“I said, You know what I mean.
“He said, You want me to leave my wife?
“I said, No! I want you to leave me. I don’t want you inside me. I don’t want you beside me. I hate this room. I don’t want to be here and don’t come looking for me.
“He said, Why?
“I said, Because. Because. Because.
“He said, Because what?
“I said, Because you make me sick.
“Sick? I make you sick?
“Sick of myself and sick of you.
“I didn’t mean that part…about being sick. He didn’t. Make me sick, I mean. What I wanted to let him know was that I had this chance to have Acton and I wanted it and I wanted girlfriends to talk to about it. About where we went and what he did. About things. About stuff. What good are secrets if you can’t talk to anybody about them? I sort of hinted about Joe and me to Felice and she laughed before she stared at me and then frowned.
“I couldn’t tell him all that because I had practiced the other points and got mixed up.
“But he’s coming for me. I know it. He’s been looking for me all over. Maybe tomorrow he’ll find me. Maybe tonight. Way out here; all the way out here.
“When we got off the streetcar, me and Acton and Felice, I thought he was there in the doorway next to the candy store, but it wasn’t him. Not yet. I think I see him everywhere. I know he’s looking and now I know he’s coming.
“He didn’t even care what I looked like. I could be anything, do anything—and it pleased him. Something about that made me mad. I don’t know.
“Acton, now, he tells me when he doesn’t like the way I fix my hair. Then I do it how he likes it. I never wear glasses when he is with me and I changed my laugh for him to one he likes better. I think he does. I know he didn’t like it before. And I play with my food now. Joe liked for me to eat it all up and want more. Acton gives me a quiet look when I ask for seconds. He worries about me that way. Joe never did. Joe didn’t care what kind of woman I was. He should have. I cared. I wanted to have a personality and with Acton I’m getting one. I have a look now. What pencil-thin eyebrows do for my face is a dream. All my bracelets are just below my elbow. Sometimes I knot my stockings below, not above, my knees. Three straps are across my instep and at home I have shoes with leather cut out to look like lace.
“He is coming for me. Maybe tonight. Maybe here.
“If he does he will look and see how close me and Acton dance. How I rest my head on my arm holding on to him. The hem of my skirt drapes down in back and taps the calves of my legs while we rock back and forth, then side to side. The whole front of us touches. Nothing can get between us we are so close. Lots of girls here want to be doing this with him. I can see them when I open my eyes to look past his neck. I rub my thumbnail over his nape so the girls will know I know they want him. He doesn’t like it and turns his head to make me stop touching his neck that way. I stop.
“Joe wouldn’t care. I could rub anywhere on him. He let me draw lipstick pictures in places he had to have a mirror to see.”
Anything that happens after this party breaks up is nothing. Everything is now. It’s like war. Everyone is handsome, shining just thinking about other people’s blood. As though the red wash flying from veins not theirs is facial makeup patented for its glow. Inspiriting. Glamorous. Afterward there will be some chatter and recapitulation of what went on; nothing though like the action itself and the beat that pumps the heart. In war or at a party everyone is wily, intriguing; goals are set and altered; alliances rearranged. Partners and rivals devastated; new pairings triumphant. The knockout possibilities knock Dorcas out because here—with grown-ups and as in war—people play for keeps.
“He is coming for me. And when he does he will see I’m not his anymore. I’m Acton’s and it’s Acton I want to please. He expects it. With Joe I pleased myself because he encouraged me to. With Joe I worked the stick of the world, the power in my hand.”
Oh, the room—the music—the people leaning in doorways. Silhouettes kiss behind curtains; playful fingers examine and caress. This is the place where things pop. This is the market where gesture is all: a tongue’s lightning lick; a thumbnail grazing the split cheeks of a purple plum. Any thrownaway lover in wet unlaced shoes and a buttoned-up sweater under his coat is a foreigner here. This is not the place for old men; this is the place for romance.
