Third Girl from the Left (3 page)

There was a stool in front of the bar and a series of Xs made with masking tape all along it. The girl who'd been hustling along in front of Angela hopped up onto the bar in two quick moves, taking her robe off at the same time. No one even looked. Angela climbed up behind her, a little more awkwardly, her butt sticking out as she hoisted herself. She stood there for a minute, still holding her robe closed. The other girl stood on her tape mark X, wearing nothing but a G-string, looking intently at her long, red nails. Angela let her robe drop, felt the cold air on her body. All around her voices called. There was the sound of a hammer and then somebody saying “Goddamnit,” then another bullhorn announcement. “We're ready to shoot. Mr. Williamson on the set, please.”

When he came out, he leaned on the bar right in front of her. He was wearing a buttery-soft tan leather coat and his skin looked polished, though his eyes were a little bit red. A white actor whom Angela didn't recognize came and stood with him, made a joke and they both laughed. They never looked at the girls standing behind them. “All right, we're rolling. Silence, please.” The men took their places and the first assistant director pointed at Angela, moving his finger in a slow circle. She started swiveling her hips and sticking her butt out. The refrain of that Delfonics song, “La-La Means I Love You,” kept going through her head. The other girl danced too, a bored look on her face. But Angela wasn't bored. Cold and a little bit scared. But not bored.

The girls danced without music for about twenty minutes as the actors went through the scene twice—one time the white guy messed up a line so they had to do it over—then the director said, “Cut and print.” And the first assistant director said, “That's a wrap. Next scene in fifteen.” Angela hopped off the bar and so did the other girl. They were done. They still hadn't said anything to each other. Mr. Kaufman, Howard, was on the set, standing just a little behind the director's chair. He looked at Angela once with blank indifference. She tied her robe around her waist.

Angela walked back to the corner of the room that had been marked off for the girls with makeshift sliding walls and a sheet on the floor. There were a couple of rickety steel stools in there and a clothes rack made of piping pounded sloppily together. A thick-painted, greenish radiator hissed in the corner. The other girl peeled off her G-string and picked up her underwear, which wasn't much more generously cut, without a word. Angela finally got up the nerve to speak. “This right here is my first movie,” she said.

“That's nice,” the other girl said in a flat tone.

“How about you?”

“Oh, I don't know. I've done a lot of them.” Now she was wiggling into her jeans. They were very tight. “It doesn't get much better than this. But it's a living, I guess.”

Angela looked around. Not much better than this? “I'm going to have it better,” Angela said.

The other girl laughed and rolled her eyes skyward. “Where have I heard that before?” She snapped her fingers. “Oh, yeah. That's what every girl in this town thinks.” She sucked in her breath and buttoned her pants. “You go right on believing, kitten. See where it gets you.” She picked up her fake fur bag, took a final look at herself in the mirror, and shoved the cheap curtain aside, exposing Angela's half-naked body to anyone passing by. “See ya 'round the cattle calls, baby.” And then she was gone.

T
ULSA, OKLAHOMA, IN THE EARLY
1960s was not a place that a smart black girl would want to linger. What the future held for such a girl was as circumscribed and prim as the dust and doilies on every surface. Greenwood, the section of town where most black families lived, felt as if it was about to go out of business. Life proceeded, but the pace was slow and uncertain. Angela Edwards of the Greenwood section was a smart black girl, though her mother never said that to her. What her mother said to her was this:

Girl, ain't you got sense to come in from out in the rain?

I ain't raisin' no heathens.

You bet' come on in here and get that hair combed. You can't be runnin' around lookin' like who-shot-john-what-for-and-don't-do-it-again.

My mama didn't raise a fool. You better have finished washin' every dish by the time I come in there.

You best be careful around those boys.

