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CHAPTER TWO


"Between 1900—1930, two and a quarter million Black Americans left the farms and plantations of the South. Most of them emigrated to selected urban areas of the north—New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Detroit being among the most popular destinations . . . [from 1910 to 1920], the black population in the North increased from a mere 75,000 to 300,000, an increase of 400% . . .
"One hundred Black Americans were Iynched during the first year of the Twentieth Century. By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the figure stood at 1,100 . . .
"Many industries sent agents into the South to lure the blacks north with promises of good jobs . . . it was a common practice for the agents to purchase tickets for whole families and to move them en masse for resettlement in the great industrial cities. The war had drained away the white manpower needed to build the ships, work the steel, pack the meat, and man the machines; and it had also cut off the normal supply of immigrant labor from Europe.
"After the war was over, the black man's welcome wore thin . . ."

—C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America 
"New York City's population shifted as dramatically during the decade of the 1970s as at any time in the history of the city.
"That is the conclusion of demographers . . . who have now had several months to study the first reports from the 1980 census.
"The figures provide a profile of a shrinking populace that nevertheless includes more old people and young adults, but markedly fewer children and teenagers.
"The figures show what may have been the largest exodus of New Yorkers in the city's history . . .
"And they show a city where the traditional 'minority groups' are now close to being—if they have not already become—a majority of the population."

—Michael Oreskes, New York Times, Sept. 20, 1982

 

Dena turned out the light and sat on the edge of the bed.

"Jennifer, honey, I think it's time that you and I had a little talk." I always knew we'd have to have this talk someday, she thought. Why didn't I prepare?

"Mother," the girl said, wrinkling her nose and pulling the blankets up to her chin, "we had that talk. Ages ago."

"Not that talk. This one we've never had. Time we did."

"Oh. That talk. About race, you mean."

"Yes. After what happened uptown this afternoon, something has to be said." Dena shifted uneasily. "I just don't know what."

"Me either."

"Do you understand why those four boys were mad at us?"

"Because you're married to a white man."

"And because you're white, and they thought you were my daughter."

"I don't understand that part."

"I'm not sure I do either, honey. But . . . See, one of the reasons that many black people hate to see a black marry a white is the question of what color the children would be. In North America the whites so badly outnumber us, some of us are afraid that if we interbreed with whites, one day we'll disappear entirely. You look to them like their greatest fear come true, as long as they think you're my daughter."

"I am your daughter, Dena."

"My biological daughter, I mean, and you know it, girl. But that gets you a hug anyway."

The two embraced, and held on. Jennifer's hands were strong on Dena's shoulder blades. The child smelled sweet. "Jennifer," Dena murmured into her ear. "Oh Jennifer, I feel as though I ought to apologize for those boys, apologize to you."

"Okay," Jennifer whispered back. "Then I'll apologize for all the generations of white people that made them so crazy; then we'll be even. Is that good?"

Dena giggled. "Sweetheart, when I grow up I hope I turn out as wise as you." She brushed hair back from her daughter's face.

"Well, I'd say you've got a shot. You married well."

"Goodnight, Jennifer. Dream pretty dreams."

"G'night, Mom." She started to roll over. "Do you know why I love you so much?"

Dena nodded. "Sure. Because I never call you 'Jen' or 'Jenny' but always Jennifer."

"Almost. Because nobody ever had to tell you that."

Dena closed the bedroom door and stood awhile, smiling. I don't need to have one of my own, she thought. I couldn't love a child more than Jennifer no matter whose belly it came out of. I thought child-geniuses were supposed to be insufferable.

She looked around her own bedroom, at the heaps and stacks of things that would have to be unpacked sometime soon. If she started now, she'd be going at it at five AM—and she was already tired. The bed was made, there was room to reach it; sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof.

She left the room, went into the main room. The shade was up; through the heavily-barred window she could see her husband out in the garden. He was sitting in a white canvas-and-magnesium director's chair, facing the back fence, looking up at the sky. She noted that his glass was almost empty. She made two of the same and brought them outside. The night was warm and humid; she smelled curry and burnt pasta. "Any stars up there?"

"A few. They look sick."

"City air. Here's a fresh drink."

"Thanks, love. As far as I'm concerned, the brightest star in this garden just walked in, carrying two drinks. Oh—let me get you a chair."

"What would I do with a chair?" she said, sitting on his lap. "Russell, about this afternoon—" She felt him tense.

"Yeah."

Thought so, she congratulated herself. "I just wanted to say I think you handled it well."

"Sure. Sat there and watched it happen. Brilliant strategy."

"Yes, it was."

"Perhaps it might have been, if I'd had the slightest alternative."

"But you did. Two at least that I can think of. You might have gone all macho, charged out of the car and made me a widow. Or you might have gibbered and wept with fear and terrified Jennifer."

"I wanted to."

"But you didn't. I did."

"And what did I do? Nothing whatsoever. I sat there and waited for a miracle."

"And just by coincidence, that turned out to be the best thing you could have done, didn't it? If you'd been trying to fight them when Michael came, it might have turned out differently."

He thought about that, searching her face. "So I'm just being a jerk," he asked softly, "feeling bad about my performance?"

"I didn't say that. What you're feeling, my true love, is what is sometimes called The Sorrow of the Survivor. And it is a wonderful feeling—compared to the alternative. So be miserable and enjoy it."

