“They made road liquor out of it,” Mabel said. “Just add an ounce of vodka and set it down by the engine exhaust for a month or so. It’ll cook up into a bitter poison that’ll knock you cross-eyed.”
It sounded dangerous to me, but Mabel didn’t think so. “Not that I would drink it,” she’d say, “but I wouldn’t fault a man who did.”
They stole napkins, not one or two but a boxful at a time. Before we switched to sugar packets, they’d come in, unfold two or three napkins, open them like diapers, and fill them up with sugar before they left. Then they might take the knife and spoon to go with it. Once I watched a man take out a stack of napkins I was sure he was going to walk off with. But instead he sat there for thirty minutes making notes on them, then balled them all up and threw them away when he left.
My mama was scandalized by that. “And right over there on the shelf is a notebook selling for ten cents. What’s wrong with these people?”
“They’re living in the movies,” Mabel whispered, looking back toward the counter.
“Yeah, Bette Davis movies,” I added.
“I don’t know about the movies.” Harriet put her hand on Mama’s shoulder. “But they don’t live in the real world with the rest of us.”
“No,” Mama said, “they don’t.”
I take a bite of cherry tomato and hear Mama’s voice again. No, she says.
“No,” I say. I tuck my blouse into my skirt and shift in my shoes. If I close my eyes, I can see Mabel’s brightly rouged cheekbones, Harriet’s pitted skin, and my mama’s shadowed brown eyes. When I go home tonight I’ll write her about this party and imagine how she’ll laugh about it all. The woman who was talking to me has gone off across the room to the other bar. People are giving up nibbling and going on to more serious eating. One of the men I work with every day comes over with a full plate and a wide grin.
“Boy,” he drawls around a bite of the cornbread I contributed to the buffet. “I bet you sure can cook.”
“Bet on it,” I say with my Mississippi accent. I swallow the rest of a cherry tomato and give him my heartbreaker’s smile.
Steal Away
My hands shake when I am hungry, and I have always been hungry. Not for food—I have always had enough biscuit fat to last me. In college I got breakfast, lunch, and dinner with my dormitory fees, but my restless hunger didn’t abate. It was having only four dollars till the end of the month and not enough coming in then. I sat at a lunch table with the girls who planned to go to the movies for the afternoon, and counting three dollars in worn bills the rest in coins over and over in my pocket. I couldn’t go see any movies.
I went, instead, downtown to steal. I became what had always been expected of me—a thief. Dangerous, but careful. Wanting everything, I tamed my anger, smiling wide and innocently. With the help of that smile I stole toilet paper from the Burger King rest room, magazines from the lower shelves at 7-Eleven, and sardines from the deli—sliding those little cans down my jeans to where I had drawn the cuffs tight with rubber bands. I lined my pockets with plastic bags for a trip to the local Winn Dixie, where I could collect smoked oysters from the gourmet section and fresh grapes from the open bins of produce. From the hobby shop in the same shopping center I pocketed metal snaps to replace the rubber bands on my pantleg cuffs and metal guitar picks I could use to pry loose and switch price tags on items too big to carry away. Anything small enough to fit a palm walked out with me, anything round to fit an armpit, anything thin enough to carry between my belly and belt. The smallest, sharpest, most expensive items rested behind my teeth, behind that smile that remained my ultimate shield.
On the day that I was turned away from registration because my scholarship check was late, I dressed myself in my Sunday best and went downtown to the Hilton Hotel. There was a Methodist Outreach Convention with meetings in all the ballrooms, and a hospitality suite. I walked from room to room filling a JCPenney shopping bag with cut-glass ashtrays showing the Hilton logo and faceted wineglasses marked only with the dregs of grape juice. I dragged the bag out to St. Pete Beach and sailed those ashtrays off the pier like Frisbees. Then I waited for sunset to toss the wineglasses high enough to see the red and purple reflections as they flipped end over end. Each piece shattered ecstatically on the tar-black rocks under the pier, throwing up glass fragments into the spray. Sight and sound, it was better than a movie.
