pleated skirt. She’d have made us look good.”
Petunia, forever the cautious one when it came to the maintenance of her precious car, kept her eyes and mind on parking it, completely ignoring Cill. When Petunia was satisfied that she’d parked exactly twelve inches from the curve, she looked over at Mother Blister, and accidentally hit her mouth on the steering wheel when she leaned over. She almost chipped a tooth to keep from laughing, too.
“Lord, please don’t let me be and look that crazy if I live to be that old.” Petunia whispered the prayer, laughing as she did.
“We ask in your name, dear Father,” Cill added as she crossed her chest and her fingers. She almost caught a cramp when she tried to cross her toes, too.
Mother Blister hadn’t looked in their direction. Instead, the seventy-plus senior stood under her building’s awning with a jar in her hand. At five foot nine, with a hefty frame, she looked like an overripe dark raisin with twice the wrinkles, bent almost in half like the letter C. Her entire body looked uneven when she stood.
As the blazing hot sun poured through the cracks in the awning’s cover, she spooned fistfuls of sunscreen from the jar and smoothed it on her dark skin. But it was when she lifted her skirt, to dab a little on her knobby knees, that she spied Cill and Petunia. She dropped her skirt and waved to let them know she’d seen them.
“Look at her,” Petunia said. She pointed towards the building’s awning quickly so Mother Blister wouldn’t see her as she approached. “She’s one of the senior heads of our church’s Mothers Board.” She dropped her head again pretending not to laugh as her bony shoulders shivered. “That’s too sad.”
“Sad ain’t exactly the word I’d say. Downright ridiculous is more like it,” Cill chimed in as she suppressed another giggle. “Listen. Do you hear it?” she asked.
“Hear what?” Petunia asked. She turned her head from side to side while holding one of her ears.
“The sounds of snaps, crackles and pops,” Cill answered while snapping her fingers. “Mother Blister was standing there broiling in that sun and sounding like a geriatric bowl of Rice Krispies. I can still hear the sounds echoing in the air.”
“Hello, Mother Blister.” Petunia stopped laughing long enough to call out as Mother Blister ambled towards the car. She opened her door and stepped out to give the woman more room to enter on the driver’s side, when she finally reached there. “You’re going straight to hell for that,” she leaned back inside and whispered to Cill.
“How y’all doing, today?” Mother Blister asked as she finally arrived. She squeezed her hefty body into the back seat of Petunia’s car, pushing aside the blanket Cill had carefully laid out.
“How was Blind Betty’s wedding?” she asked, but didn’t wait for an answer before continuing. “Forget about a wedding, I hope we get to the meeting on time, today,” Mother Blister said as she finally found a comfortable spot, despite the concerned look from Petunia and the smile on Cill’s face.
“Well, they can’t have a singles meeting without all the most promising singles being present,” Cill offered. “You do remember that we are going to discuss what other things we can do to meet our soul-mates, don’t you?”
“You do remember that I’ve probably forgotten more about men than you’ve ever learned or will learn no matter how hard you try to be like one,” Mother Blister snapped.
“I like keeping in touch with my masculine side. You gotta problem with yours?” Cill’d always liked tattoos and keeping folks guessing about her gender. She never questioned why. She just enjoyed the game.
Mother Blister was old, but not stupid. She knew Cill would always try to get an argument going with anyone she could. “Watch yourself, youngster,” Mother Blister continued as she adjusted her false teeth as if she were going to take them out and use them on Cill.
For the rest of the ten-minute ride to Sister Need Sum’s house, the three women alternated between arguing and apologizing. And, of course, Cill and Petunia had to give their edited version of Blind Betty’s “fiasco of a wedding,” as they called it.
And they were the sanest women in the Oh Lawd, Why Am I Still Single Club.
2
It was Saturday morning and several sweat-stained gardeners were scattered throughout the Pelzer suburbs of the rich and wish-they-were rich population.
Most of the men were young, willing workers, and arrived in small trucks and multi-colored vans. Their well-toned bodies were tanned from the hot sun and dirty from the hard work of mowing lawns and spreading fertilizer. That morning they came prepared to prune and to plant.
Light testosterone whiffs of dripping sweat intermingled with the fragrance of jasmines and yellow lilac bushes that dotted the lawns of several plush homes. The homes of the rich and snooty residents of Hope Avenue were definitely not the homes of the single, but often desperation still came to visit.
As they pushed their roaring lawnmowers, the gardeners’ sleeveless T-shirts clung to their bodies. Although the sight of the young men intimidated the well-dressed men struggling under the weight of their golf clubs, it wasn’t enough to keep them from driving off in their luxury cars and leaving their wives behind.
Standing in the doorway with each hair in its place and nails polished to a shine, the left-behind wives leered at the workers. The sight of the promising young men caused the spoiled wives to daydream of slinging the golf clubs and their husbands over their shoulders, and depositing them at the curb.
A little farther away the intoxicating mixtures of flora and perspiration had wafted towards the corner and into one of the homes on Drudge Road. It was a house where an old flowery faded mat with the furrowed face of a winking cherub, resting lopsided on the front porch, welcomed visitors.
Townfolks always described Hope Avenue as looking “well-off.” They said that Drudge Road just looked “far off.”
Inside the small, cluttered wood-framed eye-sore on the corner of Drudge and Hope avenues, where the smell of Icy Hot for back pain and Clairol plum hair dye was certain to attack a visitor’s nose, lived Sister Need Sum. Her close friends called her Needy. Moreover, even those who didn’t know her at all took one glance and called her that, too.
Needy leaned out of her narrow bedroom window with a chipped pair of binoculars and inhaled the morning air for the umpteenth time since awakening from a restless night. I’m long overdue for some pruning and planting, she sighed as she mentally tore off with her teeth the shirt of one of the young gardeners. With her free hand she began to fan furiously with a torn Aretha Franklin album cover. Her heart fluttered as her mind began to entertain fleshly thoughts that she’d thought she’d overcome at a recent prayer meeting.
Since she had her first kiss at the age of twenty-five, Needy struggled with issues of the flesh. “God’s still working on this building,” she always testified.
“Buenos diás, Carlos. Que pasa?” Needy shamelessly yelled across and up the street at one of the workers who came dangerously close. She prayed her voice rose above the constant high-pitched buzz of the hedge clippers. “Oh you fine, young thing,” she muttered and then quickly looked sky-ward and added, “Lord, please forgive me for that flesh-ridden thought about what I’d love to do with that young man.”
As
