This is kind of a silly, unfinished one that I started as a break from my second novel and have been picking up the thread of again lately.
Anthony stood at the corner of doubt and self-possession, wavering, as usual. If he turned left he would be at Kelly’s safe and warm, the green of the carpeted stairway looming before him as he waited for her to come down. But if he arrived too soon she would be angry, she would think he hadn’t finished what he set out to do. Right then, to Samantha Bowman’s apartment on the Upper East Side, an apartment with rooms and rooms, without a worry in its molded mind.
He saw the bottom of her chandelier from the street and briefly marveled without envy that people should live that way. Elegance was all that remained to the eye and the palate, regardless of what it had cost to attain. He thought perhaps he would buy Kelly something with the money, if she let him have it. He steeled himself, straightened, coughed, shook out his pant leg and put on what he thought of as his business face. It only brought his blonde eyebrows lower on his face and made him look like a kid playing cop. Nonetheless, he braced himself. He rang and waited for the polished click of high heels on hardwood. He was surprised when she opened the door, first because she’d been soundless, and second because when she opened it she looked like hell. She wore a cotton robe that despite being thin, looked expensive. It formed a small crooked rill above her right shoulder and it seemed as if she had nothing on beneath it. She was barefoot and by the look of the furrow cut into her forehead, hungover.
He took a deep breath, cataloguing all the differences he hadn’t apprehended, saving them for Kelly, and he began, imagining that the screen had only changed, but the game was still on. “Miss Bowman, I think there’s something you ought to know.”
He meant to speak fast here like a private dick, he meant to slur the words intriguingly together, but he left a rather long pause in which she made no response. He went on, “It’s about Burke Law. I don’t know how well you think you know him….” No help. “But there may be things about him that you might not like.” She slid a hand into her robe, lifted her breast to scratch under it. She lifted her hair from her neck with both hands. “Let me get this right. You’re here about…Burke.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He didn’t know why he went southern when the nerves kicked in.
“But what about Burke? You…ah,” she said, as the realization dawned. She sized him up and smiled. She kicked her bare foot out across the empty air that separated them and it landed as a nudge on his shin. “You got a cigarette?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He dug in his pocket and handed her a crumpled Camel Light.
“Got a light?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He lit the match for her and held it to her cigarette tip. She looked into his eyes as he did it. He thought she might invite him in.
“Hey you, what’s your name?”
“I can’t tell you that, ma’am.”
He saw some small delight register in her eyes.
“Hey you, nameless, listen. Don’t you ever fucking come back here trying to sell information. Alright, honey?” She smiled, took a deep drag and her eyes pulled him in once again. She let out the smoke on a whistle, blowing up towards the gray sky beyond the doorway and sliding down the scale till she was eye to eye with him again. She gave him a dazzling smile and while he was still swimming in her glamour, closed the door.
“Kelly? Baby?” He heard the click of the burner on the stove go as he moved deeper into the apartment he shared with Kelly, a voluptuous brunette singer who worked the bar at Charlie’s Fish Can and sent money to her child in Oregon on occasion. “Kelly? I think I fucked up.”
He stood in the doorway of the spare kitchen, clean save for the breakfast dishes from this morning, still in their positions on the formica table, ready to satisfy some other Kelly and Anthony. Kelly swiped her hair back from her face which was heart shaped and soft with large brown eyes and long lashes, a small sweet mouth and a forgettable nose on which there were several freckles that Anthony treasured. “Anthony,” she said in a warning way.
“Baby, I just…I don’t know what happened…I…”
“You didn’t get the money, that’s what happened.”
“I didn’t get the money,” Anthony agreed. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry is not,” she said, forcing the omelet from the pan to the plate, “gonna cut it.”
He had been sent to shake Samantha Bowman down, to get her to agree that her safety from certain information was worth a couple of grand, to intrigue her into the melody of fear and dance her into a corner over which he would hang, panting, his palm out. Back on the street, he would regain all composure, smooth, assured, suave as the day is long, slicker than grease. He was, of course, none of these things, couldn’t live up to any expectations. He’d tried to shake her down and it had been more of a jostle. He did have good dirt on her. Her boyfriend, rising pop star, charismatic man, no good dirt bag, had fathered Kelly’s child all these years ago, a fact Kelly hadn’t thought much of until recently, until Burke’s CD’s had started selling when her own were not, until she saw four foot posters of him everywhere she went, until she had to contend with the myth instead of the man. She had known him all those years ago, they had been close. They used to sing together, they used to drink together, on occasion, obviously, they would fuck together.
It was a long time ago and everyone had aged since then, maybe learned things, maybe not. They had been a group of promising musicians, most of whom had scattered now, most of whom had been reabsorbed into the mainstream. It was something to see, all that promise, all that presence shucked off. It usually wasn’t at the person’s choosing, though sometimes there was posturing in that direction. It often seemed more a matter of despair, a loss of faith in the great world surrounding. Kelly knew about this because she was one of the casualties. She still sang, but she felt a certain hardness to her heart, to her self that she had not felt before. She was cooler towards newcomers, she had given up the hope that she would find someone to set her life on fire, she was…more grown up, and yes, a little sadder, but even her sadness felt content now. It was not the raging sadness of what she, at 30, now thought of as her youth.
She loved Anthony, you could ask anybody. But sometimes his baby cheeks and just his…general blondness, his aura of newness and faith, it irritated her, it made it hard to breathe sometimes. Other times, other nights it was so comforting to see him studying on the bed, his brow furrowed, turning over the pages of Kant or Kafka—he liked difficult reading and she thought it was sweet that he thought that knowledge lay that way. That an argument might save his life, clear his thinking, that another man’s labyrinth could be his salvation, that he might like to see a labyrinth appear before him, that that might give his life shape.
They had met in a grocery store, the one that her friend Sandy, before she disappeared, had always said was a meat market. He was inclined over the papayas, deep in judgment and she was sad, scared, and could tell a ripe one from a hard. He smiled at her and in that moment it did seem that he took it all away. She forgot anyway, what other interference had been playing in her mind and only saw his warm face, his interested eyes, intelligent eyes and his sweetness all around her like a light, a reassurance.
She had wanted to show him her singing. She invited him to her motley gigs and liked that he sat in the back, it stretched the space for fantasy, for creation and she always sang directly for him, into him as she imagined he might be. It was so sweet, so strong and its thickness justified her sadness. When life was this …round, this, fragile, how could you help but feel the weight? They had begun to see each other more, in taverns and in dancehalls. She began to broach the subject of Callie. There had been a popular movie that frequently quoted the off base statistic that a woman over 30 has a better chance of being hit by a train than marrying and Kelly quietly multiplied that chance by negative ten when you factored a child into the equation.
Callie was a beautiful child, a good kid in every sense, quiet and charming with a burgeoning voice and a polite manner that did not hide, as it did in the popular girls, haughtiness and disdain, but that covered a genuine uncertainty that she was too young to know the value of. She was only twelve, but she seemed, despite her innocence, worldly. It was a new issue for Kelly, and one she’d tried to call into the foreground last month, but found that looking into the sweet round face of her daughter, she could not do it. She was too young, too tied to her origins, there would be time for the talk when she showed some savvy.
