The Little Holly Market
She wakes up early,
alone. It is late July. Her bedroom is east-facing, and a brick
building to boot. The rotating fan on
the floor doesn’t do much, just stirs the moist hot air around, like river
water down in the Bottoms. She doesn’t
want to be awake. She wants to hold onto
sleep as long as she can, hold on to sleep and not knowing. But even in sleep, the heat makes you
fretful.
The sheets are at the edge of the bed, kicked
off in the night, her nightgown twisted up under her breasts, sticky. She hears the children in the front room, the
cartoons going full-tilt. The front room
stays pretty dark all day, cooler, and the vinyl sofa, cracked but not bad, is also
cool. The children love to dive into the
cushions, thrash into them like water, loving the feel of it against their bare
arms and legs. Even the cracked parts feel
like little fish mouths nibbling at you all over.
Sleep gone, she rolls
over silently, straightening her gown. No sense layin here. Might as well get up an move. She is of indeterminate age. Her flesh is the color of roasted coffee
beans and absolutely smooth but for a single vertical line carved between her
brows. Her body is heavy. She shuffles her feet in an old woman’s drag,
unconscious that this is how she walks, that she has slowly worn a groove into
the industrial carpeting from her bed to the hallway. It would startle her to know that she has
been here that long.
Her face puckers as she reaches the window,
through which the sun is shining too brightly.
The light is like the light reflected
off car windshields, off tinfoil, jagged and hateful. It gives the dingy walls and the old bed
sheets and pillowcases a bleached look.
The edges of things seem out-of-focus.
Heat like the worst headache you can imagine, like glass in your head, lodging
in the tender spots in the folds of your brain, turning your stomach sour, your
eyeballs to jelly. Squinting, she yanks
the shade down.
She steps out into the
little space between her bedroom and the kids’ rooms. Can’t
even call it a hallway. It’s too small
to correckly call it that. To the
right is the bathroom. The children are
quiet. They don’t even turn around as
she shuts the bedroom door behind her.
Their eyes are glued to the nineteen-inch screen. The color is off. All the pictures have a reddish tint.
They been listless, she thinks.
This damn heat. Her mamma used to say saps. This heat just saps your energy. Mamma used to keep a cool rag around her neck,
a pitcher of water in the fridge. But
the heat is only one problem. She keeps
a pitcher of water in the fridge like Mamma used to.
Problem is, that’s all that’s in the fridge. Her
cupboards, like the woman’s in the nursery rhyme, are bare.
She takes her time, sitting
on the toilet. She doesn’t want to leave
the bathroom, even though it is always stuffy.
Mamma never had no air condition
neither. She stands, flushes. Even if
she had, she wouldn’ta turnt it on. She
was forever screaming about the ‘lectric bills. Washes her hands and face. Her hands are very dark against the white
basin. Brushes her teeth, thinking of
Mamma. She wishes her Mamma was here to
tell her, Don’t you do it. But then, if Mamma were here, she might just as easily say, Girl, you do whatever you got to to get them babies fed.
She combs her hair,
then comes out of the bathroom and goes into the kitchen. Any minute now, the elder children will come wandering
back to the house, scrounging for breakfast.
There has been nothing in the house but oatmeal and rice for days, and
they are now out of oatmeal. So she
resigns herself to heating water on the stove to boil the last of the
rice. She will mix in a little sugar
instead of salt, so it will be at least a little like Rice Krispies. Except for there’s no milk.
The little ones come
get their bowls and quietly return to the living room floor to eat in front of
the TV. They eat slowly, making little
fuss. She wants to cry.
Almost as if on cue, the elder children come
inside and they each have a small bowl.
One of them makes a face, picks at his food.
“That’s all they is,” their mother tells
them. “I gotta go to the store.”
“When ya goin to the
store?”
She doesn’t
answer. Instead, she goes out onto the
stoop and lights a cigarette, barefoot, still wearing her nightgown. It’s so humid, she perspires right away, a
little pool forming in the groove of her upper lip. The paper of her cigarette turns damp where
she holds it between her fingers. Check
won’t come till next week. After he is
done eating, her oldest boy, Quentin, comes back out and sits on the stoop next
to her. She tilts her cigarette away.
