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Mercy says it’s Kiwi’s hands that make everyone act so stupid around her. Says Kiwi knows it and you can tell by the way she holds them, press out in front of her like she’s praying but the prayer’s aim at you, legs spread, elbows on her thighs. It’s those hands but it’s also those thighs that seem to go on forever, and even those elbows, the way the sleeves of her shirts fall down across them when she’s sitting like that. Mercy says the whole package makes you want to holler. Says Kiwi’s no joke.
Some days I get all confused, don’t know if I want to be her or be with her. I picture us together—two girl-boys, all straight edges and sharp lines. Mercy says she feels some of that about Denzel Washington—especially when he walks on to the screen like he did in Devil in a Blue Dress—wearing just an undershirt and those khaki pants. Denzel’s no joke, Mercy says. I’d rather have him over anybody. But him and Kiwi got cut from the same bolt of fabric.
Saturday night we go over there, bring our clothes underneath dry-cleaning bags; Mercy’s got her makeup in a case. Kiwi lives on the East Side, Lower East Side, way over near the river where the people walk right up to you and ask what kind of dope you looking for. Mercy tells the first guy that comes up to us she’s got someone who’ll show him what kind of dope we looking for, he don’t watch what he’s saying. The boy walks away backwards, holding his stuff and cussing at us. Mercy doesn’t play that—been clean for nearly ten years and can’t even stand the smell of pot. Me, I get nice every once in a while when the mood hits me or someone’s offering something to take the edge off my day. Most days I’m temping for the All Call Agency. They’re good about sending me on long-term gigs. Nights, I practice my singing. Once in a while I get a gig with some fellas playing the clubs. I sing “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” and people sway side to side and nod like they’re remembering something from their way past. On a night when I’m feeling brave, I’ll do Tina Turner’s “Private Dancer.” That song makes me sad, though. Makes me think of all the nights I slow-dance naked in front of the mirror, watching my own body move with just the dim light from the living room coming into my bedroom. Sometimes, if the moon’s out and coming in through my window, my skin looks goldlike and I find myself running my hands slow over my breasts and down between my legs.
With my eyes closed, I can imagine it’s Kiwi’s hands, her fingers pushing my thighs apart and moving slowly up inside of me. Then the music stops and I’m back in my own apartment, alone. And if the moon’s gone on behind a cloud, my skin doesn’t even look goldlike anymore. Loneliness can eat you whole and leave you standing. Some mornings heading to work, I feel a sadness so deep I want to moan. If I have a gig the evening after one of those mirror dances, I usually see tears in my audience’s eyes.
I pull my bag of clothes tight to my chest and follow a step behind Mercy. She’s tall and broad shouldered, brown and pretty. Says the next person that uses some sort of food to describe her skin coloring is looking to have their head pulled off. Brothers always saying “Hey, Sweet Chocolate” and “Brown Sugar” and “Miss Truffle.” Mercy say she can’t stand how people don’t have any sense about description. Look in the mirror, she says to me one evening. I look. See my same self staring back at me. Big eyes. Hair pulled back into a braid. Nose is just a nose and lips Kiwi once called juicy in a way that made my insides dance around. Teeth white and straight and strong—a gift from my mother’s family. One dimple when I smile. People always surprised by it. Some say “Oh!” and nod—like they’re seeing me for the first time when it creeps into my cheek. It’s right below my left eye. My mama had a dimple there and her mama and so on all the way back, I hear. Mercy says, “What color would you call yourself?”
“Brown.”
“What kind of brown?”
“Caramel.”
“See, that’s the problem,” Mercy says. “If it wasn’t for food, Negroes wouldn’t have no idea how to talk about themselves.”
