Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (23 page)

“What happened? Did I hurt you?” you ask.

“Look,” she says.

You watch the burn go through phases like a moon. From new wound, to blister, to scab, to gone.

“Every likeness a life,” she tells you again, and you start to understand.

“Do it hurt them too, Grannie?”

“This work is a revealing. Both sides. Ain’t no hiding place in it. Strike a match to a likeness, you feel the burnt. Cut one and you bleed. Drown it and you fight to breathe. This little I take is a willing price for what they pay on the other end.”

“They still alive, Grannie? These folks that hurt you.”

“Some live. Some be gone. If they already gone, this’ll find the next in line.”

Every likeness a life. Every likeness a wound. Every likeness a debt.

When you destroy a likeness, you only feel a shadow of your Grannie’s pain. An echo. You feel the quick sting of a slap, a burn, a cut, a disavowal, the tenderness of a bruise already fading. The two of you hold the hurt together.

She is fading, your Grannie. You try to make her rest between likenesses; you try to take more of the revealing as you watch her get weaker and weaker, still. It won’t be long now. As she fades, you bloom. Each new destruction of a likeness is another settled debt: you are fulfilling her true legacy. This is the last, genuine Clementine, balancing the record book of her life. Collecting payment for her wounds.

How could your Grannie bear it? And then bear it again?

How can you?

You try your hand at cutting figures. Your hands so gifted to the work of sharp things, but no matter how you try, you cannot master a true likeness.

You fail.

As soon as your Grannie is buried, your family puts you out. They send you to a distant cousin who runs a very elegant house in the city. You have never been away from home. You have never lived among white folk.

You have never been in such a house. The walls soar way above your head, blue like a sky. A crystal chandelier breaks the light into a thousand pieces that are reflected in mirrors. And the light, such light! Gas lamps, candlelight, and a whole wall of windows swathed in heavy silk drapes.

The lady of the house takes pity on your situation and gives you a bed and a uniform and a meager salary. The uniform must always be on if you are “in service.” You are always in some kind of service under this roof.

It is almost Christmas when you arrive, so until she decides what to do with you, the lady of the house has you prepare for the holiday season. You polish and shine all the woodwork, dust every single knick-knack and object. She gives you white gloves and a feather duster to attend to the artwork.

Over the sideboard, right at eye level, is a long gilt frame. Inside of the frame there is a series of figures cut of black paper. Six in total. A background of this very parlor has been sketched in behind them. The likenesses captured are so fluid, so intimate, that you expect them to chat, or raise their paper pipes to smoke or order you to clean their shapes in a more suitable way, but they stay almost still, almost fixed under your gaze.

“These are very, very delicate,” the lady of the house says. “Silhouettes cut by the European artist Mister Auguste Edouart on his tour of these United States.” She looks to her bored teenage daughter, who is waiting for her piano teacher to arrive.

Your Grannie’s figures were not all of heavy black paper. They were not behind glass. She did not have to tell you that they were “very, very delicate.” Your Grannie’s likenesses were cut from whatever she could get her hands on.

When the lady of the house leaves you to your cleaning, the daughter stands at your side.

“With them being black like that, that lady could be you,” the daughter says. You start to hate her a bit more. She is about your age, you guess, and has taken you as her personal servant whenever you are not in service to her mother.

You lean in toward the figures, searching for Mister August’s signature. Your Grannie’s Master August.

“I hate all these dead people on the walls, watching my every move. At least these don’t stare,” she says.

Her hand flutters at her jaw line, ruddy with pimples. “I saw you lance my sister’s boil. Can you help my complexion? I have my own pocket money if you can keep a secret.”

You can keep secrets.

You had to.

When the men (and boys) of the house start to corner you, you borrow a bigger uniform and keep your hair covered. You are always busy, in a rush to somewhere with witnesses. There is no hiding place for live-ins.

You are your mother’s outside child. The whispers are not even whispers about your ruined mother. The secrets not even secrets. Adults speak freely around you because you know how to disappear. Your mother disappeared. Your father died. Becoming invisible runs in the family line. You try to make yourself invisible before they can force you to disappear.

