The Garden of Last Days (16 page)

Don’t look into the sun, honey
, Mama says. Don’t look into the sun or you can’t see. She’s scared and blinks her eyes but the big room is foggy, then bright foggy, then bright and Mama must be in that door. Like the door to her room at home. The same kind. She walks over the floor that is very dirty. Dirt sticking to the bottoms of her feet. Where are her flip-flops?

The knob round and gold metal like at home but Jean has glass knobs downstairs in her house. Knobs like big jewelry. And this one is loose and she turns it with both of her hands and it pulls away from her so fast and it’s dark and loud and a big man is looking down at her face.

“Where’re
you
goin’?”

And she turns and runs. Run run fast into the crack and into the lady’s room. A boom-boom-booming where her heart is and she
crawls under the chair under the table with the light on it. She hugs her knees with her arms and waits for the man to come and her eyes are all wet again and she closes her mouth tight and hears the loud music and yelling and laughing.

Mama.

Is the man in the room now? Scratches on the wood under her toes. One is a letter from the alphabet—F—she knows them all. Gums sticking under the table where the lady puts her legs. Is he here?
Mama
. If she puts her head under the chair and looks, he will see her and that will be bad. She’s not
little
. She’s not. She goes pee on the toilet now and Jean says she’s a big girl.

Because she’s not even crying anymore and she peeks under the chair and out the crack and sees the closed door on the other side of the bright empty room. But a new naked lady is coming in from a different door. And she has high shoes like Mama’s Franny put on one day and Mama laughed and then she didn’t like it. The lady opens a door in the wall and puts money there and closes it and turns a round metal blue thing and she gets dressed but her clothes are shorts, shiny shorts, and a small shiny shirt and Franny likes it because they’re the same color—they match.

This one is nice. She doesn’t have black on her eyes. Nothing shiny on her cheeks and she has white, soft ribbons around her legs. But she can’t talk to her. Mama will get mad. Like when she talked to that man in the store by the candy. Mama wasn’t looking. She was putting food on the moving thing and she got mad.

Some grown-ups are mean, Franny
.

Now the booming again. In her ear too, she can hear it. The loud loud music. It’s a party. Mama’s at a party and she thinks she’s asleep but she’ll surprise her. She can’t see the lady anymore. Maybe she’s at the big mirror with the hot lights. She wants to ask her where Mama is but Mama will get mad.

She waits. She’s thirsty for water. At home Jean puts water by her bed in a blue cup with orange butterflies on it. Maybe the lady left some on the table by the couch. She looks. Sees the couch, the pillow
and blanket, the TV. Now she sees the new lady in shiny shorts walk fast in her high shoes by the mirror to the door with the man behind it. She knocks and the door opens and the man smiles at the lady and says something and the lady is laughing and goes into the blue dark. Her hair bounces like after a bath and Franny’s going to cry but she can’t or the man will hear her and she feels scared again and wants a drink of cold water and her flip-flops. She pushes the chair and crawls out. The floor is dirty on her knees and hands and she has to find Mama but she doesn’t like this dirt against her feet. She lifts the blanket. She looks at the floor by the wall, then turns and sees a high shelf by the door. A shelf with papers up there and big books for the phone and her backpack and flip-flops on top. She stands under and stretches on her toes and touches the air. Mama used the chair from the kitchen to hang pictures on the wall they bought at the store, a picture of the moon and ocean waves. Franny peeks out the crack in the door. Just the big room and no naked ladies and she hurries and squeezes the chair with her hands and pulls on it and it drags over the dirty floor. She’s strong. She is a big girl.

You’re such a big girl
.

Jean’s voice in her head. Her smell in her head too so it’s in her nose. Jean’s smell. Pretty perfume and coffee and sweating from working. Franny works too. Climbing onto the chair. A bumpy cushion there with buttons. She puts her foot on it, then the other, and her body slides a little but she doesn’t fall. She reaches for her flip-flops but the chair is too far away so she gets down and pulls on it till the dark shelf is above her and she climbs back onto the chair. The cushion is soft. Her knees feel good on it, but she’s afraid she will slide again and stands slowly, holding her arms out. And now she can touch her backpack. She can feel it all lumpy with her clothes. She tries to reach her flip-flops, but her fingers just touch the backpack and can’t go higher.

The music is loud again and the grown-ups are yelling. She will go out to the party with her bare feet. It’s okay, she thinks. I walk in Jean’s garden with bare feet and it doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t.

It feels better to be off the chair. And she’s used to the dirty floor under her toes. She sticks her head out the crack. Nobody there. No naked ladies. No big man. But she can’t go back to his door. She will go the other way. The way the new naked lady came.

She’s still thirsty. Mama will give her something when she finds her. Maybe Jean is here too. But why is the music so loud? Why do the men yell and everybody’s laughing?

She sees a black curtain. Like the one at the haunted house Granma took her to last time and it had skeletons and spiderwebs and two ghosts and she didn’t like it. But there’s a blue crack between them. A pretty blue light.

She touches the curtain. It’s soft and thick. Not like the curtain in the haunted house. Thin and scratchy and smelling like dogs. She makes the blue crack wider and steps inside it. But where is the party? She can hear it better but she can’t see it. Everything dark blue. Her hands and her arms. Her bare feet. She touches the wall with her blue fingers and it’s black and hard. No door.

A blue light is shining on the other side of her because it’s not a room, it’s a little hallway like at home. Mama’s room is at the end of it and down in Jean’s house her room is at the end of it too. The light is pretty blue. And round like a bright moon. She thinks of winter where Granma is. Sledding with Mama down the snowy hill behind Granma’s house when it was almost night and Mama held her between her legs and the wind came cold and fast on her face and her eyes got watery, but it was fun and the snow looked blue. Like this.

