Divas of Damascus Road Read online

  “I think you’re being overly concerned and selfish, Regina,” Orlando ventured.

  “Okay, how about if we just shave a big bald spot on the top of your head and let you go around looking like a middle- aged man? Deal?” she asked him, fully aware that losing his signature thick, black locks would be a devastating blow to Orlando.

  Orlando forgot for a moment that he was talking to an attorney who just happened to be taking twelve months off to raise their son. “Regina, it’s not that bad.”

  “But you agree that it is bad,” she cornered him.

  “It’s not bad at all.”

  “Your words were ‘it’s not that bad.”

  “Please, Regina, I’m not about to play courtroom with you on this. I’ve told you for the past four months that you are a beautiful wife and the beautiful mother of our son, but I don’t guess you’re too thrilled about either predicament. Ay!” Orlando got up from the bed and walked out of their bedroom, leaving Regina to loathe her body in the mirror.

  And loathe she did. Those minuscule changes in her appearance encircled her in a gay dance, taunting her the way the children at school used to when she was a child. She could hear them flow: “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fattest of them all? Regina! Regina! Big fat Regina!” The teacher comes, her whistle signaling the end of their shift, and the tormentors scatter in different directions to make room for their replacements. The replacements came on the bus or in the lunchroom with blatant ridicule. There was more humiliation in the way the lunch ladies put a little less food on her plate.

  Even at home there was no escape. Gloria’s attempts to slim Regina down to Yolanda’s and Dianne’s size were undermined by Regina’s late-night binges. Sometimes it didn’t even matter that she would get a whipping in the morning for devouring an entire box of doughnuts. The high, even if only for a minute, was paradise. A dozen powdered pieces of pleasure.

  By the time Regina got to junior high school, she’d added a few more rolls to her torso but shed the shy and withdrawn aura. The pain turned to anger, and the anger built a wall. Regina decided that since she couldn’t be beautiful, she’d be big and bold. She was loud and rude, her attitude a distraction from the body she abhorred. She would gladly opt for hours in in-school suspension instead of the weigh-ins whenever it was time for the presidential fitness challenge, or time in the principal’s office versus the humiliation of being picked last for a kickball team.

  Truth was, however, Regina owned an undeniable natural beauty that couldn’t be smothered beneath a million pounds. Her chocolate brown skin was faultless, a never-ending canvas that didn’t need paint. Her eyebrows arched naturally, and that thing her eyelashes did was to die for—the way they bunched up on the lower lid so tightly it looked as if she were wearing eyeliner, though she wasn’t. Her lips pooched out just enough to accentuate the sultry line that movie stars pay thousands to create. Even on a bad day, Regina was more attractive than many of the smaller girls in her class.

  But she couldn’t see that.

  Because of her attitude, Regina almost lost her chance at her dream career as an attorney. Had it not been for a few big- girl-to-big-girl talks with Ms. Davey, an overweight African-American counselor at her high school, Regina would never have applied for all those scholarships that she was awarded. One thing led to another, and Regina was set for college. It was then she realized: For all the names she’d ever been called, no one had ever called her “dumb.”

  Everything changed when Regina went to college. There, away from her small hometown of Dentonville, she met girls from every walk of life. Her roommate, a slender Latina with long brown hair and a personality that saw no size or color, was beautiful in Regina’s eyes: five feet six, maybe 115 pounds soaking wet. Carlotta said she saw “fat” when she looked in the mirror, but somehow she didn’t think Regina was all that fat. She did, however, concede that Regina could stand to lose a few pounds.

  “Don’t worry,” Carlotta had said. “My dad’s a doctor. I’ll write you a prescription for Plathene; it’s a weight-loss drug. I promise, you’ll be thin by the end of the semester.”

  “You can do that?” Regina had asked in amazement, suspecting Carlotta’s suggestion was probably a federal crime.

  “How do you think I stay in shape? It certainly isn’t because I like to eat right or exercise.” Carlotta laughed and gave Regina a dismissive wave.

  “I don’t know about this, Carlotta. We could both end up in jail,” Regina worried.

