Surviving the White Gaze

by Rebecca Carroll

  “Are you wearing my perfume?” Tess asked, moments after she arrived home that night. I’d only wanted it for me, so that I could keep her with me, inhale her smell when no one was looking.

  “Yes, I just love the smell so much.” I thought she might be flattered.

  “Get your own essence,” she scoffed. “And wash my perfume off. Everybody has their own essence, Rebecca. This one is mine, and you need to find your own.” Her tone softened a bit, and I could tell she was trying to turn this into a teaching moment instead of yet another instance of what she saw as my shortcomings.

  * * *

  “Black men are the best lovers,” Tess said the next day. “They have more rhythm, they just do. I highly recommend that your devirginizer be black.”

  I was fourteen years old and barely even thinking about sex but for the fact that Tess talked about sex a lot and had recently become obsessed with me losing my virginity.

  “What about Troy?” she suggested. Troy was almost twenty years older than me, and the first black friend of Tess’s that I’d met prior to Carl, who wasn’t technically her friend but, rather, her “lover.” Funny and kind, towering and geeky with thick, bottle-cap glasses, Troy adored Tess, and was gracious with me, although clearly uncomfortable when she made this suggestion to him in the living room a few days later.

  “I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Troy said, laughing awkwardly. I sat on the floor nearby, against the wall facing the window, where the sun poured in on a bright afternoon in late spring, trying to look relaxed and maybe attractive? I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be doing in this dynamic, where Tess had invited Troy over to casually suggest he take my virginity. It was extremely weird and uncomfortable.

  “I’m sure there’s someone out there for you, Rebecca,” Troy said, trying to keep things friendly, like this was all a silly joke. “Someone more age-appropriate maybe!”

  Tess left the two of us sitting in an awkward silence while she went to make lunch.

  “Come eat,” she said after what seemed like an eternity. The subject of Troy as my “devirginizer” never came up again.

  * * *

  Back at Kearsarge, Ryan started dating his first serious girlfriend. Her name was Bliss, and she had brown doe-eyes and shoulder-length strawberry-blonde hair and bangs. She was a year behind us, and she was thin and perfect, and Ryan fell head over heels for her. He also immediately stopped talking to me. After pining over him for years now, I still thought somewhere in the back of my mind that he would come around to the idea of us being together, even though I also knew it was pretty unlikely.

  It was crushing to watch the way he looked at Bliss, and I felt demoralized, stupid for thinking he would ever want me like that. Or that any of the white boys I went to school with would choose me over girls who reflected the images I saw every day in magazines, on TV, and in the movies, everywhere—Brooke Shields, Phoebe Cates, Cindy Crawford, Alyssa Milano, Molly Ringwald, Julia Roberts.

  There were moments that evoked the same confusion I’d felt when Mrs. Gordon had told me I was pretty for a black girl, moments regarding my appearance and level of attraction that felt arbitrary, delusional, and always guided by an observation made by a white person. Like with Connor, who was a good friend, generous and thoughtful, an only child who wore the spoils of his privilege with a notable measure of resentment. He was tight with Nate and Ryan, and wore clean Stan Smith sneakers, white with Adidas’s signature green heel tab, and straight cuffed chinos. He was the first white boy in high school to tell me outright that he thought I was pretty, but then he ignored me for the rest of the week.

  Beyond that, attention from boys during high school came at a cost. Drunken white seniors made out with me just before passing out late at night at weekend kegger parties, or in a hot tub where everyone was getting high. One boy tried to rape me behind a closed door at a party once. He pushed a clothing bureau against the door once we were inside the room, turned out the light, and grabbed my arm, forcing me to sit down next to him on the single bed.

  I heard him unzip his pants, and then let out a gasp when I felt his hand grab the back of my head and shove it down onto his erect penis. It was too awkward to stay seated next to him, so I had to kneel down in front of him with his hand still on my head. “Do it. I know you want it,” he grunted, his fingers moving to clamp the base of my neck. “I saw you looking at me. I know you want this.” His penis was rubbery in my mouth, warm and pulsing. I worried about my teeth. My chin skimmed the zipper of his pants, and I thought it might leave a scratch.

