Joy. Marsha Hunt

even go ahead organizing the funeral.’

      Tammy was probably the last person Joy would have wanted doing that, but how could I tell him as much.

      ‘You got Brenda’s number?’ I asked him, ’cause I would of rather talked to her than him, since he sounded like Tammy probably had him hoodwinked into thinking that she was suffering. She was good at that. Even I fell for it for a time after Dagwood left and Tammy took to her bed surrounded by any kind of bottle that was made – from hot water bottle to pill bottle to whiskey bottle, though I’d be lying if I said she ever became a alcoholic. But she might as well have been since she stayed in the bed for months with me waiting her hand and foot till I got fed up and stopped bringing her in food, although I kept up fixing meals for them children. Though I have to say Brenda and Joy did a lot for theyselves. And for Anndora.

      ‘Brenda’s phone’s been disconnected,’ Jesse said.

      ‘Again!’

      ‘Yes again,’ he sighed. ‘Her girlfriend Latrice moved to Phoenix for six months for some job training scheme with the Federal Government and Brenda’d run up a big seven hundred dollar phone bill calling her every night.’

      ‘Seven hundred dollars!’

      Joy had told me that Brenda had taken up with a new woman but I was only half listening to her when she said it, because Brenda’d been through so many women it didn’t seem worth taking in the details about her latest at the time, since I’d had enough about Brenda and women from the first she let it out. In fact, if Brenda hadn’t started that ruckus in the papers about being a lesbian, things might have worked out real different for Bang Bang Bang. Although I reckon it was Anndora’s fault as much as Brenda’s that the group split up ’cause Anndora had a tantrum and stopped speaking to Brenda when the story about Brenda hit all the papers. ’cause they had a number one record and wasn’t nobody admitting back then that they was gay, it caused a big stir. Not like these days. Everybody in San Francisco is gay seems to me when they turn out in the thousands for them gay parades. I didn’t blame Brenda, when the fuss started, to take it upon herself to quit. Not that I hold with her laying up with women, ’cause as far as I’m concerned that’s uncalled for. But since she was the one doing all the singing and getting none of the glory, ’cause Joy and Anndora had all of it, she said she didn’t have to put up with Anndora giving her attitude.

      Anndora being the youngest was used to having her way. Children born pretty as Anndora got people smiling up in their faces before they’ve earned it, so they start out thinking that life’s a pushover.

      Which brought to mind that as much as I didn’t have time for Anndora, I would of rather been talking to her even than to Jesse.

      ‘How ’bout giving me Anndora’s number,’ I asked him.

      ‘Hang on, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘I’ll see if I could put my hands on it. Tammy’s probably got it in her book somewhere, though I know Anndora’s like quicksilver the way she rushes from place to place. On planes and off planes more than Joy she was.’

      I didn’t like to hear him mention Joy in the past tense. It was like he’d buried her already.

      Last I’d heard, Anndora had been living in Milan, Italy, and it wouldn’t of surprised me to hear she’d shacked up with some gangster, ’cause all that ever interested her was brassy clothes and flashy cars and she didn’t care how she came by them. Joy said I didn’t give Anndora a chance, but then Joy was the main one who ruined her. When they was little, Joy used to dress Anndora up like a china doll and pull her up and down the streets in a red wagon so that folks would stop ’em to ooh and aaah. Joy wasn’t but four years older than Anndora, but once Tammy went off the rails over John Dagwood, Joy played mother. She had sense but she was too soft, so little as Anndora was, she walked all over Joy and that didn’t never change that I could see even after they got big. Kindness is one thing but you ain’t ’sposed to let people treat you like a door mat.

      Helen used to say that she thought part of Anndora’s problem was that she looked too white and thought she was too good to be with coloreds, and it’s true enough that she didn’t never have no colored friends at school, not that there was many of them there to choose from, ’cause Tammy’d got her into a school out of our district and whereas Anndora should have been going to Grange Elementary two blocks away which was almost all colored, Tammy’d put her into a school over by the library, six blocks from the house where wasn’t nothing but white folks and Mexicans living then, though I hear it’s all colored now.

      But when I’d go to collect Anndora out the school yard and she’d be standing with them little Mexican children that she was always making friends with, I couldn’t hardly see no difference between her and them.

      I hated to think it, but Joy seemed proud that her baby sister didn’t have no color to her. Even Anndora’s fingernails and toenails was thin and brittle like white folks’.

      When Bang Bang Bang was touring in Europe, all heads turned when that girl sashayed down the street with them green speckly eyes of hers and that dark reddy brown hair hanging down her back in big waves and ringlets. Them folks in Europe couldn’t believe it was hers and was always asking if she had on a wig and what country she come from. Anndora lapped it up, but over the years, she got to look way older than Joy. I expected as much, and was always telling Joy to be thankful she was brown, ’cause that light skin wrinkles up quick.

      Jesse had come back to the phone. ‘Baby Palatine, either I’m not concentrating well enough or it’s actually not in Tammy’s book, because I can’t see Anndora’s number or her address. But I know she’s living in Milan, if you want me to see if I can get her telephone number from the international operator.’

      ‘Ain’t no need going to all that trouble,’ I told Jesse. ‘When d’you think I should phone back to speak to Tammy?’

      ‘Give it a few hours.’

      ‘A few! I’m setting in San Francisco at my wits’ end and I got to wait around a few hours to find out what’s going on?’

      ‘I understand how you feel, but we’re all helpless. Life takes an unexpected turn like this, and as much as we want and expect the world to stop, everything goes on. That’s something I learned working in the police department. Life goes on.’

      I didn’t want no policeman’s lecture, I wanted to know what had happened and why, and I wasn’t gonna get no satisfaction out of Jesse, but I figured Rex might have some answers.

      Jesse hadn’t finished talking. ‘Baby Palatine, we plan to drive to New York as soon as Tammy wakes up, because she thinks that’s the best place for us to all be. She asked me to ask you to meet us there if you phoned, and I assume you have Joy’s address.’

      With Freddie B out of work two months I didn’t hardly have the money to get across the Bay Bridge on a bus, so getting to New York was gonna take some doing, but I didn’t let on to Jesse.

      ‘Okay, I’ll meet y’all there. I don’t know nothing about the planes and that, but I’ll get myself there.’

      ‘I’m sure that’s where the funeral’s going to be held,’ Jesse said, and as I was worried that he would start in talking about Joy again I hurried to get rid of him.

      ‘You’ve been a big help, Jesse. Thanks. And I’m looking forward to meeting you proper. Bye, now,’ I said and hung up.

      Petty things can set me off, but when I got to deal with the big ones, I even surprise myself.

      Dry-eyed, I opened my kitchen cupboard and took out that box of Sugar Pops and kissed it before I slung it in the trash.

      I ain’t claiming I was thinking completely straight though, ’cause if I had of been, the thing I always say when anybody passes would have come to my mind which is that ‘the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away’, ’cause don’t nobody know as good as him when your train’s come to the end of the line.

      But my pea brain didn’t settle on no thoughts as clear