Something She Can Feel

“More grown ... whatever.” She flipped her hand at me.

“Okay, English teacher.”

“Just ... why don’t you seem excited? Not even a little bit?”

“I’m excited,” I said, hearing the lack of enthusiasm in my voice.

“Then come eat with me, pleeeeassee,” she begged.

“But I have to walk today. I promised myself. I have to do something with these bad boys by summer.” I pointed to the round hips that seemed to be stretching my size eighteen slacks into the next cut. “I’m not trying to be the Southern cliché of a black woman—in the church, singing ... and big.”

“Please, J. You know the brothers love those country curves.”

“Not Evan.”

“Well, the Mr. Evan Deeee-Long is a different breed. Everybody has to be picture perfect around him—since he wants to be the first black president of the universe—”

“Well, Obama’s already on the way!” I said and we both laughed.

“Exactly. But I say, bump perfection ... when there’s a tasty sandwich shop waiting to feed us. Come on, girl!” She grinned and waved her hands rhythmically in front of my face to entice me.

“That’s easy for you to say; you’re a size 6,” I said, laughing as I slid off my shoes and began putting on the sneakers. One of the smartest, boldest people I’d ever known, Billie was the kind of pretty girl other pretty girls hated to walk into a party with. For her, beauty was something she didn’t have to work at. Billie’s chestnut skin, doe eyes, and slender cheeks made her an eyeful even when she was asleep—and I lived with her for four years in college at Alabama, so I knew.

“Size doesn’t matter when no one’s there to look at it,” she said, her voice sinking. “Sometimes, I feel like I could be a size 2 or 202 and that fool still wouldn’t notice.”

In high school, Billie was voted “Best Looking,” and we expected some Prince Charming from New York or Atlanta to come swooping down to see her beauty and take her far away from Tuscaloosa. But she had other plans. The love of her heart, Clyde Pierce, wasn’t from New York or Atlanta and he’d sworn long ago that he wasn’t ever leaving his father’s land. He graduated from Stillman College the year before we left the University of Alabama and took a job teaching gym and coaching the varsity football team at Black Warrior. No one was surprised when Billie signed up for a teaching job the following year—even though she was a finance major.

“Oh, Billie, don’t bring up Clyde. I thought you were finally moving on ... remember?” I said.

“I know, but it’s hard to have his shit just all up in my face like this, you know?” She leaned her elbow on the desk and rested her chin in the palm of her hand.

As coach of the football team, Clyde had been enjoying his own form of celebrity in Tuscaloosa. And for years, he’d had a long line of fans linked up behind Billie. The biggest problem he had was crowd control—especially with the other female teachers at the school. But Billie loved even the sweat that bubbled on Clyde’s brow, and while she usually wrote off his philandering and slipping in and out of janitorial closets as rumors, the last chitchat hit her like a bucket of his sweat in her face. Nearly a ringer for a younger Billie, the new physics teacher, Ms. Lindsey, was twenty-one, petite, and so cute the senior class voted to have her put on the list for their “Best Looking.” Last year, when word spread around the “grown people senior class”—that’s what we called the faculty—that Roscoe the janitor caught Clyde and Ms. Lindsey in his storage closet, giggling like teenagers ... and naked, Billie broke it off and she’d dedicated herself to finding a good man ever since. I was happy that she’d had the strength to move on, but also thrown off by the fact that unlike every time before, it seemed that this time the breakup was final. And not from Billie’s position either. Unlike the others, Clyde seemed serious about Ms. Lindsey. He paraded her around town, and sometimes I caught him looking at her the same way he’d looked at Billie when she was twenty-one and vibrant, her mind not caught up in the desires of a grown woman looking for a husband and family. This, of course, I never told Billie.

“How’s the Internet dating thing going?” I asked, trying to change the subject from Clyde.

“It’s great.” She perked up suddenly. “In fact, do you remember the guy I’ve been writing? Mustafa?”

“Mustafa?”

“Yeah, the hot Nigerian man? We’ve been chatting for like a month. Anyway, he’s coming to visit me this weekend.”

“Visit you? Did you check him out? Are you sure he’s not a part of some credit card scam or trying to marry you so he can get a green card? Did he ask you to transfer money into an account? I saw an e-mail about that.”

While I’d accepted the fact that the chances of Billie meeting a single man above the age of twenty-five in Tuscaloosa was nil, and that next to driving to Birmingham every weekend, the Internet provided the next best way for her t

o fulfill her grown lady resolution, I was still a bit nervous about the men she’d been meeting online.

“Don’t be so closed-minded, J. You know better. Mustafa is a good man. He has his own business and money. He’s single. No kids. Lives alone,” she rattled off but something in her voice was so rehearsed. I just couldn’t figure out what it was. “He has it going on. And with the shortage of good men over here in the States, a sister had to expand her options to the Motherland.” She started doing a ridiculous African dance and we both laughed.

“I’m just saying—he’s coming here to see you? All the way from Africa? Does he know anything about Tuscaloosa? This isn’t exactly a melting pot.”

“Well, he has a little extra money and neither of us wants to wait ... so, we figured ... why not? We’re grown.”

“That’s a good attitude, I guess,” I said, running out of questions. “At least you know he’s real and not some kid in Wisconsin with braces and a humpback.”

“And I’m bringing him to church, so you guys can meet him.”

“Bringing him to church?” I repeated. This was a serious “don’t” for a single woman in the South. Bringing a man to church came with too many complications, including aunties assuming you two were getting married now (and saying prayers out loud over that very thing) and other single women trying to steal him away before the service was over. “This seems pretty serious.” I stood up and began walking toward the door in my sneakers.