Your cousin is gray around the edges. She is tall and almost glamorous. Almost. A pinched look of bitterness has settled into her features and makes her look sterner and older than she is.

You ask your cousin how to leave this very elegant house. Your cousin tells you that you will never get set for day work. That you will be destroyed without a home, a family to take you in. She tells you stories about all of the live-ins who left and came crawling back. She spits the names of the ruined ones as a warning: Gladys. Morease. Mary Francis. Eloise. Hortense. Ruby.

“I will not speak a word on your behalf to return if you leave this household,” your cousin says. She taps her hand over her heart as she says this. A pledge. A promise. A hope. A worry that is something a little less than a blessing. Her fingertips break loose from the pledge and tug nervously at her stiff, high collar. Her eyes rim with tears.

The string of ruined women’s names is a map. When you quietly ask about the ruined women, bit by bit you find your way. Miss Gladys gives leads for houses where the menfolk will mostly leave you be. Miss Morease helps you enroll in the penny-saver at her church. Miss Mary Francis loans you her map of the city. Miss Eloise promises to make your first day work uniforms. Miss Hortense teaches you to roll a cigarette and drink corn whiskey. Miss Ruby runs the boarding house where all these ruined women once lived.

“Get yourself set,” Miss Ruby says, “then come see me.”

So you bide your time at that terrible, grand house. To get set, you must learn to speak and keep quiet. You save every penny back. You make yourself useful to your household and to their guests. On your day off, even though your legs shake, you ride the streetcar up and down to learn the city.

You keep stashing your pennies. You do complexion work on the sly for your employer’s spoiled friends. You let your stomach grumble when you pass the people selling food in the street. Slowly your money grows.
This is a day’s wages. This is a week.
You mark the stations on the jars
. This is a month. Six months. A year. Set.

When you are set, you start day work like everyone else with housekeeping and laundry, but soon, much of your money comes from skin work. You hone the profile with creams and tonics, and you are known for your extractions. You have a whole arsenal of sharps: tweezers with and without a slant, needles run through the blue of a flame before they free ingrown hairs, sewing tools repurposed for the job. You use the tools of your trade to poke and prod the face, tighten the skin. Your best tools are your sharpened fingernails, wrapped in cotton to press up long-submerged sins.

You blame their favorite food or drink or cosmetic or habit for their imperfections. You frown and tell them to abstain from what they love best. This is the first deprivation that some of them have ever known. How they thank you for this punishment. How they admire the longing they feel for their vices denied.

How they ooh and aaah over the pain you inflict. They come to crave the ecstasy of the release you provide as you squeeze out the blackheads, lance the boils of pus and blood, and steam the whiteheads up to ooze. They crave the sting and burn of the astringents and tonics you slap into their skin. They feel pure and regal. Saintly.

You wear a white work dress for skin work. When Miss Eloise measures you for this dress, you weep from missing your Grannie. The white uniform lets them know that to clean this type of dirt costs more than to scrub a floor. You always leave a bit of blemish behind. You make your work
almost
perfect. Close to perfect. And wait for time to do the rest.

In the basement at Miss Ruby’s there is an illegal club where the musicians and dancing girls come to be themselves when they are finished with white people. One night she tells you your cousin’s story. For a few weeks not so many years ago, your almost glamorous cousin left her very elegant house. She did not get herself set first. She did not save up the cash, make the contacts, or learn the city by streetcar on her day off. She met a man right there in the basement club who promised to marry her. She waited for three days for him to return.

“He was a wonderfully terrible man,” Ruby says.

You and the other girls eat breakfast together and share chores around Miss Ruby’s place. You make the coffee and fill the cups.

“Do this in remembrance of me,” Sally says and holds her coffee cup up for a toast.

“What?” You ask.

“That’s what the old lady said in my dream,” Sally says.

“What old lady?” you ask. Sally yawns. She is no good before coffee.

