Brown Girl, Brownstones

by Paule Marshall

  Those brief visits linked her days and gave them meaning. They kept her purpose clear—to free them both. The vitality hinted in her stride, in the cutting swing of her arms suddenly burst at the full to sustain her, and she was happy that for the first time she was living at a pitch and for a purpose. Alone at night she visualized her mind as a faceted crystal or gem mounted on a pivot. Each facet was a single aspect of herself, each one suited to a different role. Thus, for the Association, there was, surprisingly, a part of her that enjoyed the sense of importance and power, that could speak persuasively and subtly impose her will, that could dissemble . . .

  At school, another facet appeared and she was absorbed in her work. On Sundays she studied in the school library until the city’s lights showered the sky like diamond chips flung by some profligate hand; then she would leave, hurrying through the deserted library and halls to the subway and Brooklyn and Clive.

  Each day after her classes she practiced with the dance group or alone in their studio off the gym, and another facet spun into focus then, excluding all her other selves; her sole concern became to mold her body into an expressive whole.

  That summer, caught in the momentum, she could not stop, and worked in an office, saving her salary for when they went away, took lessons in the dance and gave her week ends to the Association and Clive. They spent Sundays at the beach, walking over to the bay at dusk to sit on the rocks—and the sea, the heavy night air, the distant clangor of the buoys seemed to echo her last summer’s pledge.

  Quickly it was fall again—the sere leaves falling in the park—and she was elected vice-president of the Young Associates a week before it was announced that the first scholarship would be awarded that coming spring. With a final surge she flung herself into the last round of school, the Association and her dance group.

  “Clive, yours truly is to make her debut!” she announced one day near the end of winter, rushing in hatless and disheveled, with a long streamer of the wind in tow.

  “Oh God, in what now?” he laughed.

  She swept down on him with a wild shout. “In the dance, of course. I’m going to do the birth-to-death cycle—something the mimes do, but Rachel and the teacher adapted it. It’s to be the feature of the recital!” She leaped up and bowed, then waited for his comment, her small breasts braced under her sweater, her immense eyes overwhelming her face. When he said nothing, she cried, “Just think, I’ll be on stage alone. Me, following in the footsteps of Isadora Duncan! Watch, I’ll do it. It begins with birth naturally.” She sat on the floor in the pose of a fetus: her legs drawn to her chest, her slim arms around them and her supple back bent until her forehead rested on her knees.

  “Get up!”

  His harshness stunned her and for a time she could not get up. Paralyzed there, she remembered a game called statues, which she and Beryl used to play as children. Beryl would spin her around, then release her abruptly, and she would assume some grotesque pose. She felt like that now—like a child being scolded for playing statues. What was it in her that displeased him? Her loudness for one, she knew, and the way she rushed at things. Her roughness. How could she expect love when she was like this? Hadn’t Ina predicted it that day long ago in the hall?

  Her limp arms slipped down her legs. Forcing a light laugh, she said, “I’m sorry. I’ll spare you my cavorting.”

  His eyes avoided her hurt eyes and his slack body contracted with sudden self-disgust. “Christ, Selina, forgive me. I don’t mean to hurt you. It’s just that your enthusiasm is a little hard on my inertia at times. Please . . .” He extended his hand.

  Taking it, she pulled herself up and sat beside him. “I will grow out of this giddiness,” she said softly and then cried, “Oh, I’ll be so glad when it’s all over and we’ll be gone!”

  He said with an indulgent smile, “You are shamelessly romantic, you know.”

  “I know.” She laughed. “It’s my father’s doing. Look, are you coming to the recital?”

  “You know how I hate that goddamn city . . .”

  “All right.” She kissed him. “You’d probably make me nervous anyway.”

  “You nervous? Impossible.”

  “I used to be . . .” Suddenly her eyes glazed over with a memory and she smiled to herself. “Once, long ago, I had to recite in the Sunday School Mother’s Day program. Well, I promptly wet through to my new dress, just before my turn, I was so nervous. My mother was in tears, I remember, and they had to skip me until I dried out.” As he laughed and pulled her close, she added anxiously, “I just hope I don’t revert to that opening night.”

