“Do the Greeks eat Chinese?” she asked, peeking up.

Outside, Catherine patted her stomach. We strolled.

“That was a nice repast,” she said. “Have you got any chewing gum?”

“How come I’m always here when you want something?” I asked, reaching in my purse for some spearmint.

“I don’t know; why are you?”

I gave her the gum. She giggled and ran ahead of us. The socks on one of her feet had made its way down inside her shoe. She disappeared around a corner.

“I’ll go ahead,” I suggested.

Ernest shook his head.

We walked on.

Catherine came back around the corner, strolling, chewing her gum, smacking it rather, looking like she didn’t know us. She passed us, tipped an imaginary hat. “How do?”

We turned, waited for her. She about-faced and joined us, running.

“Is that y’all?” She peered like a little old woman who’d forgotten her specs. “I didn’t know that was y’all. I thought that was everybody’s Black gentleman and his lady, but that really is y’all, ain’t it?”

“Who are we?” I asked.

Ernest just stood.

“I ain’t telling. You won’t get it from me. Beat me with a rubber hose and I won’t tell.”

“Even Tweety Bird gets uhn-uhn today,” said Ernest. “No rubber stuff.”

“Not even a band?”

“Not even a band.”

“How do you expect me to work if you keep limiting my materials?”

“You limit your own materials,” he said. He walked.

“Come and see the new Catherine Shuger exhibition, folks. Catherine Shuger, the only sculptress to work with chocolate pudding and a spoon!”

“It’s been done,” I said.

“Has it?” Catherine stood there looking like she really thought it had been.

“Come along,” said Ernest.

We followed him like chickens.

5

Stay clear of salvage dumps and rubber factories.

6

In Catherine’s sculpture studio, music is always playing, mostly jazz—Satchmo, Miles, Tyner, the great Trane. Sometimes, though, she’ll play opera—Carmen, La Bohème, Le Nozze di Figaro, Pagliacci, Orfeo ed Euridice, Tannhäuser, The Magic Flute. Now, as I enter, Miles’s Bitches Brew flies from the speakers and she’s standing at her worktable, gluing wooden feathers on a piece called The Birdcatcher, made of bits of wood and aluminum and found objects, a piece she keeps dismantling and rearranging, a piece she’s been working on, on and off, for years, like that fellow’s puzzle sculpture, except the artist herself can’t decide what piece to put where and keep it.

I sit on a pallet that she has for me in the corner of the room. I sit with my knees raised, my arms on my knees and my chin in my hands. I don’t disturb her while she wrinkles her forehead. I sit like a stone cat and watch.

“Do you still have that war penny?” she asks, over her shoulder.

“Yeah.”

I fish for it in the pockets of my culottes, start to rise.

“Toss it.”

She catches it.

It’s a gray penny, made during the war when they were out of copper. We’re both war babies.