"Leave me alone! Please stop! Please!."

The walls in my apartment were paper thin and I could always hear everything that went on in my next door neighbor's bedroom, especially at night.

Naturally I was curious about the woman who was beaten almost every night, followed by what sounded like rough and abusive sex which either she could not resist or pretended to like for the sake of the partner she called Grady.

I went to work too many mornings looking as though I had been up partying all night. In fact, some of my coworkers teased me and said I probably stayed out late, looking for the hot hide-away night spots. I had just recently moved to D.C.

Finally, the screamer and I met in the hall. I must have conjured up a smile which started her talking to me as though we were old friends. I liked her right off. You know, down- to-earth, friendly, unpretentious.

"Girl, I know you hear me at night. Don't lie. I get so embarrassed, but my man likes it like that. Calls us Ike and Tina."

I was slow on the uptake and wondered what she meant. I surely had not heard them singing, so I blurted out my most intelligent sounding "Huh?"

I must have looked as dumb as I sounded because she laughed and said, "You know. They were known for doing everything 'ruff.'"

"But don't you get tired of him beating you?" In a heartbeat I had tripped over into her business.

Although Rachel was a taller woman than I and big-boned, as my grandma would say, and pretty as could be, when she talked to me she made me feel as though I were her height since I had on flat shoes to give my feet a break from the high heels I wore all the time. My vain passion was to be tall and willowy thin. But the moment I asked the question, I knew she was 5'7" and I was barely 5'1 because her eyes locked mine and she turned her head downward so that her entire focus was on me. First, she gave me a going over as though this were the first time she had ever seen me and then her scrutiny carefully traced every inch of my face, my hair, and what I had on before she spoke again.

"You got a smoke? I knew she was talking to me but for some reason I could not answer right away because her voice had changed. It sounded different: tired and very southern, not the way it sounded when she first started talking with perfect enunciation.

Yeah, got some inside. Wanna come in? When I changed my speech pattern also, we both were on the "same page" and she recognized it.

Nawh, your mama in there; ain't she? With your baby. Cute thing. I saw you last Saturday tryin' to push her in that stroller. Laffed my ass off. Your baby bigger than you, Girl. I started to hollah out the window and tell you to get in the stroller and let that baby push you.

We howled.

"Yeah, she wears my tail out, too. Gon' be one spoiled bitch cause Mama acts like she some little princess and to think she didn't let us do shit when we was growing up. I come home one day and the baby all up on my bed, pulled my spread off. Made a mess of my whole room! And Mama come telling me the baby needs to have some fun, sometime! It's a blip, but they love one another and I do gotta work, so...."

"You lucky. You know?"

I did not answer because things are too often not what they appear to be.

"Don't you get tired of him beating you?" I risked my question one more time.

She plopped down on the steps leading downward from the apartments on our floor, and I did likewise, seeing that maybe she wanted to talk.

"Look, I ain't telling you this 'cause this none of your business. You got a momma to help you and that big old niggah I see pullling off for work every day and a pretty little baby. And to top it off the lady downstairs said you work at a college. Do you?"

"Yeah, I head a program which helps women like homemakers, retirees, or women in the work force already, get into college. I know some organizations that help with tuition, GED prep, domestic abuse, child care, health care, and other issues which concern women like us."

"Oh, I get it, Missy. Bet you think you can recruit my tired black uneducated ass. Huh? How you get that kinda job anyway?"

I could tell she did not really want to know, so I told her to wait while I ran inside my apartment for the cigarettes.

After we lighted up and I had showed off by blowing a few circles which amused her, and she had made fun of me for bringing out an ash tray when there were already plenty of cigarette butts scattered all on the hall floor and the steps, she began to tell me her story.

"First, what I do is my business. See? But, I got a plan and I am working it. And I 'm only telling you 'cause I ain't got a sensible soul to talk to and you look like you could hear me without blabbering all up and down Benning Road."

I smiled and blew one more misty ring above our heads. All I needed was some Jack Daniel's Black because I had the notion that I had somehow signed up for a long session on hard dirty steps.

"Take a good look at me. I'm black; my hair nappy, didn't finish high school and I stay home and clean the apartment and cook, mostly greens, all the time, and watch TV, of course. My ass looks as wide as that new couch I got the other day. But, Grady rescued me from way down South where I was making a living working in a shirt factory during the week and helping some of the white farmers with tobacco on Saturdays and Sundays. And now that we moved here he wants me to stay home and cook and fuck, while he works to take care of me. What can I say?"

"Rescued you? What do you mean?'

"Girl, where I come from when a big old buck like him comes along and says, 'Baby, I just cain't live without you; marry me and let's move to the city,' a woman jumps. Just like a frog. That's what I did. I jumped to get here to D.C . Just didn't take time to learn nothin' really much 'bout Grady. And I was stuck. Felt hopeless and worthless until a year ago."

"You mean to tell me that getting beaten every night along with rough sex is better than working down South?"

