Widow Basquiat (2 page)

Suzanne thinks, “These are the children that need to go to the doll hospital.”

For three years the house shelters three or four of these children a day. Their hands get washed, their backs get rubbed, they break things they find. But this house doesn’t shelter black-and-blue children.

The black-and-blue children are thinking about running away. They think, “We don’t fit in this house.”

Suzanne loves one of the kids called Sammy. Sammy is a six-year-old black girl. Suzanne knows only one chromosome is missing in her beautiful little face. Suzanne braids Sammy’s hair and buys her candy.

Suzanne makes her dresses that she copies out of
Vogue
magazine and she teaches Sammy to count to five.

One day Suzanne and Sammy are sitting in the garden when Suzanne’s mother comes outside. “Now, you girls be careful, you’re going to turn your skin too dark,” she says.

Once she gave Suzanne a whole case of bleaching skin cream. “If you think about it hard enough,” Suzanne’s mother says, “you can change the way you look.”

“If you think about it hard enough,” Suzanne tells Sammy, “you can make that chromosome grow in you.” Sammy looks straight at the sun. She can do that and not even squint or blink.

Suzanne’s mother has a magic horsetail. Out of a short, carved ivory stick hangs a white horse’s tail. It was given to her by her great-aunt for luck when she was little, growing up in England. She took it with her to Beirut, where she was a British naval officer. It was here that she met Suzanne’s father. Together they moved to Canada as Palestinian refugees. The horsetail has always been with her.

Suzanne braids the horsetail, shakes it around. “Make lots of wishes with it, Suzy,” Suzanne’s mother says.

“Did you make wishes with it?” Suzanne asks.

“Oh, millions and millions. But I don’t believe in making wishes.”

Suzanne’s mother always tells lies. She says she saw a woman in Beirut who had transparent skin. She says there are forty-two ways to cut an apple. She says she’s seen the vaults with the gold reserves of England. She says the Earth has two moons. She says she has eaten sheep eyes, ant larvae and raw eggs because she was working as a spy.

She tells Suzanne, “You have your father’s barbaric blood. You are genetically more Arab than your brothers and sisters. You will always have problems with hysteria, rage and jealousy.”

Every time Suzanne thinks about her mother’s sulfur-blue eyes it rains.

Suzanne has always made a wish to herself. But it is not really a wish because it is going to happen no matter what. She’s going to leave. She’s known this ever since she could look in the mirror at her face.

When she was six, she walked alone around the block for the first time and it felt good. After that, she did it every day, always walking a little bit farther. In the winter, she’d walk and walk around the house looking for cobwebs, which she would eat to make her strong.

Suzanne knows her skeleton. She knows where every bone is and which one hurts most. She knows the bruise from falling on ice is different from a bruise from a belt. She has studied the length of her tibia and the width of her femur. The pull of hair from the nape of the neck is different from the pull of hair from the forehead. She has learned the swivel and turn from a hand that can cover her whole face.

At night Suzanne lies in her bed listening to her father play trictrac with his friends who have also come to Canada as Palestinian refugees. Sometimes, she sneaks down, watches them, and her father pulls her out of the shadows.

He strokes her hair and gives her a taste of beer with his finger.

Sometimes I would jump on his back to stop him and I would get thrown across the room. Once when I was five he threw me down the stairs and I hit my head on a heater. I still have the scar on my forehead. He often threw us across the room and we would hit furniture or walls. He would also pick up furniture and throw it at us or break it.

A chair feels like a slap.

A table feels like a kick.

A lamp feels like a punch.

A door feels like a shove, but it can be opened.

“I fell down the stairs.”

“My brother punched me.”

“I crashed into a tree on my bike.”

“The door slammed in my face.”

“I slipped on the ice.”

“I don’t remember.”

“My doll’s hand scratched me.”

“The rain fell hard.”

“I know you’re going to leave. One day you’ll figure it out and leave,” Suzanne’s mother says.

“Yes, I know, Mum,” Suzanne answers.

