Love Edy Read online

  “Just let me in,” Sandra Jacobs snapped.

  Her uncle made a sweeping bow and nearly pitched, before righting himself with a quick snatch of the doorknob.

  “Right this way, your highness.”

  Except he went only as far as the shadow swallowed living room before collapsing in his arm chair. A litter of green beer bottles chinked at his feet.

  “Well, where is he?” Sandra snapped. She shoved a lock of hair behind her ear and cautioned a glance upward. She wore the look of a girl who expected the ceiling to cave post haste.

  Roland Green rummaged through the pile of bottles on the floor, found an unopened one and rid it of its condition.

  “Not dark enough for you to be over here, yet,” Roland said. He took an indulgent swig of beer. “Can't have anyone seeing you and figuring out you're white trash, too.”

  “I am not white trash,” Sandra spat, trembling with the declaration.

  Roland laughed. A hearty, choking, belly aching guffaw that had him swigging beer after to quench his thirst. “Your cousin’s upstairs eating his Banquet dinner. Grab one out the freezer if you're hungry.”

  Sandra stomped up the stairs, only to slow at each creaking groan it earned her instead. The house did look fragile. A few kicks to the wall might topple it.

  The dust and darkness overwhelmed her. Up the staircase and a turn right had Sandra easing down a thin hallway. She could run a hand down either wall as she walked. With her heels on, she could touch the ceiling.

  Though she knew a string dangled from above somewhere along the way, she didn't bother with the absurd swipes necessary to find it. Already, she knew this corridor, knew the way the floor warped. Sandra eased down until she found the right door and threw it open.

  Wyatt didn’t look up from his furious scribbling. Seated at a peeling white desk in a plastic folding chair, he worked to fill in the last details of Edy—shadowing in her hair, touching up a subtle smile, easing in curving hips, or whatever. Sandra had seen enough of them not to bother with looking.

  “Lottie’s home,” Sandra said.

  That earned a pause of his pencil. Then he started back in, furious.

  “She asked about you.”

  Wyatt’s pencil snapped. “Asked who?” he said.

  “Only her sister. That’s who told me.”

  Wyatt opened his desk drawer and lined the broken pieces in with an assortment of others. Before he could reach for a fresh one, she put a hand over his.

  “I'm sorry I accused you,” she said.

  Wyatt said nothing, breathing steady, labored.

