#23
      The "Ghost Spring" Issue

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Tumbleweave

     by Betsy Boyd

Things Elaine told old friends soon after she moved into the city: 1) She loved the interior moldings! 2) The only racial hostility she’d encountered—young boys playing basketball in the back alley swatted the back of her Rav4 as she coasted past—she’d nipped in the bud by putting on her brakes, stepping out of her car, and confronting them: “Can’t we be friends?” Emma watched from her car seat, learning a lesson. 3) Elaine frequently spied synthetic hair dumped in clumps on the street and, though at first she tended to panic that her next-door neighbor’s poodle had been hit by a car, she’d grown accustomed to the matted tumbleweeds, and could identify them half a block away. The last she threw in as an anecdote—the listener’s light reward.
     Things Elaine didn’t tell those friends from her county days—friends who never dropped by after her first month in the urban zone anyway: 1) Amid her divorce, she felt so low that she didn’t care where she and Emma settled, so she circled an affordable address in the paper, strolled through the airy space, and made an unthinkably low offer of $87,000, which got accepted the next day. She didn’t care she was moving into this cheeseburger-wrapper-strewn area, where a rusty Oldsmobile that didn’t run but served as a vibrant rat motel was parked in front of her house day and night. And she didn’t care that she found it physically impossible to pray to God now, something that had become rote and brittle feeling years before anyhow. 2) She still pined for her lover, Ernest, the rather stupid but sexually heroic defensive driving instructor who’d brought her marriage to a staggering halt. 3) Her exceedingly pale three year old, Emma, had got nicknamed Light Bright by their tall transgender next door neighbor, Vanna Black—this came on the heels of the pediatrician noting offhandedly that he almost wanted to test Emma for albinism. Almost.
     Of course, she wanted to tell somebody this crap! She wanted to tell all of the friends she’d thought she trusted in the county, but she couldn’t risk looking even more irresponsible in the approaching storm of her divorce proceedings. If only she hadn’t quit her university job, but that was the oblong plan her husband had drawn on a white board two years back: She would care for Emma while Donald earned his seminary degree, then they would travel as missionaries (using his inheritance). The plan had lost its appeal more and more by the month for Elaine, who was pushing forty and pulling away from prayer both consciously and subconsciously—she could have drawn her waning faith in God like a right triangle narrowing down. Now she and Donald shared custody of Emma, nothing more.
     “Just Dentures?” Donald asked the first time he came to fetch Emma.
     “What?”
     “The place on the corner.”
     “Obviously, it’s a place that fits people with dentures,” Elaine said.
     “It’s a place that pulls junkies’ teeth,” Donald said, hiking Emma higher on his hip. He pulled his wire-rim glasses off his sweaty face and looked at her with such disdain she thought he might spit.
     “I suppose that’s a worthwhile service, isn’t it, Pastor?” she threw back.
     Whatever, Elaine didn’t actually resent Donald—and she certainly didn’t want him out of Emma’s life—but she no longer felt like herself around him. Could no longer talk to him openly.
     Still... God, how she wanted to talk—more than ever—to gab to someone witty and to confide, having been denied the experience for an entire three months. When she pushed Emma in the stroller down the deep leafy-green back alley behind her new house, with the jasmine blooming and the older men repairing cars off the books, she tried to strike up a conversation with everyone she passed, to no avail.
     “How are you?” she’d ask the man in his work jumpsuit, Dana, who was always crouched beneath a different hood.
     “What’s up, ma’am?” he’d call.
     And that was that.
     She also wanted to fuck. At thirty-eight, she wanted to do that more than ever. But her new world was very quiet—no candidates presented themselves. This left Elaine plenty of time to collect quirky design ideas on Pinterest, paint the kitchen cabinets a revelatory purple, and fling herself on the living room floor in lonely desperation.
     According to the muscular building inspector/published poet, Gary, a friend of a friend who no doubt colored his gray, her brick house was built like a tank—more importantly, a tank she could afford without borrowing a dime from her parents. He’s the one who’d pointed out the “exquisite” moldings, which she so appreciated. He hadn’t worn a ring, had he? What had she done with his card?
     Elaine felt at such loose ends after Emma went to sleep at eight she often tiptoed next door and tapped on Vanna Black’s door intending to invite her for a drink—because why not? Vanna was always super friendly when Elaine waved to her from the porch. She stopped and asked how Elaine was doing before she took off running down the street with that mannequin head in her hands, trying to catch a bus to get her “skinny ass to beauty school” before she “flunked out.” Even in a mad rush, “Hi to Light Bright,” Vanna would call sweetly—or sometimes “Have a blessed day.”
     Unfortunately, Vanna Black was never home in the evenings, and why should she be? With such a vital queer community in the city, or so Elaine had read, she must have spent every almost waking minute in festive dance, surrounded by beautiful friends, every night’s experience a photo op for Facebook or wherever. Sometimes, well after midnight, Elaine could faintly hear Vanna laughing in her house, giggling—probably in the arms of a lover.

