Broken in Soft Places

by Fiona Zedde

  “Jump on the truck!” the men called out. “Jump on the truck!” A man leapt behind the woman, his naked chest gleaming with sweat as he rode her ass, teeth flashing in masculine triumph.

  Stephen laughed. “Damn!”

  “Woai!” Sara shouted, caught up in the excitement. She clapped her hands and danced to the music, graceful and curvaceous in her tank top and tight jeans.

  Dancers, male and female, fluttered like exotic birds from the floats moving past. The women wore elaborate body-baring costumes, peacock tail feathers flaring up high over their thonged and glitter-scattered backsides. Little more than strips of cloth covered their nipples while animal masks decorated their faces, hiding their features except for the brightly painted and smiling lips.

  The carnival atmosphere beat against Stephen’s skin, insistent and jubilant. Attached to his hand, Sara laughed out loud again, releasing him as one of the male dancers, bare-chested and sweating the glitter from his hard brown body in rivulets, jumped off the float and pulled her up against him, whirling his hips against her backside. Cheers from the crowd rose and fell around them.

  Rille tumbled into Stephen, laughing. “Oh my God!”

  And Stephen staggered, in shock that Sara was allowing a half naked man to grind up on her.

  “She looks so happy!” Rille said with a wild laugh, teeth like lightning across her face. “This is perfect.”

  “Is her happiness what you’re on the hunt for today?”

  “Yes, absolutely.” Her head fell back, throat damp from the May heat.

  In the midst of the crowd, Rille danced against him, moving her body to the frantic soca beat. She looked so awkward, jerking without rhythm, her narrow hips incidentally bumping into his. He kissed her, chuckling against her mouth.

  “Despite what you might think,” Rille said breathlessly. “I want her to be happy.”

  “She’d be relieved to hear that.” Maybe even surprised.

  Stephen looked down at her knowing that, despite everything, he would stay by her side and do his best to make her happy.

  Rille shimmied and shook in front of him, grabbing fistfuls of his shirt while she flung the hair back from her face. “My Sara knows—”

  “Hey!” Sara’s shout cut through the crowd and jerked Stephen’s head up.

  She pushed her way through the crowd toward them. Her male dancer’s tail feathers flashed from up ahead where he ran alongside the slow-moving float, winding his waist and leaping onto other welcoming women.

  “Are you two going to stand there looking serious or you comin’?” Sara’s usually buried Jamaican accent tripped off her tongue on the uptilted question.

  Rille grinned back at her and shoved Stephen forward. “Go ahead. I’m going to get us something to snack on.”

  He fought his way through the revelers to meet Sara halfway. When they reconnected, she grinned up at him, her face naked with euphoria. A girl with the Jamaican flag draped around her shoulders as a shawl bumped into them, grinned in apology before leaping away, disappearing like laughter into the parade.

  “We haven’t done this kind of thing in a long time,” Sara shouted against the music, the noise.

  “I know,” Stephen agreed.

  Their lives revolved around home and work and Rille, creating something resembling happiness despite the obvious complications. Rille was happy, Stephen knew that. Because of this, his own happiness was assured. Sara’s was more of a tricky thing. Uncertain at the best of times, elusive at the worst.

  Here, in the middle of the celebrating crowd, her delight was obvious and beautiful to see. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed it.

  “Here.” Rille emerged from the crowd, laughing and breathless. She shoved a steaming hot beef patty at Stephen and turned to Sara with a half-wrapped circle of bun and cheese. The brown bun, sliced in two, was still warm and smelled sticky sweet, absorbing the melting edges of the cheese pressed inside it.

  “Hm.” Stephen bit into the patty’s flaky crust, eying Sara’s food. “That almost looks better than mine.” He felt his patty flake, the crumbs falling from his mouth to his shirt.

  Sara brushed at the crumbs caught in his goatee, her smile emerging as she chewed a bite of her bun and cheese. “It is better than yours.”

  “Look! The Jamaica truck is coming!”

