Black Silk

by Retha Powers

  Those being the disadvantages. What was good about traveling to the North was that Rhonda had a house all to herself, unlike the women he knew at home. Not a room, not an apartment in a city project, but a real single-family house with many rooms in which to fuck. No matter it looked like a box, all fenced in by the same Adirondack posts everyone else had, or that by twilight her roof was indistinguishable from the rest of the land. This woman didn’t answer to nobody. She didn’t have to cook or clean if she didn’t feel like it; there were no obligatory greens pots simmering on the stove, no tobacco-stained clothes waiting in wicker baskets. It was so different from Auntsville, with its large dilapidated faux-antebellum homes, wringers, double-wides, televangelists blaring trumpets. There were no memories on Long Island. Here Rhonda and Billy were new and improved; they could make love until the early hours of sun and never worry about angry lovers barging in, or incapacitated relatives. He and Rhonda (a woman normally too alpine for his taste) could sit naked at the table and nibble chests, breasts, toes, and elbows, ripened bodies instead of the usual coffee, butter, and grits they had grown up on.

  This night, Billy Merry had a plan. He felt stung by ambition as he drove the highway, thinking of the plan in all its glory. And this was his plan: that seven years would end tonight. It was time to learn from the past.

  Billy gripped the steering wheel in fury, and relief—even though the past was a million miles away, and now he was not just some ignorant boy in the field. He had been deciding what to do for quite a while.

  How funny that all roads eventually lead to Asenath Fowler!

  Rheumy eyes, arms and legs resembling spiderwebs, a time-worn mouth tasting of cinnamon and juniper bark. Time to learn.

  She was an old woman back when there were hundreds of beauties in Auntsville, thousands even, lining up to his door. Nothing more than a scarf of skin, or a heart that beat like an African drum. Why had he listened to her? Why had he even trusted her? But then you would have to ask: Why does moss grow on the north side of trees? Why is the earth at the center of the universe?

  Outside the snow fell in soft pillows of sky around him. He stared ahead at the highway, whispering to the windshield,—Rhonda. Rhonda. It is time to learn from the past.

  The woman waiting in the house, however, was ignorant of his ideas. She did not hear his whispers from the Belt Parkway or see the particular arrangement of clouds in the night sky. She was sewing, breathing, conceiving, reconceiving, imagining, reimagining; but ignorant, all the same. She knew she was in love, but unfortunately could not read the signs overhead, heavenly signs that admonished her for sewing that dress again and that informed her that tonight, Billy Merry was planning on leaving her for the woman of his dreams.

  She picked up her dress and resumed sewing. If only he were here already. At the door, she would immediately rise out of the doldrums which had all that month whispered to her: Ain’t Christmas a family holiday? Ain’t you supposed to have some turkey wings, some biscuits in the fry pan? Where your real people? A man alone is not real people.

  Her thoughts turned to yesterday, the last day of school: the silence of the hallways as the aged janitor glided his sweeper across the floors; Rhonda standing at the school entrance, waiting for the last child to leave the building. When she went back to comb the rooms for leftover children, she noticed the clock in Mr. Wool’s classroom, and the indecent way it hung over the map of the United States, almost insulting her with its arcane ticking. (What was it trying to tell her?) The janitor had entered the room and surprised her by pushing a potted Christmas cactus in her direction. —Moo moo, he seemed to say to her, only she couldn’t understand his country talk. —Moo moo. Moo.

  What was the message? Rhonda took the cactus and pulled her coat tightly around her shoulders. The old man had already acted the fool in the yard that afternoon—now what did he want?

  As he got ready to open his mouth again, she quickly wished him a Merry Christmas and left the building.

  The old man fell into a rusted folding chair by the door and watched as she walked away. During the day she was in his thoughts as he pushed his broom down the school hallway, or as he swept away gum wrappers and coils of lint and hair, or as he poured a scalding bucket over vomit or a lake of urine, or as he locked and unlocked his myriad cabinets. He had seen many a pretty teacher come and go at Featherstone, but had never met anyone as gainly as Miss Robinson.