  Quietly, he removed her hand from his arm and retrieved another pencil.

  ~~~

  With the drapes to Edy’s window open and the moon shimmering on the shores of the Hudson, Edy lay on her back, legs wide, flats of her feet touching and tucked to touch her bottom. The Supta Badda Konasana was a hip relaxing yoga pose she’d learned two years ago in India. Edy held it with ease for sixty slow breaths before releasing, hoping that the stretch and meditation would help with the stomach cramps. She flipped into a smooth headstand and held it, counts and breaths steady till the phone interrupted.

  “Hassan,” she said, the second she answered. “Tell me how it was.”

  “It” was a football camp sponsored by running back Earl Rush.

  “Oh.” Hassan breathed, enraptured. “Crazy intense. And hands on. I even got some guidance from the man himself.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I did.”

  “He called me a show stopper. Said he would keep out an eye for me.”

  Edy threw her head back and squealed. She shimmied a little too.

  “How’s ballet?” he finally said.

  “Good. Hard, but good.”

  The silence between them turned heavy.

  “Are you staying the whole summer? Seems weird, having you gone this long.”

  Weird. Interesting choice of a word. Detached, too.

  “Yeah,” Edy said. “Well, I didn’t think you cared all that much.”

  They held the phone for awhile.

  “You’ve been on my mind,” Hassan said and all the air sailed out the window.

  She didn’t trust herself to say anything sensible, anything safe, so Edy hunched forward and gnawed on a fingernail.

  Hassan sighed. “I’d better go.”

  “Oh.”

  Oxygen slammed back into her, finally, but the rhythm and ease of breathing had yet to return.

  “Call me tomorrow,” Hassan said. “But don’t tell me what time. Just . . . surprise me.”

  “If you want.”

  “I want.” He paused. “Night, Cake. Love you.”

  “Love you too, Hassan.”

  Edy felt the distinction between his absentminded declaration of love and the unequivocal devotion in hers. Her belly flamed hot in response. Just as she hung up, it was in time to see Ronnie Bean standing in the door, smile unmistakable. He let out a low whistle, tilted the brim of an imaginary cowboy hat and turned on his heel.

  Gone, Edy thought. But silent for how long? Sleep eluded Edy, leaving her to toss and turn and wrestle comforters on a cool summer night. ‘I love yous’ played in her mind like a misfit melody, taunting her, mocking.

  She hadn’t thought she’d slept at all. Yet Edy woke to a tangle of melded sheets plastered to her thighs, bottoms, and back. She sat up slow, brain fogged and baffled by the contradiction of sweat and cold air. She didn’t feel feverish. And yet . . . Edy peeled back the quilted white comforter and gasped. Blood stained bedding and body, saturated down to the mattress in a massive arc. Edy scrambled from the bed, feet tangling, pedaling sheets to the floor in her panic to be free. And her mess only spread. Why hadn’t all the books she read warned her about how repulsive menstruation would be?

  On her feet, Edy twisted to glimpse the backside of her nightgown. She’d been stabbed in the back a thousand times, butchered by a maniac, it seemed. Think. Of all the girls on the planet, she had to be the most prepared. So, what should she do?

  Rani was forty-five and may or may not have entered menopause. Kala was younger at forty-two but childless. Had Edy heard something about Kala not being able to have children? Would that mean she did or didn’t have periods? She felt insensitive and ignorant for wondering.

  A gush of something sickly sloshed down her leg, and Edy scampered. Down the hall, stomach lurching, as she shouted Rani’s name. Edy banged on her door, rattled it in impatience and willed her to hurry up and help. New York or Boston, one house or the other, in crisis, Rani was the one she needed.

  Rani emerged, bleary eyed and yawning.

  “What’s wrong?”

  With a morbid whimper, Edy spun round to show the fast spreading red on her backside. Rani gasped, bloodshot eyes sprung wide.

  “This is what we’ve been waiting for! Your womanhood has arrived!”

  Edy glanced down the hall, half expecting Bean to pop out and see some of her “womanhood.”

  “Help me!” she hissed. “Do something.”

  “Come.”

  Rani grabbed her by the arm and pulled her toward the guest bathroom. She shoved Edy inside, flipped on the light and crowded in with her.

  She worked diligently, quietly, taking the time to explain to Edy things that her mother should have. How to clean her clothes, how to combat her bellyaches, how to cope with a tender and sprouting body.

  As Edy showered, Rani brewed tea and straightened up. After, the two returned to her room, where they sprawled on her bed whispering about her family half the night. Bean’s father, her brother-in-law, had ejected him from the house and disowned his only son. No one knew why. Given that boys were revered in their culture, it seemed an extreme thing to do. Had Bean pushed him so far? Edy couldn’t help but wonder.

  “He’s changed,” Rani said in Punjabi. “You can see that for yourself.”

