Rainey Royal (9 page)

The girl has a Renaissance face, half beautiful and half plain. “You look like a Botticelli,” Rainey says.

“Andy Sak might like her when we’re done with her,” says Tina.

Leah winces, though it might be from how Tina combs out each new section with a yank. “Botticelli,” she murmurs. “He did Venus on that shell.”

“Goddamn,” says Rainey. “I should have talked to you sooner. We should go to the museum. Tina won’t come with me.”

Tina looks over at her. “Yes, I will,” she says. “I will, Rain.”

Rainey ignores this. Miss Delectable Dial will have to earn her trips to the museum. “Reach over and get her something cute out of my drawer, Teen.”

“I don’t need to change,” says Leah. “Just the makeover.”

“This
is
the makeover,” says Rainey. “We’re hanging out tonight.”

“I’m not allowed,” says Tina, but she hands over a white blouse that Rainey has altered so it’s mostly lace below the bust. She looks at Leah with her hair completely off her face and says, almost to herself, “I don’t recognize you.”

“I know,” says Rainey. “Gorgeous, huh.”

Male footsteps make the stairs creak. Tina tends to a new section of braid as if studying an algebra equation in very small print. Rainey listens to the second flight of creaking
and waits for the doorway to fill with Howard. On the stairs, he is humming bebop.
Hum job
, thinks Rainey. It sounds half musical and half obscene, a phrase she has heard before, probably in this house.

When Howard appears he is all door. His hair falls to his shoulders in a way that makes women tuck it behind the Kool over his left ear.

“Hi, Howard.” Tina’s voice is slow and musical, as if everything in the room is under water. Rainey watches her closely. Stolen earrings gleam from under Tina’s hair, and on her wrist is Paul’s watch, which seems to Rainey like a terrible risk: walking down the street with plunder flashing like traffic lights.

“Miss Temptation.” Howard bows his head formally.

“Hi, Mr. Royal,” says Leah, and to Rainey, “It’s beautiful, but I can’t wear it. You can see everything—”

“I wear this to
school
,” Rainey says.

“It’s Howard,” says Howard, “and somebody in this room should definitely wear that.”

“Can I try it?” says Tina.

“Not you,” says Howard, studying Leah. “Her.”

Leah says, “I decline.”

Rainey watches Tina’s fingernail slip into her mouth. She marvels that Leah thinks everything is about the shirt, when in fact Tina is waiting to be tuned again by her best friend’s father’s attention, and Howard is flirting with the school giraffe.

“What, do I not get a vote?” says Howard. He uncocks the Kool from behind his ear. Tina rises with a pink plastic lighter, and he grips her entire hand while he inhales.

Then he kisses her knuckles.

Rainey, fierce, says, “Howard, would you get
out
? You got the clarinet vote, that’s it. Put it on, Leah.”

“Where’s the bathroom?”

“Leah, will you just turn around and put on the top before I undo this whole damn makeover? I swear I’ll take out every braid.”

“Why are you doing this?” says Leah softly, fingering the lace. “I can’t change here.”

“But you can,” says Howard. “I won’t look.” He turns sideways in the doorway, extends one arm to the opposite doorpost, and tucks his head down behind it, smoking.

“He won’t cheat,” says Rainey, because she knows this one thing about her father. He likes to win what he gets.

Leah looks at Howard with his head under his wing. Then she scoots around on the dressing-table stool. Her spine is as long and pale as a yardstick, bisected by a white bra strap. When I’m done with her, thinks Rainey, she’ll be wearing black. Leah turns back in the mostly lace blouse, and Rainey says through her fingers, “You’re beautiful. I bet you had no idea.”

Howard turns, too. He presses his fingertips to his lips, then opens his hands wide. The gesture is packed with irony, but Rainey wonders if Leah can tell. Leah is the tottering
lamb who cannot see the altar. “Daughter, you have said it. She has no idea. It is the source of her beauty.”

Tina doesn’t wait for Leah to even blush. “I can’t go out tonight,” she says, as if she has spent the past five minutes submerged. “You should wait for me.”

Rainey looks at the clarinet case. It is a pebbly black box that hunkers by her dressing table. With sugary innocence she says, “We won’t go anywhere exciting. Maybe we’ll hang out here.” She gets a hooded look from Tina.

“Fine,” says Tina. “If they play again, I’m going down to listen.”

“In that case,” says Howard, “why don’t we have a brief lesson.”

