A short story set in the sixties: headstrong Geniece craves deflowering with a guy who can't quite cut it and familial closeness with two sisters who uncover something new yet old--family.

I’m dancing to “Cold Sweat” and waiting for Chazzie to say something deeper than I want to sleep with you. Anything at all. He pulls me close during the slow side. “You ripe for the plucking, ain’t you?”
“For the what? The sucking. You said sucking to me here on the dance floor?”
“You heard me, girl. The plucking. I’m ready to pluck your fruit.”
“Do what?”
“Lemon boy got some sweets for you.”
“You think I got a thing for yellow boys?”
“Bet on it.”
“You got a lot of nerve, Chazzie.”
“Let me hit it, I’ll show you a lot more than nerve.”
He’s cute. Chazzie met me at Whiskey-a-Go-Go on Friday afternoon. The Young Men of the City meet weekly here; everybody black and alive in the financial district in the city comes and connects. To go is like a pre-date, like showing off too. I got somebody on the hook. Ha ha. Do you?
Chazzie says, “I’ve been trying to get next to you for days.”
All the way off the dance floor and into his Karmann-Ghia a block from the club.
“So I’m ripe for plucking. How do you do that, pluck somebody?”
“You jugging with me, girl.”
“Jugging? Jugging, sucking, plucking. I don’t know what’s on your mind.”
“What’s on my mind ain’t got nothing to do with my mind.”
Funny. Cute. All the way to his place on Gough and Hayes. Natty-sharp dresser. All the way up three flights. I check out his wingtips, slacks, button-down shirt. No half-stepping in the clothes department. All the way into his studio. It’s clean. And small like him. Tight. I’m feeling pushed, even though he’s a polite hound dog.
“Get comfortable,” he says.
I’m still debating what I’m going to do. He puts Eric Dolphy on his stereo, On Green Dolphin Street.
“Chazzie,” I say, sitting on the pullout bed. “What are you majoring in?”
He‘s grooving on the music. “Maybe business. I don’t know.” Can his tight little nattily dressed body teach me even one thing? Chazzie starts undressing.
“You got a lot of soul, you know that,” he says.
“Is that a code word for drop my drawers?”
“Naw, splibby. You got a lot of heart, that’s all.”
“Which means?” If I rub against him will I be any different?
“You’re the lady. You got the moneymaker.”
He’s undressing me. I help out a little. What can I learn from this guy? I take off my top but not my bra. I know how my knobby collarbones stick out. He leaves his shoes on. We make out. Gee whiz, jazz sides go on forever, not like a 45. Was I paying attention or just sweating on the dance floor? I want him to be smart. He isn’t. Chazzie is average. I wonder if he knows that I’m a virgin. Can guys tell? He gets up. He looks odd standing there, his briefs bulging and all, with his socks and shoes still on, like he’s waiting for me to do something to make him take the rest off.
“Chazzie, I know this is going to sound lame or something but I’m a virgin. I mean I’ve never done it. Gone all the way.”
“And to what do I owe the privilege?”
I feel off the wall standing up next to him, looking down on him by three inches. Can I get out of this?
“How can you pluck me when I’m the tall one?”
“You ready, girl?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re messing my mind, you know that?”
“No, honest, I don’t.”
“Come on, let’s do the nasty.”
“I told you I’m a virgin.”
“You expect me to believe a splibby girl from East Oakland don’t give up nookie?” He starts laughing.
“I’m totally serious, Chazzie.”
“So am I. Once I get to drilling, that’s it.”
I want him to give me a line that will make me cave in but my silence is like a permission slip. Chazzie takes off his shoes.
“Now don’t get thrown by this little bit of a problem I have with my feet.”
I don’t know what to expect. A clubfoot? A rash? Immediately an odor fills the small room. Not just foot odor, unbreathable foot odor. I look immediately for a window but his bureau with its assortment of stingy brims is backed up to it. I will be asphyxiated if I don’t get some air. And they found the missing black girl not raped not murdered but suffocated to death in a studio on Gough St.
“Please, Chazzie, open the door.” He acts like that’s not possible with him in his undies and all but I repeat it until he does it. I put back on my blouse. He puts back on his shoes and then his clothes, and like a genie back into a bottle, the odor quells, my virginity intact.

The next day, I’m just ahead of the police proceeding down Telegraph to Lila’s Lilac Garden at the border of Oakland and Berkeley. I like Lila with her lilac dusters that she insists we wear when we’re working. On 63rd St., the Alameda County sheriffs bear down so hard on their motorcycles they look like beetles, black on black on silver and black. I look toward the Campanile at U.C., then towards downtown Oakland. As far as I can see, police and people crowd the sidewalks. The last time I saw this was for President Kennedy’s motorcade.
