by Sean Stewart
“Are you sure you’re not in love?” Candy said.
I hugged my jacket in its crinkly paper shopping bag. “Not yet, but here’s hoping.”
At Starbucks I let Candy examine the tags and turn the shoes over, plotting makeup, while I sipped my cup of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, the recommended special. I felt giddy and lighthearted, watching the ice skaters three stories below, bumping and circling. Putting an ice-skating rink in the middle of a mall in sweltering Houston was a stroke of genius, I thought, a perfect way of saying that at the Galleria, you really could get anything.
Most of the skaters were hapless: eight-year-old boys trying it on a dare, or thrill-seeking visitors from Panama in rented skates. An elderly couple I judged to be transplanted Canadians did better. But the class of the field was one young woman who had clearly trained as a figure skater. While the rest of them milled and slipped and tottered their way about, clinging to the boards or creeping gingerly along, she swept around the rink backwards, her head cocked over one shoulder to see where she was going, controlled and wholly beautiful. The hair she wore in a short swing was the same beautiful auburn shade Momma used to get out of the Clairol box. She was going terrifically fast, but her strides were long and smooth, nearly motionless, so that she seemed to glide swiftly and effortlessly among the other skaters, soaring like a gull among pigeons.
(“You will never be as pretty as your sister.” We’re at Candy’s junior high-school graduation. Momma has leaned over and whispered it to me, so softly that Daddy, on the other side of her, can’t hear. “It’s not just the dress and the smile,” she whispers. “She is pretty and you are plain.” I sit stiffly in my chair. “O baby,” she whispers. Her breath is warm against my neck. I can smell her hair-spray. “Oh, baby, and I’m just so sorry.” Something wet and hot touches my neck. It’s one of her tears. I know the way they feel, oh yes.)
“Candy.”
“What?”
“I got lost for a minute,” I said carefully. “In my head.” The whiteness was back, the whiteness that had eaten my thoughts away just before the Widow mounted me the day we buried Momma. “Candy. Candy, help me.”
“Oh shit, Toni, what can I do?”
A cold whiteness, like the ice below.
The light in the Galleria’s atrium dimmed, as if it were a movie theatre and the show was starting. Silence fell over the two Mexican women who had been bantering at the table next to us. Down below, the skaters faltered and looked up, all except for the young woman with auburn hair. The light failed and darkness came on, but still she soared and circled, gathering speed, weaving between the boys cluttering the ice and their parents and the teenaged girls and the elderly couple who stood still, looking up at the darkening sky as if suddenly afraid. A silence stretched out, carved by her skates cutting into the ice. She gathered herself and then she leapt, high, high in the air, arms and legs spinning, and her auburn hair.
I didn’t see her come down. Blindness washed through me, and I smelled peaches.
“Sugar!” I tried to push back my chair, tried to stand up and keep moving, tried to look away from the ice and the skaters circling, circling. My right foot froze to the carpet, ice racing up it from the rink far below. I wrenched it up, pulling with both hands. People were staring but I didn’t care. All I cared about was living, living, not letting the goddess come for me, not letting her blot me out.
The smell of peaches suddenly redoubled and my head spun with it. Heat, flies, fruit and liquor. Secrets. Sex. “No,” I whispered.
It didn’t save me.
“Toni? Toni—come sit out here with me for a minute. I’m going to tell you a story.” I am eighteen. It’s later on the night of Candy’s junior-high graduation. I am still angry, so angry at what Momma said to me, whispering that Candy was pretty and I was plain.
Momma is sitting in the garden with her back to the French doors, but somehow she has sensed me tiptoeing barefoot across the kitchen tiles. I could pretend not to hear her, but I don’t. I have come to dread Momma’s stories, but living in this family has made me honest. Bitterly, resentfully honest. I scorn to lie.
Momma has the most beautiful voice. Sometimes she claims to have been an actress in her younger days. I can’t prove that, but no one who hears her speak can deny the power of her voice; not clear at all, but worn soft with smoking and tears and bourbon, and laughter too. I don’t think I’ve told you how much my mother laughed, or how much her laughter sounded like crying.
