What's Mine and Yours(12)

Golden Brook was less than an hour from the city, her old life, and yet she’d let her days shrink to the circumference of a few miles. She could spend a whole day driving between the house, the grocery store, one strip mall, then another. She and Nelson had loved living near downtown. It was a proper city, not like home. The skyline was blue and gray glass, the buildings shaped like spaceships. Her heart gave a thump as she coasted through the streets. She rolled down the window, breathed in the flowering trees and exhaust. She reached the studio just as the class was starting.

Inéz was at the front in a black leotard and tiny turquoise shorts rolled up to nearly nothing. She gave Noelle a quick arch of the eyebrows through the mirror, ignored the students as they filtered in. Her hair was pulled into a gumdrop-sized nub at the top of her head, her skin bare, her gold septum ring sparkling in her face. She was magnificent. Noelle stood at the back, reached her arms overhead as if she knew what she was doing.

Inéz counted them in, Five-six-seven-eight. It was hard for Noelle to keep up, and it was only the warm-up. Her limbs were stiff, heavy. She hardly left the ground when she tried to leap up. She had to steady herself with her hand when she sank her hips to the ground. Inéz had a parakeet’s voice, high and sweet. That’s it! she shouted with enough gusto that it was almost convincing.

At the end of class, Noelle hung at the back, watching the students hover around Inéz, as if they weren’t sure whether to say good-bye or simply leave. She was aloof and beautiful, mesmeric. In this way, she was like Nelson. Perhaps that was all Noelle had been doing with her life: collecting stars that never wanted to be collected in the first place.

When the room was empty, Inéz found her. “Excuse me, ma’am, did you pay? I don’t remember you signing up for a class pass.” She crawled down to the floor where Noelle sat, bound her with her arms. “What are you doing here?”

Noelle took her friend’s hand in hers. “I want to take you to lunch. When’s your next class?”

“Is everything all right? Are you pregnant or something?”

“Far from it. I need your help, baby girl.”



Noelle drove them to a place on the Westside with tinted windows and small bistro tables. They ordered eggs, a coffee for Inéz, a glass of wine for Noelle.

“God, it’s been forever. I thought you’d gotten lost up there in the country. Golden Hollow, or whatever it’s called?”

“It’s the suburbs, not the sticks.”

“Same thing. Nelson out of town? Where this time?”

“Paris.”

“But of course.”

Inéz smiled and shook her head. Fourteen years ago, she was the most beautiful person Noelle had ever seen, and she still was now. Even Lacey May had referred to her once, when Noelle was home from college for Thanksgiving, as “that pretty dark girl.” She was no darker than her sister Diane, Noelle had said defensively, and then it troubled her that she had felt the need to point out that someone she loved wasn’t all that dark.

Noelle took her wine down in gulps, and Inéz watched. It was eleven in the morning.

“Don’t you miss it here, Nells? You must be bored out of your mind out there, without your work, your friends. Do you even see people during the day? Or just in the grocery store, as you roam the aisles searching for a chicken to roast?”

It pained Noelle how accurate her friend’s parody of her was.

“If these months had gone the way I wanted, I wouldn’t mind being somewhere quiet, with fresh air and green space.”

“Green space? Do you hear yourself?”

“I wanted a change.”

“Well, you got one, honey.” Inéz poured a drop of maple syrup into her coffee, swirled the spoon around with grace. “Now, tell me everything. I’ve got to be back in half an hour.”

“We’re a part of this homeowners’ association.”

“Naturally.”

“And there’s a party tonight. It would look awful if I’m not there, but I hate these things, especially when Nelson isn’t around.”

“Nelson isn’t the best at parties though, is he? He just sits on the couch and pouts until someone asks him about his photographs, then you can’t shut him up. Or if he’s drunk, then he’s fun for an hour or so until he sobers up and gets sulky again. No offense.”

Noelle knew her friend’s opinion of Nelson had turned sometime over the years. At first, Inéz, like all their classmates, had admired Nelson’s cool. But eventually, she’d tired of how he seemed to live without moods, impenetrable. Everything was fine, nothing was a crisis, but nothing was a tremendous pleasure either. She didn’t expect Inéz to love him, but she ought to leave him be. After a life like his, what did people want? For him to give a song and dance? He’d done enough.

“Please, Inéz. Every time I go somewhere without Nelson, I get asked a dozen times, ‘Where’s your husband? He travels a lot for work, hunh? Must be lonely, hunh?’ It makes me feel like we’re doing this whole thing wrong.”

Inéz looked at her, as if to say, Maybe. “Who cares what they think?”

“It doesn’t help that we already feel like anomalies out there.”

“Because he’s black and you’re white?”