  She repeated this to Rachel Fine at the dress rehearsal, and Rachel, with her quick savage little laugh, said, “Go ahead. It’ll give an authentic touch to the childhood sequence . . .”

  Selina’s laugh joined hers and scattered in a gay fugue across the stage. They were resting behind the high wall of scenery, all the way at the back of the stage. Selina was stretched flat on the floor, her body light and finely tuned from the long rehearsal while Rachel reclined against the wall beside her, her small dead-white face disembodied in the shadows, her hands describing their usual nervous arabesque with her cigarette, her wild hair, her quick gestures. The chorus, hidden from them by the scenery, was rehearsing before the deserted theater.

  “Besides,” Rachel added, spouting smoke, “why be nervous in front of a bunch of giddy girls? What’d those lumpen know about the dance? Just finish with a flourish and they’ll think you’re the greatest. Is your mother coming?”

  “My mother!” Her laugh flared in the dimness. “Are you kidding? Do you want her to take apart this building bare-handed? She caught me practicing once and wanted to know what kinds of foolishness they were teaching at these so-called colleges.”

  “Well, my mother doesn’t mind, just so long as it doesn’t lessen my chances of making a good marriage. Speaking of that—Bobby might be here if he comes down from school tomorrow.”

  Selina turned, surprised. “Bobby? You took him back?”

  Rachel shrugged; the pale hand plunged deep into her hair and something genuinely tragic crept into her eyes. “Yes, we’re at it again. What was I going to do, Boyce?” The same tragic note lined her voice. “Every guy I went out with after him had, what I call, the stench of the tit about him . . .” Despite Selina’s laugh Rachel remained serious. “I mean it and it’s not funny. There wasn’t a real man among them. Bobby at least comes close, so I chucked my pride and got on the damn phone one night and begged him to let’s try again. He said he didn’t mind, so we’re trying.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me why you broke up?”

  A shy silence held until Rachel slid down beside Selina and said softly, “I was afraid you might not understand. You see it was over the stupid engagement ring. Remember I told you how my family and his kept pressuring us to get engaged . . . ? Well, finally they arranged that his father’s uncle who’s in the jewelry business should get this ring for us. God, how I wanted that ring, Boyce. The diamond was so big and it sat up high on the setting like it said ‘Here I am—all four carats of me!’ I thought of how the kids in school would be turning all shades of envy . . . Yes, when he started putting it on my finger, I felt like puking. I swear! I told him I didn’t want his father’s uncle’s damn diamond and that I didn’t want him either if he couldn’t understand why . . .”

  After a pause she added with a grim little laugh, “All hell broke out of course. My mother took to her bed. Told me I was killing her. First the hair, she said, and now the ring.”

  “What about the hair?” Selina bent over her, feeling a sudden kinship and bond.

  “I chopped and dyed it,” she said flippantly. “It used to be very blond and long, and everybody was always saying I was like a little goye with my blond hair and blue eyes. Except, of course, the little goyim brats in school. Then, when it started turning dark, everybody started commiserating—like it was a tragedy. So I got fed up and on my fifteenth birthday I cut it
myself and drowned it in black dye . . .” Suddenly she gave the hacked hair a fierce tug and cried despairingly, “Oh, I know it makes me look like a bomb. My boy friend’s always pestering me about it. Men! Boyce, you should be glad you can do without them!”

  Selina gave her a meaningful look which was lost in the darkness, but a charged silence settled between them. Rachel stirred, curious, her white hands plucking at the air. Suddenly she struck a match and held it close to Selina’s face, and her own small puzzled face dropped close.

  “My dear Fine,” Selina began, blowing out the match, “I’ve had a lover all this time.”

  Rachel’s shock, her momentary disbelief, was a jarring chord which was finally broken by her dazed whisper. “You dog.” Then with her harsh sputtering laugh she cried, “You dog! Why haven’t you ever . . . ?”

