Wilted Flowers by Denise McIvers
Tony Rose was my ‘Girl-what-were-you-thinking?” experience. Anyone with any kind of common sense would not have ignored the red flags that waved back and forth in my mind that day. He was much too charismatic, beguiling and too wonderful. What everyone — men and women alike — found so appealing about him was his smooth criminality. Finally, I realized he embodied all the characteristics that would have made him a successful pimp. His dangerousness made him vicious and deliciously nasty at the same time. I was Eve, and he was the deceiver.
Being with Tony helped me understand all those Dominican and Puerto Rican mamis I used to watch getting off the train from the City at Ossining to visit their men in Sing Sing. I remember how worn and pliable they seemed. I could see the loneliness that they wore lightly around their necks like a string of tiny seed pearls. Loving men who couldn’t love you back because they weren’t there.
The train station at Ossining is very old. There are many steep steps that take disgorged passengers from the platform to the rusty iron and concrete street-level platform above to waiting cabs. During the winter, the women tightly bundle their cheap imitation wool coats about their waists as shields against the wind that blows in from across the Hudson River.
The youngest children are held in their mothers’ arms or against their jiggling hips. They take the narrow steps one at a time to the overhead platform, stopping only to brace themselves against the railing to catch their breath. The older children lean away as they struggle with bulging shopping bags of items from the cheapest stores in the City or the Bronx. Through the opaque pink or yellow plastic I see names like Colgate, Marlboro and Charmin. Sometimes I could even make out the bunches of white athletic s
ocks sold for $10 for ten pairs or the BVD’s and the “wifebeaters” purchased from the slant-eyed, mirthless Nigerians and Sudanese in midtown who stand like sentries over their neat rows of counterfeit Gucci sunglasses and Kate Spade purses displayed on oversized pieces of cardboard. These women always bring lots of different things so their men can barter them for cigarettes, more time on the phone and other favors.
They pile into waiting cabs, drivers looking straight ahead. The drivers never turn in their direction to ask for an address because they know where they’re going.
These women were usually overdressed and wore too much perfume. They looked like they weren’t visiting Sing Sing at all, but instead going to a baille at the Corso on East 86th Street to salsa with their husbands and lovers instead. Blusher the color of pink carnations is sharply angled on plump cheeks, thick black lines are drawn across sagging lids, extending way beyond the corners of their eyes. Their ruby red lip gloss shimmer on mouths making them look sticky and shiny like caramel-dipped apples at Halloween. Too bright, too girlish, and too much. They don’t wear makeup from Elizabeth Arden or Estee Lauder. Wet ‘N Wild is the brand they buy, usually found somewhere on a counter way in the back of Duane Reade. For one dollar they can get two brow pencils and a lip liner.
I love these women. Unlike me, they are brave, and they have learned to inhale and exhale through the ache of their pain, and their disappointment of their slippery dreams. They are the dried roses, lilies and violets that society hangs upside down and ignores; still colorful but growing more pale with each day that they are exposed to the unfiltered sunlight.
