by Meghan Daum
“Actually,” said Jeb to me, “Lipinsky told me to take more time on this one. Apparently your boss has a lot riding on this.”
“Oh, that’s just Joel being a perfectionist!” said Valdette.
“No, Joel’s pretty lax,” said Jeb. “It’s the TV show that’s squeezing our balls. I guess he talked to Lucinda’s boss. He seemed pretty shaken up.”
Jeb had Sue and Valdette sit down while he ran the microphone cord underneath their blouses, which were green and zebra print, respectively. I noticed that Sue had worn her beaded African necklace. In the middle of this act, M.J. and Dee Dee barreled through the front door. Dee Dee, who was wearing a turtleneck under an Estrogen Therapy T-shirt (which featured a guitar whose neck formed the yoni sign), clucked when she saw Jeb.
“Didn’t know we were being frisked,” Dee Dee said.
M.J., when she took off her coat, revealed a teal turtleneck sweater and a beaded African necklace. Her earrings hung nearly to her shoulders.
I wondered if either of them had been molested as children and whether or not Clip My Wings and I’ll Grow a New Pair might elicit some memories. With any luck it would be M.J., as she was the slimmer of the two.
The rest of the Coalition of Women arrived en masse, including Christine, who, other than her gold watch, had adhered flawlessly to the wardrobe requirements. As Jeb pawed them with the microphone cords, Brenda dispensed white wine and laid the food out on the chrome coffee table. There were deviled eggs, Rice Krispies treats, Fritos, cold cuts of ham and turkey, M&Ms, string cheese, pizza rolls, and four bottles of Fetzer. Six women were seated on Brenda’s lime green modular sofa. I suggested that Dee Dee move to the overstuffed chair.
“Okay, you guys,” I said. “Don’t do anything different than you normally do. We’re just going to shoot the meeting in its natural state and edit it later.”
“We’re rolling,” said Jeb.
Valdette and Brenda immediately lit up cigarettes.
“Okay,” Brenda said, exhaling a plume of smoke. “As president of this coalition, or, I should say ‘club,’ I guess I’ll just remind everyone that the first thing we do is go around the room and let everyone share with the group the passage from the book that was most meaningful to her.”
“I’ll go first,” said Dee Dee, who was sitting with her enormous thighs spread open in the overstuffed chair. “Because I feel—being a veteran of the civil rights movement—that I need to set the tone.”
“Before you do that,” Brenda interrupted her, “let’s just all be clear on what this book is about—because I know sometimes some of us get a little, ahem, behind in our reading.”
Brenda held up the book and looked right into the camera.
“Clip My Wings and I’ll Grow a New Pair tells the story of a young African American girl growing up in the projects of the South Side of Chicago,” she recited, paraphrasing from the back of the book jacket. “She lives in a two-room apartment with ten brothers and sisters, a few of whom are the result of her mother’s being raped by the building superintendent, who, of course, can turn off the heat if he feels like it so she has to submit to him. The girl grows up in these absolutely awful conditions, surrounded by racism and sexism and terrible abuse from men, and eventually discovers that she has enormous gifts as a painter. So she gets out of the projects and becomes a famous artist who eventually goes back to the projects and founds a battered women’s shelter that’s also an art school.”
“But that’s after she’s raped by her art teacher,” Dee Dee interrupted. “Who makes her pose nude.”
“Right,” said Brenda.
“And don’t forget the back-alley abortion,” said Valdette. “Which still goes on today.”
I made a mental note to ask if any of them had undergone a back-alley abortion.
“Right,” Brenda said again, finally putting the book down. “But the point is that she uses her gift—her gift of painting—and her experience with all these struggles to give back to the community she came from. And that final scene, that image of all the women’s paintings on the wall of the shelter, with the terrifying images they depict, I just found it so powerful.”
“Well, now that she’s described the whole book—” Sue began.
“More wine!” Valdette shouted. A few other women clapped.
“Seriously,” Dee Dee said. “I’d like to read the passage I found most meaningful. Because I think it just, well, it cuts right to the bone.”
“Go ahead,” said Brenda.
