Another Brooklyn

5

We came by way of our mothers’ memories.

When Gigi was six years old, her mother pulled her in front of the mirror. It was cracked already, Gigi said. I guess that should be a sign. Broken-ass mirror and my crazy mama making promises.

Those eyes, her mother said, were your great-grandmother’s eyes. She came to South Carolina by way of a Chinaman daddy and mulatto mama. Gigi stared at her eyes, the slight slant of them, the deep brown. The hair, too, her mother said, holding up Gigi’s braids. Heavy and thick like hers.

The only curse you carry, her mother said, is the dark skin I passed on to you. You gotta find a way past that skin. You gotta find your way to the outside of it. Stay in the shade. Don’t let it go no darker than it already is. Don’t drink no coffee either.

When we had finally become friends, when the four of us trusted each other enough to let the world surrounding us into our words, we whispered secrets, pressed side by side by side or sitting cross-legged in our newly tight circle. We opened our mouths and let the stories that had burned nearly to ash in our bellies finally live outside of us.

It’s dark, Gigi said. But it’s got red and blue and gold in it. I look at my arms sometimes and I’m thinking skinny-ass monster arms. She held her thin arms up into the light, her head lifted, thick braids falling against her back. And sometimes, she said, they look so damn beautiful to me. I don’t even know which thing is the truth.

We circled her, undoing her braids until her hair fell in black coils across her shoulders, then rebraiding and unbraiding them again, telling her how lucky she was to have such thick wavy hair and eyes like a Chinese girl.

When I’m an actress, Gigi said, I’ll be everywhere — TV, movie screen, onstage. Who’s that? Who’s that?

When it wasn’t wavering around doubt, her voice was deep and sure, and we wanted that, too—Who’s that? Who’s that? we echoed, laughing, our hands on her head, in her hair. That’s that big star, Gigi. Chocolate China Doll!

What keeps keeping us here? Gigi asked one day, the rain coming down hard, her shirt torn at the shoulder. We didn’t know that for weeks and weeks, the lock had been broken on her building’s front door. We didn’t know about the soldier who slept behind the darkened basement stairwell, how he had waited for her in shadow. We were twelve.

I can’t tell anybody but you guys, Gigi said. My mom will say it was my fault.

We twisted the long braids up into a crown, used oil and a comb to etch the fine baby hair over her forehead. Dabbed our fingers against our tongues and smoothed out her eyebrows. We wanted to make her broken self know she was still beautiful. It wasn’t you, we said again and again. We can kill him, we said.

We sat on Sylvia’s bed counting out what change we had, ran the blocks to Poncho’s for a small box of Gillette razor blades, then spent the afternoon practicing how Gigi would hold them when she slashed the soldier. We had heard that Pam Grier slipped them into her hair in Coffy and imagined Gigi pulling the blades from her braids just as the soldier stepped out from the darkness.

It’ll always be the four of us, right, y’all? Gigi asked.

Of course, we said. You know that’s right, we said. Sisters, we said. We said, Always.

But when the soldier finally emerged from behind Gigi’s stairs, it was not with a single-edged blade protruding from his neck but with a needle clinched and dripping from his left hand. He had been dead three days when the super found him.

Angela’s skin was so light you could see blue veins moving through it. She had seen Josephine Baker and Lena Horne and Twyla Tharp on television. Whenever a good song came on, she swayed like water being poured and we watched her, breath caught in our throats, the sadness in her body so deep we had no idea what it was or what it meant or how it got to be there. She was all muscle and sinew. On Saturday afternoons, she showed up on the block with her Joe Wilson’s School of Dance bag, her black leotard and tights sweaty and smelly inside it. My mom was a dancer, she told us, then quickly grew silent.

Does she still dance, we asked. But Angela turned away from us. Shrugged. Said, Why you have to be all up in my business? Said, Kind of. Said, Damn, why’s it all have to be so complicated, you know? She put her face in Gigi’s hair and shook until she cried. We said, We love you, Angela. We said, You’re so beautiful. Said, Just keep dancing. That’s all.

We tried to understand without asking if Mother plus Dance equals Sadness. We waited for her hands to curl into fists. In Sylvia’s pink bedroom, we lay down and pressed our ears to her thin chest, listening to the quickening of her heart. Angela, what is it? we begged. Tell us. Please, please tell us. We have blades, we said. We can cut somebody.

We had blades inside our kneesocks and were growing our nails long. We were learning to walk the Brooklyn streets as though we had always belonged to them — our voices loud, our laughter even louder.

But Brooklyn had longer nails and sharper blades. Any strung-out soldier or ashy-kneed, hungry child could have told us this.

I wanted to step inside of Sylvia’s skin. Beneath the sweet copper, there lived something diamonded over, brilliant. When we walked, Angela, Gigi, and I vied to be the ones whose arms brushed Sylvia’s. When she reached for a hand, ours shot out, lacing our fingers desperately into hers. She was sloe-eyed and wide-mouthed, a beauty that could have just as easily not been so. But hers was all straight teeth and full lips, all green eyed and new. Long before we were teenagers, her voice was deep, graveled, a woman’s voice on a young girl. Still, it wasn’t the skin or the eyes or the voice I wanted. I simply wanted to be Sylvia, to walk through the world as she did, watch the world through her eyes. Is that girl laughing at us, my brother had asked that first time. And now I knew Sylvia was laughing at us, because she was laughing at everyone. The same way she had laughed when her father said We’re going to America, his broken English a joke to her, a puppet’s mouth moving over newly learned words. Forever.

What’s with America, she asked him. This America thing you keep talking and talking about.

At four, Sylvia was reading books assigned to her eight-year-old sister. At five, she was made to stay after school with ten-year-olds, cracking codes in long division, searching Latin word origins. While her father quoted French philosophers, Sylvia stood in front of her dolls, asking her unblinking jury if they could look into the heart of her client and see the innocence there.

My father said study law first, Sylvia told us. Then everything I love can follow that.

When we asked, What do you love? Sylvia looked around her perfectly pink room and said, I’m not the boss of me. How the hell would I even know.

Maybe this is how it happened first for everyone — adults promising us their own failed futures. I was bright enough to teach, my father said, even as my dream of stepping into Sylvia’s skin included one day being a lawyer. Angela’s mom had draped the dream of dancing over her. And Gigi, able to imitate every one of us, could step inside anyone she wanted to be, close her eyes, and be gone. Close her eyes and be anywhere.