The president of the college invited all of the scholarship students over for tea or wine. He served cheese that had to be cut from a great block with delicate little knives. I sipped wine, toothed cheese, talked politely, and used my smile. The president’s wife nodded at me and put her pink fleshy hand on my shoulder. I put my own hand on hers and gave one short squeeze. She started but didn’t back away, and I found myself giggling at her attempts to tell us all a funny story. She flushed and told us how happy she was to have us in her home. I smiled and told her how happy I was to have come, my jacket draped loosely over the wineglasses I had hooked in my belt. Walking back to the dorm, I slipped one hand into my pocket, carefully fingering two delicate little knives.
Junior year my scholarship was cut yet again, and I became nervous that working in the mailroom wouldn’t pay for all I needed. St. Vincent de Paul offered me a ransom, paying a dime apiece for plates and trays carted off from the cafeteria. Glasses were only good for three cents and hard to carry down on the bus without breaking, but sheets from the alumni guest room provided the necessary padding. My roommate complained that I made her nervous, always carrying boxes in and out. She moved out shortly after Christmas, and I chewed my nails trying to figure out how to carry her mattress down to St. Vincent de Paul. I finally decided it was hopeless, and spent the rest of the holidays reading Jean Genet and walking through the art department hallways.
They had hardwood stools in the studios, and stacking file boxes no one had opened in years. I wore a cloth cap when I took them, and my no-nonsense expression. I was so calm that one of the professors helped me clear paper off the third one. He was distracted, discussing Jackson Pollock with a very pale woman whose hands were marked with tusche. “Glad they finally decided to get these out of here” was all he said to me, never once looking up into my face. My anger came up from my stomach with an acid taste. I went back for his clipboard and papers, but his desk was locked and my file broke on the rim. In compensation I took the silk lining out of the pockets of the corduroy coat he’d left thrown over a stool. The silk made a lemongrass sachet I gave my mother for her birthday, and every time I saw him in that jacket I smiled.
My sociology professor had red hair, forty shelves of books, four children, and an entirely cordial relationship with her ex-husband. When she invited me to dinner, I did not understand what she wanted with me. I watched her closely and kept my hands in my pockets. She talked about her divorce and the politics in the department, how she had worked for John F. Kennedy in 1960 and demonstrated for civil rights in Little Rock in ’65. There were lots of books she could lend me, she insisted, but didn’t say exactly which ones. She poured me Harveys Bristol Cream, trailing her fingers across my wrist when I took the glass. Then she shook her head nervously and tried to persuade me to talk about myself, interrupting only to get me to switch topics as she moved restlessly from her rocking chair to a bolster to the couch beside me. She did not want to hear about my summers working in the mop factory, but she loved my lies about hitchhiking cross-country.
“Meet me for lunch on Monday,” she insisted, while her eyes behind her glasses kept glancing at me, turning away and turning back. My palms were sweaty, but I nodded yes. At the door she stopped me, and put her hand out to touch my face.
“Your family is very poor, aren’t they?”
My face froze and burned at the same time. “Not really,” I told her, “not anymore.” She nodded and smiled, and the heat in my face went down my body in waves.
I didn’t want to go on Monday but made myself. Her secretary was confused when I asked about lunch.
“I don’t have anything written down about it,” she said, without looking up from her calendar.
After class that afternoon the sociology professor explained her absence with a story about one of her children who had been bitten by a dog, “but not seriously. Come on Thursday,” she insisted, but on Thursday neither she nor her secretary were there. I stood in the doorway to her office and tilted my head back to take in her shelves of books. I wanted to pocket them all, but at the same time I didn’t want anything of hers. Trembling, I reached and pulled out the fattest book on the closest shelf. It was a hardbound edition of Sadism in the Movies, with a third of the pages underlined in red. It fit easily in my backpack, and I stopped in the Student Union bookstore on the way back to the dorm to buy a Hershey bar and steal a bright blue pen.