Anthony didn’t seem to think that Callie was a problem, though it was also true that he rarely saw her. Kelly privately thought that Callie had a bit of a crush on Anthony and she didn’t know whether to encourage it as an expression of fondness and a sweet nature or to nip it sharply in the bud as she would with a friend who showed too much interest.
It was puzzling having a daughter. It was a lie that they didn’t grow up till 18. She should have known it seeing how she was at 14, 15, lucky she didn’t have any older than Callie. It was a weird system that kept these young girls in captivity, sexually matured, perhaps even intellectually adequate, exciting maybe, but so vulnerable that it was a little sick, it made her see how a man could want to cuff a woman, to punish her for being so open, so freakishly giving, with no end in sight. Kelly did not want to hit her kid, but sometimes she wanted to distance herself from her, float off into another zone, another universe where Kelly’s voice was louder than the incipient beauty’s, where she really could control, simply by holding her position of authority.
Anthony lay awake in bed that night, thinking of how Kelly’s disappointment, and something more—her exasperation—had dulled her face for a moment, how she seemed to think he couldn’t do anything right. He supposed he should be thinking he would show her but he didn’t think that, he thought she’s right, I can’t do it, I haven’t done it, I won’t. Well, I will. I have to now.
Samantha Bowman was difficult to deal with though, not just because she did not behave as he thought women and humans should behave, but also because she was famous if only in a limited way, and there was something about the familiar face that lulled him. It was hard to feel serious around her. It felt a little too Busby Berkeley, a little too candid camera, someone would any minute tote out a huge camera that he would briefly almost subconsciously try to imagine how they had hidden and then he would have to smile and wipe his forehead, apologize with his shoulders and live in a mild shock for weeks afterward, always expecting his life to be randomly televised again.
It was disorienting, an overlap between the real world which he felt he undoubtedly lived in and the glittering distant world of make believe. He wouldn’t mind crossing over but he imagined himself uncomfortable even in his fantasies, not having anything to hold onto, getting squirmy after an hour or two and returning to Kelly’s heart shaped face and bottom with an immense sense of relief. He smiled at her in the dark just thinking of it. He loved her and hoped secretly that she would get pregnant. She didn’t seem anxious to have another child, but there was something so light, so graduated about the idea of fatherhood. Him, a father, a man with something to teach, much to show. He liked it. Bikes and loose teeth, school problems and Halloween costumes. It was a life he could live, could work out from memory.
He didn’t know where blackmailing fit in to this sunny future, he was sure it didn’t. But this was soft blackmailing. Gauzy and as friendly as it got. They needed money and she had it. Burke was a twerp and deserved to pay. Callie deserved to get money from her father. It wasn’t too hard to see who was right. But swimming in the in between, in the deed undone was something that he would like to wrap up. He didn’t mind asking for the money, conveying it, threatening even, none of that bothered him, but if it could all just be over…that would be nice.
On his second visit, he dressed up a little more. Not memorable still, but polished in his own right, as if to make up for the polish she had failed to provide. This time she was dressed. In a slim skirt and sweater, her hair pulled back and small rubies in each ear. She looked radiant.
“Samantha,” he said, with an easy smile, “I seem to be back. I’m back. What do you make of that?”
She looked slightly puzzled, as if she had actually forgotten him. She looked him up and down, “I’m sorry,” she said, “You were?”
“I am a friend of yours,” he said, this time, as he had practiced, “I’m here to give you some information that I know you want.”
“I don’t...” she frowned, half apologetically and started to close the door on him and he stuck his foot in the door, pleasantly, he hoped, and gave her another smile. “Miss Bowman, let’s just talk…”
“You’re freaking me out right now,” she said, and turned on her heel to walk further into the apartment. She hadn’t closed the door and Anthony hesitated in the doorway for a moment, politeness overtaking his current errand. Then he eased inside and followed the clacking of her heels towards a large woody dining room, with multipaned windows shining at each end. She emerged from the other doorway holding a butcher knife rather casually and leaned against the doorframe. “I’ll give you six minutes.”
“I won’t take more,” Anthony said and sat at the far end of the giant table. It must be a single slab of wood. Whatever it was it was impressive, Beowulf impressive. “Ms. Bowman, thirteen years ago Burke Law fathered a child that he has since held no responsibility for. The mother of this child wants recompense.”
The butcher knife fell slightly. “What the fuck? Why are you talking to me about Burke’s problem. Talk to fucking Burke. I mean, I’m sorry and all about the … kid or whatever, but… what the fuck?”
“It’s not possible to talk to Burke. We are talking to you because if you care about Burke, the best thing you can do for him is to help him settle this bill. We’re asking ten thousand, only what’s fair, less than what’s fair, for thirteen years of negligence. I read in the paper that you and Burke are going to be married. What’s his is yours and in this case what’s yours needs to be his.”
“That’s not even true,” she said, “I don’t know where they heard that.”
“Regardless. People believe it to be true and I believe it too. I think you’re closer than you’re letting on.”
She said nothing.
“The question is, can you help him? Can you help him now? Give us this money and we’ll go away. You’ll never hear from us again because what’s right will have been served, but if we have to go the route of DNA tests and courts it’s going to take a lot longer and it’s going to make your man look a hell of a lot worse.”
“I still don’t understand why you’re asking me.” She waved a gesture with the knife, “I mean, what do I know about it? What do I have to do with it? Can’t you just leave me out of it?”
“No,” Anthony said solemnly, “you’ve got the means. You’ll have to decide what the future you have planned means to you. Thank you for hearing me out. You can reach me at this address when you’ve decided.”
He laid the card they’d had printed on the table and rose to go. She stood still in the doorway in her pretty sweater and skirt, her eyes cast down, thinking.
He wanted to go and console her, to help her with the burden he’s just laid at her feet, that was his upbringing, but he walked instead, slowly, measuredly, to the door.
When he got home Kelly was sleeping, laid across their bed like a king of hearts, face to the side, looking fully armed. He curled around her and her body molded to his.
In the morning there were pancakes and the beginning of the wait. Who knew how long it would go on, but the tension was thick. Would she buy it as her responsibility? Had they mismeasured her regard for him, their entaglement? If so, it was all off. Anthony had pushed courts early in the scheming, but mulishly Kelly did not want to take her old friend to court, though somehow blackmailing fell within her moral code. She wouldn’t show his if he wouldn’t show hers, he supposed. He thought there was still something there, something he should watch out for. She was desperate and there was really nothing to get desperate about, so that should have been a red flag and it was, but not the kind that could change anything.
