Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [17]
She looked straight ahead as she walked. She felt as she imagined the sun did right now: itching for the night to come, needing to break the routine, be blanketed herself after her hardworking week. Except that Ramona didn’t have the expanse of the sky to put on her seductress dance, only the tiny row house on Addison Street where she lived with Mae, her mother, who had a lazy eye and who made her living by taking in foster children from the state. Nor was the one who Ramona would beckon as powerful as the night. Tyrone. Nice enough, seemed devoted to her, but lacked a city slickness she had come to expect in her men.
She walked fast, deliberately, trying to get what she needed from Sixtieth Street and make it home in time for her appointment with Vie to receive this new crop of foster children being dropped off. For once Ramona wished her mother would be there—these three girls would most likely be severely traumatized, and Ramona never knew what to do about the traumatized—but her mother, Mae, had gone to see about her ailing sister in Buffalo, so Ramona was left not only to cook and clean and otherwise care for the girls but also to be a pillow for them to cry into when their grief came down. That part she just couldn’t do, especially for the girls.
She turned into Darlene’s hosiery, where they were throwing in a garter belt with the purchase of six pair of nylons. She chose the black garter belt from among the inducements Darlene offered and managed a hurried “uh-huh” and “just fine” to Darlene’s queries about Mae.
“Hear she’s gone to Buffalo to see after her sister,” Darlene said. “Keeping her in prayer, you tell her that; tell her I’m holding her Playtex Eighteen Hour stretch too. Don’t forget now, Ramona. Just came in in that beige color she wanted. A month from Tuesday she’ll be back, right? You minding the foster kids, for her, huh? Better her than me taking that ride; I’d rather walk through Dead Block at twilight and deal with the ghost of Donald Booker than suffer through ten hours on a Trailways bus.”
Ramona didn’t interrupt Darlene as she went on to talk about Donald Booker, the bad seed white boy who had disappeared in the park almost twenty years ago, and to say there’d been another sighting earlier that day. Ramona hated ghost stories, and this one made her chest go tight. She rushed to get to the door as Darlene’s voice ushered her out, and she left clutching her box of smoke-colored hose. Even though her mother always told her those dark stockings on her light legs looked whorish. “Get the cinnamon-colored; that’s the shade a girl who purports to be a Christian like you should be wearing,” Mae always said. Ramona shook off her mother’s voice about the color of stockings. Least she could do was show off her legs in the shade she wanted, especially after being saddled with grief-stricken girls until Mae got back.
She passed the five-and-dime where the window was done up in an oversized box of Jean Naté toilet water. “The scent for all of his senses,” the sign read. The bright yellow box stopped Ramona, made her back up to gaze in the five-and-dime’s window. She fingered the change from her stockings, which she’d dropped into her coat pocket. “A dollar and nine cents,” the sign seemed to whisper, “splash on this, and he’ll be all over you for a well-spent dollar nine.”
The streetlamp in front of the five-and-dime popped on, and Ramona shrugged off the whispered enticements of the Jean Naté. What was the sense in eating into next week’s bus fare just to make herself irresistible to Tyrone when she was only going to have to sneak him up to her tiny bedroom? Piece of car he drove barely had a back seat, and surely he couldn’t afford a room at a drive-in motel,