He set his drink down, hugged her close, and ran a hand through her hair. But Dena could feel tension still in him. "How's Jen?" he asked after a while.

"Fine, fine." She sat up straight in his lap. "No, that's a little glib. She's shook up, of course. I think that was the first real-life violent confrontation she's ever seen. But she's tough, Russ. She checked out the bars on her bedroom window really carefully—and then never glanced at them again. We talked a little. She's okay. Am I too heavy on your lap!"

She always asked; he always said no. "Yeah, a little." She got up, and he did too. "Sit down, darling, I want to show you something."

She did as he asked, and looked around her new backyard while he went back inside. Five-story apartment buildings on all sides cut off all but an overhead square of night sky. The head-high board fence that enclosed the garden was festooned with wires for phone, power, and TV hookup, running every which way. She heard two stereos going, different songs that coincidentally happened to be in the same key. The music harmonized most of the time occasionally diverging in a weirdly interesting way. She saw glimmerings of a dance set to such music. Dena saw such half-formed images frequently—and had wasted many hours of her life proving to herself that glimmerings were all she was ever going to see, that the gift of choreography would never be hers. Sometimes it pleases the gods to visit itches on a person with no arms.

She shifted position in the chair, and a sudden clutch of pain in her lower back reminded her that soon she would not even be able to dance other people's dances . . . she shied away as always from that thought, and sat up straighter. The pain receded.

Russell came back outside with a second chair and sat beside her. "Listen," he said, "this afternoon while José and I were cleaning out the bedrooms, I found something. I don't want Jen to know about it—but I do want you to know." He produced the gun.

"Russell, Jesus!"

"I'm going to keep it under our mattress, on my side. There's a box of a hundred slugs with it. The firing pin will be in the top dresser drawer. There'll be a note with the gun, telling Jen that it's not a toy in case she finds it somehow."

"Wow. That Figueroa must have been a drug-runner, for sure."

"Well, he wasn't an evangelist."

"Russell, I don't know if I want that thing around."

"I'm sure I do. And I want you to know how to use it if the need ever arises while I'm not around."

"But—"

"Use your head, Dena? What are the odds that Michael will happen along the next time the animals come?"

She thought about that. "What do I do?"

He showed her how to remove or replace the firing pin, how to load or unload, how to remove a burst shellcasing, how to aim and what to aim for, how to fire and when not to fire. "Get your first shot off quick, then take time to aim the second one. It rattles them, spoils their aim." He stripped the gun down again, had her practice loading and arming it as fast as she could, then had her dry-fire to get the feel of the action.

"Russell, how do you know about this stuff? You were never in the Army."

"I grew up in New York."

"Oh, bullshit. When you grew up in New York, handguns weren't part of a kid's wardrobe."

He reddened slightly. "Well, you can learn a lot by reading John D. MacDonald novels."

She wished she had let it ride. Her husband was suffering from machismo leakage—and she had reopened the leak. "All right, dear. If you don't want to tell me the truth, you must have a good reason. I'm just glad you do know about guns. I like a husband with romantic secrets in his past." She saw him buy it; his spine straightened almost imperceptibly. "Should I take this with me when I go downtown to work?"

"Let's talk about that. You'll have to go through some rough territory. You can have it if you want it."

"But you don't think I should?"

He made a face. "I'm not sure. Twenty-five years ago I'd have been sure. This morning I'd have been sure. Now I don't know."

"Why would you have said no this morning?"

"Two reasons. First, if you get caught carrying this thing around town, you could be doing your dancing on Riker's Island. Second, when you have to go through rough turf, you're usually better off unarmed. It keeps you alert and cautious and scared. A gun gives you the entirely false impression that you're invulnerable. What I just taught you was how to operate a gun, not how to use one."

"I follow your logic. So why aren't you sure now?"

"As to the first reason, it doesn't seem like they're enforcing a whole lot of laws here. Possession of a gun may be good for a twenty-dollar ticket these days. As for the second reason . . . I think that after what happened this afternoon, you'd be alert and cautious and scared if you had a bulletproof leotard and a machine gun. I know you pretty well. You wouldn't shoot if you didn't have to—and you would shoot if you did have to."

"Thanks."

"But I'm not sure you'd hit what you aimed at—and as a rule it's better not to show a gun than to pull it and miss."

Dena finished her drink and thought about it. The gun lay on her lap, its teeth pulled. She picked it up and sighted at a broken flower pot near the back fence.

"Here's the way I see it. If some guy hits on me in the street, there's three things he could be: an entrepreneur, a rapist or a maniac, what they call here a mucker. If he wants money, I give it to him, including what I've got hidden in my sock, because there's more where that came from. If he wants my ass, I show him the best time I can, 'cause there's more where that came from, too."

"As long as you stay alive, there is," Russell agreed. "Be careful there. Some kinds of rapist, cooperating is more likely to get you killed."

"Whatever the customer wants, I can deliver. There's no such thing as a fate worse than death."

"How about category three, the mucker? A gun could be useful there. There's nothing on earth that will placate a mucker, you know. He's in a berserk frame of reference."

"Baby, from what I read about these muckers, it'd take a lot of bullets to even slow him down."

"Good argument for having a lot of bullets. And that's a lot of gun there. But a mucker isn't the only kind of maniac you could run into."

