One may as well begin with Kiki in the delicatessen.
‘What I need,’ explained Kiki, hauling her mountainous two hundred and fifty pound African-American ass towards the counter, ‘is a homey, warm, chunk-filled, pastry-lovin’, finger-lickin’, hot-doggety, down home kind of pie.’ She recalled being invincible and truth-loving and twenty years old, and thinking that if she could only be honest about the kind of pie she wanted, then she could emerge moist-eyed in the light that would drench her and those around her in its languorous aura.
‘Hey there,’ said the brother behind the plastic sneeze-guard. ‘Heeey there. Ain’t I seen you some place before?’
‘. . . A kind of back-porch kind of pie, do you know what I mean? Nothing sour . . . or sassy.’
‘Sure I have. You been in one of them Zadie Smiths novel, sister.’
‘I don’t . . .’
‘Yes you have. Can tell. First there’s the way you speak quite ordinary sentences but sorta emphasising quite arbitrary words, kind of like you was compensating for their dullness.’
‘It ain’t . . .’
‘Sure it is. Pretty soon you’ll start talking in CAPITAL LETTERS, like it was some PRETTY IMPORTANT THING you was wanting to say. Only it AIN’T. Then, ’fore I know where I am, there’ll be some huge, multi-cultural family jes’ sashaying in from nowhere with names like Jerome ’n’ Levi ’n’ Zora . . .’
‘Hold on there . . .’
‘And the whole structure just insisting on its complex derivation from existing literary sources. In this case, sister, Mr E. M. fuckin’ Forster. I mean, what is it about that girl? And her on the Man Booker shortlist an’ all.’
Suddenly, to her abstracted relief, Kiki found that Jerome, Levi and Zora were collected in a familial huddle at her side. She clutched them to her, affixiating them in the quaint caverns of her armpits.
‘Yeah and I’ll tell you some stuff about them. Like, one of them’ll really be into black street culture . . .’
(‘. . . Yo my man,’ Kiki now heard Levi greet her, as they swapped a bunch of high fives. ‘Bin hangin’ with my homies in the hood is all.’)
‘. . . And check out the chick with the college education, dropping some big fancy names . . .’
(‘. . . And I’m, like, saying to the poetry class,’ Zora presently informed her mother, ‘surely Foucault has negated all this’)
‘You hear what I’m saying, sister? Now, I knows it ain’t easy for a girl to get herself in the newspapers every time she write a book. She gotta get herself looking real nice and have some fahn photograph that the editor of the Daily Telegraph’s gonna love. Like she was in Destiny’s Child or something. But, believe me you got a difficulty . . .’
But Kiki had seen the pie, golden and in the centre a red and yellow compote of sticky baked fruit. She thought of her husband, weaselly white-guy Howard, and whether she had quite done loving him. Still she managed to raise her face again towards the sneeze-guard.
‘What kinda difficulty?’
‘Sister . . . It ain’t my place to say so, but you’re generic.’
‘What so bad about that?’
The brother wrinkled his nose. ‘Well, curiously enough, in this particular case, nuthin’. I mean, honey, you read the chick in the Times Literary Supplement? Where it say that “On Beauty’s most interesting ethical endeavour is the way it fits itself so perfectly – happily inhabiting its own apparent slightness”?’
‘What that mean?’
‘Seems to me it means “We have a problem here only I’m too polite to say so.” But relax, honey, it ain’t your fault you’re campus-lite. Only it ain’t gonna last for ever. Someone gonna see through the trick that girl playing, and then what, huh?’
Kiki exhaled vertiginously. ‘At least I’ll have the pie,’ she said.