“Here, pussy. Here.” Pallas had heard that before. A lifetime ago on the happiest day of her life. On the escalator. Last Christmas. Spoken by the crazy woman, whom she could see now in greater detail than when first sighted.
The hair at the top of her head, sectioned off with a red plastic barrette, would have been a small pompadour or a curl had it been longer than two or three inches. In the event, it was neither. Just a tuft held rigid by a child’s barrette. Two other hair clips, one yellow, one neon purple, held fingerfuls of hair at her temples. Her dark velvet face was on display and rendered completely unseen by the biscuit-size disks of scarlet rouge, the fuchsia lipstick drawn crookedly beyond the rim of her lips, the black eyebrow pencil that trailed down toward her cheekbones. Everything else about her was dazzle and clunk: white plastic earrings, copper bracelets, pastel beads at her throat, and much, much more where all that came from in the bags she carried: two BOAC carrier bags and a woven metal purse shaped like a cigar box. She wore a white cotton halter and a little-bitty red skirt. The hose on her short legs, a cinnamon color thought agreeable to black women’s legs, were as much a study in running as her high heels were in run over. Inner arm skin and a small, sturdy paunch suggested she was about forty years old, but she could have been fifty or twenty. The dance she danced on the up escalator, the rolling hips, the sway of her head, called to mind a bygone era of slow grind in a badly lit room of couples. Not the electric go-go pace of 1974. The teeth could have been done anywhere: Kingston, Jamaica, or Pass Christian, Mississippi; Addis Ababa or Warsaw. Stunning gold, they dated her smile while giving it the seriousness the rest of her clothing withheld.
Most eyes looked away from her—down at the floating metal steps underfoot or out at the Christmas decorations enlivening the department store. Children, however, and Pallas Truelove stared.
California Christmases are always a treat and this one promised to be a marvel. Brilliant skies and heat turned up the gloss of artificial snow, plumped the green-and-gold, pink-and-silver wreaths. Pallas, laden with packages, just managed to avoid tripping off the down escalator. She didn’t understand why the woman with the rouge and gold teeth fascinated her. They had nothing in common. The earrings that hung from Pallas’ lobes were eighteen carat; the boots on her feet were handmade, her jeans custom-made, and the buckle on her leather belt was handsomely worked silver.
Pallas had stumbled off the escalator in a light panic, rushing to the doors, outside which Carlos was waiting for her. The revolting woman’s singsong merged with the carols piping throughout the store: “Here’s pussy. Want some pussy, pussy.”
“Ma-a-a-vis!”
Mavis wouldn’t look at her. Gigi always uglied up her name, pulling it out like a string of her sticky bubble gum.
“Can’t you go over ten miles an hour? Cha-rist!”
“Car needs a new fan belt. And I’m not going to take it over forty,” said Mavis.
“Ten. Forty. It’s like walking.” Gigi sighed.
“Maybe I’ll just pull over here and let you see what walking’s like. Want me to?”
“Don’t fuck with me. Drag me out to that bummer…Did you see that guy, Sen? Menus. The one who shit himself when he stayed with us?”
Seneca nodded. “He didn’t say anything mean, though.”
“He didn’t stop them either,” said Gigi. “All that puke, that shit I cleaned up.”
“Connie said he could stay. And we all cleaned it,” said Mavis, “not just you. And nobody dragged you. You didn’t have to go.”
“He had the d.t.’s, for crying out loud.”
“Close your window, please, Mavis?” Seneca asked.
“Too much wind back there?”
“She’s shaking again. I think she’s cold.”
“It’s ninety degrees! What the hell is the matter with her?” Gigi scanned the trembling girl.
“Should I stop?” asked Mavis. “She might throw up again.”
“No, don’t stop. I’ll hold her.” Seneca arranged Pallas in her arms, rubbing the goose-bumpy arms. “Maybe she’s carsick. I thought the party would cheer her up some. Looks like it made her worse.”
“That stupid, fucked-up town make anybody puke. I can’t believe that’s what they call a party. Hymns, for crying out loud!” Gigi laughed.
“It was a wedding party, not a disco.” Mavis wiped the perspiration forming under her neck. “Besides, you just wanted to see your love pony again.”