Things Vanna told certain nosy family members after she inherited the house from Grandma Adina: 1) “Despite her crankiness, I always knew she loved me best—because she told me so!” 2) “No, you cannot have a key—you can ring the bell.” 3) “I happen to like the flamingo wallpaper.”
     She didn’t tell anybody how, sometimes late at night, alone in the rowhouse, she still thought of herself as Marvin—like, one part Marvin. It didn’t bother her. More like she felt Marvin was no longer dead to her, a familiar bird who’d come home to nest in one of her dense branches for the spring. She could almost hear Adina calling Marvin to the table, the red-topped chrome number she’d kept because she loved the retro vibe it gave off. She also loved the memory of drawing there for hours each day after school.
     These days she sat at the table and styled her mannequin head’s attached weave according to that evening’s assignment, and that was fun, too. Then she might change her nail color glittery pink to red or draw wings from the inside of her eye to the tip of the occipital lobe. She might apply cucumbers to her eyes and jack off, pretending she was the recipient of the cock in her hands. After dark, though, she never went out—still couldn’t do it—except to let Chipotle into the backyard to do his thing. Instead, she’d often drink a shot or two of Adina’s grape vodka and stream this dumb-ass makeover show on BET called “Who Dat?” that sometimes made her laugh.
     One evening, like many others—around 8:30 or so—she heard that familiar sturdy tap at her front door, and she could feel her heart race. To be sure, she looked through the peephole and saw that tall dumpy white woman walking away—what was her name...Ellen, no, Elaine. The one who’d mistaken some cheap-ass tumbleweave for Chipotle’s dead body. What in hell did she think they’d have to talk about? She reminded Vanna so much of that lady on the back of the 22 bus, the one who wanted to explain to black people why she recycled: long brown hair like a curtain, pointless bangs likely left over from high school, broad body shamefully concealed in long dresses that no doubt made her look older than she was.
     Maybe Vanna should have run to the door and pulled Elaine inside, shown her how to cinch a wide belt and boost that sad booty with Spanx. Maybe Vanna could ask Elaine if she’d be her non-black Diversity Subject—everybody had to have one by next week latest. No Diversity Subject, no diploma. Stylists who could cut white, black, Asian, they stayed working, you couldn’t argue with that.
     “You’d rather fail out of Goddamn sheepishness, wouldn’t you?” Adina might have said. “Marvin, where your backbone?”
     When Marvin started high school, Grandma Adina was baffled by her decision to apply fake nails and lip gloss.
     “You think that looks good? You’re the ugliest girl in town!”
     But as Grandma Adina lay on her death bed, she promised Marvin again how she loved her best—and yeah, maybe it was partway the dementia talking—but she said to her, “You’re my unicorn, baby,” which seemed real.
     After Adina passed, Vanna considered dyeing her black hair white and purple in honor of that unicorn but finally decided against it. Those who didn’t know Vanna stared too hard anyhow. That skinhead monstrosity in her old neighborhood might have killed her over it, not just broken three of her ribs and her left wrist as payback for thinking she was a biological girl from the back and hooting for her number. Since then, she’d stopped wearing leggings and heels and started wearing belted jeans like the square kind her brother Myron wore, loose t-shirts, Timberland boots. She hid her curls in a Ravens baseball cap—the only real sign of Vanna was on her face, always clean shaven, moisturized, and fully made-up, her dark hands, always manicured in stripes and glitter, queer as shit, and in her narrow hips that naturally swiveled as she walked.
     “Be happy, baby,” Adina said, but she’d been saying that for years, and it hadn’t happened yet. Still, sometimes by herself in the rowhouse, even if Vanna felt a little lonely, she threw a ball to Chipotle and lip-synched Prince and designed a lipstick color combo, and she felt good. Or peaceful. Something past nervous. She felt like Vanna. Cut the wacky last name. Vanna Black, a remnant from tenth grade, was just a way to make people smile or laugh—same as her smoky, flirty voice—a way to give them what they wanted and create a shield against, she wasn’t sure, something she feared. These days, these nights alone, she was almost simply Vanna, and that was almost enough.

