Some days, as she grasps the steel handrail to board the bus, I remember the first time I noticed her scars—the jagged, pale parallel stripes on both her obsidian cheeks. I distinctly recall the metallic taste of autonomic empathy, as I moved my tongue around my mouth in search for dirty nickels, loosened teeth or the acrid evidence of blood.
The George Washington High School kids call her Tiger Lady. They whisper to one another, awestruck, when she curls her tongue in the middle of a wide yawn. I agree with them—there is something distinctly feline about her—but their words only weave stereotypical fiction and bind her with their early morning chatter.
I’ve seen her a few times elsewhere, downtown. She sells brightly colored candies and foil packages of potato chips from a cooler on the street.
On courageous mornings, I sit in a seat across the aisle from her, or along one of the long benches near the front doors, and bait her into shallow conversation. I like listening to her muted French accent and need an excuse to stare. My chin bobbles loosely to indicate comprehension when she struggles with words like ‘cellular’ or ‘independence.’ She makes bulging, intense eye contact to listen, but rotates her head almost constantly while she talks with closed eyelids, stretching neck muscles and shifting the weight of her skull with each revolution, and never seems to notice my nods of affirmation.
Usually I feel comfortable talking with her about traffic congestion, chocolate soy milk, or stories I heard on Public Radio, but on some days the introvert within me strains to make words with anyone, so I sit near her in silence, like a distant stranger.
I read about the Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda, about militants in the DRC and Sudan and countless other atrocities occurring daily in her native Africa. I remember how often the Wall Street Journal used the word “atrocity” to describe the continent in one particular article this spring, and how I’ve struggled to minimize my own associative use ever since. And I have seen in Time magazine at the dentist’s office, and on late-night television through my blurring, sleepless eyes, images of countless other dark-skinned women with similar slashings.
I watch her closely each morning—the deliberate, patient way she repairs an untied shoelace, the way she affectionately digs dirt from her fingernails with the thumbnail of the opposite hand. Some vestige of junior high schooling on the Scientific Method convinces me that if I meticulously catalogue and observe her, I will one day infer the details of her attack.
But the courage to simply ask her about the scars never summons itself, despite my almost daily renewed resolve to do so. Inevitably, as I start to ask questions leading in the right direction, an itchy doubt crawls under my skin and I change the subject.
To occupy the loneliest mornings, my imagination constructs dozens of gruesome scenarios of her attack, from which she eternally emerges battered but triumphant.
Slowly, we become friends, at least the sorts who always greet each other for a few minutes on a mass transit commute. I begin to notice, with quiet pride, that the teenagers stare at both of us and I’ve grown into their mythology. I bubble words, cheery chit-chat at its most effervescent. I watch for her on the sidewalk every morning long before her stop and start sharing more of myself with her than mere mingling talk. I appreciate her presence, so I reflect it with a gift—a small leather wallet I stopped using years ago—when I notice her spill a handful of cards and dollar bills from her left back pocket into the driver’s lap.
“This is wonderful, you are too kind, I will put everything in it this moment?” she says, questioning herself, looking warmly at my mouth or my chin.
Two days later, she invites me for dinner at her apartment north of City Park. I humbly accept.
Outside, I see goldenrod curtains through rain-spotted windows. I enjoy the sound of my heels clicking loose tiles on the patio.
She opens the front door before I knock. She invites me in, her hair wrapped in colorful, crumpled cloth. The kitchen rests at the end of a long, cryptic hallway, and she turns away to walk ahead of me.
I realize I have only seen her walk straight lines, through the belly of the morning bus, along sidewalks. I wish I could see her dance, or at least sway side to side, so I could fully appreciate the rhythmic precession of her hips.
As I walk down the narrow passage, I cross other opened doors. My wandering eyes capture a velvet-lined shadowbox hanging on the wall in the bedroom, and behind the glass I see a tarnished machete, with what appears to be a mummified hand still gripping the handle.
She turns and strolls back down the hall. Her knees splay obtuse angles with each step. Her eyes fix on mine. She stops next to me, her elbow lightly against my forearm. Staring at the beaver-tailed blade, clicking her tongue, she sighs, “That was my boyfriend’s cousin. I hope you like fish. It has bones.”