There was always this need to do things right, to be seen to be right, never to be too mussed or too loud or too worked up or too anything. When she was in kindergarten, Angela brought home a drawing she'd made. It was furious with red and pink and orange crayon. Smiling faces and suns. A green star in the corner. Mildred took one look at it and said, “Girl, what's all them colors about? Can't make head or tail of it.” And Angela brought home no more pictures. She didn't know that her mother found that picture later and smoothed it out and kept it. Angela missed the bright fury of the colors, the pure concentration of making the work. She could never get that moment back, but sometimes that feeling was there, just around the comer. Sometimes she paused on the stair landing, feeling her hair ribbon coming untied and tickling her neck (again), holding a pile of neatly folded laundry, and she would hear this hum in the back of her neck, just below the threshold of audibility. It seemed to her that it was the hum of everything, of understanding. If she stood there long enough, stood still and quiet long enough, she might begin to understand what it was she was supposed to do, where exactly she had failed. Why her mother was so nervous about things being right. She could never be quiet long enough. But she stopped on the landing often, trying to hear that hum.

She was pretty sure she was loved. She knew she was taken care of. Her mother's rough hands pulling through her hair, lingering just a second longer than necessary to fix a bow. The softening in her eyes when she looked at Angela sometimes. Everybody knew the kids in town who never got that look, never got the hair bows or the smoothing hands. They were the ones with the dusty faces and ashy legs. They were the ones who always smelled of pee and soda and would ask you right out for a quarter if they saw you at the ice cream parlor. They hit one another a lot. Angela and her brothers and sisters had good home training. Their legs shone with Jergens, their faces gleamed with Vaseline. If they hit one another, they did it out of sight of their mother. Or their father. They didn't hit much. They knew they had to act right. But Angela always wondered why. What would happen if she just stopped?

She was seven, she was ten, she was fourteen going on fifteen. Her best friend was Louann Parsons from next door. Angela had long, honey brown legs with slightly knobby knees, small breasts that she spent a lot of time standing in front of the mirror examining, and a neck that, even as young as she was, made a man think about the hollow at the base of it. She and Louann loved to go down to deep Greenwood on a Saturday after their chores were done with nickels begged from their fathers and get ice cream. The best part, though Angela never said this aloud to anyone, was walking past the barbershop where the old men and the young bloods hung out, spitting into an brass pot put there for the purpose and talking what Angela's mother called a lot of nonsense. Their rich voices wove together like a sweet bluesy tune, rising and cresting as the girls approached and then dropping to a croon as they went by. The older ones tipped their hats, the younger ones simply looked on steadily, their eyes heavy with appraisal, their teeth parted behind their lips with possibility. As Angela walked away she bit her own lip, her heart rattling at the thought of the eyes that watched her retreating form, the legs that shifted together, then apart as she left. She touched the back of her hair, lifting her arm so her breasts would be outlined under her dress. Louann looked at her as if she were crazy. “What you doing, Angie? You know they all looking at us.”

“I know. I had an itch.”

“Well, it makes your dress hitch up when you do that.”

“Can I help it if I had an itch? Don't be such a worrywart.”

Louann sucked her teeth elaborately. “All right then, Miss Fast Thing. What kind of ice cream you want?”

“I don't know. Vanilla. What you gettin'?”

“What I always get. Chocolate.”

Old Mr. Evans who ran the ice cream shop had a picture up behind the counter of his former ice cream shop, which had stood in the very same spot (and had nicer stools to hear him tell it). The old shop, which had been his father's before him, had been burned to the ground in the attack in 1921 and he never tired of telling any child who would listen—or anybody at all—of how he stood in the bell tower of the First Baptist Church, firing his gun until it was empty and then using his brother's when his was depleted. “Them white folks went crazier'n mad dogs that day. Burned my daddy's shop right to ashes. But I stood my ground. I wasn't much older than you then. You girls are steppin' tall. But you don't know. You don't never know when they gonna just turn on you.”

The two girls listened politely, their hands waiting for their cones, their eyes solemn. They received their ice cream at the end of the story, said “Thank you, Mr. Evans” in chorus, and walked out into the brilliant sunshine. Louann's tongue worked around the edge of her cone. “Don't you get sick of him talkin' about that riot all the time?” said Angela, her tongue darting in and out.

