Yesterday, I Cried_ Celebrating the Lessons of Living and Loving - Iyanla Vanzant [39]
Rhonda missed Nett terribly. She felt she’d been ripped apart from the only person who had ever shown her love, the person she believed to be her real mother. As long as Nett maintained contact, Rhonda found ways to fill the moments of separation. But as the months and years passed, Nett’s visits were less and less frequent. Rhonda had to work at getting the people she now lived with to notice her, to speak to her beyond the obligatory daily greetings. No one ever kissed her or hugged her. It was incredibly hard being in a place where she didn’t feel she belonged, where she didn’t feel loved or wanted or pretty. With Nett gone, there was no one to talk to her, to explain things to her. It was no wonder her hair started to fall out again.
Rhonda had gone bald at her temples and at the back of her head, so besides teasing her about her weight, the other children made fun of her hair loss. If Aunt Nadine had paid her any mind, she might have prepared Rhonda for the day she was sent to school wearing an auburn wig. She was teased, talked about, laughed at, and pushed around. Her teacher asked her, “Does your mother know your hair is red?” Several boys chased her halfway home, threatening to pull the wig off. Aunt Nadine’s response was to put more hairpins in the wig to keep it in place in case someone actually did try to pull it off. “Stop your crying,” Aunt Nadine told a weeping Rhonda. “It’s better than nothing, and it’s certainly better than being bald!”
Eventually, the kids at school got used to the wig, and so did Rhonda. Every week, Rhonda got 100 percent on the spelling test. She got an A on every book report. Rhonda was so smart in school the other children began to see her as potentially useful to them. Aunt Nadine’s daughter, Beanie, had introduced Rhonda to African culture and African dance. Rhonda, in turn, shared all she learned from Beanie with her classmates. It made her popular in school, and she was no longer teased about the wig or the smell of the sulfur-based hair-growing concoction that emanated from beneath the wig.
Saturday nights were when other family members came to Aunt Nadine’s to play cards, drink, and fight. For Rhonda, Saturdays were when she and her brother got money from total strangers who claimed to be their uncles or aunts. It was the day she and Ray got to drink all the leftover Coca-Cola and club soda. It was also the day when Rhonda got updates on Daddy and Nett, filtered through curse words and smoke and alcohol.
“She hasn’t called in a week. Next time she does, I’m gonna tell her a thing or two!”
“Who does that yellow b——h think she is?”
“She thinks she’s white, that’s what she thinks! Why should she waste her time raising a dead woman’s kids? She doesn’t care about them one bit, not one little bit.”
“Well, neither does he, and they’re his kids.”
“Why should he care about them when he’s busy making new ones on the other side of town!”
“He can’t feed the ones he already has. What kind of fool woman would have children with a man who can’t feed the kids he’s already got?”
“Don’t act like you don’t know how some women are. They will do anything, I mean anything, to keep a man. Especially a good-looking man.”
The grown-ups who came to the Saturday night basement parties always got drunk enough for their tongues to get loose enough to say things they wouldn’t say when they were sober. In fact, they were drunk enough to forget that the children they were talking about were listening. Children and who they belonged to was not the only topic of conversation. They also talked about each other. One drunken person inevitably said something outrageous to another drunk in the group. By ten o’clock, somebody would slap, or threaten