Black Silk (13 page)

(Why had he been so stupid for so many years? It seemed a veritable lifetime.)

Billy eventually drifted off to a shoulder. He closed his eyes (a reckless thing to do on the Southern State Parkway, especially
on Christmas Eve) and he wept. Treachery was akin to death.

In life she had been different from anything he had ever known. Arthritic, camphorate, and yet bold: She wore an old-fashioned
floor-length dress and stood in the elbow of the afternoon sun, waving her long apron in the dust. The neck hole of the dress
was so large he could see her brown shoulders slip out from time to time. A stark scent of onion and allspice wafted up from
the pleats of her skirt; one day he and she were out on the street, just a stone’s throw from the school, and he inhaled that
skirt. He wanted desperately to touch the old woman but could not believe she wanted the same.

Now disguised as a spirit, or something the old folks liked to believe in, she arrived most inconveniently in his thoughts,
slipping into the unheated car, hushing him; he acquiesced. With a hand like a veil she agitated him gently in his privates,
forcing him to put his hand up to his left breast right there in the car and start rubbing underneath his faux-silk shirt
and bay rum.

—One thing for sure, Billy murmured,—
Women do not grow shoulders like that anymore.

Minutes later he slackened the grip on his skin, started the engine, and continued the road to Rhonda. She was waiting for
him, and like it or not, there was precious little you could deny a woman in wait.

She had waited him for years, ever since the fifth grade when his name was changed from Billy to
Shame-Billy
on account of his impetuous and horrifying need to smear his lips over the backs and fronts of the flat-chested girls in
Miss Fauset’s classroom. He used his hands like vise grips, crushing crinolines and doily collars, finding the place where
the skin salted the tongue. In the cloakroom he trampled the girls as they ran to and from him. The sugar-snap breast buds
burst as he tried to pry them off bodies. Screams, hollering: and once a pretty girl who split her head on the sharp wooden
molding. Somewhere in his trousers, the shadow of a miniature boy-bulge appeared.

—
Shame! Shame-Billy!
the girls cried, all of them scurrying to the other side of the room, laughing in the terrified pitch of sparrows. Billy
Merry usually came to and stood by himself, on the verge of tears, not understanding his feelings or the haze that had overtaken
him. The boys in his class—ages ten and eleven and twelve—broke a few of his bones. The girls went home and complained to
their mothers that he was possessed by the devil; that witches used him to do their voodoo, to capture people in spells, to
work their roots on innocent souls.

He never once, however, approached Rhonda with his lips. She watched and waited in a corner of the classroom, sitting on upturned
palms, but nothing happened. Once he accidentally tapped the bottom of her buttocks, and in a flurry she threw herself on
top of him, flailing her arms and her breasts, which looked and moved like a woman’s breasts. After that spectacle, the girls
refused to let her near their circle and the boys threatened to break her bones as well, saying —
You ain’t normal, shame-girl!
Miss Fauset expelled Rhonda from school for wanton acts.

His face took to appearing to her in her dreams, in meadows and forests, in the large vegetable garden at her grand-mother’s
house, on swampy clouds that floated to nowhere. Ironing and starching clothes, sewing buttons back on shirts and darning
socks; canning pears and peaches and peas and then preparing the pots for supper; squeezing lemons by hand because that was
the best way to make lemonade. Pouring the sugar out grain by grain. She would feel his lips on her flat front, stinging her
with desire. (Hunger is a potion, as the old folks say.) One time she lapsed into a dream of Billy only to awaken to a brash
whipping by her grandmother, who—annoyed by the moans and words her baby used (and so incorrectly!)—smacked the girl’s head,
and consequently, the boy from it as well.

—There is a right way and a wrong way, Asenath explained to the girl. —Things you are not ready for.

—What is the right way? Rhonda asked.

—Do any of us really know? the grandmother cried, whipping harder.

But later, as her granddaughter whimpered to herself alone, Asenath Fowler found herself standing outside the school building.
The children had long since dissipated. She stood dressed in her church clothes, a sprig of camellia hanging above her breasts.
She saw Shame-Billy emerge from the building and called him over. —Are you the boy who thinks he is a man? she asked.

