by Ed Pavlić
–You and Melvin play in-side, here. You all know that. This time of night, you both know what that means.
Ndiya didn’t recognize the voice. And “crip”? What was that? Ahrrisse and Melvin nodded at the changed voice that came from the kitchen. They went back to the corner where the puzzles were. They argued, apparently over the puzzles, in silence via some kind of sign-slash-mime language made mostly of throat-cutting gestures, shoulders jerking forward, and finger pointing. They took two puzzles, mixed all the pieces in a single box top. Each boy then stood up and stepped back. They looked at each other. Ndiya watched the boys shake their hands facing each other. They counted one, two, three fingers before they went down on one knee and began to take pieces out of the box. They examined each piece and then either placed it by their side or tossed it back in the box.
Muna vanished without another word.
Ndiya walked back into the kitchen, staring back at the two boys and the closed door where Muna had stood seconds before. Shame had the ball covered in a dishtowel and he’d turned the sausages off. A small saucepan was out and he was busy skinning two large tomatoes.
–Do you know how to crush garlic and sauté it without making it turn brown?
–I can do that. Shame, ah?
–Yes?
–Does she, you know, Muna, does she come here every night at this time? With, what’s that boy’s name? I mean—
–Ahrrisse. No. Rarely this time of night.
–Then how did you know it was her?
–Three slow knocks. And then she waited. I knew it was her. She’s probably got a quick appointment.
–An appointment.
–Yes. You know, an arrangement. Do you know how to slice fresh ginger?
–No. Are we talking about what I think we’re talking about?
–No, we’re not. No trick to it, really. Thin, though.
–We’re not?
–No, we’re not. But we will if you want to when we get this meal ready, OK, Ms. Ndiya-no-ginger-slicing-full-of-questions-Grayson.
Shame, with elaborate theatricality, held up a knife with a small triangular blade, nodded at her, and put it on the counter with the handle pointed in her direction. He pointed at the knife.
–Use that. V-e-r-y, very thin. This slicing of ginger is very technical, you understand? Precise. Hold it with your fingertips. Mix the slices together awhile with your fingers to release the scent. Leave the ginger slices on the board and then stir the butter and the crushed garlic together in that pan over the flame.
–OK, then what with the ginger?
–Just leave it.
Shrugging off the precision technicalities—he can’t be serious—Ndiya looked at the knife on the counter with its handle pointed at her. She thought, “Jesus, ‘Never hand a knife to a friend!’ How long has that been? Who even said that anymore? You’ll cut the friendship.” Then, “So we’re friends, now.” Ndiya frowned her smile down at the ginger surgery she’d been assigned.
She sliced away the pink petals, stirred them up with her fingers like Shame said and set them to the side in a pile. She took two plates and four glasses to the table. Ahrrisse and Melvin were statues of concentration. Each on one knee, only their hands and their heads moved at all. Ahrrisse rose up slowly in a hula-like motion, waved what Ndiya realized was the final piece in his puzzle around his head, kissed it, and placed the piece at the bottom right corner of the completed rectangle. She was just about to say, “Good job,” or something like that when Ahrrisse stood up straight. Melvin’s puzzle still had a scattered half dozen pieces missing. So, Ahrrisse slapped him on the back of his head. Pop! Ndiya winced. Both boys then fell on the floor silencing their laughter into faint squeals. The fit subsided. Immediately, they took out two other puzzles, dissolved them into a box top, repeated the one, two, three with their hands. Ndiya turned away to find Shame at the saucepan adding the garlic, butter, a can of tomato sauce, skinned tomatoes, and several small piles of green flakes to the mix. He closely inspected the small pile of ginger slices. Shame rubbed his hands together in the “now we’re getting somewhere” motion, nodded, and pointed to the garbage can.
–Would you please stir those again with your fingers and then toss them?
–Something wrong with how I sliced them?
–Nope. Perfect.
