Crystal (11 page)

“Well, we hope you keep this to yourself,” Rowena said, nudging Crystal with her elbow as the cab pulled up outside of Bergdorf’s.

“Of course,” the driver said. “And what did you say your names were again?”

“Elizabeth Harmon,” Crystal said. “And of course, this is Vadrika.”

“Yeah, of course.” The driver nodded. He offered them the change for the twenty, but they were already walking down Fifth Avenue.

They went into almost every store from Fifty-seventh to the French Building on Forty-fifth on the east side of Fifth Avenue, then crossed and did the same coming up Fifth on the west side of New York’s most glamorous thoroughfare. They didn’t buy anything, but Rowena kept asking the sales-clerks if they would have the things she looked at until that weekend.

“You going to buy that stuff this weekend?” Crystal asked.

“No,” Rowena said. “But they don’t know that.”

They bought hot dogs from a vendor near Barnes & Noble and ate them in front of a construction site. The construction workers, mostly young men with hard, flat bellies, whistled and called to them. Older men, with bellies that hung over their belts, looked on.

“This is what I like to do,” Rowena said.

“Turn on all the guys and then walk away?” Crystal asked.

“Walk away with a friend,” Rowena said.

They walked a little way down Fifty-seventh, looking and being looked at. “I hate the pictures,” Crystal said, suddenly.

“It’s okay,” Rowena said. “We’ve got each other. You and me and Alyce. Right?”

“Right!” Crystal said, taking Rowena’s arm.

“Yo, mama!” A tall, skinny messenger, wearing tight, black biking pants over a gray sweat suit, stopped his bike in front of Crystal and Rowena as they made their way through traffic across Fifty-seventh street. “Y’all look good enough to eat!”

Rowena and Crystal looked straight ahead.

“I know I’m disgusting to you pretty ladies,” the messenger called after them. “But what you want from a high school dropout?”

They walked for another hour, stopping on the corners long enough to attract attention, occasionally stopping in front of store windows so that passersby could notice their reflections, stopping in Barnes & Noble so that a middle-aged Black clerk could show them outrageously priced prints.

The weather grew cooler. They talked less. They struck fewer casual poses. They grew tired. After a while, as the evening rush hour began, they were hardly noticed.

“I just think I need a vacation, that’s all!” Crystal pushed a piece of cubed cantaloupe around the edge of her plate. “Anyway, my grades are really falling. I’m just so far behind in everything.”

“What are you
talking
about?” Carol Brown leaned against the refrigerator. “What are you
talking
about? We’ve worked so hard for this, and now you just want to give it up?”

“I can still be a model. I just want to rest for a while,” Crystal protested.

“
Rest?
Now that you’re on top of things? This is the opportunity you’ve been waiting for!”

“I don’t like what I’m doing. I don’t like the pictures I’m in, I don’t like the people, I don’t like the magazines…”

“Crystal, please, don’t start whining!”

“I’m not—Mom, what’s so important about this, anyway?”

“It’s important not to throw away your chance when it’s in your lap!” The vein in Carol’s neck bulged as she spoke.

“The chance to have my picture taken for a dirty old man?”

“Grow up!” her mother screamed. “You have the chance to live as well as you please, to take what you want from life instead of standing on the sidelines, hoping a few crumbs fall your way. I know what it’s like waiting for the crumbs. I’ve been waiting for them for the last fifteen years!”

“Mama, don’t say that!”

“Why not? Every day I have to walk around the garbage in the streets to get to our building. Every day I hold my breath so I don’t have to smell everybody’s life as I pass through these hallways. Every day I dream of what life could have, should have, would have been if I had known anything.
Anything!
”

“I don’t want to throw anything away,” Crystal said. “I just thought…you said I didn’t have to do the modeling if I wasn’t happy with it.”

“Oh, Crystal, baby, you’re right.” Carol Brown slumped into a chair. “That’s what I said. And you don’t have to. You don’t, really. Sometimes I just get to thinking about what life is about, what it’s really about, and I look around here and I just don’t think this is it. I want so much for you, baby.”

