Sugar (10 page)

She arrived and called Al Schwartz as soon as she stepped off the Greyhound.

“Mr. Schwartz, Ms. Mary Bedford said I should call you to—”

“Who?” The whining, annoyed voice crackled back at her.

“Mary Bedford—”

“Mary Bedford,” he repeated, “Mary Bedford? Listen sweetie, I don’t know a Mary Be—”

“Mary Bedford of St. Louis,” she said, cutting him off.

There was silence for a while.

“Yes,” he said. The Hollywood had left his voice.

“Well, she said I should call on you while I’m here—”

“Oh really. Did she now?”

She felt it, the sleaze. She could detect sleaze a mile away.

“Yes, Mr. Schwartz. She said I should call on you and that you might be able to help me. You see, I’m a singer.”

Silence.

“Okay, sweetie, if you’re a friend of Mary’s and she specifically asked you to look me up, well, then fine. Where are you now?”

“I’m at the bus station.”

“Hop a cab and come on by.”

Detroit was even bigger and busier than St. Louis.

“Say, listen,” Sugar said to the cab driver as she ran her fingers over the business card. “What type of name is Schwartz?”

“Jewish,” he said.

She had never met a real live Jew before. Well, not that she was aware of.

She walked into a building that had marble floors and marble walls. She walked into the elevator, a bent-over old black man mumbled a hello and then asked her which floor. “Fifteen,” she replied and moved to the back. The elevator crept through each floor. Sugar smoothed down her tight red dress and fluffed at her short strawberry blond wig. The old man looked over his shoulder at her once.

A large desk sat no more than five feet from the elevator doors. Behind it was a woman whiter than the whitest white person Sugar had ever laid eyes on. Her skin was the color of talcum powder and you could see tiny river veins threading through her face, neck and hands. Her red hair was swept up into a beehive; her lips were so thin they disappeared when she frowned. She looked at Sugar with her baby blue cat’s-eye-shaped glasses and asked her to have a seat.

Sugar sat for nearly an hour and a half. The woman behind the desk kept looking at her like she was a piece of rotting meat. Sugar knew that look. That look slowly stole away the special feeling she’d had with her all the way from St. Louis.

Wasn’t that something, one look from a pale white girl with bad hair and glasses sent her reeling back to Short Junction and no good-time thoughts.

The box on the desk buzzed and some words came out.

“ ’Scuse me,” she said, snapping her fingers in Sugar’s direction, “Mr. Schwartz will see you now.”

She pointed toward a door at the end of the hall.

Al Schwartz was small, balding and white. He smiled and Sugar saw that his teeth were too big for his mouth.

“Well, hello, Miss. Uh . . . what was it again?”

“Sugar,” she said as she shook his hand. It was clammy.

“Please sit.”

Sugar looked around the large office. Fancy. White thick carpet, gold records hung on the wall. Pictures of Mr. Schwartz and a variety of singers Sugar knew and didn’t know.

He sat behind his big shiny black desk, grinning at her with big teeth and rubbing his hands together like she was going to be his next meal.

“So, Sugar, how is ole Mary?”

“Oh, she fine,” she said, trying to keep the pleasantness in her voice, trying to keep a smile on her face.

“That’s good. I haven’t seen her for quite some time, at least fifteen years or more,” he said, kind of absently. “So, you sing, do you?”

“Yes.”

“Where have you performed?” he asked, getting up and coming over to sit on the desk right in front of her. His legs were open a bit. Just a bit.

Sugar leaned back in her chair. She smelled his sweat, and it didn’t smell good.

“Well . . . just church,” she lied.

“Church? Really,” he said, closing his legs. “You’re a church woman, are you?”

“No,” Sugar says and his legs open up again. Wider this time.

“Hmmm, interesting,” he said. “So, how do you know
our
Mary?”

“Our Mary”? Mary always said she didn’t belong to anyone. Maybe he hadn’t heard that.

“I worked for her for a while,” Sugar says. No need for her to lie about that. She hadn’t realized that some lives were based on the lies people told to get by.

“Really . . . interesting,” he said again. Sugar supposed he liked that word a lot.

“And Mary said you should call me?” He seemed a bit surprised.

Sugar’s smile was beginning to waver and she thought,
We’ve been down this road before. How many times does he want me to answer that question?

