The Importance of Being Dangerous

by David Dante Troutt

  “I’ve had a similar thought lately, but there’s other things too for me.”

  “And I think from now on we should start coming into Q’s through the back door only,” she added. “I don’t want all those eyes on me every time we walk in there. It’s like the Apollo sometimes.”

  “That’s cool,” he said. “Hey, by the way, you know Raul’s got a crush on you?”

  Sidarra turned into Griff’s face and got real close. “You should probably worry less about who else has a crush on me and work on your own.”

  I do, Griff wanted to say. Every day.

  MICHAEL WASTED AN ENTIRE DAY off for Sidarra driving her around stores on Fordham Road in the Bronx. His low-cost taste in home materials was exposing his roots, and the whole outing made her impatient. If she’d stuck with him, there’d be wallpaper everywhere. By the time Sidarra refused to stand any closer than the doorway of tile shops, Michael was getting resentful. He barely understood how her money had come so fast, but the change in attitude, the loss of interest in him, started to smell like betrayal. He knew she didn’t wear the clothes he bought her, even though he’d outspent himself. Her kind explanations about why her closet was full of dresses with the tags still on them didn’t help. Sometimes speaking nicely is a way of telling somebody you’re better than they are, or that they don’t belong in your league anymore. The truer that felt, the angrier Michael got.

  That didn’t matter as much to her as the whirlwind construction crew already at work on her new home. Q knew somebody who knew a contractor known for speed, and the race was on. Fortunately, there are stores near the corner of Park Avenue South and Nineteenth Street that sell bathroom fixtures from Italy as well as a full array of marble tiles from the region. Sidarra’s new acquaintance Darrius Laughter had his boyfriend fax her a list. She and Raquel went together, free of Michael’s constant sticker shocks, and they sat in empty luxury claw-foot bathtubs imagining bubbles. They turned faucets at a rate of ten a minute. They stood under chrome showerheads that looked like sculptures and tried to guess where the water actually came out. They had long dialogues in and out of the presence of salespeople. If somebody got funky with them, Raquel had learned how to lead them right out of the store.

  Carpets look the best on newly finished wood floors, and carpets were found in the tall buildings of lower Fifth Avenue. In their elongated windows hung beautifully woven rugs from Persia, Pakistan, and India. This was the template for a thousand forgeries found in Target and Kmart, where Sidarra usually bought area rugs.

  Raquel soon took over the day. Her urges moved them along; her imagination colored their tastes. Sidarra followed her daughter through each store with a kind of awe. The older Raquel got, the more she became Sidarra’s teammate—even, on days like this, her captain.

  “I’m just gonna run a bit, okay, Mommy?”

  “Do what you gotta do, Raquel.”

  Sidarra and the salesmen would stand aside smiling over a $3,000 rug while Raquel, with a look of care and utter determination on her brown face, would do short jogs and quick stops on the fabric.

  “She wants to see how the traction works,” Sidarra would explain to the person. “I never used to let her run in the house.”

  “Your daughter is a very serious child, no?” asked the curious salesman.

  “I found it, Mommy!” Raquel exclaimed.

  “That one, sweetheart?”

  “Yup. It should be comfortable. Just enough. This one’s right.”

  Sidarra knew it was her own fault that Raquel wouldn’t leave the “comfortable” thing alone. Children have no reason to dismiss the things you say and fewer worries to replace them with. Raquel told all her friends about the shoe-making children of Taiwan. She might never stop wondering about them. Of course, Sidarra had been the same way. That’s why she was putting Raquel in a fine Catholic school come the fall. She knew that what had happened to her as a young woman seemed to turn on the moment she stopped focusing on things that interested her. She roamed, then she settled too soon. That was not going to happen to Raquel’s mind. That’s what comfort started to mean to Sidarra now. That’s why spending time buying the details for the house had to be their joint endeavor. It’s why she went to such lengths to conceal from coworkers the brochures and catalogues on her desk and spoke in whispers to salesmen on the phone. She couldn’t explain it, but she wanted nothing in the way anymore. She wanted clean open space to live in and now she could. As long as her own wits and research turned Cicero’s Club blood money into small fortunes, she saw no harm in sending a few bad people to chase after their insurable losses. They’d be paid back eventually. Following some inconvenient bumps in their roads, their way would open again. The only lesson would be the improvement of her life, and one that, for obvious reasons, they would never learn.

