Paradise by Toni Morrison

Author:Toni Morrison
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780307388117
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-07-24T04:00:00+00:00

The silence in the Cadillac was not an embarrassed one. None of the passengers had high expectations of men in suits, so they were not surprised to be asked to leave the premises. “Give these little girls their bicycles back,” said one. “Get on out of here,” said another, through a mouthful of tobacco. The younger men who had laughed and cheered them on were ordered away without words. Just a look and a head movement from a man seven feet tall. Nor were they angry about the dismissal—slightly put out, maybe, but not seriously. One, the driver, had never seen a man who didn’t look like an unlit explosion. Another, in the front passenger seat, considered the boring sexual images she had probably incited and recommitted herself to making tracks to somewhere else. A third, who had really been having fun, sat in the back seat thinking that although she knew what anger looked like, she had no idea what it might feel like. She always did what she was told, so when the man said, “Give these little girls…,” she did it with a smile. The fourth passenger was grateful for the expulsion. This was her second day at the Convent and the third day of having said not one word to anybody. Except today when the girl, Billie something, came to stand near her.

“You all right?” She wore a shell-pink gown and instead of the shower cap had tiny yellow roses pinned into her hair. “Pallas? You okay?”

She nodded and tried not to shiver.

“You’re safe out there, but I’ll come by to see if you need anything, all right?”

“Yes,” Pallas whispered. Then, “Thanks.”

So there. She had opened her lips a tiny bit to say two words, and no black water had seeped in. The cold still shook her bones, but the dark water had receded. For now. At night, of course, it would return and she would be back in it—trying not to think about what swam below her neck. It was the top of the water she concentrated on and the flashlight licking the edge, then darting farther out over the black glimmer. Hoping, hoping the things touching below were sweet little goldfish like the ones in the bowl her father bought her when she was five. Or guppies, angels. Not alligators or snakes. This was a lake not a swamp or the aquarium at the San Diego zoo. Floating over the water, the whispers were closer than their calls. “Here, pussy. Here, pussy. Kitty, kitty, kitty,” sounded far away; but “Gimme the flash, dickface, izzat her, let go, maybe she drowned, no way,” slid into the skin behind her ears.

Pallas stared out of the window at a sky so steady, landscape so featureless she had no sense of being in a moving car. The smell of Gigi’s bubble gum mixed with her cigarette smoke was nauseating.

“Here, pussy. Here.” Pallas had heard that before. A lifetime ago on the happiest day of her life. On the escalator.

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