Minding Ben (26 page)

“Wow,” Kath said, “white people have more
comess
than we, mama. And so what about Dave, he have AIDS too?”

“That's really shitty, Kath. What happen to you this morning? You and Donovan fight last night or something?”

She laughed. “You're the only person I know who would pick up with a buller-man, Grace. You can't even fuck him and get some money.”

“Okay”—I started putting Ben's stuff together—“you need to be alone this morning. Call me when you ready to talk some sense.”

“Don't stay mad for long,” Kath said as I rolled away. “My party is Saturday and you coming.”

MIRIAM DIDN'T HIDE HER
surprise when I gave her the folder after dinner that night. The forms were filled out, I had two notarized passport pictures, and $150, cash. One twenty-five for the filing fee, $20 for the ad in
The Irish Echo
, and $5 to cover postage.

“Wow, Grace, you move fast.” She passed the folder to Sol for his lawyerly inspection. He placed it unopened next to his dessert plate, picked Ben up, and took him to his room.

Miriam sat still, rubbing her growing belly while I cleaned up. She flipped through the forms. “When did you get a chance to get the pictures taken, Grace?”

“Today, after the park. There's a guy right next to the pizza place on Fourteenth.”

“You really should run your personal errands on your own time,” she said. And with that she picked the folder up off the table, then went down the hall to meet her husband and child.

“Y
ou must be mad if you think I wearing this.” I held the catsuit Kath had BeDazzled between my thumb and finger. “This is pornographic.”

“Oh, just hush and put it on, Grace.”

“To go out in public?” She had snazzed a rhinestone bikini onto the black fabric. “This thing just missing a tail.”

“Only because I couldn't find one. I pick up something else, but it's the final touch. Wait and see.”

“What? A whip?”

We were in the small room Kath rented for ninety dollars a week. Monday through Friday she had the communal spaces to herself as the other women boarders lived in at their jobs out in Jersey and Long Island. Now, it was Saturday night and everyone was readying to go out. A smoky-sweet cloud from iron-roasted hair clotted the low ceiling, and every five minutes someone wanted to borrow a black brassiere or a dip of hair gel or a spritz of perfume. Getting ready to go to a house party or a basement lime or Club Calaloo or International or Empire or Tilden Hall—any place to get far away from the choking rooms and even farther from the thought of going back to the suburbs on Sunday night.

Even with the window hoisted wide open, Kath's room was still unbearably hot. It was a scratchy, unnatural heat that never managed to mimic the caressing warmth of home. She sat in her white, lacy underwear on a short red pouf in front of her formica dressing table. I leaned against the mattress edge of her tall iron bed. For the third time she tried to outline her thin lips, and for the third time she messed up.

“Shit.” She grabbed a napkin and rubbed it over the crooked lines, which only spread the black around her mouth. She looked like a coal miner.

“Here.” I laid the catsuit on the bed and reached to take the pencil from her. “Let me do it.”

“Grace, please. What you know about putting on makeup?” she complained, but she passed me the liner.

I held her chin and cleaned off the sooty smear. “Kath, what you so nervous about?” I asked her. She pulled her mouth wide to smooth the edges. She turned back to the mirror and nodded quickly, pleased with my work. Then, reaching for her lipstick, she knocked over a bottle of perfume.

“This is crazy,” I told her. “You need to relax. What is wrong?”

She spun the pouf, and her beautiful hair, down still, lifted like a black mantilla off her shoulders. When she was eleven she had taken a pair of scissors and cut off her plaits. Her mother, livid, kept her home from an outing to Tobago for which Kathy had canvassed her posh neighborhood and raised the most money. When she was a woman, her mother had told her, she could do what she wanted with her body, but not while she lived under her roof.

“What if she come, Grace?”

I had no idea who she was talking about. “Who she?”

“
She.
Donovan's . . .” She spun back. “The idiot woman he living with. I hear she planning to show up tonight.”

Before I could answer, Shivani knocked and pushed her head in the room. She had been a nice Indian girl from Caroni but had run away after her old-fashioned Hindu parents found a man twice her age with twenty acres of cane for her to marry. “Kathy, you have Stayfree to lend me one, please?”

“Grace, look in the drawer,” Kathy said.

Shivani took one pad.

“Take the whole set,” Kathy said.

“No, I just want one. I will buy a pack when I go out tonight.”

Kathy snapped, “Shivani, just take it, all right.” And Shivani, too timid to refuse again, took the bag from my hands and pulled her head like a tortoise out of the room.

I turned back to Kathy. “Who you hear that stupidness from, that she coming tonight?” I wanted Kath to be happy on her birthday. “Please, Kath. You think Donovan would put up with that, and lose he big-man reputation? You know these Jamaicans.”

