The Necessary Hunger

by Nina Revoyr

  Telisa came over that night around six, carrying two chicken-and-bean burritos from the local takeout. No one else was at home, so we ate in the living room, beneath the eight-foot scroll of Japanese calligraphy my great-grandmother had painted, which was one of the few things that had survived her internment. I brought out a quart of Coke and we took turns drinking from the bottle. Telisa seemed subdued and distracted, though, so finally, between bites, I jiggled the box lid that held her burrito.

  "What's wrong?"

  "Oh, nothing," she said. "My mom's just trippin again."

  "What happened this time?"

  Telisa sighed. "She started yellin at me and shit when I was leaving. Said I shouldn't be runnin around like a wild woman all the time. I told her I was comin over here to study, but I don't think she believed me."

  I nodded sympathetically, but Telisa was looking down and didn't see me. She picked up a tortilla chip, inspected it, and then stuffed it into her mouth. We both sat there in silence for a while, Telisa lost in her thoughts, me getting increasingly annoyed at her mother. I didn't know what gave Mrs. Coles the idea that Telisa was, in any way, wild—one glance at T's report card should have been enough to show her that her daughter had things under control. But Mrs. Coles was strange—frazzled and emotional, so that when you saw the two of them together, it seemed that she, and not Telisa, was the child.

  I'd consumed my burrito in about two minutes—I was always a fast eater—so I watched my teammate as she finished with hers. Telisa was thin and short—5'5" and maybe 110 pounds—but she moved through the air with broad, expansive motions, as if staking out her space; as if daring you to say she had no right to it. She was the color of dark chocolate with a little cinnamon sprinkled in; her features were angular and she had a dramatic wedge of short, thick hair. Some of these physical details—her color, her thin nose—she'd gotten from her mother, but I didn't know where her emotional makeup had come from. It could have been her father, but there was no proof one way or the other—he was out of the picture and she didn't remember him. But whatever the source, whether it was inherited or self-created, Telisa had this essential steadiness, this equilibrium, that seemed to increase in direct proportion to the craziness around her. These were good qualities, of course, in a point guard. But they may also have been the reason that her mother took so much out on her. Telisa's older brother, Earl, was an ex-gangbanger, and at twenty-three he'd already spent two years in juvenile detention and three years in Folsom State Prison. He had the same kind of brains and steadiness as Telisa, and they had helped make him a star with the Inglewood Family Bloods, but after he'd been shot three times in an ambush a couple of years before, he'd decided to leave the gang. Now he worked whenever he could, doing whatever was available, which wasn't much for a young guy with a record like his. Anyway, Mrs. Coles didn't bother with him—maybe she figured he was already beyond her grasp—but Telisa, her A student, her college-bound kid, had to deal with her fury every day.

  There was another thing too. Although they'd never acknowledged it, Mrs. Coles knew that her daughter was gay. She'd asked a family friend of theirs, a cool, laid-back high school counselor in whom Telisa had confided, and the friend, not wanting to lie, had told her the truth. The woman had warned Telisa, though, so Telisa was aware that her mother knew. She'd braced herself for a confrontation, but her mother never brought the subject up, and chose a more subtle way of conveying her disapproval. She started acting rude to Telisa's girlfriend, Shavon—being short with her on the phone, not acknowledging her in the house—and whenever someone female called, she refused to give her daughter the message.

  "You know," I said, as Telisa wiped her mouth with a napkin, "I bet your mom thought you were goin out to meet Shavon." I dropped a chip on the floor and Ann, who'd been lying at my feet, immediately gobbled it up.

  Telisa nodded and put her napkin down. "Yeah, that's what I thought too," she said. "But I wouldn't lie to her, you know what I'm sayin? That's what pisses me off. And even if I was gonna meet Shavon, it'd be none of her fuckin business." She pushed her chair away from the table, tilted back in it, and patted her stomach. "But I don't wanna talk about that shit no more," she said. Then she smiled. "That was a damn good burrito.

