by Laura Furman
The earrings and T-shirts will go in the trash right afterward, that’s the idea.
Would go. They’re just playing.
The man and the woman amble on through the purpling evening, walking single file past the trees that encroach on the sidewalk.
“Gordy didn’t mind you going through his stuff, huh?” Tina’s T-shirt says LARRY CORYELL on the front and THE ELEVENTH HOUSE on the back. Rainey’s says CHICK COREA. Hers is signed.
Rainey regards Tina as they walk. She wonders if the question is loaded. Tina is the only person on earth whom Rainey has told about Gordy’s night visits. But they are best friends. Tina must not mean anything. Plus, Rainey doesn’t want to be what her father calls those eggshell people.
She says, guardedly, “If he figures it out, he’ll be pissed. But he might not. I’m never in his room.”
Ahead of them, the couple slows to look up at the window of a town house, and Rainey stalls by bending over to retie her sneaker lace.
Tina makes a little smirk-sound in her nose. “Yeah, why would you be,” she says. “He gets into your room every night.” Her face darkens. Her hand fastens to her mouth. “Oh, no,” she says through her fingers. “I fucked up. It just came out. I’m sorry, Rain.”
Inside Rainey’s purse, the gun beats like a heart. Its workings are a mystery. She and Tina were afraid to check if it had bullets because of the little lever that looks like another trigger. Rainey thinks the round part might be called a chamber, which sounds romantic.
“It’s okay,” says Rainey, not breathing. What else is it her father says? Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.
Through the darkness that drapes them all, she studies the woman who walks ahead of them. She’s tucked her sleek hair into her collar, implying some magnificent length—Like mine, thinks Rainey—and she wears Frye boots, which make a lovely, horsey click on the sidewalk. It’s not enough for this chick to hold the man’s hand; she has to nestle both of their hands into the pocket of his leather jacket, a gesture that irritates Rainey and makes her think, bizarrely, of the airlessness of that pocket, of lying under her quilt at night, waiting to see if her door will open, and faking sleep.
How do you say no to an innocent back rub? She has asked Tina that. “Do you want to say no?” Tina asked back, and Rainey wanted to sock her.
“It’s not okay,” says Tina. “I can read you. It was a shitty joke, Rain. It just came out. I don’t know why.”
As they walk on, Rainey can see what the man and woman stopped to admire: a red room hung floor to ceiling with paintings. “Really,” says Rainey. “It’s okay.” She smiles sweetly at Tina. It isn’t clear who’s being punished by the sweetness.
What kills her is the woman’s extraordinary cape. It flaps serenely around her calves like a manta ray.
“Swear it’s okay,” says Tina.
“I swear.” She is still smiling and it is like smiling at Tina from across a long bridge. Rainey ought to get over it—seriously, fuck her if she can’t take a joke.
Tina exhales. “Okay.” They both watch the couple for a moment. Then Tina says, “It’s not like I need the money.”
Rainey opens her mouth and closes it. She’s tempted to make a crack but she holds it in. Tina goes on about her grandmother a lot—how she gets paid to live with her. How she can’t bring anyone home because the grandmother doesn’t like strangers. How the grandmother is blind. Best friends for five years and Tina has never invited Rainey home, so Rainey’s not buying. She’s never probed, though. Tina might detonate, or cry.
They’ve sped up, and now Rainey slows, partly so their footsteps won’t be heard, but partly because she is pissed off and wants to consider the ramifications—that she is one of those eggshell people and fuck her because she cannot take this particular joke, and she suddenly has had it with the twenty-dollars-a-week grandmother story, because Tina has never had a twenty in her pocket once. A perverse urge to find the fuse in Tina rises up in her. And it would be so easy. Tina is like one of those sea corals they saw in a bio class movie that plant themselves any damn where they please, but close up tight as a fist when brushed by something they mistrust. In fact the only thing they do trust is this one fish called a clown fish. Rainey isn’t anyone’s goddamn clown fish.
She says, “I know, Tina. You get twenty dollars a week to live with your grandmother.”
Tina looks at her slantwise and reaches deep into the bag on Rainey’s shoulder—for the gun, Rainey thinks crazily, but it is only for the pack of Marlboros.
