Trading Dreams at Midnight Read online

  But after a month of not having heard from Alfred, Goldie told Nan to stop talking about him. Cautioned Nan that people might become envious seeing how happy the telling of the story made Nan, people might commence to wishing her hard luck.

  It was a stormy Saturday and Nan doubled the length of her visit with Goldie to try to wait out the rain. Sam had gone in the back of the store to take his nap and Nan and Goldie ate egg salad sandwiches and sipped iced tea and Goldie asked Nan to describe the ring again that Alfred was wearing.

  Nan smiled in spite of herself as she pictured Alfred’s strong-looking manly hands, imagined those hands tilting her face for him to kiss until Goldie’s voice pulled her back.

  “The ring, Nan. Tell me again about the ring.”

  “Oh, it was just a silver something, not at all garish—”

  “Tarnished though, right. Didn’t you say it was tarnished?”

  “Well, I did, but what—?”

  “Was it tarnished to black or bluish, or did it have a hint of red around it.”

  “Near as I can recollect it had a hint of red,” Nan said, face caught up in a worry frown over Goldie’s line of questioning.

  “See, I don’t like that.”

  “What? What you talking ’bout, Goldie?”

  “The ring. I don’t like your description of that Negro’s pinky ring.”

  Sam stuck his head in from the back room and told Goldie, “Don’t try to use the slicer. If anybody needed a cut something, come wake me.”

  “Go count your money, Sam,” she said on a laugh. “I know when to call you.”

  She turned her attention back to Nan and explained to Nan that when the metal’s worn against the body turn color, usually silver goes to red, it means somebody has put something on that person.

  “Put something on him? You mean like roots.”

  Goldie came from behind the counter and stood right in front of where Nan sat and adjusted Nan’s pearls that had latched around the collar of her polka-dot blouse. She talked right into Nan’s eyes as she did. “That’s exactly what I’m saying, baby. Somebody done already rooted your man. And whatever they put on him is fixing to work because his silver is turning red. Wasn’t you, was it? You didn’t fix him, did you?”

  “Come on, Goldie, I don’t know nothing about working no roots. You know I’m in the church.”

  “Well, in the church or outta the church, you still got to fight fire with fire. You got to work fast to counteract whatever somebody else is already doing. The first thing you got to do is get a strand or two of that Negro’s hair—”

  “No way, Goldie, I don’t dabble in that mess. And if I did, I sure don’t know him good enough to be pulling on his hair.”

  “Suit yourself then. But I guarantee you the most you gonna get from that Negro from here on out is a tipped hat, and a howdy do Miss Lady, if you even get that.”

  “See Goldie, that’s where we differ. I believe that the Lord delivers the desires of the heart in His own time and His own way.”

  “The Lord also helps those who help themselves. And the lady I used is from Virginia, and my mother used to say people from Virginia can cause you to crawl on your belly.”

  “Why would I want someone to crawl on their belly?”

  “That’s just an expression, Nan. You know, just to describe how potent—I’ll tell you how potent,” Goldie said as she walked to the window and looked out on the rain falling in slanted squares. “Sam and me started out the typical way, me doing days work, cooking and cleaning and ironing. Him showing up in the middle of the day when the wife and the kids were outta the house making no mistake about his intentions. I was young, about the age you are now. I denied him for the most part. Then Miss Eule who worked two doors down from me, would come and sit on the back steps and smoke her pipe when we took our break after hanging the wash on the line, told me how she handled her lady’s husband. Said her auntie from Virginia fixed him so good that his mind went blank to her. Said she became part of the woodwork to him and he left her ’lone from then on. So I told Miss Eule I didn’t know if I wanted to fade into the woodworks far as Sam was concerned, I wanted to be seen, but not seen as just some faceless body for him to take his pleasures with, shit, see me as a total woman same way you see your wife.

  “I remember Miss Eule laughed so hard her pipe fell from between her teeth. I remember her digging her toe into the dirt below where we sat on the steps making a hole to bury her pipe ash. She told me I was young to the ways of the world, but give her a strand of my hair and his hair and two dollars as soon as I could come up with it and as much as possible put my bare feet inside of his shoes. Then she went to visit her aunt and came back with a special solution for me to mop down the floors with, gave me special bath crystals, gave me candles to light, I ’clare it wasn’t a month later before Sam started bringing me ladylike gifts, perfumes, a charm bracelet. Bought me a weekend in Atlantic City, then strutted himself over to Kentucky Avenue where I was staying as if he was colored himself. Came loaded down with stuffed animals and toy windmills and chocolate-covered cherries and saltwater taffies. Lord have mercy, Nan. You talking about gentle. That man more concerned with giving me pleasure than taking his own. Mnh, mnh, mnh. Treated me like I was the most precious specimen he’d ever beheld. Still do. He talk gruff, but it’s all for show, Lord have mercy.”

  “So maybe he just felt it anyhow, maybe the roots didn’t have a thing to do with it.”

  “I have wondered about that. Though I had my final convincing when Miss Eule gave me a special soap for washing the bedsheets where Sam and his wife slept. A week later that woman packed up her and her kids and said she was moving back to Brooklyn. Said she hated Philadelphia, hated working in the store, missed her own people too much. So what are the chances of such a thing happening unprovoked like that?”

  She stopped talking then because Sam stuck his head in from the back. “You okay, Goldie?”

  “Fine, Sam, thought you was taking a nap.”

  “Can’t sleep. Close up for a half hour when it gets empty out there.”

  “See what I’m talking ’bout. He can’t get comfortable if I ain’t close by.”

  “And what about you, Goldie? You comfortable when he not near? Seem like they put something on you too.”

  Goldie laughed as Nan gathered her things to leave. Nan could still hear her laugh when she crossed the street and saw the sign in the window turned to BACK IN 30 MINUTES.

  Goldie’s musing on the power of a love potion wore Nan down. The circumstances helped. Alfred had not called and Nan’s preoccupation with the why not had ballooned so that she imagined him killed in his sleep by a leaky gas stove, or unable to move his neck after eating half-cooked pork. She dragged through her well-ordered days burdened with the weight of missing him as if they’d been attached for decades. She finally yielded when she spotted Alfred on Fourth Street where she’d gone for zippers and a new bobbin head and there was Alfred strolling down the street. Nan waved and he looked at her as if she was part of the blue and yellow of the summertime air. She cleared her throat then and called his name and when his eyes focused on her he asked, “Yes, Miss Lady? I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.” She was too devastated to remind him about his fall up the bus steps, her lip print on his seersucker jacket, her shoulder that became his pillow.

  “See they made his mind go blank,” Goldie insisted when Nan related the details of the encounter. And though Nan refused to go see the lady Goldie used herself because she was afraid of the devil and what the Lord might do to her for going to such a place, she did provide personal items for Goldie to take so that the lady could work with the essence of Nan, provided her hair brush, a handkerchief that she’d recently cried into, and her signature written three times in red.

  Goldie returned with instructions and candles and powders. Told Nan how to sweep her house daily from front to back, gave her the contents to mix a solution for mopping her floors, a dime to wear against her
ankle, and when Alfred still didn’t come around she told Nan that they were dealing with some strong mess that required a direct approach. Alfred needed to drink a special concoction, Nan had to be the one to get it down him.

