By: Andria Nacina Cole

She’s wearing a too-small wedding dress that squeezes her like Aunt Plum when she’s drunk and in the mood with no man to touch. From behind, she’s a lumpy, lacy thing with shoulders broad as the moon when it’s not shamed and shines full. She has nowhere to go, but that’s because she’s 14 and the daughter of Lawrence Gaither, who believes in raising a certain kind of woman (six before her—all married, the majority clean), and she cannot leave the house except inside her own head, even, and especially, on Saturday mornings when the other neighborhood children are sitting on their porches being common.

Like most days without school or a trip to the branch library, she’s sitting in front of the television—black and white and small enough to be carried at her hip if she gets the feeling and dares defy her father to watch it outside on the concrete steps where any and everyone can see. Once, he caught her. And did nothing more than lift his pant leg to climb right past her like she were the railing itself. That and not say her name ’til the Fourth of July one month later. But today the television’s screen is blank and she has nestled her button nose into knotted hands. Over and over again she is chanting the name Charlie. 

The photograph above the television is almost as tall as the wall it hangs from. Charlie. It, like the television, is black and white, but a full forty years older. Of her parents standing beside a short-stacked, indistinct wedding cake, it folds in at the corners, despite the frame, as if it to hug itself. It has hung, unmoved, through three mistresses not old enough to remember King’s murder, through the suicide encouraged by those mistresses, through rape, through an illegitimate child neither named nor kept nor spoken of since. Her father, in a light-colored, well-tailored suit, looks satisfied, and her mother, behind him, duped. (Of this picture, he says, “My! Look at Ella. See that look on her face? If that ain’t love I don’t know what is.”)

Outside the windows pure white wilderness and all the rest of Buffalo sit. Of the six sisters before Dot, not one girl, ugly or not, has left this house unmarried, let alone a whore. Not one. Sweet Charlie. Dot’s suffocating in this wedding dress, the only one to have been plump in it or not on the verge of marriage, but it’s what she has, and she knows enough to give the day some weight. You should have seen how her father used his body to mop the floor when he’d found that Juanita, the third youngest, had been raped.

“What good is she now?” he’d screamed on all fours. If not for the Smith boy who cared far less about a spoiled wife (the rape brought the unnamed son) than the roundness of her ass and the utter beauty of her jaw line, Lawrence might’ve died of grief thirty years too soon.

If it were Dot’s choice, she’d wear a full-length gown with pencil-thin heels tall as the sun is far away. But her father is careful about his money, sleeps with it shoved in the very center of his box spring, and only ever buys things he can afford flat out. Anyway, what would she ask him? “Can I have a new gown, Daddy? One that teases the floor when I walk and hugs me good in the middle so I can go on and make love with your fine friend, our neighbor, Mr. Charles?” Charlie.

They have done everything short of making love, but that’s Charlie’s doing. He’s tasted her there, with his 50-year-old mouth, because that can be forgiven, and she knows, because he’s told her, that it tastes like pickles or tomatoes, depending on the season. And he loves either. Naturally, she’s tasted him back, because that’s not sex at all, but when asked, “What’s it like?” she says, “Skin,” or if she’s swallowed, “Silk.” Charlie.

According to Melody and Harmony, fraternal twins who live two blocks over—so poor they swap two hand-sewn shirts—Charlie will not want to be bothered with panties. They’ll inconvenience him. He may walk away and then where would she be? Exactly where she started. New. He’ll want her like a bowl he can dump himself into. Open. And anyway, does she want her virginity tossed away like theirs? On no particular night in no particular way in no particular clothes?

“What about Ella’s wedding dress?” Dot asked the twins three days back when the snow was young.

And Harmony said, “How come you call her Ella and not Momma?”  

“Because that’s her name.” Dot looked Harmony square in the eyes.

Anyway, they thought the idea of a wedding dress perfect, but warned her about what to do underneath it.   

“Wear panties if you want,” Melody said.

“See where that lands you,” said Harmony.

And though she is sure Charlie would wait for her to peel off panties, she believes the twins. They were right about kissing—how it’s nasty and good all at once—and they were right about his age not making a difference where true love matters. And especially … especially about her body craving his like he was pure sugar. Charlie. 

He had better hurry. Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. Her father will be home in exactly one hour and thirty-three minutes, and won’t stop short of gutting him if he is found on top of her where her father thinks only Wonder Woman underclothes or sheets or her own hands with toilet paper should be. Charlie knows that as well as she does. He saw, like she and all the rest of Leroy Street, her father drag Bridget’s crush out the house by his ankles. Saw his head hit each step with six thuds that changed things permanently. Charlie knows the boy never spoke good English after that. Please, Charlie. Don’t you go chicken on me.