She reached for her ponytail and instead flicked a finger full of loose hair against her cheek. “You think so, Grace?”

“I know so.”

Kath sighed. “I think you right.” She turned back to face her reflection. “Come on, Grace, we wasting time. Put on your clothes. The car coming for one.”

The outfit was insane, the clingy jersey outlining my breasts, my bottom, and my crotch, where Kath had done her dazzling. The long sleeves and full-length pants provided no modesty. “Kath, you have a scarf or something I could tie around my waist? Look at this.”

She turned to look and beamed. “Grace, perfect, perfect, perfect. Oh, my God, you look like a—”

“Kath, I swear to God, if you say I look like a model, I am not leaving this house tonight.”

She grinned, showing her little teeth. “But you know is truth, right.” Then she did a vulgar Jamaican winer dance and sang,

Girl, yuh body good

no 'oman caan touch yuh

'cause yuh body good, oh.

“This is crazy,” I muttered and started pulling my hair back into a rubber band.

“What on earth you doing?” Kathy shrieked and snatched at my hair. “Give me that. You spoiling the whole look. Grace, tonight you are ‘Cat Woman.' Fantasy, please. Sit down.” She took an afro pick off her dresser and started digging into my hair and covering me with hair spray.

“What are you doing? Kath, ow! Stop, Jesus.” I tried to get the comb from her, but she was too quick, using it instead to crack me across the knuckles.

“Behave and wait,” she commanded. She swung the pouf around so I couldn't see what she was doing—the combing and fluffing and spritzing—all the while biting her bottom lip and angling her head as though she had any idea of what she was trying to create. “Close your eyes.”

“For what?”

“You so harden. If I wanted you to know, for what you think I would tell you to close your eyes? Just close them please, Grace. The limo coming in fifteen minutes.”

“Limo?” I asked. She changed cans, sprayed another few bursts of aerosol poison, and then stuck something sharp into my scalp just behind my ears. “Ow!”

“Christ, you tender-headed. Hold on,” Kath chided. I opened my eyes, and she was so focused on fixing something into my head that I closed them again. “Okay,” she said, “look.”

I spun the pouf around and laughed. “Kath, you gone completely mad.”

She grinned. “Yeah, but tell me it don't look good.”

I looked frigging fantastic. She had picked out my straightened hair with some kind of gel and that superstrength spray, and now the whole thing sprang from my head bushy and flecked with gold. And the sharp pinch I had felt came from a tiny pair of silvery cat ears set on a bandeau Kath had used to pull back the wild mess. My eyebrows went up into my hairline. “Holy shit.”

“Hypocrite. You like it, don't you?” She was so pleased with her work.

“I love it.”

Kath started jumping around the room like a true true
sketel
. “Grace, tonight we going to mash up the place!” she told me. And I, unsteady in my tall boots and crazy hair, jumped around and shouted with her too.

WE GOT TO THE
club at 1:30
A.M.
Kathy stepped out of the limo and into a crowd of yardbirds who were waiting to check her out. She looked beautiful in her all-white outfit: a leather bustier and matching
poom-poom
shorts, over-the-knee boots with fishnet stockings. Her hair was piled extra high, and she had woven white sequined ribbons into the length of her ponytail. She held on to Donovan's hand and posed for photos before turning back to me, still in the backseat. “Grace, grab my coat please.”

I smiled, already holding the same white coat with the fur-trimmed collar she had worn to City Hall a few weeks earlier. “Got it, Kath. You look amazing.” She smiled again at me before turning to preen some more in front of the yardbirds. Then Donovan, bumping like a pumping jack, escorted her through the crowd and into the underground belly of Club International.

I followed a few steps behind, feeling foolish in my getup but fast realizing that Kath had been right, I fit right in with the outrageousness of the night. The yardbirds had come out in true Jamaican style for the evening. Girls competed for the shortest pair of shorts and between them sported just-under-the-bottom
poom-pooms
like Kath's or the one-inch-shorter batty riders that exposed just a crescent of fatty backside, or the highest cut of all, the two-inch-up punanni printers that did just that.

Donovan hadn't really rented out the whole club for Kathy, but he had paid the promoters good money to dedicate the night to her. All the flyers that had gone up in the jerk joints and barbershops and had been handed out on the street corners to advertise the regular Saturday night party had “
HAPPY BIRTHDAY KATHY
” printed across the top. Everyone knew Donovan, so word had spread that this was to be in honor of his likkle matey. There was no doubt wifey knew about the party, but unless she was an acid thrower, she wasn't going to be here tonight.

