Second Story

ou okay?" Chick asked in a mumble as Donny eased out of bed. Donny bent back, nudged the crystal necklace over, and left a kiss at the hollow of Chick's throat. "I can't sleep worth a damn tonight." "Full moon," Chick said before she turned her face back into her pillow.

Donny was hot and itchy and damp in hard-to-reach places. She tiptoed into the sitting room overlooking Stage Street. Almost silently, from long practice on these sleepless nights and from years of doing shift work, she opened the window high. Chick was right. The moon was showing her stuff, clouds like wispy gray scarves floating across her face. The windowsill was wide enough to perch on. She looked down at Stage Street in the white moonwash. Beyond it the freeway was almost empty, one car buzzing by like a bug in a hurry.

It had been a month since the M.C. bust. Chick hadn't even known Donny had been part of it except that she had to make a statement and, because she was so often a contact in the bigot battles, the whole thing was all over the papers.

"I know Joan appointed you deputy so you can do drug prevention talks, but why did you get involved in all this rough stuff?" Chick had asked, looking completely baffled.

"I wanted to help," Donny told her, but didn't say that it was Chick she'd wanted to help.

Chick had put her arms around Donny and held her close. "That man was dangerous."

"Not as dangerous as letting him do his thing."

Chick's hold tightened. "I'm glad you didn't get any more damaged than putting a second joint in your shoulder."

The emergency room doctor had popped that sucker back in, and, aside from some lingering soreness, M.C. might never have fallen on her. And while Chick wasn't one hundred percent, she was laughing more, and touching more.

"I'm so glad," Donny said. With Chick, it was never the details that mattered. They had too much respect for each other-and that wordless thing, trust-to need to know everything. What did the talking, Donny thought, was their love.

Damp as it often was here, and hot as menopause often kept her, tonight's warmth was soothing. She recalled a day, at least a dozen years ago, that had felt something like this. She and Denise Clinkscales had lived in a railroad flat on the South Side of Chicago.

"Where're you taking me for our anniversary tonight?" Denise had asked. She had a Sylvester tape playing and was wiggling her bottom to the beat. "Three's my lucky number."

Except for the music and Denise's hot-to-trot energy, the wide-windowed apartment sometimes felt peaceful after the streets. Denise kept it shining clean and neat as a magazine ad. Donny had come home from her job as graveyard fry cook. Her whites were spattered with grease, her hands smelled like old pan drippings, but the apartment smelled like fresh clean clothes.

"Out? Why? So I can show you off?" She pulled the slip Denise had drying on a black wire hanger across the bedroom door to her nose and breathed in the soap smell. "I love all your frilly stuff hung up to admire."

"You think I'm doing this for you, woman?" Denise replied with a swat. "Get your hands off before I have to go down and wash it again." That was one reason they'd taken the place despite the elevated rumbling by non-stop-a communal washing machine in the basement. "Where you going to take me for our anniversary, honey-boat?"

"To this bed of ours."

"We do that every morning, woman."

Donny slipped to the other side of the room and pressed herself to Denise's round butt. The iron gave off a damp steaming-wool smell that took her back to her coming up days. "You complaining?"

Denise, tall as Donny, was able to rub her nightgowned bottom against Donny's tummy. "You haven't taken me out," she went plaintively on, "since New Year's Eve. Six months, honeypot."

Donny let go. "Don't you love staying home?" She went to the window and thrust it up, dislodging paint chips from the sash. Daylight fell in. Balmy air, such as she smelled maybe once a year in Chicago, flowed over her face like an angel's cloud. A jet made a clean getaway overhead, its roar buffered by the cries of kids on the street. She thought she could smell the lake. "Look at that sky! Our own second-floor place on top of the world, Dee. We don't need some borrowed room or a crowded dance floor any more. We have our privacy and our cuddle-down time." She spun around and struck the lead dance position, arms out. "You want to dance? Come to The Don! We'll dance till night!"

Denise ignored her, ironing Donny's other set of whites so hard the ironing board shook.

"Don't you go sulky on me, Dee. Why can't we have a candlelight dinner-or breakfast-and fool around?"

