Crystal

by Walter Dean Myers

  “I guess you’re right,” Pat answered.

  Crystal had thought about doing the History homework. She had promised her mother that she would keep up with her schoolwork. She didn’t really have to, she knew, but she’d said she would. On the other hand, nobody expected her to be perfect.

  Crystal had known Sister Gibbs for as long as she remembered. Her mother had said that she should stop doing Sister Gibbs’ hair when she started working as a model. She couldn’t, her mother had said, do everything that people from the church wanted her to, and they would just have to understand that. But the seventy-seven-year-old Sister Gibbs was special to Crystal. Crystal looked at the clock above the refrigerator and figured she could go upstairs and do Sister Gibbs’ hair and still have time to get in her exercises before dinner. If not, she could always do the exercises after dinner.

  “Crystal?” The small, thin woman leaned forward. “That you?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Crystal replied.

  “Well, if you’re sure it’s you, come on in.” Sister Gibbs moved away from the door.

  “I figured I could do your hair this afternoon instead of tonight,” Crystal said. “If that’s all right with you, of course.”

  “I don’t know.” Sister Gibbs sat at the kitchen table, her white hair just reaching the top of the high-back chair. “The little girl I used to know that did my hair used to do it in the evenings. Now this big glamorous woman come ringing my doorbell…”

  “Sister Gibbs, now you just go on!” Crystal said.

  “What you done heard in the streets that’s juicy?” Sister Gibbs asked.

  “Nothing much,” Crystal answered. She had brought her combs and makeup kit with her and put them on the table next to the bowl of wax fruit that sat in the middle of a doily.

  “What you mean ‘nothing much’?” Sister Gibbs tilted her head back so she could look at Crystal through the bottoms of her bifocals. “When I was a young girl I could always find me something juicy to carry around. Now who out here doing the dirt?”

  “Sister Gibbs.” Crystal was behind the old Black woman, taking the bobby pins out of her hair. “You know the Bible says ‘Judge not lest ye be judged.’”

  “I ain’t asking you to do no judging,” Sister Gibbs said. “I’m just asking you to do some reportin’! Now the Bible don’t say nothin’ about no reportin’!”

  “Well…” Crystal loved working on Sister Gibbs’ hair. It was so soft, it reminded her of spun silk. “I heard that Dotty, Sister Kaye’s girl—you know who I’m talking about?”

  “Skinny girl with a big butt,” Sister Gibbs said dryly. “Got about as much tittie as a boy.”

  “That’s the one.” Crystal smiled to herself. “I heard she was running around with Deacon Turner’s cousin. I don’t know if it’s true or not, though.”

  “’Course it’s true!” Sister Gibbs said. “They was over in that bar on Gates Avenue, ’cross from the funeral parlor, last Saturday night. Sister Williams told me she saw her coming out of it, and she walked up to her and asked her what she was doing in a bar when she was supposed to be at Bible study.”

  “What she say?” Crystal was gently brushing out Sister Gibbs’ hair.

  “Sister Williams said she come talking about how she was looking for her brother in there. Now you know Vernon don’t be hanging out in no bars,” Sister Gibbs said. “And Sister Williams said Dotty’s eyes was as red as a fire truck. I know she been in there nippin’!”

  “Her mother’s really disappointed in her,” Crystal said. “You want some henna in your hair?”

  “What I want that mess in my hair for?” Sister Gibbs asked. “You go on and comb it out like you usually do and pin it up so it look nice. Maybe put some of that moussey in it. Now what you saying about her mama being disappointed?”

  “I said I thought she would be disappointed if she knew she was in that bar,” Crystal said.

  “Humph!” Sister Gibbs turned to one side. “I don’t see why she be so disappointed. I remember that hussy when she was wearing tight dresses down in Durham. You know anybody that come from Durham, North Carolina, and ask don’t they know about them Greenes. That was what they was then, the Greenes.

