El
stands under muted chrome lights, legs splayed apart and left hip
cocked out like the jagged end of a lipstick smear. The soft
undercurrent of voices drifts from the club crowd up to the stage,
quiet murmured conversations below the chink of glasses and clicks of
the mike stand slotting into place. If she listens close enough she
can almost hear the bare echoes of a young man's laugh, a woman's
soft tinkling sigh, the swell of a family's conversation.
"All ready," the man before her grunts around the toothpick
hanging out the corner of his sun-cracked mouth. El reaches a hand
over to tug at the length of color-faded silk knotted around her left
wrist, stepping forward to take the place he vacates. The same hand
rises to wrap around the cold silver shaft, glossed lips parting as
she ghosts them towards the microphone.
The crowd has
dropped in volume, calm falling over the haphazardly arranged
three-legged stools and half-rickety tables. It's a quiet she's felt
many times, countless times, slotting into the places between
attention and anticipation. One that she's lived by and in and for.
But tonight is different, just like all the nights before it. Because
no matter how long it's been she'll never really get used to this
stage, never go quite as far as to take anything for granted.
A steady bass starts up, smooth tones of the keyboard falling in
with a slow blues, and lids slip shut over chestnut eyes as a velvety
voice joins the fray.
Elinor Chaffer was born in the winter of 1933, daughter of the
widowed owner-by-default of the Second Street Club. The club's
founder, Theodore Chaffer, had been a widower himself, an ex-soldier
settled in Louisiana with a four year-old son and his own New Orleans
jazz club when he married Stacey Waites several years after the end
of the Great War. When he succumbed to his old wounds half a decade
later, Stacey Chaffer spent three months in mourning before promptly
declaring a fresh start and leaving for the West with her stepson.
Little Hank was nine at the time, too young to deny otherwise when
she returned barely a year later, an infant in her arms but no new
name, claiming to have been left pregnant before Ted's death.
Hank had taken both well and quickly to his new half-sister, who
quickly became a staple among the club staff. Ellie spent her early
years in the dusty spaces of the backstage, half helping the crew at
her own insistence and half being a small bundle to trip and stumble
over, all laughing eyes and brown hair held back by her favorite
purple ribbon gifted one year by the kind manager.
Stacey,
on the other hand, had not been treated well by the years, more
commonly found at the bar than in the director's seat. She was the
official name in the legalities courtesy of her late husband, a fact
which no one had gotten around to correcting even during her thirteen
month absence, though it was Jeremy the manager who had long played
the part of the sole proprietor in practicality if not on paper. She
loved her children both, unconditionally so despite the lack of blood
relation to one, promising herself every day to be never less than a
good mother. Her drug of choice was the drink. Not the really strong
stuff, but she had a particular fondness for cocktails which showed
some nights after the kids had disappeared into their closet-bedrooms
on the living story above the dance floor. She had her own room up
there, along with a kitchen and lounge space; it made really quite
nice an apartment despite the slight squeeze, even if it only got use
the times she didn't pass out on one of the backroom couches after
the lights went down. The cleaning crew had become accustomed to it.
The establishment wasn't quite anything that could be called
'sleazy,' but music clubs were never the height of cultural
refinement. Things worked even if they weren't ideal, a father stolen
away by a decades-old bullet, a mother half-living in a bottle,
children raised in a playground of amplifiers and yellowing sheets
and whirlwinds of revelry in the darkness of each night. Things were
good. But things changed; they always did.
Ellie was
sixteen when she decided it wasn't enough. Hank, ten years her
senior, had long taken his own place at the sound-desk and made
himself do with a step-mother who cared for her charges but not
herself. It wasn't some act of nobility, trying to 'save someone from
themselves' or any fantasy like that, but unlike her brother Ellie
saw through the crystal-rippled surface. She wasn't the kind of girl
that could be satisfied with something less than real, a happy facade
as long as the little one was up then out trying to escape as soon as
she was down. It wasn't the alcohol or the hangovers, it was the
lie.
"--know I love you two, Ellie. You kids
are all I have."
"And the club."
"Yea, and the damn club," the middle aged woman slurred,
the last word rounding off with a snicker. Ellie set down her tray of
glasses on the bar.
"Come on, let's get you up to bed.
You have a lunch tomorrow."
Stacey hiccupped as her
daughter lifted her to her feet, zig-zagging between the last few
straggling patrons. It was late--pushing early, really--and the
waitressing shifts that Ellie had picked up when she turned eighteen
were long enough today that Stacey had hit the bar half-way through.
