Crystal

  “I know, Mama. Let me think about it.”

  “No, if you don’t want it anymore, you should call Loretta. She’s been good to us and we should lay it on the line to her.”

  “Does the money change things?” Crystal asked. “I know I’m making a lot of money.”

  “You’re what’s important, Crystal,” Carol said. “Now, go get dressed for school. Maybe…maybe, you can just bring that grade up to a B-plus.”

  “Sure.”

  Crystal went to her room and put on a dark-red pleated skirt and a sweater. She hated to hurt her mother, but it was true, she was tired. At first modeling had just been glamorous and exciting, but now she felt tired all the time.

  Gizmo was under the bed, as usual. She took him out and put him on the bed. He pranced around slowly, then stopped and stretched and began to scratch at the bedspread.

  “Don’t!” Crystal admonished softly.

  The kitten looked at her with wide eyes, his tail straight up. She’d have to teach him to behave, she thought. She gave him a little push and watched him fall over. He didn’t care about falling, he didn’t know anything about being hurt.

  “Get up, silly!” she said.

  Gizmo lay on his back and looked at her.

  “You want to hear the poem I wrote about you for school?” Crystal asked, teasing Gizmo with her finger.

  She went to her drawer and got the binder the poem was in.

  “It’s got to be the best poem ever written to a kitten for our school magazine,” Crystal said. “So you be very good and listen carefully.”

  She read the poem to Gizmo, holding the paper inches above him as he, still lying on his back, tried to reach it with his claws:

  “To My Kitten, Gizmo by Crystal Brown

  You’re very beautiful, you know,

  Eyes of amber set aglow,

  A look so fierce, and yet so mild.

  There is a beast in you, and there is a child,

  And yet, you’re very beautiful, you know.

  I watch you stalk some shadowed prey.

  Is it real or do you play?

  Are you truly what you seem?

  Are you the dreamer, or the dream?

  Eyes of amber set aglow,

  You are quite beautiful, you know.”

  She put the kitten back on the floor. She knew her mother was disappointed in her. It would be easier telling Loretta. Loretta would say something about her throwing away an opportunity, but she wouldn’t push it. That wasn’t Loretta’s way.

  The crash of glass brought Crystal abruptly to a sitting position. She listened as the noises came from the kitchen. There were crashes, the sounds of things being broken, and most terribly, the small whimpering sounds in between.

  “Mama!” Crystal raced to the kitchen and grabbed the doorway for support. There, nearly flat against the patterned wallpaper, her mother slid along the wall, banging her fists into the gay patterns. And there were the sounds. Quiet, almost soft sounds of anger and frustration.

  “Mama!” Crystal went to her mother as quickly as possible. She put her arms around the older woman’s shoulders as the woman huddled away from her in a corner. “Mama…Mama…please!”

  Carol Brown, still facing away from Crystal, straightened up.

  “Mama…”

  “I just feel so frustrated….” Crystal could hardly hear her mother’s words. “And I don’t have the right…I just don’t have the right!”

  “Mama! Mama!” Crystal was crying.

  “I’m okay.” Carol turned and wiped at her face with her hands.

  “Mama, please don’t cry…Please be all right…”

  “I’m okay, now.” Her mother shook her head from side to side. She took her daughter’s hand and held it against her cheek. “I’ll clean this up.”

  “No, I’ll do it later,” Crystal said. “It won’t take me long. Why don’t you lie down for a while?”

  They half walked, half stumbled into her mother’s bedroom. Carol Brown fell across the bed and was still. Crystal sat by her side, the tears streaming down her face, her lips twisted in the agony of the pain she felt.

  “Mama…oh, Mama…”

  “Honey, will you do something for me? Please?”

  “Anything, Mama,” Crystal said. “Anything.”

  “Please don’t tell your father about this,” Carol said. “It was so silly for me to lose control of myself. Your father’s got enough worries on him about money and keeping the family together. Please don’t tell him, honey.”

  “I won’t tell him, Mama.”