  “Because you were always so damn busy talking about Bobby or somebody else, I never got a chance.” Laughing, she sat up, leaned her head against the wall and said quietly, “He’s an artist. He paints. We’re going away soon and live together—openly—and to hell with marriage!”

  Rachel clutched her shaggy hair, one hand pressed her tiny breasts, her thin voice beat up ecstatically, “Oh, we artists! Where’re you going? When?”

  Very calmly, her eyes reflecting the scant light and Rachel kneeling before her, with the darkness like a high tent around them, Selina told of her plan and of Clive, her voice falling below the sound of the piano and the muffled slur of the dancers’ feet.

  When she finished Rachel fell back on her heels, struck silent for a time before she gasped, “Jesus Christ, you’re an operator.”

  Strangely, instead of laughing also, Selina’s head suddenly dropped, as if one of the overhead curtain weights had fallen and struck her. “Fine, I’m going to feel like hell taking their money. But what can I do? If we don’t get away, he’ll go to waste in that room and I’ll rot down in Howard’s med school.”

  “But where’re you going?”

  “We don’t know yet. Anyplace, it doesn’t matter.”

  “You could go to the Caribbean,” she said, and Selina, still depressed, hardly heard her. “Especially since your family’s from there. Besides, it’s very cheap living on some of the islands, and if you really intend to dance you could learn a lot down there. I know because my aunt is a wheel in this cruise agency. She arranges the entertainment. Look, maybe I could swing jobs for both of you. You could skip out at one of the islands on the ship’s return run . . . They might not even miss you, and so what if they did.”

  “No, Clive wouldn’t go for it,” she said.

  “Oh, that’s too bad because it would save fare,” and then she added brightly, “I met Bobby on a week’s cruise to Jamaica and Haiti one spring. Late at night, when all the peasants were tucked in, that tub became our private yacht. It was our honeymoon . . .” Wistful suddenly, her restless hands stilled for a moment, she added, “I didn’t care if we never saw land again . . . Hey,” she said, turning toward the stage. “They’re calling you. It must be your turn again. Come on.”

  But they both lingered, reluctant to leave the dark tent, knowing perhaps that their intimacy would end once they left, that the world would separate and drive each into herself again. Rachel caught Selina’s arm, “Hey Boyce, let me dance your solo with you.”

  “All right.” Selina took her hand and, laughing suddenly, pulled her up. “Just go easy so you don’t show how shaky my technique really is.”

  “I promise,” Rachel said, and as they leaped together into the arena of light, their heads poised, their slim arms hailing the nonexistent audience, she added, “Let’s show these elephants in the chorus that dancing is an art, not just a course in calisthenics!”

  IX

  The following night at the recital, fear eddied, then heaved in a wave inside her as she waited—kneeling alone on the stage—for the lights and heard the restless, ominously breathing audience waiting for her in the darkness. She knew how exposed she would be despite the heavy stage make-up and the black leotard, how utterly dependent she would be upon her body. It must speak for her and, crouched there, she feared that it would not prove eloquent enough.

  But as the light cascaded down and formed a protective ring around her, as the piano sounded and her body instinctively responded, she thought of Clive first, and then of Rachel—how she and Rachel had danced the night before as if guided by a single will, as if, indeed, they were simply reflections of each other. At this, her nervousness subsided, and she rose—sure, lithe, controlled; her head with its coarse hair lifting gracefully; the huge eyes in her dark face absorbed yet passionate, old as they had been old even when she was a child, suggesting always that she had lived before and had retained, deep within her, the memory and scar of that other life. Her slender arm boldly hailed the audience now, and their hushed suspense, palpable on the air, made them suddenly harmless.

  And she danced well, expressing with deft movements the life cycle, capturing its beauty and exceeding sadness. The music bore her up at each exuberant leap, spun her at each turn so that a wind sang past her ear; it responded softly whenever the sadness underscored her gestures—until at the climax, she was dancing, she imagined, in the audience, through the rows of seats, and giving each one there something of herself, just as the priest in Ina’s church, she remembered, passed along the row of communicants, giving them the wafer and the transmuted blood . . .