  Earlier that day, the last before Christmas vacation, he’d found her during cafeteria and cornered her with babble, a stream of something unfocused and heady, but incredibly lovely (he imagined) to listen to. He suddenly adored the sound of his own voice, so deep and baritone. Mr. Blank talked about children because he knew that women were always impressed by men with feeling. He talked and talked—an amazing baritone! (Why hadn’t he noticed it before?) Often he’d lain in bed, chirping wildly like the birds on the suet. It was only on that day before Christmas vacation, however, that he had become aware of his depths.

  It was all quite natural. As he spoke, he thought about the way her breasts would taste in his unencumbered mouth, and how he would love to see her in that pink-and-black gingham just to erase (by hand) the seams that had been crudely stitched and opened and restitched together. He was an old man but he still could make a girl scream; it hadn’t happened that way in years (or maybe it had never happened, he couldn’t be sure), but something in him, a distant memory of prowess, convinced him of the possibilities of lust that has layered over time.

  Through a thicket of words, Mr. Blank found himself admitting to Rhonda that though he’d had his share of grief, it was now time to move on. Keep on keeping on, as the young say. In truth, he rarely thought about his former grief: the gang of unloving kids he had raised, his wife, eternally grim. All of them had left him long ago. Now what remained was to push his broom, clean up after the schoolchildren (bless their nasty little hearts), and watch the teachers come and go. Never anyone as gainlyas her.

  Mr. Blank stopped speaking, and suddenly wondered where he was. His memory sometimes played tricks.

  Rhonda Robinson was frowning at him, a deep (but possibly ecstatic) frown. The janitor sank to his knees in the cafeteria; everyone turned and looked. He focused on Rhonda Robinson’s legs as though they were the first he had ever seen in his life. Round, slightly knobbed, caramel colored, drenched in pantyhose.

  —Rhonda, he suddenly said. —Oh. Oh.

  —Mr. Blank, please!

  He took her hand. —Please hear what I’m saying, he whispered. —I want to feel you, Miss Robinson, it’s this dream I have. He could not finish his thought, his sentence. Like the birds on the suet.

  Rhonda opened her mouth to say something (he knew it would be harsh, but looked forward to it) and then stormed off, leaving the old man floundering in a pool of children’s giggles. He rose slowly and planned his next course of action.

  The house on Long Island had belonged to her grandmother when she came up north, and then the old woman sold it to Rhonda and went to live in a nursing home called the Plantation. It was just down the road in East Amity, but the granddaughter was never seen visiting.

  Billy, too, rarely made inquiries about Asenath when he came up. He never even mentioned her by name—until this night, he believed the past should remain in the past. He knew, however, that treachery was ugly; that it made you as alone as a dog tied to a tree, cooling the body into parched red earth. When he was with Rhonda, and when he was in that sort of mood, he referred to her grandmother as the old woman, the battle-ax, the crazy bitch. They laughed. They rolled on a bed and then onto the floor and then down the hallway and down the stairs past the slipcovered couch. They grew splinters in the dark knots of their bodies, chestnut locks, and undone frizz. Nothing but laughter.

  (Why had he been so stupid for so many years? It seemed a veritable lifetime.)

  Billy eventually drifted off to a shoulder. He closed his eyes (a reckless thing to do on the Southern State Parkway, especia
lly on Christmas Eve) and he wept. Treachery was akin to death.

  In life she had been different from anything he had ever known. Arthritic, camphorate, and yet bold: She wore an old-fashioned floor-length dress and stood in the elbow of the afternoon sun, waving her long apron in the dust. The neck hole of the dress was so large he could see her brown shoulders slip out from time to time. A stark scent of onion and allspice wafted up from the pleats of her skirt; one day he and she were out on the street, just a stone’s throw from the school, and he inhaled that skirt. He wanted desperately to touch the old woman but could not believe she wanted the same.

  Now disguised as a spirit, or something the old folks liked to believe in, she arrived most inconveniently in his thoughts, slipping into the unheated car, hushing him; he acquiesced. With a hand like a veil she agitated him gently in his privates, forcing him to put his hand up to his left breast right there in the car and start rubbing underneath his faux-silk shirt and bay rum.

