Tastes Like Chicken Read online

  “I love you too, Granny.”

  It was brick outside, but Reesy was warm inside the car. The sound of the old woman’s voice made her heart light and easy. As conversation dwindled, Grandma Tyler hummed an indecipherable tune. If Reesy hadn’t been driving, she would have closed her eyes and lost herself in the rhythm of the soothing melody.

  “Speakin’ of crazy,” Grandma Tyler said abruptly, “your mama and your daddy are two of the biggest nuts I ever done met.” The announcement put Reesy on edge.

  “I know,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with them. I think what happened messed them up so much, they don’t know

  what to do. They’re used to yelling at me, but they can’t really do that right now because they think I’m fragile.”

  “You? Fragile? Not hardly,” the old woman said. “My Tweety’s a tough bird. Ain’t no foolishness gon’ break you down. You made-a the good stuff.”

  Grandma Tyler made a smacking sound with her lips. Reesy knew what that meant. The woman was bracing herself to spit out a mouthful, and she was warming up her trap so she could do it.

  “So what makes you say they’re crazy?” Reesy asked after a moment. “Did Tyrene say something?”

  “I say they crazy ’cause they are. I called over there to see if they had talked to you, and they bust out and hollered at each other through the line while I sat there in the middle like a squirrel at a tennis match.”

  Reesy laughed.

  “A squirrel, Granny?”

  “Hell yeah, a squirrel,” she said. “You know he sits out there on the court, thinking that’s a big ol’ nut being batted around. He just waits and waits, watching the nut go back and forth, figuring if he wait long enough, the nut’s gon’ drop.”

  Reesy gripped the wheel and gazed at the road, trying to follow her grandmother’s visual.

  “But you see, in this case, the nut ain’t gon’ drop,” Grandma Tyler said.

  “Why is that?”

  “Because it’s two nuts—your mama and your daddy—and I’ll be damned if I’m gon’ sit there like a stupid squirrel while they bat some bullshit across my head.”

  “Shut up, old lady,” Reesy said, “before you make me crash.”

  “Your daddy said sela so many times, I thought he was Lionel Richie. I told him he can take his sela and stick it up his ass.”

  Reesy laughed so hard, she mashed the gas pedal by accident. Black sped forward and hit an ice slick in the road. The car threatened to spin. It frightened Reesy enough to make her pull over onto the shoulder.

  “Shit,” she said, her head resting on the wheel. “You’re gonna get me killed, lady.”

  “What you do, almost hit somebody?”

  “Just shut up talking. You ain’t got no sense.”

  “Neither does your mama and your daddy,” Grandma Tyler said.

  An hour later, they were still on the phone. Reesy told her about her new haircut.

  “Does Tyrene know you did it?” Grandma Tyler asked.

  “Heck no. That’d just be something else for her to fuss about.”

  “One-a these days, you gon’ learn from what I say. Don’t let them two bully you. I done told you before, they ain’t no saints. You a grown woman. It’s time you know that. Stop measuring your life against what they might or might not say. They didn’t let nobody do it to them, so don’t you let nobody do it to you.”

  Reesy was back on the road, headed toward Utah. She saw the reason for the absence of roadkill in Wyoming. Fencing separated the fields from the interstate. Nebraska, at least the part she saw, had been wide open and unfenced.

  “That explains everything,” Reesy said.

  “Right. They was some wild ones, those two,” said Grandma Tyler.

  “I’m sorry, Granny. I wasn’t talking to you.”

  “Well, who was you talkin’ to? Somebody in the car witcha? That’s a mighty long drive you been on,” she said. “We been on the phone for a long time. They ain’t gon’ shut it off, is they?”

  “No,” Reesy said with a laugh. “The phone’s okay. And I wasn’t talking to anybody. I was just looking at the road and talking to myself.”

  “Oh.”

  The old woman started humming again.

  “So, Granny, how wild were Tyrone and Tyrene? And what do you consider wild, because my definition might be different than yours.”

