I’m very excited to share an excerpt from the brand-new book by Beth Gibbs, Soul Food, Life-Affirming Stories Served with Side Dishes and Just Desserts. This one is a book of short stories, a collection of loosely connected, life-affirming stories celebrating the tenacity of the human spirit in seeking and finding clarity, contentment and resilience in a complicated world. The excerpt we’re sharing today is a complete story called “1-800-555-MARY”. For more about Soul Food or to buy the book, go to here. —Nina

 

1-800-555-MARY by Beth Gibbs

Learning to love oneself is the foundation of
self-respect, self-acceptance and self-care.
It requires self-awareness—and sometimes tough love.

 I’d picked up my cell phone to call Charlaine when I looked out the window—and there it was. Smiling pink lips, pale blue eyes, and slim white hands folded in prayer. Above a golden halo were the words “Virgin Mary Speaks to America Today.” Underneath the hands was a telephone number with the instruction “Call 1-800-555-MARY.” I stopped dead in my tracks and laughed before I got mad. I spent at least ten minutes with my hands on my hips and my eyes all squinty, trying to figure out what that billboard was doing in my neighborhood. I was used to the ones that sold Kool cigarettes, Boone’s Farm wine, and Ford Mustangs, and I wondered how much Madison Avenue planned to charge for salvation.

She looked like the models on those other billboards. Size 10, thin, pretty in a washed-out, Eurocentric kind of way. I snorted. What a loony tunes world! The Black Madonna is front and center in many French churches, and here’s a White Madonna on top of the Nation of Islam’s mattress factory. Go figure!

Maybe I wouldn’t have been so irreverent if she looked more like the women I knew, but that blonde hair and those blue eyes were a bit much to swallow in a neighborhood where most folks ranged from café au lait brown to pitch purple-black with soft dark eyes and lots of too, too solid flesh.

“Too, too solid flesh.” That’s Shakespeare. It’s from Hamlet. I’d always liked it because I’d been trying to melt my too, too solid flesh for too, too, too many years.

I was 250 pounds and counting when Oprah went through her weight thing. She got into those size 10 jeans and strutted on stage, and I gave it up for her. “You go, girl!” I screamed.

“You go for all of us!”

Then she had to drop the size 10 when she ballooned back into 16s and 18s. I was crushed. Finally, she hired a personal chef and a trainer and found a happy medium. I was glad for her, but I couldn’t afford a personal chef or a trainer, so instead I called 1-800-94-JENNY.

I tried Nutrisystem, Weight Watchers and Overeaters Anonymous. I did the grapefruit plan, the protein plan, the Keto plan, and the low-fat plan. I sweated to the oldies, took pills and even paid a three-month visit to Mama Rue’s fat farm in the Caribbean. For a New York minute, I even thought about having my stomach stapled. Dumped that idea, then gave up trying.

It was the breakdown that finally did me in. After that happened, I just sat around the apartment, watching TV and talking to Charlaine whenever I could get a word in edgewise around her advice about what I should be doing with my life. Charlaine is my best friend, you see. We used to talk on the phone during Oprah, swapping opinions about her diets, hair, clothes and guests.

Delores and Charlaine, two sister-friends passing the time. Because of our friendship, and only because of it, I listened and nodded and said things like, “Uh-huh,” “I know you’re right,” and “Okay, I’ll think about that.” But my depression weighed more than I did, so I did nothing.

The last time we talked, I could tell she was all kinds of upset with me. “Dee,” she said, “you have got to pull yourself together. I’m all outta advice. I don’t know how else to help you.” She sighed. “And you know I want to. We’ve been ride-or- die friends since the third grade, and if you can’t dig yourself out of this hole, you leave me no choice but to figure out how to hold an intervention on your behind!”

The breakdown? Oh, yeah, that. Well, it had been coming on for a while. I could feel it sneaking up my spine, looking for attention, but I got really good at pushing that shadow back into its hole. Food, sex and shopping worked until they didn’t, and I’d pretty much reached the end of my rope when I walked into the cafeteria at work that day. The lights were too bright, the noise was too loud, and I swore I could feel bugs crawling up my legs. I stood stock-still, dropped my tray, and commenced to cuss, shake and howl something awful.

