These Women Read online

  Dorian shakes the grease from another batch of fries.

  My order ready yet?

  How come this shit is too slow.

  She dumps the fries into a Styrofoam container.

  Bitch went down on him.

  Dorian drops the fryer basket, missing the grooves. Oil splatters onto her forearms.

  The girls are laughing. Pinching each other. Congratulating themselves on leaving childhood behind. Leaving safety and sanity.

  Dorian turns, exiting the kitchen, and approaches the counter with the food.

  All you do is open your mouth and close your eyes. No big deal. Like nothing at all.

  Dorian drops the fries. She reaches across the counter, her hand grasping the speaker’s forearm. “Lecia!”

  The girls fall silent, their invincibility interrupted.

  “Get your hand off me.”

  Dorian holds firm. “Lecia,” she says, her voice brittle with panic.

  “I said, get your hand off me.”

  “Lecia,” Dorian says, shaking the girl’s wrist to stop her talking the way she’s talking.

  “Who the fuck is Lecia?”

  She feels a hand on her own arm, the present reaching into the past. “Dorian.” Willie, her helper at the fish shack, is at her side, his voice soft but firm. “Dorian.”

  Dorian’s holding fast, shaking her kid back to reality.

  “Tell this bitch to get her hand off me.”

  Bitch. Lecia would never call her mother a bitch.

  Dorian lets go. Willie pulls her back into the kitchen.

  “Easy,” he says. “Easy, easy.” As if she’s a dog that got too riled.

  The girls scatter, leaving their half-eaten food. The gate to the fish shack bangs behind them. Dorian can hear their voices mocking her as they hit the streets.

  Fifteen years later, nothing is going to change the fact that Lecia’s still dead. Yet somehow the past keeps calling. Dorian puts her hands to her temples to settle her mind, sort imagination from reality. Still everything remains tangled.

  2.

  THE EVENING RUSH IS OVER. DORIAN DROPS SOME SCRAPS into the fryer and turns up the volume on the radio. It’s tuned to the classical station that plays the obvious hits of Mozart and Beethoven, and because this is Los Angeles, John Williams and Hans Zimmer.

  The fryer spits. Dorian shakes the basket. After nearly three decades running the fish shack on Western and Thirty-First, Dorian should be sick of the fried stuff, but if you can’t stomach your own grub, you can’t serve it. She shakes on a little extra salt. Reaches for the hot sauce.

  Long ago her customers stopped caring, noticing, or remembering that it’s a white woman running the fried fish place at the southern edge of Jefferson Park. If they knew she’d never had collard greens or catfish before she met Ricky on the other coast and allowed him to bring her cross-country, they’d put it out of mind. If she’d told them she’d never cooked cornbread or fried okra in her life before Ricky died, they’d chosen to forget.

  “Hold up.”

  Someone’s banging on the grate covering the kitchen window.

  “I said, hold up. How many times I’ve told you I don’t like hot sauce on my fish?”

  It’s Kathy. Dorian knows the voice—a gravel singsong that she hears up and down Western.

  Didn’t want you anyway.

  Probably too small to find in the dark.

  You buying or wasting my time?

  Dorian opens the back door to the fish shack.

  Kathy’s standing in the alley. She’s short, compact, like she did away with anything she didn’t need. She’s wearing a denim miniskirt, a fake fur bomber jacket, ankle boots with pencil-thin heels. She’s pale and her bleached, frizzy bob only washes her out more. My great-grandmother was raped by a plantation dude, she told Dorian once, and all I got was this yellow complexion. Then came the manic cackle Dorian can recognize from a half block away. Dorian didn’t bother with the math to see if Kathy’s story was even possible.

  The things she’s heard from Kathy’s mouth. The things she’s heard from the rest of the women who work Western.

  Half assault, half work, is how I’d tell it.

  No worse than choking on a raw sausage.

  Couldn’t keep an umbrella up in a light wind.

  Thirty seconds wet and sloppy, but done is done.

  Smell like the reptile house and I know you know what I mean.

  There are more. More about the life. More about the men. More about the discomfort, the drugs, the antibiotics. The nightly bump and grind.