“Still hongry,” she
says. It’s not really a question, and
certainly not the question.
“Yeah.”
She nods once, curtly. “Miz Flores wa’ant home?”
“Uh-uh.”
She nods again. “Well, we’ll go down bout 11:30. Go get us some Hot Lunch.” The way they had come to use the term was
like a brand-name. There was a Boys and
Girls Club on Twentieth. It had a lunch
program in the summer—free hot lunches Monday through Friday. Lunch was served at noon, but you had to get
there early. The line would be almost up
the block.
“Okay,” Quentin says
cooperatively. She gives him a little
sideways glance. He’s a good boy, this one, never no back-talk. In a rare stray bit of affection, she reaches
out her free hand and runs it playfully over his summer-cropped curls. He ducks, grinning.
“Go on now,” she
says. He runs off. Probably somebody would go around to the fire hydrants
along Holly and Mercier Streets with a wrench, opening up the valves so the children
could play in the water. She has half a
mind to join them. Instead, she just sits
for a little longer, fiddling with the cigarette and looking out over the block
of housing that zigzags down the hill. Knowing
the children would get at least one meal on the weekdays was fine. But it was Thursday already. And then the long weekend with nothing to
eat, if she didn’t do something about it quick.
Every woman in the neighborhood knows a way to get free groceries round
here, if she got a mind to. The
thought makes her shiver, despite the heat, and a fine rash of goose pimples
raises on her bare upper arms. Her
stomach, queasy to begin with, drops.
Rising heavily to her
feet, she flicks the cigarette away in the dew-damp water grass growing in scraggly
patches around the building. She starts
to go inside, but she hears the screen door around the side bang open, and her
neighbor, Twyla, comes out, a yellow laundry basket on her hip. She has her daughter with her.
“Hey, Yvonne!” Twyla
calls. Twyla is tiny, wiry and dark,
darker even then Yvonne, with a tight little cap of crazy curls that stick
straight out from her head, making her look like a black Raggedy Ann. At the moment, she is wearing a bright yellow
and white flowered sleeveless blouse tied at the side of her waist, sky-blue
polyester shorts, and blue jelly sandals.
“Hey,” Yvonne calls back easily enough.
Twyla moves with quick little movements like
a terrier, covering a lot of ground on such itty-bitty feet, dropping the basket
in the beaten dirt under the clothesline.
She starts to bend over but pauses ever-so briefly, stealing a glance at
Yvonne.
“What’s th matter wit choo?” she inquires.
Yvonne shrugs. “Nuthin.”
Twyla takes a baggie full of clothespins
out of the basket and hands them to her girl.
“Nuthin my ass.” Then she starts
taking clothes out of the basket. Straightening
up, she shakes out one of her son’s T-shirts and begins smoothing it out on the
line. “Sheeyit. I wish I had a pair a big ol titties like you. Bad enough I’s born dark, and skinny to boot. I say make em work for you, girl.”
“You hush yo mouth!” Yvonne snaps.
Twyla’s eyes roll, gold
tooth flashing. “God damn if they
wouldn’t have to pay me to cover up
knockers like dat! I be flashin em every
chance I got! All my blouses be cut down
to dere.” Gesturing to her belly button, she gives a
little shimmy, wiggling her hips.
Yvonne waves her
hand. “You don’t know whatchoo talkin
bout.” But she has to fight hard to stop
from grinning herself.
“Oowee,” Twyla exhales,
holding out a brown palm to her daughter, who obligingly hands her a
clothespin. “We got a bashful one right here, don’t we? Big-tit mamma.” She slaps her own ass. “Afrait to shake dem puppies out.”
“Quit it now!”
“All right, all right,”
Twyla agrees, still flashing her gold tooth.
“I just playin.”
Yvonne turns and goes
back inside without another word, Twyla’s cackling chasing her all the way back
to her bedroom, where she goes to the closet (the sliding door is propped on
the wall next to it—it had come off the track sometime ago and Yvonne couldn’t
get it to go back right). It shouldn’t
matter what she wears today, but somehow it does.