  —One thing for sure, Billy murmured,—Women do not grow shoulders like that anymore.

  Minutes later he slackened the grip on his skin, started the engine, and continued the road to Rhonda. She was waiting for him, and like it or not, there was precious little you could deny a woman in wait.

  She had waited him for years, ever since the fifth grade when his name was changed from Billy to Shame-Billy on account of his impetuous and horrifying need to smear his lips over the backs and fronts of the flat-chested girls in Miss Fauset’s classroom. He used his hands like vise grips, crushing crinolines and doily collars, finding the place where the skin salted the tongue. In the cloakroom he trampled the girls as they ran to and from him. The sugar-snap breast buds burst as he tried to pry them off bodies. Screams, hollering: and once a pretty girl who split her head on the sharp wooden molding. Somewhere in his trousers, the shadow of a miniature boy-bulge appeared.

  —Shame! Shame-Billy! the girls cried, all of them scurrying to the other side of the room, laughing in the terrified pitch of sparrows. Billy Merry usually came to and stood by himself, on the verge of tears, not understanding his feelings or the haze that had overtaken him. The boys in his class—ages ten and eleven and twelve—broke a few of his bones. The girls went home and complained to their mothers that he was possessed by the devil; that witches used him to do their voodoo, to capture people in spells, to work their roots on innocent souls.

  He never once, however, approached Rhonda with his lips. She watched and waited in a corner of the classroom, sitting on upturned palms, but nothing happened. Once he accidentally tapped the bottom of her buttocks, and in a flurry she threw herself on top of him, flailing her arms and her breasts, which looked and moved like a woman’s breasts. After that spectacle, the girls refused to let her near their circle and the boys threatened to break her bones as well, saying —You ain’t normal, shame-girl! Miss Fauset expelled Rhonda from school for wanton acts.

  His face took to appearing to her in her dreams, in meadows and forests, in the large vegetable garden at her grand-mother’s house, on swampy clouds that floated to nowhere. Ironing and starching clothes, sewing buttons back on shirts and darning socks; canning pears and peaches and peas and then preparing the pots for supper; squeezing lemons by hand because that was the best way to make lemonade. Pouring the sugar out grain by grain. She would feel his lips on her flat front, stinging her with desire. (Hunger is a potion, as the old folks say.) One time she lapsed into a dream of Billy only to awaken to a brash whipping by her grandmother, who—annoyed by the moans and words her baby used (and so incorrectly!)—smacked the girl’s head, and consequently, the boy from it as well.

  —There is a right way and a wrong way, Asenath explained to the girl. —Things you are not ready for.

  —What is the right way? Rhonda asked.

  —Do any of us really know? the grandmother cried, whipping harder.

  But later, as her granddaughter whimpered to herself alone, Asenath Fowler found herself standing outside the school building. The children had long since dissipated. She stood dressed in her church clothes, a sprig of camellia hanging above her breasts. She saw Shame-Billy emerge from the building and called him over. —Are you the boy who thinks he is a man? she asked.

  Billy did not lift his eyes.

  —Well, Asenath said, looking him up and down, —Come here and talk to me. Let me try to put you right.

  The clock moved from six to seven to seven-thirty; startling certainty at each slam of a car door, but it was never him. Late, too late. The dress was finished, laid on her bed for the last-minute rush, but then she got up and threw it on hastily, careful with the zipper. She hadn’t had a chance to do her hair, but that could be taken care of in a flash—she kept the curling iron hot in the bathroom. In the next room, the exact place where others on North Moss Drive housed children and oversize dressers, Rhonda moved to a small vanity table and began to paint her nails. Coral Mirage, to match her house, her dress, her underwear. As she spread out her fingers she imagined his hands: broad brown, the color of a wheelbarrow full of dirt, hands creased with motor oil that the detergent had not been able to remove. Sun, dirt, motor oil, detergent, musk. Onion, clove, maybe lemon. His face would be, as ever, handsomely unlined, though he spent most of his days in the tobacco.

  He was too late. Eight o’clock. Tobacco did not grow in the winter—why wasn’t he here yet? Men did not disappear into thin air for no reason.

