All about Skin (36 page)

He had expected the group to shuffle into his office at least five minutes late, as was the Negro way. His first surprise, then, was to find them dressed to the nines and reading newspapers casually beside his secretary's desk when he walked in to the office, twenty minutes before the meeting time they'd arranged. The surprise did not end there, but rather grew into shock as he heard the group speak and watched them perform. The two men and two women moved as a unit, and spoke as clearly and articulately as the creature before him, which, from the freestanding Negroes, was even more of a shock. The two-headed creature was made, sent even, to thrill and bewilder. But a pack of well-dressed, well-spoken darkies, mannered and reading, and operating together with an almost mechanical precision—this was the kind of spectacle no audience member could forget. The two-headed old Negro girl would alarm audiences, for sure. She would scare them and smile at them as they left the theater and returned to their lives. But the dandies—no, not dandies, one couldn't really even call them that—the “Different” negroes, with their finery just on the slight side of decadence, would bring the audiences to their edge, where jealousy gave its last agonized shout before dribbling into the childish mockery that proliferated on the minstrel stage. They would not let men and women tumble form theaters contentedly into their days. They would haunt them as they haunted him, their dark eyes flashing from wall placards, campaign posters, family portraits on parlor walls, or worse—and chillingly better—from the looking glass itself. The thought scared and thrilled him, and he found himself eager to see them at a distance, behind the fourth wall of the stage. They were performers, darkies on stage like so many, for so many years before; and yet unlike those darkies, or the black lump of oddity that sat before him, the “So Different Four” were not so different at all. They were black, of course, but otherwise, they were nearly … almost …

When the creature's poem concluded, the prettier head gave a confident, expectant smile, pushing the upper portion of her side of its body toward him.

“Well, you certainly are talented.” Salsbury stood and walked toward her. “I imagine no one could be disappointed by such a treat. Thank you for your time, young lad—” he stammered, then put his hand on the creature's back, making sure to get a grab of the fleshy wishbone spine as he ushered it out the door.

We stayed on in New York for three weeks after our meeting with Salsbury, in a property of Mrs. Amanda Bunting, a friend of Mrs. Susan's. Mrs. Bunting owned a boarding house on the southeast tip of the city, in the middle of a cluster of settlement houses, slaughterhouses, and Jewish bakeries. The house was empty, as Mrs. Bunting and her husband had just bought the property and had yet to carve it up into single rooms. Mrs. Bunting lived far across the city—a chess knight's move away, she said—and so there was no sense in feeding the coal stove daily just to keep our one body warm. Still, she promised us privacy and discretion at the boarding house, and, for the most part, delivered both. We lived off of money Mrs. Susan loaned us, though We-Chrissie refused to call it a loan—all of Mrs. Susan's money, she said, came from us at the end of the day.

We spent our time in New York City gazing out of Mrs. Bunting's garden-parlor window at the feet of norms, watching their heels pass lightly over the cobblestones. We-Millie felt a quick tug from We-Chrissie's side of the body when one of the new electrified streetcars passed by; We-Chrissie was as excited by the cars' speed and smoothness. She imagined the body perched in one of those cars, darting sleekly from one place to another. We-Millie shuddered under Mrs. Bunting's blankets when she felt We-Chrissie's tugs. We-Millie's side of the body seemed to grow heavier and heavier with each new day, each passing gust of wind.

When we didn't hear from Salsbury after a week, We-Chrissie asked Mrs. Bunting to load us in her carriage and carry us back to his office, a mile away up on Tin Pan Alley, where we waited with his secretary for two hours before being told he wouldn't be able to see us that day. It was a cool, rainy afternoon, the kind we have only experienced in the American North, where the wind feels mean and lazy at once, and the rain seems to pinch at the skin, as though to get its attention. We-Millie had been feeling lower and lower, her fevers coming stronger and more frequently since we'd left home. The coolness and the wetness made things worse on her side of the body, and, feeling it too, We-Chrissie promised that we would return to Columbus County as soon as we signed a contract for the Negro show. Once signed, she said, we would insist on staying home with Mrs. Susan until just before the opening performance.

