The boys she screwed would pass Lydia in the school hallways or they’d see her on the bus and whisper to their friends that she was a whore, a slut who’d do anything. They gave her sly looks, but she acted like the stuck-up yellow heifer everyone thought she was. She flipped her long hair and pretended she didn’t know her betrayers’ names. Lydia asked her friends, did that Negro look like anybody who was good enough for her, who’d she even let sniff her drawers?
Lydia knew how to make other girls love her, to tell them exactly what they wanted or needed to hear. What the lines around their eyes and mouths craved: girls needed love more than anybody else. She was popular at Toomer High, with plenty friends, and they protected her with their words, and in college, she never ended up on the Dirty Thirty list. One guy in her freshman year started a rumor that Lydia was a freak, but Lydia told her girlfriends he had an incurable disease. He’d even shown her the sores. No way would she get close to that guy. When she saw him again on campus, he looked at Lydia like he was a beaten dog, and she smiled at him and tossed her head. She was the bear, big and strong and wild. And he was only a dog who couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
Lydia thought she was fooling her father, too, that Daddy didn’t know she was having sex, and though she loved her father dearly, that made her feel powerful, too. Her lovely, harmless daddy who worked so hard to provide for his family. He thought his oldest daughter was innocent, but one early morning in high school Lydia had crept into the kitchen, after a late night when she hadn’t even made it to the movie she’d been invited to. Her date had told her, he forgot something back at his place, and then propositioned her in the driveway of his parents’ house.
Daddy was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of banana pudding.
“Hey, darling.”
“Oh! Daddy, you scared me!”
“I bet.” He looked at his watch. “It’s a little late, isn’t it? I thought your mama gave you a midnight curfew.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry. My girls and me were studying. I forgot the time.”
“Studying. Huh. Okay.”
Lydia walked to the cabinet and pulled out a bowl. At the table, she scooped up a portion of pudding and pulled up a chair. Then she felt silly that she hadn’t seen what was coming, when Daddy told her, it was fine that she wanted her own personal life. He wasn’t going to pry. She was at an age where she wanted to explore, and as long as she wasn’t doing anything she didn’t want to do, he was happy. But also, he was going to write her a prescription for birth control pills and give her some money to buy some condoms at the drugstore. Lydia didn’t tell him she already had her own pills and condoms, as Daddy kept on. She needed to protect herself, and next time she wanted to study with her girls, she might want to take a brush along. Get her hair together before she headed home, because it was all over the place.
Daddy told her that he was tired. The emergency room had been busy that night. Some crazy brother had come in there bleeding but didn’t want treatment. He only wanted painkillers. People were truly something else, and Daddy should get some sleep. But he stretched out his legs under the table and spooned up another bite of pudding. Daddy laughed and said he never thought he’d see this day. His little girl staying out half the night. He remembered his salad days of staying out. That’s how Mama and he had made Lydia. So please be careful, darling, and then Daddy laughed some more.
*
Spring was Lydia’s favorite time. Up in the City, the few trees on her block would whisper into buds. Waiting, defiant of the lingering chill, but in Georgia, spring shoved winter out of the way. It’s my time now, spring insisted. One night you could go to bed and the trees were plaintively bare. The next morning, every branch was sassy. Full of green and red and pink, and one spring afternoon, when Lydia returned from classes, there was Dante Anderson, sitting on the couch in the lobby of her dorm.
When he’d stopped calling, Lydia had dreamed about him. There was no romance in these nightly reveries, only mundane events that they’d never experienced in reality: she and Dante shopping for groceries. She and Dante on her granny’s farm, walking up the road that led to her family church.
But Lydia had not expected to see him again, not while she was awake. When she tried to treat him like she had boys that she’d discarded—cold, contemptuous—Dante only sat there. He looked different from the other two times she’d seen him. There was no church attire or expensive velveteen tracksuit. He looked ordinary, in his collared shirt tucked into ironed jeans. On his feet, penny loafers.