Don’t
, thinks Rainey.

“Have fun at the museum.” Tina picks up her pack and the loaner clarinet.

“Always carry your ax,” says Howard approvingly. He puts a hand on Tina’s shoulder.

Rainey looks away. She senses that Leah, demoted now to merely the girl in the lace blouse, seems altered by what she saw in Howard’s eyes.
The source of her beauty
. She sits straighter. She feels, Rainey decides, shinier.

Rainey can be a mirror, too. A better mirror. She will finish the French braids and teach Leah the Pearl Drops toothpaste move, and they’ll steal some of Howard’s pot. Maybe Leah will sleep over. She will teach her how to dance.

“You should take off Paul’s watch,” says Rainey.

“You should quit using Estelle’s photos in art,” says Tina coolly.

“Who’s Estelle?” says Leah.

Howard makes an arch in the doorway with his arm. Tina ducks under it without looking back.

T
HEY ARE, IN FACT
, having an actual lesson.

From outside Howard’s closed door Rainey hears clarinet scales, clumsy, with mistakes and do-overs. She walks into the bathroom and listens through the narrowly open door. For a moment there’s silence from the bedroom, then fluid, mournful scales pour from the clarinet—that would be Howard, of course. She’s never really thought about clarinet till now, the way its private, throaty unhappiness underlies even its lighter notes. She thought oboe had sole claim to musical grief.

Silence again, then Tina’s laughter.

She listens through ten more sets of scales—Tina’s—punctuated by murmurings and bursts of laughter. Lessons should not be this much fun. An ache opens in her stomach and spreads to her chest. From the third floor, Leah calls, “Rainey?” and Rainey makes her own inelegant music, creaking across the floorboards and back up the stairs.

T
INA, CARRYING HER PACK
and the loaner clarinet, walks to the subway at Union Square and takes it uptown, like crazy far. Rainey watches her from between the cars, swaying.
Leah, still wearing the lace blouse, hangs back. Tina stays on till Ninety-Sixth, where all the white people disappear off the face of the planet. “God, let her walk downtown,” says Rainey, but she follows half a block behind as Tina heads north on Lex. They pass Spanish people and tough-looking kids just out of school. Tina walks without apparent fear.

“Are we safe?” says Leah. In fact people are staring at her, a girl two inches shy of six feet, hair braided tight but flaming in color, lace revealing her navel.

“We’re cool,” says Rainey. Toughness is her métier, but she does not carry a knife like everyone knows kids do up here, so she is feeling a little freaked. She turns her mother’s ring around on her finger; now the diamond and rubies won’t flash.

“She’ll see us,” says Leah. “She’ll kill me.” She considers. “She’ll try.”

Rainey’s not sure who knocks her out more, this pretty shiny brave Leah, born in her pink room an hour ago, or reckless Tina who strolls toward robbery or rape or whatever awaits chicks who wander past projects in Spanish Harlem. Maybe, having held a gun, Tina lost her fears. Rainey certainly feels more capable.

“Let’s get this over with.” Rainey grabs Leah’s wrist, bone thin, and they walk up behind Tina at the light on Ninety-Eighth.

“Tina,” says Rainey, and when Tina whirls around, “Don’t get mad. You owe me.”

“I knew you were there,” says Tina, “and I owe you shit. You, you’re dead.”

“I quit being dead,” says Leah, though she looks at Rainey when she says it.

“You’re in my neighborhood, you might already be dead.” They are standing outside a hair salon with its door open and that Ricky Ricardo music playing. In the window are pictures of women with different hairstyles, fancy ones, updos, stuff none of the Urban Day moms would be caught dead with.

“You’re Porto Rican,” says Rainey.

“Puerto,” says Leah automatically.

“
Tú, cállate
,” says Tina. “Puerto. I ride the bus. Is that a problem?”

Rainey scrutinizes her. “You don’t ride the bus.”

“Say it. I ride the bus,” says Tina.

“But you don’t,” says Rainey. Tina has dark honey hair and light skin, though Rainey can almost now perceive the faintest cast to it, maybe, she thinks, like Sophia Loren.

“That’s your big fat mistake. You look at me, but you don’t see.
I ride the bus
.”

She wheels around and walks toward Ninety-Ninth. Rainey and Leah follow. They pass a storefront that fixes flat tires and another that seems to sell dolls covered with dust and has young men lounging outside, watching them intently. “Okay, if it matters that much, you ride the bus.”

