Every morning she would remove her black nightgown to bathe and weep at the moonlike whiteness of her body. After towelling off it flushed pink in the foggy mirror and that brought her also to tears. An old boyfriend once told her that wearing black all the time was a form of overcompensation which would make her complex worse. How does a black man feel, he used to say, when he gets naked after wearing a white all day? Like a toothy nothing. A shadow. His nickname for her was pearl and although he had been good for her at first was not part of her life anymore.
One morning in a summer cold snap she was cutting her fringe over torn magazines in the kitchen when the phone rang. It startled her and she and cut it crooked. Twice a week she trimmed her black fringe sheer across the forehead, just above her eyebrows raised as far as they could go. If too much skin showed through it affected her less at the level of appearance than of morality, just as an open-toed pair of shoes could reduce her, in her mind, to a person not worthy of anything but derision. She screamed and answered the phone in a voice quavering with fury. She grabbed at her fringe like mad. The voice on the other end belonged to the lawyer in charge of her grandmother’s estate, her estranged mother’s mother who had died four days earlier. Beverley has bequeathed her farm to you and would you come to the offices in Queen Street to sign the papers.
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