  After thirteen years of feeding the women on the stroll, there’s not much they can say that would shock Dorian. They try though. Make a game out of it. Dorian could run a late-night sex call-in show with the information she’s gleaned. She could give a twisted anatomy lesson.

  She wedges the door open with her foot. “Are you coming in?”

  “Hold up.” Kathy squats down, getting close to the sludge running off the dumpster. She reaches out for something. When she stands up, Dorian can see tears in her eyes.

  She’s holding a dead hummingbird. It’s a Costa’s—its purple crown slicked by the runoff from the dumpster.

  Dorian cups her palms and Kathy drops the bird into them. It feels impossibly light, as if minus its soul it’s hardly there.

  “Fuck is it with the world?” Kathy says. “Beauty’s nothing but a curse. That’s what I tell my kids.” She wipes her eyes.

  Dorian should have told her daughter, Lecia, the same thing. But Lecia learned that lesson before her eighteenth birthday.

  And there it is—the black flash of rage. A punch to the gut. A hand closing over her throat.

  “You gonna feed me or not?” Kathy says.

  Dorian holds the door open and stands aside.

  The kitchen barely fits two people. Dorian presses herself against the counter and Kathy slides past, taking the container of fish trim to the far end by the window. She eats with her hands, dipping the fish in tartar sauce and raising it to her lips, then licking the sauce from her fingers.

  Dorian gets a Pullman pan from the overhead rack. She places the dead bird inside it, then checks the temperature of the oven. It’s two hundred give or take. She slides the loaf pan in and turns up the heat a bit like she’s drying jerky.

  “That’s fucked up,” Kathy says.

  “It’s how I save them.”

  “Save,” Kathy says. “That’s a good one. How many you got now?”

  On top of the refrigerator are two shoeboxes of dead birds perfectly preserved and nestled in cotton wool.

  “Twenty-eight,” Dorian says.

  “Shit,” Kathy says. “I wouldn’t want to be a bird around here.” She takes a bite of fish. “You gonna do something about this situation?”

  “What situation?”

  “Somebody’s trying to fuck you up. Somebody’s sending you a message. It’s straight-up cartel. Dead birds. Hell, I’ve seen girls do shit like that to other girls. Back them off their turf. Seen pimps do worse.”

  “I’m not on anyone’s turf,” Dorian says.

  “Seems like it,” Kathy says, polishing off another piece of fish. She cocks her head toward the radio. “The fuck you listening to?”

  “Classical.”

  “Lemme change that.” She swipes at the radio, shifting it to the other NPR affiliate in L.A. that runs All Things Considered on a slight delay.

  Idira Holloway is talking. It seems that ever since the verdict was handed down about the death of her son—all officers found innocent although they shot the kid at point-blank range in broad daylight—the woman’s been talking nonstop, swamping the airwaves with her rage. Dorian could tell her a thing or two about how the rage is senseless. How it accomplishes nothing. How all that screaming and anger only digs you in deeper, alienates you, makes people pity and fear you—as if grief is contagious.

  “Bitch is pissed,” Kathy says. “Bitch is mad pissed.”

  “Wo
uldn’t you be?”

  “Hell, someone kills one of my kids, I’d kill a whole bunch of motherfuckers in return. No shame in that. Only shame in doing fuck-all.”

  Sometimes Dorian imagines there’s a city full of women like Idira Holloway. Women like her. A city of futile, pointless anger. A country. A whole continent. It’s a fantasy she hates, but it comes anyway. It makes her claustrophobic, like she’s going to choke on the proximity of all these grieving mothers.

  “Only one way to get justice for Jermaine,” Kathy says. “Law of the streets. An eye for an eye. It’s like how I tell my girl, Jessica—don’t look for trouble, keep a low-pro, because when shit goes down, you’ve got to represent yourself. What’s more, I tell her if she gets herself into some real shit, there’s a chance I’d have to go to work on her behalf. And neither of us want that.” She roots around for any fish she’s missed. “What I wouldn’t do for her or the others. Protect them to my grave.”

  Yet here’s Kathy, night after night, strolling Western, putting herself out there, right in the way of danger. A strange form of protecting her kids if you ask Dorian. But choices are choices. And some people don’t get too many.