  “She and that no-good yellow brother of hers used to be the most notorious things down there. I didn’t think she ever was going to get married. When she did, it was all of a sudden and we started counting. Sure as I’m sitting here, it wasn’t but eight months to the day when she laid down and had that first kid of hers. And I’m telling you what the Lord loves and that’s the truth!”

  “I didn’t think that Deacon Turner would want to have anything to do with her, though,” Crystal said.

  “Humph!” Sister Gibbs straightened up in the chair. “Them Turners ain’t nothing but a bunch of Sunday School Christians. Butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths if you see them on a Sunday morning. Got they Bibles under they arms and nodding at all the ladies. Especially that James with that gold tooth stuck up in the middle of his mouth like some kind of heathen! They all womanizers! Every one of them!”

  “I ought to make you up real nice,” Crystal said. “So when Brother Pugh comes around, he won’t know what to say.”

  “Ain’t no use in making me up, Crystal,” Sister Gibbs said. “If that old man knew what to say, he wouldn’t know what to do!”

  “Sister Gibbs, I do believe you are getting fresh in your old age!” Crystal said.

  “Don’t you worry none about me being fresh, honey.” Sister Gibbs looked in the mirror that Crystal put before her. “Me and the Lord got us a little deal. I done spent my life serving Him and now I can talk the way I want to. I knew how to live my life, though. You can’t read the Bible and not know how to live your life.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You know how to live your life, Crystal,” Sister Gibbs said. “I can tell that by the way you carry yourself. You just keep on living like you know you supposed to. Don’t let nobody turn you around, girl.”

  “I surely won’t.”

  “Let me see that mirror again.”

  Sister Gibbs looked at the mirror Crystal put in front of her.

  “You look pretty good to me,” Crystal said. “I still think I should make you up some.”

  “No, honey, that wouldn’t do at all,” Sister Gibbs said, shaking her head slowly. “How would it look? Me, a Christian woman, going around breaking these old men’s hearts?”

  Sister Gibbs laughed, and Crystal put both arms around the old woman’s shoulders and hugged her. “Sister Gibbs, you are something else!” Crystal said.

  “I know it.” Sister Gibbs put her dark hands over Crystal’s. “Now you get on home before your mama accuse me of stealing you!”

  Crystal kissed her gently, got in a second hug, and left.

  3

  Crystal had finished a breakfast of tea and fresh fruit by the time the limousine arrived. The driver, a thin, owlish man, was relieved when Crystal’s mother said that he had the correct apartment.

  “It’s early, you know,” he said, twisting his cap nervously in his hand. “You don’t want to wake people up at this time of the morning and ask if they’re expecting a limousine.”

  “Especially in this neighborhood.” Daniel Brown was sitting in his robe at the table, a cup of black coffee cradled in his hands. “You want coffee?”

  “No, sir.” The driver glanced at the clock over the refrigerator. “We’d better start off; you can never tell how traffic is going to be.”

  “At this time of the morning?” Crystal’s father asked.

  The driver shrugged.

  Crystal kissed her father good-bye. He grunted and shook his head. His lips tightened ever so much, and Crystal thought of the argument she had overheard when she came out of the shower. He didn’t want her modeling without her mother’s being there, he had said.

  “Daniel, you can’t take away the girl’s chances,” her mother had answered. “She has a chance to do something with her life. Ar
e you going to take that, too?”

  “What do you mean, too?” had come the angry reply.

  “Nothing.” The muted reply was scarcely audible through the bathroom door. So many of her parents’ arguments finished with her mother ending the discussion by saying ‘Nothing’ to something her father had said.

  “You be careful,” her father said as she went out the door.

  Crystal turned and smiled. “I will,” she said.

  The driver seemed to come alive once they had left the Black section of Brooklyn.

  “Your mother’s a looker, too,” he said. “She ever a model?”

  “No,” Crystal said.

  “How long you been modeling?” he asked.

  “Not that long,” Crystal said.

