Before he could step forward, the woman’s hand, dazzling with jeweled rings, caressed Eva’s cheek.
“Daddy’s getting me cotton candy,” Eva said, eyeing Jules warily. Like a good city kid, he thought.
The woman looked at Jules and, startled, took a step back. As if seeing him for the first time.
“Who did your hair all pretty like that?”
The question, he knew, was meant for Eva, but the woman looked at him as she spoke.
“Mama did ’em,” Eva whispered.
“It’s amazing she was able to make braids out of…” She waved at Eva’s head. “All that.”
A bell rang out and a gravelly voice shouted, “Step up, step up! Everyone wins a prize! Get your prize!”
“There’s a word for it,” the woman said.
“Ma’am?” Jules asked, surprising himself. When was the last time he’d called a woman that? At his great-aunt Eunice’s eightieth birthday party maybe.
“You know,” the woman continued, drawing out her words like it was a cute little trick Jules was playing, as if he were only pretending to misunderstand. “What you people call your hair when it gets all unruly? My grandson has a book about it. His mama”—she looked into Eva’s face—“believes in diversity and such. Buys him books about all the children in the world.”
He heard her say you people. Had she? No, he couldn’t trust himself, not with the screeching brakes of the Twirling Teacups ride, and the stench of the Porta Potties, and his little girl shrieking Look, Daddy! Look! as the pink cotton candy spun inside the dome. And his wife so far away. Where the hell was Leslie?
He focused on the exquisite bloom pinned to the woman’s dress and the sight of the orchid calmed him. Now, was it an amethystoglossa, the amethyst-lipped variety? Or the porphyroglossa, purple-lipped? He always confused the two, and who could blame him, he thought, when there were one hundred and thirteen varieties of Cattleya orchids alone. He took a step closer to get a better look.
“Aha!” he said. “I knew it. That there’s Cattleya labiate,” he pronounced slowly, pointing to the woman’s heavy breast.
She took a stumbling step back and let out a hacking smoker’s cough. He was pleased to see he’d ruffled this peahen’s feathers.
“Beg your pardon?” she said.
“Your orchid,” he said. “Its scientific name is Cattleya labiate. Discovered by William Swainson in Brazil, actually.”
He paused, pretending to search for the date, although he knew it well. He’d taken a course in his second semester at Harvard on the hybridization of orchids.
“In 1817, I believe,” he said matter-of-factly. “Translates to crimson for that big ruby-lipped labellum.” He lifted a hand, almost reached out and stroked the frilled center petal that opened wide like a wet mouth.
“Well, well.” She smiled, her chin doubling when she shook her head. As if he were a naughty boy—not fair, him surprising her like that. “You are a clever one. Aren’t you, now?”
He could’ve gone on. Made this a night she would never forget. One she’d tell her girlfriends about at their weekly bridge game. He knew they wouldn’t believe her. A black man an expert of orchids, graduated with honors from the Harvard Graduate School of Design? Landscape architecture, Orchid Lady would recite slowly, and the ladies’ mouths would turn down, You don’t say, simultaneously impressed and baffled. A colored man speaking Latin.
There was so much to say. Details he knew would seduce this fat, sweating woman into cherishing her orchid. Maybe even cherishing Jules. Did you know, ma’am, he imagined saying, this is Colombia’s national flower? Oh yes, indeed! The tissue-thin tri-color lip matches their flag—yellow for the country’s gold, blue for its two bordering oceans, and red for the blood spilled by patriots.
He would step closer, reach out and stroke the velvety lip of the flower, his fingers dark against the silvery white … This was an endangered species once. He’d transport her to the elfin forests of the highlands thick with clouds and mist and moss.
Did you know, ma’am … expeditions of men died so that orchid can hang off your bosom. Isn’t that something? Together they’d ascend, he and Orchid Lady, to a place where orchids were more than mere flowers and black men were more than creatures to be ignored or feared. He heard his mother’s voice now, as gentle as his father’s was harsh: Redemption, dear Julius, can be found in the most surprising of places.
He stopped himself. He knew he played that game to give his ego a charge when it felt like a dead battery, and while it felt good to hold people’s prejudices up to their faces like a mirror, he always felt shitty after. A self-righteous hangover.
The flower was doomed anyway. All that natural beauty, he thought, upstaged by curls of silver ribbon and clumps of baby’s breath. The labia was torn and discolored. The whole mess of it destined to land in a trash can later that night, among coffee grounds and toast crumbs, kitty litter and used tissues. Nothing he said could save it now.
The pimpled teenager manning the cotton-candy machine handed Eva a Pepto-pink cloud as big as her head. Jules lunged, catching the paper cone before it hit the trampled grass.
“Give me!” Eva shrieked.
“Nappy!” the woman called out. She nodded vigorously, proud of herself. “That’s the word.”
The woman stroked Eva’s hair as his little girl sunk her teeth into the pink fluff. Jules wanted her piggy fingers off his baby.
“I think my wife just calls them tangles,” he lied.
He hated it when Leslie used that other word as she tore the fine metal comb through Eva’s olive oil–slick hair, working the naps out. Leslie, whose hair was as fine as corn silk.
“My wife,” Jules paused, “is Leslie Marshall. Maybe you knew Admiral and Mrs. Marshall?”
The woman’s leaky eyes widened but his satisfaction was spoiled. He loathed using his wife as a screen but he’d seen the effect Leslie’s name had on the islanders. At the DMV registering their city-battered station wagon or picking up a package at the island post office when he’d forgotten his ID. The Marshall name held a power that, as his mother used to say, turned frowns upside down.
The woman only proved his point, smiling. “Of course! Of course I know the Marshalls. Good folks. Delighted to meet you, Mr. Marshall.” She hurried away on stocky legs, vanishing into the crowd.
The tang of burnt kettle corn and sweat and spilled beer rocked over him. He was tired.