The plant to a powder to a chunk—a clover burr in your hand. And then it turned red and glowed, like a rat’s eye in the palm tree when you looked up just as headlights caught the pupils. Did rats have pupils?
Then you breathed in. And behind your eyes, it was like someone took a white-out pen and erased everything. Your whole head turned into a milkshake. Sweet and grainy and sliding down the back of your skull.
Look at all these nail salons. She turned the pages of the advertisements in Vietnamese, the flyer on the coffee table. Massage pedicure chairs. Swirling water. The women with perfect eyebrows and lips and hair. Every other one name Nguyen.
Linh Nguyen. Lynn Win told Glorette she changed her name to make it easier for Americans to write on checks. “Win like money I get.”
Glorette breathed again at the open salon door. “Sisia. Please. Tell me you ever heard a man say, ‘Girl, I love those nails. That color’s perfect with your clothes. The decals are fresh.’”
“Shut up, Glorette. You just cheap.”
Lynn Win glanced up at her and frowned, her perfect Vietnamese face sheened with makeup, her eyes encircled by a wash of pale green, her lips pink as watermelon Jell-o. Against her neck, on the left side, was a scar. A healed gash that must have gaped, against tight neck skin.
No one had loose neck skin until forty. She must be about thirty-five, Glorette thought. Just like us.
Sisia had a scar on her neck, too, a keloid caterpillar, shiny as satin. Curling iron. Sixteen. They’d been getting ready for some high school dance. Back when Sisia still hot-combed her hair and then curled it back like Farrah Fawcett and Jayne Kennedy.
What did the DJ play at that dance? Cameo? She’d have to ask Chess when she saw him next time. Bar-Kays? “Your Love Is Like the Holy Ghost.”
The hot air at the door mixed with the cold AC and nail polish fog.
No scars. She had never done anything with her hair other than wash it, comb in some Luster Pink or coconut oil, and let it hang loose in long black ripples. Back then. Now she wore it in a high twisted bun every night, unless a man told her to unpin it. Put all that hair right here. Hurry up.
This new woman cruising Palm in the brown van had poked her finger into the bun a few nights ago and then pulled. “Man, I know that shit ain’t real,” the woman had said, her voice New York like rappers on a video, her words all pushed up to the front of her lips. People from New York kept their words there, just at their teeth, not deep in their throats like Louisiana people. Like her mother and father.
Then the new woman had said, “I-on’t-even-care you think you the shit around here. Just cause you light. Cause you got all that hair. Anybody get hair. Bald man get hair if he want to. You need to move your ass off this block. Cause I’m parked here.”
She couldn’t have been more than twenty, twenty-two. Short, thick-thighed in her miniskirt, her hair in marcelled waves close to her forehead. Her words moved behind her lips and her lips moved like a camel’s, while her eyes stayed still.
“Sound like she said she some pork,” Sisia said, hands on her hips.
Glorette just shrugged and looked back over her shoulder at the woman near her van. That’s where she worked the men. She had a CD player in there, and some silk sheets, she said. And her man stood in the doorway of the liquor store for a long time, watching Chess and Reynaldo and the others who were just biding their time.
“I ain’t no crack ho,” the girl called, and Sisia laughed.
“I ain’t either,” she said. “I’m somethin else.”
“This ain’t the nineties.” The girl shot them the finger.
“And I ain’t Donna Summer.”
Glorette watched Sisia move her head on her neck like a turtle and stalk away, and she followed.
GLORETTE THOUGHT: 1980? Was I sixteen?
Damn.
Gil Scott Heron said the Revolution will not be televised, brother. You will not be able to turn on or tune out. But they did. That’s what Sere always said. Brothers tuned out. Green Acres and Beverly Hillbillies will not be so important, Gil Scott Heron said—but they were. The revolution will not be televised, brothers, the revolution will be live.
One night Glorette had run into Marie-Therese at Rite Aid. Marie-Therese used to be with Chess, back then when they were girls in the darkness of the club called Romeo’s. 1981? Only two clubs in Rio Seco back then—Romeo’s for jazz and funk, and Oscar’s Place for nasty old blues and knife fights and homebrew.