Samantha Bowman thought about it for a long time. She paced her apartment, ending up always in the bathroom, the cool extra large gray tiles calming her down just when she had reached the pitch of pissedness, the height of annoyance. Why the fuck should she care? People had kids all the time in and out of wedlock—look at Mick Jagger, look at…anyone. They all had bastards, roaming the world, ducking in and out of their famous names. Why should anyone care if Burke had one too. But she kept finding, snagging on the fact that she did care about what people thought of Burke, Samantha’s husband, if not of Burke music man, famous whatever. I mean everyone felt a little sorry for Jerry Hall when Mick kept showing up with babies. Though they were already married. She hadn’t even married the sonofabitch yet and he was already giving her grief. Unfortunately, she loved him. Unfortunately. And 10,000 dollars really wasn’t much money to her. Her lingerie bill for the year. It wasn’t much. It was possible. But, no. How could she even consider giving in to blackmailers? Because she wanted them gone, that’s how. To not have to think about this ever again, to never have to meet this child, plan a Thanksgiving dinner that in any way involved this offspring, to never have to mention it again, that was worth something. She sat on the edge of her cool, black tub and thought, heel gently tapping the porcelain. Was this a precedent or a preemption?
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
On Command
This is also an oldie, but I still like it.
On Command
Sitting at the small wooden vanity in her trailer, her feet hidden under the teal flounce, Meredith flips through a magazine, comparing herself with the women laid out on the pages: glossy hair, bedroom eyes, parted lips. She looks in the mirror, nods, she is Meredith Haynes, up and comer. Recognized occasionally on the street from the relatively small part she had as the secretive Olivia in a “smart sad drama” (People, November 17, 1998) about high school life which ran for a season. In October of 1998 she had a quarter-page photo in Entertainment Weekly. It was a studio shot, Olivia sitting alone at a long cafeteria table, her face in profile, her eyes blended in soft flattering shadow. She had a ponytail and a black leather jacket that was half-tough. She kept the jacket and wore it around town for a couple of months. That was when fans had approached her. The caption read “The 25 year old Meredith Haynes has made her mark as forlorn 18 year old Sadie on Life Is.... Next challenge, can she play happy?”
Next year maybe, it will be a one page shot. With a wind machine and her hair blowing loose around her face, her eyes sultry, her smile welcoming. It’s up to the photographer of course, but that’s one good possibility. She adds it to the mental file. Her friends from home and her new friends from L.A. will recognize her, save the page; anonymous strangers will fall in love with her. Lust. They will fall in lust with her. With the picture. She lights a cigarette and frowns at herself. She shakes her head, inhales, blows out the smoke peacefully. Her scene is in fifteen minutes. Meredith, as Sarah, will meet Billy, the guy that Joan Ann has just started dating. Sarah thinks Billy would be better for her. She must convey how subtle the cooling towards her friend is, how subtle the shy smiles towards the boy are. The smiles must have a secret behind them, not nerves, but some little thing in reserve.
She puts the magazine down and places her hands on either side of the long oval mirror. Shoulder length hair of varied light color, brushed fifteen minutes ago. Wide eyes, long eyelashes, small nose but not too small. A little interesting. Perfectly understated lips. She focuses on the lips and tries out a shy but knowing smile. The smoke from the cigarette in her right hand flows across the mirror’s surface and back to her, shaping and releasing the air around her head, a soft halo, an exhaust line of cloud suspended in the wake of a fast moving vehicle. She slips another smile around her lips. Ah, this one is closer, keep the eyes focused, straight ahead, the lift of the lips small, quick. She takes a drag of the cigarette, stubs it out, pushes away from the mirror. She opens the door gathering her hair into an elastic and stops, stunned by the bright blue New Mexican morning.
She anchors her vision on the small white spot in the near distance and walks across the parking lot to the director’s chair set up before a false suburban backyard. She pats Stan on the back and smiles at him, not the shy smile but a genuine, tired one. “Why so early, Stan? It’s always so early.”
He grins back, “Hey princess, some of us used to have office jobs. Do you know how early I had to get up when I was working at Merrill Lynch?”
“Liar. You were never a banker, or broker, or whatever the hell they do over there.”
“Got me. Coffee’s on the banquet. Come back when you’re feeling friendly.” She slaps his back and shrugs over to the banquet where something akin to brunch is laid out. An actors brunch: smoothies, granola, Power Bars, carrots, cauliflower, cherry tomatoes, Reese’s peanut butter cups, tiny airplane boxes of cold cereal and three aluminum coffee pumps next to which sat personalized mugs, a small extravagance. The mugs were named, one for each of the small crew. For the actors it was their movie name spelled out in Varsity jacket script along the side of each mug. She picked up the mug marked Sarah and filled it with hot coffee, glanced back at Stan, appreciative of the small joke.
The coffee was one rubber band in the fluctuating nexus that kept her able to do her job. Lately she couldn’t sleep nights, not until the sun was almost up and the New Mexico night passed from still to restless. Inside her trailer she lay exhausted on the couch next to the bed until the darkness opened up and she slid inside.
She would sleep better if someone’s head lay against her chest, someone to breathe rhythmically beside her. In the morning she would look at that person, mocking, cool. Smile and try to make her eyes sparkle. “Breakfast?” She’s done it enough in the past eight months to know a good performance from a bad one. Even if she doesn’t manage to instill the right amount of fresh-faced enthusiasm in her eyes, it doesn’t much matter, the audience is rotating. During the bad performances she gets a stare that is meant to puzzle out something before it’s finished. Then she flashes a cold look and offers breakfast again. The good performances make her feel expansive and small at the same time.
The last time she’d had anything more than that she had not known what to do. She tried smiling, tried her serious face too, even a contrite one and nothing. She got only an extended look of amusement. She had seen him twice more, but she only went home with him when she was very drunk and in the mornings she was afraid to look at him.
Flopping onto the couch, she throws the couch pillow over her eyes. Lying there like her Lady Macbeth she drums up that hurt that should be at her center. Is. The hurt that is there. She’s alone. Lost. She’s wasting herself, and she won’t let a goddamn soul save her. She starts to cry softly. She wipes the tears from her cheeks, adjusting the pillow on her face to make room. She takes in a deep breath and listens to the night quieting around her.
She stirs sugar, cream into her coffee, looking around for the other actors in her scene. Dixie/Joan Ann and Rob/Billy--are doing partner stretches outside of Dixie’s trailer, sitting on the dusty ground, their feet touching, pulling at each others arms like a pair of oars. Meredith goes back to sit next to Stan.
She waves her cup of coffee at him and smiles, “When are we rolling?”
“As soon as Diego and Rich get the cameras checked. You OK, princess? You look a little tired.”
“Fine.” She looks at him out of the corner of her eye, the rest of her gaze filled with the impossible blue of the sky.
Meredith and Dixie sit side by side on the garden bench from props. Rob comes out of the sliding doors of the house and waves at them both. Meredith who has been gazing into the distance away from Joan Ann perks up, begins to fidget. Joan Ann smiles and jumps up waving. “Hi Billy!” She says her lines with her arms around Rob’s waist. “Were my parents just awful, or what?”
