By Racquel Goodison
ONE.
It is a dance she did every evening, but this time she hoped she would not be locked in the broken waltz, draped over its enduring grip, circling till dawn.
TWO.
At the end of her day, she climbs out from the tunnel deep beneath her stop. She pauses outside the subway station, briefly, to catch her breath. “I’m only 31,” she thinks. “Why is this hard?”
Her exhales rush between her ears and she whispers to herself, “Just make it home.”
Minutes later she climbs the steep stoop of the building she now lives in. These too are hard, but she moves more quickly knowing she is almost there. Soon enough she is inside her apartment, ripping out of her clothes, and stepping into the shower.
The water is hot. It makes her nose run, her sinuses drain. She lets it beat against her chest. Then her back. Then her face. She lets it almost put her to sleep with its pouring.
“I could stay here forever,” she thinks and sighs. But nothing lasts forever and she is hungry.
And soon enough she is seeking out what’s there for her to eat. She glances at the bowl of red onions she purchased from the farmers’ market a week ago, when she had grand plans for the stove she barely uses and the pots that sit dusty on their rack. She microwaves leftover Chinese take-out and eats most of it. Everything had died in that dish: the chicken’s texture had turned toward the feel and density of an eraser block; the garlic sauce was now just a salty, hot jelly; and the rice had returned to a hardened grain.
At 8:14 she is back in the kitchen and staring at the insides of her refrigerator: loosely gathered oranges; a side order of rice from a different order of Chinese food; a half-finished jar of Prego Pasta Sauce, a grey fuzz now visibly growing up the inner side of the glass; and curried chicken from two weekends ago when she’d stopped by to pick up her mail, the stuff that was still coming for her at her parents’ house, more than two months after she stepped out on her own. Her mother had ladled high spoonfuls of it into one of her many recycled clear-plastic containers. She had insisted that Catherine “take it for later, when the hunger take you and you don’t have nothing better to eat.” And the hunger does often “take her”; her jeans do have more room since she left home. But, still, the container remains untouched. The yellow of the curry now stains the plastic and the fat from the chicken has hardened into a white layer on top of the chunks of meat and gravy. Some rice and peas sit in yet another recycled plastic dish.
Everything was growing rancid.
THREE.
Months before the move, Catherine had seen her mother watching her from the kitchen, from her bedroom doorway, from the passenger side seat of the car. Watching each sparkle in her eyes, each blush of her skin, each irrepressible smile, and waiting, keeping it in and letting her know with the flinching blink of her eyes (Don’t hurt me!) and the pressing together of her lips (I can’t speak!), that she was keeping it in and so should this daughter of hers. This single child.
This flesh from her body that arrived too early, that had to be cut from her. She sees her and still sees the effort to make her take the heavy breasts she offered, the tiny slit of a mouth that she coaxed her nipples into and begged her to drink from. The prayers that feel like more than one for each day this girl she made has been alive.
Something, now, was out there between them. Circling every conversation. Visible on the horizon of every moment they spent together. Threatening to crash in on them, on their togetherness.
It was this way for months, since Catherine had come home, different, after she had gone away for two years to study in Chicago and had been almost impossible to reach each week. She had come home with secrets. She had come home in a gold Honda Civic that only had two doors and one side-view mirror: the kind of thing her mother feared could have killed her. She had managed to buy it using some of the money the university gave her to live on while she studied and some of the money her father sent her each month so that she would have “good food to keep her strength up.” She was thinner and more muscular. Her forearms had a distinct line that ran from her armpit almost to her elbow when she lifted her hands to wave or point. Her hair was also short, again. Chopped almost down to the roots.
She had come home with more boxes of books than she had left with and just as many suitcases of clothes. She barely unpacked any of it.
And then one day, as this mother polished the whatnot in the living room, she saw her daughter, crossed-legged on the sofa, head leaned into the phone, smiling. She knew that face, could read those lips.
When Catherine hung up the phone, she turned to ask, “New beau?”
Her daughter looked at her long enough to say, “That was a girl.”
And she knew better than to open her mouth.