When I was a little kid, I use to love it when she told me her stories. If she was lying propped in bed in her pink nightgown of Chantilly lace I would come curl up with my head on her lap while she stroked my hair. On summer nights out in the garden I would sit next to her and close my eyes to listen better. Texas folk legend has it that Skin-So-Soft moisturizing cream works as a mosquito repellent, so we spent all summer wiped down with it, and I would breathe in the skin lotion and cigarette and hair spray smells that drifted from Momma into the lilac-scented night. As I grew up I began to suspect that her stories had a point to them. Maybe they always did, and I just hadn’t noticed.
“Come set yourself over here.” Momma pats the arm of the wrought-iron chair next to hers. Her voice is lazy, calm as a slow creek in dry weather. “No, I’ll tell you what. Get us a couple of those little Cokes out of the fridge and bring them here, would you, honey? It’s a night for it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She’s right, the Cokes are cold and taste pretty good. She always buys the little ones, the six and a half ounce ones in the old-style glass bottles that stay cold to your touch long after they leave the refrigerator. It’s been dry for a spell and the mosquitoes aren’t so bad with our Skin-So-Soft on. We talk a while about nothing in particular. She never mentions Candy’s name. I give short, sullen answers. Finally the effort to make small talk becomes too burdensome and Momma says, “Did I ever tell you the story of the time the Little Lost Girl took Sugar to be her mother?” Which is a lie because I know she’s just now made it up.
“No, ma’am,” I say. Not wanting to encourage her; not willing to leave and miss hearing the story.
“Would you like to hear it?”
“I reckon you’re going to tell it to me.”
She has a little more of her Coke. “I reckon I am,” she says.
Well, she’s been a-walking and a-walking, that Little Lost Girl, trying to get back to her momma’s house, but the longer she walks, the lost-er she gets, and never has she found that house where she was born, with the white paint on the fence and the yellow trim around the door and the big live-oak tree with the swing outside.
Finally one day she sees Sugar sittin’ out on a step. “’Morning, ma’am,” she says. Real polite, like she was taught.
“Well, hello, sweetie,” Sugar says, with a tired smile. “How is it with you this fine day?”
“’Bout that poorly,” says the Little Lost Girl. “I been all this time a-walking and I ain’t ever found my home. I reckon I could walk the rest of my life and not find it, neither. My momma left me and now I’m lost for good.” And she sets herself down beside Sugar and starts to cry. “Can’t I just stay with you? You’re the only one that’s nice to me, and I am so tired of all this walking on my lonesome.”
“Oh, honey-child,” says Sugar, “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
Well, the Little Lost Girl starts in to crying and blubbering and holding on to Sugar’s arm, piteous as a baby bird, until finally Sugar, whose heart is soft as tar in summer, agrees to let her tag along. “Well all right,” she says, “but there’s one rule you’ll have to mind if you want to come with me, and that is No Crying. I can’t ever cry, and if you come with me, then you can’t neither.”
“Why can’t you cry?” asks the Little Lost Girl.
“Sweetie, ain’t nobody wants to see Sugar cry. Okay?” The little girl nods. “I have to warn you, we ain’t done walking yet. I haven’t had me a bite to eat in about a day or
maybe two. We’re gonna have to find us a friend.”
(Just here Momma stops and looks at me to make sure I’m paying close attention, which I am.)
So Sugar wipes the tears off that Little Lost Girl, and brushes her hair, and rubs the spots out of her dress. Then she puts her lipstick on, and her earrings, and smooths out her little red dress, and bites her lips a few times until the pink comes up, and then they set out together to find a friend who might give them something to eat. The first person they meet is Pierrot, standing on a corner juggling apples. Sugar gives him her prettiest laugh. “You must be the most talented fellow alive, I do declare.”
“Hey, sweet thing! Do you want to have some—oh. Too bad about the kid,” he says, with a wink. “We might have had a little fun together, you and me.”
“Maybe I could come back later?” Sugar asks, a little desperate.
“Oh, well. Sure. Try around about lunchtime,” Pierrot says, and he saunters off. But when lunchtime comes and they go back to Pierrot’s corner, he isn’t there anymore. A shopkeeper says he went off with a real cute young lady not so long ago, and he hasn’t been back since.