  “We’re all changing,” Edy said. “Look at what just happened to me.”


  Rani, whose eyelids had been fluttering, went wide awake at her words. She studied Edy’s face with unguarded curiosity.

  “You are becoming a woman,” she said. “This is as it should be.”

  “If becoming a woman means having the Incredible Hulk’s temper and agonizing cramps, then yeah, I’ve accepted the womanhood challenge wholeheartedly.”

  Rani smiled.

  “Is there a boy?” she said.

  Horror sliced her to the gut. Edy tripped over a swallow, then another, as her brain flung contrary commands to her mouth. Say something. Say nothing. The wide eyed fright that swept her face was a horror in itself. Rani absorbed it, face unreadable. Finally, Edy found control.

  “There’s no boy,” she said, aware that she’d already blown it.

  Rani appeared to comb her thoughts, sorting through each one before deciding to speak. “What about Wyatt Green? Do you like him?”

  Edy laughed. Leave it to an adult to steer right off the map. “He’s a friend. If that changed Hassan would—”

  Hassan. Jesus Christ.

  Rani sat up, and again, she took care in studying Edy. “Your romantic interest can be of no concern to Hassan. His bride has been selected for him since birth.”

  Edy flinched. “I know that.”

  A sting set in her eyes. Tears, she supposed. She willed them away with gritted teeth and sniffed as an old memory came to her. Edy recalled a trip to India. She and Hassan had been nine at the time and pissed about most everything—heat, traffic, the absence of cartoons, and the amount of time it took to get to Chandigarh where Rani’s family lived. Like always, the warmest, rowdiest reception swallowed Edy there: the feeling of home jumping up thrilled on the opposite side of the globe, of hugs and kisses set to smother, of love kicked into overdrive. They knew her in Delhi, Ali’s home, and in Chandigarh, Rani’s, and in little villages where cousins dotted the way. Maybe they all knew her a little too well.

  “Tomorrow, Hassan meets the girl that will be his bride,” Rani had explained back then, with nails digging Edy’s shoulder. “And she’s not you.”

  She’d cut to kill. Like a double edged serrated sword, dragged throat to stomach and twisted back again. Maximum damage inflicted.

  Edy hadn’t bothered to hide the tears when they came. She let them roll like only a child could, mopping hot drops with the hem of her dress until Rani drew her in and there there’d her. She’d shushed Edy with whispered promises of eternal friendship and devotion and even then, even then, Edy’s heart whispered more.

  Through beaded curtains she’d glimpsed Mala Bathlar, Hassan’s future wife. A slight and trembling thing who looked like she couldn’t kick a ball, or climb a tree, or skate forward, let alone back. She certainly didn’t seem as formidable as she ought to have been. And Edy wondered did the girl even own a bike? As soon as she had the thought, the two were whisked away for supervised alone time.

  It lasted three minutes.

  A flood of shouting adults returned with Hassan at the helm. Edy had howled before tearing after him. He’d burst out a side door with her on his heels and them on her heels. They’d run and run, rounding corners until they’d lost the adults. It hadn’t taken long at all.

  “No way,” he’d said to her. “I cursed them and said I’ll never marry her.”

  Rani’s mask of steel said she remembered their trip to India, that she remembered Mala Bathlar and Edy’s tears about the girl, and she remembered Hassan’s foul-mouthed vow to forever disobey his parents.

  “I understand you love him,” Rani said.

  And the words snatched at Edy’s heart with iced fingers. When she opened her mouth to protest, Hassan’s mother silenced her with a hand.

  “I’m not Rebecca,” she said. “Nor your father, where you can tuck into corners and dip into shadows unseen.” She tilted Edy’s chin upward, forcing their eyes to meet. She had Hassan’s same gold flecked green eyes. Hassan, minus the warmth in that instance. “There is no hiding your heart from me. I know you love him. But your feelings don’t matter. Accept that he’ll never be yours.”

  She dropped Edy’s face and sat back, as if expecting the tears to come, as if expecting an encore performance from the nine-year-old who needed comfort.

  Edy’s eyes stayed dry and her mouth kept closed. She didn’t have Hassan’s heart steady as a promise, but sometimes, sometimes she sensed it, sometimes she felt it. But God, anytime that thought seeped into her mind she couldn’t help but question it. Could it even be true? Or was it blatant hope soaring out on the wings of trouble? Hell, his mother thought so.

  But so what if she did? And what if Hassan did feel something for her? What then?

  “You are young still,” Rani said “Feelings are fluid. What appears certain will succumb to the passing of time. Do you understand, my love?”

  Except this—them—Hassan and Edy—had never felt lax, fluid, changeable. The earliest bastions of happiness placed them side by side, hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder, growing through the years together. Her mantel and his overflowed with pictures of the two in diapers, in need of front teeth, in dozens of countries, and as time passed, with them curling one toward the other.