  THE DUMPSTER IN FRONT OF THE BUILDING had been gone two weeks and the paint dry for one when Aunt Chickie finally agreed to come see the renovation of Sidarra’s brownstone. Rain fell hard that late August day. It soaked into the brick along the tops of buildings and darkened the sky by midafternoon.

  “So this is what you did, huh?” She spoke under her breath, thoughtfully, and Sidarra didn’t answer. “You and that guy. They sure can be useful sometimes.”

  Inside the door, the vestibule had changed. Sidarra replaced the old mailboxes and hung a chandelier that shined ample light on the fresh white walls. Through the glass door, Aunt Chickie could see a short hallway and rooms opening to the rear of the parlor floor. Sidarra led her aunt into the living room that had once been two and a half smaller rooms. The high ceilings seemed even farther away under the columns of exposed brick, the restored mantel that arched proudly around a grand new mirror and the thin tracks of bright, recessed halogens.

  “Mmm, mm, mm,” Aunt Chickie said, careful with each curious step. Sidarra watched her eyes for approval. “Your mother,” she said, emphasizing the th for some reason, “your mother would be very proud of you, Sid.”

  “I appreciate you saying that, Auntie. Are you proud of me?”

  This was always the harder part for Aunt Chickie, who never had children of her own. She nodded reluctantly at Sidarra. “Ummhmm.” Sidarra needed more. She waited like the nine-year-old girl who always hoped for Aunt Chickie to come visit and, eventually, maybe, to compliment her. “Yes, Sidarra,” Aunt Chickie added with some vigor. “Yes, yes, girl. I’m very proud of you, truly.”

  Sidarra moved toward her aunt with her hand on her daughter’s back, as if to push her four-foot security blanket along with her, and made them all grab in a hug. “Then come live with us. Come on, Aunt Chickie.”

  “Come on, Aunt Chickie,” Raquel echoed.

  “This house is too big for just us. Live here where we can be near each other.”

  “Yeah!”

  Aunt Chickie was flattered enough to turn slightly away, as if to take counsel with herself. At that age, the facts of one’s immediate life are never far from thought. She was hopelessly poor and spending most of her fixed income on housing at the senior home. She was sick and needed watching. But she was also proud and happy to be nasty when she cared to be. At the old-age home, she had a perfect balance of friends and enemies. And she was watched every so often by nurses. Tough choice.

  “You want to put me in the apartment where that old lady died?”

  “No! She died over there,” Raquel announced, pointing back to the living room.

  “Of course not, baby,” Sidarra explained. “Come let me show you the apartment downstairs. It’s on the street level so you wouldn’t have to climb stairs, and it’s got a kitchen and access to the back.” Sidarra led them carefully down the stairs and walked her through the sitting room in front.

  “What’s that out there?” Aunt Chickie asked, pointing to the rear.

  Raquel and Sidarra smiled at each other. “Come look, Aunt Chickie.” They walked under the low ceilings, across the small kitchen, and through a short pantry hall to a door with a window
at the top. “That’s the garden. That’s your garden.”

  “Garden?”

  “Yeah. Mr. Simms didn’t even rent out the ground-floor unit. He saved it for himself in case he ever decided he wanted a place in the city again. There’s a backyard out there that was full of so much junk and rotting nonsense that you couldn’t see it’s got two lemon trees. I just found out there’s fresh soil underneath.”

  Aunt Chickie was silent as she stared out the bottom edge of the window. She scanned the yard, but her eyes kept falling on the soil beds. At first she seemed to be trying to guess which way the sun fell. Aunt Chickie was a plant mother, a green thumb trapped in the city. She abruptly changed the subject. “You should throw yourself a party or something, Sid. A housewarmer.”

