“Yeah. I mean, sure. But Beta has been color-struck for years. That’s why I didn’t want to join this shit in the first place. I only did it for you.”
“I know, soror. But this is important. We have to make a stand.”
“Okay, you do your thing. But you gotta type the letter.”
Lydia hardened herself to Niecy’s concerns. She couldn’t worry about children’s games acted out on campus. Routledge wasn’t the real world. It was a giant playground, but Lydia was a woman now. She had higher matters to attend to, like making sure to remind Dante to pay the rent and the electric and water bills. Calling up an insurance company and making an appointment for an insurance man to come by the apartment, so she and Dante could have burial policies. They were young and had years ahead of them, but every married couple needed those policies. Paperwork was proof of lifelong commitment.
Her suspicions that marriage was not child’s play were confirmed that weekend, when she went to Atlanta to see Dante. When she returned from the Laundromat and folded his clothes. Other than cooking, doing laundry was her favorite chore. Lydia made Dante clean the bathroom and wash dishes, but she actually liked folding clothes. It had been the only time that she’d had peace with her mother growing up. She and Mama used to sit in the basement together, saying nothing, only moving their hands, while the washing machine and dryer rumbled softly beside them.
Lydia’s contentment was broken when she opened the top drawer of the dresser—Dante’s drawer—and saw the cluster of cellophane packets. They were filled with what looked like cloudy diamonds.
Till My Baby Comes Home
Lydia was fifteen, going on sixteen, when Mama had talked to her about what it meant to be a woman. How Mama had been in college, headed to graduate school and planning to become an English professor, before she found out she was pregnant by Lydia’s father. Mama had set aside her dreams to become a wife and a mother, and she hadn’t regretted her choice, not for one second. But she told Lydia that she wanted her to understand that once a woman had a child for a man, he could come and go in a woman’s life, exactly how he pleased. He could decide if he wanted to get married or stay single. He could pay child support, or make a woman track him down every month or take him to court to buy formula for her baby or groceries once his child had teeth to chew proper food. And even if a man did pay child support, that wouldn’t be enough to cover the bills for a house he wasn’t staying in. Even if he did want to get married and live with a woman, her child would be a red wagon to pull behind her, not the man’s. A mother couldn’t ever be free of her child.
And while Mama loved all her daughters dearly—God knows she did—she wished somebody had told her what a woman’s life truly was before she and Daddy had gone down to the Chicasetta courthouse and married. That when the women in her family had talked about the evils of men, they hadn’t been so specific, naming this man or that man. Pointing at random, troublemaking men in the community as exceptions and not the rule. They should have told her every man has got some serious faults.
“But Daddy is nice to you, isn’t he?” Lydia asked.
“Oh, yes, baby, your daddy is a real good man! I don’t want you thinking I’m trying to bad-mouth him. I love that man strong. But as nice as your daddy is, Lydia, I want you to know that I got lucky. I’m saying, if he wasn’t nice, it wouldn’t have mattered, because I had you. And having a child with a man ties you to him for life, even if you’re not married. Even if he doesn’t even want you.”
That day would have been the time for Lydia to tell her mother, no, she didn’t understand. To sit in the car with Mama and talk it out, but that morning, Lydia was pregnant. It was early September, and they were sitting in the car in the parking lot of an abortion clinic outside the City. When Lydia had returned from the south in August, she hadn’t known that she was pregnant by Tony Crawford. She hadn’t noticed anything at first, until her mother asked her, how long had it been since she’d seen a period? Had she been feeling sick? And were her breasts hurting?
Her mother made the appointment for the abortion without even asking. It was for eight in the morning. Aunt Diane would take her sisters to school, because Lydia and her mother left the house at six forty-five. If she missed that appointment, she’d have to wait six more weeks to get a new appointment. By then, she’d be in her second trimester, and an abortion would be a complicated affair. Perhaps a hospital stay and general anesthesia. If that happened, Daddy would have to be told that his daughter was pregnant, instead of given the lie that his wife and oldest child were going on a shopping trip for school clothes because Lydia had hit a growth spurt.