  Reesy knew Grandma Tyler might consider exotic dancing outré. There was no way her parents had her beat. Maybe they cursed a little too much back in the day, and Tyrone was back on his cigarette habit again. So what, she thought. She bet that showing her naked ass to men for fun and money was the height of edgy behavior for anyone in the Snowden clan.

  The old woman cleared her throat.

  “They was wild, baby. Back when they was Panthers, they was into all kinds of stuff.”

  “Like…”

  Reesy checked the road signs while she waited for her grandmother to deliver the shocking goods.

  “Like sharing partners.”

  “What do you mean, ‘sharing partners’? Sharing them how?”

  “I mean swappin’ each other off for sex. Tyrone used to be a big cocky so-and-so, and them Panther men liked to rule they women. A few of ’em went through your mama, and your daddy let ’em have her. It was all ‘for the cause.’ Meanwhile he was rakin’ his share of fat fannies ’cross the coals.”

  Reesy’s eyes were fixed on the broken white line down the middle of the road. She couldn’t imagine the things her granny was saying. Tyrone and Tyrene were much too prim and judgmental to get down like that.

  “Were they married then?” she asked, not sure she wanted to know the answer.

  “Married?” Grandma Tyler said with a cackle and a rasp.

  “Them two?” Reesy couldn’t tell if the old woman was laughing or coughing. “Them fools put the ‘common’ in common-law. It was your mama’s big secret, that’s why you ain’t never seen a wedding picture round the house. I don’t know why she kept it from you. They been together so long, what difference does it make that they ain’t have no real ceremony?”

  Reesy couldn’t find the wind in her lungs to form words.

  “Shit,” Grandma Tyler said in a small voice. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you that. I promised your mama I never would.”

  Reesy’s ears were ringing.

  “Well, you’re grown now, Tweety, and you was bound to find out one day. Better to hear it from me.” She cleared her throat. “That’s why Tyrene was so upset that you had everybody in white at your wedding. It was her first real chance to see it done right. She wanted you to do what she didn’t, but that’s too much pressure to put on somebody.”

  Reesy was on the shoulder of the road now. Black was low on gas, but she didn’t notice. The car idled while she leaned back against the headrest, her eyes closed.

  “I’m not saying nothing your mama won’t confirm. She knows she can’t lie ’bout it, but ain’t no way you’d know none of it if I didn’t tell you. It makes me sick to seem them hold you to standards they wouldn’t answer to themselves. It’s time to put a stop to it. I’d spin in my grave knowing I left this world without you ever knowing the truth.”

  “Stop talking like that,” Reesy said. Her eyes were still closed. She tried to picture Tyrone and Tyrene with people other than themselves. “I can’t wrap my brain around this,” she said with a whisper. “I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone.”

  “I’m just sayin’, don’t let them make you question your life and your decisions,” said Grandma Tyler. “They was rapscallions then, and they rapscallions now. They just rich ones, that’s all. That’s why I get so hot when they get on you ’bout stuff, all judgmental and intolerant. If I had a dollar for the times I smelt weed on your mama back in the day, or hell, a quarter for every time I heard them talkin’ ’bout an orgy—”

  “Grandma, stop.”

  “I’m sorry, Tweety,” Grandma Tyler said. “I hope I’m not up setting you
. I’m just fierce when it comes to my tugar. I done watched them try to run roughshod over you for years and I can’t take it no mo’. I done had my fill of this madness. My fill, I tell you.”

  “Right.”

  Reesy realized her theory about the ideal couple, well matched down to their near-identical names, was history. Gone in the twinkling of an old woman’s attempt to protect her from harm.

  Oh my God, she thought, my whole life is a fraud. She sat back up, leaning her head against the wheel.

  Reesy imagined she could feel the universe shifting. Her molecular structure was being realigned into the creature she was supposed to be, something leagues away from the being she thought she was. It was like the girl in Shrek: princess by day, ogre by night.

  She raised her head and stared at the highway.

  All this time she had felt like a princess. Now she learned she’d been raised by two ogres. Which made her an ogre. Which, she figured, was pretty fucked up.

  She stared at a FedEx truck that passed by. She focused on the back of the vehicle, her eyes fastening on the deepest color…purple.