  The phone rang.

  “Let it ring,” Crystal said.

  “Life has to go on,” her mother said. “No matter what I feel.”

  Crystal picked up the telephone.

  “Your mother called,” Loretta said. “What’s up?”

  Crystal looked at her mother. “It’s Loretta.”

  “I called her to tell her that you were…” She turned away.

  “Hello, Loretta?” Crystal’s hand trembled as she held the phone. “Mom just wondered if I would be working this weekend?”

  Loretta said she wouldn’t be working that weekend. Crystal hung up the phone and turned to her mother. The woman who she had thought just the day before could have been a model now looked old, drawn. Crystal knelt on the floor beside Carol Brown.

  “Mom, are you going to be okay?” Crystal asked.

  “I will be,” she said. “If you’re okay, then so am I, honey.”

  Her mother smiled and kissed Crystal on the cheek.

  Crystal pulled the sheet around her mother’s shoulders and went into the kitchen. The damage wasn’t that bad. Only a few of the cheaper glasses had been broken. Crystal swept up the broken fragments of glass and then wiped a coffee stain from the wall. When she looked back into the bedroom, her mother’s eyes were closed.

  Usually she didn’t make up to go to school, but she stood in front of the mirror putting on the darker-than-usual foundation. She knew it would at least help cover the anguish she felt.

  She felt so alone. You have to grow up, she said to herself. You have to know what it’s all about.

  And what was it all about? It was having people you love depend on you. Helping her parents, who wanted so much for her. Not letting people down.

  Crystal was surprised at how she looked. For some reason she had taken the eyebrow pencil and drawn huge black circles around her eyes. She hadn’t even been aware of doing it. She looked horrible. She quickly sponged it off and started over. Her hands were shaking. She knew it would be difficult to look good.

  “So anyway, it came down to either a fashion show,” Pat said, “a beauty pageant, or a volleyball marathon.”

  “How can you raise money playing volleyball?” Crystal asked.

  “You get sponsors,” Donald said. “For every point that’s scored, the sponsor gives a dime. So if we play volleyball all night long and the score ends up like two hundred to one hundred and fifty, something like that, then each sponsor has to shell out a dime and thirty-five dollars.”

  “And everybody liked that?”

  “Nobody liked that,” Pat said. She carefully wiped the top of the can of Diet Coke she had bought. “But everybody figured that if we had a beauty pageant you would win, and nobody wanted to be in a fashion show if you were in it, because they couldn’t compete with you.”

  “Which is true,” Donald said, pleased with himself.

  “Are you telling me, Mr. Evans, that I cannot compete with Crissie?”

  “No, I’m just saying what everybody else is saying,” Donald answered quickly.

  “And what are you saying, Mr. Evans?” Crystal asked, taking Donald by his sleeve.

  “Roses are red, violets are blue, if you ask me who’s the prettiest, I got to name two!”

  “You think he’s copping out, Crissie?” Pat asked.

  “He just might be, but I think we’ll let him slide this time.”

  “Where were you du
ring the meeting?” Pat asked.

  “I had to give Mr. Dennison this poem I wrote for the school magazine.”

  “Is he going to publish it?”

  “I don’t think so,” Crystal said. The day had hardly begun and she was already exhausted. “But I did it anyway.”

  “Hey, my group is rehearsing this afternoon in the music room,” Donald said. “If you ladies want to come by and hear some fresh sounds, you’re welcome.”

  “Maybe some other time,” Pat said, lifting her shoulder in a mock sexy pose. “We wouldn’t want to distract you boys.”

  Donald went to his French class, and Pat asked Crystal what she thought of him.

  “I like him,” Crystal answered. “You must be falling in love, or you wouldn’t ask so much.”

  “I like him a lot,” Pat said. “You looked upset when you got here this morning. You okay?”

  “My mom was sick,” Crystal said. “She was feeling better by the time I left.”

  “Anything serious?”

