“Yeah. I think so, Daddy.”
Roxbury Parish was quiet. He put his hands on his knees and cast his gaze around the room a few times. At some point he picked up his bourbon, took a sip, and as he scanned around again, he caught his daughter’s expectant expression. He raised his glass to her in a customary toast, sipped, and continued his slow scan of the room. “You finished? You ready to come clean and let ’em know what happened?” She looked out the window, then back at him. “If you’re done, I think you should tell ’em.” She stared at his glass of bourbon and waited for the ice to crack, then nodded. “You wearin’ your trouble, you know?” Sidarra looked up at him and nodded again. “And don’t plan to go no place for a while, ’cause you’re grounded, y’understand?” She nodded and actually smiled a little, realizing she was already serving the sentence. He too smiled slightly. “’Course I’ll be here if you need me.”
In all the years of conversation in that room, Sidarra knew that her father spoke there as he spoke nowhere else. However, this time was the same, only more so. “And you should always have a room for yourself, like this one, baby queen,” he added for no apparent reason.
Her Redbone Guilt cleared up overnight.
Years later she learned that on that day her father had been fired from his job of nineteen years. It was the beginning of his end. He hid the firing from her and her brothers for a long time, speaking in whispers about it to her mother, leaving and returning home at the same time each day, for years finding only part-time work at best. At his age, he could never find as good a job. Eventually it all merged into an unexplained poverty, with each child who could helping out.
Sidarra was slow to become the queen of her father’s wishes, and she failed to keep her mirrors clean. Instead of grinding toward her teaching certificate, she went to school in fits and starts and worked as a substitute teacher. She had finally finished college with a baby and a certificate when she got her own classroom. There she saw the horror of her dreams. For all of her own doubts and delays, she came face-to-face with pure failure. Sidarra saw the trying-hard faces of lovely doomed spirits soon to be quit upon. Not every child, but too many children. Especially the boys, like Tyrell from her block, whom she first met as a bucktoothed, gangly thirteen-year-old whose sweet eagerness took steady leave of his personality with every day he was shunted to a program for slow learners, sent away to a counselor for disciplinary misdeeds, or ignored. There was nothing for them, she realized, nothing intended. Sidarra tried for five years to be the difference in their lives, just as she was doing alone in her East Harlem apartment with Raquel. She thought she’d gotten a lucky break when a well-known philanthropist—a “white knight,” as they were called then—decided to donate his millions into a special schools program. He wanted fresh, bright, and untainted professionals to administer his plan to expose junior high school students to internships at corporations. Sidarra had already enrolled in school administration classes when she was hired on and moved into an office at the Board of Miseducation in downtown Brooklyn. And there but for the grace of God, she left the classroom and its neglected faces for good. Yet because it looked to her father like a promotion and because he had wanted so little and gotten much less, Sidarra never shared her unhappiness with him.
Her parents were happy before they died. Her father had discovered a problem with his blood. It was killing his bones. The flow to the joints had ceased and the edges were rapidly collapsing. Soon he would not walk or sit comfortably in a chair or make love without great pain. In short order the doctors said he would need his hips, his knees, and possibly his shoulders replaced. There was no money for all that. So her parents decided to get in all the strolling they could before his health prevented even that. Arm in arm, they walked the city, visiting parts and places they had only vague memories of from years before. One such day, they stood on a midtown street corner together, waiting for the light to change, when along came a terrifying screech, the quick blue smoke of a car’s tires, and the errant twist of a steering wheel. Careening over the curb to avoid a swerving yellow cab, the car hurtled straight into their bodies and decided everything once and for all.
After that, trouble seemed to become always for the Parish children, especially Sidarra’s big brother Alex. The cabdriver, lucky for him, was soon deported, and her other brothers, mad at an unjust world, wandered aimlessly for a long time. Sidarra needed help with her parents’ effects, but the men couldn’t find the strength. Alex argued a lot with her; he refused to be her backup. Alex tried hard, but he couldn’t move. He too had been crushed. Then one day Alex did move. He moved out to the desert with his young family, to New Mexico, where he became a plumber. And years of silence between Alex and his beloved little sister commenced.
