“Fifty-ninth Street, Bloomingdale’s,” the loudspeaker said.
The white couple came into the car looking at each other. “...with the wife. We’re going down to St. Croix for a week,” the chubby man, wearing a tan jacket made from some kind of synthetic blend, said. He looked like an eight-year-old that had been puffed up into man-size. The woman with him was young also, dressed in a fine maroon silk business suit. They didn’t look around to see who was in the car. They didn’t care about anything or anyone but him. He went on talking about his wife and his kids and his trip. She was smiling but it was that same smile of hatred that Katherine had for Negroes.
“...we go every year. The kids love it. They got a park for kids right on the hotel grounds...”
The doors slammed closed and the car went on.
“Dang,” the sweater-breasted girl intoned. “Roger said Marie did that.”
The sliding door banged open in the back of the car. The women all looked up. A Chinese man came by carrying a pile of hand-painted bamboo calendars over his left arm. He showed them first to the chubby man and maroon lady, then to the old woman and Kiki. There was a billowing yellow-and-red dragon, a tea garden with serving girls, and Hokusai’s great wave. He didn’t bother showing his wares to the girls or the little man.
The girls were crouched low over the book like kittens licking from a bowl. Above their heads Kiki could see the murky image of herself, no longer a girl in her twenties. Pale with crinkled red hair limp from days without washing. She traced the dark shadows under her eyes, thinking that she looked as if someone had beaten her.
“You’re very pretty,” the little man said in a slight Jamaican accent. He was talking to the girls.
“Mmmmmmmmmmm,” the girl to the left hummed. LaToya slammed the book shut and shoved it back into her folder. Then they all leaned their heads together and laughed.
The train was moving fast, rocking from side to side as it rushed on. The old woman held a string of garnet rosary beads in her left hand. The maroon-silk woman lost her smile as she gazed up into the great moon face of the chubby man. And he talked and talked. Kiki watched his mouth move but all she could hear was the black girls’ laughter. Laughter like hard fists. Kiki half-closed her eyes and held on to the rim of her seat through the storm of laughing fists in a haze of queasy pain.
One of the girls said something to the little man, but Kiki couldn’t make it out. They laughed and rubbed shoulders. The man stared intently at the girl in the sweater, the one who had her hair like Hattie’s. But she didn’t look like Hattie. Hattie’s skin was so dark that it was actually black. And all of her teeth had spaces between them. And even though Hattie was large her stomach never stuck out like that. And when she laughed it was a bass holler that tickled Kiki’s neck from across the room.
A priest and a man in a gray suit got on together at the next station. When the train stopped again the conductor announced Fourteenth Street.
Kiki reached for the small cloth bag under the seat. The bag that the orderly had given her when she told him that she didn’t have a suitcase.
It hurt to stand up. She could feel every stitch pull against torn skin.
The girls were ahead of her going out the door.
“Thank you,” the little brown man said as they filed past him. When nobody answered he touched the last girl’s arm.
“Thank you,” he said again.
“What?” the girl in the football coat shouted. “What you want?”
“You should say thank you when you get a compliment,” he said.
Maybe he was really hurt, Kiki thought.
“Come on, Clarice,” her friends said.
Kiki could feel every step on the inside where the doctor said that the stitches would dissolve on their own. Some kind of plastic thread melting right up inside her.
The local train was waiting across the track. The girls were there, also the old lady with the shopping bag.
At Astor Place everybody got out. All of them, even the old lady, walked faster than Kiki. She watched them go, the girls laughing about what they had read and the lady struggling with her bag. Kiki had to take the stairs one at a time. Every step up jabbed into her. Sweat was trickling down her neck by the time she’d reached the top stair. There the frozen wind blew through her clothes, right down to her skinny frame.
Four hooded boys were standing at the corner. They were smoking cigarettes and bobbing their heads to the beat of loud hiphop that blasted from a boom box set on the ground near them. They were young, twelve or thirteen. All wore tennis shoes, unlaced. Three of them had on jeans so loose that they threatened to fall off their skinny boy hips. The largest one wore satiny purple-and-pink-striped running pants. They were talking tough, making gestures like full-grown black men with little-boy grins. Kiki turned her back to them and went quickly through the crowds down to Broadway and around the block. She hated them too. Nausea rode on the wave of hatred. Kiki leaned against the store window at Astor and Broadway and threw up all the neatly cut carrots and green beans they’d fed her for lunch at the hospital. She went down on one knee and her side felt as if it had ripped open.
“Honey! Honey, what’s wrong?” The cold fingers at the back of her neck felt good. Really good. Strong hands in her armpits and a feeling of weightlessness. The mature woman’s face brought Kiki back to when she had the intestinal flu and Hattie took her home to care for her because her mother was too weak, and daddy never did know how to take care of little girls.
“Thanks, Hattie,” Kiki said, more in a dream than on that cold March corner.
“What? Who did you call me?” The woman was short and pecan-colored. She had on a big red cotton hat and a zigzag quilted coat of many greens, blues, and yellows. Her bag was black patent leather, her shoes hospital white. “Look at what you done here. Here,” she said, taking a large white handkerchief from her bag. “Clean the mess off your sweater.” Then she began to wipe the cloth against Kiki’s chest. Kiki leaned into the pelting blows, a girl again, so sad that she had thrown up.
“You okay, honey?”
The rush-hour crowd flowed around them. Some people would stop to stare a moment before moving on — like she was some kind of sideshow for them to snigger at.
“Yes, Hattie, m’okay.”
“You sure?”
“Uh-huh.” Kiki remembered another black face. The hard-faced little boy hating her so much that he seemed to hurt. He could hardly wait to do some harm.
“Thank you,” Kiki said, not knowing whether she was going to throw up or cry. “Thank you, I’m okay now.”
“You live near here?” the woman asked. “You need a taxi?”
“I’m real close, honey. Don’t you mind,” Kiki said. Her own words soothed her. The boy’s face now far off, lurking somewhere in the crowds. His memory like the ache in her side: if she kept very still it remained at bay.
“Here.” The woman pushed the handkerchief on Kiki. “You take care of yourself, honey. Take care.”
Kiki watched her move away in the crowd. She pressed her bare cheek against the cold glass of the display window and watched the woman, dressed like a patchwork parachute, weave away. She could have almost gone to sleep there amid the droning motors and scuffling feet.
Even two blocks away she could see the yellow of the cold-fingered lady’s coat.
The Astor Café was all glass and Formica. Kiki ate there every morning at seven-thirty before taking the subway down to Marshall & Pryde. It was crowded in the late afternoon. She held the hospital bag over the stain on her sweater and walked right to the ladies’ room before anyone could say no.
They kept the heat up high in the rest rooms at the Astor. Sitting on the toilet, she wanted to sleep again. The heat and the running tap lulled her.