When Joan Ann and Billy are gone Meredith stands in the garden alone: sweeps her hair up with one hand, lets it fall. Puts one foot in front of the other, sticks out her chest, puts a hand on her hips, tilts her head, parts her lips and smiles. She shakes her head, uncrosses her feet, sweeps her hair up again, smiles, stops, smiles.
Stan yells Cut! She doesn’t turn. She laughs a little breathlessly, sits down on the bench again, drapes herself back into it, hanging her head over the edge, laughs again and continues to smile, runs her hand slowly up her thigh and back down. “Bil-ly.” She says it slowly, splitting the “l”’s, her mouth staying open on the last syllable, eyebrows raised. She hangs a hand over the bench back. “Bil-ly.” She laughs again and shoves off from the bench, walking casually back to the crew.
When she returns to the banquet table there is a silence around her, the smooth water surrounding a toy boat gliding out to sea. Stan breaks it; slaps her on the back, says great work, beautiful job. Her hair ceases to brush her cheek in slow motion. She looks up at him, her cheeks reddening. She looks down again, puts four pieces each of cauliflower and carrot on her plate and walks toward her trailer. Before she gets there Rob catches her by the elbow, almost spilling the careful arrangement on her plate.
He smiles earnestly at her, “Wow, Meredith, you were great.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“No, I mean it, you were wonderful. Natural and. . . honest. It was perfect.” She considers him again, smiles, keeping her eyes on his, lifting only the edges of her lips.
“Thank you.”
On Command
Sitting at the small wooden vanity in her trailer, her feet hidden under the teal flounce, Meredith flips through a magazine, comparing herself with the women laid out on the pages: glossy hair, bedroom eyes, parted lips. She looks in the mirror, nods, she is Meredith Haynes, up and comer. Recognized occasionally on the street from the relatively small part she had as the secretive Olivia in a “smart sad drama” (People, November 17, 1998) about high school life which ran for a season. In October of 1998 she had a quarter-page photo in Entertainment Weekly. It was a studio shot, Olivia sitting alone at a long cafeteria table, her face in profile, her eyes blended in soft flattering shadow. She had a ponytail and a black leather jacket that was half-tough. She kept the jacket and wore it around town for a couple of months. That was when fans had approached her. The caption read “The 25 year old Meredith Haynes has made her mark as forlorn 18 year old Sadie on Life Is.... Next challenge, can she play happy?”
Next year maybe, it will be a one page shot. With a wind machine and her hair blowing loose around her face, her eyes sultry, her smile welcoming. It’s up to the photographer of course, but that’s one good possibility. She adds it to the mental file. Her friends from home and her new friends from L.A. will recognize her, save the page; anonymous strangers will fall in love with her. Lust. They will fall in lust with her. With the picture. She lights a cigarette and frowns at herself. She shakes her head, inhales, blows out the smoke peacefully. Her scene is in fifteen minutes. Meredith, as Sarah, will meet Billy, the guy that Joan Ann has just started dating. Sarah thinks Billy would be better for her. She must convey how subtle the cooling towards her friend is, how subtle the shy smiles towards the boy are. The smiles must have a secret behind them, not nerves, but some little thing in reserve.
She puts the magazine down and places her hands on either side of the long oval mirror. Shoulder length hair of varied light color, brushed fifteen minutes ago. Wide eyes, long eyelashes, small nose but not too small. A little interesting. Perfectly understated lips. She focuses on the lips and tries out a shy but knowing smile. The smoke from the cigarette in her right hand flows across the mirror’s surface and back to her, shaping and releasing the air around her head, a soft halo, an exhaust line of cloud suspended in the wake of a fast moving vehicle. She slips another smile around her lips. Ah, this one is closer, keep the eyes focused, straight ahead, the lift of the lips small, quick. She takes a drag of the cigarette, stubs it out, pushes away from the mirror. She opens the door gathering her hair into an elastic and stops, stunned by the bright blue New Mexican morning.
She anchors her vision on the small white spot in the near distance and walks across the parking lot to the director’s chair set up before a false suburban backyard. She pats Stan on the back and smiles at him, not the shy smile but a genuine, tired one. “Why so early, Stan? It’s always so early.”
He grins back, “Hey princess, some of us used to have office jobs. Do you know how early I had to get up when I was working at Merrill Lynch?”
“Liar. You were never a banker, or broker, or whatever the hell they do over there.”
“Got me. Coffee’s on the banquet. Come back when you’re feeling friendly.” She slaps his back and shrugs over to the banquet where something akin to brunch is laid out. An actors brunch: smoothies, granola, Power Bars, carrots, cauliflower, cherry tomatoes, Reese’s peanut butter cups, tiny airplane boxes of cold cereal and three aluminum coffee pumps next to which sat personalized mugs, a small extravagance. The mugs were named, one for each of the small crew. For the actors it was their movie name spelled out in Varsity jacket script along the side of each mug. She picked up the mug marked Sarah and filled it with hot coffee, glanced back at Stan, appreciative of the small joke.
The coffee was one rubber band in the fluctuating nexus that kept her able to do her job. Lately she couldn’t sleep nights, not until the sun was almost up and the New Mexico night passed from still to restless. Inside her trailer she lay exhausted on the couch next to the bed until the darkness opened up and she slid inside.
She would sleep better if someone’s head lay against her chest, someone to breathe rhythmically beside her. In the morning she would look at that person, mocking, cool. Smile and try to make her eyes sparkle. “Breakfast?” She’s done it enough in the past eight months to know a good performance from a bad one. Even if she doesn’t manage to instill the right amount of fresh-faced enthusiasm in her eyes, it doesn’t much matter, the audience is rotating. During the bad performances she gets a stare that is meant to puzzle out something before it’s finished. Then she flashes a cold look and offers breakfast again. The good performances make her feel expansive and small at the same time.
The last time she’d had anything more than that she had not known what to do. She tried smiling, tried her serious face too, even a contrite one and nothing. She got only an extended look of amusement. She had seen him twice more, but she only went home with him when she was very drunk and in the mornings she was afraid to look at him.
Flopping onto the couch, she throws the couch pillow over her eyes. Lying there like her Lady Macbeth she drums up that hurt that should be at her center. Is. The hurt that is there. She’s alone. Lost. She’s wasting herself, and she won’t let a goddamn soul save her. She starts to cry softly. She wipes the tears from her cheeks, adjusting the pillow on her face to make room. She takes in a deep breath and listens to the night quieting around her.
She stirs sugar, cream into her coffee, looking around for the other actors in her scene. Dixie/Joan Ann and Rob/Billy--are doing partner stretches outside of Dixie’s trailer, sitting on the dusty ground, their feet touching, pulling at each others arms like a pair of oars. Meredith goes back to sit next to Stan.
She waves her cup of coffee at him and smiles, “When are we rolling?”
“As soon as Diego and Rich get the cameras checked. You OK, princess? You look a little tired.”
“Fine.” She looks at him out of the corner of her eye, the rest of her gaze filled with the impossible blue of the sky.