A LITTLE MORE THAN THREE YEARS LATER, Sidarra found herself defiantly examining her naked body in the mirrors of her converted room, wondering just why the smooth bronze skin she was now all too willing to share with Griff chose now to turn into the hide of a poisonous butterfly. The rash was more venomous on an adult body. It had tracked clear across her breasts, tattooing one nipple with laughable discoloration, and freckled the slight paunch of her tummy. Never in childhood would it dare approach her genitals, but now the spotted march was on with a vengeance upon rounded hips she’d come to love again, down her strong inner thighs, and even populated among her outer pubic hairs. In disbelief, Sidarra stood there itching.
The transformation of the storage room into a sanctuary for self-examination was painstaking. The plaster was blasted clean of a hundred years of neglect. One wall had been replaced with hand-carved teak, insets for pictures of her parents were cut, special frames were ordered, and beneath it Sidarra had put in a Yoruba mask and shrine for the ancestors. The other walls were red. The windows that never existed behind old blinds and boxes were replaced by one huge pane that looked down on the garden. The boxes, loose hats, and shoe trees were in an attic space now. Sidarra had replaced them with a bank of deep couches covered in plush cream-and-mocha-satin-covered down pillows. To the left as you entered was an electronic piano on a stand. Beside the instrument was a cabinet with an encased sound system. At least eight speakers of different sizes were cut into the walls and ceiling. And everywhere were mirrors.
Before she began speaking to her father in the room, Sidarra felt she had to cover her body in a robe. He would know why the pox had come. “It could be the Whiteboy money—I mean, the money we play for and invest,” she began aloud. “But I don’t think that’s what broke my skin out this time Daddy. Making that money is very abstract. You don’t even experience it until you can turn it into a house. And I’m pretty clear about the sources. They’re scum. I’m not saying it’s right. I’m just saying I don’t think I regret it enough to go Redbone over it. Maybe the bet they won when Eagleton died. That wasn’t cool at all. His wife is grieving while I’m furnishing a brownstone with her loss. Maybe that’s had an effect on me. You never know what it is. It’s unconscious anyway. That’s what you always said.
“No, I think it probably has something to do with this guy I’m starting to love. You know, it occurred to me the other day, and it’s funny: no matter how much I think of him, no matter how long I’m at it, there’s no ‘but’ about Griff, Daddy. I mean, everybody gets a reservation. You got reservations about family all the time. You have reservations about even your best friend. Things they’ve said you never forgave ’em for, things they do, something you wish they’d change. The longer you know somebody, the farther they are from perfection. Look at Michael. He came on a lifeboat of reservations, and he’s been docked there ever since. But not Griff. I’ve known this guy for over a year and I like him, like being around him and what he says and how he says it and how the man looks when he says it, and I got no particular place I’d rather be than with him. I harbor not a single reservation. Not one.” Sidarra dropped her hands to her sides. “Except the fact that he’s married.
“I’m not even sure if this is my p
roblem, Daddy, or his. I can feel it coming off of him all the time, and I’m forced to deal with that. I don’t even know how Griff feels about his wife, or how much he hides from her—or from me. I just sense sometimes that it’s the only thing that could blow his cool, and I am heavily invested in this man’s cool. Crazy, huh?
“That’s probably why I’ve grounded myself up here in this room so much, where I can do no trouble but grow a few more scales or horns. Of course, if you could talk back, I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened. I wouldn’t be out at night with Uncle Cicero’s pool cue, I wouldn’t be playing the stock market with bad white folks’ money, I wouldn’t be goo-goo for a married fella, and my skin would be lovely and clear. So I suspect all this is the trouble without you, Daddy.”
15
SIDARRA’S FATHER WAS RIGHT about the unconscious cause of her skin condition. The itching got so bad that she went to a dermatologist, who diagnosed it as a nasty case of pityriasis rosea. Such a beautiful name for a problem conscience, much better than the clever labels she and Raquel made up in front of mirrors. Mocha Revolt. Streaking Tiger, Spotted Frog. Neither Noir. Red Arrests Rust. Raquel was also the only person other than the doctor who saw the whole quiet storm of color as it progressed from cute red pimples to burning brown swathes to flaking, itchy blobs. She helped administer the anti-itch creams as well as the historically offensive “de-pigmentator” called Fair & White. Yet none of the new information about the disease solved the mystery of just what Sidarra felt so guilty about—furnishing her new home with ill-gotten gains, marrying a married man in her thoughts, or something else.
