Third Girl from the Left

by Martha Southgate

  The two girls listened politely, their hands waiting for their cones, their eyes solemn. They received their ice cream at the end of the story, said “Thank you, Mr. Evans” in chorus, and walked out into the brilliant sunshine. Louann’s tongue worked around the edge of her cone. “Don’t you get sick of him talkin’ about that riot all the time?” said Angela, her tongue darting in and out.

  “Yeah, but what are you gonna do? Grownups always talk about that old-timey stuff. ’Sides”—Louann’s tongue darted out again—“my daddy says he’s right. He was a little boy then. He says it was the worst day ever come to Tulsa. White folks is crazy.” Angela was quiet, considering. Her parents never talked about that day. But her daddy walked on the same side of the street as a white person only when he absolutely had to. And one time, when her mama asked her to clean out the hall closet, Angela found a brownish old picture of a beautiful woman. She had steady eyes and an oval face, an almost too full mouth. She wore a high-collar dress and a dreamy expression. Angela stared at the photograph for a long time, then took it to her mother, who was hanging the wash outside. “Mama, who’s this?”

  Her mother looked down, distracted, a clothespin in her mouth. “What, Angie?”

  “I said, who is this in this picture?”

  Mildred pulled the clothespin from her mouth, her distant look vanishing. She reached out and snatched the photograph from her daughter’s hand. “That ain’t nobody you need to concern yourself with. Just an old picture. She been gone since the burning in twenty-one. Now get back up there and finish cleaning that closet like I asked you to.” Her eyes brightened with sadness. She was looking at Angela when she first took the photograph from her but now stared down. Her hands shook. Angela knew better than to ask why she was so upset.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She went back upstairs, back to her task. But she couldn’t stop thinking about the woman whose picture made her mother cry. She folded heavy sheets, put away hot, itchy blankets, swatted summer moths away from her face. But she could feel the beveled edge of the photo frame in her hand, its light weight against her fingers. A picture of someone who had the dreamy eyes of a girl who would stand on the landing and listen for the hum of the universe. Who was she?

  Her fifteenth birthday came and went. When she was nearly sixteen, she started keeping company with Bobby Ware. Her parents approved. He was the son of Dr. Ware and a football player for the colored high school. He was tall and chocolate-skinned and polite to grownups. He had legs that ran through the dreams of half the girls in town and a mouth that you found yourself watching when he talked. Lips so pretty it didn’t matter much what he said. Whenever he talked to Angela, his voice a slow caress, she found her feet doing an independent, twisting dance of their own, her heart slamming into her ribs. And she became the chosen one. In all the good seats at the games. Walking home with him after church. Wearing his letter sweater slung casually over her shoulders. Sitting with his hand on her leg at the movies. She knew she ought to make him move it, but it felt so good there, warm and gentle, the feeling between her legs so delicious. It was dark in the theater, the only light that which beamed from Sidney Poitiers face as he showed a group of unworldly nuns the meaning of life in Lilies of the Field. No one could see them. She allowed him this liberty. She lay in bed after he brought her home, always well before her curfew, and rested her hand on her leg in the same spot he had rested his.

  The way it happened was like standing in water up to her waist and suddenly finding it was over her mouth. First she let him keep his hand on her leg, then when they went to see The Birds, her belly, then when they saw A Hard Day’s Night, she let him touch her breasts, outside the bra. She knew her mother would kill her if she knew, but she also could not believe how good it felt. How desperate she was to keep going.

  So finally she did. She was with Bobby under the football bleachers after a game. He still smelled of the shampoo he’d just used. The air was sweet and cold, about to turn fall. When he reached under her bra and moved his fingers over her nipples, her eyes opened wide in shock. She must have looked like a cartoon. She had no idea she was capable of feeling such pleasure. What could be bad about it? She shifted her legs underneath him, wanted to reach down and rub herself the way she did before she fell asleep some nights. Only this was better. It was nice to hear his hoarse breathing, feel where the soft flesh met his springy hair on the back of his neck. She liked that intent look on his face—like she was the last thought he was ever going to have. She took his hand and slid it between her legs, a move that surprised him so much that he was still for a moment. But soon his hand began to creep, at first hesitantly, then when he met with no resistance, a little more quickly, into her underwear, moving gently over the soft places underneath. She moved her hips to encourage him, surprising both of them with her small, unselfconscious moans and gasps. After a minute, his hand went still again and he finally spoke: “Can I? Girl, what you want me to do?”