“Vanna Black, hello!” Elaine called to Vanna out of nowhere as she crept onto Elaine’s porch to return a piece of mail delivered to her in error. It was a letter covered in scrappy blue ballpoint stars and addressed only to “E.” In the top left corner: “From E.”
     “You got mail,” Vanna said in that flirty upbeat voice she used on strangers—she’d just spied Elaine leaving with the baby in the stroller for their afternoon walk down the alley, perfect timing for the delivery, but Elaine was already home again for some annoying reason. “How’s Light Bright?”
     “Emma is just fine. Pooping on the potty this week, aren’t you sweetie? She wants to try right now.”
     “Poo poo!” Emma sang.
     Elaine—dressed in another shapeless gown of a linen dress, this one patterned in miniature palm trees—rubbed the head of the blond toddler who was chewing a ring of actual car keys.
     “Wow,” Vanna said.
     “Fanna Back!” the baby called. She was so cute, her white hair in two braids strung with red ribbons, even if her bare legs shone like a neon bulb.
     “I won’t keep you from your business, Emma,” Vanna sang.
     “Right, operation defecation! Hey, wait, you want to come by for a drink Friday?” Elaine asked, unhooking Emma from the seat. “I’m in desperate need of advice on paint colors for the kitchen and dining area.”
     “Of course—how fabulous,” Vanna said, turning up her sexy sound, feeling jittery, unsure how to formulate a true statement, something like, “I don’t give a fuck about your kitchen.” But...true, Elaine probably bought decent alcohol. True, she’d only have to hike a leg over the brick divider between their porches to make it a date. And, whether or not she broached the pressing hairstyle question, she could leave in a flash.

While Elaine mixed her trademark guacamole, she reread the note from Ernest: “Thanks for getting in touch and being so fourthcoming, Elaine. As a kid, Bfore middle school, my family lived not far from where you live now—Bfore my dad’s promotion. Nice place and neat to see a blue blood like you occupy. Nothing bad ever happened to me there. I still remember your long silky hair and our connexion fondly. Bcause I’m off the market—PLEASE DO NOT text me again. Drive safe, Ernest”
     Reading it made again her laugh, rather than cry, then brought her lunch close to her throat. She’d never seen Ernest’s scratchy penmanship, one, and it was tough to excuse gross errors and abbreviations when a person wasn’t texting, two. Plus, in her drunken late-night text missive, she hadn’t referenced any connection, she’d said in plain type she wouldn’t mind if he rode her doggie style ASAP. She threw out her new address. After all the fucking in dark cars...why on earth did he remember her hair?
     Clearly it was more striking than she’d realized. She touched its softness.

In the big studio classroom, Vanna teased the new Afro she’d designed on her mannequin’s head and snapped a pic with her cell phone. The other students were gone.
     “Getting your girl ready for her bus ride?” asked Vanna’s teacher, Miss Mindy, who reminded Vanna a little bit of Adina, maybe just because she was getting old.
     “She’s got to look her best,” said Vanna. “Even if the humidity’s gonna get to her.”
     “You ready for Diversity, darlin’?”
     Vanna picked up her mannequin and smoothed its eyeliner into place.
     “‘Cause you’re Monday, point of no return.”
     “I’m going over to see a white lady this very evening.”
     “Look at you! Show her you can cut like the big leagues.”

