Tears on a Sunday Afternoon - Michael Presley [57]
“I guess hard work pays off.” I maneuvered around a yellow cab that had stopped in the middle of the street.
“Hard work and some carpet burns.” Donna laughed at her own joke. “In this world, it’s never about one thing. Some of us might be able to combine hard work and some luck to equal success. Some of us could be in the right place at the right time combined with a certain look and you are tops. Look at you.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you!” she shouted. “Do you think that there are a whole lot of ugly guys pushing thirty-five and living in Mill Basin? You don’t think that your brains got you there? Because, if you do, you can let me out right here.”
I continued driving, knowing that she was speaking the truth. I didn’t have much to offer a woman like Lauren. I was nothing more than a reproductive showcase for her family. There’s a saying that states you have to know who you are to get where you are going. I knew who I was and I was about to use it to get where I was going. Donna had said that Julie wasn’t much different from her, but I also realized that I wasn’t any different from her. I turned down Fifth Avenue.
“This is it. Right here.” The excitement in her voice was beginning to make her voice quiver.
I pulled the car over and parked. We got out. I didn’t bother putting any quarters in the meter. Donna stood outside the boarded-up two-story building. “So, this is where the new Donna Karan starts?”
“Yep, I’m going to call it Rochelle’s, where the fancy people go to shop. We won’t be talking about ten-dollar dresses.”
“Don’t knock the ten-dollar dresses. With the right body, a ten-dollar dress could make a woman look like a million bucks.”
I recalled some women from my past. They didn’t have the money to buy the expensive clothes, but whatever they wore made them look like they had stepped out of a fashion magazine. One such woman was Carol. Carol was a student attending Columbia on a full scholarship. She lived in the Glen-wood projects but you could never tell that Carol was poor by the way she carried herself. She never wore any ghetto-looking clothes that showed too much of the wrong things. She wore clothes that accentuated her positives. Her long skirts encased and molded her long, gorgeous legs. Her mid-cut blouses never fell below her waist; making her ample breasts a feast for the human eye. Her heels were never more than two inches above the ground and her effortless, sexy walk left men longing for a turn.
“I know what you mean. Believe me, I’ve seen some five-hundred-dollar dresses that I would throw in the garbage before I gave them away. But, I won’t be selling anything inexpensive. My store has to be a name-calling store. When women mention that they’re going to my store, I want people to know that a Rochelle bag means that the person purchased something expensive. It’s like a Bloomingdale’s bag, which is a far cry from Conway. I want people to walk around with the bag just because the store is expensive.” Donna tapped on the glass window.
“Yeah, I know what you mean. A lot of women put Conway stuff in Macy’s bags,” I said, laughing.
“You got it; image is everything. There’s a black middle-class that has a lot of money to spend while they try to keep up with the Joneses. I plan to help them spend that money.” Donna opened the car door. “In the process, I plan on opening hundreds of Rochelle’s all over America. Some people merely need a start. What are your plans for the money?”
I was at my worst. Donna had a lot of dreams that would never materialize because she would never get the ten million dollars. Unlike me, she had the world waiting for her respect. The money was going to