MARY (TAKE ONE)

He’s come in here looking for his daughter. But no one knows her by that name. His overalls splattered with dried cement, the lace on one of his work boots loose and dragging along the floor. He goes from table to table, asking each man about his daughter. He walks a hundred miles between each table, his knees sagging, his back hunched from the strain. If he comes over here to the counter, I’ll tell him that no one knows her by that name.

He’s making a mistake with the way he tries to describe her: tall and pretty, fair-skinned. His daughter is more than pretty. She’s one of those women you see and don’t believe. The kind that live just outside the limits of your imagination. And I’m hardly one of those fellas who go around thinking that light is right. My whole philosophy’s been, The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice; but this gal is from Wonderland.

When Sugar Man first saw her, he just about lost his mind. She swung in here on those high high heels, dropped her suitcase by the counter, wrapped those long, perfect legs around the end stool, and crossed those perfect arms in front of her. A cocoa-butter dream. Curves went into curves went into curves. It was a weekday and so I hoped she was willing to eat the one thing on the menu, cause if she’d wanted something else—and you give a woman like that whatever she wants—I would have had to break a house rule to serve her. And that woulda meant I’d have to do it over Nadine’s dead body. And since I love my wife, I was praying hard that my new customer wouldn’t make me kill her. It turned out she only wanted coffee. Two sugars. No cream.

—You rang? said Sugar Man, sliding his tiny little self onto the next stool. If that suitcase means you need a place to stay, baby, I’ve got one that’s just the ticket. We can run right over there. And don’t listen to my mama; I was putting her in the old-age home anyway. And if you don’t like that apartment, I’ll build you another. As a matter of fact, I’ll build you two so you can have a spare.

She rewarded him with a smile. Soft red lips to melt in your mouth. A deep dimple. She ran her fingers up the side of her face to push a curl back under her veil. One of those peekaboo veils that draped from the brim of her hat, leaving you just a hint of one brown eye. Bedroom eyes. Warm and sleepy.

Sugar Man was crushed when he found out she was looking for Eve’s. A woman like this could make him a small fortune. He tried to talk her out of it. The place was full of crazies. And she was much too good—excuse his language—for a cathouse. She said she’d heard it was only a boardinghouse. He said she’d heard lies. Then she asked me what I had heard. I said that the garden was awfully nice. And I was about to lean over the counter to elaborate when Nadine yelled out that my chops were in trouble. I hurried back to pull them out from the broiler, but Sugar Man kept on insisting that whatever Eve’s was, she wasn’t the type to live there. And she told him in that sweet sweet voice that he really knew nothing about her. That’s true, he admitted, but he was willing to take the many hours necessary to learn. They could start right now with a little spin around the block. Did she notice his Duesenberg parked in front? The fifteen-thousand-dollar Duesenberg? It’s hard to miss it, she said. Well, they could jump right in and run by his place to pick up his good car.

Sugar Man sure has a way with women but this one wasn’t buying. She slid off the stool and picked up her suitcase. It’s no secret I’m a rear-end man, and watching her walk toward the door told me why. It’s a sin for a woman’s body to do that to cloth. Not that I can remember exactly what she was wearing. As the door closed behind her, Sugar Man shook his head and had the courage to whisper what every man in here was thinking: Born to be fucked.

And so when he came in here looking for his daughter, begging any man to help him, close to tears—no one knew her by that name. He tells them he’s been up and down the streets of Kansas City. He tells them he’s run ads in the papers for months. He tells them that no matter what she’s done, he loves his baby and just wants her home. His daughter’s tall and pretty, fair-skinned. But his daughter is more than pretty. And his daughter lives at Eve’s now, where no man calls her by that name.

It was Daddy Jim who started calling me Peaches. Plump and sweet. Yellow and sweet. Daddy’s baby. Daddy’s beautiful baby.

—Pride before the fall, Mama warns.