Next thing you know, I’m in a straitjacket at the local loony bin, popping Valium like it’s aspirin. The shrink they sent me to didn’t have a clue, so as soon as I stopped raving, they gave me a prescription for antidepressants and let me go.

They didn’t know what was wrong. But I did. I felt unloved. Sure, Charlaine and my family loved me, but theirs was the safe love that families and friends are supposed to have for one another. I was missing the bone-deep, totally accepting love, the kind that wraps around your life and bursts your heart. And it wasn’t about men. Many had declared their love for my soft eyes, my ample curves, my southern fried chicken, and my sweet potato pie. I felt their arms and heard their words, but I never believed they were really meant for me.

Anyway, my depression and I holed up in my apartment. When I needed to talk, I called Charlaine. When I needed food, I called Stop and Shop.

My job had given me a six-week medical leave to get myself together and go back to work. With three weeks to go, I was nowhere near ready and really bummed out. Giving up my job as a systems analyst and not working at all was scary. The thought of going back to work and facing everybody made my insides quake, but I knew I couldn’t make it on welfare. Too humiliating. I felt like Mount St. Helens before her big bang.

The Mary billboard was just another irritant. And that irritant started to watch me. Her eyes followed me around my living room. They reproached me when I ate, pleaded soul- fully with me when I watched TV, and got a hopeful glint in them when I talked to Charlaine. I could feel those eyes glued on me like white on rice. The feeling persisted even when I pulled down the shade.

So that’s how it was when I woke up three weeks before my day of reckoning. I heaved myself out of bed and waddled past the window to pick up the remote control. I was going to watch the Today show and try to ignore Mary like I usually did, but that morning something pulled my eyes to the window and glued them square on the billboard.

My jaw dropped. Her eyes had changed color. Now they were brown—a soft, warm, sparkling brown. I shook my head and looked again. No mistake. Strange, I thought. Why would they come back and just change the color of her eyes?

The next day, her blonde hair turned dark brown and started to curl. After that, her skin darkened, her nose broadened, her lips widened, her hair kinked up, and she started gaining weight. I sat by the window night after night, trying to catch the midnight painter, but despite NoDoz and extra coffee, I never saw a soul. Yet each morning, Mary looked more and more like a fat Black Madonna with a ’fro. But her mouth still wore that lush, glowing smile, and her eyes continued to haunt me.

Many times during those days, I felt an urge to pick up the phone and make the call. Many times my hand reached out and just as many times I snatched it back. I knew the billboard didn’t make any rational sense, and I am basically a rational and intelligent person. Except for my breakdown, I tend to carefully plan my idiocies. I knew I wasn’t hallucinating because I had flushed all the medications from the hospital down the toilet. Reality was bad enough without drugs. I was depressed and dysfunctional—not delusional.

Finally, when I couldn’t stand it a minute longer, I pulled my hand out of a bag of double chocolate macadamia nut cookies, pushed the bottle of Diet Coke aside, heaved myself up from the couch, grabbed my phone, and punched in the numbers: 1-8-0-0-5-5-5-M-A-R-Y.

I heard it ring on the other end, and I started to sweat. It rang again, and I began to panic. It rang a third time, and I was about to hang up when someone answered. A voice warm enough to melt frozen butter in a nanosecond said, “Hello-o-o.”

“Uh, hi. Uh, can I speak to Mary, please?”

“Oh, sure, honey. Is this Delores Gray?”

“Uh… uh… Yeah, this is me,” I said as I peered around my apartment. “Listen, am I on Candid Camera?”

The voice chuckled. “No, sugar. This is for real. Hang on a minute, will you? She’s just getting off the other line.”

The other line? Why, I wondered, did this feel like a call to the Psychic Friends Network? I looked around for Dionne Warwick.

“Listen, dear, you will hang on. Won’t you?”

Well, really, what did I have to lose? “Yeah, I’ll wait,” I managed to croak.

