Sugar (19 page)

“What are you up to?” Pearl asked and sat down after a slight moment of hesitation.

“You need a new look, Miss Pearl. Not that there is anything wrong with the look you have now, it’s just that it’s too Bigelow,” Sugar said, her hands fiddling with Pearl’s tight bun trying to find the pins and release it from its present confined state.

“Stop it,” Pearl said and tried to slap Sugar’s hands away. “Ain’t nothing wrong with my look.” And then curious now, “What you plan on doing?”

Sugar stood back and placed her hands on her perfectly curved hips. She still wore the denim shorts and bright orange tank top she’d lounged in on the porch earlier that day.

“I plans on making you look forty instead of . . . fifty?” Sugar questioned and leaned forward, hoping Pearl would reveal her age.

Pearl blushed, joyful that Sugar had missed her true age by ten years. “I believe I look just fine,” Pearl said and turned her bashful smile away from Sugar.

“I ain’t say you don’t, all I’m saying is that you could look better, better than fine.”

They laughed together, and Pearl did not resist when Sugar went at the bun again. “Lord, Miss Pearl, you’ve got a whole head full of hair, pretty too,” Sugar said as her fingers played in Pearl’s long, thick mane. “Why you always wear it up? You hiding it from someone?” Pearl shook her head no and placed her hands over her mouth, hiding the smile that was plastered to her lips.

“First off, the gray has got to go.” Sugar reached into the bag and pulled out a dark bottle of liquid.

“What’s that?” Pearl said, looking around Sugar to eye the bottle.

“Dye. Dye for your hair.”

“Oh no!” Pearl said, trying to stand. Sugar pushed her back down on the toilet.

“Just be still, Miss Pearl. Trust me, I know what I’m doing.”

Pearl sat shaking as Sugar parted her hair into sections and squeezed the dark liquid onto it. She listened to Sugar talk about her time in St. Louis, the time when Sullivan Place was hot and Mary Bedford’s house was the place to be. She did not explain in full exactly why it was so, but Pearl got the gist that it was a whorehouse, and she held her tongue still from speaking against it. “I usta dye a lot of heads then. No one ever wanted to have their own hair color. Always red or blond. Ha, me, I never went in for all that, I was happy with my wigs.”

Pearl listened and prayed that her hair would not simply slip off her head and drop to her tiled floor. The only person she had allowed on her head for years was Fayline. Every other Thursday at two, a wash and press and then back into the bun. She herself barely dislodged her bun, except to take it down to give her head a good scratching and greasing.

By nine o’clock Pearl came face to face with a woman that she’d known so many years earlier. She stood and stared open-mouthed at herself in the mirror, unable to believe that the woman who grinned back at her was indeed her.

“Oh my Lord,” were the only words she could repeat over and over again.

Her hair hung limp and wet, shining blacker than night around her face. She stood that way for a while, running her fingers through her hair, and pulling at the curls that had begun to take hold of it as it dried in the humid house air.

“You look beautiful, Miss Pearl,” Sugar said. She, too, was amazed. A bottle of dye had weeded out the age that had grown there.

“You miss her, she sure look like she been missing you, Miss Pearl,” Sugar said as she coiled Pearl’s hair into a French roll, leaving ringlets of curls to hang loose around her face.

“I ain’t never seen her before,” Pearl said in profound awe. She touched her face lightly, afraid that any contact with her fingers would cause the vision before her to waver and then distort, like a disturbed reflection in a pool of water.

“Joe is gonna love you, Miss Pearl!” Sugar yelled in delight and clapped her hands together like a gleeful child.

Joe’s name brought Pearl back to reality. “Oh no,” she whispered. Her face took on a fretful look. She turned to Sugar, wringing her hands, tears formed in her eyes. “Oh Lord . . . Joe?” How could she have forgotten that she had a husband? She’d made a decision, a drastic decision without consulting her husband. Suppose he hated it? Suppose he hated her for having done it?

“Oh Sugar, what have you done?” Pearl shrieked and dragged her hands down the length of her face, as if the very action would somehow change her black hair back to the ravaged gray it’d been just minutes ago.

Sugar looked on, bewildered at Pearl’s sudden reaction. She was hurt.

“Miss Pearl,” she started slowly, “what do you mean, what have I done? What I’ve done was make you look younger, beautiful. What’s wrong with that?”

