The One Thing, Chapter One

The Prologue is HERE





CHAPTER 1

She woke up to the kind of day that leaves a nasty aftertaste. It began with an unusually polluted sky that resembled sour milk and a refrigerator that contained just enough of the real thing to make a scientifically plausible comparison.

The air smelled like stoned people’s barbecue: a combination of starter fluid and burnt, unseasoned meat. There was a jittery vibration in the air that was punctuated by the wier-wooing and woo-doodling of too many sirens.

She knew better than to turn on the radio or the television. She just knew that this would be the kind of day when the “Breaking News” alerts would be bullying the soap operas and game shows out of the way. Wolf Blitzer would be editing in his usual weaselly references and wrongness. No Wolf. Not today.

The phone rang. She managed to clog from the bathroom and to slap at the speakerphone button before her cranky answering machine message, recorded by a drunken friend, kicked in. The thing would start recording and it would take a series of calls and passwords to get at the recording.

“Hello?” she yelled, trying to breathe past a slug of toothpaste. Was that a spider on the wall? She smashed it with a phone bill, leaving a jet black smear on the wall. The phone bill was past due.

“Hello?” an unfamiliar, astringent voice responded, “Is this Christine Shaw Baker?”

“Yes it is.”

“Christine???”

“Yes it is!”

“Did I wake you up?”

“No, but I am trying to get to work. How can I help you?” This was getting stranger and stranger. She suspected that a certain women’s club was involved. Those women surpassed all manner of resistance to their ability to annoy and to infuriate. She spat out the toothpaste and rinsed in the kitchen sink. Gross. But raw chicken juice was already down there, so screw it.

“Are you all right? You don’t sound too well…” Like the grit in poorly washed collard greens.

“Who is this?”

“My name is Yuvilla Wandela. You volunteered to work at the fund raiser on the 19th for the Social Council for Political Goodness”.

“Yes I did”.

“Are we on a speakerphone?” The woman was getting strident.

“Yes we are”. Christine used her “Non-negotiable” tone. Perhaps the non negotiable tone and good English would work.

“Oh…Well. We need for someone to go to Los Angeles tomorrow and…”

“Oh! I’m sorry, but that is not possible…”

“Well, we really need this…” Yuvilla barked. “You don’t have kids, do you?

“I don’t know where you got that information, I have two kids!” Christine lied, blatantly and without caring. That would confuse the obnoxious, gossipy biddies.

“But aren’t they grown by now?

“Look, I have to go…”

“You need to know that we at the Social Council have expectat…”

“Then expect to find someone else and expect to lose my phone number!” Christine had to resort to the howling snarl. She got that from her mother, who had a howling snarl that would pierce through solid stone, flesh and armor.

“I think that I handled that well.” Christine muttered to herself after shutting off the conversation.

Continuing to mutter, Christine sprinted to her closet. She frantically plowed through her rack of power suit components, dodging a mass of inbred wire coat hangers, but still failing to prevent a snag in her JC Penny control top pantyhose.

After doing the double pantyhose, each hose with one good leg, she realized that she was now sentenced to an entire day of double control top and crotch incarceration, but there was no more time.

She threw on her cleanest power blouse, the least wrinkled power jacket and the closest matching power skirt. Her hair kept separating into stubborn clumps because of five hours of detention in pink foam curlers that were wrapped in tissue.

She smeared on some Queen Jujine African Oil, slicked her hair back, twisted on a scrunchy.

“Foundation and blush. Eyeliner and shadow. Lipliner and stick. Earrings. Bang! Done! Looking good, even if the crotch is tight. Yuck.” She muttered to herself.

She almost lost her will to continue when she nearly tripped over the cat. When she recovered from her joint-jarring near fall, Christine recalled that she did not own a cat. That cat belonged to that weird neighbor who was always lurking around. The man did not seem to have a job!

A wave of guilt and shame washed over her. Mothers of fifteen children were doing a better job of getting off to work.

After her bout of self chastisement, she chased the animal from her home. She made a firm resolution to get to work as soon as possible and to avoid her condo for a very long time.

