more.
Nothing.
Shirley sat down. Pearl poured the hot water into the waiting teacups. They sipped in silence, both watching the window.
The first thing Pearl heard after she saw the smooth dark chocolate skin was the shattering sound of bone china as it made quick and unexpected contact with the kitchen floor. The second sound was Shirley’s quick intake of breath, and the last and final sound was her own voice whispering, “Sweet Jesus.” It was said not in prayer, but in total and complete disbelief.
“Oh, my God, she’s stark naked?”
Pearl was sure that Shirley wanted her words to form a statement, but it came out as gauche as the situation at hand.
Sugar had returned to the room and now she was sitting, as naked as the day she was born, in front of her window. One leg swung lazily over the arm of the chair and the other stretched out before her. A magazine rested on her lap and she flipped idly through the pages with one hand while the other languidly moved her cigarette to and from her mouth.
Curtains, white and transparent—nothing like the heavy drapes that graced the other homes of Bigelow—moved in and out like waves guided by a soft summer gale. They did not hide her, or Sugar’s dark triangle of pubic hair.
Pearl stared at Sugar’s pussy. But she did not see it as it was, she saw a memory of a day when a man came to her, head bowed, and unfolded a handkerchief that held her daughter’s cootie-cat. That’s what Pearl called it and her mother before her and so that’s what she taught Jude to call her own. Cootie-cat.
Pearl had avoided looking at her own cootie-cat for fifteen years. And Joe, well, he wished he could say that he had touched it or caressed it within all those years.
He longed to be able to say it was so, but that would be a blatant untruth. If asked, Joe would say: No, I have not seen it since spring 1940. All I have is my memory of it.
John Lee Hooker’s “Burnin’ Hell” quickly filled the background and replaced the fog that shrouded her whenever she was forced to remember. She heard Shirley talking fast and she lifted her head above the fog, thankfully being able to tear her eyes away from Sugar.
“I ain’t never seen no mess like this in my entire life! Who the hell sits ’round butt naked for all the world to see!? Lord have mercy, Pearl, what kinda trash you got living next door to you?”
Shirley was crouched down on the floor, her dress hiked up over her knees. Pearl could see her stockings, rolled up around her varicose-ridden thighs, choking them. She spoke in a conspiratorial whisper and her eyes were like globes behind her thick glasses. Pearl just looked down at her. She was horrified at what she’d just seen and at the memory it forced on her, but seeing Shirley crouched down below the windowpane, peeking up every three seconds to snatch a look at Sugar’s privates, well it was just too humorous a scene and Pearl had to bite down hard on the inside of her cheeks to keep from laughing.
The guitar and harmonica were dying, the sound of John Lee Hooker’s voice faded and Sugar was gone.
Shirley stood up and her knees creaked loudly. “Can you believe this?” she said, her hand extended out toward the window. Her mouth kept opening and closing in disbelief and sweat trickled down from around her temples. A sweet, sickening musty smell rose up from her body that was nearly as suffocating as her overpowering personality. Pearl stepped back, trying to escape it and Shirley.
“I gotta go . . . this ain’t right and she ain’t right, Pearl. You gotta husband, Pearl.”
There is silence and Shirley need not say any more; her words carried heavy meaning. “That’s all I’m gonna say on it.”
She left, leaving peanut shells still on the plate, stepping over shattered pieces of china. The news would spread quick and fast now. Pearl considered pulling the phone from the wall.
Chapter Six
T HE morning came in raw. Smelling like a sea that was
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