Claudia takes a little step back. “I’m as good as I look,” she says, turning this way, that.
Rolando’s smile goes rigid until he aw-shucks it away. “Well you look as good as ever. I mean that girl, I really do.”
Claudia smiles, confident decorum will be preserved, face saved, and if Rolando sees the little quiver in her lips it doesn’t show on his. She puts her left hand on his lapel, soft as an infant’s cheek. “And how’re you, baby? Business”—she smirks a little—“seems to be treating you well.”
There is room for a more barbed comment. All she has to do is mention Parker’s name, or Ellis’s, but she’s had enough of that, with me, and she decides not to go there.
“I ain’t complaining.” He looks down at her hand on his chest, and she remembers that just beneath this iridescent silk there’s a hole in Rolando’s skin. Not a hole, of course. Not now. A scar. A note, she thinks, because she didn’t just read Nabokov in school. A whole note. But she remembers when it was fresh and gaping, and she snaps her hand away.
But Rolando catches it in both of his as if to tell her it’s okay. “How’s Reggie? Nigger ain’t shown his face in a dog’s age.”
“That’s cause he’s in the dog house.” Claudia puts her free hand on her stomach and they both laugh. “You know how it is. He’s hanging. Hanging and sanging.” She drawls the word out and they both laugh again. By now the heat of Lando’s hands has warmed up Claudia’s and she’s lost in that feeling, remembering when men still wanted to warm her up when she was cold.
Lando squeezes tighter. “Still sound like a ten-year-old girl?”
“Twelve.” Claudia squeezes back. “He hit puberty.”
They laugh again, easily, and Claudia pulls her hand away, thinking it time to put history back on the shelf, but when Rolando lets go she feels something left behind, and she has to resist the urge to look at it. It’s not like she doesn’t already knows what it is.
“Well, you say hi-lo to that nigger for me. Tell him I’ll buy a hundred copies of his first CD if he ever puts one out. Yo, String Bean!” he yells. “Get your fat ass in the car. We’ll fix this kid later.” He looks down at Claudia. “You didn’t hear that.”
“
No comprendo
.
No inglés
.
Pero mira, señor, estas muy guapo. ¡Ay, caliente!
”
“You too much, girl, you always was. You take care-a yourself.”
He reaches for the handle of his truck, which is also gold, like the logos on the wheels and grille, like the rings on his fingers and the band on his ear and the plate in his mouth. Lando. Golden boy. Who’d-a thunk it?
It’s too fucking cold for this, she thinks then, heading for home, but even as she thinks that she reflects on the fact that it’s been one of the mildest winters on record. In her pocket her hand is curled around the glassine. She rubs it between thumb and forefinger, feels the slickness of the plastic, the uneven consistency of the stuff inside. Proust had his madeleines, she’s thinking, and what the fuck do I get? Horse. Goddamn him, she thinks, and she doesn’t mean Proust (and no, she didn’t read the whole thing: did you?). She means Parker. Goddamn both of them, she thinks, reminding herself not to take sides. Parker
and
Ellis. Taking sides was what got them into trouble in the first place. Maybe, she’s thinking, that’s what I should have told Jamie. I should have told Jamie that the trouble really began when people started taking them for twins. That must’ve happened when they were four or five, at any rate before I was old enough to remember. Fine for Ellis—he was the younger, eleven months behind Parker—but for Parker it was the first sign he wasn’t developing as fast as he should have, at any rate not as fast as Dad would have liked him to. There’s a lot of pressure put on the oldest child, especially when he’s a boy and especially when he’s black. From an early age Parker knew everyone expected him to be perfect, straight A’s, star athlete, church on Sundays, the prettiest girlfriends. And I suppose Dad did have high hopes for him but he had high hopes for all of us. Dad marched with the Reverend. He believed honest work and clean living could make things better for the American Negro, and looking at him, at his life and what he accomplished, I guess you could say it worked. He started out as an elevator boy on the Upper West Side and after fifty years of yessirs and nomes and sixty-hour work weeks he’d dragged himself all the way up the ladder to the middle, by which I mean he was head doorman
emeritus
at a Central Park West co-op building and he had his own twelve-room apartment on Frederick Douglas Boulevard to show for it. Of course by that time he’d lost both of his sons and his wife and, for all intents and purposes, his daughter, but he still had his rent-controlled lease and God save the fool who thought he could take
that
away from him too.