“He’s here. Oh, look. God. He’s crying. Am I falling? Why am I falling? Acton is holding me up but I am falling anyway. Heads are turning to look where I am falling. It’s dark and now it’s light. I am lying on a bed. Somebody is wiping sweat from my forehead, but I am cold, so cold. I see mouths moving; they are all saying something to me I can’t hear. Way out there at the foot of the bed I see Acton. Blood is on his coat jacket and he is dabbing at it with a white handkerchief. Now a woman takes the coat from his shoulders. He is annoyed by the blood. It’s my blood, I guess, and it has stained through his jacket to his shirt. The hostess is shouting. Her party is ruined. Acton looks angry; the woman brings his jacket back and it is not clean the way it was before and the way he likes it.
“I can hear them now.
“‘Who? Who did this?’
“I’m tired. Sleepy. I ought to be wide awake because something important is happening.
“‘Who did this, girl? Who did this to you?’
“They want me to say his name. Say it in public at last.
“Acton has taken his shirt off. People are blocking the doorway; some stretch behind them to get a better look. The record playing is over. Somebody they have been waiting for is playing the piano. A woman is singing too. The music is faint but I know the words by heart.
“Felice leans close. Her hand holding mine is too tight. I try to say with my mouth to come nearer. Her eyes are bigger than the light fixture on the ceiling. She asks me was it him.
“They need me to say his name so they can go after him. Take away his sample case with Rochelle and Bernadine and Faye inside. I know his name but Mama won’t tell. The world rocked from a stick beneath my hand, Felice. There in that room with the ice sign in the window.
“Felice puts her ear on my lips and I scream it to her. I think I am screaming it. I think I am.
“People are leaving.
“Now it’s clear. Through the doorway I see the table. On it is a brown wooden bowl, flat, low like a tray, full to spilling with oranges. I want to sleep, but it is clear now. So clear the dark bowl the pile of oranges. Just oranges. Bright. Listen. I don’t know who is that woman singing but I know the words by heart.”
Sweetheart. That’s what that weather was called. Sweetheart weather, the prettiest day of the year. And that’s when it started. On a day so pure and steady trees preened. Standing in the middle of a concrete slab, scared for their lives, they preened. Silly, yes, but it was that kind of day. I could see Lenox widening itself, and men coming out of their shops to look at it, to stand with their hands under their aprons or stuck in their back pockets and just look around at a street that spread itself wider to hold the day. Disabled veterans in half uniform and half civilian stopped looking gloomy at workingmen; they went to Father Divine’s wagon and after they’d eaten they rolled cigarettes and settled down on the curb as though it were a Duncan Phyfe. And the women tip-tapping their heels on the pavement tripped sometimes on the sidewalk cracks because they were glancing at the trees to see where that pure, soft but steady light was coming from. The rumbling of the M11 and M2 was distant, far away and the Packards too. Even those loud Fords quieted down, and no one felt like blowing his horn or leaning out the driver’s side to try and embarrass somebody taking too long to cross the street. The sweetness of the day tickled them, made them holler “I give you everything I got! you come home with me!” to a woman tripping in shiny black heels over the cracks.
Young men on the rooftops changed their tune; spit and fiddled with the mouthpiece for a while and when they put it back in and blew out their cheeks i
t was just like the light of that day, pure and steady and kind of kind. You would have thought everything had been forgiven the way they played. The clarinets had trouble because the brass was cut so fine, not lowdown the way they love to do it, but high and fine like a young girl singing by the side of a creek, passing the time, her ankles cold in the water. The young men with brass probably never saw such a girl, or such a creek, but they made her up that day. On the rooftops. Some on 254 where there is no protective railing; another at 131, the one with the apple-green water tank, and somebody right next to it, 133, where lard cans of tomato plants are kept, and a pallet for sleeping at night. To find coolness and a way to avoid mosquitoes unable to fly that high up or unwilling to leave the tender neck meat near the street lamps. So from Lenox to St. Nicholas and across 135th Street, Lexington, from Convent to Eighth I could hear the men playing out their maple-sugar hearts, tapping it from four-hundred-year-old trees and letting it run down the trunk, wasting it because they didn’t have a bucket to hold it and didn’t want one either. They just wanted to let it run that day, slow if it wished, or fast, but a free run down trees bursting to give it up.