"I want to go out on the town before we lose our friends! We never leave this place. If I didn't go to the beauty college I'd be jumping out of my skin. This is nothing but four walls, woman, and a sooty old sky, and those trains! Sometimes I think I'm going to get a gun and shoot those trains off the track."

Donny collapsed on the sofa. "Ouch!" She scooted off the damn spring that she hit every time.

"Why don't you want to take me out?" Denise pushed. "You ashamed to be seen with me? I'm ugly now?" She leaned over the sofa. "You afraid somebody's going to give me pretty things and lure me away?"

The woman was swinging at her heart with a sledge hammer. "Somebody could do that? Tempt you like that? Someone who's not putting all her cash into this apartment?"

"I'm not saying what will happen if we don't get out of this place once in a while."

Shaking her head, Donny said, "I'm too tired. It takes me a week to catch up on my sleep after we go out, you know that. Let's get a picnic lunch at the store and go eat it at the lake. You can call in sick to the school." Subway cars rolled by at full creaky speed. She could see the people hanging on straps, swaying.

"I can't call in sick. My state tests are coming up. Besides, that's not my idea of celebrating, Donny Donalds, and you know it. Once a week, that's all I'm asking. I'm compromising." Denise walked to the side of the room where the small stove and refrigerator stood. "I've got some nice greens and that leftover chicken for your lunch. Or do you want an omelet before I leave? Sit down, I'll make you one."

The sky had looked smaller from across the room, its blue hemmed in by white window frames. That, Donny remembered as she sat 2,000 miles west at the window over Natural Women Foods and looked down on empty, dark Stage Street, was the beginning of the end with Denise Clinkscales. But it had lasted long enough to give her a taste for permanence, something she hadn't had since her father, a shoe repairman and hotshot at the church, had tossed her out on her ass at sixteen for being an abomination.

Chick snorted, a high sleeping mound back in their bed. It was only two o'clock. At five every morning but Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday, Chick slept in while Donny started the day's baking. She'd run a hand along the patchwork quilt that lay over Chick on her way out. She'd made that damn quilt as fine as her mother could have. Their friends at the Waterfall Ladies' Quilting Club had taught her.

She stifled a laugh. The Don in a ladies' club! She should have sent a picture to her evil father. Her and the old white country ladies who held down their permed hair with baseball caps from diesel shops. And a picture of her presenting Sheriff Sweet with the quilt they had all made for the jail fund-raiser. They liked Donny. They loved teaching. And they loved that her and Chick made them mad money by selling their quilts, displayed on the rafters at Natural Woman Foods.

Two truck rigs, rattling empty, blasted through the sound barrier this quiet time of night. A car with a hole in its muffler whizzed by the trucks. Hurrying fools. There wasn't a thing wrong with going slow and staying put. Down on the sidewalk the flowers in planters exhaled their fancy perfumes up at her.

"What happened to my Don Juan?" Denise had cried that hot Chicago morning, putting on her perfume before she left for school.

Donny had come to like the time she had alone after Denise left. She'd switch to an Ahmad Jamal tape, read the paper, putter, walk the neighborhood, daydream about saving up enough after Denise finished hairdresser school to buy a little travel trailer and see the world.

"You're a mean dancer," Denise reminded her, "a jazzy dresser. You're The Don!"

That was the morning she'd realized that she didn't want to be The Don, not anymore. The Don had been a wild thing, born raging to get out from under her father's heavy foot and away from the frosty bitch, her mother, who didn't have time in her day for an oddball kid.

"What am I supposed to do with this child?" her mother would ask the ladies at the church, or sometimes just a mother in the street who had a little girl in beribboned pigtails and a dress. Mrs. Donalds would complain, "Her hair's like my mother's. It won't grow long enough to put up, and when I put a skirt on her it looks like a dirty rag before the day is out." She would look accusingly down at Della, hands on her hips. "I can't dress her in anything but her brother's hand-me-downs."

Donny didn't see a problem. She loved her brother Marcus Junior's soft, old elastic-waisted pants and striped jerseys. The minute her mother tried to humiliate her by ordering her to put them on she'd feel free. It was the Sunday dresses that felt humiliating.

"Donny?" Denise said, putting her face up close. "Is anybody home?"

