by Xenia Ruiz
I rolled up a towel for her and put it under her neck for support. Then I directed her into the chair, with her back to the sink, and guided her head backward, under the water faucet. She didn’t protest or question me further as I took over massaging the shampoo into her hair with my fingertips, from the roots to the ends. With her eyes closed, she sighed with appreciation.
“Where did you learn to wash hair?”
“I used to work in my mother’s hair shop.”
“Really?” She said this like she didn’t believe me.
“Yup. From the time I was thirteen to about fifteen. I had to quit ’cause the women kept hitting on me.”
“Get out.”
“I’m serious. These women used to come on to me. Older women. ‘That sure feels goo-ood, baby.’” At my high-pitched, mimicking Southern accent, a smile slowly appeared on Eva’s face, so I continued with the entertainment. “‘Mmm-mm-mm, I sure wish I could take you home with me, sugar.’ Then one day, one of them grabbed my crotch as I was rinsing her hair. That was my last day.”
The laugh she had been trying to suppress erupted, her eyes still closed. “You know what they say. Washing someone else’s hair can be sensual.” She pressed her lips together as if to keep any more words from escaping. I rinsed her hair, then began another shampoo, listening as the next reggae track began to play.
“Who is this playing?”
“Danté. It’s a reggae band. You like reggae?”
“It’s got a good beat—you can dance to it,” I joked, paraphrasing the old American Bandstand line. “I just can’t understand what the he— heck they’re saying.”
“They’re singing about God. It’s Christian reggae.”
“Christian reggae, huh? I didn’t know there was such a thing.”
“Christian music comes in all genres. There’s Christian rock, Christian salsa. It’s not just gospel. You like gospel?”
“Why I got to like gospel? ’Cause I’m Black?” I joked.
“I like gospel and I’m not Black.”
“You are Black. The only thing that separates us is a language and a country. Latins are just as mixed as Blacks.”
“Ooh, you sound just like …”
“Who? Your ex-husband? Boyfriend?”
“No. Rashid. He says skin color and language and religion are all man-made things created to keep us from concentrating on what’s really important—God.”
I mulled that over for a moment and conceded that there might be some element of truth to it. All the while she was talking, her eyes were closed, her lips moving independently. I decided to test her, to see if there was any interest.
“How do you say eyes?” I asked her.
“What?”
“How do you say eyes, in Spanish?”
“Ojos.”
“Open your ojos.”
She blinked several times before squinting up at me. “My, what big nostrils you have,” she joked.
“My, what big ojos you have,” I said, playing right along. Then I said seriously, “Nice big ojos.” I had intentionally begun my wooing.
She closed her eyes again. “Not ‘o-hoes,’ ojos,” she corrected my Pidgin Spanish.
“Ojos,” I mimicked with an exaggerated breathy accent. She smirked but didn’t reply, so I changed the theme of our conversation. “Can I ask why you have your wedding picture on display?”
“For the kids. I wanted them to know that there was a time I loved their father. That it wasn’t all bad.”
“Seems kind of strange. Your kids aren’t little anymore.”
“It’s just been up there so long, I’ve forgotten it’s there. It’s not like I stare at it. But I’ll put it away if it bothers you.”
I started to protest but then I realized she was just pulling my leg when a smile spread across her face.
“You really box?”
“Yeah, but just for the exercise. Maya took that picture of me, the one in the dining room. I used it for an article I wrote on Latin women in boxing.”
“I thought you wrote about education issues.”
“Mostly. But every once in a while I write about women’s topics, diversity, anything I feel strongly about.”
I washed her hair a couple more times before conditioning and rinsing it. Her hair was so soft and thick, it felt like velvet. When I finished, I lifted the towel that hung around her neck and started to dry her hair, but she stood up abruptly, taking over, standing so close to me that I had to take a step backward. She pushed the chair with her foot to make more room, pulling a section of hair around to her nose to sniff it.
“I think it’s all out. Do you smell any perm?”
I bent down and took a whiff of her hair but all I could smell was the scent of the strawberries-and-cream leave-in conditioner. It reminded me of the strawberry swirl cone I used to get when the ice cream truck came around on summer days.
“Does it?” I heard her ask from far away. “Smell?”
I hadn’t realized that she had lifted her head and was looking up at me. I sensed that her eyes were blinking a sort of Morse code, signaling me to kiss her. But then maybe I was seeing what I wanted to see. Had it been so long that I couldn’t tell when a woman was hitting on me?
I took a chance. Before I knew it, my hands were in her damp limp hair and I was kissing her forehead, her eyebrows, then her pug nose. With her hands braced on the sink behind her, she tilted her face and closed her eyes. We both turned our heads to each other’s left, our lips meeting simultaneously like we had been thinking the same thing at the same time. It dawned on me then that I had never kissed a left-handed woman. With right-handed women, there had always been that initial head-butt because I always tilted left while they usually tilted right.