While they sat on Elaine’s patio in hard-ass wrought-iron chairs, Vanna found herself crossing her legs in her blue jeans, trying to look extra feminine, lifting her pinky as she drank from the flute Elaine had served her and refilled twice, full to the brim with cheap Chardonnay from a glossy black box.
     Elaine’s porch light was on and Vanna wondered if she looked pretty to her neighbor, in her shimmery makeup—her lipstick pink, her mascara silver—with her shoulder-length hair teased in bigger-than-usual curls that referenced the ’80s. Chipotle sat in Vanna’s lap like a perfectly behaved little prince. Meanwhile, Vanna took Elaine in, a woman maybe ten years older than Vanna, with a kind smile, round unpainted hands, wide hips, bowed legs marked with black dots, and that bundle of blah brown hair she’d stacked into a bun this evening, as if that ‘do was something extra for a guest.
     “You have a gorgeous jawline, Vanna Black,” Elaine ventured. “Well defined.”
     “Thanks,” Vanna said, downing her drink halfway. “You can just call me Vanna.”
     “Do you wear extensions?”
     Vanna rolled her eyes on the inside.
     “Yeah, I do.”
     “And. Can I ask? Have you started transitioning?”
     Here it comes. Vanna cleared her throat, and sounded so male she felt herself flinch.
     “I don’t have health insurance right now.”
     “So you plan to? I’m a college admissions counselor...if you ever want to talk about nuanced life stuff.”
     “Maybe I’m transitioning in my head,” Vanna heard herself say.
     That was a great idea, Elaine thought, to transition in your head—not to move streets, states, countries, not to have to cheat, not to need to know how your neighbors or friends saw you, not to have to flee or to fight. To do it all in your mind, tell your story as you saw fit, to reinvent and just be. Forget God and forget mankind. But complete transition was impossible, without other living, breathing people to take it in, wasn’t it?
     And because of that, she said to beautiful Vanna, “What would you think of salmon walls in my dining room? Gut reaction?”
     Vanna wasn’t listening—she wanted to transition, but that was not an option till she earned her cosmetology certificate and started making a little bank. Then she’d embrace dating men without fear. Then her new life would really begin.
     “Mama?” called the bright white baby who stood at the backdoor. “I woke up.”
     “Hi, Light Bright,” Vanna whispered, happy to see the baby.
     “Come sit with me, Em,” said Elaine.
     “Is that girl an albino?” Vanna almost asked, but that would have been rude, as rude as asking somebody you barely knew if they were transitioning.
     The time was half past 10 and a couple of men were arguing in the alley cattycorner to Elaine’s back patio. Vanna and Elaine could both hear the profanities but not make sense of any other content.
     “Should we call the police?” asked Elaine.
     “Don’t you hear the ball?”
     “Pardon?”
     “Those guys are just shooting hoops—they’ll fuss that way all summer.”
     The way things were going Vanna didn’t think she could ask Elaine about the haircut unless she drank to near sickness. So she stood up to leave.
     “I guess I should be going.”
     “No! Drink some more!” sang Elaine.
     They did drink more. As Emma slept in her mother’s arms, they drank a lot more, and Elaine told Vanna all about Ernest and about Donald and about the handsome house inspector, Gary.
     “Maybe you should fuck him,” offered Vanna—in a break between Elaine’s fits of laughter.
     “Maybe. I. Will.”
     Vanna’s head was swimming, but she felt confident all the same.
     “Look, I’m gonna come out and ask a favor: Would you let me cut your hair?”
     Elaine took her hair in her hands.
     “You don’t like it?”
     “I just think you could use a fresh start—salmon walls and sassier hair.”
     Resolutely, Elaine got to her feet and tucked Emma in. She skipped into the connected kitchen, got a silver bowl and a pair of scissors from the cabinets, and offered them to Vanna like birthday gifts.
     “Oh I got my own stuff,” said Vanna. “Lemme grab it. Come on, Chipotes.”
     Since they were sitting in the back of Elaine’s house, Vanna would most logically walk through the alley to reach her house, and that dark back road was something she preferred to avoid. But on this drunken night she braved it, moving with a breathless hustle that Elaine seemed to study but didn’t ask about.
     They didn’t talk or drink much more, but before Vanna walked home again she’d cut Elaine’s damp hair into a short jagged bob that emphasized her cheekbones and dark eyes. The design just came to her. She got so into the fine details, micro-snipping and blow-drying with Elaine’s high-end device, that her left wrist ached before she was done.
     As Vanna took Elaine’s “after” photo—for the class exercise—she knew she’d done good work, even drunk. She texted Elaine the best pic she’d snapped—with the message “the hot u”—and without a moment’s hesitation, Elaine texted it to Gary the poet.