  “You know who I had in the car about two weeks ago?” the driver asked, and then continued before Crystal could reply: “Michael Jackson’s look-alike. The guy looked just like him.”

  “That’s nice,” Crystal said.

  “I had that colored boxer in here once, too. What’s his name—real dark guy—you know who I’m talking about.”

  “No,” Crystal said.

  “Yeah, anyway, I had him in here. He was okay.”

  The city in the early morning was eerie. The dark shadows of the buildings loomed ominously over the narrow streets. Crystal sat in the middle of the backseat as the car whisked into downtown Brooklyn and over the Manhattan Bridge. In Manhattan, there was already activity as trucks unloaded in Chinatown and the East Village.

  She felt alone. It was more than the empty streets or being shut away in the speeding limousine. It was as if she were no longer herself but some other person being carried through the morning stillness to be something she was not. There was a picture somewhere, waiting for her presence. There were angles that she would fill, a glossy smile that she would place in just the right light, at just the right moment.

  The early shooting was for an Italian magazine. Crystal didn’t like working with foreign photographers that much, because sometimes she didn’t understand their directions. When the limousine arrived at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, she felt nervous. The crew was already there. A young man came and opened the door for her quickly. She was glad to see Susan Hirsch, Loretta’s secretary, on the sidewalk, close behind.

  “Good morning, Crystal.” The young man who had opened the door made a sweeping gesture with his hand. “I’m Frankie, and I’ll be doing your makeup.”

  In a moment, Crystal was sitting in a small tent set up on the sidewalk outside of Tiffany’s. The blouse she would be wearing hung on a padded hanger. Frankie looked at her face a long while and then put shadow on her cheeks.

  “You have a marvelous face,” he said, leaning close to her. “If you stay away from sugar, you’ll never need anything except touch-ups for years. Maybe a little highlighter around the eyes. You should pluck your brows, though.”

  “They’re not very heavy,” Crystal said. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Susan sipping coffee.

  “They don’t have to be heavy,” Frankie said. “You can always add in this business. It’s the taking away that’s hard. There. You’re beautiful.”

  “Do you know the photographer?”

  “He’s not bad,” Frankie said. “I don’t think he’s that good, either. He’s a poser. He goes around striking poses and thinks he’s wonderful. When they get tired of his photos, his posing won’t do a bit of good.”

  “He’s hot. Anything he does they love,” Susan said. “When you’re hot, you don’t have to be good.”

  The photographer ignored Crystal as the wardrobe lady and designer adjusted the blouse she would be wearing over the slim black pants. Crystal looked at herself in the mirror. She looked good.

  “They’re going to shoot you in front of the steel doors,” Susan said. “Later, they’re going to digitally add the perfume into the picture.”

  Frankie waited until all of Crystal’s wardrobe was in place before putting the final touches on her hair. He brushed it up from the back and put a small circular comb in the center of the back, and then combed the hair out from it.

  “It’ll look fuller this way,” he said.

  “I feel like my scalp is being shrunk or something,” Crystal said.

  “Don’t pay too much attention to what this guy says,” Susan said. “He’s very insulting. He’s already called me a few names, and he’s insulted everybody else, too. Just ignore everything except his directions.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “C-r-o-c-e,” Frankie said, with an effeminate flourish of the hand. “It rhymes with okay.”

  The photographer’s assistant took a light-reading, with Crystal in front of the doors. Then the photographer came over.

  For a while, Giovanni Croce just stood in front of Crystal, looking at her. Crystal stood looking back.

  “Just try not to look too Black,” he said, finally. Then he went back to his camera.

  “Just look at the camera,” the assistant called to Crystal.

  Crystal stood, feeling angry from Croce’s remark about her not looking “too Black” and awkward with the lack of direction, as the short, thinnish photographer shot several pictures. Then he turned away, and the assistant said that he had finished.

  “I told you he was a pain in the rear end!” Susan Hirsch said. “He treats everyone like dirt, but he gets into all of the big magazines in Europe.”