Slowly, for emphasis on the absurdity, Ndiya stared at Shame while she stirred and then tossed her pile of technical ginger slices into the trash. After he savored the theater for an instant, Shame poured a glass of wine into the pan and it fizzed up steam. He put his nose into the vapor and whispered,
–Inspissation. Don’t you love a word that sounds exactly like what it is?
Ndiya was still confused but she was beginning to see a puzzle, a pattern of her own. On top of that pattern, she liked how he moved. She felt a splayed-out tinge of the last-bite-of-oatmeal feeling. To distract herself, she started to ask something but Shame spoke first:
–I’m glad you’re here. I’m really glad you’re here. Most people, you know, they don’t come back here.
–Why not?
–I don’t know. You could probably tell me better than me telling you.
–A few things come to mind. But I wouldn’t want to guess.
–To speculate?
–Correct. Plus, in my book, I didn’t come here the first time, you brought me here. So I still have a chance.
–That’s the second time. You came along.
–First time here. That was an accident.
–OK. But the bad kind or the good kind?
Ndiya knew this game. She didn’t mind playing for a while. It was fun and he was good at it. But as she stared at her feet, she couldn’t fit some piece of his question into the box for the game she knew it belonged in. She looked up at him hovering over the stove, flour still in the hairs on his wrists. It looked like he was dancing without moving. Like he was moving to music but there wasn’t any playing. The lack of music struck her. That felt strange. She paused, said nothing. He asked,
–What time is it?
–Almost nine.
–OK, when Mrs. Clara comes for Melvin, I’ll send Ahrrisse with them. That’ll be very soon. Mrs. Clara’s got a Swiss watch where her brain should be. The woman doesn’t play.
–I gathered that down the block.
–Oh, right. Exactly how did you meet up with Melvin, anyway?
Two minutes to nine on Ndiya’s phone, Mrs. Clara knocked once on Shame’s door, entered the apartment, and took Melvin by the hand. She blew a kiss at Shame and pointed to her cheek. She took Ahrrisse’s hand, and, while Melvin opened the door for the three of them, Mrs. Clara said,
–Thank you for minding Melvin, Miss Anita.
–Oh, that’s Ah-ndi—well, you’re certainly welcome, ma’am.
Mrs. Clara’s chin raised up, she aimed her eyes over Ndiya’s shoulder.
–I’ve got Ahrrisse too. See you tomorrow, Mugga-bugga.
–Right. Sixish.
–You know I don’t do ish-ness my dear. See you at six. Sharp.
And they were gone. Ndiya put her phone in her pocket and stared down at her wrist.
–Wow. 8:59.
–I know, and that’s just a taste. And your wrist is slow.
■
Ndiya sat at Shame’s table in a pause. She hadn’t been back to her job since the confessional fiasco of her errant email to the SnapB/l/acklist. She took that as an invitation to come back to the scene of the crime. She definitely didn’t believe in signs. But still. Yvette had called, left messages, emailed. Her supervisor had called too. Then she emailed to say that, in light of the high quality of Ndiya’s work over the summer, they had decided to place her on emergency leave-of-absence without pay and hoped she’d return when she felt better and would she give them ten days’ notice before returning? Ndiya had stopped checking all of it. She had enough money saved for six months of life if she concentrated a little and stayed away from Shame’s Blue Labels.
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She hadn’t told Shame any of this. After date number two, when he dropped her at her sublet townhouse in South Commons, they had agreed to see each other “next Friday” and hadn’t talked since. The last thing they’d said to each other before she arrived at twilight swayed before her like the loose, frayed end of something. She’d told Shame how it felt with his hands on her and he’d said: “That was a risky thing to say to me, Ndiya Grayson.” She knew she was skating on soon-thinning ice, again, but she couldn’t place the unfamiliar feeling. When she did pay some attention, she found several feelings turning over like a basket full of snakes or maybe twisted like currents in a mountain stream; maybe it was going somewhere? When this possibility dawned, as if in a chorus of one hundred songs at once, something in her hummed, “Let it go.”