Mercy always finds a way to say something to make me laugh; then that dimple comes out and she says Pretty Girl Ray, which makes me smile even more. Ray from Raylene from my father Raylen. My family’s from the South—near Anderson, South Carolina. When I was in school there, there were three other Raylenes in my class. One of them was my half sister. When we figured it out, we thought it’d be like that movie The Parent Trap, when those twins discover each other after years going without knowing the other existed. But it wasn’t like that. The other Raylene had heard my mama was trash and I’d heard the same thing about her mama and after that first day of sitting in the schoolyard eating our lunch together then walking everywhere all hugged up, smiling like we’d won a million dollars, we couldn’t stand each other’s guts. Didn’t go a single day after that first one without getting into a fight. Raylene’s mama finally pulled her out of that school. Some evenings I wonder what became of her—the other Raylene Tyler walking through this world.
By the time we get to Kiwi’s building I’m already out of breath, and then there’s five flights of stairs to climb on top of everything else. Mercy takes them two at a time because she runs six miles a day and stairs aren’t anything to her. I hear her up above me knocking on Kiwi’s door; then I hear her and Kiwi talking and laughing and carrying on. By the time I get up to the top Kiwi’s standing there, that one-sided smile she has on her face, shaking her head. My stomach gives a little leap up into my throat and I nod hello, trying to breathe through my nose so I don’t seem so tired.
“Work out much?” Kiwi says, holding the door open for me. I shrug and smile, stepping past her into her apartment.
“Can’t breathe enough to even talk,” Kiwi says. She takes the clothes I’m carrying and points me toward the couch.
Kiwi’s wearing a suit—black with a black shirt underneath it and patent-leather shoes. She has a bit of eye makeup on—some liner, that’s all, and a tiny gold dot of an earring in her nose. Her hair’s short and curly. She’s put some gel or something in it to make it look wet. Her hair’s blacker than anything and she says it’s probably gonna stay that way. Says her Indian—straight from India and not some fake Native-American relative—grandmother had jet-black hair till the day she died at ninety-two. Kiwi gives me another half smile, pours me a glass of water and Mercy a Coke, then sits down on the couch.
“This club might not be as tight as Dixie,” she says. “I hear it’s all right, though. You ready to kick it, Birthday Girl?”
I take a sip of water. “I guess so.”
So far all I know about twenty-three is that it’s as trifling as twenty-one. Inside, I still feel lost half the time—like the world is happening over there to my left somewhere. I want to be thirty—like Kiwi and Mercy—know where I’m going and all, have a bit of life behind me. In the corner of the living room Kiwi’s police officer uniform is draped neatly over the back of a chair. Even though I can’t see it, I know there’s a badge that says WINCHELL right above the breast pocket. Officer Winchell. Kiwi Winchell. Kiwi catches me staring at her uniform and a slow smile spreads over her face. I look away from her, not smiling but not frowning either.
I met Mercy two years ago on the corner of Seventeenth Street and Fifth Avenue. One morning I was coming from a temp gig and she was going to one. When I stepped out into the street, she pulled me back just as a cab raced by, saying, “Hey Lil’ Sister, you too pretty to be killing yourself this early in the morning.” We walked a ways together after that, and by the end of the walk we were friends. I’d been in the city for six months then and didn’t know many people. Turned out Mercy lived just a few blocks from me. Turned out, too, her family was from Charlotte, and she threw out a couple of names I recognized. Felt like home.
Kiwi came along later. I’d gone over to Mercy’s to see if she wanted to walk some. It was August. The city was hot and my small top-floor apartment was hotter. Kiwi was sitting on Mercy’s couch. What I remember was her left hand palm up in the air, those long fingers the first part of her I ever met. Later on I found out she was showing Mercy a cut on her palm, a tiny nick of a thing she’d gotten cutting a bagel. Narrow but deep. Three stitches like tiny black crosses across the pale peach of her hand. Then she turned full toward me, and her eyes caught me hard. Figure none of that day’s anything I need to tell Mercy. And Kiwi, figure she must already know.
