How Are You Going to Save Yourself

by JM Holmes

  Sylvester came into his periphery and gave him the thumbs-up. Once you passed thirty seconds on the line, the odds skyrocketed.

  Dub felt sick, but a gun owner was already paranoid, he rationalized. You don’t? Well, do you know that, on average, it takes a determined criminal only seven seconds to reach your bedroom upon entry? There was a silence. He knew it was the moment, didn’t know if he could push it any further. You’re not the only man with a gun…

  ON THE MORNING of the shoot, Simone drove her mom home from the doctor before heading up to Boston. The doctor had put her on new medication. It was supposed to cut relapses in half. Simone had asked about side effects and who the manufacturer was. She distrusted American doctors. Her friend’s mom in high school had gone home to visit relatives in Ecuador and came back with her lupus cured. Sometimes she thought the whole country revolved around keeping people sick. Orthodontics seemed clear-cut—straightening teeth, a service important but without hearts on the line. Plus, she could hook up cheap dental care on the low. She’d seen her dad fix cars in exchange for food or help putting up their deck or cheap plumbing. Sometimes he even fixed them for free.

  She didn’t tell her mom where she was headed, didn’t want her to worry or question it. She’d come home with the pictures, maybe even a dress. She’d heard that sometimes models got to keep the clothes. She could store it away for when L finally asked her, or maybe she could sell it to help toward the down payment. She couldn’t imagine what the dress would be worth. Then the paintings would come out and even if people had no idea who she was, they’d be awed by her likeness. Not the way her boss complimented her haircuts, with that smile that suggested something else.

  When she arrived, the pitchers of water were filled with cucumber slices and mint leaves, and the light falling through the factory windows made the space look like a ballroom. She’d assumed all the old factory buildings in East Boston had been abandoned, but this was an oasis. Refurbished light fixtures hung from the ceiling in steel-cocoon blossoms. The place was sparsely furnished, but the floor was new. People whirled around wearing satchels and capes. Other women looked side-eyed at the whole affair. These were not the naive young women who made the news for being taken advantage of. These were not even the cocoa-butter ones who got snatched up as video vixens. These were women in their late twenties and thirties. Still, some of them scrambled through their bags looking for accessories or checking themselves in small flip mirrors, reawakening a dream in themselves like teenagers, a dream they’d thought long dead.

  Simone didn’t want L’s dreams to dry up, just to age and mature. She was supportive, she just wanted him to be smart. In high school, he would convince his boy Rolls to borrow camcorders from his dad’s store and charge kids at school to shoot their crappy music videos. Simone actually thought they were good with the camera, and L had the charisma to get girls in the video and knew enough people to fill out the flicks and make the rappers look tough when they weren’t. Still, the end product was always grimy. Same as when L had done a short stint as a club promoter and even gelled his hair like a guido. She knew that the city maintenance job meant family benefits and guarantees. Who wouldn’t back that? But he didn’t want the life she did, or if he did, she couldn’t always tell.

  For her, the shoot existed outside all that. She let the space wash over her and took a break, took it in. The workers exuded fashion above the daily, not all flashy, but demanding a second glance. Some became new personas and switched bodies—men to women and back again. The clothes they wore made their fluidity clear. L would’ve said they looked like skinny-ass Prince look-alikes or some other stupid shit. If she had moved to Boston after school like her classmates, she wondered if she would have gained entry to this life. She tried to envision L stuffed into the poncho of the skinny man who was ushering her toward the woman taking measurements. The poncho probably would’ve made L blend in with the aging men out around the Transit Center wearing dresses and capes and belly shirts two sizes too small. She frowned.

  “Not many lights,” Simone said to the skinny man.

  “Better contrast,” he said. “Don’t worry, your painting will look like prom-night photos on the world’s best crack.” The man left without introducing her to the woman measuring.

  Simone didn’t even register it, already transfixed by the dresses. They weren’t all folds and lace like she’d expected. Some were simple, dark blues and shades of black, exposing radiant patches of shoulder. Some looked Grecian, the women dark-skinned beneath the white toga-cut dresses.