There is not a lot to
choose from. She is a big woman, and the
fact is, there just aren’t many nice clothes for big women, black or white. She selects a magenta-colored halter dress and
holds it up in front of the mirror, her mouth twisting. For a minute, she sinks back down on the bed. Then, with a new force of determination powering
her body, she yanks off the nightgown. Her
fingers are swift as they do up strings and snaps, white bra, panties, the dress. It has a print pattern like palm fronds. She slides her feet into a pair of
tan-colored sandals. It’s too hot to put
on make-up, she’d just sweat it right off, but she checks her hair, checks the
hang of the dress, fussing with the folds and creases, tucking and smoothing
until it looks just right.
Then she folds her nightgown and stows it away under her
pillow, makes the bed, and goes back out into the living room. To general protest, she shuts the TV off with
a snap.
“Go on now!” she says,
shooing the children outside. “Go play.”
She goes out too,
shuts and locks the door behind her. Twyla’s
laundry is completely hung already.
There is no breeze to stir the dripping shirts, T-shirts, baseball jerseys,
(Twyla’s oldest boy plays on the church team with Quentin), but the July sun
would just about bake them dry, sure enough.
Going up Twenty-First,
the rows of units that make up the Pennway Projects are squat and red like
crabs crouched on a shelf of rocks, surrounded by a flat asphalt sea. Cresting the hill, she turns and follows a cracked
footpath to one of the middle units. As
she expects, an old woman is seated on a glider swing on the front stoop,
looking impassively out over Holly Street.
A small rotating fan is positioned on the window sill to blow in her
direction.
“Hey,” Yvonne leans
down and kisses the old woman’s cheek, wrinkled and soft as crepe.
“Hey, baby,” Pinky
greets her, that old face lighting right up.
Her voice is quavery, yet pleasant.
“Just look at you, so purdy! Gonna
set with me a while?”
“Thought I might,” Yvonne
said, settling down on the glider swing next to her, turned slightly to face
her. Pinky had been a friend of Yvonne’s
grandmother, now well into her eighties.
Her hair is mostly white, shot through with a few sprigs of silver. She wears large, thick bifocals with pink
plastic rims. Never a heavy woman, the
years have rendered her body shapeless: flattened breasts hanging to her waist,
belly pooched out. She has had three
hiatal hernias. The doctors refused to
operate on the latest because of her advanced age. Compounded by the formless housedress she is
wearing, so wash-worn and faded its pattern seems to blend with Pinky’s high
yellow skin, she resembles a lump of clay set on a pottery wheel. Yvonne didn’t know how she could stand even
those half-sleeves in this heat. Prolly had that dress since 1962, she thinks
with some wonder.
Underneath it, Pinky’s legs are bare,
broken-down looking, heavily streaked with veins. The ankles are slightly swollen over her
white orthopedic shoes. Her hands, also
swollen, sit bunched in her flowered lap, but her back is straight as a measuring
stick. She rocks the glider steadily
with an easy heel-toe action.
“How you doin?” Pinky asks.
“Doin all right.”
Pinky nods amicably
and pats her hand. “You always was a
good girl, Yvonne. Always was. Mmm-hmm.”
The two of them settle back in the glider seat, looking out. The silence between them is comfortable, with
the low whir of the fan behind them and the steady creak of the glider punctuated
only now and then by some quiet remark from one or the other as they watch the
neighborhood regulars go by.
After a while, along
comes Mr. Peregrino. He is a small, neat
little figure of a man in a hat, starched button-down and sharply creased
trousers. With his litter stick and a
trash bag, he makes the last of his rounds before the afternoon and the worst
of the heat, picking up scraps of paper and crumpled soda cans. There is Miss Bailey, who is white. And crazy.
She shuffles along in her strange, ungainly lurch, barefoot as always,
despite the abundance of broken glass on the street. Sometimes she waves; today, she does
not. Just lumbers along with her head
down, hair hanging in clumps to hide her face, so only the shiny tip of her
nose is visible. Yvonne heard that one
afternoon, Miss Bailey got into some kind of argument with some boys in the
neighborhood while she was sitting on the front porch of her house. She had screamed insults at them, then pulled
down her panties and flashed them, bumping her bare ass right up against the
chain link fence. Then she yanked out
her tampon and threw it. But it was, in
Yvonne’s estimation, them boys’ fault.