  The snow was blinding; he’d heard the weather report just that afternoon, during which springlike temperatures had foolishly been predicted. Everywhere around him cars lay frozen, stalled, or in damaged heaps. He glanced at his wristwatch, knowing she would be impatient, likely to burst the moment he drove up. He could read her like a clock on the wall.

  He had followed Rhonda north after she left seven years ago, but why? He couldn’t tell you. Initially she had seemed surprised to see him standing there at her door, so far from Auntsville. She seemed surprised to learn that he had been thinking of her all these years, and giggled girlishly at his lust. She made some offhand remark about him only caring for her old grandma, to which he laughed, and she laughed as well. Silly ideas clouding a girl’s head. Now a woman. (Legs, breasts grown into splashing hills, buttocks that could be construed as roomy and tight at the same time.) And yes, she had thought of him, too.

  He promised to visit her the very next Christmas, and the one after that. From Auntsville he sent Rhonda parcels of ladies’ undergarments, large bottles of inexpensive eau de toilette, long-stemmed matches, occasional dirty magazines, and locks of his curly chestnut hair (a white person’s hair, but sexy nonetheless). From there on in, he was awash in her love.

  Once in a great while, when he was in that sort of mood, Billy Merry would ask about the old woman. The old battle-ax. Just out of curiosity, of course.

  Rhonda would laugh at him. —Why you care about her? She just fine where she is.

  Tears forming in both their eyes. And that was the end of that.

  She’d gotten in the habit of speaking to him every day as he left the school, lying in wait like the Trojan Horse. As he rounded the corner, she would call out, —Where you taking all those kisses, boy?

  Long ago. In the garden behind her house, in the tangle of catbrier, in the shade of a wisteria hung over a rickety scaffolding, the old woman guided the boy’s hands around her waist and explained to him the importance of courting girls instead of scaring them away. She had heard things about him—no matter. This was how it was done.

  Her voice soft and treacly, her waist as vast as a rainwater barrel. He found he had to get even closer to encircle the old woman, closer than was proper, and when he looked up, she was smiling greedily into his face.

  —This is the way. This is the start. You don’t want them to run from you. You want them to want you.

  Nine o’clock. Normally she would say to herself: Nothing new to this; all men are late. Normally she would admit to herself that all they really cared abo
ut was some things, never other things. They never thought about your wishes, your desire to break free from a thing unseen or unheard.

  Rhonda walked past the Chinese partition separating the vanity from a brass-and-leather wet bar and poured herself a tumbler of Bristol Cream. She glanced out the window: nothing, only the shapes of two children, girls possibly, dashing across the yard, knocking over her only potted plant. From the left corner of the sky, an owl flitted back and forth between two elderberry trees. The owl, she remembered from her grand-mother’s day, was sign of trouble. Rhonda held her breath; there was definitely something wrong with this lateness.

  Her job at Featherstone Elementary and Middle Schools was dull, but she loved to look at the children and secretly open their textbooks as they played and hit on each other. Sasha Devine, the little mixed girl, carried Leaves of Grass around with her everywhere and sometimes recited,

  When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d…. And thought of him I love.

  Plain silly. Mozelle Mountain, the other mixed girl (part Indian she claimed), stuck her nose in a book called Confederate Spies and Soldiers. Stupid girl, stupid book. Harriet-Ann Hutchinson, a full-blooded colored girl, carried The Dawn of Our World in her book bag, but it was clear that the pages had never really been turned. Why hadn’t the stupid girl realized the beauty of those Greek men? They were practically edible! Rhonda shook her head in dismay. She knew a few of their names: Homer, Eurydice, Cupid, Rex. She searched her mind for the details, but nothing came up. It was so long ago, and Miss Fauset had thrown her out like a piece of garbage.

  After recess was over and the bell summoned the children inside, Rhonda would sit in the sun—no matter how cold or how softly the snow fell—and bask a few minutes before returning to the hallway. This small space of time outdoors in the yard was like home, where oftentimes the stark North Carolina sun had been her only real company. The companion of her secret.