“Check out that cape,” says Rainey. “That’s mine.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, about my grandmother?” Tina lights a cigarette and drops the pack back in the bag.
Rainey wonders if she should be reeling Tina in right now, since they are playing robber girls. Besides, the grandmother is sacred territory. Rainey knows that without being told. Tina is tougher than Rainey but she is also easier to hurt. She knows that without being told. Rainey listens to the slow, steady hoofbeat of the Frye boots, satisfying as a pulse. Can you rob someone of her boots and cape? It’s okay to think these things, because they are just playing. They will veer off any minute. The woman looks back, appraises them with a glance, and dismisses them.
“I asked you what it means about my grandmother,” says Tina.
“It means your cup runneth over.” Rainey uses her musical voice. “If you’re getting twenty dollars a week.”
“I don’t have a cup.” Tina’s voice is low. “I have a savings account. I’m not supposed to touch it.”
“You must be rolling.”
Now Rainey too reaches for the cigarettes, which they jointly own, and lets her knuckles bump the gun. “What bank?” She’s ultracasual. The gun is cold and bumpy and could shoot off her foot, but the weight of it feels good. Already she knows she will stash it at the bottom of her school backpack, with her picture of Saint Catherine of Bologna, patroness of artists.
“What bank? What is this, a fucking quiz? You don’t believe me,” says Tina. Reflexively, she passes over her cigarette so Rainey can light hers.
“I want that cape, Teen.”
The couple turns left on Greenwich, walks a block, and crosses Barrow. Then they turn right on Morton. Rainey and Tina pick up their pace and fall back again, spooling out distance like kite string. It’s perfect; they’re all headed closer to the Hudson, where only true Villagers live and tourists rarely stray. Even from a half block back Rainey knows the man is handsome, his hair dark and thick, the shape of his head suggesting broad cheekbones that ride high. Rainey wants this man to desire her even as he looks at the gun and fears her. If she can make him desire her, she’ll erase the feeling of Gordy’s fingers where they don’t belong, where he can still call it a back rub when he makes his night visits. Right now the feeling is like a dent at the edge of her left breast. It’s a pressure along her neck where he starts stroking her long hair. She wants the cape, and she wants some other things that the man and the woman have. The money doesn’t interest her.
“I have over a thousand dollars in Marine Midland Bank,” says Tina.
“I’m going to take her cape,” Rainey says. “You can have all their bread.”
“If you don’t believe me,” says Tina, “I’m not taking another step.”
“Oh?” says Rainey in the dangerously charming voice she saves for the final minutes with a victim in the girls’ room. “Do you really live with your grandmother? Or do you just not want me to meet your family?”
Tina stops. Let her, thinks Rainey, she won’t stop long. She keeps walking. By the time she makes half of Morton Street by herself she is trying not to trudge; she is missing Tina acutely, missing the way she bumps into her sometimes, the slight brushing of her jacket sleeve. Tina doesn’t go in for hugging but she finds other ways to make contact, the affectionate shove, the French braiding of each other’s hair, touching the hand that holds the match—anything that can’t be called lezzy, which suits Raine
y fine. At school there are teachers who insist they sit on opposite sides of the classroom, who make them play on separate teams: Rainey Royal and Tina Dial. When Rainey finally hears Tina approaching at a scuffing trot, she stops and waits, happy and faintly ashamed.
Tina says, “Gimme the goddamn bag, Rain.”
Rainey passes it over. She waits to see if Tina is going to detonate and what that will look like. She waits to see if Tina can take a joke.
“I’m sorry, Teen.”
Tina looks into the bag as she cradles it in front of her, and Rainey knows she is looking at the darkly radiant gun, a gun Rainey stole from her father’s filing cabinet days earlier after one of his obnoxious sex talks. She’s spent a lot of secret time in Howard Royal’s room. She’s excavated the postcards her mother sends from the ashram. She’s stolen family photos from Howard’s albums, one at a time. She’s found boxes of Ramses and a pair of leopard-print underwear for men and the dispensers of birth-control pills from which Howard administers one pill every morning. I know what girls your age are doing. She hates those talks, Howard loosely strung across a brocade parlor chair while she’s curled into her carapace to hide her breasts.