Everybody knew Miss Bailey wasn’t right.
That was why she wasn’t married and lived with her mother, even though
she had to be at least forty.
“Poor soul,” pronounces Pinky, shaking her
head.
There aren’t many
white people on the hill. There are the
Baileys, which, in addition to Miss Bailey, consist of old Mrs. Bailey, her
mother; and an assortment of nieces and nephews. There is Mrs. Flores, who was actually a
German, married to Mr. Flores, and known to be the best cook in the
neighborhood. Her children are all but
grown, but she still cooks enough for twelve every day. Anyone who comes through her door is welcome
to either a plate of brats and sauerkraut with mashed potatoes, or a big bowl
of menudo, or a patty melt on Texas toast, depending.
Otherwise, the hill
itself is almost all Mexican. They live
in the houses on the west side of Holly Street, the barrio. And the blacks on the east side, in the
projects. The line had been drawn a few
years ago. Yvonne can still remember
that day. Too many robberies going on in
the houses on the west side-- on Mercier, on Twenty-First. One of the Ramirez girls’ boyfriends got beat
up real bad when he came to take her out on a date, put in the hospital. And somebody tried to break into old Mrs.
Martinez’s house when she was home.
She’d seen him—a big black man.
So without a lot of noise or fuss, the Mexican men all got together and
lined up in the middle of Holly Street, right on the invisible line that
divided the neighborhood, black from brown.
They’d all had rifles. They’d
said there’d better not be any more robberies.
Tell the men, they’d said. They
wouldn’t go to the police. The police don’t
do nothin. So they’d have to take care
of it themselves. No more.
There weren’t hardly any men in the projects. Teenaged boys, sure. But no men.
If you saw a man, he had a woman here, a woman and kids. And he only came around after dark.
As if reading her mind, Pinky asks,
“Where’s Sam lately? I ain’t seem im
around.”
Yvonne doesn’t answer. After a pause, Pinky pats her hand again,
strokes it.
There is one other white man in the
neighborhood, in a manner of speaking. Mr.
Hauffman, the big German who owned the Little Holly Market at the bottom of the
hill. Mr. Hauffman had married himself
the prettiest girl on the hill, a little slim gal, one of the Salamanca
sisters. Germans marrying Mexicans, what
was that all about? The Salamanca girl
has a Spanish name, but Yvonne can’t think of it. Their daughter had come out milk-white. Yvonne saw her one time, not that long ago,
when she was down buying a carton of cigarettes. The little girl was sitting up on the
counter. She couldn’t be more than three
years old, with her mother’s dark hair and Spanish eyes—not wide, but long,
with dark lashes. And with that skin, she
looked just like a little doll. Just the
prettiest little girl you ever saw, wearing a little white sundress and
matching white sandals. The dress had
yellow bows on the shoulder straps. She was
sucking on a red Blow Pop. Her little
bow-shaped mouth was the same color as the sucker. If his daughter was there, his wife,
presumably, could have come in at any time.
Mr. Hauffman was nothing but polite to her that day as he slid the
carton of Kools across the countertop.
Right around 11:15, as
if on cue, the children showed up, the younger ones in pairs, Quentin on his
own, soaking wet, shoes squelching as he comes up. Each and every one of them gives Pinky a
kiss. There was a time when they could
have climbed up in her lap, but her arthritis is too bad now.
Sighing, Yvonne rises,
holding fast for a second to Pinky’s fingers before she lets them go. “You okay?” she asks.
“Go on, honey,” Pinky
waves her gnarled hand. “I’ll be fine.”
Yvonne smiles and
herds the children down the sidewalk, thinking she should have checked Pinky’s
cupboards while she was there.
The projects border
Observation Park, which is fenced off on one side, so they have to take the
long way around to Holly Street. On the
south and west sides of the park is a graduating stone wall. While it is still low, the children scramble
up it. Sometimes they dart ahead, to where
the wall rises above the sidewalk by a good ten feet, shrieking and dangling
their legs. It’s the children’s favorite
spot for hurling eggs at passing cars, or water balloons at each other.
