Where Beauty Survived by George Elliott Clarke

Author:George Elliott Clarke [Clarke, George Elliott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2021-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

xiii.

But Sibyl wasn’t the only subject of an abortive, pre-adolescent and early-teen amour. In grade seven or eight, ages twelve to thirteen, I fell in like—due to wonder tinged with excitement—with another classmate, the daughter of a soldier or sailor. Like Sibyl, Alma was chalk-skinned with dark hair, but had a spicy, sassy, exuberant freshness in her demeanour. Her face was as white (though freckled) as a skull. She was an ocean breeze—so bracing in her windbreakers, salty in her speech (all fuckin this and friggin that), and an urgent whirlwind of jumpy energy. She was bony—or splendidly slender, but also flighty, nervous, her hands flying off every which way. Her step was a giraffe’s gait—a loping glide—as she cruised along sidewalk or asphalt, in flat shoes or sneakers, pacing, marking off her territory. Sitting still in the classroom, her mouth would work chewing gum as loudly as a machine-gunner rat-a-tat-tatting down enemy troops. She let me know that she liked me by alternatingly hugging me and then playfully punching a shoulder. I classed her as surely, purely desirable, all devil-may-care pizzazz, and wiry where she wasn’t just spaghetti-skinny.

She lived right round the corner from where I gathered newspapers for delivery, so I got to walk her home from school a couple of times, and I got to stroll by her house (or her and her father’s rooms in the building), roughly six days a week. Even if the sun was glaring on its front stoop and staring at the front windows, that house—really, a rooming house—was always dark, always dank-smelling (a stale-beer and mouldering-newspaper scent, a rude and repellent odour), a place where sombre shadows were prowling. So, I was constantly amazed when she’d emerge, all big blue eyes and gleaming brunette hair, and looking so scrubbed she seemed laundered—soaped and bleached—herself. Even so, her scent was more cigarettes and bubble-gum than it was “9944/100 percent” Ivory Snow “pure.” Her mouth exuded spearmint chewing-gum and nicotine.

Intriguingly, Alma didn’t seem to have, nor did she ever speak about, a mother. However, that her father loomed large was never in doubt. The ill-humoured figure lurked in overbearing, juggernaut-gargantuan shadows.

I did screw up the nerve to knock on her door once, to ask for her. Her father answered. I have no recollection of his looks, just the sound of the door blamming, yes, in my face, and a voice yelling, muffled by thick wood and frosted glass, that he did not want “niggers” about.

His sentiment did not prevent Alma from smiling my way or clasping me for a playful split second, or tapping me on my shoulders, and I was pleased by the attention, though she was no gold-star or A-plus classmate—I mean, someone who I might have thought that Bill would like. Yes, Alma’s pops wouldn’t tolerate me, but I never considered whether my parents would like Alma. I liked her—and that was good enough. Still, I was awkward—being lanky, skinny, “Bucky,” four-eyed, a “brain,” a nerd, and a “goody two-shoes.

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