Meredith and Dixie sit side by side on the garden bench from props. Rob comes out of the sliding doors of the house and waves at them both. Meredith who has been gazing into the distance away from Joan Ann perks up, begins to fidget. Joan Ann smiles and jumps up waving. “Hi Billy!” She says her lines with her arms around Rob’s waist. “Were my parents just awful, or what?”
When Joan Ann and Billy are gone Meredith stands in the garden alone: sweeps her hair up with one hand, lets it fall. Puts one foot in front of the other, sticks out her chest, puts a hand on her hips, tilts her head, parts her lips and smiles. She shakes her head, uncrosses her feet, sweeps her hair up again, smiles, stops, smiles.
Stan yells Cut! She doesn’t turn. She laughs a little breathlessly, sits down on the bench again, drapes herself back into it, hanging her head over the edge, laughs again and continues to smile, runs her hand slowly up her thigh and back down. “Bil-ly.” She says it slowly, splitting the “l”’s, her mouth staying open on the last syllable, eyebrows raised. She hangs a hand over the bench back. “Bil-ly.” She laughs again and shoves off from the bench, walking casually back to the crew.
When she returns to the banquet table there is a silence around her, the smooth water surrounding a toy boat gliding out to sea. Stan breaks it; slaps her on the back, says great work, beautiful job. Her hair ceases to brush her cheek in slow motion. She looks up at him, her cheeks reddening. She looks down again, puts four pieces each of cauliflower and carrot on her plate and walks toward her trailer. Before she gets there Rob catches her by the elbow, almost spilling the careful arrangement on her plate.
He smiles earnestly at her, “Wow, Meredith, you were great.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“No, I mean it, you were wonderful. Natural and. . . honest. It was perfect.” She considers him again, smiles, keeping her eyes on his, lifting only the edges of her lips.
“Thank you.”
Intake
This is a story I wrote a long time ago, at NYU. Paule Marshall really liked it, my classmate Carl didn't so much.
Intake
The night flashes by, the highway lights blur as the van picks up speed. On the side of the van is an obese airbrushed cowboy sitting atop a mule whose weight-bearing back is bent, his belly dangerously near his hooves. The radio station is tuned to country music.
Shel Hardy sits still, her body tensed with fear and ready for action. She searches the interior of the van for a sign of a weapon. A gun would be the worst, her cowardice and caution would mix badly with terror and she would be a second too late to avoid the blast. Would she feel for a moment the side of her head gone, her limbs unable to move as he advances, not caring about the mess, wanting only....What? What would he want? No, he would have too much to lose. He owns the van and the business. It was he who answered the phone, wasn’t it?
Hello? Is this the shuttle service? Hi, two from Stanford to SFO please. United, 6:30 a.m.
At 4:50 a.m. her boyfriend is still staring into space biting his pencil and shuffling his feet. His clothes are strewn across the room, occupying every inch of space except for the enclave she has made for herself on the bed, backed up against the wall. Finally he turns to her, cross, exhausted, “I can’t go Shel. I still have four pages to write and this is for Richard Rorty for godsakes, I’m not going to write crap. You go ahead, I’ll take a cab later.” She considers the sharp blue of his eyes and decides not to push it. “Tell your family I said hello.”
She has been concentrating hard out the window, thinking of her boyfriend at school, now frantically packing, calling for a cab that will cost him twice as much as the shuttle. In a few hours he will be home with that counter full of photographs charting every step of his life. High school graduation, with a gleaming blonde at his side, first day of college, first Thanksgiving home from school, second Thanksgiving, third. And now a new set in the making. She has not managed to grace that counter just yet and she tries not to count the years she has been waiting. She turns away from the window in resolution and the van’s atmosphere settles around her, close-fitting. She hadn’t expected to be in the van alone. She hadn’t expected to have to try to make conversation with this large white man on two hours of sleep and a bitter feeling. Not that she necessarily thought of him as white, just a man, a big man driving a big van, getting her to the plane on time. Or taking her off to the side of the road and shooting her up full of lead and taking her limbs apart, leaving her in a plastic garbage bag, with only her memory like a belch lingering over the plush seat.
There had been a case in the paper a month ago: a truck driver who had killed fifteen women and finally turned himself in at the police station because God spoke to him. The man had brought along physical evidence. She imagines the scene like the beginning of an obscene joke,
A man walks into a police station in California. He pulls a breast out of his pocket and lays it on the desk of the supervising officer. The officer looks at his desk and then up at the stranger, “We’ll be right with you.”
She looks at her driver in stages, first gazing intently through the windshield at the night rising like wind--from there she can see his hands on the steering wheel, black hair settled on their pale backs. Her own hands press the armrests. In an attempt to look unconcerned she turns her head by creaking degrees and then like a door swung wide she looks straight at him and smiles.
“Not many people on the road this time of day, huh?”
The driver, a big doughy man in a shiny jacket with elasticized cloth cuffs looks at her, takes in the brown-glass skin and the tightly stretched smile. He nods, “Yeah, my favorite time to be on the road.” There is a long pause, and then he asks, “You work over at Stanford?”
The jacket bears the logo of Big John’s Airport Service, the oversized cowboy atop the pint-sized mule waving his hat and headed for sunset.
“Work at Stanford? No, I go to school there, this is my last year.”
“Huh.” He glances at her again and nods, then beeps his horn at a swiftly passing car. She fills the silence after the horn dies, “Are you from here?”
“Yeah, born and raised. Went to San Jose High.”
“Good school.”
He looks at her to see if she is joking. “Yeah.”
She wants to move her leg, to spread out a little, but she doesn’t want to call attention to her physical self. She sits still. Breathes, tries to listen to her breathing.
She is headed for home, not quite a sunset, hopefully not yet, but rather the stark and flat chill of the Midwest. How her family ended up there she is not sure, yet they seem stuck, the only spots of color in an otherwise white landscape. The heaps of snow she is no longer used to, the sky on December mornings. White, peaches and cream, porcelain and tan, just regular folks.
They are approaching the convoluted mass that is the San Francisco airport. He drives down below when she thinks he should have gone up. “Hey, I’m going to United you know.”
“Yeah, mornings you can’t go to the main level. You’ll have to take the escalator.”
“Oh.”
She gets out, pays him, smiles, relieved now.
Into the brown timeless expanse of the airport. Zombies--sleeping, watching the luggage carousel scale along. She goes upstairs, glad she packed light for once and won’t have to check anything.
She doesn’t want to stand in line and feel her exhaustion, she doesn’t want to start suspecting herself before they do. Suspect herself of what? She never does anything wrong. OK, once she smuggled some pot home in her panties, but that was too nerve wracking to repeat. She is a good citizen, a normal person, who has paid for the service she is about to use. She repeats to herself, I am completely legitimate, then snorts when she hears it in her head. Of course I am. She feels the eyes of the counter people on her and keeps walking, her teeth pulling at her bottom lip. She fields glances at her gate, what you’ve never seen a black person from Iowa before? Looks around for people she might know, aches to sleep.
Over Des Moines, god, so empty looking and layered with grudged white snow, small, twinkling faintly. Hello again.
