Night of Power, page 5
“I think I’m going to like this apartment,” she said aloud.
“Me too,” Russell said lazily. “Much nicer’n I expected.”
“Of course, it’s still a New York apartment. Those damned roaches. I’ve got to do something about them.”
“Have you figured out where they’re coming from?” Russell asked, falling into the trap.
“Yeah,” she said sleepily, faking a yawn. “Got it pinned down. Whole city of ’em back there. All interconnected, between the stove and the fridge…” And although she wanted to hold her breath, she made it deepen as if toward sleep, to cut the conversation off there.
“The stove and the fridge—” he repeated, as she had hoped he would, and trailed off as she had hoped he would, remembering as she had prayed he would his own words from this afternoon about redesigning those two appliances. Dena girl, she told herself, you are such a clever bitch that you ought to be ugly, just to make things fair. She could almost hear him thinking about his idea, and when, ten minutes later, he slipped carefully out of bed and left the room in search of pencil and paper, she had to roll over to hide the smile.
She and Russell had been married for five years. Extreme success with some of his early designs—including the solar-powered air conditioner which had kept their car cool over two thousand kilometers of summer driving, functioning only when it was needed—had allowed him to retire almost ten years before; he need never work again unless it suited him. Dena and Jennifer were quietly determined between them that before long it would suit him. It was one of the strongest bonds cementing stepmother and daughter: a shared conspiracy to bring joy to the man they both loved. And just as Dena had hoped, the sight of his childhood home on the horizon had woken old instincts, started the long-unused creative engine in his mind.
Perhaps, she thought, the engine would cough fitfully a few times and die. It had before. But she was going to keep jump starting it, and if necessary she would push the damned thing up to speed and pop the clutch.
Feeling so pleased with herself that she completely failed to notice the turmoil in her own subconscious, Dena snuggled more comfortably into her pillow, clenched her thighs around the memory of their lovemaking, and drifted into sleep.
She dreamed. Since the dream was not recorded anywhere in her conscious or unconscious memory banks, it had no more—and no less—existence than the sound of a falling tree which nobody hears.
She was back home in Halifax, on Gottingen Street, the shabby half-kilometer strip on and around which the city’s black population had tended to center, since the forcible relocation of Africville in the early ’60’s. It was a street which had attracted and repelled Dena all her childhood, an alternate world in which she did not thoroughly understand the rules, a world whose rules her parents did not want her to learn. She walked past the old Casino Theatre, saw the posters for the usual porn double feature and felt the familiar tingle of disgusted intrigue; ahead a group of black boys stood outside a tavern, laughing and strutting and she hoped they would hit on her and was prepared to draw blood if they dared try. But as she approached the tavern, Gottingen Street melted and ran and flowed like a time-lapse film of entropic decay, became East 125th Street, and she was no longer walking but sitting in a stationary car, and the boys were surrounding the car, menacing and gleeful. Her child was crying, and her lower back hurt.
She became a tigress, burst from the car, confronted the attackers, brandishing an enormous straight-edged razor. “Come on, chumps,” she snarled, the black Amazon in her wrath.
They burst out laughing.
“Woo-ee!” the middle one said mockingly, pantomiming great fear, “danger on the set!” His face flowed like the street had, became the face of Jerome Turner, her old lover and dance partner. “Look here, Dena-mite,” he said, using his old pet name for her, “You come on bad-ass nigger like that, maybe you gonna fool white people or pakis. But a real bad-ass nigger see through you from jump-street.” Suddenly he dropped the jive accent and spoke in his natural voice. “All I see is a shade with a tan, and a razor in her han’.”
The razor wilted and drooped; she flung it away. “I’m blacker than you are, Jerome!”
“No you aren’t. Your skin, maybe, but not you.”
She remembered this conversation, knew how she would convince him. She would dance. She would strut, shuffle, shake, snap her body around in those funky steps that white dancers could imitate but never master, and then he would have to admit that in her bones and sinews where it counted she was black. “Watch this.”
