Pt. 2 Looking for Merci Mini-Series: Crash
Twenty years later
Read part 1 of Looking for Merci
20 years later…
Merci crashed into every room she entered. A goddess wrapped in the colors of sunsets and the bulk of waist-length braids, caged in a proper bun on top of her head like a lightbulb. She commanded attention like the reverence of deep thunder rumbling in the distance.
In her typical way, she flounced into the chair of a coffee-wine bar on the Upper East Side—the latest in the trend of, in her opinion, bullshit hipster mashups. But the music was good, and the baristas were beautiful, so what was there to complain about?
Merci sipped an emotional support Bordeaux in the bullshit-mashup-shop and waited. She flipped through receipts from her agenda - spa facial, the results of a phone call with her personal concierge to secure the Brunello Cucinelli and Pyer Moss items she had to have, and a 3-hour lunch. A triumphant and packed Tuesday, as usual. She turned the Cartier bracelet shaped like a nail wrapped around her delicate wrists as her phone buzzed with a reminder - BORING ASS DINNER at 7pm.
A long hiss rippled the red in her glass. For years, Merci’s wife dragged her to dinner with someone, the opening of something, or whatever else a budding power player in this city must attend to be seen by the right people. Black lesbians were all the rage this season - and double points if you’re married - so their schedule was packed more than usual.
As Merci sipped, her wife was in an office three blocks from there. More than likely fucking her Chief of Staff again. In 35…now 34 minutes…Merci would waft into the front door of her wife’s office and chit-chat with the receptionist about his kid’s track meets. Her doting and loving wife would enter the reception area perfectly prompt, in an impeccable suit, with her Chief of Staff trailing behind her in last season’s shift dress. A hint of someone else’s lipgloss would linger when Merci kissed her wife hello.
All three of them would get in a private car to go a few blocks on a beautiful summer evening. The Chief of Staff’s nonstop chatter in a voice that could best be compared to the piercing sound of the train’s emergency break would fill the time.
At precisely 7 p.m., dinner with the board of god-knows-what to secure funding would drag on for hours. Merci would charm the golden geese in the room with her beauty, and she would sprinkle the conversation with a few hints of the business degree she never used.
Whenever it was over, her wife would pretend to take a call, which happened to conveniently line up with the Chief of Staff's need to catch a cab outside. Then they’d go home. Fuck for her wife’s pleasure, and Merci would sit in the window, leaving tear stains on the glass—her wife snoring peacefully in the next room. Every inch of their apartment and their bank account belonged to her wife. Merci realized too late she was merely the last accessory.
Living the dream! Merci sighed. According to her calendar, they’d all do today and then again three — no two — days from now.
She watched a group of women pass by arm in arm, with a fresh happy hour in their system, heads back or bellied over in rambunctious laughter. She scoffed her jealousy into another long sip of wine.
Her mind drifted, as it usually did, to her mother. Have your own, baby. Always have your own. Her mama warned her, and Merci, true to herself, had never listened. In the bullshit-mashup-shop, Merci longed to be down in that little town in Georgia again, with her feet in the grass and a fresh cup of sun tea with too much sugar that tasted like home.
“I’d like to meet that wife of yours one day. You gon’ bring her down this way?” her mama asked softly on the last visit, in the way a woman spoke when she’d been robbed of her voice for too long. Merci was still not quite used to this level of acceptance. But she’d been without warmth for too long to turn it away.
“Of course,” Merci said with a tense smile. The “when hell freezes over” was silent.
Now that her daddy was dead, her mother found the courage to love Merci as she was, with all the things she wasn’t supposed to be. Fifteen years of silence collapsed with a solemn phone call on a Sunday morning. (Of course, the mighty Deacon died on a Sunday.) But that was all it took to bring it all back. Her mother. The sun tea. The sound of the organ.
And a kiss behind the sanctuary that tasted like pound cake and love.