  The woman eyed her closely and scanned the rack adjacent. She began holding different dresses against Simone. “Tall,” she said.

  Simone couldn’t help but smile. She’d never been the slump-shouldered type. Some of the dresses had fishtails. Some were hemmed short. She couldn’t stop staring at a charcoal one with blue hues, a dress she could wear out into the world without looking insane.

  The woman followed Simone’s eyes and pulled it off the rack. “This reads nice on your skin,” she said. She began moving efficiently around Simone, measuring and pinning fabric back in places. It actually wasn’t too different from the way her mother had measured her when she was little. The movements relaxed her.

  It wasn’t a cookout dress, but she could get away with it at a quinceañera, or maybe L would take her to Trinity Rep to see Memphis, though she knew he wouldn’t. He hated musicals like her family hated Lucifer. She wanted to twirl and see the dress’s angles in the mirror and had to check herself. She wasn’t going to let a dress turn her into a child. Instead, she stood straight-backed in the mirror and smiled, slowly striking poses and realizing how natural it all felt.

  DUB WOKE UP with the sun. He’d had nightmares about having to move in with Mone and her family and her dad snuffing him out on the couch. Her dad had never been a big fan. He didn’t say it outright but he always spoke about what his nephews were doing. One even worked for Google. Dub wanted to throw shots at him for being an out-of-work mechanic, but Mone respected her father too much and he knew not to cross that line.

  After two glasses of water and a clear piss, he tried to do the math. Without getting any commission, he could swing another month’s rent. He knew Sylvester was just waiting to fire his ass, but he tried to put that out of his mind. All morning, he lounged around mad that he had the night shift again. Around lunch and after a nap, he heard steps on the stairs. The stairs were so shot they even made Mone sound like the police.

  She’d brought the photos. For Dub, the snapshots looked too much like rich people’s marriage pictures—people he and Mone could laugh at in the mall arguing over Pottery Barn shit, maybe his boy G’s people. He tried to stay positive. Mone did look impressive in the dress, even though it was still a little baggy on her figure. He couldn’t lie, he preferred her in booty shorts or black skirts with platforms, sundresses, or just panties and high heels. His memory was a distracting motherfucker. He liked Mone a lot of ways. The pictures were crisp, but he thought that any creative nigga could take a decent photo. If she wanted a photo shoot, he had boys who could do it.

  Mone was excited to see what the test shots became. Dub looked at the gold hoop earrings she wore in the photo and couldn’t stop thinking of the ones she used to wear with her name in the center, bought at the bodega where the case had a hundred names. He thought about the nonexistent money that’d been coming in from work lately, and the house seemed like a distant memory and the only way forward.

  “They look aight,” he said.

  She frowned and held out another photo. “They’re going to tailor the dress just for me.”

  Dub got up and started getting ready for work.

  “No comment?” she said.

  “I don’t wanna watch you get played,” he said.

  She wanted to hit him. “Stop being ignorant.”

  He picked up her photos and threw them across the room.

  There was silence.

  He looked at himself in
the mirror, but only quickly, avoiding getting lost there. She was the reason he even had a high-school diploma. But the words came before he could stop himself. “Any dumb-ass with a camera can make you look good.” His hands kept struggling with the buttons on his shirt and he felt old, too old, like he had missed his cue to change.

  “Your dumb-ass friends?” she said.

  “My friends? Your girls are fucking lames.”

  “Yeah, just like you,” she said.

  He stopped messing with his shirt. “Okay, Miss Secretary.”

  At least some of his boys had gone, left the city. Many hadn’t. A few came back. Ty started a foundation for ball players to “end the violence.” He still had the same big ears and deep voice. He didn’t live here anymore. Dub didn’t want to either. His brother had left. Dub liked the sounds of dogs barking and kids running around, but twenty-eight years in the city was too long.

  Simone clenched her jaw. She’d swung on him once before. She’d broken lamps and flipped end tables. Now she simply collected the photos that were on the ground.

  Dub became nervous. He was used to her cussing and fighting back. He felt the distance all at once. She wouldn’t look at him.

