Man Curse Read Online Free PDF Page A

dinner.”
    â€œMeena, I will call you back.”
    I threw the phone down, screaming, “Asshole!”
    Brooding on the couch, face turned up, I stared at Grandma Fey’s picture on the mantel. All the yelling Dexter and I did reminded me of Grandma telling one of her stories at the reunion.
    The life of the almost-retired side of the party, she talked at an escalated volume, cracking up at her own jokes. With a tendency to recount the details of a family fight involving knives, cussing, and screaming, Grandma Fey and her happy giggles brought contagious laughs and discomfort.
    â€œI watched Mama pull a knife on my daddy. Yeah, Daddy hit her while she was cookin’. And Mama grabbed a butcher knife, put it to his neck, and said, ‘If you hit me again, I’ll kill you.’ Mama didn’t take no crap.” Grandma laughed loud and boisterously, swaying back and forth. Her bright purple dress swept the ground with each move. A gold tooth glistened as she opened her mouth extra wide. “Uh-huh,” she’d add with a nod, before taking a finger to scratch the dry scalp flaking under her curly tight wig.
    Grandma Fey’s mother, or Ma Betty, as we called her, had died like her daddy, Great-Great-Grandpa Marcus. Like her father, Ma Betty passed with no memory of who she was and what she’d been born on earth to do. The Alzheimer’s was so severe that she was placed in a nursing home where visits from family members became as uncommon as married black women. She died alone, under covers stained by infected bedsores oozing puss. Her death caused a rift in the family between those who’d regularly visited and ones who hadn’t.
    As usual, the family curse had touched her. Decades before Ma Betty became sick, she was an upbeat go-getter, proud voter, skilled baker, and soul food chef. Traumatized by disappointment and heartbreak, Betty decided to spend the rest of her days without a man. Ironically, her three younger sisters followed this same path, remaining single till their deaths.
    When random family reunion time came and they all got together, the matriarch Mitchell ladies would find themselves on familiar relationship ground.
    â€œWant a man, but don’t need one. Probably won’t get one,” I remembered hearing Ma Betty say during one of our holiday family visits to her home in Brooklyn. “Hand me that towel,” she’d instructed my mother, who was in the kitchen, watching her drizzle lemon glaze frosting over a moist, bundt-shaped pound cake. “Mitchell women are cursed. Gon’ be all alone, forever.”
    Sitting at the kitchen table next to me, sipping a tall cup of Pepsi while watching an old Western, Grandma Fey yelled without taking her eyes off the TV, “Don’t put those things in Deena’s head.”
    â€œWell, it’s true,” Ma Betty snorted. “ I know.”
    â€œIt is not,” Grandma spit back. “I been married.”
    It was the first time I’d ever heard that Grandma Fey had married. As I found out, she was eighteen when she’d met a charming, light-complexioned man with curly black hair—Bill Boone. They dated two weeks before jumping the broom. Six months later, she was home pregnant when a woman knocked at the door.
    â€œHi, does Billy Boone live here?” A short, plump woman waited for an answer. She wore a large sunhat with a daffodil pinned to the side.
    â€œYes, Bill lives here,” Grandma Fey said. “May I help you?”
    â€œWho are you?” the little lady asked, putting her suitcase on the steps. “Do you live here?”
    â€œI’m his wife, who are you?”
    â€œHis wife.”
    Grandma says she almost passed out when those words came from that woman’s mouth. But still, Southern hospitality was upheld as she invited her inside for tea. Over sips of Earl Grey, Grandma found out that Bill had disappeared from his other home in Raleigh,