She did not answer him, not verbally, she just nodded her head because she felt that if she opened her mouth she might say something that might not be too nice. Mary begged her to be nice. This is Mary’s friend and Sugar wanted to be nice, but she knew he wanted her to be nicer than she had intended on.

“Nice dress,” he said and those teeth were showing again. He was closer now, so they were even bigger. She made a bet with herself that he was a biter. She didn’t want to fuck him, she knew he’d leave marks.

“Thank you,” she said. Quiet again.

“Yes, um, red suits you well,” he said and his eyes traveled over her. She could feel them; sleazy, slimy little things that felt like fingers, moving down and over her breasts, across her stomach around her behind and then down between her legs.

They sat there in silence for a while. Him smiling. Her, not smiling.

His legs were wider and his hands were playing around the zipper of his pants. She didn’t even look down at what was going on there. She just kept looking at those big teeth.

“Sugar . . . I want you to do one thing for me. Just one, before I hear your sweet voice.” His voice was thick. She’s familiar with that sound. She grew up hearing that sound.

“Just . . . just . . .”

He couldn’t even finish. But still, she wouldn’t look down. She heard the zipper of his pants come undone. She smelled his dick before she saw it.

“Just suck it?” Sugar innocently asked, still looking at his teeth. He couldn’t talk, he just nodded yes, yes, yes.

“No, I don’t do that anymore,” Sugar said. “I’m a singer now.”

His eyes flew open; and his voice became clear.

“You don’t do that anymore? You don’t? Oh. I’m sorry . . . the rules are you suck, you fuck and anything else I want you to do, then you sing. Those are the rules.”

Sugar looked at the pictures on the walls. Then down to his dick then back to the teeth.

“Did you tell Frank Sinatra that too?” Sugar said and got up to leave.

“You ain’t no fucking Frank Sinatra . . . you ain’t even no Bessie Smith! What you are is a colored whore!”

Sugar was out the door walking past the pale woman behind the desk and hoping she didn’t see the tears in her eyes. But that man, Mr. Schwartz, he couldn’t let her go just like that. He ran out of his big office, zipping up his pants, and he screamed:

“You ain’t gonna get nowhere without me, now bring your black ass back in here and do what I tell you to do! Do what Mary sent you here to do! You don’t really think I would just hear you sing just because you’re—” He was stumped for a while, like he was trying to find a word that would insult her more than asking her to put his penis in her mouth.

“—you!” he finally screamed.

She wanted to turn around, to go back and slap him around for a while. He was so small it would have been easy to do. But she kept on walking and telling herself that he was a friend of Mary’s and she had promised to be nice.

“I gotta tell Mary, he’s a friend she don’t need,” she said aloud as she slammed out of the building and into the bright sunlight.

There she was, back to her beginning, but now it was worse. Now she was all alone. She traveled from city to city always trying to get someone to hear her sing, but all they wanted to do was fuck. So she gave up and gave in.

Chapter Eight

T
HE
hammer that resided in her head was banging hard today, causing Sugar to squint her eyes in pain and massage her temples. The headaches had been with her since she was a teenager. The hammer . . . the bang, bang, bang just seemed to be the perpetual echo of a million headboards slamming hard against bedroom walls.

She rose from her bed and stiffly walked to the bathroom. Fragments of a dream fading in and out, trying to slip between the pain and the pounding. She couldn’t bother with that now, she felt soiled, her body and hair were heavy with the left-behind smell of a john.

She sat on the toilet and let the urine fall from inside of her. She picked at the long dried rivers of cum that clung to her thighs; it flaked easily and fell weightless to the floor.

No different than the night, week, month or year before. Always the same, so why now did the sameness of her life bother her, cause her frustration and purple anger?

She wanted to slap at these men, the ones who came to find pleasure between her legs, she wanted to slap and claw at their faces when they used her roughly and wrongly, treating her as if she were a lavatory. These men who didn’t stop to kiss the nape of her neck, or explore the lonely place beneath her breasts with their tongues.

She wiped herself and laughed at the comical indecency of it all, the business and the men that kept it prosperous. Who would know to look at them, Bigelow men; broad-backed, strongchinned men that wore pride on their shoulders, spoke loving words to their wives and kissed the small foreheads of their children nightly. Who would know they laid with Sugar Monday through Saturday and asked God for forgiveness on Sunday. Same hands that cupped the soft cheek of a wife or held lightly to the elbow of an elderly grandparent, had also crossed Sugar’s body and invaded her moist places. If only the Bigelow women knew, knew for sure. Right now all they heard were rumors that spelled something, but what that something was, they didn’t yet know.