  She thought her heart would break if he stopped. “Go ahead,” she whispered. “I want everything.” They looked at each other a stern moment, legs shifting against the rough plaid wool blanket. He slid a finger in, experimenting. She cried out, pleased, and he grinned a little. “OK, then.” He unhooked her bra and got to work. Her last clear thought was: Boy, I’m really going to have to leave town as soon as I’m old enough. Folks are going to hear about this.

  Girls who felt the way she did about Bobby Ware under the bleachers didn’t last long in the Greenwood section of Tulsa. Not long at all before everybody was calling them “fast” and looking the other way when they came down the street.

  After they finished, Bobby lay stroking her face, not speaking. She didn’t say anything either. She felt the whole world had opened up between her thighs. Sam Cooke’s voice was in her head, like silk. She knew it wasn’t right, but she couldn’t stop beaming.

  “What you smiling at, girl?” Bobby said after a few minutes.

  “You,” she replied. He liked that. He smiled and kissed her. But she didn’t really mean it. She liked the way he made her feel. She liked that her mind was free of words, that there were so many sweet green moments of being completely out of control. That’s what made her smile. But she didn’t know how to say that. He seemed satisfied with her answer. She sat up, pulled up her panties, brushed at her skirt, kissed him with an open mouth, and said, “We probably ought to be getting back. My mama’s gonna be worried.”

  That night at dinner, her stomach kept swooping downward unexpectedly. She had trouble eating. She kept remembering some moment—Bobby’s mouth on her nipples or the way he ran his tongue, just once, around the edge of her earlobe—and she had to close her eyes, a gasp almost escaping her. Her father didn’t notice anything, going on about Miz McNulty coming in to get “something for her monthlies,” and not wanting to talk to him about it, so he had to spend twenty minutes looking around for a woman she could talk to until he finally had to haul Tilly Ransom off the street and Miz McNulty whispered in her ear and then Tilly Ransom whispered in his ear and he soberly reached down the bottle of “remedy” (which was about ninety proof) and wrapped it in paper and handed it to her. “And all I could think,” he concluded in a too loud voice, “was as old as she is, that monthly visitor’s been hanging around a good sight longer than most. I think she just likes the medicine. If you know what I mean.” He laughed and shook his head, shoveling in a forkful of mashed potato. He had grown much franker in his dinner-table talk since Angela’s older brother and sister had married and moved out.

  “Now, Johnny Lee, that ain’t no way to talk in front of Angie,” said Mildred.

  “What? She’s a girl, ain’t she? And it ain’t nothin’ this old druggist ain’t seen. She might as well know what goes on in this town. Why shouldn’t I talk in front of her?”

  “It just ain’t seemly, that’s all.”

  “Hmm.” Johnny Lee retreated to sullen silence. Angela shifted in her chair, flushed. What he was talki
ng about made Angela especially uneasy this time. Mildred’s eyes bored right through her. What if she was pregnant? They’d have to be careful next time. No way was she having any babies. No way.

  Every Saturday after chores, Angela and her mother went downtown to the movies. Mildred was an old-fashioned moviegoer. She was willing to see everything. It used to be fine to do that. Everybody saw everything. Johnny Lee never cared much for the pictures, but she never thought twice about bringing the children. There wasn’t anything at the movies they couldn’t see back then. Times were changing. But Mildred and Angela weren’t. Not about this. The previous Dreamland, a place of magic with a glittering chandelier and acres of plush Oriental carpet, had burned to the ground in the riot and was rebuilt brick by painful brick in the years later. No one had told Angela that. And the chandelier was gone by the time she was old enough to have noticed it. But she loved the theater. She thought it had always stood there in its fading but still palpable glory. In 1964, the fading was far more apparent than the glory. The neon out front flickered and the lobby smelled of rancid oil and there were always a couple of letters missing from the awning. Today’s film was Y AIR LADY. But they didn’t care about the popcorn hulls underfoot, their feet sticking to the floor, the faint smell of old, squeezed-out sweat. Everything important was on the screen.