“It matters that much.”

“You ride the bus, and you’re going to give me that fucking clarinet.”

“I’m going to give you shit.”

“Clarinet,” says Rainey, “or I never talk to you again.”

Tina hesitates, then thrusts the clarinet hard into Rainey’s arms. Suddenly it’s the last thing Rainey wants to touch.

“Your father is—fucked up.”

“Did you kiss him?”

Leah looks back and forth between them, riveted. A meat truck roars by, almost consuming Tina’s answer.

“No,” says Tina, but she says
no
with two syllables, and Rainey hears
yes
and lifts her hand. Tina doesn’t flinch. “He touched my mouth.”

“He touched your fucking
mouth
? With what?” Rainey’s hand is gripped at the wrist by Leah. She wonders if she would have slapped Tina.

“He put two fingers on my lips. He said pretend it was the mouthpiece. He just said blow. It was part of the lesson.”

“Did you kiss them?” Rainey lets Leah push her hand down.

“His fingers?”

“Yeah, were you kissing his goddamn fingers?”

“It was like this, if you really have to know,” says Tina, and on the corner of Ninety-Ninth Street and Lexington Avenue, surrounded by passersby and storekeepers in doorways and a boy with a transistor radio to his ear and two young men in suits and a young mother with a baby carriage, she takes
Rainey’s first two fingers. Rainey lets her do it, lets Tina put her fingertips with their bitten nails on Tina’s soft lower lip. She feels the damp flesh and the hardness of teeth as Tina edges her fingertips fractionally deeper and thinks,
This is the softness inside Tina Dial
, and, a second later,
My father was here
.

Tina closes her lips and blows.

Rainey yanks her fingers back and wipes them on her top.

“I didn’t know what to do. He’s Howard Royal. He was giving me a lesson. Is that a kiss?”

“No,” says Rainey. “It’s disgusting. He’s my father and you were in his bedroom and that makes you—”

“Go ahead,” says Tina.

Rainey looks up the block, where a Dumpster is parked outside a fenced-in empty lot. “Wait here,” she says. Because of Howard her mother has split and her best friend has almost defected, and there have been other losses she cannot find words for. She walks to the Dumpster and hurls the clarinet case inside. It lands on a raucous heap of bottles.

She walks back to Tina and Leah and says, “Tell Howard you gave it back to me.”

“It’s under control,” says Tina.

“That’s criminal,” says Leah. “I could find it a home.” She starts forward, but Rainey grabs her backpack strap. They watch in silence as a teenage boy in burnt-orange pants moves in on the Dumpster.

“So you were going to follow me all the way, right?” Tina says. “You almost call me a slut because of your sick father
who can’t give a normal lesson to save his life. I suppose now you want to meet my grandmother.”

“She
exists
?”

“You seriously want to know—forget it.” Tina starts walking uptown so abruptly they trot to catch up.

“Why wouldn’t she exist?” says Leah, and Rainey thinks, We have to give this girl a job more interesting than being perpetually in the dark.

Tina laughs. “Yeah, she exists.” Her voice takes on a caramel edge—that’s the only way Rainey can think of it. “The question is, do
you
exist? She thinks I study with a good Catholic girl named Silda.”

“You lied about
me
?”

“You think a decent Puerto Rican grandmother would let me hang out at your house?”

Rainey opens her mouth and closes it. They turn east on 101st Street. People gather on the stoops of brownstones in a proprietary way that Rainey never sees in Greenwich Village, and it seems to her that every one of those people ignores her, stares at Leah, the beautiful giraffe, and nods or says something in Spanish to Tina.

They stop in front of a gray building zigzagged with fire escape and crosshatched with window gates. “So, my grandmother,” says Tina. “If you look at her funny, your most private business is going to be all over the school.”

Rainey feels half like a butterfly has landed on her wrist and half like a knife is angled to her neck. She notices that
Leah, not the type to glance at anyone’s grandmother funny, is doing a decent job of staying under Tina’s radar. A pack of kids saunters toward them, checking Leah out while they talk and smoke. She wonders if Tina will walk them back to the subway after dark or if they will have to get there on attitude alone, keys spliced out between their knuckles. Or maybe not. Some of those boys are gorgeous.

“She’s a sweet lady. I cook her breakfast and dinner, and I try to keep the scholarship you didn’t know I had. And I don’t get paid twenty dollars a week to live with her, and it sucks that you didn’t believe me.”