Saint Monkey

by Jacinda Townsend

  “Mrs. Owington,” I call her, trying to make my “t’s” as sharp as the man in Lexington’d made his, “thank you for hostessing. I can promise you, you won’t be sorry. Fuller Cosmetics are fine, fine stuff. And as a token of my appreciation, I would just love it if you’d select a gift of your choice. You can go ahead and look at what I got if you like.” It’s what the manual suggested, and it makes Mother Owington smile like it’s Christmas, so I guess that manual is on to something.

  While she’s bent over my case, with her big grandmama-of-­seventeen butt hanging out behind her, two more ladies from church walk in. Velma Ray and Wanda Hagston, both of them shaking their umbrellas out like they was twins. “How do,” I say, even though I can’t stand neither one of them. According to a manual, a lady salesperson cannot afford to be petty. She must put aside her differences for the sake of enterprise.

  “Whyn’t you have a sit down,” I say then, to Wanda Hagston, on account of she’s the one I like the least. And then I get the magnifying mirror out, just like the manual says do, and I show her all her enlarged pores, and all her little blackheads what look like buried ticks by the time the mirror gets through with them. “You look like a 41,” I tell her, and when I get out the tin and open it up, it does match almost perfectly. “Maybe a 43?” I say, but when I sponge that on it makes her darker, and the manual says Negro ladies won’t want that no matter how true it is to their complexion, so I go back to the 41 and start sponging. I sponge and sponge, and it’s hard to make her look decent because it turns out her skin is drier than you might think looking at all them blackheads, and little flakes of skin keep rolling up like carrot skin. So I end up rubbing in some of the mineral oil they put in the side pocket of the suitcase, and that makes Wanda’s face smooth as a baby’s ass. I put a little mascara on her lashes, but I don’t go crazy with the rouge or the eye shadow, on account of I can tell it wouldn’t look right with the mismatched makeup. When I hand her the normal-size mirror, she smiles like she’s just seen Jesus imprinted on her forehead, and she asks me what else I got besides the tin of 41. So I end up selling her eleven dollars’ worth of full face, which ain’t bad considering I know for a fact they ain’t had sugar in the house for three weeks.

  Next I do up Velma Ray, who has the opposite problem from Wanda, so before I get started I wipe her face with something called astringent. “Feels good, don’t it,” I tell her. “It’s cleansing you.” The manual says to say this, on account of really the astringent is full of enough alcohol to make your face feel like it’s in hell. But people’ll do anything to get clean. Say “cleansing” and they think it’s something ordained by God. So I clean Velma up and sponge a little 35 on her, and since she’s so yellow-skinned, I dab her on with a little blue eye shadow just for fun. When she looks in the mirror, ’course, here she comes screaming, “I look like a savage!” So I spread some brown shadow over the blue and that makes her happy, and then I lie and tell her it’s the blending of the two colors that’s the trick, and she ends up buying the blue and the brown plus six dollars’ worth of 35.

  Well, in the meantime, while I’ve been doing Wanda and Velma, five or six more ladies done come down to the basement looking for a good time, and I can hear them chatting each other up the wall and back down. I hear snatches of the conversation, like Miss Nettie telling Mother Owington how the salamanders are tearing up her flower bed, and old Grandmama Cundiff telling Pauline Burke how she ought to mind that she don’t catch a summer cold out here in a June rain with no coat on, the 85 degrees of Fahrenheit notwithstanding. I hear people laughing, and I smell clashing perfumes, and I’ve got two crisp fives and seven ones in my pocket, which is a good six dollars over my wholesale, and I’m almost to where I feel like I might fall in love with the whole flock of them, when who comes and sets in my chair but Colette Smith. And she’s going to be really hard to do, I can tell it. Not only because of the way her nose and her forehead shine against the rest of her dull, dull face, but on account of she’s setting here holding Junebug’s baby. It’s a right cute baby, I got to say, with a head full of hair and Junebug’s pretty Junebug eyes. But that just makes it worse. It’s like Junebug setting right here watching me, asking me what the hell do I think I’m doing, being a saleslady.

  “Discount’s only for Second Baptist members,” I tell her.

  She shrugs. Says, “Do me up anyway.”

