first look: new novel, in progress

Prologue – Summer, 1974

We had our Bacardi and our beaded curtains, and that summer it was all that we needed. There was a party – there’s always a reason to celebrate nothing, it seemed – and there was a stoop crumbing down to rock, a block, and a carousel of blinking white lights strung high in the trees even though it was June and we never had the means to celebrate the holidays anyway. We sloshed and spilled lemonade in our Dixie cups, we crunched the ice between our teeth, licked the sweet syrup from our fingers before the mosquitoes got to us. We slid our feet out of our sandals and played dangerous with the scalding concrete. Nights like these our skin smelled of asphalt and we accepted our imposed perfume. Our hair was plaited, wild, or taped to our cheeks from the heat. Neysa had a jar and she was chasing fireflies even though her mother stomped up and down the street, slurring, get your ass back in the house or else. You think I only buy glass so you can break it? Get that jar back in the damn house, or else. Or else was a cruel, obscure punishment nobody wanted. Men wore their shadows into the evening, and adjusted the pics in their hair, and the women were nutmeg and not even playing that kind of game. The street had been reduced to candlelit enclosures and we preferred the gloaming, our sentimental pink skies. Bobby Caldwell’s “What You Won’t Do For Love” bellowed from rooftops, while down on the street three generations of men crouched down in a tight circle. Shooting craps, they crinkled dollar bills and copper coins on top of a pyre.

In the winter black, when the neighborhood was all quivering actinic lips and gas ovens blazing, we remembered how Ricky had a habit of roof jumping until that one night he slipped. Fell four stories into the alleyway; the ice made a sculpture of his face. But we didn’t talk about nesting dolls shattered in the alley or bennies in brown prescription bottles with the labels scratched off. No fool of a boy, born bastard to a trifling father, was going to stop the music from playing. Back then we let the record play out. We lifted the needle. We repeated.

Chapter One – January 1975

“You got two bitches in front of a trashcan fighting over a man who’s a deep lake. Please tell me that this is all a cruel joke you’re playing on your poor mother. Because what woman in their right mind would marry Keith?” Stella said, picking the lint off her cheap boucle suit. She performed this task patiently and with meticulous precision, for to have an outfit marred by an errant strand of hair or a dust moat would be criminal. Stella was a typist posing as an executive. Splattered coffee would send her into convulsions on the level of mortuary. As a child Vicki dreamed that her mother’s tiny closet was under siege, plagued by famished moths feasting on Stella’s polyester separates and picked-over tweed. Vicki would creep to the foot of her mother’s bed to see Stella open her closet, to bear witness to her shrieks and screams over all the wings and spindly legs fluttering and skittering out. But as soon as the dream began it immediately ended, and there were no crunch of bugs underfoot, no hysterics, only her wisp of a mother coughing from all the Pall Malls she smoked, lecturing her bitterness like sermon. Men only like women who fuck like whores.

Stella desperately coveted wealth, pined for fox fur stoles and gossamer gowns, but she ended up looking discounted and small, a worn-out secretary whose body became a projector showing old movies. The neighborhood joke, all the black girls sucked their teeth and laughed at Stella: who that white bitch think she is? The Puerto Ricans sneered: a bitch at a check-cashing place is a bitch at a check-cashing place, no matter what their shade. But Stella ignored their taunts and their snorts because the roach-infested apartment in which they lived was only temporary, the food stamps were for extras, and she continued to cruise the street in her beat-up car with the muffler scraping the pavement, imaging herself ensconced in a limousine.

Today was Vicki’s only day off from the diner, and she spent it trapped in the passenger seat of her mother’s station wagon, running errands: Con Edison, C-Town, Salvation Army. Relief washed over Vicki when Stella announced they have one stop left to make.

“Do you want to spend your whole life chasing after crazy whores crawling under your sheets and sneaking down fire escapes? How do you intend to keep a job, start a family, be a good wife?” Stella said. “You’re on the verge of expiration.”

“They’re sixteen, and I’m not a fucking milk carton.” Even as Vicki uttered these words, she didn’t believe them. Vicki had that new Cadillac smell to her, like fresh paint on walls, a house just built and uninhabited. Swaggering over, the men from around the way palmed white peaches they’d procured from bodegas on the corner, and whispered to her in baritone while smoothing skin. They swore on their dead mothers that they’d never leave; they’d make it their career just to sit home and watch her belly grow. They called her fox, they whispered baby, they husked sugar; they called her every pet name but never by her given one. Vicki was the rare neighborhood jewel: a beautiful white girl who only doled out her affection to the blackest of men, but she wasn’t getting younger and she knew it. Soon the harvest would bring the famished men and their roving eyes a whole new crop of girls breaking soil. Teenagers with tawny skin and tight bellies, the kind of girls at the height of their plumage, who still twirled their hair between their fingers and crossed their legs. A far cry from the elders in their twenties whose bodies were a mess of stretch marks and pain, these girls didn’t know how the game was played.

