Rainey Royal

by Dylan Landis

  She wheels around and walks toward Ninety-Ninth. Rainey and Leah follow. They pass a storefront that fixes flat tires and another that seems to sell dolls covered with dust and has young men lounging outside, watching them intently. “Okay, if it matters that much, you ride the bus.”

  “It matters that much.”

  “You ride the bus, and you’re going to give me that fucking clarinet.”

  “I’m going to give you shit.”

  “Clarinet,” says Rainey, “or I never talk to you again.”

  Tina hesitates, then thrusts the clarinet hard into Rainey’s arms. Suddenly it’s the last thing Rainey wants to touch.

  “Your father is—fucked up.”

  “Did you kiss him?”

  Leah looks back and forth between them, riveted. A meat truck roars by, almost consuming Tina’s answer.

  “No,” says Tina, but she says no with two syllables, and Rainey hears yes and lifts her hand. Tina doesn’t flinch. “He touched my mouth.”

  “He touched your fucking mouth? With what?” Rainey’s hand is gripped at the wrist by Leah. She wonders if she would have slapped Tina.

  “He put two fingers on my lips. He said pretend it was the mouthpiece. He just said blow. It was part of the lesson.”

  “Did you kiss them?” Rainey lets Leah push her hand down.

  “His fingers?”

  “Yeah, were you kissing his goddamn fingers?”

  “It was like this, if you really have to know,” says Tina, and on the corner of Ninety-Ninth Street and Lexington Avenue, surrounded by passersby and storekeepers in doorways and a boy with a transistor radio to his ear and two young men in suits and a young mother with a baby carriage, she takes Rainey’s first two fingers. Rainey lets her do it, lets Tina put her fingertips with their bitten nails on Tina’s soft lower lip. She feels the damp flesh and the hardness of teeth as Tina edges her fingertips fractionally deeper and thinks, This is the softness inside Tina Dial, and, a second later, My father was here.

  Tina closes her lips and blows.

  Rainey yanks her fingers back and wipes them on her top.

  “I didn’t know what to do. He’s Howard Royal. He was giving me a lesson. Is that a kiss?”

  “No,” says Rainey. “It’s disgusting. He’s my father and you were in his bedroom and that makes you—”

  “Go ahead,” says Tina.

  Rainey looks up the block, where a Dumpster is parked outside a fenced-in empty lot. “Wait here,” she says. Because of Howard her mother has split and her best friend has almost defected, and there have been other losses she cannot find words for. She walks to the Dumpster and hurls the clarinet case inside. It lands on a raucous heap of bottles.

  She walks back to Tina and Leah and says, “Tell Howard you gave it back to me.”

  “It’s under control,” says Tina.

  “That’s criminal,” says Leah. “I could find it a home.” She starts forward, but Rainey grabs her backpack strap. They watch in silence as a teenage boy in burnt-orange pants moves in on the Dumpster.

  “So you were going to follow me all the way, right?” Tina says. “You almost call me a slut because of your sick father who can’t give a normal lesson to save his life. I suppose now you want to meet my grandmother.”

  “She exists?”

  “You seriously want to know—forget it.” Tina starts walking uptown so abruptly they trot to catch up.

  “Why wouldn’t she exist?” says Leah, and Rainey thinks, We have to give this girl a job more interesting than being perpetually in the dark.

  Tina laughs. “Yeah, she exists.” Her voice takes on a caramel edge—that’s the only way Rainey can think of it. “The question is, do you exist? She thinks I study with a good Catholic girl named Silda.”

  “You lied about me?”

  “You think a decent Puerto Rican grandmother would let me hang out at your house?”

  Rainey opens her mouth and closes it. They turn east on 101st Street. People gather on the stoops of brownstones in a proprietary way that Rainey never sees in Greenwich Village, and it seems to her that every one of those people ignores her, stares at Leah, the beautiful giraffe, and nods or says something in Spanish to Tina.

  They stop in front of a gray building zigzagged with fire escape and crosshatched with window gates. “So, my grandmother,” says Tina. “If you look at her funny, your most private business is going to be all over the school.”