  “I’d like that. With Labor Day coming up, I thought maybe a barbecue. I just don’t know who to invite.” The three of them continued to stare up at the gray sky from the window. “You wanna think about it? Staying here?”

  When a face gets old enough, tears fall a different way. Like soldiers who already know the paths they’ll march down, it is steady as they go. Sometimes you cannot even tell they’ve been through except for the wetness they leave in the grooves of the cheeks. After the last one had gone, Aunt Chickie was clear. “No, I’ll stay,” she said softly. “I’d like to stay.”

  14

  WHEN SIDARRA WAS A LITTLE GIRL, it was always clear to her family when she was having some crisis of conscience. Her skin would break out. Not just her face but her arms and legs would fill with tiny dark blotches that would deepen, fatten, and spread like pox. It never lasted more than a few days, but whenever it occurred, Aunt Chickie used to call it Redbone Guilt. This strange affliction, and the vague fear of going to hell, kept Sidarra from being a child who stole things or lied on people or cheated in school. Aunt Chickie would know, since she had skin light enough to betray her emotions and mischief enough (at one time) to produce guilt. On the other hand, Sidarra’s caramel skin shouldn’t have been the moral showcase that it was.

  For the first time in some thirty years, it was back. The telltale marks of Redbone Guilt had established a beachhead across her forehead, with small clusters on the move inward from her shoulders and her thighs. Now that Aunt Chickie lived in the brownstone with them, Sidarra could only hope the old woman’s eyes would fail her, sparing Sidarra the obligation to explain her pimpled flesh. But this time was worse than ever before. This time confused her because Sidarra no longer feared damnation, having decided you had to feel God’s love before you could lose it. This time the source of any guilt was unclear—her feelings for a married man? That seemed superstitious; they had only flirted shamelessly for months. Purchasing a dream house with a little of other people’s money? Maybe, but they deserved it, it was insured, and they made it grow on their own in any event. Still, that summer the mysterious patches migrated and thickened, preventing her from showing her skin just when she began feeling beautiful again. Even Darrius had no cure. Instead, Sidarra spent a lot of time upstairs in her new room. Which is where she would have gone as a child for the only cure there was.

  “LET’S GO IN THE ROOM AND TALK,” Sidarra’s father used to say. “I don’t want your mother contradicting me.”

  That was his usual line, the signal, but Sidarra knew the room was really chosen because it was the one place away from his boys. He had three of them. They couldn’t help what they were, but their presence could annoy the hell out of him at times. When Roxbury Parish finally got a girl, he made sure to get her her own room so that she would always have a boundary line of retreat from the suffering caused by the boys’ loud voices and flying limbs. His daughter gave him the opportunity to speak freely about serious issues, like growing up, and that was a pleasure he would not deny either of them for the sake of his sons’ jealousy.

  The room was down the long hallway from her parents’ bedroom and the one her brothers shared next to it. Sidarra’s room had been the apartment’s second bathroom. Just before she was born, her father ignored every imaginable protest and ripped out the fixtures, painted the walls peach, and installed things he was sure a girl would like. He even made her brothers help in the work, demanding that they learn how to respect a female other than their mother. The room was small—but not to Sidarra, who for most of her childhood thought it was a palace compared to the lion’s den her brothers piled up in. She was allowed to hang some of the best family photographs on her walls right next to the one of Dr. Martin Luther King and the life-size poster of Michael Jackson. There was also a large antique mirror her father bought for her at a junk shop on 125th Street. In the corner she had two soft chairs covered in blankets, one for her and one for him. Her father would crouch down and assume his seat, always surrounded in her memory by the glare of the white bathroom tiles that still climbed halfway up the walls. His knees would fork outward, and while they conversed he would raise his elbows and put both hands behind his head. At his feet, she would hear the occasional crackle of ice cubes melting in a glass of bourbon. For a man who was named like a small town in Louisiana, Roxbury Parish seemed more at home with his daughter in that room than anyplace in the world.

