She would do what she had to do; staying fly, alas, might not be an option. It implied the sustainment of a metaphysical state from which Gwen, a house on a rain-swollen hillside, had long since slid. But she gave it her best shot, determined to quit sneaking around, put an end to the hiding, all the craven marital and professional ninjutsu. To come on as straight and strong and brazen as Candygirl Clark, unreachable as that aspiration might remain to a woman in her thirty-seventh week who had spent the past three days with a suitcase for a wardrobe and a foam pad for a bed.
With three hours to go before the showdown at Chimes, Gwen drove through the tunnel to the Land of the White People. Her BMW faded incrementally into the local autosphere as the freeway stretched and flexed for its run toward the Sierra foothills. Shadows sharpened, and the afternoon took on a desert shimmer. Sprinklers chittered. Titleists traced white rainbows against the blue Contra Costa sky. Along the forearms of hard-shopping women in tennis skirts, sunshine lit the golden down.
At A Pea in the Pod, Gwen consigned her cubiformity to a simple A-line dress of stretchy gray jersey with a matching gray blazer. The jacket came with shoulder pads that lent her an uncomfortable resemblance to the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. Because it rode up so high on her belly, the dress appeared to hang down at the back a good three or four inches in a kind of impromptu train. She would spend the rest of the day tugging her dress down at the front like a half-bold teenage girl in a micromini.
Up at the cash register, she asked for a pair of scissors to cut out the shoulder pads, which, given the shock on the face of the downy golden salesgirl as Gwen vandalized a dress on which she had dropped $175, felt like kind of a kick-ass thing to do. Then it was on to the Easy Spirit store, where, employing a pair of vanadium tongs and a portable blast shield, she consigned her depleted espadrilles to a trained hazmat team and walked out in a stolid gray pair of modified Mary Janes. They had the charm of cement and the elegance of cinderblocks, but they held her feet without pain or structural failure, and it seemed to her that the librarian-nun vibe they exuded was also not incompatible with the kicking of ass.
Thus equipped, she returned through the Caldecott Transdimensional Portal to Oakland, to submit her hair to the subtle if not silent artistry of Tyneece Fuqua at Glama. To meet Gwen’s hair emergency, Tyneece had been obliged—she explained in irritable detail—to reschedule a telephone consultation with a psychic in Makawao, Hawaii, a woman who, during their prior phone session, had come close to locating the two bars of looted Reich gold that Tyneece’s great-grandfather had brought home from the war and buried, it was said, in one of three backyards belonging to three different Oakland women who were the mothers of his nineteen children. While she lectured Gwen on the intricacies of Nazi gold registration numbers and of her abundant and goldless cousinage, Tyneece serviced Gwen’s worn-out locks, picking out slackers, stragglers, and lost souls, then twisting them tight, as if winding the very mainsprings of Gwen’s resolve. She massaged Gwen’s scalp, neck, and shoulders and put the new girl on Gwen’s sore feet. Finally, having done what she could, she called in Mr. Robert, whom she had sent for as soon as she learned what Gwen was up against today.
Mr. Robert came in wheeling a scuffed pink plastic art box on an airline-stewardess luggage trolley. He was a dapper little gentleman in green plaid pants, a short-sleeve lime turtleneck, and zip-up white ankle boots, with Sammy Davis hair. Nowadays he mostly worked weddings, proms, and the odd quinceanera, but at one time he had been the go-to Hollywood black makeup man, relied upon by an entire vanished generation of television actresses, from Diahann Carroll to Roxie Roker, to combat the visual and technical biases of white cameramen and lighting directors. After a few seconds of intense scrutiny, Mr. Robert shrugged and looked confused.
“I heard this was supposed to be an emergency,” he said. “But honey, you’re so hot, I’m afraid you going to set fire to my cotton balls.”
“Now, don’t lie to me, Mr. Robert.”
“I’m serious! You’re radiant! I need a Geiger counter! I need to get me one of those lead suits like Homer Simpson wears.”
Mr. Robert was a scabrous if outdated gossip with a brusque, pointillist touch and a habit of asking questions without waiting for answers. When he had finished, he took hold of her chin in his slim, dry fingers and turned her head this way, that. One eyebrow lifted in a skeptical arch. Then he let Gwen get a gander at herself in the mirrored wall of the salon.
“I almost look beautiful,” she told his reflection.
“Almost?” his reflection said, looking hurt. “Honey, fuck that, Mr. Robert doesn’t leave no one looking
“No, you’re right, thank you, Mr. Robert,” she said quickly, as he began with an angry clatter to return his brushes and bottles to the pink tackle box. “I look
He didn’t say anything, but she caught the shrug of the left wing of his mustache, a half-satisfied half-smile. He packed up his gear, slow and deliberate, from time to time rubbing the ache of age out of his fine brown long- fingered hands. Tyneece had already collected Gwen’s money for this emergency session, but when Mr. Robert looked up from his kit, Gwen was holding out a twenty-dollar tip. Mr. Robert shook his head and pushed away her proffering hand.
“Hit me next time,” he said.
“No, Mr. Robert—”
“I was born in my momma’s kitchen,” he said. “In Rosedale, Mississippi. Was a midwife like you brought me into this wonderful world.”
“Yeah, well,” Gwen said, touched, embarrassed, regretting, in spite of the progress it seemed to imply, the loss of the world of black midwives catching black children, grappling the future into the light one slick pair of little shoulders at a time. “After today I might not
As appeared to be his habit—maybe Mr. Robert was a bit deaf—he ignored her. “Before she called my daddy in to see me for the first time,” he continued, “this lady, the midwife, she took a lipstick out her purse? And made up my momma’s mouth. She combed my momma’s hair. Fixed her up, you know? Got her ready. That was how my momma always told it, anyway. Sometimes I wonder, you know, hmm, was that, did that give
He hoisted his tackle box onto the wheeled trolley and bound it carelessly with loops of green bungee cord. “Do you think something like that,” he said, “something that happened in the room when you were born, you could notice it, and it would stay with you the rest of your life?”
“I wouldn’t put anything past a baby,” Gwen said.
At 2:55, her Chimes General parking ticket tucked carefully into a zip pocket inside her handbag, Gwen trundled through the high, wide sliding doors she had come through so many times before, having so much more at stake, those other late nights, long afternoons, and early mornings, than her own small, personal fate. The feeders and freshets of East Bay humanity flowed through the filter of the hospital lobby, all the wild variety of life in the local pond. A gang banger rolling toward the elevator with a bouquet of lilies and Gerber daisies stuffed under his arm, a sunburned old buzzard with a physicist shock of white hair and camp shorts, a one-legged, three-fingered bearded biker dude she figured for a lax diabetic being eaten by neuropathy, two new moms—one Asian, one veiled and tented in the laws of Islam—waiting in festive wheelchairs with their babies for their husbands to bring the cars around. Scrubs, coveralls, nightgowns, baller jerseys, and patterned hippie-chick skirts, a pair of Buddhist monks flying the saffron, probably Thais from over at the Russell Street Temple. At the sight of them, Gwen was rapt by a need for the little coconut-and-chive pancakes they served there Sunday mornings, but it was a Thursday, and anyway, Candygirl Clark never would have permitted a craving, even for Thai temple pancakes, to divert her from a mission.
“Wow,” Aviva said, taking in the fruit of Gwen’s resolve. Shoes, dress, jacket, the exuberant coils of her restored coiffure. “Don’t you clean up nice.”
Gwen gave a tug on the front hem of the dress.
Aviva was at her gravest, slim and efficacious in a taupe suit with a skirt that fell to just above her knees. Her hair, regularly—you might even have said
