Unburying Hope Read online

  Frank guffawed. “Me too.”

  Jeannie sneered, “Both of you are going to be parents some day, knee deep in spit up and sticky hugs.”

  “Yuck”, Frank said, “I don’t think I’m father material.”

  “I could never have a kid,” Celeste said. ”All they do is fidget and they’re always bored. They’re foul mouthed and a pain in the ass.”

  Jeannie pulled out her purse and reached for her wallet. She opened it to a photo and showed it to Frank first, and then Celeste. “I’ve got two kids. One’s in Middle School and one is six months old.”

  “Awkward.” Frank winked at Celeste. “Cute kids, but Celeste and I aren’t cut out for home life.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Celeste said. “I want to settle down.” She looked down at the photo and wondered what you say when someone’s baby looks like a mushroom top. “Nice kids”, she said flatly.

  Frank laughed, “Then we’d better tramp up your clothes, honey.”

  “Not here at work.”

  “Especially here at work,” Frank motioned for her to pull her sweater off her shoulders. “Let’s shop at lunch today, you just need one or two things to light a fire under your ass.”

  Jeannie looked uncomfortable. “Being slutty isn’t going to get you a man,” she looked right to left. “Either of you.”

  “I’m not slutty,” Frank protested. “I’m just not interested in having a second date.”

  “And I’m not slutty”, Celeste said, “I just never meet the right man.”

  “Well, stop sleeping with guys you meet in bars,” Jeannie said.

  “Hey,” Frank said, “keep your house-frau energy in your own cubicle. ”

  A bell rang and Frank walked out into the lobby, unlocking the street door to let in a few customers who were waiting on the sidewalk.

  “You don’t need a hookup, you need a good man. The marrying type,” Jeannie said as Frank sat down again, pointing her finger at Celeste.

  Celeste and Frank rolled their eyes at each other. “Jeannie’s version of the Holy Grail,” Frank muttered.

  Celeste reached for her phone and texted Frank, “Yeah, and look where that got her, two fungi-faced kids and a garden.” She shook her head and looked up at her first customer.

  Chapter Five

  She blushed a deep red. “Frank!” But a few seconds later, she held the sweater’s fabric within her fingers, smoothing the delicate knit over the hanger. It felt flimsy, compared to the thick wool she usually wore. “I’d be showing too much in this.”

  “What? You wear clothes thick enough to repel bullets.” Frank rolled his eyes and reached thru the store racks for another sweater, a green cashmere v-neck. “Try this on, it looks like the V goes deep, which means some cleavage will show!”

  “You are entirely too giddy about this,” Celeste dismissed, holding the feathery light emerald sweater to her chest, looking at herself in a mirror at the side of the aisle. “Do you really think I could pull this off?”

  “You were born to flaunt, Missy, but you keep hiding your light under a bushel.”

  She held the sweater tight against her heart. “Funny, my mother told me to do just that. She said you hide your light under a bushel and you come out to shine when you get married.”

  “That’s crazy,” Frank said. “You miss out on all the joy in life that comes from being your best self. Besides, we need you to tap into that billowing pissed-off inner voice of yours, before you paint at the train station.”

  She smiled wanly. “That’s why I love you, Frank.” She’d spent a weekend carving out new stencils, able to expand her graffiti to larger places with Frank’s eyes on lookout. No one was ever patrolling, though. That was the heartbreaker. It felt like there was no percussive after-effect, even though she saw photos in online blogs and heard talk on the radio about her, the unknown tagger leaving wishful messages around the city. The heartbeat of the city was registering a reaction but it was so feeble, so powerless against the utter poverty that had hit Detroit like a tsunami.

  “Don’t go trying to seduce me with that honeyed voice of yours, nothing could bring me to your team.” He smoothed the sweater against her breasts, touching the threads, pushing his hands against her body to size it to her frame. “Well, maybe this cashmere could,” he laughed, “but I’d want to wear it myself. That green is alive.”

  She pulled the sweater over her head, over her white cotton blouse.