She gets off the plane and goes to baggage claim to wait. No one is ever on time to get her. Oh god. She sees the boy she dated in high school, big brown-skinned boy who took her to new sexual heights and then patiently explained to her that she had been “played.” She edges into a corner and starts to wish herself smaller and then she catches sight of her mother. Solid, brown, smiling back at her with her own face. “Mom.”
Home in the big white Jeep, feeling conspicuous, through street lights and dirty snow, down the long strip where sidewalks are empty except for a few flannel-clad adventurers. Inside the car Etta James is playing and it is warm. “We’re so glad to have you home. Nothing much new with us . . . your brother hates his new school. Alanna is fourteen. Same old, same old.”
She looks at her mother. “Well, it’s good to see that some things don’t change.” She smiles and then laughs. “I’ve missed you Mom, school is too much lately. My classes are still full-on and I don’t know when the thesis will get written.”
They have begun the upward climb into the long driveway. She takes in the familiar brick house which looks much larger from the front than it really is, the bald trees that surround the house, and the bit of damp blue sky that is visible over the rooftop. Then she notices a dark splash on the white mailbox.
“What’s that?”
“Huh. I don’t know.” As they get closer they see that the word “nigger” is scrawled across their mailbox. They are both still. “Are you kidding me.”
Inside the house she looks out the window over the backyard. This was the front entrance when the house was built. Her head is full of monumental images, the KKK riding up the lawn, bedsheets flapping, horses charging, eyeholes menacing. People hiding in the bushes, in the trees. Her eyes fall on the short black man holding a hitching ring in his plastered fist, a bit of negricana that was left by the former owners of the house. Why have they never bothered to get rid of it? She’d go out there right now and kick it smack between the teeth but as her hand reaches for the door knob, it falls again and she scans the lawn for intruders.
Her mother leans her head against a cabinet in the kitchen, screws up her pretty brown face, “In this day. I cannot believe it. We’ve never had a problem before.”
Shel brings her head out of the refrigerator and pours her glass full of water. “Remember those cross burnings in Dubuque? When was that, ‘93?”
Her mother looks at her over her glasses, “Dubuque is over an hour away and it’s in farm country.”
“Yeah, and so are we, basically.”
She shakes her head, frowning, “That’s not true, Shel. I just don’t see it. We’ve been here for ten years, in this house for five. Who would do that? Who? Someone must have seen them, someone must have been out, the neighborhood police at least.”
Shel looks at her mother through the bottom of her water glass, “It wasn’t there last night? You’re sure?”
“I’m not sure, but I think I would have noticed.”
“Well, I guess we better report it to the police. Not that that will help, but it should be on file....in case anything else happens.”
“Anything else, huh? Who do those fools think they are? I grew up in Maryland in the 50s and if they think I haven’t seen this before...if they think they can just move me out of my place, well. They got another think coming.”
“Mom.”
Shel’s father was in his office, Alanna was still at swim practice and Raj was spending the day at his friend’s farm half an hour outside the city. When the minivan pulled up and Raj jumped out, Shel hung back. His friend’s mother hopped out behind him and waved at them all, “Heya guys, sorry he’s a little late, we had some trouble pulling them off the four wheelers. But he just kept talking all day about how his big sister was coming home, so I know he’s glad to be here.”
Confused by the wall of silence that greeted her, she looked around at them all. “Hey, sweetie, somethin’ the matter?”
“We were vandalized last night, Sharon. We’re just all a little shook up.”
“Vandalized? Now, what in the hell?”
Shel’s mother led Sharon around to look at the mailbox. “Jesus! Now, who would want to do that?”
Raj stood a few feet behind the mothers, looking through the shield of their bodies at the mailbox and its message. He turned and went into the house. Shel found him sitting cross-legged on the floor, watching TV. She sat down next to him. “Hey Raj. What’s up?”
“Nothing.” He tore his eyes away from Cartoon Network briefly to look at her. Encouraged, she asked, “How’ve you been?” Too late, his eyes had already slapped back. She watched the bright colors reflected on his glasses.
She tried again, “Babe. It’s not personal. Chances are, they don’t even know us. They must have read about us in the paper or something.”
They had been in the paper five years ago when they had first moved into the neighborhood. They had published the price of their house and noted that it was the most expensive real estate trade in the last six years. They had appeared in the Register again last month, her mother, brother and sister smiling out from the front page of the Metro section. The caption read, “African-Americans battling for Des Moines Public School smarts find the going is not too tough.”
Alanna walked in the door and Shel got up to embrace her. “Hey you, it’s been a while. You look good. Did you see that crap outside?”
“Yeah, Mom showed me. Her and Sharon are still out there talking about it.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“Yeah, well. It’s just somebody who doesn’t know what’s good for them. If my Andre were here, there wouldn’t be no problem.”
“OK.” She studies her, not wanting to ask, because she knows her tone will be belligerent, “Who’s your Andre?”
“Andre. You know Andre, didn’t you meet him at my swim meet last time?”
“You mean that little eighth grade boy that you were with?”
“He’s not little. He could clear this up quick.”
“Alanna, what if it’s someone who’s older than fourteen that did this?”
“Doesn’t matter.” Alanna put her hand on her hip and pressed her lips together.
“OK, well you just let me know how Andre does with this one.”
“Why do you have to be like that, Shel?”
“Why do you have to be like that?” Alanna’s face crumpled, the edges of her mouth turning down. “Alanna, I’m sorry. I’m tired, I had a long flight today and since I’ve been home it’s just been....like this.”
Alanna raised her eyebrows. “Yeah, well. Rap City is on,” She smiled, though her eyes still put distance between them, “Let’s go out in the pool house, goober-head is taking up this TV.”
When the blue sky began to crust and turn dark the pool house became an aquarium, a box of light in a dark background and they went into the house, turning on the alarm behind them.
Shel sat in her room now, curled into her childhood bed: four posts, wood, a princess’ refuge. She thanked god that she did not live here anymore, that none of this was her problem. In three days she would go back to her books and her boyfriend, her friends and their campus where the green was bright enough to wash out the other colors. She sighed and willed sleep to come. It would not come, it let her go on thinking.
And after that? After her cap had been tossed, the gown worn? Would she go off with her boyfriend? Would she then earn a place on the record-keeping counter of dreams? It had been three years already and suddenly, in this bed where years collapsed, she couldn’t see how another year would make a difference. She was restless. She thought some fresh air might help her to think more clearly.
She was already downstairs, turning off the alarm before she got nervous. Fresh air? Was she crazy? Who knew what was out there? Certainly someone, something was out there that didn’t like her. But standing there in the sealed house, breathing stale air, she was as scared not to go outside as she was to go.
She opened the door tentatively, listening for the soft beep of the security system, and she looked outside. It was black, wind rustled through the almost bare trees. She stepped outside, her heart beating in her chest, her ears sensitive to every sound. The bottoms of her slippers hushed against the cement driveway. The door was cracked behind her and she glanced back at it as she made her way to the center of the driveway.
