Third Girl from the Left (22 page)

One night, on a whim, she went to her trousseau trunk and picked up the Lawrence book, brought it outside with her. There was a full moon, bright enough that she could see the paintings fairly well when she opened it. They had a silvery, mysterious sheen and seemed to rise out of the darkness at her. She sat for a long time with her favorite, the one that could be a church but that William had told her Lawrence said was a train packed with migrants. She sat, gazing at it, until she felt herself almost within it, breathing the colors, tasting the fried chicken from home on people's laps, their sweat rolling down her face in the hot, enclosed space. She sat so long that she didn't really feel like herself when she got up and went into the small work shed that Johnny Lee used to use before Angela left, still holding the Lawrence book. She pulled a rickety stool up to the rough-hewn table he'd made and picked up a board he'd left there. She ran her hands over it for a while, knowing the wood. Coming to know it. There was an old can of red house paint on the shelf. She opened it, stirred it, found a skinny brush and made her first strokes across the wood. She didn't know what she was doing. Didn't have a plan. But it felt right. She took off her nightgown so she wouldn't stain it. Piled it onto the stool for padding, sat naked, painting, thinking of nothing but the colors in front of her, the flat, rough wood in her hand. She found some more paints, yellow, a blue she especially liked, a little white. She worked awkwardly, slowly, using the wide, difficult brushes until the light began to change and she knew she'd better get back into the house. Johnny Lee'd be up soon. She looked at what she'd done, the sprawled colors. It didn't look like much. But her heart felt just a little bit less like dust. The taste of ash was gone from the back of her tongue.

 

 

 

 

1954

 

When Dorothy Dandridge makes her entrance in
Carmen Jones
, your breath stops like glass in your throat. It is the Negro division of a military base. There has been all this pseudo-operatic singing in the scenes before. It is ridiculous. But at the same time it is so thrilling to see all those brown faces together talking and laughing, the center of the image. Then, swinging in from the right side of the frame, a small, sure smile on her face, is Dorothy Dandridge. She looks like life itself. She looks like sex itself. She looks like she will never apologize for anything, never have anything to apologize for, bring only pleasure. You cannot see the way the world will hurt her. You can see only her splendor—those long legs, a butt you'll never forget wrapped in a tight red skirt, a sweetly sexy black V-necked blouse, and a red rose in her hands. She strides into that false cafeteria like it's a Michelin four-star restaurant. Every man in the room tries to talk to her, earn her favor. She just laughs, the rose spinning between her fingers. Then she looks straight at Harry Belafonte, her black eyes promising him every joy he has ever dreamed of. She opens her mouth to sing. And she is beautiful. There is no denying her. There is nothing ridiculous here.

 

 

 

 

PART III

L
OVED WATCHING MY MOTHER AND SHEILA GET
ready on Oscar day. To the rest of the world it takes place at night, swathed in burnished flesh, glitter, and tulle. But for those of us who lived where it really happened, it was Oscar afternoon, Oscar day, the holiest Monday of the year. It still doesn't feel right to me that the Academy moved it to Sundays.

The day began early, always, with my mother making a call to my school saying I was sick. I could hear her through my door: “That flu just keeps going around, doesn't it, Miss MacGregor. Well, I certainly will make sure she gets some rest.” She always laughed hard in her piping girlish way once she hung up the phone. Then she and Sheila started in on preparing Sheila's special-best strawberry pancakes, made from a recipe her neighbor Miss Clarissa gave her when she was a little girl. The making of the pancakes was one of the very few references Sheila ever made to having had any kind of life before her adulthood in Los Angeles. Oscar day was the only day of the year that Sheila and my mother cooked. The rest of my childhood, I survived on microwaved this-and-that and takeout food. They fussed around in the kitchen together, getting flour everywhere and giggling like they were little girls, not women past thirty. Sometimes it would get suddenly quiet. I figured that's when they were kissing. They did that a lot in front of me but told me to tell everyone they were just roommates and that Sheila was a big help with the rent. I obliged. I did whatever my mother asked.