  Rainey feels half like a butterfly has landed on her wrist and half like a knife is angled to her neck. She notices that Leah, not the type to glance at anyone’s grandmother funny, is doing a decent job of staying under Tina’s radar. A pack of kids saunters toward them, checking Leah out while they talk and smoke. She wonders if Tina will walk them back to the subway after dark or if they will have to get there on attitude alone, keys spliced out between their knuckles. Or maybe not. Some of those boys are gorgeous.

  “She’s a sweet lady. I cook her breakfast and dinner, and I try to keep the scholarship you didn’t know I had. And I don’t get paid twenty dollars a week to live with her, and it sucks that you didn’t believe me.”

  Rainey lights a cigarette. Leah makes a small, shifting gesture, and Rainey passes her one. The pack of kids breaks, swarms around them, regroups.

  “It sucks that I have to think about you sucking on Howard’s fingers,” says Rainey.

  “Blowing on,” says Tina. “I quit clarinet, obviously. I quit Howard, okay? He’s like … hypnotic. He’s a creep, if you don’t mind my saying.”

  Rainey doesn’t mind. “Where are your parents?” she asks.

  “My mother and sisters live below us. They’re Colón. I’m Dial like my father. So listen, when I introduce you to my grandmother, you say, Buenas tardes, Señora Colón. Do it.”

  Leah bares a long throat, exhales a stream of smoke, and utters the words in perfect Spanish. She’s done being an acolyte, thinks Rainey. She had the acolyte tenure of a moth.

  When Rainey tries the Spanish, her tongue feels thick. She wants to touch Tina’s hair. It’s got strands of light blond in it, maybe Dial blond. “I didn’t know you could cook,” she says.

  Tina shakes her head. “Museum, Jesus,” she says, and pushes open the front door. To Rainey’s surprise, Leah steps into the lobby first. The floor tiles are laid in a jazzy pattern, and music pulses through one of the apartment doors. Rainey hears trumpets playing faster and brighter than they do in her father’s music. She hears quick percussion like the congas in the park, and some fantastic clacking sound that makes her want to move, but she doesn’t know how. The pattern on the floor tiles is practically jumping, and Leah thrusts her hands in the air as she follows Tina up the stairs, circling her hips on each step. Climbing behind Leah, Rainey looks up and sees Tina on the first landing do a little two-step, hips held straight, not swaying like when Rainey puts on the Doors. Rainey hopes that if she does everything right—if she repeats the Spanish, if she believes the stuff about the bus—Tina Marie Dial will teach her how to dance.

  THE GRANDMOTHER IS TETHERED to earth by the steel wheels of her chair and the absence of one leg. Her remaining leg, and her upper arms, are buttery loaves of flesh. Yet Rainey looks at the high cheekbones and flawless hairline, the elegant ledges of brows and lips carved as gracefully as Tina’s, and takes her in as shapely. Someone has pinned up the grandmother’s thick silver hair with curved combs, and gold hoops hang from her ears. Rainey repeats to herself: She has no idea. It is the source of her beauty.

  Clearly not blind, the grandmother looks the girls over, wary and pleased. On the wall behind her is a thrilling picture of a heart wrapped in thorns and encircled by fire. It’s clearly connected to Christ, whose portrait hangs nearby and who would resemble Howard if he clipped his beard. Something something amigas, the grandmother tells Tina. Something comida. Her one foot has lost its curves to swelling, but she wears a neat white ankle sock, folded down at the top; and it occurs to Rainey that the person who was
hed that sock, and dried it, and put it on, was Tina.

  Rainey takes a deep breath and says, “Buenas—buenas—” and prays to Saint Cath for the rest. She dips into a little curtsy of desperation as Leah steps forward and says the words.

  The grandmother nods once, as deeply as her chins allow. “Beautiful,” she says in four appreciative syllables. She might mean Leah or the perfect Spanish or that Tina has brought her these lovely girls from the outside world. Rainey looks at the flames bursting from the heart of Jesus and thinks: For this I sacrifice the clarinet.

  I KNOW WHAT MAKES YOU COME ALIVE

  Barbie melts slowly, but she melts. She smells like the chemical highway in New Jersey. Her wrist softens to a blackened nub.

  Around her the tar paper is marked by dozens of ashy burn marks. Chimneys and ventilation fans populate the roof like random landmarks, and farther out, hundreds of black rooftops quilt the Upper West Side under a purpling sky.