“I know, Mama. Let me think about it.”

“No, if you don’t want it anymore, you should call
Loretta. She’s been good to us and we should lay it on the line to her.”

“Does the money change things?” Crystal asked. “I know I’m making a lot of money.”

“You’re what’s important, Crystal,” Carol said. “Now, go get dressed for school. Maybe…maybe, you can just bring that grade up to a B-plus.”

“Sure.”

Crystal went to her room and put on a dark-red pleated skirt and a sweater. She hated to hurt her mother, but it was true, she was tired. At first modeling had just been glamorous and exciting, but now she felt tired all the time.

Gizmo was under the bed, as usual. She took him out and put him on the bed. He pranced around slowly, then stopped and stretched and began to scratch at the bedspread.

“Don’t!” Crystal admonished softly.

The kitten looked at her with wide eyes, his tail straight up. She’d have to teach him to behave, she thought. She gave him a little push and watched him fall over. He didn’t care about falling, he didn’t know anything about being hurt.

“Get up, silly!” she said.

Gizmo lay on his back and looked at her.

“You want to hear the poem I wrote about you for school?” Crystal asked, teasing Gizmo with her finger.

She went to her drawer and got the binder the poem was in.

“It’s got to be the best poem ever written to a kitten for our school magazine,” Crystal said. “So you be very good and listen carefully.”

She read the poem to Gizmo, holding the paper inches
above him as he, still lying on his back, tried to reach it with his claws:

She put the kitten back on the floor. She knew her mother was disappointed in her. It would be easier telling Loretta. Loretta would say something about her throwing away an opportunity, but she wouldn’t push it. That wasn’t Loretta’s way.

The crash of glass brought Crystal abruptly to a sitting position. She listened as the noises came from the kitchen. There were crashes, the sounds of things being broken, and most terribly, the small whimpering sounds in between.

“Mama!” Crystal raced to the kitchen and grabbed the doorway for support. There, nearly flat against the patterned wallpaper, her mother slid along the wall, banging her fists into the gay patterns. And there were the sounds. Quiet, almost soft sounds of anger and frustration.

“Mama!” Crystal went to her mother as quickly as possible. She put her arms around the older woman’s shoulders as the woman huddled away from her in a corner. “Mama…Mama…please!”

Carol Brown, still facing away from Crystal, straightened up.

“Mama…”

“I just feel so frustrated….” Crystal could hardly hear her mother’s words. “And I don’t have the right…I just don’t have the right!”

“Mama! Mama!” Crystal was crying.

“I’m okay.” Carol turned and wiped at her face with her hands.

“Mama, please don’t cry…Please be all right…”

“I’m okay, now.” Her mother shook her head from side to side. She took her daughter’s hand and held it against her cheek. “I’ll clean this up.”

“No, I’ll do it later,” Crystal said. “It won’t take me long. Why don’t you lie down for a while?”

They half walked, half stumbled into her mother’s bedroom. Carol Brown fell across the bed and was still. Crystal sat by her side, the tears streaming down her face, her lips twisted in the agony of the pain she felt.

“Mama…oh, Mama…”

“Honey, will you do something for me? Please?”

“Anything, Mama,” Crystal said. “Anything.”

“Please don’t tell your father about this,” Carol said. “It was so silly for me to lose control of myself. Your father’s got enough worries on him about money and keeping the family together. Please don’t tell him, honey.”

“I won’t tell him, Mama.”

The phone rang.

“Let it ring,” Crystal said.

“Life has to go on,” her mother said. “No matter what I feel.”

Crystal picked up the telephone.

“Your mother called,” Loretta said. “What’s up?”

Crystal looked at her mother. “It’s Loretta.”

“I called her to tell her that you were…” She turned away.

“Hello, Loretta?” Crystal’s hand trembled as she held the phone. “Mom just wondered if I would be working this weekend?”