“I believe you,” says Rainey. “I do.”
In addition to the gun, Rainey stole her birth certificate from a file marked “Legal.” Rainey Ann Royal. Who the fuck picked Ann, anyway? A girl named Ann would dance badly and her hip-huggers wouldn’t hug. If anyone kissed her, she’d wonder where the noses go. In dodgeball, if you were feeling mean, Ann would be the girl whose anxious face you’d aim for.
Maybe Ann is the reason her mother left.
No one knows Rainey’s middle name, not even Tina, and she knows every single other thing about Rainey. Tina knows it is a lie when Rainey says she plays jazz flute. She knows it is true that Rainey technically may have lost it to her father’s best friend. She knows it is a lie that Rainey will move to the ashram when she is sixteen. She knows all this, and she doesn’t judge.
Ahead, near the corner of Washington, the couple sits on a town house stoop. They kiss and lean into each other.
“She’s blind,” says Tina. It takes Rainey a second to realize they are still talking about the grandmother. “I told you.” They are standing less than half a block from the couple, watching obliquely. The man lights two cigarettes and passes one to the woman. Maybe they are just playing too, playing at being robbed, Rainey thinks. The man glances up the sidewalk and watches Rainey and Tina, still in conference.
“I get it,” says Rainey. “I believe you. I get it, Teen.”
They resume a slow walk toward the town house stoop. Rainey could swear she hears Tina thinking hard in her direction. She could swear she hears something like I’m lying, she’s not blind. The twenty dollars, that’s bullshit too, and Rainey thinks back, It’s okay, Teen, I love you anyway, and we’re going to just walk by these people, right? and she hears Tina think, Of course we are, we’re just playing, when Tina drops her hand into the bag and says, “You don’t get anything.”
They are about a quarter block away. Less.
Alarmed, Rainey looks straight at the beautiful leonine man. “Don’t do it,” she says in a low voice. And then, because she knows it is too late, because it is not in her control and because she wants to do it too, she whispers, “Don’t hurt anyone.”
Now the woman looks up. In about fifteen steps, if they keep walking, Rainey and Tina will reach the man and the woman on the town house stoop.
They keep walking, slowly.
Tina whispers, “There’s a safety, right? That’s what it’s for, right?” Her elbow is cocked, it’s obvious she’s about to draw something out of the bag, and now they are right there, steps from the man and the woman sitting and smoking on the town house stoop, and Rainey has no idea if there’s a safety or what a gun was doing in Howard’s filing cabinet. She wants the man to look at her and lose all awareness of everything that is not Rainey, and he is, now, looking at her, but with the wrong expression. Quizzical. He looks quizzical, and the woman is checking his face to see what’s changed. Tina stops. Rainey stops behind her. She has no idea what will happen if Tina steps any closer and the man twists her wrist so that the gun falls to the sidewalk and explodes, shooting someone in the ankle. She does want that softly gliding cape, which she will wear to school, inciting fabulous waves of jealousy.
She could go somewhere around the treetops and look down from there. It’s a gift she has, one she likes to think her mother left her. The moment hurtles toward them. She has to decide fast. Tina faces the woman as if she were going to ask her directions. Her two hands shake around the gun, which is abruptly half out of the bag.
“This is a stickup,” she says, trembling, her voice hoarse, and Rainey is far from the treetops, she is right there, feeling the concrete through her shoes.
The woman claps a hand over her mouth, stopping a laugh. “Central casting,” she whispers from under her hand.
“The gun’s real,” says the man. “Shut up, Estelle.” Rainey has no idea what wuthering means, but she thinks he must have that kind of face: brooding and gorgeous, from some dreamy old novel.
“Yeah, shut up, Estelle.” Tina sounds like she does in the girls’ room but with an undertow of fear. “You guys live here or what?” Rainey feels the approaching moment thundering right up to her. She feels like someone who can take any kind of joke, now. She can’t wait to find out what her job will be.
The man and the woman say no and yes at the exact same moment. “Take our wallets,” says the man. “You don’t have to hurt anyone.”