His seventh child. The one daughter. The last is a father’s gold. Yellow gold in this baby gal, in my Peaches; he’d roll my cheeks between his fingers until they blushed.

—Color-struck: Mama shakes her head.

He dressed me in sky blue. Made a cotton sling to hang on his chest and took me everywhere. My brothers told me this. I don’t remember.

I remember large, dark hands, the knuckles ashy and cracked. Bits of granite and dust under the broken fingernails. A bricklayer’s hands. I remember the wall he started building around the house when I was nine years old. And I remember that it was already too late.

But in my teens the wall did keep the boys out. Most of them weren’t brave enough to ring the iron bell on the locked gate. And the few who were, their knees gave out waiting for him to take his dear sweet time getting up from the porch swing and reaching inside the screen door to prop his shotgun in full view before coming down the walk to ask them what they wanted. And of the few who made it through all that, fewer still could choke up the breath to whisper that they wanted to see Peaches.

—Who? he’d ask as if they were speaking Chinese.

—I want to see Peaches, sir.

He’d wait forever, Daddy Jim, letting them fidget and sweat, pull at their starched neck collars, jam their shaking hands into the pockets of their knickers and out again, into the pockets and out again. And after he had them right at the breaking point, he fired off the last question sharp and loud:

—Why?

They’d turn tail and run like crazy. Cause he was really saying, I already know why you want to see my daughter, and you know I know why, so let’s see if you got the guts to tell me? And I’d watch the cowards from my bedroom window, laughing. Daddy Jim was something else.

—One dog knows another, Mama says.

But he shouldn’t have worried about the boys. He should have worried about the mirrors.

I had a bedroom full of them: one attached to the large oak dresser; two in the doors of the wardrobe; a cheval that Daddy Jim imported from Belgium; a heavy silver hand mirror that was part of a matching dressing set, the silver brush and comb all with the same engravings of morning glories and vines; the mirror inside my notions box, where the tiny ballerina danced when you opened the velvet lid; the mirrors packed away in drawers from Christmas, Valentine’s, all my birthdays—rose tinted one year, petal shaped the next. Everywhere I turned, I could see her. But what was she doing in my room? She was a whore and I was Daddy’s baby.

Every mirror outside had told me what she was: the brown mirrors, hazel mirrors, blue mirrors, oval, round, and lashed mirrors of all their eyes when they looked at me. Old eyes, young eyes, it didn’t make any difference if the mirrors belonged to men: I saw her standing there unclothed with the whispered talk among my brothers, their smudged laughter about the sofa down the block on which they were always welcome. But there was a difference when it came to the women: the young and unmarried reflected her with an envy so intense it bordered on hate; those older and married, with a helpless fear. Yes, they all looked at me and knew, just knew, what she was. You have to believe what you see in the mirror, don’t you? Isn’t that what mirrors are for?

Before I was nine years old, my father’s friends would sit her on their knees, touch the soft curls on her head, raise her dimpled arms. The gal has promise, Jim. And he would nod, proud. So proud. And upstairs in my mirrors I would try to see what she had promised that would cause the heat to seep up through the rough denim of their pant legs and melt the corners of their mouths.

—What have you promised them? I whispered to her.

—You. You. You.

I smashed the swan-shaped mirror, my tenth-birthday present, after the choirmaster put his hand under my blouse. I smashed it with the metal edge of my roller skate because I could see her small brown nipples tightening as I remembered how it felt to be pressed into the dark corner of the high altar, to have his soft hands squeezing and stroking, his breath warm against the top of my head.

—What have you promised them?

—You. You. You.

I didn’t have the words to explain about my fear of her, so Daddy Jim spanked me for breaking that mirror. He had sent all the way to San Francisco for it. I never broke another.