And so it was months of this, of Catherine’s mother keeping her eyes on her from her stand over the kitchen sink, of Catherine knowing that she was wondering again: Who is she? And When will this end?
Now, in her own place, the daughter lets her body sink into the embracing foam of her bed. Each pound, each ounce of her flesh, settles deeper. She lets herself slowly drift and sink. She lets her eyes close; her thoughts fade.
One, two, three. One, two, three.
ONE.
It was a dance she did almost every night. And, this time, Catherine hoped she would not be locked inside it, this wondering worrying till daybreak.
TWO.
The glowing red numbers declare the hour from the clock radio’s place on the bookshelf opposite her bed. 12:30.
She stares at the time and wishes, “If only this were Friday and not Tuesday and I could take an Advil PM.” But it isn’t Friday and so she hugs her body pillow like a beanstalk and waits for sleep.
It had read like a story, the kind of thing one of those mystery beach-reads would start with: “Maurice almost escaped his death that night.”
She’d read it on the train on her way to work.
She’d been taken by the headline, and then the story had sneaked inside her skin.
“Almost escaped his death that night.”
Almost. Escaped.
His death.
He had been lured by the boys who’d laid a trap on the website for any gay man, for someone they could take because he would be “weak” – “and afraid.” He would be gay and afraid and weak and perfect. This John, this Doe, this trick, this target for a group of boys looking for an easy take.
He would be afraid and this would make him weak.
He would be afraid and it had gotten under her skin.
It struck a chord in her.
It shivers at a piercing pitch inside her ribcage, where she feels weak.
THREE.
2 a.m.
She wants nothing but to switch herself off again, soon, without too much trying.
But it is 2 a.m. and she is still wide awake.
A sandwich? A bath? She does not want to have to go through the trouble of making a little meal. She does not want to have to bother to run a bath.
She wants to do nothing more than close her eyes and be out for the night.
And so she sighs, pulls the heavy white comforter closer to her face, closes her eyes, and prays. Please…
Closed inside her dark body, she waits for her pleading to be answered. But with nothing to see, she hears everything. The swoosh of a car passing outside. The floorboards settling in ticks and feeble creaks. The clock in the living room tapping the beat of each minute. And her breathing, slow and set to a rhythm beyond her thinking.
Feeling the rise and fall of her chest, she remembers the day she learned that it all comes down to physics and biology: the diaphragm pulling down, the ribcage rising, the air she needs being pulled in. Then, just as effortlessly, the diaphragm reversing, the ribcage collapsing, the emptied air getting sent out. Over and over again. Too many times in any given day for her to count.
Her body rising and falling. Seemingly without end.
One, two, three. One, two, three.
ONE.
It was a dance she did on so many nights, but each night she hoped she would be free of it, be immune to this world until morning.
TWO.
The day she left her parents’ apartment, only the second real home she’s ever had, she agonized. She spent the day with her phone pressed against her ear, whispering desperately, “I don’t know how to do this!” to any friend and ex-girlfriend who took her call. She wanted to leave nothing behind, to do this right.
And after loading, moving, then unloading her car all day, when she was finally down to the last boxes that were packed and ready to go, when she had nothing else left, she sat down to “eat something” with her mother and father.
Her mother still wanted to know why she had to “have her own place, what she need all that space for, what going happen if something bad strike her down and nobody know till it too late.”
Her father asked her if she had enough money. He insisted on putting “a little something to help out” in her shirt pocket and deposited a bulging bag with apples and pears and oranges and callaloo and an entire roast chicken wrapped in foil and tied inside another plastic bag at her feet. It was all too much.
She ate as much as she could take, to the point where she was full beyond any comfort. And then, as they all sat back and waited for the food to settle, after her mother had sighed that that was good and that she had no room for anything more, that she “couldn’t even take a message,” Catherine cleared her throat. She wanted to say, “You know I’m gay, right?” Or, “I love you, but… I want you to know…” She was trying so hard to make a move.
Her mother must have seen it coming. She saw Catherine open her mouth and she said simply, “We know you have to have you own life.”
And Catherine understood enough to eat any words she was preparing to say to these parents who had offered up everything, including their life in Jamaica, so that she would not suffer too much want in hers.