“Well, what have I taught you? What did I fill you up with? You know, Suzy, there’s a big, bad wolf out there just waiting to eat you up. You can leave but you can always come back. You can live here again. Life can be a circle, not just a line. And don’t chew gum ever, Suzy. No lady ever chews gum.”

Suzanne’s father isn’t going to hit her anymore because she’s menstruating. She told him, “I’m a woman now. I’m bleeding now. You can’t touch me anymore.”

The house is full of the smell of paint and paint thinners that Suzanne’s father mixes up in the basement for his house-painting company. The smells fill up the house. Suzanne can tell by now if he’s mixing blue or red or yellow. The smell sticks to everybody’s skin. It stings Suzanne’s mother’s eyes. It burns her brothers’ and sisters’ skin. It makes some of the children faint. Sammy learns to cross her eyes. Suzanne giggles.

Sometimes, Suzanne goes down to the basement while her father is mixing the paint and they giggle together. The fumes are so strong they feel as if they are on a merry-go-round. Suzanne looks into the vat of cobalt blue and thinks she could swim in there. But she just dips her fingers in and they feel so cool.

The grass around the house turns yellow and two cats die from the fumes. Children stop coming to play. The mailman tells people he saw red vapor coming out of the windows. At school the teachers complain that these
children are always coming to school with their clothes on inside out.

Suzanne’s mother says, “Children, you don’t need to be going and leaving and looking for a rainbow. The rainbow is here.”

It’s easy. You sell everything you own and buy a ticket. Even if you have no place to go, some words have to sing inside. Suzanne has the magic words; they are going to turn her into a bright flag, they are going to make her measure the length of her arms. The words are: Seville Hotel, New York City. It’s easy. You sell everything you own.

“Don’t cry over anything that can’t cry over you,” Suzanne’s mother says.

Suzanne has a garage sale. She makes a big sign: FEEL GRAY, MUST EXIT. She sells everything and only keeps two pairs of pants and two T-shirts that she dyes gray in the bathtub.

Her mother buys her toothbrush for one dollar. Her sister buys her birth control pills and Iggy Pop records. Her father says, “You’ll be back.”

Suzanne says, “Maybe,” and thinks, “If you’d never hit me, I wouldn’t know my skeleton.”

There are no footsteps, but you’re moving. What is the distance between? Outside the trees move, the houses move. Inside everything is still. The woman in the back is weeping. She wipes her face with her sleeve. The smell of diesel is the smell of movement. Suzanne is sitting with her feet together, her knees together, her hands together, very prim as if waiting for a concert to begin.

Her mother kissed her forehead at the station, “Be careful, Suzy,” she said. “Everybody is hungry.” Her brothers and sisters gave her a card. It says, “Suzy Q, we love you.” Her father gave her twenty dollars. “Call us,” he said.

Suzanne sits still, so skinny, knowing the size of her bones. Knowing how to cover bruises with makeup. Knowing how to disappear. She thinks about Sammy, who came and left so quickly, who sucked the salt out of her fingers. She remembers the day Sammy learned to say “Ouch.” And that was all she would say forever after, “Ouch, ouch, ouch,” like a little song.

Suzanne came home from school one day and Sammy wasn’t there anymore. “You know how these kids are, Suzy,”
Suzanne’s mother said. “They just kind of come and go. She was sweet, though.”

You can’t get your arms to stop making circles in the air if you never say good-bye.

But the reason I decided to go to New York was because I had seen Iggy Pop and I thought I had seen God. And because I had sent to
Interview
magazine for Rene Ricard’s first book of poetry
, The Blue Book.
I had never sent for anything before but something told me to do this. I had read that book over and over again like a Bible. I realized that a book can reach out and embrace you like an arm and make you walk away from everything you thought you understood.

It is Valentine’s Day, 1980. The shop windows are filled with red hearts and paper lace. “I’m going to New York City,” Suzanne told the draft dodgers when they asked, “Little lady, what are you going to be when you grow up?”