Inside I checked in our coats, checked out where the exits were, and looked around for Brent. The reggae was loud, and the DJ kept up a nonstop chant over the bass beats that consisted mostly of the word
massive
said over and over. The crowd, thick and warm in the closed space, swayed slowly in time to the music. Unlike at a Trini fete, where man and woman gyrated backside to crotch, or everyone jumped together in mardi gras abandon, the mostly Jamaican crowd was segregated by sex. Men in oversize denim and corduroy outfits lined the perimeter of the room, while in the middle women, their downcast faces obscured by wigs and weaves, clutched beer bottles and moved their hips and bottoms in hypnotic rhythm to the dub play. I lost sight of Kath and Donovan, and, just as I decided to find the bar and get my own drink, Brent's hand curled around my waist and pulled me to him.

“Darkie,” he whispered, “where you been 'iding from me?” And then, tightening his grip, he bent his head and pressed his lips onto mine.

He smelled so good, like soap and cinnamon and cloves and woodsmoke. I looked up at him and grinned, glad to see him and not wanting to pull away. But he stepped back and whistled. “Me see me going to have to fight some man in this place here tonight. Girl, you look good, like a real cat 'oman. No 'oman in this place can touch you.”

“Are you serious? I feel completely overdone. Kath made this outfit for me.”

“Well, Kath leave she self undone. Sexy-body girl.”

I laughed; everything Brent said sounded like a lyric from a dance hall dub.

“You drink anything yet for the night?”

“No”—I shook my head—“we only just come.”

“What you want then? Beer, whiskey, soda, juice? Call for what you want, princess.”

I really liked this man, and right now I was loving Kathy for insisting I dress up. The loud music, the low lights, the swaying women and chilling men, everything was perfect and all right.

“A rum and Coke, please.”

Brent laughed. “ 'Ow me know you was going say that? That's what all you Trini girls drink. Rum and Cokes.” He steered me over to the wall, just to the side of the DJ booth. “Don't move, me soon come,” he said as he left.

He was gone for a bit, and Kath floated over to me. “You having fun? You find Brent?”

“Yes to both. You know you're the belle of the ball, right. Kath, you look like a superstar.”

“Thanks, Grace. Look, I meant to tell you sorry for what I said in the park about your friend Dave earlier this week. I wasn't feeling too good.”

“Don't worry about it, Kath.”

“You glad you come?”

I hugged her. “Yeah, I'm glad. Happy birthday.”

She wandered off right as Brent made his way back with the drinks. The DJ lowered the volume to just below deafening and bellowed into the mike, “Easy, easy, crowd a' panty. Settle, settle crowd a' bra.”

I laughed, and Brent grinned as he passed me the plastic cup. Over the humming boom of the bass, the DJ chanted, “We calling one Kyatty to come pon the stage and do a likkle ting fe we. We have a song requested 'ere by none other than the world-famous superstar Mister Donovan Manchester, and 'im say 'im want we fe play this tune and none other for 'im Kyatty to come up and dance.”

Kath was standing on the other side of the DJ's platform, shaking her head vigorously, her ponytail sequins flashing shards of light around her face. The yardbirds were clapping and urging her up the steps. Donovan took a swig from his bottle, patted Kath's bottom, then leaned in deeper to whisper something. I saw her frown, but she stretched out her hand toward the DJ and mounted the steps. The crowd roared, and Kath stood like Wonder Woman in white, her hands on her chubby waist, and waited.

“Massive and crew, stir it up,” the DJ shouted, ratcheting up the volume.

It was a song I had heard before on the West Indian radio station:

Mih love mih car
,

Mih love mih bike
,

Mih love mih money and ting
,

But most of all, mih love mih browning.

The yardbirds screamed in appreciation, Kath's light skin the perfect embodiment of the song's brown beauty.

“Come on, Kyatty,” the DJ was chanting, “show we your motion, show we your motion, show we your motion. There's a brown girl in the ring, tra la la la la,” as the song looped over and over and over again. The yardbirds were going wild, gyrating in front of the stand, and Donovan watched them rather than stubborn Kath standing with arms akimbo onstage. The men around the edges of the room paid full attention to the fury in short shorts, slowly easing forward toward the mass of writhing women. And still Kathy stood looking down at the party held in her honor.

The DJ laughed, a hoary, deep rumble. “There's a brown girl in the ring . . . wait, wait, wait, massive and crew. Me have another one, massive, hah hah hah.” Quickly, he changed the music from the dub play to a tinny-sounding steel pan rhythm, then mimicking the folksy, old-time calypsos, sang,
“Brown skin girl, stay home and mind baby . . .”