  A thunderous blast of reggae music obliterated the soca sound of the passing Trinidad and Tobago truck. Cheers erupted and more people jumped the flimsy barrier to join the parade, their shouting laughter ringing out as they ran alongside the float, calling up to the dancers on the floats with their gleaming skin and muscular bodies moving in a frenzy to the music.

  “Come on!”

  Stephen startled when Sara grabbed his wrist, almost jerking the patty from his hand, and pulled him through the wall of human flesh and police barriers separating the spectators from the passing parade. He barely had the presence of mind to reach back for Rille’s hand and pull her along as he was being pulled into the pulsing stream of bodies.

  They rode the parade’s wave of excitement, dancing, eating, running after the trucks, bumping hips with rambunctious strangers until they were all grasping at the edge of exhaustion.

  “That was fantastic!” Sara grinned as she fell into Rille. “We should do this every year.”

  Answering laughter bubbled up in Stephen’s chest. His body tingled with the aftereffects of strenuous and spontaneous dancing. A piece of ginger still burned his tongue from the black spice cake that Sara dared him into trying. Yes, this was definitely fantastic. The sun. The music. Sara’s unguarded laughter. Rille seemed to drink it all in, watching Sara with a yearning that surprised him.

  They wandered away from the crowd of sweating bodies and relentless music into a quieter alley of vendors, people chatting in the patois of various Caribbean islands. Sara stumbled into Rille’s arms and then they spilled into his, giggling and giddy.

  “I have to get some of that sorrel to take home with us.” Sara pointed to a nearby vendor’s stall and the tall glass bottles of ruby liquid, heavily spiced with rum, on display.

  The bottle of sorrel they had already drunk from another vendor sang in their veins, giving them a nice buzz that carried them through the parade.

  “It won’t be as good as the one you make.” Rille threaded her fingers through Sara’s hair before turning away to approach the bored Rastaman behind the food cart.

  “How much?” she asked, eyes crinkling in flirtation. The Rastaman immediately perked up.

  “For you, beautiful lady, name your price.”

  Stephen shook his head, laughing. No one could resist her for long. He toppled into Sara’s eyes.

  “She’s amazing, isn’t she?” Sara murmured, not really questioning. A ghost of a smile played at her lips.

  “She is.” He nodded.

  “She can never belong to anyone. I hope you know that. I learned the hard way. Twice.”

  “I don’t want to claim her, just share. Isn’t that what we’ve been doing the last few years?”

  “Is it?” Sara’s eyes dipped past Stephen’s shoulder as if to check on Rille’s presence, or absence. “These years have been torture.” Sara looked at him again. “I don’t know why I’ve put myself through it.”

  Rille turned back to them, the sweat of the humid afternoon glowing against her skin. She raised a bottle of sorrel triumphantly in one hand, the other hand reaching out to both of them.

  Stephen nodded toward Rille. “You did it for her. I would too.”

  “But what would she do for us?”

  Her tone was low, mocking. Aware. Rille would do what she wanted to do. That was how it was and always would be.

  “I would do anything for you, my Sara.” Rille came up and kissed Sara’s cheek, pressed the glass sorrel bottle just under the hem of Sara’s shirt. Sara squeaked and pulled away from the sudden cold, laughing.

  “I’m not falling for that one again.” Her laughter was liquid in the air
, careless.

  All too soon, it faded.

  Homecoming

  Sara/1994

  Sara wanted to go home. She wanted comfort. Rice and peas steaming from the enormous pot on the stove. Her mother seasoning the chicken and getting it ready to cook. Daddy already chopping the lettuce, grating carrots into long, thin slices for the salad that was his specialty. His only specialty, her mother used to joke. She didn’t joke anymore.

  “Can I come up with you to Tampa this weekend?”

  Sara spoke from her side of the room. John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty lay open in front of her on the bed, but her thoughts had nothing to do with philosophy or school.

  Raven glanced up from her desk. “I hope it’s not a threesome you’re after. Bryan isn’t adventurous enough for that.”

