The Other Black Girl(52)
These words drifted back to Nella now as she stared at the shiny new white envelope, her heart racing. It couldn’t possibly have been the envelope she’d already received a few days earlier, read, and lost sleep over; she had tucked that first one away in her closet.
No, this second note was indeed a second one—she knew that much. What she didn’t know was how it had gotten there, in her bag, while she stood on a subway platform that was beginning to get a little too crowded. She looked over her left shoulder and then her right, even though she’d been wedged between the same two people for the last fifteen minutes—a man who reeked of raw meat and an older nanny who seemed ready to fight her bratty charge.
Nella sighed and, holding the envelope close to her chest for privacy that was impossible to find on a crowded subway platform during rush hour, peeled back the flap.
LEAVE. THE LONGER YOU STAY, THE HARDER IT’LL BE.
WANT PROOF? CALL 518-772-2234. NO TEXTS. CALL.
A hand suddenly graced her lower back, causing her to almost drop the envelope on the tracks. She twisted around to see who was touching her, the words I don’t already forming helplessly on her tongue. But there wasn’t a familiar face from Wagner in sight—just the energetic young child who’d been the source of the nearby nanny’s anxiety.
“No, no, no! Bad Chloe!” the woman shouted, her words wrapped in an indiscernible Eastern European accent. She placed a heavy arm around the girl’s shoulders and reeled her in. “Little girl—stop that. You’re making every single person around here miserable. Including me.”
Nella usually hated to hear adults speak to children so harshly. Her parents had sometimes yelled at her when she was a kid, but they’d been respectful when they did it. As she stood there on that crowded platform, though—elbow-to-elbow with an antsy rug rat and Smelly Meat Man—she was inclined to agree with this Eastern European woman. No, no, no, no, no.
Diana
November 1983
Essex, Vermont
“What do we think—yes? No?”
I held up the auburn wig and wagged it high above my head the way I’d wagged around a potentially undercooked breakfast sausage earlier at the hotel. Two hours ago, he’d laughed agreeably before taking another bite of his eggs. But now, he didn’t crack. This didn’t surprise me. I’d counted how many times his reflection had paced back and forth behind me in the bathroom mirror (twenty), and how many times he’d checked his watch (far more than that). I’d even offered to wet some paper towels in the sink so he could wipe up the beads of sweat that were gathering underneath his chin. But being who he was—Elroy K. Simpson, thick-necked and thirty-four; a man who never lost his cool in front of anybody, not even when he realized his hairline was beginning to recede—he politely nudged my hand away.
“Di. Hon…” He stroked the dark, soft beard that he’d started growing back when we first went away to school. “Don’t you think it’s about time we started to make our way downtown? It’s already half past ten, and I thought you said they wanted us there at eleven.”
I sighed as I carefully pulled at a curly tendril. The last time I’d worn this particular wig—in Vancouver, I think—it had left my scalp itchy for days afterward. I’d scratched it during dinner and on the subway and in the middle of the night, the violent swaying of the bed causing Elroy to curse my new antique furniture. I’d scratched during author interviews and watched as the amount of couch space around me seemed to grow.
I vowed I’d never wear it again. Now here it was, a contender in my beauty preparations. The hard things we do for easy hair, Mom always used to say.
“Makeup’s done,” I called to Elroy. “Clothes are done. Just need the hair. Five minutes.”
“You don’t need the hair. C’mon, now. We’re going to be late.”
“I tell you this every time, El—when the people running these things tell us to get there at eleven, they really mean twelve. They say eleven because they know we’re going to be late. Traffic, gas… you know. All those things.”
Elroy lowered himself onto the closed toilet seat lid and shook his head. “If that’s the case, baby, we should have left this place half an hour ago. At least. Or hailed a cab.”
I waved him off. “Eh. You and your perpetual earliness.”
“It’s not being early,” said El defensively. “It’s just that we don’t know how long it’s going to take to get to the playhouse. And we don’t know how long it’s going to take for me to get a cab around here,” he added, a softer way of reminding me that we were in completely unfamiliar waters. Vermont.
“Silly. The point is, we’ll get there when we get there.” I repinned a section of hair behind my ear to take care of a few strays. Then I stretched the mouth of the wig open and placed it on my scalp. “After all,” I continued, watching new hair swallow the old, “it’s not like they’re going to start the Q and A without me. No way Kenny would let that happen. She was always the headstrong one out of the two of us, you remember.”
Elroy grunted. In a manner of indirect protest, he undid yet another one of the buttons on the maroon silk shirt I’d bought him last week when we were at the mall. “Shoot, Di,” he said. “You know who you’re starting to sound like?”