We won’t speak about this, Esther.
I stay with this man for twelve years because I am a good sister. My older brother gets higher wages with each passing year. I stay even though I come to understand that I am not married. This is not what married people do. My older brother gets peace at home when he buys the fat wife a Bendix washing machine. I stay one year for each year my older brother took care of me against the shrill protests of the fat wife. And each time I am called into the cellar to kneel among the sacks of potatoes and flour, I count the days left to repay my debt. I count the many ways in which you can hate a man. My brother knew. My brother knew.
I thought about killing this man when I was within hours of becoming the next lying bitch to leave. I thought about sparing the other young girls waiting in line to sleep alone in his pink-and-lace bed. The other twelve-year-olds with brothers. But my guess turned out to be right. There are too many of them to kill. And there are just too many twelve-year-olds.
We won’t speak about this, Esther.
To this day, I don’t. The only person I ever told is Eve. And that is because she already knew. The first thing she offered me was this basement room. And she removed the light bulbs herself. What they’ll need from you, they’ll need in the dark if they know it or not, she said. Even that type could not bring themselves to return if they saw your eyes. You have the most honest face of any woman I know, sweet Esther.
So they don’t see my face. And I never see theirs. But I do like the way the white roses show up in the dark. I can see them clearly, very clearly, as they wither and die. I rarely leave this basement. And I only open the shutters when it is time to clean. I won’t let Miss Maple down here. He insists he needs bright light to do the job properly, but he’s still a man after all. No, men must only visit in the dark. And they must bring me the white roses. And they must call me little sister. Or I no longer come.
MARY (TAKE ONE)
He’s come in here looking for his daughter. But no one knows her by that name. His overalls splattered with dried cement, the lace on one of his work boots loose and dragging along the floor. He goes from table to table, asking each man about his daughter. He walks a hundred miles between each table, his knees sagging, his back hunched from the strain. If he comes over here to the counter, I’ll tell him that no one knows her by that name.
He’s making a mistake with the way he tries to describe her: tall and pretty, fair-skinned. His daughter is more than pretty. She’s one of those women you see and don’t believe. The kind that live just outside the limits of your imagination. And I’m hardly one of those fellas who go around thinking that light is right. My whole philosophy’s been, The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice; but this gal is from Wonderland.
When Sugar Man first saw her, he just about lost his mind. She swung in here on those high high heels, dropped her suitcase by the counter, wrapped those long, perfect legs around the end stool, and crossed those perfect arms in front of her. A cocoa-butter dream. Curves went into curves went into curves. It was a weekday and so I hoped she was willing to eat the one thing on the menu, cause if she’d wanted something else—and you give a woman like that whatever she wants—I would have had to break a house rule to serve her. And that woulda meant I’d have to do it over Nadine’s dead body. And since I love my wife, I was praying hard that my new customer wouldn’t make me kill her. It turned out she only wanted coffee. Two sugars. No cream.
—You rang? said Sugar Man, sliding his tiny little self onto the next stool. If that suitcase means you need a place to stay, baby, I’ve got one that’s just the ticket. We can run right over there. And don’t listen to my mama; I was putting her in the old-age home anyway. And if you don’t like that apartment, I’ll build you another. As a matter of fact, I’ll build you two so you can have a spare.
She rewarded him with a smile. Soft red lips to melt in your mouth. A deep dimple. She ran her fingers up the side of her face to push a curl back under her veil. One of those peekaboo veils that draped from the brim of her hat, leaving you just a hint of one brown eye. Bedroom eyes. Warm and sleepy.