By the time she held her Labor Day housewarming party, the brownstone was ready for company even if her skin was not. Aunt Chickie stood on her feet all Saturday afternoon in the kitchen making collards, macaroni and cheese, and potato salad. They’d bought steaks, ribs, chicken, and fish for the new grill in back. Michael was scheduled to be the master cook, but he decided he wasn’t coming. He and Sidarra had loud words the night before. A little too much vodka and Michael let her have it about all that was on his mind, including how her bad skin was a punishment for ignoring him. So Sidarra let him go. That way they would both be spared the head-to-head comparison with Griff.
But pityriasis rosea complicated her own inevitable meeting with Griff’s wife, which increased her nervousness and in turn made her itch. Sidarra tried to conceal her troubled hide with tight white pants and a billowy white cotton blouse. The top had a Queen Elizabeth collar, which covered her neck at the expense of looking a bit silly; it was that or a scarf. She was also nervous about inviting enough people. Her old friends would become jealous and wonder too much about the price of everything, and in any event, she would look uncharacteristically showy. That excluded them. The creepy Raul was nobody’s housewarming guest (though he managed to keep himself close). That left only the crew and some odd choices. Yakoob brought his wife Marilyn, a short, pear-shaped Puerto Rican woman with big thighs and a high-pitched giggle. Q showed up with an unknown girlfriend, Jeanette, who looked so young that maybe he picked her up at a bus stop on the way to school. Darrius Laughter brought his partner, Justin, a white man. Both were dapper in light suits and white shirts. To fill things up, Sidarra invited the contractor, Joseph, and his wife Evelyn, as well as the painter, Harry, and his wife Pearl. Of course Griff appeared at the top of the stoop with his wife, Belinda Chambers.
The cat, Pussy Galore, took one look at Belinda from the top of the stairs and decided it was time to leave.
Belinda had clearly intended to be the vision of note among whatever human females attended Sidarra’s affair, and from the git-go Sidarra had to acknowledge that she was. Just the sight of them deflated her a little. Griff arrived wearing a spectrum of browns, like the parlor walls—an auburn button-down shirt with a wide collar, a honeycomb linen four-button summer suit and pony brown clogs. Belinda followed him in like the sun shining on earth. She was lighter-skinned than Sidarra had imagined, a well-tanned butterscotch complexion, and even taller in high heels. Her thick reddish hair flowed just below her shoulders, framing her long, angular face, green eyes, and weak mouth. For an investment banker she boldly wore tight suede slacks in marigold yellow, her long, thin legs striding confidently inside. Belinda was small-chested beneath a cranberry-colored vest, but her arms were elegantly muscular, her neck like an antelope, and her exposed belly noticeably firm. The woman worked out. The woman never said no to herself.
Which included not wasting time where she didn’t care to be. Belinda had no interest in spending their holiday here, but gave in at the last minute. Griff asked her to make the best of it; out of curiosity, she said she would. But the more she heard of this Sidarra woman, the more her anticipation grew caustic. Belinda took no prisoners and that included party hosts. Her first sight of Sidarra released a slow drip of competitive juice down her spine until it tasted like salt or blood down the back of her throat. Their introduction was all eyes and no blinking. The girlie handshake they approached with was quickly tossed for a real grasp. Then they took turns measuring each other’s details. Once everybody was seated around the living room, Belinda took advantage of Sidarra’s momentary shyness, put a choke hold around whatever initial unease her own insides brewed, and did what she was famous for at work: she ran the room.
“So tell us, Q,” she began from her privileged position on the love seat beside her husband, “what do you do?”
The big dark man in the royal blue shirt smiled to everyone. “Would you believe I’m a cop?”
“Not if you’re a friend of Griff’s,” she came back.
“Ex-cop,” Griff added.
“Retired actually. I run a bar.”