There was something disturbingly familiar about Mary’s voice when she came on the line. In a way, it was like listening to the women in my family. The cadence, pitch, tone and accent were right on the mark, yet it was different somehow. I couldn’t place it, and that unsettled me.

“Delores, what took you so long? I’ve been waiting and waiting to hear from you.”

“You have?” My eyebrows shot up to meet my hairline. “Yes. We’ve been trying to get through to you for weeks.” “Really?” I put my free hand on my hip, popped it out, and sucked on my teeth.

“Yes! We tried reaching you through your family and Charlaine. You weren’t listening. You know, Delores, you’re running out of time. We had to resort to something dramatic.”

I rolled my eyes. “Uh-huh, and you thought a billboard of the Virgin Mary would be just the thing to get my attention?”

“Well, we send out the word as best we can, but it doesn’t always get through the way we intend it. The veil between us is very thin, dear, but it can cloud up.”

I sighed. What kind of scam was this woman running? “The billboard designer and Father O’Leary didn’t get the image right. We had to alter it to make our point. I hope it didn’t upset you too much.”

It didn’t compute. Maybe I was having some kind of post-drug hallucination. Discomfort and confusion coalesced and turned into a nasty hunch. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. My head felt poufy like cotton candy. Suddenly, I knew why the voice was so familiar. It was woo-woo time.

“Your name’s not really Mary, is it?” I whispered. “No,” she said softly.

“Who the hell are you?” I rasped.

“I think you know.”

“Maybe, but I want to hear you say it.”

“My name is Delores, and I love you.”

The weight of those words knocked me off my feet and sat me down on the couch. I was talking to myself! I was talking to the part of me that had never given up; the part I ignored and shunted aside; the part that knew the truth about my inability to feel love; the part that recognized my feelings of

insecurity, vulnerability and pain; the part that sent me off the deep end, hoping I’d find a way to climb back up.

“Delores?”

I sniffled. “Yes.”

“Are you still listening?” I gulped. “Yes.”

“Can you love me back?”

“It’s hard,” I gasped. “I… I don’t know how.”

“Too hard to love yourself? Oh, dear, maybe I’m too late after all. Should I hang up?”

“No-o-o!” I screamed into the phone. “No-o-o! No-o-o!” “Way to go, dear. I think you need a little more time to pull yourself together. How about two weeks?”

Two weeks later, I went back to work and rejoined the human race. I recycled the Diet Coke bottles, started drinking lemon water, and added fruits and vegetables to my Stop and Shop deliveries. I had a heart-to-heart with Charlaine and told her I needed to see a new shrink, someone with some common sense.

“I’ve been waiting for you to get to this point.” She said. “Now here’s what you do. You pick up your phone, and you call Frank Rutledge. He’s a brother, and he’s smart as hell. Aunt Delesta and Uncle Sanders are going to see him for marriage counseling. Oh, and did I mention he was cute?”

I took down his number, but it took me a few days to screw up my courage and make an appointment. My experience with shrinks is not a pretty picture. But when a good friend like

Charlaine does the recommending, the least I can do is try. The fact that Delesta and Sanders were trusting him to help them was comforting. Charlaine’s relatives have been part of my family in the same way that mine are part of hers. Small towns and close-knit communities are like that. Sometimes, it truly does take a village.

Delores-Mother-Mary-Me was right. I’m working on loving myself as I am: big, Black and bodacious.

Charlaine was right about Dr. Rutledge. It’s slow going, but I’m making progress. I’ve even started singing again. As a kid, I sang in the church choir, then choral groups in high school, and an a cappella group in college. I dropped the singing when I started working and forgot about it altogether when the “troubles” started.

Oh, and I’m still giving it up for Oprah. If she knew about my struggle, I know she’d give it up right back and scream, “You go, Delores! You go for all of us!”

 

The original of this story first appeared in the 2020 edition of The Connecticut Literary Anthology and has been revised and expanded for Soul Food.

 

Beth’s self-awareness newsletter is published six times a year. It features informative, inspiring and entertaining tips for finding clarity, contentment, and resilience in a complicated world. For more information and to sign up for the newsletter go to www.bethgibbs.com.

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