Plus, Jo’s not that bad. Not really.
And I’m not that good.
“So am I in trouble?” I say.
“What?”
Be here. With me. I’m here. Not her, I want to say. But it seems whiny, like a tantrum, and in several weeks I’ll be a grown-ass woman.
“Are you cold?” my mother says.
Before I can even answer, she leans forward and cranks up the heat so it blows at our faces and toes in warm gusts.
“Your sister was a very difficult child, even as a baby; she’d cry and cry, and I could never figure out why she was crying or how to get her to stop. I used to drive her all around the city, talking to her in the early morning when it was just the two of us and the rest of the world was quiet. It’s both very hard and very easy to talk to a baby for hours. Talking to her now… it’s just hard.”
“What was I?”
“What?”
“You always talk about Jo, but how was I? As a baby, I mean.”
She pauses for a moment to think, almost like she’s forgotten. Or at least it feels like that.
“You were a happy baby. Quiet… I left you in the back seat of the car once. I’d gone inside the house and started to unload the groceries and everything. Your sister was the one who remembered. We rushed to the car thinking you would be crying or upset or something, but when we opened the door, you smiled, and I felt like the shittiest mom ever.”
“You’re not shitty.”
She pats me on the thigh. “I know…”
* * *
My parents and grandparents have made it so that Jo and I know nothing. We know nothing of crack or gangs or poverty. We know nothing of welfare or Section 8 housing or food stamps or social workers. We know nothing of schools with metal detectors and security but no books. We know nothing of homegoings or small coffins. We know nothing of hunger. We are, according to my father, spoiled rotten little brats.
Once, Jo and I got into a really bad fight because I stole her favorite shirt, which she didn’t even wear anymore, from her closet, and when she went to push me, we tussled and I bit her until I drew blood in an itty-bitty red rainbow across her palm. I still had mostly baby teeth then. She pulled her hand back in shock, examining her wound. After we’d both briefly peered down at it in awe, she used her injured hand to slap me across the face, hard.
“Stay out of my room! Stay out of my stuff!” she screamed at the top of her lungs, as though she were possessed. “It’s mine!”
“You spoiled rotten little brats.” My father appeared out of nowhere, as if summoned by this demon child. He dragged us by our arms down the stairs and out the house as we tried to hit each other and hollered, “She started it!”
“Where are we going?” we yelled as he stuffed us into the car, but once we got on the road, none of us said a word.
My father drove us somewhere not that far away and parked in front of a house the size of our garage. A citrus tree dropped its flesh in the front yard. A group of girls jumped rope. There was the clack clack clack of round barrettes, the sound of little black girls in fits of flight. I think maybe it was a dangerous neighborhood, but you wouldn’t have known it at that moment.
“Seven of us in there. Me, my mother, my grandmother, my aunt Minnie, my two cousins, and your uncle Ronnie. That was the first house we lived in here, before we could afford to buy our own,” he said. “I ate fast, because I had to, to make sure I got enough. I’d never even had my own room until I was done with grad school. Never had my own nothing. Shoes, socks, underwear, toys, you name it. We shared everything.”
He grew quiet, and I sat there trying to understand him. It must’ve been summer, because I remember that, through the window, the concrete wiggled like steam rising.
“Everything?” Jo asked.
* * *
Lucia is in the kitchen chopping peppers when we get home from Jo’s. As she chops, she tells my father a story.
“They kidnapped and killed all of them. The women and children, too,” she says. “Usually when they do that, they burn down the village so there’s nothing left, but not this time. This time they just left it empty.”
My dad, Craig, was in the US Foreign Service in Honduras and speaks perfect Spanish. Now he’s in international finance. He’s tall and handsome, and his hair is turning into silver strands that shimmer in the right light. Before he goes to work, he slicks his curls down into a rigid wave, hair waiting to be surfed. In the company brochure, he’s the lone black man in a glass boardroom, smiling, front and center. Sometimes while Lucia’s making dinner, he’ll join her in the kitchen, and they talk about their childhoods.
“Who did they kidnap and kill?” I want to ask, but before I can, my mother interrupts as she barges into the kitchen.
“Your daughter is a real piece of work.” She slams her purse down on the counter, and Lucia and my father look up, startled.
She doesn’t understand anything they’re saying in the slightest, so for all she knows, she interrupted a conversation about a soccer game.
“What’d you do?” My dad looks over at me.
“I cut my foot on a beer bottle; look.” I raise my foot to show him. The pain runs along my sole like a fault line.
“Not her,” my mother says. “The other one.”
She recounts the evening’s events, but in her version we ate pig slop for dinner and Harrison was raised by wolves who let him nearly die of lockjaw, and poor sad wayward Jo is his prey. Then Jo stomped right on her own mother’s foot and slammed the door in our faces before we could even say goodbye. And as we were going back to the car, we witnessed a police beating, because that’s the kind of neighborhood his daughter wishes to live in these days. All of which, I suppose, isn’t entirely untrue, but it’s also not entirely true. We all sew a few sequins on our stories to make them shine brighter.
“I thought the slop was pretty good,” I offer.