It would have been easier, I think, if she hadn't asked me to lie. If she hadn't been so busy trying to lie to herself. I mean, who cared about a couple of middle-aged black lesbians or bisexuals or whatever they cared to call themselves in Los Angeles in the early 1980s? No one, that's who. They had no power. They had very little money; Sheila was the manager of the Avis office at LAX, and my mother was the receptionist for a plastic surgeon, for Pete's sake. Their lives didn't matter to anyone but me. They were the only parents I knew. But not being able to talk about who they were, acting as if it wasn't happening, that was the hard part. My mother was never a big one for the truth, and Sheila wasn't much better. She always seemed a bit shocked to be helping to raise me anyway. And the truth? The truth can be way too nerve-wracking.

I lay in bed, pretending to be asleep. They set great store in waking a surprised me up to a beautifully set table with a platterful of pancakes and slightly burnt bacon set in the middle of it. I usually woke up between 6:00 and 7:00 every morning, and Oscar morning was no exception. But to please them, I hid in my room, reading Archie comic books and issues of
Seventeen
and
Essence
that my mother bought for me. “A girl's never too young to start thinking about how to look good,” my mother informed me grandly when she got me my own subscription to
Essence
when I was five. So I learned a lot about being a proud and beautiful and lissome soul sister from a very young age. Not too much of it took, though. My hair stayed unruly, fuzzy braids sticking up all over, even though my mother applied gallons of Ultra Sheen to my head, her hands like music in my hair. My dark legs stayed ashy no matter what combination of creams my mother attacked them with. My disposition stayed ungirlish, despite my mother's determined effort.

Anyway, after a while, they came in to get me, hands floury, wearing aprons they'd gotten from who knows where. My mother always had her earrings on by this time, her fade carefully picked out into squared-off perfection. She looked good even when she was cooking. “Come on, Tam. Oscar breakfast awaits!” I laughed and went out to the kitchen and was appropriately noisy in my appreciation of the many pancakes and the beautiful table. I always ate a little more than I wanted so that my mother would not feel her work had been wasted. But not so much that she'd say, “Dag, Tam. You better watch that. You don't want to blow up the way some of these girls out here is. You only a little girl, but you don't wanna get fat now. You'll never take it off.” Gauging the correct number of pancakes to get the pleased reaction without the censure took some doing, but by the time I was seven I'd figured it out. Four and a half pancakes was just right. My mother and Sheila smiled at me.

Once we'd finished breakfast, at about 10:30 or so, it was time to get out the magazines.
People, Variety, Vogue, Essence, Seventeen
. They spilled around our tiny living room in glamorous profusion. Sheila and my mother settled down on the sofa and read each other occasional little bits and showed each other dresses they particularly liked for about forty-five minutes. I read my Archie comic again, twirling my feet, still wearing my pajamas. Then suddenly, always, as though it were a surprise, Sheila or my mother would squeal, “Damn, we gotta get ready.” Then Sheila would jump up and put on some Earth, Wind and Fire, and they'd grab my hand and we'd dance around in a grooving, hip-shaking circle to “Serpentine Fire,” and then my mother would scurry off to the bedroom to change while Sheila got out the tote bag that we always carried our Oscar-day picnic lunch in. I liked to go to the bedroom with my mother and try to figure out just how she did it. What magic lay in her pots and brushes and glossy tubes to make her so, so beautiful? She never minded me watching. She never focused on me too much anyway. I lay on the unmade bed she shared with Sheila, watching her work on her face. “Mama?”

“Yeah, baby?”

“Who you think's gonna win Best Picture this year?”

“I want
Tootsie
to win. But they don't always give it to funny movies. Dustin Hoffman was great in that, though.”

“Mmm,” I said, then grabbed my foot and stretched it over my head. “Yeah, it was funny, but I want E.T. to win. I like Henry Thomas.”