  “I don’t know,” Crystal said. “I guess I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Crissie, are we sort of…you know…drifting apart?” Pat asked. “Because I’m over what happened before. It was just the little girl in me coming out. That’s why I was upset. Afterwards, I thought about it a lot. I figured if you were going to fool around a little, that was the best way to do it. You know, in a limo and all.”

  “Why would you say something like that? Why?” Crystal felt a sudden surge of anger as she turned toward her friend. “Why?”

  “Cris…?” Pat saw the rage in Crystal’s face and took a step backward. Crystal got up quickly and walked away. She was mad—she didn’t know why, but she was mad and even hurt. She stopped in the hallway and leaned against the wall until she got herself together again, then tried to put it all out of her mind as she started toward her next class.

  It was on the way to English that Crystal ran into Jim Dennison. He asked if she had a moment to discuss the poem she had given him. She said that she was in a hurry and that she would see him in the magazine office after school. She knew, even then, that she wouldn’t.

  11

  “The Roger Hallen Show?” Daniel Brown was in his shirtsleeves at the kitchen table. His dark, muscular arms were folded across his chest. “She going to sing or something?”

  “No, she’s going to talk about what it’s like being one of the most exciting young models in America.” Loretta Barrett stirred her coffee by moving the spoon quickly at the top of the cup. “I’m sure he’ll ask her how she manages to balance her schoolwork with her modeling, that kind of thing. It’ll be wonderful for her.”

  “And how much she get for being on his show?” Crystal’s father asked.

  “Five hundred dollars,” Crystal said. “How do I look?”

  “That’s all?” Daniel turned his head sideways.

  “What they pay is the absolute minimum they can get away with,” Loretta said. “The prestige and publicity are supposed to be payment enough.”

  “Do you really have to work tonight, Daddy?” Crystal asked. “You could come see me.”

  “You got to be kidding.” Daniel smiled. “I’m going on in to work at the hospital the way I usually do. I’m going to sit there on the third floor where the color television is, and when The Roger Hallen Show comes on and my baby shows up and the guys turn to me and say, ‘Hey, man, ain’t that your daughter?’ you know what I’m gonna say? I’m gonna look real close like I ain’t sure, and then I’m gonna say something like ‘Yeah, that’s her’ and make believe I’m reading a newspaper or something.”

  “Get out of here, Daddy,” Crystal said.

  “Ain’t no ‘get out of here,’” Daniel Brown said. “When Timmy’s kid got a scholarship to Fordham, and it was in the newspaper, do you know what he did?”

  “He bought a copy for everybody,” Loretta guessed.

  “A copy?” Daniel looked at Loretta. “He bought two copies, one for us to read and one for us to save!”

  “We’d better get going,” Carol said. “Crystal you look beautiful.”

  “She always looks beautiful,” Daniel said. “I told you beauty was in my genes.”

  Loretta, Carol, and Crystal left. Daniel waited until he thought they were downstairs and then went to the front window and peeked out the curtains as they got into the waiting limousine.

  Crystal watched Roger Hallen on the monitor behind the curtain. The makeup girl stood near her, sponge in hand. As Hallen ended the thirty-second spot for United Airlines the assistant director pointed toward Crystal and the makeup girl quickly touched the sponge to her upper lip to remove any traces of moisture.

  “You’re beautiful,” she whispered.

  The director held up four fingers as Hallen’s voice came over the monitor.

  “You see these beautiful girls on magazine covers, you see them on television; if you’re lucky you see them dashing around the fashion centers of the city. Tonight, we have a very beautiful, very charming young lady who’s making quite a name for herself—Miss Crystal Brown….”

  The stagehand held the curtain for Crystal as the audience began to applaud. Roger Hallen stood as she went to the large desk he sat behind. He was shorter than she thought he would be, and she was more nervous than she thought she would be. Loretta had warned her that the chair next to Hallen’s desk would be uncomfortable. It was, the seat being slanted slightly forward.

  “So, how’s the modeling business?” Hallen asked as Crystal sat next to his desk.