  I start in on her with some 23, and I got to say she does have some fine skin. Ain’t a blemish nowhere, so all I’m really doing with that 23 is putting a little red over her high yellow to make her look sassy. Everbody else looked straight ahead of them when I was doing their eyes, but Colette looks right up at me, right into my eyes where things is awkward between us. And evertime that baby gets its little hand up on her shirt she takes and pushes it away, like it ain’t just going to throw that hand right back up and wave it around something crazy. The way she stuffs the baby’s hand back into its own lap ever time it wants her, it’s just nasty.

  “That a girl or a boy?” I ask, on account of it’s got on green and I can’t tell.

  She narrows her eyes at me. “Don’t make no difference, do it? Boy, it’ll grow up and work down to the ice plant. Girl, it’ll stick around Shake Rag and have five squalling kids by somebody who works down to the ice plant. Boy or girl, it’s going to be screaming and puking on me for the next couple years no matter who its daddy’s out screwing.”

  I take my sponge away from her face to let some air rush over her nastiness. I tell her, “I was just trying to make small talk.”

  “You don’t need to.”

  I brush powder down her nose and she’s still looking at me, and her eyes are so full of water the tears are about to brim, which I don’t understand not one bit. Here she is setting here with the prize—Junebug’s baby. She will go home and fix Junebug his supper and iron his maroon ice plant uniform and tickle his baby’s stomach. She’ll get his good money and a roof over her high yellow head and hundred percent guaranteed loving ever night while I’m running around town following some stupid 32-page manual. She’s safe, and Junebug running around on her don’t water that down none. And she ain’t really fat, neither. She’s just soft on top, with a big blimpy bosom, and that makes her look like a cow from a distance, but really, she’s got a right nice bone structure round the face, and tiny little wrists like a Barbie doll’s.

  “Okay, then, I’ll just do your face, honey,” I tell her. I still ain’t sure why she’s mad at me, and I can tell she ain’t going to buy nothing on account of she ain’t asked about the product, but she acts like she’s got a right to the free makeover.

  “Yeah. Do my face. You and Audrey always did think y’all knew how to boogie faster’n the rest of us. And maybe she does. But I bet you all the tea in China you end up stuck here just like the rest of us. Doing everbody’s face.”

  I finish her up with a quickness, and she looks just like a clown at the end of what I do for her, and I’ve even put little diamond shapes on her eyelids, and when I show it to her in the mirror she drops her jaw.

  “I figure that’s an improvement,” I say.

  And then I feel like the party’s over, so when Miss Nettles comes and sets down in my chair, I tell her she don’t need no makeup a tall and I’m doing her a favor by telling her. Ain’t nothing the manual would ever approve of, naturally, so I tell her even perfect skin needs a little mascara on the eyes to set against it. She looks over at Grandmama Cundiff and winks without smiling, and Grandmama Cundiff throws up her hands. “Darlin’, we’ll just buy ten dollars’ worth of whatever you’re selling. Figure we need to help the party, what with your mama being dead and gone.”

  Well, that just stops everthing. Brings it to a dead hush. Even the baby picks up that something’s wrong and turns quiet, and I get so mad, thinking they all think they’re better’n me because I’m out trying to make a buck off their ugly asses. But I remember what it said in the manual, about how enterprise and pettiness can’t live
together, and I think about that New Year’s Eve ball and that convention in Chicago what ain’t none of these bitches ever going to, and I smile at them all. Just like a cosmetics model would. “Thank you, Miss Smith,” I tell Colette, while I shake her hand in between both of mine, and then I lean over and kiss her baby, even though it’s done fell to sleep. I shake Wanda Hagston’s hand and say thank you. I say it again and again, six times over, and when I get to Mother Owington, I ask her whether she’s picked her gift.

  “Can I have a bottle of that astringent?”

  I never would of figured. But I should’ve.

  I’m wore clean out by the time I get home, so I set down on the porch bench next to Grandmama, who’s sitting straight up sleep the way only dying people can do, with her hand lost through two undone buttons on her housecoat. She itches her chest in her sleep, then sets back to snoring again, and I look out on old Mr. Fleenor, wandering the stations of his yard and talking to hisself, and I wonder what he was like when he was my age, whether he ever had gals to come kiss him, and whether he ever got time to just hang between the slats of a covered bridge and fish. My cosmetics case is in my lap, and I’m stroking the chrome finish, wondering what made Mr. Fleenor into what he is now—was it too much sad or maybe too much happy.