“He was all right,” she said absently. My mother would have loved to have a real house herself, but she didn't share my weakness for stories of suburban longing. She'd been living in the same small, battered two-bedroom with Sheila since before I was born. My affection for cinematic suburbia dated back to Oscar year 1980, when I was five.
Ordinary People
and
Raging Bull
were both nominated for Best Picture that year, and Mama had a rule that we had to see all the major nominees before the awards. I loved
Ordinary People
, even though I didn't quite understand it. All that repressed aching and those giant, clean rooms.
Raging Bull
, on the other hand, gave me nightmares for weeks. But I never questioned my mother's decision to take me to everything. How could I at five? I just went and let the pictures wash over me and learned to have opinions about them all. The night after night after night that I woke in terror, Robert De Niro's bloody gray face before me, I accepted as the price I had to pay for the reward of climbing into bed between my mama and Sheila and sleeping with Mama's languid arm thrown across me: “It's all right baby, it's all right. It's just a movie. Mama's here.” Her sleepy voice soft in my ear. When I was older and in film school, I had to concede that
Raging Bull
was the better film, but I maintained a bone-deep fear of it that never left me.

She turned from the mirror, grinning, “But you know what it's really all about this year?”

“Louis Gossett, Jr!” We both shouted at the same time. She finished her face, and I started jumping up and down on their bed. “Cut that out, munchkin,” she said, but like most of her attempts to discipline me, it was without force. I didn't require much discipline, though. When things bothered her, she just eased by them like they weren't there. I didn't want to become one of those bothersome things she glided past. I jumped two more times to make a point and then hopped off the bed. My eye fell onto the old-time photograph of a brown-skinned woman she kept on her bureau. I rarely entered her room without looking at it. “Mama, do you know
anything
about your grandma? You keep that picture there, but you won't never tell me anything about it.”

“Girl, I done told you a million times, it ain't nothing to tell. She died before I was born. I just like it. My mama gave it to me, and it's about the only thing I got from back home. It wasn't
all
bad. And I like old-timey stuff sometimes.” She concentrated on her hair.

“She looks like you,” I said.

She looked at herself in the mirror for a long minute. “I know.” She took a deep breath and then was all briskness. “Listen, you, so full of questions—go on and get dressed. Sheila must have that picnic about ready by now. We're leaving soon.”

I ran into my room and put on the first things I picked up off the floor, a pair of jeans and a relatively clean pink T-shirt. I got my little Brownie camera too and brushed my teeth for two seconds. My hair was all right. Mama always rebraided it the night before the Oscars and made me sleep in a stocking cap so it was as fuzzless as it was ever going to get. When I came out, Mama was on the goldish-grayish sofa, smoking a cigarette and looking at the ceiling. She was wearing a short, tight, shiny lemon yellow dress. Her toenails and fingernails painted a gleaming bright red. She had on a pair of yellow strapped Candies. She looked at me absently. “You ready, munchkin? Good Lord, is that all you could find to wear?”

“Yep,” I said.

She sucked her teeth. “Honestly. I don't know when you're gonna start caring about this kind of thing. It's
important
.” She sat up, stubbed out her cigarette. I was used to her fussing. I sat down on the sofa next to her, knowing she'd be satisfied, or at least lose interest, after she'd tightened two or three of the beaded balls that hung from the ends of my braids. Once she'd done that, she grinned at me and put her feet up on the sofa, inviting me to entangle my legs with hers. She got out another cigarette. “Ooooh, blow some smoke rings, Mama,” I squealed.

She laughed and made a few, her lips a perfect O as she sent the cloud-soft circles of smoke to the ceiling. I laughed too. Her legs were warm underneath mine. Just as the fourth ring drifted toward the ceiling, Sheila emerged from the bedroom, wearing skintight jeans and a low-cut purple blouse, her hair sleeked back into a chignon. She looked at my outfit quickly but didn't say anything. She went to the door and lifted the picnic basket.

My mother smiled at Sheila, her eyes softening the way they always did when she looked at her, the way that made me feel as though I was in the way of something. “Put that basket down, girl,” she said, her voice a purr. “We need to get in the right mood first.” She shoved my legs off her and went over to the small boxy record player. I loved playing with the latch on it, almost as much as I loved putting pencil holes through the smooth gold fabric that covered the speakers. She rooted through the albums and pulled out an old Michael Jackson. She put on the record and the music crackled to life: “Ben.” She extended her hands to Sheila, and they started dancing.