  Maybe Dorian had doomed Lecia from the start. Maybe choosing Ricky, a black man, to be the father of her child was her first mistake. Growing up in small-town Rhode Island, Dorian didn’t understand the curse of skin tone.

  On the radio, Idira is still raging, shouting down the cops, the lawyer, the justice system. As if any of it will change a thing.

  Kathy finishes and crushes the Styrofoam. She pulls a compact out of her gigantic shiny red purse and touches up her makeup.

  “How do I look?” she says, puckering her lips and narrowing her eyes like she wants to devour Dorian whole.

  “Good,” Dorian says. “Nice.”

  “Fuck you mean by nice? You think nice is gonna get me a train of dudes so I can make rent and pay for that bounce house for my boy’s birthday?”

  Dorian knows this game. “Kathy, you look like one badass sexy bitch.”

  Kathy snaps her compact shut. “That’s what I fucking thought.” She combs her fingers through her short bleached curls and shoulders her bag. At the back entrance to the fish shack she stops. “You gonna do something about those birds? I don’t feel safe eating where someone’s murdering fucking hummingbirds.”

  “Like what?” Dorian asks.

  “Least Jermaine what’s-his-face’s mother is raising hell. Least she’s getting heard.”

  “You want me to raise hell about some dead birds?”

  “I fucking would.” And Kathy’s gone, taking her game out to Western, lighting up the night with her brilliant blond hair and hard cackle.

  Finally the news switches over to a different story—a possible bullet train from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Dorian exhales, letting out the tension that always surges inside her when she hears Idira Holloway’s voice.

  She stares into the fryer, checking the oil to see how long before she can dump it.

  Dear Idira, I know it’s hard to talk over the fury because the fury does the talking. But you’ll learn eventually. I’ve got fifteen years on you and there’s not a day that I don’t want to scream at someone, press my meat cleaver into my hand, punch the wall. The scars I should have in addition to the one on my heart. But there’s no point. Over time you let it go. That’s what you do. Stop making noise. Or that’s all you are. Noise. Nuisance. A problem. You are nothing but your pointless rage.

  Dorian claps a hand over her mouth. Who the hell is she talking to in her empty kitchen? How come the past won’t stay put?

  She turns the oven off, hits the lights, locks up, and says the same lame prayer that feeding Kathy and the rest of them will keep them safe on Western.

  It wasn’t too long ago that this strip of Western was a hunting ground. Fifteen years back, thirteen young women turned up dead in surrounding alleys, throats slit, bags over their heads. Prostitutes, the police said. Prostitutes, the papers parroted.

  Lecia wasn’t a hooker, but getting killed the same way as a few hookers seals your fate no matter how much noise your mother might make, how much hell she might raise.

  And Dorian had made some noise. Lots. All up and down Southwest Station and even Parker Center. At the local papers—the free weekly and the Times.

  No one listened.

  In fact, the mothers of some of the other victims got in her face about it. Different ’cause she half white? they wanted to know.

  Death don’t care if you’re black or white. Only thing in this world that don’t indiscriminate, one of the other mothers told her.

  Thirteen girls dead. Fifteen years gone. By Dorian’s count, and her count is right, three other serial murderers have been hauled in, tried, and locked up in Los Angeles in that time. But not a single arrest for the murder of girls along Western.

  The cops got lucky—the killings stopped after Lecia. No need to revisit old crimes in a city where tensions are always on a simmer. Let sleeping dogs do their thing.

  Dorian peers back through the bars on her window, checking that everything’s in order. The winds are still ripping through the city, swirling trash, shaking trees, and sending palm fronds swirling down. She steps to the curb and checks for the bus, then figures she might as well walk home.

  The air is choked with the sounds of the evening commute—the idling cars slower now that everyone’s distracted by their phones, the heave and wheeze of buses snarling traffic, the overhead noises, the planes flying too low over West Adams and local news choppers out pursuing some story for the nightly digest of other people’s misery.

  It’s early enough that most of the girls are keeping a low profile. The bus pulls to a stop half a block up. Dorian doesn’t chase it. The walk will do her good, clear her lungs of the heavy kitchen air and maybe get rid of some of the grease smell that clings to her clothes.