Christine Shaw Baker was a woman who could be best described as “medium”. Medium weight, medium hair, medium height and medium brown eyes were her identifying features. She would never be the slim, high breasted woman with glossy shoulder length hair and perfectly applied makeup in muted tones of mauve and pink who populated the novels that she read. She did have the outstanding and clear golden brown skin of a Black person who tans well, though. Her face contained the lines and consequences of a woman with a lot fewer than Christine’s 39 years. She had a crooked smile, spectacular lips and a cynical sense of humor.

She appreciated the anonymity that her looks provided. Her appearance made her either harmless or invisible, shielding her from the come-ons and catcalls and the jealousy and insecurity that flashier women had to put up with. There had been a time in her life when makeup, new clothes and diets were an obsession. Wigs, full makeup, false eyelashes, high heels, skirts and dresses and red, red lipstick were her uniforms.

Then, she left for college and discovered that an Afro, sweatshirt, jeans and sneakers would do just as well. She never gave up the red lipstick and earrings, however, and loved to assemble in the full regalia for Saturday nights, where she turned into a real boodie shaker.

Christine Shaw Baker spent her college years in a haze of obligation, tempered with new found freedom. As the youngest of three children she did not batter her parents with the adolescent angst and demands for attention that her oldest sisters seemed to thrive upon. She provided her own challenges as a deceptively obedient spirit who was cunningly capable of getting into her own forms of trouble. She was a brilliant, but unfocused student in high school, excelling in some areas and failing miserably in others. It was the curse of the young woman who thinks that Prince Charming will take care of the details of life and of making an income.

As a result, she had to fight like a banshee to correct her grades in Junior College.

She had to move away from her increasingly strident home life and to become independent. She almost starved to death as she waited for her financial aid program to begin. She learned to shoplift. Christine learned how to slide flat packages of cold-cuts and cheese between the pages of her books. She learned how to slip items into her pockets and book bags. She became so good at shoplifting that she took care of an entire Christmas season worth of gifts, courtesy of several major department stores.

This was all before Christine Shaw met and fell in love with her college counselor and guide through her brief time of young adult happiness. One evening, at a group session, she bragged to him about her shoplifting prowess and was told the truth. The counselor spent the next four hours explaining wrong and consequence in a fashion that she had never known before.

Christine avoided him for weeks afterward. When it came to wrong, she had been used to beatings or lengthy periods of horrible ostracism. She had been brought to believe that there was no such thing as forgiving a person for making mistakes.

Her counselor aggressively pursued her, forcing her to account for her aversive responses to his attempts at contact. This only served to turn her completely on. Thankfully, her counselor recognized a major juvenile crush and assured her that there would be no “love jones” until she presented and acceptable transcript from her first quarter at University.

Six months later, the salty girl had chased him until he caught her.

Christine finally became motivated. There was no science, no history, no math and no literature that escaped her attention. She excelled and sailed through her first, challenging quarters at University, carefully copying the grade report and mailing it to her former counselor, along with a recording of “Love Jones” by Jemal and the Zulu Kings.

He did not respond for three weeks, almost breaking her heart in the process. Christine Shaw entered her third quarter in the same foggy, helpless state that had made her high school career such a disaster. She failed to complete her assignments and was in serious jeopardy of getting so far behind that she would not be able to recover.

An hour after leaving her townhouse, Christine Shaw Baker was jolted out of her reverie. She had pulled onto the last of five freeway interchanges that lie between her condo in Oakland and her job in South San Francisco. The jolt was Christine’s realization that she was not ever going to forget this day.

She was going to have three dimensional, high definition memory of every action and reaction which occurred. This was the day. The past three years of dreadful work in the ugliest place that she’d ever seen would be over.

The past seven weeks of tedious attention to detail, of angst, of glory would culminate in a sequence of events which she lamely called “The One Thing”.

Her plans, however, had nothing to do with the events which actually unfolded. One shiver of the unexpected came to her when she noticed that the white van was there again.

That white van had been a commuting companion for weeks. The occupants, always the same two, looked like FBI guys.



© Edith Rene Allen, 1998