voice: “Is she all right?”
“I think so,” Andrew replied, also pitching his voice low.”Just tired is all. Tired all the way down to her roots.”
Howard nodded, took the battered suitcases, and startedback inside. He paused only long
enough to tip his cap toOdetta Holmes—who was almost invisible behind the smokedglass
windows—in a soft and respectful salute.
When he was gone, Andrew took out the collapsed stain- less steel scaffolding at the
bottom of the trunk and began tounfold it. It was a wheelchair.
Since August 19th, 1959, some five and a half years before,the part of Odetta Holmes
from the knees down had been asmissing as those blank hours and days.
4
Before the subway incident, Delta Walker had had only been conscious a few
times—those were like coral islandswhich look isolated to one above them but are, in fact,
only nodes in the spine of a long archipelago which is mostlyunderwater. Odetta suspected
Detta not at all, and Detta hadno idea that there was such a person as Odetta. . . but Detta
atleast had a clear understanding that something was wrong,that someone was fucking with
her life. Odetta’s imaginationnovelized all sorts of things which had happened when
Dettawas in charge of her body; Detta was not so clever. She thought she remembered
things, some things, at least, but a lot of thetime she didn’t.
Detta was at least partially aware of the blanks.
She could remember the china plate. She could rememberthat. She could remember
slipping it into the pocket of herdress, looking over her shoulder all the while to make sure
the Blue Woman wasn’t there, peeking. She had to make surebecause the china plate
belonged to the Blue Woman. Thechina plate was, Detta understood in some vague way,
a for- special.Detta took it for that why. Detta remembered taking itto a place she knew (although she didn’t know how she knew) as The Drawers, a smoking trash-littered hole in
the earthwhere she had once seen a burning baby with plastic skin. Sheremembered putting
the plate carefully down on the gravelly ground and then starting to step on it and stopping,
remem- bered taking off her plain cotton panties and putting theminto the pocket where the
plate had been, and then carefully slipping the first finger of her left hand carefully against
thecut in her at the place where Old Stupid God had joined her and all other girls and
women imperfectly, but something about that place must be right, because she remembered
thejolt, remembered wanting to press, remembered not pressing, remembered how
delicious her vagina had been naked, with- out the cotton panties in the way of it and the
world, and shehad not pressed, not until her shoe pressed, her black patentleather shoe, not
until her shoe pressed down on the plate,thenshe pressed on the cut with her finger the way
she waspressing on the Blue Woman’s forspecial china plate with herfoot, she remembered
the way the black patent leather shoecovered the delicate blue webbing on the edge of the
plate, sheremembered the press, yes, she remembered pressing in TheDrawers, pressing
with finger and foot, remembered the deli- cious promise of finger and cut, remembered
that when the plate snapped with a bitter brittle snap a similar brittle plea- sure had
skewered upward from that cut into her guts like anarrow, she remembered the cry which
had broken from herlips, an unpleasant cawing like the sound of a crow scared up from a
cornpatch, she could remember staring dully at thefragments of the plate and then taking
the plain white cottonpanties slowly out of her dress pocket and putting them
onagain, step-ins, so she had heard them called in some timeunhoused in memory and
drifting loose like turves on a flood-tide, step-ins, good, because first you stepped out to do yourbusiness and then you stepped back in, first one shiny patentleather shoe and then the
other, good, panties were good, shecould remember drawing them up her legs so clearly,
drawingthem past her knees, a scab on the left one almost ready to fall off and leave clean
pink new babyskin, yes, she couldremember so clearly it might not have been a week ago
oryesterday but only one single moment ago, she could remem- ber how the waistband had
reached the hem of her party dress, the clear contrast of white cotton against brown skin,
likecream, yes, like that, cream from a pitcher caught suspendedover coffee, the texture,
the panties disappearing under thehem of the dress, except then the dress was burnt orange
and the panties were not going up but down but they were still white but not cotton, they
were nylon, cheap see-throughnylon panties, cheap in more ways than one, and she
remem- bered stepping out of them, she remembered how they glim- mered on the floormat
of the ’46 Dodge DeSoto, yes, how whitethey were, how cheap they were, not anything
dignified like underwear but cheap panties, the girl was cheap and it wasgood to be cheap,
good to be on sale, to be on the block noteven like a whore but like a good breedsow; she
rememberedno round china plate but the round white face of a boy, somesurprised drunk
fraternity boy, he was no china plate but hisface was as round as the Blue Woman’s china
plate had been,and there was webbing on his cheeks, and this webbing lookedas blue as the
webbing on the Blue Woman’s forspecial chinaplate had been, but that was only because
the neon was red, theneon was garish, in the dark the neon from the roadhouse signmade
the spreading blood from the places on his cheeks whereshe had clawed him look blue, and
he had said Why did you why did you why did you do,and then he unrolled the windowso he
could get his face outside to puke and she remembered hearing Dodie Stevens on the
jukebox, singing about tan shoes with pink shoelaces and a big Panama with a
purplehatband, she remembered the sound of his puking was like gravel in a cement mixer, and his penis, which moments before had been a livid exclamation point rising from the
tufted tangle of his pubic hair, was collapsing into a weak white question mark; she
remembered the hoarse gravelsounds of his vomiting stopped and then started again and
shethought Well I guess he ain’t made enough to lay this founda- tion yet and laughing and pressing her finger (which now came equipped with a long shaped nail) against her
vaginawhich was bare but no longer bare because it was overgrownwith its own coarse
briared tangle, and there had been the samebrittle breaking snap inside her, and it was still
as much pain as it was pleasure (but better, far better, than nothing at all)/and then he was
grabbing blindly for her and saying in a hurt breaking tone Oh you goddamned nigger cunt
and she wenton laughing just the same, dodging him easily and snatching up her panties
and opening the door on her side of the car, feeling the last blind thud of his fingers on the
back of herblouse as she ran into a May night that was redolent of early honeysuckle,
red-pink neon light stuttering off the gravel ofsome postwar parking lot, stuffing her
panties, her cheap slicknylon panties not into the pocket of her dress but into a
pursejumbled with a teenager’s cheerful conglomeration of cosmet- ics, she was running,
the light was stuttering, and then she wastwenty-three and it was not panties but a rayon
scarf, and shewas casually slipping it into her purse as she walked along a counter in the
Nice Notions section of Macy’s—a scarf whichsold at that time for $1.99.Cheap.
Cheap like the white nylon panties.
Cheap.
Like her.
The body she inhabited was that of a woman who hadinherited millions, but that was not
known and didn’tmatter—the scarf was white, the edging blue, and there wasthat same
little breaking sense of pleasure as she sat in the backseat of the taxi, and, oblivious of the
driver, held the scarf in one hand, looking at it fixedly, while her other hand crept upunder
her tweed skirt and beneath the leg-band of her whitepanties, and that one long dark finger
took care of the businessthat needed to be taken care of in a single merciless stroke.
So sometimes she wondered, in a distracted sort of way,where she was when she
wasn’t here, but mostly her needs weretoo sudden and pressing for any extended
contemplation, andshe simply fulfilled what needed to be fulfilled, did whatneeded to be
done.
Roland would have understood.
5
Odetta could have taken a limo everywhere, even in1959—although her father was still alive and she was not asfabulously rich as she would become when he died in 1962, the
money held in trust for her had become hers on her twenty-fifth birthday, and she could do
pretty much as she liked. Butshe cared very little for a phrase one of the conservative
colum- nists had coined a year or two before—the phrase was “limosine liberal,” and she