So changing myself for a man or otherwise just sounded silly and archaic. But on the other hand, I had to admit that being left for another woman was a serious chip to my ego. I mean, I knew it was pointless, but I couldn’t help but compare myself to Miata—my tan skin to her smooth, dark cocoa complexion; my wild, curly Afro to her long, permed, jet-black hair. I’d sized up the chick within the few minutes I stood next to her in the park, and from what I could see, she basically was my opposite as far as beauty was concerned. Her eyes were deep and strong, her body was curvaceous and solid. Me? Nowadays, my eyes looked blank and dull and my body was one Cold Stone Creamery ice cream away Celebrity Fit Club. I didn’t want to change, but I also didn’t want part of the reason I lost my man to be a big bootie and long hair, which probably was not even hers.
So I decided that I, the future Mrs. Troy Helene James, needed an “update.” Yes, I’d “update” the things about myself I found to be terribly outdated. From the comfortable jeans with matching baby T-shirts I’d grown to love as I walked the streets of the Village, to the hair that had grown from Mariah Magnificent to Mangy Mess, I would update my old look to something more sexy, sleek, and sensuous. Miata may have been what most brothers considered fine, but I was about to be Fabulous with a capital F.
But what? What was my new look going to be? After scouring stacks of fashion magazines and battling it out with Tamia and Tasha over cappuccinos, I was clueless. I didn’t want the choppy pixie cut Halle Berry had made famous, and Tasha’s punk look—complete with spikes and chains—just wasn’t me. I wanted to be classy and sassy, elegant and intelligent. And there was only one person I knew who could achieve all that in a New York minute—my mother’s mother, Grandma Lucy.
“Somebody get my grandbaby a glass of champagne. We’re cele
brating,” said Grandma Lucy—who’d told me to stop calling her Grandma when I was three—when I walked in the door of her favorite salon, Bei Capelli, in midtown Manhattan. She was wearing huge Jackie O–style Gucci glasses and a white silk Hermès scarf wrapped around her head. Grandma Lucy, like her kind did in the old days, still avoided the sun for fear of getting “too dark.” Grandma Lucy’s skin was the color of cultured pearls and her hair was as fine as a porcelain doll’s. Though she now accepted her past and had even gone so far as to reconnect with our lost family down in Atlanta, my mother said it was an old habit she’d probably never grow out of. Even ten minutes in the summer sun, which would brush her smooth vanilla skin bronze, was too much for her. “I need to see my veins,” she’d say, applying sunblock on a thirty-minute rotation.
“She’s just a victim. A victim of what people had to do in order to survive in those days,” my mother once said, defending Grandma Lucy on a rare occasion. “She’s doing what my great-grandmother taught my grandmother and my grandmother taught her.”
“Lucy, you promised not to get out of control with this.” I smiled and kissed her on the forehead. She was a quite a rare jewel—the complete opposite of Nana Rue and her pro-black ideas and Talented Tenth ideologies (the two were like fighting cats whenever they were forced to be in a room together), but I learned to love my Grandma Lucy just the same. “I’m just trying to update my look a bit.”
“Oh, darling,” she purred, holding her immaculately white and perpetually puffy bichon frise, Ms. Pearl, in her arms. Grandma Lucy had had Ms. Pearl for as long as I could remember. She went everywhere with Grandma Lucy—the French Riviera, the Florida Keys, skiing. In fact, Ms. Pearl had been present at nearly every significant moment in my life. She was like a family member, sitting pleasantly beside me in most of my baby pictures, like a cousin. Really, it was amazing that the old dog was still alive. Ms. Pearl was blind in one eye, had no teeth, and couldn’t hear a thing, and Grandma Lucy loved her. She propped that old dog up on her lap like she was the cutest thing in the Big Apple.
Grandma Lucy’s beautician, Piero, who’d been doing her hair for the past ten years, appeared from the back of the salon. Piero was known throughout Manhattan as one of the hottest beauticians for the city’s rich and famous. His client list included everyone from Diana Ross to Elizabeth Taylor when she was in town. He rarely accepted any new clients who hadn’t been referred by someone already on his list. Getting an appointment with Piero was next to impossible—unless you knew my grandmother—which is why I had to call her.
“Oh my goodness, this is the ragazza?” Piero said, pinching my cheeks. He was fashionably dressed in all black Armani. “Why you no come see me in so long, my bella?” he asked, using his thick Italian accent, although he’d been in the U.S. for over twenty years.