In horror I watched her grow up, and I learned to hate her for breaking my father’s heart. Nothing satisfied her, nothing. And I tried everything to make her go away. I brought in straight A’s at the academy. I worked part-time at the druggist’s. I joined the Girl Guides. I joined the Missionary Circle. I rolled bandages for the resistance in Spain. I sang for the glee club. Sang for the war relief—sang in the church choir. But she was always there, reflected in the wetness of men’s eyes. Tormenting me. I wore high-necked shirtwaists and loose skirts, thick woolen tights, even in the summertime, that scratched and left welts on my legs. But I could feel their eyes stripping my clothes away: they knew her promise was there. You. You. No, not me—I wasn’t like that. No, never me. So I gave them her. Sweet, sweet relief. Their eyes would cloud over, the pupils tiny pinpoints that finally reflected nothing—not her and least of all me—as they groaned and sucked and plunged and sweated. Free, at last, I was free as I gave them her. In the cloak closets after school, behind the prayer altar, under the druggist’s soda fountain, against the coal furnace in the Girls’ Club, in the backs of milk wagons, in deserted streetcars, shadowed doorways. Any teacher. Any janitor. Any deacon. Any porter. Any storekeeper. Any race, any age, any size—any son of any man—had the power to drive away that demon from the mirror. Over and over, they became my saviors from her.

Why, baby, why? And I tried to tell Daddy Jim why I followed them everywhere in Kansas City. Did whatever they wanted. He’d find out about some man and go raging out, wanting to fight. But it was not that man; I didn’t care two cents about—and hardly ever knew the name of—that man. Any son of any man was my savior. Don’t lock me in my room, not there, I pleaded; I’ll have to find a way to get out again. I tried to stop him from wasting his money on doctors. I tried to stop him from hurting himself by beating me with razor straps, leather shoes, his fists. I tried to stop him from crying. I didn’t want to leave home, but I had little choice. I couldn’t stand to see my father that way.

—God’s judgment on him, Mama says.

Although it was hard for me to keep a job for very long, I never thought about going back home. There weren’t many shops willing to hire colored girls, even those from the academy, even those with fair skin. Of the few that did, I had my pick among them and I worked hard. But word spread quickly among the shopkeepers’ wives and I was out. If they’d only known, their marriages were safer with me there, doing what I did, than with most of the other girls. Those other shop girls were always scheming to find husbands—their own or someone else’s—to take them off their feet. And a man in my life was the last thing I needed. From the shops to the factories to picking up bits of day work cleaning house, the story was the same. I was always scraping to pay my room rent. Going with only oatmeal, peanut butter, and soda crackers for weeks at a time. The same woolen wrapper, season after season. And, I guess, I just got fed up with trying to live decently. So the lies began and they were the first step down.

It was a part of town that Daddy Jim would have whipped me blue for even talking about. Twelfth and Highland. Eighteenth and Vine. A part of town that swung. Fast music. Fast women. Those clubs really weren’t as bad as I’d grown up hearing: no liquor and opium flowing out into the streets. As a matter of fact, they looked sort of shabby and sad, especially in the daytime. But I could find work when they came alive at night: each manager said he couldn’t hide someone like me back in the kitchen. Did I know how to mix drinks? No. Did I know how to dance? No. Did I know how to sing? Yes, I could sing, but not the music they were playing. He’d take another look at me and say he could teach me. So my first lie to each of them was that I wanted to learn.

Some of these men took care of me longer than others. It depended upon how long it took each of them to discover my second lie: that he was the only one that mattered. None of them mattered. The fights would be awful, but the fights were the price I paid to keep a decent flat and warm clothes in the winter. The price for the low life I was living. Sick: I got called that a lot when they found out. A sick bitch. But I already knew that. I had to be sick, because over time, very slowly over time, I was forced to admit that I actually enjoyed being held and touched by some of the men I lived with. I was even starting to look forward to their coming to bed. There are no words to describe how ugly that realization was. I knew she was a whore. Had always been a whore. Was probably born a whore. For as long as I could remember, I could see her in their eyes. But now as I looked in the mirror—thinking of how my own body had betrayed me with him—I could see her in mine.

