Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan Page A

Volunteered her services: cooked them meals and would freeze them if they weren't around to eat them; she would rearrange their furniture, clean their apartments, take their clothes to the cleaners and pick them up, and sometimes she even footed the bill for weekend getaways that she had suggested. She thought they would appreciate all these gestures, but the gestures scared most of them away. And by the time Tarik was nine, he was getting all his uncles mixed up.
    It took years for Gloria to realize that she was going about this all wrong. Robin, who Gloria knew wasn't the wisest person to take advice from, made a valid point: "You can't buy a man's love." But Gloria wanted to know what being in love felt like; she'd read about it in magazines, seen it on TV, heard Robin rant and rave about how good some man had made her feel and how Russell had made her toes curl. For a long time, Gloria waited for her toes to curl. But they-never did. It finally got to the point where she got tired of waiting for love and divided all of her attention among God, hair, and her son.
    She also got fat. Food became her salvation, her elixir, her husband, and the orgasms she'd never had. She forgot all about men, forgot that she was still an attractive woman, and became a supermom. It was Gloria who took half the neighborhood boys to Little League and soccer practice, flag football, Boy Scout meetings, karate class, puppet shows, and Saturday afternoon movies. And when Tarik had sleepovers, she cooked. She always served his friends homemade waffles and blueberry pancakes for breakfast, and hot lunches: grilled cheese sandwiches and hamburgers and thick soup; and for any occasion she could think of, she baked pies and cakes and cookies. For years, Gloria's house was full of children.
    But God and hair and kids turned out not to be enough. And Tarik grew up. And Gloria got fatter. Now it was clear that her reign as mother was almost over, because her "baby" would be out of high school next year and then he'd probably go away to college, not anybody's navy. What was she going to do with herself then? How was she going to survive? And just how do you go about making a life for yourself when you've been socially crippled and emotionally bankrupt for years?
    As Gloria got out of the shower, she was thinking about what Tarik had said this morning: that David really wanted to see her. But Gloria knew that wasn't true. When he was here last time, he had done her a favor by spending the night, because she had damn near begged him. He had done it out of pity, but she didn't care. Though it was obvious that he hadn't enjoyed it, Gloria was grateful that he had been kind enough to touch her. Grateful that after four years, somebody had finally touched her. As she dried herself off, she said a silent prayer that in spite of her weight, maybe he'd have some more mercy for her tonight.
    Gloria was coloring Sister Monroe's hair Flame Red.
    "Could you leave it in a few minutes extra?" she asked. "The missionaries are going to Las Vegas next week, and I want to look extra good."
    "Yes, ma'am," Gloria said, and looked over at Phillip, who was cracking up. Sister Monroe, who was in her late fifties, was a true size twenty-two and wore three-and-a-half-inch heels at least six out of seven days. Her shoe size was six and a half, and she looked like Little Lotta, but you couldn't tell her she wasn't fine, that she didn't look thirty years old and a size fourteen. If so much as a strand of gray hair popped up through that whorish red Gloria'd been putting on her hair for the last four years, she'd run in for a touch-up. "Get this mess off my head," she'd say, and wait hours if she didn't have an appointment.
    Gloria's rubber gloves were too tight, so she smeared the thick dye onto Sister Monroe's roots as fast as she could, then asked her to sit at an empty dryer, so she could at least start pressing and curling little LaTisha, who'd already been waiting close to an