Rainey Royal (20 page)

“Congratulations,” says Zola.

“On what?” Strange, why a toilet area so obviously crawling with microbes would also be brilliantly lit.

“You passed.”

“Passed what?” Leah is thinking she means some kind of girlfriend test, the way Leah looked at that dancer.

“Your audition,” says Zola. “You can take your clothes off anytime now.”

It turns out there’s a biological basis for those cartoons where a person’s eyeballs pop out. Leah feels air cooling her eye sockets. “You lied to me,” she says. Her red hair blares at her from the mirror. “Ten minutes are up.” Though she would like to stop and watch the dancer for a minute on her way out. Maybe two minutes, if no one notices. She could stand far away, near the door. “I can’t do this,” she says. “I can’t do any single part of this.”

Zola upends her makeup bag into the sink—big clatter of Maybelline, tweezers, loose change. “I didn’t lie.” On tiptoe, she nudges a dark line along the rim of an eyelid with a short pencil. “I said I was taking you to work.”

Leah marvels at the ice forming deep in her fingers—classic fight-or-flight.

“You’re out of your mind,” she says.
Fly or die
.

Zola taps a sign by the towel dispenser. It’s lettered in careful capitals and cheaply framed, like an old diploma.

“Homework,” says Zola. “Read. There will be a quiz.”

“No,” says Leah. Though she finds the sign, all regimental with rules, curiously calming. The sign implies a structure to things where she had presumed chaos.

Bare bulbs light up Zola’s hair, ringlets both flawlessly turned and wild. “You think I’m not serious.” She puts down a compact, rummages in her tote, and hands Leah a balled-up pair of panty hose. Sheer. Sandalfoot. Size D, the tallest. Leah’s size, in fact. Leah is what people like to call a tall glass of water, and sometimes she thinks she is about as interesting.

Where is a good, shapeless lab coat when she really needs one?

“No,” says Leah, and starts laughing. Somewhere deep inside, a brake slips. “No,” she says. Even without the laugh, it sounds slightly hysterical, this
no
. It almost sounds like
yes
, this
no
. “This is crazy,” she says. Thinking:
My
breasts are the same size. I am a symmetrical person having an asymmetrical crisis.

Commandeer the sole toilet stall; slide the bolt. Tap the door.
Base
.

The stall is sordid at a cellular level, with amoeba-shaped overlays of dirt on the tile. An old toothbrush would be nice, and some Clorox, because she can tell no one has ever scrubbed this grout. It’s a nasty microbial crust, this grout. Bacteria are probably in the throes of cell division all over this grout.

She studies the graffiti, hoping for some perspective, and encounters several permutations of
FREDDIE IS A SHIT
.

And she was wrong about something else, too: the law of gravity does not apply down here in Basement World. Indeed, the floor has already let go of her feet, and she is fully three feet off the ground, consequence of forgetting to breathe, when the bathroom door wheezes open. Fingernails click on the door of her stall.

“Hellooo? This is not funny, honey. I’m desperate.”

Leah peers at Desperate’s feet under the door. Black toenails—painted, not bruised. A high arch. Personally she’d use pumice around the heels, but with those shoes—spiky, strappy—no one’s going to inspect.

“Zola,” says Desperate, “could you explain to your friend? I can’t afford another ten-dollar pee.”

Jesus, how many people were expecting her tonight?

Zola says calmly, “Lacey? Are you listening? You can go in the sink for all I care, but you have to get out fifteen seconds ago.”

“I can’t,” says Leah, but she concedes the stall, still holding the balled-up panty hose. Desperate shoves past her, a
discordant blur of peach satin and blue-black hair, and Zola, still engaged with the mirror, thrusts a lipstick in Leah’s direction. Makeup—that’s why they burn so much wattage down here.

“What’s a ten-dollar pee?”

It’s a new lipstick Zola hands her, color like blackberry stain, tip sharp as a knife. Then she touches the back of Leah’s hand, whispers. In the mirror, Leah sees her lips move. In her hair, Leah feels her breath. What gets lost are the words. And as it turns out, she cannot lip-read from memory.

You are beautiful
.

No.

Do this one thing for me
.

No.

Don’t you know where you are, my heart? This is the brink
.

No.

Just open your arms and fall. Fly or die
.

Zola’s back at her makeup. And Leah can’t ask. But here is one thing she can do. She can commune with this vampire lipstick. She can incise a blood-black heart along her upper lip.

No hour with Rainey has felt this dangerous, this close.

Desperate barges out of the stall, says, “God, I never learn,” jockeys for a sliver of mirror, pursues something in her teeth, then flings the door open, talking straight through. “You’re Zola’s friend, right? You’re the virgin, right? You need a Tums? Listen,” she adds, as the door severs their connection, “you’ll be great.”

“No,” says Leah.

“Delilah,” says Zola, like that explains everything.

“What’s a ten-dollar pee?”

Zola turns to her again, takes Leah’s chin in one hand, wields a pencil. Midnight blue.

“You’re better than many,” says Zola, drawing a curve along Leah’s eyelashes, then smudging it with a pinkie. “Didn’t throw up. Didn’t back out.”

“No,” says Leah, “this is not happening,” and curls her toes around the edge of the cliff.

TRASH

Her mother said, I’ve had it with detangling this hair. Rainey, sit still. Gordy, you try it. Start at the bottom and comb.