  We went upstairs to my bedroom, and spread our papers out all over the light green carpet. My room, in those days, looked somewhat schizophrenic. The dresser and bedside table were part of the white-and-blue furniture set my parents had bought me when I was five; the single bed had a dark wooden frame and headboard that had once belonged to my father's parents. There were two posters on the walls—one of Magic Johnson and the other of the 1984 women's Olympic basketball team, which had won the gold medal two years earlier just down the street from us at the Forum—and on my desk stood a framed picture of my father at nine or ten, sitting with his parents on the front porch of their house in Watts. Telisa insisted that she couldn't think without music, so we turned on the old radio my dad had bought at a garage sale and she did a little dance step before sitting down to work. Just then the phone rang. I got up and answered it.

  "Is this Nancy?" asked the overly cheerful voice on the other end. It was one of the assistant coaches from UC Santa Barbara, who had called me several times already.

  "Yeah, hi," I said, trying to sound as uninterested as possible. It wasn't that I minded talking to coaches on the phone—in fact, I usually enjoyed it. But this was not a man I particularly liked. He was pushy and often annoying; he'd once called at nine on a Saturday morning after I'd been out until three the night before. I had no interest in Santa Barbara—too many rich kids for me—but it was still too early to close any doors behind me, so I couldn't tell him yet to leave me alone.

  "Great!" he nearly shouted. "I'm just calling to wish you a happy Labor Day. I know it's Thursday already, but hey, better late than never, I always say."

  I turned to the wall, embarrassed that Telisa had to hear this. "Uh, thanks. Listen, I'm tryin to do this big math assignment right now. Could you call back in like a couple of days?"

  "Sure thing," he replied. "Just wanted to check in with you, anyway. Don't forget about us, Nancy, all right?"

  "All right. Goodbye." I hung up the phone, sighed, and turned back to Telisa. "Now where the fuck were we?"

  Telisa gestured with a bony finger toward a piece of scratch paper, where she'd already scrawled a bunch of numbers. "Nowhere much yet," she said, "but I did a couple of these questions while you were talking. Check it out."

  She showed me the problems she'd finished, and then together we did the next six, Telisa stopping now and then to explain how she'd figured something out. At one point, frustrated by my lack of understanding, she dropped her pencil and shook her head.

  "I thought Japanese people were supposed to be good at math," she said.

  I smiled. "I think my dad kept all the math genes so he could teach this shit," I said. Then I pulled out the blanket explanation I used for all of my mother's crimes. "And whatever Japanese genes my mother has, she probably don't even want."

  We'd just started on the seventh problem when the phone rang again. This time it was for Raina, the Michigan State coach. I took the number down and left it on the dresser.

  "That reminds me," Telisa said when I got off the phone. "How things goin with Ms. Webber, anyway?"

  Her question threw me off—I was sure I hadn't told her how I felt about Raina. It wasn't that I didn't trust her, or that she wouldn't understand—but I was terrified, then, of letting anyone in, of allowing anyone to know too much about me. After a moment, though, I realized that Telisa wasn't asking about my feelings at all; that she simply hadn't been over to visit since the recent population explosion in my house. "It's cool," I said. "She's cool. She's a trip, though."

  "Is she as crazy-ass intense as she seems on the court?"

  I started to say that I hadn't spent enough time with her to know yet, but then the phone rang again.

  "Shit!" we both said, and I got up to
answer it.

  This time, it was someone I wanted to talk to—Vivian Stringer, the head coach from Iowa, which was one of the schools I was actually interested in. I moved to the downstairs extension, and talked to her for half an hour until I started to feel guilty about Telisa. I assured the coach that Iowa was one of my top choices, and she told me to call her if I had any more questions. Then I ran back upstairs to my room. Telisa was sitting on my bed and thumbing through the latest issue of Sports Illustrated.