  “Mone!” He tried to make his voice cut but she only shook her head. She gathered her things and was gone before he could say anything else.

  He spent the better part of an hour comparing his life to his boys’, his brother’s, shit he wasn’t prone to. He’d always had a side hustle—hooking up his boy Gio with phones to sell when he went abroad, Mitchell & Ness jerseys back in the day, mix tapes, movies. Not that he was on a fast track to wealth, but he was never stationary. Now he couldn’t even remember his last project. Nick had bought a house at twenty-five. Rolls was opening his own exhibits and making 60K doing graphic design for G-Tech. Dub couldn’t even change the odds for his own girl. Outside the window, on the stoop across the street, some little kids in shirts three sizes too big were playing taps with a worn ball, throwing pass after no-look pass. The clock caught his eye and he realized he’d have to start walking to catch the bus.

  DUB PEELED AND ate his oranges before he even picked up the phone to make his first call. His mom always told him to watch his blood sugar—fruits unfurl slow, burn low. She’d also told him never to eat Chinese food because it was prechopped, and prechopped chicken and prechopped seagull look real similar. He’d outgrown that one.

  Sylvester came up behind him and rubbed his shoulders like an old friend. “How you feel, how you feel, how you feel?”

  Dub shrugged his hands off. They weren’t contact-close. “I feel like—” Knocking you out is what he thought. “Making some sales,” he said.

  “My man.” Sylvester took the peels from the table and shot them into the trash like he was Paul Pierce pulling up from deep. “Bottoms!” he said.

  Dub ran his hands over his head and realized he needed a cut bad.

  Throughout the night, he went blank during calls and got hung up on before he could even get started. He felt nervous the way he used to before his big football games in high school. He thought about Mone standing in front of lights and being ogled, but then he thought about a different reality—her nervous and making herself small. He realized he never worried about her moving in the world, only about her moving away from him. He’d found himself a fighter and never questioned it, but when she didn’t even care enough to yell, he was done for.

  He imagined her with the fans blowing and cameras flashing and all the other model clichés. Work it, doll. Lift your chin up. You’re a lioness. He imagined the room arrayed around her in that charcoal dress. There probably was a professional smoothie maker and stylists named things like Sky and Fuzz. All he could think of was a convention hall and people in chairs like it was the Oscars. He didn’t know shit about a photo shoot. Then his mind switched quick and he thought of amateur porn videos where the whole flick was a setup and the women were bad actors. He thought of a girl from high school, panicked, and called his boy Rolls.

  “What’s good with you?” Rolls said.

  Dub told him about the shoot and the house and work.

  “I got tree.”

  “Nigga, I’m calling you from work,” Dub said.

  “Right.” There was a long silence. “You ever think it could be legit? Mone’s bad. Maybe she just lucked into this.”

  “Come on, now, how many girls we came up with actually end up modeling for real? Remember Bria?”

  “Yeah, I seen the video.”

  Dub could hear Rolls sipping something on the other end. “You faded?” he asked.

  “Trying.” There was another pause. “You’re acting real paranoid. You have to figure she’s gonna get something out of it.” Rolls sipped again.

  “Yeah,” Dub said. He searched his mind for something to say but there was nothing.

  “One photo shoot isn’t gonna make her leave you,” Rolls said. “Maybe stop being an asshole.”

  “You’re high,” Dub said.

  “But not wrong.”

  Dub heard the ice in the cup.

  “Come through after work,” Rolls told him.

  THE DRESS FIT perfect. It didn’t pinch or bunch anywhere. It moved with her, tight up top and draping below her waist like fancy curtains. She’d seen these types of dresses in the closets of some of her former classmates, smooth and stitched to suit their personalities. Cameron and his people had decided to rent out a warehouse in Chelsea, not far from the Tobin Bridge. She thought it was strange that the shoot was taking place so close to the hood, but then she remembered that artists always wanted to be close. She held on to her dress like it was money she’d found in her pocket. It slid with her hips like snakeskin. The seamstress had to pull her out of it, otherwise she would’ve worn it the whole day.