  The brief cycle was ending and she was old. Death tapping at her skull and seeping chill through the blood. She recalled Miss Mary’s shriveled form on the high bed, and slowly sank down, borne down by the piano’s dying chords, prostrate finally in death.

  In the moment’s stillness she knew that she had been good. And when the applause rushed her like a high wind, it was as if the audience was offering her something of itself in exchange for what she had given it. She bowed to that thunderous sound, exultant but a little shaken, and as she turned and leaped offstage it was as if she was bearing something of them all away with her.

  The other dancers awaited her in the wings and their extravagant praise was louder, headier, than the applause. They swarmed her and she lost all awareness of herself. The raw milk smell of their heated bodies and breath, the odor of grease paint and powder drowned out her mind like an intoxicant. Her happiness erupted in a wild hoot that cut through the din—and suddenly she wanted to remain with them always in the crowded wing, to shout and never get weary.

  A heavy-set blond girl with fine white down on her flushed cheeks laced her arms around Selina and said in a hot whisper, “Selina, I had a catharsis. I swear. All term in Greek drama I’ve been trying to figure out what it was and now I know. I had one! When you started dying I felt I was dying. I’m drained. Purged. Oh, you were so Greek!”

  Selina laughed into the girl’s hot distended eyes. The girl was in the chorus, and Rachel, who described her as having her legs screwed on the wrong way, always positioned her in the rear line. Now, before Selina could reply, the girl was swept away, and other voices vied for her ears and other eager arms reached out until they all became fused into a white shifting welter of faces. Rachel emerged after a time, wearing her gaudy costume, her face still bedaubed with the heavy make-up. This, along with her hacked hair, made her like some other-world creature who had come to make sport among men. She caught Selina’s arm, and despite the throng, they were suddenly alone.

  “You were so good, Boyce, it was frightening.”

  Selina nodded gently, understanding. “I felt the same way watching you,” she whispered, “It is frightening. Because you know that if you go on you’ll almost fly out of yourself. That’s what you want but still, in a way, it scares you.”

  The noise snatched her voice. The thick-set blond girl was shouting from atop a chair, “Hey kids, let’s celebrate at my house. I called and my mother says it’s all right since my father’s out. Come on, I live near here. I’ll make some punch and we’ll spike it with some of his you know what .
. .”

  Their shrill acceptance echoed high in the wings and they lunged, one huge body with many legs and flailing arms, into the dressing rooms and there pulled on their coats over the costumes and then charged through the halls into the street.

  The night was not vast enough, nor the towering college and the imposing apartment buildings around it substantial enough to withstand their brash voices. The buildings slid back, it seemed, to give them room. The evening sky with its noxious pall of smog lifted higher above the coldly glittering city. And even the city’s pulse—that low, tremulous hum of chaos—was stilled.

  They trooped in bold formation down the street, spanning the entire sidewalk and spilling into the gutter. The wind snatched at the frothy costumes under their open coats and then scooted ahead, carrying their exhilaration in a warning to the other pedestrians. Selina, Rachel and the blond girl, Margaret Benton, were in the vanguard, and they made a startling trio—Selina, in the black leotard, her coat flaring wide, resembling somewhat a cavalier; Rachel a fabulous sprite and Margaret, her hair catching each passing light, a full-blown Wagnerian heroine.

  They advanced through the East Side, bearing toward the river until Margaret led them into an old and ponderous greystone apartment house, whose grandeur had been eclipsed by a modern apartment house that was all lightness and glass beside it, and whose future was hinted in the decrepit row of tenements on its other side. They followed her through a tarnished gilt and marble lobby into the elevator cage, and when they spilled into the hall, Selina hardly noticed the smiling woman at the door, or how the smile stiffened as she entered. All she felt was a passing dismay at the artificial opulence of the furnishings, which obscured the room’s high-ceilinged beauty.