That’s the way the young men on brass sounded that day. Sure of themselves, sure they were holy, standing up there on the rooftops, facing each other at first, but when it was clear that they had beat the clarinets out, they turned their backs on them, lifted those horns straight up and joined the light just as pure and steady and kind of kind.
No day to wreck a life already splintered like a cheap windowpane, but Violet, well you had to know Violet. She thought all she had to do was drink malts full of Dr. Dee’s Nerve and Flesh Builder, eat pork, and she’d put on enough weight to fill out the back of her dress. She usually wore a coat on warm days like this to keep the men at curbside from shaking their heads in pity when she walked by. But on this day, this kind, pretty day, she didn’t care about her missing behind because she came out the door and stood on the porch with her elbows in her hands and her stockings rolled down to her ankles. She had been listening to the music penetrate Joe’s sobs, which were quieter now. Probably because she had returned Dorcas’ photograph to Alice Manfred. But the space where the photo had been was real. Perhaps that’s why, standing there on the porch, unmindful of her behind, she easily believed that what was coming up the steps toward her was another true-as-life Dorcas, four marcelled waves and all.
She carried an Okeh record under her arm and a half pound of stewmeat wrapped in pink butcher paper in her hand although the sun is too hot to linger in the streets with meat. If she doesn’t hurry it will turn—cook itself before she can get it to the stove.
Lazy girl. Her arms are full but there is nothing much in her head.
She makes me nervous.
She makes me wonder if this fine weather will last more than a day. I am already disturbed by the ash falling from the blue distance down on these streets. A sooty film is gathering on the sills, coating the windowpanes. Now she is disturbing me, making me doubt my own self just looking at her sauntering through the sunshafts like that. Climbing the steps now, heading for Violent.
“My mother and my father too lived in Tuxedo. I almost never saw them. I lived with my grandmother who said, ‘Felice, they don’t live in Tuxedo; they work there and live with us.’ Just words: live, work. I would see them once every three weeks for two and a half days, and all day Christmas and all day Easter. I counted. Forty-two days if you count the half days—which I don’t, because most of it was packing and getting to the train—plus two holidays makes forty-four days, but really only thirty-four because the half days shouldn’t count. Thirty-four days a year.
“When they’d come home, they’d kiss me and give me things, like my opal ring, but what they really wanted to do was go out dancing somewhere (my mother) or sleep (my father). They made it to church on the Sunday, but my mother is still sad about that because all of the things she should have been doing in the church—the suppers, the meetings, the fixing up of the basement for Sunday-school parties and the receptions after funerals—she had to say no to, because of her job in Tuxedo. So more than anything she wanted gossip from the women in Circle A Society about what’d been going on; and she wanted to dance a little and play bid whist.
“My father preferred to stay in a bathrobe and be waited on for a change while he read the stacks of newspapers me and my grandmother saved for him. The Amsterdam, the Age, The Crisis, The Messenger, the Worker. Some he took back with him to Tuxedo because he couldn’t get them up there. He likes them folded properly if they are newspapers, and no food or fingerprints on the magazines, so I don’t read them much. My grandmother does and is very very careful not to wrinkle or soil them. Nothing makes him madder than to open a paper that is badly folded. He groans and grunts while he reads and once in a while he laughs, but he’d never give it up even though all that reading worries his blood, my grandmother said. The good part for him is to read everything and argue about what he’s read with my mother and grandmother and the friends they play cards with.
“Once I thought if I read the papers we’d saved I could argue with him. But I picked wrong. I read about the white policemen who were arrested for killing some Negroes and said I was glad they were arrested, that it was about time.
“He looked at me and shouted, ‘The story hit the paper because it was news, girl, news!’
“I didn’t know how to answer him and started to cry so my grandmother said, ‘Sonny, go somewhere and sit down,’ and my mother said, ‘Walter, shut up about all that to her.’