“The one with the stars on her dress,” Sally says.

Sally has the new girl position near the drafty window. You loaned her your Grannie’s quilt.

You realize it has been months since you destroyed a likeness. You are busy – keeping your room paid for, learning new dances, and work, work, work. You haven’t actually stopped, you tell yourself, only put it off.

Later, when you’re alone, you check on the likenesses and they are silent, haughty as ever. You take out a likeness from the group, a man in a cape. You hold him on your palm, ponder a suitable destruction. You glance at your Grannie’s quilt on Sally’s bed. You flush with the duty of what she’s asked you to do, the slow destruction of the flesh of those who sinned against her.

You want to snatch the quilt off Sally’s bed, to climb under it and dream. Instead you pack the likeness away. You borrow one of Sally’s dresses without permission. You line your eyes and rouge your cheeks. You spray perfume on the nape of your neck and head downstairs to sweat and dance.

You plan to tend to a likeness on the next day off, but now that you do day work, you work every single day that you can. Your nights belong to your lover, who is full of laughter, song, and a tenderness you have never known.

Your Grannie comes to you in the night and shows you her scars. She is naked, but you do not look away. She hands you a likeness of herself. When you wake up you look and look for it and sob when you realize that the likeness and your Grannie only exist in the land of dreams.

Your lover gets you to pose for a photograph in front of the club where he works as a back-up piano player and bartender. You tell him to keep his money. You tell him that your hair isn’t right, you have on the wrong dress, but he insists. He wraps his arm around you and he is Jacques, Honor, James, and Master August.

The photo comes back a few weeks later. Your lover shows you how the cardboard back folds out to make a little frame. He stands it up on your little dresser. In the photo, the wind has lifted the hem of your skirt. He holds on to his hat. Together, you lean against the wind.

“You two make a fine pair,” Sally says when you show her the photograph. “In fact, you favor. He could be your kin.”

This is the only likeness you have of yourself.

You have been dealing with a likeness. With the finest pumice stone you could find, you have been slowly eroding the figure cut from heavy white stock. The likeness that you are working is stubborn. You wonder where this woman in the fancy gown is, whether she shrieks when her skin rips, or does she whimper? Which of your Grannie’s scars does she place her name to? Would she even know? The tendering lasts longer and longer.

Your skin is chafed and raw from it. You are trying to get ready for work, to get into your clothes before the flash of tendering can be seen. You have been careful with the likeness, working on the parts of it that would be under your clothes.

“What’s troubling your back?” asks Sally.

“Maybe my new soap is vexing me,” you say.

“Be careful your complexion folk don’t see that,” Sally says.

Your lover is singing softly:

I’m going home on the morning train

I’m going home on the morning train

He has taken ill. The doctor has been no use. He can barely put on clothes. His skin is irritated. Every touch pains him. His back.
Your back.
His arm.
Your arm.
His face. His lovely, lovely face.
Your face.
You make compresses with gauze soaked in chamomile and sage tea. You beg ice chips from the iceman.

“Thank you, thank you,” he says burning with fever.

“Tell me, lover,” you beg, “where are your people from?”

Even without the fever he could not answer you. He was put out. Abandoned. Bastard.

Like you.

We’re all bound up together.

You are feverish with knowing. You search your lover’s face for your Grannie’s, for some feature of the likeness, but you have pumiced it into a dark, ragged shape. You remember the burn on your Grannie’s arm, her wince, her shout. You imagine a bright red thread stitched from you to your Grannie, see it tremble as you set that likeness against the flame for the first time. You follow the thread from you to your lover as he trembles in bed.

Each likeness a life.

You lock the likenesses away. You stow them in a box at the top of the closet. Under your bed. On a bright, cold morning you take them to the river to tumble them all away and yourself, too. The likenesses shift and writhe in your pocket. You feel an invisible web of ropes tighten and tighten around you, cutting off your breath. Long dormant, they have grown powerful, greedy since your Grannie came to trouble Sally’s sleep. You turn and run back to your room. The likenesses settle.