Laughter became raucous, stories became full-fledged lies and Pearl watched as wives ran their long painted fingernails down the napes of other husbands’ necks, while husbands whispered deep into the ears of their partners’ wives—or their wives’ best friends.
When it was all done, guests gone that could, others that couldn’t retired to the many guest rooms, Pearl was left alone on the great lawn, gathering the delicate crystal that still held the liquids that made the guests talk louder and laugh longer. Cigar, cigarette and pipe smoke still clung to dew-wet eaves and the crying branches of the weeping willow trees. She didn’t know why she suddenly tilted the glass up to her mouth. It was a quick and jerky motion, as if her hand was guided by something other than her mind. The drink traveled down her throat tickling as it went until it finally reached her stomach and settled there like glowing embers. Oh, the feeling was unique, and the only thing that came close to it was the feeling she got when she thought of her Joe and the way he kissed the under part of her arm.
She could think of the two at once and get a sharp pleasurable stabbing sensation in her womb, one that would keep her feeling silly for hours.
Even now as she sat and reminisced, her stomach contracted and she hid her smile behind a mock cough and her hand.
The second time had not been pleasurable at all. Her wedding night. She and Joe lay together in her own childhood bed, in her room that shared a wall with her parents’ room. They spoke in whispers and giggled in the moonlit darkness of her room. She could tell the urgency he had for her. His sex organ pressed against her hip and throbbed there like a second heart. She would not, could not, remove her starched new cotton nightgown given to her by her mother as a wedding gift. She did allow his hands to travel beneath it and explore her virginal body. She was embarrassed by the moans that escaped her, heavier and even more sexual than the ones that emanated from Joe. When his mouth clasped hold of one of her erect nipples, she thought for one split second that her mind would snap.
He could not enter her, even though she was slick. The pain was too much to bear. He placed his hand between her legs and massaged her opening with his finger, he glided it effortlessly in and out until she thought her whole body would fall apart with pleasant convulsions. But when he mounted her again for the third time, she still squirmed against him, pushing him away instead of pulling him forward. He became desperate. “Take a little of this,” he said. His voice was thick with want as he guided the small flask of whiskey to her lips. The smell alone intoxicated her, but to please her new husband she drank the whiskey. Moments later her head was spinning and her stomach turning. She spent an hour in the outhouse, puking up her wedding cake. Joe spent some time there afterward too, pleasing himself.
Pearl was consuming her third glass of pike aid, and wondering why the name began to sound familiar to her. She thought hard and long about it, but could not remember. She forced her attention on Sugar, who was smoking a cigarette. For the first time she realized that Sugar did not have on one of her many wigs. Her head was tied with a rag. Her face was absent of makeup, which was a rare occurrence. She looked normal for once, even fresh. Her scantily clad body seemed less threatening without all of the fixtures. In this chaste state, Sugar looked more like Jude than ever before. Pearl looked away and tried to consider something else, but again her vision was drawn back to Sugar. The cigarette smoke sailed over to her and invaded her nose. She coughed a little and fanned it away with her free hand.
“You need to stop that,” she said, her voice lagging a bit.
“Stop what?” Sugar said.
“That smoking. You smoke too much and you don’t wear enough clothes, either.” Pearl was speaking matter of factly, her tone was less than accusing, just tottering on the verge of drunkenness.
Sugar, realizing this, just rolled her eyes and looked back toward the fields.
“Gimmesomemore to drink.” Pearl’s words spilled out like poor man’s pearls, strung together and worthless.
Sugar looked over at her, and realized by the way Pearl was shoving the glass in her direction that she’d probably had too much already.
“I think that might be it for you, Miss Pearl. How about a Coke?” Sugar said, not moving.
Pearl set the glass down between her legs and leaned her head back against the house. “Sugar, don’t it make you feel ashamed when you take off your clothes for everyone and anyone?” Pearl asked, curiosity lacing her voice.
“No,” Sugar said quickly and shifted her body. She was uncomfortable, knowing what the questioning was leading up to.
“Umph,” Pearl grunted and shook her head.
