Black Rainbow

by Miriam Sagan

  I checked myself out in the reflective surface of the subway window. I was wearing my best pair of gently flared jeans over black boots, a purple turtleneck sweater, and a large silk scarf printed with roses. Usually I wore my purple beads, but since they were broken I was forced to steal the scarf from Grace. My amber earrings were screw on because I wasn’t allowed to pierce my ears, but they had the “pierced look.” My dark hair only came down to my ears but at least I’d grown my bangs out. I was wearing a dark green, full-length, maxi coat and red gloves. The red gloves were the wrong touch, I knew, but I couldn’t find the black ones. I did not look half bad. Of course I did not look old or effortlessly hip or as if I wasn’t a virgin, but still, I squinted, there was no reason for boys not to like me. Boys would like me. I willed hypothetical boys all over the five boroughs to like me. I knew that if I could find the right boy I could put a hex on him, will him to like me, and never let him go until I was good and ready.

  I got out at the station. The neighborhood was an unfamiliar one. But I easily found the little park with posters for the rally taped to the tree trunks and the sides of trash barrels. I could also see a cluster of older looking student types standing around in black berets and unfurling flags with the single Viet Cong star on them.

  There was no sign of Monique. For a moment, I wished I was at the museum, looking at Chinese vases or something. I sat down on a green park bench, feeling the cold slats through my jeans. A handful of pigeon feathers fluttered down out of a tree.

  “Excuse me,” said a voice. It was the voice of a boy. “Excuse me, but did you lose this?”

  At first, I didn’t look up. I saw a pair of scuffed sneakers, straight brown corduroy pants, a blue pea coat, and then finally a pale face with a mop of black hair.

  “What?”

  “Did you lose this?” He was holding out a red mitten. He had long fingers and a fat palm. I could sink my teeth into that hand.

  “No.” The mitten was red. It might have been mine, but I was still wearing both gloves.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “But thank you.” And then in strange slow motion I stretched my own hand out and sank it deep into the pocket of his jacket. The pocket was warm and linty, empty except for what felt like a dime and a wad of gum.

  “My name is Michael,” he said. “Are you here for the rally?”

  “Uh huh.” I didn’t take my hand out of his pocket.

  “Where do you go to school?”

  I told him, adding, “That’s in New Jersey.”

  “That explains it.”

  “Explains what?”

  “That you believe in the existence of New Jersey.”

  I laughed.

  He laughed, too. “I go to Horace Mann.”

  “That explains it.”

  He laughed again. “Do you always do this?

  “What?”

  “Put your hands into strange people’s pockets?”

  “That depends. Are you strange?”

  “A little.” He shrugged.

  “And do you always do this?”

  “Do what?”

  “Come to peace rallies?”

  “Sometimes,” he said “But my friends aren’t too interested so I have to come by myself. My parents don’t mind, though; they’re against the war. My father says I shouldn’t go, even if I’m drafted. He was in World War II. But he says that was different. It was something you could believe in, not just killing people far away for no good reason.”

  “My parents think I’m at the museum.”

  “You’re wild,” he said approvingly. I beamed up at him. Suddenly he sat down on the park bench next to me. “I guess you don’t want this mitten.”

  “No,” I smiled. He smiled, we smiled at each other, and we leaned towards one another just a tiny bit.

  “You came all the way from New Jersey by yourself.”

  “Well, sort of, I’m meeting my friend…” His face fell a little.

  “My friend Monique,” I hurried to say. “She’s supposed to meet me here but she’s late. We’ve gotten in a lot of trouble together. She took a car and drove us down the shore and she doesn’t drive very well or have a license, and our parents were furious and we got grounded until Halloween but we got stoned anyway because we couldn’t go out trick-or-treating even though we are too old to care anyway.”

  “I never met a girl like you,” said Michael.

  I smiled some more.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Rania,” I said. “My name is Rania.”

  Just then a chant of HO HO HO CHI MINH NLF IS GONNA WIN floated towards us. Someone was shouting through a bullhorn. I took my hand out of Michael’s pocket and looked around. The trees were stark against a pale sky. A small crowd was gathering around the bullhorn. I looked at Michael. “The rally is about to start.”

  We got up and ambled closer. The wind blew a leaflet with a skull and crossbones into the street. Someone had lit a barrel full of trash on fire and the demonstrators clustered around it. The speaker on a makeshift platform was yelling something that sounded like “pig enforcers of a fascist racist society designed to crush the worker/student alliance and…” It smelled like snow.

  “Rania!” I heard my name clear across the length of the park. “Rania!” It was Monique, her bright hair blowzy, her eyebrows raised in their perpetual question mark. “Rania!” She was running towards me. She stretched both her arms open, and I could feel the force of air before she hugged me and began whirling me around as if we had been parted for years instead of hours. Then she noticed Michael, slowed her spinning, and came to a complete halt.

  “Hiya,” she said.

  “Hiya,” he said.

  “Hiya,” I said. I was nervous to find myself standing between the two of them.

  “This rally is going nowhere,” I told Monique. A handful of demonstrators huddled in their overcoats. It seemed to be getting colder by the minute. Two pigeons walked by—a male and female—both fluffed up in the chill. The iridescent feathers on his neck glistened like rain on an asphalt oil slick.