  “I’ll write it out to myself and give you the pills. If I get caught, my dad will hire a lawyer; they’ll say I need counseling or something, and I’ll go to rehab again for, what, a month?”

  Regina knew things might not be so simple, but Carlotta’s welfare was the last thing on Regina’s mind. If Regina could get her hands on those pills, her life would be changed forever.

  Regina agreed to the plan and all the tricks Carlotta taught her, including slathering on the vitamin E so her skin would shrink right along with her body, and taking prenatal vitamins so her body wouldn’t give out. As a result of the strain she put her body through, her menstrual cycles were irregular to nonexistent (a bonus in Regina’s eyes). She went from a size twenty to a size fourteen by December. Size eight by spring break. Ego from zero to one thousand by the end of the school year.

  “Regina Jordan, is that you? You look so good!” people had said to her back in Dentonville. Everyone from church folk to the boys she’d had secret crushes on in high school seemed to notice her. Aside from her great Aunt Toe, who suggested on more than one occasion that Regina was “starting to look like she was on poppy seed and opium,” Regina was received as new and improved.

  But, of course, Regina couldn’t take the prescription pills forever. So Carlotta inducted Regina into the clandestine world of weight management for those with no weight management skills. A dangerous recipe of binging here, fasting there, water pills, ephedrine-laced supplements, laxatives, an occasional purge, and working out to the point that they spent hours writhing from the painful tearing through their dehydrated muscles. Of those strategies, Regina came to favor fasting and diet pills. She could go a week on water and crackers, and she’d learned to use makeup to camouflage the dark circles that formed when her eyes threatened to unveil her secret.

  By the time Regina graduated from Smith-Preston, she held a bachelor’s degree in criminology, but she was a master at matching the red line to the number 120 when she mounted the scale. Like clockwork, she lost three pounds every month in preparation for the three she would gain during PMS. Never, never did she intend to let the scale’s dial tilt past 120.

  She’d crossed the line for the first time in her second month of pregnancy. Fear inched up her bones, and Regina could hardly breathe when she saw that red line to the right of her magic number. Her mind screamed, “What have I done?” But with Orlando taking such an active role in the pregnancy, Regina couldn’t tiptoe around nutrition as she’d done for almost fifteen years. For the first time, someone actually prepared her food and watched her eat it.

  Regina knew that, after all those years of mistreating her body, she’d beaten the odds by giving birth to a healthy baby. She was thankful, for what it’s worth. She did have maternal instincts and a desire to give her baby every chance at survival, but old habits die hard.

  Maybe, if the old tricks had worked again, she might have considered another baby. But her body wouldn’t cooperate the same as it used to. It seemed to Regina that her metabolism had slowed down to zero while her appetite had gone into overdrive. Something had been thrown off with the pregnancy, and even with breast-feeding Orlando for a month, she still carried an extra twelve pounds.

  Might not have seemed like much to some, but life is different when you grow up fat, lose it all, and then become threatened by the fat again. Like being in prison, then having freedom, and then having someone refer to you by your number again.

  Regina took one more look at the padding u
nder her chin and the flab around her waist and decided that she was ugly and worthless and fat again. Then she promised herself that she would scrape the fat off her body by any means necessary.

  Chapter 5

  Yolanda blew her horn, and Regina came rushing out in a red sundress and jacket combination that hugged her in all the right places. Yolanda laughed to herself, thinking that even on her best day she’d never have a body like Regina’s. And it would only get worse after having a baby—assuming that she’d meet the right man and get married, which was something that she wasn’t holding her breath for.

  “I like that dress,” Yolanda said to her sister as she hopped into the car.

  Regina gave a grunt. That was Regina. Everybody said she was mean, and Regina wore it like a badge. More than once Yolanda had suggested that Regina see a doctor about the mood swings, but Gloria fussed at Yolanda for bringing it up. “Just because you’re a pharmacist doesn’t mean you have to go around pushing drugs off on everybody. Some people are just sometimey, and your sister is one of them,” their mother had said.

  “Put your seat belt on,” Yolanda reminded her sister.