On the next Monday, she apologized again, and again invited me to go to lunch the next day. I skipped lunch but slipped in that afternoon to return her book, now full of my bright blue comments. In its spot on the shelf there was now a collection of the essays of Georges Bataille, still unmarked. By the time I returned it on Friday, heavy blue ink stains showed on the binding itself.
Eventually we did have lunch. She talked to me about how hard it was to be a woman alone in a college town, about how all the male professors treated her like a fool, and yet how hard she worked. I nodded.
“You read so much,” I whispered.
“I keep up,” she agreed with me.
“So do I,” I smiled.
She looked nervous and changed the subject but let me walk her back to her office. On her desk, there was a new edition of Malinowski’s The Sexual Life of Savages. I laid my notebook down on top of it, and took them both when I left. Malinowski was a fast read. I had that one back a day later. She was going through her date book looking for a free evening we could have dinner. But exams were coming up so soon. I smiled and nodded and backed out the door. The secretary, used to seeing me come and go, didn’t even look up.
I took no other meals with professors; didn’t trust myself in their houses. But I studied their words, gestures, jokes, and quarrels to see just how they were different from me. I limited my outrage to their office shelves, working my way through their books one at a time, carefully underlining my favorite passages in dark blue ink—occasionally covering over their own faded marks. I continued to take the sociology professor’s classes but refused to stay after to talk, and when she called my name in the halls, I would just smile and keep walking. Once she sat beside me in a seminar and put her hand on the back of my neck where I was leaning back in my chair. I turned and saw she was biting her lips. I remembered her saying, “Your family is very poor, aren’t they?” I kept my face expressionless and looked forward again. That was the afternoon I made myself a pair of harem pants out of the gauze curtains from the infirmary.
My parents came for graduation, Mama taking the day off from the diner, my father walking slow in his back brace. They both were bored at the lunch, uncomfortable and impatient to have the ceremony be over so we could pack my boxes in the car and leave. Mama kept pulling at the collar of my robe while waiting for the call for me to join my class. She was so nervous she kept rocking back on her heels and poked my statistics professor with her elbow as he tried to pass.
“Quite something, your daughter,” he grinned as he shook my mama’s hand. Mama and I could both tell he was uncomfortable, so she just nodded, not knowing what to say. “We’re expecting great things of her,” he added, and quickly joined the other professors on the platform, their eyes roaming over the parents headed for the elevated rows at the sides and back of the hall. I saw my sociology professor sharing a quick sip from the dean’s pocket flask. She caught me watching, and her face flushed a dull reddish gray. I smiled as widely as ever I had, and held that smile through the long slow ceremony that followed, the walk up to get my diploma, and the confused milling around that followed the moment when we were all supposed to throw our tassels over to the other side. Some of the students threw their mortarboards drunkenly into the air, but I tucked mine under my arm and found my parents before they had finished shaking the cramps out of their legs.
“Sure went on forever,” Mama whispered, as we walked toward the exit.
The statistics professor was standing near the door telling a tall black woman, “Quite something, your son. We’re expecting great things of him.”
I laughed and tucked my diploma in Mama’s bag for the walk back to the dormitory. People were packing station wagons, U-haul trailers, and bulging little sedans. Our Pontiac was almost full and my face was starting to ache from smiling, but I made a quick trip down into the dormitory basement anyway. There was a vacuum cleaner and two wooden picture frames I’d stashed behind the laundry-room doors that I knew would fit perfectly in the Pontiac’s trunk. Mama watched me carry them up but said nothing. Daddy only laughed and revved the engine while we swung past the auditorium. At the entrance to the campus I got them to pull over and look back at the scattered buildings. It was a rare moment, and for a change my hunger wasn’t bothering me at all. But while my parents waited, I climbed out and pulled the commemorative roses off the welcome sign. I got back in the car and piled them into my mama’s lap.
