by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

When Ilana Randolph left her house that Saturday night, the only people outside were on their way. Only a handful of shadows moved under the streetlight as Ilana pushed through the blocks toward Convent Avenue, a
garbage bag full of babies in tow.

Everyone knew Ilana was unusual, even before she left with the babies. In her almost-seventeen years of life, Ilana had amassed an impressive crew of teddy bears, My Little Ponies, black Barbie dolls, and others. There were handmade rag dolls with black yarn hair and skin that had thinned to the texture of old paper bags. There were antique brown china dolls with painted swirls of black hair and eyes that closed lazily when jostled, as though silly with delight or begging for sleep. Her favorite had been a brown-skinned, bushy-haired doll with a gleaming white faux-fur jacket that engulfed it like a marshmallow, and with perfectly round bubble-gum colored dots on its cheeks.

Until Ilana was four or so, the dolls had been her peers. She had once enjoyed waking up on Saturday mornings, spreading her blanket on the floor and joining her dolls for mornings of cold cereal and cartoons. But when her
classmates began to refer to their dolls as their sons and daughters, Ilana was done. She stopped combing their hair, stopped offering them cereal, stopped taking them to swim in the bathroom sink. She let their eye sockets cake with dirt, let dust settle deep into their fur and hair. She had never bothered to box them, perhaps out of laziness. She simply let them lounge atop her desk and dresser, sit in her chairs, hang from her mantle, and press their paws and fingers against her window sills as they pleased. Still, for years, the dolls kept coming as gifts from her mother, and from cousins and uncles too distant to know that, ever since age four, Ilana had had no interest in dependents.

Now, under the watch of the dolls, she would think of the Grange Women, from the homeowners’ association her mother belonged to, who always caucused to gossip with the kind of gleeful disdain of which only the deeply
lonely are capable. Ilana would think about what tragedy of life must have made them who they were—what error kept Joyce Turner’s full lips running and glassy eyes darting in her doughy face as though calamity would come if she let her mind be still? What indiscretion made Marietta Mann so quiet she seemed to be shocked by the sound of her own breath? These women had been defeated, it seemed, by the quest to fall in line with domesticity’s parade—find a good man, find a good job, keep both, have good children that would be willing to lather, rinse, repeat. But the cost of this process, the lint in the trap, seemed always to be the women themselves. Their imaginations, their joys, the brightness of their smiles all seemed to vanish in the tumble of family life, and so they found themselves empty, their bodies warn to laundry bags for other peoples’ futures.

So Ilana decided to do things differently. She would handle life selfishly, and never give it to anyone. Sometimes, she was sure of it: she would create no family, no children, nothing but herself. She would consider sharing that selfish life with somebody else only if she truly and deeply felt like it. In the meantime, she would make the ornate ballet of Harlem’s social life her entertainment. She would live her life and enjoy herself fully, even if it meant making a little trouble.

The most delicious of her plans involved DeShawn Master, whose mother, Ann, was arguably the primmest and most anxious of the Grange Women, and who was, himself, smart and, truth be told, pretty cute. Ilana had seen him for the first time in a while at her father’s funeral six months before the babies, and had immediately come down with a terminal crush, though not the typical kind, she was sure. Most of the Hamilton Heights girls admired
DeShawn for the regular reasons: he was known for his deep red skin only lightly peppered with pimples, his pretty singing voice and his elaborate tags on the walls of the abandoned school on 145th Street. But he was also rumored to have single-handedly masterminded the Destino 2000, a phantom gang whose only real criminal activity was spray painting neon-colored peonies over parking signs and turning traffic signals the wrong way. This, more than anything, made Ilana swoon.

She plotted her first major encounter with DeShawn carefully. It was no small feat; DeShawn was a senior at the rough-and-tumble Catholic boys’ school in the Bronx, and Ilana was tenth-grader at her small, artsy nerd-nest on the Upper East Side. There was no chance of unplanned encounters outside of Harlem, and given Mrs. Randolph’s awkward standing in the Grange, to trade on their neighborly connection wouldn’t have been much help either.