  She started to cry. It was bad enough to learn that Pa ain’t Pa.

  Who the fuck was Ma, was what she wanted to know.

  Her hands were against the steering wheel. The ring twinkled through the kaleidoscope of her tears like a million stars in an open sky.

  Hit the Road, Black

  Reesy left Harlem at dawn the next morning, her trip laid out compliments of Mapquest.com.

  She was taking the northwestern route, I-95 to the Jersey Turnpike, across the Delaware Water Gap, through Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, past Chicago, then Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada. She was giving herself four or five days to get to California, no rush.

  This was to be a trip of leisure, with eight-hour stopovers each night so she’d be well rested the next day. It was the thick of winter, but nothing on The Weather Channel indicated that she’d hit horrible driving conditions anywhere. If she needed snow chains, she figured she could stop in some city along the way and get them. Other than that, everything seemed copacetic.

  It was just going to be her and Black, her Porsche Boxster—a gift from Dandre the first night she played the lead in Black Barry’s Pie. The car was ready for the long trip ahead. He had been given a full inspection at the dealership the day before. He’d had an oil change, all the fluids were fresh, there were new spark plugs, belts, wipers, and tires. Black had been cleaned and was smelling quite spiffy, like pineapples, compliments of one of those ubiquitous car fresheners sold at the counters of gas sta tions and convenience stores. She’d stuck the scented tin under the driver’s seat. By the time she got to L.A., she knew she would be sick of pineapples and tired of sitting hostage in Black.

  She had a grip of CDs packed, her favorite stuff: Biggie, ’Pac, the Beatles, everything by Stevie Wonder, some Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan, Jay-Z, Nas, Lauryn Hill’s Miseducation joint, some Erykah Badu. And Maxwell. He was her Moses, and it was his music she planned to have playing as he led her on her exodus from the wilderness of the city off to freedom in California, with miles of distance—2,814.32, to be exact—between her and Dandre.

  She had fried up a mess of chicken the night before and had it packed in a Tupperware container, along with a loaf of white bread and slices of Sara Lee pound cake. She had a small cooler stuffed with plastic bottles of Pepsi and tiny bottles of Cocola. All these things were more tradition than actual want. Whenever Tyrone and Tyrene took her on road trips as a child, this was what they had packed. The three of them would eat the cold chicken folded up in the light bread, wash it down with small bottles of Coke, then snack on Sara Lee. It was like an oil change—necessary for any drive that exceeded four hours.

  Mapquest said her trip was an estimated forty-five hours and thirty minutes. She planned to stop for fast food and a few sit-down meals along the way, but things wouldn’t feel right without the smell of cold cluck in the car. She needed all the accoutrements to bless the trip.

  She hadn’t told Tyrone and Tyrene about her plans. She’d deal with them once she was settled in L.A. To prevent them from calling her apartment and finding the number disconnected, she told them she was going away to a resort in the Poconos for a couple of weeks. They bought it, insisting she needed the peace of mind so that she could regroup.

  “I’ll have my cell with me,” she said, “but it’ll be off most of the time. If there’s an emergency, just leave me a message.”

  “That’s okay, baby girl,” said Tyrone. “You take your time, we won’t call and bother you. Do you need anything? Are you doing okay?”

  “I’m fine, Tyrone. Really. I’m looking forward to the mud baths and full-body massages.”

  Tyrene, listening on another extension, had a flash of herself laid out on the bed at the Parker Meridien getting a full-frontal treatment at the hands of Hill.

  “Well, good for you,” her mother said. “Has your father told you about his problem?”

  “Tyrene,” he interjected with a growl as subtle as a bear’s.

  “What, Tyrone, what?” she said. “Teresa, you know your father’s smoking again, don’t you? All that secondhand filth in the air around here. I swear, it’s like he’s a different man. He doesn’t give a shit about me.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, woman?” he said, his mouth away from the phone. “Why are you discussing this in front of Teresa?” He coughed and cleared his throat. “I wish I was going to the Poconos with you, daughter,” he said into the receiver. “Goodness knows I could use some R and R, some earplugs, some something. Sela.”