Leaving Salsbury's building, we stopped near the entranceway to fumble with our umbrellas, each of we-two working to find an angle at which to hold our separate shields while making sure to cover the join. We-Millie had turned to protect her hair from a particularly fierce spattering of droplets when the finest group of niggers we had ever seen waltzed toward the threshold. A man and two women trailed behind, and at the head of the pack was a tall, slim brown man with eyes like pools of sweetmilk trimmed with lashes as long as a fox tail's fur. We-Chrissie's sent a rush of blood through the body and lurched so quickly toward him that We-Millie feared, for a second, that the join would tear.

The man's name, it turned out, was Carlo. He was the lead performer of a new musical group being courted to join Salsbury's show. We-Chrissie gave Carlo a smile We-Millie had never felt before, one that buzzed over the entire surface of the body's skin and burrowed down in the knots of its flesh. Both of we-two eyed the women, though We-Millie kept her gaze up only long enough to see that neither of them looked kind. Both were dressed finely, in smart streetcoats with silver buckles. One in particular looked to We-Millie like one of Mrs. Susan's blown-glass vases, her body curving in and out, her shoulders reaching up into the sky as though they were asking for something. We-two felt instantly ashamed, though we were wearing the best costume we had—a black and blue suede number with beadwork and embroidery that cinched at the body's waist. We felt the women's eyes fall on the body, felt the familiar mix of nausea and awe. We-Millie, of course, wanted to leave the scene, to find dryness and warmth and wrap the body in it. After a few minutes of conversation, though, We-Chrissie determined that the two women were Carlo's colleagues and nothing more, and, in some way that We-Millie could not understand, this meant something important to We-Chrissie.

Carlo said that he had heard about our act as a child, and had kept us in mind as icons as he dreamed about an entertainment career. This news fell on We-Chrissie like a marriage vow, and she began to gush compliments over him, being sure to work in details of our life that would indicate—in case he was too simple to know, We-Millie thought—that we were single and available. We-Millie gave him Mrs. Bunting's address, and suggested that he call on us to chat about our experience in the business, or anything else. He thanked her with a deep bow and proceeded with his company out of the rain, leaving us to continue the business of keeping ourselves dry, and giving us another call to wait for.

The following morning, We-Millie's fever broke like a cloud into sweat showers, and the coughs from her side of the body began to produce a pinkish phlegm. Still, We-Chrissie added days to our stay in the North, promising that Salsbury, or Carlo, or somebody, would call at any minute.

We-Millie finds it needless to say that neither call ever came. We-Chrissie resents this feeling from the body's other half.

What is remarkable, for We-Millie, at least, is the course our story was taking, even as we dallied in New York, holding ourself up for sale like the last rotting piece of fruit at the produce market. What is remarkable, even We-Chrissie won't deny, is the shock, still with us, of returning to Columbus on a Saturday morning, to be met with Ron Samuel's stricken face and shattered voice, announcing in an auctioneer's bewildered monotone how Mrs. Susan had passed, alone, late Friday night.

We did not know something like that could happen. We-Chrissie did not know how painful it can be to get one's way. We-Millie did not know how one's own will discarded to the wind can fly back to hurt the ones one loves.

But we knew Salsbury like we have known all the masters and handlers and doctors, all the white norm men all our lives, including Master John. And somehow, Carlo now seems like one of them, no more sincere than Salsbury, no kinder than Master John. We should not have been surprised by Salsbury. We-Chrissie had felt his ambivalence as he eyed the body, even while we spun around his office, doing our most difficult dance. We-Millie felt him stare at us as though he expected gold coins to pour from between our legs, smelled his disappointment when they did not. We knew these shocks and the feelings they brought, but we needed money as badly as Salsbury wanted it. So We-Millie stayed quiet while We-Chrissie brightened her face and stuck out her bosom, waving the body in the white man's face like a flag before a firing squad.

We-Millie tries to be understanding as she reviews this scene. She tries not to think of Mrs. Susan, just as she feels We-Chrissie trying not to think of Carlo, the nigger show, and all the other things she feels we've lost.

“We were stupid to think it could work forever,” We-Chrissie sighs, her head falling onto We-Millie's shoulder. “We were stupid to think they would always want us. A dumb thought, that we could be just the right blend of bile and sugar always, that tastes and people and times would not change and leave us here in this torture box, alone. How stupid we were …”

You were stupid. The thought slices like a knife into the body.