I pass in and out of clots of bodies, squeezed between some white kids in cut off jeans, a woman in a tie-dye dress with a llasa apso, the shopkeepers, more people walking dogs, and then the sundry black people. The black Berkeleyites. Small shop owners. Grew up Oklahoma or Texas. Came here during WWII. Worked in the shipyards. Lived in rooming houses. Stayed on, saving pocket change in Mason jars. Opened businesses. Nothing big. Restaurant. Shoe repair shop. Two-cab taxi biz. Five and dime. Fresh fruit stand. Bought bungalows in Berkeley or East Oakland. Raised kids. Still getting up saying good morning. Lila owns, runs, and counts all the day’s receipts. I like how she compares everything. “Long ago and far away,” she loves to say, or “women are big and men are small…or “Okies are education and Texas is family.” I like her hairy legs. She’s the first colored woman I’ve seen who will not shave her legs for anything. I like that she’s taller than I am by an inch. I get tired of being the tallest.
I’m looking for Lila in the clots. I see The Girls in dusters instead. The Girls are not really hers. They’re only ten years younger than she is. She took them in when the institution shut down. She calls them The Girls, always “C’mon Girls” or “Now, Girls.”
They wave me down. The police have passed now. They were closer than bark on a tree. Now they’re gone. The Girls are making over a newspaper
“Why are you chattering like magpies?” I ask.
“Miss Lila found our picture in the newspaper. We’re in the news.” They talk like a pair of radios tuned to slightly different frequencies. Annette and Arletta.
“I’m afraid to ask.”
“We’re not in trouble, Geniece.” They call me GEE-niece instead of juh-NIECE. “The newspaper says we’re going to meet our sister.”
Lila comes out and motions them back into the shop.
“Did you see the police, Lila?”
“Seen police all my life,” Lila says. “Nothing new under the sun.”
“They’re going to arrest the demonstrators. That’s new.”
“Police and demonstrators. Please. These motorcycles don’t compare to a battalion of horses riding your front yard. Stomping down a good crop of mustards.” She clips dead leaves from the potted plants.
Arletta shoves the paper between Lila and me. The Berkeley Post, the black weekly, has their picture on the first page. I read the story out loud. The story chronicles how Lila took them in, noting that the birth of multiple children in the Depression was a catastrophe. The Girls were farmed out, two of them to one family, the third to another.
The Girls squeal and hop around the little shop. For as long as I’ve known them, it was rumored they were triplets. It seems the parents who took the third one died and the authorities undertook a search for next of kin. They found Annette and Arletta through a mental retardation registry. The third girl was coming to Oakland.
“We have a sister. We knew it. We have a sister. The paper says our sister is coming to see us.”
The picture is grainy and I can’t tell if she’s identical. Her name is Trissie. The Girls go on and on. Lila takes the paper and puts it under her arms, clipping stems for the church bouquets all the while.
“Now Girls, let’s wait for the moment to get excited.”
They pay her no mind. She keeps arranging the bromeliads for display. She turns to Arletta. “Go get me some of the small pine bark.”
Lila and Arletta make over the bromeliads, a specialty plant. Lila says she likes bromeliads because most people consider them strange and hard to grow.
“For the tillandsia or the cryptanthus, Miss Lila?” Arletta says.
She turns to me on her way from the soil keeper. “Geniece, we’re trying to make more of the puppy bromeliads. When they sprout, you can take one home, as soon as the mother plant dies. O.K.?”
“O.K. Arletta.”
“But not before it dies.”
“I heard you, Arletta.”
“It leaves so many pups behind. But the mother dies.”
“I know, Arletta.”
“Miss Lila said I put my heart and soul in my bromeliads. Didn’t you, Miss Lila?”
Lila nods and starts in with the grapes. She puts a bunch in the freezer for an hour and rolls them in powdered sugar. She pops them right in our mouths because our hands are usually deep in dirt.
“That’s right,” Lila says. “Arletta puts Arletta’s heart and soul into bromeliads,”
Childlike, Annette starts repeating our conversation: Arletta’s heart and soul heart and soul bromeliads bromeliads so many pups so many pups the mother dies mother dies bromeliads bromeliads.
I start sweeping the floor. Lila isn’t paying me to stand around with my mouth wide open and yapping.

The next day I try to explain Chazzie to the Girls. They love the plucking and the chucking and the sucking.
“Did you satisfy him?” Arletta asks.
“I wanted to discuss things with him, Arletta.”
“And all he wanted was one thing, Geniece?” Annette says.
