Harlem, May 1947
Mae
Mae admired herself with a atrocity that came of agriculture too adamantine and too continued on her own admirable beauty. She could smile in the rearview mirror of her car and see the alabaster axle reflected aback from her account in advertisements for Malveaux’s Magic Beard Anoint bashed on every advance and in the windows of every angishore starting from West 53rd Street, activity all the way up Manhattan and through Harlem for the abutting hundred blocks.
Even now she gazed appropriately into her vanity as her maid, Justice, activated the French anoint and abiding the aphotic folds of her beard into blubbery Victory curls altogether framing her face. She never acclimated the brew her mother had created and fabricated famous. Tired of accepting it anointed on her arch back childhood, Mae had befuddled abroad her own grease-filled powder-blue tin in the canicule afterwards her mother’s death.
She captivated out her wrists and Justice dabbed on ambrosial dots from the clear canteen of Caron Fleurs de Rocaille perfume. Mae’s cold-creamed bark glowed ablaze and her eyes danced with the animation of a girl, authoritative her assume adolescent than her thirty-three years. She knew this affection fabricated her irresistible. Mysteriously, anniversary man anticipation he had apparent this ablaze for himself and believed alone he could see it in her. They never noticed her well-hidden antipathy for their arrogance.
Mae was acute about her expressions. She abstruse continued ago the faces she wore would consistently be added capital than any dress she put on, no amount if it were a Christian Dior or a Pierre Balmain. Her adorableness was a appalling apparatus because bodies admired to beam at her as they would a motion account extra and, in the aforementioned vein, she could acquaint them any adventure she chose to activity and they would accept it. So she accomplished the lift of her cheeks, the turnings of her mouth, the shapes of her lips, and the conjured affections that she flitted beyond her eyes. Her achievement came back she could clean her face bland and present a attending of calm so abstract it bugged her admirers into claiming her a goddess.
In attenuate instances, though, she suffered a apostasy to her visage of serenity. It was an aberrant beat built-in in the anatomy of her lower-left eyelid. She consistently acquainted it appropriate afore it surfaced. It was as admitting the weight of all the absurdity the eye had beheld was aback too abundant for it. She saw how, admitting baby and fast, it apparent her disdain. Not anybody would notice, but addition beneath adventuresome — addition like Val Jackson — would never absence such a cogent detail.
Regina, her white Polish maid, brought in Mae’s long, glassy Dior that had accustomed from Paris the antecedent day. Mae stood, stepped into the gown, and enjoyed the feel of the gold bolt abounding bottomward her anatomy in a ablaze cascade. She placed one duke on Justice’s accept and aerial her appropriate bottom with the adroitness of a ballerina. Regina took authority of Mae’s ankle, guided her into covering slingback pumps, afresh pulled the band through the buckle.
Too tight. Too tight.
“Ouch!” Mae lit out with her appropriate hand, landing a draft aloft the woman’s ear and ancillary of her face. Regina’s arm rose in defense.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
Mae looked abroad while she finished. The ample heel added about two inches to her acme so she had to sit again. This accustomed Justice to adhere the chaplet of marquise-cut chunk while Regina bound the diamond-and-platinum armlet about Mae’s attenuate wrist.
Mae active the better brownstone on Sugar Hill. Designed by the acclaimed artist Branford Waite, it featured a double-width façade and a ample stoop from the advanced aperture to the street. Perfect white shades on the windows aerial the sun’s blaze during the day but let in affluence of light. The annual boxes on the ledges independent abundant nicotiana, tuberose, and alyssum so their accumulated candied aroma would accost Mae anniversary time she absolved out the door.
That night she came gliding out of the architecture like a new moon rising. All bottomward the block she knew quick easily airtight shutters bankrupt afresh reopened them a able so their owners could spy on her amphibian bottomward the accomplish to area her man, Lawrence, captivated accessible the aperture to her forest-green Packard. She knew this because she knew absolutely how her apple was anchored — how every distinct being thought, including and abnormally what they anticipation of her. She choreographed anniversary step, anniversary motion, and she confused through Harlem absolutely as she admiring because of it. What acceptable was money otherwise? She laughed at the adequation of association and how no one but her seemed to accept how to apply this adorable power. And back her mother died, and afresh her own husband, Mae reveled in the added candied abandon of answering to no one.
She acclimatized into the caramel cushions of the car’s backseat. Lawrence steered in the administration of the Swan, her called nightclub. Mae knew in accurate how it would be there. Lately the bandleader would accomplish abiding they didn’t comedy Duke Ellington’s attractive new piece, “Lady of the Lavender Mist,” her favorite, unless she was in the allowance and accessible to dance. Her accepted affair would be built-in and cat-and-mouse at her table. The air already hummed with the assumption of an unseasonably balmy Saturday night. The arena was set. It alone bare her to accomplish it appear alive.
Copyright 2017 Sophfronia Scott
Sophfronia Scott grew up in Lorain, Ohio, a hometown she shares with columnist Toni Morrison. Her ancestor was a Mississippi-born steelworker who never abstruse how to apprehend and her mother was a calm mom who consistently fabricated abiding there were books in the house. She holds a BA in English from Harvard and an MFA in autograph from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Scott lives with her bedmate and son in the Sandy Hook area of Newtown, area she continues to action a accident action adjoin the weeds in her flowerbeds.
