Have You Met Nora?

by Nicole Blades

  “Those things, those moments, the people, they don’t define you,” he said. “They’re ghosts, Mackenzie. They can’t haunt you if you don’t give them that power. Leave them in their boxes and live your life.”

  Their love came fast, but it was also very real, in a way that was strange and pure at once. For Nora, this meant feeling at ease and like herself—or as much as that was possible considering her special case.

  But then the proposal came.

  It was part of the après-ski in St. Moritz; Nora didn’t suspect a thing. She had reached for her wineglass on the table behind her and turned back around to find Fisher on bended knee, with mist in his eyes and a green ring box in hand. The heat from Nora’s wine-warmed belly spread to her face. She felt the thump of that vein by her temple, convinced that the blue thing was lit up like a fluorescent sign in a storefront window. She was in love with Fisher; there was no doubt in any part of her body. But she hadn’t processed that loving a Beaumont could lead to becoming a Beaumont. At the time, she wasn’t sure that she was ready for the weight of it. What she did know with certainty right then was this: If Fisher had been a banker, real-estate starter-mogul, or successful generic businessman, the urge to shut down and walk away would have been overwhelming.

  But he wasn’t any of those things. He was Fisher Beaumont, and he was there at her feet waiting for a one-word, sparkling answer. And so Nora made a willful choice to bury her apprehension deep beneath her gut and cover it over with a beaming grin and a shriek, “Yes!”

  Then, three months after the grand proposal, something had sprouted in that buried-over plot in the center of her—a weed with tough roots—and it was spreading fast through her and Fisher’s rarefied space, leaving Nora desperate like an animal with the tip of its tail caught in a vicious leg-hold trap and considering whether to gnaw it off and try to move through the world without it.

  The fact that Julius was still gripping her hand—or was she holding on to his?—brought Nora back to the strange electricity of the present moment at the bar. She wanted to let go, end the handshake, but somehow couldn’t.

  “Actually, I know who you are,” Julius said, looking sheepish. He tossed a glance toward the bartender. “Asked about you.”

  “Is that right?” Nora’s back straightened and she clenched her jaw.

  “Yeah, that’s right. I need to be your client.”

  “My client?” Nora smirked and raised her brow at Julius’s natty tweed jacket. “From my view, you’re doing pretty well on your own.”

  “I can be impressive, at times.”

  “So what do you need from me?”

  “Your edge, your mastery.”

  “Mastery? We are talking about menswear here, right?”

  “Right.” Julius unleashed his wide, bright smile and nodded slowly. “Do you have a card?”

  “No, I don’t do cards.”

  His grin grew wider. “Carrier pigeon?”

  Nora smiled back. “Listen, Julius, I . . . I’m sure you’re a good guy, a nice guy, but I can’t”—she leaned away from him—“I’m . . . I’m with someone.”

  “Right. Beaumont. Fisher Beaumont.”

  Instinctively, Nora covered her ring finger with her thumb. A futile move; her tremendous engagement ring—a vintage Cartier, four-carat diamond set in an emerald halo—wasn’t even on her finger. The heirloom was being resized, but because of its history and preciousness, that process took some time. “We’ll definitely have it for you well before the wedding, Mr. Beaumont,” the family jeweler had said, although Nora was sitting directly in his eye line, while Fisher stood off to her left. To anyone watching, Nora appeared clearly disappointed, anxious for the ring’s safe return. But it was the first time since St. Moritz that Nora would be without the massive ring, and inside she felt relieved to have it off her finger.

  Julius’s soft chuckle stirred in his throat. “I have to say”—the laugh folded into a snicker—“I find you, what you’re doing, interesting. But now, looking at you up close, I’m downright amazed . . . and low-key surprised by ol’ Fisher Beaumont.” He raised his glass to his lips. “Guess you can’t assume, huh?”

  The look he gave Nora drilled right through her skin and made it prickle. She knew exactly what he meant. Her mouth filled with cotton wool and a twitch started in her stomach. It happened so fast; she felt off-balance as the heat from her ears spread across her face. She knew that tears would arrive next but couldn’t string together a clear enough thought to save herself from them.

  Julius’s smile dropped and an oddly scornful expression took its place. He moved to touch Nora’s elbow, but she rocked back and away from him. His face morphed again; this time the kindness and warmth reappeared. “See, now, I didn’t intend to upset you. I say shit not always thinking it through. I apologize.” His smile pushed through. “You all right?”

