don’t know where that Luscious nonsense came from!” Millie screams in frustration. “Her name is Rita Josephine Smith. That’s what’s on her birth certificate, baptismal record, and welfare check, and that’s all I’ll ever refer to her as!”
After Millie say what she got to say to Campbell, she sucks her teeth and waves her off with one hand while she reaches for the phone with the other and dials those seven digits that have belonged to Luscious for what seems to Campbell like forever.
She waits a few seconds, and Campbell don’t hear her say hello or how ya doing or nothing; Millie just jumps right on Luscious and tells her to stop spreading lies and confusing her child’s mind with foolishness.
There’s no hiding her pain from her daughter, and Campbell stays close by while her mother weeps and wrings her hands in frustration until she can’t take it anymore and settles herself down in her recliner. “Get me a beer, baby,” she says to Campbell. “And my headache pills from the medicine cabinet.”
Campbell is too young to know that aspirin don’t come in prescription bottles and are not small yellow pills with the letter V stamped out of their center.
“Thank you, baby,” Millie says, and gives Campbell a sad smile before she pops the pill on her tongue and takes a long swig of the beer.
Campbell will stay with Millie until her mother’s eyes close and her head lolls on her neck. She’ll spend those moments at the window, humming “Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz. It is a soothing tonic for her and Millie during tense times, and there are many of those.
Campbell finds herself at the window, her hands stroking the long emerald drapes, her eyes moving between her mother’s sad face and the street below.
There is a lemon-colored sun resting peacefully in the pale summer sky. It’s quiet except for the chirping of birds and the now and again blast of a car horn.
Not many people roam the streets on that sultry Sunday afternoon, and Campbell’s eyes are growing heavy with boredom when the click-click sounds of a woman’s heels against the pavement—faint at first, and then swelling—pique her interest.
Campbell leans a bit over the windowsill, and her eyes fall on auburn hair and the mocha-colored shoulders of a woman who has a small pink suitcase clutched in one hand while her free hand, balled into a tight fist, punches at the air with every fourth step she takes.
She’s wearing open-toed, strapless baby-blue clogs that whack at her heels as she speeds along. Campbell winces at the sound but notes the fresh pedicure and wonders why Millie doesn’t take that sort of time with herself.
Before the woman reaches the corner, Campbell has the urge to call out to her. For some reason she needs to see her face, needs to see the lines in her forehead and maybe the set of her mouth and color of her eyes.
But she’s only eight years old, and that would be out of place, and Millie would call her mannish and grown and probably twist her ear or pop her upside her head.
So she bites her lip against the urge, and the woman disappears around the corner taking the punching hand and the clicking whacking sounds with her.
Millie begins to snore, and Campbell turns to look at her. She observes the mussed hair and the salty tracks her tears have abandoned on her cheeks. Campbell thinks it’s a shame, a downright shame. But those are Luscious’s words, not hers.
Campbell retires to her bedroom and pulls her journal from its hiding place beneath her bed, opens it to a clean page, marking her name, age, and date at the top, and beginning with:
Ain’t no man ever going to make me cry, make me talk to the walls and wail out to the Lord.
Ain’t no man ever going to break my heart.
AGE TEN
As far back as Campbell could remember, there were no flowers in the courtyards of the Brookline housing projects. No flowers, but plenty of beer bottles, candy wrappers, and other pieces of debris that people saw fit to toss over the chain-link fences.
Each spring, Housing came through to repaint and repair the benches that had been vandalized during the year, sloshing green paint over the nicknames, gang tags, and declarations of love that had been scrawled there with spray paint and black marker.
The halls of Brookline Projects smelled like piss, reefer, and—according to Luscious—Maria Santos’s nasty ass.
She said this because she had heard Maria screwing in the stairwell a number of times, had heard her scream, “Ay, Papi!” over and over again, and had seen the discarded condoms on the steps, and Luscious said the scent Maria left behind was ungodly.
The intercom system in the Brookline Projects was always broken, that and the locks on the doors. Housing gave up on repairing those things, leaving its residents vulnerable to whoever wanted in. They concentrated instead on installing wire encasements over the light fixtures to keep vandals from breaking the bulbs only, making the residents easy targets in the darkness.
They just became easy targets in the light.
Most apartments were mice- and roach-infested, and hot water was something you prayed for before you turned on the shower.
When people moved, Brookline residents ran to their windows, gathered on the benches, or balanced their behinds on the chain-link fences to watch the tattered sofas, mismatched kitchen chairs, color television, bookshelves, wall units, and various other pieces of furniture the family had accumulated over the years loaded into the borrowed van, rented U-Haul, or box-shaped delivery truck Juan Miguel had bought from a junkman on Euclid Avenue for five hundred dollars two years earlier. The red letters on the left side of the truck still screamed, WONDER BREAD, glowing through the cheap white paint he’d smeared across it last spring.
Luscious would watch from the bench that sat closest to the doorway. The one she’d claimed as her own so many years ago. It was her throne, and in warm weather she could be found there most of the day and well into the night.
She was the queen of 256 Stanley Avenue, Brookline Projects.
Everyone knew Luscious, and Luscious knew everyone.
She’d arrived there from Detroit in 1953. Back then, the apartments were still filled with white people, the courtyards with colorful blooms that lasted from April straight through to October.
The benches unmarked, well-lit hallways, working elevators, and clean stairwells.
Neighbors bidding you hello or good night, and even asking about that ailing family member they’d heard about.
Back then, Luscious was hefty but still considered a good-looking woman. Green-eyed and honey-colored with soft wavy hair that rested on her shoulders.
Like Brookline Projects, Luscious would change, and her beauty would become a shadow of what it once was. Her weight would bloom from two hundred to four, and her skin would hang in folds, her beauty retreating into the creases of her flesh, and Luscious would look every bit the hog people began to refer to her as.
* * *
In 1975, on Campbell’s moving day, Luscious sits and watches over the broken pavement on a blemished bench beside Campbell and her closest friends: Pat, Anita, Porsche, and Laverna.
The girls have been together since nursery school, and they would be together in one form or another throughout their adult lives, but on that sweltering July day, Campbell was fragmenting their circle, leaving them behind and moving what seemed to them miles away—to another part of Brooklyn.
Luscious nudges Campbell’s waist and winks at the girls. “So will you come and visit us? Or will you forget all about us once you’re gone?” she asks.
The girls look at Campbell expectantly.
“Uh-huh,” she replies, and slurps up the last bit of soda from the can. “Y’all