Loretta said she wouldn’t be working that weekend. Crystal hung up the phone and turned to her mother. The woman who she had thought just the day before could have been a model now looked old, drawn. Crystal knelt on the floor beside Carol Brown.

“Mom, are you going to be okay?” Crystal asked.

“I will be,” she said. “If you’re okay, then so am I, honey.”

Her mother smiled and kissed Crystal on the cheek.

Crystal pulled the sheet around her mother’s shoulders and went into the kitchen. The damage wasn’t that bad. Only a few of the cheaper glasses had been broken. Crystal swept up the broken fragments of glass and then wiped a coffee stain from the wall. When she looked back into the bedroom, her mother’s eyes were closed.

Usually she didn’t make up to go to school, but she stood in front of the mirror putting on the darker-than-usual foundation. She knew it would at least help cover the anguish she felt.

She felt so alone. You have to grow up, she said to herself. You have to know what it’s all about.

And what was it all about? It was having people you love depend on you. Helping her parents, who wanted so much for her. Not letting people down.

Crystal was surprised at how she looked. For some reason she had taken the eyebrow pencil and drawn huge black circles around her eyes. She hadn’t even been aware of doing it. She looked horrible. She quickly sponged it off and started over. Her hands were shaking. She knew it would be difficult to look good.

“So anyway, it came down to either a fashion show,” Pat said, “a beauty pageant, or a volleyball marathon.”

“How can you raise money playing volleyball?” Crystal asked.

“You get sponsors,” Donald said. “For every point that’s scored, the sponsor gives a dime. So if we play volleyball all night long and the score ends up like two hundred to one hundred and fifty, something like that, then each sponsor has to shell out a dime and thirty-five dollars.”

“And everybody liked that?”

“Nobody liked that,” Pat said. She carefully wiped the top of the can of Diet Coke she had bought. “But everybody figured that if we had a beauty pageant you would win, and nobody wanted to be in a fashion show if you were in it, because they couldn’t compete with you.”

“Which is true,” Donald said, pleased with himself.

“Are you telling me, Mr. Evans, that
I
cannot compete with Crissie?”

“No, I’m just saying what everybody else is saying,”
Donald answered quickly.

“And what are you saying, Mr. Evans?” Crystal asked, taking Donald by his sleeve.

“Roses are red, violets are blue, if you ask me who’s the prettiest, I got to name two!”

“You think he’s copping out, Crissie?” Pat asked.

“He just might be, but I think we’ll let him slide this time.”

“Where were you during the meeting?” Pat asked.

“I had to give Mr. Dennison this poem I wrote for the school magazine.”

“Is he going to publish it?”

“I don’t think so,” Crystal said. The day had hardly begun and she was already exhausted. “But I did it anyway.”

“Hey, my group is rehearsing this afternoon in the music room,” Donald said. “If you ladies want to come by and hear some fresh sounds, you’re welcome.”

“Maybe some other time,” Pat said, lifting her shoulder in a mock sexy pose. “We wouldn’t want to distract you boys.”

Donald went to his French class, and Pat asked Crystal what she thought of him.

“I like him,” Crystal answered. “You must be falling in love, or you wouldn’t ask so much.”

“I like him a lot,” Pat said. “You looked upset when you got here this morning. You okay?”

“My mom was sick,” Crystal said. “She was feeling better by the time I left.”

“Anything serious?”

“I don’t know,” Crystal said. “I guess I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Crissie, are we sort of…you know…drifting apart?”
Pat asked. “Because I’m over what happened before. It was just the little girl in me coming out. That’s why I was upset. Afterwards, I thought about it a lot. I figured if you were going to fool around a little, that was the best way to do it. You know, in a limo and all.”

“Why would you say something like that? Why?” Crystal felt a sudden surge of anger as she turned toward her friend. “Why?”

“Cris…?” Pat saw the rage in Crystal’s face and took a step backward. Crystal got up quickly and walked away. She was mad—she didn’t know why, but she was mad and even hurt. She stopped in the hallway and leaned against the wall until she got herself together again, then tried to put it all out of her mind as she started toward her next class.