  The bus is idling, lowering the plank so a wheelchair can roll off. The drivers behind it lay on their horns. Dorian arrives at the stop before the doors close. The driver is fiddling with the controls to raise the handicap ramp. Dorian reaches into her bag to locate her TAP card. There’s a screech of tires from the southbound lane of Western followed by the roar of a powerful engine. Dorian looks up to see a black car—black tinted windows, fat tires with brilliant chrome spinners—thread a needle between the stalled traffic, then pull up to the opposite curb. The passenger door opens, releasing a preposterous amount of white smoke. A woman gets out.

  “You getting on?” The bus driver is shouting at Dorian. “You getting on?”

  A passenger bangs on a window. “Lady, get on the fucking bus.”

  Dorian doesn’t take her eyes off the woman across the street because it’s Lecia climbing from that car. Seventeen, unblemished, beautiful and alive. Her curly golden hair tight to her head and pulled into a high ponytail that swishes over her shoulders.

  “Get on the goddamned bus!”

  Dorian hears the door swing shut as the bus pulls a few feet away only to be stopped by the traffic light.

  “Lecia,” she calls, even though she knows it’s crazy. “Lecia.”

  Then she’s tearing into the street, zigzagging between cars coming from both directions, summoning a mad chorus of honks and screeches. “Lecia.”

  As she reaches the middle of the street, she comes to. It’s not Lecia, of course—but Julianna. The resemblance between Lecia and the girl she had been babysitting the night she died still surprises Dorian. She stares at Julianna, who’s leaning into the passenger window of the car she’s just exited. Julianna laughs at whatever the driver just said and steps back onto the sidewalk.

  Thefuckoutofthestreetlady.

  Getoutthefuckingstreet.

  Two cars close in from opposite directions, trapping Dorian. The drivers lay on their horns. The wind charges from the east.

  She scrambles to safety. But Julianna has already walked away.

  “Julianna,” Dorian calls afte
r her. “Julianna.”

  No response.

  “Julianna,” she tries again. But her voice is lost as the black car revs its engine and tears off, somehow carving a path for itself through the stalled traffic. Julianna has turned her back and is walking away when Dorian realizes her error. “Jujubee,” she calls. Dorian squints, trying to tease Julianna’s shape from the dark street, but she’s lost her.

  She leans against the bus stop on the southbound side. The number 2 is pulling up. When it rolls to a stop, Dorian kicks its bumper. Pain radiates up her leg. “What’s your problem, lady?” the driver calls through the open door.

  “What’s yours?”

  The only answer is a gust of wind.

  3.

  SHE CONTINUES NORTH PAST THE ODD ASSORTMENT OF INDEPENDENT shops—Martin’s Fishing Tackle, Crown & Glory Hair Design, Queen’s Way beauty supply, a barbershop, two water refill stations, three Pentecostal churches, and a Laundromat, all surviving between the strip malls that are eating up Western. You’d think there weren’t customers enough for another budget cell-phone place, knockoff chain pizzeria, donut shop. But the city, especially south of the 10, seems to have an insatiable appetite for the same stores sloppily reproduced.

  It’s just over a mile to her house—the last uphill stretch giving the neighborhoods surrounding the 10 the title of Heights: Western Heights. Arlington Heights. Harvard Heights. Kinney Heights. The houses grow grander on the incline. Three- to five-thousand-square-foot Craftsman, Victorian, and Beaux Arts homes, not to mention the row of oddball mansions lined up on Adams Boulevard.

  From the business corridors like Western it’s hard to see the neighborhood’s old grandeur. Hard to see how West Adams and all its constituent neighborhoods were once upscale and desirable. That was before Los Angeles lifted restrictions on nonwhite home ownership, moving the city’s focus farther north and west. And once blacks moved in, staking their claim in a genteel hood in the middle of town, city planners didn’t think twice about where to put the 10 connecting downtown to the beach. They laid it right in the middle of West Adams, creating a five-hundred-foot-wide gully obscuring one part of the neighborhood from the other and tearing down houses like they were razing a rain forest. And as an aftermath, or rather an afterthought, some of the most beautiful houses in Los Angeles have a tidal wave of traffic or a stagnant sea of red and white lights in their backyards.