Before, I had only hated her. Now I wanted to hate myself. And I started thinking that I should always have hated myself, I was probably always enjoying those back rooms and back stairs. I was probably always tempting the choirmaster. I was probably always making men in the streets look at me that way, my father’s friends look at me that way. I was probably always asking for it, asking for it. I was probably always dirt. Yes, I was sick. Sicker than the angry man in front of me knew. Last night I warmed inside when he caressed my neck and touched me.

But it took a long time to hate myself as deeply as I wanted to hate. It took a long time and a lot of work. Many more lies and another step down. I moved from the men who only took care of me to the men whom I stayed with long enough until they made the mistake of caring about me. I didn’t feel bad having to pretend that way. After all, they were lying too, weren’t they? There was nothing good to see in me. They were lying about my poetry books, about my singing hymns in the tub, about my laugh and the dimples in my cheeks, about the way I tossed my head. And sure, we had a good time in bed together, I loved us being in bed together, but then I was a whore. And it was their own fault when they got hurt.

I would have stopped myself for one or two of them, if only I’d known how. The one or two who I almost believed really cared, with whom I would think that if, indeed, I had been born into a world without mirrors, there might have been a chance for a real home. But it was so mixed up by then. Sometimes I was out there because I was getting too comfortable and it was time to get back at them for lying and move on, sometimes to punish myself for being the piece of filth I was, and sometimes, sometimes … When it was dark and secluded enough at our chance meeting; and there was little talk, no questions, so no lies; and he understood not to offer me money; and he understood it must be right there, it must be quick, it must be now—sometimes, those times, were the purest joy I had ever known.

Besides the one or two, I certainly would have stopped for the cripple if I could have. The man worshiped me. I should have guessed that feelings like his were dangerous, and perhaps I did, hoping that he would kill me and save me the trouble. He carried a pearl-handled straight razor; he needed it, being a gambler and as small as he was. His build was delicate like Sugar Man’s, but the large sums of money he spent on his clothes didn’t make him look cheap. That straight razor was the first thing I noticed about him when he came into Piney Brown’s. No, that’s not quite true, the first thing I noticed was his clubfoot—it’s what everyone noticed—but the first thing he showed me was the pearl-handled razor. His way of saying hello. He stroked it like a baby as he asked me if there was room at my table. Any regular at Piney Brown’s knew there was always room at my table. And they also knew that I didn’t drink or smoke. So his second and third questions told me right away he was a stranger in town. But it was the fourth question that put him into my life: Before we even get started, tell me your real name.

I was to hear it whispered as he dressed me for bed each night. Mary. Always a fresh nightgown. Always white. He started with my bobby pins, removing each one so gently I didn’t lose a strand of hair. His small fingers were the comb, his cupped palm the brush, as the loosened curls fell to my shoulders. With each button of my blouse: Mary. He’d raise my right arm and slip it out of that sleeve, bring the blouse around my back, then raise the left arm and slip it out of that one. My skirt was slid down into a pool of bright cotton at my ankles. The hem of the nylon slip was guided up and peeled off over my head. The metal hooks in my brassiere, one by one: Mary. The elastic band of my panties sliding down my waist and over my hips. He’d sit me on the bed before unfastening the garters. My nylons were next. The extended right leg, then the left leg, supported between his armpits as he knelt before me, the nylons forming perfectly even rolls of brown mesh that came to rest at the tops of my shoes. He’d cradle those two feet in his hands, staring at the curves of the rolled nylons, fingering the leather straps of my high heels. I could feel his warm breath on the tops of my feet, the deep trembling. He waited an eternity before finally baring them. His fingers would slip under the rolled nylons, he’d grasp the curve of my instep and slowly stroke the nylons and shoes over the arch, slowly over the toes, his breath quickening, his hands moist as he circled and stroked the fine bones of my feet until stockings and shoes all spilled into his lap.

