Gather Together in My Name - Maya Angelou [64]
L.D.'s car was parked in front of his house. My scheme was to ring his bell and if his wife answered, tell her I was an old friend and had a message for him from a friend. I'd quickly tell him about Big Mary and the baby and he'd decide what to do. I was proud that I hadn't cried and that I wasn't afraid of his naggish wife.
A pretty, thirtyish, light-brown-skinned woman opened the door. Her long black hair curled around her shoulders, reminding me of a beige Hedy Lamarr.
“You want to see L.D.? What's your name?”
She had the same soft slur that made me love to hear L.D. talk.
“My name is Rita.”
“Oh.” Her lips firmed on the edges. “So you're Rita. Well, just wait a minute, I'll get Lou.”
She closed the door and I waited on the landing, wondering how we'd find my baby.
“Rita.” L.D. had opened the door and held it just wide enough for me to see half of his body. “What put it in your head to come to my house?”
I whispered, “I told her I was a friend, L.D. My baby's—”
“Don't you have better sense than to come to my house?”
“I need some help, L.D. I have to talk to you.”
He stepped out on the porch and pulled the door closed behind him. His face was inches from me and he spoke through uneven teeth.
“Let me pull your coat, you silly little bitch. This is my house. No 'ho goes to a man's house. You talked to my wife. No 'ho opens her mouth to speak to a man's wife.” He curled his mouth and snarled, “Clara's never even met my wife and Clara's been my woman three years. You've been gone a week and you got the nerve … Go to your place. I'll be there when I get time.”
He walked back in the house and slammed the door.
I wanted desperately to cry.
I had been stupid, again. And stupidity had led me into a trap where I had lost my baby. I tried to erase L.D. Tolbrook from my mind. Obviously he wasn't very bright. He had had a good woman who would have done anything to help him. And he was too dumb to even have the courtesy to listen to my troubles. And he had lied to me by not telling me that Clara was his woman.
Pity. That he thought outsmarting a young girl, living off the wages of women was honorable. He obviously had been doing it for years. He probably started in the South with white women, thinking that by taking their bodies and their money, he was getting revenge on the white men, who were free to insult him, ignore him and keep him at the bottom of the heap.
Clara must have wriggled her nose off in laughing at my stupidity with her “daddy.” And L.D.'s wife probably bought the white piqué dress she wore with money I had made. I detested him for being a liar and a pimp, but more, I hated him for being such an idiot that he couldn't value my sterling attributes enough to keep me for himself alone.
There was no thought of the greed which coerced me to agree with L.D.'s plans in the hope that I'd win, in the end, a life of ease and romance. Like most young women, I wanted a man, any man, to give me a June Allyson screen-role life with sunken living room, and cashmere-sweater sets, and I, for one, obviously would have done anything to get that life.
I couldn't telephone Bailey or Mother. Even if they had been in the best of shape, I couldn't admit to them that out of ignorance I'd lost the baby.
As I walked, my rage at L.D. diminished and I regained some steadying peripheral vision. Had I melted down on the pavement in tears of frustration, the action would not have changed the fact that my baby was still missing. Or the fact that with this latest loss, I was shatteringly lonely for my baby and his arms hugging my neck. The weight was on me.
I decided to sleep the night in my old room and leave the next morning for Bakersfield. The idea that Big Mary might have taken him on to Oklahoma was squashed over and over in my mind like a buzzing fly.
The small Southern California town on those midnight rides with L.D. had seemed fanciful and unreal; now from the bus windows it was drab and seemed overpopulated with mean-faced whites straight out of my