“She explained to me what he meant: that for the everyday killings cops did of Negroes, nobody was arrested at all. She took me shopping after that for some things her bosses in Tuxedo wanted, and I didn’t ask her why she had to shop for them on her off days, because then she wouldn’t have taken me to Tiffany’s on Thirty-seventh Street where it’s quieter than when Reverend asks for a minute of silent prayer. When that happens I can hear feet scraping and some people blow their noses. But in Tiffany’s nobody blows a nose and the carpet prevents shoe noises of any kind. Like Tuxedo.
“Years ago when I was little, before I started school, my parents would take me there. I had to be quiet all the time. Twice they took me and I stayed the whole three weeks. It stopped, though. My mother and father talked about quitting but they didn’t. They got my grandmother to move in and watch over me.
“Thirty-four days. I’m seventeen now and that works out to less than six hundred days. Less than two years out of seventeen. Dorcas said I was lucky because at least they were there, somewhere, and if I got sick I could call on them or get on the train and go see them. Both of her parents died in a very bad way and she saw them after they died and before the funeral men fixed them up. She had a photograph of them sitting under a painted palm tree. Her mother was standing up with her hand on the father’s shoulder. He was sitting down and holding a book. They looked sad to me, but Dorcas couldn’t get over how good looking they both were.
“She was always talking about who was good looking and who wasn’t. Who had bad breath, who had nice clothes, who could dance, who was hincty.
“My grandmother was suspicious of us being friends. She never said why but I sort of knew. I didn’t have a lot of friends in school. Not the boys but the girls in my school bunched off according to their skin color. I hate that stuff—Dorcas too. So me and her were different that way. When some nastymouth hollered, ‘Hey, fly, where’s buttermilk?’ or ‘Hey, kinky, where’s kind?’ we stuck our tongues out and put our fingers in our noses to shut them up. But if that didn’t work we’d lay into them. Some of those fights ruined my clothes and Dorcas’ glasses, but it felt good fighting those girls with Dorcas. She was never afraid and we had the best times. Every school we went to, every day.
“It stopped, the good times, for a couple of months when she started seeing that old man. I knew about it from the start, but she didn’t know I did. I let her think it was a secret because she wanted it to be
one. At first I thought she was shamed of it, or shamed of him and was just in it for the presents. But she liked secret stuff. Planning and plotting how to deceive Mrs. Manfred. Slipping vampy underwear on at my house to go walking in. Hiding things. She always did like secrets. She wasn’t ashamed of him either.
“He’s old. Really old. Fifty. But he met her standards of good looking, I’ll say that for him. Dorcas should have been prettier than she was. She just missed. She had all the ingredients of pretty too. Long hair, wavy, half good, half bad. Light skinned. Never used skin bleach. Nice shape. But it missed somehow. If you looked at each thing, you would admire that thing—the hair, the color, the shape. All together it didn’t fit. Guys looked at her, whistled and called out fresh stuff when we walked down the street. In school all sorts of boys wanted to talk to her. But then they stopped; nothing came of it. It couldn’t have been her personality because she was a good talker, liked to joke and tease. Nothing standoffish about her. I don’t know what it was. Unless it was the way she pushed them. I mean it was like she wanted them to do something scary all the time. Steal things, or go back in the store and slap the face of a white salesgirl who wouldn’t wait on her, or cuss out somebody who had snubbed her. Beats me. Everything was like a picture show to her, and she was the one on the railroad track, or the one trapped in the sheik’s tent when it caught on fire.
“I think that’s what made her like that old man so much at first. The secrecy and that he had a wife. He must have done something dangerous when she first met him or she would never have gone on sneaking around with him. Anyway, she thought she was sneaking. But two hairdressers saw her in that nightclub, Mexico, with him. I spent two hours in there listening to what they had to say about her and him and all kinds of other people who were stepping out. They had fun talking about Dorcas and him mostly because they didn’t like his wife. She took away their trade, so they had nothing good to say about her, except crazy as she was she did do hair well and if she wasn’t so crazy she could have got a license proper instead of taking away their trade.