And he never called me anything but Mary. Never. Not even when Kansas City had to become Saint Louis, and Saint Louis had to become Chicago, and Chicago had to become South Bend, and South Bend—Cincinnati. He made the same mistake Daddy Jim had. One thought a wall would be the answer; another thought distance. Still he never called me anything but Mary. Never. But after he found out about the redcaps on the trains, he knew there was no point in traveling past Cincinnati. Yes, I guess, I should have expected what was coming. The apartment he put me in was too fine: a marble lobby with doormen and carpeted halls. The hours he worked were too long: all-night games into late-afternoon games until his hands shook so much he couldn’t hold the cards. The clothes he made me shop for were too expensive; the furniture was too large for the rooms. Everything imported or not at all. Months and months, it went on like that. His working himself to exhaustion, his buying and buying and buying. He didn’t question my absences. He didn’t curse. He didn’t plead. He just took out his straight razor one morning at breakfast, pressed it against my throat, and told me very quietly that the next man I was with, I would have to watch die. He would have done it, too, made me watch that man die. And the next. And the next.

For a solid week I never left the apartment. I didn’t even trust myself to take packages from the doormen. I sat on the thick brocade divans. I clenched and unclenched my hands. I listened to the radio. I watched my new television. I paced the blue-and-gold Persian rugs. I read the leather-bound books in the mahogany cases. I sorted and re-sorted the silks, cashmeres, and angoras in my closets. Now realizing all of it had been put there to warn me that there was no place on earth to run. If I’d known a way to stop, I would have. Didn’t he understand that? I opened and closed linen closets. Kitchen cabinets. The dumbwaiter.

His closet was as large as mine. All tailored suits and matching vests. Pinstripes. Worsteds. The cambric cotton shirts. The velvet boxes with jeweled cuff links and tiepins. But my eyes rested on the rows and rows of custom-made boots for his shriveled and twisted foot. Thousands of dollars’ worth of boots: the calfskins almost uncountable, alligators, eel-skins, suedes: kept in immaculate condition. I had known him to throw out a new pair of Moroccan leathers because he couldn’t remove a water spot on one of the toes. I looked at his boots and I looked at my feet. It was all I did for another solid week in that apartment. As soon as he’d leave, I’d open his closet to look at those boots and look at my feet. But at the end of that second week, when I took the beer opener from the pantry drawer and went to the bathroom mirror, it was to stare at my face.

The police thought he had done it. But since I refused to change my story, there was nothing they could do and they had to release him from jail. No one believed that a woman would do that to herself. No one believed that his grief wasn’t guilt. But his grief over what he’d lost was very real. First, I took the tip of the beer opener, smiled into the mirror, and traced the path I was going to take: under the right cheekbone—yes, it must be the right—then a straight diagonal across the dimple, all the way over to the left side of the chin. A thin red line was left on my skin for me to follow, so I didn’t need to smile again as I grasped the opener in both hands and dug down. But I wasn’t prepared for the first bolt of blinding pain; it took precious seconds to catch my breath. And now the opener hanging in my ripped cheek was too slippery to hold firmly because of the gushing blood. I made a poor job of it. I had to resort to sawing my way down, leaving hunks of flesh wedged between the two prongs of the opener. That took so much time that when I’d only reached the bottom jawbone, the pain was so intense I passed out. I awoke to him wailing my name and the ambulance wailing out in the street. And after the sirens had died down, my name kept echoing over and over. It was the only word that man could bring himself to say in my presence again.

I walked out of the hospital free to do whatever I wanted. And since he had started me on the railroads going east, I kept going east. It gave me pleasure to sit on the right side of the train aisle and to watch through the window’s reflection as one of them moved hopefully toward the empty seat beside me. I’d show my good left dimple when he asked if the seat was free.

—Yes, I’d answer, and so am I.

He’d almost break his kneecaps hurrying into that seat. So where are you going? I really didn’t know where I was going. And hadn’t a clue about what to do once I got there. Everything was so cloudy. So confused. But I spoke the truth each time as best I knew it: Wherever women like me go—and I’d turn my full face to him and raise my veil. Sometimes it was embarrassment. Sometimes it was disgust. And many many times, pity. But each time there was the question.