I took her full bottom lip softly into my mouth. She in turn seized my top lip. I opened my eyes briefly and saw that her eyes were closed. Holding her face in my hands, I tried to swathe the immensity of her lips in my mouth, turning my head from side to side in an effort to taste every inch of them. I kept my tongue away, using only my lips, because I didn’t want to take the chance that my breath was still sour from cigarette residue. It had been one week since my last smoke.
For one brief moment, I had forgotten we were in the bathroom, a place I didn’t associate with intimacy unless I was in the shower with a woman. I waited for her to stop me, but she didn’t. If anything, she was kissing me harder than I was kissing her, her hands still planted firmly on the sink. At one point, I looked into the mirror at myself and saw a man capable of anything. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I was aware of the beast outside the bathroom sitting on his haunches, tongue hanging out hungrily, blocking me like a jealous man. I closed my eyes, and tried to block him out, attempting to concentrate on Eva’s sensual lips. But the demon-eyed freak was throwing me off. I pulled away briefly and saw that the top button of her blouse had come undone. She wasn’t very large, a C-cup, average, and her skin was flawless, with the exception of a small, dark brown birthmark on the left side of her chest.
“Could you lock him up?”
“Why? Is he scaring you?” she asked.
“Actually, he is.”
She rolled her eyes and spoke sharply to the dog. “Get in the back.” The dog trotted off, his head bowed in submission.
We resumed kissing. This time, she removed her hands from the sink and I could feel them kneading my back and working their way up to my hair until she held my locks and caressed them between her fingers. Then she started kissing me erratically, one moment steady, the next, hesitant, momentarily pausing like she wasn’t sure she should go on, until I would take possession of her lips again. One minute she was Dr. Jekyll, the next Ms. Hyde. Her hesitation began to unnerve me. Was she really celibate? She sure didn’t kiss like a celibate woman. Or maybe that’s what celibate people did—kiss.
I fought back the urge to lift her onto the sink because I didn’t think I would be able to stop myself if I got her in that position.
Finally, I decided it was time to put an end to our session and I pulled away, sliding my hands down neutrally to her shoulders. I cleared my throat.
“What?” she asked softly, innocently. Was she kidding?
I scoffed, unable to resist showing my frustration, and out of habit I pushed my hair back with both hands, forgetting that I had a tied bandana holding it back. She stepped up to me and slipped her hands around my waist. I backed up farther, banging the door against the wall, putting my hands on her wrists as gently as possible and removing them from my waist. As we avoided each other’s eyes, she leaned back on the sink and covered her mouth with one hand, pinching her lips. There was a look of surprise on her face, as if she couldn’t believe what had just happened, as if something, someone else were responsible. As I looked down, away from her face, I noticed that her birthmark was heart shaped, not the typical Valentine’s shape, but the form of a miniature human heart. It almost looked like a tattoo. She noticed me staring at her opened shirt and quickly fastened the button.
“You want something to drink?” she asked abruptly, hurrying out of the bathroom.
“Sure,” I answered, though what I wanted to do was leave altogether. She went into the kitchen and I withrew to the living room. I sat in a rattan chair and rubbed my hands together. What was I doing? I brought my hands to my face and smelled strawberries-and-cream all over again. I wiped my hands on my thighs and looked at her wedding picture.
“Was your husband … your ex … Puerto Rican?”
“No. He’s Black.” She entered the living room with two wine glasses.
“I don’t drink,” I told her.
“It’s sparkling white grape juice. Non-alcoholic. It’s good.”
I took a glass and tasted it, nodding in agreement. “So, you like Black men, huh?”
She gave me the dirtiest look. “I hate when people say that,” she said, curling up on the cream-colored pillow-back sofa. “You sound just like my father. Just because I happened to marry a Black man and dated a couple of them doesn’t mean I prefer them. I’m attracted to them, just like I’m attracted to Latin men and an occasional Caucasian. My sister’s husband is also Black. Well, half Black. You can’t help who you like, or fall in love with—or think you love.”
I was amused by her defensive stance and played into it to take the edge off my frustration. “It’s okay to like the brothers. I’m not mad at you.”
“If you saw my cousins, you’d think they were Black. Some of them are darker than you.”
“Shoot, you’re darker than me,” I cracked.
“Look—” she started, tilting her head in warning.
“Relax,” I said, laughing, holding out my hand because she looked like she was about to take my head off. “I’m just messing with you.”
She set her glass on the coffee table and began to section her hair with her fingers and twist it into individual coils. I watched, puzzled.
“You straighten your hair with a relaxer so you can twist it?” I asked, confused.
“Yeah. I don’t really like my hair straight. I just relax it to get the kinks out.”
“Why don’t you lock it?”
She flinched slightly. “Too drastic. I mean, certain hairstyles look better on some people but not on others—”
“You mean it’s okay for Blacks?”
“No,” she said in a condescending tone. “I’ve seen a lot of people who aren’t Black with locks and locks look good on them. I mean, for me, it would be drastic. I’ve never colored my hair or cut it or anything like that. Maya’s the one who’s always experimenting with her hair.”
I watched as she continued twisting her hair, wondering if she was going to bring up the kiss we had just shared. I decided to be direct. “Are you really celibate?”