  “Then go, muthafucka,” Tyrene said. “There’s no one here forcing you to stay.”

  “What’s wrong with y’all? I’ve never heard the two of you act like this.”

  “It’s all that damn cigarette smoke. He’s sucking it in and blowing it out, and watch…I’ll be the one with black lung and emphysema.”

  “Those are two different things,” said Tyrone.

  “Well, it all spells death to me,” she shrieked.

  The three of them were silent, the echo of Tyrene’s hysteria lingering in the air. Each one held a receiver and stared at nothing, longing to be somewhere else.

  “I need Misty’s phone number,” Tyrene said.

  “What for?” asked Reesy, wondering if her mother would admit to their tiff.

  “She had some legal issues at work she wanted to ask me about,” Tyrene lied.

  “Then won’t she call you?” interjected Tyrone.

  Good one, Daddy, Reesy thought.

  Tyrene searched for a comeback, but Reesy gave her the number before she could think of something that seemed more convincing.

  “I gotta go,” Reesy said after giving her Misty’s info.

  “You’re not going away with that philandering bastard, are you?” her mother asked.

  “Tyrene,” said Tyrone.

  “Bye, y’all, I love you.”

  “And stop saying ‘y’all,’” Tyrene commanded. “It’s improper English.”

  “Oh,” said Reesy, “but ‘muthafucka’ and ‘philandering bastard’ are okay?”

  Tyrene gasped. Reesy clicked off before there was any further response. The last thing she wanted was another diatribe from her mother. No matter what they discussed, it would somehow weave its way to Dandre, and Reesy was not ready for that. It had required a herculean effort to shut him out of her head. She knew she hadn’t dealt with what had transpired between them and that it threatened to erupt if she didn’t, but there was time for that. The words of her favorite heroine from literature and film—Scarlett O’Hara—still held true: tomorrow was indeed another day. There was plenty of time to look into the belly of that beast.

  Tyrene’s rants were persecuting, a torture Reesy wouldn’t wish upon the most wretched of souls. She pitied her father, who seemed to be rearing up and taking umbrage—at long last—at the incessant hooting of his wife. Tyrone was opinionate
d and, at times, quick to interfere, but he was slow to anger.

  When he did blow, it was big, volcanic, and swallowed up everything in the vicinity. Reesy hadn’t seen him come undone in years, and that was only once, after a teacher who’d made the mistake of calling ten-year-old feisty Reesy a “bad little nigger.” Her father had threatened to dismember the woman, two limbs at a time: “I’ll pry her apart like the fucking Barbie whore she is!”

  According to Tyrone, people like Reesy’s teacher should be the first ones culled from society. To him, she had represented the oppressive establishment. Dismembering her would have been the clarion call of a real revolution.

  Reesy couldn’t imagine what it must be like for him with Tyrene right there in his ear. All day long at work. All night long beside him in bed. They’d seemed like such a perfect match, the kind of Frick and Frack relationship she sought with her own life partner, whoever he turned out to be. The hint at a possible chink in their collective armor was disturbing, a shifting of absolutes that would have repercussions too infinite for her to ponder. It made her remember that moment in the movie The Color Purple, and the line that always struck her the most: “Pa ain’t Pa.”

  Reesy needed Tyrone and Tyrene to be made for each other. How else, she thought, could she hope for the same for herself? They’d been so simpatico, even down to their names. She defined herself by their uncanny symmetry. If their duality wasn’t real, she wondered if her own personal truths would be next to fall away.

  She realized that she wasn’t leaving soon enough. She shook her head and fingered her hair. The glimmer of her ring caught her eye as it passed.

  Two weeks would give her an adequate break. She knew the next time she heard her mother’s voice she would be telling them she’d moved an entire coast away, and the ranting would begin anew.

  The thought of them made her head hurt. She took some Aleve to intercept the pain before she started on her way.

  She and Black had made it through Des Moines and were headed into Nebraska.

  It was late, almost eleven, and she figured she’d stop for the night.