How I Became Hettie Jones by Hettie Jones

Author:Hettie Jones
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780802196781
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I was still looking several days later when a flash of new color caught me, a morning I was late for work and running. Overnight the wide, dim window of the vacant store had been transformed. A proscenium curtain was painted on it—in royal blue, with white crescent moons and stars—and in a semicircle stage center, artfully lettered, PROFESORA LUZ, PALMISTA, READER & ADVISER. On the ledge underneath was the color I'd seen, a swath of red velvet strewn with flowers and figurines, and behind all this, hunched in a chair, sat the Profesora herself—strong-featured, kerchiefed, lost in thought. Then noticing me she was suddenly all smiles, a playful middle-aged woman, beckoning. But I just smiled and waved and rushed on. The soft Romany of this woman's family, their laughter and argument and incredible music came up through the floor all the time we were there. But I never would let them look in my eyes. My future was mine.

Anyway there was plenty of present, and to regard it an enormous, ornate, gilt-edged mirror, four feet wide and floor-to-ceiling, bolted to the wall between the two front windows. The house itself was long, wide, and open like a loft, and the mirror gave the whole thing back. You were always coming upon yourself. Kellie would climb on her trike and drive hell-bent toward it: twenty pounds of consciousness, grinning like crazy, hurtling through a million cubic feet. I called Fourteenth Street the Court: hard to live in but great for games.

It was also cold in all those (unheated) cubic feet, and sometimes the Profesora or one of her daughters would knock at our door, and heroic Roi would run downstairs with his butane torch to thaw the pipes before they froze solid and burst. The grateful gypsies would always offer him coffee and a free reading, but like me he'd decline—I think he also knew some stories he didn't want told. The plumbing froze because it was an afterthought in that house: our bathroom was crammed in a piece of the hallway under the stairs, and as you sat on the toilet, enthroned above an eight-inch slab of cement, the neighbors went up and down right over your head. It was the kitchen of 324 East Fourteenth that I liked, an addition at the back with a gas heater stuck in a high, wide hearth, where the bricks held heat as they were meant to. All day the room was flooded with light, from two enormous windows that overlooked a forest of weeds and a long, tangled stand of ailanthus—poverty trees Roi called them.

Aptly. We never had more than a dollar, it was hard to manage the fifty for the rent, and someone still owes Granddaddy for that truck. For a while, until we got a water heater, to bathe I sat in the deep side of the double kitchen sink with my feet in the shallow side, in water poured from pails on the stove.

I put my new desk

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