I shrug as if to say, who knows. I don’t know if either Girl has had sex. I don’t think so. They look like they’re my age, not in their forties. Lila told me that’s because of their condition. Their word for sex is satisfied.
“Maybe if you give him the one thing, he will discuss the other thing. He needs satisfied.”
“I think he would want satisfied over and over,” Arletta says.
“And over and over.” They start repeating it. Satisfied. Over and over. And over and over.
“Girls?” They stop and turn to me. “Do you know what a virgin is?”
They nod and stop the repeating.
“I’m a virgin. And I don’t want to be one any more.”
“Like when you cut your hair off,” Arletta says. Their eyes had widened when they saw me with a natural for the first time. Lila sends them for their weekly press and curl.
“Yeah, like that.” For a few days, they touched my hair, as if it was fire.
They get into a nodding contest, repeating virgin, don’t want to be one anymore, virgin, don’t want to be one anymore. They don’t look stupid to me. This is what they do. They keep their pocket change in handkerchiefs; they repeat what you tell them.. But when they say these words over and over it has a different effect. Being a virgin has been my choice. I want to see what it’s like not to have that choice. But not with Chazzie. We finish the day’s bouquets.
Annette says, “Go home and take a bath, Geniece.You stink.”

A reporter from the Oakland Tribune comes to the shop the next week with a photographer. “How exactly did the two of you come here from Oklahoma in the first place?” the reporter asks the Girls.
He’s white, balding with freckles on his scalp, the photographer younger and mute as if his camera is mouth enough.
“We came here on a train, the Santa Fe,” Arletta speaks up. The reporter smiles and fiddles with his pencil.
“No, I mean the circumstances,” he says. I want to jump in and tell him how they got here but I don’t know. I want Lila to talk but she is indifferent to their presence. When she told me they were coming for the story, she said she didn’t care what the Oakland Tribune wrote, we made the Post, that’s what counts, that damn Tribune insults my intelligence whenever it runs a story making Negroes look like buffoons.
“We came to Oakland because our family was here,” Arletta says, putting a story together for the man. They didn’t have family here, I know that much.
“Our poppa came here first and sent for us,” she continues.
“When was that?” the reporter writes it down.
Arletta looks at me. “When we got older.”
Irritated as hell, he looks up at first Arletta and then the photographer. “Jesus, this is a joke.”
He puts his steno pad away and walks out of the shop. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
When the two get into a dusty orange Ford Fairlane up the street, Lila comes out. We stand there watching them make a U-turn and head towards downtown Oakland. Arletta and I wave but only the photographer nods. The Girls and I giggle.
“Humph, “ Lila says. “Peckerwoods.”
I turn to her. “Where did they come from, Lila?”
“Their people in Okmulgee took care of them as long as they could. When I heard The Girls needed a home, they were on the next train. You can’t be colored and alone.”
Annette asks, “Can you be white and alone?”
“Only if you’re Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck,” Lila says, giving me a look.
When The Girls ask who they are, Lila says, “Yet another race.”
Which race, both Girls ask at once. Lila snorts and goes back inside. I try to tell The Girls about “On The Beach.”
“It ‘s a movie about the end of the world.”
They ask if the move is about Judgment Day. I say, “It’s about if white people died and went to hell which is down under which is Australia where the kangaroos live. And the colored people disappeared even before the end of the world so there’s none of us in the movie. Like we miss what we never had except for Sidney Poitier and Hattie McDaniel. And the white people are scared because it’s goodbye to everything.”
Arletta says, “It’s a movie. It’s not the truth. White people are never scared.”
“Sometimes they are, Arletta,” I say.
“Scared of what?” she says. She looks at me like there is nothing I can say. Sometimes I wonder how slow Arletta really is.
“Arletta, they’re scared of the bomb, like everybody else.”
“Um-mm. What else?” She isn’t convinced.
“I think most of all they’re afraid of getting old.”
She nods with satisfaction. “That reporter was old, wasn’t he?”
“On the road to old,” I say.
“He had freckles with sores all over his head and his arms, Geniece,” Arletta says.
“That was sunburn,” I say.
“It was ugly. He ugly,” Annette scrunches her face. “I don’t like the way he looked. He had hair coming out his ears. The camera man didn’t.”
“Miss Lila don’t have hair coming out of her ears and Miss Lila say she getting older by the minute,” Arletta says, loud enough for Lila to hear.
Lila shouts out, “Who you calling old? We don’t get old like white folk. It’s our consolation - look good, catch hell.”
Arletta says, “He had hair coming out of his nose too, like Mr. Reinhart.”
Stooped shoulder Mr. Reinhart owns the antiques shop next door. He has a bulbous nose and shuffled walk.