“Thank you,” Sugar tells him, and gives him her pretty smile. She stands outside a minute, fussing at her reflection in the shop window. It’s been a while now since she’s eaten, and it’s hard to get the color into her lips and face the way she likes it.
“Sorry,” the Little Lost Girl says.
“Don’t you worry, honey,” Sugar says. “We’ll get us a bite here sometime soon.”
But they didn’t. They walked all afternoon and by quitting time they still hadn’t found Pierrot, and Sugar was beginning to look a little shaky.
They’re just walking down the boulevard when the Little Lost Girl smells this smell of hot dust and gasoline, and Mr. Copper’s car rolls up beside them. “Sugar,” says a voice from inside. It’s so dark inside that car, the little girl can’t even see Mr. Copper, but she can hear his dry, smooth voice. “Sugar,” says the voice again.
Sugar pretends not to hear.
“You look a mite hungry,” says the dry, smooth voice. Still Sugar doesn’t turn around. “I have food for you.” The car keeps creeping along beside them. “I have food for the little girl too.”
Without turning Sugar says, “What do you want for it?”
“Come here and I will tell you.” The car rolls to a stop. Sugar looks down at the little girl, and then slowly walks to the curb and leans into the open window.
A minute later she stands straight again, and Mr. Copper’s car drives off into the night. “No food?” says the Little Lost Girl.
“Not from him. Not yet,” Sugar says.
“What did he want for it?”
“I reckon that’s none of your business,” Sugar says. The Little Lost Girl doesn’t ask again.
Well, they keep on, walking into some pretty sorry neighborhoods, until about sunset they find themselves at the Preacher’s mission, a little white church with a cross on top that stands out among the shacks and tenements like a bleached skull with a hundred candles burning inside. The church is crowded with a long line of women waiting. At the back there’s tables covered with every kind of delicious food, brisket and sausage and fried chicken and mashed potatoes and fresh green beans and yellow squash and on and on. Standing before the pulpit is the Preacher, with his long black coat over his long white bones, and his two eyes burning in his head like train lamps far down a tunnel. As each woman comes forward he says, “Daughter, have you climbed into Mr. Copper’s car?”
Mostly the women say yes when he asks them this question. Some do it real quick and soft, but he makes them say it right out loud, where everyone can hear it. And after each woman confesses, the Preacher grabs her chin in one white hand, and with a brand in the other he presses the image of a snake onto her forehead. It doesn’t seem to hurt exactly, but the Little Lost Girl can tell that afterwards many of them are crying. Once a woman is branded, the Preacher waves her over to the tables of food. There are clean clothes over there too, and clean white panties and hose and sturdy shoes.
Once, not long after Sugar and the little girl get into the church, a pretty, red-haired woman says, “No.” At that the Preacher shakes his head, and asks his question again, and then once more, and each time she says no. The Preacher says, “And if ye not repent, how can ye be saved?” and he sends her away without any food.
“Sugar?” the little girl whispers. “What should we do? He won’t give us any food if we say we didn’t go with Mr. Copper. But if we do, we’ll be fibbing.”
“Sometimes you have to tell a man what he wants to hear,” Sugar says, a little sadly. “It’s not your fault for telling a lie, then; it’s his fault for hearing it.”
The Little Lost Girl wasn’t sure what her mother would have said about that, but her mind was made up by the sight of all those candles and all that food, and the thought of the darkness outside, and the men sitting on their porch steps watching her go by.
When they get to the front of the line the Preacher glares at Sugar. “Daughter, have you climbed into Mr. Copper’s car?”
“Well, hang it all, I must have done,” Sugar says, good and loud, so he won’t make her say it again. Then the Preacher reaches out and grabs her chin with one cold hard hand, and with the other he presses the snake brand into her forehead.
Then he points at the table and pushes her and the little girl along. He doesn’t even look at them again, like he doesn’t care a lick about Sugar except for getting her confession. The food is wonderful, and the Little Lost Girl is grateful for the clothes, especially the shoes, as she has worn hers about down to strings. Sugar helps the Little Lost Girl load up her plate with cornbread and ribs and black-eyed peas and stewed okra and a big slice of sweet potato pie. Then, when they are done, they go together to a little room at the back of the church to sleep.