Sugar Man was crushed when he found out she was looking for Eve’s. A woman like this could make him a small fortune. He tried to talk her out of it. The place was full of crazies. And she was much too good—excuse his language—for a cathouse. She said she’d heard it was only a boardinghouse. He said she’d heard lies. Then she asked me what I had heard. I said that the garden was awfully nice. And I was about to lean over the counter to elaborate when Nadine yelled out that my chops were in trouble. I hurried back to pull them out from the broiler, but Sugar Man kept on insisting that whatever Eve’s was, she wasn’t the type to live there. And she told him in that sweet sweet voice that he really knew nothing about her. That’s true, he admitted, but he was willing to take the many hours necessary to learn. They could start right now with a little spin around the block. Did she notice his Duesenberg parked in front? The fifteen-thousand-dollar Duesenberg? It’s hard to miss it, she said. Well, they could jump right in and run by his place to pick up his good car.
Sugar Man sure has a way with women but this one wasn’t buying. She slid off the stool and picked up her suitcase. It’s no secret I’m a rear-end man, and watching her walk toward the door told me why. It’s a sin for a woman’s body to do that to cloth. Not that I can remember exactly what she was wearing. As the door closed behind her, Sugar Man shook his head and had the courage to whisper what every man in here was thinking: Born to be fucked.
And so when he came in here looking for his daughter, begging any man to help him, close to tears—no one knew her by that name. He tells them he’s been up and down the streets of Kansas City. He tells them he’s run ads in the papers for months. He tells them that no matter what she’s done, he loves his baby and just wants her home. His daughter’s tall and pretty, fair-skinned. But his daughter is more than pretty. And his daughter lives at Eve’s now, where no man calls her by that name.
It was Daddy Jim who started calling me Peaches. Plump and sweet. Yellow and sweet. Daddy’s baby. Daddy’s beautiful baby.
—Pride before the fall, Mama warns.
His seventh child. The one daughter. The last is a father’s gold. Yellow gold in this baby gal, in my Peaches; he’d roll my cheeks between his fingers until they blushed.
—Color-struck: Mama shakes her head.
He dressed me in sky blue. Made a cotton sling to hang on his chest and took me everywhere. My brothers told me this. I don’t remember.
I remember large, dark hands, the knuckles ashy and cracked. Bits of granite and dust under the broken fingernails. A bricklayer’s hands. I remember the wall he started building around the house when I was nine years old. And I remember that it was already too late.
But in my teens the wall did keep the boys out. Most of them weren’t brave enough to ring the iron bell on the locked gate. And the few who were, their knees gave out waiting for him to take his dear sweet time getting up from the porch swing and reaching inside the screen door to prop his shotgun in full view before coming down the walk to ask them what they wanted. And of the few who made it through all that, fewer still could choke up the breath to whisper that they wanted to see Peaches.
—Who? he’d ask as if they were speaking Chinese.
—I want to see Peaches, sir.
He’d wait forever, Daddy Jim, letting them fidget and sweat, pull at their starched neck collars, jam their shaking hands into the pockets of their knickers and out again, into the pockets and out again. And after he had them right at the breaking point, he fired off the last question sharp and loud:
—Why?
They’d turn tail and run like crazy. Cause he was really saying, I already know why you want to see my daughter, and you know I know why, so let’s see if you got the guts to tell me? And I’d watch the cowards from my bedroom window, laughing. Daddy Jim was something else.
—One dog knows another, Mama says.
B
ut he shouldn’t have worried about the boys. He should have worried about the mirrors.
I had a bedroom full of them: one attached to the large oak dresser; two in the doors of the wardrobe; a cheval that Daddy Jim imported from Belgium; a heavy silver hand mirror that was part of a matching dressing set, the silver brush and comb all with the same engravings of morning glories and vines; the mirror inside my notions box, where the tiny ballerina danced when you opened the velvet lid; the mirrors packed away in drawers from Christmas, Valentine’s, all my birthdays—rose tinted one year, petal shaped the next. Everywhere I turned, I could see her. But what was she doing in my room? She was a whore and I was Daddy’s baby.
