Heads of the Colored People(41)
The boy in the hoodie and his mother were called into a line, and remembering her grimace, Marjorie felt a little bad. She tried to smile at him, but he frowned and tucked his face into his mother’s arm. People could be so unforgiving. It would serve Coryn well to forgive, just as Marjorie had when Coryn tried to have her excommunicated from the church. Such petty nonsense. The Church of God in Christ didn’t even practice excommunication. Coryn was remarried now anyway, and without Marjorie’s interventions, she never would have known that Charles was a cheater. It was not as though Coryn were blameless herself.
Coryn, Marjorie, and Marjorie’s half-sister Latrice had grown up together as foster sisters under the care of Mother Lydia, a fine church lady from all external appearances but an uneven guardian. Mother Lydia made sure all three girls and her two foster sons were well dressed and fed—though in exchange they had to help with the sewing and cooking and grocery shopping. Her temper was frightening. Coryn, light-skinned and two years younger than Marjorie, with hair that was almost honey brown, was Mother Lydia’s favorite, Latrice her alternate, Marjorie her scapegoat. Once, Coryn had stolen twelve dollars from Mother Lydia’s purse and smiled innocently as Marjorie took the fall. Coryn had sneaked out of the house multiple times during their teen years, and Marjorie got the flack.
“You gotta watch out for your sisters, girl,” Mother Lydia had said, “because who do you even have besides me and them? Don’t nobody else want you.”
Marjorie still bore the scars of Mother Lydia’s cigarette burns up and down her arms and on the backs of her legs.
Mother Lydia would sometimes say to Marjorie, pulling her face close to hers, “You remind me of somebody I don’t like, and I can’t figure out who it is.” She never burned her after such speeches, the words searing enough. Marjorie would retreat to the bathroom to examine her round eyes and round face, her small breasts, the marks on her arms, but she could never figure out what Mother Lydia despised in her appearance. On Sundays Mother Lydia was all, “Praise the Lord,” and “I’m blessed.” Someone in the church must have suspected something was wrong in that house, but if they did, they never let on, and Marjorie was sure—from patchy memories—that whatever Mother Lydia rescued her from was worse than what she gave her.
Certainly Marjorie had forgiven Mother Lydia and Coryn for these wounds, even Latrice, who married young and moved three counties away. Latrice, still married and a teacher now, hadn’t spoken to Marjorie since the scandal with Coryn and Charles. Marjorie could have easily brought up the lingering rumors about Coryn, about her son Londyn’s questionable paternity and the “spiritual retreat” where Coryn had “assisted” Pastor Bevis while First Lady Bevis was caring for her mother in Oakland. But she didn’t. And while Marjorie knew Charles was married to Coryn when she became involved with him, she didn’t date him out of any vengeful spirit toward Coryn, she was sure, at first. But when Charles whispered—his stubble against her ear—that he loved Marjorie’s personality, her hips, and the way she moved them, Marjorie couldn’t help but feel victorious. She hadn’t set out to hurt Coryn; Charles simply liked her better—she fulfilled his needs—just as Mother Lydia had seen something in Coryn that she preferred. These things happened sometimes.
Anyway, Coryn won. She was happily remarried to a man who had legally adopted her son Londyn. Marjorie had only her work, both voluntary and paid—and the anticipated veneration for that work—and occasionally Jessica to keep her busy. Charles fled town after the scandal, after Coryn filed for divorce. Marjorie sometimes feared, especially now that her values were back intact, that she would never find love beyond the Lord.
It might be good for her to talk some of this over with Alex, at least the Mother Lydia parts. Though the burn marks that covered her arms had long healed, sometimes the scars still hurt, and because of Marjorie’s self-flagellation they seemed to be living, growing things that reinflamed all the time. Marjorie didn’t want to see the marks or give anyone the opportunity to ask about them, so she kept them covered. But as Alex said about concealing feelings, the long sleeves didn’t take the pain away.
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DESPITE HER SLEEVES, Marjorie wished she had brought a sweater into the DMV. She was freezing, and according to the monitors mounted on the wall, she still had a while to wait.
“Freaking incompetent,” a man grumbled as he passed her on his way out of the building. “All this time, and now you tell me I have the wrong form.” He yelled back to the tellers, “Thanks for nothing,” and stormed out of the building. The space momentarily went silent before it filled with small gasps of pleasure and incredulity at the man’s speech. Marjorie had read a study somewhere about why DMVs and banks and similar spaces were known for horrible customer service. It concluded that where the job is low in status but high in power, the customer service will suffer the most. The more discontented the workers, the more discontented the customers. She’d read another story about a man who came to the DMV to pay a $3,000 bill, and in the ultimate act of passive aggression, did so with 300,000 unrolled pennies, distributed in five wheelbarrows carted in with the help of his friends. These kinds of things were the reason why people went postal, employees and customers alike.
Marjorie could understand this in part. The students who came into the bursar’s office were often furious before they even got in her line, panicked that their financial aid had not been processed properly or irritated at what they perceived as discrepancies on their accounts. Marjorie’s training had taught her how to defuse these conflicts: (1) listen (avoid the word “but”); (2) acknowledge the problem (“Yes, that must be tough”); (3) provide assurance (“I understand, and I can help you”); and (4) even apologize for things that weren’t her fault if it calmed the situation.