  She could think about that, of course. That and the endless nights he spent in her bed, plus the hugs, and forehead kisses. She could tell herself they meant something, possibly everything. But she knew better than to put her heart through a gamble with the deck stacked against her.

  “Edith, we must all do what is best for the family. As you grow up, you will discover that sacrifices for the people you love are common, even desirable.”

  Whatever.

  Her stomach cramped again. With the relief of a hot towel on her mind, she got up, gave Rani the obligatory kiss on her cheek to let her know there were no hard feelings between them, and headed straight for the bathroom.

  She collided with Ronnie Bean in the hall.

  He was fully dressed. Hand on the doorknob across from Rani’s room, Bean froze, white stick of a lollipop jutting from the corner of his mouth.

  Edy folded her arms. Caught.

  “Better me than your aunts,” she said.

  Bean exhaled. “What’ll it cost?”

  Edy smirked. “I want to go with you. Wherever it is that you dance.”

  “Be serious. I—”

  Kala coughed in the next room.

  “Agree or I scream.”

  “Dang it, Edy. You’re so lame. I don’t want to bring you with me.”

  “That’s funny,” Edy said. “’Cause I don’t remember giving you a choice.”

  Edy didn’t expect her opportunity to come so fast. But that next Monday night, Bean cracked open her bedroom door.

  “We leave in an hour.”

  He gave no word on whether she needed money or how to dress. So, Edy rose, pulled on blue jeans and a Harvard tee, grabbed a ten-dollar bill, and stood in the hall until Ronnie Bean met her.

  “Obvious much?”

  He flipped off the hall light, grabbed her by the wrist, and pulled her, yanked her to the front door. They were out so fast. Together, they rushed away.

  Bean slipped the doorman a five, and they headed for the subway at Eighty-First Street. B toward Brighton Beach, a transfer at West Fourth, then the F toward Stillwell. It wasn’t till Bean asked her if she was keeping a log that Edy realized she’d been studying the time.

  “I’ve never been out so late,” she admitted.

  “You asked to come. No regrets now,” Bean said. He scowled at her Harvard tee and turned away, annoyance jerking his features.

  At East Broadway, they exited and walked two blocks on before they joined a queue of jean-clad teens on a trash-strewn sidewalk.

  They entered Epic, a suffocating, peeling black box of a nightclub. The sort that prided itself on violated fire codes and poor ventilation, Edy presumed. Packed body to body with sweat-covered adolescents, Epic itself pulsed and strobed to the beat. People didn’t dance so much as sway, in limbo.
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  “Give it a minute,” Bean said, “and you’ll see what you’ve been missing.”

  Wild bass pumped, then froze. A single note pierced the air, then another. The crowd shrieked their approval. A vamped and lusty voice of first one woman, then another, echoed and overlapped.

  It happened fast.

  A black guy, short and compact, popped onto the floor like a jack out the box. He cavorted to the center, feet gliding, torso snapping, head swiveling in a jerking burst of art. Edy tossed Bean a look of disbelief. Was this what he meant by dancing?

  When Edy was ten, her mother caught her watching Krush Groove and banished her from the room, promising her that disjointed jerking would lead to a thrice-broken neck. But this boy looked fine. Better than fine, in fact, and Edy pulled Bean in for a closer squint.

  “Explain it to me,” she said, drinking in every flicker of motion, every flinch of muscle, making parallels to classical form when she could. “Tell me what he’s doing. Tell me why he’s doing it.”

  “Old school purists call it b-boying,” Bean said, ignoring her Punjabi for English. “But you probably know it as breakdancing.”

  She’d seen breakdancing before, and never had it seemed so curiously frantic, so inexplicably enormous. Never had it volleyed such a crash of emotions, forcing her inward instead of out. What a contrary shock of beautiful ugliness buried beneath the tender parts. Classical dance breathed technique and execution, but this . . .this wanted identity.

  She stepped closer, drawn like a child uncertain she’d be permitted to play.

  The pit’s new b-boy surveyed his crowd with a face-wide smirk, tilted his hat, and mocked the music’s snare with a flurry of amped up steps, ultra heavy on the bravado. Cheap strobe lights from a corner illuminated the sharpest of features: a witch-like nose that hooked at the tip and barely there lips that disappeared as the lights sought out a contender. B-boy taunted them for a competitor, beckoning with fingers and booing.

  Bean slipped from Edy’s grasp and leapt in, spat back the boy’s moves triple fast and in reverse, and bowed for the pleasure of his company.

  Edy glanced at her shoulder to double check if Bean still stood there.