She could be a model if she wanted to. She’s gorgeous enough. A real beauty. She has the brains for it too, if you know what I mean. Not to say that she’s stupid. I don’t think that about her. I guess it’s more about the mentality. She’s all about her looks. Very conscious about them and she loves pleasing men. She’s flirtatious like that. As long as there’s a man in the room, she’s on full alert, teasing and flipping her hair. Giggling over every little thing. She’s all about guys.
“Dinner?” she said, expressing an entire sentence with one word.
“Order a pizza,” I said. “I’m not cooking.”
“Fine,” she said. She reached into her hip pocket of her shorts, took out her phone and sent the order in with some app she downloaded. She knew the routine and what to order to satisfy everybody.
“And trim those shorts a little shorter,” I said as she walked back out of the kitchen headed back toward her room. My head was buzzing pretty good by then, the chugging had done its job. I don’t drink very often and when I do, I get buzzed quickly.
“Excuse me?” she said, turning around. “Did I hear that right?”
“Yep,” I said. “Take at least another inch off. Hell? Take two off.”
“Can I?” she asked me, her face quizzical.
“Take three off, if you want. Hell, I don’t care.”
“You’d let me do that?” she asked and I couldn’t help but notice that she wasn’t fighting me on the idea.
“Yep,” I said. “You might as well,” I added, holding my beer up at her as if offering her a toast to her booty. “I mean, how you gonna land a hot black guy all dressed like a nun and shit.”
“Ha, ha, Dad,” she said. “Nuns don’t wear denim.”
“Nope, they wear habits with nuthin’ underneath, so the priests can bend them over after mass and hammer their pussies raw.” I paused for a second. “Ha, ha, ha,” I said, my head starting to spin a little.
“You’re drunk?” she asked me, looking at the table and the chaos I left.
“Yep,” I said. “Well, gettin’ there anyway,” I added. “Hand me another one, would ya?” I finished the one I was drinking off and held the empty bottle in her direction, waiting for her to fill my request. She thought about it for a second, shook her head and then walked to the fridge, snatching my empty as she walked by. She sat the empty down on the counter, grabbed a fresh beer out of the crisper and gave it to me.
“Can I really trim my shorts shorter, or are you just saying that because you’re drunk?”
“Trim away, baby,” I said, tipping my beer toward her again. I was being an ass, speaking through sarcasm alone, but I had a feeling that even if I fought, somehow, my wife was going to get her way anyway. Even if I divorced her. Probably, especially if I divorced her. She’d probably do it then, just to spite me.
“You won’t change your mind tomorrow?”
“Fuck, if you wanna wait until tomorrow, I’ll trim the damn things for ya.”
“You’re definitely drunk,” she said. She thought for a second. “Can I have some money?”
“Tell you what,” I said. “I’m getting impatient here. Wanna see a little more of that sweet ass of yours. Go in your room and trim those shorts. I’ll give you ten buck for every inch of material you take off. Save the scraps so I know how much to pay you.”
“Deal,” she said, starting to turn around.
“But!” I said, holding up my beer. “Just so you don’t get any crazy ideas.” My words were starting to slur as more and more of the alcohol I consumed hit my bloodstream. “I’m taking you out somewhere tomorrow. Someplace public, so don’t you get any funny ideas, young lady. If you trim ‘em, you gotta wear ‘em.” I lifted both hands into the air. “I mean, look around you. There ain’t no black guys in here! How you gonna lure a black guy into your bed if you don’t go out huntin’ for ‘em? Hmm?”
“I can, um … date black guys?”
“Hell, yeah, baby. I hear it’s all the rage now adays.”
“I’ll ask you that question tomorrow, I guess. That way I know you really mean it.”
“Oh, I mean it. Thinkin’ ‘bout puttin’ up a sign in the front yard, invitin’ all them black folk to come and fuck all my little girls. Gonna try to get a line formin’ up in the front yard and shit. Hell, might get out my barbeque and cook ‘em some chicken while they wait to defile my girls!”
Hailey didn’t know what to think. She stood there staring at me as if I’d went nuts. Was having a nervous breakdown. I think I was. I was too panicked to panic. It was easier to raise the white flag.
She finally turned and started to walk away again.
“Don’t forgit to trim them shorts. Make ya some money, honey! Maybe tomorrow, I’ll take you to Detroit. Stand ya on a corner. You could make a mint, baby. I bet that sweet pussy you got is like gold to them black boys.”
Hailey didn’t leave to go trim her shorts. She came back a few minutes later with Brooke and Misha in tow.