“Mr. Reinhart has bags under his eyes. Big bags. Enough to hold groceries until he gets home.” Arletta laughs at her own joke. I’m amazed when she plays the dozens.
“I watch white people in the supermarket sometimes, Geniece,” Annette says. “Old white people, their ears get so big. Like Dumbo. Why come?”
“I don’t know, Arletta. Maybe it’s gravity, pulling everything down.”
Pulling everything down pulling everything down everything down down down. They’re back to repetition.

The Tribune story never appears. But the third Girl comes in like rain. At first a few sprinkles, then a deluge. Lila is wired she’s on the way and we all go to the Southern Pacific Depot to pick her up. We pile in Lila’s Buick Skylark. Its seats are so high and full of horsehair we float above the streets of West Oakland. Once we pass Market St., I can feel, just barely, the railroad tracks. Annette and Arletta read the street names. Myrtle, the old maid. Filbert, big fat nut. Linden. Look at that Chestnut street roasting on the open fire. Sweet Adeline. We pass DeFremery Park with the old Victorian house in the center. Here come more trees. Poplar. Cypress. Lila points out Esther’s Orbit Room and Breakfast Club like we have all the time in the world, which we do since Lila is exceedingly punctual.
“Some of these places you’d never understand what a big deal it was.” Lila’s voice sounds teary like when people sing Lift Every Voice and Sing. “Earl Fatha Hines whipped a mean organ in Esther’s.”
“When you used to be young, Miss Lila?” Annette asks.
“Young my eye. When life was a grand adventure.”
Lila turns onto Campbell and finds a park across the street from a huge, gray stucco and granite building. Three giant arched windows across the front look like glass portals to the San Francisco skyline.
“This is it, Girls.”
I don’t know whether Lila is talking about the building or coming to get Trissie.
We walk single-file like ducks behind Lila into the waiting room, past six feet tall cast iron lampposts marked Geo. Cotter Co., South Bend. Ind. and on past sculptured fountains, stone fruits and leaves cascading down pilasters, and lintels toped by large gilt crests. There aren’t any people, only oak benches and marble under our feet. Our heels make clicking sounds over the marble floor.
Annette walks to a pedestal. “How come this looks like the cemetery?”
“Look, Miss Lila! Acanthus leaves way up,” Arletta points to the ceiling three stories up.
“Arletta, how can you see that design from way down here?” I ask.
“Oh, my, Arletta is right. They call it Beaux Arts, Girls. It’s used in many public places,” Lila says, looking up.
“Like City Hall?” I say.
“Like City Hall, Miss Geniece,” Lila says. Lila is not acting like Lila today, calling me miss and getting teary about old, dilapidated West Oakland.
“We used to come in here and be all decked out for our beaux going off on the hog head run. The night run. We would go to the old waterfront terminal, and board the ferry to Frisco. They had an orchestra on the ferry,” Lila starts humming. Annette starts repeating, Bo, Bo, little Bo peep lost her sheep, lost her sheep.
“Can you imagine?” Lila talks over Annette. “On a ferry on the San Francisco Bay listening to a white band playing Count Basie. Oh! This California. We left the South in the dust. And after we came back, our fellas would put on their porter’s uniforms and we’d take their dress clothes home. Now that was grand.”
The train whistle sounds from somewhere off in Oakland and it’s as if the train has a baritone’s throat and a steel volcano in its gut.
The Girls say, “Geniece, let’s go up there.”
We walk out to the platform but I stand back. I feel the train’s rumble in the concrete beneath me like a quake. The Girls stand alarmingly close to the track. Why doesn’t Lila pull them back? Does she want them to fall in front of the train and be crushed to death? Lila stands next to me, holding her car keys like prayer beads, looking at the locomotive and sighing. I whisper to Lila, is this going to drive you nuts, three of them? I think about it, about how strong she is and how she’s managed the shop and The Girls so many years. Sometimes you choose your cross, sometimes it chooses you, she says as the train whistles in.
A stream of passengers unlike what we’re looking for pours out. It is not hard to spot her. She steps out, squinting from the sun. She puts one gloved hand up to her brow and holds her bag in the other. The Girls go up to her, Arletta leading. I can’t hear what Arletta is saying because her back is to me. I make a move toward them but Lila puts a hand on my shoulder. She doesn’t speak but her body warmth seems to say, let them be. I let them even though curiosity is killing me. I wanted to see the look on The Girls’ faces when they first met her. They stand there as if time has taken a five-minute break. Then another five minutes. I can’t tell who’s talking. Their heads are bobbing like doll heads. I want to turn their heads around like doll heads, and have them talk to me.
