“You were never an Ugly Duckling.”
“You haven’t changed.” A sting. A Needle Man prick. Maybe some brown shoe polish on your cheekbones, little bit there, would help.
“Uncle Bitter told me I could find you here. Can I sit for a minute?” She moves over, making room on the wobbly concrete bench. Her sweat smells like sage. “I’m sorry to interrupt your lunch.”
“What brings you back after all this time?” She’s playing it cool, the way Uncle did two nights ago when I showed up on his porch.
“My mama died.”
“Yeah, Daddy told me. I guess he got a funeral notice.”
“I had them send him one. She left me, you know, with a lot of questions. I needed to be here to study up on them. So …” A quiet minute. She nibbles her sandwich. “How long have you been teaching?” I ask.
“Six years.”
“You like it?”
“Pays the rent.”
“I figured you’d be married with a passel of kids by the time you were twenty. Playing house was always your favorite.”
“I’m not married.” Another minute. “Got a boyfriend. You?”
“No.”
She stamps a cockroach at her feet. Crushed, it keeps crawling away, trailing what looks like sticky coconut. “Your hair’s still naturally straight like that?” she says, a little shyly.
“Mostly. In my teens, it thickened up some. Now, it seems to be relaxing again.”
“Lucky. ‘Round the time I lost my fat, I started going to the hairdresser to get pressed — two, two-and-a-half hours — forty dollars a pop. Daddy wasn’t happy about that, let me tell you. I tried the snatch-back look for a while, but finally the chemicals turned everything into, like, these gnarly old plaits, so I gave up.”
“It looks lovely.”
She pats her short curls. “You’re one of those women who, late at night in the clubs, makes the rest of us crazy,” she says. “In the heat, when all our ‘dos have wilted and fallen flat, you’re still just perfect.”
A tall girl in overalls comes running up to us. In her hair, a plump yellow scrunchie. She eyes me suspiciously, then whispers to Ariyeh, but not so softly I can’t hear, “I be having my periot now, and the koteck thingy in the bat’room is broke.”
Ariyeh reaches into her big leather bag, produces a tampon with an applicator. The girl grabs it, greedily, then hurries off. “Fourth grader,” Ariyeh says.
“You’re kidding. How old is she?”
“Thirteen. We stopped social promotions here a few years ago, so some of these kids stay stuck.”
A grackle lands in the courtyard, plucks at the gooey bug. In its throat, the bird makes a leaky air hose sound.
“Uncle told me you’ve lost some kids lately.”
“Three. All boys. Ten-year-olds.” She bites into an apple, talks as she chews. “Police checked all the unguarded construction sites in the area, the crack houses, vacant lots. Nothing.”
“Needle Men?” I smile, though as soon as I’ve said it, I know it’s in bad taste.
Of course she won’t share the humor. Or memories of our childhood on Bitter’s lap. “If Reggie — my boyfriend — ever heard Bitter spinning that tale, he’d hit the roof. He doesn’t have any patience for superstition or folklore. I guess I don’t either, anymore.”
I decide not to tell her I passed the Flower Man’s house last night and thought of us. A man in a gray custodian’s uniform fast-walks through the courtyard, scolding a boy for apparently setting fire to paper in a trash can. “Send you to boot camp, boy, how you like that?”
Ariyeh balls up her lunch bag. “I need to get back.”
“Ariyeh.”
She stands, then turns to me, waits.
“Ariyeh, I’m sorry I didn’t stay in better touch. I know Bitter thinks I was being a snob. Maybe you do, too. I was just … my mama didn’t want me to … anyway, anyway, I missed you. I thought about you a lot.”
She taps the bag against her thigh. It sounds like a torn tambourine. “I didn’t think you were being a snob,” she says softly. “I just thought you were being white.”
I look at my hands. My very pink palms. Then Ariyeh starts to laugh. I stand, smile nervously. I laugh with her, slowly at first, finally in great, sobbing waves of relief. I want to hug her, but she doesn’t look ready for that. She is beautiful. And dignified. “How long are you going to be here?” she asks.
“A few days, at least. Right now I’m staying with Uncle, but I may give him a break and move to a motel.”
“I’ll stop by. Maybe you can meet Reggie.”
“I’d like that.” She squeezes my arm. “Ariyeh,” I say, grasping her hand. “How well do you remember my mama? If you don’t mind me asking?”