“The foul breath of the morning caressed my face like fruit gone bad,” Dee Dee read. “Mama had already gone, to the first of her three jobs, this one cleaning house for a white lady who called her ‘the girl,’ though in my mind I couldn’t imagine Mama ever being a girl. We didn’t see no white folks where we lived, just on the TV, until Mr. Dawson pulled it out of the wall with his beasty hands and tossed it out the window one night when he was drunk. Mama said to pay him no mind. But I paid him mind. I paid him mind when I drew pictures. I drew pictures of Mr. Dawson looking like a beast, his teeth fangy and his black skin darker than the meanest black dog. Years later, when I’d become famous and was showing my paintings in Paris, white folks would tell me my work was haunting. But compared to those pictures of Mr. Dawson, which I hid in the closet where Mama couldn’t find’em, every thing else I did was as bright as the sun shining on the Chicago River, all lit up like a ribbon wrapped right around heaven hallelujah amen.”
The room was silent. M.J. reached over to Dee Dee in the overstuffed chair and put her hand on her knee. A few women nodded and murmured.
“That was very powerful,” Sue said finally.
I looked at Christine. She’d been following along in the book. Now she was staring into her wineglass.
“I’m curious,” I said to Dee Dee, knowing that she was far too fat to ever make it into the segment and I could therefore veer off the topic, “as to how this connects to what you were saying about being a veteran of the civil rights movement.”
“I think that’s pretty clear,” said Dee Dee.
“How, specifically?”
“Well, for one thing,” said Dee Dee, resting her elbows on her spread-eagle knees, “this is a very powerful and candid exploration of race.”
“Uh huh.”
“And for another thing,” she continued, “she rises above her circumstances by using her circumstances. She doesn’t want to become white. She loves blackness. She paints blackness.”
“So beautifully,” Valdette chimed in. “Even though you don’t see her paintings you can tell she’s a genius.”
“So tell me,” I asked Dee Dee, “a little bit about your civil rights activities. I’m interested.”
“Oh honey,” Dee Dee said, waving her hand. “We don’t have time. Let’s just say I was very active in the sixties.”
“In Prairie City?”
“In P.C., in Des Moines, in Sioux Falls, you name it. Let’s put it this way, you know the strip mall on Prairie Boulevard?”
I did know it as it was the location of Hollywood Tan.
“That land,” she continued, “was once an open field. And we had a benefit concert there like you wouldn’t believe.”
“I remember it,” said Sue.
“It was intense,” said Dee Dee. “It was freakin’ Yasgur’s farm.”
“And now there’s a Payless Shoes and a Weight Watchers there,” said M.J.
“What are you gonna do,” said Dee Dee. “‘They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.’”
Jeb had taken the camera off the tripod and was snaking around the modular sofa trying to get a closeup of Dee Dee, which was a colossal waste of time. Brenda lit another cigarette.
“Moving right along,” Brenda said. “Who wants to be the next person to share a passage that touched her?”
“I’ll go,” Valdette said. She stamped out her cigarette and put on her reading glasses. “This is from page 274.”
“Everyone find it?” as
ked Brenda. “Go ahead, Valdette.”
“‘Get your black ass out of this place,’ the beastylike fangy-fanged toothed Mr. Gallery owner, Mr. Black-girls-can’t-paint-but-they-sho-can-pose art expert extraordinaire shouted at me,” Valdette read. “‘Your kind wasn’t made for painting. Throw some paint on the floor and wipe it off,’ he said. ‘That’s what you’re good at.’ But he was wrong. Even as the hot sun soaked the loft like Mama’s oven had come alive and taken over the world, I knew that he was wrong. I knew that I could paint and paint better and with more heart and soul and godly godliness than most white folks, except maybe Michelangelo, ever had. Even then, after the fangy-fanged gallery owner had tried to rip off my dress, even after he’d clipped my wings so I couldn’t fly, I felt new ones a’sproutin’. He’d clipped my wings and I’d done gone grew a new pair. He’d clipped my wings, but I had some to spare.”
Valdette was weeping. M.J. handed her a tissue.
“Intense stuff,” said Dee Dee.