Finally the three of them turn and walk towards us, Trissie in the middle. Trissie has the same exact leaf brown skin, and wide set, saucer brown eyes; she’s their size and build. But she has on black patent pumps and they’re wearing flats. They’re in cotton seersucker pants and white blouses. Her dress is gabardine. A wide black patent leather belt emphasizes her waist. They look so much alike and unalike it’s a shock.
She greets us, extending a gloved hand. “Miss Lila, I am so pleased to meet you.” Good googa mooga, she has a Texas accent a mile wide. We walk to Lila’s car. The Girls keep Trissie between them, as if she’s a balloon that could fly away. They arrange themselves beside her in the back seat of the Skylark. I turn around as the car hits the streets of West Oakland heading back to Berkeley.
Annette says, “The street names are trees, Trissie. Poplar. Cypress. Oak.”
She turns to Trissie, “Why do you talk so funny, Trissie? Like Gomer Pyle?”
Arletta reaches across Trissie and pops Annette on the forearm. “She’s southern. Don’t make fun. I like it.”
“Linden. Wood. Look, there’s the 62 bus,” Annette points to the bus. Trissie turns her head and looks back like it’s no big thing.
“Trissie,” I say, “your outfit looks good after all that traveling.”
“That’s what they taught us at college. How to keep the press no matter how hot it gets. I starched and folded everything in my suitcases.”
She sits back and relaxes into the seat. Her dress rides up and we can see she has on a white panty girdle. Her stockings are lighter than her skin. Annette runs her hand over the top of Trissie’s knees. “Geniece dips our stockings in coffee so they match our skin.”
Lila asks, her hands on the wheel, “You went to college, Trissie?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Oh, such manners. Where, dear?”
“Lane College is my alma mater.”
“What a treat, Trissie. Lane’s choir is singing at our church.”
Trissie sits up straight on the hump “Down south, colored folks, we suck up education.”
Suck up education, Annette repeats, suck up education.
“You went to college?” Arletta asks.
Annette repeats suck up education, suck it up.
“Don’t look at Trissie like she has trumpets in her ears, Geniece.” Arletta rolls her eyes at me.
“I’m not looking at her like anything,” I turn around facing front.
Arletta asks Trissie, was it hard? I turn back around.
Trissie takes off her gloves finger by finger. Her nails are trimmed and polished with clear pink shellac. “Perseverance is the soul of success.”
“Geniece said soul is a feeling,” Annette says. She starts singing “Soul Man” by Sam and Dave.
“I kept my nose to the grindstone,” Trissie says.
Annette takes the ungloved hand and places it on her leg. “Look. We have the same hands.”
We look at the hands while the car crosses San Pablo Avenue. It’s true . All their hands are long and the joints spindly. Arletta’s nails are nibbled to the quick. Annette’s are short and lined at the bed with dirt from potting plants.
“A woman’s nails should be neat and above all clean,” Trissie says. She gives Annette a pat on the last word.
Lila says, as she turns onto Telegraph, “To each his own, my dear.”
“Are you retarded like us? “ Annette asks Trissie.
Arletta says quickly, “We’re not retarded. I told you, we’re slow.”
“In the South,” Trissie says, “colored are always getting labeled and then thrown in a garbage can. But I’m not retarded. Nobody threw my brain away. I bet you’re not retarded either, Annette.”
“Yes, I am.”
“No, we’re not,” Arletta says.
“I like being retarded. I don’t have to do as much,” Annette says.
Arlette picks up Trissie’s glove and runs her fingers over it. “No we’re not,”
“Yes, we are and I don’t care.” Annette begins to repeat, nobody threw my brain away.
“Do you want to try it on?” Trissie asks Arletta.
Arletta shakes her head, “I want to try them both on.”
She pulls the glove over the palm of her hand and flexes her gloved fingers. She holds the one up for us to look at, and then pulls on the other glove. She holds up her hands and flutters them, and then folds them primly.
“Nobody in this car is retarded, okay, Annette?” Arletta says. “Not a soul.”
“Geniece said soul is a feeling,” Annette begins to repeat soul is a feeling, nobody is retarded, not in this car, not a soul. Arletta gives the gloves back to Trissie.

I’m late for Lila’s church program, so late I can’t meet them at the flower shop. I go directly to Lila’s church, which is decked out as grandly as if it’s Christmas. They’ve hung streamers with the names of the three black colleges, Lane, Houston-Tillotson and Wiley, which have sent singers for a joint chorale program. Even late, I am proud to be here. Even not knowing anyone, not seeing a familiar face outside of The Girls and Lila. Sitting in my aisle seat I feel the waves of music, the altos, sopranos and deep baritones, the crescendo of the pianist as he mixes gospel and classical strains of James Weldon Johnson. In dat great gittin' up mornin' Fare you well, fare you well.