"Eh?"

"Look, this afternoon racism almost bit me on the face on East 125th Street. Black racism. But things always balance, there's always a backlash. If I was a target uptown—

"—I could be one downtown, I get you." She twirled the pistol in the manner of a TV gunslinger. "Well, I'm glad you said that; I'll be alert for that sort of thing when I start going to work. But I think the gun should stay here, where it can protect Jennifer." She held it out to him.

He did not reach to take it. "I'm inclined to agree. But I'd feel awfully stupid if you happened to get killed some way that a gun could have gotten you out of. You'll be the one out there on the streets, the bad streets—"

"Honey, the city is a giant kid's playground of corners and alleys and hidey-holes. Run and hide is an easy game to play out there. Where are you going to run and hide in this concrete box here? When they're coming in the window and it takes thirty seconds to unlock the damn door? You know the statistics: an apartment is much more likely to get robbed than a pedestrian. You handle that gun the best; you keep it here." She looked down at the weapon, still on her outstretched palm. "In fact, I'm wondering if we shouldn't tell Jennifer about it instead of hiding it."

"Hell no!"

"Russell—"

"Dena, for God's sake you don't tell a child where the family gun is. She's liable to start fiddling with it and—"

She began to get annoyed. "Russell Grant—does that girl or does she not use the chainsaw back home? Are you trying to say she's stupid?''

"Of course not. She's too bright for her own good."

"I think you should teach her to use it, just the way you've taught me."

He stared at her. "Are you out of your mind? Teach a child to use a gun?''

"That's the second time you've used that word. Russell, watch my lips: Jennifer. Is. Not. A. Child."

"She is fourteen fucking years old. Genius or not, she's a child emotionally—she hasn't reached menarche yet—"

"How did she come through this afternoon? Weeping? Hysterics? Panic?"

He sprang up from his chair and began pacing around the garden, speaking in that peculiar strangled voice of one who wishes to argue over distance without being overheard by the neighbors. "Dammit, I don't know how much this afternoon traumatized her—but I'm not going to add to it by telling her that she might need to use a gun at any time."

"Even if it's true? She's never going to be alone in this apartment for five minutes?"

"I've got that covered, I think." He came back close to her and sat down, lowered his voice. "That gun wasn't all I found today. A black attaché case, triple locked, heavy to the heft. Shaw tried to take it aside for himself—so José and I switched cases on him. José got it open. Somewhat disappointing: only five thousand in cash inside."

"Jesus." Something was becoming clear to Dena. She kept her features neutral.

"It made a pretty problem. I didn't feel good about taking drug money—but if I gave over my share to José, it placed him under too much obligation to me. It could have spoiled our relationship, an imbalance like that, and I like that kid. So I hired him as a part-time bodyguard for Jen in exchange for my half of the money."

Dena thought about José. The boy had impressed her as efficient, courteous, and intelligent. She'd liked him, and had sensed that Jennifer liked him too. "I think that's brilliant, honey. I like José. He seems trustworthy."

"And streetsmart."

"Has he got weapons of his own?"

Russell mimicked José. "Bet you fuckin' A."

Dena giggled. She handed him back the gun, and this time he took it. "Under the mattress, you say?"

"And the firing pin in the top drawer, right hand side, near the front, with the box of ammo. I'll keep the gun loaded for quick use—just slap in the pin, take off the safety and squeeze the trigger."

"Okay." Dena realized that they had wandered from the subject of Jennifer's maturity, and was tempted to return to it. But she knew that topic would take years of patient work, and she had a more pressing problem that she could do something effective about. Nor were her motives entirely unselfish, she thought with a smile. "Now will you do me a favor?"

"Sure."

She brandished her drink. "Now that you've got me loaded, for quick use . . ." She set the drink down and began unbuttoning his shirt. "Why don't you, uh, slap me across the pins—" She tugged the shirt out of his trousers. "—take off my safeties—" She licked his neck. "—and squee-eeze my trigger?" She looked into his eyes from a distance measured in millimeters. "I might just go off."

"Well," he said, reaching out his tongue to lick her lips with infinite gentleness, "I don't often meet a woman of your caliber . . ."

Her hand touched his left thigh, quite high up on the inside. Russell's tailor would have said that he "dressed on the left." "Talk about high caliber," she murmured, "I think I just found a .44 Magnum." His own fingers were brushing against the base of her throat, and she preened exactly as a cat would have done. "Now, a man with a special gun like that needs a special holster—and I've got just the thing."

"My darling," Russell said, bringing his hands along her shoulders and down her arms, so that his palms brushed the sides of her breasts, "I have always maintained that you have much more than just the thing."

"My place or yours?" Maintaining her grip on the bulge in his trousers, she led him back indoors.

One happy and energetic hour later, Dena lay back in the darkness and listened to Russell's breathing returning to normal and congratulated herself on her intuition.

She had been very surprised when her husband casually mentioned that he had helped José defraud Shaw of drug money. It was absolutely atypical behaviour for him. The Russell she knew would have stood back and had as little as possible to do with anything so unsavoury and dangerous. Dena had sampled cocaine a few times in her younger days, as had most of her contemporaries in the dance world, she had stopped because she simply did not like it very much. But Russell, she knew, had never tried it. He still would not share a joint with her. And given his personality and lifestyle and social class, one would have expected his sympathies to lie more with Shaw than with José. Though she knew Russell had been born in the Bronx, he had moved to Long Island at age eight, when his father's ship had come in, and had lived in what used to be called "gentler circumstances" ever since . . .

