Red at the Bone

by Jacqueline Woodson

  Is that your sister?

  Iris jumped and the picture fell to the ground.

  A girl she didn’t know was standing beside her. The girl picked up the photo, brushed off the dusting of snow, and handed it back.

  She’s cute. She looks a lot like you.

  Yeah. She does.

  In the photo, Melody was holding an orange balloon and grinning into the camera—her hair neatly cornrowed, her eyes dark and clear. The hand holding the balloon showed perfectly manicured nails. Someone had polished them a pale pink. Emerald birthstones dotted her ears.

  Iris, right? the girl said. American literature. You debated Carver with that white dude. You won.

  Iris had no recollection of the girl being in her class, even though classes were small and it was easy to count the black kids. She remembered disagreeing with some guy about the brilliance of the writer. Carver’s staccato sentences bothered her. They felt like something she could have written in seventh grade. But every white person in her class seemed to be in love.

  How had she missed this girl?

  Yeah, she said. I can get with Márquez. At least the brother throws you an adjective or two.

  The girl smiled. She had small silver wire-framed glasses, her head covered with a dark green hood.

  Iris put the money back into the envelope. Slid the picture of Melody into her coat pocket. She wanted to keep looking at her daughter—long and hard. Wanted to continue tracking the month’s changes. See what parts of her continued to hold on, continued to connect them.

  Jamison, the girl said, holding out her hand. There were silver rings on her thumb and middle finger.

  Iris. Iris didn’t know what to do after the handshake so she stood there, fingering the envelope and staring out over campus. Jamison took off her hood, and now, with her hair exposed, long locks tied back, Iris remembered her.

  Yeah, you, she said.

  Yeah, me. Jamison smiled. She took a package of Drum tobacco from her pocket and was now flicking some into paper. She rolled the cigarette expertly with one hand, lifted it to her mouth, and licked it closed. She smiled when she saw Iris watching her. Something about the hair and the rolling made Iris feel unsteady.

  Melody’s name had been her idea. Whenever you say her name, she told Aubrey, it’ll be like you’re hearing a song.

  That’s tight, Aubrey said. I like it. Then he kissed her. Again and again he kissed her.

  Like the whiskey, Jamison said.

  What?

  My name sounds like the whiskey. I go by Jam here mostly, though. Like the jelly.

  Can I try one of those? Iris pointed her chin toward her cigarette.

  Sure thing.

  It was early afternoon, two days into the long Thanksgiving weekend. Snow was coming down. Not the scary Ohio snow she’d witnessed her first winter here. This snow was gentler, more hesitant. From day one, Ohio had shaken her.

  And it was shaking her again. Right now.

  Jam handed her the cigarette. When she leaned in to let Iris light it against her own, Iris could smell her. She smelled like the cold and the earth and something deeply familiar.

  You’re from New York, right?

  Yeah, Brooklyn. Iris took a small drag on the cigarette. The smoke tasted sweet and hot in her mouth.

  Jam was tall, narrow-shouldered inside a green jacket and striped turtleneck. Her pants looked intentionally ragged—like she’d done work to get the fading just so. The girl’s skin was medium brown and perfect—no pimples, no dark spots, no moles, nothing. Iris had found herself looking hard at people’s skin. After she gave birth to Melody a crop of pimples erupted on her forehead, and for years they’d been coming and going. No matter how much she scrubbed and masked and steamed, she couldn’t get rid of them. She took another puff of the cigarette, this time letting the smoke roll down into her lungs before exhaling. But this girl’s skin—she wanted to touch it. Find out if it was as soft as it looked.

  Been there my whole life, Iris said. Till now.

  New Orleans, Jam said. First gen. You?

  First what?

  You the first in your tribe to go to college?

  Iris shook her head. It was a question about class. She knew that now. It was the what-are-you question. The where and what and who do you come from.

  Nah. She had learned how to answer it simply.