  Nora formed her mouth to say “I’m fine,” but those words—and any others—were tangled up in the cotton wool.

  A sound broke through the uncomfortable silence: the rattle and buzz of her cell phone vibrating against the bar top. Nora snatched it up without looking at the screen. She held up her index finger near Julius’s face.

  “What the hell, Nora?” barked the voice through the phone.

  “Jenna?”

  “Uh, yeah, it’s me, calling you like it’s goddamn 2004, because you’re acting like texts are not a real thing.”

  “Oh, I’m here. Waiting for you.”

  “No, I’m here. At Holy Moly. Waiting for you.”

  “I thought we were doing Chestnut. I’m at Chestnut.”

  “It’s pizza-snack, Nora. They do pizza at fucking Chestnut? Look. I’m here. I’m waiting. Get here. It’s Snack Time,” Jenna said, and hung up.

  Nora, more grateful for Jenna and all her sourness than ever before, used the phone call as a ripcord and raced out of The Chestnut with the silent phone still pressed up to her ear, refusing to look back at Julius—the risk of turning into a pillar of salt was much too high.

  * * *

  Jenna was waiting at the door of Holy Moly Pizza with her arms crossed and her face bent. Before Nora could plant both feet out of the cab door, Jenna started in on her.

  “Thin ice, you hear me?” She unfolded her arms only to jab a finger near Nora.

  “All right, all right. I’m here. Dial it down,” Nora growled.

  “You know how this goes, Nor. We do not fuck around with pizza-snack.”

  “Got it. Easy mistake.”

  “Is it, though?”

  “Drop it,” Nora snapped.

  Jenna put her open hands in the air. “All right, sugarplum. It has been dropped like a bag of bees.” She rubbed the top part of Nora’s back. “There’s just one small hiccup,” Jenna said, holding the door open for Nora.

  “You’ve only got thirty minutes, tops?”

  “You know me well. Yeah, I’ve got to head to Williamsburg to meet your favorite comedian. Ugh. He’s such a little pig. But then there’s this.” Jenna swung her arms out, gesturing at the table in front of them where two Asian women sat chatting and sipping from giant mugs.

  “What am I looking at, Jenna?”

  “Them. They’re at our table.”

  “So . . .” Nora brought down the volume in her voice. “We’ll sit somewhere else.”

  “No,” Jenna said, raising her voice. “That’s not how it works.”

  Nora rolled her eyes and took a breath to say something more (she wasn’t really in the mood for the hangout anyway), but Jenna had already moved in toward the women at the table.

  “Hey, y’all. Excuse me. This is actually our table.” Jenna was practically leaning on the shoulder of the younger-looking friend.

  She looked up at Jenna, smiled, and started, sweetly, “We just sat down here, like, a bit ago. Is it okay if we stay here? Our table is over there . . . and it’s totally fine, but I can’t see my dog from there. He’s just right outside”—a delicate point of her finger at th
e storefront window—“so . . . do you mind?”

  Jenna let out a long sigh. “Yeah.”

  “Thanks,” she said, ending high like a question, and started to turn her attention back to her friend.

  “No. You asked me, do I mind? That was my answer: Yeah, I do. I mind. I reserved this table because I reserved this table.”

  The woman’s head snapped over to her friend. “Féi zh shì èle,” she said, decidedly not under her breath. The friend giggled. It was clear from the quick up-down glance they both gave Jenna that they had said something unkind.

  “Talking about me in your language doesn’t move the needle here, sugar. You’re wasting everyone’s time at this point.”

  “Are you serious right now?” the younger woman said.

  “Yes,” Jenna said. “Oh . . . that’s my answer: Yes, I’m serious.”

  The two women, simmering and gagging on eye rolls and bitter cackles, slid out of the chairs, letting them scrape the floor loudly. The friend with the dog spat out one last secret insult: “Yang gui zi.” But as they turned to walk back to their designated table, Jenna unleashed her own string of contempt—in flawless Mandarin: “Qù n de! Gun huí shí ba céng dìyù.”

  With their faces flushed in embarrassment, shock, and indignation, the two women slunk off to their table whispering and looking back at Jenna with mouths slightly curled in amazement.

  “What in the hell?” Nora said, her own mouth wide.

  “I’ve been speaking Mandarin since college, and I’m more than halfway through learning Japanese. It’s called business strategy.” Jenna shook her head and started scrolling through her email on her cell phone. “People rarely win when they assume,” she said, not looking up from her screen. “My daddy taught me that.”