That had been the point in her thought-train at which she had seen the answer. Close contact with violence can make a man revert, in some ways, to his childhood. Russell had made of himself a cultured, civilized man—but somewhere down in there were the remnants of a New York street kid. Badly frightened, and shamed by his helplessness, he was subconsciously seeking powerful allies—and José must look much more like the eight-year-old Russell's image of manhood than Shaw.

In short, his masculinity was threatened even more than he had admitted to her in his opening words. And there is one good way to deal with shaky masculinity—or rather she corrected herself, hundreds of lovely ways that all come under the same general heading. And there, she thought, is a pretty good impromptu pun.

The vigour and intensity of his response had convinced her that her insight was correct, and that her cure was effective; she felt contentment in more than just the physical sense.

Then suddenly she remembered something that had happened earlier this afternoon; before the trouble started. Perhaps there was one more task she might work on tonight. A long-term project, like the one about making him see that Jennifer was growing up under his nose. If she could just do this deftly enough to not get caught at it—

"I think I'm going to like this apartment," she said aloud.

"Me too," Russell said lazily. "Much nicer'n I expected."

"Of course, it's still a New York apartment. Those damned roaches. I've got to do something about them."

"Have you figured out where they're coming from?" Russell asked, falling into the trap.

"Yeah," she said sleepily, faking a yawn. "Got it pinned down. Whole city of 'em back there. All interconnected between the stove and the fridge. . . ." And although she wanted to hold her breath, she made it deepen as if toward sleep, to cut the conversation off there.

"The stove and the fridge—" he repeated, as she had hoped he would, and trailed off as she had hoped he would, remembering as she had prayed he would, his own words from this afternoon about redesigning those two appliances. Dena girl, she told herself, you are such a clever bitch that you ought to be ugly, just to make things fair. She could almost hear him thinking about his idea, and when, ten minutes later, he slipped carefully out of bed and left the room in search of pencil and paper, she had to roll over to hide the smile.

She and Russell had been married for five years. Extreme success with some of his early designs—including the solar-powered air conditioner which had kept their car cool over two thousand kilometers of summer driving, functioning only when it was needed—had allowed him to retire almost ten years before; he need never work again unless it suited him. Dena and Jennifer were quietly determined between them that before long it would suit him. It was one of the strongest bonds cementing stepmother and daughter: a shared conspiracy to bring joy to the man they both loved. And just as Dena had hoped, the sight of his childhood home on the horizon had woken old instincts, started the long-unused creative engine in his mind.

Perhaps, she thought, the engine would cough fitfully a few times and die. It had before. But she was going to keep jump starting it, and if necessary she would push the damned thing up to speed and pop the clutch.

Feeling so pleased with herself that she completely failed to notice the turmoil in her own subconscious, Dena snuggled more comfortably into her pillow, clenched her thighs around the memory of their lovemaking, and drifted into sleep.

She dreamed. Since the dream was not recorded anywhere in her conscious or unconscious memory banks, it had no more—and no less—existence than the sound of a falling tree which nobody hears.

She was back home in Halifax, on Gottingen Street, the shabby half-kilometer strip on and around which the city's black population had tended to center, since the forcible relocation of Africville in the early '60s. It was a street which had attracted and repelled Dena all her childhood, an alternate world in which she did not thoroughly understand the rules, a world whose rules her parents did not want her to learn. She walked past the old Casino Theatre, saw the posters for the usual porn double feature and felt the familiar tingle of disgusted intrigue; ahead a group of black boys stood outside a tavern, laughing and strutting and she hoped they would hit on her and was prepared to draw blood if they dared try. But as she approached the tavern, Gottingen Street melted and ran and flowed like a time-lapse film of entropic decay, became East 125th Street and she was no longer walking but sitting in a stationary car, and the boys were surrounding the car, menacing and gleeful. Her child was crying, and her lower back hurt.

She became a tigress, burst from the car, confronted the attackers, brandishing an enormous straight-edged razor. "Come on, chumps," she snarled, the black Amazon in her wrath.

They burst out laughing.

"Woo-ee!" the middle one said mockingly, pantomiming great fear, "danger on the set!" His face flowed like the street had, became the face of Jerome Turner, her old lover and dance partner. "Look here, Dena-mite," he said, using his old pet name for her, "you come on bad-ass nigger like that, maybe you gonna fool white people or Pakis. But a real bad-ass nigger see through you from jump-street." Suddenly he dropped the jive accent and spoke in his natural voice. "All I see is a shade with a tan and a razor in her han'."

The razor wilted and drooped; she flung it away. "I'm blacker than you are, Jerome!"

"No you aren't. Your skin, maybe, but not you."

She remembered this conversation, knew how she would refute him. She would dance. She would strut, shuffle, shake, snap her body around in those funky steps that white dancers could imitate but never master, and then he would have to admit that in her bones and sinews where it counted she was black. "Watch this."

And as she began her lower back spasmed. Pain shot down her right leg clear to the ankle. She tried to adapt her dance to the injury, and the left knee went; she nearly fell. She managed to complete the series, but it was a stiff, feeble parody—the way a white person would have danced it.