THREE.
In her first home, Jamaica, there were stories, ones she heard like warning shots.
There was Berry Berry, the thin, tall, dark man her auntie sat with each evening on her porch. A weeping willow of a man who swayed through the neighborhood and waved off all those who shouted, playfully, from their gate, “A why you can’t find you yard?” He did this for so many years, she missed him as soon as he was gone. But, in a town, where everything was everyone’s business and people complained about all the “mouth a’massy Lizas,” even as they leaned in closer across the hedges for “the latest,” it was a mere whisper, accidentally overheard, that let Catherine know that Berry Berry had died, some say of AIDS. And “is so things go.”
There was Mrs. DeSilva who kept a black Range Rover in her carport. It never left her house. She polished the tiles around it each Saturday and then wiped and polished the car. But she took the bus everywhere and everyone understood: “Is her poor son car, the one them kill up in Red Hills, where him go live with him man-friend… Poor t’ing.” But “a so them t’ings go.”
And, like so, they went on and on.
One, two, three. One, two, three.
ONE.
It was a dance she did each night; this deadening dance in the deep of night.
TWO.
2:21 a.m.
She still waits for sleep.
She tries to push the memories from her mind, tries to push it far, far from her, as far as the place they came from.
She’s here now, she reminds herself.
She is here now and not there and not back then.
She is as far from that scared, small girl she used to be and that tiny place she used to live in as she could possibly get.
She had moved to the States. She had gone off to school for years. She had moved out of her parents’ home. She had dared to say yes to lovers, dared to nestle her lips against women she craved. Dared to step into their arms.
She is so far from that place, so far from that place.
So far from that island. Home.
THREE.
Right after she had moved out, her mother made it a habit to call each night. She wanted to know if Catherine made it home alright, and was she sleeping, was she eating, and when she was going to come by, and how come she take so long to call back, and why she killing her with worry, why she taking years off her poor mother’s heart, and how she keeping herself, and, even, what kind of company she keeping these days. And, a few times, “what going happen to me girl baby, lawd…” But Catherine knew enough not to say much about the company she sometimes kept these days or anything about the sleepless waltz she wandered in each night.
Sometimes she could only watch the phone ring and then listen to her mother’s messages get recorded.
One, two, three. One, two, three.
ONE.
It was like a dance with some force she was partnered to. Encircling her and circling her till the sun took its turn in the sky.
TWO.
It was a tragic tale of what could happen. And years ago it was all over the news. Catherine burrows beneath her blanket, remembering.
She was taken by a murderer looking to mug her. He stabbed her repeatedly. He chased her through the streets while she screamed for her life. He riffled through her purse.
The neighborhood listened to it all.
One of them tried to call the police, but “she couldn’t breathe; she couldn’t make herself talk into the phone.”
Another was tired, too tired. “This city is so exhausting.” And, besides, who knew she was being killed?
They thought it might have been a lover’s quarrel.
They thought her lover was this man stealing her life.
It never crossed their minds that her lover was a woman waiting, waiting for Kitty that night she couldn’t escape her death.
A woman in love: a woman waiting. She waited forty-three years to tell the reporter marking the anniversary of it all that she was no roommate. She was her lover, waiting with her heart in her mouth for the keys to turn, and for her girl to come home.
THREE.
The night was slowly going, the seconds reliably slipping by, the memories calling on her, congregating in her mind.
One. Two. Three. One. Two. Three.
ONE.
It is a tiresome dance she did in the dead of night.
TWO.
She marks the minutes till morning. She feels herself rise and fall, in time.
THREE.
She wonders how this will end.
Racquel Goodison is an Assistant Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY. She has been a resident at Yaddo and the Saltonstall Arts Colony, as well as a recipient of the Astraea Emerging Lesbian Writer’s Grant and a scholarship to the Fine Arts Works Center. Her stories, poems, and creative nonfiction have been nominated for the Pushcart. She has work forthcoming in All About Skin II, an anthology for award-winning Black women writers, and The Encyclopedia Project, Vol. L-Z. Her chapbook, SKIN, was a finalist for the 2013 Goldline Press Fiction Chapbook competition.