  Nora thought back to Julius; the look he gave her covered over everything in her brain like a thick quilt. She heard Jenna’s voice in the distance until it crystallized, loud and shrill. “Uh, why do you insist on fucking up Snack Time with Jenna today? Order your pie or dainty slice or whatever already.”

  It was all too much for Nora right then. Things long buried were resurrecting: the obituary for Dr. Bourdain; the mean-girl moment about “our table” that brought Nora crashing back to the terror Emily would regularly unleash on their fellow classmates at Immaculate Heart while Nora sat by in silence, seething and secretly cringing; and the way Julius looked at her, steeped in conjecture, a look she faced for years in Montreal when yet again she was judged as not enough for either the black kids or the white. Even the itch beneath her skin and the insomnia was back along with the slippery grip on her emotions—uncertain when she’d break down in tears. Soon, if history were truly repeating itself, her natural blond glory would start falling out in clumps in the shower.

  “No,” she said first; then shook her head hard. Nora jumped up from the prized table, nearly knocking the chair back, and bolted, leaving Jenna shouting her name behind her. She needed to get home to put these ghosts back in their rightful boxes.

  CHAPTER 3

  Montreal

  Nora, age 9

  Fix your face. Nora could set her watch to those three words. Her mother said them nearly every time she looked over at her. It wasn’t because Nora had some proclivity for sulking or an unpleasant resting scowl and needed regular reminders to adjust her hanging grimace. The mother’s directive was steeped in something else, something more disheartening than basic berating. This mother believed that Nora—her only child—was destined for good fortune and greatness, but it all hinged on how beautiful she appeared to others, how gracious and pleasant, welcoming and willing. This mother, she wanted her daughter to always be seen as pretty, pure, and simply better. Nora was to be the preferred and obvious choice, far greater than all that surrounded her.

  Light, bright, right: three more words that were baked into Nora’s entire being. From her exceptionally green eyes and naturally blond-streaked hair to her tiny face, all fine and symmetrical and the color of the milkiest tea, Nora was an unmistakable beauty—an extraordinary one, as her mother tells it. But to Nora, none of it mattered. The fawning and fixation from her mother and strangers alike, it was all just words, wishes, and when it came down to it, a weight around Nora’s neck.

  “What did I tell you about staring out into the sun like that?” Nora’s mother said, frowning. “Now, come over here and help with this. It’s coming up on tea and I ain’t even cut up the cucumber yet.” She shook her head, annoyed, and returned to folding a basket of white clothes, separating out those shirts that would be ironed in the afternoon, during her late, late lunch. “And fix your face.”

  Nora did as told, resetting her expression, removing the scrunch from her brows, letting her jaw settle, and dimming her eyes, but not before rolling them—in full view of her mother.

  She glanced down at Nora. “You act like life is so hard. But it’s not. Not for you.” She shook her head once more. “You don’t know the first thing about hard life. People like you, a girl-child like you, you could never know.” She jabbed a crumpled men’s undershirt in Nora’s face, her lips pursed, waiting for her daughter’s good sense to take hold. “You know, when I was a little girl, back home in Bim,” Nora’s mother said, a tender smile creeping across her face, “I was all too happy when my Auntie Pearl asked me to help her do anything. Folding clothes, washing the wares, cleaning up fish heads, combing her hair—anything. I was there when she called on me. Just to spend time with her . . . and on a bright summer morning like this? You could tell me the sky was turning green, and I wouldn’t care. I wasn’t going nowhere. I was with my Tauntie Pearl.”

  “Dumb,” Nora mumbled. Doing chores—particularly this chore of folding someone else’s clothes—was boring and useless enough, she thought, without having to listen to these stories from back home in Bim with their little lessons tucked into the hem. And hearing her mother talk about green skies only made her crave escape even more. Nora stepped up on the tip of her bare toes, hoping to see past the broad clothesbasket and look through the laundry room’s bay window. All she could make out was a clear strip of blue sky and a swatch of green—some ivy dangling from the rear stone walls.

  “Rah-Rah, if you’re going to help me fold, then fold.” Her mother gestured at the undershirt—his shirt—still a jumble in Nora’s small hands.