Jerome laughed. "About as black as rock cocaine. Just look at yourself."

She looked down, and it was true. Her skin was changing colour, getting lighter. It was still Negroid, but barely so, as she watched, it reached sun-tanned Caucasian, then bleached further until she was as pale as Jennifer. She whirled toward Jennifer, and her daughter was not in the car any more, was just disappearing around the distant corner in Russell's arms, waving and smiling back at Dena.

She turned back to Jerome, angry and afraid. "Give me back my black," she said, voice dangerously soft.

He rolled his eyes and grinned. "Give back?"

"You took my black. Now give it back," she screamed.

The surrounding youths became a rap-group, chanting her words back at her. Someone improvised a fingerpop bass line, another played conga with a pair of trash cans; a call-and-answer chorus developed, in which the first group repeatedly chanted, "You took my black, now—(beat)—give it back," while the second group waited until the fourth beat to respond, "Gimme back my black," quickly, so that "my black" coincided with "You took" from the first group.

Over this foundation Jerome improvised, strutting and leering:

 


"You want your black back: that's too bad 
Can't give back what you never really had 
It isn't where you been or the color of your skin 
Or even how you like to sin—it's just a feelin' from within 
You never been used, you never been warned 
You never been abused and you never been scorned 
Never been cheated and you never been afflicted 
Never been mistreated and you never been addicted 
Never gone hungry and you never been cold 
Never been rented let alone been sold 
Never been shabby let alone been naked 
Never needed anything so bad you hadda take it 
Never hated anything so bad you hadda break it 
Never had a child that you knew could never make it 
If you see that you're whiter than you think you oughta be  
Complain to your Mama and your Daddy, not me!" 

 

He repeated the last line several times. Dena turned and saw without surprise that her mother and father were now sitting in the car, regarding the horde of dancing, chanting youths with distaste and another emotion she could not identify. She approached the car, melted through the door, knelt on the back seat leaning forward between them. Her back still hurt.

"Mama? Daddy?"

"Yes, dear."

"What color am I?"

"Dena, a person's color is the least important thing about them."

"Yes, but what color am I?"

"Child, I'm color-blind—I just can't tell."

"Mama, tell me!"

"I just couldn't say."

Her back hurt too much to hold her position. Angrily she lay back on the seat and closed her eyes." Tell me!"

Outside, the boys were still rapping; the volume of their chanting increased and drowned out any answer her mother might have made. Dena screwed her eyes tighter, and when she opened them again she was on stage somewhere, a hall she didn't recognize, and she didn't know what piece this was, her partner was waiting for her, improvising frantically as he waited for her to snap out of it and get back into the dance but she didn't know what piece this was, the costume was no clue and her fourth lumbar was pinching the sciatic again sending terrifying pain down the outside of her right leg and the left knee still felt wobbly, she couldn't dance this even if she could remember what it was. She was a pro, she kept moving, improvising like her partner, you never freeze up on stage, but it was no good, her improv clashed with his and as he came closer she misinterpreted and then couldn't get out of the way in time and his elbow caught her full in the face. It did not hurt at all, but the impact spun her offstage and into the water. The last thing she saw, in mid-air, was the angry face of her partner, and he was Russell. But Russell can't dance, she thought, and then the water crashed over her and she sank like a stone, noting as she sank that her pale skin was visible even in the black, black water . . .

When she woke, Russell was beside her, in deep sleep. She slipped out of bed without waking him, shrugged on a robe and donned slippers, and went out into the main room which served as living room, dining room, and kitchen. Her back hurt from three days on the road.

"Morning, Jennifer."

"Hi, Mom. Was he good?"

The question was rhetorical, facetious, and familiar. Dena gave the ritual answer: a wiggle of the hips, and a "He was dyno-mite!" Then she took in what she was seeing and hearing and smelling. "Jennifer, you angel, you have been busy."

Jennifer had located the carton which held kitchen gear, and cleared several heavy items off the table. It was set with paper plates, silverware, cups and condiments. English muffin halves were in the toaster waiting to be popped down into heat, eggs were sitting out on the counter, by the stove, which held the egg-poacher and the Melitta pot, into which Jennifer was just pouring the last slug of boiling water. She set the water-pot back on the burner, turned off the gas, and got orange juice from the fridge. "That supermarket where we got the food really sucks," she said cheerfully.

"You know I don't like that kind of language," Dena said automatically.

"Aw, we're in New York now."

"All the more reason to preserve the amenities."

"You're right," Jennifer decided. "But it really does suck."

Dena sighed. "I'll tell you what. Every time you make breakfast like this you can talk as crudely as you like. Until your father gets up. And don't you say it, girl, I've heard that pun." Caffeine tropism drew her toward the coffee. "In what particular respect does the store suck?"

"Two eggs were cracked, the English muffins are stale, and the milk's bad—the coffee cream's okay, though. Why do they call them 'English' muffins anyway?"

Dena picked up a half-muffin; it was, as advertised, going stale. "Because if you throw them like a frisbee with enough English on them, they'll always come back to you."

"And they call it French toast because it's so sweet to the tongue," Jennifer finished with a giggle.

Dena arched an eyebrow. "What do you know about French stuff, girl?"