And as she began her lower back spasmed. Pain shot down her right leg clear to the ankle. She tried to adapt her dance to the injury, and the left knee went; she nearly fell. She managed to complete the series, but it was a stiff, feeble parody—the way a white person would have danced it.
Jerome laughed. “About as black as pharmaceutical cocaine. Just look at yourself.”
She looked down, and it was true. Her skin was changing colour, getting lighter. It was still Negroid, but barely so; as she watched, it reached sun-tanned Caucasian, then bleached further until she was as pale as Jennifer. She whirled toward Jennifer, and her daughter was not in the car any more, was just disappearing around the distant corner in Russell’s arms, waving and smiling back at Dena.
She turned back to Jerome, angry and afraid. “Give me back my black,” she said, voice dangerously soft.
He rolled his eyes and grinned. “Give back?”
“You took my black. Now give it back,” she screamed.
The surrounding youths became a rap-group, chanting her words like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Someone improvised a fingerpop bass line, another played conga with a pair of trash cans; a call-and-answer chorus developed:
“You 1took my 2black now 3_____ give it 4back You took my 2black now _____ my black _____ _____ gimme back my black _____
Over this foundation Jerome improvised, strutting and leering:
“You want your black back that’s too bad
Can’t give back what you never really had
It isn’t where you been or the color of your skin
Or even how you like to sin—it’s just a feelin’ from within
You never been used, you never been warned
You never been abused and you never been scorned
Never been cheated and you never been afflicted
Never been mistreated and you never been addicted
Never gone hungry and you never been cold
Never been rented let alone been sold
Never been shabby let alone been naked
Never needed anything so bad you hadda take it
Never hated anything so bad you hadda break it
Never had a child that you knew could never make it
If you see that you’re whiter than you think you oughta be
Complain to your Mama and your Daddy, not me!”
He repeated the last line several times. Dena turned and saw without surprise that her mother and father were now sitting in the car, regarding the horde of dancing, chanting youths with distaste and another emotion she could not identify. She approached the car, melted through the door, knelt on the back seat leaning forward between them. Her back still hurt.
“Mama? Daddy?”
“Yes, dear.”
“What color am I?”
“Dena, a person’s color is the least important thing about them.”
“Yes, but what color am I?”
“Child, I’m color-blind—I just can’t tell.”
“Mama, tell me!”
“I just couldn’t say.”
Her back hurt too much to hold her position. Angrily she lay back on the seat and closed her eyes. “Tell me!”
Outside, the boys were still rapping; the volume of their chanting increased and drowned out any answer her mother might have made. Dena screwed her eyes tighter, and when she opened them again she was on stage somewhere, a hall she didn’t recognize, and she didn’t know what piece this was, her partner was waiting for her, improvising frantically as he waited for her to snap out of it and get back into the dance but she didn’t know what piece this was, the costume was no clue and her fourth lumbar was pinching the sciatic again sending terrifying pain down the outside of her right leg and the left knee still felt wobbly, she couldn’t dance this even if she could remember what it was. She was a pro, she kept moving, improvising like her partner, you never freeze up on stage, but it was no good, her improv clashed with his and as he came closer she misinterpreted and then couldn’t get out of the way in time and his elbow caught her full in the face. It did not hurt at all, but the impact spun her offstage and into the water. The last thing she saw, in mid-air, was the angry face of her partner, and he was Russell. But Russell can’t dance, she thought, and then the water crashed over her and she sank like a stone, noting as she sank that her pale skin was visible even in the black, black water…
When she woke, Russell was beside her, in deep sleep. She slipped out of bed without waking him, shrugged on a robe and donned slippers, and went out into the main room which served as living room, dining room, and kitchen. Her back hurt from three days on the road.
“Morning, Jennifer.”
“Hi, Mom. Was he good?”