“Be quiet, Ashley,” my mother says as my father pours her a glass of wine. Being the only black person in the brochure at the office is stressful. Sometimes my parents get mistaken for their own assistants, or people think they’ve stumbled into the wrong meetings, or their assistants think they know better than my parents do and it becomes a whole thing, even though both of them are amazing at what they do, or they wouldn’t have gotten where they are to begin with. Like Grandma Opal said, “You have to be better.” That’s why they drink, Jo says.
“Did you do anything?” my father asks.
“About what?”
“The police and the kids.”
“What should we have done?”
“You said they were little kids?”
“I don’t know what they did or didn’t do. And I wasn’t going to jeopardize our safety to find out. We’re still black. Besides, that’s not the point. What if Jo and that man have kids in that neighborhood? I mean, they’re probably not gonna be moving anywhere better anytime soon. And even if they move somewhere else, things are changing, but people are still ignorant. If people say or do nasty things to them or to their kids, what’s he gonna do about it? Jo’s a smart girl—too smart for this shit. She needs to get her ass back in school. What if people think she’s her own kids’ nanny?”
Lucia looks up at this and makes a face but doesn’t say anything. Then she looks over at me. I’ve already started to nibble on the chicken going into the enchiladas. She slaps my hand out of it.
My father scratches above his eyebrow and opens his mouth as if to say something that never comes out.
“You should have been there,” my mother finally says.
“I couldn’t get out in time, Val. Things were too busy,” my dad says.
“They always are.”
My mother leaves the room, clutching her wineglass, my father at her heels. They’re off to argue about Jo, which is a lot of what they do these days. Although before it was Jo, it was other stuff. Jo says they’re so busy trying to be perfect for everybody else that all they have left
for each other is the messy. Lucia turns to me and passes me a knife.
“You eat, you help.”
* * *
They say one day when the Big One hits, all of this will just cave into the ocean, all the beauty and the rocks and the grass and the homes and the people. Our house is made of glass and wood so that you’re inside and outside all at once. It’s loosely modeled after a Case Study House by a very famous architect that my mother loves. Once, she took Jo and me for a Saturday drive to tour all the Case Study Houses, which are famous historical houses designed by famous architects all around the city. I think she wanted us to love those gleaming corners as much as she did, to understand how the right beam could make you feel closer to the very universe itself, but mostly Jo and I complained about how hot it was, and I had attitude all day because I was missing a birthday party for this girl I didn’t even particularly like. “I don’t understand why we’re spending the whole day paying to look at other people’s houses. It’s so dumb,” Jo whined. Still, we spent the day wandering through great modernist boxes, light and dark, with their big open glass windows and plywood and steel and concrete, the stuff of the houses themselves kinda like the three of us together, our parts both knowable and unknowable to one another. Eventually, Jo and I stopped sulking and started to marvel at the way all that glass in those fancy houses refracted the light in colors across our skin; and instead of being little assholes, together we chased rainbows. Anyway, if there’s a Big One, we’re definitely goners. On days like these, even the gusts against the glass feel as though, if they keep on hard enough, the entire house will collapse on all of us fragile in it. The roof feels like the safest place to be sometimes. Jo and I used to stand on the edge and dare each other to jump.
Courtney calls, and I climb out onto the roof for some privacy. Sometimes I see my parents as shadows at my door, listening. The roof is safer for secrets.
“Are you in a wind tunnel? Good Lord.”
“Eye of a hurricane, actually.”
“Are you in trouble?” she says.
“Lucia didn’t tell them.”
“God, I wish I had a Lucia,” Courtney says. “I’m grounded, but not until after prom.”
“That’s not too bad, right?”
“I can’t go to any of the after-parties, though.”
“That totally sucks.”
“Yeah, but, like, I went to them last year… so I guess it could be worse.”
“Totally.”
* * *
From my perch on the roof, I can see into my sister’s room. Inside, my mother takes a book off Jo’s shelves, then another and another. My father comes in, and the two of them say something to each other, come to some sort of agreement, and then he too begins to take books off Jo’s shelves. Then they’re not Jo’s shelves at all, they’re just planks of wood in need of a purpose. My mother takes down a Purple Rain poster. My father takes down Jo’s seventh-grade photo.
“This calc homework is ridiculous. Have you finished it?” Courtney says.
“I haven’t looked at it yet.”
Together, my parents remove a customized trophy case with Jo’s Model UN trophies. They get more and more frenetic, swept up in the act of removal as they take things off the wall and throw them on the floor. I can’t tell if they’re laughing or crying or both.
“So, problem eight says, ‘The graph of the function f is show in the figure above. For how many values of x in the open interval (−4, 4) is f discontinuous?’… like, I don’t get it.”
“I don’t have my book out here with me.”
When they tire, my parents sit down together in the middle of all the things that make up my sister’s life and look at each other. There are patches of bright where the wall hasn’t seen the light of day in years. The room is exposed and raw, and I’m embarrassed for them and it. Lucia appears in the doorway, and my parents look up startled, caught.
“And problem nine says…”
Courtney’s looking for me to feed her the answers, like I’ve done for most of our lives. But I don’t know how I’m supposed to tell her the answers when I don’t have them yet myself.