“See? Look, he’s drunk as a skunk,” Hailey said, one hand on her hip, the other pointing at me. I held up one of my beers, saluting my older girls.
“She’s right!” I said. “Drunk is what I am. Drunk is all I am. Better get used to it. Prolly gonna be a lot drunker, a lot more often from now on.”
“He’s saying all kinds of crazy stuff to me,” Hailey said.
“Like what?” Brooke asked, first looking at her, then at me, then back at Hailey again.
“He offered to pay me to cut my shorts shorter. Ten dollars an inch, can you believe that? Dad? Asking me to trim my shorts?”
“Oh, he’s just messing around,” Misha said. She walked up to the table and looked at the table.
“Didn’t you just like … get home a little while ago? There’s what, four beers.”
“Five!” I said, holding up the one that was half gone. “Can’t forget this one!” I took another big swig.
“What else is he saying,” Brooke said, as if she were some kind of investigator or something, all tryin’ to get to the bottom of shit and stuff.
“Said he was going to put a sign in the front yard asking for black guys to come and have sex with us.”
“And cook them chicken,” I added. “Can’t forget the chicken! Them boys love their chicken. I mean, why you think they like white girls, huh? To get them some more chicken legs! Ha, ha, ha,” I said, laughing at my own jokes and slapping my knee, spilling some of my beer on the kitchen floor.
“You should call mom,” Hailey said.
“I, uh … yeah,” Brooke said. “Dad’s definitely lost it.”
“I ain’t lost shit, honey!” I said. “Somebody git me another beer! Spilled some of this one. Now it’s almost gone.” I finished it off and held it up.
“I think you’ve had enough, Dad,” Brooke said. She stepped forward, took my empty and brought it to the counter.
“Girl,” I said. “Get me another beer, before I bent that hot ass of your over my knee for not listenin’ to me.”
“No, Dad. You’ve had enough.”
“I ain’t messin’ around, Brooke,” I said, leveling a finger at her. “Get me another beer, dammit!” I raised my voice at her. Something I never do.
“Just get him a beer. It’s not like it’s gonna kill him,” Hailey said.
“Go trim those shorts girl. Niggers love white girls in shorty short shorts.”
“DAD!” Brooke said, holding a hand on her hips, thrusting it out.
“Oh, it’s a white aunt Jamima!” I said, laughing again. “Need ta get you wunna those red bandana’s though.”
I stood up. Big mistake. I must have stood up too fast, dizziness overwhelming me. I fell over and the next thing I knew, I woke up in the hospital, Liz staring over me, her face outlined in the light overhead.
“You hit your head on the counter when you fell, Don. You’re in the hospital.”
“Damn,” I said, my buzz worn off quite a bit, but still there. “And here I thought I was being visited by an angel.”
“You okay?” The doctor said you weren’t concussed. She shined a light in my eyes.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll take tomorrow off of work. I sat up. “Where are my clothes?”
“You aren’t going anywhere right yet,” she said. She sat down. You just woke up. The doctor will want to look you over again now that you’re awake.” She picked up a magazine, still wearing her scrubs, but the clock told me she got off of work an hour before. It was the same hospital she worked in. I recognized the shitty brown paint job.
“You gave the girls a scare. I told them they couldn’t come in until I was sure you had your head screwed on right again.”
“Got a little carried away,” I said. “After reading your tweets from today.”
She folded her magazine and dropped it on the table next to her, looking over at me.
“That,” she said.
“Yeah, that,” I repeated.
“We’ll talk about that later. Here’s not the place.”
“Why not?” I asked her feeling the sarcasm bug hitting me again. “I mean, apparently ya want the who’oole world to see your picture and know the things you like to do.” I paused. “Oh, wait. No, that’s not quite right now is it. The whole world ‘cept me, right? I’m not supposed to know. That’s about how you’re workin’ the deal, right? Advertisin’ to everyone you can reach? Tellin’ the world everything you do, but when you get home? Sit beside me at our kitchen table? Why, there’s nothin’ goin’ on. You’re just a regular old country girl, doing regular old country girl things?”
“This is why I made the girls wait in the lobby. Don, we can talk about this later.”
“Fine,” I said. “Long as you tell me we’re actually going to talk about things. Otherwise I’mma start gettin’ louder.”
“We’re actually going to talk about things.”
She did bring the girls back in after I promised to keep my cool and stop saying strange things to them, even though I was sure our family was still headed for a whole lotta of strange things in the near future. I apologized to them for saying what I said, blaming the things I said on things I heard from work, not things I found out from their mother’s secret Twitter account. Liz was satisfied with that.