They climbed the narrow stairs like a lumbering four-legged
creature, the taller half tumbling onto the unmade mattress as soon
as they stumbled into the master bedroom. "Night, Stace."
They'd never really gotten the hang of the word 'mom.' Stacey just
gave another sweet-stenched hiccup.
"S**t, El.
Disappointed in your ma?"
Ellie let out a sigh. "You
don't have to hide, Stacey, not from us." She'd seen enough
people--performers and customers alike--who came to lose themselves
in the night-life, too many to be bothered by it by now even if they
were one of the more respectable places.
Stacey snorted.
"You're not like Hank, you know? Never tried asking me why I'm
so goddamn broken."
"You're not broken, you're...
No one's perfect." She leaned over to press a kiss against the
graying hairline then reached up to wipe off the blood-colored stain
left behind. "But you're still our ma."
"Prouda
me, are ya?" Another snort, but different now. The giddy high
had leaked away, loopy grin falling from the older woman's face.
"S**t, El, you're nineteen, ya still don't get it. Betcha
wouldn't be so proud if you knew. You're not Hanky's sister."
Silence.
"Yea, that's right. Dun believed they
bought that left-pregnant crap. Nah, I met a fella in Utah and you
know what else?" This laugh was cruel, deprecating, razor-sharp
peals falling from a sneering mouth. "He was a n***a! Howzat for
ya? Ma fucked a n***a, and didn't even remember the rubbers!"
And with a last hacking laugh, Stacey Chaffer passed out.
It was no surprise that the owner of Second Street was what she
was in name only, with her somewhat worryingly regular habit of
waking up with the entire previous might wiped from her mind. She
joked about it sometimes, calling it her survival instinct, making
room for better memories. It had ceased to be unsettling for her to
mentally stumble across a few hours that she couldn't for the life of
her remember.
But Ellie remembered. How could she not.
There was a man leaning against the counter, grease-slicked
blonde hair pulled back from his cool blue eyes. He muttered a few
words to the bartender before turning to flash a grin at Ellie, who
hesitated for a moment before smiling back.
There had been
some surprise the first time she ordered herself a drink in between
serving the tables. She caught a couple of exchanged glances, though
Jeremy was the only one brave enough to ask her about it.
"Something the matter, girl?"
"Just learned something, is all."
It had been four months since she'd found out the truth, four
months during which the seat with Ellie's name on it had gradually
moved from the artist's spot backstage to one of the grimy corner
tables on the floor. Nothing had changed, not really. Sometimes when
the night was late and the door was locked, Ellie would stand in
front of the mirror and pull her dark bangs back from her tanned
skin, so far from Stacey's light and pale but nothing she'd ever
given a second thought to before, almost swearing that it was
screaming the truth to everyone she passed. I'm
not white. But no, no one knew better,
except her. I'm not white.
The man was moving closer now, and Ellie felt a small smile
curl her lips as she saw he was holding two glasses. He looked a few
years older than her, but no more than that, deep set eyebrows and a
slightly hooked nose over an otherwise classically handsome face.
Ellie took three seconds to reach out and close her fingers around
the offered stem as she thought, 'why
not?'
It hurt. She'd heard
that it always did the first time. But there was something thrilling,
addictive, in that visceral realness of the dull pain and the slick
drag of skin against skin. He sat back afterwards against the chipped
headboard of the filthy motel bed, pulling out a home-rolled
cigarette from the pocket of his dropped pants as she lounged on her
side.
"Want one?"
"Sure," she
said lazily. "I'm already a spade. What's a little more s**t."
She spat out her first drag, almost hacking up a lung, then
finished the whole roll.
They were disappointed in
her, she knew even if they didn't say. No one looked at a girl the
same way after something like that. But it wasn't until Hank cornered
her in her room one morning that she heard about the other rumors.
"Ellie, there's been talk."
"There's
always talk."
"That man, that …lover of yours--"
she sneered at the word "--he mentioned something, something that
you said, about being--"
"You got a point or
what?" she snapped, cutting in before he could say it.
"Just, be careful, Ellie. You're not alone, you know. You're
always my little sister."
She waited until he left
before letting out a bark of cold laughter.
It took
ten months for them to send her away. Really, Ellie was surprised it
wasn't two. The cover was all fine, an old friend of Stacey's whose
brother needed a secretary. They said it was because they wanted
something better for her, even Hank urged her to do something more
and leave when he didn't, but there was always that undercurrent
whispering, 'you know why, you know why
they want to get rid of you.'
