“You don’t have to work to eat. I know plenty of people who don’t do a damn thing, and they get to eat every day,” she argued.
“Where are they getting their food from?”
“From other people.”
“Do those other people work?”
Maddy stopped talking again.
Then she said, “The point is, everybody doesn’t have to work to eat.”
I said, “Well, why would anybody give a person food who doesn’t work?”
She said, “You got babies, teenagers, old people, crippled people, crazy people, even bums, who don’t work, but they all eat, don’t they?”
“Okay, but none of those people are independent either,” I argued.
Maddy said, “Who said anything about independence? You were talking about eating.”
“I was talking about how eating relates to work, and when you do your own work you have independence. And when you have independence, you can eat whenever you want to, and as much as you want to, but not while you’re working. It’s better to be hungry while you’re working so that you look forward to the food that caps off your day. That’s what I was talking about,” I told her.
Maddy looked at me like I was crazy. And maybe I was. But somewhere in all of that, I still had a point to make.
I clarified my point and said, “We all have an opportunity to turn this work into our own independence, but instead we’re fighting each other over some dumb stuff.”
Maddy looked at me and said, “How is this creating independence for us? We’re out here working for your cousin. She’s the only one benefiting from this. We’re not even getting paid. We’re getting to spend a week in Philadelphia while we bust our ass all day on some film we won’t even star in. Well whoopty-fuckin’-do. I’m so excited.”
I said, “You took plenty of pictures that you can use for your own purposes. You’re in contact with professionals you didn’t know before. People are getting a chance to see you on stage and think of you in ways of importance. And it’s up to you to work your opportunities to your own advantage.”
I told her, “J. Lo was only a dancer once, and so was P. Diddy.”
“So fuckin’ what?” she snapped at me.
“So they wanted to be more than that, and they worked hard to get there.”
“Well, maybe everybody doesn’t want that, Vanessa. Maybe you’re the only one who’s all gung-ho about this shit. And maybe I just want to eat my fuckin’ food, like I said.”
“That’s why I asked you what you wanted,” I told her. “But if all you want out of life is to eat your food, then I guess you’re no different from the crippled bums, babies, old people, and teenagers you talked about who eat but don’t work.”
“I do work,” Maddy insisted.
I said, “Well, make it worth something then. And you can be mad at me all night, but the reality is, you’re here, and you still have an opportunity to make something out of whatever you do. And beefing with me and Tracy has nothing to do with that. So don’t blame us for your wasted opportunity.”
Maddy said, “Who do you think you are, Oprah Winfrey or somebody? You’re a nobody without your cousin. Everything you’re doing right now is through Tracy. You take Tracy away and you don’t mean shit. So you need to stop your fuckin’ frontin’.”
I said, “Yeah, but you take me away and you don’t mean shit either.”
“So what do you think, that I owe you something because of this? Well, you know what, as soon as we get back to L.A., you don’t have to worry about doing anything for me again, ’cause I see how you work now. In fact, you’re worse than your cousin. At least she’s not trying to paint some bullshit picture to us. I mean, you talk about sisterhood and all of that, but this is all about you. Well, you can have it all without me. And if you don’t mind, I’d like to eat my food now, because I don’t like being hungry.”
So much for talking to Madison. I started off good and ended up sounding very selfish. I probably made the situation worse. Then she would tell Alexandria.
I stood up from the bed where I sat. I told her, “I’ll leave you alone then.” I thought about apologizing again for my slipup, but I don’t believe she wanted to hear it. I had said enough for one night.
Instead, I came up with a simple and overused cliché, “Life is what you make it, Madison. That’s all I can say.”
Before I could walk to the door to let myself out, Maddy said, “Thank you, Vanessa. I never knew that before. Now I know that I can do anything I want to do in life. And I owe it all to you.”
I walked out the door and closed it behind me. I felt small and insignificant again. Madison had shot me down with her sarcasm. Did Sasha and Jasmine feel the same way about me? Was my head that damn big? I walked over and knocked on their door to find out.
Jasmine opened the door and said, “Hey.”
She wasn’t bouncing with energy like she normally was.
I walked in behind her and took a seat at the desk chair.
“Hey, Vanessa? How’d the rest of your day go?” Sasha asked me.
“Actually, good,” I told her. “I got a lot of things squared away with my family.”
Sasha nodded to me. “That’s good.”
They were both watching a movie from their beds. They had already finished their room service dinners. Their trays were on the desk and the floor.
“No South Street tonight, hunh?” I joked.
“I mean, how many times are we gonna see it?” Jasmine stated.
“I know what you mean. So how did you like seeing the rest of Philadelphia today?”
“I mean, we really couldn’t concentrate on everything because of what went on this morning,” Sasha admitted.
I shook my head. They were letting the conflicts get in their way as well.
I said, “We can’t allow something that happened in the morning to ruin our whole day.”
“That’s easy for you to say, you got to get away from them. But we had to keep looking at their sour faces all day,” Jasmine told me. She had a point.
I said, “So, what happens for tomorrow? Do we keep this thing going, or do we move on?”