The Boys and Girls
Club is on the other side of the park, to the north. There is a bright orange swing set in front,
a blue jungle gym, and a row of those little rocking horses on metal
coils. It seems to be boiling over with
people already, crowded and bustling as an anthill. The children frolic on the playground
equipment. Mothers huddle in clumps to
talk, turning occasionally to shout something at their offspring. There are some picnic tables where a few
people have already sat down to eat, but most prefer to eat indoors, where it’s
air conditioned.
Yvonne looks around at
the people already coming out of the cafeteria with their pale green Styrofoam
trays of food. It’s like hospital food—mealy
hamburgers, limp corndogs, sweaty hash browns, warm Jell-O, neon-green pickles,
runny ketchup—all wrapped in cellophane.
But it’s food. It hurts to watch
the children apply themselves to it so eagerly.
There are also cartons of milk, and occasionally, pints of vanilla ice
cream to be eaten with flat wooden spoons that leave splinters on your tongue.
She turns to Quentin. “You watch yo brothers and sisters. I’m gon run down to d’ store.”
He nods. “Okay, Mamma.”
She watches them for a
moment as they get in line, making sure none of them can look to see what she’s
doing before she turns and hurries off down the street.
The road is narrower
here. Originally, her mamma told her,
most of these back streets were designed for streetcars, but the tracks are
long gone. The houses end on a series of
vacant lots, houses lost in a fire. Arson. A set of stone steps are all that
remains. Stone steps covered in vines
and graffiti, leading up to air, and at the foot of the hill is Mr. Hauffman’s
store. It’s a simple, square, cinderblock
building in the middle of an untreed gravel lot. It’s almost noon, so the shadeless building seems
to float on a wave of heat above the concrete curb, bare walls absorbing and
reflecting light in a pale, screaming glare.
Across the front is a white sign with cheery red lettering, THE LITTLE
HOLLY MARKET, like a candy cane. It has
no windows except for a small, square pane set in the thick wooden door. She does not allow herself to think about
this. She just tugs on the handle and
steps inside.
As she crosses the
threshold, she feels suddenly as if she’s hit a pool of water. Her body feels heavy and light at the same
time. Overhead, a bell chimes and the door
swings shut behind her. There is the
shock of air conditioning. How icy it is
in here, how dim. The air is dry and
somehow still compared to the raucous light outside. After her eyes adjust, she sees directly in
front of her are three narrow aisles lined with food. Immediately, her stomach starts to growl, her
mouth fills voluptuously with spit. She’s
been subsisting on rice, oatmeal and cigarettes for two weeks. She almost forgot that there even was such a
thing as treats—chips, pretzels, peanut butter crackers, snack cakes, beef
jerky. In a freezer case in the corner
are pints of ice cream – good ice cream, not the kind you eat with a tongue
depressor -- individual Eskimo pies, Big Tops, Bomb Pops. And of course, there are all the more sensible
things. Loaves of bread, jars of peanut
butter, canned soup, tins of sardines packed with good fat. Along the back wall are cold cases stocked
with beer, pop, milk, eggs, lunch meat, and cheese. Back against the right wall is the counter,
with shelves underneath for candy bars.
Behind the cash register is Mr. Hauffman. He has the look of a once-handsome man now
going to seed, not bad yet, but you could foreglimpse paunchy, bald middle age
coming up fast, as if the man in front of her is being erased a little bit at a
time, blond hair getting thin, belly becoming soft and vast, straining against
the buttons of his shirt.
“Hey there,” he says.
Yvonne forces herself
to nod. “Hey,” she says uncertainly,
lingering at the end of the food aisles.
There is no one else in the store, so he watches her. She tries not to stare back and looks down at
the shelves instead.
The bells over the
door chime again as someone else comes in, a woman in cut-off shorts that
Yvonne doesn’t know. Mr. Hauffman turns
his attention to her as she grabs items, heaps them on the counter. Yvonne turns her back to them, momentarily
relieved. Keeping her eyes on the
shelves, she picks things up and puts them back down again, not really seeing,
too busy listening to Mr. Hauffman and the other woman.
