Rainey Royal (10 page)

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.

T
HE 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 washed 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 listen. 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.