In her pocket her fingers rub back and forth and round and round, unconsciously, round and round and back and forth. There’s a connection there, between the package in her pocket and the thoughts in her head. Not the obvious one: Parker, like most crackheads, couldn’t
stand
junkies. No, what Claudia’s thinking is that, like genies, memories are called forth by simple friction, but, also like genies, once called forth they have a curious way of bending their summoner’s wishes to their own ends. But like I was saying about Parker (she tells me, in her head): I mean, he wasn’t what you’d call a slouch, but he was far from perfect. B’s mostly, sometimes an A but just as often a C. He made all the teams he tried out for but he was never, like, a star. And so on down the line. When he was in third or fourth grade, I remember (Claudia remembers), one of Parker’s teachers wrote on his report card that “Parker’s work is consistently above average” and I think that just about drove a stake through his heart. Do you know what I’m saying? If he’d’ve just been a flop I think Dad would’ve let up on him, but Dad always seemed to think that with a little application Parker could turn that “above average” to “excellent.” He wanted his boy to climb all those rungs of the ladder he never managed himself. He never realized that Parker was sweating bullets just to get by.
Now Ellis, Ellis didn’t have the same kind of pressure on him, you know what I’m saying. But I don’t think it would’ve mattered if he had. Ellis was just naturally a star. Even in baby pictures, there’s Ellis, eight months old and standing, with Parker at a year and a half still crawling next to him. The joke was that Parker had waited around for Ellis to be born and ended up playing catch-up ever after. Like I said, a lot of folks thought they was twins, but just as many thought Ellis was the oldest, especially after Parker broke his femur and more or less flunked first grade. I say more or less cause, you know, wasn’t his head that was broken, just his leg, and he told me he was glad when he got the report card with all them incompletes on it cause now he’d get to go all the way through school with Ellis. Cause that was the thing. Parker, you know what I’m saying to you, Parker, he loved Ellis more than anything else in the world, he lived and died for that boy and never once blamed him for getting the better deal outta life, at least early on. He blamed Dad for that.
Me, I was kind of the witness, kind of. Like when Parker said he’d flunked first grade so he could be in the same class as Ellis—which by the way didn’t quite work out, since after the fourth grade Ellis got put in the accelerated classes and Parker, like, didn’t. Anyways I remember I asked Parker if he and Ellis would both fail again. What was I, five, six years old? I asked Parker if we could all three be in the same class together and what Parker said to me was, This is between Ellis and me, little girl. You best stand back. Parker may’ve been slow in some things but he sure as shit learned how to be a man fast. But I tell you what, I wasn’t down with that shit even at that age. I was
on
it, you know what I’m saying, I was a girl-child with two older brothers and the way I figured it they was my personal servants and soldiers. Got to be some benefits come with this ridiculous body and I tell you what: I never wanted for anything except later on for a boyfriend, cause Parker and Ellis had a pretty rigorous screening policy. They sister was too good for anyone except maybe Elijah Mohammed himself, but whatever, I think they had this vision of me as some kind of vestal virgin when what I really was was your classic little slut. Making out with boys when I was ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. I played show ‘n’ tell so many times I could’ve practically identified every boy in the hood through a glory hole. But of course once Parker and Ellis found out some boy was messing with me—which is how they always thought of it and I never did nothing to disabuse them of the notion, you know what I’m saying, the average boy like to think that a girl don’t get turned on by but one man in her life which theory he can find a way to believe in even as he’s swapping stories about the same girl with his best friend, or his brother—and anyway once they heard some boy talking about getting with Claudia MacTeer they was all up in his shit, they was all like Claudia a
good
girl and if you don’t give her her propers we’ll cut your dick off and use it as a hood ornament. Dumb-ass Negroes. They always thought the problem was with the boys, but it was me me me. I don’t know, maybe it come from having two such fine brothers, but for as long as I can remember I just liked men’s bodies. The look-a them, the feel-a them. Truth be told I think I wanted one for myself, the muscles and the dick and like a beard and shit. I don’t mean I wanted to be a boy or some whacked-out shit like that. I just wanted to have the body every once in a while. I wanted to be able to kick some ass on my own stead-a having to bat my eyes at Parker and Ellis. Cause you know it’s like that. Womanly wiles is womanly wiles, whether you be using them on a stranger or on your brother or your daddy—or a gayboy for that matter. But whatever. It don’t matter. This ain’t about me. It’s about Parker and Ellis. Right?