  A guy with a beard came towards us. More exactly, he headed toward Monique. He wore a black beret and an expression that said he knew what was going on.

  “Hi,” he said to Monique. Maybe Michael and I already looked like a pair. Monique didn’t say anything. She stood with her hands in the pockets of her red wool coat.

  “You guys go to school around here?” asked the black beret, trying again.

  “We’re not guys,” said Monique.

  “Yes,” said Michael.

  I said. “No.”

  “High school?” asked the beret.

  We nodded glumly.

  “Well,” he said, “this scene is nowhere. But we’re having this big dinner together in a communal house over on Avenue B, plan strategy, talk theory, that sort of thing. Are you interested?”

  “No,” said Michael, looking at the fat black watch on his wrist. Monique just looked sullen, and I didn’t say anything.

  “Well,” said the beret, “here are some subway slugs. Anything to beat the capitalist system and to get to our house you just take the…” Then he rattled off a confusing list of subway numbers and letters. The slug felt dirty even through my glove. I dropped it into my pocket, ashamed, with no intention of using it.

  “Let’s go,” Monique said to me.

  “I’m exhausted,” I said, “I’ll be glad to get home to some dinner.”

  “No,” said Monique, “I mean, let’s go to this free house thing and check it out.”

  “I can’t,” said Michael. “I said I’d be home…”

  I shot him my most compelling boy-hex look.

  “Well, maybe for a little while,” he said.

  Then boldly he shot out his hand as if he’d done this before and grabbed one red wool finger of my hand. I could feel his warmth and pressure through the glove. He held tightly, as if I were a child he didn’t want to lose.

  “But wher
e are we going?” I said.

  “Don’t worry,” said Monique. “I’ve got all the information.”

  The sky hung low over the buildings now, a solid gray. It was snowing. A policeman passed by on a horse, but he gave the square only a cursory glance. The clop-clop of hooves echoed in the cold. A few blocks uptown, lights were coming on, the trattorias and bookstores filling as people came in from the cold. But we went down into a subway station that looked abandoned. There was no token seller in the booth, only a metal revolving door, so I had to use the slug.

  I stood between the two of them on the platform. I was the one with two mothers, after all. Here, underground, none of my mothers could find me.

  Michael was still holding my finger but he was hunched up now, glancing at his watch. But Monique looked expansive— all pink and gold in the gloom. She looked at me but she didn’t smile. She had the self-satisfied, almost surprised, look of someone who was getting something she hadn’t even known she’d wanted.

  CHAPTER 12

  WE TOOK THE FIRST TRAIN UPTOWN. The next stop looked familiar. It was Waverly Place. We were back on my map. Monique stared off into space. Michael had inched his hand around my waist and was holding on to me lightly. He was holding more coat than flesh.

  Michael was a boy. That was enough for me. My interest in boys was basically sex. I had little desire to talk to them. If I wondered about God, if I wondered about Tampax, I did not ask a boy, I asked a girl. It was girls who were ferocious, particularly parochial school girls, those tough girls who carried knives and would stick you in the bathroom at dances. Boys would not stick you in the bathroom; they weren’t even in the bathroom. Boys were tender, with their red socks left balled in corners, their belief in bicycles, their fear of policemen, and their bravery towards strange dogs. I needed boys to serve my purpose. Sex was information. I had to have it.

  “We have to change here,” said Monique. The platform at Waverly was cozy; it smelled of cigarette smoke and pot and faintly of the fresh cold roses an old lady was selling from a kiosk.

  “You know,” said Michael, “I really have to go home.”

  “Do you?” I said.

  “Well, Rania and I are going to that dinner,” said Monique. “This is a good opportunity. We can learn all about political theory.”

  “Since when are you remotely interested?”

  “Come on,” said Monique, “this is an adventure.”

  “I think I’m going uptown,” said Michael. “I really have to go home for dinner.”

  “I should go home, too.” I looked at Monique.

  She didn’t say anything.

  “I mean, everyone will be worried if I just don’t show up or something.”

  Monique still didn’t say anything.

  “They’ll be worried about you, too.”

  “So what?”

  “Excuse us for a minute, will you?” I turned from Michael and steered Monique into a quiet corner behind a broken gum vending machine, the kind particular to the New York subway system, which dispensed individual pieces of gum that I could never imagine actually putting into my mouth on purpose.

  “Come home with me.”

  “You just want to be with that guy,” she hissed.

  “Michael.”

  “That Michael.”

  “I want to be with you, too. Don’t be silly. Let’s go home. It’s getting late and it’s getting colder and I’m hungry, aren’t you? Monique, we’re just going to get grounded all over again if we do this. They were so mad at us, and it was such a drag. Besides, it’s snowing.”

  “You’re afraid.”

  “Damn straight I’m afraid.”

  “Then come with me. Don’t be a coward, Rania. Just come with me and see what happens.”