Mercy’s been in love more times than I can count. Men act stupid around her, and in return she pays them some attention every now and then, then gets bone tired of them before they can think of something clever to say. Some evenings, when me and Mercy are just sitting on the fire escape drinking Cokes and watching the city pass beneath us, she starts talking about what she’d like—a good man, a nice home. Maybe a kid or two. I look down at the people moving around on the sidewalk and wonder how many of them got someplace good to be, somebody to love when they get there. Mercy’s eyes hollow out and I think she thinks she’s never gonna get what she needs. When she gets that look, I tell her—don’t get sentimental; the love she’s looking for is out there somewhere. She’s a good woman, Mercy is.
“What do you want, girl?” Mercy asked me one night.
I shrugged, took a sip of my Coke. Stared down at all the people moving by us. All different colors and loving every which way.
“To sing,” I said.
“You do sing already,” Mercy said. We were sitting close and she nudged my shoulder with her own. “You sing like a bird, girl.”
“To really sing,” I said. “From way deep. Hurt people with my singing. Knock them down with it and lift them back up again.”
Mercy nodded. “That’d be some singing.”
The first time somebody told me I had a voice was when I was ten and singing in my church’s choir. Even then I knew I was only about seventy-five percent holy. The rest of me wanted more than Jesus and “This Little Light of Mine.” The rest of me wanted to fly. But more than that—even at ten, I wanted to know something, someone. And love them deep.
When we get to the club, it’s loud and smoky but the music is pumping. All around us brothers and sisters are getting tight at the bar or loose on the floor. Mercy’s wearing a long red dress that cuts halfway across her breasts and promises more with a high split up the back. She dances in ahead of us and gets scooped up by a pretty dark-skinned brother in leather pants. He doesn’t look anything like Denzel, but Mercy’s smile is saying Denzel who?
The DJ throws TLC’s “Unpretty” on and I am taken right back to my bedroom mirror when I feel Kiwi’s hand pulling me onto the dance floor.
“Pretty girl,” she whispers, leaning into my ear. The mirror disappears. The loneliness lifts up off of me. Kiwi moves slower than the music and still it’s like the music is moving her. No hips to speak of but the place where hips should be is swaying around me and I find my own self moving closer to her, scared of the lead my body’s taking over my mind. I know once she and Mercy were close like this, but then Mercy decided she was more into men than women. I know Kiwi was so hurt, they didn’t speak for years, and then they were speaking again but it was different, strained sometimes, like ex-lovers but most times like family, like sisters. Different but connected nonetheless, all but choking on their spit when someone brings up them being together once. And then Kiwi fell in love and stayed in love for a long time. Then that love thing ended and Kiwi went back to just being a cop. A different Kiwi. Sadder, Mercy says. Quieter. A Kiwi that was waiting for something. That was a year ago.
I look across the dance floor and see Mercy’s got her arms around that brother and her eyes closed, that red dress flashing. And something about the flash of that dress makes me feel brave enough to pull Kiwi into me. She looks surprised, then laughs, presses her hand against my mouth and says, “We got seven years between us, sweet girl. Seven years is seven years.” She lets her hand move around to the back of my neck and down into the collar of my shirt—a navy button-down tucked into black pants. A wide black belt with a silver buckle—a birthday gift to myself. My hair is pulled back into one braid so from far away maybe we look like two slender men on the dance floor—Kiwi’s the beautiful one.
Kiwi once told me her parents didn’t name her for three days. “They wanted to see who I was first,” she said. “And they came to realize that I was sweet and sour as their favorite fruit. I don’t mind—it’s easy to spell and easy to say.”
Now, she slips her hand out of my shirt and smiles again. I feel the smile spread over my body.
“I want this,” I say, pulling her hand back to my neck. This is what twenty-three is, I’m thinking to myself. It’s the year you get brave, girl.
“Want what?”
“Whatever’s all in those seven years.”
Then Kiwi’s grinning, all the while holding me by my belt, holding tight, pulling me into her. The DJ throws Sade on, singing “Lover’s Rock,” telling the whole club that we’re the ones that she clings to. I take a step closer to Kiwi, move slowly in her arms. Sade’s voice brings up a sadness in me, a loneliness so deep, I need to swallow hard to hold it down. Kiwi moves with me, stroking my back and humming. We stay this way long after the song ends.