“It ain’t no big deal. You take your clothes off in front of Joe all the time. That don’t make you feel shame, do it?” Sugar said, a bit sarcastically.
Pearl had never disrobed in front of Joe, in fact when they made love, it was in the thick darkness of their bedroom and her gown was simply lifted above her waist. But that was so long ago; she had not been able to perform that wifely duty since Jude’s death. It had been fifteen long years of nothing more than caresses and quick kisses, sleeping with even breath against a neck and a hand settled into the curve of a waist. Joe and Pearl simply shared a bed now and not each other.
Pearl did not respond.
“I feel free when I ain’t got no clothes on,” Sugar continued.
“How does being naked make you feel free?” Pearl sat up now, wanting to understand Sugar’s words.
“I can’t explain it, Miss Pearl, it just do.”
“I think it’s downright disgusting,” Pearl said, frustrated because Sugar could offer no valid explanation.
“Well . . . don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.”
Pearl huffed. “I don’t know nothing about you, Sugar. You live next door and we spend time together, but you still a stranger to me.”
Sugar laughed. “Miss Pearl, I see you one of those soupy drunks.”
Pearl scratched at her nose. “I ain’t drunk.” Her words were slurred and she squirmed again against the warm feeling between her legs. “Tell me something, what you think your mamma woulda said ’bout what you do?”
Sugar stiffened at the words. They hit her like pellets. “Okay, Miss Pearl, I think it’s time for you to go now.” She stood and stretched her long brown frame. Any high she had was quickly seeping from her.
“Y-you think she woulda approved of you being a whore?” Pearl continued, oblivious to the anger that was building up in Sugar.
Sugar flinched at the questions and swallowed hard. She did not want to discuss a mother she never knew.
“She dead. How am I suppose to know what she think?” she said and bent down to snatch up Pearl’s empty glass.
“I don’t think she wouldalikeditverymuch.” Pearl’s bottom lip was stuck out and her head began to look too heavy for her neck.
Sugar just smirked.
“You think maybe she was a whore too?” The words fell effortlessly from Pearl’s mouth and luckily Sugar had sense enough to realize that Pearl’s words were only alcohol induced.
“Miss Pearl, if my mamma was a whore then she did what she felt she had to do. I ain’t gonna judge her, cause I don’t want to be judged. Anyway, we whores ain’t all that different from the rest of you.”
Pearl’s eyebrows went up. “How you figure that?”
“Well we all got working pussies. We all whores in one way or another—”
“I ain’t no whore. I know that for sure!” Pearl exclaimed.
“Yes, you is, Pearl, you and your mamma before you—”
“I ain’t no whore!” Pearl was standing now.
“You lay down with your husband and in return he clothe and feed you—keep a roof up over your head. You stop laying with him, all those things disappear.” Sugar snapped her fingers for emphasis.
That was not true. And Pearl shook her head insistently no, but she would not tell of what didn’t go on in her bedroom. She would not.
“Look
here, I do what I have to to put food on my table and clothes on my back and will keep on doing it same as you.”
Pearl raised her hands in defeat. She did not want to argue again, but she had Sugar angry now. Sugar’s tongue flicked words at Pearl like a whip.
“The only difference between you and me, Miss Pearl, is you began your whoring life in front of a congregation, dressed in white and with God’s blessing!”
She slammed into the house, leaving Pearl sorry for speaking at all. Pearl heard the glasses crash into the sink. The refrigerator door opened and slammed closed three times and by the time Pearl’s foot landed on the last step Sugar was back on the porch, huffing and puffing like a wild, angry boar.
“You right, Miss Pearl, you don’t know me at all. I been on my own since I was fifteen fucking years old. Fifteen! And did you forget how I told you I survived? Have you forgotten!” Sugar’s anger had the best of her now. Pearl turned to meet Sugar’s enraged eyes but she did not utter a word.
“With my pussy, that’s how! Men pay to fuck, eat or smell my pussy!”
Pearl blushed at Sugar’s use of language; she wanted to throw her hands up to her ears.
Sugar was spent, the anger was mellowing down to simple annoyance now. Her breathing slowed and she sat down heavily on the steps.