Her marriage to Keith had to work out, otherwise Vicki knew she’d be worn out, damaged goods. Nobody had any use for a woman after the seal’s been broken and the house’s been lived in. So Vicki bought her white dress from the Rainbow shop, made her City Hall appointment, and come Monday she’d walk down the hallway, grocery store carnations in hand.

Vicki closed her eyes and inhaled overheated car engines, the sweet syrup of shaved ice, and the boiling meat from the hot dog vendors wheeling up and down Fourth Avenue, while her mother likened her fiancée to slippery fish. Vicki’s dug her nails deep into the leather seat. Stella’s always had a way with a phrase; her mouth was a hammer like that. Her words were her armaments.

“Mark my words; he’ll be the death of you. No woman’s heart can stand all that running around.”

“What are you talking about, ‘running around’? Explain to me how breaking up a fight between two Montauk girls automatically means he’s fucking them…”

“That brawl was so vicious you think they were pulling vermin out of their hair.” At a stoplight Stella slathers coral lipstick all over her mouth.

“Why do you hate him so much?”

“Except for the fact that he’s a nigger? I don’t like his smile. It’s compulsive.”

“In three days I’m marrying Keith, so you’re going to have to come up with a better reason other than the fact that his smile irritates you so damn much.”

“Eat your lunch,” was Stella’s response.

Vicki unwrapped one of the sandwiches her mother had packed for her, and picked at the cold, scaly meat, the thick slabs of cheese. Nineteen years old and she still ate mother’s meals. How many times did Vicki have to explain to Stella that she detested ham, that the very thought of it merged with a piece of cheese on two slices of white bread sickened her? Tuna, turkey, even bologna, would’ve sufficed. Always with the slippery ham and the salty cheese. Vicki remembered her seventh birthday, and how she had begged for ice-cream cakes, peppermint patties, balloons and a unicorn. Instead, she entered a room filled with all the kids she hated, children of the people her mother worked for, who were too polite to decline the invitation to an area of Brooklyn they only drove through, and all the kids on the block who wanted free food: the bullies and chicas with their chipped teeth, kinky hair, and air of defiance, and Mira Santiago. Mira Santiago was a walking bruise; she was the sort of child one should only bring out for funerals, because from the moment she crawled out of the car until her mother shoved her, face-first, back in, the whole neighborhood suffered her excruciatingly high-pitched screams. No one ever understood why Mira was so anguished, why human contact brought out the wail in her, yet that Saturday in April Vicki found herself consoling the inconsolable while her mother’s ham and cheese sandwiches towered ominously in the background. She even offered Mira her brand-new copy of Highlights magazine, but Mira spat on the cover image of Thomas the Engine. Mira was a typhoon, kicking lawn chairs, knocking over gin bottles, and howling into seat cushions. Standing in the middle of the lawn overrun with weeds, Stella appeared mortified, covering her face with her hands. Everyone spoke of whips, paddles, and belts, because that Mira Santiago was downright begging for a good, wholesome beating.

Vicki remembered biting into one of the sandwiches. It had tasted of her disappointment.

Ten years later, Mira Santiago married the owner of the cemetery on McDonald Avenue. She clutched a bouquet of silver roses at her wedding. And when Peter Meltzer slipped the gold ring on her finger, he didn’t blink twice at the soil and gravel, like finely milled flour, lodged deep under her nails – practice, everyone suspected, for the grave she was hell-bent on digging. Milagros Santiago grieved for her daughter, whose life seemed to be one long, proud death march, and it broke her heart to see Mira grow from a pitiful, bawling child to a woman who pined for the afterlife so valiantly, clung to it so desperately. Why was she so determined to return from where she had come? And more importantly, why couldn’t she marry a Catholic? Why a Jew?

For a while there was talk about her being unable to bear children, but Mira silenced the gossips and the stoop fixtures, during last year’s block party by loudly declaring to no one in particular that she didn’t want children, thank you very much, because her body was a house of sorrow, incapable of sheltering life. No child’s coming out of this tomb, she bitterly laughed.

Stella glanced at the mess of bread and cold cuts on her daughter’s lap. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Vicki balled the sandwich into a fist and considered killing her mother, just a little bit. “I’ve hated ham and cheese sandwiches for as long as you’ve been making them.”

“That would just be like you to waste a decent meal. Perhaps you’ll have more respect for the things I give you once you no longer have the luxury of enjoying them.”

“I don’t need what little money you have,” Vicki snapped.