2
“So, how long have you known,” Liz asked me when we got home. We were standing along our back fence that overlooked the meadow behind it.
“Liz, you already know the answer to that question. I’ve confronted you what…”
“About my Twitter account?”
“Oh,” I said. “Not too long after you started it. When I found it, I could still see your very first tweet.”
“Oh,” she said, staring down. “That’s how you knew to get me this tattoo. I should have figured that out.”
“How else would I have known?”
“Somebody from work? One of your friends from around here? I don’t know. When I’m out, I don’t exactly try to hide what I do.”
“Well, it was Twitter. I saw your sign in on your phone one day and looked you up.”
“So, let me have it. How much do you hate me?” She kept her eyes cast at the fence. It was the middle of the night and I saw her by the moonlight.
“I don’t hate you, Liz. I’ve known you were cheating on me pretty much from day one. I accepted that fact a long, long time ago. The only thing I hate as that even when I try to talk to you, you pretend like it isn’t happening, even though I know damn well it is.”
She sighed. “I know,” she said.
“Why is it so important to keep it from me?”
“Because, I couldn’t stand the idea of you looking at me any differently than you do. Like an equal. That’s the one thing about you I love the most.”
“But, I knew the whole time, Liz. I’ve tried to talk to you about it a million times.”
“I wasn’t ready to face you knowing, all right. It was easier for me to pretend like you didn’t know. I didn’t want to feel like you were staring at me over my shoulder while I did what I did. I needed the secrecy, okay.”
“I don’t even care that you do it. I put that in your birthday card. You can fuck all the black guys you want, but you’re leaving our girls out of it. They are hands off,” I warned.
She took in a deep breath and looked at me.
“It is what I want, Don. I want them all blacked. I want them doing the same thing I do.”
“Not gonna happen,” I said.
“It is going to happen,” she said.
“Liz, I’m fuckin’ warning you.”
She held up her hand. “Even if not by my hand, Don. Whether I try to influence them or not,” she lifted her index finger, cutting me off. “Which I haven’t been doing, by the way. At least not intentionally. It’s the way the world is moving. Their friends are telling them how great black guys are. The media is hinting at it. It’s on Facebook, which you know all three of them spend half their spare time on. It’s everywhere.”
“The world is not moving in the direction of your tweets. If they want to date black guys, then fine. If that’s what they want, I won’t give them shit about it.”
“What do you think dating black guys means?”
“Dating. Dating black guys. It’s self explanatory.”
“That’s where you have things mixed up, Don. Ten years ago, fine. Dating was dating. But now? Huh, uh. Not when it comes to black guys.”
I turned and looked around for a chair. The closest thing I could find was the stump from the tree I cut down last summer. I sat on it.
“I’m sure dating hasn’t changed all that much since we did it.”
“White guys? Sure. It’s pretty much the same, only white guys have to work a hell of a lot harder than they used to. That’s what I’m getting at. More and more white girls are taking themselves off the market for white guys. A lot of them.”
“You point?”
“Okay. I’ll explain it. I started by trying to replace you, Don. Before the girls nights. I knew I wanted a black guy. And I was looking for a black guy to take over as my man. My boyfriend, if you will. I was going to ask you for a divorce, but before I did, I figured, why not test the waters a little. See what it’s like. So, I started hinting around to black guys, suggesting they should take me out to dinner, or to see a movie or something. And I’m talking about black guys I knew from work. Educated. Good looking. With futures. Single, but looking. They looked at me like I was crazy and at first, I couldn’t understand it. I was like you. I thought that dating a black guy was like dating any guy. So, I asked someone that I knew went out with black guys why I was being looked at by black guys like I was nuts. You know what she said?”
“What?” I asked her.
“That’s not how you do it with black guys. So, I asked her. Well, how do you do it with black guys and she told me. You put out. If you want to get a black guys attention, you either dress like you want to put out, or you tell him you want to give it up for him. It’s as simple as that. So, essentially, when you were being a smartass to your daughters last night, you pretty much hit the nail on the head. Put up a sign and invite them in. Cook them some chicken while they’re waiting.”
“And this is the life you want for our daughters? Them, going around, putting out for black guys?”
“Yes,” she said with absolutely no hesitation whatsoever.
“Let me make sure I have this crystal clear. You want our thirteen-year-old daughter to be a, let’s make sure I get the terminology right…”
“A black man’s cum dump? Yes, Don. I want Hailey to be a place for black men to dump their cum. Absolutely.”