I collected a lot of business cards on those trains. Men who promised to give me the name of the right doctor. One was even a plastic surgeon himself. And I’d expect nothing in return, child, he said, absolutely nothing. But how to tell this nice old man I didn’t want to fix my face? I’d probably have to end up doing it all over again.

When those railroad tracks ran out of land going east, I changed trains and went south, changed again and went west, then north. I was circling back toward the east again and realized I’d come to the end of the line. That’s when I heard of a place where women like me could go. Just get off at that next stop, I was told; you can find Bailey’s Cafe in any town. They turned out to be right. And Eve never asked the question. Gently she removed my veil, and she lifted my chin in her hands to trace her thumb down along the path I had taken in front of the mirror. I saw only the scar reflected in her rimless glasses as she felt each jagged curve, each section of twisted flesh. And it was only the scar that was reflected in her eyes when she murmured, Beautiful.

It’s Sugar Man who finally shows her father how to find his way down the street to Eve’s. He’s hoping to get a ruckus going just out of spite. Sugar Man can’t really describe what goes on in that brownstone since he’s never been inside, but that doesn’t stop him from making up stories. He fills her father’s head with the hundreds of men who go there to buy Peaches. She gets a lot of callers, but hardly hundreds. And the only thing they buy is daffodils. Of course, now, he leaves out that he’s tried from the first to put her on the streets. And even kept trying after he found out about the scar. There’s still a lot of mileage left below her neck, he says.

He presses his case every time Peaches comes in here, but that isn’t too often. She seems to like staying close to the house. And with all the callers she does get, Sugar Man’s never been one of them. He wouldn’t give Eve the time of day, no less the fifty dollars she asks for the daffodils.

—And you ain’t a pimp? he spat out.

—The girl chose the flowers, Eve said. And you try growing daffodils in the fall.

Eve won’t let Sugar Man and the father past the front door. Visible over her shoulder are the eager men waiting to visit Peaches. They sit knee to knee in the parlor. That side of the room blooms with bouquets of the yellow flowers. The word didn’t take long to spread. The hot one who moved into the second-floor room takes on all callers. But there are fewer men now than the week before, who were fewer than the week before that.

—Leave your daughter here, Eve says, and I’ll return her to you whole.

The autumn wind is chill outside and the fragile heads of the daffodils wilt easily in the heat of the parlor. And if they go upstairs with a bouquet that’s less than perfect, Eve’s taught her to send them back down again. Look in that mirror good, and accept no less than what you deserve. The longer the line, the longer the wait; the later the season, the warmer the house. And it’s the same fifty dollars for a fresh bouquet.

—I don’t know what she’s doing up in that room, Eve says, and to tell you the truth, I don’t care.

She spends much more time with each gentleman caller than she spent the week before. And at the time curfew is called, there are still some waiting. But the next evening, if they want to come back, it’s the same fifty dollars for a fresh bouquet. Fewer and fewer men, longer and longer waits.

—But whatever she’s doing up in that room, she’s doing it feeling beautiful.

Winter’s coming soon and Peaches will still demand daffodils. More perfect and more perfect daffodils. They will be gotten at no florist for any price. And it will take a special man to give Eve what she’ll ask for hers. A man special enough to understand what the woman upstairs is truly worth. The house will be even warmer, but soon he’ll only have to buy a bouquet once. There’ll be no one else waiting.

—Go home, my friend, Eve says, and I’ll return your daughter to you whole.

The man standing in front of Eve is crying, and he keeps calling for Peaches to come down to him. There is no answer from the lighted room on the second floor. He calls louder and there is still no answer. Eve closes the door in his face. He hears the bolt slide shut as the autumn winds blow cold.

—Go home, my friend. I’ll return your daughter to you whole.