“Shit. Gotta go,” I tell Courtney, and start to crawl back to my room before anybody notices. I drop the phone on the roof with a thud, and it starts to slide down and off. I grab the phone and yank it up, but the damage is done.
They look out at me. My father wades through Jo’s things on the floor to get to the window, which he slides open.
“You get your little ass off that roof right now, young lady.”
“What are you doing?”
“We told you and Jo not to go out on that roof ever again.”
Jo fell off once. We were up here together in the sun and then, like that, she fell into the bushes below and then hit the ground hard. She fractured several ribs and broke her arm and scraped her skin so hard in several places that she wasn’t brown anymore but red. She spent several months in a neon-pink cast that she let me draw on with Technicolor Sharpies when I was bored. Jo fell, but I thought I saw her rise onto her tiptoes and lean forward. I thought I saw her close her eyes and lift off. But I know nothing.
In the hospital, when they were setting her arm, my father held her tenderly against his chest and sang “Isn’t She Lovely” while she cried.
“Daddy, that’s Stevie’s absolute worst song,” Jo stopped crying for a second to say.
“Girl, is you crazy?” my father said, which is how we knew he was dead serious, ’cause he very rarely uses the vernacular.
Then Jo started to laugh until the doctor yanked her arm back into place. Then she screamed into Daddy’s armpit while he held her tighter against his beating heart.
“What are you doing to Jo’s room?” I ask my parents.
“Jo doesn’t live here anymore,” my mother said.
* * *
Lucia has a stack of People magazines on the bed and we pore over them, imagining other people’s lives as our own. Lucia loves Princess Diana, and People keeps speculating that she and Prince Charles might be getting divorced. Lucia’s dark hair is cut exactly like Princess Diana’s, and my mom’s is too, so that my two mothers are each other and somebody else all at once. The idea that it’s 1992 and we still have kings and queens and people born into being the heads of entire countries is weird to me, but I think my mom and Lucia both like how Diana looks good in Givenchy and happiest as she holds the brown orphans others have left to die.
“How is she?” Lucia folds laundry on the bed next to me. I place my whole head in the laundry basket. I love the smell of fresh laundry, the heat against my skin, those few moments when the clothes are like the sun instead of just another pair of faded pajamas. Lucia swats me away.
“It’s been a shitty month. Her dad keeled over from a heart attack, and there’s family drama. ‘Diana pleaded with nearby photographers to “please, just leave us alone,”’ ” I read.
“Smartass. Your sister.”
“Crazy,” I say. “Can we talk about something else?”
“You need new friends.”
“Did you know Diana’s mom ran off with a wallpaper heir?”
“You’re gonna miss me, you know.” Lucia sighs, and when she does, I wonder if she’d rather be arguing with Umberto and Roberto back home instead. I think she’s talking about when I go off to college, but later I find out that’s not what she’s talking about at all.
* * *
On Saturday, Lucia invites me and my parents out to dinner at her favorite place, which is this perfect Chinese hole-in-the-wall with questionable service and actual Chinese people eating there. As we slurp and my mother finishes her second glass of rice wine, she tears up and tells Lucia how grateful she is for everything she’s done for us over the years and that we truly consider her part of the family.
Then Lucia awkwardly blurts out, “I have some big news.”
For a second, I’m afraid she’s gonna say that she has cancer, or that something terrible has happe
ned to Umberto or Roberto, or both. I feel my stomach drop all the way down to my knees. Lucia is my best friend, even more than Heather or Courtney or all of them. I don’t want to lose her. I can’t.
She pauses for a second as though she’s summoning up the courage to say what comes next. “I’ve decided to go back to Guatemala… for good. Now that the girls are grown… I… think it’s a good time for me to go home.”
My father reaches across the table and grabs Lucia’s small hand in both of his.
I start right then and there to blubber loudly in the restaurant, with all those Chinese people staring at us.
“Please don’t leave me.” I got snot going down my face, which isn’t my best look, but I don’t care. Not now.
Lucia turns to me and places her forehead against mine, which is what she used to do when I was little; she would say she was taking my sad thoughts away and replacing them with her happy thoughts for me.
After that, we crack our fortune cookies open and look at Lucia, hoping hers says something like “A great adventure awaits you,” but all it says is “You are beautiful,” which isn’t even a fortune at all.
Lucia’s lived with us for thirteen of the seventeen years I’ve been alive. For her twenty-fifth birthday, my parents gave her a very expensive bottle of champagne, and I broke it while playing in her room. Our birthdays are only a few days apart, and so after my birthday party, I gave her two of my new dolls to replace her broken bottle. Then Lucia and I played with them together in her room until it was time for bed.
When we get home, I fiddle through Lucia’s records until I find one and place it on the turntable. The record clicks and scratches as it begins.
“Are you going to nanny other kids in Guatemala?” I ask.
“I won’t have to be a nanny there,” she says quickly, and it’s like a punch to the gut, even though I know it shouldn’t be.
“What about your car?”
“Enough with the questions,” she says.
The Black Kids Page 5