Free Wit's End by Karen Joy Fowler Page B

sense.
    â€œHe’s tall,” she said. “Guys like to brag how they took a big guy down, and Cody’s tall, but he doesn’t weigh so much, so he’s a big guy, but not a scary big guy. He gets hit a lot.” She took the napkin off Cody’s chin to look at the cut, then put the napkin back. “Of course, it could be racism.”
    Someone was surprised at the suggestion. It might have been Rima. She might have said so.
    â€œHe’s black,” Scorch said. “You mean to tell me you don’t see that?”
    â€œI see it.” Rima felt oddly guilty, as if there would be something racist in not recognizing a black man when you saw one. She looked at Cody again. He had dark eyes, teeth so white that in the dark bar they were faintly green. His arms were wrapped around Scorch and there was a Chinese ideogram tattooed on the back of his left shoulder. He could have been a lot of things. Black wouldn’t have been her first guess. Rima thought they needed to talk more about the fact that someone had, just out of the blue, hit him in the face, but now Scorch and Cody were kissing, open-mouthed, tongue to tongue, so that some of her sparkly body lotion had rubbed onto his face and hands, plus the next song was starting and there was just no way.
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    N ot so much later:
    Martin’s voice, dipping into Rima’s ear. “Has anyone ever told you you have cat’s eyes?”
    Rima turned and was surprised to find his eyes looking so directly into hers. “Okay, then,” she said. “Martin. You have to stop flirting with me. I have a little brother your age,” and the minute she said it, she remembered it wasn’t true. She started to cry, and it was not the silent-tears-on-her-face sort of crying, but the great gulping, full-body, nose-running sort everyone was bound to notice.
    Scorch had been lost in the music. Now she gave Martin a look designed to turn him to stone. “What did you say to her?” she asked, and if he was sharing that bit about the cat’s eyes, Rima didn’t hear it.
    â€œNothing,” he said. “Jesus.”
    â€œCome on,” Scorch told Rima, who took one step in her direction, the toe of her shoe hooking the sleeve of Scorch’s discarded coat. Instead of catching herself, she panicked and capsized completely. She landed in the arms of some guy she didn’t know, but later she thought she remembered that he’d tried to pick her up earlier in the evening.
    Careening drunkenly into his lap was a classic mixed signal.

Chapter Seven

(1)
    I n a good bar, toilets are second in importance only to the liquor itself, and there should be lots of them. This bar had just two, though there were more downstairs, or so Scorch shouted through the door on the many occasions over the next twenty minutes in which someone knocked. Rima was sitting on the toilet lid blowing her nose. Scorch stood at the sink, putting her hair into lots of small braids, pasting the unruly ends together with soap from the dispenser.
    Rima was trying to explain about Oliver, how her dad’s death had been horrible, of course, but expected and, by the time it came, something of a relief to both him and her. When she was younger, he’d traveled a great deal. In those days, he seemed less like family and more like the circus coming to town. After her mother died, he’d come home to stay and been a good father, an involved father, a dependable father. Even so, family to Rima would always be Oliver.
    The night after her mother’s death, Rima and Oliver had to stay with the Whitsons, neighbors across the street, because their father had been covering a trial in the Netherlands and couldn’t get home any faster. Rima remembered how, when her father had arrived with his suitcases, his eyes red, his face unshaven, she and Oliver had been sitting at the Whitsons’ breakfast table. “Are you staying for dinner?”