Flesh and Blood (14 page)

“Cassandra,” the man said. “Charmed, I’m sure.” Now that Nick or Ted had gone, Cassandra appeared to have lost interest. He glanced around, preparing to leave. He glittered in the heavy air like a school of fish.

“I like your earrings,” Zoe said. One of Cassandra’s earrings was a silver rocket ship, the other a copper moon with an irritable, unsettled face.

Trancas said, “Yeah, they’re great.”

Cassandra touched his earrings. “Oh, the rocket and the moon,” he said. “Fabulous, aren’t they? You want ‘em?”

“Oh, no,” Zoe said.

“I insist.” Cassandra pulled the moon out of his ear. Its tiny copper face darkened in the bar light.

“No, really, please,” Zoe said. “I couldn’t.”

“Is it a question of sanitation?” Cassandra asked.

“No.
I just—”

“Let’s split them,” he said. “You take the moon, I’ll keep the rocket.” He dangled the moon, the size of a penny, before her face.

“Really?” Zoe said. “I mean, you don’t know me.”

“Honey,” Cassandra told her, “I am a Christmas tree. I drop a little tinsel here, a little there. There is always, always more stuff. Trust me. It’s a great big world and it is just
made
of stuff. Besides, I stole this trash, I can always steal more.”

Zoe reached for the earring. Trancas helped her run the post through her earlobe. “This is a great little thing,” Trancas said. “This is a treasure, here.”

“Now we’re earring sisters,” Cassandra said. “Bound together for life.”

“Thank you,” Zoe said.

“You’re welcome,” Cassandra said. “Now excuse me, will you, girls?” He walked away, expert in his heels. His platinum wig sizzled with artificial light.

“Wow,” Trancas said. “Now
that’s
a character.”

“I wonder if he saved our lives,” Zoe said.

“Probably. He’s our fairy fucking godmother, is what he is.”

Trancas and Zoe went back to smoking dope on the sofa, but now only less could happen. They finished the joint and left the bar. They went to a few other places, smoked another joint, danced together and watched the men. When they got back to Trancas’s apartment they found her mother snoring in front of the television. Zoe checked for the first stirrings of fire. Trancas put her finger to her mother’s sleeping head. She said, “Bang.” Her mother smiled over a dream, and did not awaken.

Momma said, “I wish you’d stay home this weekend. What’s so endlessly fascinating about New York?”

“Trancas is lonely up there,” Zoe said. “She needs me to come.”

Momma wore red tennis shoes. She put her shadow over the tiny beans and lettuces, the darker, more confident unfurling of the squash. Momma stood in a swarm of little hungers. When the beans were ready she’d pull them off the vines, toss them in boiling water.

“Trancas,” she said, “can probably manage on her own for a weekend or two.”

“I miss her,” Zoe said. “I’m lonely here, too.”

She wore Cassandra’s copper moon in her ear. She wore the clothes of her household life, patched jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. She squatted among the labeled rows, pulling weeds. The dirt threw up its own shade, something cool and slumbering it pulled from deep inside.

“Let her go, Mary,” Poppa said. He carried a flat of marigolds so bright it seemed they must put out heat. Poppa himself had a hot brightness, a sorrow keen as fire.

“I just think it’s getting to be a bit much,” Momma said. “Every single weekend.”

Poppa came and stood beside Zoe. He touched her hair. When they were in the garden together, he defended her right to do everything she wanted. Outside the garden, he lost track of her. His love still held but he couldn’t hold on to the idea of her without a language of roots and topsoil; the shared, legible ambition to encourage growth.

“This is her best friend,” he said. “And hey, it ain’t like there’s much happening here on Long Island on a Saturday night. Am I right, Zo?”

Zoe shrugged. There was a lot happening everywhere. But she had some kind of business in New York. She wasn’t after fame and the victory of self-destruction like Trancas was. She wanted something else, something more like what Alice must have had after she’d gone to Wonderland and then returned to the world of gardens and schoolbooks and laundry on the line. She wanted to feel larger inside herself.

“Fine,” Momma said, and her voice took on a gratified bitterness. She loved defeat with a sour, grudging appetite, the way she loved food. “Do whatever you like.”

She went back into the house, stepping on the grass in red canvas shoes. Poppa stood over Zoe, still touching her hair with one hand and holding the flat of marigolds in the other. The smell of the flowers cascaded down, rank and sweet. Marigolds collapsed helplessly inside their own odor. They were just smell and color, no rude vegetable integrity.

