On the radio, a grown man yells at me to go to some for-profit college: “Aren’t you sick of your dead-end life? What you waiting for?”
These are the ads they play on Spanish and Black people stations—bail bonds, cheap auto insurance, ads in which grown men berate your very existence. As we drive, the surfers pack up for the day along the rocks, reedlike and tan, half-naked and black from the waist down in their wet suits, like one of those half-chocolate Pocky snacks Heather brought back from her trip to Japan.
“Change the channel,” Lucia says.
Lucia is my nanny, but I don’t like to call her that ’cause it feels gross. She’s short—shorter than any other adult I know. Like, I was taller than she is by the time I was ten. When she cleans, she can reach only to a little bit above my head, and so sometimes it seems like she spends the day going up and down ladders to reach hidden corners, like some life-size version of the game Chutes and Ladders. Her car is matte gray with missing hubcaps, a Corolla that looks like somebody tore the secrets from its seats.
“I don’t know why you always hanging with those girls when you’re always telling me how terrible they are,” Lucia says.
“I’m not going to tell you anything if all you do is use it against me,” I say. “… And I never said they were terrible.”
“You’re lucky your parents weren’t home,” she says.
She’s right, but also not. Once during sophomore year I ditched with Kimberly and Courtney, and the school called. Unluckily for me, on that particular day my dad just happened to be working from home and answered the phone. When I got home, he sat me down and made me calculate, down to the hour, how much they spent on my schooling to show me how much money I wasted when I didn’t show up for class.
“We’re not your friends’ parents. You don’t have some magic trust fund. This is still a sacrifice for us. We want more for you,” he said.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure that nowadays my parents are far too concerned with work and analyzing what went wrong with their wayward daughter, Jo, to care about what I’m up to.
Jo is my troubled older sister. She dropped out of college and didn’t tell them for a whole-ass semester. That’s a lot more money than I’m wasting. Her new husband is a musician who’s really a construction worker, and she’s a musician who’s really a secretary, and they live in a shithole somewhere on Fairfax between the Orthodox Jews and the Ethiopians. I think she’s angry at all the things my parents have done to her, or haven’t.
To be honest, I don’t remember her ever not being at least a little bit angry. When she was in high school, she got suspended for a month because she handcuffed herself to the flagpole up front to fight apartheid.
“We got plenty of people here to handcuff yourself to a pole for,” my mother said.
“Josephine helped the Resistance, and she wasn’t really French,” Jo sassed back.
“She didn’t have to worry about college applications.”
“We got to help our black brothers and sisters abroad,” Jo said.
Jo is named after Josephine Baker, who helped the French Resistance during World War II but also danced around Europe naked except for a costume made of strategically placed bunches of bananas. When we were little, my sister used to tell her friends she was named after Jo March from Little Women; this was back before she got all into being black. Both Jos are pains in the ass, as far as I can tell.
Two weeks after Jo’s twenty-first birthday, she and the construction worker wed in the Beverly Hills Courthouse and didn’t even invite any of us. My mother cried for weeks that her firstborn got married in “our own backyard and didn’t say a thing! Not even to her mother!”
Tonight’s dinner is to be the beginning of a truce.
My mother thinks my sister is on drugs, that her husband is forcing her to be some other her. I don’t think that’s it, though. Some girls are given away, but some girls run.
I think Jo ran away from my parents and away from me and away from the ocean because she was afraid of drowning. When she first started teaching me to drive, she drove me up the coast to Santa Barbara and back. The car charged forth in fits and starts, German engineering under teenage toes.
I was terrified of driving both of us off a cliff, of careening out of control, but Jo just said, “Steady. Steady.”
It was a quiet ride. I started to tell Jo about school, about how Heather and Kimberly were fighting that month, about how my history teacher sometimes called the Civil War the War of Northern Aggression, about how I was thinking of getting bangs but, like, half the school had bangs, so I didn’t know. Jo said I needed to concentrate, not talk, so I shut up. When I started to get exhausted from all the concentrating, we pulled off the freeway and parked and walked through the rocks and down to the sand. Two girls in wet suits sat in the back of a station wagon and waxed their surfboards. Fishermen balanced on the rocks and pulled in fish that gleamed. Then they gutted them, and out the red poured.
“Poor fish,” Jo said.
“You eat fish,” I said.
“Yeah, but I don’t kill them for fun.”
We watched as the men placed them in big plastic coolers.
“See, they’re going to eat them.”
Jo started to build a sand castle between us. She poured water from her water bottle into the sand and started moving the earth in scoops toward the sky. When she was done, there was a moat and a bridge and two hills that were a home.
“Sometimes it feels like a piece of my brain is far off in the distance,” she said, “and no matter how hard I swim, I can’t quite get to it. And I’m getting so tired of swimming.”
She waited for me to respond. I think I was supposed to say something, but I didn’t know what.