  They were sitting in the dining room of Nan’s two-bedroom apartment. Sam had gone to the dock to buy spices in bulk and he’d dropped Goldie off. Nan had just finished making dress pants for Sam that Goldie was giving him for his birthday. She was cleaning up the scraps of gray all-weather wool from around the sewing machine. She wished she’d treated Alfred the way she treated most everything else she’d ever wanted. Picture it, claim it in the name of the Lord and if it wasn’t delivered, then it wasn’t to be, just that simple. Wished now that she’d followed her mother’s approach about things: “Don’t start nothing, won’t be nothing,” her mother always said. But she’d started something for real, an obsession the likes of which she’d never experienced. She’d directed her own hand to paint the outcome she desired. Her desires, though, had spilled outside of the margins, bled on off the entire page, and sprouted hands and feet, a bear-sized body that she couldn’t see beyond, couldn’t think beyond; could barely breathe because of its hot, heavy presence in her face moving with her from side to side, up and back so there was no getting around it. Nothing to do but feed it. Feed it or watch it come after her with its big bear paws and tear the skin from her short cube of frame, crush her bones to the gristle, all the way to her soul that she didn’t even know who owned these days. Devil himself might own it by now. No sense in even thinking it preposterous what Goldie was suggesting. Goldie suggesting that Nan perch next to Alfred on a bar stool where the lights were low and his logic likely faltering. Goldie even producing the situation: the boyfriend of one of her cousins, who used to work as a stevedore before a hundred-pound can crushed his foot and he ended up losing the foot, had just settled his insurance case and was throwing himself a scotch and chitterlings birthday party at the bar on Bainbridge Street. “I know your Negro gonna be there, Nan.”

  Nan protested that she’d never even been inside a beer garden. Wouldn’t know what to say or do or even think inside of one. Goldie told her she would go with her; she’d have to think of a nice-like lie to tell Sam to explain her leaving the house dressed up on a Saturday, but she would do it for Nan.

  Nan had no choice but to relent. The bear-sized obsession stood in front of her with its thick immovability and dared her not to, then stroked her hair with its oversized claws as she thought about the dress she’d make from the red satin fabric she’d bought when she’d seen Alfred that first time. She’d give the dress a wide sash and a low open back to replicate a waist line that would also create the illusion of curved hips. She’d edge the hem of the dress with black lace and wear black silk stockings with seams up the back. She’d never worn seamed stockings before, black either, never went darker that Puff-of-Smoke though cinnamon was her main shade.

  She put the cloudy-colored liquid concoction per Goldie’s instructions in an empty vanilla extract bottle, was supposed to add a single drop of her own sweat though she wasn’t sure whether her sweat went in the bottle or ran down the side. She hadn’t asked Goldie what made up the contents otherwise. She didn’t want to know. From minute to minute didn’t even believe this was her, Nan, good-raised southern Christian girl going to these lengths to get the man of her obsessions with whom to make the daughter she was desperate for.

  But here she was in her red belted dress and black seamed stockings, her hair in loose longer curls and not the tiny ones rolled tight to her scalp that she usually wore. Here she was getting out of the Yellow Cab as Goldie pulled her toward the door marked LADY’S ENTRANCE on the side of the Bainbridge Street bar. Here she was dizzy from the low-hanging blue lights and the smell of whiskey and chicken and pork. The crowded room revolved on her as the drum beats from the live band thumped in her chest. The laughter was strong and sad and drifted in wafts like the steam rising from the bowls of chitterlings and rice. She tried not to look around and gawk like a country girl in New York mesmerized by the city’s bigness. But she was mesmerized. And she was repulsed too. Had the simultaneous urges to both giggle and vomit as she followed Goldie past women in painted-on clothes—that’s how tight their apparel—and men with shiny processed hair and suits cut too loud to wear to church. Then Goldie turned abruptly; her mouth formed in a wide OO. And when Nan said, What? Goldie said she didn’t believe what she was seeing but there was Sam’s brother playing the keyboard with the band. “Lord Jesus,” Goldie said, “what they doing bringing in a white boy from New York. Shit. That’s all Sam needs, he’ll swear I’m running on him. God. Sam don’t deserve that. Damn. I got to go, Nan, I’m sorry baby. Shit.” She hesitated, looked at Nan as if Nan was her child and she was leaving her for the first day of school in a bad neighborhood.

  “Damn,” Goldie said again, and Nan could see the tussle over whether to leave or to stay play out on Goldie’s face. Saw the leaving win out as Goldie blew Nan a kiss and said, “You gonna do just fine, baby,” then moved farther and farther toward the door where they’d come in. Nan tried to follow Goldie, determined not to stay by herself, but then the room stood still for Nan because there he was. Alfred.