She packed what she needed, not bothering with the little memories or
remnants of her long-left childhood. Her false brother walked her to
the station along with Jeremy, who had always seemed to think that
babysitting was part of his manager duties. Then it was just a
slightly stiff hug and a peck on the cheek from Hank before she was
off.
Her employer, Arnold Beckett, was an amiable man,
friendly if not for his tendency to treat her more like a colorful
ornament than an employee. The work was acceptable, days spent as a
helping hand with papers or a perky disembodied voice on the end of a
phone line. Every week or so she would forward an invitation to her
boss for some function or other, and after the first few he began
inviting her along as his date--a convenient pretty girl to appear
on his arm, if only they knew the truth.
No one called her
'Ellie' anymore. She was El, just El, twenty-one, office-girl. Mister
Beckett helped her find a small apartment with her earnings, and she
made do with her own cooking. There wasn't much time for herself,
though she got friendly enough with some of the women from the next
department and a pair of brothers in her building. It was good, she
was happy. At least that's what she told herself in the chilly hours
when she slipped out for a smoke.
El spent Christmas with
Stacey and Hank and Second Street, but things weren't quite the same.
They said she was moving up, but she knew she just didn't belong. It
was her third holiday back when Hank caught her with a Winston in the
alley behind the club.
"How long have you been
smoking?"
"'Bout three years."
"Jesus," he said.
She took a last inhale then
dropped the butt to the ground and crushed it under a gaudy leather
boot. "Something wrong?"
"What do you
think?"
She didn't reply, reaching into her purse and
pulling out the half-empty packet. "Want one?" Hank ignored
her. El shrugged and lit another for herself.
"I hate
seeing you like this."
"Yeah, yeah," she
scowled, "seeing me. F**k everything, as long as you don't see
it."
"D****t, you know that's not what I meant.
You're my sister, Ellie--"
She cut in with a scoff.
"Really, Hank, I always thought you might be dim, but haven't
you figured it out? Didn't you even pay attention to the broad
dragging around half the States?"
"What the hell
are you talking about?"
"They were right, those
f*****g years ago. Stace got herself wrapped up in a sooty, got
herself f*****g knocked up with a tar baby. Don't even know what my
name should be, but whatever it is it isn't Chaffer." She
dropped her second cigarette, only half smoked, not even bothering to
stomp it out before she pushed past to get inside. "I'm not your
sister, Hank. Ellie Chaffer is goddamn lie."
El didn't give Beckett a chance to protest when she told him she was
leaving, barely an hour off the train, dropping the keys off at her
landlord's doorstep and checking into a motel with her savings. She
spent the first few weeks living off the corner deli, and the next
few off packet meals. When the money finally ran dry, she checked
out, caught the bus to the next city, and asked around for the
nearest club.
"What do you do?" the manager said,
leering at her with a drag of his eyes over the length of her body.
She resisted the urge to roll her eyes before answering:
"I
can sing."
The first time she visited home was
five months after she left, three nights after her second performance
and first envelope of cash. It wasn't nostalgia, she swore. No one
said much, Stacey made an attempt to mix her a cocktail and Hank
offered her a seat backstage. El could almost feel the words in the
air. Ape. Nigra. Never
directed at her yet, but she'd seen and heard enough slammed doors,
spat out insults, stories of the lynchings that came after. It was
the first time she'd been in a room full of people who knew. They
were disappointed. Always disappointed.
She had a
career now. Some part of her family, of Second Street, of herself
even, half-expected El to be a streetwalker, or maybe landed in the
pen. She was never the brightest, Hank had already finished by the
time she started school and she'd dropped out in sophomore year, but
she hadn't quite sunk that low. Though she was never above getting
invited into a strange bed the times she couldn't quite scrape
together enough for a room. El had a pace for herself, continuing,
displacing, leaving behind a trail from state to state of empty
glasses and soggy cigarette ends. She'd been offered the harder stuff
from time to time and she'd given them a try, still took a joint if
was handed to her, but she had learned to crank herself away from the
fog, the haze, the shedding of reality.
She was in one of
the more backwater dens one evening, passing through, one of the few
places willing to pick someone up for just a few nights for a little
spice. Her set was late and it was almost empty as she sat at the
beer-slicked bar with a cigar thrown at her by an enthusiastic, or
maybe just very drunk, crowd member. She was close to calling it a
night when there was a rustle of thick clothing by her elbow. A woman
sat down on the stool beside her, dressed in something that would
have rather outrageously offended the sensibilities of some of the
better audiences she sang to.
"Enjoyed your
performance tonight," she said.
"Hm," El
replied.