Every mirror outside had told me what she was: the brown mirrors, hazel mirrors, blue mirrors, oval, round, and lashed mirrors of all their eyes when they looked at me. Old eyes, young eyes, it didn’t make any difference if the mirrors belonged to men: I saw her standing there unclothed with the whispered talk among my brothers, their smudged laughter about the sofa down the block on which they were always welcome. But there was a difference when it came to the women: the young and unmarried reflected her with an envy so intense it bordered on hate; those older and married, with a helpless fear. Yes, they all looked at me and knew, just knew, what she was. You have to believe what you see in the mirror, don’t you? Isn’t that what mirrors are for?
Before I was nine years old, my father’s friends would sit her on their knees, touch the soft curls on her head, raise her dimpled arms. The gal has promise, Jim. And he would nod, proud. So proud. And upstairs in my mirrors I would try to see what she had promised that would cause the heat to seep up through the rough denim of their pant legs and melt the corners of their mouths.
—What have you promised them? I whispered to her.
—You. You. You.
I smashed the swan-shaped mirror, my tenth-birthday present, after the choirmaster put his hand under my blouse. I smashed it with the metal edge of my roller skate because I could see her small brown nipples tightening as I remembered how it felt to be pressed into the dark corner of the high altar, to have his soft hands squeezing and stroking, his breath warm against the top of my head.
—What have you promised them?
—You. You. You.
I didn’t have the words to explain about my fear of her, so Daddy Jim spanked me for breaking that mirror. He had sent all the way to San Francisco for it. I never broke another.
In horror I watched her grow up, and I learned to hate her for breaking my father’s heart. Nothing satisfied her, nothing. And I tried everything to make her go away. I brought in straight A’s at the academy. I worked part-time at the druggist’s. I joined the Girl Guides. I joined the Missionary Circle. I rolled bandages for the resistance in Spain. I sang for the glee club. Sang for the war relief—sang in the church choir. But she was always there, reflected in the wetness of men’s eyes. Tormenting me. I wore high-necked shirtwaists and loose skirts, thick woolen tights, even in the summertime, that scratched and left welts on my legs. But I could feel their eyes stripping my clothes away: they knew her promise was there. You. You. No, not me—I wasn’t like that. No, never me. So I gave them her. Sweet, sweet relief. Their eyes would cloud over, the pupils tiny pinpoints that finally reflected nothing—not her and least of all me—as they groaned and sucked and plunged and sweated. Free, at last, I was free as I gave them her. In the cloak closets after school, behind the prayer altar, under the druggist’s soda fountain, against the coal furnace in the Girls’ Club, in the backs of milk wagons, in deserted streetcars, shadowed doorways. Any teacher. Any janitor. Any deacon. Any porter. Any storekeeper. Any race, any age, any size—any son of any man—had the power to drive away that demon from the mirror. Over and over, they became my saviors from her.
Why, baby, why? And I tried to tell Daddy Jim why I followed them everywhere in Kansas City. Did whatever they wanted. He’d find out about some man and go raging out, wanting to fight. But it was not that man; I didn’t care two cents about—and hardly ever knew the name of—that man. Any son of any man was my savior. Don’t lock me in my room, not there, I pleaded; I’ll have to find a way to get out again. I tried to stop him from wasting his money on doctors. I tried to stop him from hurting himself by beating me with razor straps, leather shoes, his fists. I tried to stop him from crying. I didn’t want to leave home, but I had little choice. I couldn’t stand to see my father that way.
—God’s judgment on him, Mama says.
Although it was hard for me to keep a job for very long, I never thought about going back home. There weren’t many shops willing to hire colored girls, even those from the academy, even those with fair skin. Of the few that did, I had my pick among them and I worked hard. But word spread quickly among the shopkeepers’ wives and I was out. If they’d only known, their marriages were safer with me there, doing what I did, than with most of the other girls. Those other shop girls were always scheming to find husbands—their own or someone else’s—to take them off their feet. And a man in my life was the last thing I needed. From the shops to the factories to picking up bits of day work cleaning house, the story was the same. I was always scraping to pay my room rent. Going with only oatmeal, peanut butter, and soda crackers for weeks at a time. The same woolen wrapper, season after season. And, I guess, I just got fed up with trying to live decently. So the lies began and they were the first step down.