“I just relate to that so much,” Valdette sniffed. “I thought about becoming an artist. But I didn’t think I was good enough.”
“They tried to keep you down,” Dee Dee said.
“I’ve never told anyone that before,” said Valdette. She dabbed her eyes and lit another cigarette.
“This is a safe haven,” said Brenda, refilling the empty wineglasses. “This is a place where you can say anything.”
“Is there anything else you want to say?” I asked Valdette. “About people trying to keep you down?”
“Like what?” she asked.
“You know,” I said, “any way in which you were oppressed? Battered? Exploited?”
I was hating myself, and hating Faye even more.
“Well, for starters,” Valdette said, “my seventh-grade art teacher mistook my self-portrait for a drawing of Minnie Mouse.”
“That must have been very painful,” said Dee Dee.
Sue squirmed uncomfortably. “Did you get enough, Lucinda? Or should we go on?”
“We haven’t heard from Christine yet,” said Brenda.
“Christine is so smart,” said Valdette. “Her analysis is going to put us all to shame.”
Christine, in her gray cashmere turtleneck sweater, slim wool pants, and tiny pearl earrings, shifted in her seat in the other overstuffed chair. Even her shoes were perfect, delicate flats worn with opaque knee-high stockings. Her shimmery lips highlighted her smooth, light brown skin. I held my breath as she thumbed through the book. Whatever she said was guaranteed to wind up in the segment and would probably constitute most of it. She was the only one who looked good enough.
“I have to say,” she began. Jeb squatted in front of her and pointed the camera right in her face. “That I didn’t actually have a chance to read the book.”
Shit! I thought.
“Oh!” said Brenda.
“Don’t worry about it!” cried Valdette. “I know how it is. Not enough hours in the day!”
I thought, for a moment, that Christine might have neglected to read the book on principle. Clearly by now she’d have “gotten hip” (as Sue might have said) to the efforts of certain Prairie Cityites to infuse into their daily lives a multicultural spirit that would lift them to a higher plain than the flat, snow-covered expanse on which most residents were more than happy to sit. Surely she recognized that her induction into the Coalition of Women, which had been celebrated with considerably more gusto than my own, was less a matter of her intellectual contributions at meetings (she had, according to my count, opened her mouth exactly once) than with the guileless way she mesmerized Prairie City’s more liberal citizens with her particular blend of dark(ish) skin and correct English, a combination that Idabelle Sugar, for instance, knew better than to show to the general public (and this was why Idabelle Sugar would go on, the following year, to win another prestigious literary prize and it would take Christine more than fifteen years—although she would eventually win by a large margin—to be elected to a seat in the state legislature).
Christine, still with the camera inches from her face, fidgeted with her wineglass and crossed and uncrossed her long, slender legs.
“It’s just,” she said, “that I’m still reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.”
I was panicking. This segment was a disaster. In desperation, I clapped my hands and yelled “Folks, folks, there’s an issue I’ve been wanting to raise, something I thought might have some resonance in conjunction with this very powerful novel.”
“Speak, woman,” said Dee Dee.
“Has anyone here ever been fondled by her gynecologist?” I asked.
“Are you talking about Barb Podicek’s husband?” Valdette gasped.
“No names, please, ladies,” said Jeb from behind the camera.
“Honey, why in the world don’t you go to the P.C. Women’s Wellness Center?” Dee Dee asked me. “It’s totally holistic, they accept most insurance plans—”
Dee Dee was interrupted by the doorbell, which played a very long, chiming version of “Moon River.” This must have been the reason that everyone else just came in without ringing the bell.
Brenda shouted that the door was open and from where I sat I saw only Brenda’s bewildered expression as whoever it was entered the house.
“Can I help you?” Brenda asked.
“Where’s Lucinda?” a voice asked.
I turned around and, there, in the doorway, stood Faye Figaro. A short guy in a bomber jacket pushed in behind her. He wore a knapsack and was carrying a notebook and was so unassuming that Faye’s austere presence seemed to eclipse him totally.