“And,” Suzanne continued, “I’m going to be famous and eat artichokes.”

“Go to the Seville Hotel,” they said.

There are three middle-aged prostitutes in the lobby of the Seville Hotel.

“What’s gonna ruin you, girlie?” the one in the blue dress asks.

“What do you mean?” Suzanne answers.

“What she said,” the one in the yellow dress interrupts. “What’s going to ruin you? A man? A job? No job, no man? Your babies? What?”

“A man’s gonna ruin her, for sure,” the one in the red dress says. “Let me tell you, everybody gets ruined by something—even if you’re a queen in a castle—something’s gonna say, you’re mine.”

It was February 14, Valentine’s Day, 1980. I went straight to the Seville Hotel. The first night a prostitute was murdered by the infamous “Slasher.” It was terrible. There were cops everywhere and the women who were staying at the hotel were moaning and screaming and cussing at the police officers. I was so frightened that I moved out to the Martha
Washington Hotel on 29th and Madison, which was only for women. No men were even allowed in the lobby.

I found Rene Ricard’s number in the phone book and I used to call him and we would discuss philosophical things and I would tell him how brilliant I thought he was and read him my own poetry. It never occurred to me that he would not speak to a stranger. He would talk to me for hours. He was very kind. I never told him my name, though, and he never asked. This special telephone friendship lasted for several weeks.

Suzanne wears black elbow-length gloves, a short pearl necklace, fishnet stockings and a short skirt with a crinoline underneath. She wears white pancake makeup, thick black eyeliner and red lipstick.

She smells like lemon soap and coffee. She has a red wood cigarette box with compartments. As Suzanne walks around the Ritz nightclub she singsongs in her sparrow-voice, “Cigarettes, cigars, Life Savers, joints. Cigarettes, cigars, Life Savers, joints.” She makes a lot of money and rents an apartment on the Lower East Side.

LeRoy Neiman, the illustrator from
Playboy
, wants to sketch her. All the young Puerto Rican boys want to go out with her. And the lesbians, the ones who wear Chanel No. 5, want to take her home.

She sucks on Life Savers all night. Green, red, yellow, orange. Some people put tips inside her gloves. The owner of the Ritz tells her he loves her and wants to put a hole in her heart. Suzanne quits this job. She tells the owner she can’t breathe deeply anymore. She gives him her gloves filled with rice.

A week after arriving in New York I was hired as a waitress at Max’s Kansas City. It was a very hip place at night like CBGBs. These two places had all the cool bands. I worked in the day and the customers were mostly businesspeople from the offices in the area. When the manager left to manage the Ritz, she took me with her as a cigarette girl. I got fired for selling joints, but it was really because I had been having an affair with one of the owners. Soon I got a job at Night Birds as a bartender.

I did not know anything about being a bartender so I went to a bookstore and bought a book on mixing drinks. I learned all those different drinks and all their names by heart. I became an expert at this by practicing with water at home and pretending to have all the ingredients. However, I didn’t really need to know all this since Night Birds was a very dark, seedy bar where taxi drivers stopped by in the afternoon for a beer, and where a few alcoholic men hung out all day. The bar was so dark it always felt like night in there, so it attracted people who did not like daylight.

Looking back, it was the perfect place to meet Jean because he liked the night and never liked the day.

Even though one year has passed, downtown New York is still covered with one face that is marked “MISSING” and “Child last seen going to school bus stop, wearing black pilot-type cap, blue corduroy jacket, blue pants, blue sneakers and carrying blue bag.”

On light poles, telephone booths, in shop windows, along the walls of buildings, and in subway stations a small boy’s face on a pasted poster looks out. His face is also hidden behind layers of old rock concert posters and advertisements. His name is Etan Patz:

He has been missing for one hour, one day, one week, one month, one year. His mother is quoted in the newspapers: “It was the first time I let him walk to the bus stop alone. It was the first time I let him. I never let him go alone before. It was the first time I let him walk to the bus stop alone. It was the first time I let him walk to the bus stop alone.”