Ace

Audrey Jiggetts

When Winnie turned 12, she taught herself how to play solitaire. 

At first she was slow and fumbling, making the wrong choices early on and having to unravel all her moves until she got back to the moment of consequence. Sometimes she didn’t even know where the mistake was, and she’d have to call her brother Desmond over to get his opinion. 

“Winnie,” he would tsk, “that’s a white man’s game.” Still, he’d give little tips before bustling out the door, on the way to a job or a woman or perhaps some clandestine intertwining of the two. She’d readjust on their rough, green pull-out couch that doubled as her bed and squint at the cards she’d found in a free bin, as if a thinner line of vision would reveal a thread connecting them all, slithering through the air. 

When Desmond returned it was late, and Winnie would pretend to be asleep as he silently moved about the room. It was important to her to stay small and take up as little of his life as possible. The only inconvenience she allowed herself was for her cards to always be sprawled out on their makeshift coffee table, alert for the next time they’d be picked up and shuffled. Desmond never complained about caring for his little sister. He moved about the world with a haggard patience, worn down from doped-up parents and endless bartending jobs and paternity tests his ladies waved in his face. When their parents first dumped Winnie on his Harlem apartment doorstep, he’d opened the door with a tired smile on his face, like he’d known what was coming, and had ushered her in without a word. Oftentimes he seemed older than 29, aged beyond his years, and yet stuck in the romantic relationships of a teenager. 

“Your brother is a boy,” Opal would tell Winnie whenever she was over, “not a man.” Opal was Winnie’s favorite, with long pink nails and a blonde afro. She was always nibbling on some fruit, and while her delicate appearance made her seem like a fleeting fairy, she had stuck around Desmond the longest. When Winnie was six she got the birds and the bees talk, after meeting her first nephew named Sam. Once she made the connection between the woman’s birth and subsequent disappearance, she prayed every night in the bath that Opal and Desmond would sleep as far apart in bed as possible. 

“Tina…or maybe Valerie…” Opal was muttering to herself now, as Winnie tried moving the four of spades to another pile. This game wasn’t as successful as her previous one, and she was starting to feel frustration boiling up in her, a dull heat cupping her face. Opal finished her muttering and looked at Winnie as if inspecting her. 

“What time does your brother get home on Tuesdays?” 

“Late.” 

“Kid-late, or late-late?” Opal cocked her head. Her hair had been braided into neat cornrows, and her face looked shiny in the light. After every sentence she licked her lips, tongue flicking out so quick it was barely noticeable, and when she was displeased with Desmond while Winnie was around she would hiss her insults, words quiet enough that she thought the girl couldn’t hear her. 

“Late-late.” Winnie barely looked up. The game had tanked quickly, and she swept the cards into a messy pile to reshuffle. Opal snorted. 

“Don’t just give up when things don’t go your way.” 

Winnie shrugged. Opal did her little hiss. 

“Disrespect doesn’t make anyone think you’re cool, Miss Winnie. Just a brat.” When Opal was upset with Desmond she could become cruel to Winnie, substituting one black body for another in the event of unavailability. Her lithe body would get all wound up, like a spring ready to pop, and pop she quickly did. When Desmond was home he could calm her down quickly with low, murmured words and promises of the future. It was hard for Winnie to miss how his gaze lingered on Opal’s stomach, how she began to move slower, like trapped in molasses, and how Desmond was out of the house more often than not. 

Within a few months it was all over: a few screaming matches in the kitchen, one glimpse of a fussy baby with Winnie’s brother’s eyes, and Opal vanished like a fae. Winnie missed Opal’s hands holding hers on the walk to school, laying bacon in a pan, pointing accusingly at her brother. 

When Winnie was sixteen she started working at an ice cream shop a few blocks down. Desmond presented it like a social experiment: a trial for her to make friends. Really Winnie knew it was because she had overstayed her welcome, even being his own blood, and it was time for her to start pulling her weight. Her apron was baby blue with cream stitching, presented to her by the owner, Mr. Roberts. He had permanent frown lines and a stomach like a scoop of ice cream, bulging and pressing against his polo shirts. Desmond had bartended his third wedding for cheap, and so Winnie was allowed to stay on for more than a day. If he’d had it his way she

doubted she would’ve lasted an hour; she barely spoke all shift, letting a girl named Belinda take the orders and silently molding the little balls of cream. Handling the money made her anxious; the bills felt slippery sometimes, like her solitaire cards, and she would get the sudden urge to run out the door with them. What she would do with them, she didn’t know. 

After a few months the old ice cream maker quit. Mr. Roberts hired a boy named Owen. His skin was fair like her favorite flavor, classic vanilla, and he had a smile that seemed to slide onto his face, from one side to the other. When she met him she thought he was the most beautiful boy she’d ever seen. Later she learned he was a man. 