Pearl did not respond, she just stood staring at herself and shaking her head in dismay.

“What you want me to do, turn you back? Make you look old again?”

“I am old!” Pearl screamed and pushed past Sugar.

Sugar followed her into the bedroom. “You’re older, not old, Miss Pearl,” Sugar said. Pearl sat down on the bed and placed her head in her hands. Sugar leaned against the wall and examined the tight neatness of the room. The room lacked life. By instinct, Sugar knew nothing close to sexual passion had occurred there in a long time.

“You know what you need? You need to go out. Get away from this house, this town,” Sugar said. She walked over to Pearl and knelt down beside her. “Miss Pearl, why you acting like your life is over? It’s just a dye job. In time the gray will come back.”

“Before Joe gets back?” Pearl asked hopefully.

“No, not by then,” Sugar said with a wisp of a smile. “C’mon, we going out and show you off.”

Pearl looked at Sugar as if she’d gone mad. “Out? Out where?” Pearl’s eyes sparkled in spite of herself.

Sugar just smiled. “Just get dressed,” she said. “I’ll be back.” And then she was gone. Pearl heard the front door close and quick footsteps move the few feet down the pavement to #10 Grove Street.

Pearl sat on her bed staring at the floor. Periodically she would look over at the worn Bible that sat conspicuously on the nightstand beside the bed. Its black cracked cover seemed to fill the whole room and dwarf her. There was nothing in the Bible that said you shouldn’t dye your hair. There were no words that said, Thou shalt not befriend a whore. No, Pearl knew the Bible from cover to cover, and those shalt not’s did not exist.

Pearl got up and went to the full-length mirror that stood in the corner of her room. She stood before it and looked at herself, the new her. She fingered her hair, soft, silky and black. She touched her face, ran her fingers over the face that was absent of wrinkles. Her eyes held her age, not the skin on her face. Slowly, methodically, without being totally conscious of her movements, she began to disrobe. She slipped her dress over her head. The slip followed, as did the brassiere and stockings and panties. She stood before herself, her naked self, and began to re-familiarize herself with her body.

The once flat stomach was rounded and protruded forward; it was scarred with motherhood marks three times over. If she could, she would not even sell those long, black marks that crisscrossed her abdomen, no, they made up who she was—a mother.

The breasts that once sat high and curved now sloped, but did not sag. Her hips were thicker, rounder, and so were her legs. She turned to examine her behind. It was large, expanded by time and good eating. All in all, Pearl did not have a body unworthy of wanting. She released the French roll and let her hair cascade down onto her shoulders. Wild, black waves of hair. She giggled to herself and hurriedly covered her mouth with her hands.

The night was dawning dark blue as the full moon took its place high above Bigelow, giving light to dark back roads and lost souls. A breeze kicked up, late-night September air that prepared you for October and beyond moved through the open window, provoking the curtains into shrill and frenzied movements. Without thinking, Pearl moved to close the window, and in doing so, exposed herself to the night. She stopped, but did not draw back. The night air moved seductively across her naked body. It was tantalizing and invigorating. Slowly, the night caressed her, transforming her nipples into resistant pebbles and teasing the small, pointed, pink flesh between her legs. Pearl parted the curtains and leaned the top part of her body out of the window, allowing her breasts to sway slowly in the night air. The night welcomed her nakedness. It felt so good, so right, so free. Suddenly, she understood.

This sudden empathy she felt for Sugar sent her reeling back from the open window. She snatched her clothes up from the floor and wrapped them, best she could, around her nakedness. What was she if she was able to take part in, understand and even enjoy an act that was clearly amoral? Had her acceptance of Sugar made her susceptible to her low-down traits? Was being a whore like having a flu—could you catch it like the diseases that hid and floated invisible in the air?

A shaken, unsure laugh bounced off the walls. “I’m being so stupid,” Pearl said aloud and dropped her clothes back down to the floor. She started toward the closet door to retrieve her gown from the hook it hung on during the day. As she went, she caught, once again, the naked sight of herself in the mirror and something in her smiled.

“What you gone and done?” Sugar stood before Pearl, dressed in a dress so tight, it was as if her body was smeared with red paint and dusted with white gardenias. The tops of her breasts sat recklessly at the edge of the low curved neckline and jiggled like currant jelly with each draw of breath she took. “Why ain’t you dressed, and why is your hair all undone?”