  “Just fine,” Crystal said. A man with headphones, out of camera range, was holding up a picture of a can of dog food.

  “I understand that besides being a model, you’ve written a book?” Hallen said, twisting a pencil between his fingers.

  “A book?” Crystal shook her head. “No.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Hallen corrected himself. “I’m sorry, I got my notes wrong, you’re planning to write a book. Let’s sneak in a quick word from one of the sponsors, and then we’ll talk more about your modeling and the book.”

  The offstage monitor showed a close-up of Roger Hallen’s face as the director gave hand signals. A screen at the side of the camera Hallen was looking at lit up and a message began to roll slowly. Hallen read it in a way that looked as if he were making it up as he went along.

  “Dogs are man’s best friends, we’ve said that time and time again and I guess we’ve actually become dogs’ best friends, too. I think the makers of Gro-Chow had this in mind when they created their new line of nutritionally balanced dog food.”

  The red light on the camera went out, and a taped commercial began to play on the monitor. The director came over to the desk in response to Hallen’s beckoning.

  “I thought she wrote a book,” Hallen said, nodding toward Crystal. He pulled a book from a table behind his desk.

  “The next guest wrote the book, a thing on the changing values of family life,” the director said with a shrug.

  “Look, tell her the show’s running behind schedule or something.” Hallen handed the book to the director.

  “Fine.” The director took the book, tossed it to an assistant, and ran his finger across his throat.

  “We’ll talk about your modeling career,” Roger Hallen said, “and then I’ll say that you’re thinking about putting it all down in a book and I’ll say I’m looking forward to reading it.”

  “Okay,” Crystal said.

  “And call me Roger, okay?” He had a warm smile.

  “Fine, Roger.”

  The director cued Hallen back in just as the red light came on the camera directly facing them.

  “So, what’s it like being a young model—how old did you say you were?”

  “Sixteen,” Crystal said.

  “Sixteen? They didn’t make sixteen-year-old girls like you when I was sixteen!”

  The audience laughed.

  “And I didn’t make any sixteen-year-old girls when I was si
xteen, either!”

  There was whistling and larger applause.

  “I guess being a model can be pretty exciting?”

  “It’s very exciting, Roger,” Crystal said. “It’s like a dream come true.”

  “So are you.” Hallen rolled his eyes toward the studio ceiling. “Let me ask you something. Be honest, now. When did you first discover you were a very beautiful girl?”

  Crystal opened her mouth and nothing came out.

  “Okay, let me change that.” Hallen shifted his position, obviously pleased with himself. “When did the boy next door first discover he couldn’t look at you and breathe normally at the same time?”

  There was more applause, and Hallen laughed with the audience.

  “I thought I was okay-looking last year,” Crystal said.

  “Okay-looking?” Hallen rolled his eyes again and there were more whistles from the audience. “There were guys all over the country slowing down their pacemakers the moment you walked out here.”

  “You’re nice,” Crystal said.

  “What’s absolutely the best thing about being a glamorous model?”

  “I think it’s seeing your pictures in print and thinking that you’ve done a good job,” Crystal said. “It’s very rewarding.”

  “You know, I think there are more and more opportunities for Black girls in modeling, wouldn’t you say?” Hallen asked.

  “I hope so,” Crystal responded, remembering Loretta’s admonishment not to contradict Hallen.

  The rest of the interview took six minutes and Crystal found herself kissing Roger Hallen and walking off the small set to a round of applause. A moment later, the monitor showed a tiger jumping into a gas tank.

  “You were wonderful!” Loretta was waiting backstage. “Absolutely wonderful!”

  “That thing with the book really threw me,” Crystal said.

  “It worked out fine,” Loretta said. “Do you know how many close-ups they had of you?”

  “I was afraid to look at the monitor,” Crystal said.

  “Plenty,” Loretta said. “Carol was in the front row. I’m sure you didn’t see her, but she’ll be in the lobby when we get there. I think you just turned on your afterburners, young lady. You are on your way!”