  Mildred generally smelled of lavender sachet and wore her hair pulled back in a smooth chignon. To Angela, she only seemed truly relaxed in two situations: one was singing in church, which she did fervently to every hymn, even though she was never in the choir, her eyes closed, her round tones like butter in the air. The other was at the movies every Saturday. Inevitably at emotional moments or in musicals, as the lead actress—Audrey, Judy, Debbie, Dorothy, Deborah, whoever it might be—burst into song, Mildred sat, mouthing the lyrics gently, tears rolling down her face. The first time this happened, when they went to see The King and I when Angela was six, she happened to look over during “Hello, Young Lovers” and was terrified.

  “Mama, why you crying?”

  Mildred wiped hastily at her face and gazed down at her daughter with a look she never forgot. Even though it was dark in the theater, her mother’s face was sufficiently lit by the sudden arc of light from a daytime scene, the brightness reflected from the screen. It was the same look Angela saw later in the woman in the photograph she found, the same look she sometimes saw in her own eyes later in life, when she looked at herself in the mirror until she was dizzy, falling into the brown pool that was her face.

  It was a look of longing, of rivers unheard and songs unsung and dances never danced and paintings never painted. She seemed not to recognize her daughter. “I’m not crying, baby,” she said. Then she said, “I mean I am. But I’m not sad.” Angela didn’t believe her, then or ever. But she knew better than to ask any more questions. She just got used to her mother’s tears during movies. Now, with sixteen looming just ahead of her, she was beginning to feel the same way, sometimes. Like there was something there that if she could just reach it . . . But it was always hiding behind the music. She felt her mother’s tears in her own throat sometimes.

  Like today, when Audrey Hepburn came down the stairs in that column of white, her hair piled upon her head like that of a princess. Angela’s breath disappeared. What could she say? What could she say about something like that? She looked at her mother. But neither of them said anything. Just kept reaching into the shared bag of popcorn, eating quietly and methodically.

  It was these Saturdays that made Angela decide she wanted to be an actress, although she didn’t say so. She started using her allowance to buy every movie magazine she could. The funny thing was, her mama didn’t stop her. She usually didn’t hold much truck with what she called foolishness, but she dusted around the ever growing piles of Photoplay and didn’t say anything about the pictures of Sidney Poitier and Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood and Diahann Carroll up on the wall. And they kept going to the movies together. It was the only fun they had with each other.

  Today, after Rex had reclined in his chair, feet up, to inquire in his velvet-cream voice, “Eliza, where the devil are my slippers?” mother and daughter walked out together in contented silence. They never talked much after a movie. They relished the remembered pictures in the quiet between them, the early-evening crickets just beginning to be audible, even in town. After a while, though, Mildred spoke. She touched her own hair quickly, making sure it was in place, and said, “Angie, you’re not doing anything with that Bobby Ware that you shouldn’t be, are you?”

  “What, Mama?”

  “You heard me.”

  “I did, ma’am. No, ma’am. I’m not doing anything I shouldn’t.” She surprised herself with the bold calmness of her lie. It didn’t even feel like a lie, really—what they were doing didn’t feel like a shouldn’t. “We’re just keepin’ company, that’s all.”

