Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [18]
The March wind was starting to gurgle and belch on Sixtieth Street, and Ramona pulled her coat collar up around her ears. She was glad she’d worn her good trench coat with the genuine suede trim; she always wore her good clothes when she got her hair done on Sixtieth Street lest the loud-talking women in the shop think she was needy. They knew she made a half-decent living as the assistant buyer in Lit Brothers bargain basement, and she didn’t want anybody to guess her real financial nonworth, how Mae was always siphoning her money, talking her out of generous bits of her pay week after week while Ramona watched in horror as her hard-worked-for dollars slipped through her own fingers into Mae’s card-playing hands like Johnson’s baby oil. So Ramona wore her good trench coat with the genuine suede trim in order to cover up for Mae.
Ramona straightened her back and brushed at her new French roll. She turned from the five-and-dime window and made her way toward the Sun Ray drugstore on the corner. Decided if the sun could do her thing with the night so boldly, she could certainly stop at the Sun Ray, treat herself to a Coke, sit at the counter, and listen to the els go by. She hoped she wouldn’t run into any of the gospel choir, who’d surely want to talk. She wanted instead to try to think about Tyrone. Wanted to try yet again to summon up those tingling feelings that glittered that she thought she should have for Tyrone. Except every time she tried to think about Tyrone in the dreamy-eyed way appropriate for a woman allowing herself to fall in love, she’d end up sighing to herself, the way she guessed the sun would have sighed had she not been able to beckon the night; it wasn’t Tyrone’s face she’d see at all. It was a face more formed, hardened, lined in ways that stirred Ramona’s passions. She felt cheap and common when she thought about that face in such a gushing, silky way. It was Tyrone’s father’s face. Ever since she was a teenager and would giggle to her best friend Grace how fine she thought Perry was, he’d had that effect on her. And Grace would tell her he was too old, old enough to be her father, and what did her father look like anyhow because on The Edge of Night somebody was in love with an older man and it turned out just to be a need for a father figure? But Ramona never knew her father; some high-yellow sailor who came and went with the ships at the navy yard was all she knew, so she told Grace that couldn’t be it because Perry was brown as a chocolate snap cookie, and probably as sweet.
She shifted on the stool and nestled her body against the frame of the stool, which was padded and covered in red vinyl, and ignored the conversation bursting around her so that she could chase away thoughts of the father and try with everything in her to fall into mink-lined thoughts about Tyrone. She drew hard on her straw and swallowed a gulp of Coke. The cola was sweet and strong and fizzed all the way up into her head and threatened to push back out through her nostrils. There it was again, Perry’s face instead of Tyrone’s, all etched with lines that were gullies of entrenched manhood, signs of hard living that now that she was in her twenties Ramona knew often made tender lovers.
She shook the image of Perry again, now she had to. The whistle that still blew at five as if it had people to dismiss was sounding at the abandoned bread factory. It was almost time for her meeting with Vie; she had to go.
The plastic chair covering kept wanting to talk as Ramona listened to Vie going on and on about the blowout down at the office she’d had over the placement of the three foster girls waiting in the car. Vie was a big-busted, big-hipped woman and was sweating on the couch, even though it felt like wintertime outside, and squirming and forcing the air under the plastic to sigh and squeak almost right on cue so that Ramona didn’t even have to utter “unhunh,” and “mn,” and “is that so?”
“Imagine, Ramona,” Vie said, casting her large arms up