“That asshole?”
“Yeah. Him.” Mavis smiled. “Now he’s married, you want him back.”
“If I want him back I can get him back. What I want is to leave this fucking place.”
“You’ve been saying that for four years—right, Sen?”
Gigi opened her mouth, then paused. Was it four? She thought two. But at least two were spent fooling around with K.D., the prick. Had she let him keep her that long promising to get enough money to take her away? Or was it some other promise that kept her there? Of trees entwined near cold water. “Yeah, well, now I’m for real,” she told Mavis, and hoped she really was.
After a grunt of disbelief from Mavis, the car was silent again. Pallas let her head rest on Seneca’s breasts, wishing they were gone and that instead Carlos’ hard, smooth chest supported her cheek as it had whenever she wanted for seven hundred miles. Her sixteenth-birthday gift, a red Toyota with a built-in eight-track tape deck, was crammed with Christmas presents. Things anybody’s mother would like, but in a variety of colors and styles because she couldn’t take a chance on having nothing that would please a woman she had not seen in thirteen years. Driving off with Carlos at the wheel just before Christmas was a holiday trip to see her mother. Not running away from her father; not eloping with the coolest, most gorgeous man in the world.
Everything had been carefully planned: items were hidden, movements camouflaged, lest Providence, the eagle-eyed housekeeper, or her brother, Jerome, see. Her father wasn’t around enough to notice anything. He was a lawyer with a small client list, but two were big-time crossover black entertainers. As long as Milton Truelove kept them on top, he didn’t need to acquire more, although he kept a lookout eye for other young performers who might hit the charts and stay there.
With Carlos’ help it was as easy as it was exciting: the lies told to her girlfriends had to be cemented; the items left behind had to signal return, not escape (driver’s license—a duplicate—her teddy bears, watch, toiletries, jewelry, credit cards). This last made it necessary to do massive check cashing and shopping on the very day they drove away. She wanted to buy more, much more, for Carlos, but he insisted otherwise. He never took presents from her in all the time she knew him—four months. Wouldn’t even let her buy meals. He would close his beautiful eyes and shake his head as though her offer saddened him. Pallas had met him in the school parking lot the day her Toyota wouldn’t start. Actually met him that day but had seen him many times. He was the movie-star-looking maintenance man at her high school. All the girls went creamy over him. The day he pressed the accelerator to the floor, telling Pallas her gas line was flooded, was the beginning. He offered to follow her home in his Ford to make sure she didn’t stall out again. She didn’t and he waved goodbye. Pallas brought him a present—an album—the next day and had trouble making him accept it. “Only if you let me buy you a chili dog,” he said. Pallas’ mouth had gone felt with the thrill of it all. They saw each other every weekend after that. She did everything she could think of to get him to make love to her. He responded passionately to their necking but for weeks never allowed more. He was the one who said, “When we are married.”
Carlos was not a janitor, really. He sculpted, and when Pallas told him about her painter mother and where she lived, he smiled and said it was a perfect place for an artist. The whole thing fell into place. Carlos could leave his job with little outcry during the holidays. Milton Truelove would be extra busy with clients’ parties, showcase concerts and television deals. Pallas searched throug
h years of birthday and Christmas cards from her mother for the most recent address, and the lovers were off without a hitch or a cloud. Except for the crazy black woman ruining the Christmas carols.
Pallas snuggled Seneca’s breasts, which, although uncomfortable, diluted the chill racking her. The women in the front seat were quarreling again, in high-pitched voices that hurt her head.
“Exhibitionist bitch! Soane is a friend of ours. What do I tell her now?”
“She’s Connie’s friend. Nothing to do with you.”
“I’m the one sell her the peppers, make up her tonic….”
“Whazzat make you, a chemist? It’s just rosemary, a little bran mixed with aspirin.”
“Whatever it is, it’s my responsibility.”
“Only when Connie’s drunk.”
“Keep your nasty mouth off her. She never drank till you came.”
“That’s what you say. She even sleeps in the wine cellar.”
“Her bedroom is down there! You’re such a fool.”
“She’s not a maid anymore. She could sleep upstairs if she wanted. She just wants to be close to that liquor is all.”