  “You’re not funny.” She bit the tip of her erasable pen, lightly marking the white eraser with her teeth. “I want to see my parents.”

  The smile left Raven’s face. “Okay. We can leave early Friday after your last class if you want.”

  “Yes. I would definitely want. Thank you.” Sara gave up and closed her textbook, shoving it and her notebook out of the way so she could sprawl on the bed.

  “Any time. You know I always worry about you being by yourself on campus every weekend.”

  “You know that I’m not by myself.”

  She had made a few friends on campus, even played a regular game of basketball in the fitness center every Saturday afternoon before heading out to dinner with that same group of girls. And then there was Rille.

  “Technically, that’s true.” Raven seemed to consciously ignore Rille, the pink elephant in the room. “Still, I’m glad I was here when you had your little adventure on the bridge.”

  “I’m glad you were here too, although, it really wasn’t that traumatic.”

  “Nearly jumping off a bridge after smoking some bad weed wasn’t traumatic?” Raven pointed her pencil at Sara. “I don’t know about you, but after seeing what shape you were in the other night, I was definitely ready for my trip to the trauma ward.”

  “Drama queen.”

  “Whatever, bitch.”

  In the spaces between their shared smile, Sara forced herself to acknowledge that what happened nearly a week ago had been serious. She could have ended up hurt, or worse. Still, she felt no regret. Everything that happened on the bridge made what she had now worth it. All she wanted now, though, was to see her parents and bask in the warmth of home. Touches from people who wanted nothing from her but happiness. Nothing but love.

  Sara got to the house in Tampa before her parents returned from the factory where they worked. Silence blanketed the space that had been so alive before; perhaps not with noise but with the possibility of an effervescent presence showing up to lighten the mood, to remind everyone what life was supposed to be like. Now everything sat, heavily. Reminding Sara of what things used to be like.

  Raven looked around the house. “Your house is nice.”

  “Thanks.”

  Sara knew Raven didn’t really mean it. That was just something you said when visiting someone’s house to be polite, no matter the hole they lived in. Garbage in the corner? It didn’t matter. The visitor was obligated to find something to say on the good side of neutral. “Your decorating style is very natural.” Or some such thing.

  Looking at her house through Raven’s eyes though, what she saw was a revelation in “make do.” The small house they’d been lucky to afford after four years of living in a housing project needed tending to. With both of her parents working overtime at the factory, it was hard for them to find the strength to clean up their own house. Exhaustion often ravaged their faces. After a ten-hour shift, Papa collapsed on the couch with his glass of iced water and a copy of the Jamaican Gleaner, while on the television a nature show droned quietly until it was time for dinner or bed.

  The cream carpet with its blackened trail of scorched nylon leading from the kitchen to the glass doors and backyard was the main eyesore. A few years ago, Mama had accidentally caught a pot of oil on fire, then in a panic, she raced to the sliding glass doors with it, scalding herself and the carpet in the process. Replacing the patch of carpet had never been an affordable option.

  The white walls were mostly bare except for a small tapestry of the Jamaican coat of arms and a cascading arrangement of photographs of Syrus, following him from birth to a few months before he died. Furniture straight from the catalogue of a local store sat in the usual arrangement while a thick, leaning shelf full of books (mostly Sara’s romance novels) punctuated the wall between the room’s only window and a cabinet full of porcelain figurines and souvenirs from every visit the family had ever made to Jamaica since they’d left seven years before.

  “I’ll stay with you until your parents get home.” Raven dropped her shoulder bag on the couch.

  Sara turned from investigating the contents of the fridge. “You don’t have to. It’ll be a while.”

  A while turned out to be nearly four hours. Sara and Raven were sitting on the back porch near the open screen door, drinking rum punch and slapping off mosquitoes when Sara heard a key in the front door.

  “Daddy!”

  She dashed through the house to give her father, who was struggling through the door with his small cooler and thick work boots, a tight hug.

