After the episode ended on a frame of Jason’s fiancée crying as her mother gave her a blank check to purchase the dress she chose, Alex turned the sound down and opened up the Facebook app on her phone. She usually stayed off it because it was for boomers and conspiracy theorists, but she hadn’t given up her account because her sister occasionally posted pictures of her nieces on there. They lived a thousand miles away, and she missed them. Hanging out with them on Christmas gave her a vague understanding of why her sister had volunteered to have her vagina ripped open in order to bring them into the world. But she wasn’t descending into the bowels of social media at ten o’clock on a Friday night to admire the fruits of her sister’s loins.
She was on a mission, a journey, and a quest.
Alex had never looked up her exes before. In her mind, that was for girls who didn’t have anything going on in their own lives. Her mother, an anthropology professor, would find it fascinating and might even write a whole book about how the American patriarchy twisted young women’s minds. She would then send it to Alex’s sister, who wouldn’t read it, and then they would have something to fight about over the traditional Thanksgiving dinner that Alex’s sister insisted they all attend.
It would be a refreshing change of topic from the ethnographic presentation about stolen Native lands that Alex’s mother usually insisted on as a condition of her attendance.
Jason still had a Facebook profile. Sure, he’d stopped posting on it almost a decade ago, but his new fiancée—that felt so strange to say, even in her head—tagged him in a lot of posts. Alex didn’t know how long she got lost in photos of Jason smiling at parties and dinners. He’d never even wanted to go to parties with Alex. At first, Alex had thought he’d been trying to keep their relationship a secret—as though he was embarrassed by her—but he’d explained that he was just sort of a homebody. Alex couldn’t help but wonder if that was a bold-faced lie.
One thing that Alex knew was absolutely true for her was that she didn’t want to get married. Given her family history and the carnage she saw in her professional life, she knew that she wasn’t cut out to do the hard work that it seemed to take to make a marriage work. Over the years, she’d dated a few men she’d thought she could make things work with, but that was a long time ago.
By the time she’d met Jason, she’d been so certain that marriage wasn’t in her future, she’d stopped hoping to be chosen. She’d stopped dreaming about a future beyond a few weeks or months with any of her romantic interests.
She loved her nieces but wasn’t interested in becoming a mother. She might have been a good parent if held to mid-1970s standards—when benign neglect was acceptable. But she’d seen too many contentious custody battles where an extra thirty minutes of screen time was a major issue to take the risk. Even though she’d likely be able to afford help.
Not wanting children made it easier to not want marriage. For most people, it was a package deal. Casual acquaintances often expressed horror when she said that she didn’t want children. Even her sister acted like wanting to sleep in on the weekends and pee alone made her the witch from “Hansel and Gretel.” Most people got so stuck on the no-kid thing that they let the no-marriage thing slide.
Alex had truly thought she was over the fact that a happy, long-term partnership wasn’t going to happen for her. Her family history was riddled with misbegotten matches, and her job had made her jaded. And she’d never met anyone who’d made her question that for long enough to make a difference. She closed the Facebook app and flipped through the contacts on her phone, not quite sure what she was searching for. Before she could stop herself, Alex was methodically clicking through all the profiles of every person she’d dated who had a Facebook or Instagram account. To her horrified fascination, she discovered that all of them were now happily married or partnered. What fascinated and horrified her was that they all seemed to have partnered off right after breaking things off with Alex.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, her mother’s words about correlation and causation rang, but Alex wasn’t a scientist. She was a lawyer. Where Alex saw patterns, she logically concluded that the common denominator among all her exes pairing up at least semipermanently after breaking things off with her wasn’t that all these people were opposed to commitment and partnership. They were just opposed to it with her.
That made Alex sit back and try to take a drink out of her now empty wineglass. She wanted to call someone. Her sister would be busy with her small children, and her more conventional sibling would not have time for any theories about why Alex apparently made her romantic partners want to marry other people.
And she wouldn’t call her mother, either. Dr. Maureen Finnegan-Turner wouldn’t have any soothing words or any insight into why Alex’s discovery made her feel a little empty inside. Her mother would have a reading list and possibly some suggestions for new psychiatrists.
No, the only person Alex could call right now was her grandmother and namesake. In addition to being one of the most famous Black women on the planet, Lexi Turner was the only person who could make sense of why Alex felt so shitty about this. She’d call her in the Uber to let her know she was on her way.
TWO
Alex didn’t ask Lexi why her personal tarot card reader happened to be at her house when Alex pulled up in an Uber less than an hour later. Lexi Turner was a jazz legend, a noted actress, and a renowned eccentric. You simply did not ask questions like “Grandma, why is your boyfriend in a large cage in the pool house?” when you were dealing with the great Lexi Turner. Unless you wanted her to tell you about how she’d been into BDSM when the woman who wrote Fifty Shades of Grey was still in diapers.
Lexi was wearing a sequined caftan and a matching headwrap. Her face was fully made up, and she had arranged herself on a purple velvet chaise as though at any moment someone was going to appear from the kitchens at the back of the house to feed her grapes and fan her. Other than the fact that Lexi was about a half foot shorter and could likely balance a platter on her ample bosom, looking at her grandmother was sort of like looking into her future. Lexi and Alex shared the same eyes and the same face shape. Lexi’s skin was a few shades darker than Alex’s, but there was no doubt that they were related.
Given that Lexi had an aesthetician on call, her grandmother had more than once been mistaken for her mother.
“Darling.” Lexi’s voice projected across the great room of her Baldwin Hills mansion, bouncing off the rococo-by-way-of-art deco columns to the foyer. “What’s got you so upset? Whatever it is could probably be cured more effectively by a new lover than a late-night visit to an old woman.” Lexi looked her up and down and narrowed her shrewd gaze. “At least you don’t go to bed at eight o’clock like your normie sister.”
Lexi tried to keep up on teen slang, but she was usually about a decade behind. “It’s a Friday.”