  His stool was turned away from the bar and looked out on the center of the room where big butts and balloons and blue and white crepe paper wiggled to the beat. His face had an intensity about it that shocked Nan; in all of day-dreaming over him she’d only pictured his smile. Plus he’d cut his hair, though the remnant strands were still silky and black, still charmed Nan. His whole presence charmed her, from the width of his shoulders under the gray pin-striped jacket, to the way his leathers matched on his belt and his shoes, both burgundy with a lizard cut, even the way he swayed, almost imperceptibly from his waist to the beat of the drums. She had the thought then that she would go to any lengths to make him hers. She’d dance with the devil if that’s what it took. She put her hand to her mouth at the image that conjured. Thought the smell of drink so pervasive in here that it was sifting into her pores and she was getting drunk just standing here, just watching Alfred, wanting him, Lord Jesus did she want him. Pushed past her temerity in this bar with her support, Goldie vanished and said, “Good evening, Alfred, do you remember me? Can I sit with you a minute and tell you how we know each other?”

  Alfred was drinking hard. Didn’t know any other way to drink once he got started. Envied his peers who could stop at two or three or while they could still make their hands and feet behave. Had promised himself he was walking, not staggering out of here tonight, that he would wake in his own bed in normal sleep-garb of boxer shorts and T-shirt, not in his clothes where he’d pissed himself, or worse in an alley with his pants pockets turned inside out, stripped of his watch and wallet and his emergency half pint with no recollection of how he’d gotten there. But he was to that no-stopping serious stage, and now it appeared that somebody was ready to start some shit. Fighting in bars was not uncommon for Alfred. Sometimes he’d catch a saucy lady sneaking peaks at him, and out of respect he’d wink back and garner the wrath of her man. Other times it was all a misunderstanding because of what he did with his eyes. He had a feel-things-deeply nature that he kept to himself because such a quality in men he thought sappy. He’d perfected a hardened look with his eyes to disguise how emotional he was but with his pretty-boy eyes, if you didn’t know him, you’d swear he was glaring at you; a problem in places where liquor was being poured and men with diminished judgment mistook his practiced tough-eyes as calling them out for a fight. His own diminished judgment, though, was the real problem tonight as he eyed Frank who worked first shift at the dock. He’d suspected Frank of carousing with his last woman even while Alfred was still giving her half his pay. Another woman sat on Frank’s lap right now whispering in his ear and Alfred watched Frank throw his head back and laugh with an open mouth. At that moment Nan appeared in front of Alfred and blocked his view. Her lips, their heart shape vaguely familiar, were mo
ving but he couldn’t understand what she was saying. “What? I can’t hear you, what?” he said, shouting so loudly that even with the high volume of foot stomping and laughter and music, the people in his vicinity turned around to look at him, and at Nan.

  Nan rubbed her hands up and down her bare arms, reacting first to Alfred’s unfocused stare then to his booming voice telling her to speak up and now the sense that all eyes were on her. She felt threatened by the sudden attention. Felt naked. Wished right now that she’d used the leftover red satin fabric to make a cape so that at least her back could be covered. Torn between repeating what she’d just said, or mumbling out never mind and scurrying through the smell of chitterlings and rye to get the hell on out of here. Except that Alfred was up from the bar stool, now his hand was on her back, his hand thick and warm, and she had to steady herself as he leaned in to whisper in her ear. “You’re right Miss Lady, I ain’t got to take that disrespect from Frank, I’m do just what you suggesting. I’ma put my foot up his—’scuse my French, Miss Lady—his ass.”

  Nan tried to respond that she hadn’t suggested anything like that but there was a disconnect between her brain and her vocal cords, all her neurons it seemed crowded in that space on her back where he had his hand, and jumping then to her ear, his breath pushing in her ear as she felt his spit droplets against her cheek, wished she could capture the drops, preserve them for Goldie’s lady to use, forgot all about Goldie then, her lady, could barely remember her own name as she listened to Alfred tell her to take his seat at the bar. “Pretty that area up a bit with your red dress, Miss Lady,” he said.