"Nice to see a girl on the stage with her
clothes on."
"Really?"
"No,
not really."
El frowned as she turned, looking up into
black-lined eyes and smirking crimson lips against a heavily powdered
face. "So what's your name, then?"
"Missy.
Missy Lorrane."
"El Chaffer."
"Chaffer, huh. Father's or husband's?"
"Mother's."
"Oh."
El didn't
let the smile flicker on the other woman's face. "What about
you? Got a Mister Lorrane?"
"Nah, no man for me.
Not really my thing." She leaned closer, the curve of her body
against the counter emphasizing the swell of the bust that was almost
bursting out from the front of her sequined
dress. El paused for several seconds before, 'oh.'
"Would you like a drink?" she asked as she thought,
'why not?'
El never quite managed to stay away from Second Street. Visits
weren't regular, but they happened. Sometimes she talked, sometimes
they talked, and sometimes she stood on the sidewalk out front in the
early hours of a morning without talking at all. There were times she
stayed for a few weeks, even a few months, but then there always came
the morning when they woke to find her gone again without a word. Her
old room had long been given to Jeremy as an office; El took up
residence in one of the backrooms, or at least the nights that she
slept.
She spent a few months in New York as the mistress of a retail magnate. It wasn't the wife that made her leave, and things he said about El when he thought she wasn't listening just made her raise her eyebrows. It was the complacency, the realization that she almost had
the easy life at her fingertips. She gathered up her things, all
necessities and nothing personal, and disappeared across the border
into Vermont, back to the motels and midnight gigs. El wasn't one for
high society. Or just, society, really.
Her mother
passed away in the fall of 1961, natural causes, and El felt. That
was all it really could be described as. She froze up when she got
the letter from Hank, sent to a post box she kept in Atlanta that she
wasn't sure how he knew about. She rented an auto and made the drive,
waiting the whole eight hours before she snapped and screamed at her
once-brother. She didn't cry.
Some part of her felt it
could be relieved, as if her secret has somehow died too. Some part
of her was relieved she had an excuse to let go all that had been
mashed together and shoved under the glitter-stained blanket over the
long years.
"Stay," Hank said, "stay home
this time." But it wasn't home, hadn't been for a long time.
There was no need to agonize over too-good or not-good-enough, the
simple fact was that she wasn't Stacey Chaffer's little girl anymore.
El told him so in a whisper, as if afraid someone might overhear, too
much had changed and would never change back. It was the first real
conversation they'd had in years.
She stopped at the first
bar out of the city, not for a job, just to toss a few down her
throat and feel the burn. She picked up a girl, a young one, but El
barely noticed as she fucked her back in the unfamiliar apartment,
ragged nails drawing red lines over softly bronzed back and breasts.
She turned to El afterwards, lips swollen and voice languid.
"That was my first time with a woman."
"Think
it's going to be your last?"
Looking over the ripped-out hairdo,
smeared make-up, and almost dazed gaze, El lit a cigarette and didn't
have to listen to know her reply.
Women weren't like men.
They were different, and not just in the obvious. It wasn't a case of
morals or decency, it was one more freedom from convention,
expectation. For the love of hell, El couldn't remember the girl's
name afterwards.
She ended up staying another night, going
home with a man old enough to be her father. If
only.
Time passed,
things moved on, El was no youth anymore at thirty years of living.
Down in Washington a man named King had a dream, and over the next
few years race equality and anti-discrimination laws started popping
through congress. But they were just pieces of paper. Words. They
didn't really change anything, not now. In the whirlwind of bright
lights and cheap liquor of El's passing years, somewhere between the
last motel and the next stranger's bed, things had slowly dawned on
her. It wasn't just about the spook who was her father. It was about
independence--not the sort of waffle that the women's rights
movement spewed--about shaping herself, making something real from a
frightened mother's half-baked story.
She married a
blackjack dealer in Vegas after getting herself a semi-permanent
seasonal job. Not a bout of drunken stupidity, they knew each other
for almost a month before falling into the chapel together. He told
her his name was Steve Decker, which made her snicker the first time
she heard it. El liked him, she really did. It wasn't love, not the
kind they waxed about in poetry and movie-houses, but it was good. It
worked. He didn't care when she disappeared for weeks on end and she
pretended not to notice the girls sneaking around their apartment, a
different one every month or so.
It took until the
second time she visited as El Decker for her to forget to take off
her four dollar ring, only slapped on two nights before for some
celebration or other at Steve's insistence. She was avoiding the
front entrance, coming in from the back when Hank met her.