  Rainey is spending the night at Angeline Yost’s. She squats on the roof with her back against the parapet and watches Angeline’s little sister, Irene, burn Barbie. The three girls crouch half hidden behind a chimney in case the super comes. Irene has stripped the Barbie naked and holds a Bic lighter under the left hand.

  It is the fall of Rainey’s junior year. Rainey and Angeline are friends from music, the only subject that seemed to make Angeline happy before she flunked out of Urban Day. The Yosts live in a housing complex on West One Hundredth Street near Columbus Avenue with NO LOITERING signs posted at the entry. About fifteen people were loitering on the long, low steps when Rainey arrived—a party, with a laughing baby and an ice chest.

  Irene, who is twelve, does not speak. She isn’t mute; it is some choice she has made, and it lands her in detention every week—Angeline talks about this with pride. Irene has to burn stuff. It’s a compulsion. “If she doesn’t burn something small, she’ll burn something big,” Angeline says. She rises and hugs herself.

  Rainey unfolds herself from her crouch, too, not wanting to see the Barbie’s hands melt. “That works?” She figures it’s okay if Irene hears. It feels important to understand, somehow. “She burns a Barbie so she won’t burn down the building?” She looks down at the doll despite herself.

  Irene smiles at Rainey enigmatically. She has the same straight curtain of hair as Angeline’s but a distinct way of ducking behind it. She holds the Barbie gently, almost tenderly, at the waist with two fingers and lights the Bic under the long yellow hair. The flame climbs and flares into a halo around the small, pretty head, blackening the scalp.

  “It’s like stealing.” Angeline looks out over the city and shivers. “You take a bra so you don’t take three tops and get caught.”

  When the Barbie has sacrificed her hair and her hands, they go back downstairs and close the door to the room that Angeline and Irene share. It’s got two sets of matching furnishings standing on curvy ivory ankles. The room gives Rainey an ache, the way everything tries so hard to be pretty. There are twin beds with headboards, a poster of Isaac Hayes taped up above one, Mick Jagger above the other. Irene has Cinderella sheets under her Mick Jagger poster, and Rainey wonders which sister put him there, with his lanky muscles and that lush cup of a mouth.

  Angeline gestures at her own bed. “If I sleep under the sheet and you sleep under the blanket,” she says, “we won’t touch.”

  Rainey has brought all her drawing materials, in case things get dull, and now seems like a good time to pull them out. The lack of music bothers her. A no-name stereo sits on one of the desks, with records spilling out of their jackets around it. She goes over to inspect. She should pick out a record. But someone has amputated the arm from the turntable, and it lies nearby, sprouting wires like torn nerves. Stepfather, Rainey thinks.

  She sits carefully on the desk. Angeline flops down on her bed and props her chin on her fist. “So, your dad?” she says. “He’s a famous musician, right?”

  Irene sits very still on her Cinderella bed.

  Since when does Angeline know, or care, about her father? Rainey never mentioned Howard. Tina could have told her at school—except Tina said Angeline was a slut. Angeline copied off Leah in bio; maybe Leah told her. Rainey shrugs one shoulder like Leah does and says, “Semifamous if you’re obsessed with jazz. I brought my sketchpad—want me to draw you?”

  “What do I have to do?”

  “You’re perfect. Don’t move.” She slides off the desk, pulls colored pencils and a sketchpad from her pack, and takes her place next to Irene, but not too close. “Tilt your head toward me. Now open your fist.” She sees, beside her, Irene’s hands open in tandem. Rainey starts roughing out Angeline, fingers long and graceful despite the chewed nails, eyes focused on some distant place where loitering, Rainey imagines, is a religion.

  “So listen,” says Angeline. Her words sound blocky, as if she’s trying not to move her mouth. “My boyfriend, Jay? He’s incredible. He plays guitar. When we sing in the park, people practically throw money at us.”

  It’s true that Angeline’s throat is a flute. She can do Joni Mitchell almost as well as Joni Mitchell can, and some old blues stuff that Rainey, from her father’s Billie Holiday records, knows is the real thing. She steels herself for an audition question. Angeline would be a bowl of cream to Howard, an afternoon’s catnip. Rainey is not going to deliver a girl up to her father. It’s bad enough that Tina has Howard hypnotized.

