Under the table, the husband tried to grab her hand. This wasn’t what they had discussed, but Lydia pushed him away. She went into her charming routine: she was back in control. Her bear was awake but that was fine. She was the bear, but no one else knew it. She watched Nana’s displeasure as no one paid attention to her anymore. How Nana plucked at the edge of her napkin and grew smaller in her chair.
Nana was easy. She had been vanquished. It was Mama who frightened Lydia when she lost control, shouting about how she hadn’t wanted to marry Lydia’s father.
That night, Lydia told Dante she had to take a shower. But she took her purse with her. After she locked the door, she pulled out the pipe that Tim had given her. She couldn’t smoke a primo in her parents’ house; everyone would smell the weed. So she turned on the shower and sat on the toilet seat. When she lit the crack rock and pulled the smoke through the pipe, the happiness filled her veins. She didn’t care about what her mother thought about her husband. Or what Dante thought about her. She only wanted to sit on this toilet and inhale this smoke. When she finished smoking, she put the pipe back in her purse, stripped, and took a shower. She rinsed her mouth out with toothpaste.
Her mother was pleasant to Dante in the morning. She made him a big breakfast and handed him two plastic containers filled with Thanksgiving leftovers. She had wrapped an entire pie for him, too, but no banana pudding for Lydia. That was the only indication of her mother’s hurt feelings.
At the door, she pulled Lydia aside and held out a spiral notebook. Write down her new phone number and address. Then Mama leaned in and whispered, she was putting a little extra money in Lydia’s mad fund. Every married woman needed something, in case she ever had to leave. Lydia thanked her but was insulted by the implication. The bear roused in the cave, but Lydia gentled it back to sleep: she’d given her mother the wrong contact information.
*
In Georgia, the weather chilled permanently. That December, Lydia packed up her belongings in her dorm room, but she didn’t tell Niecy that she wasn’t returning in January. She didn’t want to provide any explanation. She didn’t want to be away from her husband anymore. When the holidays arrived, as Lydia decorated a tree and bought presents for Dante, she thought of her grandfather. How Christmas used to be the worst time of the year, back when she was a little girl. During the holidays, Mama would drop her children off at her in-laws’ house nearly every day. Gandee would take off time from his practice, and Nana would go shopping for her granddaughters. She would splurge on beautiful dresses for them, frocks made from satin and taffeta with many ribbons, and tell them to act nice and be pretty.
Thinking about her daily holiday baths with Gandee made Lydia sad. She craved her rocks even more: since her trip to the City, she had given up the pretense of primos. Now she paged Tim twice a week. She smoked a rock after Dante was sleep, which lasted her into the morning, when she tried not to show her impatience with him as she sent him off when his own pager buzzed.
But there was the night when she sneaked into the room where Dante was sleeping. She picked up her pocketbook and gently closed the door behind her. In the bathroom, she slipped the rock and the pipe from her bag, and there was nothing between that cloudy diamond and her. The smoke. The smoke. The smoke. The smoke. Yesyesyesyesyesyes. She was putting her hand in her panties and touching herself and she was coming. She was the bear in the cave and she was standing on her hind legs and nothing could kill her but there was a roaring and it was Dante. He knocked the pipe from her hand, but Lydia wasn’t angry. She had sucked up all the smoke.
She tried to speak, but the words in her mouth didn’t match what was in her head. She couldn’t fit the understanding to the movement, but she didn’t care because there was pleasure and she was alive and by the time she came down, Dante was pulling the blanket off the bed and telling Lydia he would sleep in his car.
When dawn came, she was back to herself and feeling ashamed. Her husband had found her smoking crack and touching herself. She didn’t know how to make that better, but she showered and washed her hair. She wanted to be squeaky clean, a different woman from the one he’d seen the previous night. And she prayed, too. It had been a long time for her since she’d sent up some words or given gratitude. She and Dante hadn’t been to church since he’d started working for Tim. Those long Friday and Saturday nights had tired him out; he didn’t have the energy on Sunday morning.
Lydia was standing at the counter with her eyes closed, begging God to save her marriage, when Dante came up behind her. He hugged her, and whispered, sit down with him. Eat some breakfast, but her appetite was gone. Her plate turned cold.