On weeks there were no orders, the women would tack and baste and talk, without men’s energies around. But some days there was a vague, musky smell to the place and the shop would dream of its past incarnations—Polish saloon, candy and soda shop during Prohibition, then back to a factory workers’ watering hole; later a hippie tavern, a hookup bar, and finally, Criss-Cross maneuvers. It was just Harold, the retired fix-it man who came by the sewing shop to barter for mending, who remembered the building’s way-back-when.
By and by, the door swung open. In sauntered Malik, the Africanist healer. Last time he had brought Violet some St. John’s Wort in Chippewa blueberry paste to lift her spirits. This time he was wearing a long, flowing white robe and carried a book.
“Oooooooo, Malik,” Toni purred. “Do you have some blueberry paste for me?”
“Where are the other men-in-white?” Nikki jumped in. “Not sewing today?”
“They’re at karate,” Malik said.
“What you got there?” teased Violet.
“I have something I want to read to you,” Malik replied.
“First, can you take a shot at fixing the plugged toilet in back,” Violet said. “Harold left his plumber’s snake for us.”
Malik, rolling up his sleeves as best he could, went back with Violet to the old tavern’s bathroom and the boys followed along behind them.
“Here, help me and Toni,” Nikki said to Bess. “We need to change the energy in here.” The three began rearranging the table rows into a rough circle. “Feel the vortex,” declared Nikki.
Toni then wandered over to the bathroom to watch. Malik was telling the boys that you had to be good with your hands to fix things. “I ain’t touching that snake,” Roberto said.
Bess leaned over the sewing pieces and whispered to Nikki, “He’s got lots of kids by other women.” Nikki half-smiled.
After the plumbing was unclogged, the adult bathroom crew returned to the tables to work and the boys came over and observed them for a little while.
“I like it,” pronounced Bess. “We can see each other all the time.”
With an order on deadline, the women sewed with make-or-break purpose. Malik would help on most projects except kente, the cloth of royals. After a while, he opened his book and read Juan Antonio Corretjer’s poem to an isle besieged by storms: Domador Bayoán de tempestades, you do not know of the dying and forgetfulness!
“I like poetry,” declared Toni. Violet watched Malik, gratefully.
During the work’s next break, Malik got up and went to the boom box to change the music from the soul-safety of slow gospel to Orisha’s rumba hip-hop. These new rhythms might have been too much for the shop’s old spirits in their day. And which would the young lady at the table prefer and who would she choose—the circle of women or the man with herbs who reads her Corretjer’s poems to his Doña Consuelo: “I would be borincaño even if I had been born on the moon”?