  A pretty man named Manny did her makeup and hair. She was disappointed that they straightened and curled it. They were turning her into a brown Princess Di.

  “Do you like it?” Cameron asked Manny. He was posted in the doorway of the bathroom they’d annexed.

  “Do you like it?” Manny repeated.

  “You’re going to call me Boss Man next,” Cameron told Manny and let a cheap laugh go. “You look majestic,” he said to Mone. He stepped back, looked again, then left the bathroom.

  In the mirror, she watched as her hair was burnt into a bouquet. She couldn’t stop thinking about the dress and hating herself for getting giddy. She thought about the clothes her mom made—uneven at the seams if you got close enough to notice.

  IN THE CONFUSION after the shoot, Simone forgot to ask any questions. She’d expected Cameron to invite them all out, but dinner got delivered to the warehouse, vegetable quiche and tomato soup—good for their humors, according to a fecalist—and then all of a sudden, Cameron was no more. His assistants gave the models their reservation confirmations for the hotel and said Cameron’d be in touch about the exhibit date. It was going to be months later anyway. Simone took in all the info as if it weren’t her being painted. She peered out the windows to be sure he was really gone, evaporated. She came from a long line of people who believed in ghosts and she started to doubt the whole event. As the rack of dresses got wheeled away, she managed to ask about their final resting places.

  “They go back to the fashion houses,” the assistant said. “They get altered for the runway.”

  “Right.” Simone turned away from the woman, thankful she was too dark to show the blood in her face.

  Hours later, at the Hilton she wished she’d just driven home. She lay on the bed in one of Dub’s old shirts with her hands tucked inside, feeling the smooth of her stomach, pressing on her belly button until she felt the tingle in her gut that always made her shiver a bit. The TV was off and she kept the curtains closed because her room faced away from the skyline. She was alone with the questions she’d never asked—back at college, letting go of the connections she should have stayed in contact with and pressed for job interviews, and long before that, as
a girl in seventh grade getting asked to join the mock trial team and swallowing the invitation down inside her, letting it die there, not wanting to argue with her parents about the value, having to pay for the trips, not even wanting to ask. Weekends were for church and housework.

  She thought of Cameron in the studio with her images, transforming her into a woman who asked for things owed to her. She was still to be unveiled to the world. That was something to look forward to—some ceremony that would change her in the way she always thought a doctorate might. Doctors are never left behind. They are saluted in their own way. She had a lot of cousins who’d joined the Marines for less. She rolled over onto her stomach and fell asleep on top of the covers.

  THE WAIT SET in. Dub had been the lowest-selling salesman two months in a row. Mone’d kept giving him rides to work the past few months even though she was silent the whole way. He’d ask about her DAT prep or her parents, his own form of apology. He could see there was something she wanted to tell him, but she said “Fine” and nothing else. At least she kept the routine, though. At the end of the third month, Sylvester told him he’d have no choice but to fire him if things stayed the same.

  A few days later Mone said she couldn’t take him to work. She gave no reason and hung up before Dub could press her. At the bus station, he sat next to a woman who needed sleep bad. Her eyes fluttered closed again and again. The 78 was behind schedule and he started to hate Mone. He knew she could withhold a lot of shit—sex, communication, whatever—but she was fucking with his job, the one thing she was always bitching at him to keep. She knew better. He didn’t know if it was a final warning or if she had really stopped giving a fuck. The woman next to him smelled sweet, like lotion. He wondered where she was off to or coming home from. He loved the way Mone smelled when her perfume had time to mix with her sweat a little. The smell could make him cross-eyed even after all these years. That was something not to take for granted. He knew that. In a different life, they would settle down like his bro and his wife, in a suburb, have people over for parties. He tried to laugh at himself. What type of caged-bird shit was that? Maybe they’d met too early. Or maybe he’d just made the wrong moves, falling out with his connection in the mayor’s office and messing up his in with the city, not taking Mone up on the classes so he could get his associate’s—shit, not even staying in shape. He prodded his gut every day before putting his work clothes on. He tried to run a few times a week, but after a mile he’d stop and sit in Slater Park watching teenagers skip class to get high, same way he used to do.