“Let’s get these planted,” Poppa said tenderly. “And I’ll take you to the twelve-thirty train.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I’m sorry I go away so much.”

“It’s okay,” he told her, and she knew he was telling the truth. Susan’s absence punched a hole in the house, and Billy’s did, too. Susan took a piece of the future with her when she went; Billy took the mistakes of the past and made them permanent. Her own departure had a different kind of logic. It was part of her job to leave.

Sometimes Cassandra was in the bar. Sometimes he wasn’t. Zoe found that she waited all week for the nights she went out to the bar with Trancas, and when Cassandra wasn’t there Zoe felt dejected and diminished, as if a promise had not been kept. When Cassandra was there Zoe said hello to him with a swell of anxious hope, the way she’d speak to a boy she loved. Cassandra always said, ‘Hello, honey,’ and moved on. Zoe wasn’t in love with Cassandra but she wanted something from him. She couldn’t tell what it was.

Trancas started turning tricks to earn the money for a motorcycle. She told the first story as an accomplishment.

“I hung around in front of this theater on Forty-second,” she said to Zoe in a coffee shop on Waverly. “I was so scared, I was like, what if nobody wants me? What if nobody even knows what I’m doing?”

Trancas’s face was bright and homely, red with an exaltation that resembled rage. She dumped five spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee. She wore her gray denim jacket and a Grateful Dead T-shirt, a skeleton crowned with roses.

She said, “I told myself I’d stand there, like, fifteen minutes, and if nothing happened, I’d go home. So, like, about fourteen and a half minutes go by and suddenly this guy comes up to me, just a regular guy about fifty. He didn’t look rich but he didn’t look like a creep either, he was just all polyester, one of those
guys,
you know, just a guy, probably worked in an office and did something all day and then went home again. Anyway, he comes up to me and at first I thought, he’s a friend of my father’s. Then I thought, no, he’s gonna tell me something like the bus stop is down at the corner or give me some kind of Jesus pamphlet or something. But no. He walks right up to me and says, ‘Hi.’ I say hello back, and he says, ‘Can we make a deal?’ And my heart is pounding and I’m so scared but my voice comes out like I’ve done this a thousand times before, like I’m an old hand at it. I look at him a minute and then I say, ‘Maybe.’ And it was
weird,
Zo. It was like I knew exactly what to do and what to say and how to be. He asks, ‘What do you charge?’ and I say, ‘Depends on what you want.’ I was so
cool,
I don’t know where it came from.”

“What did
he
say?” Zoe asked. She leaned forward over the scarred, speckled surface of the table. In the kitchen of the coffee shop, a man with an accent sang, “Hang down, Sloopy, Sloopy, hang down.”

Trancas said, “He said, ‘I want to get blown, and I want a little affection.’ And you know what I said?”

“What?”

“I said, ‘A blow job costs thirty dollars, and I don’t do affection.’”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true. I was cool, Zo. I was playing a part and I was perfect at it.”

“Then what happened?”

“He said, ‘How’s about twenty-five?’ And I just
looked
at him, like, stop wasting my time, jerk. And he sort of laughed, this big old haw-haw-haw with his big teeth showing, and he said okay, thirty it is. Then I thought, shit, what happens now? Am I supposed to know a hotel for us to go to? But he said to come with him, and we went, like, a few blocks over to this hotel he was staying in, the Edison or something. Yeah, the Edison. And we went up to his room and I said, ‘Before we go any farther, how about my thirty bucks?’ He did that haw-haw-haw thing again, and he gave me the money. Man. His teeth were as big as dice. He didn’t ask me any questions. He didn’t even ask how old I was. He just took his clothes off and he wasn’t a pretty sight but he wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever seen either and I took my clothes off and blew the motherfucker right there on the bed and then I put my clothes back on and got the hell out.”

“That’s it?” Zoe asked.

“That’s it. Thirty bucks.”

“You really did it?”

“Only way to get the money.”

“Weren’t you scared?”

“Zoe, I
told
you I was scared.”

“I mean, of him.”

“No. He was nothing to be scared of, you’d know that if you’d seen him.”