“God, I hate your guts.”
Seneca intervened in a soft voice designed for harmony. “Connie’s not drunk. She’s unhappy. She should have come with us, though. It would have been different.”
“It was fine. Just fine!” said Gigi. “Till those fucking preacher types came over.” She lit a fresh cigarette from a dying one.
“Can’t you stop smoking for two minutes?” Mavis asked.
“No!”
“Don’t see what that nigger ever saw in you,” Mavis continued. “Or maybe I do, since you can’t seem to keep it covered.”
“Jealous?”
“Like hell.”
“Like hell, like hell. Nobody’s fucked you in ten years, you dried-up husk.”
“Get out!” Mavis screamed, braking the car. “Get the hell out of my car!”
“You gonna make me? Touch me, I’ll tear your face off. You fucking felon!” and she rammed her cigarette into Mavis’ arm.
They couldn’t fight really well in the space available, but they tried. Seneca held Pallas in her arms and watched. Once upon a time she would try to separate them, but now she knew better. When they were exhausted they’d stop, and peace would reign longer than if she interfered. Gigi knew Mavis’ touchy parts: anything insulting to Connie and any reference to her fugitive state. On her last trip Mavis learned from her mother of the warrant posted for her arrest for grand larceny, abandonment and suspicion of murdering two of her children.
The Cadillac rocked. Gigi was scrappy but vain—she didn’t want bruises or scratches to mar her lovely face and she worried constantly about her hair. Mavis was slow but a steady, joyful hitter. When Gigi saw blood she assumed it was her own and scrambled from the car, Mavis scooting after her. Under a metal-hot sky void of even one arrow of birds they fought on the road and its shoulder.
Pallas sat up, mesmerized by the bodies roiling dust and crushing weeds. Intent bodies unaware of any watcher under a blank sky in Oklahoma or a painted one in Mehita, New Mexico. Months after Dee Dee Truelove’s excited hugs and kisses: months of marveling at the spectacular scenery outside her mother’s windows; months of eating wonderful food; months of artist talk among Dee Dee’s friends—all kinds of artists: Indians, New Yorkers, old people, hippies, Mexicans, blacks—and months of talk among the three of them at night under stars Pallas thought only Disney made. After all those months, Carlos said, “This is where I belong,” sighing deeply. “This is the home I’ve been looking for.” His face, moon-drenched, made Pallas’ heart stand. Her mother yawned. “Of course it is,” said Dee Dee Truelove. Carlos yawned too, and right then she should have seen it—the simultaneous yawns, the settling-in voices. She should have calculated the arithmetic—Carlos was closer in age to Dee Dee than to her. Had she noticed, perhaps she could have prevented the grappling bodies exchanging moans in the grass, unmindful of any watcher. Then there would have been no stupefied run to the Toyota, no blind drive on roads without destinations, no bumping, sideswiping trucks. No water with soft things touching beneath.
Feeling again the repulsive tickle and stroke of tentacles, of invisible scales, Pallas turned away from the fighting-women scene and lifted her arm to circle Seneca’s neck and press her face deeper into that tiny bosom.
Seneca alone saw the truck approach. The driver slowed, maybe to get around the Cadillac hogging the road, maybe to offer help, but he stayed long enough to see outlaw women rolling on the ground, dresses torn, secret flesh on display. And see also two other women embracing in the back seat. For long moments his eyes were wide. Then he shook his head and gunned the motor of his truck.
Finally Gigi and Mavis lay gasping. One, then the other, sat up to touch herself, to inventory her wounds. Gigi searched for the shoe she had lost; Mavis for the elastic that had held her hair. Wordlessly they returned to the car. Mavis drove with one hand. Gigi stuck a cigarette in the good side of her mouth.
In 1922 the white laborers had laughed among themselves—a big stone house in the middle of nothing. The Indians had not. In mean weather, with firewood a sacrilege in tree-scarce country, coal expensive, cow chips foul, the mansion seemed to them a demented notion. The embezzler had ordered tons of coal—none of which he got to use. The nuns who took the property over had endurance, kerosene and layers of exquisitely made habits. But in spring, summer and during some warm autumns, the stone walls of the house were a cool blessing.