A leathery man in neon shorts jogged by and smiled at us. We’re pretty girls together, the kind that white folks assume are mixed with something else because we don’t look like mammy dolls. We have heart-shaped faces and mouths and almond eyes and unassuming ancestral curves. Jo had these beautiful thick curls that cascaded down her back, but she cut it off above her ears, and my mother cried for, like, an hour over how she could do such a thing. My hair doesn’t curl—it kinks—but it doesn’t matter because it’s relaxed anyway. I don’t think my mother would cry if I cut it.
“I dropped out of school. Just for the semester,” she said.
“Why would you do that?”
“I don’t know. I… I’m going back. When I’m doing better. My counselor was the one who suggested it.”
“Do Mom and Dad know?”
“They wouldn’t get it. And don’t tell them.”
I got mad at her then, even though I knew I shouldn’t.
Last year, New England was hit by Hurricane Bob, which is a pretty funny name for a hurricane. Like a sunburned white man with a beer gut and dad sneakers. Hurricane Jo is the black girl in ripped tights and Doc Martens drenching the rest of us in her feelings, and it’s like we either need to batten down the hatches or be swept away.
“What do you even do all day, then?”
“Wander around campus, sleep, listen to music; I don’t know,” she said. She bit her lip like she does to keep from crying, and I froze. Then, just like that, the moment passed.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Several weeks later, she met Harrison while wandering through campus. He wasn’t a student, just one of the construction guys working on the new dorms. Also, Harrison is white, but so are most of our neighbors and friends.
She took me out to drive one more time after that. As we twisted along the coast, she gushed, “He’s got the most beautiful eyelashes you’ve ever seen, Ash. He makes me happy. So happy.”
“Eyelashes?”
“Jesus, Ash.” She paused and took a deep breath. “So… I have something big to tell you. Huge, actually.”
“All right.”
She’s so dramatic.
“I got married… I mean, it just kinda happened.”
“You
don’t just kinda get married, Jo. What about Mom and Dad? What about me?”
Jo and I aren’t as close as we could be, but I always figured I’d be her maid of honor and tell a funny story about us as kids or whatever as I toast the marriage. Or, like, at least be there.
“Are you pregnant?” I blurted out.
“Excuse you. No,” she huffed.
“Sorry.… Congratulations,” I eked out.
“Thanks. So, like, don’t tell Mom and Dad.”
“What the fuck, Jo?”
We didn’t talk that much for the rest of our drive after that. She took me only to the edge of Malibu and back, and we didn’t stop or anything. I called her once to see if she would take me out to practice driving again, but she said, “Have Lucia do it. I’m kinda busy right now.”
I probably shouldn’t have asked if she was pregnant.
* * *
Jo is smart and very sad, and secretly I think it’s easier for my parents that she’s gone, even if nobody wants to admit it. At least fighting about her is easier than fighting with her. How do you raise a sad black girl?
Every emotion is so combustible with Jo, every feeling at full volume. I feel like I’ve got all these emotions just on the tip of my tongue, but it’s like I’m in the doctor’s office going ahhh and there’s that sad Popsicle stick without anything sweet pressing the feelings down.
“We aren’t living the blues,” my dad yelled once, after Jo barricaded herself in her room to cry about nothing, far as the rest of us could tell. “Not here. Not us.”
Lucia says, “Your parents don’t know what she’s so sad about. Sadness for them is a cause and effect, not simply a way to be.”
* * *
Concrete and billboards and people waiting for the bus. Furniture stores and fast food and gas stations and thrift stores. The longer we drive, the dirtier and grayer the city gets and the browner the people get, carrying shopping bags and pushing strollers and carts across crosswalks. A man with a Moses beard rolls his wheelchair right into the street and holds up a yellow sign that says JESUS IS COMING!
Lucia slams on the brakes. “¡Pendejo!”
After all that business with the cop, I’m late getting home, so Lucia brought me an outfit in which to meet my sister’s new husband, like I gotta dress up to see my own sister. Except she’s accidentally grabbed one of Jo’s dresses.
“That’s Jo’s dress,” I say.
“But you wear it all the time,” Lucia says.
“She doesn’t know that,” I say. “I’ll just wear what I’m wearing.”
My foot is still in pain, and my legs are still covered in dust.
“Don’t you wanna look nice?” Lucia says.
“I don’t care,” I say.
“Yes, you do,” she says.
“Fuck Jo,” I say.
“Don’t say that,” Lucia says. “One day your parents will leave you and you’ll just have each other.”
Lucia’s from Guatemala and has twin sons close to my age, Umberto and Roberto, whom she visits once a year. I can’t picture her tiny body carrying a single baby, much less two at once. She had to lie in bed for two months before they were born, she said. Everything hurt and got swollen, and when she pressed her fingertips into her skin, they left little indentations, like when you press into the sand before the tide comes back in; she was that full of water and baby. Even though she says they’re the loves of her life, she also says, “Don’t have sex, mija.”
I wonder if she felt better leaving them, thinking that at least, even without her, they would move through the world together, tethered by their twindom.
