Dialogue Concerning the Imminent Apocalypse

colloquy two: opinionated calculators

The very first thing Louise's mother said to her when she stepped in with another hole in her nylons was, "Is it true? By God, is it really true?"

Louise froze as the hem of her dress tickled the exposed back of her knee. Mother's nearly black irises bore into her own eyes as if she were trying to stare straight at her daughter's limbic system and scour her memories for answers to the question she never fully asked. Unsure of what she wanted, Louise simply shivered in the doorway while her father peeped his head through the kitchen doorway.

"Evenin', Louise." His greetings were always gruff, and phlegm rolled like thunder in his heavyset throat. At the sight of her mother's intense glare, he reached for a pack of weed and pushed cancer stick so far into his mouth, it looked as though he was going to swallow it whole. But he didn't stray very far. When Mama was curious, the whole house waited with baited breath to see what had her riled up.

"Good evening, Daddy," Louise replied evenly. Her mother's mouth dropped into a little brown 'o' as her eyebrows raised in an expression that said, You 'bout to turn this good evening into a real bad one for you and your behind.

"So you answer your father but not me? Was I not clear?" Mama's hands were firmly on her hips, practically indistinguishable from the dark skirt she wore—which, in turn, was indistinguishable from the blackened floor of the living room. Louise's eyes stayed glued to the very same floor as the next sentence spilled from her mother's mouth. "Is it true that...that butch friend of yours put her Daddy's suspenders on today at school?"

Louise blinked. If the aforementioned quantum physics extraordinaire were here now, she would've asked Connie Anne what the word butch meant. For now, all she could do was twist the Ring helplessly in the snowy doorway.

Daddy took a drag on his weed before drawling, "Susp'nders? She wore his braces?"

"Well, that's what Mrs. Douglas told me. She said that Connie Anne girl had stolen those damned things right outta her father's top drawer and put them on in the girls' bathroom as if she planned to wear them the whole day. Thankfully, someone caught her before she could leave, and she got a good whipping a'course. Because God knows no girl here in this Anacostia-Near Southeast area is going to be dressing like that to school. To think, her parents wanted to send her to get integrated with you, Louise." Mama shook her head vigorously as if Connie Anne's suspender incident was a violent contagious disease. Daddy opened his mouth, but nothing except for toxic smoke escaped.

Mama and Daddy were similar in very few but prominent ways. They both spoke as though they'd hopped straight off the map from somewhere in the deep South, with drawled vowels and missing letters to the point where Louise could barely understand either of them. They both worked from dawn to dusk, toiling away over hulking machines that always found themselves broken after one too many rides (white-owned Capitol Hill elevators for Mama; rusty Anacostia cars for Daddy now that the ports weren't doing well). And they both certainly deemed Connie Anne to be an unfit friend for Louise.

However, that was all they could ever seem to agree on in their perfectly unhappy marriage and two out of three of those things were uncontrollable.

Daddy was a quiet man who kept his business to himself while Mama flittered around the Anacostia Laundromat, spreading illegitimate gossip as if her life depended on it. Mama was all for reform and yearned to personally lead a movement for freedom from the whites' theoretical shackles, while Daddy simply wanted to kick back and drink a few beers with his boys at the shop. They were two extremes drawn together by nothing but the passion of lust. Even now, as Louise's mother glared at her and gestured for her father to follow her into the kitchen, all Daddy did was take another cigarette from his pack.