“I ain’t bad, Miss Pearl, I just ain’t had no crossroads in my life is all.”
Pearl traced Sugar’s jawline with her hand. “Yes you have, child, you just wasn’t able to recognize them when you came across them.”
Chapter Twelve
HER headache was finally withdrawing. Just to be sure, she took another aspirin and kept the ice pack on her head. Her first hangover at sixty. She laughed out loud in the five o’clock darkness of her bedroom. She thought of Joe and her stomach trembled. She moved her hand across the empty space his absent body left in their bed. Not one full day had passed and she was already missing him as if he had been gone for twenty.
Her body was weak from the pike aid and lack of food. Cooking was something she did not want to consider after the heat and angry words from Sugar; the cans of tuna fish stacked in the cupboard would remain stacked until another day. Her mouth craved barbecue, but her feet would not carry her to town to get it. Perhaps buttered bread and a cup of tea, she thought.
Shortly before seven Pearl found herself eating exactly what she craved. Sugar appeared at her front door with two barbecue rib dinners, complete with corn bread and potato salad and Coca-Cola.
Sugar seldom visited Pearl’s home, and when she did, she never left the confines of the kitchen; her visit was always short. Pearl felt they both preferred it that way. Pearl was uncomfortable having her around Joe; Sugar was uncomfortable with Pearl’s apparent uneasiness having her there. But today they sat and listened to the radio.
Sugar bore another bag, a large heavy brown paper sack, its top rolled tightly closed. Pearl eyed it on and off, wanting to know exactly what it contained, but Sugar made no effort to disclose its contents to her.
“Miss Pearl, I got something I wanna do to you,” Sugar said as they cleared the table of the dinner remnants.
“What?” Pearl was surprised at her statement. “What you want to do to me?” she said suspiciously.
“C’mon,” Sugar said and grabbed the brown sack and headed up the stairs.
“W-wait a minute,” Pearl said and rushed to follow her.
Sugar found herself standing in the upstairs hall of Pearl and Joe’s house. The differences were few. Pearl’s floors were bare, the unfinished floors dull against the old beige wallpaper with the tiny light blue flowers. Sugar turned into the bathroom. Unlike her own bathroom, Pearl’s walls were painted white, and butterscotch towels, washcloths and hand towels added brightness to the room, even though it was dead darkness outside the window. “Sit down,” Sugar said as she dropped the toilet seat down.
“What are you up to?” Pearl asked and sat down after a slight moment of hesitation.
“You need a new look, Miss Pearl. Not that there is anything wrong with the look you have now, it’s just that it’s too Bigelow,” Sugar said, her hands fiddling with Pearl’s tight bun trying to find the pins and release it from its present confined state.
“Stop it,” Pearl said and tried to slap Sugar’s hands away. “Ain’t nothing wrong with my look.” And then curious now, “What you plan on doing?”
Sugar stood back and placed her hands on her perfectly curved hips. She still wore the denim shorts and bright orange tank top she’d lounged in on the porch earlier that day.
“I plans on making you look forty instead of . . . fifty?” Sugar questioned and leaned forward, hoping Pearl would reveal her age.
Pearl blushed, joyful that Sugar had missed her true age by ten years. “I believe I look just fine,” Pearl said and turned her bashful smile away from Sugar.
“I ain’t say you don’t, all I’m saying is that you could look better, better than fine.”
They laughed together, and Pearl did not resist when Sugar went at the bun again. “Lord, Miss Pearl, you’ve got a whole head full of hair, pretty too,” Sugar said as her fingers played in Pearl’s long, thick mane. “Why you always wear it up? You hiding it from someone?” Pearl shook her head no and placed her hands over her mouth, hiding the smile that was plastered to her lips.
“First off, the gray has got to go.” Sugar reached into the bag and pulled out a dark bottle of liquid.
“What’s that?” Pearl said, looking around Sugar to eye the bottle.
“Dye. Dye for your hair.”
“Oh no!” Pearl said, trying to stand. Sugar pushed her back down on the toilet.
“Just be still, Miss Pearl. Trust me, I know what I’m doing.”