Beneath her fingers and inside the plastic the drug is turning to dust now. Her rubbing’s acquired a spasming quality: it’s as if she’s rubbing two sticks together to start a fire. Certainly a lot of heat’s being generated. She’s practically cooking that shit right there in her pocket. Her thoughts are on two levels now, her front brain all caught up with Parker and Ellis but the back of her head wondering if along with everything else her father never threw away, he never threw away her mother’s insulin needles. Which reminds her: I guess the next thing what went wrong was Momma. I mean, that wasn’t never really right, Momma, or Momma and Daddy I should say. It’s funny, thinking bout that that shit now. I mean, Momma was around till I was like, what, eleven, twelve? But in my mind I always kind of write her out the picture from the get-go. I mean, I’m sure she was probably right there next to Daddy when he was on one of his as-long-as-you-live-under-this-roof-young-lady kicks but that ain’t the way I remember it. In my mind Momma’s always in the other room. You want me I’ll be in the other room. Just a minute dear I have to get something out the other room. You seen Momma I think she in the other room. In the kitchen cooking something for lunch when we was sitting down to breakfast, gone to bed early when we sat down to watch TV, taking a long bath while Daddy was hustling us off to church. And well anyway, Momma believed in hard work but she drew the line at what she called
striving
, which
striving
she defined as doing something you don’t like doing in order so that later on you can do something you do like. When Daddy was still working elevators she used to call him a foot soldier in Mr. Otis’s personal army, you know what I’m saying, and
then
, when he got that doorman’s uniform—red velvet, gold braids, one-a them hats like the Elks wear with the little tassel—I mean, talk about a monkey suit. Not that she mentioned any of that when she left. She just said she didn’t like a New York winter. Said she didn’t much like snow at all but she liked her snow to be
white
, and then she went back home to Missouri.
I don’t think Parker and Ellis even missed her. They was two black boys trying to make it in the ghetto—trying to make it out the ghetto—and the appearance or disappearance of one more frigid white woman didn’t mean much. At least that’s what it felt like. But the icing on the cake was college. I mean, there’s Ellis, straight A’s, 15-something on the SATs, every Ivy in the country sending personal invitations to this fine upstanding example of the African-American race to come and boost they multicultural rating without pulling down they GPA, and Parker just wasn’t on that level. They wanted to go to Columbia together so they could live at home and save on room and board and Ellis got in, no prob, scholarship even, of course you can live on campus, we’ll pay for that too. But Parker was wait-listed. They called the school, they said the chances Parker would get in was good if he’d made it that far, I don’t think they ever used the word
quota
but then they didn’t use the word
nigger
either, and so anyway Ellis went ahead and accepted, and as a show of support to Parker he even pulled his applications to every other school that wanted him. I guess this was sometime in they senior year, I was kinda there and not there if you know what I mean, I mean between the boys and worrying about my own test scores and shit—
and shit
in this case meaning that I was recovering from my first pregnancy, or my first abortion I guess I should say—but even so I could see the wait just drove Parker outta his skull. I mean, they string you along for months, these fucking universities, to them black people are like pepper if you know what I’m saying, they don’t wanna add too little but they don’t wanna add too much either. Meanwhile Parker started drinking—drinking more, I guess you could say, since if they was one thing he, Parker, took to, it was booze. He’d come home drunk in the middle-a the night and get in these crazy-ass fights with Dad. I mean
crazy
. Ain’t nobody hates they Christian daddy more than a black boy drunk on malt liquor, I’ll tell you that much—except maybe herself, she’s thinking, cause she’s home by then, she’s looking in the medicine cabinet in her father’s bathroom and: no needles. She still has his coat on, it’s still buttoned up, it feels like it’s eighty degrees in the house and even hotter in the cabinet under his sink, damn if she didn’t have to stick her head way the fuck back there to find that box, and talk about dusty. But inside the needles are individually wrapped and clean, their surgical steel points undulled by time. Golf course; lightning, she’s thinking, Cora’s Kitchen; lemon meringue pie. She uses one of the nice spoons, solid silver with a fleur-de-lis crest and nearly black with tarnish. What she’s thinking as she cooks up one great big shot is that if the junk don’t kill her maybe the oxidized silver will. And to Divine she says: it’s better this way.