That was where I met Sere. A brother with a flute. Didn’t nobody in Rio Seco have a flute.
Gil Scott Heron’s band had a flute. Yusuf Lateef had a flute. War had a flute. Herbie Mann had a flute. Sere had loved that Mann song—“Push Push.” She could still remember it. Sere’s band was called Dakar. His last name.
Where the hell was Sere playing his damn flute now? For Jay Z or 50 Cent? For Ludacris? What else did this girl from New York always have blastin out her CD player when she was waiting?
Nobody said Hey, brotha. Nobody but the old ones. Her age. Chess and them. That Sidney, the one ran into her at Sundown. He used to work at the hospital. Chess and them said he burned the body parts after the doctors cut them off. Said he burned up Mr. Archuleta’s leg, and Glorette always wondered how heavy that piece of meat would have been. She ran her shoulders up under her ears with the shivers. Piece. Give me a lil piece, sugar. Just a lil piece. What the hell was that? What they wanted wasn’t no size. You couldn’t give anybody just a lil bit of anything.
***
SISIA HANDED THE money to Lynn Win. Sisia’s skin was so thin over her facial bones that her temples looked stretched from the tight cornrows, even her nose.
They had been smoking for so long. Chess gave her the first pipe, but then he got done with it. He said he didn’t need it.
He had his weed and Olde English.
How was the skin distributed over the bones? How did her buttocks stay in the right place? When did men decide they wanted buttocks and cheekbones and hair instead of something else? Like a big nose or huge forehead or belly? Some caveman picked.
Sisia stood up with her nails purple as grape juice and rings winking. But could a woman kill someone with her nails? Because this new woman from New York looked like she wanted to kill Glorette.
THE MAN STOPPED in his old Camaro. Moved his chin to tell her come on. Glorette knew he wanted head. That’s all. He parked in the lot behind the taqueria. Five minutes. A little piece of her lip when he jerked around and her tooth banged on his zipper.
Her piece: $20. She walked back toward Launderland, where Jazen and his boys kept their stash in a dryer.
The rock was so small. Not even a piece. A BB. A spider egg. A grass-hopper eye. But not perfectly round. Jagged edged.
A white freckle, she thought, and started laughing, waiting for the screen like a windshield in front of her eyes when she breathed in hard. Like someone had soaped up her brain. Store was closed.
HEADPHONES. AL B. Sure—“Nite and Day.” Switch—“I Call Your Name.” All those sweet-voiced men from when she was first walking out here. Not jazz. Jazz was Sere. “Poinciana.” April in Paris. And funk. Mandrill and Soul Makossa and Roy Ayers.
But somebody always stole the headphones. And she wanted Victor to have headphones, and they kept stealing his, too. So he slept in them, with a chair against his bedroom door. She tried to make sure only Chess or someone she knew came home with her, but sometimes Sisia begged to let her use the couch or the floor with a man, and then sometimes he stole.
Victor knew everything about music.
“New York rappers, man, I have to listen real careful to understand,” he said. “Oakland and LA are easy. St. Louis is crazy—I mean, they mess with the actual syntax like nobody else.”
Victor analyzed everything. Sometimes Glorette stared at his forehead while he was talking, at the place where his baby hairs hadn’t grown into his dreads yet. His hairline curved like a cove on a map. She had been to a cove once. To
the ocean. With Victor’s father. Sere.
He’d seen her in the club. He thought she was eighteen. He’d borrowed a car, pulled up in front of the high school and leaned his chin on the crook of his elbow like a little kid. He told her, “I’m fixin to see this place California’s supposed to be. What they all talk about in Detroit.”
“What you think you gon see?” Glorette had watched the freeway signs above them, the white dots like big pearls in the headlights.
“Remember Stevie singing ‘Livin for the City’? Skyscrapers and everythang. I’ma see waves and sand and everythang. Surfers.”
“At night?”
“They probably surf at night.” He’d turned to see her in the passenger seat. That car was a Nova, and someone had spilled Olde English in the backseat and the smell rose from the carpet sharp like cane syrup. “It’s an hour to the ocean and you never been there?”
