“Where you from, sweetheart?”
“Shit, I know you got a tongue. I ain’t never met a bitch that didn’t have a tongue.” And then when I was standing at the corner that time that man drove his car real close to the curb and opened the door. I just stood there looking at him, and then he slammed the door and went around the curb real quick. “Shit, you the coldest-ass bitch I ever seen in my life.”
“If you don’t wont a man to talk to you you ought to . . .”
“Are you lonely?”
“Naw.”
“You wont a ride?”
“Naw.”
“You think I’m gon bother you. I ain’t gon bother you. I was just askin if you wont a ride. Shit.”
That was when the buses were on strike.
“Shit, you the coldest-ass bitch I ever seen in my life.”
“Are you lonely?”
“Naw.”
“Why you so cold?”
“You a evil ole bitch. Your name ain’t Eva it’s Evil. I wasn’t doing nothing but trying to . . .”
Before Elvira went to flush the article down the toilet, she wanted to show me the picture they had of me. She folded it so that I could see the top of my wild head. Then she stuffed it in her bloomers and called them to let her be excused. He wouldn’t let me comb my hair. I don’t know why, but he kept me in that room and wouldn’t let me comb my hair. Took my comb and kept it in his pocket.
“What the shit you wont to comb your hair for. Ain’t nobody see you but me.”
“I don’t wont you to see me like this all the time.”
“Shit.”
I looked at him. I remember just looking at him. I said nothing.
I tell the psychiatrist what I remember. He tells me I do not know how to separate the imagined memories from the real ones.
“You know what I told you,” Elvira says from her cot now. I keep staring at the ceiling.
“The first man after you get out. The first man who does you wrong.”
“Maybe I won’t let no other man get close enough to do me wrong.”
She laughed hard. I looked over at her ankles.
My mother and Miss Billie came in the apartment. That’s when we was living in new York. Miss Billie worked with my mother at a restaurant. She and my mama worked in the morning, and got home around one. She would go get me from the woman who kept me. I was five and wasn’t in school yet. Miss Billie would come over and visit for a while and then go on home. She was almost twice my mama’s age. She didn’t live in the same building we did, but one down the street. Every time she came and Mr. Logan was sitting out in the hall she would start talking about him, saying the same things she’d said before. Mama was listening like she’d heard it before. Mr. Logan was the old man who lived in the apartment next to ours. He didn’t have a wife or anything and liked to sit out in the hall.
“I never could stand that man,” she said when she got in the house. “He ain’t nothing but a shit. He ain’t nothing but a ole shit.”
I know Mr. Logan could hear, the way the building was made. Mama took her back in the living room. The way the apartment was you came into a little anteroom Mama had fixed up like a sitting room. To the right was the kitchen, and to the left was the bedroom, and then the living room. So we’d always say “back in the living room”. I slept in the living room on a couch that let out for a bed.
Miss Billie was talking all the way back to the living room. She wore a scarf sometimes that made her look like a gypsy. She had on the scarf now.
“Yeah,” she was saying. “He used to be a carpenter. Every day I used to go over there to that building he worked on and watch him. And me no more than five or six then. No older than this little girl here. I don’t even know if he remember me now, cause every time I pass him in the hall he nod but he don’t look like he know me. Ain’t nothing but a shit. You know, I used to watch him work on this building, and he would show me these things he used, things for measuring, you know. He had this stick with this little bubble in it, he showed me, said it was so you could tell if things was level. Well, you know, he showed this to me, and gave it to me in my hand, so I could move it around and see how the bubble in it moved. Then he said, ‘I got another kind of stick you can see.’ He was the only one working on this building, and we was standing where nobody couldn’t see us, and he got up real close to me and took his thing out. I swear it was right up in my face. He told me I could touch that one too. I backed away from him, but you know, still stayed there looking, like I was hypnotized or something. He had it in his own hand, and he was rubbing on it. He kept rubbing on it till all this white stuff—I didn’t know what it was then—came out. That was when I cut out and run. I still had his stick too. He ain’t never got it back . . . He retired, though, now ain’t he?”
Mama nodded. Miss Billie had told that so often and I’d heard bits and pieces of it till Mama got so she didn’t even tell me to go in the other room, cause I could’ve heard it from the other room. They were sitting in the living room and