The question was rhetorical, facetious, and familiar. Dena gave the ritual answer: a wiggle of the hips, and a “He was dyno-mite!” Then she took in what she was seeing and hearing and smelling. “Jennifer, you angel, you have been busy.”
Jennifer had located the carton which held kitchen gear, and cleared several heavy items off the table. It was set with paper plates, silverware, cups and condiments. English muffin halves were in the toaster waiting to be popped down into heat; eggs were sitting out on the counter, by the stove, which held the egg-poacher and the Melitta pot, into which Jennifer was just pouring the last slug of boiling water. She set the water-pot back on the burner, turned off the gas, and got orange juice from the fridge. “That supermarket where we got the food really sucks,” she said cheerfully.
“You know I don’t like that kind of language,” Dena said automatically.
“Aw, we’re in New York now.”
“All the more reason to preserve the amenities.”
“You’re right,” Jennifer decided. “But it really does suck.”
Dena sighed. “I’ll tell you what. Every time you make breakfast like this you can talk as crudely as you like. Until your father gets up. And don’t you say it, girl, I’ve heard that pun.” Caffeine tropism drew her toward the coffee. “In what particular respect does the store suck?”
“Two eggs were cracked, the English muffins are stale, and the milk’s bad—the coffee cream’s okay, though. Why do they call them ‘English’ muffins, anyway?”
Dena picked up a half-muffin; it was, as advertised, going stale. “Because if you throw them like a frisbee, with enough English on them, they’ll always come back to you.”
“And they call it French toast because it’s so sweet to the tongue,” Jennifer finished with a giggle.
Dena arched an eyebrow. “What do you know about French stuff, girl?”
Jennifer crossed her eyes and grimaced wistfully. “A girl can dream.”
Dena grinned. “You lie. You were French-kissing boys before I met you, I bet.”
“I’m not the kind that tells. Shall I put the eggs on for all three of us?”
“Just us two.” The coffee was finished dripping; Dena poured gratefully and spooned up the first sips. Then she leaned close to Jennifer and whispered, just in case the smell of coffee had Russell stirring: “He worked last night.”
Jennifer froze, then whipped around eagerly. “That fridge-stove thing?” An expert would probably have ruled that her voice was, technically speaking, a whisper, but it carried better than normal speech might have.
“Shush. Yes, I think so. I planted the hook and ‘went to sleep,’ and after a while he got up and came out here. My,” she went on in conversational volume, “you make good coffee.”
“Now if I could only stand to drink the stuff,” Jennifer replied in equally loud tones, and dropped again into a whisper. “Evidence. There should be evidence around here somewhere—and I don’t see it. Notes, sketches, something.”
“For sure?”
“Hell yes—Daddy leaves paper behind like worm-tracks. Let’s look!”
Dena found the sketchpad and pencil on the floor in front of the couch, but there was nothing written on the pad. “Damn, he must have pulled a blank.”
Jennifer took the pad, sighted along it at an angle. “No! Look, there are impressions on the top sheet, and some pages are missing. Now let’s see—” She sat on the couch, pantomimed her father sketching. She shook her head, scowled ferociously, tore off the top sheet, crumpled it with her left hand—and automatically tossed it behind her and to the left. The couch was near the corner of the room, offset from the lefthand wall by perhaps half a meter where one of Figueroa’s end tables had formerly stood. The crumpled piece of paper ricocheted in the corner and dropped quite naturally into the hidden space between couch and wall. Jennifer and Dena exchanged a glance. The girl got up and pulled the couch sideways. “Jackpot,” she cried, snatching up nearly a dozen balls of paper. “Oh Mother, you did it.”
“Maybe.” Dena unrolled one of the balls and studied it dubiously: three square boxes interconnected by a spaghetti of arrows, surrounded by copious notes in an absolutely illegible hand. “Let’s not celebrate until he produces some sketches worth keeping.”