Glorette had shrugged. She had felt her shoulders go up and down, felt her collarbone in the halter top graze the cloth. He had left a love bruise on her collarbone. He’d said her bones made her look like a Fulani queen. “I bet them sorry brothas call you a Nubian or Egyptian. Cause they don’t know the specifics.”
She’d touched cheekbone and collarbone and the point of her chin. But after all that it was the soft part they wanted.
No bones.
“It’s a hour I ain’t never had free,” she said.
Sere took out the Cameo cassette from the old stereo and slid in an unmarked tape. “Poinciana,” he said. Piano hush-hush and cymbals. Like rain on a porch roof and swirling water.
Then, after they’d driven to the ocean and sat in their car looking at the blackness that was one with the horizon, a cold purple-blue blackness like charcoal, with the waves the only sound and then a plash of white in a long line as if someone were washing bleach clothes in too much detergent, Sere turned to her, and he only wanted the same things as the rest of them.
WHY HAVE BUTTOCKS? What good were they? And hair? If Glorette’s great-great-whoever had been Fulani and had gotten with some Frenchman in Louisiana, why all this hair falling down her back? How was that supposed to keep her warm? Hair was fur. Nails were claws. Sisia was ready to kill some damn lion then, now that they were done with Lynn Win’s place. Glorette had gotten high off the fumes anyway, waiting for Sisia’s toenails to dry. Who the hell was she gon kill with them toenails? Lynn Win’s mother sat at the spa chair waiting for the next pedicure. The mother looked old but probably wasn’t. She wore knit pants like an old woman, and her hair was in a bun on her head. Black hair with gray threads shot through like moss.
All the blood moving through the pieces of their bodies. When she woke up at noon or so, the already-hot light streaming through the blinds like x-rays on her legs where she lay on the couch, she would see the tops of her feet smooth and golden, her toes dirty from the walking, but her skin still sleeping.
Sometimes Sisia spent the $12 on a pedicure just so she could sit down for an hour, she said.
But Glorette didn’t want decals on her toes. She saved $20 a day for Victor. For CDs and Ramen.
She went to the older plaza further up Palm, with the Rite Aid and the auto parts store. The lipsticks stacked in the bin like firewood. Haircolor boxes always started with blonde. Blonde as white taffy and then about thirty more yellows. Saffron and Sunflower. Gingercake and Nutmeg. Black always last. Raven. Midnight.
Black hair ain’t nothin you could eat.
There were flowering plants in front of the drug store. Her father always shook his head and said, “Anybody buy plant when they buy cough syrup don’t grow nothin. Put that tomato in the ground and throw water on it and wonder why it die, oui.”
She walked past the window of the auto parts store. When she was small, in here with her father and Uncle Enrique, she used to wander the aisles touching the oil filters like paper queen’s collars, and fan belts like rubber bands for a giant’s ponytail. After Victor was born, Chess came to visit from college and said he loved her. Brought her the pipe. The little air fresheners hanging right there by the cash register. Chess brought her here once when he needed Armor All. Chess played ball all day, and loved her all night. But he had to love Marie-Therese and Niecy, too, and she told him Only me, and he shrugged and said Only always too small. Only one dollar. Only one rib. See? I ain’t livin only.
Boxes and boxes of fuel filters near the window. Same size as haircolor. A lil piece. Only a lil piece.
Ramen was ten for a dollar. Beef.
Now, when she looked at her hands on the Rite Aid counter, they were smooth and gold. She slid the dollar across and got six cents for tax from the little dish. Take a penny leave a penny. By midnight, when she sat in the taqueria just before it closed, she would study her hands, the veins jagged like blue lightning. Her feet—it looked like someone had inserted flattened branches of coral under her skin. The skin so thin by midnight, at hands and feet and throat and eyelids.
She imagined she was swimming down the sidewalk. The pepper trees in the vacant lot past the strip mall, where the old men used to play dominoes on orange crates, where the city had put a chainlink fence, trying to keep people from loitering. She didn’t loiter. The street-lights shone through the pepper branches. She was under the ocean. Sere had brought a flashlight that night they went to the ocean, and he’d found tidal pools where the water only swayed in the depressions of the rocks, and the flashlight beam showed her a forest of seaweed and snails clinging to the leaves—were green blades called leaves, underwater? stems?—and the whole world under the surface swayed.