     “How u like me now?” she typed, blushing. Immediately his reply dinged.
     Elaine felt like herself with the new cut, and she told Vanna Black as much at least three times in a row.
     In exchange, she gave her neighbor a knit dress—lime-colored, knee-length but provocative—a size eight she’d outgrown during the later years of her marriage.
     “You’ll look beautiful in this,” Elaine said. “By the way, Donald has Emma next weekend if you want to go salsa dancing or something. Seriously.”
     “Fabulous,” Vanna almost said, but stopped herself.
     “Salsa ain’t my thing. But this dress is amazing. Thank you.”
     “Just a thought!”
     “It’s so nice to have a girlfriend to talk to again,” said Elaine, flinging her arms around Vanna. She was just a nudge taller than Vanna. “Sometimes I hear your music.”
     “Do you mind?”
     “No, it’s nice.”
     As they ended their embrace, Vanna almost admitted how she sometimes heard Elaine crying, but stopped herself.
     “We could see a movie one of these days. At the new wine bar theater!”
     You had to give this white woman points for sticking to it. Vanna put her hand on her hip and handed Elaine her empty glass matter-of-factly: “Sounds like a plan.”
     Then Vanna walked home, tried on the dress—which fit like skin—fell asleep on the couch and forgot to lock her door.
     An hour later, she awoke to a tall silhouette in her space. She stayed in place on the couch, one eye watching, a few drops of urine blotting her underpants. The man was moving toward her, but slowly, walking like he meant to surprise her. Before Vanna could decide how to react, he was sitting close, and then he was on her—his lips on her neck.
     Vanna’s scream was gigantic.
     The man screamed in mocking return, and Vanna knew he had to be a sick fuck.
     “Help!” shouted Vanna leaping to her feet in that sexy lime dress, turning on a lamp. Jesus—maybe her neighbor would hear and call the cops. “Help! You skinhead fuck! Elaine, you hear me over there? Fuck!”
     Chipotle was yelping and barking in chorus with Vanna.
     “Whoa there. Settle down!” yelled the wiry man, who wore an Ole Miss T-shirt, whatever that shit meant.
     “Help! Rape!” Vanna continued, hugging Chipotle tightly, flinging open her front door.
     Hold up, though. This man was indeed white, but he wasn’t the skinhead Vanna assumed him to be. In fact, this guy was raising his arms in the air as if Vanna’s cries wounded him.
     “Look, I think I got--” the man started.
     Elaine’s head was a fishbowl of confusion as she ran inside her neighbor’s dimly lit room. She found herself praying for Vanna Black involuntarily, without even using language. Then she heard herself plead somewhere deep inside, more to herself than any higher power: “Grant me strength.”
     “Gotcha!” she cried throwing her considerable weight atop the back of the intruder, who coughed and collapsed on Vanna’s shag rug, the wind knocked out of him.
     “Gary?” Elaine shrieked.
     “Crap, that’s Gary, the house inspector,” she told Vanna.
     Elaine cinched her short robe—she tried not to barf her wine.
     “Fuck’s sake,” said Vanna turning on the ugly overhead light. She started to cry and fell onto the couch—and Elaine sat beside her.
     “I’m so sorry he scared you!”
     “Christ! What does that preppy fuck want with me?”
     “I think he stepped inside the wrong rowhouse.”
     “Sure as shit did,” Vanna said, wiping her tears with her long slender fingers, her mascara streaking silver down her cheeks. “Fuck you. Fuck me.”
     They caught their breath and turned their attention to Gary, who rested face down, his butt slightly angled. He was moving now.
     “Where am I?” Gary whispered. Elaine hurried to him, cradling his head on her broad lap.
     “All of these houses look so much alike,” Gary said, who, despite Elaine’s urging him not to, got to his shaky feet and Frankenstein-stepped out the open door.
     Chipotle followed him out as if to ensure he was really leaving.
     “Want to sleep on my couch?” Elaine asked Vanna after a moment.
     “Fabulous,” she said, blowing her nose, but she meant it.

In the hung-over morning, after Vanna had showered at her own place, she texted Elaine’s photos to hard-to-please Miss Mindy, who noted that Elaine looked “out of business” before the style change and “all grand opening” afterward. Vanna clapped her hands and kissed Chipotle on the mouth.
     Elaine meanwhile composed an apology text to Gary: “What promised to be a booty call became a very bad fall.” But it sounded so lame she didn’t send it. Instead, she strollered Emma to the corner market and bought an ice cold Coke that eased her clanging headache.

“So how’d you find this white bitch?” asked a classmate. “She pretty.”
     “You know, she’s a neighbor on the block,” Vanna said, clearing her throat.
     “Your block?”
     “Right next door. She’s, like, a friend.”
     “All right.”
     “That old hair was not doing her any favors,” Vanna muttered.
     “You said it. She look fly now, though. She look living.”




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