  In a couple of days I’ll make another trip up to Lexington, replenish my foundation supply, and see about that Cotillion ball, what ain’t even six months away. Since I’m just the middleman for the music I ain’t really got to attend to the arrangements a tall, but I want to see the inside of the Strand, to see what the lighting is like and what shade eye shadow I ought to wear in front of all them debutantes, what color lipstick might show up best under whatever kind of fancy lights they got in the theater and make Sylvia French jealous. The lady running the show is one of ’em’s mama, lady by the name of Sugar Raspberry. She’s the first Colored lady to work at the law firm of Stites & Harbison, even if all she does is run part of the switchboard. Sylvia French took me up to Lexington to meet her one day, and I was some surprised on how refined she ain’t. She smokes so much, she lights the end of a new cigarette with the one she just finished smoking, and when she says a word that begins with the letters “h” or “p,” you got to move out of her way, her breath smells so bad. “You’ve spoken with Audrey on the telephone?” she asked me, and I lied yes. Grandmama ain’t got no telephone. And letters is just as good, I think. Sugar Raspberry’s just fascinated with the telephone on account of she pokes numbers in one all day. “Very well, then,” she’d said. “I will be mailing her a contract.” I gave Mrs. Raspberry the address, but something about all of it still ain’t setting right with me. I reckon it’s that I still can’t believe Audrey said yes, but I’m getting myself ready for the party. I went down to the fabric store and bought two patterns for dresses for me and Imagene to wear. Christians ain’t supposed to be in competition with each other, I know, but it’s always going to be a winner and a loser come out of a situation, and come that Cotillion ball, I don’t want me and Imagene to be the losers.

  Grandmama itches herself again in her sleep and moans, so I ask her, “What’s wrong, Grandmama? Something bit you?”

  “No, love,” she says, without opening her eyes. “It’s just been doing like this come lately. My chest.”

  I put my case on the floor and get up right in front of Grandmama. “Let me see,” I say to her, and I unbutton the top three buttons of her housecoat. When it all opens up to the air, it smells like something right terrible, something you’d find under a Band-Aid after a few days if you got your nose close enough, but worse. Way worse. She’s got all kinds of dry, sore skin flaking off the side of her right boob, and the skin underneath that done turnt the most peculiar color of orange. Like a grapefruit.

  “Grandmama,” I say. “Something’s wrong.”

  “Ain’t nothing wrong,” she says, and she waves me out of her face and buttons herself all the way back up, and takes to rocking herself back and forth in her chair.

  But it is something wrong, and it’s a mite curious but it makes me think back to a day when everthing was still right, a day when Mama was still living and she piled both us girls in the back of Daddy’s car and we went for ice cream down to the drug store. Imagene was setting next to me with her little hand wrapped around her sugar cone, and chocolate ice cream dripping all down the front of her yellow dress. It was her first time having ice cream, and I’ll never forget the look on her face, like Newton discovering gravity.

  “I’ll call Dr. Pitts tomorrow.”

  “Don’t need no doctor,” she says, but I know right then—I’m going to lose her.

  “Grandmama,” I say, but she’s already back to sleep. Lost to snoring, even, and as her hand shudders and falls out her housecoat, it hits me, how many things Grandmama’s had sprung on her in one lifetime. And it hits me too, what she’d say if she was awake. Everbody gets them ice cream days. But everbody’s going to get a few surprises ’fore it’s all over with, too.

  ANGELS’ SHARE

  Can’t let cancer hit the air, the old folks say. Somebody dies, it’s on account of they opened him up on the table. Once that cancer hits the air, they’ll say, he was a goner. And so when we go to see Dr. Pitts, I’m straightening my back when we walk through the door, fixing my lips in a line so I’ll look more like a whitegirl, getting ready to tell Pitts he ain’t opening my grandmama up noway, nohow. Well, turns out, after Dr. Pitts feels all round Grandmama’s boobs—over them and around them and all up under them, and then looks all up close on the sore spots with a lighted lens—turns out ain’t a thing he can do for her. She don’t even need to be opened up to tell it.