I’m so happy I talk to myself like The Girls, in nonsensical phrases. I matter, we matter, I mattered, I mattering. The words echo in my head, mingling with the chorale pieces.
At intermission, I go with Trissie to her alma mater table, Lane College. Trissie goes to the bathroom. I sign my name on the Lane College recruiter’s list.
“Are you in high school or college already?” The woman behind the table asks. I proudly tell her which college. She frowns slightly and I begin to tell her about my major and my grades.
“You don’t pay tuition at a junior college?”
I nod and she raises her eyebrow.
“Are your parents alumna?”
My mouth drops open. I don’t know what to say. I don’t have parents. I don’t pay tuition. My grandmother raised me. I can’t come up with the right answer. Some other students come up to the table and finger the brochures. She begins speaking to them, her voice lighter. I don’t want to think about why she‘s nicer to them. I mattering. I look down at the program.
Trissie walks up and says with a flourish to the woman, “All is not lost that is not forgotten hence.” Then she extends her hand to the woman. The woman makes a slight bow with her head and rises to embrace Trissie.
“Young lady,” the woman says to Trissie as she releases her, “What good things has been your lot since you left us?” I want to correct her and say have not has.
Trissie says, “I’ve been working in floral design and sales, both here and in Oklahoma.” I don’t know if Trissie is blowing smoke out of her ears or what. She hasn’t been here a week. We don’t design at Lila’s; we dig up dirt and mealy bugs and spray gloss on dieffenbachia and bake the dirt to kill the bacteria.
“Are you using your degree, child?” the woman asks her. “That’s the important thing. Use your education to better yourself.”
“I am. I assure you, I am,” Trissie answers confidently.
The woman points to a stack of yearbooks and lets loose a barrage. “What year did you graduate, my dear? What was your major? Horticulture? And what did you pledge? Tell me your exact job title and civil service rank for our alumni update.”
Trissie looks uncomfortable. She pulls her hands together and fingers the spines of the yearbooks. “My year isn’t in here, I don’t believe.”
“Nonsense,” the woman says. “We have everyone from the last twenty years.”
Trissie stammers, “I, uh, I…”
The woman stops everything – the questions, the shuffling of yearbooks, moving the brochures around like a three-card monte. There is a terrible silence even though the noise of the crowd goes on around us.
“My dear, you aren’t by chance a poseur? “ she asks Trissie in a damning tone.
“What’s that?”
“Someone claiming to be a thing they are not.”
“I can’t remember which year I-“
The woman cuts her off. “Nobody forgets the year they graduated. It’s a matter of pride.”
She restacks the yearbooks and moves the brochures away from us.
I want Trissie to leave the table, get away from this woman. I want to speak in loud, confident, clear tones. I matter, she matters, you matter, we all matter. Instead Trissie and I walk back to our seats, Trissie not speaking but holding her head so high.
The Girls ask, “Trissie, did you see your college table?”
That’s the only time Trissie looks at me. If looks could kill, I would be in a coffin. She says, “Uh huh.”
The Girls ask, “Geniece, are you going to Trissie’s college?” I shrug my shoulders and we listen to “I got a home in that rock,” Lila’s favorite spiritual.
I got a home in that rock, well, don't you see?
Way between the earth and sky
I thought I heard my Savior cry
Well-a poor Lazarus poor as I
When he died he had a home on high
He had a home in that rock don't you see?
The rich man died and lived so well
When he died he had a home in Hell
He had no home in that rock, well, don't you se?
God gave Noah the rainbow sign
No more water but the fire next time
He had a home in that rock, well, don't you see?
You better get a home in that rock, don't you see?
Trissie refuses to look at me or even let our arms touch on the padded iron rail between our seats. The final number is Peace in the Valley by Thomas A. Dorsey, which the three choirs jointly sing. Their voices fill every inch from the floor beneath our feet to the frescoes on the ceiling. Trissie begins to hum the last stanza with them:
There the bear will be gentle, the wolf will be tame
And the lion will lay down by the lamb
The host from the wild will be led by a Child
I'll be changed from the creature I am
As the choir members link hands the director motions the audience to link hands. Trissie and The Girls link hands. Trissie leaves her hand closest to me at her side. I place my hand on hers. Her skin is hot. She draws away from me. Her skin is unlike our hands that touch water and dirt so often. I try again to take her hand in mine. Trissie pulls her hand to her chest. I wait until she puts it down again and I grab it. But she won’t close her fingers around my palm. It doesn’t matter. I clasp her stiff hand tightly with every ounce of feeling that I have. I can feel her hurt as if I had swallowed it. I want her to hear my heart saying I matter, you matter, we matter. The song ends and everyone gives the choirs a standing ovation. I turn to Trissie and for a second she looks at me. When I see the pure hate in her eyes I feel a sharp pain.