“Be nice,” says Tina. “Invite us up.”
“If you’re going to do anything do it here,” says the man. Estelle’s hand remains plastered to her mouth, but her eyes are rounded.
Rainey feels ravenous for what is about to happen. The sidewalk is pushing through her shoes now. “I’m feeling kind of antsy down here,” she says in a voice that sounds like smoke and jazz. She has it down. “Take us upstairs, baby,” she tells the man.
Tina walks up to the stoop and jabs the gun against Estelle’s knee. Saint Tina of the Girls’ Room—are they really in the same place, doing the same thing? Is it possible that Tina feels purification as she does this bad act? Rainey’s father’s words unspool from her body as if she is expelling a magician’s silk scarf: They talk about this at school, don’t they? How girls your age are approaching the height of their sexual powers? She feels the nape of her neck sealing itself against Gordy’s hand, and she looks at Estelle’s neck with rising irritation.
“Okay okay okay okay okay,” says Estelle, and gets up fast from the stoop.
“Hey, listen,” says Rainey, batting Tina on the arm. She almost says her name but catches herself. “I totally believe you. I do. I had one crazy moment of doubt but it’s over. I’m sorry.” She watches as Tina closely scans her face as if she’s not sure she’s seen it before.
“You still think I’m bullshitting,” says Tina, locking her gaze back onto the boyfriend and Estelle. “And you’re still mad from what I said about Gordy.”
Rainey is not afraid of Tina. She might be afraid of hurting Tina, though.
“I believe you to death,” says Rainey. “And it’s okay about Gordy. Come on. I’ll prove it. Let’s do something crazy.”
“Oh my God,” says Estelle. “Oh God oh God oh God.”
The brick building’s entry hall is lit with bare bulbs and its stairs are thickly carpeted. Glossy black doors, greenish walls—Rainey feels like she is at the bottom of a fish tank. “Go,” says Tina harshly, and the man looks at her jamming her purse, with the gun half in it, into Estelle’s back. “Don’t touch her,” he says, and immediately starts up the stairs. Rainey listens for sounds from other tenants and hears none. “I’m aiming right at Estelle’s spine,” says Tina, and while it seems to Rainey that the man could lunge back down the stairs at them, it also seems that the word spine sounds menacingly like bone porcelain, and she is not afraid
.
They climb, first him, then Estelle and Tina in a kind of lockstep, then Rainey, the shag carpeting hushing their progress, till the man stops at a door on the third floor and Estelle sags against it. She says, “You don’t have to come in. You could just turn around. We’ll give you everything.”
Tina holds the gun close to her own side, aimed at Estelle. “Oh, we can’t wait to see your apartment,” she says in a pretend-guest voice.
Rainey holds her hand out for both sets of keys; she senses Estelle and the boyfriend trying not to touch her palm. It makes her powers grow, holding their keys and key chains: such intimate objects. She opens the shiny black door, feels for a switch, and turns on the light.
“You’re not kidding we want to see it,” she says.
The apartment, a large studio with two tall windows, is painted a deep violet, as if an intense twilight has settled. In contrast, the trim and furnishings—a bureau, a table with chairs, and a curvaceous bed frame—are painted bridal white. Rainey can’t believe it. She walks down a violet hall into which a Pullman kitchen is notched, flicking on lights as she goes. At the end, she opens the door to a violet bath. She wants to steal all the walls.
Behind her, she hears Tina telling the boyfriend and Estelle to sit on the bed, and how far apart.
“What color is this?” she calls from the bathroom, where the white shower curtain manages to look like a wedding gown against the violet walls.
“I mixed it.” Estelle is breathing hard. “I’m a set designer.”
Rainey walks back down the hall into the main room and props herself against a white dining chair. Tina moves cautiously around the room, always watching Estelle and the boyfriend, lifting small objects off the mantel and nightstands and amassing a little pile of goods on the hearth. Rolls of coins. Earrings. The gun never wavers. Rainey asks Estelle, “Yeah, but what do you call it, this color?”
“Amethyst,” says Estelle. “It’s a glaze.”
“It’s incredible,” says Rainey. “It’s the most beautiful color I’ve ever seen.”