She stood there in her nightgown and slippers feeling arrows pierce her back, bullets from the left, a sledgehammer from the right. She looked up at the sky and her breath slid back into her throat, cold breath, cold night. The moon was veiled and the clouds, illuminated by the invisible light, stood out in deep contrast. In a gesture that she didn’t understand, she raised her arms up to the sky. Stretching, trying to lengthen her arms and pull herself up. She heard a movement in the bushes to her left and she froze that way, arms raised, head up. Let it come.
“Shel is that you?”
Shel closed her eyes, opened them, lowered her arms, “What are you doing out here?”
When she looked closer the question was unnecessary. Her mother was on her knees in front of the mailbox, a bucket in front of her and a rag in her hand. Shel walked over, the leaves crunching beneath her feet, icicle wind stinging her face. She reached her mother’s upturned face and towering above her she said, “Now?” She could as easily have said, “Still?”, “Here?”, or “With you?”
Intake
The night flashes by, the highway lights blur as the van picks up speed. On the side of the van is an obese airbrushed cowboy sitting atop a mule whose weight-bearing back is bent, his belly dangerously near his hooves. The radio station is tuned to country music.
Shel Hardy sits still, her body tensed with fear and ready for action. She searches the interior of the van for a sign of a weapon. A gun would be the worst, her cowardice and caution would mix badly with terror and she would be a second too late to avoid the blast. Would she feel for a moment the side of her head gone, her limbs unable to move as he advances, not caring about the mess, wanting only....What? What would he want? No, he would have too much to lose. He owns the van and the business. It was he who answered the phone, wasn’t it?
Hello? Is this the shuttle service? Hi, two from Stanford to SFO please. United, 6:30 a.m.
At 4:50 a.m. her boyfriend is still staring into space biting his pencil and shuffling his feet. His clothes are strewn across the room, occupying every inch of space except for the enclave she has made for herself on the bed, backed up against the wall. Finally he turns to her, cross, exhausted, “I can’t go Shel. I still have four pages to write and this is for Richard Rorty for godsakes, I’m not going to write crap. You go ahead, I’ll take a cab later.” She considers the sharp blue of his eyes and decides not to push it. “Tell your family I said hello.”
She has been concentrating hard out the window, thinking of her boyfriend at school, now frantically packing, calling for a cab that will cost him twice as much as the shuttle. In a few hours he will be home with that counter full of photographs charting every step of his life. High school graduation, with a gleaming blonde at his side, first day of college, first Thanksgiving home from school, second Thanksgiving, third. And now a new set in the making. She has not managed to grace that counter just yet and she tries not to count the years she has been waiting. She turns away from the window in resolution and the van’s atmosphere settles around her, close-fitting. She hadn’t expected to be in the van alone. She hadn’t expected to have to try to make conversation with this large white man on two hours of sleep and a bitter feeling. Not that she necessarily thought of him as white, just a man, a big man driving a big van, getting her to the plane on time. Or taking her off to the side of the road and shooting her up full of lead and taking her limbs apart, leaving her in a plastic garbage bag, with only her memory like a belch lingering over the plush seat.
There had been a case in the paper a month ago: a truck driver who had killed fifteen women and finally turned himself in at the police station because God spoke to him. The man had brought along physical evidence. She imagines the scene like the beginning of an obscene joke,
A man walks into a police station in California. He pulls a breast out of his pocket and lays it on the desk of the supervising officer. The officer looks at his desk and then up at the stranger, “We’ll be right with you.”
She looks at her driver in stages, first gazing intently through the windshield at the night rising like wind--from there she can see his hands on the steering wheel, black hair settled on their pale backs. Her own hands press the armrests. In an attempt to look unconcerned she turns her head by creaking degrees and then like a door swung wide she looks straight at him and smiles.
“Not many people on the road this time of day, huh?”
The driver, a big doughy man in a shiny jacket with elasticized cloth cuffs looks at her, takes in the brown-glass skin and the tightly stretched smile. He nods, “Yeah, my favorite time to be on the road.” There is a long pause, and then he asks, “You work over at Stanford?”
The jacket bears the logo of Big John’s Airport Service, the oversized cowboy atop the pint-sized mule waving his hat and headed for sunset.
“Work at Stanford? No, I go to school there, this is my last year.”
“Huh.” He glances at her again and nods, then beeps his horn at a swiftly passing car. She fills the silence after the horn dies, “Are you from here?”
“Yeah, born and raised. Went to San Jose High.”
“Good school.”
He looks at her to see if she is joking. “Yeah.”
She wants to move her leg, to spread out a little, but she doesn’t want to call attention to her physical self. She sits still. Breathes, tries to listen to her breathing.
She is headed for home, not quite a sunset, hopefully not yet, but rather the stark and flat chill of the Midwest. How her family ended up there she is not sure, yet they seem stuck, the only spots of color in an otherwise white landscape. The heaps of snow she is no longer used to, the sky on December mornings. White, peaches and cream, porcelain and tan, just regular folks.
They are approaching the convoluted mass that is the San Francisco airport. He drives down below when she thinks he should have gone up. “Hey, I’m going to United you know.”
“Yeah, mornings you can’t go to the main level. You’ll have to take the escalator.”
“Oh.”
She gets out, pays him, smiles, relieved now.
Into the brown timeless expanse of the airport. Zombies--sleeping, watching the luggage carousel scale along. She goes upstairs, glad she packed light for once and won’t have to check anything.
She doesn’t want to stand in line and feel her exhaustion, she doesn’t want to start suspecting herself before they do. Suspect herself of what? She never does anything wrong. OK, once she smuggled some pot home in her panties, but that was too nerve wracking to repeat. She is a good citizen, a normal person, who has paid for the service she is about to use. She repeats to herself, I am completely legitimate, then snorts when she hears it in her head. Of course I am. She feels the eyes of the counter people on her and keeps walking, her teeth pulling at her bottom lip. She fields glances at her gate, what you’ve never seen a black person from Iowa before? Looks around for people she might know, aches to sleep.
Over Des Moines, god, so empty looking and layered with grudged white snow, small, twinkling faintly. Hello again.
She gets off the plane and goes to baggage claim to wait. No one is ever on time to get her. Oh god. She sees the boy she dated in high school, big brown-skinned boy who took her to new sexual heights and then patiently explained to her that she had been “played.” She edges into a corner and starts to wish herself smaller and then she catches sight of her mother. Solid, brown, smiling back at her with her own face. “Mom.”
Home in the big white Jeep, feeling conspicuous, through street lights and dirty snow, down the long strip where sidewalks are empty except for a few flannel-clad adventurers. Inside the car Etta James is playing and it is warm. “We’re so glad to have you home. Nothing much new with us . . . your brother hates his new school. Alanna is fourteen. Same old, same old.”
She looks at her mother. “Well, it’s good to see that some things don’t change.” She smiles and then laughs. “I’ve missed you Mom, school is too much lately. My classes are still full-on and I don’t know when the thesis will get written.”