  Angeline says, “I want your dad to meet Jay. He needs a break.”

  Angeline’s nose is long and elegant. Her hair is dark at the roots, and Rainey draws it that way.

  “Jay needs a break?” Rainey’s reminded of a girl at school who saved up six hundred dollars, God knows how, and bought a color television for her boyfriend. He kept sleeping with other chicks, and now she has razor scars on her wrists. “My dad doesn’t give breaks.”

  This is half true. He’s given breaks to lots of young musicians, but there are terms. If one is female, sex with Howard is involved. Rainey can’t miss it, and she would like to. Sex with Gordy might also be involved. Always, Howard veneration. Intense amounts of discipline. Personal chemistry.

  And jazz.

  “Your dad hasn’t heard Jay,” says Angeline. “He’s amazing. We do folk rock. It’s a twelve-string guitar, and he writes his own songs. If your father just heard him once, I know he’d do something, make a call—he might even set up some studio time—Jay is that good.” She smiles a private smile and starts humming something soulful that Rainey recognizes in her veins.

  Her fingers tighten on the pencil. She keeps sketching, conscious of close attention from Irene.

  “He wouldn’t,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

  “Would you look up?” says Angeline. “Please? He might. Musicians like to help other musicians. You could try, right?”

  Rainey’s pencil freezes. When she manages to get her hand unstuck, she starts adding some visual weight to Angeline’s dime-store earrings. “So,” she says finally, “you think you’ll get your GED?”

  Irene’s hand moves into her field of vision. Slowly, with her forefinger, Irene traces the outlines of the sketch. She puts her finger to her pursed lips and then applies it to a corner of the drawing.

  “Yeah?” says Angeline. “Is she making me pretty?” When Irene nods it is with her whole body, slowly.

  After a moment, Angeline says, “What’re you, kidding? What would I do with a GED?”

  Rainey senses that Irene is straining for cues, or instructions, on how to get through school, get through life. She, at least, has Saint Cath to guide her.

  “I don’t need school to sing,” says Angeline. “We do great. Maybe we’ll do greater after Jay meets your dad.”

  Or maybe Angeline won’t even graduate from singing in the park. “My father hates folk rock,” Rainey says. “He hates everything that isn’t jazz. He won’t listen,” she says, to clinch it.

  “Just have us over,” says Angeline. “He doesn’t have to list
en. He’ll hear.”

  “I’m not supposed to play music so he hears it,” says Rainey. “Why Jay, anyway? Why not you?”

  Instead of answering, Angeline gets up and walks over to the sketch. “Wow,” she says. “I’m taping that up. It’s mine, right? You know how many men offer to help me? It’s Jay who needs a break.” She takes the sketchbook and examines the portrait closely. “I tell you what,” she says. “You think about it tonight. And I’ll hold on to your book.” Playfully, she waves it away from Rainey and slips it under the pillow, as if Rainey cannot reach it there. “Think about it,” she says. “I’m just asking to visit you.”

  Rainey is not afraid to take her sketchbook back from under the pillow, but she would rather not fight with Angeline. So she thinks about it. She thinks about it while they watch television, which she cannot stand, with Mr. and Mrs. Yost. She thinks about it again before dawn, when Angeline turns onto her side and flings an arm across Rainey’s ribs, waking her. In the faint light of a streetlamp she sees that Irene’s eyes are open. The weight of the arm—possessive, familiar, female—sends Rainey into a state of shock and bliss, as if she suddenly had a sister or a friend so close they were allowed to sleep like this. Tina would never permit it. What if Angeline wakes and catches her tolerating the arm? She thinks ahead to a morning of saying no, of bickering for her sketchbook, of Angeline possibly getting pissed.

  In slow motion, she rolls out from under the arm and slithers out of bed.

  She tugs her jeans on. She sees Irene watching her silently in the dark, blows her a fingertip kiss, and keeps dressing. She extracts her sketchbook from under the pillow and slips out of the room past Angeline Yost, whose throat is a flute, who has told her: People throw money at me. Who has shown her: Some fires need to be set.

  HER FATHER CONFRONTS HER in the townhouse parlor. “Four o’clock in the morning? Interesting, Daughter.”

  They have arrived home at the same time. He and Gordy were coming from a club.