Billy did not lift his eyes.

—Well, Asenath said, looking him up and down, —Come here and talk to me. Let me try to put you right.

The clock moved from six to seven to seven-thirty; startling certainty at each slam of a car door, but it was never him. Late,
too late. The dress was finished, laid on her bed for the last-minute rush, but then she got up and threw it on hastily, careful
with the zipper. She hadn’t had a chance to do her hair, but that could be taken care of in a flash—she kept the curling iron
hot in the bathroom. In the next room, the exact place where others on North Moss Drive housed children and oversize dressers,
Rhonda moved to a small vanity table and began to paint her nails. Coral Mirage, to match her house, her dress, her underwear.
As she spread out her fingers she imagined his hands: broad brown, the color of a wheelbarrow full of dirt, hands creased
with motor oil that the detergent had not been able to remove. Sun, dirt, motor oil, detergent, musk. Onion, clove, maybe
lemon. His face would be, as ever, handsomely unlined, though he spent most of his days in the tobacco.

He was too late. Eight o’clock. Tobacco did not grow in the winter—why wasn’t he here yet? Men did not disappear into thin
air for no reason.

The snow was blinding; he’d heard the weather report just that afternoon, during which springlike temperatures had foolishly
been predicted. Everywhere around him cars lay frozen, stalled, or in damaged heaps. He glanced at his wristwatch, knowing
she would be impatient, likely to burst the moment he drove up. He could read her like a clock on the wall.

He had followed Rhonda north after she left seven years ago, but why? He couldn’t tell you. Initially she had seemed surprised
to see him standing there at her door, so far from Auntsville. She seemed surprised to learn that he had been thinking of
her all these years, and giggled girlishly at his lust. She made some offhand remark about him only caring for her old grandma,
to which he laughed, and she laughed as well. Silly ideas clouding a girl’s head. Now a woman. (Legs, breasts grown into splashing
hills, buttocks that could be construed as roomy and tight at the same time.) And yes, she had thought of him, too.

He promised to visit her the very next Christmas, and the one after that. From Auntsville he sent Rhonda parcels of ladies’
undergarments, large bottles of inexpensive eau de toilette, long-stemmed matches, occasional dirty magazines, and locks of
his curly chestnut hair (a white person’s hair, but sexy nonetheless). From there on in, he was awash in her love.

Once in a great while, when he was in that sort of mood, Billy Merry would ask about the old woman. The old battle-ax. Just
out of curiosity, of course.

Rhonda would laugh at him. —Why you care about her? She just fine where she is.

Tears forming in both their eyes. And that was the end of that.

She’d gotten in the habit of speaking to him every day as he left the school, lying in wait like the Trojan Horse. As he rounded
the corner, she would call out, —Where you taking all those kisses, boy?

Long ago. In the garden behind her house, in the tangle of catbrier, in the shade of a wisteria hung over a rickety scaffolding,
the old woman guided the boy’s hands around her waist and explained to him the importance of courting girls instead of scaring
them away. She had heard things about him—no matter. This was how it was done.

Her voice soft and treacly, her waist as vast as a rainwater barrel. He found he had to get even closer to encircle the old
woman, closer than was proper, and when he looked up, she was smiling greedily into his face.

—This is the way. This is the start. You don’t want them to run from you. You want them to want you.

Nine o’clock. Normally she would say to herself:
Nothing new to this; all men are late.
Normally she would admit to herself that all they really cared about was
some things,
never
other things.
They never thought about your wishes, your desire to break free from a thing unseen or unheard.

Rhonda walked past the Chinese partition separating the vanity from a brass-and-leather wet bar and poured herself a tumbler
of Bristol Cream. She glanced out the window: nothing, only the shapes of two children, girls possibly, dashing across the
yard, knocking over her only potted plant. From the left corner of the sky, an owl flitted back and forth between two elderberry
trees. The owl, she remembered from her grand-mother’s day, was sign of trouble. Rhonda held her breath; there was definitely
something wrong with this lateness.