“Twenty-four,” he told her, “and just now finished school.” He scoffed, self conscious but in a performing way. Winnie wanted to comfort him, but her break was running out and she had spent all of it in the kitchen talking to him. His eyes were dark and opened like chasms, ones she could easily trip into. 

To draw attention to her age would’ve been a mistake, Winnie decided. Belinda was so evidently twenty that Owen paid her no mind; she was constantly blabbering about her plans for a “senior thesis.” Besides, Owen knew that she was in high school. Sometimes he’d make their breaks coincide and sneak up on her while she was doing homework in the break room, braiding numbers together to make equations. He thought she was smart, and mature. She had made her first friend. 

Desmond aged rapidly that year, finally having landed a 9 to 5 job. His body was always sagging, burdened by his parents and Winnie and all the children running around with his teeth and nose. It was as if he could feel them, clinging onto his legs or pulling at his hands-even climbing onto his shoulders. Winnie tried to ease the load by cooking dinner or doing the laundry. She no longer talked to the women who came over. She could see now it was a great shame he carried with him into the bedroom; a shame that was birthed later on. She didn’t want to look at it anymore. 

Owen taught her chess. Initially she resisted the change. The familiarity of the cards sliding between her fingers was lost, and she felt clunky as she dragged the pieces around the board. Eventually, though, she learned, and on her breaks they would secretly play as he mixed the ingredients into whatever batch he was making.

One night he invited her over. Winnie had school the next day, but it seemed unwise to remind him of that. Plus, his smile when she agreed was unlike anything she had ever seen. It made tears prick at her eyes. That slick smile of hope. 

After all three of them locked up, they waved goodbye to Belinda. Winnie could see the girl watching them, calculating, and it made her bite her cheek to keep from smiling. Maybe she thought they were something to each other. Sometimes Winnie thought it too, when he’d lean down to move his rook and when he looked back up their faces had somehow moved closer. He was like a magnet, and she itched to wrap herself around him. Let their everything fasten together. 

His apartment was bigger than hers. 

“My parents pay for it,” he told her as he flicked on all the lights. Decorating the walls were pictures from sports games, high school and college graduations, family trips. One polaroid featured the Swiss Alps, another Jamaica.

“They want me and my sisters to experience other cultures. Made no fucking sense when they flipped out about me trying to make my own way here. I mean, it’s the city. Why else would you be here if not to try living a little? Who actually goes to grad school?” 

Winnie nodded. Their months of talking in the kitchen had made her feel comfortable, for nothing she wanted could happen while Belinda was feet away serving customers. Now her want was palpable, and the thought that she might get her way had stunned her into silence.

“Winnie?”

He was watching her now, gaze shy but hungry, and she nodded slowly. His touch on her hip was soft, and it was all Winnie could do to keep from launching herself into his lap. She lasted only a few moments. 

Afterwards Winnie felt like a live wire; buzzing in all the right places, Her teeth chattered and she couldn’t sit still, so full of adoration and incredulous at the luck of her situation. What benevolent God had brought him to her Harlem, and gave him the glorious body which knew just what to do? For once she had been unable to be silent; praising and hissing all in unison. 

When she got in that night, Desmond was home, eating leftovers. His eyes betrayed his face, which remained smooth as he asked how her day was. She could see fear in them, fear at the difference in the way she held her body, the difference that signaled the making of a woman.

When she sat on the couch it was without fear of taking up his space, and when she spoke her voice was clear. 

“I could not be better.” 

When Owen went off to graduate school, she considered stepping out into the road. Nothing helped, except sleeping, and even when her eyes were closed she could still feel the weight of his body, how almost stifling it felt, how he had always been so stoic and let her fall apart. Sometimes she would touch herself and try to replicate the feeling, but at the culmination she would find herself sobbing, a hollow and wracked sound that felt like it came from beyond her. 

When she could walk again, she did. The stretching of her muscles became associated with new things; the cresting of hills, the sluggishness of her brain contrasted with the unremarkable power of her body. Sometimes when she thought about their brushing of hands on the job her palm would thrum, awakened by the first thing to have really adored it. She remembered him kissing each finger, then sucking. 

The leaves had almost all fallen and the cold pricked her skin like a serpent’s teeth. When she spotted an older black man, wisened with age and sitting alone at a chess table, she almost felt faint. It was like a disgusting mixture of her brother and Owen, with all the worst traits from both. Her legs itched to run across the country, anything to never look at such a creature again.  Yet she sat.

All too fast she was in checkmate, and the old man was smiling a sad smile, his eye tooth missing. Winnie tried to unravel her mistakes, trace it back even just to teach herself, but it was unclear to her where the game had gotten muddled. Owen had always been white, and perhaps she had just been unsure how to start the game. Perhaps he hadn’t really taught her how to win, just how to lose slower.