Stella drove down 44th Street. Leaning against the steering wheel, her body tensed as if the pantomime of Vicki’s breath might send her flying through the windshield. Vicki spied the veins on her mother’s arms spreading like thin, splintering branches, and she wondered what would it take for Stella to explode. But that’s not her way, Vicki though. Stella would rather taunt, knowing all to well that her words left marks deeper than fists. In all of nineteen years, her mother struck her once. Vicki was ten, and she plucked a kiwi from a stack of fruit and cradled it in her hands; she never owned such a beautiful, ripe thing. In the produce aisle, strangely comforted by the stubble of its skin, Vicki petted the fruit as if it were a small, fragile mouse. But as soon as she leaned down to press her lips against the kiwi, to deliver a sweet kiss that reminded her of her father’s tender peck on her forehead after he told her a bedtime story, sealing her slumber, Stella raced down the produce aisle and snatched the kiwi out of her hands. Do you realize that people are staring? You’ll do just about anything to humiliate me. Stella smacked the taste out of Vicki’s mouth because in those days beating your child was acceptable while kissing a piece of fruit was not.

“Oh no?” Stella said, her voice low. “The spare change you call a salary at that diner are going to buy you a house?”

Vicki wanted to plunge her foot through the seat and tear through steel, just to feel concrete. To believe that she could slip beneath a moving car, to know that escape was possible. Money served as her lifelong prison and her mother its proud warden, dangling dollar bills like shiny keys. For the past few years, Vicki’s been preparing for her jailbreak, a fast-car getaway. She wanted out of her mother’s apartment, out of Brooklyn.

“Oh no?” Stella repeated, honking her horn at an idle car. “Is a green light only a suggestion to hit the gas? Do people need a fucking invitation to move?”

Vicki wanted to scream the word NO, but when she opened her mouth, puckering her lips like a little fish, only air rushed out. Rebellions against Stella had always been minor.

“You just started Brooklyn College, you got a little change saved, and you want to throw that all away over some reformed delinquent peddling paint? If memory serves me right, he was arrested three years ago for selling smoke?”

“He built that business from nothing. He does drywall for all of Canarsie,” Vicki said, her voice filled with pride. “And he doesn’t mess with that nonsense anymore.”

“And that’s enough for you – a man repainting cheap houses because he’s cheaper than the Italians from Long Island? It doesn’t bother you that Keith’s got women crawling all over him? Carla Lewis actually heard him compare himself to God.” Stella clucks her teeth. “I’ve never encountered a man so narcissistic. Only a masochist would marry him.”

“Carla Lewis eats cat food.”

“Carla Lewis used to eat cat food,” Stella corrected. “Before the treatments. It’s a wonder what pills and a little electricity can do.”

Vicki sighed. “Should I interrogate every pretty woman who walks through the door?”

“No. Just stop him from fucking them.”

“Keith’s never been unfaithful.”

“The only thing he’s faithful to is that ego of his.”

“I love him with all my heart…”

“Don’t be so naïve,” Stella hissed. “You don’t love a man with an organ; you only fuck them with one. Vicki, once you realize that marriage is less about what happens while you’re on your back, and more about the number of zeros in your bank account, the better off you’ll be. Because all the love in the world isn’t going to prevent the repo man from prying that ring off your finger when you can’t make your car payments.”

“And where am I going to find better?” Vicki pauses, makes small fists with her hands. “I found someone – a good and decent man – who loves me, really loves me. So why can’t you just be happy for me?”

“Because you’re marrying a waste of my time. Keith Warren’s a predator posing as a house pet, tricking girls with his three-card Monte. And no amount of sweet-talking is going to change the fact that you’re marrying black trash.” Stella shakes her head. “I just don’t understand how you could be so blind.”

Vicki regarded the clasp of fake glass pearls draped on her mother’s wrist, the ivory and bejeweled broach on her lapel – the only real thing she owned, with disdain. Their life had always been about never having enough instead of simply being content with what they had. The year before her father died of a heart attack from all the hours he worked so he could pile the steaks in the freezer, Vicki confronted her mother at dinner once; her voice was the loudest in the room when she said, “You’re killing him.” To which Stella had replied, “Maybe so. But that man could use a little motivation.”

Vicki chewed one of the balled-up sandwiches that lay in her lap, considered which words could possibly fill the vast gulf of space that has widened between her and her mother, but all she wanted was to be on the other side of the car door, on the ground, bare heels on hot concrete, while Stella drove. A man passed, his drycleaning slung over his right shoulder, and Vicki stared at the fluttering plastic bag when she blurted out, “We love our customers.”

Dusk loomed, folding the sun into the horizon. Starlings wove through treetops; the streetlamps cast a soft, tapered glow on the sidewalks. The sky was a canvas of violet, sapphire and pink.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 2:27 pm and is filed under the writing life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.