Lawrence works every Saturday, even if there’s a graduation to attend or he hits the number for four weeks’ pay or even if he’s bent over sick with pneumonia. He says they need the money, though Dot’s counted what’s stashed and knows better. What he means is she drives him crazy with her nearly pretty, not necessarily ugly, self. She is the mirror image of her mother—dead two and a half years—only shorter and rounder, and looking at her too long means remembering. It creeps Dot out. His staring with that faraway look. Who wants to be gawked at knowing the gazer’s considering the corpse you resemble? Knowing he’s aching to the marrow over his part in the matter?   

After seven hundred seventy-six Charlie’s, the man arrives shivering from the cold. Only forty-nine minutes left, and she does not match as beautifully with the small fair dress as she did forty-four minutes before when she was still honey-colored and horny.

“What happened? I told you two thirty.” She raises her shoulders to shrug, but mostly to force her embroidered sleeves down her arms—give him more of her to look at.

He does not answer that. Instead he runs up on her like he wants to jump inside her skin and live there. He puts his hands all over her and she cannot keep up. This is exactly why she loves him—for being tangible. She can bite off pieces of his love and hold them in her cheeks to taste later when he’s gone. When he’s finished making a mess of her lipstick and dress, he tells her he is hungry and thirsty and needs someplace comfortable to sit. By now, her inner thighs are damp. What does he mean hungry and thirsty? Can’t he see she’s ready and warm? 

She pours him homemade juice and chases it with rum, like Lawrence does in the mornings. She slams the pot on the stove—­­impatient with yesterday’s spaghetti, the noodles and sweet sauce collected like bits of blood and bone. He sits on the couch and combs his chest with trembling hands. He looks her way, but he won’t speak.

She wants to tell him to grow up. That in thirty-seven minutes her father will come and blow a hole in his head, and if he wants her at all, he had better take her now, at the stove making his meal. All he needs to do is lift her dress, to move and hold the taffeta with one hand, and there, with the other, he will find nothing at all, just her welcoming bowl. Between him and the lonely woman staring down at her from the wedding photo, Dot’s ill. Everyone in the room—Charlie, her dead mother, she herself—is damn scared of Lawrence. 

Charlie eats slow as honey pours. Drinks like the juice is lead—as if it should hit every rift in the roof of his mouth before he swallows.

“What you put in this?”

“Puerto Rican rum.”

She never takes her eyes off him. He is the color of wheat bread and unshaven. She sits right close. So close he can’t get his fork to his mouth without feeling her titty against his elbow. And when there are only nineteen minutes left and he still has yet to finish his food or take a finger across her thigh, he says, “I can’t do this, Dot. Can’t do it.”

“Don’t do that to me, Charlie.” As if 14-year-old Dot is all woman and been here ten times.

“I can’t do this.” As if 50-year-old Charlie hasn’t had one year to prepare.

He says it again. “Can’t do it.” And her heart sags low, kissing her stomach.
 
“Can’t.”

Down lower, nearly hanging from her ribs.

“I can’t do it, Dot.” And he gets up to leave her there, with her heart damn near collected in her shoe. She lifts that plate, still heavy with the blood and bones, to throw, but doesn’t. It would mean spaghetti slipping down the walls after itself and bits of glass between her toes. It would mean she hates him.

“Don’t you remember what we said last night? On the telephone?” She puts the plate down.

There’s a tight bulge in his pants, like he is collecting quarters. “I remember,” he says, then his eyes gloss over. He is the kind of man that always cries and watching him is both amusing and painful. “I wish I had a camera right now,” he says, “so I could take a picture of you in that stupid dress.” But he isn’t callous. No word has any particular pitch. The sentence is as bland as the spaghetti almost thrown against the wall.

“Don’t you do that, Charlie.” She sees him picking a fight. “You said you would make love to me.”

“What’s wrong with you?” he asks.

“I love you.” 

“This ain’t right.”

“Sure it is.” She pulls her dress down over her breasts, big and ripe as honeydew.

“I got no business here.”

She takes his old man handsome hand and puts his pointer finger into her mouth.

“How you know to do things like that?” He pretends to want to know, but this is not the time to tell him.

“Well, come on.” He takes back his finger. “We need to get this thing started if we gonna be done in time to miss Lawrence. He’ll be through this door any minute wanting his drink and paper.”

He’s trying to be cold, trying to make her curse him, but there’s no use. There is love clogging his throat. She lifts her dress so that it is gathered at her hips in a bunch of pasty ruffles. She stands exposing her fat legs all the way to where they meet in a glorious V. She has only had hair there for a season and it is not tame. Both she and Charlie find this funny and say things like, “Bet it’s enough to braid.”

“I know plenty of men slept with girls exactly your age. Some two, three years younger,” says Charlie and he pulls his belt back on itself.

