ROLANDA
By Margaret Sisu
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Copyright © 2011 Margaret Sisu
All rights reserved. No part of this story or cover image may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the copyright owner.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Rolanda cover design by Gennia Holder
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Also by Margaret Sisu:
Short Stories
Alabama Blues
Me and Tommy Lee
Books
The Nude
This ebook contains an excerpt from The Nude.
Available at:
www.margaretsisu.com
or
Amazon.com
Table of Contents
ROLANDA
By Margaret Sisu
Palisade Boulevard is awfully quiet this afternoon—not a soul is in sight to see me stroll out the front door.
Isn’t that odd?
There’s no one out shining some SUV to perfection, no trimming immaculate lawns, no kids idling on the block just because it’s Saturday. There’s just cloudless sun, a whisper of wind, and the faint smell of turmeric drifting from Sheila’s kitchen window next door. Everything is so…still. It makes me think that all these houses know exactly what I’ve just done, even if the people inside them don’t.
I’m also convinced the silence is an unspoken, cosmic blessing.
I drop my last bag—a Louis Vuitton make-up case—and the towel-wrapped bundle into the trunk of the car and slam it shut. I pause a second, one last time, and listen, but there’s not so much as a peep coming from inside my–the–house. I can’t help a smile. I saunter around the car, slide in behind the wheel, back out of the driveway, slip into drive…and keep right on going.
It’s odd, too, how calm I am when I’m so excited about what’s next for me.
I’m going to be free, at last.
Well… for a while, anyway.
***
No doubt my life would have turned out different if I hadn’t won the swimsuit portion of the Miss Pecan County Beauty Pageant back in 2005. I didn’t win the title. The Master of Ceremony asked the other contestants easy questions like, “What do you think is the key to achieving world peace?” When he got to me, he asked how I thought the pecan industry in south east Florida could be taken to new heights in the future. Huh! I fumbled the answer, ended up two points behind the winner, Miss Municipal Museum. In all the excitement of roses and royal waves, Miss Muny’s boyfriend leapt onto the stage, dropped to one knee, and proposed. The crowd loved it, especially when she gushed, “Yes, but not for a whole year,” just close enough to a mike for everyone to hear.
What none of us girls knew at the time was that there was another contest going on, an unofficial one being judged solely by just one of the contest panelists. Mrs. Francine Tooley had an agenda all her own and with the winner spoken for, she turned her sights squarely on the first runner up—me.
I can still see Francine now—cutting through the backstage crowd, bearing down on me like a missile. Contestants and judges weren’t allowed anywhere near each other until the contest was over, so we had never spoken, but I knew who she was. Francine was—is—a striking woman, even at ten years past menopause. Tall, mahogany skin, high cheek bones, and an inch-long cap of sterling silver hair. She would have been a stunner in her twenties—still was—plus she had the sort of straight-backed walk that came from old money and was polished by years of beauty contest training. She was accustomed to being looked at.
She came right up to me that night backstage and stuck out her hand.
“Hello, Miss Clarke. Congratulations on being first runner-up. As far as I’m concerned, you should have been the winner.”
While I tried to think of something to say beside “Thank you, Ma’am”, she said, “There’s someone I’d like you to meet,” and stepped to one side.
I didn’t need her to tell me that the man who stood in front of me was her son. I do remember wondering if she was presenting him to me or me to him. All six foot-two inches of Quinn Calvin Tooley looked much too fine in a fitted black tux, his smile making my belly flutter and my knees shake worse than when I was on stage in front the big crowd.
He was seven years older than me—twenty eight—and already a Vero Beach law firm partner. Francine would never admit that she started plotting the wedding the minute Quinn and I smiled at each other and shook hands a little too long. At our engagement party four months later, she did confess that the first time she saw me in the preliminary round of Miss Pecan, she knew two things: 1) that I could win the swimsuit category standing still, and 2) that I would be perfect for Quinn. By then I had also discovered that back when Francine was young, there weren’t too many beauty contests that let black entrants get far and she had never made it into final rounds, not even in all-black competitions. But she stayed active in the circuit as a consultant, and later as a judge. She dreamed of someday debuting her own daughter on the pageant scene, but she never had a daughter; just three sons. Quinn’s oldest brother, Trey, married an island beauty from Barbados, and Tyrone, the middle son, an ex state queen from up north. Why that didn’t put me on my guard, I don’t know. I was just thrilled to be one of these beautiful people and, if I’m going to be honest, just too lazy to open my eyes and see things for my damn self. I was under a spell, swept along by the Tooley charisma. I dumped my runner-up winnings in to a bank account and threw myself into being Quinn’s fiancée.
When Quinn wooed a woman, he did it right—piano serenades, champagne dinners, theatre box seats, yearning late night phone calls. Pretty soon I was ready to seal our relationship skin to skin but Quinn held out. He discovered that I had miraculously survived high school and the nearly four years since with my virginity intact. It was more lack of interesting candidates than presence of piety that resulted in my anomalous condition, but he said, “The fact that you’re discerning enough to save yourself for someone special says a lot about you, Rolanda.” The highlight of our courtship was heavy-petting-without-penetration. I was awed by his self-control.
By the time he popped the question at a cocktail party at his parents’ house—down on one knee, after playing “You Are So Beautiful To Me” on the baby grand out on the lawn—I was a deer trapped in the beam of a two-carat-diamond’s glare.
My mother and brother were thrilled, but Sherry, my sister, said it was too good to be true. Sherry can be a bitter-tasting bitch sometimes, even when we were back in high school. She sabotaged every relationship she ever had by never trusting her boyfriends and, even more, by not caring if they knew it. She was always cynical about happy endings. I don’t know why—we grew up in the same house, with the same parents, got the same presents and punishments. When she dropped remarks about how fast Quinn had roped a ring around me –(“He didn’t sweep you off your feet, Ro. He Hoover-ed you up like a cornered dust bunny”)—I called her a sour old maid (she’s four years older than me) who just wanted me to be alone like her.
Our Dad had died two years before, so my brother, Bobby—the oldest of us three—walked me down the aisle. Sherry finally shut up and was my maid-of-honor.
On my wedding night, I expected losing my virginity to be uncomfortable but by then Quinn and I had been fooling around long enough that we knew how to please each other, plus he could play a woman’s body like a three-section orchestra, build her up to a crescendo, and make her forget her own name in clash of the cymbals. I glowed fo
r a full year.
Falling in love was easy—I had my eyes shut the whole time. Staying in love, I found out, meant opening my eyes and still choosing not to see things, even when those things made little doubts whisper in my head. I told myself I just had to adjust to married life and take the next logical step toward having our own family.
Idiot.