It was a part of town that Daddy Jim would have whipped me blue for even talking about. Twelfth and Highland. Eighteenth and Vine. A part of town that swung. Fast music. Fast women. Those clubs really weren’t as bad as I’d grown up hearing: no liquor and opium flowing out into the streets. As a matter of fact, they looked sort of shabby and sad, especially in the daytime. But I could find work when they came alive at night: each manager said he couldn’t hide someone like me back in the kitchen. Did I know how to mix drinks? No. Did I know how to dance? No. Did I know how to sing? Yes, I could sing, but not the music they were playing. He’d take another look at me and say he could teach me. So my first lie to each of them was that I wanted to learn.
Some of these men took care of me longer than others. It depended upon how long it took each of them to discover my second lie: that he was the only one that mattered. None of them mattered. The fights would be awful, but the fights were the price I paid to keep a decent flat and warm clothes in the winter. The price for the low life I was living. Sick: I got called that a lot when they found out. A sick bitch. But I already knew that. I had to be sick, because over time, very slowly over time, I was forced to admit that I actually enjoyed being held and touched by some of the men I lived with. I was even starting to look forward to their coming to bed. There are no words to describe how ugly that realization was. I knew she was a whore. Had always been a whore. Was probably born a whore. For as long as I could remember, I could see her in their eyes. But now as I looked in the mirror—thinking of how my own body had betrayed me with him—I could see her in mine.
Before, I had only hated her. Now I wanted to hate myself. And I started thinking that I should always have hated myself, I was probably always enjoying those back rooms and back stairs. I was probably always tempting the choirmaster. I was probably always making men in the streets look at me that way, my father’s friends look at me that way. I was probably always asking for it, asking for it. I was probably always dirt. Yes, I was sick. Sicker than the angry man in front of me knew. Last night I warmed inside when he caressed my neck and touched me.
But it took a long time to hate myself as deeply as I wanted to hate. It took a long time and a lot of work. Many more lies and another step down. I moved from the men who only took care of me to the men whom I stayed with long enough until they made the mistake of caring about me. I didn’t feel bad having to pretend that way. After all, they were lying too, weren’t they? There was nothing good to see in me. They were lying about my poetry books, about my singing hymns in the tub, about my laugh and the dimples i
n my cheeks, about the way I tossed my head. And sure, we had a good time in bed together, I loved us being in bed together, but then I was a whore. And it was their own fault when they got hurt.
I would have stopped myself for one or two of them, if only I’d known how. The one or two who I almost believed really cared, with whom I would think that if, indeed, I had been born into a world without mirrors, there might have been a chance for a real home. But it was so mixed up by then. Sometimes I was out there because I was getting too comfortable and it was time to get back at them for lying and move on, sometimes to punish myself for being the piece of filth I was, and sometimes, sometimes … When it was dark and secluded enough at our chance meeting; and there was little talk, no questions, so no lies; and he understood not to offer me money; and he understood it must be right there, it must be quick, it must be now—sometimes, those times, were the purest joy I had ever known.
Besides the one or two, I certainly would have stopped for the cripple if I could have. The man worshiped me. I should have guessed that feelings like his were dangerous, and perhaps I did, hoping that he would kill me and save me the trouble. He carried a pearl-handled straight razor; he needed it, being a gambler and as small as he was. His build was delicate like Sugar Man’s, but the large sums of money he spent on his clothes didn’t make him look cheap. That straight razor was the first thing I noticed about him when he came into Piney Brown’s. No, that’s not quite true, the first thing I noticed was his clubfoot—it’s what everyone noticed—but the first thing he showed me was the pearl-handled razor. His way of saying hello. He stroked it like a baby as he asked me if there was room at my table. Any regular at Piney Brown’s knew there was always room at my table. And they also knew that I didn’t drink or smoke. So his second and third questions told me right away he was a stranger in town. But it was the fourth question that put him into my life: Before we even get started, tell me your real name.
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