I just stared at her. She had officially gone nuts.
“No,” I said. “I’ll have no part in this and neither will you.”
“If you tell me not to, I won’t. That much I will promise you, even though it’s what I want. I won’t do it behind your back.”
“So, you say.”
“I want to Don, yes. I’m not denying that.”
“I just don’t get that. I mean, to my ears, it would be the same thing as you saying that you wanted our daughters to all forget about college and climb around in sewers collecting dead rats. I mean, don’t you want the best for our girls?”
“I do want the best for our girls, but the mistake you’re making is thinking that our girls cannot be successful in life if they like sex and that’s bullshit. It’s misogynistic bullshit.”
“I think your simplifying it a little much here.”
“Am I any different outside of what I do? I go to work. I come home, yes, sometimes later than you’d like. I fuck you better than I ever have. We have fun together. Our marriage is better and I’m as happy as I’ve ever been. I want our girls to be happy too and black men do that for women.”
“Yeah, but in the way you talked about on Twitter? As their owners? I mean, for Christ’s sake, Liz. Don’t you see how nuts that sounds?”
“It’s the way things are moving, Don. It’s the only way for a woman to have any real chance at securing a black man in any permanent way.”
“And that makes sense to you, how?”
“The more women pursue black men, the more power black men have. It’s supply versus demand. You should know that as a manager. That should make sense to you. Women have used sex as a lure for men since the beginning of time, but because black men have so much power, regular sex doesn’t work with them. The commitment has to be bigger.”
“Well, whatever, Liz. You’re right. I’m not the one out there trying to land a black guy, I guess. But I can’t condone it. I just can’t.”
“You don’t have to. Like I said, all three of those girls are going to end up doing this on their own. So, yeah. I want to be selfish. I want to be a part of it with them and besides that, all of us together have a much better chance of luring a quality black man to own us than any of us would apart.”
“What do you mean,” I said.
“If you were so highly desired that women were throwing themselves at you, offering to be your slave, would you choose a house with one woman, or a house with four?”
“Five,” I said.
“Oh? Something I don’t know about you? You’re a woman now?”
“Well, no. You know what I meant.”
“She’s only thirteen,” I said as if that should end the conversation.
“And she’s probably the most ready out of all of our daughters. I know, as her father, you don’t like to think of her that way, but trust me. She is.”
“I doubt that. Not for what you have in mind.”
“When you were saying those things, was she interested, or appalled?”
“Well, it’s not like I…”
“You told her you wanted to put a sign in our front yard, inviting black men to screw them. Interested, or appalled? Remember her body language? Her expressions? Answer that question and you’ll know whether I’m right or I’m wrong.”
“Fuck,” I spat, giving her a dirty look and she returned my look with one of victory.
I gave up for the night, realizing there was no way I was going to win the conversation. Not on that night. I told her I’d think about it, but what I meant was that I would think about how to turn the table in the direction I wanted to go.
Hailey, when I walked back into the house, changed my mind.
“I trimmed them, Daddy,” she said, standing in our kitchen, holding her scraps in one hand. I looked at what she was holding. She had taken at least three inches, possibly a little more off of her shorts. I raised a finger and swirled it around, asking her to turn for me. She did and my heart caught in my throat. I could see about half of her ass.
“And you’re telling me that you’re willing to wear those in public,” I said, remembering what I said to her in my drunkenness.
“Hell, yeah,” she said. “It’d be fun.”
I pulled out my wallet, being a man of my word and gave her a fifty.
“I don’t have change, Dad,” she said.
“Keep it. If you’re actually willing to wear that in public, you deserve the tip.”
“Are you sober?” she asked me.
“Yes,” I said.
“So, can I?”
“Can you what?”
“You know? What you said?”
“Remind me.”
“About black guys? Can I have them over? In my room?”
“Turn around again,” I said. She followed my directions, turning for me and popping her ass at me. “That is a pretty nice ass,” I added, scratching my chin for dramatic effect.
“You like it?” she asked, beaming over her shoulder at me. I took a step closer to her and reached down. She gave me a tentative look, but fuck it. If it was good enough for a black guy…
I cupped her ass, just to see what her reaction would be.
“You sure you’re ready to let random black men use your ass as a cum dump?” I was trying to shock her out of it. Scare her a little.
“Yes,” she said. She leaned forward a little more and widened her stance, staring at me over her shoulder. Liz was at the door, watching me with a smile on her face,
“I call first dibs,” I said, smiling back at Liz as she nodded, offering me her consent.