  I had been looking at him. He was the star player on the opposing soccer team we’d defeated under the home field lights a few hours before. Blond and blue-eyed, athletic and cocksure, he was impossible to miss, and I wasn’t the only girl watching him work the room. His arrogance in coming to a party with the team that had just defeated him was impressive, but he was also undeniably good-looking, and I could hardly believe it when he struck up a conversation with me out of all the other girls who were there.

  “Let’s explore this place, huh?” he’d said, his hand gently grazing my shoulder, the same hand that was now holding my head down. Tall, sweaty boys still in their soccer uniforms pumped the keg behind us, raucous and crowing from their win, as he led me into that tiny bedroom.

  The bureau came crashing down just as I’d started to gag. “Oh my God, Becky!! Look at this mess! You need to clean all this up, right now! Oh my God!” Lisa had been one of the other girls looking at him. She barged into the room, mad that I was in there alone with him. She didn’t see, or didn’t want to see, that he was assaulting me.

  A few weeks later, a very popular senior boy named Kurt who was captain of the soccer team and had either been at the party or heard about it, showed up at my house late at night. Built in the 1700s and barely altered since, our front door didn’t have a proper lock. I don’t even recall whether Mom and Dad were home, but if they were, they were asleep, and Kurt took the liberty of letting himself in.

  We’d been friendly at school, but he was friendly with everyone. That was part of his persona—a beloved straight-A student who drove a red Jeep and went out with his female counterpart, an equally beloved, straight-A student, president of her class and of political programs and other extracurriculars and sports.

  Kurt appeared in my bedroom, maybe tipsy, and got into my bed with me. I was startled, but also flattered, because Kurt, who might as well have been a local celebrity, was in my bed, with me. He rubbed up against me until his penis was hard under his pants, then moaned, stood up, and rearranged himself, smiling. “Look what you made me do,” he said. And then left.

  My body, I was learning, was a prop or a toy at the hands of my white male peers. A brown body to explore, pass around, and violate, but never to fall in love with or date.

  Seventeen

  “Nate, come on, the prom is so stupid anyway,” I said, sipping from a can of Diet Pepsi at a table in the library. We were hanging out after school before his soccer practice started. “Dude, let’s just go for the hell of it? Who cares?”

  “Sure, why not?” Nate said, shrugging his shoulders. Nate and I had remained good friends since middle school, when I’d been his confidante and shoulder to cry on through numerous breakups with his then girlfriend Ella, who had left to spend a year abroad. Now Nate had just broken up with another girlfriend, Ginny, a few weeks before the sophomore prom, which, although it was widely considered pretty corny as a thing, a lot of popular couples still attended and used as an excuse to make out all night.

  “We can dress up, it’ll be fun,” I said. “And we can leave early if we get bored.”

  After trying desperately to assimilate with the preppy crowd during middle school—saving babysitting money to buy pink and green Izod polo shirts, borrowing L.L.Bean sweaters from friends, and begging Catherine and Tess to buy me Nike sneakers—I’d gone in the complete opposite direction fashion-wise in high school, and now shopped almost exclu
sively at thrift shops. I modeled myself after Lisa Bonet’s character Denise from The Cosby Show, wearing oversized men’s blazers, harem pants, scarves and strips of lace tied around my head, button-up shirts, and large, beaded brooches pinned at the neck.

  Recently I’d found a pair of men’s black tuxedo tails and a short red strapless dress at a shop that had clearly just received a big drop from a cocktail-party-going crowd. What better excuse to wear these two fancy pieces than the prom? I thought.

  “Sure,” Nate said, if not enthusiastic then at least up for it. “I’ll come pick you up, and you can dress me.” Nate smiled, suddenly amused at the thought. “This will be fun. OK, gotta go to practice.” He grabbed his stuff and got up to leave. “Later.”