  "I'm sorry," I said. "I should of tried to get off sooner."

  Telisa grinned. Her face was so narrow that her smile seemed to split both her cheeks. "That's okay, homegirl. You a celebrity and shit. Is it like this around here every night?"

  "It has been lately," I said. "Especially since Raina moved in."

  "I'm just not gonna let you answer the phone no more, till we finish this stupid math."

  Just then, as if on cue, the phone rang again. Telisa jumped up and grabbed it. "Chinese takeout."

  I heard mumbling from the receiver, and then she laughed. "Sorry," she said into the phone. Then, turning in my direction, "It's for you."

  I took the phone from her and said, "Hello?"

  "Does that mean dinner's going to be served when I get home?" asked the voice on the other end.

  I laughed. "Hey, Dad. Telisa and I were just doin some homework."

  "Yeah, right," my father said. "You bums. Anyway, I'm still at school watching a tape of the team we're playing on Friday. I should be finished pretty soon, though. Is Claudia there?"

  "No. I guess she's still at the office."

  "That woman works too hard."

  "Well, 1.5 million readers of the LA Times are depending on her for their news."

  "Oh, stop it. When you talk like that, you make it sound like she's the Pony Express."

  I grinned. "The Pony Express was mail, Dad."

  "Whatever. Anyway, if she does get home in the next hour or so, tell her that the love of her life called."

  "Okay. But do you want me to say that you called too?"

  "Ha ha. Very funny. I'll see you when I get home."

  "All right," I said. "Goodbye."

  As I was hanging up the phone, I heard the front door open. "Shit," I said. "That's probably Claudia now." The dog, who had been sleeping on my bed, trampled all over our papers in her haste to get downstairs. When she got there, though, it wasn't Claudia's voice that greeted her.

  "Hey, dog," I heard Raina say. "Don't jump."

  She climbed the stairs, went into her room for a moment, and then came down the hallway and appeared at my door. Her presence moved through all my layers of self-protection, like a cold gust of wind through a jacket. "Hey, ladies," she said. She was wearing green shorts and a loose white tank top; her legs looked sleek and powerful. Just watching her made all the hair on my arms stand up, as if she were running her fingers along the back of my neck. There was a wide smile on her face, and she looked, for once, completely at ease.

  "Hey," I replied. "Raina, you've met Telisa, right?"

  "Yeah," she said, smiling at my teammate. "Wassup?"

  "Nothin," Telisa answered. "Just doin some stupid homework."

  "Really? You guys got homework already?"

  "Yeah, that's fucked up, huh?" I could tell that Telisa liked Raina—she was smiling, and nodding a bit, as if in approval. "So what you been up to tonight?"

  "Oh, this and that," Raina answered noncommittally. I took this to mean that she'd been over at Toni's, and felt a sudden pang of jealousy.

  "You know where you gonna sign yet?" Telisa asked. She never asked me this question anymore, because she knew I had no idea; she also knew me too well, after ten years of friendship, to think I might want to discuss it.

  "Nope," Raina answered.

  That reminded me of the message I was supposed to give her. "Hey," I said, looking up at her, "Michigan State called."

  Raina straightened up immediately. "Really? When?"

  "An hour ago, maybe. He left a number."

  She looked at my clock, which read 9:37. "Shit. I guess it's too late to call now, huh?"

  "Actually, he said you could call till midnight." I handed her the message, without meeting her eyes. I could never look at her face for very long; it was like staring straight into the sun.

  Raina looked at the slip of paper as if it held the secret to her future. "What time is it there now? Are they three hours ahead of us?"

  "No," Telisa answered. "Two."

  Raina smiled hugely. "The Midwest," she said. "Wheat and corn. The Midwest is the kitchen of the country." Then she turned and practically ran down the stairs.

  Telisa and I stared after her and laughed. Raina often said things, I was starting to notice, which didn't really make sense, or which adhered to their own strange logic. She didn't seem to care whether people followed her train of thought, or found her too intense, and that kind of confidence and self-possession was remarkable at an age when the rest of us were struggling hard to be cool.