  “I don’t like this. You know I don’t.” Nora tossed the shirt back into the basket and folded her arms instead. “And I wish you’d stop calling me that, too. All of those names: Rah-Rah, Tauntie, Doctuh B, Mistruss B. It sounds old and corny and . . . ignorant.” She pushed her chin out, closed her eyes, and waited for it: her mother’s loud kiss of her teeth, a rough nudge in the small of her back—or worse, the pinch—and a few sharp words, letting her know that she was dismissed from laundry duty. Free to go nestle in the prickly lawn out back and gaze up at the cloudless sky.

  After a long pause, Nora opened her right eye, then her left, and was startled by what she saw. Her mother was still standing next to her, neatly folding each white item. No heated glares, no slaps to the ear, no muttered threats. Just folding. Nora watched for a moment as her mother, with her crisply pressed uniform, continued to move slowly and evenly, plucking things from the basket. One crumpled pillowcase—to the iron pile it went. Two slinky women’s trouser socks—matched, then rolled together as a pair and placed on top of a short stack of the doctor’s cotton T-shirts. Nora stayed locked on the neat pile. Even though the shirts were freshly laundered, his scent—a distinct mix of salt, whisky, and dead leaves—lingered, making its way up Nora’s nostrils. She felt the tops of her ears heating up and she clenched her jaw, fixing her stare on her mother’s dark brown, chapped, dry hands, so dedicated to this ridiculous task. As the silence began to fill each corner of the narrow, white-tiled space, Nora could feel the heat from her ears spreading across her face. The long, bluish vein at her left temple started to quiver—or so it felt. Nora ran her two fingers the length of it, thinking of the countl
ess times her mother had cursed the thing, this reminder of the white father Nora never met. And then she said it: “Your life isn’t worth much, you know?”

  Finally, her mother stopped moving, resting her hands gently on the edge of the wicker basket. Though the words were intended to hurt her mother, something—a stinging residue—lingered on Nora’s lips.

  The mother tilted her head toward her daughter and spoke slowly. “Now, you can hold your breath and stomp your feet all morning, Miss Nora. But you’re nine, a child. You don’t know the first thing about what anything is worth.” She went back to folding. “Besides, my life—our life—is the best it can be, Rah-Rah. All thanks to Doctuh and Mistruss Bourdain. Them people are good to us; treat us decent. One day you’ll see that. You’ll see beyond all your selfish, spiteful ways. And you’ll be grateful for this. But it might be too late.”

  Nora released her arms from the tight twist across her chest, but kept her fists clenched. “I hate this life,” she said, and punched the side of her own leg.

  “You’re almost done here, Nora,” her mother said, pointing at the near-empty clothesbasket. Rolled up at the bottom of it were an odd tube sock, a hand towel, and Dr. Bourdain’s golf shirt.

  Nora peered at the shirt and back at the side of her mother’s plump brown face. Then, without a qualm tingling in any part of her, she spat into the basket. A line of dribble clung to the bottom of her lip.

  “Child!” her mother snapped.

  Before her mother could look her in the eye, Nora ran off, down the three narrow steps, through the kitchen, and out the back door. Nora’s bare feet slapped the cool grass as she sprinted across it. The ground of the backyard, though covered with a grand, expertly manicured lawn, was uneven. Nora felt as though she would tumble at any moment, but didn’t slow down to catch her balance. And turning back was not an option.

  Everything behind her was broken, smashed to useless chips with sharp edges.

  Dr. Bourdain’s awful violations continued, growing more frequent and egregious with every year Nora added to her life. And after each sickening, secret visit to his study, she’d leave a larger broken-off piece of herself on his dark wood floor. Soon all she had left were her tucked-away wishes. Empty as they were, Nora still clung to them. She continued to close her eyes tight and blow out her birthday candles atop the chocolate banana layer cake—a homemade favorite—wishing for a return to the before, the one where Dr. Bourdain’s only touch was a pat on her head as he walked by her on his way to his regular, adult life. The before where Mrs. Bourdain still watched her with warmth in her eyes instead of looking through her with barely veiled contempt; the one where she and her mother would sit shoulder to shoulder in the kitchen, their heads tossed back, holding their bellies filled with laughter and raw shelled peanuts, and whispering stories about the ways of some white folks. Nora also wished that somehow her mother would notice the missing fragments of her daughter and go off looking for them, gathering them up from under beds and behind bookshelves and beneath heavy rugs, and she would rinse the dust and dirt from them and slide the pieces back into place, making Nora whole again.