  “Can you get the comb out of my hair?” Crystal asked.

  Susan took the comb out.

  “Hold it!” The assistant put his hand on Susan’s shoulder and directed her away from Crystal.

  “Just don’t smile.” Giovanni began to take more pictures of Crystal. He moved in front of her quickly, taking pictures from a lower angle than he had before.

  Susan Hirsch looked behind Crystal and saw the sun breaking through the clouds over the distant buildings. In another moment, Giovanni had stopped and had merely walked away, leaving Crystal standing in the middle of the sidewalk.

  Crystal saw that Giovanni had given his assistant his camera and had gone into his own limousine. She saw Susan speak to him and then come over to her.

  “The guy’s a real creep,” Susan said. “I asked him how it went, and you know what he said?”

  “I was too Black?” Crystal asked.

  “He asked me why I would care!”

  “It went strangely,” Crystal said. The wardrobe people took the blouse, and Frankie brought her coat to her.

  “You’re very beautiful,” the wardrobe lady said.

  “Thank you,” Crystal said.

  “You were good,” Frankie said. “He took extra pictures. He makes it such a big deal that his shots are so precious, but he took more pictures of you.”

  “Sure, she was good,” Susan said. “You headed for school today?”

  “Yes.”

  “The limo will take you later,” Susan said. “Loretta wants to have breakfast with you. You eat anything yet?”

  “Yes.”

  “So have coffee,” Susan said. They took the limo to the Regency-Carleton, where Loretta lived, and called her apartment. They waited in the lobby for nearly ten minutes before she came down and then went to breakfast in the hotel’s restaurant.

  “How’d it go?” Loretta asked.

  “Frankie said it went fine,” Susan said. “Croce took some extra shots.”

  “He made me feel awkward,” Crystal said. “I felt like a thing.”

  “That’s what he wants,” Loretta said. “A lot of people in this business are like that. They all have their reasons, but what they want most is for the girls to be anything but people. That way it’s them that make the session work. You’ve got to be bigger than life to work your way through these people.”

  “How about just punching them out?” Susan said.

  Loretta smiled and signaled the waiter. She ordered coffee for herself and Crystal, and Susan ordered eggs and toast.

&nbs
p; “How did you like Jerry?” Loretta asked, after the waiter had left.

  “He seemed okay,” Crystal said.

  “He was telling me that Joe Sidney is doing another picture. He wants to start principal photography next August.”

  “Joe Sidney’s a director,” Susan said. “He does a lot of pictures for the young market. Coming-of-age things, mostly.”

  “Garbage, mostly,” Loretta said. “But he makes money for the studios. Anyway, he’s got a big budget this time around and he’s looking for a name male lead. I think he’s making a big mistake—just because you make money with a cheapie doesn’t mean you’re going to make more money with a bigger investment—”

  “That’s right,” Susan said. “Disney’s not kicking any butt recently.”

  “And their last few movies were pretty good,” Loretta said, nudging Crystal and pointing to two little old ladies at a corner table. “They’re both richer than Midas and act as if they’re dirt poor.”

  “They look nice,” Crystal said.

  “That’s their act,” Loretta said. “They’re meaner than Gila monsters. Anyway, getting back to Joe Sidney…I don’t think he can do anything for us, but I think we should be thinking about movies.”

  “I don’t know anything about acting,” Crystal said.

  “Most of the youth things they’re producing now are easy to act in,” Loretta answered. “All you have to do is wear something that shows off your figure and act as if you checked your head at the door.”

  “A lot of this,” Susan said. She put her hands under her chin and opened her eyes as wide as she could.

  “That I can do,” Crystal said, laughing. She imitated Susan just as the waiter came over.

  “Ah, you are an actress, madame?” the waiter asked.

  “Of course, she is,” Loretta said, smiling. “Don’t you see her talents?”

  Susan’s eggs were done so that they looked like white puffs of foam. Crystal saw Susan attack her breakfast as if she were really hungry while Loretta just played with her coffee.