They have begun the upward climb into the long driveway. She takes in the familiar brick house which looks much larger from the front than it really is, the bald trees that surround the house, and the bit of damp blue sky that is visible over the rooftop. Then she notices a dark splash on the white mailbox.
“What’s that?”
“Huh. I don’t know.” As they get closer they see that the word “nigger” is scrawled across their mailbox. They are both still. “Are you kidding me.”
Inside the house she looks out the window over the backyard. This was the front entrance when the house was built. Her head is full of monumental images, the KKK riding up the lawn, bedsheets flapping, horses charging, eyeholes menacing. People hiding in the bushes, in the trees. Her eyes fall on the short black man holding a hitching ring in his plastered fist, a bit of negricana that was left by the former owners of the house. Why have they never bothered to get rid of it? She’d go out there right now and kick it smack between the teeth but as her hand reaches for the door knob, it falls again and she scans the lawn for intruders.
Her mother leans her head against a cabinet in the kitchen, screws up her pretty brown face, “In this day. I cannot believe it. We’ve never had a problem before.”
Shel brings her head out of the refrigerator and pours her glass full of water. “Remember those cross burnings in Dubuque? When was that, ‘93?”
Her mother looks at her over her glasses, “Dubuque is over an hour away and it’s in farm country.”
“Yeah, and so are we, basically.”
She shakes her head, frowning, “That’s not true, Shel. I just don’t see it. We’ve been here for ten years, in this house for five. Who would do that? Who? Someone must have seen them, someone must have been out, the neighborhood police at least.”
Shel looks at her mother through the bottom of her water glass, “It wasn’t there last night? You’re sure?”
“I’m not sure, but I think I would have noticed.”
“Well, I guess we better report it to the police. Not that that will help, but it should be on file....in case anything else happens.”
“Anything else, huh? Who do those fools think they are? I grew up in Maryland in the 50s and if they think I haven’t seen this before...if they think they can just move me out of my place, well. They got another think coming.”
“Mom.”
Shel’s father was in his office, Alanna was still at swim practice and Raj was spending the day at his friend’s farm half an hour outside the city. When the minivan pulled up and Raj jumped out, Shel hung back. His friend’s mother hopped out behind him and waved at them all, “Heya guys, sorry he’s a little late, we had some trouble pulling them off the four wheelers. But he just kept talking all day about how his big sister was coming home, so I know he’s glad to be here.”
Confused by the wall of silence that greeted her, she looked around at them all. “Hey, sweetie, somethin’ the matter?”
“We were vandalized last night, Sharon. We’re just all a little shook up.”
“Vandalized? Now, what in the hell?”
Shel’s mother led Sharon around to look at the mailbox. “Jesus! Now, who would want to do that?”
Raj stood a few feet behind the mothers, looking through the shield of their bodies at the mailbox and its message. He turned and went into the house. Shel found him sitting cross-legged on the floor, watching TV. She sat down next to him. “Hey Raj. What’s up?”
“Nothing.” He tore his eyes away from Cartoon Network briefly to look at her. Encouraged, she asked, “How’ve you been?” Too late, his eyes had already slapped back. She watched the bright colors reflected on his glasses.
She tried again, “Babe. It’s not personal. Chances are, they don’t even know us. They must have read about us in the paper or something.”
They had been in the paper five years ago when they had first moved into the neighborhood. They had published the price of their house and noted that it was the most expensive real estate trade in the last six years. They had appeared in the Register again last month, her mother, brother and sister smiling out from the front page of the Metro section. The caption read, “African-Americans battling for Des Moines Public School smarts find the going is not too tough.”
Alanna walked in the door and Shel got up to embrace her. “Hey you, it’s been a while. You look good. Did you see that crap outside?”
“Yeah, Mom showed me. Her and Sharon are still out there talking about it.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“Yeah, well. It’s just somebody who doesn’t know what’s good for them. If my Andre were here, there wouldn’t be no problem.”
“OK.” She studies her, not wanting to ask, because she knows her tone will be belligerent, “Who’s your Andre?”
“Andre. You know Andre, didn’t you meet him at my swim meet last time?”
“You mean that little eighth grade boy that you were with?”
“He’s not little. He could clear this up quick.”
“Alanna, what if it’s someone who’s older than fourteen that did this?”
“Doesn’t matter.” Alanna put her hand on her hip and pressed her lips together.
“OK, well you just let me know how Andre does with this one.”
“Why do you have to be like that, Shel?”
“Why do you have to be like that?” Alanna’s face crumpled, the edges of her mouth turning down. “Alanna, I’m sorry. I’m tired, I had a long flight today and since I’ve been home it’s just been....like this.”
Alanna raised her eyebrows. “Yeah, well. Rap City is on,” She smiled, though her eyes still put distance between them, “Let’s go out in the pool house, goober-head is taking up this TV.”
When the blue sky began to crust and turn dark the pool house became an aquarium, a box of light in a dark background and they went into the house, turning on the alarm behind them.
Shel sat in her room now, curled into her childhood bed: four posts, wood, a princess’ refuge. She thanked god that she did not live here anymore, that none of this was her problem. In three days she would go back to her books and her boyfriend, her friends and their campus where the green was bright enough to wash out the other colors. She sighed and willed sleep to come. It would not come, it let her go on thinking.
And after that? After her cap had been tossed, the gown worn? Would she go off with her boyfriend? Would she then earn a place on the record-keeping counter of dreams? It had been three years already and suddenly, in this bed where years collapsed, she couldn’t see how another year would make a difference. She was restless. She thought some fresh air might help her to think more clearly.
She was already downstairs, turning off the alarm before she got nervous. Fresh air? Was she crazy? Who knew what was out there? Certainly someone, something was out there that didn’t like her. But standing there in the sealed house, breathing stale air, she was as scared not to go outside as she was to go.
She opened the door tentatively, listening for the soft beep of the security system, and she looked outside. It was black, wind rustled through the almost bare trees. She stepped outside, her heart beating in her chest, her ears sensitive to every sound. The bottoms of her slippers hushed against the cement driveway. The door was cracked behind her and she glanced back at it as she made her way to the center of the driveway.
She stood there in her nightgown and slippers feeling arrows pierce her back, bullets from the left, a sledgehammer from the right. She looked up at the sky and her breath slid back into her throat, cold breath, cold night. The moon was veiled and the clouds, illuminated by the invisible light, stood out in deep contrast. In a gesture that she didn’t understand, she raised her arms up to the sky. Stretching, trying to lengthen her arms and pull herself up. She heard a movement in the bushes to her left and she froze that way, arms raised, head up. Let it come.
“Shel is that you?”
Shel closed her eyes, opened them, lowered her arms, “What are you doing out here?”
When she looked closer the question was unnecessary. Her mother was on her knees in front of the mailbox, a bucket in front of her and a rag in her hand. Shel walked over, the leaves crunching beneath her feet, icicle wind stinging her face. She reached her mother’s upturned face and towering above her she said, “Now?” She could as easily have said, “Still?”, “Here?”, or “With you?”
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