The next morning, when Sugar wakes up, the Little Lost Girl says, “Thank you so much for having me along, but I b’lieve I’ll make my own way from here.”
“Well, if you must,” says Sugar, who doesn’t seem any too broke up about it.
“I don’t think your days are any much easier than mine, and if I’m going to be always walking, maybe I better look for my very own house with the yellow trim and the white picket fence,” the little girl says.
Then Sugar kisses her on the cheek and gives her a hug and wishes her well, and the Little Lost Girl goes back to walking on her lonesome, where she doesn’t have to care so much about Pierrot and Mr. Copper and the Preacher, and she can just think about getting back to her very own home. And if she hasn’t found it, she’s walking still.
My mother takes another sip of her Coke.
“Is that the end of the story?”
“Nearly,” Momma says. “Not quite.” She reaches over and to my surprise she takes my hand, the one holding my Coke, and brings it to her lips and kisses the back of it, on my knuckles, and lays it against her cheek. “The only other thing to tell is how some time later—I don’t know how long; a few weeks maybe—the Little Lost Girl is out walking in the middle of the night. It’s late, really late, but she’s too scared to fall asleep, she’s back in a bad part of town, so she just keeps walking. Finally she sees a building up ahead that looks empty and she thinks maybe she could find a little corner inside to sleep in. But when she gets closer she sees there’s light coming out of one solitary window. So she creeps up to that window and stands up on her tiptoes and peeks inside.
“There she sees the strangest thing. She sees Pierrot and the Preacher and Mr. Copper in the same room together, playing dominos. From the cigarettes in the ashtray and the empty bottles on Mr. Copper’s side of the table she can tell they’ve been playing together for a long time. The dominos are white as bones, and click together at every play. And the strangest thing is, the tablecloth they’re playing on is brown and black and red and gold, all kinds of soft colors. When the Little Lost Girl squints a little harder, she sees t
hat’s because it’s woven up from real girls’ hair.” Momma presses my fingers to her cheek and kisses my hand. “Do you understand, baby?”
I realize I have been holding my breath. “No, ma’am.”
Momma kisses my hand again and looks at me. “It’s all made from beautiful, beautiful girls’ hair.”
And that’s the end of the story.
Some time after Sugar mounted me in the Galleria she walked out of me again, leaving my head pounding. My breath came in great whooping gasps and I sobbed helplessly, completely unstrung. Every part of me was trembling with exhaustion. The crying jerked my whole body, making my shoulders jiggle, and my thighs and my feet, limp as a jellyfish.
“Oh, thank God,” Candy said. “You’re back.”
I tried to nod, but it came out as more crying. I hadn’t been able to open my eyes yet, but there was crushed velour under my cheek and we were moving. Candy was driving me around in the old Oldsmobile Momma had given her. The car slowed and gave the kind of rolling nod that Candy uses to recognize stop signs. We turned a corner and drove on.
I had forgotten how soothing it was to lie in the back of a car. Momma told me any number of times that I had been a colicky baby. There was many a day when she had lost her temper with my fussing and shoved me into Daddy’s arms after dinner and he would take me out in his old Chevy Impala and drive around Houston, and I always went silent as a lamb, they said, as soon as the car started up, and would go to sleep before he drove a mile.
Candy must have remembered the same stories. I opened my eyes. “How long was it?” I asked.
“About two hours.”
Sugar had mounted me for two hours. I knew it had to have been her from the peaches smell. Momma always had the same smell on her when Sugar was in her head.
I squeaked and tried to sit up. “Two hours? With Sugar? In the Galleria!” My legs felt cold. I looked down and gasped. I was wearing a skirt so short it showed the top of a black stocking at the hem. Stupidly I tried to tug it down, but there wasn’t any more to tug. And garters. I was wearing garters. I could feel the cool elastic against my thighs. And a pair of panties you could mistake for a Kleenex. “Omigod.”