Suicide's Girlfriend Read Online Free PDF Page A

here affected him like the whiffs of Parsons’ ammonia received when cleaning his bathroom: fascinating, purifying, liable to bring tears to his eyes. Bundles of energy thrilled the air! He stretched out a hand, laughing. He could grab a fistful of that energy, compress it—like the Minnesota snow, weightless flakes that, shaped into balls, became hard, might crack the windshield of an automobile.
    A knot of poem forming in his belly pushed him upright:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Your hair is dark and kinked as my own
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  but, dressed with sweet oils,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  becomes a cloud of rainbows.
    He would give this poem to Joe. To give to Peggy. But that made no sense! The excitement of the day had made him foolish; Joe’s hair was neither dark nor kinked—
    Gingerly, Oyekan lifted his fingertips to his new haircut. A terrible mistake. The day before he had accompanied Joe to the barbershop, where Joe—who always wore his hair in a battered left-hand parting—told the barber he wanted something “different.” And when the man finished? Rusty curls rose out of the top of Joe’s narrow, shaved head like froth on a glass of beer, so painfully awful that, as a comrade, Oyekan had felt the only thing he could do was to climb up in the chair and say, “Me, also.”
    He rose from the bedroom’s bright carpet. Shyly, as if going to meet a stranger, he examined his reflection in the mirror that hung over the little bathroom sink.
    How did he appear? When the barber had stopped his clipping, whisked away the silky apron, Oyekan had made a little joke: “And now I believe I am Frankenstein’s monster!”
    But the barber said, “Hey, Joseph, look at your handsome buddy, here. He looks like that Carl Lewis guy, doesn’t he?”
    Oyekan did not know any Carl Lewis.
    â€œHe was a celebrity,” Joe had said. “Come on, I’ll buy you a beer and you can sign my napkin.”
    Oyekan squinted at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. At home, they did not have a mirror, but a neighbor let them look in hers before town meetings and such. Americans were forever telling each other they resembled celebrities. Since arrival in the U.S., Oyekan had been told, also, he resembled the actor Harry Belafonte and a boxing star. At home, he resembled only his mother.
    Suppose Peggy Dixon thought him a fool, an imitator of Joe’s drastic gesture. Suppose, also, that on the way to the Internationals’ Barbecue, in the confines of Joe’s Datsun F10, he smelled of Mrs. Scotty’s sauerkraut dish of last night.
    Twice he brushed his teeth. The guide prepared by the Rotary Club stated that sometimes foreign students were “unfamiliar with accepted practices of hygiene.” Oyekan and the other Internationals laughed about this at orientation, but it was not so funny the time a lady at the student union cafeteria backed away from Khabir with a show of disgust. “My friend does not want to be in your nose!” Oyekan told her. Scandalous! But she had not understood. Khabir had not understood. Oyekan had forgotten to use his English.
    â€œOy?”
    Mrs. Scotty stood in the doorway, so cheerful in her bright skirt with black dogs following one another about the hem.
    â€œI believe you are already to the barbecue, Mrs. Scotty?”
    â€œOn our way, sweetie. I just wanted to tell you”—she shifted a green lunch bucket decorated with flowers and birds and such from one hand to the other—“if you do decide to stay, Oy, I could write your mother for you. If you like . .