Belinda clasped her hands together, leaned up in the couch, and nodded approvingly. “And you?” she asked, looking at Q’s girl.
“Oh, I’m Jeanette,” she said with a round-the-way meekness you knew wouldn’t last and a thick Harlem accent that would. “What do I do? Cosmetology.”
“Cosmetology!” Belinda repeated in case everyone hadn’t heard. “That’s great.”
“Jeanette, we have to talk, girl,” Darrius piped up from a leather stool beside Justin. He sipped his martini through a plastic stirrer.
“Darrius,” Belinda said, turning to him next, “what do you do?”
The natural flow was to settle into Belinda’s third-grade circle and wait your turn, but no one had told Darrius that. “Oh, you don’t know?”
“No,” she said, looking deliberately cute, and waited for him to tell.
“I’m Sidarra’s stylist, only I pay her!” His strong voice carried around the large room, and everybody laughed. “Isn’t that right, my queen?” he added, calling over to where Sidarra leaned against a doorway at the circle’s edge. She laughed and waved him off.
“Okay, so we got Hugo Boss in the house. How about you over there?” Belinda pointed to Justin. “Are you Calvin Klein?”
“If you’d like me to be, darling, but just for today,” Justin said, and broke up the room. Justin was a striking young white man, clean-shaven like a model, but delicately built, a brunette tussle of well-coiffed bedhead with blond highlights up top. When he opened his mouth, no s went unspoken. “I’m Justin,” he waved to the group. “And I’m a funkaholic.”
“All right,” Belinda went on, applauding playfully.
“You gonna keep running this thing, Oprah?” Griff turned and said to her.
She ignored him. “How about you, sweetie?” Belinda asked Yakoob’s wife. “What’s your name again?”
“Marilyn,” she said with a tart Nuyorican accent that rolled the r in “Mari” and licked the leen in “lyn.” Marilyn was the color of butter in the pan, with straight, nearly black hair pulled tight in a ponytail and a pudgy, beautiful face. Kind as pie, said her full cheeks when she smiled. Her thin brown eyes gleamed with good nature, and her pretty teeth never stayed hidden for long. “I work in the pharmacy, in the Duane Reade,” she told
them, sitting up, rubbing her husband’s thigh for brief social support.
“Which one, baby?” Koob joked in a soft voice, looking into her ear.
“Quiet, bu,” she waved toward him.
“Nah, baby, tell ’em which one.”
She sucked her lips and elbowed him. “You know the one downtown on Duane and Reade streets?” Everyone sort of pretended to be right there. “That’s the one. That’s the original one.”
“That’s how that shit got named Duane Reade, y’all,” he added.
“And, Koob, you’re a comedian, right?” Belinda asked when the giggles subsided.
“If I am, somebody in here owes me fifty cent for that last one.”
“I get half of it!” Marilyn added. The group laughed nervously. “So what do you do, Belinda?” Marilyn asked.
“Yes,” Darrius said, “what do you do all day?”
“Well,” she pulled up to the edge of her seat again, “I’m an investment banker.”
Long silence from those who knew what that was. “Oh yeah?” Marilyn said with a little excitement. “At what bank—like Citibank? That’s my bank.”
Belinda tried to be gentle. “No. Not that kind of bank. I’m with Smith Barney.”
What else could anyone say? They’d all seen the TV commercial with the fat white Englishman smoking a pipe in a library somewhere and bragging about what he had and how he’d earned it. Marilyn, her hand on Koob’s knee, just nodded and smiled. Game over, people started to stand up.
The pairing off began at once, mostly so folks could peek around the house, at least the parlor floor. Q immediately asked about the grill. When Sidarra hesitated about who was cooking, Q stepped up. Darrius and Justin strolled over to Jeanette, and Jeanette and Justin wound up outside in the yard beside Q for the next hour. Raquel spent some time slapping Koob five, until she decided to show him and Marilyn how well she could run and stop short on the new Persian rug. Aunt Chickie was polite with the construction people for a while, then left them on the bench and went back to the kitchen. Belinda stepped in and out of conversations but mostly circled her husband.
The Importance of Being Dangerous Page 14