"I ought to take my ass inside and watch my stories! Wasting my damn time talkin' to you! How long you been black? Better still how long you been a black woman? Tell me that you don't take some shit off that big niggah that looks so quiet and pious. Them the ones you definitely got to watch, you know. Ain't your mama told you nothing?

"Yeah, I was raised on 'Niggers ain't shit, ridin' or walkin.'"

Rachel had a good laugh, slapping her thighs, telling me that she needed to go inside and talk to my mama, 'stead of me!

"See, this is how my thing works." I could tell that Rachel was making another speech pattern shift. Back to perfect enunciation.

"Every week, every week, mind you, I walk around looking just about the way I look now, but three afternoons of each week, I get my hair fixed. I do it myself, and then I go to my girlfriend's where I keep some dress clothes. Naturally, I get dolled-up and then I go off to National, catch my New York flight, a commute. Off for fun, folly, fucking and finances."

"What?" I was too startled to say more but she did not seem to mind and went ahead with the story.

"Yep, got me a sugar daddy, 'Eye-talian', as I call him. Hung like a horse. Girl! Girl! And we have our fun times. He is good to me; treats me real nice and he pays me well-really well. Big bucks! Of course, he calls it his gift to me, but it is always that green stuff. He says I can buy whatever I want. I go along with the program, but I know what the real deal is. Then, sometimes he has special friends for me to entertain also, and they pay me well. After my work is over, I fly back to D. C., leave my clothes at my girl's, jump in the shower there and let my hair go back and come on home. When Grady arrives I am all up into getting some serious dinner ready. Something he likes: greens, loves collards with smoked turkey necks, cornbread, ribs, chops, whatever. And so when he is beating and fucking me, I think about my bank book! I am gonna get away from here and from him and buy me a nice home somewhere, probably not in this city, though. You can bank on it!"

"Girl! For real?" I could not find anything else to say.

"Don't you hear good? Yeah, for real! In fact, now that I got an up close look at you, I could get a lot of work for a little thing like you. Weekends, though, since you gotta help other women make their lives better or whatever you do for that chump change salary you are probably getting. You could be doing something for yourself. I know you want to move to another neighborhood, send your baby to an outstanding school and get a real car. That is a piece of broken down looking shit you drive, if you don't mind me saying."

"Well, where is your car, Miss Making Big Book?"

She did not skip a beat.

"Parked in a garage in Georgetown. Brand new beautiful black Caddy. And Grady, dumb ass, thinks I can't drive."

About that time, the apartment door opened and Mama stuck her head out and said that dinner was ready.

"Go on and get your dinner. Think about it, and we'll talk again."

For some reason or the other, Rachel and I never had that chance. One time she invited me over for drinks and card playing. I went but I didn't play cards and she was into it so we could not do any girl talk. Next, my work hours changed and if we ran into one another in the hall, one of us was usually tied up with something or someone.

Months later, I knocked on her door to let her know I was moving, but there was no answer even though I knew she had gone through her usual ritual the night before. I slipped a note under the door, to tell her how glad I was to have met her and to wish her well. I did not mention that I was not interested in the weekend moonlighting, to which she had alluded. I figured she knew that all the time.

In fact, I was convinced that she had seen me coming and decided to try out her "story" of escape from her real life on gullible-looking me.

Oh, it must have been three years later, maybe, when I "accidentally" ran into another woman with whom I had been friendly who still lived in the apartment building. I was waiting for the subway when I spied her. I rushed over to say hello and when she saw me, she was so delighted that she said she would wait for the next train.

We caught up while we waited on a cold slab bench in Metro Center.

"Did you ever meet the woman across from you when you lived upstairs over me?"

I nodded, not wanting to reveal anything about Rachel's lifestyle, illusionary or otherwise, in case the woman wanted to ask me something about that.

"Well, seems that husband of hers found her checkbook one day when she went to get some greens. The story goes that she had saved $86,666.66! Imagine! And what she did not know was that Grady was screwing her girlfriend and when he told her about the bank book, which she did not know about, that so-called friend told what she did know. He hired a private-eye, so they say, who got all the information Grady needed in order to follow Rachel to New York. Say he knocked on the door of a suite on Park Avenue. Got in, somehow. Threw a "John" down the hall and knifed Rachel. Said it was one bloody mess! Almost cut off her head! He in prison now. And she six feet. Ain't that something else?"

Before I could completely process the reality of what she had told me, her train came and she scurried off, waving and promising that one day we should "do" lunch.

I could barely find a seat among the rush hour passengers when my orange line train finally pulled into the station. The tears, kept coming. An older woman, sitting across from me, got up and handed me what she called "clean" Kleenex just as she said, "Life can be a bitch, Baby Girl. You gotta know when to fold." I looked at her, puzzled.

"Well, I loves me some Kenny Rogers and that's good advice he gives." She went back to reading her horoscope magazine.

As I thought about Rachel, a woman I really did not know although I remembered her smile and her hope for the future, a few lines from the Kenny Rogers song wafted softly into my consciousness:

"You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em. Know when to walk away and know when to runà."