  Aubrey wouldn’t have been first gen either. But before she left for Oberlin, she watched from her bed as he rose at six every morning, changed Melody’s diaper, brought her to Iris, then showered, shaved, and dressed for work. High school had been all he needed, he told her. I’m good with a diploma and a job. Plus it’s a Regents Diploma so I’m golden. He’d been so proud of the gold seal attached to his diploma—a symbol of having done well on the exams in the five main subjects. If he had taken the SATs, Iris knew he probably would have scored high enough to get into any school he’d chosen. But he was done. He was good. Some mornings he whistled softly. Iris didn’t understand his happiness. How this was so absolutely enough for him. After she latched Melody on to her breast, she pressed her nose into the baby’s head and drifted back off to sleep. What she saw was a future past this moment of the three of them crowded into one bedroom every morning. A future bigger than the three of them living in her parents’ brownstone. But more than that, she had never imagined Aubrey being the end of the line for her. An eternity with him had not been a part of her plan, whether or not she’d taken his cherry. As the acceptance letters started coming in, first Barnard, then Vassar, and finally Oberlin, she saw the chance to unrut herself. She saw the way out.

  You miss her?

  Who?

  Your little sister, Jam said. The kid in the photo.

  Yeah, Iris said.

  You got others?

  Iris shook her head. No. Just her. Just Melody.

  Melody. That’s a pretty name.

  Iris smiled. They stood there shivering and silent, inhaling and exhaling smoke, watching it rise and vanish above them.

  6

  The first time Aubrey brought Iris home they were both fifteen, Iris with her hair in two French braids, greased-down baby hair arching above her brow and down the side of her face.

  It’s not baby hair, if you ain’t no baby, Aubrey had said as he watched her work a toothbrush she’d pulled out of her bag and Murray’s Nu Nile to achieve the effect.

  Shut up. Iris laughed, pushing him away from her. You’re the one that’s not a baby. Not anymore, thanks to me.

  It was summer 1984 and Iris had a copy of the paperback sticking out of her jeans pocket. Both of them had been blown away by the book—how Orwell had imagined something completely different from the year they were living in. It had made Aubrey love Iris even more—the thought of a world where he wasn’t able to love her scared him. Still, Orwell had missed the important stuff—where were Kool and the Gang and Tina Turner and Ghostbusters? Where was Michael Jackson’s Thriller dropping hard? If 1984 was anything, it sure as hell wasn’t what Orwell imagined.

  Iris was still living in Bushwick then and they’d spent the morning in her empty house, upstairs in her bedroom, where the bedspread matched the curtains and the walls were painted such a startling white, it looked as though they’d been done yesterday. Up in her room, they had lain on her bed kissing and rubbing against each other until Aubrey’s lips burned and his body felt like it would explode from everything he wanted. They had been serious for four months, Iris hanging at the park while he shot baskets with his boys, then the two of them talking for hours on a bench in Knickerbocker Park, his hand beneath her shirt, warm on her back, her legs draped over his. What he felt for Iris was different from what he’d felt for other girls—when he was ten, eleven, twelve. This was deeper, older somehow—like a memory of something from a long time ago and them here now, inside that memory. She was always on his mi
nd—in math class, at basketball practice, when he and his ma sat alone eating TV dinners—there she was, smiling at him, leaning in to kiss him, teasing him about his jump shot, his old-school PRO-Keds, his fresh haircut, the way his cheek dimpled just below his right eye.