“The only sketches he saves are the ones he sends to the patent attorneys. Believe me, he’s working again.”
“Are you sure? You were only six the last time he turned anything out.”
“I remember. I remember good. I mean, ‘well.’” She tossed a couple of the balls up to the ceiling and caught them happily. “Come on, let’s cover our tracks.”
“Oh—yes. Breakfast is getting cold.”
By the time Russell awoke, Dena and Jennifer were well into the task of unpacking and distributing their possessions, Jennifer doing all the bending and heavy lifting without having been asked.
Russell was always useless when he first woke up. But both women knew how to deal with him: they ignored him and stayed out of his way while he botched his own eggs and toast, firmly suppressing their natural urge to giggle. As always, breakfast recapitulated phylogeny. He reached the vertebrate stage halfway through his meal, and was nearly human by the time he finished. A second cup of coffee completed the resurrection. He cleaned up after himself and joined them at their work, throwing Jennifer a smile the first time their paths crossed.
Dena enjoyed the morning that followed. Spending time with her family always gave her a warm happy glow, a deep pleasure in having not only a family, but such a nice one. Her husband was a special man, who gave her what she needed, and needed what she had to give; her daughter was a special young woman whom she had always loved, and who had always loved her—at first because Russell did, and then because Dena loved Russell, and at last for her own sake. Dena appreciated what she had in her family—and only hoped that it would be enough to fill her life when she could no longer dance. Because she had no idea what else to do with herself…
José came by with a bootleg TV converter which he connected to a bootleg dish hookup that apparently came with the apartment. The 50 cm dish on the building’s roof provided them with exactly the same channels they got at home, from the same STI satellite. He told them where to go to get Figueroa’s phone disconnected and their own installed (literally around the corner, thank God). He explained about mail, and where the nearest laundromat and deli and supermarket were, and where the best laundromat and deli and supermarket were, and a number of other basic New York survival tips. “You keep one hand in your pocket all the time. It never comes out. The mugger is a businessman. What do you got in that pocket? He don’t know. It ain’t worth the risk to find out, because somebody stupider is gonna come along in a minute, catch?”
Dena took him aside discreetly. “José, my husband told me about his arrangement with you, regarding Jennifer.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I just want to say that I think it’s one of his better ideas.” She looked him square in the eye and held his gaze. “I trust you with my daughter—I just wanted you to know that.”
“Thanks, Miz Grant.”
“Dena.”
“Thanks, Dena. You want your daughter to know?”
Dena thought quickly. No—it could not be kept secret, not even clumsily. “Yes. Look, one tip: her name is Jennifer. Not Jen, not Jenny—Jennifer, got it? Catch?”
He smiled. “I figured that out.”
She felt even better. “This is going to work out okay, I think. Jennifer?”
Jennifer came at once. “Yes, Mama?”
“Jennifer, you’ve met José, I believe?”
The girl looked at José, inclined her head. “Yes. Hello, José.”
“Hi, Jennifer.”
“Darling, José is going to look after you whenever your father is busy.”
Jennifer was expressionless. “Like a babysitter?”
“No, dear,” Dena said hastily. “More like a bodyguard.”
“Oh.” Jennifer seemed to field the novel concept well. “I see.” She turned back to José. “Are you dangerous?”
He did not crack a smile, though Dena believed it cost him some effort. “Yes, Jennifer. I am very dangerous.”
She looked him up and down, making no attempt to be polite about it. “Show me.”
He blinked, then slowly nodded.
The three went outside to the garden, collecting Russell on the way. José had them stand just outside the door, then walked across the broad patio to the edge of the garden proper. It was marked by a border made of small half-bricks set diagonally in the earth. He loosened a half-brick with a kick and tugged it free, tossed it to Jennifer. It was an excellent toss, slow and high enough to let her see it coming, not so slow as to give her time to panic. She caught it easily, then looked surprised and pleased with herself. It was the size of a cigarette pack.
