“Nice neighborhood. They keep the streets clean.” She checked her face in the mirror behind the sun visor. “You’re surprised,” she said. “I had an old boyfriend who said it’d be good for my career if I said I grew up in the ghetto. You know what? They ate it up. I said I was from Harlem in my first interview for Miss Pretty’s Promise and from then on I came from a broken home—my daddy wasn’t around, the whole thing.” She grinned. “You say Harlem and white people get ideas in their heads. I didn’t see the point in correcting them, seeing how much they liked it. Not just white people—I had black folks coming up to me like, ‘I used to see you dance at Shiney’s back in the day,’ mixing me up with other people. My friends I grew up with tease me and congratulate me for getting over.”
Poor girl makes good was a more interesting story than suburban girl makes good, he supposed. Pepper had heard of passing for white before but passing for broke was a new one on him. Getting over. He’d always liked that expression. Crooks make a big score, grab that jackpot, and law-abiding black folks get over, find a way to outwit white people’s rules. Stealing a little security or safety or success from a world that fought hard to keep that from you.
“I was heading back today anyway,” she said. “Zippo freaking out?”
“He was concerned.”
“So they sent you to rescue me? I don’t need saving.”
“Has anyone in your life saved you from anything?”
She looked at him. “No.”
“Ever?”
“No.”
“Then it sounds like you don’t got to worry about it.” He grunted. “But they got a lot of people standing around getting paid for nothing. Had me looking all over. Roscoe Pope. Quincy Black.” He refrained from linking himself to the dead gangster.
“Them,” she said. She sat up straight. “You know about Chink, then. Because Quincy’ll gossip like an old woman.”
He didn’t say anything, which she took as a yes.
“I was a teenager,” she said. “I didn’t know who he was when he waved us over to his table. My cousin Baby, she whispered to me: He’s a bad man. She ran with that street crowd, running uptown to hang out. It was the first time she took me up there. Then I started going with Chink and didn’t need a tour guide anymore.”
“Gangster’s girl is usually chew ’em up and spit ’em out. You look all right.”
“Better than all right.” She cracked the window to cut the cigarette smell. “My parents had a fit when Baby told them about us,” Lucinda said. “I’d told them I was seeing a boy from CCNY—that’s where Daddy went. But they couldn’t do anything about it. Afraid of what he might do more than what the neighbors might say.” Chuckling. “Then it got worse! You should have seen them when I said I was moving to California—‘No one ever comes back from California.’ They’d have preferred I had ten babies with Chink than move out there.”
After Burma, no one had to sell Pepper on leaving New Jersey. He’d never been out West. He saw how it might broaden a person. Then again, Pepper himself had visited ten of these United States—eleven if you count Connecticut—and he couldn’t say they’d made a big impression. A cup of coffee costs the same all over and the person who serves it is miserable in the same way, so maybe when you think you’re moving around you’re marching in place. “I grew up in Newark,” he said.
“Oh, yeah?”
Not too much traffic. The wheels bit into a pothole. It seemed like they just put in this roadway and it’s already falling apart. It used to be on So-and-so Street, before they put the highway in. He knew some boys from Orange who’d had a garage on Essex. A good place to get some wheels, and one of the mechanics knew a coins guy. It had been around here, maybe at this very moment he was driving through where it used to be. The highway had bulldozed on through, splitting Orange in half, erasing the garage, all those nice Victorians, the churches, a playground or two, the whole thing. But it was faster to midtown now, so it was worth it in Pepper’s estimation. Save ten minutes, that adds up over time.
“I saw you in that movie,” Pepper said. “You were good.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“You were that single mom telling off the punks.”
“I’ve done single mom on TV a bunch, but if it was a movie it was Birdie’s Way.”
“They’re playing a transistor radio on the stoop and you come out and yell at them.”
“Birdie’s Way. I moved out there for Miss Pretty and thought I’d made it. Got good notices, too. Did a lot of appearances when the song became a hit. Then a couple of years and all they gave me was stuff like Birdie’s Way.”
“It was all right.”
“They paid on time.”
He realized he was irritated with her. She’d been sitting on the couch with her mother fetching her cocoa while he was running around like a donkey, headbutting trifling fools and getting his bell rung.
The Manhattan skyline emerged for two seconds, misty in the ghost fog, and then another bend in the highway snatched it away again.
“Back into it,” Lucinda said.
“Next time don’t take the job.”
“And do what?”
“You hide out in New Jersey because of Chink?”
“Chink.” She huffed through her nose. “When I left Quincy’s, he was outside. He’d called earlier that night when I was on set and it got me upset. I needed something to mellow me out. I’d been clean since August. It was a hard summer.” She checked his reaction. “Sitting in that big Cadillac. I thought about running. But I’ve seen him do shit to people. Bad shit. Mostly he didn’t do business when I was around, but we’d be out at one of his hangouts and his face’d get mad and I know he spotted someone. He’d have the man brought over for a…” She searched for a euphemism and gave up. “He said, you teach someone a lesson in front of everybody, it stays with them.” She laughed. “Which is a terrible thing to tell an actress! Because my mistakes are out there for everyone to see, and he’s saying no one forgets. I got in the car.”
Chink wanted a cut of her earnings for setting her up when she was starting out, Lucinda said. She owed him. But that was just venting. He still loved her, he told her. He was leaving Harlem to retire someplace nice, an island. “I told him he was already on an island and he said, Somewhere sunny.” Harlem wasn’t the same, he said. It was getting worse. The whole city was, and it wore on him. When the film was over, they could go live somewhere nice, he was making moves to get his stuff in order. She sucked her teeth in disbelief. “Know why I dumped him?”
“Like your cousin said, he’s a bad man.” Present tense.
“That part I was okay with. Back then. Back then I didn’t understand. I had to go because the only way for me to be me was to leave who I was behind. All of it—back East, my family. My man.” Lucinda turned on the radio and jabbed the buttons. She settled on a doo-wop song that wove in and out of static. “I got the part in Miss Pretty’s Promise and they called me out to California and Leanne Wilkes was not getting on that plane. In a way it was Chink’s fault—he’s the one who bought me clothes for auditions and paid for my classes in the Village. He knew people—Hollywood people who liked to slum it uptown. The whole time he was schooling me to leave.”