  “Inoperable,” he says, while Grandmama looks straight on ahead with that stone-hard look on her face, the one what don’t tell you what she’s really thinking, the same look she gave that charity lady from the Morehead Home for Children who come around looking for Imagene when Daddy went off to the pen.

  “Inoperable?” I ask him, and all of a sudden I’m ready to beg him to open Grandmama up. He’s got to do something. There’s got to be something he can do.

  “Stage Four. Terminal,” he tells me, leaning over right into my face like Grandmama ain’t even there. “From here on in, you just need to keep her comfortable. I’ll write you a prescription for morphine,” he says, and he leans over to scribble it out.

  I wonder if he’s thinking my grandmama’s just some old Colored lady not worth fooling with, and I blurt out, “If it’s the money—” but he turns round and pats me on the hand ’fore I even get it out right.

  “It was the time,” he says, patting my hand again. “It was the time.”

  And then it seems like ain’t nobody got nothing to say, on account of ain’t nobody can argue Grandmama ain’t waited too long to go see about things, and the quiet between the three of us grows like some kind of animal what’s going to hatch and get ugly. We all feel it, I guess, because Dr. Pitts nods at us and then leaves, and I help Grandmama get out of the thin little dingy gown the nurse gave her and back into her pink blouse. I fasten all her little pearl buttons and fix her glasses back on the bridge of her nose on account of they done slipped down in her surprise. Still she don’t say nothing, not “Lord help me” nor “Jesus have mercy” or even “Dammit,” and it’s her not saying nothing after a lifetime of talking a blue streak what makes me want to cry and cry and cry. I take a string of gray hair what’s fallen down over her eye and fix it back behind her ear, and I kiss her on the cheek and leave my lips there just for a second so I can get a good smell of my grandmama.

  “How much do I owe?” I ask the red-haired lady at reception, when we get out into the lobby.

  She folds her lips together and looks down, so she can be sorry without having to say it. “Doctor says you’ll get the bill in the mail,” she says.

  Part of me knows that means I ain’t getting no bill, but then part of me worries I read it wrong, and Ruth Simmons’s mama might be walking up the steps
any day with a paper what says I owe something I can’t pay. All week, the worry of it follows me around everwhere I go, and then it gets bigger and turns into something else, on account of I ain’t paid for the bad thing I got told. It’s like skipping out on a fortune-teller before you’ve handed her the quarter, I think, and if I ain’t paid for what Dr. Pitts said, maybe the bad thing’ll get even bigger, reach out and grab somebody else I love. It gets to where I almost feel like I need that bill to make everthing okay, and so I’m walking around everwhere I go waiting for Ruth Simmons’s mama to tap me on the shoulder and say, “Oh, I forgot this little thing in the bottom of my mailbag.”

  I’m standing in line at the Colored store Wednesday dusk, not able to remember a thing I got in my basket, just waiting for Ruth Simmons’s mama to come hand me that bill, when I run into Gordon Bell, who I ain’t seen in a good two years.

  “How do?” he says. He shrugs an elbow at my basket. “Need a ride?” He’s been looking at me all this time I’ve been off in outer space—that much is clear.

  “Sure,” I say, on account of I know I’ma end up with two bags of groceries instead of my regular one, and the next thing I know, he’s loading my bags into the back of his car, and it’s a big bolt of thunder what booms so loud we both jump, and the wind’s blowing my hair every which way, and it’s a fire engine what motors by. And when it’s past, it finally registers that under all that noise, Gordon’s asking me if I ever been to the distillery.

  And then it turns out, Gordon Bell’s got a right nice car. A 1955 DeSoto Fireflite, sea green with a beige stripe down the side. Also turns out, Gordon Bell is good people. Don’t nobody got nothing much good to say about him, on account of he’s real quiet and don’t fool with people, but when I take my finger and slide it down the inside of his pants, just under the stitch of his belt loop where I can feel his smooth skin, he takes my finger right back out and holds my hand in the one he ain’t driving with. “We ain’t even kissed yet,” he says. Puts ever one of his fingers between mine like we was knitting ourselves into a pattern. “And you’re better’n that.”