Page 22 of His First Wife

“Well, how about you make an appearance and then come back up here? I’ll tell people your feet hurt or something.”

“Hum . . .” I put a dab of concealer beneath my right eye. “I guess so . . .” I started but didn’t finish my thought. I wanted to say I wished none of this was happening, that I hadn’t carried my behind over to that woman’s house this morning, and that I still had my husband by my side, but this would only send me back into hysterics. “You think he’ll come?” I asked.

“Jamison promised Damien he wouldn’t come by,” she said firmly. “Look, Kerry, I don’t see why you should be the one hiding in this thing. You didn’t do anything wrong. Let his behind sit in the house and think about the fact that he’s messed up his marriage. Let him be the one forced out.”

As the crowd grew, the chatter coming up the stairs escalated from a few spurts to what sounded like a mob of two hundred or so. Hiding my cleavage with a pink sash I found in the closet, I stood by the door of the bedroom practicing my entry: how I’d smile and say Jamison had a stomach virus. He really wanted to be there. But I had to come to share in our best friends’ glory. I’d smile again and change the subject. Perhaps I’d bring up the new exhibit at the High Museum, that always shut up the fakers.

When I finally found the nerve to open the door and make my way down the stairs, I could see from the third step down that the foyer was full of people. Laughing and smiling as if not one person was missing, they seemed so content and full of themselves. There were men in black suits and women in knee-length cocktail dresses in the appropriate seasonal colors. Real pearls and diamonds sparkled from the women’s extra-slender necks as the men held their hands in the smalls of their backs. Everything was so fixed, so on key with how things were supposed to be. They’d learned well.

But who were these people really? I couldn’t help but think this as I questioned my own existence. Climbing farther down, I noticed a senator I’d been to college with. She was the first in her family to go to college. Her husband was the same. You’d never know it by how they laughed and traded secrets in the circle of spectators. They would never have been accepted at one of my mother’s gatherings. They had no name, and even in politics, little money. Like most of the people there, they were new to this crowd and had no clue that they’d never be accepted elsewhere. Mixed in here and there were a few of Marcy’s sorority sisters—all skinny, all light skinned, all married, all exceptionally successful in their careers. They were the girls at Spelman everyone had to know. When we were there, they ran all of the student organizations, and when I didn’t run, they were nominated for homecoming titles. I’d never really clicked with these women. There was something about the competition between us, the way they seemed so surprised at my beauty that just rubbed me the wrong way. They insisted on complimenting me about my dark skin, fingered my hair but seemed surprised that it was so long and not extensions, and always seemed to follow up compliments about both with “. . . to be so dark” as in “You have such a nice complexion . . . to be so dark” and “Your hair is so long . . . to be so dark—I mean, you’re not even mixed.” To make matters between us worse, they knew that my great-grandmother and mother had pledged their chapter and perhaps wondered why I wasn’t signing up. As one girl put it, “I was a paperwork shoo-in.” But I wasn’t hearing any of this. I’d grown tired of the old color thing when I was a child and my mother made it seem as if my skin, which was much darker than both hers and my father’s, was some type of genetic experiment gone wrong. It was the ’90s, for God’s sake. We had to get over it someday.

“Is that you, Kerry Ann?” Piper Muck, one of Marcy’s line sisters called when my eyes caught hers. A former big bitch on campus, she was now a big somebody in the room. She was a third-generation attorney and had just made partner at her grandfather’s firm.

“Yes,” I said, smiling as I wobbled down the last step.

“I thought so.” She smiled and as she made her way across the foyer to me, five or six other sisters came along cooing.

“The baby,” one said, touching my stomach—I hated that. “When is it coming?”

“Soon,” another said who I knew was a gynecologist. “I’d say in three weeks at the most.” She placed her hand on my stomach without asking and nodded her head “yes” to the other ladies.

“Well, that’s it,” Piper said. “When Wilma says the baby is coming, it sure is.”

They all laughed and Piper, whose oddly thin body was the reason so many women became bulimi

c, shifted the wineglass she was holding from one hand to the other.

“A boy, I bet,” she said. I could feel Jamison’s name coming up in the next sentence. There was only one way to handle the attack.

“Yes,” I said smiling. “His name will be Jamison. . . . Oh, you’re probably wondering why he isn’t here. He’s sick. He sends his best.”

They all sighed with a look of fake desperation. One could only wonder why in the hell they even cared.

“The poor thing has a stomach flu or something. . . .” I went on, beating them to the punch. “You know that bug has been going around up North.”

“Aunt KeKe,” a sweet voice called. It could only be my goddaughter.

“Milicent,” I said, turning to find her cute face. A complete replica of a young Marcy, Milicent had dimples and the most adorable little bow tie nose. She was eleven and nearly taller than me, but in my eyes the girl would always be five. She was standing beside another little girl who was the same height, but she was white with blond hair and light green eyes. They were both dressed in ballet leotards.

“Look at your belly,” Milicent squealed, touching my stomach with the other little girl. While most of the black families I knew insisted on connecting to their culture with a kind of shrewd militancy—attending black art shows, seeing Alvin Ailey every year and attending a small list of HBCUs—this was not the case for Damien’s family. We were both of the same position, but his family was a bit “bluer” than mine. With a fourth-generation European education and a blue bloodline that led right to the front steps of a plantation, Damien still held ties in the black community, but like many in his lineage, he believed in maintaining close ties to whites. For this reason, Milicent attended a white private school where she was one of eight black students, played with mostly white children, and didn’t belong to Jack and Jill or the Debutantes.

“It’s a boy, right?” Milicent asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Oh, I wish it was a girl . . .” she moaned.

“We all want girls, but we all get boys,” Piper said laughing with the other ladies readjusting their configuration around the two girls.

“You didn’t introduce your friend,” I said.

“Oh, this is Iris. She’s my new best friend.”

The girls smiled.

“Wonderful, how nice to meet you, Iris.” I shook her hand.

“She has such beautiful blond hair,” one of the other women said. “Like wheat.”

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