Chapter 2 Crystal
Crystal
I thought, My life must really be bad, because I was standing in a liquor store on a Saturday afternoon, and it wasn’t even two o’clock yet. But I needed some Merlot; I had to have some Merlot.
Some Merlot, Jill Scott, and a hot bath.
“Yes, how can I help you?” The Asian storekeeper stared out at me from behind two sets of glass—the one shielding him and the bifocals that made his eyes look as large as serving platters.
“Um,” I said, and pressed my finger against my lip, “what type of Merlot do you have?”
He smirked at me. “What kind you like, lady?” he yelled. “I got Australian, California—”
“Um,” I cut him off, “you know, I think I’d rather have a Shiraz. You have Shiraz, right?”
He shot me a look that said: What the hell do you know about Shiraz?
His eyebrows climbed to his receding hairline.
“Or, uhm, maybe a Petite Syrah?”
Now I was just showing off. I knew my wines. He was so used to black people coming into his store and asking for a pint of Bacardi white or E well, at least until Geneva popped up pregnant and Noah came out of the closet.
After those two incidents, Sonia, Karen’s mother, decided that we were a bad influence on her little girl and forbade her from being in our company at all.
The poor child spent her last two years of high school with her nose in every book the library had to offer; Sonia was determined to make her little girl a success.
And she had succeeded, to some extent anyway.
Karen was accepted to Vassar, where she obtained a degree, and then she went on to marry a Frenchman who just happened to be a doctor and who just happened to be white, and in some odd exchange that we all never quite understood, Karen took her husband’s surname, dropped her first name in favor of her maiden name, and now was known as Shaw DeJeuné.
To go along with her change in identity, she got a nose job, got Botoxed, lightened her already light skin, shaved off her eyebrows and got some permanently tattooed on, and dyed her hair blond.
We all thought she’d lost her mind. Well, most of us. Chevy didn’t see a thing wrong with it.
Karen, I mean Shaw, lives in Los Angeles now.
She’s quite famous in the voice-over circles; she’s the one you hear on the commercials that advertise the drugs of various pharmaceutical companies—well, it’s her voice you hear toward the end of the commercial.
Come on, you know the one that rattles off the 101 possible side effects that one could experience after using said drug…
Anyway, Shaw and her plastic surgeon husband were coming to New York to attend a medical conference, and oh, joy, she wanted to get together and have lunch.
The last time she’d come to town, I was stuck spending a whole weekend with her, and it was torture!
First, I vowed never to see that confused child again, and then I thought that might be too harsh, so then I vowed never to do it alone again, which was how Geneva and Chevy got invited.
***
I took a few sips of my wine and flicked on the Bose radio. Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” floated from the white box, and I found myself immediately lost in the music.
I was feeling warm from the inside out and began to dance myself round and round on the kitchen floor, totally lost in the song until the spell was broken by the clamor of my ringing telephone.
“Hello?”
“Crystal, girl.” Geneva’s sad voice filtered through.
“Hey, I was going to call you to remind you about lunch tomorrow,” I said, and then I realized that Geneva was panting urgently as if she were in the midst of a panic attack. “You okay?”
“Guuuuuuurrrrrrrrrl,” Geneva hollered, “Mandingo’s dead!”
And just like that, my best friend provided me with my first hearty laugh of the day.