Like now, when the evening wind moved the whole street. The pepper branches swayed delicate and all at once, the palm fronds rustled and glinted above her, and the tumbleweeds along the fence trembled like the anemones.
She’d gotten a book, a child’s book, after that night at the ocean, and learned the names of every animal in the tidal pool. She had waited a year for him to take her back there, but he disappeared when she was eight months pregnant, veins like fishnet stockings all stretched out along her sides.
She swam along the sidewalk now, wondering where Sisia had gone, waiting to see who was looking for her. Maybe Chess. Maybe the brown van, with New York City pissed because Glorette had shrugged and said in front of the woman, “This ain’t hot to me. Long as my hair up and my soda cold.”
“Pop.”
“What?”
“You mean pop.”
“I’ma pop you,” Sisia said, coming up behind the woman. “Don’t nobody care if you from New York or New Mexico. Time for you to step. Don’t nobody want to get in no nasty van. Fleas and lice and shit.”
The woman spat a cloud onto the sidewalk near Sisia’s sandals. “Then why I had five already tonight? Make more in one night than you make all week. This the way in New York. Mens want some convenience. And it’s the shit up in there. I got incense and candles and curtains. So you take your raggedly country ass back to the alley.”
But all this time she was looking at Glorette. “And your high-yella giraffe too.”
THE CUSTODIAN BACK in junior high said, “Just a lil minute, now. Just stand still. Right here. I ain’t even gon touch you. But it ain’t my fault. Look at you. The Lord intended you for love. Look at you. Hold still. See. See. Lord. See.”
The mop was damp like a fresh-washed wig near her arm. The closet. He was behind her. He stood close enough that she smelled Hai Karate, and then the bleach smell of what left his body and he caught in a rag.
“See.” His voice was high and tight. His white nametag was small as a Chiclet when she crossed her eyes and didn’t focus at all.
SHE WANTED SOME chicharrones. Explosions of fat and chile on her molars.
When she turned back down Palm to head toward Sundown, seeing Chess and two other men now, thinking the chicharrones would give her enough time to let them see the backs of her thighs and her shoulder blades, everything better than what New York had, better than curtains or candles, it
was like her thoughts had brought the brown van cruising down Palm, stopping at the liquor store. The woman got out and folded her arms, cocked her head to the side, the tails of her bandanna like a parrot’s long feathers curling around her neck.
Glorette turned down the alley and headed toward the taqueria instead.
LOOK HERE, THE custodian said. Mr. Charles. But he was not old. His fade was not gray at the edges. Look here. He held out money rolled tight as a cigarette. I ain’t gon bother you no more.
The five-dollar bill was a twig in her sock all day.
SHE SAT AT the table in the taqueria for a few minutes, feeling the blood move and growl in her feet. No socks. Sandals. Heels. The money not in her cleavage. No money yet tonight. When she got money she put it inside the thick hair at the back of her head, just before the bun.
Chess would give her money. But most of the men just slid a rock into her palm.
***
THE CUSTODIAN DIDN’T have to touch her after that. He didn’t ever give her money again. He watched her walk in the hallway, and she knew he went into his broom closet and stood there and saw her when he moved his hands. Free. A lil piece. He stood facing the mop. The string hair. Then he was gone.
They were all gone.
At the taqueria, the woman behind the counter watched her, waiting patiently. Her mop was already wet. It stood up behind her, at the back door. Her night was almost over. The carne asada was drying and stringy in the warming pan.
Just a lil piece of meat. And a warm tortilla.
SHE STILL HAD the bag of ramen, but Victor would be sleep now. He was seventeen. He was about to graduate. He stayed up late studying and fell asleep on the couch, even though he knew she might bring someone home if she had to. The only one who always insisted on coming to her apartment was Chess. He liked to sit on the couch and drink a beer and pretend they were married. She knew it. He would watch TV like that was all he came for, laughing at Steve Harvey, like this living room was TV, too, and there were sleeping kids in the bedrooms and a wife.
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