  “You’re bastardizing the sweater by putting it over that grade school peter pan collar,” he pouted. “Get naked and put that sweater on properly.”

  Celeste wandered over to a dressing room, a large space about half the size of her bedroom. There was a shuttered door that closed behind her, giving her privacy.

  She ignored Frank’s low register plaintive begging outside the door, he wanted to come in, but she laughed and said no, she’d be right out.

  She pulled her blouse off over her head, seeing and not ignoring the threadbare spots under the arms and at the elbows. She usually covered them up with her heavy sweaters, or retired the blouse every Spring and Summer so its age wouldn’t be visible to a world that always wanted new, new, new. She pulled the deep green sweater over her head and stepped back.

  Frank opened the door a few inches, sticking his head around it, and whistled at her.

  She instinctively crossed her arms over her bra, forgetting that she was relatively covered up, wearing her skirt and the sweater. But the v-neck was deep, it went all the way down to her white cotton bra.

  “Good god, woman, what is that thing holding your breasties?”

  She hunched her shoulders forward, embarrassed. “It’s my bra, bozo, you’ve probably never seen one.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen bras, honey, tons of them. That is not a bra, though. That’s a battleship. That thing has more steel in it than the Ford assembly line.” He pushed his way into the room and grabbed at the sweater, pulling the V down farther. “That’s for old ladies with pendulous breasts. You should be wearing a black lace bra.”

  “I could never wear this sweater to work, it’s too low cut.”

  “You’d wear this to work?” He dabbed imaginary tears from his eyes, his voice hopeful. “My little girl/old grandma lady is growing up. Well, you can wear a plain camisole underneath, it would cover up the lace. When we go out after work, you can hit the bathroom and do a strip tease, pull the cami off and hide it in that piece of luggage you call a purse.”

  “Christ, Frank, I don’t want to do that much work, wearing layers, taking them on and off every few hours.”

  “Then you don’t know the fun of seduction, Missy. It’s all about the smoke and mirrors. Except you’ve got the goods, you really do.” He patted the cashmere, molding it to her figure.

  She knew she needed a change on a deep level and if putting on jewel tones in a ceremonious way each morning would jumpstart her heart, alright, she’d do it.

  He stuck his head out the dressing room door and she heard him call forth a sales woman. It felt foreign, but she let him tug at her bra strap, showing the woman the horror that he wanted replaced. He helped her quickly pull the emerald sweater off and reached behind her to read the size tag on her bra. With hands waving, he sent the sales clerk off in search of a black lace bra to highlight her cleavage, with matching bikini panties.

  She laughed that he rattled off her sizes so easily, and she barked, “and make sure you bring a plain black camisole in my size, with NO lace, please.”

  She blushed when Frank wouldn’t leave the room when the lingerie came. It looked lurid on the smaller hangers, two black lace bras and two black lace panties with less than an inch of fabric at the hips. She forced him to turn his back to her, waved off his ‘like you have anything I’d want to see’, and whipped her ugly underwear off and gingerly pulled the new dainties on, then tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Good god, girl.” He whistled again. “Straight up and down hot, you are. Look at that. Why have you nev
er bought this kind of thing before? You can really rock it.”

  She stood solid, not knowing how to move in the foreign bits of fabric. She turned sideways, as though she were chasing a tennis ball, but the awkward movements forced laughter out of both her mouth and Frank’s.

  “Okay, I can see this is a huge step for you.” He stood behind her, looking over her shoulder into the mirror. She could feel his chin as he lay his head cocked sideways on her neck. “What does it feel like to be so pretty?”

  She shook her head, not knowing how to inhabit this person she saw looking back at herself in the mirror. The girl’s figure was healthy, attractive, curvy. She patted her firm belly, her shapely hips. “I like to hide in my clothes.”

  “From what?” Frank looked at her through the impersonal witness of the mirror. “What are you afraid of, Missy?” His voice was low and kind.

  “I work, I have my apartment, but I’ve always lived in the shadows here, ever since I was a kid,” she said thoughtfully.