Sugar brushed her teeth, scouring her tongue with her toothbrush until it was pink with irritation. She worked feverishly at trying to rid her mouth of the lingering taste from the night before that otherwise found its way into every forkful of food she consumed.

She sighed and moved to the lower parts of the house, into the kitchen that held one table, two chairs, bare cupboards and a refrigerator that hummed empty. She would have to go out today, take a walk into town and shop at the small market underneath the quiet, hating eyes of the Bigelow women.

Maybe Pearl would need to go too; it would make her task so much easier. She could allow herself to be distracted by the constant sound of Pearl’s voice.

Sugar moved to the living room and stretched out on the couch. She could hear the small laughter that sailed into her house from the Taylor home. Pearl. Sugar liked her, perhaps because Pearl did not question her outright. Although Sugar had caught the question in Pearl’s eyes, saw it poised in the lift of her brow and slight purse of her lips. Never voiced, not yet anyway. Sugar knew it would not always be that way, the same way you knew night would not last forever and summer would follow spring.

Saturday. Bid whist night. Pearl, Shirley, Minnie and Clair Bell sat around the kitchen table, doing more talking than playing. Bid whist was just the excuse to draw them together. Tall glasses filled with lemonade sat at the wrists of card-holding hands, water moved slowly down the outside of the glasses, forming tiny puddles around their bases. It was hot enough to have all of the windows open to welcome in any small breeze that chose to come, but what the other women were hoping for, praying and wishing for, was a glimpse of Sugar—preferably naked—to appear across the way.

Shirley and her sister Minnie had fought like children over a toy about who was going to sit in the chair facing the window, until Pearl threatened to lower the shade. Shirley gave up, conceding only because she had witnessed the maiden unveiling of Sugar’s privates.

“I tell you, Pearl, somethin’ ain’t right about that woman. And now you and her spending time together . . . that don’t look right at all,” Shirley said, looking over her glasses at Pearl. “I say ya better keep a close eye on your belongings . . . and that means Joe too!”

“Believe it, Pearl, Shirley talkin’ the truth, she may be crazy but she ain’t stupid!” Minnie Grayson added in a laughing voice.

Pearl moved her gaze from her cards and planted it dead center on Minnie’s thin face. Minnie was Shirley’s baby sister. Nearly fifteen years separated them. She was the quintessential change-of-life baby. Although they were full-blood relatives, the two women looked nothing alike. Minnie was cobalt black, short and extremely thin. Her face resembled a vulture’s, long, ragged and drawn—her life was written all over it.

The only similarities connecting the two were the large wide eyes and flair for minding other people’s business. They were infamous for bickering amongst themselves and insulting each other was a way of life for them.

“The Lord don’t like no slack mouth,” Pearl said and turned back to studying her hand of cards.

“Sure don’t . . . He must can’t stand you at all, Shirley!” Minnie said and slapped her thigh hard with laughter.

“Hush up, woman . . . I done told you once already,” Shirley said between clenched teeth. She was getting riled up and her head shook in anger and exasperation against her sister. “I ain’t gonna tell you again!” She shook her finger at Minnie and adjusted her blue wig.

“Aw, cool it, Shirley, you know I’m just messin’ with you.” Minnie waved her hand at Shirley. Pearl caught the glint of mischief in her eyes and the short tail of the smile that moved swiftly across her lips.

“Alls I know is I heard Gibson down at Motley’s talkin’ ’bout her.” Clair Bell spoke in her scratched voice. As a young woman, the thick coarseness of her voice had been seductive, but now, pushing seventy, it came out as if from vocal cords made of steel wool; hard, brash and unappealing.

Clair Bell, the great-granddaughter of the town’s first reverend, was hardly outspoken. To share the same breathing space with Clair Bell was to be alone. She behaved the exact opposite of what her physical presence presented. A large woman, a full six feet, big boned and thick skinned, Clair Bell looked as if she could beat any man in four counties. In fact she was the exact opposite. She could chop her own wood and haul a twenty-pound bag of grain on her head from the general store to her front porch, but she couldn’t snap the thin necks of chickens or handle the jelly-like liver of cows. She cried crocodile tears at the thin slicing pain of a splinter. Clair Bell was nothing that you would expect her to be.