“Quite something, my daughter,” she laughed, and hugged the flowers to her breast. She rocked in her seat as my stepfather gunned the engine and spun the tires pulling out. I grinned while she laughed.
“Quite something.”
It was the best moment I’d had in four years.
Monkeybites
In college I contemplated a career in biology for one long year, and rats—fat gray ones with minuscule wires in their skulls or slender white ones trailing colored threads to mark the buried electrodes. The animal labs were in a cinder-block building set away from the campus. I went there like a pilgrim to stare into the cages and finger the plush on a monkey’s neck, the monkey bent to a frame that kept his razor teeth from my flesh. After a while the teeth were gone with the larynx, and he only spat when I came to see him.
It hurt me that he could not bite; the rats at least kept their teeth. I told myself that the security of a career in science demanded sacrifice. I would have to get used to rats with wires and monkeys without teeth. But it was hard, hard. I hated the whitewashed walls and the raw, shrinking creatures under my hands as much as the implacable mechanical motions of the professors in rubber gloves. After I got the job of cleaning up the lab, my dreams were full of monkeys’ teeth and the sibilant scratches of rats’ nails on Formica counters. On those rare nights when Toni and I could sleep over at a friend’s house in the city, I would wake shuddering, feeling her arms around me like the wires that trussed the monkeys.
“You are one restless woman,” Toni would tell me in the morning, showing me the scratches I’d made on her arms and back. “Can’t lie still to save your life.” More out of guilt than desire, I’d kiss her shoulders and slide down between her legs to ease with my tongue what I could not cure with words. I felt about oral sex with Toni the way my roommate in the dorm felt about transcendental meditation. At the point at which my neck began to ache and my fingers spasm on her thighs, I would begin to feel righteous. The longer it took to get her off, and the greater the ache in my neck and back, the farther away I would go in my mind until finally it was as if I were not making love to Toni but to myself. I became a point of concentration, icy and hot at the same time. When she began to babble those love words that meant she was just about to come, my own thighs would shake sympathetically. I rarely came making love to Toni, but nothing made me feel so balanced as an hour or two pushing my tongue between her swollen labia. It was expiation and penance. It was redemption.
But for Toni, sex was a matter of commitment; making love was a bond itself. She had her own cage, her own need for expiation, and she hated the way I could go away into my own head, the distance between us that she could not cross. She wanted a bridge across my nerves, a connection I could not break at will. Hanging out i
n the lab with me, she’d tease and flirt, laughing at the other lab assistants and the carefully serious expressions with which they’d clean rat shit off their fingers. The truth was Toni loved the lab, the perfectly square cinder-block rooms, the walls of cages, and the irritable way I’d stalk around with my broom and dustpan. She loved to follow me over in the evening to watch me sweep up the little gray turds and chopped-up computer printouts that lined the bottoms of the cages. Sipping from her omnipresent thermos of vodka and orange juice, she’d throw cashews at the bald-headed monkeys and tease me about how my ass moved when I bent over with my pan.
Once I’d gotten so angry I’d grabbed her thermos and threatened to kick her out of “my” lab.
“Oh sweetheart, you don’t want me to go,” she’d told me, and tried to coax me up on one of the big empty lab tables beside her.
“Have a sip. Have a little smoke. Tell me how you always wanted to find somebody like me to tease you, and love you, and suck on your nipples till you’re howling at the moon.”
“Oh yeah. Uh huh. I just always knew some black-eyed woman was gonna come along dying to fuck me silly in front of a bunch of toothless monkeys.”
“Prescient. That’s what you were.”
“Desperate, maybe. That’s what I was when I let you talk me into bringing you over here.”
“Oh, girl.” She held a joint in her left hand and using her right hand only, she pulled out a match, struck it against the pack, lit the joint, took a puff, and then held it out to me.