When I come to work a few days later Lila has put Trissie on the register, something she seldom let the Girls do.
Arletta says, with a taunting smile, “Geniece, there’s nothing for you to do.”
Annette says, “Go home and take a bath, Geniece, you stink.”
“Do what?” It’s our game. One of The Girls is supposed to say, “Do which?”
Nobody answers. I look for Lila but she’s in the back. I can hear her humming.
“Trissie, can you handle it?” I ask.
“I’m good with figures. I can do it, Geniece,” Trissie says.
Annette says, “You have to go, Geniece. Three’s company, four’s a crowd.” Annette repeats it over and over until I correct her. Two’s company, three’s a crowd.
Lila comes back. Her body, so angular and tall, fills the shop. I ask her, “Is Annette right, Lila?”
“It’s up to you, sweetheart,” she says. She has on gardening gloves. She’s been repotting. I can see it’s too many bodies in here.
“Do you want to stay here, Geniece?” Lila says
I want Lila to say, stay here. A command, not a question. She only asks me once. It takes a minute to feel how tiny the shop has become.
“I guess it’s time for me to go.”
Lila nods and I turn to leave. Annette starts clapping.
“Annette, I thought you were my friend.”
“I don’t want a friend. I have my sisters and Miss Lila,” she says.
Arletta gives me a hug; Annette keeps on clapping. Trissie, popping grapes into her mouth from a brown paper bag, doesn’t look me in the face. I don’t want to start crying. I don’t want to but I can’t help it; the tears will spill out if I blink. It’s important to get out of the shop quickly.
I look at it from outside. The Girls and Trissie are in motion as if I was never there. I feel a stinging pain in the back of my throat, worse than severe thirst. It begins there and spreads. It’s funny; I hate dirt and hated getting it on my hands. Lila looks up at me, shrugs and waves me on, twice, as if to say, go, find your cross, this is mine. It eases the aching. As I turn to walk to the bus, Arletta comes out, squat-legged, with a terra cotta pot of the young bromeliads.
“Here, Geniece, I can grow more pups. They take less than a month.” She gives me the pot, a kiss on the cheek and a Lila-style wave, and goes back in the shop.

I have come to Chazzie’s apartment on Gough to sit and talk and eat the chicken and short ribs we got from the B-B-Q on Divisadero and Hayes.
“Chazzie, why did you drop out of school?” He quit City and I had stopped seeing him around. Then I ran into him on Divisadero while I was job hunting.
“I got a job at the airport.” He passes me a joint. It’s another thing I’ve never done but I don’t feel like explaining that to him. I give it back to him.
“More for me,” he says with a shrug. “How many years have splibs tried to get on at TWA?”
I shrug. “Forever,” he says, his lungs puffed up. “I can go to City anytime.”
“Chazzie, it’s been three weeks and civil service hasn’t called. “
“I don’t want to be a civil servant or any other kind of servant. I’m going where the money is.” He rolls another joint.
I flip through his Post. I look at the Help Wanted. He throws me the Chronicle.
I throw it back at him. “Why look for a job where people are going to slam the door in my face?”
“The times are changing, splibby. Surprise yourself.”
I scan the Post, the society chatter, the church stories, and the wedding announcements. A picture looks familiar. It is. Of all things, it’s Lila’s shop, a picture of the Girls and Trissie standing outside the flower shop.
“Look. These are the triplets I was telling you about. Their picture is in the Post.” It’s a grainy picture. Arm in arm, they’re smiling broadly, each set of teeth, each pair of full lips the same. The Girls have on dresses cinched at the waist. They look regular, sexy, like the object of men’s whistles.
Chazzie comes back in the room with some napkins. “Yeah, I saw them. It’s a shame isn’t it?”
“That they’re triplets?” He looks at me like I’m talking out of my head.
“That it happened when they got back together.”
I find the story and start reading. Even as I skim the first paragraph, I’m seeing the look on their faces, all three of them, as Lila reads in her deadpan voice.
“After the reunion with her sister for the first time in 42 years, Arletta Kindler, 43, had a heart attack. By the time medics reached the scene, she had expired.”
Expired. I’m thinking she fainted or stopped breathing for a minute or something. I let out a shriek or a yelp or a howl. Chazzie drops a rib on the floor and the red sauce in the cup splatters.
“Damn, Splibby.”