“OK,” says Dot, and she lifts that dress up over her stomach.

“Worse things is going on in this world right now. Things way worse than a man making love with a girl that really want it in
the first place.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s worse things going on right now while we here thinking about what we might do.”

With the wedding dress hiked she is still round, but soft. Any boy her age would be displeased with her folds; a young boy wouldn’t rest his hands between them and tell her how much she feels like home, but Charlie is twenty years past young with eyes that see things in a beige light.

When there are only twelve minutes to go, she pulls him by those handsome hands into the bedroom to the right—the one all those good sisters slept in. 


In nine minutes, Lawrence might shuffle through the door, high off of Georgia, the new, peach-smelling woman at the plant. He’ll put his hat on the hook. Pour himself three shots. Drink them like tea. Run his bare feet across every plank of the wood floor, not even knowing his daughter’s there, getting grown. If the liquor hits him hard, he’ll stand beneath the photo of him and his wife and see it for what it is. Ella will look, in his drunken state, as she looks to everyone else: suicidal. He’ll get angry with her and call her “weak” aloud, and decide (this too aloud) that his wife is simply unimportant. Eventually he’ll scream, “What I still got you on my wall for anyway?”

While Lawrence is asking his dead wife questions, Charlie can put himself back together and Dot can clean everything up. She won’t have to worry about the bedspread so much as returning the wedding dress to its plastic shield in her father’s bedroom. Lawrence will not go into his daughters’ room drunk. All over there are mirrors and he is a short, dull man, shorter and duller when drunk. While he considers ways to remove the frame from its wall, Charlie can slip right past. He might as well be Lawrence’s shadow if the liquor hits quick enough. 



Except that Charlie starts up with his crying and slows everything down. Tears big enough to fill a cup drop and open wide all over Dot’s breasts. She slams her fists against his back.

“Shut up. Shut up, Charlie. Shut up!”

Three minutes left and she doesn’t know if she’s a virgin or not. She can’t tell if the pile of skin between his legs where firmness just was means anything. His penis seems discouraged now. Lenient. And for the first time, she feels like a girl.  

“Get out of here, Charlie.”

Dot sends the crying fool to the wind, not caring if he meets Lawrence on the snow-covered concrete steps and they wrestle like boys. Not caring if they lose their balance and lives over one another.


Her father gets home a full sixty minutes late, and Dot is sure this means Georgia has been fooled onto her back. She is dressed in slacks and a shirt, her hair pulled off her forehead so that she is all eyes and cheeks, and she is standing there on Lawrence’s snow-covered porch, with her legs shoulder-width apart, and her hands inside her pants pockets. She is on the top stair and Melody and Harmony skip every other one below her. They are underdressed because they are poor, while Dot is missing hat, gloves, and coat because she’s a woman now, and warm.

The girls are staggered so Lawrence can’t give the stairs a straight go. He tries stomping around them but the steps haven’t been cleared and his anger is lost on the snow.

“Evening,” Dot says, anyway, and he gives no “Evening” back.

He goes inside to fill himself to the elbows with Puerto Rican rum and the twins look at Dot like she’s drowning.

“You crazy?” they say over and over on top of each other.

And Dot is as cool as if she were not youngest of the Gaither clan. As if she were not a member of the Gaither family at all. She’s already told the twins about Charlie. Described the lovemaking as something dying between her legs. Already called the film left across her stomach “sex” and had that description sharpened by them and named “cum.” Already told them about the wedding dress hanging, un-cleaned, back in its plastic cape. Of pounding Charlie’s back and falling out of love just that easy.

But not of revelations. Not of finding out firsthand what drives your father to cheat. To dictate and cause frail women to hold guns to their heads. And use them.

“Scared of what?” Dot stares in their eyes a pair at a time.

“Scared he’ll beat you … put you out … never talk to you again.”

“Uh-uh,” she says. And takes the palm of her hand across her hair.

Inside herself, where the twins can’t see, Dot considers Ella. She feels as messy as her mother was when they found her, measuring blood with her open mouth (her eyes thrown so far back into her busted head they seemed not eyes at all, but white backdrops worth painting). Only her mother’s mess was cranberry-colored and overwhelming and Dot’s feels like nectar—translucent and strange. She just almost cries for her mother. Just almost. The tears well up so high it’s a wonder they balance. So high if she breathes in the levees will collapse. But she pulls it together and the tears get swallowed back down to live inside her. 

Lawrence hasn’t the courage to question her, she knows. She could always say, “You killed my momma, you dirty old dog.” At 14, she knows men are not capable of doing themselves what they require of others. Not capable of keeping their dicks in their pants no matter the consequence. Not a suicidal wife, not an underage girl, not one thing on this whole mighty earth can keep them from giving in.

How Ella live so long and not figure that?




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