“I’m ready to move on,” Jasmine said, “but you can’t make everybody feel that way. You need to talk to them about that.”
“I already did. And I think I only made the situation worse,” I admitted. “Maddy didn’t want to hear anything I had to say, so we started arguing about the whole idea of this trip, the clothing line, the movie, and our sisters’ support club. And she’s ready to wipe her hands with all of it now, just because of me.”
“Well, what did you say to her?” Sasha asked me.
I answered, “Her main point is that she thinks I’m big-headed, and that I look at this whole trip as something that I put together.”
“You did put it together,” Jasmine told me.
“No,” Sasha countered. “You were a major part of it, but we all instigated it. Because at first, you started talking about starting something without Tracy. You didn’t even want to use the Flyy Girl name. You were talking about an urban ladies club.”
She was right.
I said, “So Maddy felt like she wasn’t getting anything out of this trip, and that it was all about me and Tracy, and that’s part of the reason why we were fighting this morning?”
Sasha said, “Well, I feel they both need to be appreciative, but obviously they’re not. They’re trying to use this whole trip for their own purposes, and that’s not right.”
I said, “But I don’t mind that. Use this trip the way you want to. That’s my whole point. Tracy’s not stopping any of us from making our own contacts and things while we’re here. She only asked for us to be safe and to stick together when we can. But they turned that into some kind of control thing.”
“Maddy always thinks somebody’s trying to control her. That’s just how she is. Like she always has to break the rules or something,” Jasmine stated.
I said, “But le
t’s all look at it. Maybe you do irk people by talking too much, Jasmine. Tracy had to tell you that several times.”
“But that’s no reason to want to fight me.”
“If anything, I should be the one beefing with Alexandria about your cousin,” Sasha reminded me. “But I’m not even like that. I only like him as a friend. But you know they’ve been sneaking around together.”
“Everybody knew that but me, hunh?” I asked them.
“Because you kept going out with Tracy every night,” Jasmine told me. “And that made us feel like we had babysitters or something after hanging out with Robin.”
I smiled. “What, she wasn’t cool?”
“Yeah, she was cool, but we wanted to meet some of the people you were getting to meet with Tracy,” Sasha told me. “We wanted to meet some of the people in the book, too.”
“So, you all felt like I was getting special privileges then?”
“I didn’t sweat it, myself. I mean, you’re her cousin. What do you expect?” Jasmine reasoned.
“But do you think I act extra because of that?”
“I think you would be that way regardless,” Sasha answered. “That’s just your personality. You like for things to be in order. And I don’t see anything wrong with that. But when you’re dealing with people who don’t like order, you’re bound to have a problem.”
She said, “So, if we would have had Petula and Tonya out here with us instead of Maddy and Alexandria, everything would have been fine.”
I nodded to myself and thought about it.
She said, “Every team has to be organized for a specific task. But we all came together for this because we were friends. And sometimes friends are not the best people to go into business with.”
Well said. I agreed with her.
“So, no matter what you say or do, some people are just not going to see your point,” Sasha summed up.
“That’s life, man,” Jasmine agreed. “I have sisters and cousins, too, and they don’t see anything that I’m trying to do. I mean, they get it, but they don’t get it, you know. They all feel like things are supposed to come to you instead of you going to get them.”
I nodded to her. I said, “You’re exactly right. Some people just don’t get the work that you have to put in, so they look at you as if you’re crazy, until they can see the end result.”
“Yeah, and then they all want to share in the results,” Sasha added.
“So, if you had a bad apple like that, then you can’t change them, you just have to weed them out?” I philosophized.
“Yeah,” Jasmine agreed. “That’s always.”
Sasha was more analytical about it. She said, “I wouldn’t look at it as all apples. Sometimes you have oranges, bananas, peaches, pears, and you just have to figure out the best way to use each fruit. Because all people are not alike.”
“Yeah, that’s a good way to put it,” Jasmine said.
I felt better about myself after talking to Jasmine and Sasha. So I retired to my room to call Petula and Tonya out in California. I hadn’t talked to them at all that week. It was close to eleven o’clock in Philly, which meant that it was close to eight o’clock in L.A.
Petula answered her cell phone on the first ring. “Hey, Vanessa. How’s everything going?” she asked me. “You’re the only one I haven’t talked to this week.”
I said, “Have you talked to anyone today?”
I was wondering if anyone had told her about our catfight in the hallway that morning.
She said, “Last night, but not today. Not until you called.”
“Well, let me ask you something, Petula. What do you think about the professional skills and personalities of each one of us?”
“You mean our girl clique?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, okay. In all honesty?”
“Yeah, in all honesty,” I told her, “starting with me.”
“Okay, well, you’re definitely the leader. You always come up with new ideas. You have plans of execution. And you definitely know how to push your point to make sure things get done. But that doesn’t leave you much room for a personality. So you get talked about in the positive and negative all the time, with not much balance in between.”
I said, “Okay. All good points. But do you think that I’m big-headed?”