  “Later,” I said, feeling warmly toward Nate as I watched him walk down the hall toward the gym. Not in a romantic way, but I was overcome by an enormous sense of appreciation that he was my friend. There was nothing to read into; neither of us was harboring an unspoken crush or feeling an unrequited love toward the other. We weren’t playing games. We were two sophomores in high school who had been friends since the sixth grade, and who thought it might be fun to dress up and go to the prom together. When he said he would come pick me up, there was no question in my mind that he would—I knew that he would show up for me, and that felt good.

  * * *

  Our inner circle of friends was small, so people found out pretty quickly that Nate and I had decided to go to the prom together. The next day when I walked into school, I was immediately besieged by concerned friends. Had I heard? they asked. Heard what?

  “Nate’s father forbid him to take you to the prom,” my friend Mark said.

  Forbid him? I thought. It’s the prom. Whose parents forbid their child from going to the prom?

  “What? Why?” That I didn’t immediately connect the dots and answer my own question is evidence that I was either delusional or hopeful regarding my viability and worth among my white peers. Especially since Nate’s father, Mr. James, was my US history teacher, and had not so subtly indicated a few weeks prior that I was dumb because I’m black. It had been during a class when he was teaching us about the American economy, and Mr. James said something about how smart the early Southern settlers had been. I asked if he thought having slaves had made the settlers smart. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about,” he snapped back at me. “You see, black people don’t think right, and that’s your problem.”

  * * *

  “He said if Nate goes with you, he won’t allow any pictures to be taken, because who wants to look back and see that you took a black girl to the prom?” Mark, tall and serious with an exceptionally defined jawline and near maniacally focused eyes, seemed both mortified and tantalized by this information. It was as though he felt honored to wield this very grown-up set of circumstances that we all knew was slightly horrifying, but had never heard of having happened before.

  “Well, that sucks,” I said, trying to shake it off, but it felt like my face was starting to dissolve, drips of brown flesh sliding down my cheekbones and landing onto my shoulders, pooling in messy dark blobs.

  “Mr. James is an asshole,” Mark said, in an effort to console me. As if Mr. James being an asshole made it easier for me to dismiss or unhear what I had just been told.

  The words “who wants” and “a black girl” were attacking each other in my brain, gouging holes into the “girl,” beating bruises onto the “black,” wishing the “want” had a name before it, any name at all.

  The school bell rang and it was time to go to class, the racism dissipating into the everyday ether for Mark and all of my white peers. Later, I asked Nate about it.

  “Let’s just go anyway,” he said, standing in front of a wall of cubicles near the physics classroom. “Whatever. We don’t have to take pictures.” He thought he was being a good friend.

  * * *

  On the night of the prom, Nate stood admiring himself in front of the floor-length mirror in my bedroom. The vintage tuxedo tails fit him to a T. I joined him in the reflection, standing at his side, my bare brown collarbones and rounded shoulders rising up out from under the tight, bright red taffeta of my dress that fell just to the top of my knees. Nate grabbed his lapels, grinning like a showman, and I looped my arm inside the crux of his, smiling, too. Nate had beautiful, clear eyes and garnet-colored lips. He’d grown taller since middle school, and gone from boyish-looking to handsome. We looked amazing.

  “OK, let’s go!” Nate said, patting down his chest and the back pockets of his jeans for what I presumed to be his car keys.

  “Didn’t you just have them?” I said.

  “I’m not looking for my keys, I’m looking for my wallet,” he said, visibly annoyed. “Shit, I think I left it at home. Is it OK if we stop at my house real quick on the way?”

  “I guess so,” I said, deflated after such a sweet moment in front of the mirror, and irritated that we had to make a stop before getting to the school. The prom started at seven, and it was already close to eight.

  “It’ll be really quick, I promise. Unless you want to pay for PC’s,” Nate said, playfully. “PC’s” was short for Peter Christian’s, a rustic, pub-like restaurant close to school where a bunch of us often gathered for chips and dip or grasshopper brownie chip pie after parties or soccer games. Nate and I thought we’d probably bail the prom early and meet up with friends there.

  “OK, fine,” I said, knowing that I couldn’t afford to pay for PC’s even if I’d wanted to.