“ ’Cause it’s bedtime, that’s why,” Pearl said solemnly and looked back at the open Bible in her lap. Sugar shifted her feet and swung her tiny red handbag onto the bed.

“It ain’t, either, Miss Pearl. You ain’t gonna sleep on my hard work and time. We going out to show you off. I don’t give a shit what you say!” She grabbed Pearl by the shoulders and pulled her into a standing position.

Pearl raised tired eyes to Sugar’s face. A glint of newfound knowledge lingered in her dark eyes. Sugar recognized it, she’d seen it in her own eyes some time ago. She walked over to Pearl’s closet and began rummaging through the frugal, dreary-colored dresses that hung there. Dress after dress she pulled from the closet, examined and then tossed to the bed. “Ain’t you got nothing a little spicy?” Sugar asked in frustration.

Pearl was sitting again, flipping through her Bible. Every once in a while she would throw a look over her shoulder to see Sugar’s progress. Her mouth was tired of saying no, she could not remember having to use the word so often in her whole life, except of course when she was raising her children.

“I guess this will have to do.” Sugar held out a long pale pink dress. It was sleeveless, and had a large white collared neckline that came together as a huge bow in the front. The bottom was a million tiny pleats. Pearl turned to see what Sugar had found mildly approving. It was a dress her son Seth had given her for her birthday. It was a beautiful dress, but Pearl never wore it. She always imagined a younger woman wrapped in its silky cloth, but she could not bring herself to part with it, and so it hung at the back of the closet waiting for Pearl to remove it, admire its print and the sweeping sound of its material, only to place it back in the closet until she was moved to do it again.

“I ain’t wearing that,” Pearl said. She saw Sugar smile a little. “And I ain’t going,” she quickly injected and shook her finger at Sugar.

“I said you are.”

“Ain’t.”

“Are too!”

“Ain’t.” Pearl was unmovable.

“Okay, Miss Pearl, what can I say or do that will convince you to go?”

“Nothing.”

Sugar looked down at the old woman. Pearl’s lips moved silently as she read her Bible. Sugar sighed and began surveying the room again. A small cross sat on the wall over the bed, and another, fashioned out of palm leaves, rested atop a jar of Vaseline on the dresser. Sugar suddenly realized how she could persuade her.

“If you go . . . I’ll come to church with you.”

Pearl’s lips stopped moving and she raised her eyes to meet Sugar’s.

“You can have me for a month of Sundays,” Sugar continued. She was grieving inside. Church wasn’t the place she wanted to spend her free time, but she knew that was probably the only way Pearl would agree to go. What she didn’t know, was why it was so important to her that Pearl actually went.

Pearl closed her Bible and considered Sugar’s offer. Sugar craved a cigarette, but instead bit her thumbnail in anticipation.

“Two months of Sundays,” Pearl said, holding up a pair of fingers.

Sugar bit her lip, and then in surrender she said, “Okay, two months.”

The dress hugged Pearl’s hips a little too snugly, and embraced her bosom like an old familiar friend. She kept tugging at the material, hoping that she could stretch it loose.

“Stop it,” Sugar said and slapped Pearl’s hands away from the material. “You look just fine.” She was applying a light dusting of baby powder to Pearl’s face.

“That lipstick is too bright,” Pearl said and shrunk back as Sugar tried to apply the flaming red lipstick to Pearl’s lips.

“It ain’t. That stuff you got there is too boring and too damn old,” Sugar said, referring to the fifty-cent, doughy pink lipstick Pearl had tried to give to her. It
was
old, and was already in the beginning stages of decay.

“I ain’t putting that loud color on my lips.” Pearl turned her lips inside her mouth and folded her arms across her chest like a stubborn child.

“Okay, okay. Have it your way, then,” Sugar said and threw the lipstick back in her bag.

Pearl looked like a doll. Her hair was back in the French roll, her eyelids lightly dusted with blue shadow. The color wasn’t completely flattering to Pearl’s skin color, or Sugar’s for that fact, it was just a wild ocean that raged on your face and called attention to your eyes. Pearl put on her Sunday fake pearls, but Sugar made her take them off.

“You ain’t going to church, Miss Pearl.”

Pearl kept examining herself in the mirror, still unsure that it was her that looked back at her.