“That everything?” Mr.
Hauffman asks.
“Yep. That about does it.”
He punches the numbers
into the cash register and gives her the amount. The shush-shush of dollar bills being counted
out, the clink of change in the cash register drawer, rattle of brown paper
bags. The bells jingle for a third time
and the woman is gone.
Mr. Hauffman gives her
a look. “Help you find something?”
She fiddles with the
can of soup she is holding. “No.”
His eyebrows
raise. “You just browsing?”
“No,” she says
again. “I . . . I ain’t got no money.”
“Well,” he says. “That is
a problem.” The way he talks sounds
funny to Yvonne, like he’s trying to be cute or something. It distracts her.
“I need groceries,” she says a little
hesitantly.
“Sorry, honey. I ain’t running a charity.”
Yvonne takes a deep
breath. She is sweating, despite the air
conditioning. “Maybe I could pay you
some other way,” she says real fast.
For the first time, he
looks interested. “Yeah?” he
smirks. “What way would that be?”
Yvonne’s tongue feels
like it’s caught in the roof of her mouth.
He crosses his arms and waits, leaning against the counter, looking at
her so nasty she wants to cover her face and run out the door.
She swallows a couple of times. “I’ll show you my titties.”
He walks over and
locks the door. There is a piece of
cardboard taped to secured to the door with duct tape. He unfolds that and smooths it over the small
window in the door. “All right,” he
says, still smirking. “Let’s see em.”
Her arms feel heavy,
the muscles weak, as if she’s been pummeled.
Slowly, she slides the straps of her dress down, then her bra. She moves them down so he can see,
concentrating very hard on the movements so as not to see him. How he steps closer. Those pale blue eyes make it easy to see the
black iris opening wide, the beads of sweat on his upper lip, at his receding
hairline. Bare arms beneath his rolled
sleeve cuffs. The hair on the back of
his arms is so blond it’s almost silvery, like fish scales, white skin speckled
like trout. At the end of his arms, his
hands are enormous, the thick, chapped fingers, more blond hair sprouting from
the knuckles. It makes her sick, the
thought of him laying those hands on her.
“That all?” he
says. “For groceries? C’mon, honey.
Raise your arms. Jiggle em a
little.”
She does as he says,
painfully aware of every inch of bare skin, prickling and burning with shame,
aware of the weight of her tits as they bob up and down, heavy and dark, her
arms out. But she looks anywhere but at
him, her eyes trained on a corner of the ceiling. Slowly, she raises her hands and begins
playing with her tits, squeezing them and pinching the nipples.
His breathing roughens
a bit, but otherwise he is still, she can see out of the corner of her eye. For a long time, he just stands there,
looking as she stands with her arms out, upper body bare. Somehow, she knows he isn’t going to lay a
finger on her. Not this time. Next time, maybe, or maybe he’d just want her
to take all her clothes off and jiggle for him.
Next time, it wouldn’t so hard. And
then what? And what then? How much could she get out of him? Sooner or later, he’d be tired of her.
At last, he goes over
and takes a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk from the shelves and sets them
on the counter while she re-does her bra, pulls the top of her dress back up. He even bags it for her. Milk and bread, that’s it. But it’s something. She wonders how far she can stretch it.
She doesn’t notice as
she steps back out into the sunshine that the top of her dress is slightly
askew, brown paper bag on her hip. Behind
her, she hears the door lock again.
From now on, she
promises herself, she won’t come here. She
would shop at Jingle’s on 17th when she had to, or run down to the
liquor store on the Boulevard. She
couldn’t afford the temptation she thinks as she walks slowly back up the hill.
Lauren Scharhag
Lauren Scharhag is
an award-winning writer of fiction and poetry. She is the author of Under
Julia, The Ice Dragon, The Winter Prince, West Side Girl & Other Poems, and
the co-author of The Order of the Four Sons series. Her poems and short
stories have appeared in over eighty journals and anthologies, including Into
the Void, The American Journal of Poetry, Gambling the Aisle and Glass:
A Journal of Poetry. She lives in Kansas City, MO. To learn more about her
work, visit: www.laurenscharhag.blogspot.com
Tags:
Short Fiction