“Yeah, but what are you gonna do? Grownups always talk about that old-timey stuff. 'Sides”—Louann's tongue darted out again—“my daddy says he's right. He was a little boy then. He says it was the worst day ever come to Tulsa. White folks is crazy.” Angela was quiet, considering. Her parents never talked about that day. But her daddy walked on the same side of the street as a white person only when he absolutely had to. And one time, when her mama asked her to clean out the hall closet, Angela found a brownish old picture of a beautiful woman. She had steady eyes and an oval face, an almost too full mouth. She wore a high-collar dress and a dreamy expression. Angela stared at the photograph for a long time, then took it to her mother, who was hanging the wash outside. “Mama, who's this?”

Her mother looked down, distracted, a clothespin in her mouth. “What, Angie?”

“I said, who is this in this picture?”

Mildred pulled the clothespin from her mouth, her distant look vanishing. She reached out and snatched the photograph from her daughter's hand. “That ain't nobody you need to concern yourself with. Just an old picture. She been gone since the burning in twenty-one. Now get back up there and finish cleaning that closet like I asked you to.” Her eyes brightened with sadness. She was looking at Angela when she first took the photograph from her but now stared down. Her hands shook. Angela knew better than to ask why she was so upset.

“Yes, ma'am.”

She went back upstairs, back to her task. But she couldn't stop thinking about the woman whose picture made her mother cry. She folded heavy sheets, put away hot, itchy blankets, swatted summer moths away from her face. But she could feel the beveled edge of the photo frame in her hand, its light weight against her fingers. A picture of someone who had the dreamy eyes of a girl who would stand on the landing and listen for the hum of the universe. Who was she?

 

Her fifteenth birthday came and went. When she was nearly sixteen, she started keeping company with Bobby Ware. Her parents approved. He was the son of Dr. Ware and a football player for the colored high school. He was tall and chocolate-skinned and polite to grownups. He had legs that ran through the dreams of half the girls in town and a mouth that you found yourself watching when he talked. Lips so pretty it didn't matter much what he said. Whenever he talked to Angela, his voice a slow caress, she found her feet doing an independent, twisting dance of their own, her heart slamming into her ribs. And she became the chosen one. In all the good seats at the games. Walking home with him after church. Wearing his letter sweater slung casually over her shoulders. Sitting with his hand on her leg at the movies. She knew she ought to make him move it, but it felt so good there, warm and gentle, the feeling between her legs so delicious. It was dark in the theater, the only light that which beamed from Sidney Poitiers face as he showed a group of unworldly nuns the meaning of life in
Lilies of the Field
. No one could see them. She allowed him this liberty. She lay in bed after he brought her home, always well before her curfew, and rested her hand on her leg in the same spot he had rested his.

The way it happened was like standing in water up to her waist and suddenly finding it was over her mouth. First she let him keep his hand on her leg, then when they went to see
The Birds
, her belly, then when they saw A
Hard Day's Night
, she let him touch her breasts, outside the bra. She knew her mother would kill her if she knew, but she also could not believe how good it felt. How desperate she was to keep going.

 

So finally she did. She was with Bobby under the football bleachers after a game. He still smelled of the shampoo he'd just used. The air was sweet and cold, about to turn fall. When he reached under her bra and moved his fingers over her nipples, her eyes opened wide in shock. She must have looked like a cartoon. She had no idea she was capable of feeling such pleasure. What could be bad about it? She shifted her legs underneath him, wanted to reach down and rub herself the way she did before she fell asleep some nights. Only this was better. It was nice to hear his hoarse breathing, feel where the soft flesh met his springy hair on the back of his neck. She liked that intent look on his face—like she was the last thought he was ever going to have. She took his hand and slid it between her legs, a move that surprised him so much that he was still for a moment. But soon his hand began to creep, at first hesitantly, then when he met with no resistance, a little more quickly, into her underwear, moving gently over the soft places underneath. She moved her hips to encourage him, surprising both of them with her small, unselfconscious moans and gasps. After a minute, his hand went still again and he finally spoke: “Can I? Girl, what you want me to do?”