Jennifer crossed her eyes and grimaced wistfully. "A girl can dream."

Dena grinned. "You lie. You were French-kissing boys before I met you, I bet."

"I'm not the kind that tells. Shall I put the eggs on for all three of us?"

"Just us two." The coffee was finished dripping, Dena poured gratefully and spooned up the first sips. Then she leaned close to Jennifer and whispered, just in case the smell of coffee had Russell stirring: "He worked last night."

Jennifer froze, then whipped around eagerly. "That fridge-stove thing?" An expert would probably have ruled that her voice was, technically speaking, a whisper, but it carried better than normal speech might have.

"Shush. Yes, I think so. I planted the hook and 'went to sleep,' and after a while he got up and came out here. My," she went on in conversational volume, "you make good coffee."

"Now if I could only stand to drink the stuff," Jennifer replied in equally loud tones, and dropped again into a whisper. "Evidence. There should be evidence around here somewhere—and I don't see it. Notes, sketches, something."

"For sure?"

"Hell yes—Daddy leaves paper behind like worm-tracks. Let's look!"

Dena found the sketchpad and pencil on the floor in front of the couch, but there was nothing written on the pad. "Damn, he must have pulled a blank."

Jennifer took the pad, sighted along it at an angle. "No! Look, there are impressions on the top sheet, and some pages are missing. Now let's see—" She sat on the couch, pantomimed her father sketching. She shook her head, scowled ferociously, tore off the top sheet, crumpled it with her left hand—and automatically tossed it behind her and to the left. The couch was near the corner of the room, offset from the lefthand wall by perhaps half a meter where one of Figueroa's end tables had formerly stood. The crumpled piece of paper ricocheted in the corner and dropped quite naturally into the hidden space between couch and wall. Jennifer and Dena exchanged a glance. The girl got up and pulled the couch sideways. "Jackpot," she cried, snatching up nearly a dozen balls of paper. "Oh Mother, you did it."

"Maybe." Dena unrolled one of the balls and studied it dubiously: three square boxes interconnected by a spaghetti of arrows, surrounded by copious notes in an absolutely illegible hand. "Let's not celebrate until he produces some sketches worth keeping."

"The only sketches he saves are the ones he sends to the patent attorneys. Believe me, he's working again."

"Are you sure? You were only six the last time he turned anything out."

"I remember. I remember good. I mean, 'well.'" She tossed a couple of the balls up to the ceiling and caught them happily. "Come on, let's cover our tracks."

"Oh—yes. Breakfast is getting cold."

By the time Russell awoke, Dena and Jennifer were well into the task of unpacking and distributing their possessions, Jennifer doing all the bending and heavy lifting without having been asked.

Russell was always useless when he first woke up. But both women knew how to deal with him: they ignored him and stayed out of his way while he botched his own eggs and toast, firmly suppressing their natural urge to giggle. As always, breakfast recapitulated phylogeny. He reached the vertebrate stage halfway through his meal, and was nearly human by the time he finished. A second cup of coffee completed the resurrection. He cleaned up after himself and joined them at their work, throwing Jennifer a smile the first time their paths crossed.

Dena enjoyed the morning that followed. Spending time with her family always gave her a warm happy glow, a deep pleasure in having not only a family, but such a nice one. Her husband was a special man, who gave her what she needed, and needed what she had to give; her daughter was a special young woman whom she had always loved, and who had always loved her—at first because Russell did, and then because Dena loved Russell, and at last for her own sake. Dena appreciated what she had in her family—and only hoped that it would be enough to fill her life when she could no longer dance. Because she had no idea what else to do with herself . . .

José came by with a bootleg TV converter which he connected to a bootleg dish hookup that apparently came with the apartment. The 50-centimeter dish on the building's roof provided them with exactly the same channels they got at home, from the same STI satellite. He told them where to go to get Figueroa's phone disconnected and their own listed in the borough directory (literally around the corner, thank God). He explained about mail, and where the nearest laundromat and deli and supermarket were, and where the best laundromat and deli and supermarket were, and a number of other basic New York survival tips. "You keep one hand in your pocket all the time. It never comes out. The mugger is a businessman. What do you got in that pocket? He don't know. It ain't worth the risk to find out, because somebody stupider is gonna come along in a minute, catch?"

Dena took him aside discreetly. "José, my husband told me about his arrangement with you, regarding Jennifer."

"Yes, ma'am."

"I just want to say that I think it's one of his better ideas." She looked him square in the eye and held his gaze. "I trust you with my daughter—I just wanted you to know that."

"Thanks, Miz Grant."

"Dena."

"Thanks, Dena. You want your daughter to know I'm guarding her?"

Dena thought quickly. No—it could not be kept secret, not even clumsily.

"Yes. Look, one tip: her name is Jennifer. Not Jen, not Jenny—Jennifer, got it? Catch?"

He smiled. "I figured that out."

She felt even better. ''This is going to work out okay, I think. Jennifer?"

Jennifer came at once. "Yes, Mama?"

"Jennifer, you've met José, I believe?"

The girl looked at José, inclined her head. "Yes. Hello, José."

"Hi, Jennifer."

"Darling, José is going to look after you whenever your father is busy."

Jennifer was expressionless. "Like a baby-sitter?"

"No, dear," Dena said hastily. "More like a bodyguard."

