Free On Beauty by Zadie Smith Page A

items on the table.
    â€˜OK . . . And these?’
    â€˜All earring fifteen, necklace thirty, bracelet some ten, some fifteen, different – silver, all silver – all this here silver. You should try necklace, very nice – with black skin, it is good. Do you like earrings?’
    â€˜I’m going to get a burrito.’
    â€˜Oh, Jerome, please – one minute. We can’t spend five minutes together? What do you think of those?’
    â€˜Fine.’
    â€˜Small hoop or big?’
    Jerome made a desperate face.
    â€˜OK, OK. Where will you be?’
    Jerome pointed directly into the rippling day. ‘It’s called something hokey . . . like Chicken America or something.’
    â€˜God, Jay, I don’t know what that is. What is that? Just meet me in front of the bank in fifteen, OK? And get me one – a shrimp one if they have it, extra hot sauce and sour cream. You know I like ’em hot.’
    She watched him amble away, pulling his long-sleeved Nirvana T-shirt down over that sloppy English backside, wide and charmless like the rear view of one of Howard’s aunts. She turned back to the stall and once again tried to engage the man, but he was busy fiddling with the coins in his fanny pack. Listlessly she picked up this and that and put it down, nodding at prices as they were earnestly recounted each time her finger made contact with an item. Aside from her money, the guy seemed barely concerned with her, neither as a person nor as an idea. He did not call Kiki ‘sister’, make any assumptions or take any liberties. Obscurely disappointed, as we sometimes are when the things we profess to dislike don’t happen, she looked up abruptly and smiled at him. ‘You’re from Africa?’ she asked sweetly, and picked up a charm bracelet with tiny replicas of international totems hanging from it:the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Statue of Liberty.
    The man folded his arms across his narrow filleted chest, every rib as visible as it is upon a cat’s belly. ‘Where do you think I am from? You are African – no?’
    â€˜No, noooo, I’m from here – but of course . . .’ said Kiki. She wiped some sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand, waiting for him to finish the sentence as she knew it would be finished.
    â€˜We are all from Africa,’ said the man obligingly. He made a double outward fan of his hands over the jewellery. ‘All of this, from Africa. You know where I am from?’
    Kiki was trying to fix something to her wrist, unsuccessfully. Now she looked up as the man took a half step back to give her a fuller view of him. She found she wanted very much to be right , and struggled for a minute between a few places she recalled having French history, unsure if she was right about any of them. She wondered about her own boredom. She must be very bored indeed to want to be right before this man.
    â€˜Ivory . . .’ began Kiki cautiously, but his face repelled this, so she switched to Martinique.
    â€˜ Haiti ,’ he said.
    â€˜ Right . My –’ began Kiki, but realized she did not want to say the word ‘cleaner’ in this context. She began again, ‘There’re so many Haitians here . . .’ She dared a little further: ‘And of course it’s so difficult, in Haiti, right now.’
    The man put the hub of each hand firmly on the table between them and engaged her eyes. ‘ Yes . Terrible. So terrible . Now, every day – terror .’
    The solemnity of this reply forced Kiki to turn her attention back to the bracelet sliding off her wrist. She had only the most vague sense of the difficulty she had made reference to (it had slid off the radar under the stress of other, more pressing difficulties, national and personal) and felt ashamed now to be caught under the pretence of having more knowledge than she