After weeks of planning, Ilana decided to meet DeShawn on his own terms. She skipped school for a week and left the house each day with spray cans, stencils, box cutters, and colored chalk stuffed in the bag where her textbooks should have been. Starting at the rock wall on Riverside Drive where DeShawn and his friends smoked weed after school, she began to place ornate, sprawling letters in paint so thickly glossed it shimmered under the streetlamps. She painted these letters beside the Destino 2000 tags, working her way south and east from the Hudson, past her home off of Amsterdam Avenue, past the Grange office, moving north with DeShawn’s flowers as her guides until she reached the row of tidy brownstones on 145th and Convent, where Ann Master’s home sat proudly on the corner. There, she swapped the spray cans for the chalk, crouched to the pavement, and placed the biggest and most elaborate letter yet—a lemon-yellow I, winking with glints of peach and lime.

It took only two days for news of Ilana’s work to wash back on the whisper mill. ShaLondra Prior, a slim tenement girl from Broadway known for her involved and frequently-changing hairstyles, suspected Ilana immediately. ShaLondra had been DeShawn’s girlfriend in the sixth grade, and had maintained a de-facto claim over him since then, at least in her own view. She approached Ilana one afternoon, her hair pulled into thick, mile-long box braids and piled on top of her head like Janet Jackson’s in Poetic Justice. Ilana looked up as ShaLondra neared the stoop, then turned back to her cereal.

“Do you know the bitch who’s fucking with Destino?” ShaLondra demanded, patting at her temples.

Ilana shook her head and studied her Craklin’ Oat Bran. “That’s some weird shit, yo,” ShaLondra said. “It’s just a bunch of random letters. What the fuck is an L or an E supposed to mean anyway?” She watched Ilana’s face for a beat. When Ilana said nothing, ShaLondra pursed her lips, pivoted on her heel and turned away, the burnt ends of her braids taking flight behind her.

Ilana knew then that she was on the right track.

The next morning, she marched to Ann Master’s house, armed with her paints and stencils. She posted herself behind a dumpster on the corner and waited for Ann to leave for work. When Ann was out of view, Ilana pulled her tools from the bag and shook a can of silver paint as vigorously as she could, its metal agitator ball rattling loud just beneath DeShawn’s bedroom window on the first floor. The window rose as though on command.

“What the fuck, Ilana?” DeShawn mumbled, his voice still gravelly with sleep. “I knew that shit was you. All them Is and Fs and shit. What the fuck is that supposed to mean? And, anyway, how you gonna tag my mother’s
house, though?”

“Oh, you live here?” Ilana said, still shaking the can. “I didn’t know. Plus, rhododendrons and azaleas don’t exactly say ‘step off.’ I halfway thought Destino 2000 was a group of kindergarten girls.” She shook the can again.

“But damn, why you gotta be so loud?” He mumbled through a smile. “Hold on.” And he came downstairs in flip flops, socks, and basketball shorts to let her in.

He rolled a blunt, and the two spent the day writing rhymes and blowing smoke out of Ann Master’s parlor window, taking care not to disturb the masks and statues that decorated the room, or to ash on the Strohmenger & Sons piano, which was polished to an indignant shine. When enough time had passed and DeShawn seemed high enough to have forgotten himself, Ilana turned to him and traced her fingernails between the hairs on his knee. She tilted her head to the side, pushed her chin toward him, and softened her lips for a kiss, but DeShawn jerked away.

“No,” he said, his voice unsteady. “I mean, that can’t happen. You’re cool but, you know. My mother and shit… She wouldn’t… you’re not…”

He continued to stammer, beginning explanations and stopping mid-sentence, gathering his voice and trying again, but Ilana didn’t need to hear the words. The next day, she called DeShawn to tell him that it was okay,
that she understood what he’d meant, and that she still wanted to be friends.

In the following months, she established a tight liaison with DeShawn. The two skipped school together, tagging buildings and writing songs, stealing icies from the coco helado man while it was still warm and snatching knishes from the hot dog trucks in Central Park when it got cooler. By January, Ilana had succeeded in becoming his truest homie. They even had their kiss, and a few others here and there, but Ilana assured him each time that she wouldn’t mention that to anyone. Even when ShaLondra Prior gusted up to her stoop one day, a fresh weave of auburn curls floating behind her like rings in a ringtoss, and said “yo, what the fuck is up with you and D?” Ilana only stirred her cereal and said “What do you mean? We’re just peoples,” and watched ShaLondra spangle away. Ilana understood what their touching meant, she told DeShawn: nothing.