  Telisa turned to me and shook her head. "Nancy," she said, "that girl is crazy fine."

  I smiled. "Yeah, I guess she do look pretty good."

  "Pretty good!" Telisa exclaimed. "Pretty good! Shit, she's gorgeous. I guess I just never noticed before, 'cos I've only seen her in a basketball uniform."

  "Get your eyes back in your head, girl," I said. "You got a woman already."

  Telisa dismissed me with a wave of the hand. "Oh, I'm just lookin. You know I'm happy where I am."

  And I did. She and Shavon were great together, still madly in love, neither of them having her head turned by all the attention that came from other quarters. They started seeing each other the first month of our sophomore year, around the same time I got together with a senior named Yolanda. Shavon and Yolanda both ran track and Telisa and I both played basketball; the four of us had often doubled together since only Yolanda had been old enough to drive. I think she got tired of chaperoning us, though—she broke up with me just after Thanksgiving vacation, saying it was her last year of high school and she wanted to be free. I was heartbroken at the time, but soon realized that there'd been nothing more to our relationship than a strong, mutual lust; if I'd run into her during my senior year, we would have had nothing to say to each other. There was one other girl I'd dated, Lisa. She was a basketball player from New Mexico I met at an AAU tournament in Virginia; we'd continued our affair throughout the summer at camps and tournaments all over the country. But that was before Yolanda, and there'd been no one in the two years since, because then Raina had come into my life.

  "So," said Telisa, flipping some pages in her math book, "your pops realize he's now got two gay kids in the house?"

  "Hell no," I said. "He doesn't even know he's got one."

  Telisa raised an eyebrow at me. "Oh yeah?"

  "Yeah," I said, feeling the blood beat against the side of my neck. "Why, you aware of something I'm not?"

  She shrugged. "I just think he's probably figured it out. Your pops ain't stupid, you know. And you were trippin so hard over Yolanda that time that I can't believe he wouldn't of known what was up."

  I felt a little thrill of fear, then, listening to this, because I knew my friend was probably right. But I had no idea what I would do with the subject of my love life if my father ever brought it up. Not that he would—he didn't like to talk about anything too personal or potentially difficult. Both he and his parents had always been silent, for example, about their internment during World War II, their history, their culture, their past. I wouldn't have known anything about my parents—about how my mother was head cheerleader the year my father was team captain; how they were always the best dancers at the socials held at the Japanese Baptist Church; how my father had wanted more children—if it hadn't been for my grandparents on her side. A few years earlier, he used to joke about what would happen once I started dating boys, but then, when the boys hadn't materialized, when time after time I'd turned down request
s for dates, he'd finally stopped kidding about it.

  "I don't know," I said finally. "Maybe you're right."

  We still had homework to contend with, and I wanted to change the subject, so we cut our discussion short and got back to work. We decided to split up the remaining problems and then exchange our answers at the end. I had a hard time concentrating—I kept thinking of how Raina had looked standing in the doorway, how her face had lit up when I'd given her the message. Still, I managed to finish my part in a reasonable amount of time, and then presented my answers to Telisa, who was already done. We copied each other's work as fast as we could. It was after eleven by the time we finally wrapped things up.

  "I'm tired, girl," Telisa said as she gathered her books and put them into her backpack.

  "Me too," I said. "But think how long this would of taken if we did it by ourselves."

  Telisa snorted. "Probably half the time."

  "Yeah, but this way was a lot more fun."

  She rolled her eyes and smiled. "Fun for you, maybe. Shit. Who you think did all the work?"

  We went downstairs to say hi to my father and Claudia, who had both come home while we were still doing our assignment. They were drinking beer and watching a rerun of Taxi. Telisa and Claudia hadn't met, so I introduced them; we all made small talk for a while, and then I saw my friend to the door.