Her mother said, Will you look at this drawing, Howard? Who draws an antelope in
kindergarten
? Will you stop playing for one minute and look?

Her mother said, You just got yourself a job, Gordy. She sits so still when you do it. Look, she doesn’t
breathe
.

Her mother said, The problem with a pet is you are tied to it forever, so no.

Her mother said, When you sew a dart, leave a tail of thread and tie it in a knot.

Her mother said, Your father is the most charismatic man I’ve ever known. There is nothing he could ask me that I wouldn’t do.

Her mother said, That’s a sleepover, baby. When I go into
Gordy’s room? Mommies can have sleepovers. So can Daddies. It’s not just little girls.

Her mother said, Every morning I go up on the roof at six o’clock and pray for twenty minutes. It keeps me from coming apart. Her mother said, Coming apart, coming apart—it’s just a crazy thing I feel.

Her mother said, Every woman needs a signature, and mine is tea-rose oil. You don’t need to hear this when you’re eight, do you? But you need to make your mark as a woman. You might as well think about it now.

Her mother said, We’re having one of those grown-up parties, baby—close your door tonight and stay in your room.

Her mother said, Rainey Royal, you baste like a dream. That is the neatest hem in New York.

Her mother said, It’s like having two husbands, I swear to God, except neither of them provides.

Her mother said, If you don’t like what goes on in this house, Rainey, don’t be a part of it. (Her mother did not say what to do if it was already a part of her.)

Her mother said, You can keep your groupies, Howard. You can keep your loverboy Gordy—that is one sick friendship. I want something real in my life.

Her mother said, Sometimes I go sit by the washing machine, Howard, just to escape the fucking jazz. I don’t care how good it is.

Her mother said, Rainey, sometimes a woman has to do something for herself.

Her mother said, Say something.

Her mother said, I’ll write, I promise.

Her mother said, Maybe in a few years you can live with me.

Her mother said, We’ll see.

T
INA
’
S GRANDMOTHER DIES, AND
Rainey stays four days on East 101st Street. She sleeps in Señora Colón’s narrow bed and folds the dead woman’s enormous clothes. She makes Tina eat. She follows Tina slowly up the aisle of a packed church and watches, shocked, as Tina presses her lips to the dead woman’s forehead.
Cath, give me strength
, she prays, and bends to kiss what feels exactly like the old, veined marble of Lala’s kitchen counters.
Thank you
, Tina whispers. She has barely spoken in days.

Rainey comes home to a front hall footprinted with dry mud that no one has mopped.

“A pipe broke downstairs,” Rainey’s father says from the piano. “We got the plumber out of bed.”

Rainey runs down to the basement utility room. It’s empty now, swamped with two inches of water that flow out to form a delta of muck.

She stalks back into the parlor. “Where’s my stuff?”

“I’m composing.” Howard teases out a flutter of high notes.

“Where are my boxes from the utility room?”

“
Your
boxes? It looked like trash.” Howard stops playing, tries a short variation, stops again. “Everything got soaked. I threw it out. Tax records, too. We better not get audited.”

“It looked like
trash
? My mother’s clothing looked like
trash
?” Rainey can catalog every piece. She packed it away when she was thirteen, when Linda left: a Marimekko miniskirt, an Indian-print jumper, a wardrobe Linda stitched herself on a secondhand Singer before it died.

Howard sets his palms on his thighs, turns to Rainey, and says, as if explaining simple arithmetic for the third time, “It should have been thrown out years ago. When she took off, if you ask me.”

“I had photo albums in there.” Rainey wraps a long hank of hair around her finger, pulls it taut, and fights the temptation to chew on it. “I had her bangle bracelets.”

“You could have told me, Daughter,” says Howard. “I opened the boxes and saw wet clothes.”

“I don’t care if they’re soaked.” The hair sneaks into Rainey’s mouth. “I’m bringing them back in.”

But now she can’t recall if she saw boxes at the curb when she came home. She can’t remember if any townhouse on the block still had trash on the street. Maybe garbage trucks came while she was comforting Tina and inhaling Tina’s boyfriend, Eric. Eric is a tattoo artist who etches scenes of old New York—ships, buildings, even battles—down people’s arms and backs. The rules say she cannot steal Eric. The rules do not say anything about standing very still, one inch too close, admiring the golden hairs on the arm that guides the needle.

“I’m sorry, babe. You should have written on the cartons.”

Rainey dips her head back to look at the ceiling cherubs.

“I can’t move,” she says, and this is true. She is scoured out.

Howard snaps his fingers twice. Rainey still stands with her head tipped back.

“Look, if it’s such a big deal,” says Howard, “your aunt Laurette’s a clutter hound.”

Rainey sees Laurette about once a year, maybe twice—lunch, it’s always lunch, and it’s always at Tom’s, never at home; and it’s got to be a tuna-fish sandwich; the rest of the menu might as well be toxic. Howard might mock her for going, but Rainey likes to hear Laurette talk: her aunt has her mother’s voice.

“I see Laurette sometimes,” she says cautiously. The clutter-hound thing is news to her.

“Then you know,” says Howard. “She’s kind of a shut-in. A little nuts. But she might have things that belonged to Linda.”

“H
OW DO
I
KNOW
you’re not with the landlord?”