  I don’t think Nate realized it until we pulled into his driveway, when he turned off the engine, looked over at me in the passenger seat, and then turned the engine back on.

  “Um, I’ll just leave the car running so you can stay warm,” he said awkwardly, as if he weren’t hiding me from his father. “I’ll just be a minute, I promise.”

  I watched him walk up the driveway to his house, the headlights exposing him as fully as I was hidden inside the dark car, set against the pitch-black night, with the heat on. Part of me wanted to jump out of the car and march up behind Nate, blast through the door, and just stand in front of Mr. James. But the other, more familiar part of me sat isolated and stuck inside my own chaotic unease about my identity. Because even though Nate had defied his father’s racist warning, I was still unworthy of being seen, of being remembered as part of a major moment in Nate’s young life, in our young lives.

  A few minutes later, Nate bounded out of the house, back down to the car. He got in, looked over at me, pretending that he hadn’t just hidden me from his father, and said, “Ready?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “OK.” But I couldn’t get back that feeling I’d felt when I’d watched him walk down the hallway toward practice that day after school, when we’d first decided to go to the prom together, or that moment in the mirror less than an hour before, when he grinned and I smiled, and we were two friends who had dressed up together for a special night of silly fun.

  Nate backed out of the driveway, and we drove to the school in silence. Inside the gym was dark, the vibe was lackluster and lazy, punch bowls half full and popcorn spilled all over tables and the floor underneath. Students were coupled off in dark corners, or swaying arm in arm as the longest slow-dance song in the history of slow-dance songs, “Stairway to Heaven,” crawled out of the speakers. We were later than we’d mentioned we might be to friends, and now couldn’t see anyone we’d planned to meet up with.

  “You OK?” Nate asked. I was standing against the wall with my arms crossed.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. I don’t really feel like staying here, though. You?”

  “Want to go back to your house?” Nate said, suddenly shifting from my good friend to a random, horny teenager.

  We were definitely just friends, but once in the seventh grade when we’d snuck out of a school play to talk about his most recent breakup with Ella, Nate kissed me abruptly and then asked if he could touch my breasts. He hadn’t pushed himself on me in a forcef
ul way, more in an entitled way that made me feel like a blow-up doll he could fool around with when no one else was watching. When I said no about touching my boobs, the face he made then was the same face he was making now—as if it were my loss.

  And I did feel a loss, but it wasn’t the opportunity to fool around with my friend; it was the loss of innocence about how my white friends saw me, or didn’t see me.

  * * *

  “Why is everything suddenly all about race for you?” Nate said a couple of weeks after the prom. He was annoyed that I kept bringing it up, along with how insane it was to me that his father, our US history teacher, had reacted the way he had to us going together.

  “How can it not be about race when there’s no other reason for something?” I said.

  “Something like what?” Nate said, leaning against the wall near the gym after school.

  “Like your father telling you that you won’t want to look back in pictures and see that you took a black girl to the prom. That black girl is me, Nate!”

  “I mean, I guess. But he’s from another time, you know?”

  “Nate, you should have heard what he said to me in class a few weeks ago.”

  “I don’t really want to know, OK? Look, you’re my friend. Why can’t we just leave it at that?”

  “Maybe you can, but I can’t,” I said, frustrated.

  “I gotta go to practice. Later,” Nate said, and left.

  Eighteen

  I watched in the mirror as giant clumps of hair fell to the floor around me.

  I hadn’t kept up with Ida’s hair-care instructions to keep my scalp greased, or to wrap it at night, or to wear a bonnet to bed, the last of which didn’t even make sense to me. But even if I’d understood her instructions properly, I lacked the discipline to apply them. Tess reasoned that if I didn’t know or want to learn how to take care of my hair, and since no one else within a forty-mile radius of Warner knew how either, I should just get it all chopped off. “It’ll be low-maintenance, and super chic,” she said, and for my fifteenth birthday, she took me to a glitzy, high-profile salon in downtown Portsmouth called 210, where you had to make appointments weeks in advance.