Like a hallucination, Faye stood on the steps leading to the sunken living room, a black leather coat wrapped around her skeletal body, high-heel boots tracking snow onto the carpet. Her head was covered (as if to protect her from the weather) with a filmy silk scarf. In the whiteness of Brenda’s living room, Faye’s dark, attenuated figure, combined with the pallid face that even beneath the kerchief conveyed her horror at Brenda’s design sense, lent her the appearance of a phantom who couldn’t bear the decor of her haunt.
The Prairie City Coalition of Women must have surely believed they were looking at a ghost. Valdette jerked in her seat as though an icy breath—perhaps one similar to “the foul breath of the morning”—had grazed the back of her neck. Faye scanned the crowd, registering greater disgust with each coalition member she surveyed, until she spotted me.
“There you are,” she said.
“Faye!” I gasped.
Jeb still had the camera rolling. I motioned for him to stop but he shook his head and motioned toward Faye. “I can’t,” he mouthed.
“Can I help you?” Brenda asked again.
“This is my boss, Faye Figaro,” I said to the coalition.
“Oh!” The coalition sighed. They began talking among themselves excitedly. Valdette got her coat, a down parka with a fake leopard collar, and offered it to Faye.
“We’re just now doing the filming,” Valdette said. “We didn’t know you were coming, otherwise we would have waited for you.”
Faye surveyed the women again, as if to catalog the particular atrocities of each of their outfits, and began shaking her head. Dee Dee hoisted herself from the overstuffed chair, ambled up to the entrance way (from which Faye, no doubt fearing the sunken living room, had not ventured), and stuck out her hand.
“I’m Dee Dee,” she said.
Faye looked not at Dee Dee’s face but at her Estrogen Therapy T-shirt, the letters of which were partially obscured by the folds of her stomach.
“Estrogen Rape?” Faye asked.
“Estrogen Therapy,” Dee Dee said. “We’re a folk vocal duo. That’s my partner, M.J.”
“Holy Jesus,” Faye said.
“Is this your partner?” Dee Dee asked, looking at the guy in the bomber jacket.
“Oh God no,” Faye said.
“I’m Randy Abrams from New York Magazine,” the guy said. “I’m doing a
story on Up Early. Faye came out here to supervise the shoot and I thought I’d tag along.”
“You’re kidding!” I yelled.
“How wonderful!” Valdette cooed.
“Well, have a seat,” Brenda said. “I’ll get you some wine. I guess it’s a multimedia event!”
“Stop the tape!” Faye barked at Jeb. “Lucinda, I want to speak with you privately for a moment.”
Faye walked with me to Brenda’s kitchen and as soon as she got out of Randy Abrams’s line of vision she grabbed me by the elbow and dragged me into the bathroom. It was done entirely in pastel pinks and had a beach theme. Seashells and pieces of coral lined the counter and the toilet seat was covered with a padded turquoise cushion. Faye pushed me down on the toilet seat, causing air to seep from the cushion in a slow hiss.
“What the hell is the matter with you?” Faye yelled.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Is this the book club?”
“What do you think it is?”
Faye slammed her fist on the counter, flinging a seashell onto the floor.
“They’re all fat!” she screamed. “What do I keep telling you about shooting fat people?”
“You expect me to hire actors?” I asked.
“When the people look like that, yes!” she yelled. “And maybe a set designer while you’re at it. What is with that sofa?”
“You only came here to impress that reporter, didn’t you?” I asked.
“He has halitosis,” Faye whispered. “I keep offering him Altoids but he’s not catching on.”
“Did you offer him cash, too? To not write about what a freak you are?”
“Lucinda,” Faye said, her giant hands pressed against my shoulders, “we are in serious trouble. Upstairs says you have to get this segment right! Otherwise they’re going to, like, make structural changes.”
“They’re going to fire you?”
“Oh God no,” she said, her mouth curling. “They just might, like, kill your series. And then you’d be stuck out here, exhaled from New York. Like a fugitive. I don’t want that to happen to you.”
“Do you mean exiled?”
“Plus,” she whispered, her face contorting like she’d tasted some thing rotten, “they’re threatening to make me have sensitivity training, with role playing and falling backward and having someone catch you and all this other bullshit. That is just so profoundly uninteresting to me.”