  I love you, he whispered into her ear as they lay side by side on her bed. I love you so much, Iris. Because maybe this was what love felt like—a constant ache, an endless need. He waited for Iris to tell him she loved him back, but instead, she reached inside his pants, then into his underwear, and wrapped her hand around him. He bit down hard on his bottom lip, closed his eyes, and waited for what came next. He was terrified of what came next. He had only done this to himself. His own Vaselined hand in the bathroom, with the door locked and water running in case he cried out to the images of girls he had only seen fully clothed reimagined naked playing in his head. He had imagined Iris naked, but no matter how tightly he closed his eyes, no matter how fast he moved his hand, her body was never clear. It was as though his own imagination waxed over when he tried to see her. Lying beside her, her hand moving slowly, his fingers moving up her belly and beneath her bra, he was grateful that she felt so surprising beneath her clothes. So perfect. When he opened his eyes again, Iris was smiling, that sloe-eyed smile that scared the hell out of him and made him love her more. She pulled his pants and underwear down below his knees, and because he didn’t know what else to do, he closed his eyes again and let her. Praying silently that she’d stop. Hoping she wouldn’t. I love you, he said again, because if he whispered anything else, he was sure he would cry. He didn’t want to cry. He wanted to laugh. No, he wanted to cry.

  Open your eyes and take my shirt off, she said.

  He started unbuttoning her shirt slowly. In the movies he’d seen, this was part of the love scene, the guy looking into his girlfriend’s eyes as he took off her clothes. He wanted this part to last forever. He wanted everything to be slow and perfect and right.

  You mess around, my dad’s gonna come home and find you in my room half-naked. Iris moved his hands away and quickly undid her own shirt. He didn’t know what to do with his hands.

  Take your clothes off, Aubrey! You acting like you don’t want this.

  He stumbled jumping off the bed, steadied himself against her dresser as he removed his pants and T-shirt. A fan whirred in the window, but the room was still hot. Other than the whirring, though, the house was quiet. He could hear his own panting as he climbed in beside her—so much excitement and fear. And then he was naked on top of her, just outside of her, and then, by some strange grace of God, he was inside of her. And that quickly, he wasn’t a virgin anymore. That quickly, he had something to understand now—about how doing it felt. Painful. It hurt. Why did it hurt? But then the pain was gone. And it felt good. So good. So, so good.

  But Iris wasn’t crying.

  The guys on the court said it hurt for girls the first time. They said there was some skin wall you had to break through. Like a pearly gate, they’d said. And then you in Heaven! He’d laughed with them, gave high fives as they lied about their first times. One brother went on and on about how this girl made him stop but he told her if she didn’t let him finish, she’d have to walk around the neighborhood with a half-popped cherry and what kind of look was that. But they were wrong. There wasn’t a skin wall, just Iris pressing up and him pressing down and the feeling like nothing he ever believed could exist on earth. His body exploding first inside of himself, then into Iris. He could feel himself shooting into her, her own body, swallowing him whole. This had to be love. It had to be.

  After, as they lay there, their clothes quickly pulled back on, Aubrey wanted to ask her if there’d been some other dude before. But he couldn’t. He wanted to ask if he was big enough, slow enough, good enough. She was smiling at him—that I know something about you smile, and he could only look away, out past the matching curtains and window fan, into the late afternoon. He felt like he had lost something. Something more than his virginity. Like something had been taken from him and he could never get it back. He felt like a punk thinking this. Iris had given it up to him. So why was he feeling like this? Why was he feeling like some promise the universe made had been broken? Damn.

  An hour later, she was restyling her hair in front of somebody’s side mirror—a banged-up Oldsmobile that had been abandoned on his block. For days before that, the car’s presence embarrassed the hell out of him, but watching his girl do her thing with her hair to get cute for meeting his mama made him feel some other kind of way about the car. Like maybe some divine something had landed it where it sat, tireless and with a busted windshield, there for this very moment. The feeling that he’d lost something wasn’t threatening to be tears anymore. But it was still there—heavy like that. He felt wet and sticky. He could still smell the two of them together. The guys hadn’t talked about this—about how you smelled and felt afterward. Afterward, he had held Iris so tightly. If she hadn’t said, I can’t even breathe right now, he would have still been holding on to her, wanting to pull her inside of him. Even bent in front of the side mirror, just inches from him, Iris still felt too far away.