“Just busy, I guess,” I answered, trying not laugh. Watching Piero and Grandma Lucy talk about anything was a comedy sketch in and of itself. They were like best friends—rich old black lady and sassy homosexual Italian beautician—a match made in champagne heaven. It was like Driving Miss Daisy but with lots of liquor and hair conditioner.
“Yes, busy!” He looked at my grandmother. “Busy not combing your hair. Not doing nothing, I see.” He touched my hair as if it was matted dog hair. “Is this the Afro? The Afro is back? No, no, no. Piero no think so.”
“I say we flatten it out and try some color. It’s too dark,” Grandma Lucy said, stuffing a treat into Ms. Pearl’s mouth.
“Um…” Piero held my chin up and looked at my face quizzically. “Yes, I see it. You sit down,” he said, pointing to the chair. “That’s perfect for this girl.”
“What is flattening? And what color?” I asked.
“Are you wearing hose?” Grandma Lucy changed the subject. She was always worried about whether I was wearing panty hose, a brassiere, or sunblock.
“No, Lucy. It’s 2007. No one wears panty hose anymore,” I replied. “Not with a sundress.” I pointed to my sundress and open-toed shoes. She flicked her hand at me dismissively.
“I’m not just talking about ‘no one,’ Troy Helene. I’m talking about my granddaughter, my favorite granddaughter.”
“I’m your only granddaughter, Lucy.”
“Yes, well, then you win by a long shot.” She smiled.
Piero’s assistant, Bartolo, a more recent immigrant from Italy, came from the back of the salon pushing a cart full of odd-looking beauty products. Grandma Lucy and Piero were silently watching the dark man with jet-black hair line up the little products for Piero in slow, exaggerated motions like he knew they were watching him. Like all of Piero’s assistants before him, Bartolo was a real piece of eye candy. Even though he couldn’t speak English, Bartolo was studying acting at some studio downtown, and by looking at his ass and abs, I was sure he’d make it all the way to the top. If he didn’t, he’d always have work with Grandma Lucy and Piero.
Grandma Lucy didn’t start talking again until Bartolo had disappeared again in the back of the salon. After fanning herself dramatically, she turned back to me as if Bartolo had never appeared.
“I’m not talking about just anyone. You’re an heiress,” Grandma Lucy went on. “And it’s improper and unladylike for you to carry yourself in such a way. Like that Paris Hilton on the television. God forbid you squander away my groom’s fortune—God bless his soul—like that!”
“I know. Calm down, Lucy,” I said. She was about to get on her two favorite topics—cash and class. I’d heard all of it before. Grandma Lucy kept watch over Grandpa’s railroad fortune better than the accountant and she didn’t mind sharing findings with my mother and me. It was just the way of the old guard—keep the young ones in check by predicting impending doom if we didn’t keep the good family name alive.
But I, like my mother, hated talking about money. Don’t get me wrong, it was nice to know it was there, but growing up, I just wanted to be like everybody else. Not rigid and snobby like the Jack and Jill kids my grandmother wanted me to hang out with. I despised all of those ritzy, glitzy cotillions and selective summer camps they forced me to be a part of. By the time I was fifteen, I had been about to go crazy if my mother bought me another ball gown. “Just put the damn thing on,” my mother had said, stuffing me into my coming-out dress. “I had to do it and so do you.”
“Troy, you must accept who you are and be prepared to take on my role when I’m gone,” Grandma Lucy said now, sliding her sunglasses off. “Lord knows that mother of yours can’t do it; she’d probably give all of my money away to charity.” I rolled my eyes, but Grandma Lucy did have a point.
Though my teenage angst developed into an appreciation for the finer things in life the first time I slid on a pair of Manolo Blahniks on West Fifty-fourth Street, my mother grew to hate the high-society “to do” stuff when she was a teenager. She became a total BAP (Black American Princess) rebel when she went to Howard—participating in campus sit-ins, wearing the same clothes in one month, living in the dorms past freshman year! Mary Elizabeth was a rebel without a decent pair of shoes. She was walking on the wild side. However, all that had changed when she got married and had me. My mother knew better than to try to raise me any other way. I was Nana Rue and Grandma Lucy’s only granddaughter, and neither of them would hear of it. Stuffing me into expensive dresses and sending me to private school at Fieldston, where Nana Rue had gone, were the only ways my mother could keep them off her own back.
“Oh, Lord, Lucy,” I said, looking at myself in the mirror. “Can we not discuss your death again? I’m here to think about life…my new life.” I paused. “With Julian,” I said under my breath.
“Yes, signora, and you just close your eyes,” Piero said.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.