You were dumb to think they wanted you in the first place. You are the stupid one.

The shoulders twist. The heads roll apart. We are sharing a brutal wish.

It may have been one or the other who tempted the barrage, but we feel the shrapnel in all quarters of the body. The back hands reach for each other and stroke themselves. A hot sweat slicks up on the spine, a chill rushes down from the tender crevice of the join. We have never shared this wish before.

We-Chrissie's heart is slowing. We-Millie feels hers quicken.

Metta Sáma

L
illian is an ordinary child, as ordinary as any freshly turned eleven-year-old who, by third grade, has been overstimulated with compare-contrast analysis teachings and exercises and who, by second grade, had creativity pretty much shattered by Mrs. Mason, whose underzealous teaching of cause-effect made Lillian, and her eight-year-old classmates, look at pancakes falling out of the sky and wonder if they were fluffier than pancakes made on a stove or not, and if the pancakes that fell from the skies were made in the skies, thus at a much higher elevation, would these high-elevation pancakes be fluffier than the pancakes they ate at home or in the local diner. Not to mention the complete silliness of pancakes, of all things, falling from the sky.

Lillian and her friends once sat in her room discussing the pure ridiculousness of her parents and their friends, who sat in the living room discussing the miracle of frogs falling out of the sky. They'd seen such in a movie and were convinced it was possible. Lillian and her educated nine-year-old friends scoffed, simply scoffed, and composed a group letter to the group of parents to explain to them how frogs settle in tress and that because of the monsoon-type conditions, which produced heavy rains and strong winds, the frogs could not stick to the trees, so they fell out of the trees, not the sky.

By the time Lillian was in the fourth grade (two years before this story begins), she was known to scowl at her parents and pointedly correct them: No, that is NOT a fox in the sky, that is a cumulonimbus cloud, a portmanteau of cumulus and nimbus, Latin for “heap” and “storm,” so you may want to stop pointing ridiculously in the sky and take cover, because a storm was surely on its way. And on and on Lillian would go. At their homes, her friends went on and on in this way, too, thanks, by then, to Mr. Kelvin, who taught them the distinct differences between thought and idea, between the real and the imagined.

The fifth grade geology teacher, in week three, during an outing on a poorly planned spring day, sternly told her group: You all are nearly adults! A little rain is not going to kill you! For heaven's sake! Dig! In Charles Dickens's England—ask Ms. Collins about this—in Charles Dickens's England, you all would be working in a factory or you would be chimney sweepers, for goodness sake!

For Lillian's eleventh birthday (the day this story begins), she announces to her mother, as soon as her poor mother has put the sweet little swirl beneath the “y” in “Lily”: I'm no longer Lily; Lily is a child's name; I'm Lillian, and I need a bralette.

Her poor mother has to carefully scrape the entire name away, make new icing for the pineapple-mango cake, and very very smartly write Lillian, neatly, because Lily, correction, Lillian, hates, more than poor grammar, sloppy handwriting. Lillian's mother wonders when her daughter's imagination slipped out of her spirit, when it began to dodge her mind, when her body stopped bumping into the impossible, when her heart turned into a cold, green chalkboard. But this is not her mother's story. This is the story of Lillian, the once exceptional, as exceptional as any up-to-the-age-of-ten-child, who is now just ordinary.

This birthday is not a big one. Eleven is eleven for any child. Even for Lillian, whose untimely training bra announcement has her father in his truck, rushing to Regina's, the local bra shop, to pick out seven training bras, as Lillian hates repeating clothes through the week, and prefers to have seven of every item of clothing: seven pairs of socks (no ducks chasing beach balls, no frogs singing to lions, and absolutely no pencils with eyes and a mouth! Plain socks (white, preferably), seven pairs of underwear (see the sock rule), seven school shirts (ironed), seven school slacks (ironed, too), seven playtime T-shirts (see the sock rule), seven playtime shorts (ironed), seven crisp white nightgowns, with just a little lace along the sleeves. The lace, a frilly adornment, leads her parents to believe that Lillian's imagination is not completely lost.