Seven Days in June(9)

As a little girl, Genevieve assumed that these were tall tales, half-truths. But her grandma and great-grandma sounded fabulous, just the same.

Lizette wasn’t sentimental. The only moment that mattered to her was the one she was in. But she did keep a thin, fraying scrapbook, which Genevieve had discovered in a cardboard moving box as a kid. On the last page, there were two four-by-six black-and-white photos with “Delphine” and “Clotilde” scrawled under them in Lizette’s Catholic-school cursive. Genevieve stared and stared into their faces until her eyes unfocused, the photos blending into each other. It was like time hiccupped. And she knew Lizette’s stories were real.

Delphine and Clotilde looked haunted, intense, wild. They looked like women who were born with the wrong mind at the wrong time. They looked like her mom. They looked like her.

And suddenly, the women didn’t seem fabulous. They seemed dark, dangerous, and self-destructive. And it was too familiar.

There were corners of Genevieve’s brain that terrified her. She was friendless and restless, and pain ruled everything. On her best days, she felt as if she were clinging to sanity by her fingernails. If her great-grandma, grandma, and mom were nuts (and yeah, her mom definitely was), then she was right on their heels.

Genevieve wanted to be normal. So she decided to tell the tales instead. Since it was usually too early in the morning to think of anything original, she’d just plug Lizette into movie plots.

“There was once,” she started, “a down-on-her-luck cutie named Lizette. She wore thigh-high boots and a platinum bob wig and worked…um, on Hollywood Boulevard. In human resources. One night, she meets a dashing, wealthy businessman. He doesn’t care that she can’t eat lobster correctly…”

“Pretty Woman,” sighed Lizette. “Richard Gere’s Black—I feel it.”

“You think everybody’s Black until proven otherwise.”

“I won’t know peace till I see his genealogy report.”

Lizette felt that since Belle Fleur was full of Black folks who looked white, numbers suggested that many whites could be Black. It was all a fine line in the South, she’d say. Given that those sinning, raping plantation owners had both white babies and Black babies, everyone was six degrees from being one or the other. Which was what scared southern white people the most.

Lizette let go of Genevieve’s hand and launched into a catlike stretch. “I’m gonna have a time falling asleep. Honey, can you brew me up some Lipton’s?”

Genevieve nodded robotically. It was 6:17, and she should’ve been asleep. But this was her job. She was in charge of daytime. So she disentangled herself from Lizette and shuffled down the short hallway to the kitchen.

The hallway was dark, but the kitchen light was on. This was odd. Lizette was maniacal about keeping lights out unless absolutely necessary. To keep the light bill reasonable, and also for mood lighting.

She froze, a creeping feeling rising in her chest.

Nooo. Not today, of all days.

She’d begged her mom not to invite her boyfriends over. And Lizette always assured her that she’d stop, that their home would be a no-man zone. But by the end of a long, liquor-soaked night, Lizette never remembered her promises. Or why she’d made them in the first place.

She smelled him before she saw him. Hennessy and Newports. There he was, a small round man who looked about sixty, slumped over their tiny Salvation Army kitchen table, snoring jaggedly. He was wearing a cheap suit—shiny at the elbows and knees—and a lush, curly black toupee that was as crooked as it was shameless.

Genevieve took a hesitant step into the kitchen, the linoleum floor crackling a bit. Bending down to his level, she snapped her fingers in front of his face. Nothing.

Good, she thought. Passed out, he was harmless.

Holding her breath, she tiptoed past him to the cabinet over the sink. As she reached in for the Lipton, she knocked over a box of Bisquick. It hit the counter with a dull thud, emitting a cloud of pancake powder.

“Genevieve,” he slurred. His voice was higher pitched than it should’ve been. And two-packs-a-day raspy. “Wassup, Genevieve? ’S your name, right?”

“Yeah,” she said, turning around to face him. “We met yesterday.”

He smiled at her with discolored teeth. “I remember.”

“I bet you do,” she muttered. She leaned back against the counter, defensively folding her arms across her chest. Chuckling, he shimmied out of his suit jacket and then thrust it in Genevieve’s direction.

“Hang this up somewhere, baby.” It sounded like Haydisumwheah bebeh.

She eyed the jacket with extreme disgust. “We don’t have hangers.”

With a barking laugh, he shrugged and tossed the jacket on the floor. And then he leaned back in his chair and adjusted each pant leg with painstakingly slow precision. He leered at her while he did it, checking her out from the top of her poufy high ponytail to her socks.

Genevieve was wearing an oversized men’s Hanes tee and sweats; he definitely wasn’t catching any of her actual body. It didn’t matter, though. His type just wanted to intimidate. Assert dominance.

She wanted to call out for her mom, who she knew was already asleep. But Lizette wouldn’t have helped, anyway. The last time she’d told her mom about a run-in with one of her boyfriends, a shadow of…something…had passed behind Lizette’s eyes, and then she’d dismissed it.