  “Well, this is a good start for you, I’d say. Detroit has gotten too gray, it’s time for us to move somewhere near the ocean where it’s bright all day long.”

  She languidly pulled the emerald sweater back on over her head, her lips parting in a gracious smile. The lace was barely visible.

  She fingered the plain black camisole that the saleswoman had brought. Yes, she’d definitely want this on to cover her décolletage during work hours.

  She reached for the price tag in the sleeve of the sweater and read the price, gasping audibly. “No way!”

  “Um, yes, way, it’s cashmere. I know you can afford it, you’ve just never treated yourself this well.”

  “It’s the price of a village of goats! I cannot spend this much on one sweater. It’s more than I spent on clothes all last year.” It had been easy being frugal when her apartment building had lost a few tenants, people moving from furnished studio apartments out onto the streets of the city if they didn’t have family to help them. Spending money on herself had felt selfish.

  “And that went pretty well for you, didn’t it?” he teased facetiously. “The ten dollar sale at the Dearborn Wal-Mart? Honey, you can’t catch a man with cheap clothes. Men are tactile, they like to touch soft things.”

  She wanted the sweater, it felt so light on her skin. She looked again at the price tag and grimaced. “Okay, just this one thing, though. And the underwear. And the camisole.” She couldn’t bring herself to take off the new sexy bra and underpants.

  “It’s not a thing, it’s a work of art.” He winked at her.

  She put on the black camisole and tenderly pulled the green cashmere sweater back on. She smiled, clutched her old sweater to her heart, then put it in her purse.

  They grabbed a few other pieces off two sale racks on the back wall, dresses, above-the-knee skirts, two boxes of mid-heeled shoes and a pair of boots. They all added up to much less than the cost of the green sweater. She paid for her fragile pile, letting the saleswoman reach under her clothes for the tags for the lingerie she had on, then she let her snip the tags off the sweater so that she could scan them.

  She knew that Frank could sense her schizophrenic response, it was fine to put them on here in the store. But could she wear them out on the bland streets where half the stores had ‘For Lease’ signs in the window? There was a huge difference between walking in the illusion of Detroit in car commercials where chrome shone and doormen stood in gilded uniforms, and the reality of Detroit, as she knew it. The grit that hung in the air from a demolished overpass nearby might coat the soft threads of this sweater.

  Chapter Six

  “How’d you survive this long alone here in Detroit”, Frank asked, as they walked back to the office for the afternoon shift.

  “I grew up here.”

  “You don’t have any family around?”

  “Nope, I’ve told you that it’s just me.”

  “Really? Why are you so enraged, then? I mean, I stand with you, but I thought you were protesting for your family.”

  “I watched so many people around me lose everything my mom worked for. The worst slap for me was losing the big be-all, end-all electric car factory from Hamtramck. It just made me so mad that all those workers hung on year after year through the bailout, trusting that the car companies would keep them with them in the lifeboat if the government saved them. But as soon as the car companies got their millions, they off-shored everything. The one hope we had was that they’d do something dramatic to get us off our oil addiction and the electric car was a dream come true, good old American ingenuity. And they started making it in Hamtramck, and I was only painting the HOPE stencil everywhere. I had hope.”

  “This place has gone to hell, it’s clear, and no one around the country seems to care,” Frank said. “I saw the steam coming out of your ears when they said they were moving that factory to China.”

  “I’ve got nothing against the Chinese, goddamn it,” Celeste cursed. “But the American guys, our guys, they utterly betrayed us. They gutted us and took American dollars and are going to make the damn electric car in China. China! Detroit doesn’t stand a chance if the bankers robbed us blind, then the car companies kick our hearts in.”

  “You don’t have any aunts and uncles? What about your dad?” Frank reached out to hold her hand. “Come away with me, my dear, we’ll move somewhere that’s not dying.

  “I never knew him and, nope, my mom’s all I had.”

  “Wow, I’m the middle of five kids,” Frank said. “I grew up in chaos. I bet you want to have a million kids. NOT. HAHAHA,” Frank laughed.