Petula chuckled at it. She answered, “Well, I’m sorry, but that comes with the territory of being a leader. Big-headedness is the reality for ninety percent of the leaders around the world, some of them just know how to hide it a little better than others. And you’re not one who hides it well.”
“And do you think I use my cousin to boost myself up?”
“Hmm, that’s a hard one. I would say that you would be the way you are anyway, but the famous cousin factor will blur the line between how much is really you, and how much can be attributed to being Tracy’s cousin.”
She said, “But knowing you like I do, and being bluntly honest about it, I would say that if you didn’t have a famous cousin, you would probably create one.”
“I would create one?”
“Most leaders need a focus point for their vision. And Tracy is yours. So, until you’re able to move past her, which won’t be anytime soon with all of us working on Flyy Girl, she’ll be what everybody thinks about when they mention your name.”
She said, “It’s kind of like Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre. Snoop Dogg is finally getting recognition on his own now, but for a long time, whenever someone said Snoop Dogg, you thought about Dr. Dre, too. But not the other way around. You could say Dr. Dre by itself, because he already had his name. I used to talk about that with my brothers all the time, because they were big rap fans, and my parents would hate it.”
Petula could go on a tangent if you let her, so I had to reel her back to the subject.
“Okay, now, what about the rest of us?”
“Ah, Sasha’s a good, around-the-way girl who wants to be down. She’s a lot like me. We just like being there and a part of the clique. So she’ll help out and be unselfish, just like I will.
“Man, I wanted to go to Philadelphia with you guys,” she stopped and told me. “But I’ll play my part and stay out here with Charmaine and Tonya, and do what we have to do until you guys get back.
“Sasha would have done the same thing,” she stated. “But she does like to be included. And sometimes I think she holds back her true feelings a lot more than the rest of us because she’s Asian, and either that’s part of her culture, or she just doesn’t want to jump out and be too noticeable while she’s trying so hard to be down.
“You know what I mean?”
I knew exactly what she meant. Had Sasha been black, or even mixed, she would have fought for my cousin, at least in principle, instead of just giving him up to Alexandria without a fight. Then again, Sasha had held out on Jason where Alexandria obviously did not.
“Yeah,” I agreed with Petula. “What about Maddy?” I asked her.
“Oh, now, Maddy has whatever social disease is plaguing a lot of black American girls who live in the inner city. She trusts nobody. She has a foul mouth. She’s cynical about everything. She rarely applies herself. But at the same time, she’s a stabilizing factor for the group. And she’ll be the first one to tell you that your head is getting too big. She’ll also be the first one to fight you. Fighting for her is a way of life. It says that she’s alive, and that she has feelings. And it says that she has something to say that won’t be ignored anymore.”
Wow! Petula was downright scary with her accuracy. Was it because she was African? Anyway, she really needed to be a psych major, because she was the queen of analyzation.
“Okay, and Jasmine?”
“I like Jasmine a lot,” Petula admitted. “She has a different part of me, the part that says ‘express yourself.’ Jasmine can embarrass all of us because we try so hard to suppress that excited little girl in us that I talked about before. But Jasmine doesn’t suppress it. She lets it be. But as sill
y as she may seem sometimes, she’s really not. She knows as much as we all know, and maybe more, but she hates being bored, so she’ll say something just to get a rise out of you. And sometimes that can get on people’s nerves. But I don’t mind that, because I have a big family and I understand it. It’s just her way of getting attention.”
I said, “Yeah, I have a baby sister who’s the same way. She just makes jokes all the time. Now what about Alexandria?”
Petula said it dramatically, “Alexandria is the exact opposite of Jasmine, and you should never leave the two of them in the same room alone.”
I broke up laughing. I said, “Wow, you are really good at this. I mean really good. You get another A from me.”
Petula laughed with me. She said, “Thank you. You want me to finish?”
Petula was more of a show-off than I was with her smarts. I used my intelligence mostly for plotting and planning, but Petula used more of hers in general conversation.
I said, “Of course I want you to finish. I know how you are once you get started. You want to complete the whole term paper.”
She said, “Thank you, my sister. You know me well. So . . . where were we?” she asked me with a laugh. “I lost my train of thought.”
I said, “Alexandria.”
“Oh, yeah. Alexandria hides herself like nobody’s business. She doesn’t want anybody to know what she’s up to. Why? Because she hates the fact that she’s not perfect.
“She’s typical of a privileged daughter,” Petula added. “She’s been told since she was young not to act in certain ways because she’s supposed to be better than everyone else. And she’ll get most of the attention, and still want more. In the meantime, she’ll do what she wants to behind closed doors.”
She said, “Every culture has these privileged daughters. And they’re always talked about as closet sluts. So the first time I looked at Alex, and she didn’t speak, I knew what kind of girl she was. Her type feel that they don’t have to speak to you unless they have a reason. And most of those reasons have to do with their own personal gain.”
She said, “So, Alexandria would be the one who would do everything with us as a group, just so she could find something extra to break off and hide for herself. And then she wouldn’t have anything else to do with us.”