"Oh." Jennifer seemed to field the novel concept well. "I see." She turned back to José. "Are you dangerous?"

He did not crack a smile, though Dena believed it cost him some effort. "Yes, Jennifer. I am very dangerous."

She looked him up and down, making no attempt to be polite about it. "Show me.''

He blinked, then slowly nodded.

The three went outside to the garden, collecting Russell on the way. José had them stand just outside the door, then walked across the broad patio to the edge of the garden proper. It was marked by a border made of small half-bricks set diagonally in the earth. He loosened a half-brick with a kick and tugged it free, tossed it to Jennifer. It was an excellent toss, slow and high enough to let her see it coming, not so slow as to give her time to panic. She caught it easily, then looked surprised and pleased with herself. It was the size of a cigarette pack.

"Wait a few seconds," he told her. "Take your time, walk around a little, talk to your mother. When you're ready—" He turned his back to her, folded his arms across his chest. "—throw that sucker at my head as hard as you can. Try to surprise me."

All three Grants frowned.

"It's okay," José insisted. "Try to knock my head off. I'm close enough, ain't I?"

"Mother," Jennifer said, "he can't be serious."

Dena opened her mouth to reply—and Jennifer let fly. She put her shoulder into it, and as Dena drew breath to cry out, she saw that the girl had apparently misjudged her trajectory—the brick was going to catch José square in the ass. And then José moved.

Even Dena's dancer's eye could not unravel exactly what he did. She thought she saw him separate his body into three components and move them in impossibly different directions. The others could have seen only a blur. Then José was facing them, his arms—again, or still—folded across his chest. "You're a sneaky person," he told Jennifer approvingly.

Russell was looking around. "Where is the brick?"

"In his shirt pocket," Jennifer said smugly.

José looked impressed. "You're gonna be a handful." He produced the brick from the pocket. Dena laughed and applauded, and Russell joined in. "But if you got such a good eye, tell me something."

"What?"

"Which hand did I throw the knife with?"

Jennifer frowned. "What knife?"

"That one." José pointed—and there was indeed a knife growing out of the furthest of the two trees, at chest height. The trunk at that height was about the thickness of a man's arm.

Jennifer's eyes grew round, and she looked crestfallen. "I don't know. I was watching the brick."

"Let me tell you something about New York," José said seriously. "You can't stop lookin' around you just because there's a brick comin' at your head or somethin'."

"José," Russell said, "that was impressive. Can you teach me any of that?"

The boy looked politely dubious. "I could teach you to throw a knife good—anyway better'n you probably can now. The rest I can't teach. You just gotta spend enough time afraid. Look, I gotta get back to work. Are you people squared away here?"

"Yes, José," Dena said. "Thank you very much for everything. I won't worry about my daughter now when I'm at work."

José recovered his knife, replaced the half-brick carefully in its socket, tamped earth around it, and left, nodding to Jennifer on his way out. She hesitated, then nodded back.

 

After lunch Russell looked around and smiled. "By Thor's thundermug," he said, "I do believe we are unpacked."

"Oh boy," Jennifer cried. "Let's go see Grandpa!"

"Well," Russell said, looking at Dena, "that is next on the list."

"I'm sorry, hon," she said, doing her best to look sorry. "I have to get downtown and get plugged into rehearsals."

"So soon?"

"The show opens in less than seven weeks, darling. Everybody else has been rehearsing for three days already. I really should have gone in this morning and finished unpacking tonight."

"Well—I guess we could wait for the weekend to drive out to Dad's."

Dena cast about frantically for an objection.

"No," Jennifer said, and Dena could have hugged her. "I want to see Grandpa today. I've never seen his new house, and Sophie says her mother says Orient Point is almost as pretty as the Fundy Shore."

"And it would be sensible to get the car stashed safe outside the city," Dena added. The Grants had agreed that it was insane to keep a car on Manhattan, and intended to leave it parked at Russell's father's home out on Long Island for the duration of their stay. "You two go on ahead. I'll see your folks later—at the very least they'll be coming in for the show, and there'll be plenty of time when it's over. Give your father a hug for me." She saw that he was trying to frame an objection, so she kept talking. "I'll call the Long Island Railroad and find out what's the last train you can take back from Orient Point. You and Jennifer plot your course out there."

Map-reading and navigation were tasks Russell enjoyed; as she had expected, he got so involved in planning the journey that he shelved—for good—the question of whether he wished to make it. He and Jennifer huddled together over the computer, folding out the liquid-crystal monitor display and plugging in the tiny card which held the best Greater New York transportation data they had been able to buy (information no more than a year out of date), while Dena used the previous tenant's still-active phone line to call Lisa Dann.

"Hello, you have reached Dann'space, home of the DannCers Company, and no one is available to take your call. For a complete schedule of our classes and performances, you may call D-A-N-N-C-E-R; or the same information can be accessed from most public databases. When you hear the beep, you will be able to leave a message of 60 seconds, and we'll return your call as soon as possible. Thank you."

"Lisa, it's Dena St. Claire. Pick up if you're there, honey—"

Four seconds. Then—"Dena? Dena, is that you?"

"In the flesh."

"In the flush, if you're really in New York. And you'd better be, you miserable bitch—you're late for rehearsal!"

Dena grinned, feeling truly at ease for the first time since she had passed through the South Bronx. "I love you too, Lisa."