  “Well, I know what these young boys out here are like,” said Mildred firmly, settling her hat on her head. “You got to watch your step. A young girl like you can easy end up goin’ the wrong way.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Don’t let him take no liberties.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  There was a school dance that night. Angela and Bobby danced all the fast dances and held each other through all the slow ones. Bobby sang the words to the songs into her ear. It was a warm spring night. They went out by the bleachers again, the sky vaulted above them, a deep blue blanket studded with stars. The moon cut a silvery path down the field for them. They fell on each other right away, hands sliding into clothes, buttons unbuttoning, mouths open, burying themselves in each other. Bobby fumbled around until he found his condom; as a measure of his devotion, he’d gone two towns over to get them. He couldn’t very well buy them from Angie’s father. This time, together, they figured out that if they rubbed spit on it, he could slide in much more easily. Angela didn’t mind the rubber. It was just as good with a condom. It was the best feeling she’d ever had. Her mother just didn’t know.

  3

  THE WORST THING ABOUT THE COSTUME WAS THE tail. Large and puffy white, it made sitting down impossible, going to the toilet a feat of Olympian proportions (you try wriggling out of that skintight bustier, sitting down, and keeping that thing out of the bowl). Aside from dealing with the costume and the toilet (which there was barely time to use anyway), there was so much to learn. Truth be told, not being able to sit down wasn’t really a problem because you weren’t allowed to sit down anyway. You could only lean, legs aligned seductively, in “the Bunny perch,” against the back of a chair, the edge of a sofa or a railing. Always ready. Always willing. You had to call in your drinks in a sequence that never ever varied and then arrange them with military precision on your tray. You always had to remember to stand in “the Bunny stance” when you weren’t moving, your pelvis tucked forward like an offering, your legs together, back arched (but don’t lose your balance in those three-inch heels). When you were serving, no matter how bad your feet hurt, you had to do that “Bunny dip” so your titties weren’t right up in somebody’s face. You’d lean back, again with the pelvis forward, arch the back, then bend the knees. Make them think about resting their hands on the small of your back, or between your legs. But if they ever tried to touch . . . uh, uh, uh. A laugh and a gentle pivot away. No drunken businessman was going to get it for free. He wasn’t supposed to get it at all. The Bunny Mothers watched the girls with smiling firmness to make sure that this rule was never violated within the club. But you could always slip someone your phone number. Or meet him later.

  Angela didn’t do that stuff, at first. She took the rules very seriously and couldn’t imagine going out with any of the key holders anyway. They were all white, all fat, all bald, it seemed. They called everyone honey, and thought their unfunny jokes were hilarious (“I love hot chocolate,” they were always saying to her), and drank Scotch straight up until their words were a liquor-edged blur. They were always plucking at her
tail and trying to get her to lean forward over the table so they could get a good look at her tits.

  The money, however, was unbelievable. She often took home $200 or $300 a night in cash. The first time a guy slipped her a $100 tip, she almost gave it back; she’d never seen a $100 bill before. She wasn’t sure it was real, and then, when she saw how much it was, she couldn’t believe he’d meant to give it to her. She perched next to Sheila for a second during one of their infrequent lulls. “Sheil, this guy just gave me one hundred dollars. Do you think he meant to do that?”

  “Girl, you look like a million dollars in that outfit.” Sheila poked her in one of the rigid stays that made her tiny waist appear even tinier. “You bet he meant to give it to you. You keep it and keep working that shit. There’s plenty more where that came from.”

  And so there was. Angela had a drawer full of cash until Sheila told her she really ought to open a bank account. She could buy any pretty clothes she wanted, but a lot of the money just sat there. She was so tired all the time. She still wanted to be an actress, but she wasn’t at all sure how to make that happen. The days slipped quietly by. As soon as she and Sheila got some rest, it was time to go back to work. The only thing that kept her going was Dexatrim. She couldn’t afford to gain a pound, and the pills gave her a buzzy feeling that she liked, especially before work. They rarely got home before 4:00 or 5:00 A.M. (if neither of them had a date). The days were spent sleeping until noon or so and then massaging each other’s sore feet and running to the drugstore to buy more Dexatrim. In their refrigerator was a cloudy glass of water, three cans of Tab, two lemons, an old bag of carrots, and a moldy Chinese takeout carton. Angela loved it. She loved walking out of their tiny apartment and standing on the corner, inhaling the mingled scents of car exhaust and gardenia, and standing on the edge of everything good.