Free On Beauty by Zadie Smith

back of his head and stood up. ‘Too much recording – try living,’ she suggested softly.
    â€˜False opposition.’
    â€˜Oh, Jerome, please – get up out of that nasty thing, come with me. You live in that goddamn beanbag. Don’t make me go alone. Zora went with her girls already.’
    â€˜I’m busy . Where’s Levi?’
    â€˜Saturday job. Come on . I’m by myself . . . and Howard left me high and dry – he went off with Erskine an hour ago . . .’
    This sneaky mention of his father’s negligence had exactly the effect his mother had intended. He groaned and closed the book between his big, soft hands. Kiki reached out her own hands in a cross towards her son. He grabbed both and heaved himself up.
    From the house to the town square was a pretty walk: swollen gourds on doorsteps, white clapboard houses, luscious gardens carefully planted in preparation for the famous fall. Fewer American flags than in Florida but more than in San Francisco. Everywhere the hint of yellow curl on the leaves of the trees, like the catch paper thrown at something about to go up in flame. Here also were some of the oldest things in America: three churches built in the 1600s, a graveyard overrun with mouldy pilgrims, blue plaques alerting you to all of this. Kiki made a cautious move to link arms with Jerome; he let her. People began to join them on the road, afew more at each corner. At the square, the power of independent movement was taken away from them; they were as one mass with hundreds of others. It had been a mistake to bring Murdoch. The festival was at its most populated point, lunchtime, and inside the crush everybody was too hot and grouchy to be interested in stepping aside for a small dog. With difficulty the three of them made their way to the less populated sidewalk. Kiki stopped at a stall selling sterling silver – earrings, bracelets, necklaces. The stallholder was a black man, exceptionally skinny, in a green string vest and grubby blue jeans. No shoes at all. His bloodshot eyes widened as Kiki picked up some hoop earrings. She had only this brief glimpse of him, but Kiki suspected already that this would be one of those familiar exchanges in which her enormous spellbinding bosom would play a subtle (or not so subtle, depending on the person) silent third role in the conversation. Women bent away from it out of politeness; men – more comfortably for Kiki – sometimes remarked on it in order to get on and over it, as it were. The size was sexual and at the same time more than sexual: sex was only one small element of its symbolic range. If she were white, maybe it would refer only to sex, but she was not. And so her chest gave off a mass of signals beyond her direct control: sassy, sisterly, predatory, motherly, threatening, comforting – it was a mirror-world she had stepped into in her mid forties, a strange fabulation of the person she believed she was. She could no longer be meek or shy. Her body had directed her to a new personality; people expected new things of her, some of them good, some not. And she had been a tiny thing for years and years! How does it happen? Kiki held the hoops up to each ear. The stall guy proffered a small oval mirror, raising it up to her face, but not quickly enough for her sensitivities.
    â€˜Excuse me, brother – a few inches higher with that – Thank you – they don’t wear jewellery – sorry ’bout that. Just the ears.’
    Jerome recoiled from this joke. He dreaded his mother’s habit of starting conversations with strangers.
    â€˜Honey?’ she asked Jerome, turning to him. Again with the shrugging. In comic response, Kiki turned back to the stall guy andshrugged, but he only said ‘Fifteen’ loudly and stared at her. He was unsmiling and intent upon a sale. He had a brutal, foreign accent. Kiki felt foolish. Her right hand passed quickly over a number of