been kissing his ass. Hell, she acts like I am talking about divorcing her. I guess, in a sense, I would be. She knows that if I even thought of divorcing Entebbe, her monthly allowance would stop before the words had even left my mouth. I wonder what she would do if I asked him to stop it, just out of spite? I know that he only tolerates her because she is the cause of him and I being together, and he don't give a damn about her, just like he don't give a damn about me.
I don't know why I decided to bring her my business. I can never do anything right by her. I have never been able to, and that hasn't changed in the five years that it has been since I left her house. Although my sense of pride has kept my mouth shut for the last five years, there's no way she hasn't seen my pain. Granted, I spend more time in Plant City with the Johnsons, but she is my mother! I know that Mama Johnson wants to ask me about my bruises. Every time I show up with bruises, no matter how hard I try to conceal them, her hugs are a little longer on those days. Sometimes, I catch her wiping tears when she thinks that I am not looking. When I see this, it hurts so much, I always vow that I will hide them a lot better next time, but she still knows when I am hiding something, even without her having to come right out and ask me. Like I said, though, the only person important to Lorraine Jenkins is, and always has been, Lorraine Jenkins. I guess you always hope that someone will wake up and smell the coffee. If she hadn't been my mother, my life would have been so different.
Looking back over my life, there is one decision I will regret making for the rest of my life. I made the decision to put my mother first, and it has cost me dearly. It almost cost me my best friend, my youth and childhood, and it most definitely almost cost me my life. I was only fourteen when I made this decision. I know now that I couldn't have known better if I had tried. I had always been an obedient child, so although I knew that it couldn't be right, I decided to make sure that my mother could continue as she had been doing since my birth, being a whore.
Today, the buck stops here. I don't care how people look at me. I don't care if I lose the lifestyle I have grown accustomed to. I don't even care if I have nothing left but my name. I really don't care. It's time for me to be happy. If she can't swim, she needs to stay out of the water, because from this day forward, I am thinking of only me. I don't know what the defining factor was, because I have been saying the same thing for years now, but I think it was her stupid comment that it was my fault that Entebbe beats me. What woman deserves such treatment? Hell, my dad never put his hands on her, and honestly, if he had, I would have still hailed him my hero!
"So what, you gonna sit there and ignore me? You can't come up with a single plausible defense, so don't even try," she says as she waits impatiently for me to answer a question that I don't even remember. I rack my brain and can't remember anything except her telling me how lucky I am to be the victim of spousal abuse.
"Huh?" I ask as I give myself a small mental shake in my effort to concentrate on her. The sun is killing me, though. Although my right eye is fine, the effort to see with just one is taxing. My head feels like I have had nothing to drink except Hennessey, straight with no chaser. My throat feels so dry, and it feels as if rocks are sitting in the bottom of my stomach.
"See, this is what I am talking about. If you are so inattentive to me, what must you be putting that poor man through?" she questions, pinning me underneath her icy glare. I remember how, as a child, I dreaded that look with a passion. Whenever I was treated with it, I would damn near become a mute. That is how afraid I was of Lorraine and disappointing her. Right now, though, all I can think is, "What in the heck was I going through to think that she would understand?"
"Let me ask you something. Since you all in the mood to talk, when you talked me into marrying Entebbe, was your life really in danger, or were you only trying to find the easiest solution to get rid of me? By the way, how much was my life really worth? How much did you get for me?" I ask sadly.
She just stares at me with a dumb look on her face. Just like I said, if it wasn't for her, I might be at someone's college dorm right now cramming for finals. I might be about to graduate. I might have more friends than the ones I grew up with and my girl Stormey. Although I left so long ago, it still feels like I am still stuck in the same year and time. But no, here I am, a few days until my nineteenth birthday and wife to a man I still hardly know, even after five years of marriage. The most that I can tell you about him is the things Lorraine told me when she convinced me to go. I know that he is eleven years older than me, and he is wealthy. Ain't that a bitch? A woman before I got my first period, and I still haven't had an orgasm! I jump up from my seat with a big grin on my face and laughing internally as she flinches like I am about to hit her.
"Hey Rain, before you leave, let me have a dime. You know I got you," she requests. I reach into my pocket and throw her a dime sack as I feel sorrow threaten to overcome me.
"Don't worry about it. This one is on me," I tell her.