The distance between my sister and me is fifteen songs. The first few songs are in Spanish; then there’s some Madonna; then “Tears in Heaven,” which is a pretty song by a racist about a baby falling out a window. Then “Under the Bridge.” The Red Hot Chili Peppers went to Fairfax High School, and Heather’s friend Jeannie’s big sister says she sucked one of them off, which I guess makes them feel a little bit more real.
“Undadabrigdowtow is where I threw some love,” Lucia wails along.
I don’t think those are the lyrics.
Lucia loves music more than anybody else I know, a fact made almost tragic by her utter lack of musicality. Lucia’s room is downstairs off the family room and a little bit smaller than mine. Her records are in a stack right under her nightstand, like at any time she might need to reach over in the middle of the night and listen to “Se Me Olvidó Otra Vez” or “Thriller.”
After the song, the radio DJs open the lines for calls. “What do you think the verdict’s gonna be, fam?”
“Fam” makes it sound like the whole city of Los Angeles is one great big dysfunctional family, and maybe it is.
“Guilty.” The caller wheezes through his sentences. “Ain’t nobody in their right mind wouldn’t find them dudes guilty. We got that
“Not guilty,” the next caller says. “The system’s rigged against us. It was built that way, know what I mean?”
“We’re here,” Lucia says.
The buildings in my sister’s new neighborhood have bars on the bottom windows, like somebody took the idea of picket fences and crafted them out of the stuff of weapons. Lucia says this is how you can tell a neighborhood is good or bad in this country: whether the fences are on the ground or on the windows.
Jo’s apartment building is next to a 7-Eleven and a car repair shop and a chicken place; the air around the building smells like fried gasoline. I like the smell of gasoline. It’s the smell of motion. The sidewalks have cracked and buckled in spots from some earthquake. Lucia parallel parks in front of one of them that looks like the game you play when you’re a little kid—“This is the church, this is the steeple”—except the church is broken concrete and the people are the exposed roots, I guess.
For Heather’s tenth birthday, all of us went down to her vacation house in La Jolla the week of the Fourth of July. We mostly spent our time running between the beach and the kitchen for meals, until the house itself was the sand beneath our feet. We boogie boarded and buried each other and built sand castles that we kicked down like little-girl Godzillas. At night we settled into the living room in our sleeping bags and held flashlights under our chins in order to better tell stories about dead people. In the morning the ground jolted underneath us, and we scrambled into the doorway together, knelt down, and held our hands over our heads and touched our elbows together so that we looked like hearts.
“It’s the Big One!” Kimberly yelled.
“We’re gonna die!” Courtney yelled.
“Shut the hell up!” Heather yelled. And then we started laughing because we were scared, but not that much. Still, we pressed our bodies against one another just in case. Best friends are the people you laugh with as the world around you shakes. Or at least they were then. I don’t know now. Seems sometimes like growing older means the ground beneath you starts to shake and you keep trying to find the right structures to hide under, the right people to huddle with, the right roots.
Jo and I are supposed to be from the same tree, but sometimes it feels like she’s off being a willow while the rest of us are sequoias.
* * *
“What you waiting for?” Lucia says. “¡Apúrate!”
I quickly move to the back seat and slide my arms through my dress, Jo’s dress. Outside, I flagellate myself with the towel to wipe the dust off. Lucia brushes my hair the way she did when I was little, and even though I’m old enough to brush it myself, I let her.
“Come in with me.”
“You couldn’t pay me enough.”
But my parents have for a long time. Lucia has been privy to all our history, good and bad, for years. She’s been the bearer of our family secrets for most of her adult life. Lucia’s the only person around whom we don’t have to pretend.
“It’s gonna be like American Gladiators in there.”
“I don’t need front-row seats,” she says.
>
I step into the heels she brought for me to wear. The pain radiates through my foot.
“Shit, that hurts,” I say.
“That’s what happens when you ditch school, mija.” Lucia kisses my forehead and pushes me forward down the walkway, until the distance between Jo and me is only the sound of a bell.
* * *
“That’s my dress” is the first thing my sister says to me in months. Her hair is back down to her shoulders now. She’s fatter than she was, but maybe that’s what happy looks like.
“Whatever,” I say. “You left it behind.”
“I’m so happy to finally meet you, Ash.” Jo’s husband, Harrison, is a bear of a man, easily seven feet tall, and I suspect he might be an actual giant. I’m not sure if he means to lift me off the ground when he hugs me, but he does. As the ground beneath me drops, for a few seconds I understand everything about the two of them. If Jo was drowning, of course she would choose a man who makes her fly. In his arms, I almost don’t even mind that he’s called me by my nickname entirely too soon. I’ll forgive him this forced familiarity because I don’t want this man to ever set me back down. I close my eyes and I’m a 747, Apollo 11; I can touch the stars and the planets and all that other gaseous shit up there.
“She’ll get her hair caught in the ceiling fan.” I hear my mother’s voice. I open my eyes and there, behind Harrison, my mother sits at what appears to be a card table covered by a tablecloth.
The Black Kids Page 3