  “Baby, what you doing here?” her father asked, looking her over with tired concern. Still, he hugged her back. The smell of seafood from the factory clung to him.

  “I’m just visiting. I missed you and Mama.”

  He dropped his work boots by the door. “You sure?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  At the noise behind her, Sara reached back blindly, gesturing for Raven to come closer. “This is my roommate from school. Raven.”

  “Raven, huh? What a name.” He clasped her shoulder then passed them for the kitchen. “Sara says nice things about you.”

  “It’s good to meet you, sir.” Raven smiled at him, looking shy for the first time that Sara had ever seen.

  “Call me Neville,” he said, then at her stricken look, laughed. “Or Mr. Chambers.

  “Okay, Mr. Chambers.”

  “I’m going to bathe,” he said, “before I stink up your air anymore. When your mother’s shift ends in another hour or so, I have to go back and pick her up.”

  They worked at the same place but in different departments, so sometimes one of them would come home before the other. Luckily, the factory was less than two miles away. They’d always shared one car and somehow made it work.

  As her father disappeared into the bathroom, the sound of another car pulling into the driveway drew Sara toward the front door. Outside, a dark green sedan—an old one that looked like a boat as it bumped into the dip Syrus made years ago during an experiment with antique cannonballs—shuddered before coming to rest. Its lights and engine stayed on.

  “Thank you for the lift.” Her mother struggled from the front passenger seat, the heaviness of her movements contradicting her too-thin frame.

  Sara shoved her feet into flip-flops and went quickly outside. “Mama, let me help with whatever you have.”

  But her mother carried nothing. Not even a bag for her lunch.

  “Sara.”

  Her mother looked at her then back at the car to wave tiredly at the figure behind the wheel. The car backed slowly out of the drive, lights bobbing as it bounced into the street.

  “Good to see you, baby.”

  The work ID badge dug into Sara’s chest as she hugged her mother. Skin, bones, breath. That was all her mother felt like.

  “Have you been eating, Mama?”

  “Of course. Otherwise I’d be dead.”

  Sara flinched at the last word, but kept her arm around her mother. They walked into the house together, the smell she’d been used to all her life, of seafood and exhaustion, clinging to Millicent Chambers like too-strong perfume.

  “You look like you haven’t been eating,”
she said. “If you were, you’d be fat like me.” Sara pinched at the skin on her forearm for her mother to see, and she offered a smile at Sara then quickly withdrew it.

  Inside the house, Raven stood at the refrigerator wrestling the jug of rum punch back into its crowded interior.

  “Hello, Mrs. Chambers,” she called out over her shoulder.

  Under Sara’s arm, her mother stiffened. “Who’s that?”

  “That’s Raven, Mama. My roommate. You remember, don’t you?”

  “You two sleep in the same room down at the school?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  Sara’s hand fell to her side as her mother pulled away, moving into the kitchen with that same heavy step Sara never got used to. Her black sneakers squeaked against the vinyl floor. She reached around Raven to open the refrigerator, pulled out a bottle of store brand cranberry juice, and poured herself a small cup.

  “What brings you girls up here?”

  “Not much. I just…” Sara hesitated. “I just wanted to see you and Daddy. It’s been a long time since I’ve been home.”

  “Nearly two months.”

  “Too long, I say.” Sara’s father came into the living room wearing gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt with a hummingbird on it. He sat on the couch, turned on the television, and switched it to a nature show. “But whenever you come home, we’re glad.”

  There were new lines around his mouth, Sara noticed.

  “Yes. Glad.” Sara’s mother said the word as if she didn’t know what it meant anymore. She shoved the bottle of juice back into the fridge and turned, cup clasped between her hands, to face them. Her gaze found Sara. Then Raven.

  “So many young girls are wearing pants now,” she said. “It’s nice to see one of you in something more feminine.”

  From the corner of Sara’s eye, Raven straightened in her frilled baby doll dress. Raven fumbled for the keys in her pocket. And cleared her throat.