Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [1]
Clarise was tough in her own right, at least when it came to crying. She could will herself not to cry and shut down her tear ducts so that no fluid fell. She wasn’t so tough when it came to men, though. She would go weak for men from the time she blossomed into adolescence. Had to squeeze her thighs together so she wouldn’t let herself go wide open every time she got a whiff of Aqua DiSilva, or Old Spice original, or Noxzema aftershave. She’d been well trained though, by the aunts, who, tough and celibate as they were, understood a woman’s nature, had watched Clarise’s strong-natured mother die a hard death from female problems: a growth, a ruptured vessel, a massive bleed, according to the doctors; too many lying men with their tainted naked things getting too close to their trusting baby sister, according to the aunts. They told Clarise what to look for when her own nature came down. Told her to run like hell from any man who said, “Baby, I’m for real.” Told her she’d do well to marry young.
So when Clarise was sixteen going on seventeen, and graduated early from high school because she was smart and had been skipped a grade, and Finch was walking through the streets of Philadelphia, taking leave and his final pay from the merchant marine ship where he’d duly served as assistant cook, he saw Clarise in the cream-colored graduation dress that had been hand-sewn by the uncles with beads at the top and layers and layers of voile. Clarise took note of Finch’s eyes, how they went liquid for her like brown gravy seeping down the curve of a rump roast; she knew then he was the one she would marry even before he tried to woo her with his financial worth. He’d flash a wad of bills, lick his index finger before he peeled off the dollars to pay for their drinks at the Showboat.
But Clarise knew it was all for effect. The sailors whose ships always docked at the navy yard made similar spectacles of their earnings. Even when she was a child walking through the streets of downtown, she’d watched them, pausing before they went into the penny arcade, or Horn & Hardart, or McCrory’s dime store. They’d heist their pants up higher on their waists before digging deep in their pockets to bring up a mound of paper money. And if Clarise appeared even minutely impressed, she’d feel her aunt Til tug her arm. “Man with real money doesn’t flash it in public for all to see,” her aunt would say.
So even though Finch tried to show off his money, which Clarise knew meant that he was broke as a grasshopper in the snow, she sensed that he was the type to turn a dollar into twenty time and again. It wasn’t just the way he puffed his cigars and mashed his feet flat into the earth when he walked or the way he’d slap the backs of the men in the clubs, with a gregarious authority; it was the way the air smelled around him. Clarise had a heightened olfactory sense that revealed more about a person or thing to her than her eyes could see. And whenever she stood within two feet of Finch, no matter how much his Old Spice tried to get in the way, she detected the unmistakably crisp scent of heavily inked, fresh-cut, new paper money.
Plus Finch was dark, meant the children they’d have together would have some color. She herself didn’t have much color. Her father was rumored to have been an Italian from the other block of Queen Street, so Clarise had an odd look: skin color like the shell of an egg when it wasn’t quite a brown egg, but not a white egg either; eyes the tint of a dusty gray dawn; long silky hair that went bushy when it was humid out; well-defined nose;