“Yes,” she answered without hesitation as she continued twisting.
“For how long?”
“Awhile.”
“Months? Years?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I was just curious … Do you go around kissing men, getting them excited just for kicks?”
She stopped twisting her hair and looked directly at me. “No. I guess I should apologize. I shouldn’t have kissed you. It was wrong.”
“It felt right.”
“That’s the problem. Not everything that feels right is right.”
“Are you saying we … you and me …?”
“I’m saying I can’t … how do I say this? I can’t start a relationship that involves sex before marriage, or that doesn’t lead to marriage. No matter how much I’m attracted to a man. Especially since I don’t want to get married anytime soon.”
“So you’re not going to be with a man ’til you get married?”
“That is my plan.” She leaned back into the sofa, interlacing her fingers.
“You do that a lot,” I pointed out.
“What?”
“That, with your hands. It reminds me of that kid’s game. ‘Here’s the church, here’s the steeple …’”
“‘Open the door and out come the people,’” she finished, wiggling her fingers.
“I do that with my niece and nephew.”
We laughed, and I relaxed for the first time as she finished twisting the last few strands of her hair and I sipped my drink. I tried to think of the best way to say good-bye. I could lie and say I had started seeing the girl whose card I accidentally gave her that first night. Or I could just tell her the truth, that there was no way I could be with a woman whom I couldn’t make love with at some point. Marriage was in my future but the future was not anytime soon. I have heard of men who said that when they met the woman of their dreams, their first thought was, “That’s the woman I’m going to marry.” That’s what I wanted to feel one day, to know that when I met the woman I was going to marry, that I would know it right away, without a shadow of a doubt.
The ice in my glass was melting but I sipped the watery white grape juice anyway to keep from talking. King staggered sedately into the living room, a canine version of John Wayne. That was one scary animal. He nuzzled his oversized head on Eva’s lap and I watched with slight envy as she caressed his loose jowls. She didn’t look like she needed anybody, least of all a man. All she had to do was kiss that beast or allow him to lick her face, and my decision to bow out would be sealed.
I turned my attention to the words of the current song playing: “It’s because there is someone who’s got my back, oh yes, there is someone I’ll never lack, the one and only one, yes, the one and only one …”
She broke the quiet first. “It’s been a while since I’ve been with a man that I felt … I had any feelings for,” she said, still stroking the dog. “So I don’t know if I kissed you because you just happened to be here or if it’s … because it’s you.”
“Oh.” I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be pleased or insulted by her explanation.
She went to the bookcase and pulled out my tattered book and handed it to me.
“I finished reading your poems. I really liked them. I liked the way you titled the poems with numbers, like the chapters in the Bible. Do the numbers have any significance?”
“They relate to a particular date, or year. Like ‘Father, Eighty-Three.’ My father died in 1983.”
“So it’s autobiographical, no?”
He smiled wryly. “Yeah, you could say that.”
“Very clever. You were what, seventeen? My mother died when I was fifteen.”
“I guess we have a lot in common.” I hoped she didn’t ask me anything else about my father; the topic was off-limits.
“Have you tried submitting them to a publishing house?”
“I don’t think anyone’s i
nterested in my therapeutic verse. I wrote them for me and gave them to my family as gifts, in case I didn’t, you know, get through the cancer. Then I found I had more copies than family.” I laughed. “I have more copies in storage. I’ll send you a newer copy.”
“There are Christian publishing houses.”
“Hmmm,” I said vaguely. I leaned back and relaxed, turning my attention back to the CD, enjoying the beat more than the singer who rattled on in what sounded like a foreign language. It was hard to believe he was speaking English. On the last track, I was able to make out some of the words from my favorite Psalm, number 23: Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life …
“‘And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever,’” I sang along in a fake Jamaican accent.
She smiled. “Do you want to borrow the CD?” she asked when the track finished playing. “It’s a copy. My sister has the original.”
I thought about that for a second. If I borrowed it, I would have to eventually return it, prolonging the inevitable. “I better not.”
She pressed the eject button on the remote control and put the CD in its case, handing it to me. “You let me read your book, I can let you borrow my CD.”
When I still hesitated, she sighed with exasperation and said, “I tell you what. You can keep it. As a thank-you for the tea and the oil. I can always burn another one using my sister’s. That way, you don’t have to worry about returning it.”
We talked about writing and music, boxing and God, but we didn’t discuss the kiss in the bathroom again. On the tip of my tongue were the kiss-off lines I had used on other women to let them down easily or to get rid of them as quickly and painlessly as possible, depending on who they were. This isn’t working out for me. There’s someone else. Also in the back of my mind were the sweet-nothings and quasi-lies disguised as terms of endearment, which I had used on other women in order to break them down, to move the relationship to the next level. I’m a one-woman man. I woke up this morning with you on my mind. Or the most potent of them all, You know I love you girl, though I was very, very careful about using that one. But then maybe I wouldn’t have to say anything at all. Something told me Eva’s resolve would be difficult, if not impossible, to break. She was backed by a powerful force I wasn’t sure I wanted to mess with, someone definitely out of my league.