  “Just go ahead and drive,” was Regina’s reply.

  “I don’t want to get a ticket—”

  “Give me a break, okay? You are not going to get a ticket between here and the stop sign.” It had always been Regina’s pleasure to overthrow Yolanda’s sense of order and watch her sister squirm when things weren’t perfect.

  Yolanda drove slowly until she heard the click, freeing her to ask the question she’d been holding since Regina came out of the house, without the carrier. “I thought you were going to bring the baby.”

  “Orlando will bring him later. Where’s Dianne?”

  “I dropped her off at her hotel so she could get checked in. She’s our next stop.”

  “Why isn’t she staying with you?”

  “Well...” Yolanda pursed her lips and gave Regina a glance above the top of her glasses, replying tactfully. “She brought a guest.”

  “A man?”

  Yolanda nodded, keeping her eyes on the road and reminding herself, to stay clear of judgment alley.

  “Who is he?”

  “Some guy. I don’t know. Don’t get me to lying.”

  “Yo-yo, you know what I mean. What kind of guy?” Regina probed her younger sister with all the expertise of an oldest child.

  “His name is James.” Yolanda’s voice went up an octave in her attempt to refrain from spilling the beans about Dianne’s friend, but it got harder and harder by the second. One more push and she would tip over.

  “Is he crazy or what?” Regina shoved.

  “He is way off, girl. No home training whatsoever,” Yolanda spewed, took a deep breath, and closed the spout again.

  Regina leaned back, satisfied that her interrogation skills were still intact.

  Regina got out of the car, entered the hotel, and called Dianne from the house phone. They met in the lobby and exchanged smiles and hugs they’d both longed to give. “Girl, I’ve missed you.” Regina shook her head.

  “Don’t start getting all sentimental on me now. I like my Reginas with bad attitudes.”

  “Shut up and come on.”

  “Now, that’s the Regina I know,” Dianne teased. They locked arms and walked to Yolanda’s car together.

  A minute later the three yapped boisterously in Yolanda’s car on the way to the rehearsal dinner at Macaroni Grill. It would be a twenty-mile trek, but to get a decent restaurant they had to get out of Dentonville. They talked about the time they cracked the watermelon trying to pick it up after Aunt Toe had specifically forbidden them to touch it. Dianne and Regina teamed up on Yolanda, insisting that it had been her idea to transport that thing from the floor to the counter in the first place. Then Yolanda brought up the time that Dianne tried to sign her own report card.

  “And remember, the bad part was that Dianne thought an S was worse than an F,” Regina howled and beat her hand on the seat.

  “No, that’s not the worst one,” Dianne yelled. “You remember that time Aunt Toe got up there singing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ at church and she didn’t even know half the words?”

  Yolanda had to slow down to stay on the road as Dianne proceeded to mimic the blunder just as loud, as wrong, and as spirited as the day their great Aunt Toe was called upon to lend her anointed voice at the youth department’s Independence Day tribute to the congregation’s veterans. “If the rockets red hair! The hots bursting in there—oh, hallelujah—gave fruits to the whites, so now we all can share!”

  “Whoo! Girl, stop!” Regina begged as she now beat the dashboard with her palm. “Stop!”

  Dianne was breathless. She held her stomach, leaned back on the seat, and rolled her head on the headrest. She hadn’t been this silly in a long time, and it felt good to be this free.

  Yolanda’s cell phone rang, and she answered it with laughter still in her voice. “Hello?”

  “Yo-yo, where are y’all?” Gloria asked her daughter.

  “We’re on our way, Momma,” she assured the bride-to-be. “You nervous, Momma?”

  “No. What have I got to be nervous about? I’m coming up on sixty years old. I don’t get nervous about much of anything anymore.”

  Gloria’s rapid rate of speech said otherwise, but Yolanda didn’t want to argue with her. “Okay, Momma, okay. Did the florist call you back?”

  “Yeah. We’ve got all that taken care of. Everything is okay.” She paused. “Yo-yo, you’ve got Dianne with you, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, I just got word that Joyce Ann is in town,” Gloria said.