She knows she fell asleep when the lady read her about Stellaluna but she misses Mama now like she didn’t see her for a long long time and she walks to the steps under the blue light. One. Two. Three of them. The music and yelling are louder and at the top is another curtain. What if she can’t find her? Or Jean? What if they’re not there?

Her face feels funny. It’s hard to swallow and she’s crying again. She’s crying but she climbs the steps and touches the soft curtain with her blue fingers because
just do your best. Always try to do your best
.

APRIL GLANCED DOWN
at the money, touched the bills lightly with her fingers. Would he give her that as easily as he’d given her the three hundred and then the two hundred for the new hour? Was she really going to make this much off just one customer in one night? The most she’d ever made was eight hundred and that was before having to pay the house and tip everyone.

She was cold. Louis had the air-conditioning cranked too high. Her nipples were hard buds and she began to rub her upper arms and legs. She sipped her Moët, a warm flurry inside her veins and head. She wasn’t as nervous around her foreigner as she was before. Maybe because he was so small. Maybe because he was showing such an interest in her, she didn’t know. She stood and wriggled out of her G-string, then picked up her folded skirt and blouse and rested them on the floor on her side, tucking her G-string between them. She sat back down. Felt awkward in just her garter belts and stilettos,
not dancing at all. Back at the Empire, Summer had gotten shit from a drunk customer who’d dropped a dollar on her crotch, then tried to stick his finger in her, and she leaned back and kicked him in the face, her spiked heel ripping through his cheek. But most of the men weren’t like that to dancers the floor hosts were paid to watch over anyway, and unless McGuiness was hard up for dancers, then every dancer started as a waitress first just to tease the regulars for weeks with you topless in a skirt and fishnets so the place would fill up your first night dancing.

McGuiness was young and bigger than most of his floor hosts. He had a shaved head and eyes that made her think of Glenn, soft blue, almost pretty, but they could turn on and off like a light. Her first night at the Empire carrying a tray, after she’d changed in the restroom on the concrete floor with the drain in it, the smells of toilet deodorizer and rusty pipes—the dressing room for dancers only—after she’d zipped up her tight denim skirt and pulled the wrinkles out of her fishnets and cinched the straps of the pumps she’d had to buy with her own money, she stood there and looked at her breasts. They were still heavy from the breast-feeding she’d stopped. She wished she’d worn a light necklace or something. The door opened without a knock and McGuiness came in out of the music, a pager in his hand, chewing gum, looking hard at her breasts, her legs, the slight lip of flesh over the waistband of her skirt.

“Get your hair off ’em.”

She did, her face heating up, a tangle of wire uncoiling inside her. He told her to tie her hair back every night and to lose ten pounds, then he was gone.

She didn’t know what to do with her clothes, her pocketbook. She couldn’t go to her car in the parking lot like this and didn’t want to walk out into the dark club with them like she had no idea what she was doing. In the corner under a Tampax machine was a tall chrome waste can. She stuck her pocketbook into the dusty space behind it, wedging her rolled jeans and halter top there too.

She stopped at the mirror, didn’t look at her body, just her face, saw
the expression she must’ve had as a girl whenever she’d do just what she was told not to. She could feel her heart tapping away, ready to go, and that same voice inside her head:
Make me. Just try and make me
.

The Champagne Room door swung open. A wave of club music rolled in with it, that and laughter, a woman’s brown leg circled by a red satin garter up high, Retro’s. She stepped in carrying a fresh bottle of Moët, winking down at April, then smiling over her shoulder at the little foreigner, who wasn’t smiling, whose eyes were on April as he closed the door.

FRIDAY

WHEN JEAN GOT
home the outdoor faucet was still dripping under the stairs. She’d had to step over a puddle on the inlaid stone and had gone inside for her purse and now she paid the jazz-loving cabbie through his window, tipping him five dollars.

He thanked her and shifted the car into reverse. “You take care of yourself now.”

His headlights blinded her a moment, then he was gone and she stood there in her darkened driveway wondering what he thought of her: Did he see a fat old widow? She didn’t usually think like this when it came to men, but when he’d told her to take care of herself, it was sincere, as if she were as precious as the little girl she was going to take care of now.

The hose connection at the wall had been emitting a fine spray against the house for hours. She stepped into the puddle, stuck her
head under the outdoor stairs, and patted around till she grasped the wet knob and turned it off. All was quiet. The dark garden at her back felt like a benevolent presence. She could smell the bougainvillea and hibiscus. She was still hungry.

Inside the kitchen, she stood at the open fridge and allowed herself a plum. The number of the Puma Club for Men was taped to the side of her refrigerator. Maybe she should call ahead? Tell April she was on her way. But what if April tried to talk her out of it? Tried to convince her this house mom had everything taken care of?

Jean switched on the front and rear floodlights and backed the DeVille out of the driveway. It was the last car Harry had ever bought, and whenever she thought of selling it, she could see his face looking hurt, and now she steered it past the dimly lit stucco and tile homes of her neighbors, people she’d yet to meet.

It was 12:17 on her digital clock, the numbers glowing blue-green across her lap. She wished she’d thought to ask the cabdriver for the call numbers of the station he was listening to; the jazz had calmed her, but she no longer felt calm; she was breathing fast, and a band of sweat had come out on her forehead. Maybe she
had
had a heart attack and was completely foolish to have left the hospital like that.

At the end of the street she stopped at Heron Way, the traffic lights of downtown on her left, to her right the empty street lined with towering palms all the way to the Gulf. She turned left, her breath caught somewhere high in her chest: What was she going to do when she arrived at this place in the darkness north of here? Just walk in and wade through what she imagined would be a smoky room full of raucous men, their eyes on her dancing naked tenant?