Gigi raced up the stairs beating Mavis to available bathwater. While the plumbing coughed she stripped and looked at herself in the one unpainted mirror. Other than a knee and both elbows, the damage wasn’t too bad. Nails broken, of course, but no puffed eye or broken nose. More bruises might show up tomorrow, though. It was the lip swelling around its split that troubled her. With pressure it oozed a trickle of blood and suddenly everybody was running through the streets of Oakland, California. Sirens—police? ambulance? fire trucks?—shook the eardrums. A wall of advancing police cut off passage east and west. The runners threw what they had brought or could find and fled. She and Mikey were holding hands at first, running down a side street behind a splinter crowd. A street of small houses, lawns. There were no shots—no gunfire at all. Just the musical screams of girls and the steady roar of men in fight-face. Sirens, yes, and distant bullhorns, but no breaking glass, no body slams, no gunfire. So why did a map of red grow on the little boy’s white shirt? She wasn’t seeing clearly. The crowd thickened and then stopped, prevented by something ahead. Mikey was several shoulders beyond her, pushing through. Gigi looked again at the boy on the fresh green lawn. He was so well dressed: bow tie, white shirt, glossy laced-up shoes. But the shirt was dirty now, covered with red peonies. He jerked, and blood flowed from his mouth. He held his hands out, carefully, to catch it lest it ruin his shoes the way it had already ruined his shirt.
Over a hundred injured, the newspaper said, but no mention of gunfire or a shot kid. No mention of a neat little colored boy carrying his blood in his hands.
The water trickled into the tub. Gigi put rollers in her hair. Then she got down on her stomach to examine again the progress she had made with the box hidden under the tub. The tile above it was completely dislodged, but the metal box seemed to be cemented in place. Reaching under the tub was the problem. If she’d told K.D., he would have helped her, but then she would have had to share the contents: gold, maybe, diamonds, great packets of cash. Whatever it was, it was hers—and Connie’s if she wanted some. But no one else’s. Never Mavis. Seneca wouldn’t want any, and this latest girl, with the splintered-glass eyes and a head thick with curly hair—who knew who or what she was? Gigi stood up, brushed away dust and soil from her skin then stepped into the tub. She sat there going over her options. Connie, she thought. Connie.
Then, lying back so the bubbles reached her chin, she thought of Seneca’s nose, the way her nostrils move
d when she slept. Of the tilt of her lips whether smiling or not; her thick, perfectly winged eyebrows. And her voice—soft, mildly hungry. Like a kiss.
In the bathroom at the other end of the hall, an elated Mavis cleaned up at the sink. Then she changed clothes before going down to the kitchen to make supper. Leftover chicken, chopped with peppers and onions, tarragon, a sauce of some kind, cheese, maybe, and wrapped in that pancake thing Connie had taught her to make. That would please her. She would take a plate of it down to Connie and tell her what had happened. Not the fight. That wasn’t important. In fact she had enjoyed it. Pounding, pounding, even biting Gigi was exhilarating, just as cooking was. It was more proof that the old Mavis was dead. The one who couldn’t defend herself from an eleven-year-old girl, let alone her husband. The one who couldn’t figure out or manage a simple meal, who relied on delis and drive-throughs, now created crepe-like delicacies without shopping every day.
But she was stung by Gigi’s reference to her sexlessness—which was funny in a way. When she and Frank married she did like it. Sort of. Then it became required torture, longer but not much different from being slapped out of her chair. These years at the Convent were free of all that. Still, when the thing came at night she didn’t fight it anymore. Once upon a time it had been an occasional nightmare—a lion cub that gnawed her throat. Recently it had taken another form—human—and lay on top or approached from the rear. “Incubus,” Connie had said. “Fight it,” she said. But Mavis couldn’t or wouldn’t. Now she needed to know if what Gigi said about her was the reason she welcomed it. She still heard Merle and Pearl, felt their flutter in every room of the Convent. Perhaps she ought to admit, confess, to Connie that adding the night visits to laughing children and a “mother” who loved her shaped up like a happy family. Better: when she took Connie her supper, she would tell her about the reception, how Gigi had embarrassed everybody, especially Soane, then ask her what to do about the night visits. Connie would know. Connie.