  “No,” I said. Then I put out my hand and tugged on a strand of Monique’s hair. Silky and cool, it shone even in the subway. My hand brushed her cheek, warm and tinged pink from the cold. Her mascara was a little smudged, black mascara, much too heavy for her fair lashes. Her eyebrows made those exclamation points across her brow. Her forehead was so white it looked powdered, Japanese. How could I not follow someone who was that beautiful?

  “Let’s go home,” I pleaded, “just for dinner.”

  Monique shook her head. “You won’t dare come with me, but who says I have to go with you? I’m not going back there, and you can’t make me. New Jersey, I hate it, all that wall-to-wall carpeting, and air-conditioned air. It’s not real, any of it, and I can’t stand it for one more minute. I’ve got to get a change, something, anything…and there are things I haven’t told you, Rania, bad things at home. Things that aren’t normal…my father…I just have to get out of there. I need this chance. I’m not going to blow it.”

  “It’ll get better,” I said in my softest voice. “Come on, let’s just go home; it’s not that bad. We’ll have dinner, there’s that party you said you wanted to go to.”

  “No!”

  “Please.”

  “Go away,” said Monique.

  “Oh, come on.”

  “No,” said Monique.

  I probably could have stood behind that gum machine arguing with Monique for the rest of my life. Finally, she was the one who turned to go. She walked away from me rapidly, flipping her hair. She hoisted her shoulder bag briskly, and she did not look back. I watched her until she disappeared, stepping into a crowded downtown train. She seemed to take the past with her—that night at the shore, the smell of the classroom in the rain.

  There was nothing for me to do but walk back to where Michael was standing and to follow him through the underground crossway that smelled of piss and back over to the up-town platform.

  “She left,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m worried about her.”

  “She’ll be fine.”

  “You’re just saying that because you’re a boy. Boys are always fine, but girls just aren’t.”

  “I really think she’ll be fine. She looks like she can take care of herself.”

  “She’s really pretty, isn’t she?”

  “Not pretty like you.”

  “But she’s all blond…”

  “You’re prettier.” He looked a little sleepy around the eyes. “I wonder what my mom is making for dinner.”

  “My mom is making, oh, probably chicken breasts with mushrooms, green peas, rice pilaf.” It sounded so nice; I almost forgot it was Grace I was talking about. “So what’s your mom cooking for dinner?”

  “Mmmm, it’s Saturday night. Sunday night is Chinese food, or pizza, sometimes I get to pick.”

  “You’re an only child, then?”

  “Yeah,” he laughed. “Anyway, Sunday is take-out. Friday is kind of formal. She lights candles. We’re Jewish, Friday is kind of sit-down, but Saturday she might cook something fun like risotto or even potato pancakes or maybe chicken a la king in pastry shells.”

  “You’re hungry,” I said.

  “Yeah, I’m really hungry.” He laughed again.

  We got off together at Penn Station. I could take the A train uptown to the bridge. Michael would take the local home. At Penn Station, I liked the little warren of underground shops, the smell of hot dogs and sauerkraut and steaming buns coming out of the Orange Julius stand. There were clothing stores with racks of cheap sequined blouses and tight red satin pants—not Grace’s kind of clothes. Commuter trains were going to places like Great Neck and the long distance trains headed out through the snow across Pennsylvania and on to Chicago. One of those trains could take me through small farms and red rock bluffs to New Mexico. I could take a Grey-hound bus north along a river through stalks of sunflowers to Pilar. There, my killer mother sat in her trailer and listened to the tea kettle boiling and wondered what had become of me, the daughter she had birthed against nature on the top of that cold mountain.

  But instead of saying what I was thinking, I had to say goodbye to Michael and go home by myself for dinner.

  He pulled o
n my pinkie finger. “Bye,” he said.

  “Well bye.”

  “What’s your phone number?”

  I told him and he scribbled it down in a little notebook.

  “Give me yours,” I said and searched my bag for something to write with. All I could come up with was my red Swiss army knife.

  “Cool,” he said. “Not a lot of girls carry those.”

  “My little brothers gave it to me for my birthday. At first I thought it was really dumb, but it’s pretty useful.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But this doesn’t have a pencil. Write your number down for me?”

  He scribbled his own number and gave it to me on a crumpled sheet. I was glad to have something in his handwriting. It made him feel real. If I thought I had made him up I could look at the number for some reassurance.

  Now came the awkward moment of goodbye. I leaned forward and softly planted my lips on his. In an instant his arms were around me and our two heavy coats locked in a mad embrace.

  Then he mumbled “bye” again and walked off without looking back. I was starving. I could see a candy store just across from a display of women’s black push-up bras and blue garters on the buxom plastic torsos of headless mannequins.

  I stepped into the candy store. It smelled of chocolate. The chocolate-covered cherries were wrapped in red foil, each one housing a mouthful of liquor and a red heart. I needed to think for a minute. I took my comb out of my pocket and thoughtfully began to comb my hair. Suddenly, the lady behind the counter exploded at me.

  “You’re getting hair all over my candy, missy. Didn’t your mother ever teach you any manners? It’s not polite to comb your hair in public. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “My mother’s dead,” I said in a whimper. I let my lower lip quiver. I really felt as if I were about to burst into tears. “My mother’s dead.” I put my head down, and fled out of the store.