She didn’t plan to ever go back to that job. She meant she wasn’t going back to any of those jobs; they were all the same job. Even thinking about it in Shame’s place made her feel sick and dizzy and she didn’t know why. She kept feeling a train passing under the building but told herself the train didn’t go beneath this block or anywhere near it. It wasn’t the El. It was too far away to feel and that wasn’t the sensation at all. And in a way that accompanied the train feeling, she felt something like a heavy weight swinging behind her in wide, slow arcs. The dinner was great. She concentrated on finding the trace of absent ginger in the sauce but only succeeded in locating a sharp, electric tingling in her fingertips.
Shame had rolled out the dough flat, rubbed flour on the surface, rolled the sheet up into a tube, and sliced it into discs. Then he unrolled the discs one by one into thin noodles in a bell curve of lengths and hung them up in suspension-bridge arcs on the two clotheslines strung overhead across the length of the galley kitchen. After ten minutes, he walked beneath the lines with his hands between them, gathered the noodles into a bunch, and dropped them in the boiling water. Minutes later they sat across from each other at the kitchen end of Shame’s long table and ate the thick noodles, the sauce, and sausages. Shame tore a hunk of bread from a baguette with his teeth and offered her the other end.
Trying to ignore the train-penduluming-in-the-mountain-stream feeling of tastes and tingling fingertips, Ndiya studied a horizontal painting behind Shame. It was unframed, and hung tacked to the wall at four points along the top edge. Across the canvas, one bold line separated ground from sky. The painting was large, about five feet across, about four feet tall. On the ground a three-dimensional outline of a house leaned and twisted under the force of a strong wind. To the left of the structure stood a telephone pole broken a third of the way up. The power lines billowed off to the left and out of view. To the right a huge figure with three intersecting arrows in its head leaned over the house. Lines of breath appeared from where its mouth would be, curled around the roof and joined the power lines exiting off the edge of the canvas to the left. Behind the structures and the figure, a golden, elephant-shaped mass of hot air rode its way up a cold gray dome hugging the ground. As Ndiya stared at the golden mass visible through the lines of the house’s roof, she noticed flames blowing from the house. At the bottom, under the ground, were the words: Oyá en lo Suyo *.
Ndiya nodded to the painting behind Shame. He looked behind him and then turned back to her.
–Bad weather?
–Depends.
–On what?
–Well, on which arrow’s which. Coffee?
–None for me.
–Me neither. I have to be to work early.
–Saturday?
–Only till noon. How about a cognac?
–What do you do at work?
Shame got up, collected the plates and took the wineglasses between his fingers. Ndiya heard the plates slide into the sink. Water sprayed and there was a pause while cupboards opened and closed. Shame came back into the room with two tiny, square glasses of brown liquid. He set one in front of Ndiya and sipped his as he sat down opposite her again.
–We’re repairing tanks that they’ll fill with acid to wash steel wire. The mill’s in operation while we do the repairs so the schedule’s a little irregular. All in all, not a bad job. It’d be better if it was in winter because it’s hot as all get out in there.
Ndiya watched the house lean in the painting behind Shame’s shoulder. She felt the train again and almost heard the weight swoop behind her head, low enough that she ducked slightly and covered it up by bending down to inhale the warm smoke-and-walnut scent coming from the small glass. The scent burned in her nose.
–That’s the work you do?
–One part of it.
–Do you want to know what I do?
–What do you do?
More trains, closer. The swinging weight vanished. Ndiya noticed that the figure to the right of the house in the painting behind Shame’s shoulder had what appeared to be a bullhorn-shaped breast protruding from its lower chest. The figure hovered about the line of cold gray and seemed to have a crest of some kind sweeping back from its forehead. Thinking about her job, all of her jobs over the years, suddenly made her feel sick.
–Well, I—you know, you don’t want to know about that. It’s just a job. Who is Muna, Shame?
–Ahrrisse’s mother. She has two daughters, as well. She lives two buildings down. She walks—well, she works irregular hours. Most of the women around here work all the time, but sporadically. If something comes up, most evenings, they know they can bring the kids here.
–She walks to work?
–One might say that.
–What else might one say?
–About Muna? She kind of walks as work. Did you notice the shoes?