She chews her lower lip. “Pretty well. I remember she always seemed sad to me.”
“She never talked to you about my daddy, did she?”
“No.”
“What do you remember about your own mother?”
“Cass? I remember her yelling all the time. That’s all.”
“What about?”
“Anything. Everything.”
I nod and let her go. She disappears behind a big metal door, catty-corner to the one I came through, in a wall scored by scorch marks. Green fungus mottles a window frame next to the door; with nail polish, someone has painted on the glass “Uh-Huh.” Two boys, about ten, with sneakers as big as banana floats, pass through the courtyard, glancing at me, snickering.
In the Safeway parking lot, as I’m loading my trunk with grocery bags, a car passes palpitating to a rap beat. I turn, expecting black teenagers. Instead, two white boys in a brand-new BMW cruise with the windows down, thrashed by the tune in their speakers.
Bitter isn’t home, so I unload our supper supplies, snatch a beer, and walk across the street to the cemetery. Sunflowers, snapdragons, and hollyhocks curl around headstones of mothers, fathers, children, baseball players, street singers, salesmen. The snapdragons smell like ashtrays. I remember picking flowers for Mama as a girl. She never thanked me for them; she’d take them from my hands with a seriousness that indicated she deserved this lovely tribute. Maybe some brown shoe polish on your cheekbones, little bit there… the day Ariyeh suggested this to me (some boys, passing Bitter’s yard, had laughed at me), I bawled fiercely. Mama, stirring chicken soup on the stove, said, “Go pick me some flowers. Hurry up now.” When I came back, she arranged the roses, lilies, and violets in a jar, poured me a glass of milk, and sat with me at the kitchen table. “Aren’t they pretty?” she said, turning the jar around and around. “And they’re all different, each attractive in its own unique way.”
I knew what she was trying to tell me. “Mama, don’t you wish you had darker skin?”
“I most certainly do not.”
“Why?”
“Honey, you can spend your life wishing you were someone you’re not, and it won’t do you a lick of good. Look at Ariyeh. Don’t you think she wishes she were as thin as you are?”
“I guess.”
“But she’s beautiful, too. With her own style, right?”
“But — ”
“Sweetie, you don’t know how lucky you are. One day you’ll recognize the advantages in looking like you do.”
Her face sagged. She’d been up at dawn, as she was every day, making hotcakes for Bitter, Ariyeh, and me. Was my daddy ever there? Cass? I don’t remember them. Lunch and supper, she was at the stove again. Her straightened hair straggled into her eyes. She was thin as well — probably too thin, I think now.
Another evening (just after we’d moved and had returned to Houston for a visit), she was walking home from the store carrying two big bags of food. Fresh vegetables had moistened one of the bags; when she reached the yard, a neighbor dog, a little schnauzer, bounded over to her, startling her. She swung away from him and the bag ripped. She fell to her knees in the dead grass, sobbing — from exhaustion, I realize now. I approached her quietly from where I’d been playing. She didn’t ask me to help her. She tried to smile through her tears. “Hello, honey,” was all she said. I felt scared, seeing her vulnerable, unhappy. I picked up a cabbage, a carton of eggs (only two had cracked), a spaghetti package. “You’re a sweet girl,” she said. “That quality’s going to get you anything you want in life.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you won’t have to live in a ratty old neighborhood like this when you grow up.”
“I like it here. More than Dallas,” I admitted.
“You’ll do better than this, believe me.” She tucked a banana bunch under her arm.
“Ariyeh and me — ”
“Ariyeh and I.”
“—we’re going to live in a tent with our husbands and children and be famous.”
“For what?”
“Just for having our pictures on magazines.”
She frowned at me, balanced a jam jar on her hip. “When’s the last time you saw someone who looked like Ariyeh on a magazine cover?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s right. Remember that.”
I didn’t know what she meant, and I don’t know now where her self-hatred started, or how. The fall from the garden. Shame at her own naked self, leading to her long rest, too soon, under a headstone just like one of these.
And my own shame? Recalling the girl today who needed a tampon, I remember sitting in my Dallas bedroom, cramping, trying to read the Modess box while Aretha sang on the radio, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.…” I longed for Ariyeh then. Was the same thing happening to her? This messy flow … it wasn’t just another fault of mine, was it, a flaw in the package, like my off-kilter skin?
I rise, brush leaves and dirt from my pants, and pick a sunflower for the supper table.