Home > These Women(3)

These Women(3)
Author: Ivy Pochoda

I could get—

Gimme—

Lemme get a—

Their voices pile on top of one another as they wait for their food.

They’re loud, performing, making a big deal of their adolescent selves.

Dorian checks the temperature of the oil, making sure it’s hot enough that the food crisps instead of sweats.

The girls are growing impatient because the world isn’t moving at their speed. Soon they’re trying to outdo one another with their takedowns, their bold profanities.

Bitch. Whore. Slut.

Dorian slides them iced tea, soda, and double orders of fries.

The girls’ voices rise, twisting and tangling.

Let me tell you what this bitch got up to last weekend.

Don’t you dare.

This bitch—

Who are you calling a bitch, bitch?

Like I said, this bitch went over to Ramon’s place.

Don’t you say another word.

Come on, you’re proud of it. Don’t tell me you’re not. Or else how come first thing you did when you got home was text me and Maria all the details.

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.

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