  “Oh.” Yolanda’s tone hushed the car.

  Regina read her face and whispered, “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” Yolanda mouthed to her sister.

  “Why?” Yolanda couldn’t add any more to the question at the moment.

  “I just know she’s here.” Gloria put a period at the end of that line of questioning. “Aunt Toe talked to her this morning, said she’s staying at the Holiday Inn on Main.”

  “Well, is that what you want?” Yolanda was fully prepared to un-invite her aunt Joyce Ann for the sake of her mother’s special day.

  “She’s my sister. Can’t do no harm in her coming.”

  “But, Momma, this is your day.”

  “She knows better,” Gloria’s voice swung high. “Believe it or not, Joyce Ann knows how to act. She’ll be all right. But she’s not the one I’m worried about—it’s Dianne who’s on my mind. How is she?”

  “The same, I guess.” Yolanda looked for the right words. Despite her sophisticated clothes and designer luggage, Yolanda wasn’t sure that Dianne could keep herself composed around Joyce Ann.

  Gloria continued, “Well, I didn’t tell Joyce Ann about the rehearsal dinner tonight. I just told her I’d see her at the ceremony tomorrow afternoon. Let’s pray about it. And talk to Dianne about it as soon as you get off this phone. I don’t want her bumping into Joyce Ann around town.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Isn’t she staying with you?”

  “Um, she’s gonna stay at a hotel.”

  “Why ain’t she staying there with you?”

  “Well, she brought a friend up with her, so they’re gonna stay at a hotel.”

  Yolanda figured Gloria must have been really nervous, because any other time she would have shoved that door right open. “All right, then, go ahead and tell her, Yo-yo. She needs to be prepared.”

  Suddenly, Yolanda’s heart weighed ten pounds. Why had Aunt Joyce Ann come to the wedding? She would ruin everything. No one had seen or heard from her in ages. True, she was family, but Yolanda preferred to pray for her at a distance. She loved her just like she loved everybody. But she did find it very hard to tolerate a woman who had abandoned her daughter at the worst possible point in the child’s life. With the phone still in her hand, and nodding as though she were still having
a conversation, Yolanda sent up a silent prayer.

  Lord, I don’t know why my aunt is here, and I don’t know what she is thinking. But I ask that you would first remove the hard feelings that I have against her, because I don’t want to be used by the devil this weekend. Please don’t let this weekend be a disaster. In Jesus’ name I pray, Amen.

  “What did she say?” Regina asked.

  Somehow, Dianne already knew. “It’s my mother, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Take me back to the hotel,” Dianne ordered.

  “Dianne,” Regina tried to reason.

  “I’m not playing, Yo-yo. Stop this car and turn around.” Dianne’s trembling voice betrayed her, and suddenly there sat the little skinny girl with toothpick legs whom everyone used to feel sorry for. Poor little Dianne. Joyce Ann’s girl. The one that had to go live with Gloria and her girls after that god-awful incident.

  Yolanda pulled into the parking lot of a gas station and stopped the car, hoping she could persuade her dearest cousin to stay. She put the car in park and raised one knee onto the seat so she could turn toward Dianne. Upon facing her, Yolanda could only take a deep breath and conquer her own tears. It always hurt to see Dianne so broken, so empty, that her body was nothing more than a chassis.

  “Dianne, you’ve come a long way to share this special time with us. Please don’t leave. We want you here.”

  “Uh-uh.” She sat with her arms crossed and her head turned to the side window as tears beat a familiar path up the crevices of her soul, then down their usual course on her cheeks.

  “Dianne, it’s not going to be the same without you. I mean, just a few minutes ago we were laughing and having a good time like we used to. We’ve missed you and we want you here. Besides, you haven’t even seen my baby yet,” Regina said.

  “You don’t understand.” Dianne still couldn’t look at them. “It took a lot for me to come back here and face these bad memories again. You two and Aunt Gloria and Aunt Toe are the only family I have, so I made myself do it. I figured I owed you guys that much. But if my mother is here”—she cried now, her shoulders sinking lower with every sob—“I just can’t go. That’s all there is to it.”