  His mother was sitting in the darkened living room, the blinds pulled closed, the box fan on the floor blowing hot air around the room. She was wearing her robe and had two curlers at her forehead, the rest of her hair pulled back into a braid. Before Iris, the only love he truly had was for his ma. It was the truth about so many brothers. Especially on the court. Mothers were golden. One step outside the Mother Line and there was a fight.

  Your mama is so—

  Hey, man, don’t talk about my mama unless you want me to fuck your ugly ass up!

  But it felt different for Aubrey. The love he had for his mom was so deep, it felt like it belonged to an old man—somebody who’d been loving and being loved for decades. He loved everything about her—the way she smelled, still strangely of the briny water he’d known as a child, the way she danced alone some days when her oldies radio station played the Chi-Lites. Oh, I see her face everywhere I go, on the street and even at the picture show. He even loved her name—CathyMarie—two first names together, as though her parents had thought it was the most normal thing in the world to have another capital letter in the middle of your name. CathyMarie Daniels. When he was little, he’d wanted to be called AubreyBrown for no other reason but the capital B. He didn’t have a middle name. Had always been Aubrey Daniels. But his mother refused to let him add the Brown. Aubrey’s fine, she said. Aubrey is perfect. You don’t want everyone thinking your last name is Brown. He let it go.

  He had hoped to walk into the apartment with Iris hearing music and catching his mother dancing, deep in some memory, hips swaying, fingers silently snapping. But the darkness in their apartment signaled something different. Something that had been coming off and on for months now. The TV on more often. Her oldies station mostly silent. The curlers in the late afternoon, something always reeking beneath the scent of Lysol.

  Aubrey stopped halfway into the living room.

  Ma?

  His mother didn’t answer.

  Oprah was on the television screen. He couldn’t tell what the crisis was, but a white woman was sitting across from her crying. Oprah looked as though she’d soon start crying too. His own mother was crying.

  Before Santa Cruz and Berkeley. Before the jazzman that was as close to a dad as Aubrey was ever going to get. Before she was his mama, she was a girl in Oakland, growing up in the system. For a long time, Aubrey hadn’t understood what the system was but knew, by the way his mother’s eyes darkened every time she spoke of it, that it wasn’t something he ever wanted to be a part of. Fuck around, she’d said, and your behind’s gonna end up in the system. Later on, he understood it had something to do with the ashy violent boys who came after him in school yards. Something to do with the sad-looking girls who walked through the halls holding their notebooks up over their chests. He kn
ew the system was the white woman on the beach when he was seven years old who asked his mother why he wasn’t in school on a weekday and the grocery store dude who side-eyed him, then asked his mother if she had any other foster children.

  But the system had paid for college. And even for the short time that she’d been in grad school. The system helped cover rent and sent an envelope filled with brightly colored food stamps once a month. The system paid for the therapist his mama talked to when the system itself was coming back to haunt her dreams, she told him. But she never told him how it haunted her. You don’t need to know that, she said. I don’t need to pass that down to you.

  On days when she was home from her part-time job in a mailroom somewhere in downtown Manhattan, he found her like she was now—in the darkened apartment with the TV on. Erase, erase, erase, he heard her whispering sometimes, gently tapping her hand against her forehead. Erase it all.

  Once, because he had seen it on a television show, he suggested prayer. But she didn’t believe in God. Or Jesus. Or Satan. Or prayer.

  I believe in words, she said. I believe in numbers and all the history I understand. I believe in things I can see. When he was a little boy she used to hug him and say, And man-oh-man how I believe in you, Aubrey. My love. My light. My life.

  My love. My light. My life. Aubrey stared through the near darkness remembering these words. Always he was remembering these words and the deep pain of love he had for his mama. And now that love had split and spread and grown. To include Iris.

  Your mama looks like a white lady, Iris whispered. ’Cept for those curlers in her hair.

  She’s not. She’s black. Just light-skinned. He felt a sudden wave of annoyance. Maybe somewhere there was some whiteness in his mama, but if there was, she never talked about it and neither did he.

  I brought my friend by to meet you, Ma. Her name’s Iris.