I used ten dollars on a jitney cab to The White People’s mall.
The eyes of the woman at Caché followed me around the small store as I tried to find a dress to match how I felt inside. I didn’t care. She was Mr. Greeley, except white and a woman and tall.
There was only one dress in the store that would do. It was bright yellow like the sun and James’s soul. It was floor-length, with slightly darker sequins that started at the V of the waist.
It cost two hundred and sixty-five dollars.
I picked one up in my size and took it over to the counter. The white woman looked down at me.
“Yes, may I help you?”
I took out my jar and counted out three hundred dollars. As I placed the money on the counter her look went from frosty to confused.
“You want this dress?” she asked me.
I handed the dress to her and nodded.
“Don’t you want to try it on?”
I shook my head.
“Okay . . .” she said. She picked up the dress and rang it up. All through the transaction she kept giving me guilty looks, like me buying a dress in her store meant that she was somehow taking advantage of me. I think she thought my muteness to be an indicator of bigger problems in my head. The kind of head problems that would send a nothing little black girl like me into a store to buy a three-hundred-dollar something-person dress.
Still, in the end, she handed me the dress in a long plastic bag. “Now you’re sure you don’t want to try this on? I don’t mind if you do. I don’t mind a bit.”
She was being kind. It was a startling realization that I didn’t quite know what to do with, since I wasn’t used to kindness.
I shook my head, and I smiled at her. Smiling wasn’t something I often did in regards to other people, but I figured I should start practicing for tonight with James.
She blinked and smiled back.
“Well . . . thank you. You enjoy that dress now.”
I walked out of there, and for the first time that I can remember, I truly believed that the world was a good place.
. . .
I had expected Cora to be gone for the night. We had run out of alcohol at home, which usually meant that she hit the bar at four in anticipation of happy hour.
But when I opened the door with my dress over my arm, she was sitting on the couch, smoking.
She looked at me when I entered.
I didn’t move my arm, hoping that if I walked in without calling attention to it, she wouldn’t notice the dress.
Usually when we crossed paths, she didn’t really look at me.
As it was, her eyes went back to the television.
“Get me a Vess,” she said.
I wanted to ask her why she was still here. Why she hadn’t gone out to the bar yet.
But of course I didn’t. I put the dress down in the easy chair, and I went into the kitchen to get her a kiwi-strawberry Vess soda.
She was watching Entertainment Tonight, and it was 6:45, so maybe that meant she’d be gone in fifteen minutes.
If I could just act normal, I thought, she wouldn’t even notice the dress.
But when I stepped back into the living room, she was standing next to the sofa chair, untying the plastic at the bottom of the bag.
She was dressed in her sequined bolero jacket and she had her purse over her arm, like she hadn’t just asked me for something. This often happened with Cora. She’d send me to get her something right before she was fixing to leave, and I’d come back from fetching it only to find her already gone.
Ten minutes. If I had just gotten home ten minutes later, I would have missed her entirely.
“What this?” she asked me.
I didn’t answer.
“Where’d you get this from?” She was pulling up the plastic now.
I didn’t answer.
She looked at the price tag. “Where you get enough money to buy this shit?”
I didn’t answer.
“You been stealin’ from me?” She came over and looked me up and down, repatterning me in her head from servant-daughter to servant-thief.
Then she backhanded me.