"God, it's good to hear your voice. Listen, Chocolate Eclair, I'm serious, if your ass isn't down here in twenty minutes, I'm gonna break in a new pair of character shoes on it. There's a Dena-sized hole in this dance, and about fifty-sixty hugs and kisses here with your name on 'em cluttering up the place."

"I'll be there as quick as I can, hon, but there's a few—"

"Woman, if you aren't coming, get going!"

"All right, I'll grab a cab—"

"No! Brush the hay out of your hair, cousin."

"What's wrong with a cab?"

"Anyone comes into this neighbourhood in a cab, it's like wearing a sign says 'I have interesting amounts of cash money on my person.' Where are you, the East Side in the 30s, right?" She gave Dena subway directions. "It's a ten minute ride, I'll give you five minutes." The phone went dead.

On her way downtown, Dena kept her eyes open for signs of racial tension. She saw them everywhere she looked. Whites, singly and in groups, seemed to make an effort to avoid the gaze of blacks, tended to give way to them in any pedestrian encounter. Black youths seemed to go out of their way to hassle whites. Interracial groupings were rare, and almost never seemed truly friendly or relaxed. Police officers of either colour seemed harassed and alert.

Something not-right nagged at Dena's subconscious; at last she puzzled it out. The racial mix was wrong for the time of day. When Dena had first come to New York, in 1982, the population of Manhattan had been seventy-five percent white—by day. At night, when the commuters had all fled their offices for the suburbs, the island had been forty-five percent black, with another twenty-odd percent composed of Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Chinese and other non-whites, leaving Caucasians a minority group.

The population mix that Dena encountered on the streets and in the subway now would have been about right for 1982 Manhattan—if it had been late evening. But it was early afternoon on a weekday.

She began paying attention to the whites she saw. The division which had been visible in 1982 was now marked and unmistakable. There were, with few exceptions, two kinds of white people on Manhattan these days: the wealthy, and the poor. The middle-class were gone to the outer boroughs and the suburbs, and even in these hard economic times apparently did not want work badly enough to venture into the inner-city for it in great numbers.

Which explained Dena's other observation: that there were more middle-class blacks visible than she had expected. To be sure, they were distinctly lower-middle-class, hanging on grimly to an economic rung which these days grew slipperier by the hour. But there were more black men and women in business attire than Dena had ever seen in her life before, walking with the hurried stride of those with appointments to keep and clients to meet and deals to cut. To her mild surprise they—and she—did not seem to arouse disdain or disgust in the lower-class blacks among whom they moved. She saw a balding black man in a pearl gray suit splitting a joint with a black messenger in a doorway—which in 1982 would have been implausible. She noted that both men had their heads shaved. A new fad?

Like all dance studios, Dann's was up several flights of stairs. Dena took them slowly, mindful of lower back and knee. At the top she knocked on a frosted glass door and smiled at the security camera above it. Almost at once the door buzzed open, and as she went through it she just had time to brace herself. Lisa Dann came at her in a dead run and hugged her like a linebacker sacking the quarterback.

"Lisa!"

"You're late, you shit. Christ, it's good to see you! Get changed!" She kissed Dena, smacked her buttock, and stood back. "You're going to like this group, I've got some good people this time. One of 'em you know, I think—Jerry Turner, weren't you and he in Janine's pickup company together in the old days? Oh, and Phyllis and Sue Ann say hello. Come on, get it in gear, girl, we'll talk later." Squeezing Dena's arm, she turned and raced down the short poster-and-flyer-bedecked corridor which led to the studio proper—

—leaving Dena with her mouth hanging open.

Jerome?

She walked down the hall after Lisa, stopped where she could see the whole studio. Lisa had already reached the far end of the room where the big mirrors were. All seven dancers were facing her, their backs to Dena. She recognized Jerome at once. He was dressed in red shorts and a black t-shirt with the sleeves raggedly ripped off, brown leg warmers pooled around his ankles. The dreadlocks she remembered were gone, he was shaving his head now, but there was no mistaking his characteristic stance: legs spread a little too wide, weight on the balls of his feet, hands on hips, jaw thrust out challengingly.

I'll be damned, she thought weakly, it's him all right.

The convergence of his thighs and forearms drew the eye automatically to his ass, and it was as splendid as she remembered. She had a sudden vivid sense-memory of nibbling on it—followed by one just as vivid of kicking it so hard that she wondered if the footprint still showed.

Dena had perhaps as few scars on her soul as a North American black female can have, but Jerome represented one of the largest that she did have. Seven years before, Jerome had been her lover, her first black lover. The relationship had been stormy and passionate and had ended explosively; she had felt the hurt of it so deeply and for so long that the thought of working with him again shook her.

But only intellectually. Five years of a very good marriage had intervened. Dena examined her own reactions very carefully, to determine whether any threat to her marriage existed, and decided there was none. True, her pulse was up and her cheeks hot—but she felt neither a lifting of the heart nor a tingling of the crotch. Her mind ran an instant comprehensive comparison of Russell and Jerome, and she knew that she had a better deal going than she could ever have had with Jerome. It might or might not be unpleasant to work with him again, but it would not be dangerous.

With that realization, her pulse already returning to normal, she turned and retraced her steps to the changing room, already planning how to tell Russell about this so that he would not worry.

 

 

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