  “You should always be able to see yourself clearly,” she remembered him telling her often, and he would inspect the old mirror for streaks. Taking a rag, he would dampen one end with a little soap and use the other to wipe it dry. “The secret to cleaning mirrors, Sid—are you listening?”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “The secret to cleaning mirrors that nobody seems to know is that you gotta keep wiping, wiping, wiping well after you think you should be done wiping. The mirror will let you know when you’re finished. The cleaner the mirror, the clearer the soul.”

  Even as a little girl, Sidarra understood mirrors as her dad’s metaphor for the mind. Roxbury Parish simply wanted his daughter to have a mind more capable than his own. Poorly educated, he was smart enough, but his specific aspirations for Sidarra were limited by his horizon. If she had wanted to become a great singer, for instance, that was probably okay with him. Yet she knew he always hoped for something more, something that would develop her mind, like a manager, a manager of something. The best word he could ever find to describe his hope for her was “queen.” “Be some kind of queen,” he’d urge. But there didn’t seem to be any queen openings, so Sidarra became a schoolteacher instead. It wasn’t the most original choice, but it was the best she could figure out, and just beyond his raising, it pleased him. He’d come from no place worth mentioning, the son of a preacher whose indiscretions taught Roxbury to distrust God, raised by relatives Sidarra never knew, and he made up his rules as he went along. The story he told of his life before her always began with him wandering for several years, then to New York City in the fifties, and finding work in the subways as a sanitation man. He was one of the men who rode the flatbed maintenance cars that roared very slowly into the stations after midnight, stopping briefly so that they could jump out, empty trash canisters, sweep and spray the platforms down with water, and jump back before entering the tunnels again. It was a job like his journey: stop in a place only long enough to find what’s rotten there. Yet once he married, Roxbury couldn’t leave.

  Sidarra’s mother, on the other hand, was a Dean. She belonged to a clan, brought her daughter to church where they sang in the choir, and preferred to have her talks with Sidarra outside the home, like walking through Central Park. Zester Dean loved the idea of Sidarra becoming a singer in a lounge as her sister Chickie had done in Paris.

  “Why not?” she would say. “Shoot for the stars, girl. Shoot at ’em!”

  That sort of encouragement led eventually to the shared coveting of a special hat by Sidarra, her mother, and Aunt Chickie, who happened to be its owner. It was mostly purple, floppy and felt, with a fuchsia bow, garish enough for the burlesque stage with the hippie soul of a seventies album cover, and perfect for a nine-year-old’s view of womanhood. Zester had managed to borrow it from her sister af
ter several months of trying. She paid for the privilege by enduring an onslaught of biting Chickie snipes about her lack of the requisite sexiness, charm, and cheekbones to wear such a hat outside. Shortly after the loan, Chickie traveled to Spain with her performing husband. When she returned two months later, it was as though she’d packed a tracking device. She wanted the hat back. She’d even made note of it in the letter telling of their arrival in New York. But Zester couldn’t find the hat. The hat was gone. And with the announcement of her Aunt Chickie’s return, Sidarra promptly turned into a leopard. Her smooth skin became awash in tight red, then wide brown pimples. Yet she remained mute on the hat’s whereabouts, and her silence was catching: Zester and Chickie didn’t speak to each other for a full year over the saga of the missing hat.

  “Why’d you take the hat, child?”

  Sidarra raised her big eyes up at her father, stared for a while, then smiled. “I like the hat, Daddy. For a long time, I liked it every day, in private. I sang in it. I danced in front of the mirror when everybody was asleep. I even hoped that Aunt Chickie would never come back. Then, after a while, I forgot about it.”

  “Even though you looked so great in the thing?”

  “Yessir. I did.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What I didn’t forget was the bad stuff she said to Mama about not looking good enough to wear it.”

  “So you thought it would be a good idea to keep it from Chickie altogether? Even when you saw the sadness it caused your mother when they fought and stopped talking. You still thought you’d teach your aunt a lesson?”

  Sidarra thought about it for a while. She knew she could come up with any answer at all. Knowing what her father would want her to say and saying the opposite had no predictable repercussions in that room. She could tell it like she saw it.