Pearl sat shaking as Sugar parted her hair into sections and squeezed the dark liquid onto it. She listened to Sugar talk about her time in St. Louis, the time when Sullivan Place was hot and Mary Bedford’s house was the place to be. She did not explain in full exactly why it was so, but Pearl got the gist that it was a whorehouse, and she held her tongue still from speaking against it. “I usta dye a lot of heads then. No one ever wanted to have their own hair color. Always red or blond. Ha, me, I never went in for all that, I was happy with my wigs.”
Pearl listened and prayed that her hair would not simply slip off her head and drop to her tiled floor. The only person she had allowed on her head for years was Fayline. Every other Thursday at two, a wash and press and then back into the bun. She herself barely dislodged her bun, except to take it down to give her head a good scratching and greasing.
By nine o’clock Pearl came face to face with a woman that she’d known so many years earlier. She stood and stared open-mouthed at herself in the mirror, unable to believe that the woman who grinned back at her was indeed her.
“Oh my Lord,” were the only words she could repeat over and over again.
Her hair hung limp and wet, shining blacker than night around her face. She stood that way for a while, running her fingers through her hair, and pulling at the curls that had begun to take hold of it as it dried in the humid house air.
“You look beautiful, Miss Pearl,” Sugar said. She, too, was amazed. A bottle of dye had weeded out the age that had grown there.
“You miss her, she sure look like she been missing you, Miss Pearl,” Sugar said as she coiled Pearl’s hair into a French roll, leaving ringlets of curls to hang loose around her face.
“I ain’t never seen her before,” Pearl said in profound awe. She touched her face lightly, afraid that any contact with her fingers would cause the vision before her to waver and then distort, like a disturbed reflection in a pool of water.
“Joe is gonna love you, Miss Pearl!” Sugar yelled in delight and clapped her hands together like a gleeful child.
Joe’s name brought Pearl back to reality. “Oh no,” she whispered. Her face took on a fretful look. She turned to Sugar, wringing her hands, tears formed in her eyes. “Oh Lord . . . Joe?” How
could she have forgotten that she had a husband? She’d made a decision, a drastic decision without consulting her husband. Suppose he hated it? Suppose he hated her for having done it?
“Oh Sugar, what have you done?” Pearl shrieked and dragged her hands down the length of her face, as if the very action would somehow change her black hair back to the ravaged gray it’d been just minutes ago.
Sugar looked on, bewildered at Pearl’s sudden reaction. She was hurt.
“Miss Pearl,” she started slowly, “what do you mean, what have I done? What I’ve done was make you look younger, beautiful. What’s wrong with that?”
Pearl did not respond, she just stood staring at herself and shaking her head in dismay.
“What you want me to do, turn you back? Make you look old again?”
“I am old!” Pearl screamed and pushed past Sugar.
Sugar followed her into the bedroom. “You’re older, not old, Miss Pearl,” Sugar said. Pearl sat down on the bed and placed her head in her hands. Sugar leaned against the wall and examined the tight neatness of the room. The room lacked life. By instinct, Sugar knew nothing close to sexual passion had occurred there in a long time.
“You know what you need? You need to go out. Get away from this house, this town,” Sugar said. She walked over to Pearl and knelt down beside her. “Miss Pearl, why you acting like your life is over? It’s just a dye job. In time the gray will come back.”
“Before Joe gets back?” Pearl asked hopefully.
“No, not by then,” Sugar said with a wisp of a smile. “C’mon, we going out and show you off.”
Pearl looked at Sugar as if she’d gone mad. “Out? Out where?” Pearl’s eyes sparkled in spite of herself.
Sugar just smiled. “Just get dressed,” she said. “I’ll be back.” And then she was gone. Pearl heard the front door close and quick footsteps move the few feet down the pavement to #10 Grove Street.
Pearl sat on her bed staring at the floor. Periodically she would look over at the worn Bible that sat conspicuously on the nightstand beside the bed. Its black cracked cover seemed to fill the whole room and dwarf her. There was nothing in the Bible that said you shouldn’t dye your hair. There were no words that said, Thou shalt not befriend a whore. No, Pearl knew the Bible from cover to cover, and those shalt not’s did not exist.
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