Ndiya nodded in disagreement, held Shame’s eyes with hers, and turned her face down so her eyebrows obscured everything above his eyes. She focused, trying—and failing—to read the slightly serious smirk he wore. Her face felt like a flock of already answered, unasked questions. Shame continued,
–What’s there to say? The woman walks. Far as I know, she got started walking on an old man named Christopher with VA benefits. Word got around, a preacher got involved. Soon as that, she’s been at it since.
–A preacher? Involved?
–Well, a sometimes-preacher. But he’s not in it as a preacher, really. More like a broker.
–Right, they’ve got another term for that …
–I know: Pastor!
–Funny.
Ndiya measured a whiff of the liquid and touched the tip of her tongue to the surface. The low burn on her tongue reminded her of the ginger-feeling at the ends of her fingers.
–It’s good. Strong.
–That means a lot coming from you, Ms. Blue Label.
–Well, I hope it doesn’t cost that much or else I’m going to have to ask you who you walking on.
Ndiya laughed and abruptly stopped.
–Does she walk you, Shame?
–Used to, a few times. I paid her twenty dollars, loaned her the rest. Long-term loan.
Shame laughed. The weight swung back and seemed to strike a huge, silent bell somewhere back there. Ndiya sat amid the deaf clang, ready. She waited, almost afraid to listen, like when a bright flash of lightning clears the way for a crash of thunder. She didn’t want to ask:
–Paid her for?
–Just walking, Ndiya. Nothing more. She offered. I said, “Muna, twenty dollars is twenty dollars, the rest is a loan.” She took my money with a friendly snatch, said, “Damn skippy,” through her smile and never mentioned it again.
Ndiya reverse-whistled a thread of the liquid into her mouth and rolled her tongue through the middle of it. The motion of her tongue seemed to triple the amount of liquid in her mouth. She swallowed and traced the heat down her throat and decided that, no matter the feeling, it couldn’t have poured straight down to her feet. She felt warm. And pendulums. And a kind of distance, somewhere, maybe an empty space. Then, in an exhale, that space collapsed.
–Shame, what the hell’s going on?
–There�
��s a whole lot going on, Ndiya Grayson. But as far as Muna goes, nothing more than a historical walk or two on my back. That woman’s got her some talented toes.
–I bet. What? Does she hold weights? She can’t be but ninety pounds.
–It’s not the weight, it’s the action.
–OK. That’s enough. It’s my fault for asking. And you watch her son when she’s walking to work? Is that bubble thing over there a stereo?
–Yes. And yes.
–Does it work?
–Yes. It has to work, it can’t walk.
–Ha. Funny.
Ndiya stood up, keeping a hand on the table just in case. Shame noticed that. She started to walk around the dining table toward a low, smaller table placed underneath a wide window along the wall near the piano. She crouched down near the bubble thing Shame called a stereo and examined a shelf of plastic slips, each containing a CD. Jazz. Jazz. Jazz. Jazz.
Ndiya didn’t know anything about jazz by name but had lived constantly within its sound as a child. “Your father,” her mother would say, turning up the volume. He was “your father” to her mother, but he was “Daddy” to her. Thinking of him sounded like funky breath through some horn made mostly of sound filling up a vacant space in their apartment or maybe whistling through a hole in her chest. Memories of that apartment mostly felt like holes in her chest. Just then, while flipping through Shame’s CDs, she remembered playing with a friend in the box gardens they’d made at school. So far back she has no image of the little girl who asked her, “What you think it would it be like having one of them all-the-time daddies?” And tears rose up behind Ndiya’s eyes as she remembered. She heard herself, hands in the cool dirt: “Then I could be myself all the time.” She snapped herself away from the memory and back to the present:
–Mind if I play something?
–The power switch is on the back. I’ll clear this table.
Ndiya flicked the switch and watched an amber-and-blue glow fill each of the tall glass bubbles. She walked her fingers from CD to CD and stopped on one with a close-up photo of a handsome, middle-aged black man in a small bow tie. Along the edge of the cover she read:
ART
BLAKEY