  Celeste nodded facetiously, “Sure, a whole slew of them, the little wet-nosed criers.”

  “Are you lonely? I mean, were you lonely before me?”

  “No. I’m happy alone,” she said.

  “But you’ve been working here in this dead zone, helping people you’d never connect with outside of the office. And you’ve been sitting in this cubicle for how many years? I’ve been here a few months and it’s driving me insane. It’s drab from morning until they lock the door behind us at closing time. Except for you, that is. I probably would have quit and moved back home if you hadn’t been a desk away.”

  “My mom walked in here a few times before she died, when GM got bailed out and dropped a lot of her union health insurance. Her medical bills were too high and she couldn’t pay our living expenses. She’d go in and they’d give her a payment plan. She’d go to the water company, the electric company. I’m used to these people.”

  “Well, you have a bigger heart than I do. You are a good daughter, to work there.”

  “How is that related?” Celeste asked.

  “You must have wanted to be kind to people like your mother.”

  Celeste shook her head warily. “That’s not why I work there.”

  “Why then, Miss ‘I Dress Like My Mother’?”

  “I do not dress like my mother,” Celeste gasped, realizing that yes, indeed, her old skirts and unshaped tops were so similar to her mother’s wardrobe that she might as well have kept and worn her mother’s clothes. Which she hadn’t. She’d given them away a year or two after her mother died, after her scent had lifted from the fibers. Celeste was thoughtful, “I’ve changed a lot these last couple months.”

  “Since I came,” Frank preened.

  “Yes, it’s all because of you. I buy cases of spray paint and get cobwebs all over my hair walking through deserted doorways because you landed at the cubicle next to mine,” Celeste said in a silly voice, patting his chest. “No, I think it was time for me to wake up. First, I got this job to pay my bills. It’s been so strange for me to be able to afford things that my mom struggled with. I never pay a bill late and I don’t have credit cards. If I can’t pay cash, I don’t need it.”

  “You have poverty consciousness.”

  Celeste cringed as though Frank’s words had slapped her.

  “No offense,” he said, “but you live like you are utt
erly flat broke. And you are not.”

  “No. I’m not. I’m good at saving.”

  “I know. It’s crazy. You could buy a house. And pay all cash.”

  “My money is in the bank, though. Banks.”

  “Banks? No mattresses?”

  “Nah, I’m the princess and the pea,” she said. “But I’ve put some money in a Canadian bank in case the US economy goes to hell, which by the way, it has.” She crinkled her brow.

  “Smart,” Frank said. “I’ve moved most of my savings to a credit union. I only keep two months of mortgage payments in the bank. But I’ve also hidden some cash, just in case the crazy Michigan militias come out of the woods. Promise me we will escape together if they do.”

  “We’ll go to Beaufort,” Celeste offered, repeating their time-honored lines.

  “I’d like to live in Savannah, near the ocean. We could go on the lam.”

  They both laughed.

  “But you still think Detroit is safe. You’ve got blinders on. There are so many dead spots here.”

  “I won’t always live in the city. I just want to stay for as long as I can.”

  “Did you ever know your dad?”

  “No. I don’t remember anything about him. I asked my mom when I was little but she waved me off. I never had a dad.”

  “My dad saved me,” Frank said. “I don’t know what I would have done without him. He’s the guy who helped me come out.”

  Celeste nodded slightly, remembering the photo Frank had shown her of a wide-faced truck driver with his five kids and happy wife. Funny, she thought, that the stereotypical nuclear family looked so at peace with their unexpectedly gay son. They’d been more upset with one daughter for moving out West than they had been with a daughter marrying out of their religion, or a son marrying a dark skinned girl or with Frank when he told them in high school that he wasn’t going to marry someone like his mother. She’d had a twinge of jealousy at the broken nose, the open, smiling face of his father, the man who had been present through all the growth of his kids, letting each one blossom. She wracked her brain, wondering what she might have missed, how her life might have been different if there had been a man like that. “I never missed having a dad,” she said defensively. “It’s not something I ever knew, so how could I miss it?”