"You're married."
"Yeah."
"How long?"
And there it was, a flash of another
scene in the same alley, last lifetime. El almost laughed as she
parroted herself, "About three years."
"Any
kids?"
She snorted. "What do you think?"
"El--"
"No need to start lecturing,
Hank. We're good."
"Who is he?" He leaned
against the doorway, cutting her off.
"Works a casino
in Vegas. Same one as me--no, not like that. On the stage. Behind the
microphone."
"He good to you?"
"Jeez, what's with the interrogation?"
"Because
I know you don't have to do this!" Fists clenched, a forearm
pounding at the wall in frustration, years of it. "You're not a
girl anymore. You can make yourself better."
"By
doing what? Keep stringing along a fantasy?"
"Is
that worse?"
He grabbed at her, fingers tightening
painfully around El's left wrist. She let a vicious sneer curl her
mouth as she spat back, "F**k you, Hank. Think you know better?
Because I can't f*****g look after myself?"
There was
a split-second, then Hank was letting go and stepping back, pushing
her away. "No. Because I love you. Because you're my sister."
El was just returning from a trip to the coast when the news
arrived. She'd finally decided she wanted to see the ocean, hubby
didn't so she went anyway. The letter from the lawyer was sitting on
the table.
Steve didn't come, just handed her the auto keys
and pressed a kiss to her cheek, saying that he'd drop by maybe if he
was ever in the area. Somehow, it was already goodbye.
The Second Street staff, new faces that had all changed and
changed again over the years that she'd never bothered to familiarize
herself with, told her the story. Henry Chaffer left on vacation
barely two weeks after she'd stormed away from him in that alley, and
never came back. Most of them, including the paper-pushers, assumed
he'd been killed in some accident. El let herself entertain the
thought that he'd run, maybe shocked out by something of his own,
followed in her footsteps, though really that was just about the same
thing.
The only constant was Jeremy, still loyal as ever,
now grayed at the temples with twice the lines on his face as when El
had left. He let her into her old room when she asked, not even sure
herself why. The bed was gone, of course. Almost everything had been
replaced. The only thing familiar was the small wooden chest of
drawers which had served as her bedside, shunted off into a corner
and covered with twice as much dust as the rest.
The first
drawer was filled with papers, shoved in every which way. The second
had a small pile of junk, from around the room apparently, buttons
and pins and the like. El levered out the third draw, and, 'oh.'
It was almost empty. The cheap pine was completely bare except
for a single strip of faded violet, the ribbon she'd thought thrown
out with the trash long ago. She picked it up, held it, and for the
first time in over a decade, she let herself cry. For a past long
gone, and a brother she loved despite everything for trying to keep
alive a girl who no longer existed.
"You know, they
say purple goes well with dark skin."
She broke off,
forcing herself to look up through wet-beaded lashes.
"I
knew, Ellie," Jeremy continued softly. "Stacey, she- I've
always known."
And that was really all that needed to
be said.
"You'll stay. Won't you, El?"
El took a moment to dry her eyes, then reached down and tied the
ribbon around her skinny arm like a bracelet, too tightly to ever
easily take off. They both knew the answer.
It
seemed they still hadn't learned after that first time. Much like her
errant mother's, El's name was never taken off the club's deed. The
legalities took a few months, change of ownership, and divorce. She
finally did the due and passed the club fully to Jeremy, giving him
the title he'd deserved so many times over. Moving into Hank's old
room took almost as long.
When the last of the paperwork
was signed and sealed, one of lawyers pulled out a packet of smokes
and held it out to her, "to celebrate." She stared at them
for several seconds before replying, "I'm good for now,
thanks."
The first night El performed at Second Street
was like finishing a long-neglected puzzle, pieces falling not into
place but to make a new picture, hidden behind the one on the box.
And there, it didn't matter. Because when she sang to an audience
that had waited for her for fourteen years, it wasn't about what face
she put up. It was music, art, pure expression, and it was real.
She didn't regret, not really, because she'd done it. Shaped
herself. Even if it wasn't beautiful, it was what made her. She was
El Chaffer, ribbon around her wrist not out of sorrow but as a guide,
a marker, a reminder. Maybe it wasn't home, but before the lights she
knew and tables she'd served and crowd that was hers, it was the
closest she would ever get.
![[send message]](https://www.writerscafe.org/images/mail.png){kind=small}
![[befriend]](https://www.writerscafe.org/images/friend.png){kind=small}
first
prev
Share This
Email
Facebook
Twitter
Read Request
My Library
Flag Writing