In those months, she made herself a fixture in Ann Master’s home. Ann would return from work many evenings to find Ilana and DeShawn sitting on her front steps, scrawling in their notebooks and moving their heads back and forth in synch like a pair of twin gulls. Ilana enjoyed watching Ann struggle to be pleasant with her. It was a sweet irony, Ilana felt. The imperious restraint that made Ann hate Ilana also kept her from saying anything bad about her, at least to her face. No matter what Ilana did, Ann would greet her with the same arched eyebrows, the same squinting eyes, the same dismal lip-raise that strained to pass for a smile. It was a good exercise for the woman, Ilana decided, this intense effort to smile against her will.

Ilana began to imagine herself as Ann Master’s personal trainer, forcing her into a calisthenics of the spirit. She pulled strands of synthetic hair from her rainbow-colored packs and stuffed them in the crevices of Ann’s bags, tied them around the clasps of her necklaces, stuck them down into the legs of her daysheer pantyhose. She watched Ann’s smile grow stiffer and her face more flustered each time she saw her—no pain, no gain, Ilana thought. This was progress, in her book. Sometimes, DeShawn would report finding whole braids in the cupboards, where Ilana hadn’t planted anything at all. Ilana didn’t quite understand it, but she didn’t complain.

It was gratifying to watch her efforts work on Ann, but Ilana hadn’t anticipated annoying DeShawn as well. He confronted her one afternoon as they smoked blunts sitting on the fence at Edgecombe park. “For real, I wish you’d stop fucking with her. I know it’s nothing, but still. She’s an unhappy woman,” he explained, blowing smoke over the park’s stony cliff. “She’s lonely. You don’t like people, so you wouldn’t understand about loneliness.”

Ilana stopped going to school shortly after that conversation. It wasn’t a decision so much as it was something she observed, as though on the TV screen. She saw herself waking up day after day, the silly morning DJs on the hip-hop station bantering in her ear for only a few minutes before she turned the radio off, rolled over, and continued to sleep. With the exception of a few forays to the Crown Fried Chicken around the corner, she recused herself from the world and retreated to her room to make plans.

During those weeks, Ilana spent time with her dolls, and nearly no one else. DeShawn became distant, too, and soon new rumors foamed up on the whisper mill—some saying that he was dating a light-skinned girl from Stuyvesant High School, others saying that ShaLondra Prior was pregnant with his child.

Mrs. Randolph did not notice her daughter’s transition into sloth, so busy was she conducting the quiet symphony of her own life, which had become a different thing to manage now that George was gone. And the fact that
Ilana had become impossible to talk to in that obnoxious teenage way didn’t help. But, one Saturday afternoon, while mopping the floors outside of Ilana’s bedroom, Mrs. Randolph decided to peek in. If she could not get to her daughter, she reasoned, just going into her room might be a start. But, taking stock, she was horrified. Her good mahogany dresser and vanity were covered in pen marks and paint stains, and smears of electric blue and green chalk clung shamelessly to her elegant salmon-colored walls. Pens and spray cans rolled lackadaisically over her antique rug, surely an injury waiting to happen to any soul brave enough to ventured up to the room in the first place.

It had been a beautiful room once, but there was so little to be admired here now. This was the thing with teenagers, she thought. Their vision was so clouded with the dramas of their lives that they failed to see the very real dangers before them—for Ilana, not just death-by-spray-can, but also the long and lonely life of a woman unconcerned with keeping house. But Ilana had not always been that way—Mrs. Randolph was almost sure of that. Ilana had never been as neat as Mrs. Randolph would’ve liked, but as a girl she’d always used her creativity around the house to good result, decorating her bedroom room with symmetrical—if tacky—drawings of rainbows and flowers, and bringing beautifully-iced cupcakes to school whenever there was a birthday. And then there were the doll babies, which Ilana had treated with a meticulous love as a child. She had talked to them, bathed them, fixed their hair and clothes with a fastidious and thorough interest that even Mrs. Randolph had struggled to understand. And even though she’d neglected them later, she never threw them away.

Mrs. Randolph looked for the dolls, ready to admire the collection she’d amassed for Ilana, to feel the hope of those decades of floral print dresses, the years and seasons of perfect pinafores, the generations of patchwork in the oldest dolls’ blouses, passed down from her mother to her, to Ilana, maybe still. She wanted to touch the yarn hair her favorite doll, to run her fingers over its faux fur jacket, which, only by this lineage of maternal commitment had remained a floury white. It was probably only five minutes or so, but it seemed she’d searched at least an hour before it dawned on her that, in fact, the babies were gone.