I grab my purse from the floor of her porch and walk slowly to my truck, ignoring her as if I am in a daze. I climb into my Lincoln Navigator and close the door, shutting off her ranting and effectively shutting her out of my life. I sit there for a moment, looking at her and shaking my head at the pitiful sight in front of me. She looks so sad to me that I feel nothing but pity for her. I never noticed how downtrodden she looked. I smile for the first time in a long time and pull away, leaving her in a cloud of dust. My eyes are slowly opening up, and I am finally seeing things as they actually are, instead of through the rosy shades that I have forced myself to wear in order to cope with my existence. Riding down I-4, I take in the world as if it's my very first time seeing it. Well, maybe it is. The air has never seemed so fresh. I don't remember the sky ever being this blue. I make the trip from Lakeland to Plant City almost on a daily basis, and I have never seen that field of flowers to my left. I damn sure have never noticed the cows grazing in that field either. Sometimes, I get sad thinking about all the pain that I suffered. I wonder how my life could be so war-torn, but I am still surviving. I am not being mean, I am just tired. I finally realize what my mother meant when she would say, as I was growing up, "Ain't no shame in my game."
I know the only reason that I am not more upset about Lorraine and her complete lack of parenting skills is because I have another family that I call my own: the Johnsons. Mama Diane Johnson is the mother of my best friend Story. She and her husband DeAndre Johnson treated me like part of the family from day one. The Johnsons had recently moved from New York when they met my mother. I loved to be around them, just to hear their accent. When I was younger, I would try to copy their inflections on words and tried to sound as if I too had recently relocated from New York. They had eight of their own children, and when my mom took me to their house for the first time when I was five years old, I gained an instant family. I don't know why my mom and Mama Johnson stopped being friends, but it never made her treat me any different, which I am very grateful for.
Their oldest child is DeAndre Jr. He is two years older than Story and I. He is a sports freak. His time is spent being part of some kind of team. One year he even joined the hockey team. Mama Diane made him quit after the first season, though, saying that she didn't want to die of a heart attack. Next, there is the first set of twins, Shemar ("Petey") and Shamere. Shemar is the cutest boy I have ever set eyes on. He is the spitting image of his father. His eyes are the lightest shade of brown, making them sometimes seem transparent. He has the deepest dimples and the softest-looking lips on the planet. His hair is jet black and has deep waves like the ocean, and if you can't tell, I had the biggest crush on him. Shamere is the queen bitch of the bunch. She could be the sweetest person in the world, but don't cross her, or you will feel a wrath so fast and strong that you wouldn't make that mistake again. Her looks are a female version of Shemar's, although she is a few inches shorter than his 5'6". They are a year older than Story and I, their personalities are as different as oil and water.
Then there is Story and I. Story is short and small. Of all the kids, she looks the most like Mama Diane. Most of the time, people mistake her for a much younger child than our fourteen. When we are not around Mama and Daddy Johnson, anyone that made the mistake and voiced it aloud was in for a very rude awakening. Story is the nut of the bunch. I don't care how hard my life at home became, I could always depend on her to brighten my day. She is forever making some type of jokes. Shamere calls her goofy at times, but that is okay with me. Story and I can talk about anything and everything. That's why we get along so well. When I am with them, I can be as childish as the young ones; not around Petey, though. When he is around, I try to be as witty as Story and as put together as Shamere. Next, there is Tiana and Theresia, a year younger consecutively. Tiana ("Binky") is a tomboy in every sense of the word. She and DeAndre Jr. are inseparable, probably because they love sports with the same amount of passion. If you saw one, you always saw the other. Tiana is also the shortest of all the kids besides the youngest two. Theresia is the equivalent of the middle child. She wasn't as young as the other kids, but not old enough to be invited to hang with me and Story on the regular. She was the prim and proper child. Theresia reminded me of the beautiful china dolls I would see in the windows of stores around the city.
Sometimes she could be insufferable because she was always so serious. Story and I constantly tried to pull her out of her shell, but our efforts were in vain. The Singular boys are last but not least: Abijah and Abijan. We called them the singular boys because, as twins, they were inseparable. They talked, acted, and looked exactly alike. If they had been born years earlier, they would be the other half of the quintets; they look so much like Shemar and Shamere. They finish each other's sentences and have their own language. It was funny, but if something happened to one and the other wasn't around, the other knew it. We used to tease Mama and Daddy Johnson that instead of spanking both of them for something, they should just punish one, because the other would feel it. The only happy times I can remember in my life had to do with them and, of course, my daddy and grandpa before he died. I was at their house all the time, and the older I get, the more I am there. I am so glad that I had that family! In that house, I learned all the fundamentals of growing up, from learning to share, cook, and have fun. From Mama and Daddy Johnson, I learned all about morals, loyalty, honesty, and the true meaning of family.