"I'm here," she said, but as Denise went back to clattering over at the stove, she'd found herself in a clammy sweat. Her mother had been so pretty. She'd had a laugh like a little girl's giggle and had used it often. At the church the ladies loved her. She'd volunteered for everything, dressed to the nines in the latest styles. Mama had sewn all her own clothes, first pinning fabric to rustley tissue-paper patterns, then cutting with big pinking shears. She could sew any of the other women under the table and often wished aloud that she'd been blessed with a little doll of a daughter she could dress up.

The women teased her momma by asking if the lost-looking little girl who followed her around was hers. "That's Della," Momma would say, "a poor little motherless ragamuffin we picked up on the streets." Then she'd laugh to show she was joking and pat Donny on the head.

She could remember the feel of her mother's tentative touch, like someone feeling in the dark, afraid of what she might find. In time, she'd learned to recite the poor little ragamuffin response before her mother could, grabbing the church ladies' laughs and getting hugged.

"Sometimes I think you don't care about me, Don," Denise was saying from the stove.

"Of course I care," she replied. Denise, now, she did love to show off her tall handsome Donny. She'd made Donny two dancing outfits, elegantly butchy, and she kept their clothes pressed right down to jeans and polyester uniforms. Donny felt so proud to have this pretty woman on her arm. All her girlfriends had been lookers, but flighty, more interested in a wild time than in settling down, more in love with the idea of Donny the charmer than with Donny herself. Denise had outlasted them all. "I'm tired, is all."

"You're always tired these days. You feeling okay?"

"I'm getting old, woman."

Denise looked away real quick. So she was worried about their age difference too. Getting up there scared Donny-who would love her? At the same time she looked forward to it. Her Grandma and Granddad Weatherbee had been old, and she'd never known happier people. They'd had a little this-and-that shop where Donny's mother would leave her while she did her fund-raising or brought food baskets to shut-ins. Grandma and Granddad always let her do some little job, very carefully pricing and piling pomades and small boxes of rice up on shelves. They let her wait on customers and make change by the time she was six, and she'd worked with them right into her early twenties, along with whatever job she had, when she wasn't out partying. They weren't making ends meet by then, and the landlord wanted more rent. Grandpa got prostrate cancer; Grandma died soon after. They'd always been laughing with each other or with the customers. People with little money came in to buy things they hardly needed, just to hang out and laugh.

"Dee," Donny had said after arguing all through their morning meal, "go out on your own tonight. Have a fine time. The Don's hanging out a while, and then she has a date with the clean sheets. You took up with an old dog too tired to maintain a thirty-eight-year-old's speed. I swear I'll take you out to celebrate next time I get two nights off in a row."

"Forty-five isn't old, Donny," Denise had said. She'd gotten all dressed up for school in tight black pants, a scoop-neck white pullover, and a pink smock. "You'll feel friskier when you wake up."

Yeah, Donny had thought, and Hank Aaron didn't just beat out Babe Ruth's home run record. She had kept busy all morning fixing the drip in their shower, then fallen asleep half-scared, half relieved to know she was going to lose Denise.

Now she was fifty-seven. Chick loved her the way she was. Whatever messed with them-women, moods, bigots-there wasn't an endless road in front of her any more. She was finally playing for keeps. It had taken a while, but she had come to see that what Chick was going through didn't have a thing to do with her. Chick still wanted her, and Joan had been right. She'd said, "Sometimes all you can do is stand aside while they go through their changes."

Donny remembered answering, "You think I should try to get her to talk about it? I'm scared if I do, she might jump ship because she feels crowded."

"It's better to leave her alone and hope."

At the time she'd told Joan, "I don't know if I can do that. You know, I've been lucky enough to have been over the rainbow more times than I can remember, and I've chased more rainbows than I can count, but here, with Chick, I'm under the rainbow and we're the pot of gold. I won't risk losing her when, if I do something, anything, it might help."

She shut the window on Stage Street, then padded to the patchwork quilt and snugged her back up against Chick's for a few more minutes of rest before the alarm went off. Maybe for their anniversary she'd whip up one of those spice cakes Chick loved so much. It would be nine years next week.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE