Darryl Junior was sitting in the middle of the living room crying the way a 24 month old baby cries when he needs to be changed: peeling, ear splitting cries that carried all over the house. The oldest, eleven year old Vanessa, was sitting on the couch ignoring her baby brother and watching television. Eight year old Shonda was sitting at the kitchenette, still refusing to eat her peas even though it was a full two hours since dinner was over. The third child, Celia, who was seven, was over at a friend’s house. (Thank God!) In the back corner of the small house, locked in her bedroom, Nice Jones was curled up on her bed crying and talking on the phone with Mama.
“Can’t you come over?” she asked. “Please, Mama. I just need some help tonight. Please…”
“You shoulda thought of that ‘fore you laid down,” was the reply. The tone was sharp. Unforgiving. “You shoulda thought of that before you laid down FOUR times, Nice.”
“Please, Mama…”
“Girl, I just got off WORK,” Mama replied. “I’m tired. My feet hurt. My knees hurt. My back’s got spasms again. I just want to soak in a tub and relax. I can’t keep coming over to help you.”
“Mama…”
“YOU the Mama now,” Mama said. “I told you, didn’t I? Now go take care of that crying child.”
She hung up the phone and Nice cried ever harder. Between Darryl Junior, the noise from the television being turned up to drown him out, and her own exhaustion, Nice Jones was spent. She couldn’t move from her bed. She’d known that it probably wouldn’t do any good to call Mama.
Nice wiped her eyes on her sleeve and looked at the pregnancy test sitting on the bedside table. She’d known the signs before she took the test, but she was hoping it was something else. Cancer, maybe. But the test confirmed what she already knew. Nice Jones was pregnant again. 24 years old and pregnant with her fifth child. The panic didn’t hit her until she got all the way home and Big Darryl had left the kids alone again to hang out with his Boys.
Once, not long after Shonda was born, she’d had a dream that her ovaries shriveled up and fell out of her. They fell out of her just like she was taking a shit, and when she was forced awake by the sound of baby Shonda crying, Nice was determined to go on birth control after that. But there was never any money for it. Other things were more important. Diapers. Formula. Baby food. Bills. Rent. More than once Old Man Marner had let her slide on the rent because he felt sorry for her; but this last time, he wasn’t so sympathetic. He told her she could pay him rent or she could work it off another way. “You’re a pretty girl,” he told her smiling like he forgot he didn’t have his teeth in. “You’re a pretty girl with big dark eyes.” Then he reached out and cupped her left tit. “We can figure SOMETHING out, Nice. Make an arrangement.”
Old Man Marner was old enough to be her grandfather. The thought of it made her sick to her stomach. Worse than morning sickness. Nice had thought about telling her Mama about what the old son of bitch had said—but Mama probably wouldn’t believe her. She went to the same church where Old Man Marner was a deacon. So she sold her car after that to pay rent, and now she was riding the bus to work… which took longer. But the money kept the old man away. For another month, anyway.
And then there was Big Darryl. Not that he was big; he actually wasn’t all the big at all. Scrawny for a man, and light as a feather. But he had a temper on him, and when he drank (which was most of the time) he made sure he got what he wanted. That included Nice, and he wasn’t about to think about slipping on a rubber after he came home from the strip clubs he hung out at with his Boys, horny when he couldn’t get one of the strippers there to do extras on credit. Nice could almost count the days back to the last time he’d climbed on top of her smelling of booze, blunts, and cheap perfume. She’d pretended she was asleep so she wouldn’t have to look at him; it was over pretty fast, and then he rolled off of her and passed out.
“Goddamn you, Darryl Stokes,” she whispered to herself, trying to pull herself together enough to leave the small bedroom and go take care of her children. She sat up on the bed and looked around. Cheap furniture. Rickety bed. Pictures of the kids on the wall by the door. The only window was partially boarded up from one of the times Darryl came home drunk and angry. The curtains were so thin and over washed that they were nearly colorless. Nice was never sure exactly how he’d come home. Or when. Sometimes he didn’t come home for days at a time; and when he finally did, Nice could always smell the reason on him. She could smell another woman’s pussy the way those dogs sniff out bombs at the airport. Darryl didn’t even bother to hide. Sometimes he didn’t even take a shower before he came home.
Pregnant, she thought. Why did I have to get pregnant again? Nice looked at the test again, as if the other ten times had been illusions. Like if she looked at it just one more time, it would read the way she wanted it to read.
She’d had Vanessa when she was just 15 years old; Vanessa’s father was a second string linebacker on the varsity football team. She didn’t really understand what that meant – she didn’t like football – but she liked wearing his varsity jacket, and she liked how big and strong he looked. When Nice came up pregnant, he told everybody it wasn’t his and convinced everybody she was a whore. He told everyone she’d made the rounds. That she’d fucked everybody on the football team. Nice had quit school by the time she was starting show. And even though she’d managed to earn her GED, she still struggled. For a while she stayed at home; but when she came up pregnant again – this time by one of the guys who worked the same shift as her at the factory where she worked an assembly line, making computer printers – her Mama had kicked her out. When she didn’t have anywhere to go, she ended up with another guy that she met through one of her friends at work. He was Shonda’s father, and it looked like he was going to stick around until the friend who had introduced them decided she wanted him for herself. Not long after that, Nice had the dream.
And then she met Darryl. He wasn’t the best man in the world. But he was willing to accept her and her kids. Plus, at the time he’d had a good job working in the deli at the grocery store, and he wasn’t drinking all that much. But that all changed within two months of her and the kids moving in. Darryl never got another job, and he was always stealing money from her purse to spend on booze and strippers and god-knows-what-else with the Boys. Then she came up pregnant with Darryl Junior. In the end, the only reason he even accepted the kid as his was because it was a boy.
Nice knew what he’d say this time. He’d say what they always say. That it wasn’t his. That she was a whore. He had plenty of proof, and they all lived in the house. She couldn’t afford to be kicked out of her own house; Old Man Marner wouldn’t do anything but help throw what little she owned on the patch of dead grass that passed for a front yard unless she got down on her knees.
Awilda, the Puerto Rican girl who worked the station next to her told her to consider her options. “There are things,” she said. “Things you can do. You have a choice , you know.”
Choice? Nice thought. What choice do I have? She was still early along. She supposed there was time. But what would Mama say? If Nice had gotten around to telling Mama that she was going to have another baby, there wouldn’t be an option. Mama couldn’t stand that her only daughter – the one she worked two full time jobs for to save money for college – was the mother of four children before she was 25. But adoption just meant sending an innocent child to a state run facility full of perverts and child haters; and The Other Option… well that wasn’t even an option at all. When her Mama wasn’t working, she was one of five people from her church who marched around the Planned Parenthood Clinic, carrying signs and pictures of aborted fetuses, yelling at the women as they walked in. The first time Nice ever heard a woman curse, it had been Mama, yelling insults at the women walking into the clinic. She called them sluts. She called them whores. She called them baby-killers. Nice was glad when she got to be old enough to tell Mama she didn’t want to go to the rallies anymore.
She stood up, walked over to her dresser, and got a single tissue from the box that was setting next to her jewelry box. It wasn’t much of a jewelry box; but then, she didn’t have much in the way of jewelry. She thought of the pictures of glamorous models in all the magazines she’d ever read. Young. Gorgeous. Adorned in the finest jewelry and most expensive clothes. Childless. Free.
Sigh. It wasn’t fair to blame the kids. She wiped the tears from her eyes and carefully blew her nose.
What am I gonna tell Darryl? she thought. No answer came to her. “What will he do?” she whispered to the empty bedroom. Nice grabbed another tissue from the box. It was scratchy on her nose the way cheap tissues are scratchy. Setting on the other side of the jewelry box, there was picture of Darryl and her. They were both smiling. Darryl’s smile was electric. She loved his smile and his laugh. His smile used to make her smile in spite of herself. She used to call him her Boo. She didn’t start calling him Darryl until he started coming home drunk and smelling like pussy. She thought about the women she’d seen on those talk shows – the ones who sniff their men’s underwear looking for jizz stains. Nice would never allow herself to go that far. When she complained about Darryl at work, though, she called him her Boo-Boo. Her tiny mistake. Like stubbing her toe on the corner table, or spilling a glass of water. It made the other women laugh and made the men shake their heads. Probably, she figured, because they knew their old ladies were saying the same kind of shit about them. Men were all the same.
Putting the picture back in its place on the dresser, she dug her hand into her pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper. On the scrap of paper there was a phone number. Awilda had given it to her. “You should call them,” she told Nice. “Call them on a break. Make an appointment.”
Nice didn’t call; but she didn’t throw the number away, either. It wasn’t a decision she could make standing on the line inserting the printer track on inkjet printers. She looked at the number, and her mother’s hoarse voice echoed in her mind. “WHORE! SLUT! BABY KILLER! HOW MANY MEN DID YOU FUCK TODAY, WHORE!?”
Praise Jesus, Nice thought. She shook her head. Mama used to slap the shit out of Nice whenever she cussed. Said it wasn’t proper. But it was okay, Nice guessed, when you’re cursing like a sailor in the service of God. What bullshit. When the pregnancy test showed positive, Nice had an overwhelming desire to talk to Mama; though she wasn’t sure why. That was why she called in the first place. Not to ask her to come help with the kids. But not far into the short conversation, Nice realized there was no way she could tell her mom. She realized she was on her own. She couldn’t tell Mama. She couldn’t tell Darryl. The only other person who knew was Awilda at work, and Nice wasn’t even sure why she told her. But it had felt good to talk about to someone.
Nice Jones sat back down on her side of the bed and looked around the bedroom. She looked over at the boarded up window and wished she could look outside. Then she looked over the cordless phone sitting on her pillow. The pillow was still wet from Nice’s tears. Then she looked at the scrap of paper in her hand. The clinic would still be open. She could make a Saturday appointment, maybe.
As she was about to dial the number, Nice noticed that Darryl Junior wasn’t crying anymore. She dropped the phone, then rushed out of the bedroom and into the living room. Vanessa, the oldest, was still sitting on the couch. But she was holding A happy looking Darryl Junior in her lap.
Vanessa looked up. “He needed changin’”she said. When Nice didn’t respond, Vanessa shrugged and went back to watching the television. After a couple of seconds, Nice asked her daughter if she’d had dinner yet. “Yeah, Mama, we ate earlier. I made hot dogs and mac-n-cheese. There’s still some on the stove. Darryl Junior had the cream peas and peaches. He’s about out of food, though.”
Nice nodded, walked back down the short hall, and into her bedroom. She shut the door behind her. Darryl might be home later. He might not be. It was nearly the first of the month and dirt old man Marner would be skulking around playing grab ass. Mama wasn’t going to help her. She looked at herself in the full length mirror that was nailed to the inside of the bedroom door. Then she walked over to the bed, bent down and picked up the phone, and dialed the number Awilda had given her.