Zoe sipped her coffee, looked out the steamed window at Waverly Place. An obese man walked a gleeful-looking yellow dog he had dressed in a white blouse and a plaid skirt. There was a new world with no rules and there was the old world with too many. She didn’t know how to live in either place. Her mother was the guardian spirit of the old world. Her mother was proud and offended and she warned Zoe: Never let a boy talk you into losing control, boys want to ruin everything you prize.

Cassandra was the guardian spirit of the new world. He believed in sex but he believed in safety, too. He cautioned girls against going off with men who secretly worshipped harm.

Zoe said to Trancas, “I don’t know if you should be doing this.”

Trancas’s face held its rapt, furious light. She was already gone.

‘Thirty dollars, Zo,” she said. “For, like, twenty minutes’ work. Nine more guys, and I can get myself that Harley.”

“It’s prostitution, though.”

“Man. So is being a waitress or secretary. This just pays better.”

Zoe looked at Trancas and tried to know. Was she setting herself free, or was she beginning the long work of killing herself? How could you be sure of the difference between emancipation and suicide?

“If you’re going to keep doing it, be careful,” Zoe said.

“Right,” Trancas answered, and Zoe could see her dead. She could see her blue-white skin and the faint smile she’d wear, having beaten her mother, having gotten first to the wildest, most remote place of all. Having won.

Cassandra stood at the bar that night in an old prom dress, a chaos of emerald satin and lime-green chiffon. Zoe waited until Trancas had gone to the bathroom and went quickly up to Cassandra. Cassandra held a drink in his hand, talked to a tall black man in a velvet cloak and a canary-colored pillbox hat.

Zoe said, “Hello, Cassandra.”

Cassandra’s face was clever and squashed-looking under his pancake makeup, his lipstick and eyelashes. Cosmetics and the intricate cross-purposes of being a man and being a woman seemed to impel him forward, and he could look, at times, as if he were pressing his face against a pane of glass, speaking distinctly and a little too loud to someone on the other side.

“Why, hello, baby,” he said. “How are you?”

“I’m all right. Actually, I wondered if I could talk to you for a minute.”

“Honey, you can talk all you want. Start at the beginning and just work your way straight through to the end.”

“Maybe, alone? It will just take a minute.”

“There's nothing in this world that could possibly shock Miss Cinnamon here,” Cassandra said.

“You got that right,” Miss Cinnamon said. A scrap of yellow veil quivered like insect wings over his shining brow.

Zoe paused nervously. “Well,” she said. “You know Trancas, my friend?”

“Sure I do.”

Zoe paused. She wanted to bury her face in Cassandra's gaudy dress, the slick, livid sheen of it. She wanted to sit on Cassandra's skinny lap, to whisper secrets in his ear and be told that a wicked and fabulous safety waited beyond the dangers of the ordinary world.

“Speak up, honey,” Cassandra said. His voice was hard and sure as rain in a gutter.

Zoe said, “She's started turning tricks.”

“Well, I'm sure that's very profitable.”

Miss Cinnamon put a huge hand on Zoe's arm. “Does she have herself a can of Mace, honey?”

“I'm worried about her,” Zoe said.

“She should carry Mace and a knife,” Miss Cinnamon said. “She can get herself a cute little knife, it doesn't have to be any big old thing. She can slip it right down inside her boot.”

“Why are you worried?” Cassandra asked.

“I'm afraid she'll get hurt.”

“That's why you need Mace and a knife, honey. Listen to what I'm telling you,”

“People do get hurt,” Cassandra said. “Terrible things happen.”

“I know,” Zoe said.

“You girls are so
young.
Don't you have parents, or something? Who takes care of you?”

“Trancas and her mother live here in the city. I come up on weekends, I live with my family out on Long Island.”

“Another planet,” Cassandra said.

“Terrible things happen there, too,” Zoe told her.

“Honey, I can imagine. Oh, look, here comes your friend.”

Trancas was back from the bathroom. She saw Zoe talking to Cassandra and came over, full of her own greedy happiness, her love of trials and ruin. Zoe thought of her folding money into her pocket before sucking off a man with teeth the size of dice.

“Hey, Cassandra,” Trancas said in her big-voiced, ranch-hand style. To Miss Cinnamon she added, “Great hat.”

“Thank you, baby,” Miss Cinnamon said demurely. Zoe saw that Miss Cinnamon had once been a little boy going to church with his mother. He had sat before an altar, under the suffering wooden eyes of Christ, as a chorus of velvets and brocades and crinolines sighed around him.