Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair by Susan Sheehan Page B

birthday, he took her to City Island to eat lobster, her favorite food—Crystal found him boring. He asked too many questions about things that she thought were self-evident. He called her at ten-thirty one night to ask her what she was doing. She said, “Getting ready to go to sleep. What the fuck do you think I’m doing? I have to be up at 4:30 A.M. to get ready for work.” Tarrant bored Crystal more after he was robbed at gunpoint in his store one night in May. He lost about thirty-five hundred dollars and had less money to spend on her. When he didn’t give her a television set that he had promised her as a Mother’s Day present, she told him, “Mother’s Day comes just once a year.” When he answered, “I’m backed up on my bills,” she said, “That sounds personal. I don’t got nothing to do with that. Just give me mine.” She did entertain a few doubts about using him. “If you go to bed with a man for money and not pleasure, it’s not good for the other part of you,” she says. Crystal got the TV set from Tarrant and started dating Stanley, a young man who had no money but was more fun to be with—for a while. Then shestarted seeing Glenn, a young man who sold drugs on her block, where one house stood out for what it was—a crack house, to and from which dealers roared in their cars and on motorcycles day and night.
    I n July of 1991, Crystal contemplated a relaxing summer. Little Daquan was going to Savannah, Georgia, to stay with some of his father’s relatives from early July until mid-August; she wouldn’t have to make the trek to the Bronx for six weeks. Tarrant was going home to Nassau to visit his family for the first two weeks of August. She would be free to watch her twenty-five-inch Sharp TV with stereo, and be cooled by a fan Tarrant had recently provided, with Herb, a van driver she had met while riding with him as a passenger, or with Cyril, a subway-maintenance man she had met at a subway station, or with Glenn, who had “put some zest back in my life.”
    Before Tarrant flew to Nassau, on August 1st, he gave Crystal five hundred and seventy-five dollars. Some of it was designated for little Daquan’s return train fare from Savannah and some for her telephone and credit-card bills. Tarrant had also told Crystal to use some of the money for a deposit at the Jack La Lanne Health Spa near her office (she wanted to improve her stomach muscles), and said that after his return he would give her the money for the monthly fee. While Tarrant was away, she went to Jack La Lanne twice after work. She gotmore exercise in bed. Over Friday and Saturday one week, she had to change her satin sheets (another gift from Tarrant) twice. By the time Tarrant returned, she was through with Cyril (“He treated me like a common slut”) and Herb (“He was too childish”) and was angry with Glenn, who had dropped out of sight a few days earlier.
    By late August, Crystal was neglecting Tarrant for Marcel, an outside messenger she had met at work. “I never really knew what to say to Tarrant,” she says. “Marcel had no money, but I could be myself with him. We’d walk down Lexington Avenue and I’d laugh so hard the bones in my cheeks used to hurt, and he’d be laughing, too.”
    On Sunday, September 8, 1991, at about 3 A.M. , Crystal returned to Queens from the Bronx, where she had been shopping for school clothes for little Daquan and hanging out in a park with Marcel. As she and Marcel approached her apartment, she spotted Tarrant’s van parked outside and told Marcel to turn around and go back up the block. Tarrant didn’t see him, but he started to argue with her. She told him she was going into the house. He got out of the van and stormed into the apartment behind her. She took her sneakers off, and he kept arguing with her. “I’m getting out of here,” she said, and