“Arletta died? How could that be?” I grab the newspaper as if it can answer me. “Damn! I read the Oakland Tribune every day. I can’t believe this happened two weeks ago. Why didn’t those crummy, freckle-scalped, long-eared peckers have Arletta’s death in their paper?”
Chazzie wipes his hands and takes the newspaper. “Splibby, you’re crying. Hold on.”
Expired. I take the newspaper back and read what a Dr. Tagliablue said: “She might have been overwhelmed by the reunion with the long lost triplet. We don’t know.”
I get my purse and head out the door.
“Funeral’s long gone, Splibby.”
“I’ve got to get over there.”
I catch Muni down Market and get the transbay bus to Berkeley. I’m crying and cursing. Crying because Arletta died and cursing under my breath because I didn’t know about it. And crying because I know about it and cursing because she had to die. Damn. 43 years old. I catch the 51 bus down Telegraph, get off at 63rd and walk over to the shop. I stop cold in my tracks. Shouldn’t I have brought something? Flowers to a flower shop? A card of condolence? I keep going. Sometimes it’s enough to show your face, Lila said over an elaborate bouquet somebody ordered. The shop’s neon sign is blinking. Lila needs to fix it. I notice the green-and-white awning has a slat missing. Lila is so busy inside she probably hasn’t noticed it. I pick up a discarded gum wrapper and hold onto it. There’s no receptacle in sight. I stand directly in front of the tinted gold window. I see The Girls and Lila. The door is ajar; I hear them talking and laughing. The dusters look like lavender lab coats. Maybe I was imagining I read about Arletta. I look harder. Lila is showing them the stems of a chrysanthemum plant. She turns and sees my face and, in a startled voice, says, “Oh, Geniece. No. Don’t come in.”
The Girls turn and see me as I come in the door. Annette starts screaming and yelling at me. Trissie tries to calm her. Their faces – Annette’s and Trissie’s- are too wide and open to hide the sadness. I know for sure that Arletta is dead. I keep walking into the store but Lila motions for me to back out. I back up and Annette yells out to me in guttural sobs that sound like, teef, teef.
“She’s calling to me, Lila.”
“Geniece, I’m sorry, you have to go,” she says.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner.”
“That’s not the problem, sweetie.”
“ I would have come before now.”
I hear Annette saying thief, thief.
“What’s the matter?”
Lila sighs, standing on the sidewalk, and runs her fingers through the missing slot as if some portable slice of daylight had floated by.
“Sweetheart, The Girls are accusing you of stealing.”
“Lila, I would never steal from you.”
“Not me,” she said. “Annette says you stole something from her.”
I look back at Annette. Trissie is comforting her.
“I need to clear this up right away, Lila.” She blocks me from going in.
“Lila, I’m trying to think of what Annette could possibly think I stole from her. Is something missing from the handkerchiefs? I’ll talk to her.”
“No, she gets hysterical if she thinks of you. Please, Geniece.”
“But what is it she thinks I stole?”
“Geniece, it’s not important. Don’t aggravate a situation like this.”
“Is it because of Arletta’s death?”
Death is the wrong word. Lila looks like I hit her. I put my arm around her. She feels bony and delicate, not like the solid Lila I know. For the first time I understand why people use words like passed away, departed, expired. When I take her in both arms she begins to heave. Lila’s heart against my chest feels like a bell swinging inside her. I sing to her, I got a home in that rock, well, don't you see? I got a home in that rock. I fight to keep from crying.
Annette comes flying out of the shop, Trissie behind her. Annette tries to pull Lila away from me. “No, no, no, don’t take Miss Lila from me,” she says.
“I’m not going to take Miss Lila from you, Annette.”
“Don’t steal her too, Geniece.” She sobs loud enough to stop cars in traffic. “Thief, you’re a thief.”
“Annette, what’s the matter? I didn’t steal from you.”
“Yes, you did. You stole Arletta. You took her bromeliads and she couldn’t live without them. You stole her soul. You stole Arletta’s soul.”
She wrenches Lila away and begins her repetitions.
“Nobody can steal your soul, Annette. It’s a part of you.”
Thief, thief, you stole my sister’s soul, her soul, her soul, Annette begins, screeching all the words we’ve taught her. Lila grips my shoulder, then lets it go and goes back in the store. nobody threw my brain away heart and soul bromeliads bromeliads you stole her soul virgin virgin soul man coffee grind stockings suck up education suck it up satisfied satisfied satisfied. They sound horrible and degrading and vulgar. I feel like I’m being banished. I look at the store but between the sun and my blurred tears, I can’t see anything. I walk away but Annette follows me. She blasts all the anguish, fury and grief at me with one last shriek: virgin, soul, you virgin soul, you stole Arletta’s soul.